by D. J. Holmes
As it often did, his mind turned to Suzanna when thoughts for Christine swirled up within him. For the first time James didn’t feel guilt. For several minutes he lingered on that revelation. Then it dawned on him that he was looking forward to getting married. No one quite knew when the wedding would be yet. It couldn’t happen until every colony had joined the Empire. Only then did Fairfax and Christine feel it would be appropriate for him to step into the role of Emperor. Still, despite all the extra responsibility and pressure their marriage would bring him, he was looking forward to being married again. With a shake of his head, James looked away from Earth as it receded in Drake’s holo projector. He could analyze his feelings for Christine when he got back, for now he had a mission to focus on. For the first time since the Battle of Earth, he was leaving the Sol system.
As he took in the other sights around Earth, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealously. Two other groups of ships were maneuvering away from Earth. Viper, Adder, and their escorts were carrying out a series of training exercises. Rear Admiral Becket and her squadron would be gone by the time he returned. Further out towards the Alpha Shift passage Scarlet Squadron was on the move. In the center of its formation were two battlecruisers, a large fleet carrier and six converted freighters. James was sorely tempted to take Drake with them. Under Commodore Rivers, they were returning to the Karacknid depot. The Imperial Fleet did not have anywhere near the ships necessary to take and hold the Karacknid depot system. But there was one thing they did have in abundance, Spitfires. With luck, Rivers would be able to raid the Karacknid infrastructure and delay whatever timetable the Karacknids were working to. With a sigh James looked away from the warships. There was no point wishing he was going with them for it was not to be.
Instead he looked beyond them to the edge of the system and the massive shift gate that would speed Drake’s journey to the Alpha system. As he did, he allowed his thoughts to drift in another direction as he thought about the long journey that was in front of him. Though he thought it a long way to New Delhi, it was nothing compared to the distances his niece was no doubt covering. Emilie had been away from Earth for ten months. She was hundreds and hundreds of light years away. By now, James really had no idea just how far. However she was doing or whatever she had found, he hoped she was okay. He hoped that by the time he got back to Earth there would be some news from her. As Drake left Earth behind, James tried to imagine just what she was up to. It was a good distraction from all the other emotions that were hiding in the back of his mind.
Chapter 14
To date Humanity has made contact with over two thousand sentient species. Thankfully, most breathe an atmosphere similar enough to ours that we can occupy the same spaces for diplomatic purposes. For the few species that come from homeworlds that are wildly different from Earth, carrying out diplomatic missions to them is always difficult and at times simply uncomfortable.
-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD.
Intrepid, Pinyal system, 19th October 2482 AD (one day later).
“All right Lieutenant Maguire,” Emilie said as she rose from her command chair. “It’s time for you to get a little practice skimming for fuel. I’ll be in my office.”
“Yes Captain,” Maguire said as a hint of excitement entered her voice.
“Call me if you need me,” Emilie responded, glad someone still had some enthusiasm. She moved through Intrepid’s bridge and straight into her adjoining office. As soon as the door slid shut, she threw herself into one of her chairs and let out a sigh. She reached up and rubbed her temple. “Another dead end,” she said in frustration as she rubbed her head more vigorously. When another door into her office slid open without her permission, she cut off what she was about to add. For a second anger crossed her face at being disturbed. Then she saw it was Alvarez.
“From the way you left the bridge, it sounded like you could do with some company,” he said as he moved over and, more gently than she had, lowered himself into a seat opposite her.
“It was that obvious?” Emilie asked.
“Maybe not to the others, but I do know you a little better than they… Well, perhaps more than a little better,” he added with a wink.
Emilie appreciated his attempts to lighten the mood, but it didn’t work. “Another dead end,” she complained. “How many more are there going to be? It’s almost been a year since we left Earth. Five months since we left Damial, and what do we have to show for it?”
“Well…” Alvarez began tentatively. “We’ve visited four alien worlds, each with their own space civilization and opened up diplomatic relations with them.”
Emilie waved a hand dismissively. “Three of them the Folians knew about. None have even the slightest possibility of standing up to the Karacknids.”
“No,” Alvarez agreed, “but, at least we warned them. They should be better prepared for what is likely to come their way. And if the Karacknids leave them alone for a few decades, who knows how prepared they might be?”
