Metal
By Larry Dunn

I.

n terms of explosive power and the stakes involved, it’s the largest battle humanity has ever engaged in,” Fowler commented as we watched the drones depart, “and no human will see it with their own eyes.” 

I met Mark Fowler, master engineer of F4 drive units, when I arrived at The Revenge, a hastily built station located between stars, but this was my first opportunity for a conversation with him.  Our mutual friend Carl ‘the Prof’ Fitzhugh had briefly introduced him to me, but until now he had been only one in the sea of new faces I had met.

“I can’t believe the military finished this station so quickly,” I said, “or that the government approved it in the first place, considering that we don’t even know if the enemy is still at Metallica.”

“They’re still there all right, although we have no idea why they’ve stayed.  We’ve sent out probes at random intervals into the deep space around that world, and the enemy hasn’t moved since the day they attacked.  I’m surprised nobody’s told you that.”

“Nobody has told me much of anything since I got here.  I’m free to go wherever I like, but whenever I ask anything about operations, the conversation has been politely directed elsewhere.”

“Don’t take any of that personally.  Almost everyone here is military, and security is second nature to those guys.  Besides, nobody knows much about you other than you’re one of the so-call ‘Fortunate Five’ that escaped the attack on the ore tug Uriah Heep, and that Carl seems to think you walk on water.  It’s not likely anyone is going to start sharing secrets with that little to go on.”

“I’ve never liked that ‘Fortunate Five’ tag the media put on us!”  I said with distaste.  “Watching everyone you’ve worked with for years being boiled away by a thermal energy beam is not my idea of fortunate!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to open old wounds,” Fowler replied uncomfortably.  “I’ll tell you what, the reason for all the secrecy left with the drone fleet.  This war will only last seconds.  Win or lose, it will all be over shortly.  If the drones had gone in one jump it would already be over.  The only thing left is waiting for the results.  I’ll answer your questions about this place if you’ll tell me why Professor Carl thinks so much of you.  All he told us is that the two of you worked together on Metallica before the attack.”

“Sure, why not?”  I replied.  “It beats just staring at the walls.  It began because the Prof has a phobia of working in pressure suits, and the mine where we found the artifact didn’t have a conditioned atmosphere, so he required an escort whenever he left the compound.  That was my job for awhile.”

II.

Carl Fitzhugh received the nickname “the Prof” on the day we first saw him stumble as he stepped away from the landing shuttle of the ore tug Oliver Twist.  Somebody on the escort team said “Just what we need, some clumsy prof” and it stuck, minus the “clumsy” part.  Away from a pressure suit, he was as confident as anyone, but it was clear that whenever he ventured onto the surface he needed protection, for he could never relax with just a few layers of foil and cloth separating him from the poisonous atmosphere we worked in.

He couldn’t object to a nickname as they are common to mining worlds, I went by “Remy” because Robert R. Remington was just a bit too long to stencil onto a suit, and “Bob”, “Rob” and “Bobby” had already been taken.  Initially we had only been told that he was an outside expert the company brought in, so it was only later that we discovered he really was an academian, the best xeno-linguist in his small field.

III.

I remember best our last trip out to examine the artifact, not because it was last but because it had been the most eventful.  Each previous trip the Prof had made was a clear battle of nerves for him due to his suit fears, but he needed to see it for himself one more time to gather the data he required to complete a new theory he had about its origin.  Because we had made several previous trips without incident, I wasn’t paying the close attention to the Prof that I should have.  I heard someone shout “Hey, don’t touch that thing!” which brought me back from my woolgathering.  I spun around to see the Prof silhouetted in pink light, touching the huge alien ball as everyone on the team was ducking for whatever cover they could find.

“Prof, get away from that!”  I shouted while I jumped to deliver a flying tackle that never connected, as he completely surprised me by deftly moving aside, leaving me to land foolishly on the cavern’s rocky floor.

“Really, Remy!”  He said as he offered me a hand up.  “Quite unnecessary, I’m perfectly fine!”

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?”  I screamed in return.  “Do you have any idea what that thing is emitting?”

“Of course!  Everything electromagnetic from infrared to gamma, but it’s all in harmless amounts.  I’ve done nothing for you to be upset about.”

I was livid.  How do you baby-sit someone who does something stupid like that?  “What about the gravity waves?”  I asked.  “In all your background study did you happen to miss that this thing has a gravity field way out of line with its mass?  What if you had been sucked into it, or squished like a bug on its surface, or ripped apart by tidal forces?”

He managed to sound miffed as he answered, “Yes, I read it all.  Did you?  The gravitational increase at the surface is too insignificant to be dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous as far as I’m concerned, and as long as I’m in charge of team safety, you clear it with me before you do anything like that again!  Besides, what did you learn just now that we hadn’t already discovered using our gadgets?”

“Only one thing actually, but a quite important one,” he replied in a voice as calm as if he were asking someone to “pass the peas” at dinner.  “I learned that it didn’t injure me.  It’s benign to our presence, at least in the short term.”

Despite the unwarranted action on his part, I couldn’t maintain my anger, for I knew the pressure he was under as we had recently received a message from the company stating that mining would resume in two days, whether he deciphered the message or function of these alien objects or not.

The objects, found along with the cavern they occupied during an otherwise routine drill coring, centered around the thing he had just been touching, which we just called “The Ball.”  It was as perfectly spherical as any of our measurements could tell, not quite six meters in diameter, surrounded by eight objects that could only be called control consoles.

