Chapter Two

pier norlin stretched and yawned. Picket-ship duty was dreary. Being stuck in a long apo-gee orbit required a duty tour of over three weeks with little to do. The automated equip-ment recorded a vast array of data. Most of it Sublieutenant Norlin ignored. Some of it he had no idea what it meant. He had done well at Em-pire Service Academy on Sutton II, but his spe-cialty field had been electronics and command, not physics and analysis.

The data poured through the multichannel collectors and went directly into the computer banks. The cerampix would be studied later by scientists and the data on the block circuits run through the massive Lyman IV base computer. A dozen intricate theories on the abnormally high density of matter inside the Lyman system would be proved or discarded, and Norlin didn't care.

He ran his fingers over the control console, not watching the slow progression of words across his vidscreen. Trying to study for the lieutenant's examination had been more diffi-cult in isolation than he'd believed when he ac-cepted this assignment. His mind kept returning to Lyman IV—and Neela Cosarrian.

Her long, blonde tresses floating on the wind mesmerised him. He could watch for hours as the breeze pulled at her locks and outlined her finely boned face—that gorgeous face with bright sea-green eyes and straight nose and full lips that pressed so nicely against his.

Norlin heaved a deep sigh and ordered the computer to back up over the last ten pages of vidtext. He had seen it all but read and under-stood none of it. How could he when he wished he were on-planet with Neela?

"Status report," he ordered.

"Forty-seven analyzers are on-line and record-ing," came the ship's soft voice. Norlin frowned. He had ordered the technicians to duplicate Neela's voice. There was a slight hint of huski-ness to this computer-generated tone that Neela lacked. This oversight didn't bother him as much as the notion that they might have cut corners in preparing other equipment. He had asked for extensive modification, and the space-port techs had not received the news well.

"How many experiments running?"

"Eight. Do you wish an itemization?"

"Is Neela Cosarrian's on-line?"

"Yes. Doctoral candidate Cosarrian is study-ing the occurrence and spacial distribution of organic molecules within the system. It is her belief that formaldehyde and other organics were left after a cloud of such material swept through the system some four hundred thou-sand standard years ago."

"Stop," Norlin ordered. He knew the basic premise of her research. He had just wanted some contact, however slight, with her and her work.

"There is an unusual signal being detected on a little-used frequency. It is almost drowned out by the ten-centimeter hydrogen emission."

"Natural?"

"Artificial," the ship said. The voice circuit al-tered slightly and turned deeper and more male. Norlin sat up and blanked his vidscreen. On a prior flight he had noticed the subtle change in tone. The ship had warned of a fuel-cell mal-function. He had repaired the trouble before it developed into full-blown danger. Since then, he had become more aware of the computer's in-flection and tenor. Norlin expertly homed in on the signal, laser-bounced a request off an orbiting cometary de-tector forty light seconds across the system to

get a triangulation, then estimated the original frequency and corrected for the Doppler blue shift to get approach speed. A plethora of other information could have been deduced from the faint signal, but Norlin allowed the computer to follow an expert-systems program rather than do it himself. The content of the message worried him.

Through the snap and hiss of hydrogen emis-sion, he heard the faint, worried voice warning, "Dangerous bastards. Can't use normal commu-nications channels. They'll hear. They listen. They're clever. Destroyed my planet."

Norlin worked to computer-filter the signal further and amplify it. He made no attempt to transmit; that ran counter to his standing orders. Other picket ships orbited through the Lyman system gathering data. An unexpected broadcast transmission might wreck hundreds of hours of minute signal collection. Even with sophisticated filtering, data had to be protected.

Norlin's eyes worked along the readouts on his board and saw everything progressed well. He concentrated on enhancing the signal from the distant source. Not only did the contents tantalize him, it broke the monotony of the flight. Studying had quickly palled, and the few amusements the Empire Service allowed aboard a picket ship held his interest less than a day into the mission.

"Huge fleet. Can't guess how many. At least ten thousand, maybe more." At this, Norlin frowned. He might be picking up an entertainment transmission from another system. The idea of thousands of ships descend-ing to destroy a planet had been discredited by Empire strategists long years ago. The finest ge-netically enhanced mentalities in Emperor Arian's court had considered the problem for a decade before deciding that planetary defense could fend off any mobile invasion. Even though such gedanken battles were suspect, Norlin had seen the computer results and agreed.

That didn't stop the trivid dramas from show-ing fourteen different worlds blowing up every week as a result of rebel invasion, alien inva-sion, natural causes, and even unexplained phenomena. Norlin snorted. That wasn't enter-tainment. He preferred the real dramas from Earth's Golden Period. Nothing pleased him more than a good Sherlock Holmes drama or a well-acted Travis McGee piece, unless it was a latter-day Golden Period vid from 2010.

"Just my luck," he said, switching off the re-ceiver and going back to his textbook. "Had to get some worthless trivid."

He tried to concentrate on the text on his vid-screen and found he couldn't. Something nagged at the back of his mind. He finally switched to full computer access and asked, "Is band splitting possible on any entertainment broadcast?"

