Star's End

  Beckhart chuckled. “What is this? Two brains working in one room? At the same time? Gentlemen, that’s a first. So. We’ve got a couple of things to work on. Will they let us orchestrate the show?”

  “Why don’t we just do it? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “But it could be the last. We’ve reached a crossroads. We—and I mean everybody in Luna Command—are going to have to fine-tune the Luna Command machine. It won’t have the internal tolerance for playing games with each other. We don’t have much time to get ready for this centerward race… That plan is simple. We’re going to hit them first, hit them hard, and keep hitting them with everything we’ve got.”

  “The way Ulant did us?”

  “Exactly. The Prime Defender’s General Staff is doing the planning, based on their intelligence. She’ll modify it daily, keeping as close to the realtime situation as she can. We come up with something, it’ll be programmed in. If the centerward crowd do something unexpected, that’ll go in too. They’ve sent out a whole fleet of self-destruct equipped, instelled scout ships to keep track of what’s happening.”

  “Sir, that strategy didn’t work for Ulant before.”

  “It may not work this time, but it’s the best shot we’ve got. Ulant’s intelligence analyses paint a pretty grim picture. The numbers… You’ll see the tapes. While you’re watching, remember that you’re only seeing one battle fleet. Ulant has identified another four. They just seem to skip from star to star behind a swarm of scouts, coming out the Arm, scouring every inhabited world of any sentient life.” The comm hummed. Beckhart stabbed it with one finger. “Beckhart. Yes, sir.”

  The sound was uni-directional, the picture flat-faced television. The others could not hear, nor could they identify the caller. After listening awhile, Beckhart said, “Very well, sir,” in an unhappy tone. He punched out.

  “That was the C.S.N. They’ve decided to go with Four slash Six. But they’re not going to let us run it. He said they’ll use von Drachau, but R and D will have operational control.”

  “R and D? What the hell?”

  “What have they got going over there? What don’t we know?”

  The comm hummed again. Beckhart answered, said, “This one’s for you, Charlie.”

  Jones sat on the edge of the vast desk, turned the comm his way. “Go ahead.” In a few seconds his tall, lean, black frame began quivering with excitement. “Good. All right. Thank you.”

  “Well?” Beckhart growled.

  “One of my Electronic Intercept people. They just picked up a message from the Starfisher Council to Confederation Senate. Routine request for clearance to hold an ambergris auction. They asked for The Broken Wings. Usual rules and mutual obligations. The same request they send whenever they hold auction on a Confederation world.”

  “The Broken Wings is close to Stars’ End. Any other reason to be excited?”

  “Payne’s Fleet is going to sponsor.”

  Beckhart stared at his hands for more than a minute. When he looked up his expression had become beatific. “Gentlemen, the gods love us after all. Cancel all leaves. Cancel any computation capacity loans we have out. Pass the word that we’re going on overtime. Everybody, including the janitors and shredder operators. I’ve got a feeling we’ll find a rose in this dungheap yet.” He laughed demoniacally. “Eyes open and ears to the ground, gentlemen. Everything that comes in from now on—and I mean everything—goes into the master program for correlation. And have the programming teams start working backward. I want the biggest and best goddamned model outside the High Command Strategic Analysis. Let’s see if we can’t do this all up in one big, pretty package.”

  Beckhart departed his desk and unlocked his personal bar. He took out glasses and the half gallon of genuine Old Earth Scotch he saved for occasions of millennial significance. “A toast to successes and victories. Hopefully ours.” He poured doubles.

  Six: 3049 AD

  The Main Sequence

  The five great harvestships barely moved. Their velocity relative to the debris was a scant three kilometers per hour. Gnatlike service ships flitted before the head and flanks of their line, nudging any flying mountain that threatened collision.

  It was almost an embarrassment, the way those swift monsters of the spatial deeps had to crawl. Elsewhere they could have sprinted off and left light lagging like a toddler behind an Olympic runner. Here they could not match the pace of a lazily strolling old man.

