“That wasn’t no rat,” Red said, following the cat. “Tiny, bring!”
The cat caught the little beast and ran over, dropping it at the machinist’s feet. But as soon as the thing hit the ground it took off, fast, faster than any rat the two had ever seen. Red never even got a good look. Tiny pounced again and brought it back over, holding the squirming thing out in his jaws.
“What the grapp is that?” Gants asked, his voice hushed.
It didn’t actually look like a rat, more like a purple crab or spider.
“I’m not touching that thing,” Gants added, backing up.
“I got it,” Red said, grabbing it with his number four arm and squeezing slightly. The shell of the thing cracked and it went limp. “I think we need to report this, though.”
“What in the hell is that?” Weaver asked, holding up the plastic bag containing the body of the spider-thing.
“Chee-hamster, isn’t it, sir?” the Eng asked.
“Chee-hamsters are more yellowish,” Bill said. “And furry. This looks sort of like a crabpus. But not really. I’m not sure what it is.”
“Well, it’s what’s been getting into the chow, sir,” the Eng said. “Once they got to moving boxes, Tiny caught two more.”
“Sir, if I may,” Red interjected. “Tiny obviously recognized them; he chased them like he knew what he was doing. I think he’s been chasing them for some time.”
“What this is, is a quarantine violation,” Bill said, sighing. “That means we’re all in quarantine when we get back unless we can determine that it’s from a nonthreatening biosphere. And since we don’t know where it came from… Hell, just when we need a biologist…”
“Miss Moon?”
“Forensics isn’t biology,” Miriam said, looking at the thing in the bag. “Cute, though.”
“They’re getting in the food,” Bill said. “And we need to know where they came from; Colonel Che-chee didn’t recognize it. If they’re from an unknown biosphere, we’re all in quarantine for thirty days when we get back.”
“That wouldn’t make me happy,” Miriam said. “Well, I’ve got the whole bio lab just sitting there. I guess I’ll use it. If Tiny catches any more that live, save them for me.”
“Successfully adjusted to system HD 242896.”
The Blade had stopped in deep space, done a complete weapons and sensors check and chilled. This was potential Dreen territory; if the enemy was present the CO wanted the option to either fight or run as seemed most prudent.
“Sensor sweep,” the CO said, holding down his position in CIC. Lieutenant Fey had the Conn with Captain Weaver at the secondary Conn in Damage Control near Engineering.
“No unusual particle emissions,” the TACO said after a moment. “All nominal for an FV9 star.”
“Conn, make course for the referenced Jovian,” the CO said.
“We’ll have to find it first, sir,” Lieutenant Fey replied over the comm. “We weren’t actually given its trajectory by the Hexosehr. Doing a planetary sweep at the moment. Permission to take the ship into the edge of the warp denial zone. We can sweep better from in near the star.”
“Move her in, Conn,” the CO said, his face blank. Item One on his report: The Navy needed a better class for COs of spaceships. “TACO, any sign of Dreen?”
“No sign of any other ships in the system, sir,” the TACO replied. “No neutrino or quark emissions over nominal for the star.”
“Stand down to Condition Two,” the CO said. “Captain Weaver to the CIC.”
“The best way to find the planets is still reflectance, sir,” Bill said, looking at the information starting to come up on CIC’s monitors. “The telescopes spot them automatically. We can get some from gravitic anomalies and standard astronomical distances. But mostly we have to just look, so looking with the sun behind us works better. The first time around we had a heck of a time but we learned from it and the algorithms are better, now. But we won’t be seeing anything on the other side of the sun, obviously.”
“CIC, Conn. We have the indicated jovian spotted as well as two more jovians, one super-jovian and two rocky planets.”
“Head for the indicated Jovian,” the CO replied. “We’ll do a sweep of the other side of the sun after checking it out.”
“I’m not spotting any other installations in orbit,” Lieutenant Fey said. “And the Hexosehr buried the other one.”
“Wonder if it’s still down there,” Bill said, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the Jovian. “Be funny if it’s sitting down on the metallic hydrogen bottom.”
“Metallic hydrogen?” Prael said. “Oh, yeah. The egghead said something about that. How do you get metal out of hydrogen?”
“Lots of pressure, sir,” Bill replied. “You’ve had chemistry, sir. Three states of matter.”
“Solid, liquid, gas,” Prael said. “Four with ions.”
“Yes, sir,” Bill said. “Ice is solid water, fog is gas and, well, water is liquid. Any material known has, potentially, all three states. But for you to get solid hydrogen requires sufficient pressure, say the pressure of the gravitational force of a gas-giant, pressing the hydrogen atoms together until they’re a solid. Nominally, due to their configuration and position on the periodic table, a metal. Metallic hydrogen.”
“Got it,” Prael said then paused. “Let me guess. If the pressure gets higher, say more mass…”
“Then you pass the pressure threshhold of the material, bits of hydrogen start to fuse and you have a star,” Bill finished. “Super-massive jovians, there’s one on this planet, are very close to stars. The pressure is so high that it generates some internal kinetic energy so they’re not actually as cold as they should be for their position in the system. There’s a theory that you could find some bodies that are right on the edge of both, sort of fusing but not really willing to be a star. Those are one class of white dwarf.”
“And so much of the planetology lecture of the day,” the CO said. “Plan.”
“We’ll approach to low ball-and-string orbit on each of the rocky planets and major moons,” Bill said. “From there we can do a ground-penetrating radar sweep as well as a computerized visual sweep. Both will be looking for straight lines. They don’t tend to form in nature but civilizations always seem to have them. If we find one, we’ll consider the imagery and try to determine if it’s an artifact or just an anomaly. If we think it’s an artifact, we land and deploy the Marines.”
“And who is the ‘we’ who are checking on the hits?” the CO asked.
“The intel section has an imagery specialist, sir,” the XO reminded him. “He’ll check them.”
“Oh My God.”
Julio Plumber hadn’t been quite sure what an “imagery analyst” was when he signed up, but he By God learned in A School. It was a guy who was going to go blind, early, from looking at satellite shots. When, rarely, satellite shots were shown to the media they were always carefully labeled and the clearest shots possible. The media didn’t get the shots that were just a blur of movement or a shadow that might be a rocket launcher and might just be, well, a shadow.
And they sure as hell didn’t get one hit every ten seconds of various rock formations.
“Chief, I’m getting swamped here,” Plumber squeaked. “I could look at this stuff for the rest of my natural life and not catch up.”
“What you got?” the chief asked, looking over his shoulder at the oversized monitor.
“Chither,” Plumber said exasperatedly. “I don’t care what anybody says, you get straight lines in nature. I got ridges, lots of ridges, I got recently cracked boulders. I got landslides. I got a couple of things I don’t know what they are but they’re not ruins I’ll tell you that. And I got more than I can look at in a million years.”