“But we’ve learnt nothing more about the Kalassai. We’re supposed to be in the area of space they inhabit. At least according to the Folians and Gramrians. There hasn’t been sight nor sound of them. None of the worlds we’ve visited had even heard of them. Heck, the Pinyals didn’t even know there were other space faring alien civilizations in the galaxy!” Emilie stared at Alvarez, daring him to disagree. A part of her wanted to argue with him, to get a chance to channel her frustration into something. Just three hours ago they had broken orbit from Pinyal. Their arrival two days before had sent shockwaves through the Pinyal civilization. They had earnestly requested Emilie and Intrepid remain in orbit for longer, understandably they had many questions. But as soon as Emilie had learnt that they would be no help against the Karacknids, and knew nothing about the Kalassai, she had exchanged pleasantries with the Pinyals’ leaders and broken orbit. Someone else could return to open up diplomatic relations with them.
“So what do you want to do? Go back to Damial and see if the Folians have any more information they can share with us? Go back to Earth and give up?”
Emilie ground her teeth together, Alvarez did know her too well. He wasn’t going to get drawn into an argument with her. “Of course not,” she replied at once. “We are not going home until we find them. How many times have I said that?”
“I haven’t been counting,” Alvarez replied with a smile, “but perhaps this is one time you need to hear it yourself. There are going to be days like this. But as soon as we collect enough fuel from Pinyal’s gas giant, we can be on our way. There are still many more systems to explore.”
“I know that, and because I know that it’s getting frustrating. Doing the same thing over and over again without any results is wearing me down. And I know the rest of the crew feel the same.”
“But as Captain all the pressure to get results falls on you,” Alvarez said as he leant forward. “The crew will follow you wherever you lead them. I’m not concerned about them. But I am concerned about you… There’s nothing I can do to take away the pressure on your shoulders. But perhaps I can distract you in other ways.” Standing, Alveraz reached over and took Emilie’s hand. He pulled her to her feet. At first she resisted, but when he strengthened his tug, she allowed herself to be raised off her seat and enfolded in Alvarez’ arms. When his lips met hers, she begrudgingly had to admit her frustrations were seeping away.
*
With a start Emilie awoke. For the briefest of seconds her mind was fuzzy as she tried to figure out what was going on. Then her bed’s inbuilt COM unit beeped again. It was a priority one alert. Immediately her mind cleared. With a groan she pulled herself out of bed and grabbed for her uniform. Twenty seconds later she was moving through Intrepid’s bridge to her command chair. “What is it?” she demanded as Maguire stood up and allowed her to take her seat.
“I have no idea Captain. One minute we were continuing the refueling skim and the next there was a massive negative mass photon wave that was
hed over the whole ship,” Maguire answered.
“A photon wave?” Emilie asked as her mind raced. It could be a weapon, or some kind of sensor. “Send the ship to battlestations. How far away was its source?”
“That is what has us stumped Captain,” Maguire responded. “Initial analysis indicates that it was thirty light minutes away.”
“Thirty light minutes?” Emilie repeated, expecting to be corrected. Instead Maguire nodded. Emilie frowned. Then she remembered the full description Maguire had given her; a negative mass photon wave, she had no real idea just what that meant. “Get Dr. Matthews up here now,” she ordered. “And run a ship-wide systems check, I want to make sure this wave didn’t do anything weird to our equipment.”
“Aye Admiral,” Maguire replied.
As her officers filed onto Intrepid’s bridge, Emilie allowed Maguire to fill them in while she thought over what was going on. With Intrepid so deep within the gas giant’s gravity well as she scooped up He3, her sensors were essentially blind. They wouldn’t be able to detect a ship even if it was half a light minute away, never mind thirty. But they didn’t need to detect whoever it was. The photon wave told her there was someone out there. And they’re looking for something, she concluded. There was no way the wave was a weapon, not used from such a distance. So it was some kind of sensor technology. “Put us into stealth,” she ordered. It was too late to take any preventative measure against the first wave, but if there was a second one there was no point making it any easier for whoever was out there to detect them. “Take us around to the other side of the gas giant. Keep us at this altitude.”
With her lieutenants overseeing her orders, Emilie turned to Dr. Matthews. She had taken her seat less than a minute ago, but Emilie was impatient. “What’s your first impression doctor?” Emilie asked.
Matthews shook her head. “I’m not sure I can say anything definitive. The computers were right. It was a negative energy particle wave. I’ve only seen them created in deep space laboratories. Even then, they couldn’t come close to travelling the distance this one has. From the energy readings we got, the wave has the strength to cover the entire system!”
“What is the point of these negative photon waves?” Emilie asked. She had read something about them in one of her advanced physics classes at the academy, but that was all she remembered.
“Besides tachyon pulses, they are another theoretical way to achieve faster than light communication,” Matthews answered. “They have always stayed theoretical because we’ve never been able to create a wave with more than one wavelength. We can’t pass on information that way.”
“So the wave moved through the system faster than the speed of light,” Emilie repeated. “What if it isn’t a communication technique, but some kind of sensor? Would the wave bounce off our hull and give whoever sent it a reading on us?”
