by Andrew Beery
“You are not aware.”
Did I mention the Tas were frustrating to deal with on occasion?
I didn’t get a chance to try again. The holographic image of the Tas disappeared. It seemed they had decided the conversation was over. Somehow, I had the feeling that any attempt to reestablish communication was a waste of time. I turned to the others in the room.
“Suggestions?”
Mike was the first to respond.
“We need to take out whatever the J’ni are building. I could have a team ready in fifteen minutes if you give the order.”
“Typical,” Lori snorted from the other end of the table where she was sitting near her father.
Ody and I raised our eyebrows in unison and said in perfect unison, “Explain.”
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
“Sorry Fleet. Go ahead,” my twin said.
I turned back to my wife.
“Explain, please.”
Lori, for her part, looked disgusted. Personally, I liked it better when she smiled… but that’s me.
“To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Her father looked at Mike and then her.
“Do you have an alternative suggestion?”
“Talk to them,” she said. “Hey, guys. That’s quite a setup you have there. What does it do?”
Admiral Riker… the other Admiral Riker shook his head. “We’ve been trying for days. No joy.”
“Frankly,” my father-in-law “we’re at a loss as to what to do. I hate to nuke the little guys but without knowing what they’re up to… I’m not sure we can let them complete it.”
“Sirs,” Commander Shelby interrupted. “Wouldn’t the Tas have warned us if what they were doing was dangerous? Maybe we should let them finish.”
Mike shook his head. Just reading his facial expression was enough to tell that the Marine commander was in complete disagreement.
“Who the hell ever knows what the Tas are thinking? They could warn you not to stick your finger in a hot toaster but completely ignore the steam-roller barreling down on your position.”
“I think Mike’s point is that the Tas may well consider the threat so obvious that they don’t feel a need to state the obvious.”
“You are not aware,” my doppelganger said. “What does that even mean?”
I nodded my head in agreement. I had been running the same thought through my head. I made a decision. Lori was not going to be happy with it, but it was the right one none-the-less.”
“Admiral Spratt, I request permission on behalf of the Galactic Order to attempt a non-military intervention. I’ll lead an away-team consisting of myself, Middy, an engineer and two marines. We will attempt to communicate face to face and/or attempt a visual on-site inspection of what-the-hell-it-is the J’ni are building.”
“You don’t need my permission son,” the UEA Admiral answered. “We’re all on the same side on this one.”
***
I was right. My wife was not pleased. It wasn’t the idea of an away-team. It was the fact that I insisted on being on it.
In the end, I agreed to allow her to be a part of the mission as well. If the J’ni were under some type of mind control and we were able to break it… her skills as a doctor might well be required.
The engineer I decided to take was Lieutenant Commander Sa’Mi. His inclusion was strictly a voluntary request. I explained to the J’ni what was going on and that there was a possibility that whatever had co-opted the J’ni in and around Earth could do the same to him.
His response was typically J’ni. “Let’s go.”
Our shuttle landed without difficulty near the J’ni encampment on the moon. We exited the craft wearing lightly armored Marine Encounter Suits. The Mark II MES’s were marginally more comfortable than the previous model, but there was still no mechanism for scratching one’s back. Maybe the Mark IIIs would address this critical deficiency.
It wasn’t long before I got my first good look at what the J’ni had been up to for the last few days. I have to admit; the little buggers had been busy. Whatever it was they were building… they appeared to be almost done. Most of what we were seeing looked to be cleanup operations. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
The mysterious construction site was surrounded by a force screen of some type. It didn’t block sensors or light from traveling in or out. But try shooting something at it… even a low-yield ranging laser and it locked up tighter than a… well… I just won’t go there, but you get the general idea.
The construction site seemed to be a circular area whose diameter appeared to be something of the order of about a kilometer wide. It looked like the J’ni were both building up and digging down at the same time. Whatever it was… it seemed to be a single massive machine… not unlike a starship but quite obviously not designed for space travel.
“Thoughts?” I asked over my MES’s comms.
“There don’t seem to be any guards,” Mike answered.
I could see him scanning the entire area with his suit’s built-in optical enhancers. What was interesting was that the J’ni we did see were not wearing protective suits. It appeared the force field that surrounded the site also served to keep a breathable atmosphere in-place.
“Sa’Mi?”
The J’ni looked like a kid in his miniature encounter suit. I was so used to hearing his chittering followed a fraction of a second later with a mechanical VOX translation that I was somewhat startled to hear just the VOX.
“The unit, being constructed, does not resemble any technology I am familiar with. It would be logical to assume the entity responsible for my nest-sibling aberrant behavior is also supplying the design parameters and instructions.”
I looked out over the massive construction site. We were less than one hundred feet from it. We knew the J’ni inside had seen us. Several stopped to look at us at one point. A group of them even seemed to have a discussion and pointed at us. Whatever they had been discussing, some type of agreement had been made, and the various J’ni went back to whatever it was that they were doing before we arrived.
“So, what you are saying is you have no idea what they are building.”
