Books by George!

Finally, an image of the breakout appeared on one of the monitors. “Seriously strange,” Abernathy said.  “What do we have here?” He thought for a few seconds. “Senior Chief Pelham! Senior Chief Pelham!”  The AI would now forward his message to the Senior Chief, wherever he was.

“At lunch,” Tactical Technician Jingfei Wu said. “He scheduled himself for an hour, knowing full well that nothing ever happens at this time of day. I suppose technically I’m in charge. He’d get really upset if I ordered a Yellow Alert.  What are we looking at?”

“From the pattern, about a million tons,” Abernathy said. “Oh, I know why the breakout looks odd. That ship is oblate, not prolate.  AIs, who on God’s earth flies oblate starships?” A very long list started scrolling across one of his displays. “Filter that for ‘could actually fly’ and ‘plausibly going to show up here’.” The display went blank. “Broaden the filters until we find someone,” he ordered.

“He’s lighting off drives,” Abernathy reported. “This time the power curve looks fairly reasonable if not very high for a freighter. Are you hearing all this, Senior Master Chief?” Abernathy asked.

“Other than you’ re interrupting my hot date with a corned beef sandwich with sauerkraut,” Pelham answered by the communicator, “I am hearing everything. That includes a certain Tactical Technician’s analysis of what I would do if she ordered a Yellow Alert, which I agree she’s currently authorized to do.”

“They’re about to enter our light cone,” Senior Comms Technician Richard Vanderwelt reported.  “Weren’t the three of us here a few months ago when this happened?”

“The nice people from Teruwhon, and their first starship ever,” Pelham said. “Much more sophisticated than most foreign barbarians from beyond the pale,” he added. “Instead of wandering around their own neighborhood, which was doubtless entirely full of other foreign barbarians, they knew to come here, to the Imperium, immediately.  Those Parsnipians must’ve told them to come to us, whoever Parsnipians are. Some other group of not quite barbarians.”

“And I have a transmission,” Vanderwelt said.  “Military validation codes! It must be one of ours.”

“No way,” Abernathy said. “We don’t build ships like that.”

“Possibly unknown ship with captured codes?” Jingfei said. She began checking readiness levels on the defense systems, then noted Pelham’s glare.  “Better safe than sorry.”

“Fair enough,” Pelham said.

“Melanie?” Winston called into the phone. “Miss Hayes? How large are they?”

“Big enough to take down a horse,” she answered. “Big as a grizzly. Hang on a second. You can hear the horse screaming.”

Winston listened. The screams were those of a horse in agony.

“Yes,” Winston answered. “We’re on our way as soon as we saddle up, so to speak. Parkinson! Schroeder! Break out the Brownings and extra ammo. Double quick! ” He stood and pulled on his pistol belt. “Madison, you have the office. First two men who call to report their rounds, they come here instead.”

Two minutes later, the Department’s squad car roared to life.

“Parkinson! Use the siren! We might as well let people know we’re on the job!” Winston ordered.

The sheriff’s car rushed down deserted streets, porch lights coming on in its wake as people looked out to see what was happening. An occasional rifle shot could still be heard in the distance.

The screams of a wounded horse drowned out the siren as the car approached the corral. Parkinson put over the wheel so the car’s headlights illuminated the nearly-dark corral. The horse was on the ground, and several things stood over it pinning it in place as they tore gobs of flesh from its side.

“Jesus, Mary, and all the saints!” Schroeder shouted. “What are those?”

The car skidded to a stop. The three men threw open the doors and jumped out. Winston paused to grab the reserve rifle and a bandolier of ammunition.

“Parkinson! Schroeder!” Winston shouted. “I don’t care what they are. Kill them. I’m covering our rear!”

“There was another oddity,” Cheryl observed. “This I found about just before heading over here, from drinking at the bars used by the Warp Point Defense Fortress crews. Someone measured the power curve on the Peaceful Harmony, practice test, which pulled rather few gees while arriving and leaving.”

“This is surprising for a first starship?” Waters asked.

