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 space bags 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…”
* * *
The expedition to the Crab had actually been to the system of a slightly variable G-Class star some 10 light years distant. Even eight millennia after the cataclysmic explosion, the nebula glowed with an energy equivalent to 75,000 suns. The dynamo that powered it was a spinning neutron star — a pulsar — that was the actual remnant of the supernova. A starship crew unlucky enough to drop sublight anywhere near it would have been struck dead by several kinds of radiation in seconds.
Upon arriving in the Hideout System, a short search revealed a world twice the diameter of Earth orbiting in the temperate zone, which they named “Brinks.” Brinks had a moon three times larger than Luna, which they named “Sutton.” It was on Sutton that they established their base. Two gas giants in the system were dubbed “Bonnie” and “Clyde.”
As soon as the first tunnels were drilled into Sutton’s surface and sealed, the team began to sweep the skies for signs of civilization. Several months went by without result before they finally detected a gravity wave emanating from a nearby star, a wave that could only have originated in a stargate.
Having found what they were looking for, Dan Landon approved a mission to reconnoiter the target star. He put himself in command of the contact party and chose Lisa to be their expert on the Broa. Mark joined the roster by the simple expedient of being the only one available who had the necessary temperament and computer skills. Landon surprised everyone by selecting Mikhail Vasloff, the anti-interstellar activist, as the fourth member. He was tapped for the coveted assignment because Landon wanted someone along who would take a skeptical view.
After a preliminary reconnoiter, they made contact with the locals, who identified themselves as the Voldar’ik and their planet as Klys’kra’t. The team claimed to be representatives of a race called Vulcans from the planet of Shangri La on the other side of the Sovereignty. To disguise their origin, they traveled in Sar-Say’s salvaged transport, a Type Seven Broan freighter, renamed the Ruptured Whale.
As a cover story, they had professed interest in various Voldar’ik gadgets. However, their true mission was to acquire astronomical data about the Sovereignty and its network of stargates. That was Mark’s job. While the rest of the team distracted their hosts, he plumbed the Klys’kra’t planetary database on the pretext of searching for marketable products.
For two weeks, Mark spent every waking moment sitting in front of an alien computer, programming search routines using the peculiar Broan script. He was hampered by the fact that he could not be obvious about what he really wanted and had to approach queries about the general state of the Sovereignty, the Broa, and all astronomical data as though by accident.
Even if he had been able to compose straightforward queries, the task would have been hopeless. The planetary data base was several times larger than the Library of Parliament database on Earth. A lifetime was insufficient to find everything they were looking for.
While Mark labored, Dan Landon broached the subject of purchasing a copy of the database itself, with the cover story that it would help them select trade goods when they returned with a bigger ship. In the meantime, Mark filled the memory of his portable recorder three times with tidbits of interest, if not precisely what he was looking for. Periodically, he returned to the Ruptured Whale to upload what he had learned into its computers.
It was on his third such trip that he met Effril, the Taff trader.
* * *
“What did you do when he told you he was a Taff trader?”
“The truth, Ma’am. I nearly crapped my pants.”
“I take it he looked nothing like Sar-Say?”
“No, Ma’am. He was tall, blue and furry. Cautiously, I asked him if there were another species by the same name. He said he wasn’t aware of any. Then I explained that I was from a distant world, and being young, had never seen a Broa. I asked Effril to describe one.
“What he described was nothing like the pictures Sar-Say sketched for us of the Galactic Overlords. In fact, Effril’s description was a perfect fit for Sar-Say himself, right down to his yellow eyes.”