Errant Contact

by T. Michael Ford

  “Gone.” She winced, and I actually felt a sad spark in my head. “There’s another hull breach just aft of the main bridge worse than this one; there’s nothing left. Whatever it was, it took out most of the bridge control and navigation computers, too. I’m not sure about the rest of the ship or engineering.”

  “What happened to the rest of my team?”

  “Some of the external sensors suggest structures were built or at least started. I would conclude that some of our team survived and tried to proceed with the mission on this planet. However, I see no signs of recent work.”

  “What do you consider recent?”

  “I’m pretty sure nothing has been touched for over five hundred years,” she said cautiously.

  “Five hundred…years…,” I stammered. “Kalaya, how long…?”

  “Nine hundred eighty-seven years and some change by the ship’s chronometers.”

  That sounded bat-shit crazy, but I knew Kalaya wouldn’t lie to me about something like that. I silently pondered the information for a good long time. Everyone that I’ve ever known is long dead by now, except for Kalaya. She allowed me to brood for a while but then broke in cheerful as ever.

  “On the bright side, I can confirm that this planet was our mission target, so we got that right at least.”

  “How would you know that? You don’t normally have access to astral navigation. Why didn’t they wake me up? And if nobody’s been around for five hundred years, why are we both awake? We should have just stayed comatose until the power ran out and we died in our sleep.”

  “I don’t know, perhaps they left an accounting of what went on somewhere. As for the charts, I matched our desired location to some alien charts I recently…umm…acquired, and they confirm our position when you factor in the time that has passed.”

  “Where did you come up with alien charts?”

  “Well, that’s the other half of the disturbing news.”

  Man, I don’t think I can take much more disturbing news. “Ok, I’ll bite, what else has happened?”

  “The ship has been found.”

  “The colony has arrived?”

  “No,” and I heard her stifle an evil chuckle. “You remember that dorky little planet out in the middle of nowhere where the inhabitants were always broadband beaming their ridiculous vids out into space. Not to mention spreading space probes everywhere with plates showing the exact location of their planet and pictures of their naked bodies on them?”

  “Yeah, I think they called themselves Terrans. They were almost a hobby of yours as I recall.”

  “They’re…here…,” she cackled dramatically.

  Chapter 4

  Laree

  “What are we going to do now?” Max said wildly, his hand still on the trigger of his caster rifle as he kept glancing around nervously.

  “We’re going to sit right here until the Jeff comes back for us,” Drik answered and pointedly shoved the barrel of the rifle so that it was well away from anyone.

  “Why did you drag me out of there?” I demanded as I looked accusingly at both of my companions. “We just can’t leave him in there like that. He’s unconscious and probably injured, and we just dropped him on a gurney and ran away like frightened children. We didn’t even bother to throw a sheet over him. What if he wakes up and needs care?”

  “It’s not a ‘he,’ it’s an ‘it,’” Max corrected in his usual belligerent manner that he trotted out every time he was thrown into an uncomfortable situation.

  “Don’t give me any of that crap; he’s as human as we are! Did you even see the man?” I shot back.

  “You don’t have to get all hot and bothered about every naked guy you meet, sis!” Max teased unmercifully.

  “You two are both missing the point,” Drik interjected with a scowl. “And I dragged you out so that we could talk privately, in case he or his other shipmates are somehow listening. Do you two even begin to grasp the meaning of this? What this discovery means for humankind? It not only means we are not alone in the universe, but there are other races of humans out there whose technology is obviously much more advanced than ours is. From what I can tell from my readings, this structure is over a thousand years old!”

  “A thousand years ago we were still landing on our moon and could barely call ourselves civilized,” I added breathlessly.

  “Exactly! If they were this advanced a thousand years ago, they probably make us look like chimps today. That cryogenic room alone is much more advanced than anything we’ve been able to achieve. The level of technology available to them is probably beyond our ability to fathom. Oh, my God, the military is going to want to know about this and take action! What if these people aren’t exactly friendly to us?”

  “And what if we aren’t friendly to him?” I questioned, my voice becoming a little more shrill than I would have liked, but I wasn’t about to back down on this. “What’s to stop him from calling his friends, whoever they may be, and simply saying, ‘Hey, come wipe out these jerks!’ and boom, we’re just a greasy stain on the galactic timeline. What if there are hundreds or thousands of his kind living undetected on this planet?”

  Drik shook his head grimly. “We’ll have to deal with that the best we can. We’re just a scientific survey crew, what possible authority do we have in addressing this kind of situation? Besides, we still haven’t decided what we’re going to do with him when he wakes up.”

  Chapter 5

  Kodo

  “So…we have Terrans on the ship?”

  “Sadly, yes. Tracking in mud and getting their filthy paws all over things, too. The three of them that were in here are in the tech’s locker room two doors over arguing among themselves.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  Should have known that one, what else would they be talking about, the weather? “Well, I guess I don’t have much choice now, do I? If I recall, there should be a recharge station in that room, right?”

