by Trevor Wyatt
“Of course, sir.” She smiles. It’s a nice smile, a private one, like the ones she gave me at the Oath. I hope to see more of it. “Shall I talk to Dr. Lannigan? Have him bring some of the debris aboard for closer study?”
“Precisely what I was going to suggest,” I say. The telltale blinks again. Admiral Flynn really doesn’t like to be kept waiting. “See to it, please, Commander.”
She actually snaps off a salute, and I return it automatically. We both smile now, and there’s a lot of subtext in those smiles. At least, there is in mine. I want to say something else, something personal, but before I can sort out my thoughts she says, “I’ll be in CNC, sir.” She turns and leaves my office.
The telltale blinks.
I tap the comm link.
Jeryl
“Dammit, Montgomery, I want answers. I need answers.”
“I understand, Admiral, and I’m doing my best to—”
Flynn waves an impatient hand as if to wipe my words away from the air. He’s a choleric man in his mid-sixties, still craggy and in great shape, his brush-cut hair gone grey. I know he’s an enthusiastic amateur boxer, and I personally wouldn’t want to step into the ring with him even though he’s shorter than I am and weighs less. He’s got a fire for personal best.
I don’t take offense at the gesture. I explain to him that I’m having some of the wreckage brought aboard for closer examination. “Just give me a couple of hours to get a more complete report together, Admiral,” I say, remaining calm in the face of his glare. I’ve dealt with Flynn before and I know that despite his bluster he’s really not a martinet. And he knows that I'm not stalling.
He scrunches his face up. “All right,” he growls. “You’ve got three hours. Fair?”
“Fair,” I say. I sign off and go down to the science section to build a fire under Dr. Lannigan.
* * *
Three hours later I’m back on the slipstream to Admiral Flynn at Edoris Station, sharing our findings. Even though there’s never been any evidence that a slipstream broadcast can be hacked, it’s customary to encode them on the off chance the Outers have made a breakthrough.
Flynn isn’t happy with what I’m telling him. “All my science team can say is that whatever destroyed The Mariner was an energy weapon of some kind.”
Flynn emits a truly impressive snort. “Well, it’s good to know that we haven’t got one of Horatio Hornblower’s ships of the line out here blasting away with a fusillade of cannon fire!” I bite my lips to restrain a laugh despite his sarcasm. “Send me the reports. I want to see ‘em.”
“Sir.” I subvocalize a few commands to the ship’s computer it responds with a low compliance tone. “On their way.”
Even though Flynn is many lightyears away on Edoris, the slipstream, quantum miracle that it is, drops the documents into his computer almost at once. They won’t make him any happier. He calls them up on a read-screen, his scowl deepening as he scans through them.
“Unknown energy signature...all remaining components give evidence of having been bathed in highly charged emissions. Super charged, in fact.” He grunts. “Whatever that is. No, no,” he adds as I start to explain, “I know what it means. You’re saying that whatever hit The Mariner basically disintegrated some of its components, destroying enough of them that the ship’s hull couldn’t maintain integrity. The Mariner exploded. The wreckage is brittle, some of it, like old bread.”
Admiral Flynn looks up from his report. “They were on their way to investigate a neutron star in that damned nebula.” He does the face-scrunching thing again. “Could they have been caught in a GRB?”
A gamma ray burst, he’s talking about. I take a few seconds to ponder that. High-energy physics isn’t my field, but like all ship captains I know my astronomy. I suppose a concentrated burst of gamma rays might do the sort of damage we found, but GRBs are very rare, maybe half a dozen per galaxy per million years. It’s true they are associated with the collapse of a dying sun into a high-density neutron star, but The Mariner’s target had been sitting in its nebula for centuries, at least.
But the biggest strike against implicating a GRB is that there’s never been one in our galaxy: All observed GRBs have originated from outside the Milky Way. An event of that size would have lit up radio telescopes dozens of worlds. A GRB in the Milky Way, in fact, if it happened to be pointing at Earth, could trigger a mass extinction event. It could potentially sterilize the planet, turning it into a lifeless cinder.
I explain my reasoning to Flynn, and he nods as if he’s already figured it out, as he probably has.
“Well then, this last bit,” Flynn says, flicking a paragraph up onto the screen so that I can see it, too. “Lannigan is saying that he suspects a concentrated, highly charged beam of photons. Mixed in with a population of some unknown particle.”
“Yeah, um...” I hope I’m not blushing, because I hadn’t noticed that particular datum in the findings. Unknown? Damn! Not that it was surprising, since everything about this situation smacked of the unknown, but even so I should've caught it. Instead I nod sagely.
Luckily, Flynn takes this as an agreement with his assessment rather than me trying to cover my posterior.
“So we’re left with a particle beam of a previously undiscovered nature that can cause molecular breakdown,” I say, summing up for myself as much as for the Admiral.
He nods.
I scan the rest of the report as quickly and unobtrusively as I can. “Lannigan says that only something focused could do this, not something dispersed, and the focusing device, platform, agency, whatever we call it, has to be something relatively small. Not the size of a star. Not the size of a planet, even.”
“Something the size of a ship, you mean,” Flynn says in a low voice.