For all the strangeness of the ball, the consoles were remarkably commonplace.  Other than that each countertop was at an odd height and angle, they would have looked at home in any industrial plant control room had it not been for the bizarre control surfaces.  There were no buttons, switches, touch screens or displays of any sort.  Instead, the panel contained rows and columns of backlit crystals containing symbols unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined.  They looked like neatly organized piles of imperfectly preserved small dead bugs, squished down into a mass of indistinguishable bodies and legs—especially legs.  They were constructed from some hard metal-like substance as clear as crystal, and each was backlit with a different shade of colored light.  If they were some sort of controls it’s hard to imagine what sort of alien hand would push, twist or turn them, since the little pointy ‘bug legs’ were sharp enough to cut our vacuum suit gauntlets, something we almost lost a man discovering.

This incident had caused most of us, unlike the Prof, to gain a sensible respect for the artifacts and let the robotic tools do all the touching.  Until then, we hadn’t considered anything in the cavern to be particularly dangerous, for many of us previously had encountered alien artifacts before and found them to be generally benign.  Many mine operations uncover evidence of alien civilizations in the course of their digging and occasionally the finds are reported to science groups for investigation, but usually the ruins are ignored or plowed under.  Interplanetary mining has to be a profit share business to entice people to risk their lives and spend years doing it and if keeping quiet about some old ruins keeps the profit flowing, then that’s how things are done.

This particular find couldn’t be kept quiet even if anybody wanted to, and nobody wanted to.  It was not only the first evidence of advanced technology that had ever been found, but also the only self illuminated object ever discovered, bathing the entire cavern in neon pink light.

After our argument about touching the ball, and the Prof’s promise not to touch it again, he resumed his study, eyeballing the consoles from every angle on one knee like a billiards player lining up a tricky shot.  After working for some time in silence, he asked, “Do you happen to recall what the engineering team made of the strange gravitational metrics that were measured here?”

“I remember they thought there might be some sort of suspended artificial black hole inside it,” I replied, “but nobody really knows for sure.”

“I suspect they may be going down the wrong path with that theory,” he said, “but I need to return to the compound and examine the microholos before I am certain.  Have your crews noticed the pattern here, eight consoles each with eight rows of sixty four objects?”

“Of course we did, it’s octal numbering, a form of computer math.  We figured that out within a few minutes of seeing the consoles.  We’re not idiots!”

“No, certainly you’re not, and I never meant to imply that.  I just think it may be meaningful in a way that hasn’t been considered yet.  I can’t be certain about that either without some confirmation from my computer science colleagues.  Let’s gather up our gear and head back.  The sooner I’m out of this mechanical skin the sooner I’ll like it.”

IV.

Back on The Revenge, I halted my conversation with Fowler when Professor Carl returned from the control area and asked, “Did you enjoy the launch, Remy?”

“I can’t say it was very exciting, just watching a group of lights in space wink out, but I’ve traveled enough in space to expect that from a ship using its F4 drive unit.  One moment you’re here, the next you’re somewhere else.  But why were so many ships needed?”

“I can explain that” Fowler replied, “One of the few errors in Carl’s original counter-attack plan was over-estimating our ability to jump near a planet.  For every five ships we send we will lose three, as some will crash onto the planet’s surface or will reappear either inside the planet or too far away to be useful.  The only way to assure the two-to-one superiority we planned for is to launch five of ours for every one of theirs.”

“That implies that you have some idea of how many of them there are.  How have you done that?”  I asked.

“We started with the recordings made while the Heep escaped.  Your ship carried instruments to detect the gravitational anomalies of F4 ship arrivals so the data recorders provided a very accurate initial count.  Since then, probes have been able to verify that the number hasn’t changed.  We can’t explain why, but they're maintaining their orbits as if they’re waiting for something.”

“Which brings me to why I’ve returned to see you two,” injected the Prof.  “We’ve just gotten the images from the last probe sent out before the attack.  Something has changed!"

Fowler fiddled with the controls of a nearby computer display, and we gathered around to look at a false color view of the planet.

“This is a polar view of the planet,” explained the Prof, “and with the speed-of-light delays both acquiring and delivering the data, it’s many hours old by now, but look at the three fuzzy spots equally placed around the globe.  In these polar views, we see their ships at the equator as bright in the IR range for they reflect the heat coming off the planet.  These three are in geosynchronous orbit, and they’re many times the size of the original attack ships, and we thought those were huge.”

“What are they?”  I asked.

“I would think that with your background, your guess would be better than any of ours, Remy.”  The Prof replied.

“Factory ships!”  I replied after a moment’s thought.  “They’re going to harvest Metallica!” 

“Now we know why they’ve been waiting around,” added Fowler.

“Yes,” added the Prof, “and had we attacked sooner we’d have missed them.  Our timing is perfect!”

“Assuming we get those high orbit ships at all,” Fowler added.  “The other ships were much closer in.  We didn’t plan for anything this far out.”

“No, we didn’t,” continued the Prof, “but you yourself predicted some portion of our fleet of drones will arrive too far away from the planet to be useful against the low orbit ships.  Now some of those drones will be perfectly positioned to take out these ships.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Fowler, “because if they don’t I rather doubt these ships are going to just sit and wait for us to launch the reserves.”

“We’ll know one way or the other when the post-battle probes report in,” the Prof added.  “Until then we’ll just have to wait and hope that if we did miss them, we’ve guessed right about their inability to backtrack our F4 fleet to its source.”

“If they could do that they’d have been here long ago, following our probes back, and besides, not a single drone has gone there or returned directly.  Every one of them has been programmed to jump somewhere else first, just in case they could be followed.”

“Didn’t you leave some exploding drones at the intermediate jump point in case these…”  I paused looking for a descriptive word, “…demons did follow one of our probes back?”

From the way Fowler and the Prof locked eyes with each other, it was clear that they hadn’t. 

