CHAPTER 4 – THE TROUBLE WITH ROSS 128
09:54 (Universal Time)
Thursday, December 16, 2320
Spacers League Conference Center
Callisto Prime, Callisto, Jupiter System
Solar System
‘’I still can’t believe how fast we travel across the system, now that we have this Koomak Drive.’’ said Governor Charles Watts of Mars as he entered the conference room with Jacobus Stein, the CEO of Pallas Mining Industries.
‘’Indeed! The trick now will be to keep a tight control of who will have access to this new technology. Can you imagine what a bunch of space pirates could do with a ship equipped with an interstellar drive?’’
Charles Watts rolled his eyes at that hypothetical question.
‘’Please, don’t even mention that possibility, Jacob.’’
Watts’ eyes then caught a number of alien silhouettes present in the room, along with a number of Humans.
‘’The Hoshi Ambassador is here? I can also see Administrator Sheraz, from the Koorivar Colony.’’
‘’It seems that this meeting will be about interstellar affairs after all.’’ said Stein before walking to the two pony-sized centaurs standing on their four legs around the table. He then bowed politely to them.
‘’Ambassador Noshia, Advisor Ibi, I am surprised but pleased to see you here for this meeting. Governor Robeson invited you, I presume?’’
‘’Actually, it was Fleet Captain Forster who asked Governor Robeson to let us attend this meeting, Mister Stein.’’ answered the female Hoshi and native from Hyanesu, a large moon in the Gliese 581 System. Glancing quickly around the room, Stein effectively saw Tina Forster, engaged in a private, low voice conversation with Janet Robeson. He then returned his attention to the female alien centaur, whose torso, head and pair of arms looked very much human-like, except for a tiny, fine nose and a long blond mane running down from the top of her head to the middle of her back. The two Hoshis wore a combination of a sort of skirt over their lower bodies, supplemented by a sleeveless blouse made of embroidered silk. Overall, they made for visually attractive creatures.
‘’And would you by chance know the goal of this meeting, Ambassador Noshia?’’
‘’I do, Mister Stein: it is concerning the Drazt of the Ross 128 System.’’
‘’Ah yes: our indiscrete, paranoid neighbors some eleven light-years away. Well, I hope that we will be able to talk further together later on, Ambassador.’’
‘’The same here, Mister Stein.’’
Bowing again, Stein then walked back towards Charles Watts, who was standing behind his designated chair, and whispered in his ear.
‘’This meeting will be about the Drazt.’’
‘’Ha! That makes sense.’’
A loud call from Janet Robeson then made all the attendants take their seats.
Janet Robeson took the time to look in turn at everybody around the table before starting to speak.
‘’Thank you all for coming on such a short notice, ladies and gentlemen. I know that you are all very busy people, like me, and that the present crisis around Africa only added to our various preoccupations. With this said, I asked you to come in order to discuss another problem: our neighbors in the Ross 128 System.’’
Janet then made a schematic picture of a star system appear on the giant viewing screens hooked to the walls of the conference room.
‘’This is a representation of the Ross 128 star system as we knew it before the KOSTROMA had an encounter with a Drazt cruiser just outside of the system, when it was attempting to save the Koorivarese refugee ship SHANIZAR. We then knew it to contain a red dwarf star and at least one planet, the latter situated inside the habitable zone of its star. Now, this is what we know about Ross 128, thanks to the data files copied from the Drazt cruiser MURKAN.’’
The participants to the meeting all stared at the new image now appearing on the screens as Janet went on.
‘’According to that captured date, which included detailed space charts and even space traffic control charts, we now know that the system contains two planets: Ross 128b, which is inside the habitable zone and is a bit larger than Earth, and a much smaller planet, an icy planetoid really, turning at a much greater distance from its star than Ross 128b. There is also a large asteroid belt between the two planets, plus two small moons around Ross 128b. We also know that Ross 128b is the home world of the Drazt, a technological, highly-advanced race which looks a bit like big gorillas with two pairs of arms. Don’t let their ape-like appearance fool you, though: the Drazt are highly intelligent beings with complex emotions and a long history as a technological society. They in fact experimented with a prototype of an interstellar drive as long ago as 6,000 years or more, which will give you an idea of how advanced scientifically and technology the Drazt are. However, their test program was apparently a failure, as proved by the 6,000-year-old crash site found by the KOSTROMA on Gliese 625, and by the fact that the Drazt cruiser encountered recently by the KOSTROMA did not possess an interstellar drive. Still, the lack of such a star drive did not stop the Drazt from spreading out around their own star system, establishing numerous space mining centers and orbital facilities. However, we now know from the captured data that the Ross 128 System is approaching saturation point and is also slowly running out of resources for the Drazt, whose population now counts over eight billion individuals.’’
