Breach the Hull
Praise for Breach the Hull,
Book One in the Defending the Future series
Winner of the 2007 Dream Realm Award
"There is more than enough great SF in Breach the Hull for any true fan of the genre, military or not."
— Will McDermott, author of Lasgun Wedding
"I enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it."
—Sam Tomaino, Space and Time Magazine
"Pick up Breach the Hull. You're sure to find stories that you like."
—David Sherman, author of the DemonTech series
and co-author of the Starfist series
"[Breach the Hull] kicks down the doors in a way that allows anyone access to the genre[ . . . ]it read like a bunch of soldiers sitting around swapping stories of the wars. Fun, fast-paced, and packed with action. I give it a thumbs up."
—Jonathan Maberry,
Bram Stoker Award-winning author
"[Breach the Hull] is worth the purchase. I normally don’t partake of anthologies as a general rule . . . but Mike McPhail has done a great job in making me rethink this position."
—Peter Hodges, Reviewer
"Breach the Hull is full of excellent stories, no two of which are the same. While similar themes crop up throughout, each writer has managed to take the subgenre and make it his own."
—John Ottinger III, Grasping for the Wind Reviews
"A collection of military science fiction from a well mixed group of authors, both new and established. Found it a good source for some new authors to investigate."
—Tony Finan, Philly Geeks
The Defending the Future series
Breach the Hull
So It Begins
By Other Means
(2010)
Book One in the Defending The Future series
Dark Quest, LLC
Howell, New Jersey
Special thanks to “Bob”
...It’s All Your Fault!
Acknowledgments
“Cryptic” first published in Asimov’s, April 1983. Copyright 1996 Cryptic, Inc.
“Black to Move” first published in Asimov’s, Sept, 1982. Copyright 1996 Cryptic, Inc. “Forgotten Causes” first published in Absolute
Magnitude, #16, Summer 2001. Copyright 2001, John C. Wright
PUBLISHED BY
Dark Quest, LLC
Neal Levin, Publisher 23 Alec Drive,
Howell, New Jersey 07731 www.darkquestbooks.com
Copyright ©2009, Dark Quest Books, LLC.
Individual stories ©2009 by their respective authors. All interior art ©2009 by Mike McPhail.
Radiation Angel icon ©2008 by James Daniel Ross.
ISBN (trade paper): 978-0-9796901-9-8 ISBN (eBook): pending
All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
All persons, places, and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Previously published in another edition by Marietta Publishing ©2007.
Design: Mike and Danielle McPhail
Cover Art: Mike McPhail, McP Concepts Copy Editing: Mike and Danielle McPhail www.mcp-concepts.com
www.sidhenadaire.com www.milscifi.com
Contents
Dedication v
CRYPTIC
Jack McDevitt
PETER POWER ARMOR
John C. Wright
WAYWARD CHILD
Mike McPhail
NOT ONE WORD
James Daniel Ross
FORGOTTEN CAUSES
John C. Wright
IN THE DYING LIGHT
Danielle Ackley-McPhail
BLACK TO MOVE
Jack McDevitt
KILLER EYE
James Chambers
COMPARTMENT ALPHA
Jeffrey Lyman
DEAD END
John G. Hemry (a.k.a. Jack Campbell)
BROADSIDE
Bud Sparhawk
THRESHER
Lawrence M. Schoen
ALLIANCES
Bud Sparhawk153
DERELICTION OF DUTY
Patrick Thomas
PERSPECTIVE
Tony Ruggiero
SHORE LEAVE
C.J. Henderson
AUTHOR BIOS
AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT
UPCOMING RELEASES
USO ENDORSEMENT
This book is dedicated to the memory of:
Charles G. Weekes
1960 - 1992
United States Navy
A sailor and submariner who served
his country in its time of need.
A science fiction writer who envisioned
in the grandeur of galactic warfare.
Creator of:
Juan Carlos Mendez,
Commander of the Federal Empires’,
Stateworld Class Galacticruiser
C2100D UCNS. Arcturus
(United Celestial Navy Ship)
CRYPTIC
Jack McDevitt
IT WAS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SAFE IN A BULKY MANILA ENVELOPE. I NEARLY TOSSED IT INTO THE TRASH with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project.
Had it been cataloged, indexed in some way, I’m sure I would have. But the en-velope was blank, save for an eighteen-year-old date scrawled in the lower right hand corner, and beneath it, the notation “40 gh.”