“I told you we should have brought him in on the plans sooner!” accused the Prof. “Too late to do anything about it now, we’ll just have to wait and see.  I’m returning to the control area to be there for incoming results, would anyone care to join me?”

“I’ll wait here if you don’t mind,” Fowler said as the Prof hurried away.  Turning to face me, he continued, “I was hoping you’d stay and finish telling me about your time together with Carl on Metallica.”

V.

When we were back on Metallica, the Prof typically stayed wrapped in silence during our walks between the mine and the surface crawler, not participating in the bored small talk of the escort team, but on our last walk together, he broke from that pattern, beginning a conversation with a question.

“Do you know what scientists really do, Remy?

“Sure, they discover new things by applying scientific method to the unknown.”

“Well, that’s as good a definition as anything I’ve heard, but it’s how they do it that sets their hard science apart from my endeavors.  They test and measure, record all their observations and keep detailed records of what is known to be true.  They apply those truths against unknowns with more tests, then develop theories about what the unknowns might be through comparison, then develop new tests to verify those theories.

“In my field an unknown is a stone or dried clay or metal with markings on it.  That’s when I’m called upon, and what do you suppose I do?”

“Test and measure it?  Compare it to known things?”

“I certainly do measure, for all the good it does me.  I measure every aspect of the symbols.  I compare dimensions, measure angles, check curvatures, apply various mathematics and note groupings, all in hopes of determining what might be words, sentences or paragraphs.  I feed it all into a database and run programs that compare it all with every known language.  And do you know what I get for all of that?”

“I would guess clues about what to do next?”

“I wish.  No, what I usually get is absolutely nothing.  The markings weren’t left by humans, and our computers only know what we know.  My problem is that we don’t know anything about aliens, not their mindset, not their organs of speech, not even a clue as to what sounds they might have made.”

“So you don’t know what sounds the symbols represent?”

“Excellent, Remy.  All written language is a representation of phonemes and noises we are capable of making, and at least within humankind, when we try to decipher some old language from archaeological evidence, we at least know our material is bounded within the limits of human speech.  In my work, I have no such reference points.  I don't know if these beings sang like birds, hissed like lizards or spoke in frequencies we can’t even hear.”

“So how do you figure it out?”

“Truthfully, I rarely do.  I’ve actually deciphered only a small percentage of the evidence I’ve worked on, but the successes I’ve had require me to use a different sort of science, one my fellow scientists prefer to call an art or a craft rather than a science.”

“What would that be?”

“I begin with the broader picture and work downward.  I examine what remains of a civilization.  I look at the ruins and artifacts and try to guess at their lives, their careers, their likely form of society and government, and I ask the ‘big’ questions.  What did they have to say?  What was important enough to them to pick up a tool and inscribe it on a durable media?”

“So what were their great thoughts?  What is worthy of carving in stone?”

“Not much different than what we carve in stone now, really, but usually stated somewhat differently.  ‘King so-and-so brought justice to this land.’  ‘General so-and-so won a great battle.’  ‘In this house you will find God.’  Most of time I find nothing, but on rare occasions I convince the computer that I’ve found meaning in something, that’s when the real work begins, Remy.  Once I get a single saying, just one correct guess, then I have a new ‘known’ to apply to all the unknowns, a new Rosetta Stone.  The rest is merely the academic grunt work of testing and measuring the symbols we know against those we don’t, and slowly it unravels.”

“How do you work that out by looking at a bunch of crumpled buildings and few rusty tools?”  I asked.

“That is where my work isn’t hard science at all, Remy.  It’s called making an intuitive leap, nothing more than the type of guessing we all do every day, loosely couched in scientific method.  With the practice I’ve had, I’ve become quite proficient at it.

“Remy, why do you think I was called in to this situation?”

“Well, we’ve been told that you’re the best there is at figuring out alien languages, and those controls are some sort of language, isn’t that right?”

“Oh, that’s the primary reason, but they had something else in mind as well.  The scientists have studied, measured, and tested but haven’t gotten anywhere beyond describing this thing’s external appearance in excruciating detail.  What they need, even if they won’t verbalize it, is a good guesser.”

Our conversation ended when we reached the surface crawler’s airlock and our attention was diverted to the mundane tasks of dust control and pressure suit storage.  Before long, we were docked at the complex and the Prof went off to find some engineers while I went to ‘The Bucket’ for a drink.

VI.

“The Bucket?” asked Fowler with raised eyebrow, interrupting my tale of former days on Metallica.  “They made you drink from a bucket?”

“No, we weren’t that desperately short on supplies,” I replied with a chuckle.  “Every planetary mining compound has a bar officially called ‘The Bucket of Mud’, a cute name some desk jockey though would be in character with the business.  The crews had other names for it, most of them involving a bucket of something nastier then mud, or just ‘The Bucket’ if they were being polite.  It was a corner of the mess hall with lowered illumination and a serving bar.  The drinks were made from pure lab alcohol, scientifically watered down and flavored at the tap in an attempt to duplicate the beers and liquors of Earth, but science doesn’t quite manage to capture the rich flavor of rotting vegetation that true Earth brands had.  It was expensive to ship the ingredients across space, but the company never skimped on it, knowing that a little recreation reduced the attrition of highly trained people.  The drinks were palatable and stayed down if you didn’t throw down more than your share.”

“However bad the taste might have been, you had more than you’ll find here on The Revenge,” said Fowler.  “We’re not allowed any recreational substances.”

“Yeah, but this is a government operation,” I replied.  “Company rules weren’t as strict.”

“You say ‘government’ and ‘company’ like there’s some kind of difference between them.”