"No," came the immediate answer. "All enter-tainment bands are laser-closed and not broad-cast. What cannot be done by satellite bounce is transmitted through fop tic cable." He nodded. There was little leakage from a satellite bounce or a comsat-origination program. Through a fiber-optic cable there would be no detectable leakage. He again worked the frequency carrying the disquieting message.

"Help me. Can't go on much longer. Dropped out of shift space too soon. Couldn't get back in. Too close to Lyman IV system primary for a sec-ond shift. No power, anyway. Oxygen's almost gone. Am switching to loop broadcast with everything I discovered. Don't let them destroy another world." Norlin jumped back from the console when a loud screech sounded. He checked the auto-vol-ume control and found it properly adjusted. The unknown ship had switched to a high frequency and microbursted several hundred terabytes of information. Norlin made sure he had inter-cepted it and began reforming it into usable data.

He fluctuated from complete disbelief to grudging acceptance of what he saw. The pilot of the scout ship had not given full documenta-tion, but the pix of the huge black beetlelike looting factories moving along the streets and stripping everything of value sent shivers up Norlin s spine. It might be a fake. The entertain-ment industry had true geniuses at duplicating reality—making their fictions seem more than real. A graininess to the pix bothered him. He be-lieved these photos had been taken from orbit using a scout's surveillance equipment. He was expert in sensors of all kinds. He made a guess about the model of cerampix camera used to record the alien fleet's destruction and invasion. Even worse, he couldn't tear his eyes from the vidscreen.

The panorama of death and devastation sick-ened him even as it held him captive.

"This must be a hoax. One of the others is sending me this as a joke." He tried to locate the other picket ships gathering data. He found Josi Prenn's. She wouldn't fabricate such an elabo-rate joke; hers tended toward sharp jabs lacking in subtlety. Two other picket ships showed up on his sensors. Both were too distant and out of position to originate the broadcast signal.

"It's broadcast," he mused. "That's hardly ever used. Signal gets too weak too fast. Better to use a lock-in lasercom." He fell silent. Lasercoms were useful when you had an exact position on both receiver and transmitter. If he believed the unknown scout ship's pilot, the man had no idea where he was or who he reached.

Norlin ran through a complete global scan. Only the faint off-band com signal from the mysterious scout ship broke the bubble of tenu-ous locator radiation he sent out. He followed it back, checking through triangulation using other detector units. The same position came out of the computer. The distressed scout ship lay just inside the Lyman system Oort cloud. This presented too much danger for a practical joke. The area a thousand AUs from the primary was littered with small comets and particles of dust and gas trying to become comets. Norlin had heard of at least two manned probes into the area that had been severely damaged.

"Not a joke," he decided. He continued to watch what the unnamed scout pilot had re-corded. The frightening view of a world being systematically ravaged sickened him. The read-outs showed conclusively that the radiation cannon had scoured the planet of life before the automated wrecking crews landed.

Pier Norlin watched and through! and grew more restive. He glanced at the sensors he had locked on the probable position of the small scout craft. The instant a tiny waver came in a gravitometer reading, he jumped into action.

"Request permission to alter course," he said, flipping on his base lasercom. He started to ex-plain, then fell silent. It would be two hours be-fore base received the request and another two for their response. Norlin fumed at the necessary delay. He jumped when the reply came sharp and clear from his console.

"What's got into you, Norlin? You haven't finished a quarter of your sweep this time. There's no way I can let you off. Finish your assigned course. We can talk about dura-tions when you get back." He had expected it and had prepared his rea-sons—and tried to brace himself for more light-speed delay.

"Sorry, this is a class-five emergency. Possibly a class two." He ran through the scout's data during the hours waiting for authorization.

"Class two? There aren't any ships in distress. Don't try to feed me vacuum. Finish your mis-sion and quit wasting time. I go off duty in four

hours and you've tried my patience all day long."

"Scout ship, registry most likely the Penum system." Norlin double-checked the computer's figures, backtracking the scout ship. Penum seemed to carry a 95-percent level of confidence as the ship's port of origin.

That meant Penum IV's human colony was dead and the entire planet raped.

"Here come details. I'll give it to you in a clas-sified burst." Norlin worked for several minutes, as if his supervisor might violate the laws of physics and order him to stop immediately. "Here comes everything I got from the ship. It's going to be a macroburst. Get ready for it." Norlin almost went crazy waiting for confir-mation of receipt of the transmitted data. Four hours stretched like four centuries.

"We're getting some proton-storm interfer-ence," came the unexpected reply. "Retransmit to be sure we get your data. Can't hold a beam longer than a few minutes."

"Understood," Norlin said immediately, then cursed himself for the response that wouldn't be heard for two hours. He punched in the transmit code again. The data relayed by the scout ship in addition to his own observations blasted to-ward Lyman IV on a lasercom beam. Even as the computer churned out the transmission, Norlin reprogrammed his orbit to intercept the incoming scout ship.

"Inconsistent with mission," came the com-puter's immediate response. "There is insuffi-cient fuel to jet directly to intercept. A

Hohmann orbit requires fourteen days. In either instance, the ordered data collection must be terminated."

