The Starkahn of Rhada (2 page)

I was trained in the profession of arms because the men of my family have always been so trained. Though Rhada has enjoyed varying degrees of independence and autonomy in the Second Stellar Empire, the ruling family of the Rhad has always served the Galacton, whoever he may be, who rules in Nyor on far-off Earth. For all of our independent airs, we have always been good Imperials and soldiers. But had I had any choice, I would have been a warlock, as learned men have been called since the Interregnum between the Empires. An historian, preferably; for that is where my interests have always been. My love of man’s history through his millennia in space is great.

On this voyage Ariane and I had been charting stars in the densely starred region of the galactic center. Our operational area for the last sweep included the PPA, or Potential Planetary Area, of the stars Delphinus 2377 through 2382. These stars were all either white dwarfs or red giants and had produced only a few frozen methane planets with strong radiation belts. In addition to this, the nebulosity of the galactic center is pronounced, and the gas clouds and plasma storms tend to block translight commo systems. Consequently, we had been out of touch, peacefully so, with any Fleet base or commo beacon for two Earth Standard Months. Thus, when the alarm came, it was a shock.

Ariane had been nagging at me for failing to give her the human inputs she needed to complete the Fleet reports on 2378 and 2379, but I had stubbornly refused to be distracted from Mullerium and the bloody tales of the Interregnal period.

My intention was to shorten our sweep of 2380 and use the time thus saved to catch up on our clerical work. Since the white dwarf we were approaching couldn’t have any terraforms, I did not think of this as exactly cheating. It is the sort of thing I used to do often as a child, to the dismay of Lady Nora, and it had approximately the same effect on Ariane, who is very conscientious about Fleet busywork.

Ariane had completed the outer zone search on her own, scanning the edges of the PPA and chastising me at the same time. As expected, the region of space subject to Delphinus 2380 inside 500,000,000 kilometers was empty, a true void. Even planetoids and cometary debris had been scoured from the area. It seemed likely that the dense white dwarf star had imploded early in life, sterilizing most of its dependent space.

Somewhere between Nav Julianus’s excellent account of the heresy trial of Anselm Styr and his translation of St. Emeric’s
Defense of Apostasy
, Ariane said, “We are picking up a line profile of radio emission by neutral hydrogen at twenty-one centimeters in galactic longitude thirty degrees. Shall I file the maxima for retransmission to SW when we are within commo-beacon range?”

I turned slightly on the contour couch and grunted something appropriate. My mind was then a thousand years in time and a million parsecs from Delphinus. I was in the Age of Heroes. I was Nav Anselm on the scaffold; St. Emeric thundering in the cathedral on Algol Epsilon.

Then the alarm sounded, and I came back to reality, surprised to feel my heart suddenly begin to pound under my tunic because I had not heard a danger signal in all this long, long voyage. Ariane was alerted instantly.

“What do you see, Ari?” I demanded.

The computer lights flashed. “Ranging now,” Ariane said. “Wait one.”

Presently she reported a contact. In this case it was a body of planetoidal size at maximum scan range. Within seconds, Ariane had computed the orbit, “Position now 197.665.0 kilometers from D2380. Apastron is 280.998.0 kilometers, periastron 179,543,000 kilometers. Sidereal period is 83.92 Earth Standard Years. I’ll refine that shortly, when we get closer.”

The information startled me. Not only was there something in an area of sterilized space, but it was something “planetoidal” in a long period ellipse that brought it perilously close to a white dwarf’s radiation belts every eighty-two years. I lowered the lighting on the bridge to red-battle and armored my pod. I brought up the Very Long Range radar display in the console. I could see the familiar stellar scatter associated with radiating dwarfs, but deep in the S-band, I could detect the unmistakable blip of a metallic mass return.

“Ariane,” I said. “Recommendations?”

“Deep penetration of the stellar temperate zone with translight cores engaged. I really can’t scan effectively at this range.” This last remark had a tinge of exasperation in it, as though I were expecting the impossible. At the end of a long survey, Ariane had a tendency to petulance.

“Accepted,” I said. “Let’s go in. Change to memory mode and record everything. Discharge a message drone at one mega-K intervals.” If anything happened to us, the message drones would be picked up eventually by another SW ship or a beacon. “Give me more magnification on the S-band.”

