Day of the Dragonstar Read online

  “Which ain’t much,” said O’Hara. “And I thought you college guys were supposed to be so smart! You don’t know nothin’ . . .”

  “Hey, knock it off, will you?” Melendez attempted to keep the anger from his voice, hoping that an honest plea for something approaching camaraderie might be successful.

  “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it’s them friggin’ A-rabs. They’ve probably got some kind of ship out here in our territory.”

  “I doubt it,” Melendez responded. “The TWC doesn’t have any ships that can operate this far out.”

  “Then what the hell is it we’re supposed to be lookin’ for?”

  Melendez sighed. “You heard what Franco said. Copernicus picked up some kind of object in this quadrant and they want a close-up look. That’s all he said, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, I was just thinkin’ . . . You don’t think they’d send us out here to do anything . . . you know . . . dangerous?”

  Melendez shrugged. “How the hell do I know? I mean, look at our jobs. They’re not exactly what I’d call ‘safe.’”

  Their helmet phones crackled again as Major Franco’s voice cut in: “Okay, SP2 double A, our telemetry is affirmative for a Number One intersect. Autoguidance until you achieve a visual contact. Manual after that. Do you copy?”

  “We copy that,” said Peter. “Can you tell us what we’re going to be making visual contact with?”

  “Negative. When you get within range, I’m told you won’t be able to miss it. That’s all I can tell you right now. Proceed on course. When you make visual, you will be patched in to a Priority Channel with Copernicus on a scramble-sequence. You will have to validate before beginning the transmission. Frequency 204.8. Do you copy?”

  “We copy,” said Melendez. “What is present ETA?”

  A brief pause. “For visual, or course intersect?”

  “Either one will do.”

  “ETA for intersect is thirty-two minutes. Can’t give you visual . . .”

  “Why not?” Melendez did not like the tone in Franco’s voice.

  “Sorry, SP2 double A. I can’t talk about it. We are standing by for visual confirmation. Big Mother, out.”

  “Roger, Big Mother,” said Melendez; flipping off the transmission key.

  “He can’t talk about it,” said Peter. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  O’Hara harrumphed. “Ain’t the only thing that’s crazy. Like how come they picked you for this mission. Me, I can figure . . . I been with this outfit for almost ten years—they know I’m good. But you! You ain’t been space-boomin’ for more than a year or so.”

  Melendez smiled. “I learn fast, I guess.” He did not really feel like talking to his partner, especially when he was in one of his argumentative, aggressive moods. Peter Melendez did share O’Hara’s apprehension concerning the mission, but he did not want to talk about it. They would know what they were looking for soon enough. He stared through the forward port into the endless velvet night.

  Neither man spoke for several minutes. There was tension in the atmosphere of the small ship’s cabin, but Melendez was able to ignore it by directing his thoughts outward, to the possible reasons for the recon mission. It was possible that the brass had picked up a TWC ship in the vicinity. Was it armed? Disabled? Maybe no one knew what it was doing out here. The thought was troubling. The Third World countries were not very advanced in space technology. Indeed, the only thing they had actually accomplished was a lunar settlement. Aside from the two IASA moonbase installations—Copemicus Base and Tsiolkovskii Base, both staffed by the combined space agencies of North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union, there were two other permanent colonies: a fledgling enterprise recently established by the Chinese—Dua Ho Chang, and an older installation erected by the Third World Confederation—tagged the TWC. That base was called Ramadas Khan and it was the final glorious breath of the TWC, having been built soon after the close of the twentieth century, when the emerging African nations and the Arab political estates were at the peak of their power. Within the intervening quarter-century, however, after the oil-depletion leverage of the Third World had been exhausted with the extinction of petroleum, the TWC became a second-rate political influence in global affairs. Since that time, the TWC had clung to their moonbase, recognizing it as a final vestige of their past glory, even though they were partially dependent on the lASA for logistical and technological support.

