Regulations stated that we should have eight hours of gravity a day at least, to prevent bone loss and other health issues. The maximum we were supposed to go without it was forty-eight hours and only if the situation called for it. I knew why she hadn’t just started the ship spinning now, it was normally only used when at rest, in orbit, by a space station, or during a long trip after the burn was completed.
The second reason was it would be a pain in the ass to make the change without the automation provided by Columbus.
“Aye captain.”
The four ensigns all showed up at once, and took over the stations.
John Crossman of course, had the systems transferred from the captain’s console when he sat down, and she stood and walked out.
Ensign Carly James took over the operations and communications console from Lt. Katy Daniels. Carly was just twenty with honey-brown hair and hazel eyes. Fit like everyone else on the ship, and both professional and ambitious. As a result, her and Katy had bumped heads on a number of occasions, Katy’s occasional playfulness had gotten under the ensign’s skin more than once in the beginning, but that was worked out a long time ago.
Ensign Ally Sanderson took over the Navigation and weapons console from Lt. Cindy Williams. She had auburn hair and brown eyes, and like Cindy had a love affair with the ship’s weapons. There’d been no trouble there, they were a lot alike and had gotten along well from the first moment.
Ensign Jerry Circe relieved Lt. George Sampson at the countermeasures and point defense console. Jerry was six-foot-tall, and had light brown hair and eyes. He and George seemed to get on well enough, but then George was clearly in charge there, and Jerry had a very laid back personality, and loved the challenge of spoofing enemy electronics.
I took a minute to send an advanced and difficult simulation for insertions to John’s board, and then took some time to tailor six more for the next six nights. After that, the bridge was quiet. It was usually a little boring, flying through the void as we were, but tonight there wasn’t even the small side conversations I usually allowed. The cause was obvious, and I felt it too, but tried not to dwell on it, after all, the first officer couldn’t be caught with tears in his eyes on duty, could he?
Timothy and I had been thick as thieves since our first day at the academy, which lasted for two years. As ensigns, we’d been posted on different assignments, but afterwards we’d both served as junior, and then senior lieutenants on the same cruiser. My mind shied away from what happened at the end of that tour, and I shook my head. I guess I was feeling stress, because Amy started playing a little light jazz in my head. Not loud enough to be too distracting, but it did calm me down.
A.I. assistants in the implants were meant to do those kinds of things, anticipate what we needed, and if necessary report an emotional instability or incorrect actions. I wondered at times how humans even got along in life before they were available. According to history it wasn’t unknown for unstable people to somehow gain positions of power and make a mess of things, or for things like abuse of power, such as a superior officer becoming intimate with subordinates.
With the A.I. assistants, those kind of things were in the past. Most crime was in the past as well, though there was piracy in space, and a black market, but most other crimes were virtually non-existent. It was impossible to get away with one when the A.I. assistant would turn you in for it. Of course, on a pirate ship the A.I. couldn’t report the infraction, which is why space, q-ships, and other things of that nature was the last bastion of criminal conduct.
More than that though, infrastructure was so automated, and resources so plentiful, that humans didn’t really need to work anymore. They could focus on other pursuits such as education, hobbies, or pursue a career to further improve humanity’s lot. That also had a lot to do with lack of most crimes, no one needed to steal the proverbial loaf of bread to eat, everyone was cared for. That kind of sedentary life didn’t appeal to many, me included, which is why I’d joined military service in the first place.
Crimes of passion still existed of course, nothing would change that, even if there was no way they could get away with it. But even those were less now, since many crimes of passion were side effects to other life stresses, like money issues which simply didn’t exist anymore in the modern world.
Ensign James brought me out of my thoughts.
“Sir?”
Amy automatically muted the jazz tune I’d been listening too.
“Yes Carly?”
She replied, “We seem to be quickly approaching an object. We’ll miss it by several hundred miles, but sir, it isn’t natural.”
“Not natural?”
She shook her head, “No sir. It’s metallic or has some other kind of reflective surface, and its shape is too uniform to be a rogue asteroid or comet ejected from the system. It’s also almost a half mile across at its largest cross-section, at least from our current viewing angle of it.”
Crap, well we couldn’t stop to check it out, even if we had our main engines online right now, it would take weeks to come to a full stop, and more than twice as long just as long to make it back. A sensor probe missile would work, it could generate up to two hundred gravities of acceleration, rendezvous in a couple of hours, and forward on the sensor readings at the speed of light. Not to mention get a reading for the FTL drive. Of course, we couldn’t prepare a probe missile without Columbus, all of our systems were limited in some way by the loss of the main A.I.
Great, the first possible proof of alien life in the universe, and we couldn’t check it out because we were a dead rock hurtling through space with nothing but weak maneuvering jets online.
“Can we get a good reading on the location for the Chavez-Teller drive?”
Carly replied, “No sir, we’re moving too fast and will be out of range before the active scans can complete. I can get coordinates and partial readings.”
