Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “I have no data to estimate her length,” Amundsen replied, “but I estimate the beam of this ship to be roughly five hundred meters. I can only assume that her length is considerably more, but we won’t know until we get a more oblique view.”

  “That ship is five hundred meters wide?” Kumar asked, incredulous. Aurora herself was barely that long from stem to stern. While she was by no means the largest starship built by human hands, she was usually the largest vessel in whatever port she put into.

  “Yes,” Amundsen told him. “And the other three ships are roughly the same size.”

  “Christ,” someone whispered.

  “Raj,” McClaren said, turning to his exec. “Thoughts?”

  “Communications is running the initial first contact sequence now.” He turned to face the captain. “Our signals will take roughly thirty minutes to reach the inner planets, but those ships...” He shook his head. “They’re close enough now that they should have already received our transmissions. If they’re listening.” He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “If I were a betting man, I would say those were warships.”

  McClaren nodded grimly. “Comms,” he looked over at Ensign John Waverly, “keep stepping through the first contact communications sequence. Just make sure that we’re listening, too.”

  “I’m on it, sir,” the young man replied. Waverly seemed incredibly young, but like the rest of Aurora’s crew, he did his job exceptionally well. “I’m well versed in the FCP procedures, sir. So far, though, I haven’t come across any emissions anywhere in the standard spectrum, other than what Lieutenant Amundsen’s team have already reported. If they use anything anywhere in the radio frequency band, we’re sure not seeing it. And I haven’t identified any coherent light sources, either.”

  So, no radio and no communications lasers, McClaren thought uneasily. Even though the aliens knew that company was coming, they had remained silent. Or if they were talking, they were using some form of transmission that was beyond what Aurora was capable of seeing or hearing. Maybe the aliens were beyond such mundane things as radio- and light-based communications?

  “How long until those ships get here?” McClaren asked Amundsen, whose worried face still stared out from the bridge display screen. Aurora herself was motionless relative to her emergence point: McClaren never moved in-system on a survey until they knew much more about their environment than they did now. And it made for a much more convenient reference point for a rapid jump-out.

  “At their current velocity, they would overshoot us in just under three hours. But, of course, they will need to decelerate to meet us...”

  “That depends on their intentions,” Kumar interjected. “They could attack as they pass by...”

  “Or they could simply stop,” Marisova observed quietly. Everyone turned to gape at her. “We know nothing about their drive systems,” she explained. “Nothing about those ships registers on our sensors other than direct visuals. What if they achieved their current velocity nearly instantaneously when they decided to head out to meet us?”

  “Preposterous,” Amundsen exclaimed. “That’s simply not possible!”

  “But-”

  “Enough, people,” McClaren said quietly. “Beyond the obviously impressive capabilities of the aliens, it all boils down to this: do we stay or do we go?” He looked around at his bridge crew, then opened a channel to the entire ship. “Crew, this is the captain. As I’m sure most of you are now aware, the system we’ve entered is inhabited. We’re in a first contact situation. The only first contact situation anyone has ever faced. So what we do now is going to become part of The Book that will tell others either how to do it right, or how not to do it if we royally screw things up. I’ll be completely honest with you: I’m not happy with the situation. We’ve got four big ships heading toward us in an awful hurry. They could be warships. I don’t blame whoever these folks are for sending out an armed welcoming committee. If it were my home, I’d send some warships out to take a look, too.

  “But I’d also make sure to send some diplomats along: people who want to talk with their new neighbors. What bothers me is that we haven’t seen anything, from the ships or the two inhabited planets, that looks like any sort of communication. Maybe they’re just using something we can’t pick up. Maybe the ships coming our way are packed with scientists and ambassadors and they want to make it a big surprise. I just don’t know.

  “What I do know is that we’ve got about three hours to make a decision and take action. My inclination is to stay. Not to try and score the first handshake with an alien, but because...it’s our first opportunity to say hello to another sentient race. We’ve been preparing for this moment since before the very first starship left Earth. It’s a risk, but it’s also the greatest opportunity humanity has ever had.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’ve got a little bit of time to discuss our options before our new friends reach us. Department heads, talk to your people. Get a feel for what they’re thinking. Then all department heads and the senior chiefs are to meet in my ready room in exactly one hour. I’ll make the final decision on whether we stay or go, but I want to hear what you all have to say. That is all.” He punched the button on the touchpad, closing the circuit.

  “In the meantime,” he told Kumar and Marisova, “get an emergency jump sequence lined up. Pick a destination other than our inbound vector. If these ships come in with guns blazing, the last thing I want to do is point them back the way we came, toward home.”

  On the display screen, the alien ship and her sisters continued toward them.

  ***

  The four battlecruisers sailed quickly to meet the alien vessel, but they hardly revealed their true capabilities. While it was now clear that the alien ship was extremely primitive, those who guarded the Empire took nothing for granted. They would reveal no more about themselves than absolutely necessary until they were sure the new arrival posed no threat. The Empire had not lasted through the ages by leaving anything to chance.

  Aboard the lead ship, a group of warriors prepared for battle with the unknown, while healers and other castes made ready to learn all there was to know about the strangers.