That figure made many participants exchange worried glances around: The War of 2315 had mostly resulted from an Earth government, the late Terran Federation, trying to squeeze more and more resources from the Spacers worlds around the Solar System, in order to feed and maintain Earth’s massive population. The Spacers had balked at that one-way trade and had revolted, forming the present Spacers League and fighting off the attempts by the Terran Federation to break their resistance. The situation inside the Ross 128 System sounded a bit too much to their taste to the one found in 2315 inside the Solar System.
‘’Are there any indications that those Drazt could possibly fall into a civil war scenario because of that lack of resources, Governor Robeson?’’ asked Vladimir Gasparov, the new chairman of the Sverdlovsk Group, which controlled the large asteroid Hygiea and its surrounding, smaller asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt. Janet shook her head in response.
‘’No! The Drazt appear to be a well-cemented society with a largely equitable sharing of resources and a strong sense of racial pride. The idea of a civil war would probably be an unthinkable one for the Drazt. In that aspect, along with most of their technology, the Drazt appear to be superior to us.’’
‘’Most of their technology?’’ replied Governor Juan Perez, the leader of the Saturn System and of the other, outlying planets and planetoids of the Solar System. ‘’In what technologies are they inferior to us, apart from not having a star drive?’’
‘’Simply said: war-related technologies and tactics. While their computer systems are highly advanced, their attempt at hacking the computer systems of the KOSTROMA proved amateurish, something that blew back into their faces. I know that this kind of superiority on our part is not something we should be proud of, but the fact is that it did save the KOSTROMA and the SHANIZAR from being seized by the Drazt. However, our mastery of warfare technologies and our long history of wars are precisely what make the Drazt nervous about us. The data files we captured told us that the Drazt have been aware of our existence since the first years Humanity started emitting radio and video waves in an uncontrolled manner. The Drazt then studied us from afar through our electronic emissions, and this for the last 300 years or so. What they heard apparently made them very leery about us and they in turn instigated an electronic blanket program to mask from us their own electronic emissions, notably by using only directional waves, rather than omnidirectional ones. That is why, despite over 260 years of radio-astronomy studies by us, we were still unaware of the Drazt’s existence until the encounter between the KOSTROMA and the MURKAN.’’
‘’I get it that those Drazt are worried about us, and for some good reasons,’’ said Toru Tomonaga, the CEO of the Ceres Consortium, based on the planetoid Ceres, in the Main Asteroid Belt, ‘’but why do we need to worry about them? They don’t have an interstellar drive, thus can’t touch us.’’
‘’True! However, two things give us reasons to worry about the Drazt in the medium to long term. The first one is the fact that an interstellar drive is actually feasible, as demonstrated by the KOSTROMA’s passage near their system. That passage may well push them into resuscitating their old interstellar drive project, which they had abandoned some six millenniums ago. With a much more advanced computer technology than they had then, the Drazt may be able to find rather quickly a solution via a series of computer simulations, to test new theories. The second point is the growing lack of resources and population saturation inside the Ross 128 System. The Drazt must be getting anxious about possibly reaching a crisis point and would understandably want to find a way to expand through the star systems around them in order to find both new resources and more living space. Eventually, may it be in years, decades or centuries, the Drazt will find how to travel through the stars. Then, it will be our turn to worry.’’
Janet’s response left the other participants silent for a moment as they mulled her arguments and found nothing wrong with them. Karl Langemann, the CEO of the Vesta Consortium and a highly competitive industrialist and geological engineer who knew well the value of space real estate, finally broke the silence.