“Are you saying there isn’t?”

“Listen Remy, we’re not supposed to talk about this, but the Interplanetary Congress is a farce, intended to let the people of the outer planets think they actually have a say in how their planets are run.  Earth controls everything behind the scenes, and Earth is controlled by a handful of powerful people.  The companies and the government are a front to keep the general population from knowing who’s really in charge.  You said earlier that you were surprised the government could put this project together so fast.  A government couldn’t.  For this to happen required a decision by those really in charge, a group referred to, usually in whispers, as ‘The Star Chamber’, a term revived from old Earth history.”

“I suppose I should be shocked, but we’ve suspected something like that on the outer worlds for a long time now.  It always seemed as if companies obtained their mining contracts more quickly than competitive bidding would allow.”

“I’m sure it will explain a lot of things if you think about it Remy, but you never heard it from me, and I wouldn’t repeat it to anyone else if I were you.  It’s safer to talk about your time together with Carl.  You left off talking about going to ‘The Bucket’.”

VII.

I was sipping some of that pseudo-liquor and well into a conversation with a woman I knew; a conversation I hoped might lead to shared quarters later if I didn’t say anything too stupid, when I saw the Prof and some of the engineers come in.  Oblivious to the general mood of the evening they were surprised at the groans of protest as they flooded that end of the hall with obnoxious light from their monitors and projectors, ruining such little “atmosphere” we forced ourselves to believe the place acquired when the lights were low.  They waved in apology but continued right at it, and we all turned back to our conversations and tried to pretend they didn’t exist.

Not much longer after that my friend made it clear we weren’t going to be bunk buddies that evening, and went off to join another group.  I wandered over to join the Prof and see what he was chatting about.  He was sitting with an attractive blond woman playing with a cup of some flavor of reconstituted juice.  With so many extra guests at the complex, the supply of fresh juice and water that arrived with each supply ship was consumed almost as soon as it arrived.  The juices reconstituted from recycled water tasted just fine, if you could keep you mind off the fact that the water, although technically purer than a mountain stream, had passed through the bodily systems of yourself and all of your coworkers a few hundred times before it got to you.  From the way she had been looking at her cup when I approached made me assume she was thinking more or less along those lines.

He opened the conversation with “Remy, glad you stopped by.  I think you already know Michelle Anderson.”

“Yeah, a little,” I replied.  “I escorted her around the mines a bit before you got here, but I can’t say we’ve had enough time together to get to know one another.”

“A pleasure to see you again,” she replied, apparently glad to be distracted from the contents of her drink.

“Michelle’s talents have been quite useful in helping me with this puzzle.  You were there when one of your co-workers slit his glove on what we’ve been calling the control crystals, am I correct?”

“Yes, I thought we would lose him before we got his suit sealed.  It doesn’t take too many whiffs of the toxins that pass for atmosphere here to burn your lungs out.”

“Do you understand why his suit was so easily sliced?”

“Of course we followed up on that.  The crystals have some sort of micro edge, which folds over itself getting smaller and sharper with each fold in a three dimensional fractal pattern.  What we don’t know is why the suit material didn’t fracture the fractal. Something that tiny should have been delicate enough to break apart instead of cutting the suit.”

“The lack of breakage is something I’ll leave to materials engineers,” replied the Prof, “but it’s the pattern we’ve come in here to look at.  Obviously you’re familiar with fractals.”

“Sure thing.  It’s not something we use in rock work, but I know the concept.  It’s a mathematical pattern that almost but never quite repeats.  Graphically it looks repetitive at first, but as you magnify the surface, you see smaller patterns emerge, each one setting off in a new direction until the delicacy of the pattern gets too small for any viewing instrument to resolve.  It theoretically goes to infinity.”

“That’s right,” replied the Prof.  “Those ‘control crystals’ are a three-dimensional fractal in some impossibly hard material, but look at these microholos under maximum magnification and tell me what you see.”

I got closer and stared into the holographic image hovering over the table.  At this degree of enlargement, the crystal formation didn’t look like a pile of dead bugs anymore but a magical forest of structures, overlapping in patterns that filled space in every direction but never touched together.

“I see it, but I can’t make sense of it.”

“I doubt anyone can yet, not fully.  The science team has looked at these enlargements before, but without a theory to assist in understanding what they were looking at.  I propose that each of the twists and turns you see is not random at all, but information imposed on a crystal carrier, just as my voice can be modulated onto a radio carrier.  Each deflection has a unique meaning associated with it.  How many different words could you fit into a structure like this?”

“You think that these things are books?”  I asked.

“More like libraries,” he replied.  “More specifically, they’re program libraries, extremely complex sets of instructions with built in databases.”

“You mean that ball thing is some sort of supercomputer?”

“No, although I think it uses a computer, just like all of your mining equipment uses integrated computers for their functions, but are not themselves computers.  The computer is only a part of what that structure is.”

“But that doesn’t make sense either; programs are kept deep inside a computer where they’re safe, not hanging out all over the surface of the unit.”

“Well, breakage doesn’t seem to be something they were much worried about.  I doubt that these would have been damaged if the cavern had collapsed onto them.  Since the unfortunate glove incident, we’ve had our robotic tools pull, push, twist, turn and shove at these things, all to no avail, so we concluded they weren’t movable.  However, when I examined them today I decided we were wrong about that.  They are movable; in fact, I believe they can be removed.  There has to be a way to unlock those things, some frequency, some digital code, some pattern we just haven’t discovered yet.  It has to be there to allow changes to the program code.  When we make a new computer for some new purpose, do we write all the program code from scratch, unique to that device?”

