by Trevor Wyatt
“Lannigan is saying that he suspects a concentrated, highly charged beam of photons. Mixed in with a population of some unknown particle.”
“Yeah, um...” Jeryl hoped his face remained passive; he hadn’t noticed that particular datum in the findings.
Unknown?
Jeryl cursed silently. Not that it was a surprise to him—everything about this situation smacked of the unknown, only he should have caught that detail. Jeryl nodded sagely.
Fortunately, Flynn took it as an agreement with his assessment rather than Jeryl’s attempt to cover his mistake.
“So we’re left with a particle beam of a previously undiscovered nature that can cause molecular breakdown,” said Jeryl, summing up for himself as much as for the Admiral.
Flynn nodded.
Jeryl scanned the rest of the report as quickly and unobtrusively as he could.
“Lannigan says that only something focused could do this, not something dispersed, and the focusing device, platform, agency, whatever we call it, has to be something relatively small. Not the size of a star. Not the size of a planet, even.”
“Something the size of a ship, you mean,” Flynn said with a low voice.
The two men locked eyes through the slipstream viewer.
“All right, listen to me, Montgomery,” Flynn said after a few moments. “This is strictly need-to-know, and I think that at this point you need to know. The Armada has been developing a gamma ray weapon for a number of years now.”
Jeryl blinked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he says. “It’s an Intelligence issue. I’m in the loop because some of my technical team members are involved. They’ve been testing the thing on Tau Ceti 2.”
Tau Ceti 2, Jeryl knew, was an airless chunk of planetary real estate about the size of Mercury, orbiting its primary at about as far as Venus was from Sol. It was lifeless—therefore an ultimately good place for weapons research.
“I see,” Jeryl told him.
“It’s still being tested. They’re having problems with shielding the—well, never mind. That’s information you don’t need to know. The short version is, it’s not ready for official deployment yet. I’m told they’re still at least three years away from that.”
“But if we’re working on something like that, then the Outers could be also,” said Jeryl.
“That’s right, Captain. Yet Armada Intelligence has not reported any sort of activity that would suggest the Outer Colonies have something even close to this kind of capability.”
It was Jeryl’s turn to scrunch up his face. The standard service joke was that Armada Intelligence was an oxymoron.
The official intelligence services did their best, and sometimes they were good at it. But it had long been an open secret that they relied too much on informers and embedded operatives whose reports were often unverifiable.
“The Armada could be off the mark,” said Jeryl.
Flynn shrugged.
“We have a new president,” he said. “We have a new council. They are a bunch of mid-level bureaucrats who only care about the damn bottom line.”
Not everyone shared this view, but Jeryl did. The new administration had been cutting funding in favor of channeling more money to the renovation of Earth’s environment. The widespread collapse of mankind’s interlocking social and technological edifice during the 21st century had severely devastated the planet; overpopulation, a stressed environment, and World War III were the overlying factors of Earth’s collapse.
Analysts predicted after the end of the World War III, it would take roughly 500 to 1,000 years for the planet to recuperate, for humanity to be able to live again on the planet sustainably. But over the last one hundred and fifty years, the predicted numbers had dropped dramatically, to the point where most areas were now habitable and full renovation was something they should be able to see in the next ten years. Most of the planet had been rehabilitated, and for Jeryl, no one could argue that it was not money well spent.
You couldn’t tour some of the places in Africa and Europe—and North America—and not come away with tears in your eyes and a determination to clean that mess up.
Well, we cleaned it up, alright, thought Jeryl. But what else did we ignore?
The money to be able to do all those things did have to come from somewhere, and one of those places was the Armada Intelligence. The perception of the administration was that the Outers were a bunch of ham-fisted goons who could barely make their starships work.
This view, however, Jeryl did not share. From someone tasked to patrol the stellar borders, Jeryl knew what the administration thought was not reality-based. The Outers lacked some resources, but they weren’t fools.
The damn Administration, Jeryl thought. Far from the field, what did they knew about…anything?
To some extent, Jeryl had always felt it left people like him hung out to dry. If they got in a jam they could yell for help and it would come, but for the most part they were expected to solve their own problems. Jeryl was generally good with that; he was not a big fan of relying on other people.
Jeryl knew Flynn was thinking that at this point, he may have to concede. But Jeryl was not ready to give, not just yet. Flynn wanted his officers to be as autonomous and self-reliant as possible. It was why they had such carefully chosen and well-trained crews.
“This is what we get for electing a bean counter,” said Jeryl, and Flynn barked out a laugh.
“I know you want more information, son. I do, too—but I don’t want this to blow up in our faces.”
“I won’t take any unnecessary chances,” replied Jeryl.
“Very well. Proceed with caution, report regularly.”
“Sir.”
With the call to Flynn terminated, Jeryl put in a call to Dr. Lannigan.
“I want you to work with Docherty in Navigation,” he told Taft. “Have him plot The Mariner’s course and follow it back.”
Lannigan raised an eyebrow.
