One thing was for sure, though. This was not a welcome. This was panic. And that meant that there was only one thing that Alex could do.
He pulled the Heron out of orbit as fast as the frigate could turn. The other ships turned with them because their conns were locked on, following the Heron’s lead.
‘Skipper?’ Silvie’s voice was very small. She didn’t experience fear as humans did but she was shocked by the noise and being confused by the shock and alarm of the crew, too.
Alex took her hand and gripped it reassuringly. He was experiencing a tumult of emotions himself – the pure delight at seeing the Phenomenon actually there in orbit had been swept aside by huge concern for the panic they were causing on that world. If it was anything like the global panic on a human world then there might well be casualties, injuries, even deaths. If there were, he would have them on his conscience for the rest of his life.
Right now, though, all he could do was focus on pulling back his ships and keeping things calm on the Heron.
Silvie caught her breath as she felt the full force of Alex’s emotions in that moment. His drive to protect was overwhelming. He was doing everything he could and would do anything necessary to protect the people of that world, his own crew and herself. He would give his own life in that cause without a moment’s hesitation.
Silvie relaxed. If there was one thing in this bewildering situation that she could be absolutely sure of, it was that if it was humanly possible to keep her safe, Alex von Strada would do it.
She was not the only one who felt that, though others did not feel it so intensively or even consciously – a glance at the skipper on screens told everyone that he had things under control. He was issuing crisp orders for maximum acceleration – barely necessary orders, in fact. Morry Morelle, in engineering, was pulling dampers off the engines so that they blazed into life. A tremor ran through the ship just with the force of that sudden surge to their superlight field. Jace Higgs, at the helm, was sweating as he urged the ship on with every thruster adding whatever tiny boost it could, even his stomach muscles tensed and hands clamped on controls as if attempting to force the ship on by sheer effort and willpower.
‘We’ve lost comms!’ Buzz was obliged to shout to be heard over the screaming, though he was sitting right next to the captain. Alex gave him a wordless nod of acknowledgment. He could see that on damage control screens, too – all their external comms arrays had redlined, reporting zero functionality. Diagnostics was reporting that telemetry links had been severed so completely that neither backup nor tertiary backup systems could engage. They had lost visual scopes, too, all the hullside cameras non-responsive.
Alex knew that the Minnow, Whisker and Florez were still with them, though – heatscan was still operating and he could see their clear, distinctive profiles keeping pace with the frigate.
‘Ah!’ Shion’s exclamation was lost in the shrieking clamour, but Alex saw her head snap up and looked across at her. Shion was on the command deck in a dual capacity – partly to look after Silvie and partly in the hope that she might be needed to assist as an interpreter. It was a role she’d undertaken before, and one which she was about to excel in again.
The screen she was showing, sharing and enlarging so that all of them could see it, told them that the sound they were hearing was actually voices – human voices, sped up and raised to a much higher frequency. She had not only been able to slow them down and bring them down to a comprehensible pitch, but even to recognise the root origins of the language they were speaking. Already, odd words were being plucked out of the cacophony as her fingers blurred over screens, building a translation matrix.
One word stood out – dapra, repeated frantically many times by each of the voices Shion was isolating from the howl. It was being translated as ‘depart’ with an implied command – an imperative verb, for sure, probably meaning something like ‘Go away’ and perhaps even, given tone and context, ‘Get the hell away from us.’
Well, they were already doing that, and going as fast as they could, too. There was no more they could do, though with that dreadful shrieking dinning in their ears it didn’t seem anything like enough. Every second seemed to take hours to drag by and the frigate seemed to be responding like a sluggish old whalebelly wallowing along.
Then, nineteen seconds after it had started, the screaming stopped just as abruptly as it had begun. It left their ears ringing in the sudden silence – or at least, what seemed like silence until they became aware of all the alerts that had been beeping and fleeping away, inaudible till then.
Everyone looked at Alex. In a similar situation at Samart, chased out of their space by Samartian warships, he had turned the Heron into a long orbit at the point where the warships defined the border of their defended territory by letting them go. It was possible that he might do the same here, putting them into a holding pattern now that they were out of the range in which the people on that planet were screaming at them to leave.
Alex, though, pointed forwards, indicating that they were going to go on. At the same time, he set their destination to the point where they had left the Stepeasy and Comrade Foretold, at maximum speed all the way. At that rate it would only take them eleven hours to get back to the rendezvous. They had not laid nanoweb more than a few hours closer than that; Alex had felt that laying unknown technology right to the system might be perceived as a hostile or invasive act. Even if they had laid nanoweb, though, they were by then travelling so fast that they’d have outrun the signal detecting and reporting their presence. And they could not, as Buzz confirmed, have used it to transmit a signal to the waiting ships anyway, as they had entirely lost their comms capability.