  They did not have much longer to wait.

  ***

  There was standing room only in the captain’s ready room an hour later. At the table sat the six department heads, responsible for the primary functional areas of the ship, the Aurora’s senior chief, and the captain. Along the walls of the now-cramped compartment stood the senior enlisted member of each department and the ship’s two midshipmen. The XO and the bridge crew remained at their stations, although they were tied in through a video feed on the bridge wraparound display.

  The emotional tension ran high among the people in the room, McClaren could easily see. But from the body language and the expressions on their faces it wasn’t from fear, but excited anticipation. It was an emotion he fully shared.

  “I’m not going to waste any time on preliminaries,” he began. “You all know what’s going on and what’s at stake. According to the Survey Department,” he nodded at Amundsen, who was the only one around the table who looked distinctly unhappy, “the ships haven’t changed course or velocity. So it looks like they’re either going to blow by us, which I think would probably be bad news, or their technology is so radically advanced that they can stop on a proverbial dime.”

  At that, the survey leader’s frown grew more pronounced, turning his normally pale face into a grimace.

  “Amundsen?” McClaren asked. “You’ve got something to say. Spit it out.”

  “I think Lieutenant Marisova was right,” he said grudgingly, nodding toward the video pickup that showed the meeting to the bridge crew. But McClaren knew that it wasn’t because Marisova had said it. It was because he was afraid to believe that what she said could possibly be true, or even close to the truth. “I don’t believe they could accelerate to their current velocity instantaneously, but even assuming several days’ warni
ng - even weeks! - the acceleration they must have achieved would have to have been...unbelievable.” He shook his head. “No. I believe those ships will not simply pass by us. They will slow down and rendezvous with us sometime in the next two hours, decelerating at a minimum of two hundred gees. Probably much more.”

  A chill ran down McClaren’s spine. Aurora had the most efficient reactionless drives in service by any of the many worlds colonized by Mankind, and was one of the few to be fitted with artificial gravity, a recent innovation, and acceleration dampers. She wasn’t nearly as fast as a courier ship, certainly, but for a military survey vessel she was no slouch. But two hundred gees? Not even close.

  “Robotic ships?” Aubrey Hannan, the chief of the Engineering Section suggested. “They could certainly handle that sort of acceleration.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” McClaren interjected, gently but firmly steering the conversation from interesting, but essentially useless, speculation back to the issue at hand. “From my perspective, it doesn’t matter how fast the aliens can maneuver. We’re not a warship, and I have no intention of masquerading as one. It’s clear they have radically advanced technology. That’s not necessarily a surprise; we could have just as easily stumbled upon a world in the pre-atomic era, and we would be the high-tech aliens. Our options remain the same: stay and say hello, or jump out with what I hope is a fat safety margin before they get here.” He glanced around and his gaze landed on the junior midshipman. “Midshipman Sato, what’s your call?”

  Ichiro Sato, already standing ramrod straight against the bulkhead, stiffened even further. All of nineteen years old, he was the youngest member of the crew. Extremely courteous, conscientious, and intelligent, he was well respected by the other members of the crew, although his rigid outer shell was a magnet for good-natured ribbing. Exceptionally competent and a fast learner, he kept quietly to himself. He was one of a select few from the Terran Naval Academy who were chosen to spend one or more of their academy years aboard ship as advanced training as junior officers. It was a great opportunity, but came with a hefty commitment: deployed midshipmen had to continue their academy studies while also performing their duties aboard ship.

  “Sir...” Sato momentarily gulped for air, McClaren’s question having caught him completely off-guard.

  The captain felt momentarily guilty for putting Sato on the spot first, but he had a reason. “Relax, Ichiro,” McClaren told him. “I called this meeting for ideas. The senior officers, including myself, and the chiefs have years of preconceived notions drilled into our heads. We’ve got years of experience, yes, but this situation calls for a fresh perspective. If you were in my shoes, what would your decision be? There’s no right or wrong answer to this one.”

  While Ichiro’s features didn’t betray it, the captain’s last comment caused him even more consternation. He had been brought up in a traditional Japanese family on Nagano, where, according to his father, everything was either right or it was wrong; there was no in-between. And more often than not, anything Ichiro did was wrong. That was the main reason Ichiro had decided to apply for service in the Terran Navy when he was sixteen: to spite his father and escape the tyranny of his house, and to avoid the stifling life of a salaryman trapped in the web of a hegemonic corporate world. Earth’s global military services accepted applicants from all but a few rogue worlds, and Ichiro’s test scores and academic record had opened the door for him to enter the Terran Naval Academy. There, too, most everything was either right or wrong. The difference between the academy and his home was that in the academy, Ichiro was nearly always right. His unfailing determination to succeed had given him a sense of confidence he had never known before, putting him at the head of his class and earning him a position aboard the Aurora.

  That realization, and his desperate desire not to lose face in front of the captain and ship’s officers, gave him back his voice. “Sir. I believe we should stay and greet the ships.”

  McClaren nodded, wondering what had just been going on in the young man’s mind. “Okay, you picked door number one. The question now is why?”