We lock eyes through the slipstream viewer.
“All right, listen to me, Montgomery,” he says after a few moments. “This is strictly need-to-know, and I think that at this point you need to know. The Armada has been developing a gamma ray weapon for a number of years now.”
“I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he says. “It’s an Intelligence issue. I’m in the loop because some of my technical team members are involved. They’ve been testing the thing on Tau Ceti 2.”
Tau Ceti 2, I know, is an airless chunk of planetary real estate about the size of Mercury, orbiting its primary at about as far as Venus is from Sol. It’s lifeless and therefore would be a good place for weapons research.
“I see,” I tell him.
“It’s still being tested. They’re having problems with shielding the—well, never mind. That’s information you don’t need to know. The short version is, it’s not ready for official deployment yet. I’m told they’re still at least three years away from that.”
“But if we’re working on something like that, then the Outers could be also.”
“That’s right, Captain. Yet Armada Intelligence has not reported any sort of activity that would suggest the Outer Colonies have something even close to this kind of capability.”
It’s my turn to scrunch up my face. The standard service joke is that Armada Intelligence is an oxymoron. Oh, maybe that’s a little unfair. The official intelligence services do their best, and sometimes that is very good indeed. But it’s long been an open secret that they rely overmuch on informers and embedded operatives whose reports are often unverifiable. “The Armada could be off the mark,” I say.
He shrugs. “We have a new president,” he says. “We have a new council. They are a bunch of mid-level bureaucrats who only care about the damn bottom line.”
Not everyone shares this view, but I do. The new administration has been cutting funding in favor of channeling more money to the renovation of Earth’s environment, which was so severely devastated during the widespread collapse of mankind’s interlocking social and technological edifice during the 21st century because of overpopulation, a stressed environment, and World War III. Analysts were p
redicting after the end of the Third World War that it would take roughly 500 to 1,000 years for the planet to recuperate and humanity to once again be able to live on the planet sustainably. But over the last one hundred and fifty years, that number has come down dramatically. To the point where most areas are now habitable and full renovation is something we should see in the next ten years. Most of the planet has been rehabilitated and no one can argue that it isn’t money well spent. You couldn’t tour some of the places in Africa and Europe—and North America—and not come away with tears in your eyes and a determination to clean that mess up.
Well, we cleaned it up, alright. But what else did we ignore?
But the money to do all this does have to come from somewhere, and one of those places is Armada Intelligence. The feeling in the administration is that the Outers are a bunch of ham-fisted goons who can barely make their starships work.
This view, I can tell you as a man whose job it is to patrol the stellar borders, is not reality-based. The Outers lack some resources, but they’re not fools.
It leaves people like me hung out to dry, to some extent. Oh, if we get in a jam we can yell for help and it’ll come, but for the most part we’re expected to solve our own problems. I’m generally good with that, because I’m not a big fan of relying on other people.
I know Flynn is thinking that at this point I may have to, but I’m not ready to concede yet. I know that he wants his officers to be as autonomous and self-reliant as possible. It’s why we have such carefully chosen and well-trained crews.
“This is what we get for electing a bean counter,” I say, and Flynn barks out a laugh.
“I know you want more information, son. I do, too—but I don’t want this to blow up in our faces.”
“I won’t take any unnecessary chances,” I reply.
“Very well. Proceed with caution, report regularly.”
“Sir.”
With the call to Flynn terminated, I put in a call to Dr. Lannigan.
“I want you to work with Docherty in Navigation,” I tell Taft. “Have him plot The Mariner’s course and follow it back.”
Lannigan raises an eyebrow.
“Somewhere along the line, they ran into something,” I explain. “Something that bit them. If we trace their course, maybe we can run into it too.”
Ashley
One of my jobs as First Officer is to keep track of the ship’s full complement. That includes the three computer-based artificial intelligences as well as the fifty humans who are aboard. The AIs in engineering and navigation are sequestered to this ship. They were created to serve in the absence of crewmembers or in the event that crewmembers became incapacitated. They walk, talk, and operate in a way to mimic humans. This was consciously done to prevent them from awkward situations.
Early generation AI were non-autonomous but Armada Security received complaints that they gave crews “the creeps." They don’t have names, either, other than EngPrime and NavPrime, or usually just Eng and Nav. Neither one has much in the way of personality, to my way of thinking.
(That was supposed to be a joke. I tried it on Jeryl once, but he just gave me a blank look.)
For some reason, the armory AI is different. It’s a later model than the others, for one thing, so its cognitive net is capable of more and faster connections. It wears clothes. Also, someone, somewhere, with a strange sense of humor programmed a personality into it, something based on an old-time gunnery sergeant. It calls itself Gunny. Gunny’s user interface is rough spoken, often obscene, and inclined to pomposity.
I find him amusing, myself, but I know Jeryl is annoyed with him and tends to avoid him as much as possible. Gunny, for his part, isn’t impressed by anyone’s rank or social standing.