  If it was a TWC ship, though, why were they sending out a Snipe? wondered Melendez. Tensions between the IASA nations and the TWC persisted, to say the least. In fact, there was an unspoken tradition of hostility, and several “incidents” within the past decade could have easily escalated into direct military confrontation, had not the diplomats of the involved countries been quick to ameliorate the disputes. True, the world did not hang in such precarious balance as in the previous century. But the utopian vision of political and economic harmony among nations was still quite distant.

  As far as Melendez knew, though, the TWC just didn’t have the hardware to get out here. Their Deep-Space vessels were obsolete and their telemetry equipment was ten years behind state-of-the-art.

  So what was it they were going after?

  Melendez’s thoughts kept tumbling over and over, and he wanted to verbalize them, but talking to O’Hara was not fruitful, to say the least. The man did his job, and that was all.

  Checking his watch, Melendez realized that they were within fifteen minutes of ETA with the object. He stared absently through the port, into the bottomless pit of stars, remembering how it had been when he’d first ventured into space. He had since overcome those early feelings of fear and insignificance but there remained a sincere respect and a sense of wonder about the universe. Melendez felt that he truly appreciated the vastness of the galaxy, the implications of the hundreds of millions of suns which burned in the darkest of nights. Here he was, a speck of bone and blood, a smear of chemicals crawling across this immense canvas. A cold, insensitive place, it made you appreciate the only true warmth in the universe for human beings—the warmth of other human beings.

  Something flickered on his long-range scanner displays. The instruments were picking up an object. Other sensors were also flashing into screen-brilliance. A solid object of incredible proportions . . . Melendez keyed in a request for some preliminary figures.

  The display blinked. Numbers appeared.

  Distance from object: 4100 kilometers. Mean dimensions of object: 321.45 kilometers by 64.78 kilometers.

  Melendez re-keyed the request, Couldn’t be anything out there that big if it was a ship. Theirs or ours. Surely, if it was an asteroid, the Survey would have known about its existence a long time ago, especially if it was off the ecliptic.

  The display screen blinked. The same numbers reappeared. Melendez checked again, just to be certain before contacting the Astaroth, No error. Whatever it was, the Snipe was gliding toward it at a speed of six kilometers per second.

  “Hey Chuck. Look at this,” Melendez said in a soft voice.

  O’Hara looked. “What the hell is it?” His tone of voice had changed from condescension to something milder.

  “Don’t know. We’re not in visual mode yet. But it’s damned big. We should be seeing it soon . . .”

  “You’d better get the Astaroth . . .”

  “Yeah.” Melendez keyed in his mike. “Big Mother, this is SP2 double A . . . Do you copy? SP2 double A, calling Big Mother . . .”

  “Big Mother here.” Major Franco’s voice swept through the phones.

  “Major, we have scanner-contact.” Melendez read out the incoming data. “Visual will come momentarily. It’s big, Major.”

  “Affirmative, SP2 double A. I have orders to patch you directly to Copernicus now. Good luck, gentlemen. Big Mother, out.”

  Static crackled, followed by a series of bleeps
and clicks as the scrambler codes activated. All transmissions from the Snipe would now be beamed hundreds of millions of kilometers back to the moon. Traveling at the speed of regular radio waves, communication from the asteroid belt to the lunar surface would have required a fifteen-minute time lag between transmission and reception. Thus, an inquiry and the reception of an. answer would consume a half hour of real time. Communication over the immense distance within the solar system would be frustrating if the IASA were constricted by the old laws of relativistic physics. Indeed, it was the discovery of the tachyon—that particle zipping along at hyper-light speeds, incapable of deceleration below the speed of light—which had made Deep-Space Operations feasible. Deep Space communications were accomplished by means of a tachyon wave-generator.

  Peter Melendez keyed in the proper frequency code, which would validate the Priority Channnel transmission, and waited.