“They had warship-grade power curves,” Cheryl answered. “Actually, and they were staying at very low throttle, they had better curves than the Imperial Fleet does. I didn’t believe it, but the fellow I chatted up had a copy of the curves, so I paid off my bet and bought his first three drinks. They also had a strange warp point emergence burst.” She put the images she had copied up on a screen.

The five of them looked at each other. “Strange people, multiple sightings, warship grade ship?” Waters said, “This is worth a message ball to Earth, four copies, full encryption. On the same line, I received a private message. The Langley has completed its Imperial Fleet Service, and will be here eventually.”

Chapter

Warp Point Prime Defense Fortress

Barham System

Martingale 5, 853 AIS

“Emergence. Emergence. I have an emergence.” Senior Technician Ninth Class Roger Abernathy looked up from his displays and tapped the ‘Warning Acknowledged’ button. “Warp zone three, extreme northwest quadrant.”

Abernathy waited for his AI systems to tell him what was going on. That part of the warp zone corresponded to red dwarf R2578.3194.639A – so said the display – from which there was almost never inbound traffic. The star was utterly undistinguished beyond being one of the 50 billion stars of the Solarian Imperium. Anywhere you could reach from there could be reached more rapidly on a different path. If the star hadn’t had a warp link to Barham, the Imperium might have taken forever and a day to survey it.

The AIs were taking their own sweet time about identifying the new ship. They should be faster than that, Abernathy thought. System Defense Command had, to the great annoyance over large numbers of people, been ordered to do a complete recalibration of the system’s gravitronic detectors, meaning the system’s half dozen warp-capable corvettes had spent several months making warp transitions to distant places and then transiting back again at different speeds. The wear and tear on their conventional and warp drives had been substantial, as a result of which all six of them were now scheduled for major time in the yards. However, with recalibration the detectors were appreciably better, even if the hardware was obsolete junk.

A search of the house revealed no bodies. There was considerable blood everywhere but no sign of any people. A pistol appeared to have been flung into one corner of the room. On examination, it was found to have been fired repeatedly, until it ran out of ammunition. A trail, not made of footprints or horseshoe marks, led into the pond. There was no sign of where whatever had made the footprints emerged again from the pond.

“We didn’t bring any dynamite,” Schroeder said, “because it might’ve been interesting to toss a few sticks of dynamite into the pond, inside bottles to keep them dry until they went off, and see if anything floated to the surface. I don’t expect anything to happen, but that’s the only idea I have.”

“That’s more ideas than I had,” Winston said. “We can confirm the house was wrecked up, four people are missing, but there’s no explanation. Let’s do a broader circuit around the far side of the pond out as far as we can go in the fields without getting into the rocks, and see if we find anything else.”

The search was fruitless. Other than the marks leading to the pond, which McTavish proposed could’ve been something walking one way and then the other, there was nothing to be seen. One entire side of the pond was up against a rocky shelf, across which a small army could have marched without leaving a trail. That appeared to be how the mystery assailants had come and gone.

“Okay,” Cooper said, “time to call it a day here, so I get to go back and write another report saying there are four more missing bodies, but no explanation for what might’ve occurred. And we really didn’t see anything inside that house that counted as a clue.”

Winston Cooper stared at the wall clock. It was not quite nine in the evening. The sun had set. Soon enough the night watch would show up and he could head off to bed. Covering for Grandpa while he was now off in Phoenix listening to the Governor by-and-by became exhausting even with an afternoon nap.

The telephone rang. Sergeant Madison lifted the receiver. “Prescott Sheriff’s Department, Madison speaking.”

“Melanie Hayes, Northcote West Corral. I have multiple large carnivores chasing our horses. Not enough light to identify. They shrugged off pistol fire, and I’m short of rifle ammunition. Please send men and heavy weapons.”

