Backyard Starship Read online

  But despite that, you could apparently stick super-secret tech in the trunk of your car and bring it home with you.

  I wonder if Gramps had stolen Perry? But why would he? And why wouldn’t the bird have its own security protocols installed, causing it to immediately try to escape to some safe place and signal for recovery? Or even just not boot up in the first place? Did the bloody thing not even have a password?

  And what the hell was all that nonsense about Galactic Knights and Peacemakers?

  Perry had landed just in front of the smaller, man-sized barn door. It stood open. The big roll-back ones were still closed. I glanced up at the light that should have been illuminating the barn, which looked fine but had apparently burned out. I glanced back at the house, just a few rectangles of wan light in the gloom. Yeah, I’d definitely have to replace this light. It was too dark out here.

  “This way,” Perry said, hopping into the barn.

  I started that way, then stopped. The barn was as dark inside as out. I didn’t have a flashlight, so if there were no working lights inside either, then I’d be left fumbling around in a black space full of tools and farm implements. I knew where my old workbench was, of course. Unlike my room, though, I was sure Gramps would have changed around the barn in the years I’d been gone. He had been running a working farm, after all.

  But it wasn’t just that. What stopped me was a sudden thrill of… anticipation? Fear? Dread? All of these things? Whatever it was, it rooted me to the muddy spot, oblivious to the drizzle, focused only on that dark doorway.

  What was really going on here?

  Of course my grandfather hadn’t brought Perry home to trial it. That’s not how these things worked. The defense research people would have been all over it, certainly once news of his death reached them. So that just made no sense at all.

  And as for Gramps having stolen it, I just couldn’t see it. Why? What would be the point? And again, the chances of him or anyone else getting away with something like that, for this long, were—

  Small didn’t begin to cut it.

  A sudden gulf of what the hell? had opened up between me and that doorway. Whatever was happening here, I just couldn’t see it being good. Or, at least, good for me. An AI construct wants to lead me into a dark, apparently powerless barn in the dead of night to show me something. That was creepy in ways I’d only encountered in atmospherically well-done books and movies. But this was real.

  Or was it? Maybe I was dreaming, or going crazy, and I’d followed a phantasm out into the night—

  “Are you coming or what?”

  Perry stood in the doorway, his amber eyes two glowing points in the gloom. Like the eyes of a cat, only golden.

  Okay, that sure as hell didn’t help. It just ratcheted the creep factor up another notch.

  “Coming why? What’s in the barn that you want me to see so badly?”

  “Your ship. Come on.”

  And Perry hopped back out of sight, into the barn.

  My ship.

  As if that explained anything.

  Again, I glanced back at the house. Safe thing to do—go back there, wait until the hard, rational light of morning, and if any of this turned out to actually be real, then consult with Miryam. Find out just what the hell was going on. Surely she had to know.

  I turned back to the barn, scowling. Curiosity had thrown itself into the mix of thoughts and feelings bubbling away inside me, like some pressure cooker about to vent—or explode.

  Screw it. What I wasn’t going to do was just stand here, in the rain, stuck between two imagined scenarios—one safe, the other sinister and weird, but in an admittedly fascinating kind of way.

  If this had been an online mystery, I wouldn’t have just walked away from it. I couldn’t have resisted digging at least a little deeper.

  Taking a breath, I splashed my way to the barn, stepped into its familiar stew of smells—hay, animal dung, old wood, hints of gasoline and oil and rusting metal—and immediately stopped.

  “Close the door,” two golden points of light said. “I’ll turn on the lights once you have.”

  I was already reaching for the light switch. Muscle memory knew exactly where it was. “That’s okay. I’ve got the lights,” I said, my fingers finding the switch and snapping it on.

  Nothing happened.

  “Those lights aren’t active,” Perry said.

  I snapped the switch a few times. “Burned out, I guess.”

  “No, I deactivated them.”

  “You… deactivated them.”

  “That’s right. They’re not necessary.”

  “Speaking on behalf of those of us who aren’t AI constructs that can probably see just fine in the dark, they’re very necessary.”

  “Just close the door, and I’ll turn the real lights on,” Perry replied. Somehow, he managed a pretty clear tone of indulgent, almost strained patience.

  “How about you turn on the lights and then I’ll close the door.”

  A pause—no. Wait. Had I just heard Perry sigh?

  “Can’t. The lights won’t come on unless the door is closed. That’s how the system’s rigged to work.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. This was ridiculous—

  “I promise you, Van, that you’ll have an answer once you close that door and I can activate the lights. You’ll then have about a thousand more questions, but one step at a time.”

  To hell with this, I thought, fully intending to just turn around and head back to the light—and security—of the house. But that part of me that was morbidly curious was already closing the door, the metal latch sliding into place with a soft metallic rasp, then a click.

  What the hell am I doing?

  I tensed as I yanked the door open again—and the world turned blazing white.

