by Rod Galindo
"Lasers?" Scalia asked. "Like from a laser gun? Did you open that bottle of champagne we've been saving for our meet up with Voyager?"
Adrienne sighed. "No."
"Then what makes you jump to the conclusion we were hit by lasers?"
"Because I was up in Observation Tower 1 when they hit us," Pearls said. "I saw the streaks; they zipped right by the dome. They looked like meteors in a moonless sky deep in the Thar Desert. Little yellow threads of light. Two of them."
"Shots!" Scalia scoffed in his Jersey accent. "Out here! Have you gone batty or somethin'? Did you stop to think that maybe they really were just meteors?"
"Meteors streak because they're in atmosphere," Adrienne spat in retort. "Last I checked, I can't breathe on the other side of this cockpit window. Can you?"
Jack didn't reply.
Don squinted through what remained of the light smoke and extinguisher dust still floating about the cabin. Through oversized windows that wrapped around eighty percent of the command cabin, he searched the heavens for anything moving amongst the static star field. "Which direction did they come from, Pearls?"
"Toward starboard. There, in Scorpio. It almost looked like they came right out of the galactic center itself!"
Don glanced to his front-right, at the dense "cloud" of the Milky Way, which stretched across the sky seemingly north and south from his spaceship's perspective. Of course, cardinal directions had little meaning out in The Black.
Scalia had floated up to the front of the cabin, and held onto the back of Don's chair. "Hold on. Do you really think she saw what she saw, Darko?"
"Why wouldn't I?" Don replied. "Pearls doesn't play practical jokes."
"Well, it's a little far-fetched, don't you think?"
"Far-fetched perhaps, but not impossible."
Jack chuckled. "You've seen too many old holofilms."
"Probably," Bouchard said, scanning all around the constellation of Scorpio, the scorpion, killer of Orion the Hunter.
"On the elevator ride down, I kept my eyes peeled for more shots, but I didn't see any. I saw part of the damage they did, but as you know the protective disc blocks a good portion of the accelerator tubes."
Don turned back to the screens around him, but before he did, he caught a glimpse of Pearls pulling up images of the ion engines from various external cameras. She whispered words of incredulity at what she saw.
Don didn't look up. "Do I even want to look?"
"No," she replied, her gaze never leaving her set of screens either.
No one spoke for several seconds while Don maneuvered through various screens describing the "health" of Explorer Two. Between the ship's automated systems and the efforts of the human crew, most of the warning lights had turned amber or back to green, as various damaged devices and circuitry were bypassed for the time being.
Scalia broke the silence. "So we're seriously entertaining the idea that it wasn't a natural event that just happened?"
"Those 'yellow threads of light' didn't come from nowhere, Scales," said Bouchard.
"I'm telling you," insisted Jack, "they were probably meteorites."
Perle turned in her seat and gave him a hard stare. "Meteorites? And our navigator sat right there at his station and missed them?"
Jack's voice dropped a full octave. "Micro-meteorites. Very micro."
"And what made them flare up just before they hit us?" asked Bouchard.
Scalia shrugged. "I don't know. Could be a dust cloud out there and they lit up zipping through it. Or hell, now that we've just left the magnetosphere of the sun, a hundred and twenty-two AU out, we are now fully susceptible to cosmic radiation. What Pearls saw could have been pin-point, focused blasts from an ancient supernova."
Don gave him a side-ways glance. "Only two of them? Wouldn't a whole swarm of blasts have zoomed by? Wouldn't they be zooming by right now?"
"Maybe, maybe not."
"Okay let's run this down," said Don. "Two laser-focused threads of radiation, launched from a supernova thousands if not millions of years ago, crossed precisely this point in space at exactly the same time as we did, and impacted the only equipment on this entire ship that wouldn't suffocate us, starve us, or blow us up. I'd say the chances of that occurring at random are worse than the odds of this ship turning into a potted daisy in the next five seconds."
No one so much as chuckled. Dead silence fell upon the cabin for an entire five seconds, as everyone seemingly waited to see if anything would indeed happen. Don lamented the fact his crew never seemed to understand most of his ancient science fiction references. Especially his wife. It was as if London carried completely different programs in their holo libraries than Montreal.
