Lin leans down next to him. “Dude…”
Hitoshi retrieves a scanner from his toolkit. Blue laser light indexes off it into the breach. After a minute, a graphic appears on James’s HUD with an inventory of damaged parts. “That’s a few day’s worth of repairs right there,” Hitoshi says. “But none of it’s critical. It’s why we have redundant systems.”
James examines the floor breach. It’s dark below, with cables and twisted wreckage obscuring most of his view. The opening is barely big enough for him to drop through, but with all the sharp edges, he thinks better of it.
Hitoshi scans what he can see and updates everyone’s HUDs. “Those mangled blobs are g-wave emitters. Good news is that we have more than enough spares because, you know, I thought not having an interstellar drive would be a bad thing. The bad news is that all that smushed stuff around them doesn’t have spares and will need to be printed and assembled.” He peers around the opening. “Wreckage is blocking line of sight to the rest of the room, so we’re going to have to go in through the access hatch to scan the rest.”
James leads, drifting over to the floor’s access panel. Caution markings read Warning: Riggs Emitter Array. Confined Space. Entry Prohibited During Drive Operation.
“So, what exactly would happen if I went down there during operation?” James says.
“Uh,” Hitoshi says, “two terawatts of power would be focused upon you, and then you’d do your best supernova impersonation.” He blinks. “Don’t worry. I locked it out. It does mean it’ll be dark down there.”
James nods his head slowly. “Roger.” He touches the panel’s icon, and the door slides open. He clicks on his shoulder lights and pulls himself into the access hatch. As his lights pan across the torn metal, the bulk of something segmented, silver, and alien gleams with reflected light. James jolts and pushes himself back out, nearly colliding with Hitoshi.
“Whoa, boss, you okay?” Hitoshi says.
James grabs the lip of the access panel and stops himself. “I think it’s a piece of what hit us. Hang on.” He takes a breath and pulls himself back into the Riggs room, swinging his light where it was before. The fragment is a four meter long silver and platinum spear embedded in the floor, tapered like an armored cone with offset rectangular slats. Debris and wreckage dangle around it and obscure most of the part that’s in the floor. “Yeah, it’s one of the projectiles.”
Hitoshi’s voice crackles in his ear over coms. “Great!”
“Let me get a read on it,” Lin says. James pulls back as Lin leans in and extends her scanner. In a few moments, she says, “It’s giving off low-level alpha radiation. Not able to penetrate our suits.”
James glances at Lin and then back at the fragment. He motions for her to move back, then draws his pistol. “Safeties off.”
“James,” Ananke says. “Be careful.”
Hitoshi and Lin draw their weapons as James drops into the breach. He keeps his pistol in the low-ready position. “James to Beckman, I’m streaming my suit vid to you. We’ve got a fragment piece in the Riggs room. Giving off some low rads but seems inert.”
“On my way,” Beckman says.
“No,” James says. “Stay at tactical. Just want you in the loop.”
“Roger.”
James advances, pushing some dangling fiber optics out of the way and ducking beneath a bent structural beam. As more of the fragment comes into view, he spots a section that abruptly narrows as if an outer sheathing had been removed. Dark translucent beads are clustered inside the shaft cavity. He furrows his eyebrows, examining it.
“I wonder what this thing is made of,” Hitoshi says. “It’s stronger than our hull.”
“James,” Ananke says. “There’s movement, behind you, near the core.”
James turns to his right. The Riggs room is a squat, cylindrical volume with dozens of basketball-sized g-wave emitters mounted along its perimeter, each shaped like a teardrop with the sharp end pointing towards the room’s center. The room itself is in darkness because Hitoshi killed all of the power, so the only light is the group’s shoulder lamps casting sharp, shifting shadows. Columns filled with lines of machinery and cables stretch upwards from the floor like stalagmites, obstructing James’s line-of-sight, but a faint blue glow moves through the living shadows. James keeps his pistol low. With his left hand, he pushes off the nearest wall and drifts towards one of the columns. “Hitoshi,” he says quietly, “come up behind the column next to me. Lin, stay by the fragment.”
“Copy,” Hitoshi says, his voice shaky.
