Edwards shook his head. “I will never be able to get you straight in my head, sir. Gruff Army guy one moment, and pacifist diplomat the next.”
Wright smiled tightly. “Your experience in the Navy ranks might be different, but I’ve found that many of the best soldiers and the bloodiest warriors I ever worked with were, at heart, the truest of make-peace pacifists … something about preferring to argue over a conference table rather than over the sights of a gun, at least while the conference table is still an option.”
The Master Chief considered it and nodded finally. “I suppose so, and it’s not a bad attitude to have, especially for the guy leading our negotiations.” Edwards turned to look at Nathan. “Still, my druthers would be to set off a warhead or six in their path and let them start the talking. We’ve tried to observe the niceties twice already, and all it’s gotten us is two dead chunks of hardware.”
Nathan shook his head. “We’ve been over that, COB. All our simulations indicate that showing off our weapons tech before we use it decisively gave us zero advantage, and like the XO said, it pretty much closes off the diplomatic option. I’m hoping we can still chalk up the probes to a big misunderstanding.”
Edwards shrugged. “Hey, you asked. And, besides, you have to allow for the fact that those sims were all made in a vacuum—literally and figuratively. Just like we don’t know their motivations in torching our probes, we don’t know for sure that a show of force would give them an undue tactical advantage.”
Wright leaned back to look at the Master Chief past Nathan’s head. “That’s true, COB, but it’s also an unnecessary violation of operational security. Right now, they don’t know that we’re even armed. Why release that info and let them see the exact nature of that armament unless we’re positive it will give us an advantage? Those simulations may have been done in a ‘vacuum’, but they weren’t done with a lack of common sense.”
Edwards held up his hands. “I’m not arguing with either of you gents’ logic, I’m just a little more sure about our visitors’ disposition than you or the CO are willing to be. It’s part of my job description: keep the sailors—spacers, whatever—under control and advocate the hell out of the devil, so you at least have one voice of dissent when the pair of you get to agreeing too much.”
Wright grunted. “I appreciate your fervor in that role, Master Chief, but sometimes you enjoy being the contrarian a bit too much.”
“Hey, just because I’m contrary, doesn’t mean I’m not also right. Provable hypothesis or not, I’d be approaching this official first contact a bit more aggressively, and I think that position’s more than justified.”
“Which is why I’m in the lead for this, and not you!”
“All right!” Nathan snapped. “Enough. Points are made, and while I have a depressing certainty that we’ll be unloading our ammo out the barrels versus the magazine trunks, we’re going to stick with the diplomatic plan. No changes.” He broke out a crooked smile and looked around at his department heads. “Unless you three have anything else to add to the XO’s or Chief’s deliberations, that is?”
Ivy Cho, Mike Simmons, and Kris all looked at one another, panicked, and only too quick to shake their heads. Kris, who was constitutionally incapable of remaining quiet, said, “Screw that! It’d be like putting our feet into a bear trap on purpose. I don’t know, but you guys seem a little touchy for some reason today. I wonder why … .”
They each tried to hide their relieved smirks, except for Nathan, who smiled at her warmly. “Okay, that’s it. No sense putting this off any more. XO, set General Quarters, Bravo Stations for contact. Let’s do this.”
Wright turned to his chair’s panel and made the necessary selections. The stern, unidentified feminine voice of the ship sounded from every speaker aboard. “General Quarters, General Quarters. Now set General Quarters, Bravo Stations. The ship may engage in high g maneuvers or lose pressure without warning. All personnel will don vacuum protection and move in an orderly fashion to their General Quarters stations. All personnel will secure for maneuvers and minimize internal transit unless specifically authorized by the Commanding Officer.”
The already suited crew on the bridge looked around at one another and put their helmets on. Sealing rings clicked in rapid succession, and then the three department heads, whose GQ stations were off the bridge, went around to each of the seated, strapped in crew, performing seal checks, verifying internal air reserves, and ensuring they were all hooked properly into ship’s air.