“Somewhere along the line, they ran into something,” Jeryl explained. “Something that bit them. If we trace their course, maybe we can run into it too.”
Ashley
One of her jobs as First Officer was to keep track of the ship’s full complement. That included the three computer-based artificial intelligences as well as the fifty humans who were aboard. The AIs in engineering and navigation were sequestered to the ship.
They were created to serve in the absence of crewmembers or in the event that crewmembers became incapacitated. They walked, talked, and operated in a way to mimic humans; this had been done deliberately to prevent awkward interactions with them.
Early generation AI had been non-autonomous until the Armada Security received complaints that the AI units gave crews “the creeps." They did not have names, either, other than EngPrime and NavPrime, or usually just Eng and Nav. For Ashley, neither one had much in the way of personality.
(That was a joke she had tried on Jeryl once, but the Captain just gave her a blank look.)
For some reason, Ashley couldn’t figure out, AI in the armory was different. It was a later model than the others, its cognitive net more capable with faster connections. It wore clothes. Someone with a strange sense of humor had programmed a personality into it, something based on an old-time gunnery sergeant. It called itself Gunny. Gunny’s user interface was rough spoken, often obscene, and inclined to pomposity.
Ashley found Gunney amusing herself, but she knew Jeryl was annoyed with him. He tended to avoid the AI as much as possible; Gunny was not impressed by anyone’s rank or social standing.
Ashley had served on several other Armada frigates, and they all had a greater complement of AIs than The Seeker. She knew that having AIs on board was strictly at the captain’s discretion. A few frigates, however, had no AIs, for one reason or another—usually down to the captain’s discretion.
Human prejudice against AIs ran strong in certain quarters and among certain demographic
groups. Ashley had never spoken to Jeryl about the relative scarcity of AIs among the ship’s crew—but plainly put, she believed it was none of her business. If Captain Montgomery had a problem with AIs, she never heard him mention it, and it was not her place to ask.
It would stand to reason that the AI’s presence was due to the recent victory of the Union’s new president in passing legislation for AIs to serve in the armed forces. This new president’s family had been involved in robotics and cybernetic development all rooting back for centuries.
They had been using computers since the 20th century, Ashley was aware; the computers weren’t anything new to the military. But it seemed like the new laws were as no more than a payback to the powerful Cybernetic Science lobby that helped the new president to come into power.
There were a lot of very conservative people in the military, which, for Ashley, was not a bad thing; she considered herself a conservative person, as well. Her father and his father before him were military men, and she was proud to carry on the tradition. She had ancestors rooting back from World War II, fighting aboard destroyers. They were a family of peacekeepers and law enforcement officers.
Many of her fellow officers, including several aboard The Seeker, never liked AIs much, but they obeyed the letter of the law. For Ashley, she had nothing against the AIs, though she had known few as interesting and personable as Gunny. Most people thought of AIs as appliances having opinions, and never regarded them as being truly alive.
Her feeling was that there were bigger issues to worry about in life. But she did know that ships with fewer AIs tended to have a happier crew. This led her to think that Jeryl was trying to have it both ways: he was obeying Armada custom by having several AIs on a given vessel, but he had limited their numbers—a shrewd attempt on his part to boost morale by having fewer synthetics on the ship.
All these thoughts slipped through Ashley’s mind as she sat at her station in CNC, going over status reports. She could do those with half of her attention—maybe even less. This was why she had been daydreaming about the AIs.
But as she had thought before, it wasn’t her business. If she and Jeryl grew closer, perhaps she could ask him.
But of course, that was an entirely different affair.
She found herself thinking again about that night. She really did not want to—it was distracting. She had duties to attend to. Supplies, nominal. Recyclers, fine...though number 45, outside the third-level lay, would only give out soap, no matter what’s asked of it. Nothing that couldn’t be dealt with once they docked.
She had been trying, although unsuccessfully, not to think about it for weeks now. She was certain that they ended up at that resort together on New Sydney by sheer accident. They had been delayed on the ship by some administrative tasks, so she missed the main shuttle that took the body of the crew down to the planet for some well-deserved shore leave.
New Sydney was something of a vacation spot, so there were resorts scattered all across its face. With barely any axial tilt, the planet enjoyed what was basically a yearlong early summer.
With so many resorts to choose from, she found Jeryl at the same spot as hers. She was surprised; Jeryl was having a drink in the lounge as she walked in to register and he was dressed in an open shirt, shorts, and sandals. Jeryl was a good-looking guy, no one could deny that, but Ashley had never seen him in such casual garb.
He didn’t see her, but after she signed in Ashley went over to his table. Jeryl looked up at her, surprised.
“Ashley! I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Well, here I am,” said Ashley, taking a seat. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Oh, a really old liquor called tequila.”
“I’ll have one, too.”
Well, she had one, two, three, and the next thing she knew...
She had never expected it. He said he never expected it. But for an unexpected liaison, it was amazing. She didn’t get to her room until the next morning. Jeryl’s was large, clean, and airy...with perfumed breezes from the flower forest nearby drifting in. They smelled like cool and sweet, like gardenias, her favorite.