I’ve served on several other Armada frigates, and they all had a greater complement of AIs than The Seeker. I know that having AIs aboard is strictly at the captain’s discretion. I also know that there are a few frigates that have no AIs, for one reason or another—usually down to the captain’s discretion. Human prejudice against AIs runs strong in certain quarters and among certain demographic groups. I've never spoken to Jeryl about the relative scarcity of AIs among the ship’s crew. Plainly put, it’s none of my business. If Captain Montgomery has a problem with AIs, I haven’t heard him mention it, and it isn’t my place to ask.
It could be that the Union’s new president, whose family has long been involved in cybernetic development and robotics, has recently rammed through legislation allowing AIs to serve in the armed forces. Now, it isn’t as though computers are anything new to the military; they’ve been using them since the 20th century. But the new laws are widely seen as no more than a payback to the powerful Cybernetic Science lobby that helped guide her into power.
There are a lot of very conservative people in the military, which is not a bad thing; I’m a pretty conservative person myself. My father and his father before him were military men, and I’m proud to carry on the tradition. In fact, if you go back far enough, you’ll find ancestors of mine fighting aboard destroyers in World War II. We’re a family of peacekeepers and law enforcement officers.
Many of my fellow officers, including several aboard The Seeker, don’t like AIs much, but they obey the letter of the law. Personally, I have nothing against the AIs, though I’ve known few as interesting and personable as Gunny. Most people think of AIs as appliances having opinions, and don’t regard them as being truly alive.
My feeling is that there are bigger issues to worry about in life. But I do know that ships with fewer AIs tend to have a happier crew. This leads me to think that Jeryl is trying to have it both ways: he’s obeying Armada custom of having several AIs on a given vessel, but he’s limited their numbers. It could it be a shrewd attempt on his part to boost morale by having fewer synthetics on the ship.
All these thoughts slip through my mind as I sit at my station in CNC, going over status reports. I can do those with half of my attention—maybe even less. This is why I’ve been daydreaming about the AIs.
But as I said, it isn’t my business. If Jeryl and I grow closer, perhaps I’ll ask him.
Of course, that’s a whole other question.
And here I am again, thinking about that night. I really don’t want to—it’s distracting. I have duties I must attend to. Supplies, nominal. Recyclers, fine...though number 45, outside the third-level lav, will only give out soap, no matter what’s asked of it. Nothing that can’t be dealt with once we dock.
But I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, not to think about it for weeks now. I’m certain that we ended up at that resort together on New Sydney by sheer accident. I’d been delayed on the ship by some administrative tasks, so I missed the main shuttle that took the body of the crew down to the planet for some well-deserved shore leave. New Sydney is something of a vacation spot, so there are resorts scattered all across its face. With barely any axial tilt, the planet enjoys what is basically a yearlong early summer. It’s very popular as a destination.
But with so many resorts to choose from, it was a surprise when I walked in to register and saw Jeryl having a drink in the lounge off to one side, dressed in an open short, shorts, and sandals. He’s a good-looking guy, no one could deny that; and I had never seem him in such casual garb.
He didn’t see me, but after I signed in I went over to his table. He looked up to me, surprised, and gave me a huge grin.
“Ashley! I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Well, here I am,” I said, taking a seat. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Oh, a really old liquor called tequila.”
“I’ll have one, too.”
Well, I had one, two, three, and the next thing you know...
I never expected it. He said he never expected it. But damn, for an unexpected liaison, it was amazing. I didn’t get to my room until the next morning. His was large, clean, and airy...with perfumed breezes from the flower forest nearby drifting in. They smelled like cool and swe
et, like gardenias, my favorite.
It was impossible; it was heaven. I’m not inclined to be particularly submissive, but he took command and four orgasms later he finally let me fall asleep. I didn’t even get to reciprocate until just past dawn, after I woke to use the bathroom and then went back to repay my debt. The next three days were largely a repeat of that, with time-off for tours of the forest, incredible meals, and—okay, a lot of sex. Consenting adults and all that.
Since then it’s been all business between us, and I’m fine with that. Not so much as a caress or a kiss has passed between us since New Sydney. Okay, okay—maybe a meaningful glance or two. But we know the truth of our positions: he’s my captain, I’m his first officer, and we have a job to do. What happened was a dalliance, a very pleasant dalliance. It isn’t going anywhere, and I’m perfectly okay with that. In fact, I prefer it. I have a career and I’m not about to settle down just yet. I don’t even know if I want children. Frankly, they don’t appeal to me. I may not be good mother material. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that...it’s not high on my list of priorities. In fact, last time I looked it wasn’t on the list at all.
I’m not looking for that to change. These are things we haven’t talked about. In fact, we may never even get to talk about them, and that's okay, too.
Though I wouldn’t rule out another fling like that one.
Suddenly a security alert buzzes from my station, making me jump. A quick look at the code tells me it’s nothing internal, but when I glance at the exterior monitors my jaw drops.
It’s a spaceship. But it’s not one of ours: nothing Earth ever built looks like this.
I slap the comm link and wait an endless three seconds until Jeryl responds.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” His voice is all business.
“Unknown craft sighted fifteen units away, northwest quadrant,” I say as crisply as I can, linking him into the feed. “On an intercept course.”
Fifteen units, I think as I speak. How the hell did they get that close without us spotting them sooner?