  Those battered survivors of Payne’s Fleet had been making the passage for a week.

  The dense boulder screen gave way to a less crowded region occupied principally by asteroidal chunks the size of small moons. The harvestfleet accelerated. The line dispersed.

  “Well, you kept asking about the Yards,” Amy told benRabi. “We’re there.” She indicated the viewscreen they had been watching.

  “Yes, but…” All Moyshe saw was a big asteroid illuminated by Danion’s powerful lights. A few smaller boulders drifted around it. Not one star was visible in the background. All outside light was screened by the dust of the nebula.

  Danion seemed to be stalking that big asteroid.

  “But what?”

  “There’s nothing here. We’re in the tail end of nowhere. I expected a hidden planet. Maybe even Osiris. Something First Expansion. Strange cities, drydocks…”

  “Planetary docks? How could we take Danion into atmosphere? Or lift her out of a gravity well? Most of your Navy ships wouldn’t try that.”

  “But you’d have to have thousands of people to work on a ship this big. Tens of thousands. Not to mention a hell of an industrial base, and one all-time grandfather of a drydock.”

  “The dock’s right in front of you.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Watch and see.”

  He watched. And he saw.

  A gargantuan piece of rock began separating from the asteroid. In time it exposed a brightly lit interior vast enough to accept a harvestship. Diminutive tugs swarmed out. Some pushed the cork. Some hurried toward Danion like eager bees to a clover patch.

  BenRabi saw a glow in the remote distance. Another asteroid was opening its stone mouth.

  “We’re going inside?”

  “You got it. You catch on quick, don’t you?”

  “Smart mouth.”

  “They’ll lock the door behind us. Then they’ll flood the chamber with air. The work goes faster that way. And the dock will hide us from any snoopers who wander by.”

  “Who would come poking around in a mess like this? That would be asking to get fine-ground between those flying millstones.”

  BenRabi was less surprised by the existence of the nebula than by the Seiners’ willingness to hazard it. Similar asteroidal shoals existed inside several dust nebulae.

  “But they come anyway. Moyshe, this’s the Three Sky Nebula.”

  “No. Not really? Yes. I guess you’re serious.”

  One of the most dramatic actions of the Ulantonid War had occurred in the outer shoals of the Three Sky Nebula. After the war, the repatriated human survivors had circulated stories of having seen abandoned alien ships there. Some had been wrecks, some had appeared to be intact.

  Three Sky had won an immediate reputation as a Sargasso of space. The treasure-seekers, xeno-archaeologists, and official investigators who went there hunting the alien ships were seldom seen again.

  “The expeditions… There must have been fifteen or twenty that disappeared. What happened to them?”

  “We interned them before they could stumble onto something and run home to report it. They’re doing what they came to do. They just can’t go home.”

  “Why risk setting up here if the traffic gets so heavy?”

  “The risk isn’t that big. We don’t have visitors very often. Not when they always disappear. And, of course, it’s such an unlikely place to look for us.”

  “Still… There’s been talk at Luna Command, off and on
, about sending a squadron to back up an investigation. In case it’s McGraws or Sangaree that have been getting the others.”

  “If that happened, we’d fight. And we’d win. Only a fool would attack what we’ve made out of Three Sky. We’ve been here since before the Ulantonid War. That’s a lot of time to get ready. It’d be almost like guerrilla warfare. We think we can hold off Confederation if we ever have to.”

  “I think you’re a little over-optimistic. For people who don’t have the muscle to duke it out with the sharks. I’ll let you know for sure after I’ve looked things over.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I haven’t met a Seiner yet who had the least idea of just how big and strong Confederation is. Or how tough Luna Command can be when they put their minds to it. Or that your weapons systems are prehistoric relics. Danion’s got a ton of firepower, but one Empire Class battleship could carve this whole harvestfleet up like a side of beef and never get in a sweat.”

  “I think you’re probably too impressed with your Navy. Our shortcomings were calculated into our defense plans.”