Sa’Mi rocked his head back and forth which was his attempt to mimic a human shaking his head.
“Negative Admiral. I know exactly what they are building. They are building an antiproton arc cannon. It appears to be quite a large one,” the J’ni engineer said in a calm synthetic voice.
Now I wish to state for the record that what happened next was a function of my being startled by the notion that our little buddies were very likely building the biggest, baddist weapon in the solar system. Suffice it to say, this was not my finest moment as a Fleet Admiral in the Galactic Order of Planets.
I turned, perhaps too quickly, to face the J’ni engineer… and in that brief moment of distraction, I kicked a boulder. Now the boulder was a fairly big and well-anchored rock. It wasn’t going anywhere. The force of my kicking it had to dissipate somewhere… it's just a matter of plain and simple physics. In this particular case, the dissipation took the form of launching me into a very impressive rolling motion that carried me a good 15 feet into the air.
That would have been a tolerable mishap, but I exasperated the situation by tapping my suit thrusters. My intent was to land next to my friends. In my mind's eye, the maneuver would have been graceful and would have helped to mitigate the embarrassment of stumbling.
Sadly, EVA maneuvers have never been one of my strong suits at the space academy… in point of fact, I had almost been drummed out of the corps because of my poor performance… I wasn’t because I was top of the class in every other respect. That poor performance in EVA maneuvers came back to haunt me. Rather than inching my way back down to the others, I hit the thrusters at the wrong point in my roll and actually launched myself higher. I tried to compensate but sadly, only succeeded in making a bad situation worse… once again.
I finally managed to control m
y roll. I was exactly upside down and falling at roughly 1.62 m/s2… right towards the energy field surrounding the construction site.
I have to admit… what happened next was… in a word, impressive. I connected with the barrier about twenty-five feet in the air… and sailed right through it. A quick adjustment of my attitude thrusters and I was right-side up again and landing on my two feet in what appeared to be a prime example of precision flying.
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I turned towards the others on the outside of the shield.
“You coming?”
Mike, Mitty, and Sa’Mi immediately launched themselves into the air and used their thrusters to gain the required altitude. Admittedly, they did it without the tumbling that I had experienced, but my efforts had had more style. That was my story, and I was sticking with it.
In a few moments, the two men settled down to the lunar surface within about three or four meters of my position. Lori, for her part just stood on the other side looking at us. When it seemed like all of us were watching her… she calmingly walked over to the shield wall… and walked thru it. As a point of reference… I hate it when my wife does that.
2100.1207.2064 Galactic Normalized Time
General Ahithophel looked out over the assembled fleet. In a moment, he and his men – all clones of a man named Riker, would make the final jump and begin the assault on earth. As the first of the clones to quicken, he had assumed overall command of the landing force. He had no memories of Riker. His thoughts were the result of synthetic memories implanted by his lord, the AI known as Ish-Boset. As such, his loyalty to the AI was absolute.
Chapter 21: Confused Dog
As much as I would like to say we were quickly able to take control of the situation under the dome, the truth was… we were flummoxed. The J’ni simply carried on with their activities and generally ignored us. The only time we could get a reaction was if we stepped in front of one… then the J’ni in question would step around us.
Sa’Mi tried talking with them but was likewise ignored.
“Do you think they even hear us,” Mike asked about five minutes into this surreal silent treatment.
“Let’s find out. Sa’Mi, yell as loud as you can that there’s a fire. Ask for help to put it out.”
“There is no fire Admiral,” the engineer replied calmly.
“That’s not really the point now is it?” I responded.
“Understood.”
Sa’Mi removed his helmet and began chittering loudly in the J’ni language. I have to give the little bugger credit. I would never have believed a guy his size could belt it out like a bullhorn. I asked for loud, and it was loud, even when muffled by my helmet.
“Well, that’s got their attention,” Lori said.
I turned and saw she was right. There were about twenty of the J’ni heading in our direction. They slowed as they got closer to us. I could tell from the way they were looking this way and that… that they were looking for the reported fire.
“Ok, Sa’Mi. You can stop yelling. Tell them we need to talk. We need to know what they are doing and why they are doing it.”
A few dozen chitters back and forth, and I foolishly thought that we may finally be making some progress. My mistake.
A deep rumble emanated from the weapon the J’ni had been constructing. This was accompanied by a tremor in the ground that raised some of the ultra-fine lunar dust into the air. My opinion as to the state of affairs made a dramatic U-turn.
I remember thinking to myself… self… this isn’t good.
As is often the case in situations like this, I was right. I hate it when I’m right… at least about the bad stuff.
It was about then that the really strange stuff began to occur. The Dust that was now floating in the air began to glow. I imagined I was seeing what the inside of a neon lamp must look like. It was beautiful, but at the same time, it didn’t give me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
Suddenly the intensity of the glow multiplied to the point where I had to close my eyes to avoid going blind. At the same time, there was a loud popping noise that came and went like a light switch being flipped.
When I opened my eyes, the glow was gone… as was the force field surrounding the mysterious work site. The sound was the atmosphere that had been held in place by the force field escaping into the vacuum of space.
