Throughout, it was clear that they had their audience’s attention. The Samartian ships had obviously turned back towards them as the frigate began to fire guns, and were lurking at the edge of their scopes. They slipped in and out of the Heron’s range, but were never off scopes for more than a few seconds.
For the last three minutes, the Heron was clearly building to a finale. They made quite a point of firing the Ignite, drawing attention to it and the fact that it was heading directly away from Samart, slow, but very difficult to detect even when you knew it was there. Once it had left their scopes, the Heron went into a routine that took them through a vertical loop, through which the Samartians could see the fighters diving through deceleration to go sublight.
They dropped to hypersonic speed, spraying water droplets as they span in tight formation, spiralling so fast that their image blurred. The fighters had been specially adapted for this, with additional hydrogen and oxygen tanks aboard, along with a combining unit and a broad-angle spray nozzle fitted externally. The water droplets froze instantly, creating a fine mist of ice particles. The mist had a density of fewer than a hundred million particles per cubic metre; two hundred kilograms of micro-droplets sprayed within a region of around five thousand kilometres in diameter. That was far below the level at which it would become visible to human eyes – less than a hundredth of the density of the nebula they’d traversed to get here. It would, however, show up on astrogation scanners, a rapidly forming swirl that showed up red on their own scopes, as an area too dense for safe navigation.
The fighters span apart and accelerated on precise 120 degree angles, shooting out of the sphere that they’d made. As they shot back into superlight speed they looped, trailing plasma, creating a petal effect as they came back to the Heron. Frigate and fighters carried out the manoeuvre designated ‘Cascade 9’, a tumble that carried them around the ice cloud at a distance of a million klicks.
Exactly on time, as they peeled apart with a simultaneous broadside salute from the frigate and all three fighters, the Ignite detonated. This time, even they couldn’t see it coming back in – for the last few vital seconds, it flooded with coolants which effectively wiped it even off heatscan.
Again, there was nothing to see of the explosion on visual scopes. Heatscan, however, lit up with the radiance of a supernova burst, a sphere of highly energised tachyons surging outward from the point of detonation. It was the biggest explosion League technology could produce. It would certainly be apparent to the Samartians that it was a stealth missile with an explosion which could utterly destroy a planet.
‘Orbital course,’ Alex commanded.
‘Sir.’ Gunny Norsten had already got that programmed. As soon as they knew the limit of Samartian defended territory, the astrogator had modelled a sphere around Samart and plotted a course that would take them in long orbit around it.
It took the Samartian ships several seconds to respond to that, seconds during which nobody moved or spoke aboard the frigate. Everyone was watching scopes, holding their breath – Jermane Taerling even had his hand clasped over his mouth. No order had been given for silent running, but he’d learned enough by now to recognise that the skipper did not need to give such an order at such a time. There were contingency plans, of course, for everything that they’d been able to think that the Samartians might do in response to this move. Full on attack was certainly one of those possibilities – a strong possibility, if the Samartians saw this swinging into orbit round their homeworld as defying their order to leave.
The reaction they were all hoping for, though, was for the Samartians to swing into a mirroring orbit their side of the border, tracking them.
Six seconds, seven... Alex could almost sense the discussions taking place on the other ships, the question in the air, ‘Do we attack, leave, or track them?’
In this, the last eight hours became crucial. They had not responded to being fired upon in that first warning blast of missiles. They had obeyed the order to leave Samartian space and had done so directly, no posturing. They hadn’t launched fighters or probes, and had made no attempt to negotiate. That might just, Alex hoped, be sufficient to have convinced the skippers of those ships that the frigate was not an immediate threat.
‘Yes!’ Davie was the first to see that the Samartian ships were spinning onto a parallel course. He gave Alex a delighted grin, mixed with some relief. ‘Good call, boss!’
A gleam of amusement showed in Alex’s eyes, briefly.
