A Planned Improvisation (8 page)

“Five hammocks in the sleeping quarters,” Iris reported over her radio, “but no sign anyone was mining here. So much for that theory. I think it was a listening post. As best I can estimate that alarm went off as we approached the probe.”

“That makes sense to me,” Dannet added. “the Alliance regularly keeps that sort of eye on emerging cultures.”

“Could be,” Park agreed. “If they were watching us, they would have heard the breakout noise but would have waited to be sure it was our probe making the noise and not just someone else’s ship passing through the system. Of course there was no reason to be coy with us. We’ve made no secret of the fact we were developing a star drive. The Alliance could have sent official observers to watch us working step-by-step.”

“True enough,” Dannet agreed. “Technically you might be seen as an emerging culture, but the existence of the Alliance is no secret to you and this sort of post is more frequently placed in systems in which contact has not yet been made.”

“But why advertise the fact they were here?” Sartena asked. “If they wanted to observe secretly it would have made more sense to leave without setting off a distress beacon.”

“Unless, they did so by accident,” Marisea added from on board
Phoenix Child
.

“That may be what happened,” Park decided. “There must have been a lot of smoke in here when they burned the files and if that didn’t do it, leaving the place open to vacuum would have set off an automated beacon for sure. They may not even have realized they did it if they were in that much of a hurry to get out of here.”

“They panicked needlessly then,” Iris remarked. “If not for the beacon we would have never known this place was here.”

“Uh oh!” Tina’s voice sounded over the radio. “Skipper, you all had better get back to the ship. I just detected something breaking out of Other Space and headed this way.”

It may have taken an hour to reach the surface of Proteus, but only a few minutes to scramble back to
Phoenix Child
and lift off. “What’s on the scope?” Park asked as Tina handled the ship.

“If the range is right,” Marisea replied, but Park cut her off.

“Why wouldn’t the range be right?” he demanded.

“If I’m reading the range correctly,” Marisea began again, “then it is a small ship; maybe half the size the
Hudson
was, only very dense. I’m worried it might be a missile.”

“A missile with a star drive?” Park wondered.

“Why not?” Ronnie shrugged. “We have one on the engineering deck. Targeting across interstellar distances must be a good trick though.”

“Not if it was sent to destroy this base,” Park replied. “If that’s what it is, let’s see if we can knock it out of the sky.”

Phoenix Child
continued on toward the unknown radar blip for only half an hour until they finally slighted a mostly black, arrowhead-shaped object whose silver edges gleamed in the dim light of the outer solar system. “Not easy to see is it?” Park observed.

“The instruments are having trouble too. It looks like that object absorbs most of our radar signal,” Iris informed him.

“Can you get a fix?” Park asked.

“Of course,” Iris nodded. “We don’t rely on radar alone. Our gunnery computers also use the visible spectrum to sight a target.”

“Well, keep that, uh, ship, I think, in the crosshairs,” Park advised. “Marisea, hail that ship and order it to identify itself.”

“Aye aye, skipper!” Marisea replied crisply. Briefly Park wondered at the response. He had never been a stickler for military protocol and the younger Mer had always called him “Park.” Then too many things happened at once.

As Marisea hailed the other ship it suddenly changed shape, broad silver wings growing out of its matte black body.
Shouldn’t need wings in space
, Park thought, but then he realized those wings were sprouting weapons as the approaching ship adjusted its course to head directly toward
Phoenix Child
.

“Dannet, Sartena,” Park asked tensely. “What is that?”

“Never seen anything like it, Park,” Sartena replied.

“I’ve never even heard of anything like that,” Dannet added.

“Scanning,” Ronnie reported from the lower deck. “Park, I could swear that ship is alive. I’ve getting heat signatures that could be blood vessels in those wings, but they are definitely metallic. Park! They’re powering up their weapons!”

“Iris,” Park ordered his wife, “Fire at will!”