  I found myself staring at the silvery-grey wood of the old door from about a foot away, my hand still on the latch. But a jarring dissonance hit me like a punch to the face. I’d spent many nights in the barn, working away soldering and testing circuits and electronic components, and had always needed a bright worklight to see my current project. Because otherwise, the barn was lit by a couple of middling overhead lights that lit up the space directly beneath them but mostly cast the rest into shadowy gloom.

  Only this light was almost painfully white. Gramps must have installed a few dozen banks of white LEDs to achieve this sort of brilliance.

  I turned toward Perry. Amid those last few thoughts before my universe changed forever, one stood out, utterly inane.

  Gramps wasn’t dead at all. I was going to turn and find him there, along with Miryam and a bunch of other people, and they were all going to yell surprise as soon as I turned because of some labyrinthine reason known only to a former spy. At least, that was a viable hope, if only for a moment, simply because my mind could find no plausible reason for anything that was happening to me—or what I was looking at.

  I stood. And stared. For a while. Seconds, minutes, I wasn’t sure.

  Filling the barn, nearly from this end to the far back, and rising to just under the lofty rafters, was a spaceship.

  “Impressive, isn’t she?” Perry said.

  I might have responded. I don’t remember.

  “Uh, Van? Hello?”

  “I—”

  It was all I managed. Another indeterminate amount of time passed.

  I glanced at Perry, then back at the ship.

  “What the f—?”

  “She’s called the Dragonet,” Perry cut in. “Vigilant class. I prefer the Vigilants over other classes of this mass. Better combination of speed, protection, and firepower, I think. Not too much of any one, but just enough of all three.”

  I took a step. One step. That was it.

  The thing sitting in the barn looked like no spacecraft I’d ever seen. And I’d long had a passion for spaceflight, so I knew them all pretty well, from the first Mercury and Soyuz capsules, right up to the new generation ships, like NASA’s Orion, which was only just now hitting the launchpad for the first time. This, though, was a whole different breed. Hell, it was a whole different species.

  I figured it for a little under twice the size and bulk of a city bus. The upper section of the forward hull and the nose were enclosed in something reflective and darkly crystalline. Various protrusions extending from the hull sported what had to be thrust bells for engines of some sort. Some of these looked like they could rotate, probably through most of a complete sphere. Larger, fixed exhaust bells extended from the thing’s stern. It squatted on chunky struts and landing skids, and overall had the color and luster of dark smoke. I looked for markings and saw a series of geometric shapes and dots rendered along the hull in medium grey.

  “Want to step inside? Check it out?”

  I looked at Perry again. “Inside?”

  “Yes. Inside. You know, the opposite of outside? As in, you’ll step through the airlock, and you’ll then be—”

  “I know what inside means,” I snapped, finally getting at least some wobbly legs under the rational part of my mind. Really wobbly, newborn deer wobbly, but enough to prop up at least a few coherent thoughts.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I finally asked.

  “See, I told your grandfather to brief you on all of this before he died,” Perry said, shaking his head with a dolorous jingling of feathers.

  “Brief me on what?

  “Your succession as a Peacemaker. Now, we’re going to have to go through the whole process of indoctrinating you to the system instead of you just assuming your place and getting to work—”

  “Okay, wait.” I held up a hand. “Never mind about what my grandfather should have done, or didn’t do, or whatever. Just tell me what’s going on. What is a Peacemaker? What are you?
And what”—I swept a hand at the ship—“the hell is that?”

  “The Peacemakers are the enforcement arm of an interstellar organization called the Galactic Knights Uniformed. I am a combat AI, model AU-987T, serial number 18974XM6, assigned to your grandfather—and now to you—as personal guard and assistant. And this is the Dragonet, a Vigilant-class starship, used by your grandfather to perform his duties as Peacemaker.”

  While Perry was talking, I sat down on a hay bale and stared up at the bulk of what was apparently called the Dragonet. It loomed in the hard glare of the white lights, which emanated from somewhere high up in the barn’s rafters. I glanced up, ready to squint and shield my eyes, but for some reason the light didn’t dazzle me the way I expected it would. It was less actual light and more just a uniform whiteness that originated at the top of the barn and painted itself over everything inside. It rendered every color, right down to the green bits of grass stuck to my shoes, a perfectly saturated, almost idealized version of itself.

  “So, let me see if I understand this. My grandfather wasn’t actually a spec ops soldier in government service. He was some kind of galactic knight who flew around in a spaceship with his talking, intelligent metal bird, traveling between planets to enforce—something.”

  “The strictures and decrees of the Peacemakers,” Perry said.

  “Ah. Right. Of course. So have I got all of that right?”

  “Well, in a really, really general sense, yes, you do.”

  I shook my head. Chuckled. Started to laugh. Laughed harder.

  “What’s so funny?” Perry asked.

  I stopped and stared at him, tears in my eyes, then swept my hand around and laughed some more.

  “This,” I finally managed, wiping my eyes. “All of this. It’s a thing of beauty. Scary, scary beauty. I always figured when someone went crazy, started hearing voices, that sort of thing, it was all—I don’t know. Just irrational. Nonsensical. But this—”

  I gestured again.