  BenRabi decided not to argue. Each of them was telling the truth as he or she knew it. “Are the creches here?”

  “Some. All of them will be someday. It’s a big job, civilizing a nebula.”

  “Mainly an engineering problem, I’d think.”

  “Yes. But it takes time and money. Especially money. We have to buy everything we can’t manufacture ourselves. Which means we have to wait for the auctions because our credit is pretty slim.”

  “Ah. I begin to see why the good doctor was making do with primitive equipment.”

  “We’ve colonized more than seven thousand asteroids, Moyshe,” Amy proudly declared. “But we’ve only just begun. They’re all cramped. The harvestships are cramped. Our other hidden places are overcrowded. We’ve been taking in Confederation’s dropouts for two hundred years. The ones who didn’t become McGraws or run away to the outworlds.”

  Outworlds was a word as relative as yonder. For benRabi, born an Old Earther, it meant anything off Old Earth. Around Luna Command it meant any planet not one of the original seven founders of Confederation. Those seven usually called themselves The Inner Worlds. But out on the fringes of Confederation outworlds were human planets not signatory to the federal pact. BenRabi was unsure which meaning Amy wanted to convey.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Why here?”

  “Because of the industrial advantages. The stories those internees took back were true. There’s a lot of salvageable stuff here. We’ve identified over thirty thousand wrecks and abandoned ships. Built by seven different races.”

  “Really?” He ticked fingers. He could name five, not counting humanity. Six if he counted the prehistoric race that had built Stars’ End. “I’ll give you human and Ulantonid. From the war. Who were the others?”

  “I thought you’d wonder why they’d be here.”

  He frowned at her. Was she trying to bait him by showing off her superior knowledge? Savoring one minuscule advantage? He knew more than she about almost everything and she seemed to take it as a personal affront.

  “I imagine because it’s a good place to lay an ambush. That’s why Carolingian came here during the war.”

  Her smile shrank. “Yeah. And because it’s close to the obvious space lanes. Moyshe, there’ve been battles here for ages. Probably for millions of years. Or even billions. Except for the wrecks from the Ulantonid war, which I didn’t even count, none of the ships here were built by any race we’ve ever met. They were all extinct before man ever left Old Earth. Or at least they were gone from this part of the galaxy. They all predate any of the races we have encountered.”

  “Ask the starfish about them.”

  “We did. We’re not stupid. But they don’t have much to tell. They don’t pay any more attention to hard matter races than we do to bacteria. Less, really, because we’re curious and they aren’t. We’re pretty sure one bunch of ships, though, belonged to a race that moved the ancestors of the Sangaree from Earth to wherever it is their homeworld is.”

  “Ah? Don’t let Mouse know about that. He’ll drive you crazy trying to get to them.”

  Only in this century had geneticists surrendered to the popular notion that Human and Sangaree sprang from the same root stock. The man in the street would not believe in a parallel evolution so similar that it could produce a being indistinguishable from himself. Scientists had demurred, citing no evidence on Old Earth for extraterrestrial intervention…

  Then the abandoned alien base beneath the moon’s dark side had been discovered. Some major rethinking had been necessary. Then had come confirmation of reports that the human female could, occasionally, be impregnated by the Sangaree male.

  The most famous—or infamous—of Sangaree agents, Michael Dee, had been half human.

  “Mouse will be protected from himself.”

  BenRabi studied her. She wore an oddly ferocious expression.

  “Amy, I’ve been here almost fourteen months and you’re still springing surprises on me. When are you going to run out?” He stared into the hollow asteroid and awaited her response.

  “Moyshe, what happened to the people who built Stars’ End?”

  “We’ll probably never know. Unless somebody cracks its defenses.”

  “We’ll do that. We’re going back. That was a rhetorical question.”

  “Wait a sec. Back? To Stars’ End? After what happened? You’re out of your minds. You’re all raving lunatics.”