  “Yep, on the back wall. It’s lucky for you that one still has power; not much, but it should be enough to recharge your implant systems…once.”

  “It will do. It will be enough time to get some systems back online and shake off this sleep hangover. How about you, Kalaya? How are you faring?”

  “As well as can be expected, although I wouldn’t turn down a nice ham sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk at the moment,” she said tiredly.

  I nodded my head, discounting the unfamiliar food references. “I’ll bet you’re starving worse than I am. We’ll do something about that as soon as I greet our new guests. I don’t suppose you have their language on hand, do you?”

  “I had an old copy, but it seems to be very outdated. But fear not, for I hacked into their ship when they were dropped off and got it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “What’s a horse?”

  “Never mind…this might sting a bit.” Sting was an understatement. She pumped raw data straight into my brain; the feeling was a little like being electrocuted. As brain waves are electrical impulses, that analogy is fairly close to the truth. Finally, the sensation eased and my mind was my own again.

  “There, that should do it. You should be able to understand them now and speak in their language. I suggest for the sake of clarity that we just use their speech for now, at least until we can get rid of them. Your brain will make the translation automatically as well as convert their native descriptions to analogs of ours.”

  “You mean like the ham sandwich and glass of chocolate milk reference?”

  “Exactly, anyway…reading and writing will have to come later. Your communication implant power reserves are now down to three percent so I would get moving if I were you.”

  I slid groggily off the gurney, stumbling around until I got some circulation back into my extremities. The bay wasn’t large, but like all spaces that medical technicians inhabit, there were weird hermetically sealed supplies tucked into every nook and cranny, most of them incompre
hensible to me. Finally, after rifling through a number of storage cabinets, I found a towel to wrap around myself. My legs still felt like someone was jabbing molten glass shards into my muscles, but I got them to move me down the corridor to where these people supposedly where. I didn’t have to travel far to know where they were since the sound of arguing was jarringly apparent. Humans never know when to shut up, do they?

  “We’ll have to deal with that the best we can. We’re just a scientific survey crew, what possible authority do we have in addressing this kind of situation? Besides, we still haven’t decided what we’re going to do with him when he wakes up.”

  I pushed the door open and walked through. “Too late, already up.”

  The three people in the room sprang to their feet and backed away from me, flattening themselves in terror against a bulkhead; honestly, it was rather funny. The one I took to be the leader; he looked older and calmer than the other two, was thin and balding. He carried a few devices strapped to his belt that appeared to be crude sensors of some kind. The other male was a big strapping sort, he looked young and strong enough, but I suspected his muscles held more fat than iron. Brown-haired and -eyed, he clutched a stick-like device in both hands as if he was trying to choke it. The last of the three was clearly female, shorter and slimmer but of a similar body style and hair color as the young male. She carried a digital tablet of some kind pressed tightly up against her chest as if it were some form of armor.

  “Holy crap, it's wake!”

  “It can talk!”

  I stalked past them to the back of the room and sat down heavily on the padded bench set into the back wall. Placing my arm into the recharging station armrest, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it still worked, even after all these years. I guess they weren’t kidding when they told us that these rechargers were built to last. Not as good as my designs, but still impressive. I looked over at the three startled people still pressed up against the wall and sighed.

  “You three just going to stand there, or are you going to say something?”

  They looked even more baffled by my continued ability to speak. This is what I get for trying to talk to the galaxie’s youngest space-faring addition.

  “You can speak our language? How?” questioned the older of the two men.

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Translator. Come on, are you even trying here?”

  “But where did you get the translation?”

  “From your ship’s computers. Really, you people need to work on your data skills. A two-year-old could have gotten into that one.”

  “You hacked the ship!” The younger man looked actually alarmed by that statement. I didn’t really see why, self-aware computers were adept at differentiating between friend or foe so most security measures, at least in our society, were obsolete. Hell, we gave up on encryption eons ago. The kid brought the tube-like thing he was carrying up in alignment with my face, no doubt a weapon of some kind. I could see the fear and hatred in his eyes; mostly fear I gauged, noting the sweat beginning to bead on his forehead. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of fear that saves your life (flight), but that pure and primal adrenaline rush (fight) that makes you do something really stupid.

  While our eyes remained locked on each other, my ears registered a sharply rising whine that I usually associated with the buildup of a seized motor system or the critical overload of stress panels in a bulkhead. However, this was just a locker room and the only powered devices in this place were the recharge station I was using and a couple of cameras. The humans didn’t seem to notice the sound so it had to be screeching above the twenty-kilohertz range. I heard it perfectly well and, in fact, it was starting to become almost painful. The walls of the room were tightening and vibrating slightly as I allowed my eyes to flicker over the walls and ceiling. Someone was preparing to implode this entire section of the ship if anything happened to me. My eyes found his again, and I couldn’t help but smirk; it’s always nice to know that someone has your back.

  Whether by a premonition or the possibility that she was just a very astute reader of body language, the young woman seemed to have had enough of our posturing. She marched over and actually grabbed the younger male by the ear and dragged him over to forcefully push him down into one of the chairs scattered about the room. With her other hand, she deftly took his weapon away and tossed it angrily on a table. He didn’t put up much of a fight, and I got the feeling they were related somehow.