Kris checked Nathan last. When she finished, she squeezed his shoulder and touched her faceplate to his, so her voice would conduct through the helmets. “I love you, babe.”
He smiled and reached up to squeeze her arm in return. “I love you too, Kris, but you probably should have turned off your helmet’s amp if you wanted that to be private.”
She turned red inside her helmet and whirled around when Edwards gave her a familiar slap on the side. He grinned and said, “Honestly, you two kids are just the sweetest things.”
Nathan shook his head, and he and Kris released one another. She left the bridge, headed down and aft through the long radiator shaft to the reactor and Engineering Central Control. Ivy and Mike followed suit—she headed forward and up to the Weapons Coordination Center, and he left for the relatively close Combat Information Center, where they would individually oversee the orders commanded from the bridge.
“XO, report when all stations are manned and ready,” Nathan ordered gently.
“Aye, aye, sir.” Though originally from the Army, the Navy lingo was second-nature to him at this point.
Edwards made some selections on his panel. “XO, Bridge is manned and ready!”
“Very well.”
Around the ship, each of the various stations reported in. Including Nathan, Edwards, Wright, and their four watchstanders on the bridge covering the Helm, Ops/Comms, Weps/Sensors, and Aux Engineering, there were twenty-two more crew aboard the USS Sword of Liberty in a number of different individual monitoring, control, and coordination posts. From the forward most portion of the ship, there was Navigation Path Clearance and the ship’s Railgun Control. Then came the Port and Starboard Missile Module Monitoring stations, Laser Monitoring and Control, and the Dorsal and Ventral Radar Rooms, all of which reported to LT Cho in the Weapons Coordination Center.
In the after half of the mission hull, Operations Department held sway, led by LT Simmons in the Combat Information Center. Reporting to him were the individual combat controllers in CIC who would make use of the weapon systems Ivy Cho’s people readied and maintained, should that prove necessary. Outside of CIC, there was the Communication Systems and Signal Exploitation Space—known as Radio to one and all in a nod to the traditional Navy—as well as the Hangar, Flight Ops, and Network Server Control.
Kris, stuck way back in Engineering Central Control between the Reactor Room and Main Propulsion, owned five spaces up forward—the four Aux Propulsion Rooms beneath each RCS pylon, and Damage Control Central which was the aft-most space in the mission hull. She also owned the entire radiator spine amidships, arguably the most critical and vulnerable system aboard, as well as the aforementioned Reactor and Main Prop Room. In terms of real estate, Kris was in charge of just over two thirds of the ship, while Cho and Simmons split the remaining forward third, but her role, and Ivy’s for the most part, was simply to support Mike in actually fighting the ship. And all three departments were there in unquestioning support of Nathan and his command team on the bridge.
The Sword of Liberty was a complex machine, many times more complicated than her schematics alone showed. Bulkheads, cableways, and equipment enclosures were only part of the destroyer, and the lesser part by any reasonable standard of measure. The people involved, the people who had built her, who had trained and sweat and bled for the last seventeen months in space, who had fought against all the odds to see their vision realized—even to the extent of stealing her outright—they were the soul of the s
hip, the driving force behind her presence here.
They were the vital cogs in the machine, finely engineered and lovingly intermeshed. As reports of readiness rolled smoothly in, Nathan closed his eyes, savoring this penultimate moment, sensing much as any ship’s captain had down through history the bright spirit of his crew that gave their ship life, that had come together to achieve the impossible.
Now he just had to see their sacrifice and hard work justified.
“Captain, all stations report manned and ready, vacuum gear verified. GQ-Bravo Station is set.”
Nathan opened his eyes, serene and satisfied. “Very well, XO. Shut all internal pressure barriers and button us up.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Wright touched a few icons on his screen and then keyed his intercom. “DC Central, Bridge, verify all GQ pressure fittings and hatches closed and sealed. Verify all atmo sections independent of one another.”