Slowly, James peeks around his column at the core. The focal point of the g-wave array is a three-sixty sphere of antennae pointing towards an open space in the room’s center. Nothing is there, but a hint of silver disappears behind one of the columns on the opposite side of the room. “Did you see it?” James says, looking over at Hitoshi.
“Yeah, it’s behind pylon four.”
“Stay here. I’m moving to five.” James pushes off and sails left to pylon five. Taking a deep breath, he peers around it. Coasting along at chest height behind pylon four is a cone-shaped metallic fan emitting a dim blue arc from its tip. The device is large, about the size of a chair, matching the dimensions of the cavity in the fragment. When James’s suit lights hit it, it pivots around one hundred and eighty degrees and points right at him, a ring of blue lights glowing upon its nose like LEDs. He resists the urge to raise his gun, keeping a level eye on the alien device.
“James, get out of there,” Beckman says over coms.
The device glides towards James, starting a slow clockwise rotation. The alien cone blossoms open like a sunflower, its radial fins flattening out into a disk to reveal a cluster of translucent black spheres of varying sizes at its center, like the compound eyes of an insect. James raises his pistol slightly, and the translucent eyes strobe blinding white flashes in response, spilling dancing blue and purple flickers throughout the room. James lifts his left arm in front of his helmet, shielding his eyes as the room devolves into freeze-frame snapshots of movement. As his arm descends one frame at a time, he says, “Ava, the first contact sequence, send it to my suit.”
Over coms, Ava says, “Okay, loading it up now.”
The alien device closes slowly on James, now five meters away.
“There’s a structure in the light pattern,” Ananke says. “I see repeating elements.”
As if it could hear Ananke, the device rotates down, its face pointing at her screen.
Ava’s file notification appears in James’s HUD. He taps a few keys on his right forearm and activates the program. Both of his shoulder lights dim to a faint purple, pulsing. The alien sunflower snaps back to face James. It rotates there, clockwise, like a gear turning in space, as dim purple bursts pop from random elements in its eyes.
James’s breathing is up, amplified by the acoustics of his helmet, and he can feel his pulse rushing in his ears.
The purples brighten slightly in the alien device’s eyes, still glowing in a seemingly random pattern from individual facets.
“James,” Ananke says. “It’s matching your transmission wavelengths.”
The device is still drifting towards James, now at an uncomfortably-close three meters. With its slats opened like a sunflower, it’s about half as tall as James. In the corner of James’s eye, Hitoshi is still behind the column to his right. When Hitoshi shifts to get a better angle on the alien, his shoulder lights swing across it. The alien’s slats abruptly fold back up into a cone, and the device snaps sixty degrees left, pointing its tip at Hitoshi. Blue light washes over Hitoshi from the device’s nose lights, and he jolts, pulling back behind the column. The alien cone pivots back towards James, spins left, and peers over James’s shoulder. James follows its gaze and sees Lin back by the fragment painted in the alien’s blue light. She looks terrified, raising her pistol. James holds up his left palm, urging her to stop. When he looks back at the cone, flashes inside of it burst like a brewing storm. It shoots
forward, and James barely has time to flinch before it smashes into his right shoulder like a linebacker, sending him spinning, the floor tumbling over the ceiling, a startled scream from Lin over coms, a flash of a pulse pistol firing with sparks bursting in zero-gee like fireworks, then something hard and immovable cracking him in the spine, cartwheeling him into a wall. He’s gasping, trying to get his wind back when a cable connects with his left hand. As he snags it and stabilizes himself, his eyes dart to Lin. Hitoshi is at her side by the fragment, his hands on her ribs. A few red embers drift nearby from where a pulse round impacted the room’s structural beam. The alien is nowhere in sight.
“Lin, are you hurt?” James says.
Her breath is ragged in coms. “I think so, but it’s not bad. My ribs are killing me. It ran me over. It shot up into the reactor room.”
Over coms, Beckman says. “I’ve got it on tactical. It just exited the ship through the breach and buzzed by the repair drone. Half a click away and accelerating. How do you want to play it?”
“Let it go,” James says. “Is it heading towards the ring?”
“Yeah. Accelerating a little more than three gees. Should get there in about an hour.”