“Of course not, that would take years.”  I answered.  “Each computer contains a few custom written modules unique to the function of the device, but most of the code is from standard pre-written library modules; ‘store-bought’ as the geeks like to say.”

“Exactly,” replied the Prof.  “That’s what those crystals are, existing libraries of code.  Those so-called ‘consoles’ are a standard interface mechanism that reads each crystal as necessary.  These crystals are dropped into the slots as necessary for the task and locked down.  Just because we haven’t yet figured out how to remove them how doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it.  It’s their gadget, not ours.”

“But we ought to be able to figure it out, right?”  I asked.  “Isn’t that always the key to solving a puzzle, knowing what you’re looking for?”

“Oh yes,” he replied.  “Given enough time and enough computing power we could definitely solve this.  Michelle, how long would it you estimate it will take to decode one of these crystals?”

Throughout our conversation, she had silently listened and managed to consume most of her ersatz juice.  Now that we began discussing her field of specialty, she enthusiastically joined the conversation.

“With enough computing power and a team dedicated to nothing else, I think we could break the first one in somewhat less than a lifetime,” Michelle answered.  “It’s one thing to know it’s a code, but we don’t have the first clue as to what code.  Is it zeros and ones or some other system?  It appears they think in base eight numbers, but the actual code could be something altogether different.  In addition, if this thing is both instructions and a database, how can I tell which is which?  It might be modulated on gravity waves for all I know.  It would probably take a decade or two to go down all the false paths but once we discovered our reference points, it would only take another decade or two to resolve the rest of it.”

“Speaking of gravity,” interrupted the Prof, “I need to spend some time with those gravimetric readings but first I wonder if you can give me a little background information on the planet, Remy.  It’s something I haven’t had time to research yet.  I know this is a metal rich planet, but just what do you mine here, exactly?”

“Oh man, what don’t we?”  I replied.  “You know how people always say their dream is to find a gold mine?  Well we have gold mines, but they’re practically a sideline.  We lift gold off world only when we have spare weight capacity.  The biggest cash cow isn’t even metal, it’s heavy hydrogen; it seeps out all over the place.  We don’t even have to work for it, just shove a hose down a crack and pump it out.  We’ve got uranium so hot it’s practically molten.  It’s so hot it has to be packed in lead casks but that’s no problem, we have plenty of lead.  We’ve a rich abundance of several other radioactives from the last row of the periodic table as well.  Next are precious metals like iridium, ruthenium, rhodium, osmium and palladium.  We’ve platinum so rich we barely have to smelt it.  There’s no shortage of the lighter strong metals either.  We’ve so much titanium it will likely affect the way ships are designed, not to mention an abundance of the more common ores like nickel, copper and aluminum, but they’re just in our way, not worth the lift cost.  The entire planet is covered with all of it, although the richest concentrations are within a few kilometers of the compound, which is why we need to get this artifact mystery resolved so we can push on.  We were making some real money until we found that thing, but if its presence forces us to mine areas away from the compound, the cost-benefit of mining this place will change substantially.”

“I suspected it was a big find, but I didn’t realize how big,” the Prof replied.  “How did this particular planet become so saturated with metals?”

“It’s a young world, less than a billion years old, which explains why so much uranium is still here, and the geologists tell us it must have been near an exploding star at one time, close enough to pick up the heavy metal outflow but far enough away to not get knocked into atoms itself.  Maybe it started as a gas giant and had all its gas blown off.  The force of the explosion must have blown it out of its original system over to this star, where it hitched up and found a new home.  But the truth is that nobody really knows.”

We said our ‘good nights’ after that, and I didn’t see him at all the next day, but I suspected he had a hand in something when the announcement came over the PA “There will be a meeting in the Mess hall tonight at seventeen-hundred for an important announcement.  Attendance by all personnel not on external duties is mandatory.”

VIII.

On The Revenge, Fowler again interrupted my story, saying, “It’s time for the probes to go,” as he pointed out the viewing panel.  We watched together as more running lights, the only part of the drones visible from the station, disappeared.  “Those probes will just take a quick look into the region around the planet and double jump back,” Fowler continued, “but of course we won’t get the results for some time yet.”

“When we watched the second wave leave earlier, it left sequentially.  Why?”  I asked.

“That wave was timed to take advantage of F4 interlink,” replied Fowler.

“I remember that’s the term the crew of the Heep shouted when we were getting ready to leave and the alarms went off, but with everything else that happened I never learned what that meant.”

“It’s certainly understandable you’ve had more pressing business than a lecture on F4 physics,” Fowler continued, “ but let me give you the short version.  We don’t completely understand interlink ourselves yet, but we know enough to avoid it.  When a ship ‘jumps out’ too closely in space and time to another ship that’s ‘jumping in’, the two vectors combine and both ships are delivered to a new unplanned location.  We have no way to detect an outbound ship, but our instruments can detect an inbound from its gravity anomalies, which sets off the alarms.”

“So the point of the second wave is to carry any surviving alien ships to a new location and blow them up there?”  I asked.

“No need for that.  If interlink just knocked ships off course, we wouldn’t be so fanatical about where and when we let ships jump in a populated region.  When ships interlink, what comes out at the arrival site isn’t the two original ships, it’s something new, a combination of both original vehicles.  On those rare occasions when we discover the wreckage of interlinked ships, there aren’t any bodies to send home, at least not anything identifiable as a body.  Interlink is why outbound ships leave ‘south’ of a stellar disk, as you were doing on the Heep and inbound ones arrive ‘north’ of it, to maintain a safe distance from one another.  If the aliens had arrived before the Heep had gotten as far as it did, or if you had jumped exactly when the aliens arrived instead of slightly later, you ‘Fortunate Five’ would have shared the fate of those on the planet, as would whatever passes for a crew on the alien ship that linked with you.”

