by D. J. Holmes
Slowly, then with more confidence, Shaw began to move. As he followed, Alverez quickly confirmed they were in one of the ship’s cargo holds. The small opening that had been blown into the ship quickly opened up into a large empty hanger bay. “Over there,” Spence called out as she turned her EVA suit’s lights towards one of the corners of the bay. “That’s a hatch, isn’t it?”
“It sure looks like it,” Hassan said excitedly. “And there is a control terminal,” he added as he moved quickly towards it.
“Hold it,” Shaw said as she caught Hassan’s arm. “Let us check it out first. It could be booby trapped.”
“Right,” Hassan replied as he quickly stepped back.
Following Shaw’s instructions, Alverez stayed back until she waved them over. “Have a go at it,” he said to Hassan. Nodding, the kid moved up beside Shaw. He reached out and tapped the control terminal. The hatch swished open at once making Hassan jump back.
“I guess there is still some emergency power left in this hulk,” he said sheepishly.
“Which way?” Shaw asked as she ducked her head and moved through the hatch. It seemed that whatever species had built the ship, they weren’t quite as tall as humans.
Alverez looked through the hatch to see what Shaw meant. There was a corridor beyond that stretched off in two directions. Alverez pictured the remnants of the alien ship. “Left,” he said. It was the most likely to take them deeper into the ship. As they moved into the corridor, everyone in Alverez’s party had to stoop to make their way along the corridor. Here and there they encountered floating bits of metal and other objects of interest. Matthews and Spence grabbed and bagged some of them to be analyzed back on Intrepid.
“Ah, guys, I think you’re going to want to see this,” Hassan called out.
Alverez turned to find he had opened a hatch by himself without waiting for Shaw. When he followed Hassan in and saw what the computer tech had found, Alverez halted. There was a body floating in the middle of the small room. It was definitely alien. Though he had encountered a number of species in his naval career, he was still amazed by what he saw. Alverez counted himself as a twentieth century movie buff and if he didn’t know better, he would have sworn he had just come face to face with ET. The dead alien had all the features of the science fiction portrayals of the day for what an alien should look like. Its hairless body was small but otherwise very human, with two arms and legs. The creature didn’t appear to have any clothes on and its skin, fully on display, was a dull brown. Its head was dominated by two large round eyes which were still open and seemed to be staring right at Hassan.
“Don’t touch!” Spence snapped as she entered the room. Hassan had just begun to reach out towards the alien body. “It’s frozen. If you touch it, it will likely break apart. Let me take a 3D scan first. Then we can take some samples.”
“Samples?” Alverez asked in surprise. “Should we be desecrating a dead body like that?” Whoever the alien was, it had been a spacer. He knew he wouldn’t want anyone poking around his or his friend’s dead body if the roles were reversed.
“How else are we going to learn about them?” Spence asked. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. And respectful.”
“Alright,” Alverez said reluctantly. “Shaw, can you leave one of your marines with Spence? We don’t all need to be here for this.”
“Higgins will stay with her. We can keep moving,” Shaw replied.
“Come on,” Alverez said as he guided Hassan out of the room by his shoulder. The computer tech seemed to want to keep staring at the alien’s eyes.
For ten more minutes they carefully made their way around the wrecked ship. Several times they had to double back when they encountered damaged sections or sealed doors they couldn’t open. “Hey, look at this,” Shaw said when they came to another sealed door with a small glass view port. “There is atmosphere in there, look at the smoke.”
Stepping up beside her, Alverez looked in. “You’re right,” he said when he saw several small tendrils of smoke snaking across the floor of the next corridor. He stepped back and took in the sealed door. “It must be an emergency airlock. When the rest of the ship began to vent atmosphere it engaged.”
“Do we try and open it?” Shaw asked.
“For sure. This is the first of these we have encountered. If it’s here, it must be protecting something important,” Alverez said. “Let’s get it opened up.”
“Right,” Shaw said as she moved over to her other marine. Reaching around the marine’s back she pulled out one of the devices she had brought with her. Setting it down in the corridor she engaged it. Within seconds an inflatable membrane sprung to life. It quickly expanded to seal off several meters of the corridor the team was all standing in. “Alright whiz kid get to work,” she said to Hassan after inspecting the seal to make sure it was snug.
Stepping up, Hassan touched the door’s control panel. Nothing happened. He tapped it a couple more times. When still nothing happened he pulled a multitool out of his pocket. After nearly twenty seconds he managed to get the front of the panel off. “Blimey,” he said when he saw what was underneath. “This is some strange tech.” He pulled out another device. First he scanned the panel, and then tried to connect two wires to various parts of it.
“How are you getting on?” Alverez asked when a couple of minutes had elapsed. “Made any progress?”