‘Thank you,’ he said, with a dry note which effectively conveyed that he did not need, or want, anybody else’s approval. All his attention was on the two fuzzy blips on their long range scopes.
Everyone was watching the Samartian ships. They had to have been able to see what the frigate was doing, and if that hadn’t impressed them, nothing would. Nothing that the Heron could do, anyway. It was their finest effort, displaying both combat skills and the technological reach of their weapons. And now, they waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
‘They’re just not going to respond, are they?’ said Mako Ireson sadly, as an hour came and went, with no communication from the Samartians at all.
‘Perhaps it’s time to consider contacting them, now,’ Jermane said, with more hope than realism.
Several of the crew within earshot laughed at the civilians.
‘We waited eight and a half weeks for the Gider,’ Ali Jezno pointed out. ‘We may well have to wait for them to send to Samart, showing them what we did, and for people there to make a decision on whether to talk to us, and send that back out to them. It’s more likely to be days than hours.’
They did not, however, have to wait that long. Just nine hours and eighty three minutes after the conclusion of their display, a signal carrier was fired from the Samartian ships. Again, it shot past them, broadcasting a short text message.
‘Manae atalos.’
The translation matrix that Jermane had been working on, based on a combination of the languages believed to be related to Samartian, rendered that in direct translation as ‘Species identity’. Jermane himself, with a whoop of delight, suggested that the most probable reading should be, ‘Identify yourselves.’ Davie, though, went for a rather more colloquial interpretation, with his ‘Who are you people?’
Alex grinned. However things might go from here, they had already achieved more than any other ship known to have approached Samart in the last two thousand years. They had established First Effective Contact.
‘Wait five minutes,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll launch the probe.’
The five minute wait seemed like a very long time. Alex was relaxed, noting with thanks a report from the tech observation team telling him that the signal carrier fired out by the Samartian ship was on a long ellipse which would take it back to them.
‘They’re not single-use disposable, like our probes,’ Misha Tregennis informed him, along with a report which included footage of the probe in the moment that it had hurtled past them. Stills grabbed from that revealed something that looked more like a miniature starship than a missile-type probe. It had a power source as hot as a superlight mix core, manoeuvring thrusters and a bristle of sensors and transmitters. They were all much smaller than anything the League had in production, though Misha did not think that there was anything there beyond their ability to manufacture. It was just that it would be prohibitively expensive when standard sized tech was far cheaper.
Jermane watched just a little wistfully as the probe he’d helped to program was fired off in response. If it had been his decision, that probe would have carried the full first contact package, giving detailed information about themselves and the League. Instead, the skipper had insisted on just a few words, to be broadcast both in League Standard and their best guess at Samartian.
‘We represent the League. Bring someone empowered to negotiate.’
Jermane had agonised over that wording. The imperative ‘bring’, he’d suggeste
d, might cause offence. It would be better to say ‘We wish’ or ‘We would like’. Alex had ruled otherwise. They had shown respect for Samartian authority while within their territory, but they were not, he said, going to hover at the border asking to talk to someone like cold-call sales reps.
Fourteen minutes later, the Samartian signal carrier flashed past them again, transmitting just one word.
‘Tarros.’
‘Wait.’ Said the translation matrix and Davie, simultaneously.
So, they waited. Taking the instruction literally, they moved into a holding orbit, circling on a three minute loop which was immediately matched by the Samartians.
They had repeated that loop five thousand, four hundred and seventy six times before anything changed. It was a long, frustrating six and a half days. They could see the Samartian ships right there on their long range scopes. The temptation to try to get a closer look at them, if not to attempt further communication, was ever present. For some of them, like Jermane Taerling, it was a torment.
‘What if they tell us to go?’ he agonised. ‘Will we just leave, without even having seen them?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said, simply. ‘We have to respect their decision.’
A hundred and sixty four hours after telling them to wait, though, the Samartians fired off a probe which signalled another word.
‘Pursos.’
