New Title 2

by S J MacDonald

  ‘They may not even have realised what the weapons are,’ said Silvie, making an unexpected contribution. She had been just sitting there watching with interest as the team shared their data, more interested in how they were interacting than in the information itself, but that caught her attention. ‘We didn’t,’ she pointed out. ‘When human ships first came to Quarus the Excorps guys had to explain what guns were. And that was very nearly a break-off point right there,’ she mused. ‘We’re a peaceful species, of course, and we’ve never developed any weapons technology, ever. So if they’re the same they may well not even have realised that the stubby pyramid things could cause them any harm.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Davie, looking a little startled at Silvie making a sensible, helpful point in a meeting, but giving her a nod of admiration.

  By the time they got back to the rendezvous point they had talked through every aspect of the data from every conceivable angle. By then they’d come up with a list of facts, another of what they all agreed to be high probabilities and a very much longer list of unknowns.

  They had also been extremely busy manufacturing parts for themselves and for the other ships, too, which didn’t have their workshop capacity. They would not be able to replace all their arrays and scanners, but would set up a considerably smaller system which would see them back to spacedocks.

  Alex, in fact, had to deal with a very polite mutiny on the issue of getting to work on the repairs right away. After a couple of hours, when they already had enough parts made to assemble the first bank of an array, a deputation of crew came to the command deck, led by the hullwalker chief.

  ‘We know the risks, skipper,’ the petty officer, like most hullwalkers, was extremely calm and methodical to the point of being obsessive. As he always told trainees, ‘There are careful hullwalkers and there are dead hullwalkers. Decide now which you are going to be.’ ‘But we’re running blind here, and we’re all willing to volunteer.’

  Alex smiled, understanding how unnerving it was for spacers to be hurtling at top speed through dangerous space in a ship without either comms or visual scopes.

  ‘We’re not running blind,’ he assured them. ‘We’re retracing our route so the autopilot alone would be perfectly safe, but we also have the Naos system, of course,’ he indicated the charts which were still being generated on navigation screens. They were created from observation of the engine outputs rather than scanning space itself, so had been unaffected by the loss of external scanners. ‘And we are communicating with the other ships – slowly, true, but quite adequately for our needs at the moment. As for sending out hullwalkers…’ he glanced at conn screens and waited for a few seconds. The ship juddered violently as they ran through an eddy – safe enough, but bouncing people in their seats. Alex looked at them, evidently feeling that the ship had made his point. ‘No.’

  ‘But skipper…’ the deputation seemed to plant themselves more firmly, some looking mulish while others were self-conscious, but all of them sticking to their guns. It was apparent that they had decided not to take no for an answer. ‘We can do it!’ the petty officer said earnestly, and there was a supporting chorus from behind him.

  ‘No,’ said Alex, and held up a hand to forestall further argument. ‘It is too dangerous. If it was a case of having to go out there because the safety of the ship depended on it, I would lead a team out myself. But it isn’t, we’re safe and we’ll manage just fine till we get to the rendezvous, where it will be quiet and safe enough to send people out. But as it is, no, absolutely not.’

  ‘But skipper…’ The PO lowered his voice, ludicrously since he knew everyone was watching on the command deck feed anyway, but leaning forward to address the captain confidentially, ‘What if that Thing – the ship’ he corrected himself hastily, ‘is following us?’

  Alex understood. The idea of the alien ship hovering around them when they couldn’t see it was making the crew edgy.

  ‘I’d be surprised if it wasn’t,’ he said, and as this sent a frisson of alarm through the ship, he smiled. ‘But I don’t consider them any kind of threat. If they wanted to destroy us they’d have done it already. And if they’re seeing us off, making sure that we really are leaving, that is, of course, entirely reasonable. I certainly don’t consider it anything to worry about, and it’s no reason at all to even consider sending hullwalkers out. So – sorry. I appreciate your dedication to the ship, but the answer is no.’ He held up his hand again as their spokesman went to speak. ‘Uh uh.’ He told them. ‘Not another word.’

  There was a general sagging of shoulders as they recognised that he really meant that.

  ‘Okay, skipper,’ the PO acknowledged, but then, moving to their fall-back position, ‘But can we at least send out bots?’

  Alex looked at them, saw their earnest appealing faces, and listened to the quiet of listening ears around the ship. This wasn’t something just coming from them, they clearly had widespread support throughout the ship, the crew just wanting so much to be doing something about the damage.

  Alex knew when to compromise.

  ‘One bot,’ he said. ‘And you drive it. If it survives for an hour I’ll consider deploying the rest.’

  In fact, it didn’t even survive six minutes. The bot was a drone which could either be deployed to carry out routine tasks automatically or operated by a driver from aboard the ship. Normally they were controlled by telemetry feeding through comms but they could also work through cables plugged into telemetry sockets within the bot airlock. The bot itself was a squat object with powerful magnagrip clamps and tiny thrusters to walk itself around the hull, rolling grapnels ahead as it moved. The upper part of it had humanoid arms on a skeletal torso and a boxy ‘head’ of scanners. It had no hands, though. Instead, there were a variety of tools which could be flicked into position. It was operated by a driver wearing hullwalker rig aboard ship, with VR which made it feel as if they were actually out on the hull.

