Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “Good thinking. Send a signal to any of our ships you can reach, telling them that we appear to have won the battle and are leaving the system as soon as possible. Wish them luck.”

  The Com tech acknowledged the order.

  “I’ll address the crew now … Intercom … ship-wide.”

  “Attention all hands. This is the CO. I know that only some of the crew can hear my voice, but I wanted you to know that even though we’ve taken damage and casualties, the alien vessel that we engaged appears to be in far worse shape and is currently drifting in space, apparently unable to maneuver or fight. We’re going to hit it one more time with a recon drone set to ram. I doubt there’ll be any survivors on that ship after that happens. We’re not going to stick around to find out. We’ve been ordered by the Squadron Leader to make sure that HQ knows what happened to the 319 and to us. We’re going home asap. First stop will be at our departure point where we’ll top up our fuel from the supply ships waiting there, and then we’ll resume our journey home. The rest of the Squadron will hopefully follow us by a few hours. I’m keeping the ship at General Quarters for now. As soon as we enter Jumpspace, we’ll stand down from General Quarters. You all deserve to pat yourselves on the back for your efforts in getting us through this. I’m proud of this ship and its crew. That’s all for now. End message.”

  He settled back in his Command Chair and felt the adrenaline fatigue begin to hit. Even the impact of the final drone was anti-climatic. There was less visible light from impact #3 versus #2. When he asked the Sensor Tech if there were any signs of life on board the alien vessel, the answer was a definitive ‘No, Sir.’ The message drone entered Jumpspace a few seconds later. It would arrive near where the support ships should be and notify them that 344 was on its way back.

  Just over 10 minutes later, the ship entered Jumpspace. With the com channel links restored to the rest of the ship, Shiloh ordered the crew to stand down from General Quarters. When the XO arrived back on the Bridge to finish what remained of her duty shift, Shiloh said, “Your duty shift will be over soon. I’ll cover the rest of your shift for you until Michaels takes over.”

  The XO looked at him with sadness in her expression. “Commander Michaels was killed by that laser hit we took, Sir.”

  Shiloh sighed and said nothing for a few seconds. Finally he spoke, “Michaels was a promising officer. The kind of officer I have a feeling we’re going to need very badly before this is all over. Okay, Angela. You take over now and cover the first half of Michaels duty shift. I’ll take the second half in addition to my own. By the time you relieve me again, we’ll have reassigned personnel to cover the gaps. Do you need a few minutes break before you take over here?”

  She thought about it briefly before nodding.

  “Then go ahead and take a break. Have a coffee and a bite to eat, and I’ll see you back here in a little while.”

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  She left, and Shiloh was alone with his thoughts. The more he thought about their close brush with death, the more worried he became. He doubted that this would be the last time Humanity encountered that alien race. He had a terrible feeling come over him that this had been just the opening skirmish of a much larger conflict, Humanity’s first interstellar war.

  CHAPTER 2: To Fallen Comrades

  While the 344 was accelerating in preparation for entering Jumpspace, Shiloh realized that the energy drain from the multiple laser shots fired at the alien vessel had used up a significant amount of their remaining fuel. In fact, the ship had barely enough heavy hydrogen remaining to reach the refueling tankers waiting for them at the other end. The only workable combination of acceleration and jump time, followed by deceleration, required them to enter Jumpspace at a slower than normal speed. That meant that not only would the 344 arrive at the exploration mission staging system with very low fuel reserves, but also that it would likely arrive after the other ships of the squadron. This in spite of the fact that those ships would have entered Jumpspace after the 344 did, as a result of passing them while in there. Unfortunately the means to communicate while in Jumpspace hadn’t been invented yet.

  The extra trip time filled him with frustration. He wanted to get his injured personnel back ASAP! He knew that in their destination star system, the Squadron had left behind a collection of support ships including two small tankers, a supply freighter and a Command/Support ship containing various support staff like medical personnel, scientists, engineers, etc. The Command ship could handle most kinds of routine maintenance in order to keep the Exploration Frigates in the Field as long as possible. Medical facilities were capable of handling all but the most extreme emergencies. In any case, the support ship had better medical facilities than did a Frigate, and some of the 344 crew injuries were serious.