  “This is amazing. It’s so detailed and realistic, even believable. Who knew I had this much imagination in me? Hell, I knew I should have started writing sci fi a few years back. I’d be raking in the cash by now!”

  Perry hopped to a point right in front of me. “Van, I know this is hard for you to accept, or even believe. But you’re not imagining this. You’re not going crazy. Your grandfather really was a Peacemaker. He believed, right down to the core of his being, in protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves. He did that as a spec ops soldier for your military, and when the time came for him to become a Peacemaker, he kept doing it—just not on Earth.”

  “You expect me to believe that my grandfather was a starfaring soldier?”

  “I can prove it to you.”

  I wiped my eyes again. “And how are you going to do that?”

  “By taking you for a flight.”

  “Into space.”

  “Yes, into space.”

  I stood. “Sure. What the hell. I’ve paid the entrance fee, might as well take the whole damned tour, right?” I gestured elaborately toward the ship. “After you, my good bird.”

  Perry muttered something, then launched himself into the air and flew to a point about halfway along the length of the ship. As soon as he landed, a hatch slid smoothly open.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Van,” he said, then he hopped inside and vanished.

  I grinned like an idiot. “I’m ready now. To space, Perry, and step on it.”

  I stopped at the entrance. “Oh, wait. Something just occurred to me. A little technical problem in this, ah, adventure,” I said.

  I saw Perry standing just inside, in a small, bare compartment. “What’s that?”

  “Well, as soon as we… crash through the roof, I guess, and get airborne, we’re going to be illuminated by every radar system from Chicago air traffic control to NORAD. Guess we’ll be a UFO, huh?”

  “Van, I’m going to turn off the lights for a moment,” Perry said.

  Okay, that broke through my increasingly hysterical bravado. “You’re going to—what?”

  “I’m going to do this.”

  The lights went out.

  The ship, and Perry, were gone.

  Not just gone, as in, it was too dark to see them anymore. Actually gone, as though they’d never existed in the first place. My night vision hadn’t even been affected by the sudden cessation of the white illumination.

  I sighed, long and slow. Well, that was interesting. And by interesting, I meant the kind of hallucination that felt more real than anything I could even imagine, let alone had experienced.

  I walked through the empty space that had been occupied by the—what had Perry called it? The Dragonet?

  Nothing. I spread my arms and turned around. Just empty, cool barn air, full of the various reeks I’d long ago come to know and largely ignore.

  I laughed. Alrighty, then. First thing tomorrow, I’d head to the hospital and check myself in for a psych evaluation because something was obviously very, very wrong with me—

  I gasped as something seemed to grab me and shove me to one side. It wasn’t physical movement, though, but more of a feeling of… displacement is the best way I can describe it. It was like those weird moments when you’re drifting off to sleep and suddenly slam awake, certain you’d just fallen a couple of feet.

  As soon as the feeling passed, the white light returned, and so did the ship, and Perry standing inside it.

  I glanced down at my feet. I was standing exactly where I’d been when the lights went out.

  “So, I guess this hallucination isn’t over, huh?” I asked, looking up from my feet.

  Perry gave a very human shrug that lifted and lowered his wings. “I don’t know. Were you having a hallucination? Are you prone to them?”

  I barked out a laugh and looked pointedly at the ship looming above me. “Apparently so.”

  Although it suddenly struck me that I wasn’t sure if this was the hallucination itself, or if being alone in the darkened barn was part of it, too. Was I still in the house? In the kitchen? In bed asleep?

  “Anyway, to answer your question—no, we won’t be detected by any earthly radar or other means. The Dragonet, like all Vigilant-class ships, is fully stealthed against any sort of detection that doesn’t involve—”

  Perry paused. “How well versed are you in terrestrial theoretical physics?”

  “Uh, I used to watch The Big Bang Theory. They used a lot of theoretical physics jargon in that. Does that count?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Suffice to say, for now, that any detection system that doesn’t operate on principles similar to these lights won’t be capable of seeing the Dragonet. That’s why you couldn’t see it, or even be aware of its existence, while the lights were off.”

  “But I walked right past where you are now, into the middle of the barn floor.”

  “Eh, yes and no. Yes you did, but the ship's stealth system shifted back to where you started the instant the lights came on. That prevents the ship from materializing superimposed on things, which would be a serious problem. Incidentally, it’s also how the ship deals with navigational debris, dust, gas molecules, micrometeorites, that sort of thing, while it’s in flight.”

  “In space.”

  “Or inside an atmosphere, in which case the air is shifted aside. It lets the Dragonet fly as though she’s always traveling through vacuum.”

  The scientific part of me saw a problem with that. If you simply shifted the air out of the ship’s way, you’d create a zone of higher pressure around it—

  That thinking didn’t go very far, though. Trying to apply logical reason to fantastic illusion was a sort of craziness all its own.

  “Anyway, this would be much easier to explain if you’d come aboard,” Perry said.