by Trevor Wyatt
This would, in turn, allow for the development of beings that were fully capable of analyzing its resources so that it could be exploited for its betterment. Which was where they had gone with on Earth, before the overpopulation, warfare, hatred, and oppression.
And so Jeryl had to wonder; how could any species, anywhere, get past those barriers?
* * *
He had been thinking of the upcoming meeting in his office, and had thought back to that lecture by Professor Guss about intelligence. In this case, Jeryl bloody well knew that that black, triangular starship housed some sort of intelligence, so that wasn’t the question.
The ship could be full of liquid in which floated something like Guss’s octopus/dolphin pair. But it didn’t matter. What they needed to know was, if they posed a danger to The Seeker. Were these the people who had destroyed The Mariner,?
And if so, why? Why would an otherwise intelligent species take such a destructive step without bothering to learn the nature of those aboard our research vessel?
Then, just as he was at the door of the CNC, Mary broke into his thoughts.
“Captain? Y-you might want to take a look at this.”
He caught the uncertainty and doubt in her voice.
“What is it, Lieutenant?” He asked, turning back to her station.
“I decided to test for scanning wavelengths that are less common,” she said. “Because we don’t know what their instruments are capable of, and I was wondering what could cause the energy signature we saw in The Mariner’s debris. I remembered something from one of my classes in neutron tomography, which is the basis for the long-range scanners we use aboard The Seeker.”
Jeryl nodded. He knew this. A good captain knew his ship’s capabilities, even if he wasn’t entirely capable of explaining them. He didn’t know exactly how radio worked, but he knew you could talk to people on the moon with it.
Taylor said, “Neutron tomography sometimes has an unfortunate side-effect, depending on how strong the scanning beam is. Imaged samples can end up being radioactive if they contain appreciable levels of particular elements.”
That was an easy implication to catch.
“You’re saying that a neutron beam of some kind destroyed The Mariner?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s possible. Or neutrinos, which have even more penetrating power.”
“We don’t have neutrino-based scanners,” said Jeryl.
“No. We don’t. But they may; and a neutrino scanning beam could easily be modulated to become a weapon.”
She pointed at one of the smaller screens on her console. “See this? There’s a flutter in this wavelength. I think it’s the main wavelength in a carrier wave, and this flutter indicates...I’m not sure what.”
“Do you think that’s our neutrino wave?”
She shrugged and shook her head. She didn’t know.
“Fair enough,” Jeryl said. “So why wasn’t this discovered sooner?”
Taylor went on the defensive. “Well, I wouldn’t have found it now if I hadn’t thought to scan on a finer scale than we usually do. Sir. And it just popped up now.”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” said Jeryl, with a smile. “I'm not accusing you of anything. I simply want to know what’s happening here.”
“The Mariner might not have had enough time to make a fine-spectrum scan before she was destroyed,” Taylor said. “They’re a research ship, and they don’t have scanners as sophisticated as ours. They might have inadvertently made a gesture that was interpreted as hostile by the alien. Hell, Sir, excuse me, but they might never have even seen the alien.”
“And so now here we are, nosing around, and maybe they’re realizing they made a big mistake,” he said, rubbing his chin.
Would the aliens apologize, or compound their error by attacking them? And if they did attack, could their shields stand up to a beam as powerful as the one that destroyed The Mariner?
“The wave is modulated,” Taylor said again. “That’s the flutter we see. It could be that they’re trying to talk to us.”
Jeryl remembered Professor Guss’s course. Just because they used radio, there was no reason to assume that other forms of intelligent life did.
“Very well,” he said after a moment. “Run it through the computer, see if you can decipher it. Get the AIs online if you need ’em. Not Gunny. The other two.”
Taylor nodded. “It may take a couple of hours to figure it out.”
“Fine. Keep me apprised.”
Jeryl looked around the CNC.
“Let’s cancel that meeting,” he said to his crew. “I want to see what we come up with as far as communication from that ship.”
He left CNC and headed toward mess hall.
Their coffee is crap, he thought, but I want a cup. Badly.
Chapter 9
Ashley
Ashley left CNC a short time later and followed after Jeryl to the mess hall. It was one of her favorite places in the ship. There were windows there, not video screens, so she could get the full experience of looking out into space. This didn’t work so well when the ship was in hyperspace, though, much to Ashley’s dismay, because there was nothing at all visible outside.
How inevitably disappointing, Ashley always thought, for anyone who grew up watching old movies—or even new ones. All they would have to do was think for a moment; faster-than-light means faster than light; as in, nothing was visible at all because light couldn’t bring it to your eyes. The force bubble surrounding the ship and shielding it from the stress and energy fluxes of FTL travel rendered the outside universe invisible.
All navigation was done by computer. In the early days of FTL travel, a lot of ships had gone missing before the energy levels required to go a given distance were properly measured. Most of them still hadn’t been found.