“Not really,” Hassan said as he stepped back. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. I might be able to get it, but I’m fumbling in the dark.”
“Alright, let’s try another approach then,” Alverez decided. “Walker, you’re up. Take it slowly though. We don’t know what kind of atmosphere is on the other side of that door.”
“Right boss,” Walker said as he pulled a plasma cutting torch from his belt. Everyone else stepped back at the sight of it. All three civilians blinked and took another step back when Walker ignited it. They then watched in fascination as Walker got to work. As soon as the blade of plasma passed fully through the door’s material, Walker jumped back and switched it off. A hissing noise followed as the air from the other side of the door filled the area Shaw had sealed off.
Matthews already had a scanner out. “It’s eight percent oxygen. The rest is nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. Nearly six percent methane in fact. I don’t think it would be the best for us to breath.”
“Nor would it smell good!” Hassan responded.
“We keep our EVA helmets on then,” Alverez ordered. “Walker it should be safe for you to continue.”
With a nod the special forces marines ignited his plasma cutter and got to work on the sealed door. Three minutes later they were on the other side. “I’m glad we kept our suits on,” Hassan said as he pointed to a partially decayed body. “Look at that!”
Alverez took a step towards the crumpled form and then stopped. It was in an advanced stage of decay, yet there was still some raw flesh visible. He quickly turned his head away, it wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. Matthews, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have a problem. She moved in close and examined it carefully. “Spence is more of an expert in this kind of stuff, but I’d say the body can’t have been here more than a couple of months.”
Alverez took a deep breath. That changed things. It had been possible the Karacknids had destroyed this ship years ago in a long-finished war. A couple of months meant the freighter had come under attack around the same time Earth had been bombarded. They could have stumbled into the middle of another Karacknid war. “Right everyone, let’s split up. We have to be in an important part of the ship now. Let’s see what we can find. We’ll go in twos. Walker you take Hassan, Shaw you can come with me and private Evans can escort Matthews. Stay in COM contact.”
As they split up Shaw gestured for Alverez to take the lead, she kept her plasma riffle raised as she stuck closely to his back. After checking a couple of rooms that seemed to be storage compartments for maintenance materials the corridor they were in curved an
d came to a stop in front of a large hatch, double the size of the rest they had encountered. “What do you think?” Shaw asked.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Alverez replied as he reached for the access panel. With an almost silent whoosh the hatch retracted. It revealed a small but impressive circular room. There were just five seats in it but with all the control consoles arrayed around them, it was obvious what they were looking at. “An auxiliary bridge,” Alverez said in satisfaction. It looked too small to be the freighter’s main bridge, at least judging by human standards. But it was definitely a control center. “Hassan,” he said over the COM channel. “Get to my location. I have found something for you to work on.” Alverez had no idea what the computer tech would be able to make of the alien computers, but if there was any useful information on board the wreckage, it was likely to be here. “Let’s see what we can make of the place,” he said to Shaw as he moved forward and carefully experimented with some of the consoles.
Chapter 14
I still remember my first command. She was the frigate Metropolis. Fast and sleek, she was what most Lieutenants dream of during their meagre off duty hours. I quickly found out she was all that and more. Of course by the standards of the time period we are studying, her size would have had her classed as a light cruiser rather than a frigate. Certainly, she taxed my inexperienced command abilities to the full. That is how the Imperial Fleet likes to do things though, as many of you cadets reading this will soon day find out.
-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD.
Intrepid, January 10th 2482 AD (two days later).
“I did it!” Hassan shouted as he came running into the bridge.
Emilie spun around in surprise, she wasn’t used to being startled on her own bridge.
“What he means is,” Debbie Spence said in a far calmer tone as she followed the younger man onto the bridge, “that we have done it.”
“Done what?” Emilie asked as she kept the annoyance out of her voice. She had to remind herself that Alverez’s team didn’t know any better.
“The computer cores we took from the Freighter’s auxiliary bridge,” Hassan said as he rushed over to Emilie and held out two small metallic cylindrical objects. “I got them to interface with one of our terminals. They were both partially damaged so the information on them was limited, but we were able to read some of it.”
“Read it?” Emilie asked. “What does it say?”
“Well read is maybe not the right word,” Hassan said, suddenly sounding far shyer.
“He means he was able to extract some of the computer code,” Spence explained. “But thankfully the Kulrean translation software has been able to make sense of some of the data. We’re still working out some parts, but we thought you’d want to see this… With your permission Captain?” Spence asked as she gestured towards the holo projector.
When Emilie nodded, she moved forward and brought up a new image. It was nothing more than a handful of dots connected by zig zagging lines. “It’s not… is it?” Emilie asked. She saw right away what it was.