Matthews’ eyes widened. “Of course! We know it does! But we’ve never been able to produce one powerful enough to cover a worthwhile distance.”
“Well someone figured out how to do it,” Emilie replied, she already had a strong suspicion who. “And they just used it against us. What are the chances they picked us up so deep in the gas giant’s atmosphere?”
Matthews surprise turned to shock as she frowned. “I… I… don’t know Captain. We’ve never carried out such experiments, at least not to my knowledge.”
“Give me your best guess doctor,” Emilie replied as calmly as she could. “Our lives may depend on it.”
“Right,” Matthews said as her lips tightened. She turned to her computer console and furiously tapped away at its screen. Less than a minute later she turned around. “There’s no way to know for sure. But it’s possible they might have missed us. Our stealth coating absorbed some of the negative photons, and the gas giant’s atmosphere may have disrupted many of them as well. They also have a strange variance, it’s almost like they are designed to reflect off some kind of material I haven’t seen before. Even Intrepid’s hull without her stealth coating would absorb a lot of the photons.”
Emilie frowned. That didn’t make sense. Who would make an FTL sensor that was bad at detecting alien ships? “Could it be some kind of system survey technology? If they are not looking for ships, maybe they’re looking for rare minerals or something?”
“It’s possible,” Matthews replied slowly, “but I have no idea what kind of minerals they might be looking for. There are none important enough that I can think of that this variance of photon wave would be good at detecting.”
“Right,” Emilie said as she came to a decision. “We need to know more. Prepare a stealth recon drone. I want it to just pop its head out of the gas giant’s atmosphere to see what it can pick up.”
“Aye Admiral,” Lieutenant Jones responded.
Emilie looked over to Alveraz’s command chair. “What do you think?”
Alveraz looked to be deep in thought. Instead of answering Emilie directly, he turned to Matthews. “You said our scientists have never produced one of these waves that has anywhere near the strength of what we detected. Why not?”
“Well, theoretically it’s possible I believe,” Matthews answered. “But the power consumption rates would be off the charts. Given our inability to make smaller strength waves work for communication purposes, there’s never been the need or financial backing to make larger ones.”
“What kind of power consumption are we talking about?” Alveraz pushed.
“I don’t know, but throwing a rough estimate out there, let’s say if we had thirty Intrepids with all their reactors hooked up together and a massive capacitor to hold the charge, we could maybe get the power we’d need in about a day.”
Alveraz let out a long whistle. “That’s a lot of energy!” He turned back to Emilie. “Apart from the Kulreans and the Varanni, who else do we know who might have the technology to produce that much energy?”
Emilie bit her lip. “I was already thinking that. But what are they doing out here, and with such a strange technology?”
“Well,” Alveraz said in a tone that suggested he was coming up with his answer as he went. “Why are we out here? We’re chasing a half mythical space civilization that supposedly has no home system and is all but impossible to track. What if the wave was from some kind of sensor designed to detect Kalassai ships? That may be why it isn’t attuned to ships like Intrepid. We don’t know how the Kalassai build their ships.”
“And,” Emilie jumped in as she grabbed hold of Alveraz’ thinking, “if the Kalassai have no home system like the Gramrians believe, then they could be hiding anywhere. If you wanted to hunt them, you’d need some kind of special technology… You may be right,” she added with a nod. “Let’s see what our drone shows us.”
“Launching,” Jones informed them moments later.
Emilie had to fight to keep still as her nerves spiked. Much more slowly than she was used to seeing, the drone was launched out of one of Intrepid’s forward missile tubes. It gradually moved away from the exploration cruiser, slowly gaining altitude until it was out of sight of Intrepid’s passive sensors.
For eight minutes everyone on the bridge waited in silence. The drone was programmed to move around to the other side of the gas giant and then poke its nose out long enough to allow its passives sensors to get a snapshot of what was going on within the system. When the drone reappeared, Emilie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her finger tapped on the armrest of her command chair as the drone closed with Intrepid again and its sensor data was transferred to Lieutenant Maguire’s command console. Before Emilie could ask, Maguire looked up and nodded to the main holo projector. As Emilie turned her head, it came to life. An image of fourteen ships appeared. Emilie’s eyes narrowed. They were unlike anything she had seen before. And yet there was an eerie familiarity about them.
“They have to be, aren’t they?” Alveraz asked.
Emilie wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but she couldn’t find a better answer. “I
don’t see any other reasonable suggestion. They are strange, but they have to be Karacknids.”
It was Matthews who confirmed it. “Think about how far we are away from the Karacknid Empire’s borders. If the Kalassai really have no homeworld and the Karacknids are hunting them, then why not have specially designed ships to go along with their negative photon wave sensors?”