  She turned back to me and actually apologized. “I’m sorry about my idiot brother; he often acts rudely without thinking first.” She smiled pleasantly and brushed some of her long sandy-colored hair back behind her ears. My own ears were telling me that the buildup in the bulkhead walls had canceled abruptly and was returning to a normal state.

  “Hey, don’t side with the alien,” her brother whined.

  “Alien?” I huffed. “Hardly. Besides, from my perspective, you are the aliens, as well as trespassers and thieves. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you have broken quite a number of our laws in the time you have been here. And unless your race is even more irresponsible than I think it is, some of your own laws, too.”

  “We could kill them and get it over with, the galaxy would be immeasurably grateful, I’m sure,” Kalaya growled protectively in my implant, still angry about the young male pointing a weapon at me. The idea wasn’t without merit, at least in the larger picture of things, but I have never been a good soldier.

  “No, we can’t just kill them, even if they are humans.”

  The other three must have heard me talking to her. Damn, forgot that they don’t know about her yet. The woman spoke up first.

  “Please, don’t hurt us, we mean no harm.”

  I heard the young guy mumble something under his breath. Pretty sure it was something like “speak for yourself,” not surprising; I get the feeling that I am going to come to hate that kid.

  The older man nodded earnestly. “We meant no disrespect, I assure you. We stumbled across your sanctuary here seeking shelter. Once inside, we were curious about it and the technology. We had no idea it was occupied; you are, after all, the first actual living alien we have had the chance to meet.”

  I’m their first contact? Surely not. “You are all the way out here and you haven’t met one of the other races yet?”

  He shrugged. “The military claims to have highly classified information on a few species, and we aren’t so blindly arrogant as to believe that we are the dominant space-faring race in the universe.” That’s one hell of an understatement, I thought as he continued, “But no, we don’t typically stumble across alien beings in our daily lives, so at least for the three of us, you are the first.”

  “Do you think they understand that the reason they haven’t seen any other races might have something to do with the fact that no one wants to see them?” Kalaya said snidely, and I couldn’t help but snicker slightly. Who knows, in all seriousness, that might be exactly the case.

  The humans stared at me as if I was losing my mind. In fact, I could see the young one eyeing his weapon again. I guess I couldn’t blame them; from their perspective, it probably looked like I was talking to myself.

  “Sorry, just thought of something that made me laugh.” The station that my arm was plugged into chirped a few times, indicating that it had charged all it could. A quick look at my power levels indicated that I was now at eighty-three percent, not a full charge, but it should do for now. Getting up and startling our unwelcome guests again, I started rummaging through the bank of lockers at the back of the room. The third one I tried still contained a mechanic’s jumpsuit and kit. A quick glance at the name patch told me it once belonged to Benn, a sturdy, quiet man who had worked for me for almost two decades. A sharp stab of pain lanced through me as I realized I knew next to nothing about him personally. He showed up for work, did his job well, and assumedly went home every night to the loving arms of a family now long dead, as was he. Some part of that hurt, and hurt
deeply. I gently tore the name tag off the suit and tucked it away in a pocket.

  Donning the mechanic’s garb, I felt more at home, or as much at home as I could ever be again. I followed this up by pulling on a pair of sensory gauntlets and snapped a headset onto one of the implant nodes alongside my skull. They weren’t as advanced as my own, but they would do admirably for now.

  “Looking good, Kodo!” Kalaya said with exaggerated enthusiasm.

  “Glad to hear that someone thinks so, but I still feel naked. I don’t suppose there’s a tool rig around here anywhere?”

  “Sorry, even I don’t want to know the kind of things left behind in those lockers; a couple of our techs were real slobs. I imagine even the passing of centuries cannot wholly erase the stinky-sock stench. You’re on your own on this one.”

  I snorted and opened up another couple of lockers. “Ah, this looks promising.” I saw the top of a tool belt hanging from a hook, the rest of it obscured by yet another jumpsuit. I pulled the much lighter article of clothing out to get at the tools, and I glanced at the name I held gingerly in my hands. Weela, a robotics mechanic, cute little redhead, saucy as hell, but she was good at her job, as all my people were.

  “She had a ‘thing’ for you; you knew that, right?” Kalaya whispered. “But you never gave her so much as a second glance romantically.”

  Huh? Hurriedly, I grabbed the tool harness off the hook at the back of the locker and respectfully replaced Weela’s suit. Resolving to open no more doors to the past, I slammed the metal portal closed. “And you would know this how exactly?”

  “Girls can always tell.” she quipped sadly, and I could tell our conversation was at an end, for the moment at least. I sighed and resigned myself to dealing with our new guests.

  I turned around to find them, mouths agape, staring at me as if I were a madman. I suppose the one-sided conversation they had just witnessed did nothing to abuse them of that notion either. The brown-haired young woman walked nervously up to me and put a concerned hand on my arm.