“They are also making excellent progress in building a framework and timeline for their Plan of Conquest, or so I am told. Both institutes will be presenting preliminary presentations of our findings in another month or so.”
“That fast?” Vasloff asked.
“Yes. We have a fairly detailed plan for making this system invisible to questing Broan probes. In addition to abandoning the interstellar colonies, we will need to develop communications technologies that do not advertise their presence… a return to land-based transmission lines and laser communications in space, for example. Once we have all returned to Earth, we will need to destroy our remaining starships. That will remove the temptation to resume exploration at some future date.”
Vasloff frowned. “I had hoped to have more time to get the political situation in hand. We have a good grassroots demonstration effort, but we need more paid media.”
“A problem with contributions?”
The Russian nodded. “We are running ten percent below projections. Not that the faithful aren’t giving generously. It’s just that we have entered the “old news” phase of the struggle. The shock is wearing off and people are returning to their daily concerns. We need something big to refocus attention and get donations up. I’m afraid I can’t pull that off in a month. I need at least three.”
“I have some small power to delay a decision, I suppose,” Landrieu replied. “One of the advantages of being Director-General, you know. A quarter-year delay may be beyond my power, however. Those simpletons at Colorado Springs are pushing very hard for a decision. They have concluded, with some justification, I fear, that the Coordinator leans in their direction.”
“Can Alan Fernandez assist in putting on the brakes?”
“I suppose, if he saw such a move to be in his best interest. Will he?”
“He will if I can get messages to the right people.”
“I’m not so sure. Fernandez is reveling in his control of Sar-Say. Every time Fernandez issues one of his reports, he frightens people. The pictures the Broa paints continue to be unpleasant. The more he tells us of his species, the bigger monsters they seem.”
“That is merely Sar-Say trying to frighten us into submission. I don’t think the Broa are monsters,” Mikhail Vasloff said, taking another sip of wine. “I think they are more like us than we care to admit.”
Jean-Pierre followed Vasloff’s example. When he set his wine glass down, he said, “I find that a startling statement.”
Vasloff made a gesture of dismissal. “Don’t get me wrong. I have spent my life warning against the dangers of star travel, and the Broa are the epitome of what I feared. However, if the situation were reversed, if we controlled a million-star empire and the Broa one lone system, we would probably be hunting them down. At least, my commissar ancestors would have done so, and human beings have not changed very much since their day.”
Landrieu nodded. “Considering some of the things we humans have done to our fellows, I suppose they don’t look so bad after all.”
Vasloff raised his glass and clinked with Jean-Pierre, then said, “And that thought is perhaps the scariest of all!”
#
“Three months delay?” Mark yelped. “What’s the matter, isn’t Paris keeping up?”
“Apparently not,” Dexter Hamlin replied. “It appears some political pressure has been applied to slow down the summer review. You can probably guess where it is coming from.”
“Mikhail Vasloff and
Terra Nostra
!”
“Correct on the first guess.”
“What are we going to do about it?” Mark asked.
“Do? We are going to do nothing about it. We are going to continue our job and be even more ready when the time comes to go up against Landrieu and his coterie of ass gazers!”
Mark knew Hamlin as the most courteous of human beings. For him to engage in profanity was unheard of. He must really be fuming!
“Give me an update on our progress this week.”
Mark’s usefulness as a tour director having withered away, he had been appointed Director’s Special Assistant. Though impressive, the title basically meant they didn’t know what else to do with him.
He knew some astronomy, the result of his hobbies and his service on the astronomy team on the Crab Nebula expedition, but was no expert. His knowledge of the Broan language was good, but did not approach Lisa’s level of skill. Besides, most of the Broan data was being translated by computer now. The pseudo-simian tongue was basically a trade language. As such, it was logical, making it easy for a computer to translate the words, if not the nuances.
Being unsuited for anything else, he had been assigned to “assist” Director Hamlin. He did so by keeping track of the wide-ranging studies and once each week, preparing both written and verbal summaries.