“When will we know how today’s battle went?”  I quickly asked, unwilling to dwell on the memories my former companions any longer than I had to.

“Not very soon,” he replied, “because of the close approach navigation problem we spoke of earlier.  The probe ships can jump away from here directly but not back.  If we try to bring them back too closely, some of them might re-materialize inside the station.  They have to return a safe distance away and beam the results to us at light speed.  It will be some time before we know anything.  Why don’t you finish telling me about what happened back on Metallica?”

IX.

Well, when I arrived at the mess hall, I spotted my favorite equipment operator alongside an empty seat, so I joined her.  After the initial small talk I again tried, unsuccessfully, to lead the conversation in the direction of personal mutual explorations, but she was too caught up in the general buzz of the room concerning the nature of tonight’s  meeting.  “I heard through the grapevine that a company executive yacht orbited in last night!” she shared.

This was not only exciting news but intriguing as well, because company bigwigs rarely show up at a mine, preferring to stay in their nice warm offices back on Earth.  I was trying to form a response to her when the some of the scientists including the Prof wandered in and began taking their places at a table set across the front of the room.  Suddenly the room was awash in hushed whispers as Brian Selvenski, the Director of the Interplanetary Mining Division was seen entering the room quietly discussing something or other with our local chief administrator.  They continued what appeared to be an animated conversation in whispers right until he strode up to the speaker’s podium.  Without missiing a beat, he turned to us, cleared his throat and began speaking without the benefit of introduction, assuming correctly that he needed none.

“You all know I’ve been in space for the weeks it takes to get from a planet to a jump point and back.  My original intent in coming here was to spearhead an effort to return productivity to what was a failing mine.  I’ve just now been informed that one of our guests, a Professor Carl Fitzhugh has finally figured out the nature of our artifact.  I’ve been asked to allow him to reveal his findings prior to presenting my plan.  I’ve agreed to let him do this on the off chance his presentation causes me to make some changes in what I intend to do there.”  Turning to the Prof and smiling broadly, he continued jokingly, “Professor Fitzhugh, those who know me would tell you it takes a lot to shut me up once I’ve gotten started, so I hope you’ve got a show stopper of a presentation, if for no other reason than to keep my reputation intact.”

A small round of applause broke out, only because we really didn’t know what else to do.  Selvenski waved down the applause and took his seat.  The Prof came to the podium and directed his opening remark back at Selvenski.

“Thank you Director Selvenski, and don’t worry, I do believe I have some information to present of great enough impact to keep your reputation intact.”  He returned his gaze to the papers before him, squinting as he moved them closer and further from his face.  He was clearly overdue for the vision correction people of his age usually received annually.  This had me musing about the fact that although medical science had made great advances in returning our vision to perfection in mere minutes, they had yet to prevent the deterioration of aging.  I snapped out of this reverie when The Prof continued his presentation.

“I am a specialist in understanding aliens, or perhaps better put, in trying to understand them and most times being completely puzzled by them.

“My specialty is to attempt to understand the aliens races that once existed, how they lived, what was important to them, trying to answer the question ‘what did they have to say?’.  To that end, I was brought here to answer that same question about the artifact you discovered.

“Tonight I have a possible answer to that question.  I believe it is saying nothing at all to us directly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t carrying a message for us, a large and very clear one.  However, that message is embodied within the reason for its existence, and until I explain that, I don’t think the message will make much sense.

“Why have we never met a living alien?  We know they existed, and from what we’ve discerned thus far, their civilizations tells us they weren’t greatly out of place with us in time.  In fact, they were contemporaries of our earliest upright walking ancestors.  We’ve never determined if they left of their own accord, drove themselves to extinction or killed each other off.  They are simply and puzzlingly missing.

“Another puzzle is this anomalous planet itself, which by the laws of physics shouldn’t exist at all.  The xenogeology studies of Metallica indicate this planet should still be a molten mass sitting in a belt of lethal radiation.

“The solution I am proposing not only explains these puzzles but explains what the device in the cavern is doing here as well.  Put simply, I believe it’s a location tracking and alarm system.”

“I’m sure more than one of you is questioning my sanity at the moment but allow me to explain how I’ve come to this conclusion.  The artifact is clearly the work of a technologically advanced race, but a race whose dependence on technology has completely depleted whatever resources were available to them in their own neighborhood in space.  To obtain more, they found a star ready to explode, or perhaps even seeded one to explode.  They pushed a big useless rock of a planet to exactly the right place, not only to receive the maximum benefit of that explosion, but also placed so the force of the nova would propel that rock onto a carefully calculated trajectory to fall into a ‘storage orbit’ around this star, for later exploitation.

“Such a race would leave nothing to chance.  The new planet would be too hot, thermally and radioactively, to make it worth mining so they planted a nearly indestructible device in a hardened cavern on the planet.  Its homing signal assured its owners that it remained in the proper location as they awaited the best possible time, in terms of economical mining, to return and claim their prize.  Given that they already had this technology in place, they included a burglar alarm as well, on the off chance that some upstart race would come along to jump their claim.

“In the meantime, while they waited for their rich rewards to become accessible, they took their neighbor’s resources.  In the process, they caused those neighbors to disappear with few traces left behind.

“But even so, their massive technological empire just used up everything too quickly. They pushed on to the galactic core where the interesting stuff is, just as we ourselves have done.  We are following them through space, half a million years later, and along the way we’ve discovered their treasure chest, opened it and set off the alarm.  Now we are sitting here awaiting the security forces that I believe will soon arrive.”