“I did put in a trade inquiry,” Cheryl Michaelsdotr said. “They’re willing to offer purified elements, recordings of music, novels, pretty pictures of tourist sites that no one here can visit, and the like.” The people around the table rolled their eyes. The Imperial supply of recorded music was so large that no one would ever finish reading the list of the pieces, let alone listening to them. “There was one minor peculiarity. There is a recent record of Teruwhon.  Ten years ago, an  Altai Lines freighter had a jump discontinuity and decided to force drop into their system.  Any port in a storm, and Altai is scrupulous about the non-contact regulations. However, they did download a complete data dump from the masked Imperial observation satellites.  Ten years ago, the locals were attempting to invent the internal combustion engine, not stunningly successfully. They had half-decent steam engines, meaning reciprocating pistons, not turbines. Suddenly, these people have a starship. And it seems to have been locally made. Immigration made their usual surreptitious sampling of various things they brought along, and all of the isotopic compositions match precisely what you would expect from Teruwhon.”

“Now, that’s quaint. How did they pull that off?” Senior Researcher Waters asked.

“Teruwhon is at the far end of the Observation Zone,” Sachenbacher said. “It’s absolutely amazing we have recent data on it.”

“The Teruwhon ship, the Peaceful Harmony, had two extra crewmen,” Abraham Fullmer observed. “They were Parsnipians. They stayed on board out of sight. They explained they had been stranded on another system way out there, where the Peaceful Harmony first stopped, and were helping with practical space navigation in exchange for being taken home near the end of the trip. No one in Immigration seems to have noticed that no one has ever heard of Parsnipians before.  So I did a search. They’ve never been seen before in our sector. But if I go across frontier sectors, all the way across the Empire, in the last few years there have been some dozens of cases in which a ship from a more or less new world would show up with a couple of Parsnipian crewmen. Their alibis were all different.”

“Imperial Immigration Service didn’t pick up on this?” Waters asked.

“Officially, they stayed on board out of sight,” Marjorie Quan said. “The ship showed up with a considerable number of Imperial credits, and I suspect left rather poorer, even not counting the Imperial map and survey they purchased. Indeed, if we send off to our Planetary government for the immigration visitation report — those are public documents — I will happily bet ten credits that the Parsnipians don’t get mentioned. Long live the Empire!”

“In theory we’re also supposed to be supporting our friends who insure starships,” Waters said.  “After all, there are only a modest fraction of a quadrillion star ships in the Empire. Did these folks give us any data?”

“Curiously,” Quan said, “they didn’t even charge for it.  For a modest number of warp points we now have improved measurements.  Actually, they did a precise job of measuring things, assuming their instruments are any good.”

“Mr. Schroeder,” Winston said, “we get enough horses from Matthews. Do you know where the Chadwick house is?”

“Rail Tower Three,” Schroeder answered, “follow the arroyo downhill to the pond. It’s about 2 miles, and the house is right there.”

“Does that sound right?” Winston asked Roberts. “Wouldn’t want to ride out there, and discover there are two Chadwick houses.”

“He’s got it, no two ways about it.” Roberts nodded vigorously. “But I ain’t going out there again. It weren’t natural. And if Mr. Matthews insists I go out there again, I quit.”

“Mr. Della Vega,” Winston called. “It appears that I get to ride out to investigate a murder. Or something. You get to be the backup Sheriff, just like Gramps ordered. And Mr. Schroeder and I ride out there to see what happened. Meanwhile, Mr. Roberts, you get to tell Deputy Della Vega here exactly what you saw, that’s after you take care of your horse a bit, while Mr. Della Vega is bringing in one of the patrolmen to back him up here.” He paused. “Gentlemen, did I forget anything?”

“You’re good,” Schroeder said. “I’ll phone ahead to the stables for a second horse, and load it up with supplies and water, just in case.”

“And pack a Browning,” Winston said. “Someone who wrecks up a house, may be a decent number of them.”

“There’ll be a couple of men calling in soon,” Della Vega said, “it being that hour of the morning. Shall I have them meet you at the stables? It might be better to send a larger party.”

“Might as well,” Cooper said. “It’s midweek and very quiet. And switch around the other walking patrols so we appear to be covering everything.”

“I’ll see if railroad can give us a ride to Tower Three,” Schroeder said. “They have that fancy new diesel yard locomotive, so they never need to get up a head of steam before they can move.”

Soon enough Winston and his three deputies had reached Tower Three, waved goodbye to the yard locomotive and its flatcar, and headed down the arroyo. There was little to say. The three deputies engaged in vigorous discussion of the ongoing baseball season, a topic about which Cooper knew little.