She found Jeryl sitting with a cup of coffee off to one side, tapping at his tablet. He didn’t look up when she entered. Ashley went to the resequencer and ordered a coffee for herself with a comm badge scan and tapped the BLACK 1 CREAM NO SUGAR combo.
Cadets were invariably surprised when they find out they had to pay for food and drink aboard a starship. Ashley was, too, the first time. But when she had thought about it, it made sense. A starship was a closed system. While it was in space, nothing comes out and nothing comes in. This meant that any food and drink that they needed was either carried, or else synthesized along the way.
Ashley knew that even back then, early space explorers brought everything with them in terms of food, but even back then, they recycled their urine for water. These days, however, with advanced 3D resequencer technology, a wider range of food and drinks were available, as well as other items.
Some of them required chemical compounds that must be carried in the ship’s supply stores. It was not unreasonable for Ashley to be charged for more for a latte than it was for a simple drink of water. But it wasn’t cheap, so she didn’t often splurge on lattes.
The plain-vanilla coffee, so to speak, was nothing to write home about, but it was better than no coffee at all—marginally.
Ashley just wished it wouldn’t take so damn long for the resequencer to work its magic. Smart folks put their orders into a queue while they were still in their quarters, but people on duty had to catch theirs on the fly, like Ashley was. And it could take up to five minutes.
While she was waiting for the thing to gather its molecules, she thought back to how she was here now. So far, so fast. It was crazy because she joined the Armada when all she wanted was the Armada to pay for school. She had every intention of becoming an astrophysicist, but before she could, she had to put in three years of mandatory space service. She forgot about astrophysics after a couple of months.
The thrill of actually being aboard a Union starship washed all of that away. Ashley ended up becoming a career officer and joining the Academy, rising in the ranks. She never regretted it. She’d seen things and been to places that a career in the sciences would ne
ver have given her.
Finally, the machine was done. It beeped at her and Ashley withdrew her cup from the slot. Jeryl was still tapping at his tablet, so she went over and sat down at his table.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
He grunted: I don’t know.
“I’m getting sick of playing chicken with these people, though, I can tell you that.”
“Do you think they’re going to...you know. Hit us with what they used on The Mariner?”
Another grunt. “I just sent a notice to Engineering to keep EngPrime ready for emergency thrust,” he said.
“At the first hint of them powering up that ship of theirs, he’ll kick us into FTL. I don’t care if it removes us from the scene, we’ll be safe in the drive bubble. Not even a particle beam can get through that.”
He swirled his coffee in its cup, and frowned down into it.
“Ashley,” he said after a moment. “This is a game-changer, you know.”
“You mean, the aliens?”
“Yeah. So now we know for a fact we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe.”
“It’s historic,” said Ashley. She couldn’t help but feel a little thrill at her own words. “This is it, Jeryl. People will remember our names. Like Neil Armstrong.”
He growled. “You know whose names they ought to remember? The crew of The Mariner, that’s who. They’ve already had First Contact.”
He scowled into his coffee. “And we know how well that went.”
“You’re right, of course,” Ashley said. “I’m just glad we were able to get those reports sent back to Edoris Station.”
“So am I, but I’m not sure what’ll ever become of them.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
He let out an ironic chuckle. “Flynn’s a good guy, but if he takes those reports up to Armada Command on Earth, and they think it looks embarrassing, they’ll bury it.”
All Ashley could do was look at him for a moment. She didn’t think she had ever heard him say anything so cynical. “Is that really true?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “We’ve been out in space for what, a hundred and fifty years? Forty-five billion human beings spread out over 198 colony words. Another 4 billion human beings in the Outer Colonies. How is it we’ve never found another trace of anything like this?”
He inclined his head toward the screen, and the image of the alien vessel. “That’s a sophisticated ship.”
“I don’t know,” Ashley said. “Maybe they don’t like Earth-type worlds. Suppose they’re from a place like Titan, hellishly cold with a methane atmosphere. Not all star systems have worlds like that...they would have no reason to visit a system with Earth-like planets but none of their preferred type.”
He tapped two fingers on the tabletop, repeatedly, still frowning. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Or, I dunno—how about this? The Union has been so focused on restoring Earth to environmental health that we simply didn’t pay close enough attention. We might have missed something. We’ve been completely occupied with looking for suitable ores and so on...and the scientists have been kept busy enough with the vegetable life we’ve found, and microbes. We couldn’t spend the money and time digging down into each planet looking for fossils or artifacts.”
“I had a professor at the Academy,” he said. “He had this course in First Contact.”
Ashley nodded.
“Professor Guss, I never took the course; it was an elective and it seemed like a waste of time to me. But I’ve heard of him.”
She kept to herself what most people thought of Guss—eccentric, Ashley thought, to put it kindly.
“His whole point was that we might not recognize intelligence if we found it. We judge other species by our own standards, and we think that there are only two states of being: asleep or awake, alive or dead, conscious or unconscious, intellectual or material. But what if it’s a spectrum, like autism? There might be degrees, and we might miss something simply because we’re not capable of recognizing it.”
