Parker's Folly (48 page)

“Yes, Captain. We should reach the insertion point in under a minute.”

Jack looked around the bridge, at the crew at their stations.
I do love a well ordered ship,
he mused,
and this
random collection of strangers is now a damn fine crew.
He looked to the helmsmen. “Mr. Vincent, is our vector correct?”

“Aye, Sir. We will be there in 15 seconds.” Billy Ray was still not back to his old self, but the raw wound of Susan's loss was starting to heal. Having the whole ship's company honor her was a help.

“Very well. Peggy Sue, take us into alter-space on the helmsman's mark.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” replied the ship's computer.

“Three, two, one, mark!” called Billy Ray. The ship's view ports went opaque and the deck shuddered slightly. In normal space the ship shimmered and vanished.

The Peggy Sue was going home.

Far out in space, an alien probe ship headed away from Beta Comae. Well off that system's ecliptic plain, the ship was already more than 30 AU away from the star shrinking behind it—as far away as Neptune from Sol. It had been waiting silently, observing the system and refueling station when a strange ship, closely followed by another probe like itself, entered the system from alter-space. The station had relayed the burst of information the second probe delivered just before its destruction.

The deep probe continued to observe as the strangers destroyed the fueling station and departed. With the alien ship gone, other directives stirred the probe to life, powering up its main drive and directing it to a distant destination. Now the probe's objective was a point in 3-space that would allow it to drop into alter-space and bypass the cosmic speed limit imposed by the speed of light.

Pathways through alter-space represent lines of equal gravitational potential between significant massive bodies, usually stars. Other factors can complicate things, but generally, the more massive the two objects—meaning the steeper the gradient of their gravitational wells—the closer in the transfer points and the faster the transit. The transfer point that the probe was seeking lay well out from Beta Comae, implying that the object on the other end was tiny, as such objects go. In fact, what waited at the other end of the alter-space passage was not a star at all, but a planet.

It is a common misconception that the star Earth orbits is an everyday run of the mill sort of star. Perhaps this is because astronomers call Sol a dwarf, implying that it is of diminutive size. While it is true that there are stars more than 150 times the mass and a thousand times the size of the Sun, the fact of the matter is that Earth's star is no piddling example. The star that warms humanity's home world is in the 80
th
percentile of all stars in the Universe.

That there are so many small stars only became apparent to human science as telescopes improved. There are tiny red dwarfs with no more than 50% the mass of the Sun, and they can be much smaller. Some have as little as 7.5% the mass of the Sun, the minimum mass needed for a star to support  fusion in its core—the nuclear fire that makes all stars shine. Below this mass are failed stars, called brown dwarfs, and below that giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

Planets are usually thought of as being kept in thrall by a star, condemned to orbit endlessly until their parent star goes nova or swells into a red giant at the end of its life. But, as human scientists have recently discovered, there are a large number of planets that are not trapped in orbits around stars—these are classified as rogue planets. Dark vagabond worlds, between the size of Jupiter and the smallest brown dwarfs, they wander the interstellar void. Warmed only by gravitational contraction and radioactive decay, they exist in a far different realm than planets found in the zone of life surrounding G type dwarf stars.

Life, however, is tenacious, inventive and infinitely patient. Even in the dark and frozen environs of these rogue worlds life exists—intelligent life, malevolent life. Life that, for reasons known only to itself, looks upon the warm and verdant worlds circling true stars with hatred and disdain.

It was to a world ruled by these dark creatures that the probe ship was headed. Following its shallow path through alter-space would take five Earth months to cross the 1.2 light-years to its dark masters' frigid realm. But that was its purpose, to watch the bright worlds and to inform the masters when a new infestation of warm life erupted—for that was something that the dark ones just could not abide.