  Upon arriving back in normal space after a jump transit of almost 42 hours—versus the usual time of 36 hours for the same distance—Shiloh was again on the Bridge. He quickly fired off a message to the last known station of the support ships in the expectation that they still would be there. Because 344 had emerged from Jumpspace at the outer edge of the star system, the signal would take hours to reach the gas giant where the tankers skimmed for heavy hydrogen when necessary to top up their tanks. And since the ship emerged from Jumpspace with the same velocity that it had entered Jumpspace, the 344 was moving towards the inner part of the system less quickly than normal. In order not to fly past the gas giant, the ship would have to decelerate. That would require pretty much all their remaining fuel, and the possibility that the tankers might not be where Shiloh had last seen them made him sweat. They SHOULD be there. But the Demon God Murphy sometimes reached down to muddy the waters, or as someone else long ago once said, ‘shit happens’. So it was with great relief that almost 13 hours after dropping back into normal space, 344 received acknowledgement from the support ships that they were ready to refuel the 344 and take care of the wounded.

  Shiloh received some other news as well. The message drone had arrived. As expected, some but not all of the rest of the Squadron had arrived ahead of 344. They were about to rendezvous with the support ships. The bad news was that the 301 and 299 had been ambushed by at least three other alien ships, roughly fifteen minutes after 344’s short, violent clash with her opponent. Squadron Leader Torres had explicitly ordered the other four frigates not to come to 301 and 299’s aid, because active scanning had confirmed the fact that there were even more alien ships waiting to pounce once the other frigates got within range. She ordered the rest of the Squadron to retreat to the staging system. Communications with both the 301 and the 299 were lost while they were still fighting for their lives. No one knew what the ultimate outcome was, but the odds for survival were not good. Torres had also communicated her belief that the ambush had been triggered early as a response to 344’s confrontation with the alien vessel. Had it not been for that, Torres believed that the entire Squadron would have been attacked once they had regrouped. Her recorded message praised Shiloh for deploying the recon drones and, as a result, springing the trap early enough that half the Squadron could get away unharmed. The tone of that recording, combined with the unknown fate of both ships, made the message particularly poignant. After sharing it with the crew, Shiloh asked all off-duty officers and NCOs to assemble in the Officers’ Mess where they raised a solemn toast to fallen comrades. Shiloh was absolutely certain that it would not be the last such toast he would participate in.

  By the time that 344 entered orbit around the gas giant and rendezvoused with the support ships and the rest of the Squadron, the other frigates had already been refueled. Carrying all of the data from each of the surviving frigates, another fresh message drone was already in Jumpspace on its way back to a forward Space Force base. There the data would be further disseminated via another drone, and so on. Shortly before commencing refueling operations, Shiloh participated in a video conference with the other Frigate skippers and support ship COs. They wanted to hear about 344’s ba
ttle first hand and then compare notes. The general consensus was that all the alien ships were more heavily armored, and armed with more powerful laser cannon, than their Space Force counterparts. 323’s Skipper, Cmdr. Omar, in his capacity as acting Squadron Leader—being the most senior officer present—had declared his intention to wait another six hours. Then, if neither missing ship showed up during that time, the four combat capable frigates would return to the battle system to search for survivors. Omar had told Shiloh that since the 344 had a damaged hull and crew casualties, with no operational laser turrets left, he would order it to head back to Sol System for repairs. Shiloh thought going back to the battle system was a mistake and respectfully said so, but Omar was adamant. Since there was no point in 344 waiting to find out if the 301 or the 299 showed up before heading home, Shiloh ordered the now fully refueled ship to leave orbit as soon as her more seriously injured crewmembers had been transferred to the Command/Support ship for further treatment. With that task accomplished, and with plenty of fuel to burn, 344 left orbit at maximum acceleration. Her destination was the same Space Force base that the message drone was headed for. The message drone was not a waste of effort. Standard operating procedure was that important data/communications were to be sent by more than one method to create a redundancy that would minimize the loss of the information due to unforeseen circumstances such as a malfunction.