  In theory, these bots should work so well that it should never be necessary to send people out onto the hull at all. In practice, it was often quicker to send out human teams. They did that a lot more often in the Fourth, too, since hullwalker was one of those qualifications that were difficult to get in the regular Fleet and often on people’s wish-list when they came to serve with them. So they had, indeed, far more qualified hullwalkers than any other ship in service, and their chief was considered the best of them all.

  So, he walked out the bot and started it getting to work on removing part of the wrecked array so that they could install a replacement panel. It seemed to be working quite well, withstanding the juddering as they ran through turbulence.

  And then in the next moment … it wasn’t. It would need slo-mo to see what actually happened. One second it was taking a carefully controlled, cautious step and the next it was off the hull, thrown off and held at the last moment by its safety tether. Two more metres out and it would have fallen out of the superlight bubble surrounding the ship – invisible but unimaginably powerful multidimensional energies. Anything that fell out of that bubble would be wrenched off the ship and destroyed entirely, so fast that there was no unit of time small enough to measure it.

  Hanging off the safety tether, though, all was not lost. That was the point of it, after all – a simple rewind would bring the bot back to the hull.

  Only, it didn’t. There was no time even to start rewinding it, as a lurching jolt hit the ship and transmitted through the cable, swinging the bot back towards them.

  It hit the hull at about 300 kph. Parts of it were duralloy but much was not. It slammed into the already shattered comms array, crashed through it and hit the hull so hard they actually heard the thud aboard the ship. They couldn’t even reel in what was left of the bot by its telemetry cable, as it had got so tangled up in the wreckage of the comms array.

  Nothing more was said, after that, about sending out hullwalkers.

  Twenty Three

  There was, of course, massive con
sternation on the Stepeasy and Comrade Foretold, seeing them arrive long before anyone was expecting them and in such a battered state, too. The Comrade Foretold, indeed, went immediately to battle stations, revealing a previously concealed armament which packed considerable punch for their size.

  It wasn’t long before Alex managed to convey, by means of flick comms, that they were otherwise undamaged and had no casualties, but that he would appreciate shuttles coming out to each of the damaged ships to handle comms for them while they were undertaking repairs.

  So, that was what happened. Slowed right down now and moving in a holding pattern within the calm space where they’d left the others, the Stepeasy sent a shuttle to each of them which, docked on to an airlock but remaining powered up, was able to provide a comlink. It was still quite limited, but a huge improvement on the painfully slow flick comms.

  And it was established just in time – eight minutes after their arrival at the rendezvous point, the signal triggered by their appearance at the edge of the nanoweb rippled through data transmission in the nanoweb around them.

  All of them saw it in the same moment – their own four ships powering by at top speed. And there, just a heartbeat behind them, was the alien ship.

  It was on scopes only for a moment – 1.32 seconds to be precise – but it was an extraordinary moment. It dwarfed their own ships, made them look like plankton. And it moved, as previous observers had noted, like a living thing. It was evident that its operators realised that they’d come within range of a scanner, as they reacted to the nanoweb at once. There was no turning arc, no impression of a ship responding to thrusters. It simply flipped around, as a living creature might when changing course in panic. There was no evident pulsing of its softly gleaming surface, but the long pale tentacles whipped around and thrashed back to stream behind it as it whirled away.

  Nobody spoke for a couple of seconds, on the Heron at least. They were coming to terms with the fact that the skipper had been right, that the Thing had been following them, right on their heels all the way back from Aseltor. It was necessary to remind themselves that it was, in fact, a ship, and not the monster it appeared to be. More than one member of the crew had to deal with a sudden sense of chill.

  Alex, however, regarded the footage quietly for a moment and then broke into a wonderful smile, his face aglow with pure delight.

  ‘That,’ he decreed, ‘is just beautiful.’

  People caught their breath, looked back at the repeating image again and, for most of them at least, felt their perspective shift from fear to wonder. And then people started to cheer, realising that they actually had seen the Phenomenon, not just in orbit at Aseltor but right there, moving with a speed and grace no human-built ship could even begin to approach.

  But that, it was felt, was all they were going to get.

  ‘They’ve seen us leaving,’ Alex observed. ‘And I believe that that is all they want.’ A little grimace crossed his face. ‘I can only hope that the speed with which we did respond to their order to go has calmed things down there and we haven’t caused a global-panic disaster.’

  ‘We couldn’t do any more, dear boy,’ said Buzz.

  ‘And we can’t do any more,’ Davie agreed, ‘other than to respect their wishes and leave them alone. But…’ he looked enquiringly at Alex. ‘Wecip?’ he queried.

  Alex considered. A wecip was a drone programmed with first contact greetings and an introductory data pack – it was nicknamed a wecip from the ancient first contact greeting which had now become just a joke, ‘We Come In Peace’. There was no way Alex would contemplate firing such a drone back towards Aseltor, but at the same time he was reluctant to leave without leaving a door open for the possibility of contact at some point in the future.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, and as Davie looked as if he wanted to discuss it, gestured at the ship, ‘Right now, let’s just focus on the job in hand.’

