What did surprise him, however, was
Magellan’
s location. The ship was not at High Station, the jumping off place for starships of the Survey. Rather, she was docked at PoleStar, the Weather Directorate’s orbiting mirror that provided illumination to dark northern climes in winter.
Once the seed of doubt was planted, it quickly grew into a mighty oak of suspicion. Luckily, in his quest for answers, Mark was not without resources. Since his parents’ death in an aircar accident, Mark had used his inheritance to pursue a life of leisure. Most nights he could be found at the Cattle Club, depleting their store of liquor. It was during one of these drinking bouts that Mark hatched a plan to discover the truth about his sister’s death.
Gunter Perlman was a renowned solar yachtsman for whom Mark had crewed from time to time. By agreeing to pay the freight, he cajoled Gunter into moving his yacht to polar orbit, ostensibly to try out a new solar sail in advance of the Luna Regatta.
Mark chafed with impatience as he and Gunter watched first one icy pole, and then the other, pass repeatedly beneath the yacht’s control pod as they constantly fiddled with the orientation of the sail to reshape their circular orbit into a lopsided ellipse.
At long last, the facility appeared in their viewscreen. Not long after, the radio came alive: “Space yacht, this is
Magellan
. You are approaching a restricted area. Advise your intentions, over!”
Gunter replied that he knew of no such restriction. There followed a brief discussion during which he was given the opportunity to declare an emergency. Perlman declined and tilted his sail to begin the long spiral back to low orbit while Mark donned his vacsuit and launched himself out the airlock.
He had barely cleared the yacht when his helmet reverberated with an order to halt. When he didn’t respond, the starship ordered three spacers out to intercept him. A deadly game of hide-and-seek followed.
Whether by luck or skill, Mark managed to reach the station habitat before his pursuers. Once there, he grounded on the hull and hid among the maze of heat exchangers, communications antennae, and other protrusions, intending to use the habitat’s hull for cover while he made his way to a point directly beneath the nearby starship
.
From there he would jump for
Magellan
, and once onboard, trade on his status as Jani’s only relative to demand answers. Hopefully, he would get them before he was carted off in handcuffs.
He never reached
Magellan
. While working his way around the perimeter of the habitat, he happened on a lighted viewport. As he prepared to skirt the obstruction, he glanced into the compartment within. What he saw took his mind off his goal.
The cabin beyond was occupied by Lisa Arden. With word of an intruder on the hull, station control had roused her from a hot shower and ordered her to opaque her viewport. Dripping wet and sans towel, she launched herself across the compartment in microgravity to comply. She arrived at the port a few seconds late.
Mark’s first sight was of a vision; breasts unencumbered by clothing or gravity, wet flanks glistening. The sight should have held him captivated. Instead, his attention faltered when he caught site of Lisa’s companion.
The being was approximately a meter-and-a-half tall, covered with brown fur. Its head was round, with two ears that stuck out, giving it a comical appearance.
At first he thought it was a monkey. One look into those large yellow eyes and he knew what it was the Stellar Survey was hiding.
Staring up at him from within the lighted compartment was an alien, one whose gaze reflected intelligence as great as Mark’s own.
#
The bullet car plunged abruptly into darkness as it entered the tunnel that would take them under the lake. Mark’s ears popped as the hurtling car compressed the column of air in front of it like a cork entering the neck of a bottle.
Thirty seconds later, it popped out on the German side of the lake. The car climbed a low hill carpeted with ordered rows of grapevines. At the crest, the accelerator pylons began a gentle turn toward Meersberg.
#
Captain Landon of
Magellan
had not been happy to discover that a grief-stricken brother had penetrated his security to the point where he had come face-to-face with the biggest secret in the Solar System. They couldn’t lock Mark up and keep him incommunicado forever, so they did the next best thing. They told him the whole story and signed him up for the duration.
Magellan
had been orbiting New Eden when the granddaddy of all gravity waves had penetrated its hull. Moments later, sensors detected two unidentified craft, one of which was hurling energy bolts at the other. Under attack, and seemingly unable to return fire, the passive member of the pair fled for the refuge of the nearby planet.