  * * *

  At Copernicus Base, it was early afternoon. Business as usual for the majority of lunar base personnel. Almost eight hours had passed since Phineas Kemp had convened the meeting of the Joint Chiefs. Only a handful of high-echelon Copernicus staff knew of the as-yet-unidentified object. Kemp was pleased with the efficiency and smoothness of Oscar Rheinhardt’s Security operations.

  Copernicus Base hummed with the life of the hive: farmers, mechanics, technicians, scientists, administrators, pilots, all busily engaged in their duties, all necessarily unaware of the drama about to unfold in Deep Space, thought Phineas Kemp.

  Attired in his Informal Officer’s jumpsuit, he paced back and forth in the Communications Center, waiting. Waiting and brooding. The room was empty except for Major Alterman, Director of Communications for Copernicus Base—one of the few personnel briefed on the current Security topic. The room was bathed in a soft darkness above, illuminated only by the operational lights on the consoles. It was cool and quiet with the relaxing murmurs and thrums of smoothly functioning machinery permeating the atmosphere.

  In contrast, Kemp felt tense.

  The image of the reactions of the Joint Chiefs to Labate’s pronouncements still registered in his mind. Kemp realized they were merely reflections of his own awe. The words reverberated.

  “. . . initial sign of its presence was a series of luminosity peaks. These peaks were caused by the specular reflection of solar radiation off the surfaces of the object—flat surfaces,” Professor Labate had told them. “The intervals between reflectance peaks indicate that the object is rotating about a principal axis of inertia. It’s an immense cylinder, tumbling end-to-end through space as it approaches the sun. Whenever the flat ends of the cylinder face the sun, we get a bright flash of reflected radiation and light. Spectrometer readings suggest that it is of a metallic substance of uniform characteristics. The object is emanating some kind of VLF electromagnetic field. So far we have not been: able to identify its nature, although the parameters indicate something of a fairly large order, well within the limits defined by a controlled fusion reaction.”

  They’d immediately realized the implications of that. Kemp’s own words had almost been superfluous. “A ship. Evidently been there in orbit for a sizable amount of time. Some product of an alien civilization.”

  The expressions of the others had changed rapidly, passing through stages of shock, flickering briefly through a spectrum of awe and confusion, finally settling into acceptance. Excited acceptance.

  Security measures previously implemented by Kemp had been reinforced by Oscar Rheinhardt, Security Chief. No doubt neither the Chinese or the Khan Base had, any idea of what was out there. Their equipment was not as good. Still, they could take no chances. The discovery was of immense political importance, to say nothing of scientific significance. Officially, the Observatory claimed it had had a hardware crash on the machinery pertinent to the discovery, and were awaiting repairs.

  Because it would take an estimated four weeks to reach the object if they deployed one of the ships in the lunar area, it had been decided to use a DS mining operation in the approximate vicinity of the object’s closest approach to the asteroid belt. Two ore-processing ships were within range: the Astaroth and the Cassandra. The Mission Commander of the Astaroth was a former crewman of Kemp’s—Major Altimiras Franco. He could be trusted. The Joint Chiefs had agreed.

  He was in charge of the first operation with the chance of contacting an alien intelligence. How about that, Dad, Kemp thought to himself as he waited. How about that.

  Alterman looked up, his beard strangely underlit by the instrument lighting. “Colonel, we’ve just gotten word from the Astaroth. Their Snipe reports instrument-contact with the object and Major Franco is patching us in.”

  Finally! thought Kemp, turning quickly and returning to the central console. He slid into a chair next to Alterman, strapping a throat mike to his neck quickly. “Thank, you, Major. Ready when you are.”

  “The Snipe’s just keyed in his scramble-sequence. Go ahead, Colonel.”

  “Copernicus Base, calling SP2 double A. Do you copy?”

  “This is SP2 double A, Copernicus. Spec-5 Peter Melendez on the com. How is my signal, Copernicus?”

  “We copy, SP2 double A. This is Colonel Phineas Kemp, Melendez. What have you got for us?”