“Keep an eye on it. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Roger that.”
When James pushes off the wall towards Lin, everything in his shoulder hurts at once. He grimaces. “Julian, we’ve got some injuries. We’ll meet you outside Environmentals in five.”
“I’ll be right down,” Julian says.
James spies his pulse pistol floating nearby and grabs it, clicking it back into his holster. He uses his left arm to hook a cable and pull himself over to Lin and Hitoshi. Lin is reclined against the fragment holding her chest. “How are you doing, Lin?” James asks.
She smiles weakly. “A little embarrassed I did the sci-fi girl scream thing.”
“Well, I think it scared the crap out of all of us.”
“Yeah,” Hitoshi says. “I could use a change of shorts myself.” He looks up at James. “Sorry, boss, I panicked and shot at it. Freaked me out when it went for Lin.”
“No worries. It was already aggressive at that point. I think, though, we got something out of it. I think we got it to talk to us. Now we just have to figure out what the hell it was saying.”
21
Arrival
The Planetary Science Lab has effectively just become The Lab. Filled with screens and work surfaces, it’s the place to be whenever there is serious science to be done. Plus, Ava thinks, it feels like home. She’s got some snacks and drink bulbs clipped onto the board beside her, and the whole thing reminds her of her workspace on Providence Station, staying up late trying to crack the light-based communications patterns of the underwater vent life on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. Willow floats across from her, leafing through a screen of text, and Ananke’s hologram is at the desk, also drifting in simulated zero-gee.
“The life on Enceladus transmitted on multiple axes,” Ava says. “There was an intensity to the light burst, a color, and a duration.”
Ananke nods. “When presented with a multi-variable equation, it helps to isolate one variable if possible. I suggest we start with the portion of the transmission where the Silver Star device matched James’s shoulder light frequency.”
“Good thinking,” Ava says. She taps a screen, and a squiggly wave appears. “UVA, three hundred twenty nanometers.”
“There are two hundred and forty repeating fragments in the communication,” Ananke says. “I’ll mark and index them.” On Ava’s display, a stacked bar chart appears with all of the fragments sorted by duration. The smallest fragment is eight hundredths of a second long. The next smallest is sixteen hundredths, and the next is twenty-four hundredths.
“They’re multiples,” Ava says. “It may be a rule. So, here’s where we make our first big assumption. Either the signal is technological, and the rule stems from encoding, or it’s native, and it stems from language constraints.”
Willow says, “If it’s encoded, then we’ll just need to wait for face-to-face communication to proceed, so let’s pursue native.”
“Agreed. The next assumption is whether it’s spoken or written.”
“Let’s start with spoken because it’s coming from the source and is not permanent.”
“So as a linguist,” Ava says, “how would you go about translating a spoken language you had never encountered before?”
“It’d have to be face-to-face with trial and error, starting with simple objects that I could point to, such as myself or an apple. Once we agreed on what an apple was, then we could agree on concepts like the number of apples or verbs like eating an apple.”
“You know,” Ava says, “there’s a theory that passive communication with an alien race is impossible without either side having pre-knowledge of the other. In our case, though, we have some pre-knowledge, and we may have more two-way communication attempts. Where do you think we should start?”
Willow squints. “Treat the shortest unit as a morpheme and catalog it. That one’s a little tricky because we’re not sure if their patterns are syllables or units of meaning, but I’ll start with units of meaning. Look for clues about sentence structure. We’re not going to be able to decode anything without talking to the Stars, but we can format our communication to mimic theirs.”
In the corner of her eye, Ava spots James arriving at the lab entrance. He’s wearing a black tee-shirt with a blue cast on his left arm. His right arm is a collection of bruises. It’s painful just look at him.
“Hey,” James says, “how’s the codebreaking going?”
Ava’s shoulders soften, and she wants to go over to him. From the change of clothes, he’s just returned from the medical bay, and it was his second trip there today. As emotions well up in her throat, she pushes them back down, slipping back into her professional voice. Her voice cracks a bit when she says, “We found a basic structure in the signal. Working on mapping it now. It might give us a template for future attempts.” She glances over at Willow, and Willow gives her a slight smile, motioning with her eyes towards James.