The radar image increased in size, but so did the stellar scatter. The nebular mist danced and sparkled. It was beautiful but frustrating.

“How about a holograph?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Ariane said.

I would have to wait until the range closed.

“Search the literature,” I said.

Ariane was good at this. She responded almost immediately. “In the Draco Nova of 9670, several dark companions to Lambda Draconis were formed, but nothing this small. There’s the Nav Chaturgy paper on stellar spume that was given in Algol in ‘86, but nothing I can scan so far fits the data. Chaturgy was only hypothesizing, in any case. And Nav Setsumi observed librations in Sigma Serpentis back in ‘16 that suggested a dark companion at a distance of one hundred mega-K. Exploration failed to back his observations. Astrophysicists say that what we are recording now is impossible. The implosion that forms a white dwarf scours the stellar temperate zone. That’s the accepted view these days. So much for the literature.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time the literature was disproved empirically,” I said, sounding like an academician.

Ariane let it go. It was her job to believe what was in her memory banks, not to argue about it with the human component of the team.

The air in my pod was growing gelatinous under heavy acceleration. Ariane was closing the contact rapidly. She reported: “The mass return now reads out at approximately one billion metric tons. Too light to be any amount of stellar material. Range closing.”

“Too light for a planetoid, too,” I said. “Check the unconfirmed SW reports. Maybe there is something there.” Ariane hummed to herself. “A somewhat similar sighting was reported two years ago by Senior Lieutenant Marya Bel-Lorquas and Marcus Cyb-ADSPS-409 in Cygnus. Close recon and flybys were made by Captain Lord Alban in
Bellatrix
and Senior Commander Florian in
Nonesuch
. They reported a tightly grouped cluster of trojan asteroids in balance between Cygnus Beta and Cygnus Beta VI, an ammonia-methane giant. The total mass of the trojans was ten times what we are showing now, and there was a substantial planetary population in the system. That’s the only remotely similar case.”

“Nothing else in the Fleet banks?”

“No matching natural phenomenon,” Ariane said positively.

“Are you suggesting we’ve picked up something man-made?”

“Insufficient data,” Ariane said primly.

Suddenly I had a dreamer’s vision of being the discoverer of something truly wonderful in the heart of the galaxy: perhaps some artifact of the mythical Third Stellar Race.

“Close to one half mega-K,” I said, with rising excitement.

Ariane said, “More readings coming in from our probes now. Object is metallic--”

My heart began to thump.

“--metallurgical analysis not possible at this distance. Length is 17,000 meters exactly. Diameter at widest point is 5,000 meters. There goes your dream about discovering the Third Race.”

She was absolutely right, as usual. Only a fool would hold out for a system of measurement that would match exactly the metric system human beings had used since long before the first man orbited the home planet.

Then the import of the thing’s dimensions penetrated my history-saturated brain. “Are you suggesting we’ve found an artifact? An artifact seventeen kilometers long and five wide?”

“That seems to be what I am saying,” the cyborg declared, sounding exactly like Lady Nora. “Dead mass is 1,000,906,098,006.00752 metric tons. Wait now--I can suppress a bit more of that stellar scurf on the S-band.” The radio image on the display sharpened, and the scatter decreased in intensity. I was looking at a tapered cylinder, familiar in outline, conical on one end, tapered through the waist, and bobtailed. “A starship?” I said unbelievingly. “A starship seventeen kilometers long--?”

“Obviously,” Ariane said. “If you think we can risk moving in really close to it, perhaps I can produce something more useful than just information on its size.”

“Close the range,” I said.

Ariane went to .3 light on a helical approach--what SW pilots called the “skittish corkscrew,” a pattern of flight that makes tracking difficult without prior knowledge of the maneuver’s foci. It is standard procedure for investigating unknown phenomena in space.

At six million kilometers I shifted the display to Q-band radar holography. A cube representing several hundred thousand cubic kilometers of space materialized in the forward end of my pod. In the star-shot dark floated--the ship.