Beyond the modest pond were the remains of the Chadwick house. Winston signalled for his deputies to stop while he approached the house. The horses, he noticed, were a bit skittish, as though they were aware of something that evaded human senses.

“Keep your eyes open,” Winston said. “The horses might smell something, like a large bear.”

“Weren’t no bear what wrecked that house,” Schroeder said. “On the ground. That was the front wall. It looks like it was just yanked out of place, so part of the roof collapsed. You could do that, with a truck, and a chain wrapped through the two windows. Assuming the walls weren’t too solid.”

Winston looked inside. Furniture was smashed to pieces. In what had been a kitchen, barrels of salt pork and flour look to have been split open. Little was left of their contents.

“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone here?” His call was met with silence.

“Mr. McTavish?” Winston said. “You’re the expert tracker. Please see if you can find a trail. Houses don’t blow apart like this, not all by themselves. Someone must’ve done it, and probably left a trail behind them.”

We are now well into the future. A private firm Eyes on the Skies provides the best available astrographic data for the Anglic Union — and anyone else who wants to pay for it.

Eyes on the Skies

Sector Headquarters, Barham

Marcus 27, 853 AIS

Senior Researcher Hiram Waters looked around the senior staff conference room.  The conference table was a slab of goldenwood, locally grown, inlaid in black oak with the corporate Eyes on the Skies logo.  Waters thought the inlay had been a substantial waste of money, though less of a waste than the rococco-carved marble walls.  However, they had inherited the corporate headquarters from the former owners, an in-system space freight Corporation whose owners and board had apparently been dedicated to seeing how thoroughly they could take the stockholders for a ride. It appeared that the stockholders had been thoroughly ridden. It was obviously a waste to tear out the marble, so there it remained. The inlay in the pre-existing table was a concession to practicality, occasionally useful to impress locals with the magnificence of Eyes on the Skies.

The rear face of the marble slabs, the face locals did not see,  was two inches of battle steel,  with a substantial air gap between the steel and the next wall. Under the conference room, reaching forty feet down into the granite bedrock, were the equally armored Eyes on the Skies computers.  Waters was inclined to view the armor as being excessive, but this facility was an Eyes on the Skies sector headquarters, remodelled when pirate attacks were not unknown.

“Gentle beings,” he opened the meeting, “we did receive the full data block from Earth Headquarters last month. We are now only the two years travel time behind them. We’ve all had computers chewing on it to see what interesting bits there might be or what inconsistencies there are with our own data.   Have we learned anything?” He looked around the table, starting at the far end and Junior Researcher Marjorie Quan.

“Their data is correct on us up to our last transmission and return date some years back.” She spread her arms palms upwards. “After all, we are at the extreme far end of everything. At least this time they didn’t get anything wrong that I’ve found — yet.”

“Still looking for new contacts,” Wilhelm Sachenbacher said. “Within our sector, almost every ship that has shown up in the last year is from someplace we already know about. That puts us out a hundred light-years from the frontier with decent coverage. There was one interesting arrival. We received a ship from Teruwhon, which is apparently their first starship. They didn’t get beyond immigration except for exchanging biological data for future trips, but they had the brains to show up with a whole pile of Imperial Credits, so they could at least pay for things. The only thing they actually bought was a decent map of the Empire so that they could figure out where they wanted to go next. They’d actually figured out the way you trade with people who’ve never seen you before without risking biological contamination issues is to trade with people who use completely different biologies.   Alas for them, they breathe air, meaning they can easily trade only with methanovores and the like.”

Winston Cooper leaned back in his chair.  Gramps had been happy to collect his penny as a Captain in the State Militia, but now the time had come to pay the piper.  He’d been called to duty, training new volunteers.  He couldn’t be ordered to leave the county, but his assigned station was in Ashfork, about as far north as you could go without crossing the county line.

The sound of hooves, a horse being ridden at a gallop, came through the front windows.  Winston stood.  People weren’t supposed to do that, not this close to city center.  The sound of  hooves stopped,  to be replaced by a horse’s heavy breathing.  Pauses suggested the horse was helping itself to the water trough.