  Once repairs were under way, though, Alex did transmit briefings to the other ships and received reports from them, too.

  The other ships involved had been carrying out their own analysis and discussion too, of course, and were keen to share their findings and conclusions.

  All of them had realised at some point that the sound they had been hearing were voices speaking words, and all had managed to identify the root origin of the language. The Fourth’s ships had been far more successful in translation because they had the Samartian matrix which had provided several key matches in vocabulary and grammar. The Heron, of course, had also had Shion, so they’d arrived at reasonably confident translation a great deal faster.

  It was interesting, though, how differently each of the skippers had interpreted the information that they had, including scans and images from Aseltor and their translation of the comms blast.

  Harry Alington believed that the alien ship was part of a quarantine system, working with the beacon/sonic ray to protect Carrea Rensis from contamination. His theory was that their comms had been taken out because it might be believed in some way that even comms broadcasts might present a danger or breach quarantine rules.

  Dan Tarrance, on the other hand, believed that the damage to their comms and scanners might well be accidental, the result of incompatible tech. In support of this, he pointed out that that the first time the Gider had arrived at the Diplomatic Corps contact ship out at their border, they had transmitted data with such speed and enthusiasm that it had taken out comms and crashed part of their computer systems. He saw no evidence for weapons and, like Silvie, did not think that the sonic ray had any defensive function.

  Skipper Florez was still attempting to reconcile the evidence of the ship and sonic ray with the lack of any space infrastructure or evidence of groundside technologies. They had been focusing on the data from the planet and he was, by then, prepared to state that there was no evidence of power generation, not even of powered vehicles, at least, not powered by any method which registered on any form of analysis they had. He was not yet willing to accept that the ship and sonic ray had been provided by a third party, preferring to unravel out all the possible solutions the Excorps team could think of to that mystery.

  The reactions of the two ships left behind when they were sent the data were also very different. The Stepeasy had no more immediate response than wow!, clearly not expecting to be able to add much to the analysis already carried out by the Fourth and Excorps.

  The Comrade Foretold, on the other hand, were absolutely clear on what they believed. Entirely predictably, the LIA reacted with the paranoia of their species. It was with some difficulty that Alex prevented them from racing off then and there to take the dreadful news to Telathor – the dreadful news that their ships had been attacked by hostiles displaying superior technology which had first blinded their ships and then followed them covertly.

  ‘There is imminent danger of further attacks,’ Harard Perkins declared. ‘And a terrifying risk that they are or perhaps already have identified our planet of origin and may carry out hostile incursion at Telathor. It is vital, vital, that we return to Telathor with the utmost speed to warn them.’ And then, with a bitter note directed at Alex, ‘You have unleashed a hostile force which is now a dreadful threat to the security of the League, perhaps even to humanity itself.’

  Davie, reading this, shook his head incredulously.

  ‘What are they on?’ he wondered. ‘What universe do these people live in?’

  Alex gave a rueful smile. ‘A universe,’ he observed, ‘of fearful shadows.’

  It took some firm negotiating to convince the LIA to stay with them, which they agreed to do mostly on the basis that the squadron would be heading back at high speed anyway and the few hours they would gain by leaving now would be counteracted by the fact that they did not have the Naos system. True, they could retrace the route safely just using autopilot, but the very nature of the space meant that it was in constant flux and without being able to read those changes they would have to go very slo
wly through uncertain areas and even then with a high degree of risk.

  They were in the calm zone for seventeen hours, the time it took them to clear the debris from their hulls and install a basic scanner and comms system on the damaged ships. Then they reformed their squadron formation and departed.

  But not before they had deposited a wecip. Alex had made his decision. Leaving a buoy here would enable a signal to be transmitted throughout the nanoweb. That signal would be short and simple.

  ‘We are very sorry that we alarmed you. We wished only to greet you. We represent the League of Worlds, a sistering of three hundred and twenty four worlds. We have left a sterile buoy at these coordinates containing information about us. We will not approach your world again. We wish you peace and happiness.’

  Alex had put his foot down over all attempts to persuade him to say ‘we are a peaceful people’ or to describe the League as ‘three hundred and twenty four worlds bound together in peace and friendship’.

  ‘We are not,’ he said, ‘introducing ourselves with anything we would then have to apologise for later when they find out the truth.’

  Davie went into fits of giggles over that, mostly over the indignation on Skipper Florez’s face and the outrage on Harard Perkins’s.

  Harard became even more outraged, and extremely vocal about it, too, when he learned that the buoy they were leaving would contain the standard first contact information pack. Which included, to his horror, a map of the League identifying all their worlds.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he demanded, in tones which added ‘You idiot!’ as clearly as if he’d yelled it in Alex’s face. ‘You can’t give hostiles information like that! You shouldn’t give hostiles any information at all, but disclosing the locations of our worlds is absolutely insane, criminally insane!’ He squared up with bullish intent. ‘If you try to leave such information for them,’ he snapped, ‘I will have no choice but to do my duty and destroy that buoy myself – giving away such information to hostiles is positively treasonous!’