‘All comms – our own, all the shuttles and the fighters,’ Buzz said, as near to shaken as Alex had ever seen him. ‘We’ve put a bot out to take a look, and…’
He shared the images the hull-bot had brought back, and Alex winced. Their comms arrays were shattered, as comprehensively destroyed as if they’d been made of glass and someone had set to work with a very big hammer. Or rather, Alex realised, as he took in the nature of the damage, as if they’d been struck by a powerful shock-wave. But if so, it was a strangely selective shock-wave. It had taken out comms right around the hull, whilst at the same time leaving navigation and even weapons systems untouched. Thrusters and guns right next to devastated comms arrays were fully functional, untouched. As the bot had not detected any flashes of light from the corvette, patrol ship or Excorps, it seemed safe to assume that they were in the same condition.
‘They took out our comms and cameras,’ Buzz observed.
‘Impressive!’ said Davie, eyes alight with the potential of such technology. But he was working with Shion, too, trying to make sense of the howl which had continued to shriek at them even after their comms had been destroyed. They had, so far, identified an initial thirty two elements within the cacophony at the point when it started, which had risen to three hundred and sixty nine by the end. The pattern was clear – thirty two voices had reacted immediately to their arrival, with others joining in very rapidly to the point where the signal had broken off.
Within a minute, Shion had isolated one of the first voices and was able to play it for them at normal speed and pitch.
‘Dapra! Dapra! Nagis apret, verbit encon! Dapra, amos, dapra!’
The voice was male, shouting and terrified. Recognising the same root language the Olaret had given to all of their Nestings, Shion had managed a pretty high-confidence translation, making due allowance for the changes in language which would have occurred over ten thousand years of isolation. They were greatly assisted, in that, by the Samartian matrix they had compiled the year before.
‘Go away! Go away! Do not approach, it is forbidden to meet! Go away, for love, go away.’
The other voices were all saying pretty much the same thing, so far as Shion’s translation had progressed. The word taboo was coming up quite often, with several voices stating that it was taboo t
o meet with Osat, which Shion translated roughly as ‘Outsiders’. Others used the word forbidden.
It was, at any rate, overwhelmingly clear that the people of that world did not want to make contact.
It was a crushing blow. To have come all that way, to have found a lost world and had only seconds to glimpse it before its inhabitants blew out their comms and screamed at them to go away … it was beyond disappointing. Many of the crew were looking appalled, a few were so scared they were shaking. And it was all, at that moment, down to Alex to hold things together.
He did so, not by making any speeches but by demonstrating that he at least did not regard this as a crisis.
‘Ms Field.’ Luci Field was junior conn officer this watch, assisting Martine Fishe whose watch it was, or would have been if the captain hadn’t taken over. She was attempting, then, a futile effort to find some way to bypass the damage to their comms arrays. When the skipper spoke to her she took a moment to respond, not quite able to believe that he would be paying attention to her in the midst of this calamity.
Alex, however, spoke calmly, even with the hint of a smile.
‘We are about,’ he told her, ‘to undertake a procedure you will not have encountered since your first year in the Academy, so you may want to take notes.’
Luci Field stared at him. All junior officers were supposed to make training notes of any procedures they carried out for the first time, and those on secondment to the Fourth hardly had a day go by without some experience to record in their training logs. To make such a comment at such a time, though, reduced this situation to the level of a useful training opportunity.
‘Yes sir,’ she managed, and grabbed rather convulsively to open a training log note-screen.
Alex gave her a small but approving nod, and accessed the PA.
‘All stations,’ he said, matter of factly. ‘Stand ready for flick comms.’
Luci was not the only one who had to look that up. All spacers knew that there was an ancient comms method which could be used by ships which had lost their arrays, but it was so very rarely used that it was more a matter of historical interest than modern usage. The Fleet had dropped it from practical training decades ago. The only mention of it, really, as Alex had referred to, was a one-hour class on emergency comms procedures held in week thirteen of Year One Operations training at the Academy.
It was a code which relied on heatscan signatures being clear enough to detect changes in orientation, which they were here, with the corvette and patrol ship close alongside and the Excorps ship directly below. It was a fairly limited means of communication, using a lexicon of set commands, questions and responses and an alphabetical system which might take several minutes to transmit even a simple message. But it was better than the nothing that they currently had.
So the Heron started to signal the others. The first message Alex sent out was ‘Report damage and casualties’, the closest he could get to ‘Everyone all right?’ In order to signal this the frigate dipped its nose eight degrees and rolled fourteen degrees to starboard, holding that position for six seconds and then returning to previous orientation.
Alex was prepared to keep repeating this until the others realised what he was doing and looked up flick comms themselves, but the Minnow, at least, responded at once. It made several tilts, rocks and rolls, clearly defined on the heatscan and readily interpreted as ‘Comms inoperable, zero casualties.’
Harry was on the ball. And he had, for once, outperformed Dan Tarrance. Dan, the computer specialist, was still trying to find a technological solution, while Harry had simply gone to the Fleet handbook on what to do when your comms were out of action and beyond immediate repair. Skipper Florez realised what they were doing very quickly, too, though there was a brief delay while they looked up the codes and signalled back ‘Zero casualties, comms inoperable.’ It took a couple more repeats before someone on the patrol ship recognised that their odd ducks and twists were actually purposeful, and managed to respond. Then they too signalled ‘comms inoperable, zero casualties’. By that time, Harry Alington was asking if he should report aboard the Heron by shuttle.