At the time,
Magellan
’s Number Three Scout Boat was returning from New Eden’s moon. The scout’s position placed it thousands of kilometers closer to the battling pair than was
Magellan
herself. Jani Rykand, the scout’s pilot, reported that they too had felt the gravity wave and relayed scenes of the battle until it grew close. Then, as the smaller unknown reached minimum distance from Scout Three, it engulfed the scout in an energy beam, instantly vaporizing it and the eight human souls onboard.
Having seen his crewmembers murdered before his eyes, Dan Landon furiously considered how to defend his ship; which, save for a few hunting rifles and light machine guns, was unarmed. In desperation, he launched an interstellar message probe at the aggressor.
Message probes are miniature starships, and like their larger brethren, are not designed to operate deep within a planet’s gravity field. The probe disappeared into superlight, then reappeared in normal space as an expanding cloud of debris.
That cloud was moving at 60% the speed of light, directly toward the aggressor. Faster than the human eye could perceive, the smaller of the two unknowns was transformed into a ball of incandescent plasma silhouetted against the blackness of space.
With its tormentor destroyed, the larger unknown ceased its wild gyrations and went ballistic. Captain Landon dispatched one of his surviving scouts to investigate. When the scout’s crew boarded the derelict, they found evacuated corridors filled with the corpses of two different types of aliens. They also found a lone survivor representing a third type. The survivor bore a striking resemblance to a terrestrial monkey.
#
Lisa Arden’s introduction to the project had come when she was ordered from her duties as a linguistics professor at the Multiversity of London to the PoleStar habitat. Upon arriving in polar orbit, she discovered that she was expected to learn how to speak with the survivor.
The survivor’s name was Sar-Say, and though she intended to learn his language, he proved an able student and learned Standard. In pidgin speech, and with many misunderstandings, they began to communicate. Sar-Say explained that he was a member of a race called the “Taff,” and that he was a trader, and that he didn’t know why his ship had been attacked. Within a few weeks, his proficiency improved to the point where Lisa felt they could proceed beyond the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” stage. She had been getting a lot of pressure from Earth to get their ever growing list of questions answered. Thus it was that Sar-Say and Lisa attended the first of many interrogations.
That was when Sar-Say told them about the Broa.
#
Chapter Two
The bullet car pulled into Survey Headquarters’ transport station after passing over the ruins of Meersburg Castle. As the car decelerated smoothly to a halt, Mark and Lisa untangled themselves from one another and gathered their spacebags from the overhead. They were watched with some amusement by Drs. Thompson and Morino, their two scientist companions.
Survey Headquarters was just as Mark remembered it. After an escalator ride from the transport station to the main level, they entered the public foyer. It was an open space large enough to have its own weather had the climate conditioners not intervened. The echoes were drowned out by an anti-echo field. The air around them seemed muffled, like on a lake when the fog rolls in.
“Ah, Mr. Rykand, welcome back!” a feminine voice said from somewhere behind them. Mark turned and discovered Amalthea Palan, the Survey Director’s assistant, hurrying across the wide expanse to meet them. It had been Ms. Palan who received him on his previous visit.
He shook her hand before introducing his companions. When the introductions were finished, she said, “If you will all come this way, the Director and his guests are waiting.”
She led them past oversize holographic displays of various colony worlds settled in the last century. Interstellar colonization was a hard, dangerous, and expensive business with as many heartaches as triumphs. Each new world had its own benefits and problems. An alien ecology was so complex that it was often years before colonists discovered the deadly disease that would wipe them out, or the environmental factor that made the planet unsuitable for human habitation.
There were a great many people on Earth who had tired of interstellar exploration. Some were opposed to the cost, while others were afraid of the unknown. Still others just didn’t see the point.
One such person was Mikhail Vasloff, the founder of
Terra Nostra
, an organization devoted to ending the economic drain of interstellar exploration, and repatriating all colonists back to Earth.