Throughout The Prof’s presentation thus far, Director Selvenski had been exchanging whispers with the scientists seated to either side of him, taking notes, and generally fidgeting about, so it came as no real surprise when he loudly interrupted Fitzhugh from his seat.

“Is this going to go one very much longer?” he asked in a voice betraying a hint of anger as he waved his pencil toward The Prof.

“I only need a few more minutes to present the reasoning behind my thoughts, which I believe will tie this all up in a neat package for you,” responded The Prof as he turned toward Selvenski, the huffy tone of his voice indicating that he did not intend to yield the floor easily at this point.  “May I continue?” he asked coldly.

Selvenski held his hands up alongside his head in a quick gesture of mock surrender.  “If your almost finished, by all means, take all the rope you need.” he replied, obviously referring to the old adage about hanging one’s self.  The Prof turned back toward us and continued.

“Let me try to wrap this up quickly.  You may be wondering why we should be concerned about a race that has been gone for half a million years or so, heading away from us.  I asked myself why they would put that system in place if they couldn’t get a signal from it.  These aliens must have had the knowledge to convert matter to energy completely, and I predict that if we were to dig under that glowing ball, we would find where it has been doing mining of its own to obtain the fuel necessary to maintain its energy output over the eons.

“As to its ability to communicate to its owners, that puzzle piece did not fit until I compared the gravimetric readings to values I discovered when I researched F4 interstellar drive engines.  When an F4 field reaches criticality and drags a ship through the universe, several energies ‘leak through’, thermal energy, EM radiation of all kinds and especially gravity.  We have measured this exact same gravity leakage near the illuminated ball, which I do not believe is a coincidence.

“What’s inside that ball isn’t a black hole as others have postulated but an F4 device providing instantaneous communication from one part of the galaxy to another, carrying messages through time and space with the speed of thought.  There will be no delay time until the aliens discover us; they already know we are here.

“The clear message to us is to ‘Get out now, while we still can’.  To that end, since he is sitting right here, I am asking Director Selvenski to provide a transport ship for the immediate evacuation of this planet.”

X.

“I can’t imagine that won him any popularity contests,” said Fowler, interrupting my ongoing tale.

“No, you can’t tell a crowd of people they’re suddenly out of a job and expect them to be happy with you, especially when most of them have just been convinced by your own words that you’re some kind of lunatic.”

“What about you, Remy?  Did you believe him?”

“Not at that time.  Like everyone else I thought he had taken a vacation from his senses.”

“We still have some time before the probes return,” said Fowler “Let’s hear the rest of your story.”

“Sure,” I replied.  “After the Prof ended his speech so dramatically, the crew was practically ready to push him out an airlock, but things hushed when Selvenski took charge, as we hadn’t heard his message yet.”

XI.

“I believe I have been quite patient,” began Selvenski with a wry smile, “in giving Professor Fitzhugh a chance to say his piece.

“I have to admit it’s quite a tale, what with planets driven into exploding suns and a pack of marauding aliens swashbuckling through space pillaging and killing, especially since those aliens should be breathing down our necks at any minute.

“While it’s been entertaining, I’m hoping none of you seriously buy into this fairy story being passed off as some sort of science.”  Selvenski was waving his hands up at his side in a gesture of dismissal, like a father telling the kids that the ghost story they just watched on the holo wasn’t real.

“If you are giving and credence to this, you should know that I’ve learned, while Fitzhugh was speaking, that few of the other scientists here agree with his conclusion, although many think he’s made brilliant breakthroughs on understanding the mechanisms of the artifact.

“Look, I haven’t always been a desk jockey in a safe office, I’ve done my share of time underground and I know what it’s like to be cooped up in a complex with nothing to do, a situation made worse as you’ve had to double up quarters due to the extra guests here.  Rumors fly even without the added irritation of a million year old ‘God-knows-what’ just a few miles away.  It might be easy to believe a spooky story about an alien menace when you’ve nothing to do but replay it in your head.  So, I’ve brought a solution to idle time problem.

“Effective immediately, this mine is going back to work.  When the time comes for profit share disbursements, I’ll make up your loss out of the company portion as compensation for having to sit idle during these weeks of scientific research.  Those of you who stay on will lose not a penny from the delay.  If anybody happens to be convinced that Professor Fitzhugh is correct, you can ship back with me and I’ll drop you off wherever you wish.  If you do choose to leave, we’ll honor our contract and pay out your share up until this artifact research started, but I won’t backfill your portion, as I have no intention of rewarding quitters from the labor of those who stay on.

“As to that contraption down in the hole, we will mine around it, giving it half a klick or so of space to itself.  It may yet be of some value to us, so I see no reason not to continue researching it.  To that end, I invite the scientific team to remain behind and continue their studies.”  At this point, his smile of ‘sincerity’ widened.

“All except one, that is, as the services of Professor Carl Fitzhugh are not required in this complex any longer.”

XII.

I caught the sad duty of taking The Prof out to the shuttle, although it was a physically easy trip as the executive shuttle had a ground crawler dock, so suiting up wouldn’t be required.  As we rode out, he needed no prompting to give me his opinion of the company decision.

“Fools,” he started, “For all the metal your company mines, they are completely lacking of any steel in their spines.  I plan to appeal to both the company and the government to place a defensive perimeter around the planet but I expect I’ll be asked to politely mind my own business.”

“What good would it do even if they did bring in the military?”  I challenged.  “If you’re right, I can’t imagine that this civilization you’ve proposed would be more than inconvenienced by anything we could throw at them.”