That was incredibly brave, and/or incredibly stupid. It was risky enough flying shuttles in this kind of space as it was, as they were far more vulnerable than the triple-hulled warships. Docking on to a superlight ship without comms or cameras was theoretically possible, using heatscan and grapnels, but that too would be extremely dangerous and only to be contemplated if lives were at stake.
Alex told all three ships that they were not to launch shuttles, then conveyed a message which took four minutes of flick manoeuvres to complete. Human voices – go away, forbidden. Respect. Rendezvous.
All three ships signalled their understanding. The people of that world had made their wishes very clear. The Fourth was to respect that and return to their rendezvous point. There was no more than really needed to be said, right then.
Though that did not stop them talking about it, of course. Aboard the Heron, they were already having an operations meeting in which they pooled what each of them had been able to discover or to figure out.
That the world they had discovered was Carrea Rensis now seemed beyond reasonable doubt. Its location, the obvious relevance of the name ‘Place of the Islands’ and above all the fact that they spoke a derivation of the same root as all the other Olaret nestings made that apparent. It was also only too clear that they had more advanced technology than that of the League, too.
‘My best guess,’ Davie reported, ‘is that they hit us with some kind of focussed energy beam capable of transmitting sound waves – both the damage caused to the comms and the fact that the ship was acting like an amplifier support that. But as to the nature of that beam and how they were able to focus it so exactly over such huge distances, well…’ he shrugged eloquently. ‘Not a clue!’
‘The observations we were able to take of their system and planet do not indicate that they possess even moderate levels of technology,’ said Buzz, and as they all looked at him in surprise, ‘Yes, I know they do, obviously, there’s the ship and what I have to call, for lack of any better term, the sonic ray, but just look at the pictures we took.’ He indicated several still holos on the datatable between them. ‘If you were just going by these, leaving the ship out of it for a moment, well, just look. Where are the system defences, stations, satellites, or any evidence at all of spacefaring capacity? Where are the cities or industrial centres groundside, or on any other body in the system? There’s no evidence of mining, power generation or any kind of advanced agriculture. If we were going purely on the images and spectral analysis of the atmosphere, this looks very much like a pre-industrial society. Yet they were able to detect us before we entered their system, take out our comms and maintain that sonic broadcast a hundred times further than any of our comms can transmit. So, despite appearances, it is evident that they are a far more advanced culture than our own.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Davie, surprising them given his own admission that he had no idea about that sonic ray.
‘But – the ship,’ Buzz tapped a finger on an image of it, as if feeling that Davie needed reminding of how huge and strange it was, clearly far beyond the current capability of humankind.
‘It isn’t theirs,’ said Davie and Shion together, in perfect unison and with absolute certainty. Then as they glanced at one another Shion ceded the explanation to him with a deferential gesture. ‘They did not build that ship,’ Davie stated. ‘I don’t care how advanced a civilisation is, they can’t produce a ship like that out of thin air. There has to be infrastructure, some kind of spacedocks for construction and maintenance. Mr B is right, there is no infrastructure in that system, not even the kind of power signatures you might expect if they were using forcefield-based technologies. Both the ship and whatever they used – all right, let’s call it a sonic ray if we must – are totally out of synch with all the other evidence for this being a pre-industrial society. And that, to me, l
ooks like they’ve acquired that ship and sonic ray, along with the skills to operate them, from a third party. When that happened, or why, or whether they’re still in contact with them, we can only speculate. But I’d lay you any odds you like that that ship came from another and very much more advanced society. And I’d hazard a good guess, too, that the sonic ray they hit us with is a modified version of the quarantine beacons we already know about.’
Alex nodded thoughtfully. They already knew of two examples of ancient beacons which were still functioning even after ten thousand years. One was the Veil technology which still protected Pirrell today, causing all ships approaching the system to vibrate with increasing intensity until they were forced to turn back or be destroyed. A similar but very much weaker system was still in operation at Korvold, causing tremors and electronic glitches aboard ships of sufficient size which came within its range. Alex was also aware that both beacons had been installed actually within their respective stars, beyond the current ability either of Pirrellothians or humans even to detect, let alone access.
‘If it is,’ he observed, ‘either they’ve remembered how to use it over ten thousand years of isolation, or someone has taught them how. Either way – and we have no way to know – it is significant that they targeted our comms and cameras but left our weapons systems untouched. Assuming for the moment that that was deliberate, that implies that they were terrified by the possibility that we would look closely at their world and yet unperturbed by the possibility that we might fire guns or missiles at them.
‘The nature of what they said,’. Buzz observed, ‘is also very much focussed on fear of contact, of meeting, with no mention at all of either threatening to shoot or asking us not to. It’s as if they felt that even to receive a comms signal from us would be in some way damaging to them, so much so that they weren’t concerned about the risk of weapons fire at all.’
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