Ensign Al-Salaam answered over the speaker from Damage Control Central immediately. “DC Central, aye, sir. Wait one.” Silence filled the circuit for a moment and then, “Bridge, DC Central, pressure board is green, all atmo boundaries shut and on independent recirc.”
The XO nodded. “Bridge, aye.” He turned to Nathan as far as his helmet and seat straps would allow him. “Captain, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
Nathan nodded back and blew air out into his helmet in a long low whistle. His momentary serenity vanished, putting him back on edge. “Roger that. Helm, take us in at one g, and close to 100,000 kilometers, parallel course.” At that acceleration, it would take almost four hours to close, hopefully enough time for them to assure the Deltans they were friendly and ready to meet, and hopefully to ascertain the same thing about the aliens.
“Helm, aye, sir. Thrusting at one g for a zero relative velocity rendezvous at 0.33 light-seconds. Estimate four hours till in position.” Andrew Weston, an enlisted Ops Tech and a former Air Force fighter pilot, went to work on his helm console. Weight quickly returned to them all, pressing them down into their seats once more.
The return of a normal sense of up and down was a welcome comfort to Nathan, and he marveled at how spoiled he had become from Kris’ engine. No longer did space and weightlessness go naturally hand-in-hand. He smiled wryly and keyed his intercom. “CIC, Captain, launch the retransmission pod.”
LT Simmons responded. “CIC, aye, sir. Deploying pod now.” The Sword of Liberty had a total of 96 missile cells, but did not actually carry 96 missiles. They had replaced the one missile they had tested at the beginning of the journey, but that still only brought them up to 86 Excaliburs. The remaining ten missile cells were taken up with more diplomatic and scientific cargo.
Eight of the non-missile cells contained subprobes for close inspection of the Deltan vessels, while the other two cells carried retransmission pods, essentially an Excalibur missile frame with the warheads changed out for communications gear. This automated comms probe would monitor the rendezvous and transmit its feed to Earth, as well as re-transmit the telemetry and monitoring data that the Sword herself sent back. It was an insurance plan, to make certain that what happened here, however it might turn out, Earth would know.
There was a clack of a missile hatch opening, and then a gentle bump as the re-trans pod was expelled from its tube. Nathan watched video from the hull on a secondary screen, as the hatch swung shut and the pod fell away, left behind by their acceleration. Moments later, the pod’s own engine lit off and it moved toward its own holding position and unfolded an immense dish antenna.
“Bridge, CIC, re-trans pod deployed. We have a good link. We’ll begin transmitting on your order.”
“Bridge, aye,” Wright answered. “Captain?”
Nathan nodded, then realized the XO could not see that with his helmet on. “Very well. It’s your show now, Christopher. You can begin any time.”
“Yes, sir. Weps/Sensors, commence long-pulse radar and lidar surveys of the alien formation.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Yvonne Clark, a former telecom engineer long in Windward’s employ, powered up the dorsal and ventral sensor blisters and began sending ranging pulses out toward the Deltans.
Wright turned to Nathan and Edwards. “We won’t get much more than range data at this distance, but it ought to be a friendly enough wakeup call in case they’re sleeping. And we’re still far enough out that we should be fairly safe from any direct fire weapons like they used on Promise.”
Edwards smiled. “So, there is a cynical old warrior in there after all. I was worried you’d gone all touchy-feely on us, sir.”
Wright laughed. “Just because I won’t let myself assume they’re hostile, doesn’t mean I’m not open to the possibility. I’m cautious, not stupid, Master Chief.” He turned back to the main screen, watching the imperceptibly approaching alien formation. Range data and some surface features began to augment the picture and information displayed for each contact. “Radar and lidar are good … but no reaction from the convoy.”
Nathan shrugged. “That’s fine. Considering the success of the last two visits, I’ll take no response over a bad one, for the moment at least. Let’s go ahead and start sending telemetry back home. We’ll let them be frustrated right alongside us.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Ops/Comm, lock the main dish on Earth and begin continuous transmission of the tactical log.”