“They’re dead!  They’re all dead!” a man shouted as he dashed up the two stairs leading to he office.  “Oh, God!  It’s terrible.  It’s unbelievable!”

Deputy Schroeder joined Winston in standing.  The shouting man dashed through the doors, coming to a stop as he tried to figure out where to go next.

“Easy there,” Winston said. “Have a seat, have some water — you look like you need it — and tell us what the problem is.” He hoped that line would work. Gramps had done a certain amount of training, how to be a good Associate Sheriff when Gramps was absent, but this looked to be a bit out of line.

The man swallowed a mug of water and finally slowed down.

“I’m Winston Cooper, Associate Sheriff. And you would be?”

“Chester Roberts. I’m a field hand for the Matthews ranch. We had a cow stray, section of fence went down, so I was sent out looking for it.  I was going to stop at the Chadwick house; Chadwick has enough water to raise feed for cows, and we buy from him.  He must be dead. Him and his family. Their house was all smashed to pieces. No idea what happened, but there was blood all over the place.  So I rode here, fast as I could in this weather without killing the horse, to get help. You’re the Sheriff, you need to arrest the killers.”

“That’s me, all right,” Winston said. “Back a half step. The bodies. Could you tell how they were killed?”

“No bodies,” Chester said. “There was just blood everywhere. Never seen so much in my life. And the house was smashed to bits.”

“Did I hear my name mentioned?” Pelham asked, his voice echoing from the ready room, to which he had retreated to attack the paperwork storm.

“Yes, Senior Chief,” Roger answered. “We have a freighter that just left. I ran full tracking on it. Jingfei’s analysis shows that it had warship level real-space drives with a better power curve than the Imperial Fleet gets. So I am dutifully writing up a report which will doubtless go into someone’s inbox and perhaps be read one decade or another.”

“Wait!” Senior Chief Pelham said. “Front-end, show me what happened.”  He waited while Roger and Jingfei led him through the display and analysis. “Now you get a lesson in how to do things and get ahead, and how the Imperial Fleet actually works. If you file a report saying that someone flew a warship through here, even a disguised warship, someone up the paygrade line will read it, have conniptions, possibly even apoplexy, throw three kinds of fit, and send an Imperial Audit team that will insist on inspecting everything, down to the usage of toilet paper in the Flag Officers Residence Hall. To justify their trip, they have to find things that are wrong, so they will, whether they were wrong or not. That’s ignoring that someone might complain that we failed to notice that this freighter was actually a warship, assuming it was, which seems extremely unlikely, since assuredly Customs and Immigration it a full and thorough inspection of the freighter, confirming that it really was a freighter.”

“I see, sir,” Roger said.

“No, what we do,” Pelham explained, “since for sure it is what actually happened, is to file a report that our tracking instrumentation malfunctioned and claimed that this primitive faster-than-light freighter was in fact a highly-advanced warship of the Invincible Empire of the Orglons. Having filed that report, which says that our instrumentation is old — that’s for sure true — and showing occasional signs of failure, for which we can doubtless find evidence someplace in the files, we then ask for replacement units and backup spare parts.”

“But what if it was a warship?” Roger asked.

“It wasn’t,” Pelham said firmly. “If you keep saying you think this freighter was a warship, someone will eventually conclude that you should have a Outstanding rating on your next quarterly review, instead of the Superlative or Incomparable rankings that in a few years will give you a promotion in rank and pay. I mean, we have thirty-seven levels of Quarterly Evaluation, and I would rather not have to explain why someone on my watch was anywhere but in the top two, an event that has not happened in over a century.”

“Oh,” Jingfei said, “I understand perfectly now. Thank you very much for educating me, Senior Chief.”

“Understood,” Roger said.

“Honorable Senior Chief,” Jingfei asked, “on this station, do people actually receive Quarterly Evaluations other than Incomparable? It is certainly correct to do so, if someone deserves this, but does it actually get done?”

Pelham did not quite laugh. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “Of course no one ever gets anything other than an Incomparable rating. Why if I had to give someone a lower rating, say a Superlative, it would reflect badly on me, the Station Commander, the Imperial Fleet Squadron Commander, and eventually the Planetary Prime Minister. All those senior people would want to make emphatically sure that the guilty party took the blame for this horrible failure, the guilty party in this case of course being me. Therefore I don’t do such a thing. After all, that’s the Solarian Imperial Fleet way.”