It was very like the ancient starships in design, but with subtle differences. The angles and curved surfaces were wrong, slightly askew. The starships of the First Empire, the vessels of the Grand Fleet, were beautiful things. Not so this giant cousin. There was something ugly and menacing about it. It brought the short hairs on the back of my neck to attention.

The metal of which it was constructed gave it an extremely low albedo, so that it appeared to blend with the galactic night, a darkness visible mainly because of the background of nebular mist and plasma. The scale of my holograph was too small to pick out details, but there seemed to be odd nodes and spikes dotting the entire surface of the vessel.

I shivered. If such a ship had ever been built in any nation of the Empire, I would have known of it. As an officer of the Imperial Fleet, I could identify almost any vessel in commission in the
known
galaxy. That was the thought that chilled me. I was only too aware of man’s tendency to equate the
Empire
with the galaxy. Yet no educated man could make such a mistake. The Second Stellar Empire with its nearly nine hundred billion souls occupied only a fractional part of one spiral arm of the immense star cloud known as the Milky Way. And far, far beyond the Rim--that region of the galaxy’s edge where the night sky was empty except for the distant luminosity of other, infinitely isolated galaxies--lay the unthinkable stretches of the unknown.

I forced myself to think calmly and logically. That vast ship in the holograph could not have been built by any race of weird aliens. It was a
human
starcraft: different, and built to a titanic scale, but
human
.

I tried to use my historian’s sense. I knew that no such giant ship had ever been built by the First Empire. Still there it was: a thousand times bigger than anything ever seen in the galaxy. Enigmatic--and somehow dangerous.

My primitive human instinct, that insight that had brought the race of men out of Earth’s primeval forests and across the sky, warned me that the black starship was evil. “Ariane,” I said. “What do you think?”

“It’s big,” she replied with unconscious cyborg banality.

“I can see that,” I said irritably. “What else?”

“Period of rotation is 42.995 ESH,” she retorted. “And it penetrates the radiation belts around D2380 at periastron. If there is protoplasmic life aboard, that could be dangerous to it. Also, if the thing has a positronic brain it could be damaged.”

“Is there anything alive on board?”

“I can’t tell yet,” Ariane said. “I’m getting something, but it could be a harmonic from the solar-phoenix reaction of D2380.”

“You think it is a derelict, then,” I suggested.

“That’s an ambiguous term,” Ariane said primly. “I wouldn’t care to use it.”

I sighed and activated the visual scan. Through the now transparent walls of my pod, I studied the blazing sky of the galactic center. We were still too far from the object for any visual sighting. Even D2380 was only a diamond-bright marble: a small star, even for a white dwarf. But the sky flamed with stars. It was no wonder, I thought, that the Order of Navigators had believed starships holy. Men who flew in space came to mysticism easily, and when the space pilots of the First Empire founded a religious order to preserve and maintain the ancient starships from the mob furies of the Interregnum, each generation of priest-Navigators in turn was given this glorious vision of the stars. Little wonder they guarded their privileges so fiercely, even (in Talvas’s time) with the rack and the stake. The old religion of star and starship worship had all but died out in the Empire, but the Order of Navigators still existed, and there were times (such as now) when properly brought-up citizens unconsciously wished for their comfort and guidance.

“Range is now forty mega-K,” Ariane announced. “I am going to .1 light. Scanners operating on high gain. Data is coming in more clearly now.” There was an overtone of worry in the cyborg’s thoughts. I could sense her deep concern.

“Range is now thirty mega-K. Closing,” Ariane said.

“Hold at .1 light and read out the ranges in kilo-K’s.” As we drew nearer the unknown craft, Ariane and I became more nearly one organism. The interfacing performed at the beginning of our association by the Fleet bio-mechs tended to adjust automatically under stress. In times of great danger the cyborg and I seemed almost telepathically linked.

Ariane was reading out the data from the scans as the range decreased. The information brought a prickling sensation to my flesh. “At range twenty kilo-K we are getting a low level of radiation. Artifact is definitely a starship with protonic controls and old style super-light cores. Cores are apparently intact, but the controls are damaged. Transit systems and protonics are very similar to First Empire designs.” That gave me something to ponder. A starship of a billion metric tons (I could still scarcely credit that figure), a vessel that would tax the resources of a dozen star systems to construct--yet powered by engines of archaic design.