  As the Snipe crewman repeated, his initial data material, Kemp nodded to himself, then signaled Major Alterman to contact Security Chief Rheinhardt, Scientific Operations Chief Marcia Bertholde, and Gregor Kolenkhov, Chief of Support Operations, a summons which would bring them immediately to the Communications Center from where they waited on standby, quite close.

  “We copy that, Melendez,” Kemp said. “You should be getting a visual any minute now. In the meantime, I want all instrument-data on telemetry ASAP.”

  “Roger, Copernicus. Stand by, please.”

  Panels on the console began flashing and blinking within three seconds. Display screens began accumulating rows and columns of data. Kemp nodded to himself as he spoke again. “All right, SP2 double A, we have a copy on your telemetry. Copernicus Base is standing by until you have visual confirmation.”

  “We copy,” said Melendez. “SP2 double A, standing by.”

  Kemp leaned back in his console chair and exhaled slowly. The feelings of tenseness mixed with ennui had been extinguished—at least for the moment. Memories flashed through his mind, and he briefly recalled scenes from his years in space. The claustrophobic cabins, the eternal night always threatening to swallow you up, tension as thick as the smell of your sweat. Kemp remembered and he wished that it was him in that Snipe, drawing close to the unknown object.

  A door slid open at the far end of the chamber. Turning, Kemp saw the other members of the Staff enter quickly. The expression on their faces betrayed anxiety mixed with excitement.

  Kemp motioned them over to the console, and began to explain the current situation.

  * * *

  After keying out the throat mike, Melendez turned to O’Hara. “Kemp! Colonel Phineas Kemp. Commander of Copernicus Base, and he was talking to us on Priority Channel.”

  O’Hara was staring straight ahead as though afraid of what he might see looming from the darkness. “I don’t like it,” he said softly. “We’ve been thrown inta something big, Melendez. Why else would the top brass be interested in what we’re doin’?”

  “Yes. My feeling exactly. For once in my life, I think I agree with you.” Melendez smiled to relieve the growing tension, but O’Hara was in no mood for it. The larger man grimaced and returned his gaze to the forward viewing port.

  “Jeez! What’s that? See it? Something just flashed!”

  Melendez had trouble speaking. “Yes. We’re closing in on it. Relative velocity down to five KPS plus. Hang on . . .”

  O’Hara obeyed, then breathed deeply several times, nervously rubbing his lips with the back of his hand. “Bigger every second. Christ almighty, that’s it! Look!”r />
  Staring into the speckled night, Melendez concentrated on something shining with grey-whiteness . . . a metallic glint. The object appeared to be a rectangle, much longer than it was wide, growing larger. As the Snipe homed in on the object, the resolution became more clear, the configuration more distinct.

  An immense cylinder. Slowly tumbling, end-over end . . .

  O’Hara cleared his throat. “I seen a lotta rocks in my time, but I ain’t seen nothin’ like that. Ain’t no asteroid, that’s for sure.”

  Melendez realized he was gawking. “I’d better get Copernicus back on line.” Unsteadily, he keyed in the mikes, and spoke his identification, following it with: “We have a visual.”

  “We copy, SP2 double A. We have your current velocity at 5.3 kilometers per second. Distance from the object 2.67 thousand kilometers. Do you copy that?”

  “Affirmative, Copernicus,” Melendez said after a glance at his readouts. “Do you suggest deceleration and manual control at this time?”

  “Affirmative. Cameras on, now. We want to see that thing.”

  “I’m switching to VOR transmission immediately.”

  The instructions were quickly punched into the instruments. In addition to the omnifrequency scanners, sensors, spectrometers, and other analyzing instruments, three high-resolution Hitachi-Kodak VOR cameras zoom-focused on the object. One camera transmitted crystal-clear images in the visible spectrum, while the others produced infrared and ultraviolet images.

  “All right, SP2 double A. We have a signal. Good hard line. Continue to monitor your telemetry and approach the object on manual.”

  “Switching,” said Melendez as he nodded to O’Hara, who punched out the autoguidance and assumed control of the small ship.