‘Follow,’ the matrix translated, with a note which added that the ‘os’ suffix was confirmed as indicating a command imperative. After a wait of several minutes, the Samartian ships turned onto a new course, and Alex gave Gunny a nod.
So, the Heron followed the Samartian ships, keeping their distance and making no further attempt to communicate. Their course was not taking them in towards Samart, but would take them on another orbital course.
‘We can only hope that they’re taking us to meet a negotiator,’ Jermane observed. ‘But what if it’s a trap? They might have decided that we’re just too dangerous to let go, and be leading us into an ambush.’
Alex didn’t smile.
‘Yes, that’s quite possible,’ he agreed. ‘And if they attack us in force, of course, we stand no chance.’
He let that hang, and Jermane’s expression turned from one of shock into anxiety.
‘But…’ he said, and floundered, having hoped for rather more in the way of reassurance than that. ‘But you don’t think they will, do you, skipper?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Alex said. ‘I hope not, but I’m not about to give any definite assurances on that point, because I can’t. Their ships are faster than ours and have greater firepower. They also, evidently, have longer range scopes than we do and the ability to communicate between their ships and perhaps even all the way back to their homeworld. The two ships there could take us out any time they wanted to. The only assurance we have is that they did fire warning shots at first encounter and have refrained from firing at us since. Frankly, Mr Taerling, we have very little choice at this point. I believe the risk of following them is worth it, balanced against everything we stand to gain if we succeed, so I am not prepared to turn back now. Would you be, if you were in my place?’
Jermane hesitated for a moment, then gave a rueful grin.
‘Well, actually, no,’ he admitted. ‘If you were turning back I’d be begging you to reconsider. It’s just so scary – for me at least – that they won’t talk to us. I mean, yes, I know, we’ve got to First Effective Contact and that’s marvellous, or at least, we’re the first ship we know of to achieve FEC. But what if other ships before us have got this far, or further, and just never made it back? I don’t want to be melodramatic about it, but it has to be faced, there is a chance that they might kill us all, or even, you know, that we could end up being captured and taken to, you know… labs.’
Alex didn’t laugh. He knew as well as Jermane himself that the response of governments to unknown ships coming into their space had, historically, been to capture them and take their crews to secret facilities for interrogation and scientific study. That being the case, it was far from being a ludicrous fear. ‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘but we all knew that risk when we crossed the border. And are you really telling me that you wish, now, that you’d stayed with the Stepeasy?’
Jermane looked shocked again.
‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘Not at all, skipper! I was, well, I guess I was…’ he hesitated, then gave an abashed grin, ‘I guess I was just expecting you to steady my nerves with a ‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine.’’ He admitted.
‘Oh, I see.’ Alex looked amused, too. ‘I credited you with more intelligence than that,’ he said, with a teasing note. ‘But if groundless platitudes will help, then by all means,’ he changed his tone to one of lordly patronage, ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Taerling, it will be fine.’
Jermane laughed, and in doing so he did feel better. He still didn’t have much of an appetite for lunch, but he was able to swallow enough to appease Simon, with his eagle eye on stress levels and nutrition.
They followed the Samartian ships for three days before they came to a point where eight more ships of the same type came out on an intercept course. The original two ships which had been escorting them promptly departed, or at least, headed off the range of the Heron’s screens. The eight ships which had replaced them adopted an elliptical holding course, making no attempt to signal them.
The Heron dropped in neatly to match the Samartian course, remaining at the distance the Samartians had themselves maintained. The Samartians were in tight formation – much closer than Fleet ships would consider safe, barely a hundred kilometres between them.
‘And now, I suppose, we sit and wait again,’ said Jermane, fatalistically. ‘For days and days and days.’
As it happened, they only had to wait fourteen hours and sixty three minutes before the Samartians fired a comms probe past them. This time it carried significantly more communication, too.