  She laughed. “Moyshe, they left their ships behind when they disappeared. Right here. God knows how many of them there are. Three Sky occupies a cubic light-year. We haven’t explored a tenth of it. They had their yards and secret places too. Most of the ships we find were theirs. They were the people who transported the Sangaree, we think. We have explorers who don’t do anything but hunt for their hideouts. Every one we find is one we don’t have to build for ourselves.”

  He spoke to the engulfing maw in the viewscreen. “She’s serious.”

  “Absolutely, darling. Absolutely. Oh, we’re not really sure that it was the same race that did all three things. But the computers go with the probability. See, these are mostly good ships, Moyshe. They aren’t derelicts. Some of them still have a little emergency power left. They try to scare us off with mind noises the way Stars’ End does. And they have parts missing. Somebody took off all their weapons. I wish we had a whole army of xeno-archaeologists and anthropologists. It’s really interesting. I always go see what they’re working on whenever we come in. The scientists don’t go very fast. They’re mostly ones we captured, so they aren’t real enthusiastic about helping us out. They train some of our people as aides, sometimes. Old folks and birth defect types who can’t do much else.”

  “That don’t make sense. People don’t abandon good ships, Amy. Where did they go? Why? How? And if they did build Stars’ End, why?”

  She shrugged. “They weren’t people, Moyshe. Not our kind. Don’t judge their motives by ours.”

  “I wouldn’t… though some ideas would seem universal. Just thinking questions out loud.”

  “The questions are why I wish we had more scientists.” She switched the viewscreen over to a stern camera. Danion was well into the asteroid’s interior. “They could be the same creatures that did the tunneling at Luna Command. But were they really? Is there a connection between the moon and Three Sky and Stars’ End? Were we meant to find Stars’ End and Three Sky? Is it all some kind of big puzzle that we’re supposed to figure out? Is it a test?”

  “You think they were planning to come back?”

  “Who knows? The questions are all a hundred years old. The answers haven’t been born. And if we ever do answer any of them, then right away we’re going to ask three more.

  “Anyway, those old ships are our main reason for being here. Some we fix up and use. They make good servic
e ships. If they can be adapted. We scavenge some for materials to build harvestships. We only buy outside if we have to. Usually the Freehaulers make our purchases landside, for a commission, and make delivery to an asteroid at the edge of the nebula. They think it’s just a way station. They don’t ask questions. Too many questions is bad for business. They don’t try very hard to follow us around, either. They’re good people.”

  “Is that a cut?”

  “If you think so.”

  “I suspected the Freehaulers. I know they had something to do with me and Mouse getting caught. How’s chances of me getting to look at one of those ships? I know a little about xeno-archaeology.”

  A girl’s face crossed his mind. Alyce. She had been his Academy love. She had been a recorder at the alien digs in the moon. She had taught him a little, and the Bureau had taught him more.

  Sooner or later, the Bureau touched every base.

  “You’ll have to ask Jarl. I don’t think he’ll let you, though. We’re going to be awful busy repairing Danion. Plus you’ve got your citizenship classes and your beer nights with Mouse.”

  “Now don’t start that again. He’s my friend, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. It don’t hurt for him and me to play a couple of games of chess once in a while. You can come keep an eye on us if you think we’re cooking up a plot against the Greater Seiner Empire, Lieutenant.”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “I don’t feel like it. I always…” She stopped before she began waving the red flag. Their positions were inflexible. Argument would be pointless. “Moyshe, we’ve got to get Danion whipped into shape fast. The fleets are coming in. As soon as they’re all here we’re leaving for auction and another crack at Stars’ End.”

  “Stars’ End. Stars’ End. That’s all I hear anymore. And it’s completely insane. We can’t stick our necks in that noose again, Amy. Look what it cost last time. And remember, I was there too. I was outside with the starfish. I know what that planet can do.”

  “We’ve got to have those weapons, Moyshe. You saw the casualty reports. You saw the extrapolations. What the sharks are doing now is going to look pacifistic in ten years. We’re talking survival, Love. And you’re still thinking power politics.”