  “Because, sir, that is why we are here, isn’t it?” Loosening up slightly from his steel-rod pose, he turned to look at the other faces around the room, his voice suddenly filled with a passion that none of his fellow crew members would have ever thought possible. “While our primary mission is to find new habitable worlds, we really are explorers, discoverers, of whatever deep space may hold. With every jump we search for the unknown, things that no one else has ever seen. Maybe we will not find what we hope. Perhaps these aliens are friendly, perhaps not. There is great risk in everything we do. But, having found the first sentient race other than humankind, can we in good conscience simply leave without doing all we can to establish contact, even at the risk of our own destruction?”

  The captain nodded, impressed more by the young man’s unexpected burst of emotion than his words. But his words held their own merit: they precisely echoed McClaren’s own feelings. That was exactly why he had spent so much of his career in survey.

  “Well said, Ichiro,” he told the young man. The two midshipmen on either side of Sato grinned and nudged him as if to say, Good job. Most of those seated at the table nodded or murmured their agreement. “So, there’s an argument, and I believe a good one, for staying. Who’s got one for bailing out right now?”

  “I’ll take that one, sir,” Raj Kumar spoke up from the bridge, his image appearing on the primary screen in the ready room. “I myself agree with Midshipman Sato that we should stay. But one compelling argument for leaving now is to make sure that the news of this discovery gets back home. If the aliens should turn out to be hostile and this ship is taken, or even if we should suffer some unexpected mishap, Earth and the rest of human space may never know until they’re attacked. And we have no way to let anyone know of our discovery without jumping back to the nearest communications relay.”

  That produced a lot of frowns on the faces around the table. Most of them had thought of this already, of course, but having it voiced directly gave it more substance.

  Kumar went on, “That’s also a specification in the first contact protocols, that one of the top priorities is to get word back home. But the bottom line is that any actions taken are at the captain’s discretion based on the situation as he or she sees it.”

  “Right,” McClaren told everyone. “Getting word back home is the only real reason I’ve been able to come up with myself for leaving now that isn’t tied to fear of the unknown. And since all of us signed up to get paid to go find the unknown, as the good midshipman pointed out, those reasons don’t count.” He turned to the woman sitting to his left. “Chief, what’s your take?”

  Master Chief Brenda Harkness was the senior enlisted member of the crew, and her word carried a great deal of weight with McClaren. Completely at odds with the stereotype of someone of her rank, she was a tall, slim, and extremely attractive woman in her late thirties. But no one who had ever worked with her for more than five minutes ever took her for granted: she was a hard-core Navy lifer who never dished out bullshit and refused to tolerate it from anyone else. She would move mountains to help anyone who needed it, but her beautiful deep hazel eyes could just as easily burn holes in the skin of anyone foolish enough to cross her.

  “I think we should stay, captain,” she said, a light Texas drawl flavoring her smooth voice. “I completely agree with the XO’s concerns about getting word of this back home, but with the alien ships so close now...” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that they’d be anything but insulted if we just up and disappeared on them.”

  “And the crew?” McClaren asked.

  “Everyone I had a chance to talk to, and that was most of them, wanted to stay. A lot of them are uneasy about those ships, but as you said, we just happen to be the ‘primitives’ in this situation. We’d be stupid to not be afraid, sir. But I think we’d be even more stupid to just pack up and go home.”

  All of
the other department heads nodded their agreement. Each had talked to their people, too, and almost without exception the crew had wanted to stay and meet with the aliens.

  It was what McClaren expected. He would have been shocked had they come to any other conclusion. “Okay, that settles it. We stay.” That brought a round of bright, excited smiles to everyone but Amundsen, whose face was locked in an unhappy grimace. “But here’s the deal: the XO and navigator have worked out an emergency jump sequence, just in case. We’ll spool up the jump engines to the pre-interlock stage and hold them there until we feel more confident of the aliens’ intentions. We can keep the engines spooled like that for several hours without running any risks in engineering. If those ships are friendly, we get to play galactic tourist and buy them the first round at the bar.

  “But if they’re not,” he looked pointedly at Amundsen, “we engage the jump interlock and the navigation computer will have us out of here in two minutes.” That made the survey leader slightly less unhappy, but only slightly. “Okay, does anybody have anything else they want to add before we set up the reception line?”

  “Sir...” Sato said formally, again at a position of attention.

  “Go ahead, son.”

  “Captain, I know this may sound foolish,” he glanced at Amundsen, who was at the table with his back to Sato, “but should we not also take steps to secure the navigation computer in case the ships prove hostile? If they took the ship, there is probably little they would learn of our technology that would be of value to them. But the navigation charts...”

  “It’s already taken care of, midshipman,” Kumar reassured him from the bridge with an approving smile. Second year midshipmen like Sato weren’t expected to know anything about the first contact protocols, but the boy was clearly thinking on his feet. Kumar’s already high respect for him rose yet another notch. “That’s on the very short list of ‘non-discretionary’ actions on first contact. We’ve already prepared a soft wipe of the data, and a team from engineering is setting charges around the primary core.” He held up both hands, then simulated pushing buttons down with his thumbs. “If we get into trouble, Aurora’s hull is all they’ll walk away with.”