Out on the desert, lights were moving. That would be Brackett fine-tuning the Array for Orrin Hopkins, who was then beginning the observations that would lead, several years later, to new departures in pulsar theory. I envied Hopkins. He was short, round, bald, a man unsure of himself, whose explanations were invariably in-terspersed with giggles. He was a ridiculous figure, yet he bore the stamp of genius. And people would remember his ideas long after the residence hall named for me at Carrollton had crumbled.
If I had not recognized my own limits and conceded any hope of immortality (at least of this sort), I certainly did so when I accepted the director’s position at Sandage. Administration pays better than being an active physicist, but it is death to ambition.
And a Jesuit doesn’t even get that advantage.
In those days, the Array was still modest: forty parabolic antennas, each thirtysix meters across. They were on tracks, of course, independently movable, forming a truncated cross. They had, for two decades, been the heart of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Now, with the Project abandoned, they were being employed for more useful, if mundane, purposes.
Even that relatively unsophisticated system was good. As Hutching Chaney once remarked, the Array could pick up the cough of an automobile ignition on Mars.
I circled the desk and fell into the uncomfortable wooden chair we’d inherited from the outgoing regime. The packet was sealed with tape that had become brittle and loose around the edges. I tore it open.
It was a quarter past ten. I’d worked through my dinner and the evening hours, bored, drinking coffee, debating the wisdom in coming out here from JPL. The increase in responsibility was a good career move; but I knew now that Harry Cooke would never lay his hands on a new particle.
I was committed for two years at Sandage, two years of working out schedules and worrying about insurance, two years of dividing meals between the installation’s sterile cafeteria and Jimmy
’s Amoco Restaurant on Route 85. Then, if all went well, I could expect another move up, perhaps to Georgetown.
I’d have traded it all for Hopkins’s future.
I shook out six magnetic disks onto the desk. They were in individual sleeves, of the type that many installations had once used to record electromagnetic radiation. The disks were numbered and dated over a three-day period in 2001, two years earlier than the date on the envelope.
Each was marked “Procyon.”
In back, Hopkins and two associates were hunched over monitors. Brackett, having finished his job, was at his desk with his head buried in a book. I was pleased to discover that the disks were compatible to the Mark VIs. I in-serted one, tied in a vocorder to get a hard copy, and went over to join the Hopkins group while the thing ran. They were talking about plasma. I listened for a time, got lost, noted that everyone around me (save the grinning little round man) also got lost, and strolled back to my computer.
The trace drew its green-and-white pictures smoothly on the Mark VI display, and pages of hard copy clicked out of the vocorder. Something in the needle geometry scattering across the recording paper drew my attention. Like an elusive name, it drifted just beyond reach.
Beneath a plate of the Andromeda Galaxy, a coffee pot simmered. I could hear the distant drone of a plane, probably out of Luke Air Force Base. Behind me, Hopkins and his people were laughing at something.
There were patterns in the recording.
They materialized slowly, identical clusters of impulses. The signals were artificial. Procyon.
The laughter, the plane, the coffee pot, a radio that had been left on somewhere . . . everything squeezed down to a possibility.
More likely Phoenix, I thought.
Frank Myers had been SETI Director since Ed Dickinson’s death twelve years before. I reached him next morning in San Francisco.
“No,” he said without hesitation. “Someone’s idea of a joke, Harry.”
“It was in your safe, Frank.”
“That damned safe’s been there forty years. Might be anything in it. Except messages from Mars . I thanked him and hung up.
It had been a long night: I’d taken the hard copy to bed and, by 5:00 A.M., had identified more than forty distinct pulse patterns. The signal appeared to be contin-uous: that is, it had been an ongoing transmission with no indication of beginning or end, but only irregular breaches of the type that would result from atmospherics and, of course, the long periods during which the target would have been below the horizon.
It was clearly a reflected terrestrial transmission: radio waves bounce around considerably. But why seal the error two years later and put it in the safe? Procyon is a yellow-white class F3 binary, absolute magnitude 2.8, once wor-shipped in Babylon and Egypt. (What hasn’t been worshipped in Egypt?) Distance from Earth: 11.3 light-years.
In the outer office, Beth Cooper typed, closed filing drawers, spoke with visitors. The obvious course of action was to use the Array. Listen to Procyon at 40 giga-hertz, or all across the spectrum for that matter, and find out if it was, indeed, saying something.
On the intercom, I asked Beth if any open time had developed on the system. “No,” she said crisply. “We have nothing until August of next year.” That was no surprise. The facility had booked quickly when its resources were made available to the astronomical community on more than the limited basis that had prevailed for twenty years. Anyone wishing to use the radiotelescope had to plan far in advance. How could I get hold of the Array for a couple hours? I asked her to come into my office . . .