"Well the odds are better than aliens with laser guns being out here!" Scalia yelled.
"Really? I'd say they're about fifty-fifty right about now," Bouchard said, matter-of-factly. "Until we have more information, I'm going to assume a continued threat to this vessel, and take steps accordingly." He pointed at Scalia's half-burnt station. "Increase magnetic field to its maximum radius, and boost it to one-thousand percent of nominal."
"We won't be able to maintain that for very long, Darko," Scales notified him. "Remember last year's coronal burst? It wasn't the burst that nearly cooked all the meat in the pantry, it was our own magnetron. I'm glad Brea remembered to put the poor fish in the freezer ahead of—"
"I got it Jack," Bouchard interrupted. "Just do it. It's about the only 'defensive weapon' we have that I'm willing to use. Set it at five-second bursts, repeating every five seconds. Don't let it fall below normal power between bursts."
Jack Scalia maneuvered back to his station. "Alright. Boosting to one thousand percent."
Bouchard turned toward the pilot. "Adrienne, keep your eyes peeled. I'll bet my next paycheck something's out there. And it isn't a supernova." He eyeballed Scales. "Or meteors broken off from a bigger asteroid."
"Roger, Commander," she acknowledged.
"Boy do I ever hope I'm wrong," Bouchard muttered to himself. He heard Scalia tapping screens at the navigation station, flipping blackened switches and mashing once-colorful buttons. Don heard Jack swear under his breath a time or two, but based on the content, they were directed at the damaged controls, not at him.
Scalia pounded the nav station with his fist and shook his head. "Well, I think I can set the magnetron from here, but I hope one of you remember which little blue dot in the sky is Earth. 'Cause if we slid off-course when we were hit by whatever we were hit by, the comm dishes sure aren't usin' this thing to zero in on home. And forget about chasing Voyager's tail. Nav computer is officially cooked!"
"Bloody hell," spat Bouchard, taking a cue from his wife, "I hadn't even thought of that!" He took a deep breath. "Check out the shuttles, Scales. If either of them is still intact, remotely tie in its nav computer into Explorer Two's astrometrics. We need to find out if we are still on-course."
"Roger, Darko," Jack replied, and floated over to another set of screens displaying shuttle status and allowing remote control of each one.
"X-Ray," called Don, "are your comm systems still locked onto Earth?"
"Negative."
The reply had come fast, as if the information was already known. "Negative? But… Ray you've been down there for a good ten minutes! Why didn't you—"
Science Specialist Ray "X-Ray Eyes" Isley's overly-polite voice boomed in the cabin from multiple speakers. "I was waiting until the right time to tell you."
"When you found out would have been a good time," Don replied.
"My apologies, Commander," the android said. "It sounded like you had more important things on your mind at the moment."
"Telling Mission Control what happened and getting some guidance is right up there in the realm of important things on my mind!"
"Yes, Commander."
"Wait," Adrienne interrupted, "Ray, did you turn on our mics? Have you been eavesdropping again?"
"I will notify you as soon a
s we have a lock, Commander," the metal and plastic man said, ignoring the question. "Once Mr. Scalia ties the navigation system through the communications array, I can recalibrate the system."
"You have!" yelled Pearls. "Ray, we talked about this!"
Silence.
"Thank you, X-Ray," Don concluded.
"You're welcome, Commander."
Adrienne set her jaw. "Oh, he is in so much trouble it's not even funny."
Don smiled. "He's still learning, you know. In a way, he's just a seven-year-old boy. He was all of one when we launched."
"A seven year old who's not going to get to play Uno with his favorite pilot tonight! Did you hear that, Ray?"
"Commander!" yelled Jack.
Bouchard's head spun to the forward windows so fast, the motion made his body spin that direction as well in the zero-G. He grabbed a nearby handle and scolded himself for not fastening his seat belt. "Did you see something, Scales?"
"I… I thought I did." He shook his head. "Maybe I was just seeing things?"