  It was with a wistful sigh that Shiloh examined their intended jump route back to the Sol star system. Exploration Frigates had enough fuel capacity to travel up to 12 light years in a series of short jumps, or a maximum of 18 light years in a single jump. The Sol system was just under 90 light years away, but places where they could refuel weren’t spaced out evenly enough to permit the ship to make the trip in just five jumps. It would take a total of seven, and almost 440 hours of transit time. That was almost 18 days, a long time to ponder recent events … and the future.

  Though his duty shift was over before the ship reached the specified pre-jump velocity, Shiloh stayed on the Bridge until 344 was safely in Jumpspace. He then spent some quiet time in the Officers’ Mess, which he had to himself. Soon he was thinking about the vision that had led to his deployment of the recon drones. Had he not had the vision, he doubted he would have taken the action on his own initiative. Shiloh had never considered himself a spiritual person. If he looked deep within himself, he supposed that at the most basic level he believed in some kind of higher power. Most Space Force personnel eventually came to believe in one version of God or another. The universe had so many awe-inspiring vistas that it was hard not to feel at some emotional level that it had to have been planned that way. In Shiloh’s case, he also had a thirst for knowledge about the sciences. The order that he had seen and heard about, ranging all the way from the inner structure of atoms up through the mind-boggling complexity of human DNA and the marvelously perfect functioning of a human body, all led him to the conclusion that it was just too complex and too perfect to have been the work of mindless random forces. From that deep basic belief in a higher power, he now wondered if that higher power had intervened, and if so, why? Was it to save him personally? He didn’t think that likely. Maybe it was someone in the crew whom God or an angel was looking out for. As he often did when he was pondering a mystery, he started making a list. At the top he wrote ‘Possible explanations for the vision’. Under that he wrote the following.

  It was a hallucination

  It was a use of unsuspected precognitive esp talents

  It was the result of external intervention

  intervention by God

  intervention by aliens

  intervention by humans

  from within the ship

  from within the squadron

  from the future

  from some other source

  He looked at the list and couldn’t think of anything else to add. The only possibility that seemed to be halfway plausible was the use of unsuspected precognitive esp talents. He remembered scoring above average when he was a student in a university lab experiment testing for esp ability, but it wasn’t above average by enough to be considered significant. Even if he did have some unsuspected esp ability, he was at a loss as to how to turn it on or off. If he couldn’t control it, then what good was it? Would it happen again? And if so, when? He discounted the other possible explanations, mainly because of the similar experience as a teenager, long before he joined the Space Force. It seemed unlikely that aliens would intervene at that stage in his life to help him save a friend who, this far at least, had no obvious connection to the Space Force or any human colony. And intervention from humans, whether from the future or from within the squadron, was unlikely for the same reason. That left intervention by God, or a hallucination. In both those cases he would have expected to experience an auditory sensation, such as a voice instructing him to deploy recon drones. Instead he’d had what appeared to have been an out of body experience. He had actually watched himself standing in front of Admiral Howard’s desk. The key was to see if the Admiral actually did compliment him on coming up with the recon drone deployment idea. If he did, then hallucinations or divine intervention would also appear less likely than a spontaneous instance of precognition.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t crazy—for the time being at least—he decided to turn his thoughts to other matters. HQ would obviously want a detailed report on the whole mission. He had plenty of travel time in which to write it, and he was probably going to need every spare moment for that task. Having served for a year on the staff at HQ, he knew they would be expecting more than just a dry, factual, minute-by-minute account of what happened. They would also want some analysis, even if only guesswork, about the nature and capabilities of the unknown enemy and, even more importantly, recommendations on what should be done next. Shiloh already could think of quite a few recommendations, but he wanted to get some input from his XO too.