‘’So, what do you propose that we do about the Drazt, Janet? I hope that you are not advocating that we quote preempt that problem unquote.’’
‘’You know that I would never push for such a monstrous act as to attack the Drazt without real provocation on their part, Karl.’’ replied Janet, her expression somber. ‘’We could and should certainly reinforce our defenses and space forces around the Solar System. Unfortunately, the recent preoccupations about the situation in Africa has pushed the Northern Alliance into substantially cutting their financial support for the building of a joint space fleet. In fact, we lost sixteen billion credits in funding for new ships because of those cuts, a very painful blow to our spaceship building program. That program will now have to proceed at a snail’s pace, unless we put up more of our own money to compensate for the cuts by the Northern Alliance.’’
Many of the participants frowned at those words as they saw the implications for their own planetary budgets, with Toru Tomunaga being the first to put up an objection.
‘’Janet, you should know that, while our economies are doing well, we don’t have a wide margin available to increase significantly our shipbuilding budgets. My citizens, for one, would want to see some positive return for themselves out of such extra expenses before accepting to shoulder higher taxes.’’
‘’The same here.’’ added Charles Watts. ‘’Martian citizens have already sacrificed much and are still shouldering significant expenditures in order to sustain the Mars Terramorphing Project, which will still need decades before it could be completed. To raise more taxes in order to build warships meant to shield us from a hypothetical future alien threat is not a pill that they will swallow easily. As unfortunate as that is, us Humans were never very good at looking much beyond our collective noses. Just look at the 21st Century Climate Warming Crisis as an example of our myopia.’’
Janet Robeson felt some discouragement then: the objections raised by Gasparov and Watts were both logical and factual. Worse, they probably reflected the opinions of most, if not all, of the other High Council members.
‘’Then, if we can’t build up rapidly a fleet of interstellar-capable warships to protect us from the Drazt, what is our alternative solution to that? Do nothing and hope that the Drazt will never be capable of developing an interstellar drive of their own?’’
‘’Why not use diplomacy rather than military measures, ladies and gentlemen?’’ suddenly said Tina Forster, attracting all eyes on her. ‘’We could go talk face to face with the Drazt and convince them that we wish them no harm.’’
‘’Great!’’ exploded Gasparov, using a sarcastic tone. ‘’Let’s send an emissary to the Drazt aboard an interstellar-capable ship! How long do you think it will take before the Drazt would simply seize that ship and then copy our Koomak Drive, while getting rid of our envoy? If I would be in their place, that is exactly what I would do myself. We would end up making a Drazt threat possible, all by our own fault. A brilliant idea indeed, Fleet Captain Forster!’’
‘’Please, let’s keep this discussion civil!’’ said Janet Robeson, raising her voice, as Tina Forster and Vladimir Gasparov exchanged hard looks. ‘’Captain Forster, do you wish to respond to Chairman Gasparov’s objection?’’
‘’I certainly do, Madam Governor. First, I am no naïve peacenik and fully understand the risks involved in attempting to initiate diplomacy with the Drazt. Second, I believe that there are ways to prevent the Drazt from getting their hands on an interstellar ship. Third, I volunteer myself and my ship to conduct such a diplomatic mission.’’
‘’You, the one who insulted and ridiculed one of their ships?’’ shot back Gasparov. ‘’They will most probably grab you on arrival and torture you to get out of you everything you know about the Koomak Drive.’’
Tina’s expression was most somber as she replied to the Hygiean leader.
‘’I perfectly know the risks I would be taking personally, Chairman Gasparov, but the risks of doing nothing are much bigger in the long run. It will certainly be a dangerous mission for me, but I am more than willing to at least try some diplomacy, in order to prevent a war with the Drazt.’’
‘’And what would you propose to the Drazt in exchange for peace, Tina?’’ asked Juan Perez.
‘’Apart from offering a pledge of non-aggression to the Drazt, I am not sure. That would in fact be something that this council would have to decide, in my opinion.’’
The High Council members, watched intensively by the Koorivars and Hoshis present, looked at each other in indecision for a moment. It took a good fifteen second before the first idea was raised, starting a passionate debate around the conference table.