"What did you see?" Pearls asked, her large, brown eyes scanning the stars off to the front-right. "Did you see my lasers? Do you believe me now?"
"X-Ray!" shouted Bouchard, before Jack could answer. "Check your backup radar. Anything?"
"I'll need to boot it up, Commander. Give me a few seconds."
"Soon as humanly possible, X-Ray."
"Funny," the android replied from one deck below. "Honestly, Commander, I doubt it will pick up anything. Otherwise, Mister Scalia would have seen it at his station before the initial attack."
"Probably, but let's make sure." A thought occurred to Bouchard. "X-Ray, would we even be able to see an object out here, this far out from the sun?"
"Possibly. For comparison, at Neptune's orbit, thirty Astronomical Units from the sun, the illumination factor is approximately two watts per meter square. At one hundred and twenty-two Astronomical Units from the sun, we might see one watt per meter square of illumination."
"X-Ray," said Bouchard, "country-speak for me, please, like we talked about."
"Oh yes," Ray replied, "again, my apologies. So, at Neptune, the sun illuminates objects close to what you might see on a dark country road with a waxing or waning gibbous moon overhead. Where we currently are, you might see half of that amount of light. If an object is made of a highly-reflective material, yes, you might see it with your human eyes."
"But if it's a ship made with a light-absorbing material, or painted with military camouflage…"
"I understand what you're thinking, Commander. It would appear as black as Mister Liev's Angus bull, and you may only see it when it blocks the stars behind it."
"It was my Pa's bull, not mine," Mag-Lev broke in.
Everybody's dropping eaves it would seem. Bouchard ignored the comment. "Is your radar booted up yet, Ray?"
"The system is running through its final startup diagnostics," the android said. "Twenty-three more seconds."
Bouchard had another fear, but he didn't voice it to the others. He tried hard to bury the idea of an alien vessel boasting a cloaking device into the recesses of his ten-year-old memory, where the warships of old science fiction movies he'd watched with his father still lived. "Adrienne, do you have anything on your short-range?"
"Short-range is as blank as long-range," the pilot replied, motioning to a glowing three-dimensional sphere hovering between them. "But that may not mean it is malfunctioning. It could just mean that whatever is out there is not yet within 300,000 K of us."
"If it's not within 300,000 kilometers," said Bouchard, "and yet Jack still saw something moving—"
"I know," she agreed.
"I must have just imagined it," said Jack. "Otherwise it would have to be the size of a small moon."
"That's no moon…" Isley quipped over the comm.
Bouchard sighed. "Always packed full of humor, aren't you, X-Ray?"
"I'm just as God programmed me, sir."
Adrienne rolled her eyes. Apparently the outlandishness of a robot bringing up the concept of a higher deity wasn't lost on her. She cocked her head. "There is another possibility," she said. "Maybe it's like, a stealth craft or something?"
Despite Bouchard's earlier cool logic, the mere mention of the word "craft" by his pilot—alluding to her apparent acceptance of aliens that could build such things—sent a shiver up his spine. He looked up and behind him at Scales, whose fingers were flying across the controls in front of him. Either he hadn't heard Adrienne, or chose to ignore her comment.
"Okay!" Scalia turned toward the others. "I've boosted the magnetic field to one zero-zero-zero, and rerouted the power relays to the mag-field detector, which is now working again. I'm sweeping it in a wide arc in front of us. If something is inside our field of detection, it will return a—"
>Bleep<
Bouchard froze.
The three looked at one another.
"Woah," muttered Pearls, breaking the silence. "Scales, what's the range of that thing?" Her voice was a whisper, as if the thing outside could hear her.
>Bleep<
"I need a distance, Scales," said Bouchard. Maybe I should be whispering too?
"Seven hundred and thirty nine kilometers," Jack reported.
>Bleep<
"Now six hundred eighty seven."
Adrienne snapped her head toward the radar, and sighed. "Nothing." She looked up at Bouchard. "I didn't mean to jinx us with the whole stealth thing."
He reached out and patted her on the shoulder. "I'm sure the radar is malfunctioning."
