“My name is Ozymandias,” Gunny Judas said.
“Sorry, Gunny?” Eric replied. “What was that?”
“I barely recall, sir,” the Gunny said. “Something I learned in school. A poem about a ruin in Egypt. The only part I can remember is the part that goes something like: My name is Ozymandias. Look upon me ye mighty and despair. But the statue it’s about was ruined and faded by time.”
“Habitable planet and all those ruins right in the line of Dreen advance,” Captain Prael pointed out sourly. “But we found nada of any use so we’re done here. We’ll leave it to generations of archaeologists if the Dreen don’t trash it. Next?”
“HD 242647,” Lieutenant Fey said. “G2 class star, just short of nine light-years away.”
“XO?”
Bill looked at the star map pensively, then shrugged.
“Technically, Astro is right,” Bill said, frowning.
“But… ?” the CO asked.
“But I’m wondering if we should bet on the ponies, sir,” Bill said. “The Blade’s engine was found on the rocky planet of an F type star and so are two other facilities that are believed to be from the same race. Another, though, is on the sole rocky planet of a B, a blue star. Okay, so this city is around a G class. But all the stuff we’ve found that’s useful has been around other classes.”
“And… ?”
“HD 34547 is a blue seventeen light-years from here,” Bill said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong and we blew a survey. But my point is that it’s not a G class star.”
“Whoa,” the sensor tech said as the ship exited the heliopause. “TACO!”
“We’re getting major readings, sir,” the TACO said, pointing at the display.
“Hmmm…” Captain Prael said. “Dreen?”
“They don’t match the Dreen readings we have, sir,” the TACO said, shaking his head. “And they’re way off the scale. If that’s a Dreen ship, sir, it’s the size of a moon.”
“Got this triangulated, yet?” the CO asked cautiously.
“Right in by the star, sir,” the sensor tech answered. “Less than one AU. Inside the warp-denial bubble.”
Sufficient gravity caused the ship’s warp drive to refuse to work. For Sol the warp-denial point was between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. For this more massive star, it was at nearly one astronomical unit, the distance from Earth to Sol. However, the surface temperature of a planet at that distance would be closer to Mercury’s. Whatever was generating the energy was relatively close to the blue-white star.
“Actually, sir,” the tactical officer continued, looking at the readings. “It appears to be in a non-Keplerian orbit. Not even that, it looks like it’s just sitting over the star, directly out of the plane of elliptic.”
“Well, we’re here to find stuff from that race,” the CO said. “Makes sense that it would be something that was big and put out a lot of particles. So we check it out. We have a visual, yet?”
“There’s a flicker there,” the TACO said, zooming in the scope. “There’s something there, but what is the question. We’ll just need to get closer.”
“Conn, CIC…”
“Whoa,” Bill said, looking at the swelling image on the screen. “That looks like…”
“The world’s biggest Christmas tree,” Prael finished.
The ten-kilometer object was tapered like a fir, either made of glass or some similarly translucent material and colored in wild shades of red, purple and green. Different “branches” were different colors and either were pulsing or picking up refractions from the blue star. The base of the “trunk,” and there did appear to be an extension, was pointed towards the star with the tapered “top” pointed into deep space. And it was, in fact, just sitting at the absolute north pole of the star.
“Distance to object?” the CO asked.
“Three AU,” the TACO said.
“Sir, recommend…” Weaver started to say.
“Conn, CIC,” the CO said. “Hold it right here. Way ahead of you, Captain Weaver. We don’t know what that thing is or what it does and I’m not getting any closer until we do.”
“It’s pretty, I’ll give it that,” Prael said.
The Blade had moved around the system getting images of the giant “tree.” There was, indeed, a section of “trunk” on the inner side. Temperatures in that region should be nearly four hundred degrees Celsius on the surface. However…
“And weird,” Bill said. “I don’t believe these readings. Nowhere on the surface, including on the side pointed to the star, does the surface temperature get above a hundred degrees celsius.”
“Conn, Astro.”
“Go,” the CO said.
“We’ve got another anomaly and you’re not going to believe this one…”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Oh, now that’s just too rich,” Bill said, shaking his head at the planetology monitor.
The ship had not lifted with a full science complement, but it had brought some specialty personnel. Astroman Darryl Figueredo was an astronomy-mate, once one of the most obscure members of the Navy’s wide-flung bureaucracy. Since man had gone to sea the stars had guided him and even with the advent of GPS the Navy had continued the tradition of teaching stellar navigation. Stars changed position ever so slightly on a constant basis which was why the Naval Observatory put out constantly updated tables detailing how to use their current position to find a ship’s current position. Somebody had to do the viewing, the calculating and fill out the paperwork. Since that was what enlisted men were for, the Navy had an insignificant number of enlisted people with just that specialty.
With the abrupt shift to a space Navy, the specialty had become far more important. However, there were still only a handful of astronomy-mates in the Navy. The school was being ramped up, but in the meantime…
Darryl pushed his glasses back up his nose and shrugged.
“Sir, I just find the stuff,” the astronomy-mate said. With gray-green eyes and chocolate brown skin, Darryl was a second-generation Dominican and still retained a trace of his family’s islands accent. But since he had also been the captain of his school’s astronomy club, getting this job was a dream-come-true. Admittedly, if he had his druthers he’d have been doing it from a nice safe observatory on Earth, but you went where the Navy sent you. “It’s up to somebody else to figure it out.”
So far the astronomy-mate had found only four planets in the system, a rather paltry number even for a blue-white star. But that was only the most minor part of the strangeness.
All four planets were super-massive Jovian gas-giants, planets that were right on the edge of being stars themselves.
All four were in exactly the same Keplerian orbit, circling the blue-white at a distance of 2 Astronomical Units, just a little greater distance than Mars is from Sol.
And they were, as far as the instruments could determine, perfectly spaced.
“I’m starting to wonder what this race couldn’t do,” Bill said, swearing faintly under his breath. There was no way that the orbits could be natural.