“We think so,” Spence replied. “We believe we have translated the freighter’s flight manifest. There are no specific coordinates, but we believe this is the system we are in.” As she spoke one of the dots began to flash. “If the lines are shift passages, then we have a map of several nearby worlds.”
“Amazing work,” Emilie said as she stood in excitement. “Amazing. COMs, get me Alverez and Shaw, tell them I want them back on board immediately. “They’ll have to cut their current trip to the freighter short. We need to decide what to do with this new info,” she said as she turned back to Spence and Hassan. “This could be the breakthrough we need. The breakthrough our war effort needs.”
Hassan beamed. Spence merely nodded. “There is more data we’re still working on. If you don’t mind we should get back to it. Your navigation officer should be able to handle this data from here. If these dots do represent the worlds of a new species, then the more we know about them the better. There could be much more on the data cores we haven’t deciphered yet.”
“By all means get back to it,” Emilie said with a smile. She had met enough scientists in her career to know they preferred work to praise. Though from the look on Hassan’s face it seemed he would have liked to bask in the excited expressions of Intrepid’s bridge crew some more. “Just let me know immediately if you find anything else,” Emilie finished.
“We will,” Spence said as she took Hassan by the arm and turned him towards the bridge’s exit.
“Inform Lieutenants Jones and Maguire that I want them to report to my briefing room as soon as Alverez’s shuttle gets back,” Emilie said once Spence and Hassan had left.
“Aye Captain,” her COM officer replied.
“Now Navigation, let’s break this alien ship’s star map down,” Emilie said as she turned to Intrepid’s pilot. “Let’s check it’s data on this system with our scans to see just how accurate it is.”
*
“What is all the fuss about?” Alverez asked after following Shaw into Emilie’s briefing room and seeing Jones and Maguire already there.
“This,” Emilie answered as she switched on a holo projector. “Hassan and Spence finally managed to get some information off the data cores you guys found on your first trip to the freighter. Now take a seat. We need to figure out what our next step is.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Alverez asked as he quickly moved towards a free seat.
“It is. A star map of this system and six others,” Emilie explained. “I’ve had Sub Lieutenant Withers look into it. This flashing system is the one we are in. If you notice, when I enlarge the image, each blip is not a perfect sphere, there are some distortions. The distortions in the blip of this system perfectly match this system’s mass shadow.”
“So we can use the distortions to figure out where these other systems are,” Alverez said as he pointed at the other blips.
“We already have,” Emilie replied as she overlaid a map of the local star systems onto the alien data. “The nearest blip represents this star system, it’s only nine light years away. But it gets better. The alien data also included this.” With the touch of a button Emilie brought up the zig zagging lines onto the image. She smiled in satisfaction at the look on Shaw and Alverez’s faces. “Yes,” she said before either could speak. “We believe they are shift passages. Marked out in minute detail. We’ll not know until we actually go and investigate one. But given how accurate the marked star systems are, it seems a fair assumption the shift passages will be accurate too.”
“Not fair,” Alverez said as he shook his head, his mouth still open. “You could have sent this to us in a COM message to the shuttle instead of dumping it all on us here.”
Emilie winked at him. “Then I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy your surprise. It’s not every day I get to drop a bombshell on an intelligence officer.”
Alverez rolled his eyes. “You said we need to decide what to do next. Surely that is obvious? We check out one of these shift passages.”
“And therein lies the predicament,” Emilie replied. “Spence and Hassan believe they have deciphered one more piece of information. This system,” Emilie continued as she pointed at another system that began to flash, “was the starting system for the freighter’s flight plan. It stands to reason then that whatever alien species built the freighter, their homeworld or one of their colonies is there. My head tells me that is where we should go. It’s the best chance we have of making contact with a potentially friendly species. We know from the decomposition of the bodies on the freighter that they have recently been at war with the Karacknids. But..”
“But what?” Jones asked. “Shouldn’t we set course to check out the shift passage towards that system immediately?”
“But, heading in that direction would take us towards the suspected edges of the Karacknid Empire,” Alverez finished for Emilie.
Emilie nodded. “If this spe
cies has been at war with the Karacknids, they may already have lost. We could head straight into a Karacknid occupied system.”
“Or worse,” Alverez added. “If they are still fighting, they may mistake us for some kind of Karacknid trick. If they don’t know about the Gift wormhole, they may not believe our story about how we came to be in their space.”
“So you think we should visit these other systems,” Shaw said as she pointed at the systems further away from where the Karacknid border was suspected to be. “We can investigate them and find out what is going on.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Emilie confirmed. “But I wanted to check with you all. I know it sounds overly conservative. But we may only get one chance at this. We need to be careful.”