I sighed, partial readings were almost worthless, no one in their right mind would risk travelling though FTL without full readings at both the destination, and the departure point. To attempt navigating subspace without both was to risk oblivion, or at least the unknown. Good readings took at least thirty minutes to get, and the active sensors just didn’t reach that far at our speeds, I should have known better than to ask.
Subspace was actually breached for the first time in 2152, but we understood very little except that it was compacted space and related to normal space in some way. That if we travelled in subspace, we could exceed the light speed limit in real space, without ever truly exceeding that limitation.
Several probes and even two manned attempts were made to travel in subspace, with the intention of using trial and error to learn how to navigate it, all of those that moved were lost without exception, never to be seen again. The only probes that came back, were the ones that didn’t move, they simply transitioned there, took readings, and came back out. It wasn’t until a year later, when two scientists by the names of Sidney Chavez, and her husband, doctor Steven Teller, discovered what was needed to move through subspace with anything approaching certainty, and only if the ship’s A.I. handled the piloting. The human mind simply wasn’t meant to understand subspace, in fact regulations required when traveling in subspace that no view ports be open, seeing subspace with the naked eye was just too disturbing to the human psyche. The two scientists had the drive named after them, the Chavez-Teller FTL drive.
Even through the viewer on the bridge, with sensor readings being rendered as visuals, it often made people uncomfortable to see it. I didn’t understand it that well, but what I did understand was there was much more about subspace that humanity didn’t understand, than what we did.
Still, I supposed partial readings were better than nothing, and it would only be a week or two from the transition point we did manage to scan in 61-Virginis in five days. I sighed, someone else would get to investigate the find of the millennium.
“Get what you can Carly, and put the
image on screen.”
It was hard to make out anything at all against the backdrop of dark space.
Carly said, “The picture should get better as we pass it sir.”
I simply nodded at her obvious statement.
Ensign Crossman asked, “Sir, what if whatever that is came from 61-Virginis?”
The picture was clearer now, and rendered in three dimensions. We’d managed to see it from head on, to the side, and from behind as we raced past, giving us enough contextual clues for the sensors to put together a picture of it without the other angles.
The scientists all say artificial gravity is impossible without spin, acceleration, or deceleration, yet when I looked at the craft that was the first question in my mind. The ship was long with sleek lines. It was shaped a little like a triangle with longer equal legs length wise, with the point being the front of the ship, and the back of the ship being the third side. It was just over a mile long, which was bigger than our largest battle ships, although not by much.
The width at the front, at its shortest, was fifty meters or so, and at the stern almost a quarter mile wide. The height of the ship also varied in tiered sections, the front of the ship was maybe ten meters in height, so two or three decks? Then additional decks were added as it went up, but also slightly smaller in width adding a steep angular look to it from the sides. About two thirds of the way back, the height of the ship shrunk again in steeper increments until the rear like the front, was ten meters in height.
In a way, the ship looked like a pyramid, that had been squashed from the top, and the point on top was sheered off, and then moved off center closer to one of the sides, the back of the ship.
There were also ripped open sections, as if the ship had been in some kind of battle.
Point was though, the ship’s engines were on the back, not on the bottom, and spinning it wouldn’t do anything but add gravity at the ends, which to me argued they had to have some sort of artificial gravity, and quite possibly another impossibility according to scientists, inertial dampeners. It wouldn’t do to have artificial gravity going down, and then feel the gravities moving forward as well.
Either that or gravity wasn’t a health concern for them at all, and they’d used pressure couches or something similar for the sideways g-forces when applying thrust. Regardless, the shape of the ship was just wrong to create false gravity using centrifugal or thrusting forces.
There was one thing I was very sure of, that ship wasn’t a human design. It was something we might design, if we didn’t have gravity requirements. All of humanity’s ships tended to be either flying saucer shaped, or have an outer ring, or even a group of them that spun around the center of the ship. That second design was used mostly in civilian space craft, since that design would be a lot more fragile in a battle.
“I suppose if that’s the case, it’s time to meet the neighbors.”
Carly snorted, and then turned red. I ignored it, I’d been going for a laugh and nonchalant confidence, although in truth I was quite worried about the possibility.
I gave thought to interrupting the captain’s rest, but we still had almost six days before we got there, so while interesting it was hardly an emergency. Okay, interesting was an understatement, my hands were sweating, and my heart beat was a bit accelerated as I thought over the possibilities of not only meeting aliens, but ones that were quite probably far ahead of us in technology, just based on that ship design.
Amy turned the music back on.
Chapter Four
I stood at attention as the captain ignored me and worked on her console, perhaps I should have woken her up. I felt rather uncomfortable as we met in her ready room.
“Sit down Williams,” the captain finally broke the silence.