“The J’ni… they’re gone!” Lori gasped.
“Confirmed,” Mitty said. “All the J’ni have teleported away from this location.”
I had just come to the same realization myself. Even Sa’Mi was gone. I hoped that wherever he was, there was a breathable atmosphere because his helmet sat at my feet where it had rolled.
“Teleported? Is that even a thing?” It felt like I had been saying that a lot lately, but these were strange times.
Mitty turned to look at me.
“It is indeed a ‘thing.’ I would not have said so otherwise.”
The rumbling, which we could now only feel through our feet, stopped. At about the same time my commlink began to buzz insistently. I tapped it with my chin,
“Riker here.”
“Admiral, this is Commander Shelby. We have a serious situation.”
“Explain.”
“In the last three or four minutes we have effectively lost control of the ship. The J’ni have isolated all the main systems. It’s a mutiny, sir.”
I shook my head in disbelief. It couldn’t be a coincidence. I signaled the others to make their way back to the shuttle. We had just arrived and yet it seemed we would have to leave before we had any answers.
“Commander, what is the current count of J’ni onboard the Gilboa?” I had a really bad feeling I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“One second Admiral… Admiral, I can’t explain it but…”
“You suddenly have a whole lot more J’ni running around than you should.”
“Yes Sir. How did you know?”
“Call it a hunch. We have reason to believe the J’ni now have access to some type of teleportation technology. If I had to guess it’s of Ancestor origin and somehow tied to whatever they were building on the lunar surface. The extra J’ni you are seeing likely beamed over from our position here. What are they doing?”
“They took control of navigation, power systems, weapons, and the sublight engines. In addition, they have isolated the corresponding sections of engineering. We retain computer access, however, all the engineering interconnections have been severed.”
“Are all the J’ni working together or is there one group working to thwart the other?”
Shelby paused for a moment before answering me.
“Sir, I can’t be sure, but internal surveillance feeds seem to suggest they are all working together. I recognize Commander Sa’Mi leading one of the teams reconfiguring a weapons system.”
Well, that pretty much nailed it. Whatever had co-opted the Earth-based J’ni had now taken control of the ones on my ship. In addition, the team that had been working on the moon, now seemed to be on the Gilboa. I still had no idea what they were about… what were they hoping to accomplish and perhaps most importantly… were they friend or foe?
“What about the rest of the engineering team?” I asked.
“Sir,” Commander Shelby responded. “that’s the part I can’t figure out. There are no human engineers currently in any of the areas that have been taken over. There should have been dozens of them.”
“I suspect you’re going to find most of them were at their duty stations and somehow found themselves translocated someplace else. Where is Commander McGraw?”
“He was with me on the bridge sir when the mutiny took place. He’s trying to gain access to main engineering.”
“OK, keep me apprised of the situation. The away team is heading back to the shuttle. We will rendezvous with you in about thirty minutes.”
“Negative that, sir. Our sublight drives just kicked in. We are accelerating towards the Kuiper
belt.”
“How fast?”
“0.6g and climbing.”
I paused for a moment. This forced a change in my thinking.
“Commander, do you still have access to the shuttle bays?”
“Affirmative Admiral.”
“Elena, I suspect you are not going to be able to regain control of the ship’s systems until we understand why the J’ni are doing what they are doing. The answers are not going to be on our ship. They’re going to be here on the moon. Have Whiskers assemble a team of human engineers. I want them on a shuttle and on there way to me as fast as possible.”
“Yes Admiral. It's going to take them a while to get to you. They’ll have a lot of velocity to shed just to turn around. And Commander McGraw is not going to be happy about leaving the ship.”
“Understood Gilboa. Patch me into the Ticonderoga.”
***
It took the better part of two hours for Whiskers and a team of ten engineers to arrive. I didn’t waste that time. I had had a conversation with Captain Kimbridge. He and the Ticonderoga were accelerating on an intercept course for the Gilboa.
At my request, Admiral Spratt re-tasked the Nimitz which was already in route from Mars to Earth. The fast courier ship would now retrieve the Gilboa away team. The Nimitz would not be able to catch the Gilboa before the Ticonderoga reached her, but she wouldn’t be far behind. It would take the ship about three hours to reach us on the moon. That meant I would have a few minutes to work with the engineering team from the Gilboa.
Commander Shelby was right about one thing. My Chief Engineer was not happy that I had pulled him away from attempting to wrest control of the Gilboa from the J’ni. The betrayal by the J’ni was especially painful for him. No one else on the Gilboa worked with them more on a daily basis then the Gilboa’s Chief Engineer.
Deep down, he understood my reasoning. The technology that the J’ni were using was far more advanced then what they should have had. That could mean only one thing. The spherical Ancestor artifact was somehow interacting with the J’ni.
We couldn’t hope to beat Ancestor tech. We needed to out-think the beings that were utilizing it. For the moment those people were the J’ni. What I didn’t know… was it controlling them or were they cooperating willingly?