“You’re wrong there,” he answered, “we already have a weapon that could make us into a force to be reckoned with but we’ve never put the resources into developing it.  I learned the theory of it when I did the research on the gravitational anomalies of the F4 interstellar drive mechanism.  Are you aware of F4 limitations?  Do you know why a space tug is allowed only six cargo containers and no more?”

“I know if a ship gets too large the F4 could go into overdrive and become one big bright light in the night sky, if that’s what you mean,” I answered.

“That’s precisely what I mean,” he replied.  “All it takes to make a bang larger than all the nukes we’ve ever built together is to overdrive an F4 on purpose.”

“That’s a little rough on the crew of the ship; besides, you can’t jump anywhere near close to a planet with an F4.”

“You don’t need a crew, that’s what computers are for.  In fact, you don’t even need a ship, just a bare drive assembly with some AI to aim it.  As to jumping near a planet, that’s just not true.  Our navigation systems can jump a ship near a planet.  There are two engineering problems with a near orbit jump.  The first being that taking the drive too close to a gravity-well may cause an uncontrolled critical reaction in the drive.  The second is that the velocity relative to the plant may be too great or too small to allow the ship to orbit.  In normal drive operations, jumping into the empty space above or below the stellar plane eliminates the first problem and gives the crew time to compensate for the latter.”

I thought about that for a few seconds and replied, “So if the whole idea is to have it explode as soon as it appears, we wouldn’t care about either effect.  So what’s stopping us from doing it?”

“Economics!  We’ve never needed a weapon of such magnitude, and the F4 is the single most expensive piece of machinery ever built.  I doubt I’ll ever get anyone interested in diverting the resources into a hugely expensive weapon system based on my theories.  Any sufficiently advanced civilization is run by its accountants, which also explains why we haven’t been attacked yet.”

“Because of alien accountants!”  I managed to exclaim without laughing.

“Yes!  For all their seemingly vast achievements, even the aliens are as likely to be as motivated by profit as we are.  Maybe not profit as we think of it, but still weighing allocation versus benefit.  They haven’t come by to remove us from their property because it hasn’t been economically feasible to do so yet, but once they justify the expense, they’ll be here.”

XIII.

“You know,” said Fowler, as he listened to this part of my story in the lounge back on The Revenge.  “That’s where Carl made another mistake.  We think they responded almost instantly when you opened the cavern where the alarm device was.”

“How could that be?  A lot of time passed before they came!”

“Assuming Carl was right when he guessed they were heading into the core, and we think he was,” Fowler continued.  “That alone explains the delay.  Do you know the effect of gravity on time?”

After digging around in my brain’s store of unused information from high school physics, I ventured to reply, “Time slows down in the presence of gravity?”

“Exactly!  The benefit of heading to the core isn’t just the number of available planets but also younger planets with less decay of whatever radioactive ores they might hold.  The effect would have been tiny at first, but they’ve covered considerable distance in half a million years, enough so that their almost instantaneous response to the alarm allowed a good deal of time to pass for us.”

Further conversation was interrupted by the return of the Prof, calling to us from down the corridor.

“Remy!  Mark!  Why are you still here?  Come to the control room, we’ve got telemetry coming in!”

I turned to Fowler “I thought we still had some time before we received information from the probes!”

“Not if some of the second wave has already returned, which they were programmed to do if they weren’t needed!” he said excitedly as we hurried down the corridor.

“Not needed?”

“It means we’ve won Remy!  We’ve won!”

XIV.

We watched as the first vids were beamed to the control room screens, the operational quiet of the center periodically erupting in loud “whoops” of joy from the military techs as new images arrived.  All that remained of the alien fleet was wreckage, some of it already reduced to burning streaks falling onto the planet, the rest floating in decaying orbits around it.

Fowler looked over to the professor.  “It will be months before enough of that garbage re-enters to make it safe to return to operations.”

My head quickly swiveled away from the spectacle on the screens to shout “Return!  How can we ever return!  That place is a molten mass now, and the grave of my friends!  Who would even want to go back there?”

Fowler and the Prof exchanged looks before the Prof said, “Remy, we rather hope you’ll change your mind about that, because we didn’t bring you to the station just to watch the show,” the Prof continued.  “I have a proposal for you which I could not offer until we were sure we would beat them back.  We’ve just destroyed a good percentage of the F4 drive units of all humankind wining this battle, and we plan to replace them as quickly as possible.  Metal is more important to humanity than it’s ever been, and Metallica has almost cooled enough to return to.  When we were putting this plan together, I was asked by certain key individuals if I knew anyone who could lead the rebuilding effort on Metallica, and I told them that only you had enough knowledge of the planet to make it happen.  If you accept our offer, you will be the new director of the mines there.”

“I don’t know if I can ever go back after this, and besides, you still have plenty drive units out there, between the ones you held in reserve and the ones that returned.”

“Don’t decide now.  You’ll have time to think it over as the planet cools.  As for the remaining drive units, enough of those will be returned to interplanetary use to keep the populations of the explored planets from starving to death while we rebuild, and others will be used to form a defensive network around Metallica.  However our plans for the majority of them are altogether different.”

“Yes,” injected Fowler.  “Because we know the date your crew opened that Pandora’s Box, and we know the date that the aliens attacked, we can use the time delta to approximate the distance they had to travel.  We’ve had a team of astrophysicists determining a locus of possible stars those ships could have left from.”

“All they know so far is that they destroyed an outpost of a space faring civilization in a sneak attack, and that their fleet suddenly disappeared.” continued the Professor with a vigor I had rarely from him before, “We intend to use their ignorance to our advantage.  The drones that remain are being sent as probes.  We will attempt to find the aliens clandestinely if possible, but should they detect us, we have planned for that as well. 

We want them to know that from now on, we are looking for them!”

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