I sat down stiffly.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes, “I appreciate your concern for my sleep, but Michael, make sure it doesn’t happen again, am I clear? Alien vessels are definitely a good reason to wake me.”
“Yes maam,” I replied.
She waved her hand, “No harm done, this time, there was nothing to do about it anyway, no real choices. What do you think about the situation?”
“Captain, I’m not sure. Chances are it was from this system, who knows how long it’s been drifting to get all the way out here, but we won’t know for sure for a few more days. I’d like to check out the ship before we go into the solar system, but I’m not sure that’s practical. To completely avoid the solar system, we’d need to burn at three Gravities or more for several days.”
“I agree,” she said succinctly, “But that kind of burn would probably be visible to any kind of sensor platform in that system, and it would put our fuel supplies dangerously low, not to mention being unhealthy for our crew. We need to go in, but with our eyes open, if they are there hopefully they’ll be willing to talk.”
I said, “We already know they aren’t peaceful, that ship had been in some kind of battle, let’s hope they aren’t xenophobic. It’s not too late to do a shallow fly by and avoid getting too close to the inner planets.”
I could just imagine how Earth’s forces would react to an uninvited guest in the Sol system. The whole theory about space faring civilizations must be peaceful and had evolved past the need for war was ridiculous. Any spacefaring civilization had already proven that they were the top predator on their planet or they wouldn’t have made it that far. Top predators could work with others if the situation called for it, but on the whole a predator’s instincts wouldn’t allow any competitors from another species, much less become friends with them.
About the best we could hope for would be initial distrust, worst case they’d just attack us on the spot. We couldn’t even get a reading to leave by subspace until we were moving slowly enough, which wouldn’t be until the insertion point in the solar system. Some might call me a paranoid military drone, but really I hoped the best would happen, but preparing for the worst just in case, was a good way to live any life, but in the military preparing for the worst could save it.
Confrontation was a lot likelier than t-shirt and lollipops.
Of course, the best-case scenario is the aliens didn’t live in the 61-Virginis system at all.
Pike replied, “We also haven’t detected any radio waves on any wavelength. Which means either that derelict is from another star system, or they use something different for communications. Regardless, I’m sending out our logs and reports with a messenger missile as soon as Columbus is back online in a few hours.”
A messenger missile had its own contained FTL drive, sensor suite, and an A.I. designed for navigating subspace, and a small drive system. It would be able to decelerate at two hundred gravities once launched, and once at rest would run the scans necessary to safely travel home. It was basically a cylinder about ten meters long, and two meters in diameter. It would also be able to pass the sensor data it takes before heading home, which meant in theory the admiralty could send another ship to evaluate the wreckage before we even got to the solar system. Unfortunately, the data would be useless for us, for us to use it we’d need to be within a few hundred miles of where the scans were taken, or they wouldn’t be valid for a departure, though we could certainly arrive there from somewhere else.
In reality, the military didn’t move nearly that quickly. I doubted they’d even update our orders with a missile messenger of their own. They’d discuss it to death, and then assign a ship which would have to be told, and then stocked. Things like that took time. The only exception to that was a distress call which would get immediate action, but we weren’t sending one of those.
Who knows, after we did our pass through the system, maybe they’d send us back to look at the ship too. I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.
As for her comments about the lack of radio signals I wasn’t sure what to believe about that. Communication through quantum effects had long been theorized, but much like artificial gravity our scientists hadn’t figured out how to do it yet.
“Captain, I’d suggest launching a sensor missile as well, at two hundred gravities it should be able to get a close-up scan and send it to us before we reach the solar system.”
She thought about that for a moment, “Good idea, just in case. Though I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find out anything helpful from an external scan of the derelict about their systems, strengths, and weaknesses. Chances are we need hands on and in that ship with specialty scanners to discover anything, but it might be worth it.”
She added, “Go get some rest Michael.”
“Yes maam.”
I got up and headed to the outer ring for a quick meal, and to get some sleep. I only woke up long enough when the alarm went off three hours later, to make sure I was lying flat on the bed, and nothing would break when the one point three gravities kicked in from the deceleration burn. I supposed that meant everything went well with the Columbus, and got back to sleep.
“Columbus, status?”
I moved carefully out of bed when I woke up, I had forty-five minutes before shift change which was enough time to shower and eat, and still show up a little early.
Columbus replied, “We are currently decelerating at one point three two Gravities. All systems are currently on-line.”
I could tell, the first part I mean, I felt awkward and heavy. I went from weighing one eighty, to about two thirty-five. It was more than safe to move around in the slightly heavier gravity, but a little caution was called for, my usual sense of balance wasn’t used to it.
“Have we launched the messenger and sensor missiles?”
Columbus replied, “Affirmative, messenger missile made transition to subspace two hours ago, sensor missile will match speed and vector of target ship in thirty minutes.”
“Welcome back, thanks Columbus.”
Scout Ship: Rise of the Empyrean Empire: Novel 01 Page 3