Mark began his report with the astronomy team’s efforts. They were working off observations of the starfield above Brinks Base and had identified fifty-plus systems within a couple hundred light-years of Brinks that might be inhabited. These were mostly G- and K-class stars of sufficient age and stability to give intelligent life time to evolve.
The Alien Technology Team was deep into reviewing the technology being pulled out of the
Ruptured Whale.
No one had yet found any show stoppers. Broan technology was different from human, but since both obeyed the same laws of physics, it was mostly a matter of learning new ways to do familiar things. A toilet is a toilet, regardless of the physiology of the species using it.
With the
Whale
out of commission, Mark had taken a trip to White Sands Shipyard to see how its replacement was coming. There he and Dan Landon had gone out for a quiet steak and beer together, both to hash over old times and to bring Mark up to speed on progress.
The White Sands engineers were nearly finished with their design of a Type Seven Broan freighter, complete with hidden armaments and with Broan style controls. The only thing they needed to complete the job was the final data from the
Whale
’s dissection. While they waited, they had begun work on a large freighter of a class they had observed in orbit about Klys’kra’t.
Mark was surprised when Landon casually remarked that they would be laying the keel of the Type Seven freighter at the end of the week.
“How can you build a ship you haven’t finished designing yet?”
Landon took a sip of his beer and said, “We mostly know what we are doing. It’s a risk, but one I’ve judged to be acceptable.”
“What if they find something that requires you to start over?”
“Then we go back to the workscreen and start over. Have you ever heard of the Manhattan Project?”
“When they built the weather dome over Manhattan Island and the East River?”
“No, the other one. The first atom bomb.”
“I’ve seen the standard lessons in school.”
“They were in a hurry. They started building this huge industrial facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee before they knew what they were going to put in it. In war you do things you would never do in peacetime.”
“I suppose,” Mark replied.
“That wasn’t the biggest risk they took. When it came time to build the machinery, they couldn’t find enough copper for the wiring. So, they requisitioned several billion credits worth of silver from the treasury and used it instead.”
Mark reported on his trip to White Sands and then continued his summary for the Director. Obtaining a Broan database continued to be their first priority, of course. Just about everything depended on it. However, the Stargate Acquisition Team had also made progress.
Like exo-biology had been prior to star travel, stargate physics was essentially a hypothetical science. The principle was related to hyperdrive physics, but not exactly the same. Despite the team’s progress, they were still predicting that a couple of decades would be required to put theory into practice.
The problem was that humanity might not have a couple of decades.
#
Chapter Fifteen
Sar-Say lounged on the sofa and listened to Gus Heinz go on endlessly about the problems of the interstellar import/export business. The two of them were seated in front of the glass wall in the Harvard Faculty Club, and save for the omnipresent security men at the door, they might have been two businessmen enjoying a drink after a hard day at the office.
Except, of course, one of the businessmen was a pseudo-simian who did not consume alcohol. In front of Sar-Say sat a tall glass of orange juice, for which he had developed a fondness.
“But surely you utilize some form of inventory control to ensure that you don’t run short of product,” Sar-Say said in response to Heinz’s explanation of how he had been shorted in the last shipment from Avalon, one of Earth’s interstellar colonies.
“You can place your order, but in an economy of scarcity, which
curaline
is, you don’t always get your orders filled. Plus there is the delay between when you order and when you discover the product will be short. Since communications are carried by starships without fixed routes or time tables, it can sometimes take months to discover you won’t be able to fulfill customer requirements.”
“Why not order twice what you need, then?”
“Can’t,” Heinz replied, slashing the air with his hands for punctuation. “If they manage to fill my order one hundred percent, it would bankrupt me.”
Sar-Say nodded as though the dry technical details of Heinz’s business were the most fascinating thing he had ever heard.