"Long range is just as I feared," Ray interjected, his voice loud in the small space of the command cabin, "it's not picking up anything. However, now that I know the distance of the object thanks to Mr. Scalia's ingenuity, I can manually scan that precise range and zero in on whatever is— Bingo."
"You got something already?" asked Don.
"Spectrographic is returning an echo. High mineral content, various alloys."
"See?" said Scalia. "It is an asteroid! Just as—"
"It's no asteroid," Isley corrected. "The object is oddly symmetrical. It looks less like an asteroid and more like a—"
"There it is!" Pearls shouted.
"Where?" asked Bouchard.
"There!" She pointed somewhere off to her left, not to her right, where the three had been looking for aliens previously.
Bouchard squinted and scanned the stars. "I'm sorry, Pearls, I'm not—" Then he saw it. A tiny speck of black occulting one of the myriad stars. Then another. "I see it!" He could follow its path across the sky fairly easily, now that he knew where to look. But a moment later, it didn't blacken the next star like he expected it to do. "Wait, where'd it go?"
"I lost it, too," said Pearls. Then a second later, "There!" she exclaimed.
Bouchard shook his head. "You and your eagle eyes."
"You see it?" Pearl's eyes were intense when she turned to face him. "Did it just perform a course correction? It's like it's going… sideways now."
"Actually, it's moving toward us," said Isley over the speakers.
Bouchard looked back at Scales. "Your asteroid just made a right turn, Navigator."
TWO
Bouchard's heart pounded in his chest. He strapped himself in, because floating out of the seat when you're trying to work is annoying, but floating away when alien visitors could come knocking on your window could be downright embarrassing. "Mags!" His call came out like an eight-year-old girl had just squealed. Bouchard closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let his shoulders drop. Try again. "Mags," he said in his normal voice. "We need every ounce of thrust we can get out of what's left of our ion drive. I'm going to take advantage of our powerplant dishing out a hundred and ten percent, and push those last two engines at a hundred and ten percent. For your detailed repair inspection, enlist Treads. She knows as much as you when it comes to those things. I'm gonna shoot for the moon here; if you can get one or more of the less damaged engines working now, mak
e it happen."
Liev's voice came over the speakers once again. "What's the urgency? Is something else about to hit us? Same thing that hit us earlier? A meteorite or somethin'?"
"No," Bouchard replied. "I think we might have company."
Larry spoke again, but in a softer tone. "Company like, you're givin' personality to inanimate objects, or company like, little green men from Mars?"
"I'm afraid it may be the latter," said Bouchard. He received an earful of silence for a few heartbeats.
"He's joking, right?" That came from his wife. Her voice sounded distant, as if she was being picked up by Mag-Lev's microphone implant rather than her own.
"I wish I was joking, babs. X-Ray, send out the sweetest 'hello' you can muster on all frequencies."
"Wilco," Ray replied.
Now safely seated properly in at the helm, Bouchard saw a flurry of activity to his left. Adrienne had begun a systems check, turning the flight stick across all axes and slamming the throttle forward and backward. She seemed to be willing the controls to execute an escape maneuver. All she accomplished was a slow spin of the star field. "Well, the attitude thrusters work," she said. "But we might as well be batakh sitting pretty for the hunter."
Bouchard smiled. "I think you mean ducks."
She turned to him. "That's what I said."
Don stared at the dark smudge now almost directly in front of them, blocking several stars now that it was closer. "Well we sure as hell can't outrun or outmaneuver them."
"We couldn't even if our fragile little home was in perfect shape," said Pearls. This ship was designed to go in pretty much one direction, not dogfight like a fighter craft."
Don lowered his voice. "What would Captain Jean Luc Picard do..?"
Behind him, Jack sighed. "Darko, you know we don't know nothin' about your French-Canadian war heroes."
Bouchard shook his head. "Uncultured swine."
"You know," Jack continued, running a hand through his jet-black hair, "I'm guessing that thing could make quick work of us considering it zipped in this close before we even saw it coming. Mining lasers likely wouldn't cut it, pardon the pun. And I'm guessing using nukes in a first-contact scenario probably wouldn't be the best way to introduce ourselves."