‘Dakaelin Jurore Tell.’ The matrix could not translate that and both Davie and Jermane had tagged it as likely to be a name, or a title, or a combination of them. Jermane’s interpretation of the subsequent words was, ‘Empowered to speak for the World’. He tagged that rapidly with an exo-briefing telling Alex and the others that it was common to find that worlds making exo-contact for the first time had a name for their world which translated as ‘World’, as if up to that point they had believed their world to be the world. That seemed to be the case, here. They certainly did not identify themselves as ‘Samart’. ‘Identify yourselves,’ the signal concluded.
Davie’s translation, as always, was more idiomatic.
‘I am Daekalen Jurore Tell, I represent this world. Who are you?’
Whichever interpretation was correct, Alex waited ten minutes then responded with the signal he had already decided on.
‘I am Captain Alexis Sean von Strada. I am here as Envoy from the League of Worlds.’
The signal carried a visual image – his official Fleet ID holo – and a copy of his official accreditation as Presidential Envoy.
It was forty three minutes before they responded, and when they did, their answer made it clear that negotiations were going to have to start at a very basic level.
‘What is ‘League’?’ the matrix translated.
Alex had said from the outset that it was unlikely the Samartians would know much about them, but even so it had been hard for them all to believe that Samart really could know nothing about the League. As far as they were concerned, at least, it was the biggest and most powerful union of worlds within human space. And, logically, if they had heard even myth and rumour about Samart, it seemed reasonable that Samart should at least have some mythology about them.
Clearly, however, the Samartians had no idea who they were, so contact really was going to have to start from absolute beginnings.
Half an hour later, therefore, they transmitted a star map with the League’s borders and worlds identified. Even Jermane, by then, wa
s happy with that, not pressing for the much bigger recommended first-contact information bundle to be sent.
It was two days before the Samartians replied. When they did, it was with a series of fuzzy images and an interrogative which Davie and Jermane agreed meant, ‘Did these belong to you?’
This time, they needed time themselves to identify the images, confirming as best they could that they were, in fact, Prisosan ships. It was two hours later that they sent a probe with a ‘negative’ signal, along with a map indicating Prisos as the planet of origin of those previous attempts at contact.
Given the pace of the communication so far, the Samartian response came with remarkable speed, just eleven minutes later. This time it was a much sharper image of Marfikian Thorns, accompanied by the interrogative, ‘Do you know these?’
Alex had spent hours with his command team, choosing the best possible images and information to convey the situation in as small a databurst as possible. If it had been left to the Diplomatic Corps, at this point they would have been transmitting an explanation which began with the disastrous first contact with Marfik nearly two thousand years before and which would include the usual justification of the League’s decision to pull back into defending their own borders.
Alex, however, merely sent them thirteen seconds of holo recording along with their best guess at ‘Yes.’
The recording was of a Marfikian attack on a convoy making its way toward Cherque. There were more than fifty freighters and three liners in the convoy, under a Fleet escort of eight warships. It was footage shot forty six years previously, during the most recent wave of border raids, testing their defences.
Everyone in the Fleet was familiar with this footage, though it was rarely broadcast on groundside holovision even now. It showed five Marfikian Thorns flashing through the convoy. They came out of nowhere and were gone before the warships could respond. They were tiny ships by League standards, not much bigger than couriers. They didn’t even look particularly impressive, no menacing black paintwork or bat wings as the baddy-ships tended to have in the movies. They were dull little craft, the unadorned grey of duralloy, a blunt cylinder at the rear tapering to the sharp pointed bow which gave them their name. They did not even carry insignia or identification, no way to tell them apart. They were each, however, armed with a single cannon every bit as powerful as those on Fleet warships. Importantly, they were faster and more agile – the swarm class fighters had actually been developed as the League’s latest effort to match and exceed the speed and agility of Marfikian Thorns, only to fail when it was discovered that the limitations of human pilots made them highly unstable. The Fleet had had to restrict their speed and manoeuvrability to a level at which pilots could cope, at least until Shion had begun teaching the Fourth’s pilots how to fly them with the stabilisers off.
Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Page 34