Curaline
was some sort of miracle drug refined from an Avalonian plant and sold for enough to make transporting it across light-years economically feasible.
This was one of the private conferences that Sar-Say had suggested the night of his first public reception. They had been meeting sporadically for the past six months and had become comfortable with one another. Ostensibly, the meetings were to increase Sar-Say’s understanding of human society. Why humans would want him to learn more about them was counter-intuitive, but they claimed it made it easier for him to answer their questions. In truth, he had gained considerable practical knowledge from the businessman, as well as the half-dozen other outsiders with whom he was allowed to speak.
Sar-Say looked forward to the talks for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that they were held in the lounge of the Faculty Club, and not his prison cell. Director Fernandez said that it was good for him to get out once in a while, and Sar-Say agreed.
Then there was Sar-Say’s primary motive. Ever since Klys’kra’t, he had been working on a new plan to escape human captivity. The problem was that he required the assistance of a small number of human beings to make the plan work.
Of all his conversation mates, Heinz appeared the best candidate for what he needed done. If all went well, he would be back in Civilization within a couple of years. If it did not, he would likely be dead.
“If communications via starship are so difficult, why not invest in your own starship to regularize traffic to and from Avalon? There would seem to be a need, and therefore, profits to be made.”
“Do you know how much it costs to operate a starship?” the businessman asked.
“Surely there are others who have needs similar to yours. You could get rich selling them services made possible by owning your own ship.”
Heinz shook his head. “I’m no transportation magnate. Heading out into interstellar space requires resources that are expensive to obtain and maintain. Hell, a trained spacer makes twice the money of a unionized robot truck monitor! The investment has a high fixed cost. One missed shipment, for whatever reason, and you are bankrupt.”
“But you
could
hire a starship if you wanted to?” Sar-Say persisted.
“Could and would,” Heinz replied, “if I had the need.”
“How does one go about such a thing? I know how we do it in Civilization. Surely it cannot be much different here.”
Heinz went on to explain how one contracted to charter a starship. About the only people who did so were potential colonists en route to a newly discovered world. In such a case, thousands of families pooled their life savings to cover a cash down payment, then pledged a certain portion of their new colony’s revenues over twenty years to pay the remainder of the cost of being transported to their world.
Of course, as Gus explained, the colony ships were the biggest starships ever constructed. They had to be. Once a colony was planted, it could be ten years before they saw another ship. This meant that everything they needed for survival must be delivered in the same trip.
“Yes,” Sar-Say agreed. “A colony ship would be much too large for your purposes.”
“Damned straight! My cargo is only a couple of meters cubed, and it still takes all of my pull at the bank to get a loan to cover the cost of procurement and shipping. Those robber baron ship captains know when they have you by the short hairs.”
Sar-Say had not heard the idiom before, but understood the comment from context.
He asked, “How many private starships are there in human space?”
Heinz responded. “Hundred or so, none of which charge less than an arm-and-a-leg.”
With that, Gus Heinz returned to cursing whoever it was that had been unable to fulfill his current order. Sar-Say hid his impatience at the turn of conversation, which was in the direction he definitely did not want it to go. Finally, Heinz’s voice cracked and stopped talking to take a sip of beer to restore moisture to his mouth. The beer had gone flat while he was jawing about his troubles.
Finally, Sar-Say glanced at the chronometer on the wall and said, “I’m afraid our time is up. Dr. Fernandez becomes angry with me if I am late for one of his research sessions. Thank you for speaking with me.” With that, he extended his arm to shake hands in the human manner.
Heinz extended his own arm, and five-fingers entwined with six. Heinz’s expression, which had been sour as a result of his complaints, suddenly turned neutral. Sar-Say felt a moment of panic. However, as they broke their grip, Heinz smoothly slid his right hand into the pocket of his jacket. They exchanged a few more pleasantries, then the business man got up and escorted Sar-Say to the security men waiting to take him back to his cell. He himself continued onward and out into the open air.