The story Sar-Say told his interrogators made even ardent colonization advocates wonder if Vasloff’s position might not be the correct one.
#
According to Sar-Say, the Broa were a carnivorous race of reptiles that controlled the stargate network and used it to enslave every intelligent species they encountered. Without interstellar capabilities of their own, the other races were helpless against them. Once discovered, an inhabited world was given a simple choice: submit or die.
In this way, the Broa had expanded their domain to more than
one million stars!
After some debate, project researchers settled on the name “Sovereignty” to describe the Broan domain.
Not a few of those privy to Sar-Say’s interrogations found the story preposterous, claiming the pseudo-simian was the equivalent of a garrulous shipwrecked sailor, spinning yarns for the gullible natives. The problem, therefore, was how to determine the truth or falsehood of his claims. The obvious solution was to send an expedition to spy out the truth. The difficulty was a simple one. Where among the stars should humanity look for these Galactic Overlords?
Travel via Broan stargate was not like a starship voyage. The gates did not cross the vast gulf between the stars so much as bypass the distance altogether. Like a computer network, the system possessed a topology that was independent of its geography, making astrogation an unnecessary skill among the Broa.
Travelers embarked on a ship in one system and disembarked in another, never caring how many light years separated the two.
Although he had visited more than a hundred worlds, Sar-Say had no idea where his travels had taken him. Besides, without a common coordinate system, there was no way to convert his observations into information humanity could use.
Eventually, frustrated project astronomers hit on a method for testing Sar-Say’s assertions. They asked him to describe unusual astronomical phenomena he had seen, in the hope he would describe something they recognized.
Sar-Say had a good memory and was a fair artist once Lisa showed him how to use a drawing tablet. He spent the hours sketching night scenes from worlds he had visited. He rendered several constellations formed from bright blue stars. The astronomers programmed their computers to search out all of the known Spectral Class A and B stars in the hope that they could find a position and viewing angle to match Sar-Say’s sketches. They met with no success. The inaccuracies inherent in drawing constellations from memory were just too great.
One of Sar-Say’s paintings showed a view of a dark alien sea, over which floated large and small crescent moons. Above the moons hovered a complex ball of gas and dust filled with glowing filaments and dark tendrils. Sar-Say explained that on the world in question, this ghostly nebula was larger than the full moon is on Earth and its diffuse silver glow much brighter. The locals called the glowing apparition, “Sky Flower.”
The object was obviously a supernova remnant, and since there had only been a handful of nearby supernovas since the dawn of recorded history, the astronomers reviewed all the possible candidates. They found a good match with a supernova that had exploded around 6000 B.C in the Constellation of Taurus. The light of that particular cataclysm had not reached Earth until the summer of 1054 A.D, when it was observed by Chinese astronomers.
Sky Flower, it seemed, was Messier Object Number One — the Crab Nebula!
#
The party entered a private lift that whisked them silently to the office of the Director of the Stellar Survey. Mark recognized those already seated around the conference table, including one person he was surprised to see. As he entered, Nadine Halstrom, the World Coordinator herself, stood and greeted him. Others included Anton Bartok, Director of the Stellar Survey, and Dieter Pavel, the World Coordinator’s representative onboard PoleStar. Pavel was also a one-time rival for Lisa Arden’s affections.
“Welcome home, ladies and gentlemen,” Bartok boomed out. “We have been waiting a long time for this meeting. We’ve read your report, or at least the executive summary. However, Coordinator Halstrom wanted to hear of your adventures direct from the source. Who will be the spokesman?”
Mark raised one hand and said, “We drew straws and I lost.”
“Then proceed, Mr. Rykand,” the Coordinator directed.
“Yes, ma’am. As you know, pursuant to your orders, our fleet set out for the Crab Nebula to see if we could verify Sar-Say’s tales of the Broan Sovereignty. We were 375 days in transit outbound, and upon our arrival, we rendezvoused in
System 184-2838
, which in keeping with the spirit of the mission, we named Hideout…”