Beth Cooper had come to Sandage from San Augustin with SETI during the big move twenty years before. She’d been secretary to three directors: Hutching Chaney, who had built Sandage; his longtime friend, Ed Dickinson; and finally, after Dickinson’s death, Frank Myers, a young man on the move, who’d stayed too long with the Project, and who’d been reportedly happy to see it strangled. In any case, Myers had contributed to its demise by his failure to defend it.
I’d felt he was right, of course, though for the wrong reason. It had been painful to see the magnificent telescope at Sandage denied, by and large, to the scientific community while its grotesque hunt for the Little Green Man signal went on. I think there were few of us not happy to see it end.
Beth had expected to lose her job. But she knew her way around the facility, had a talent for massaging egos, and could spell. A devout Lutheran, she had adapted cautiously to working for a priest and, oddly, seemed to have taken offense that I did not routinely walk around with a Roman collar.
I asked one or two questions about the billing methods of the local utilities, and then commented, as casually as I could manage, that it was unfortunate the Project had not succeeded.
Beth looked more like a New York librarian than a secretary at a desert installation. Her hair was silver-gray. She wore steel-rimmed glasses on a long silver chain. She was moderately heavy, but her carriage and her diction were impeccable, imbuing her with the quality that stage people call presence.
Her eyes narrowed to hard black beads at my remark. “Dr. Dickinson said any number of times that none of us would live to see results. Everyone attached to the
program, even the janitors, knew that.” She wasn’t a woman given to shrugs, but the sudden flick in those dark eyes matched the effect. “I’m glad Dr. Dickinson didn’t live to see it terminated.” That was followed by an uncomfortable silence. “I don’t blame you, Doctor,” she said at length, referring to my public position that the facility was being underutilized.
I dropped my eyes and tried to smile reassuringly. It must have been ludicrous. Her severe features softened. I showed her the envelope.
“Do you recognize the writing?”
She barely glanced at it. “It’s Dr. Dickinson’s.”
“Are you sure? I didn’t think Dickinson came to the Project until Hutch Chaney’s retirement. That was ’13, wasn’t it?”
“He took over as Director then. But he was an operating technician under Dr. Chaney for, oh, ten or twelve years before that.” Her eyes glowed when she spoke of Dickinson.
“I never met him,” I said.
“He was a fine man.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, her features pale. “If we hadn’t lost him, we might not have lost the Project.”
“If it matters,” I added gently.
“If it matters.”
She was right about Dickinson. He was articulate, a persuasive speaker, author of books on various subjects, and utterly dedicated to SETI. He might well have kept the Project afloat despite the cessation of federal funds and the increasing clamor among his colleagues for more time at the facility. But Dickinson was twelve years dead now. He’d returned to Massachusetts at Christmas, as was his custom. After a snowstorm, he’d gone out to help shovel a neighbor’s driveway and his heart had failed.
At the time, I was at Georgetown. I can still recall my sense of a genius who had died too soon. He had possessed a vast talent, but no discipline; he had churned through his career hurling sparks in all directions. He had touched everything, but nothing had ever ignited. Particularly not SETI.
“Beth, was there ever a time they thought they had an LGM?”
“The Little Green Man Signal?” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. They were always picking up echoes and things. But nothing ever came close. Either it was KCOX in Phoenix, or a Japanese trawler in the middle of the Pacific.”
“Never anything that didn’t fit those categories?”
One eyebrow rose slightly. “Never anything they could prove. If they couldn’t pin it down, they went back later and tried to find it again. One way or another, they eliminated everything.” Or, she must be thinking, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.
Beth’s comments implied that suspect signals had been automatically stored. Grateful that I had not yet got around to purging obsolete data, I discovered that was indeed the case, and ran a search covering the enti
re time period back to the Procyon reception in 2011. I was looking for a similar signal.
I got a surprise.
There was no match. There was also no record of the Procyon reception itself. That meant presumably it had been accounted for and discarded. Then why, two years later, had the recordings been sealed and placed in the safe? Surely no explanation would have taken that long.
SETI had assumed that any LGM signal would be a deliberate attempt to communicate, that an effort would therefore be made by the originator to create intelligibility, and that the logical way to do that was to employ a set of symbols rep-resenting universal constants: the atomic weight of hydrogen, perhaps, or the value of pi.
But the move to Sandage had also been a move to more sophisticated, and con-siderably more sensitive, equipment. The possibility developed that the Project would pick up a slopover signal, a transmission of alien origin, but intended only for local receivers. Traffic of that nature could be immeasurably difficult to interpret.