Iris had already locked in her target, but before she could do anything else, the other ship shot first. A bright orange light glowed at the black tip of the on-coming ship and a dozen wing-mounted weapons fired. The hull of
Phoenix Child
began to creak as though being torn apart and then the stasis plating activated.

Park had been in battles with the stasis plating before, but had never grown used to the kaleidoscopic view he was forced to endure as the plating would deactivate for microseconds, testing for safe conditions and then immediately reactivating. None of the images in the ship’s screen remained in sight long as they tumbled through space under the onslaught of the other ship’s guns. The tumbling, chaotic view persisted
 
almost two seconds, which Park knew might have been as long as an hour to someone not under partial stasis and then, just as suddenly as the other ship had fired on them, it stopped.

“Report!” Park ordered.

“Our automatics are working,” Iris told him. “The battle board claims we sent two missiles and several phaser shots at them. Still in Missile range though.”

“I think they’re trying to run for it,” Tina reported even as she brought
Phoenix Child
around to give chase.

“Fire!” Park urged. Iris twidled the buttons of her battle board and a missile sped away with accompanying phaser fire. “I could use a good plasma caster about now,” she grumbled.

“Working on that,” Ronnie told her over the intercom.

“Their star drive is coming on line,” Marisea reported.

“Damn!” Iris swore. “just out of range.”

“For what?” Park asked, but she did not answer. Iris had time for only one more shot, and she chose the gravity cannon.

An explosion in space is always something to see, preferably from behind a highly polarized shield. As Iris fired the gravity cannon, there was an almost blindingly bright flash of light and a rapidly expanding cloud of debris from where the mystery ship had been. “Did we vaporize it?” Park asked, not seeing more than a little debris .

“Analyzing,” Ronnie’s voice reported. “No, not likely. That explosion was all wrong. We would have felt the shockwave had the whole ship gone up. I think all we did was clip one of its wings. I’d like to collect as much debris as possible, however. A metallic material that can be programmed to change shape like this did…” she trailed off.

“Permission granted,” Park told her. “Collect all the souvenirs you want, then we’ll go back to that base and do the same thing there. Our friends on Earth are going to have a lot of junk to sift through when we get back.”

Veronica Sheetz found herself swamped between overseeing the new ships at Questo being fitted with the star drive modules and trying to analyze the odd metal fragments they had brought back to Earth. Finally, she had to put the metal fragments aside and concentrate on the ships. It had been her intention to retrofit
Phoenix Child
with the star drive and the ship had, in fact, been designed with that in mind, but between recent modifications to the ship and changes to the star drive itself meant it would be cheaper to build an entirely new ship rather than strip the
Child
down and modify it again.

Dannet, however continued to press her for an analysis of the odd metal fragments until she finally had to ask Park to call him off. “I just can’t get anything done if
 
he’s going to call me every few hours,” she told Park.

“You’re supposed to be going back to Questo this afternoon, aren’t you?” Park asked.

“I haven’t even packed yet,” Ronnie complained.

“Maybe you should just keep enough clothes in both locations so you don’t have to pack while going back and forth,” Park suggested. “You mostly wear the official Van Winkle coveralls while working anyway.”

“That’s a point,” Ronnie admitted, “but it’s not just clothing. It’s my tools.”

“I’ll authorize the purchase or manufacture of a duplicate set of anything you use,” Park offered. “All you should need to carry with you is a computer pad and your torc.”

“Just the torc,” Ronnie laughed. “I don’t use a customized pad like you do. Any will do. Well, that’s something to shoot for, but it won’t help today. Just keep Dannet off my back, will you.”

“Maybe I can offer him some of the fragments and let his own people look at them,” Park suggested.

“His people are all diplomats and politicians,” Ronnie laughed. “That’s why he keeps bugging me.”

“Maybe some of the Alliance scientists doing research on Earth then,” Park replied.

“Sure, I’ll send you about half the fragments before I leave,” Ronnie told him. “So far as I can tell, they’re all more or less alike. I think I’ll take the rest with me, though. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. They’ll give me something different to think about.”