Willow says, “Ananke, would you help me with the mapping?”
“Of course,” Ananke says.
Ava takes their hint. “I’ll be right back.” She pushes away from her workstation and meets James in the doorway, then the two of them move into the hallway. Ava reaches back and toggles the lab door closed, setting her hand lightly on James’s chest. He places his hand on top of hers. “Are you okay?” she says. “What did Julian say?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Bunch of bruising. Doc’s got me so pumped up on steroids and nanos that I’m not feeling it. No worries.”
“How’s Lin?”
“Couple of bruised ribs. She’s chomping at the bit to get back to repairs. Have to hand it to her, she’s got grit.” He eyes Ava’s mouth. “How’s your lip?”
Ava instinctively touches it and rolls her eyes. “It’s fine. Smacked myself in the face when my arms were flailing about. Not terribly graceful.” She looks up at him. “I’m hoping you can take it easy tonight.”
James smiles. “Not planning anything crazy. Julian’s helping me set the printers up. Lin and Isaac are sealing the hull breach with the repair drones. Beckman’s with Hitoshi cutting the alien shard from the Riggs chamber. I wanted to lend them a hand, but Beckman asked me if I had a death wish or something, so figured I’d leave him be.”
“Are we going to set up shifts like we did back on Astris?”
James shakes his head. “Not tonight. Won’t be able to do anything with the drive until the new parts are printed, and I think everyone could use the rest. Ananke will keep watch.”
“Hitoshi have a guess about how long until the drive’s repaired?”
James nods. “Three days.”
She takes a deep breath. “Hopefully, our friends feel like talking.”
James quirks his head. “I’ve got my best people on it.”
> She chuckles slightly, then squints. “You know, we’re going to have to find a way to show them things if we’re going to talk. With tightbeam communication only, we can get numbers and maybe conditionals, but no real concepts.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not yet.”
James considers it for a moment. “We’ll have to put our thinking caps on.” He motions over his shoulder. “Well, I’m meeting Julian in five. I should get down to the printers.”
She leans up and gives him a small kiss, catching the side of his mouth. “Be careful. See you at dinner.”
It’s just after two a.m., and James is on the bridge clicked into his harness. He’s wearing the same black shirt from before and has a blanket wrapped around him. The steroids make him feel like running laps all night, but his shoulder and ribs disagree with that idea, so here he sits. To be honest, he’d probably be on the bridge even if he weren’t sleepless. It feels like the right place to be, and there’s a certain serenity to watching the nightside of Sao spin slowly on the screen, the red halo of an eclipsed Luhman 16B the only evidence of the star’s presence. The Silver Star’s tower and ring are on the dayside of Sao at the moment, so, for now, they are alone. Ananke’s console ripples blue from the center panel’s mount, quietly keeping an eye on everything.
James leans forward and taps the record icon on his panel. “Hey, Will. It’s the early morning of mission day twenty-six. It’s only been four days, but a lot has happened. Isaac figured out that the oxygen on Neso was just sunlight and sand mixing it up. No life needed to make it. Neso’s a livable world with a vacant sign. The first of many for us, I’ll bet. The real action has been around the inner planet of 16B. Found a Silver Star base and orbital structure there, and when we tried to talk, it jumped some kind of kinetic weapon into us. At least we think it was a weapon. Banged up Promise and damaged the jump drive before we disabled what was flinging it at us. One of the weapon’s pieces had a drone in it that surveyed the Riggs room and tried to communicate with us before bolting off the ship. So here we are, stuck for a few days until the drive is fixed, unsure if the Stars will try and hit us again or talk. You know I want to make this work. Beckman had a quip about how extending your hand leaves you open for a punch in the nose. I mean, yeah, he’s right, but I’m willing to take a bump on the nose if it leads to a handshake. It’s just harder when the decisions are leading to other people getting bumped on the nose.” He leans forward towards the camera. “I miss you, buddy. I know it’s probably weird not hearing anything from me for years and then getting spammed with messages every few days, but that’s the deal with slowtime. Hopefully, the next time we talk, I’ll have some good news about the Stars.”
Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8) Page 19