Ashley could only shrug. “Well, that ship out there is a pretty plain indication that whoever is inside it is intelligent.”
“Agreed; but we’ll know that only because we have the evidence of the ship itself.” He shook his head. “All I’m saying is, we have to be very careful not to judge them by our standards.”
Ashley looked at him for a moment, and felt a surge of—something she would rather not call love. Jeryl was a thoughtful man, and she found that attractive. She frowned, banishing away the thoughts.
“Are you afraid?” he asked her.
Ashley lifted her eyebrows.
“No,” she said honestly. “Excited, yes; apprehensive, and nervous, yes. But afraid? No.”
“Good. Because I need you, Commander.”
He stared deep into her eyes and what she read there made her a little uneasy. There was a spark.
Dammit, she told herself. This is not professional behavior, you knot head. He needs you to be the First Officer of this ship.
Ashley opened her mouth to say something inane, but fortunately Jeryl’s communicator beeped just at that moment and he tapped it.
It was Mary Taylor at Comms. “The computer has deciphered the frequency.”
“All right,” he said. “My office, three minutes.”
“Sir.”
He looked at her, and that spark was gone, erased by determination and dignity.
“All right, Commander,” he told her. He drained the last of his coffee and stood up.
“Let’s go see what they’re saying to us.”
Chapter 10
Jeryl
Within a few minutes, all Jeryl’s officers were seated around the table in the conference room adjoining the CNC. Present, besides Commander Ashley Gavin and himself, were Taft Lannigan, their Science Officer; Mary Taylor from Communications, Lieutenant Eiléan Docherty, head of Navigation, and Dr. Mahesh Rigsang, Chief Medical Officer. He had given Ferriero the helm. The engineering, navigation and armory AIs were present via commlink.
Jeryl turned the meeting over to Mary Taylor, who summarized her efforts to decode the transmissions from the alien.
“It took some time to figure out what they were doing,” she said.
“It’s not straightforward, as you might expect. There were numbers, but not anything simple like 2 plus 2, to establish a mathematical baseline. Instead, it was a series of primes, running from 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 on up through 100,000, all indicated by a series of fluctuations in the carrier wavelength. So I responded with the series through five hundred thousand.”
“That sounds like a pretty firm basis for communication,” said Eiléan, a trim, dark-haired woman in her late fifties.
“Well, you would think,” said Mary. “We batted primes back and forth for a while, so rapidly that I figure they must have a computer on their end as well. Then, they started in on factoring pi.”
“Are they using base 10?”
“No, it’s tridecimal, base 13,” Taggert replied. “It’s easy to work conversions for it. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do it in my head.”
She glanced at Eiléan Docherty, who could do that sort of thing in her head. Eiléan was a math prodigy who was studying trig at the age of eight and matriculated from MIT with a dual master’s degrees in math and computer science at nineteen.
“From there the transmission got more complex. The fluctuations became multi-phasic, superimposed on one another. They were sending schematics of molecules—but with missing covalent bonds.”
“They’re trying to judge how advanced we are,” says Dr. Lannigan. “Sending us fill-in-the-blank puzzles.”
Mary nods.
“I think so. They know we’re capable of interstellar travel, but for all they know we could have been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. And that, I think, is why the last question or puzzle they sent was an engineering question regarding the equat
ions for the FTL drive.”
“What?” Jeryl barked, startled.
“It is so, Captain,” said EngPrime, the Engineering AI, speaking for the first time. “Analysis indicates that their propulsion systems must be very similar to our own, given the specificity of the question. The query aims at the containment system that allows us to warp space around The Seeker, which leads to the further conclusion that there is only one way to travel faster than light. They could not possibly have known what to ask, otherwise. The universe doubtless will not allow for more than that one path to violate Einstein’s law.”
“The old boy must be spinning,” Dr. Lannigan said with a chuckle.
“I think,” Ashley said, “the first thing they wanted to establish was that they could talk to us at all. You know, how much have we got in common?”
“I agree,” said Mary. “Now they know we can talk to each other. These puzzle questions were probably designed to tweeze out how much physical science we know.”
Jeryl lifted a finger. “Clever of them, if a bit obvious. But it leads me to wonder...”
“Sir?”
“Is that the way a hostile species would act?” he asked.
Everyone glanced at one another. Jeryl knew he was on to something.
If these people attacked The Mariner, he thought, would they subsequently go to all this trouble just to establish a basis for communication with us?
“I can think of two reasons why they might,” Ashley said. She was quick. That was one of the things Jeryl liked about her. Quick, and funny, and she could—
“For one thing, The Seeker is a good deal bigger than The Mariner. Not as big as their ship, of course, but even so we look like we might have teeth. We show up and they think ‘Uh-oh, it’s Mariner’s big brother come for revenge. We better play nice, pretend to be innocent explorers, trying to communicate. In so doing, they’ll learn how advanced we are, like Moira suggested. Then they’ll decide if they can kick our tail or not.”