“Begin continuous stream to Earth, aye, sir. Transmitting now.” Pauline Rivera, a Windward satellite data-systems tech right out of college, hit the appropriate icons on her panel and the largest antennas on the sensor blisters each slewed around to aim at the distant pinprick of Sol and the invisibly distant Earth. What happened now would be picked up in slightly less than six months back home.
“Very well. CIC, Bridge, enable your link to the re-trans pod and start backing up our broadcast home.”
Simmons voice sounded promptly. “CIC, aye.” Auxiliary antennas on those same blisters slewed around to lock onto the ever more quickly receding shape of the retransmission pod. It, in turn, pointed its own dish to Earth as well and began transmitting its own stream back.
Wright checked on the status of everything set into motion upon his screen and nodded in satisfaction. “All right. Both data streams are going out. Everything after this is on the official record.”
Nathan grinned. “Smile nice and pretty, boys. We’re on primetime now.” He nodded toward the main screen, his smile dropping for an expectant, demanding gaze. “That goes for you too, friends. What do you have to say to the good peoples of Earth, Mr. Deltan? Come on, come on. Talk to us. Why are you here?”
Silence met his questions. For a moment, however ludicrous it might be, everyone on the bridge almost anticipated an answer. Nathan grinned and shook his head. “Seems we need to knock a bit louder, XO.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll be starting with primes on a number of frequencies, just like the probes were programmed to do. Between each sequence, though, we’ll be transmitting the plain language greeting in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Hopefully, they’ll pick up on one or the other.”
“Go ahead. Once again, this is your show.”
Wright ordered Pauline Rivera to do as he briefed. Seconds later, a pair of pure tones was transmitted in a number of frequency bands. Then, three pulses were sent, followed by five after a brief pause. Then seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, counting up and up through all of the base-10 primes from two to 137, a decidedly nonrandom sequence that it was hoped would prove their intelligence and hopefully lead to a mathematical standard which could then be used for translating between two wildly disparate species.
After a hundred and thirty-seven pulses and a correspondingly longer pause, Gordon Lee’s original message went out, slightly altered by computer, his voice haunting the void long after his death. Hearing it again, Nathan sighed, knowing that Gordon should have been there.
“Greetings to you, our unknown visitors from a nearby star. We welcome you to our solar system in the name of all the
free inhabitants of Earth. Please allow this ship and crew to make peaceful contact with you, such that we might form some bridge for open and enlightening communication between our two species.”
Again, a brief pause, and then the same message went out in the other, most-prevalent broadcast languages of Earth. Nathan held his breath. With the Promise, the Deltan convoy had reacted immediately to the transmission of primes. This time … .
“Nothing. No response.” Nathan slapped the armrest of his acceleration chair, disappointed beyond measure.
Wright tried to assuage him. “We’re still really far out, Nathan. And Promise only began transmitting after doing an extended flyby and survey of the formation. They may still be dormant. It’s possible that they’re in some form of suspended animation and takes them a while to come fully out of it.”
Edwards grunted. “Yeah. And it’s also possible that they want us to get in effective range of their weapons before they light us up.”
“Master Chief—” the XO said, a warning tone coloring his voice.
“No,” Nathan broke in. “You could both be right. And there’s no need to tiptoe around my dashed expectations. It’s been a year and a half. Hell, it’s been years longer than that, and I really expected them to say something or do something after we came all this way. But … they’ll do whatever they’re going to do, regardless of what I want. Let’s just stick to the plan. Continue transmitting, continue closing, and keep both eyes on them.”
He pointed at the images of the orbiting formation on screen. “And you, whoever the hell you are, wake up. We’ve come calling, and you have some shit to answer for.”
Four hours later, and still answerless, Nathan fumed. They reached their hold point at 100,000 km, calling out to the Deltans and dutifully reporting back to Earth, but they had nothing to report other than the continued indifference of the aliens.
A Sword Into Darkness Page 26