An hour later Park found himself looking at a quart jar full of silver metal fragments of various sizes and shapes. He decided that Ronnie was probably correct in that one was pretty much like all the others. There was no chance of fitting them together like a three dimensional jigsaw. Most had been at least half melted by
Phoenix Child’s
weapons and detached from the mystery ship they might well just be an ordinary if previously unseen metallic alloy.

Ronnie had managed to find the time to place a sample in a mass-spectrometer. She found the pieces were made of an eclectic mix of titanium mercury and aluminum which, together, made up ninety-seven point five percent of its makeup. The remaining two and one half percent held iron, copper, gold, selenium, rubidium, fluorine, sodium, oxygen, carbon, potassium, sulfur and, to everyone’s surprise, neon.

When Park looked up the roster of Alliance scientists currently on Earth, however, he discovered that none of them were physical scientists. “I would have been surprised if they were,” Sartena admitted over dinner that evening. After her arrival on Earth, Sartenna had lived with Park, Iris and Marisea for over a year until she was officially appointed as the ambassador from her home world of Tzantza. Even now, she dined with them on a frequent basis. “The Alliance rarely allows physical scientists to visit developing worlds, which, technically, Earth is even though some of your technology is in advance of ours.”

“The star drive being the determining factor?” Iris asked.

“True,” Sartena shrugged.

“But we have a star drive now,” Marisea pointed out.

“You have successfully tested one in an unmanned probe,” Sartena corrected her. “I have no doubt that Doctor Sheetz will have no problem adapting it to a full-sized ship, but until you can show up at an Alliance world in one of them, the Diet is not going to recognize the achievement. However, even if the recognition were immediate, there has hardly been enough time since the first successful test for anyone to have arrived from the Alliance. Besides, I’m not sure Alliance scientists will be able to shed any more light on this than Ronnie and her Mer counterparts can.”

“Why not?” Park asked interestedly.

“What we saw is unknown technology,” Sartena replied. “I was a career officer in the Alliance navy, Dannet is the son of an influential member of the Diet. If there were even rumors of such a thing as a ship that could change shape, we should have heard of it.”

“That does seem to be what is bothering Dannet,” Park admitted.

“It should bother him,” Sartena agreed. “It bothers the heck out of me. It might be some highly top secret project in which case I suppose neither of us has clearance, but even so, rumors tend to ignore security considerations. Besides, why should the Alliance attack Earth now? We signed a treaty. You are now a probationary member world of the Alliance.”

“I understand our acceptance was far from unanimous,” Park retorted. “Isn’t there a faction in the Diet…?”

“The Premm,” Sartena nearly spat the name. “They are a xenophobic and ethnocentric collection of racists who believe that they alone are the true descendants of the Originals.”

“Who we now understand were not even the original human species,” Marisea put in.

“Technically even Park and I are not members of the original Human species,” Iris added. “The genus
Homo
includes species that predate
Homo sapiens
, but we were the first Humans to develop agriculture, domesticate animals and build civilizations. So far as Doctor Farns can tell me, the Originals evolved from us either naturally or artificially after we began to explore the galaxy beyond this system.”

“Is Doctor Farns still on Earth?” Sartena wondered.

“No, he finished his work two years ago,” Park replied, “but Doctor Deeni Vasson returned last month with her shiny new PhD or whatever you call her degree these days and Doctor Beniala Morava never left. She’s applied for a dual citizenship.”

“She’s the cat woman, isn’t she?” Sartena asked, unable to completely hide her distaste.

“You don’t like cats?” Park asked.

“I love cats,” Sartena
 
laughed,” they’re one of the few old-Earth species that were adapted to Tzantza, but Doctor Morava’s sexual behavior is… how to put this politely… Less discriminating than someone with my upbringing would consider proper?”

“Interesting way to put it.” Park laughed. “She does seem to flirt a lot, but I don’t think she means anything by it. All that touching and purring of hers is just her way of being friendly.”

“She’s typical of her world,” Sartena admitted, “but I still find it discomforting, especially when she starts rubbing up against me.”