"Rule One," Norlin said.

"Danger to the crew of a spaceship noted."

"Well?" he demanded. "Give me the mission override, and let's blast straight on an intercept and damn the fuel!"

"All pertinent data has been analyzed. There are no living crew members aboard the scout ship." He slumped. He had hoped the pilot had sur-vived.

"Oxygen?" he asked.

"Affirmative."

"Intercept in optimal time," he ordered. "I as-sume full responsibility. Even if the crew is dead, the ship contains important data." Cold waves swept up and down his back as he stared at the vidscreen and the slow parade of black metal machines chewing their way across Penum IV's surface. The pilot had died bringing this warning to Lyman IV. What other information had he put in the scout ship?

"I require base confirmation."

"Get it," he snapped. Norlin heard the deeper male tones creeping into the computer's tone. He was in no mood to argue with a hunk of quantum-etched superconducting ceramic mi-croprocessor.

"Clearance for maximum blast obtained. Pre-pare for full acceleration in ten seconds." Norlin blinked. The authorization had come

back fast. That meant the first macroburst had been decrypted quickly. That anyone at the base had the sense to appreciate the gravity of the information startled him. Several new geneti-cally enhanced officers had shipped in—per-sonal favorites of Emperor Arian, it was rumored. All Norlin knew was that the gen-hanced line officers paid little attention to duty, preferring their own esoteric pursuits. He settled into his couch just as the steering jets fired. The small picket ship realigned, then blasted out at full speed. The monatomic hydro-gen-lox engines got the ship moving and then shut down. Then the electric ion engines applied a steady thrust that rapidly drained the fuel-cell batteries. This far from the primary, Norlin could not use solar panels to replenish.

The cost and wear on the ship were not his concern. His mind raced as he tried to make sense of what he had seen. He rapid-scanned through the cerampix taken by the pilot. The dizzying array of sights and ships and destruc-tion chewed at him. The Empire Service had found three other alien races. Two had disputed the emperor's right to colo-nize their worlds. Both had been interdicted and effectively confined to their own systems. It had been from these two campaigns that the emperor's strategists had decided it was impos-sible for fleet bombardment to destroy a civi-lized world. The Empire Service fleet had sustained massive casualties in seven attempts on the two worlds.

Even asteroid diversion had proved ineffective. Spacefaring races operating near their home worlds had advantages a foreign invader did not. Three world-wrecking asteroids had been blown apart. Six other expeditions to di-vert asteroids had been destroyed. And look as they might, neither of the systems had signifi-cant Oort clouds for the deflection of a comet into their worlds.

Norlin shuddered as he thought of the third alien world discovered. The aliens had not been able to carry the war to Earth. Neither had the Empire Service been able to penetrate into the small star cluster already settled. An uneasy truce had been drawn after fourteen years of sporadic, fitful fighting. Earth observed the treaty more out of fear than honesty. The aliens had their own reasons for not venturing into fur-ther contact with the emperor's colonies.

A fourth alien race—a superior one—pre-sented Emperor Arian with immense problems. Norlin had heard of the growing rebel bands on other worlds. He had personally seen the dis-content of two colony worlds with the gen-hanced imperial line. Mutiny was becoming more common in Empire Service ships and exe-cutions for increasingly trivial offenses the norm.

Earth had internal difficulties with its colo-nies. An overwhelmingly superior alien race bent on conquest could be the element needed to break the colonies away from Earth—and possibly destroy both Earth and the far-flung colony worlds.

"Where's the picture of the aliens? All I see are

their robots." He grunted as he moved to give the computer more instructions. Even a half-g acceleration wore him down after a few days of free-fall in space. He had neglected to do his ex-ercises—all pilots scorned them and paid the price later when they landed.

"Scanning," the computer reported in re-sponse to his keyed orders. A few seconds later, the computer reported, "There are no photos of the aliens themselves. All moving indications are of robotic machines controlled by a master computer or a shielded intelligence."

"Photonic," he grumbled sarcastically. "We don't know what they look like." He punched in a new string of commands. The computer re-sponded immediately.

"Time of interception, eight hours, three min-utes. Recommendation: three-quarter oxygen intake to insure safe return to base."

"So ordered," he said. Always suspicious of automated life-support equipment, Norlin checked to be sure the computer had adjusted the levels properly. He felt a little lightheaded, but he was trained to operate at even less oxy-gen quantities. What held his attention came from a sensor panel, not life support.

"What's giving the indication? We're still too far from the scout ship for visual." He tapped the panel around the proximity indicator. The readout did not vary. He didn't have a short cir-cuit on the board.

"Vidscreen image enhanced electronically," the computer reported.

"I don't see any—" Noriin bit back his denial.

He didn't see anything—but something moved through space an AU away. Space black, it moved without showing jets or ion trail. The only way he knew it was there was by the occul-tation of a star pattern he knew well.

"Estimate size of object," he ordered.

"Which object?" asked the computer.

Norlin's heart skipped a beat. The aliens had arrived in the system—his star system.