Chapter One
The morning sun was one-third up the vault of the sky as the silver bullet car came into sight of Lake Constance. Racing through a Swiss countryside dotted with picturesque villages scattered among green vineyards, the needle-nosed car jumped from one elevated electromagnetic accelerator ring to another, defying gravity with each effortless leap. At 500 kilometers per hour, the car left a condensation trail in its wake as its passage roiled the humid summer air.
Inside the car, Mark Rykand and Lisabeth Arden cuddled together on one wide seat and watched the world slip by beyond their window. After nearly three years in space, the greens, browns, and blues of Earth held a fascination that neither of them could readily have explained.
“Look, Mark, it’s the lake!” Lisa said at the first sight of the blue expanse on which could be seen a cluster of white sails. Lisa was a petite blonde with eyes of green and a nose that turned up at the end. Her mouth was a bit too wide for her face, with a tendency to dimple when she smiled. The permanent tan had faded after three years of living in vacuum, bringing forth the naturally fair complexion common to women of the British Isles.
“Won’t be long now,” he replied as he reached up to caress her cheek. Mark was of average height with a shock of sandy hair and blue eyes, and a smile that turned up more on one side than the other. His muscular physique had atrophied a bit aboard ship, despite his thrice weekly visits to the cramped gym in the engineering spaces. Even so, his torso remained comfortably taut, with no sign of the paunch he worked so hard to keep off.
On the opposite side of the lake, the glass-and-steel pyramid of Stellar Survey Headquarters was briefly visible before the line of pylons topped by accelerator rings dipped behind a low hill. The sight reminded him of the last time he had taken this particular journey.
It was not a pleasant memory.
* * *
For Mark, the adventure/ordeal had begun when he returned home late one night from a party to find an emergency message flashing on his apartment phone. Mark punched for playback and found himself looking into the eyes of a stranger.
The man identified himself as the duty officer at Stellar Survey Headquarters in Germany and asked that his call be returned as soon as possible. A call from the Stellar Survey could only mean one thing — something had happened to Jani!
Mark had last seen his sister at White Sands Spaceport three months previous when he had seen her off on her latest mission for the Stellar Survey. Jani had joked and laughed the whole time they waited for her shuttle to board. His last sight of her had come as she waved goodbye from the passenger bridge, her wild copper mane blowing in the wind.
It took two tries to punch in the number listed, his hands were shaking so. It took only seconds for his suspicions to be confirmed. “I am sorry, Mr. Rykand,” the duty officer intoned. “Your sister was killed in an accident three weeks ago while on a mission in the New Eden System.”
Grief washed over Mark like a sea of heavy mud. That grief had turned to suspicion when the officer proved unable to provide details of Jani’s death. After a sleepless night, he booked a suborbital flight to Zurich, and from there, rode this very bullet car toward Meersburg and the headquarters of the Stellar Survey.
* * *
“What’s the matter, my love?” Lisa asked, noticing his sudden silence as she snuggled closer. The sweet smell of her blonde hair and the familiar warm softness of her body snapped Mark back to the present.
“I was just remembering the last time I was on this line.”
“Oh, sorry,” she replied, reaching out to squeeze his hand. After lovemaking, they often spoke in whispered intimacies in their darkened cabin, communicating as couples have done since time immemorial. They sometimes spoke of the tragedy that had brought Mark into her life.
* * *
Having concluded that the Stellar Survey was lying, Mark searched the information nets for news of Magellan. He was not surprised to learn that the starship had returned to the Solar System. After all, how else could the Survey have learned of Jani’s death?
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 air car 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 Meersburg.
* * *
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.