We are now rather farther into the tale

Radnor Cooper leaned back in his desk chair.  The padding was a luxury, but when a  man reached a certain age, certain comforts were worth the price.  His joints agreed; he could move as swiftly as a much younger man.  Once upon a time, he’d walked the streets, same as his men, but now the City Council wanted him to stay where he could be found.  Once upon a time, he’d read up on business records, enough to understand the ledgers at the general store he’d never gotten around to opening, meaning he could read the Sheriff’s Office accounts, enough to see if the book-keeper had been skimming.  Before the Great War, he’d caught one of them doing that.  The fool would be getting out of the Florence Prison, soon enough, and might have the wits not to show his face here.  Prescott had never recovered the money.

“Sheriff Cooper, Sir,” Deputy Juan Della Vega called from the main office, “someone you need to speak to.”

“Bring him in,” Radnor said.  He stood and extended his hand.

“Ebenezer Sickles,” the other man introduced himself as they shook hands.  “Pleased to meet you, sir.  I’m a rider for the Norcross Ranch, west of here.”

“Tycho Norcross,” Radnor responded.  “Fine horses, fine cattle, always the best steaks at Trinity House.  Hopefully your ranch has been quiet?”

“Ranch?  Yes, sir. It’s about one of our men.” Ebenezer nodded firmly.  “Denver Joe Marquardt, Assistant Foreman, rode to Prescott, hand-carrying letters for our bank and your two general stores. We usually mail or telegraph, but lines are down again and mail these days is confused.  That heath thing.  But Joe’s vanished.”

“He rode in by himself?” Radnor asked.

“No, sir,” Ebenezer answered.  “Fat Bob Smith was with him, and an extra horse. Bob was taking his four days in town.  We each get that a couple times a year.”

“Smith I know,” Radnor said.  “At least twice I can think of, he broke up a bar fight before my men got there.  Polite about it.  Picked two guys up by the seats of their pants, one on each arm, and dropped them well apart from each other.”

“Joe and Bob didn’t return, so I got sent to see what happened.   Joe didn’t reach the bank, didn’t reach either store.  They hadn’t stayed at Beth’s Rooms For Cheap.  Bob hadn’t been seen at Sarah’s Ostrich Ranch, and they know him good.   Northcote West Stables, we’ve an account with them, checked their books.  They hadn’t stabled their horses there.  Their night watch, young lady, a real looker, proper Boston accent just like my grand-dad, was sure they hadn’t come in while she was on duty.  She promised to keep an eye open for them.”

“Northcote has a girl doing nights?” Radnor asked.

“Their regular, that would be Mister O’Hara, saw the heath and left town.  Rapidly.  With his family.  For Ireland. Said heath’s haunted by demons.  He invited me along.” Ebenezer nodded again.  “But I watched her shoot – Northcote makes their people practice every day. Then she pulled two pocket derringers, like out of nowhere, shot one of them with her off hand. Never missed.  She’s darn good.” 

“Weather’s been fine,” Radnor said.  “They didn’t try to ride across the heath, did they?  There’s poison or something there.”

“No, sir!” Ebenezer answered.  “From our water tower, we can see the heath at night, see it glow weird colors.  We don’t go near it, and there’s a good trail from us east to the highway.  If you call it a highway.”

Radnor snorted.  “Highway?  It got clipped by the heath.  No one’s taking it north or south now.  Did you follow the path they’d’ve taken?”

“Not really,” Ebenezer answered.  “I was delivering a string of mules to the Callahan ranch, well north, and the boss phoned there.  That’s a long distance call; he paid good money for that.  He must’ve been real worried.  But he’s a good man to work for, cares about his men.”

“Have to send a posse out, back trace where they might be,” Radnor said.  “Horses went lame, they stopped for a day, might explain it.  I’ve already got one forming.  Phone company thinks someone stole one of their trucks…it was supposed to be back this morning from splicing lines.  They keep losing phone lines for some reason.”

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