It was impossible—it was heaven. She was not inclined to be particularly submissive, but he took command and four orgasms later, he finally let her fall asleep. She didn’t even get to reciprocate until just past dawn, after she woke to use the bathroom and then went back to repay her debt. The next three days were a repeat of the first, with time-off for tours of the forest, incredible meals—and a lot of sex. They were consenting adults after all.
Since then, it was all business between them, and Ashley was fine with that. Not so much as a caress or a kiss had passed between them since New Sydney—but perhaps a meaningful glance or two. But they knew the truth of their positions: Jeryl was her captain, Ashley his first officer, and they had a job to do.
What happened was a dalliance—a very pleasant one at that. It wasn’t headed towards anything, and Ashley was perfectly okay with that. In fact, she preferred it. She had a career and she was not about to settle down just yet. She didn’t even know if she wanted children.
Frankly, they never appealed to her. She might not be good mother material, either. Ashley never spent time thinking about that...it wasn’t at all high on her list of priorities. In fact, last time she looked, it wasn’t on the list at all.
She wasn’t looking for that to change. These were things they hadn’t talked about. In fact, they may never even get to talk about them at all, and that was okay…but she wouldn’t rule out another fling like the one with Jeryl, though.
A security alert buzzed from her station, startling Ashley. A quick look at the code told her it was nothing internal, but when she glanced at the exterior monitors, her jaw dropped.
It was a spaceship. But it was not one of theirs: nothing Earth ever built looked like the one she was seeing.
She slapped the comm link and waited an endless three seconds until Jeryl responded.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” His voice was all business.
“Unknown craft sighted fifteen units away, northwest quadrant,” Ashley said as crisply as she could, linking him into the feed. “On an intercept course.”
Fifteen units, she thought as she spoke. How the hell did they get that close without us spotting them sooner?
Jeryl was silent. He was reading the data, looking at the video feed. A completely black triangular craft about half a kilometer long was on the side on to theirs, with a faint glow of ionization from its tail section—
A drive plume? Ashley wondered.
It had circular lights in a single row along its side.
Portholes. This was an alien vessel. A question raced into Ashley’s mind; who or what was looking out of those ports?
Jeryl
Jeryl had been in his quarters, relaxing with a novel on his tablet, when Ashley’s ALERT window popped open over the text. Jeryl was so stunned by what he was seeing on the screen that he couldn’t speak; he was caught completely off guard.
It took him a good thirty seconds to fully absorb the fact that he was looking at what could only be an alien vessel. His brain creaked into motion at last. They were nowhere near a planetary system; this had to be an interstellar craft.
Length estimated at a hair under a hundred meters, and that was big. That was bigger than a seagoing battleship, way bigger than The Seeker. Assuming whatever life form was aboard, was about human size, Jeryl figured the crew of that beast could easily be ten times the size of theirs.
Even as numbers cascaded through his thoughts, a realization overrode each of them: this was the bastard that destroyed The Mariner. This was not what he expected for First Contact with an alien species. He tossed the tablet to one side and strode all the way to CNC as fast as I could.
Back in the Academy days, there was only one course that ever discussed First Contact, and that, oddly enough was a class in Humanities. The instructor, Professor Guss, devoted exactly one day to it.
The whole discussion had been purely hypothetical, of course, because by that time they had been exploring the volume of space around Sol system, and although they had found worlds where various forms of vegetation flourished, they never found any kind of animal that could be considered even marginally intelligent. In fact, their scientists had never discovered anything much bigger than a large cockroach.
There was no intelligent life anywhere in the stars—at least, not any of their stars. Their ships could achieve a top speed of about one light-year per day, which seemed impressive until you realize that the Milky Way galaxy was estimated to be a hundred thousand light-years in diameter. Divide 100,000 by 365 and you get a shade over 273.972. That was how long it would take to cross the galaxy in years, at that speed. Not days—years.
That was how their first class in First Contact began: with a discussion of how big space was. Being well grounded in astronomy, students in the Academy knew that already. But their teacher, Professor Guss, reviewed it anyway. Professor Guss was a tall man with a big nose and ears that stuck out. But from what Jeryl remembered, no one ever made fun of his appearance; the professor was generally liked. He was smart, and a good man on top of it.
“So we’ve found nothing in our own solar system except for some microbes under the ice at Enceladus and Europa,” he said in the first lecture. “Nothing on Mars, not even fossils. Nothing on Venus, of course. Nothing on Titan.”
He spread his hands. “Now, this is not to say that I believe that life on Earth is unique in the universe, or even the galaxy. We’ve just finished talking about how big space is. There could easily be a civilization elsewhere in the galaxy, but it could simply be too far away for us to ever discover it.”
“But the Drake Equation--,” someone started to say.
Guss waved a hand. “There are still too many variables in that for us to be able to make a reasonable guess,” he said.
“Everyone knows what the Drake Equation is, I take it?”