  Shortly before Johansen’s duty shift ended, Shiloh called her and asked her to stop by his cabin for a short chat as soon as she was free.

  When she arrived he said, “The Powers That Be will want a detailed report from both of us, XO. You can bet your last credit they’ll be asking us for analysis and recommendations. I suggest you start giving that some serious thought, and have something ready for them by the time we arrive.”

  Johansen nodded and said, “I’ve already thought about that. Can I bounce some thoughts off you?”

  Shiloh nodded in return, and she began to speak.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out WHY those aliens attacked us without attempting to make contact. I can see them being angry or trigger-happy if we had stumbled into an inhabited system, but from the brief time we were in that system, there was no data to indicate any kind of colony, station or resource extraction facility. If that was an uninhabited system, why the big panic? The fact that they had multiple ships in that system suggests to me they were military vessels, and the nature of their response to us tells me they were either defending a border against incursion, or they were engaged in, for lack of a better phrase, reconnaissance in force. If Space Force had stationed ships at our borders to guard against alien incursion, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that we would at least try to make peaceful contact with any ‘visitors’. Why piss off somebody if you don’t have to? So the only thing I can figure out that would explain their actions is that their psychological makeup as a race has made them either extremely aggressive or extremely paranoid. Both of those alternatives give me the shivers. They may come after us, even if we don’t move any further in their direction, assuming that we find out what that direction is.” She paused, waiting for a response.

  Shiloh nodded again as he began to reply. “Your analysis makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking, but now I have to believe that we’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, and we better get ready to deal with them fast. Any other thoughts you want my reaction to?”

  Johansen shook her head. “Not now.�
�

  “Okay. We can talk more at a later time. I don’t want to take any more of your sleep time.”

  After the XO left, Shiloh looked at the partially written report on his computer screen. The blow-by-blow account was essentially complete. It was time to move on to the more important part of the report.

  “Start new section entitled Analysis. First paragraph…” He started to talk. Over the following days, he did a lot of talking.

  -o0o-

  The short refueling stop was uneventful. Shiloh did his best to answer the barrage of questions that the base commander fired at him. Space Force bases were not especially well armored or armed as a rule. Pirates and smugglers tended to keep well away from them, for obvious reasons. Humanity hadn’t come in contact with another space faring race until now, so there wasn’t a perceived need for heavy—and expensive—defenses at fixed stations. The shock of the station personnel at hearing the news of the battle brought home to Shiloh just how unprepared Humanity was for this encounter. By the time 344 emerged from Jumpspace beyond the orbit of Jupiter, he and his Executive Officer had discussed the implications of the alien encounter in considerable depth, and they both agreed that the Space Force had to plan for a major war. What worried Shiloh was whether the civilian Oversight Committee members to whom Space Force answered would see the urgency. The Human Race had to mobilize for war, and that might be just too much for the committee members to accept and authorize since they had their own agendas to consider.

  By the time the ship received a reply to its warning message, 344 was considerably closer. HQ had ordered them to head for one of the asteroid shipyards for repairs, with a fast transport tasked with bringing Shiloh and his crew back to Earth asap. When 344 was safely snuggled within the deep recesses of the hollowed out asteroid that served as a shipyard, Shiloh took a few minutes to fly over the damaged sections in a small craft used by shipyard workers. He was shocked by the transformation of his beautiful, sleek ship into an ugly, wounded lump of metal. It wasn’t unusual for crewmembers to form a bond with their ships, of a kind that had started back in the days of sailing ships. Seeing his ship damaged like this evoked the same emotions he had felt when he visited his injured crew on the way home. The notion that an inanimate object had a personality and could feel pain was completely irrational, but quite common nonetheless. It was with great reluctance that he boarded the fast transport ship along with the rest of the ship’s crew. Because of the relative orbital positions of the asteroid and Earth, the trip would last another 10 hours. Many of the crew took the opportunity to sleep. Even though he was desperately tired after being awake for almost 20 hours, another 4 hours passed before he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.