“Pax Feris is no longer simply out of communication. As of yesterday, their status has been officially listed as missing.”
After a sharp, nearly collective gasp of air, the silence shattered. Conversation broke out throughout the crew. Several people shouted questions, shock or anger obvious in their voices even if their words were lost in the chaos. Cira’s own eyes burned as she watched Lieutenant Zafar fold in half, sobbing with her face in her hands. Only then did Cira remember—she had a sister on Pax Feris. She wasn’t the only one. Several of the crew had family on the missing ship.
Erryla held up her hand, and although the reaction wasn’t instantaneous, the crew did quiet. “There is no evidence anything has happened to the ship—no distress calls and no debris. Feris has, however, missed the last two passive check-ins on the relay. It’s assumed Captain Adriano changed course in an attempt to reach port and repair communications, but that is a hypothesis. With one ship missing and another unresponsive, the Council isn’t waiting for a third to call it a pattern.”
“Are we being sent to help them?” someone shouted from the audience.
Despite the flash of displeasure that showed on her face, Erryla shook her head. “Feris’s last known location was somewhere outside the Arae System, headed for Alula, and Amitis still seems to be on a course from Casseta to Draconis. We’re too far from either. Other ships in the fleet will be tasked to investigate.”
Another ripple of distressed whispers spread through the crowd. Although Cira kept her silence, she understood their frustration. The last thing anyone wanted to hear was that this was becoming a pattern. Patterns continued and repeated. If this pattern repeated, it meant more of their friends and families were going to disappear.
“The fleet is on high alert, and as soon as each ship off-loads its current cargo, they are to make their way to Paxis Station until the situation is resolved,” Erryla said.
“Resolved?” someone behind Cira muttered, voice teeming with skepticism. They weren’t the only one.
Lieutenant Badri stepped forward next. “Until we dock at Paxis, check in with your superiors at least twice each day. We will be asking anyone with programming or technological expertise to work extra hours shoring up defenses against a potential virus or digital attack. Report any computer glitch or suspicious behavior. Stay in contact with friends and family on other ships and keep us apprised if anyone stops responding.”
Cira closed her eyes. This time, no one spoke. The only sound Cira could hear was the strained breaths of the crew. The weight of those small noises was even more unbearable than total silence would’ve been. Then Erryla took a breath, preparing to speak again.
“Most importantly, support one another.” Erryla’s voice softened—not a lot, but enough to ease some of the crackling tension in the air. “While someone taking aim at the PSSC isn’t unprecedented, it hasn’t happened while any of us have been alive. This is the first time we are facing a direct threat. Some people will need help coping. Offer it if you can, otherwise, alert a superior. Keeping our family safe is the priority, and safe also means sane. I’ve ordered Lieutenant Commander Dalil-Antares to push us toward our destination as fast as possible, but it’ll be three weeks before we reach Datax and several more until Paxis. Don’t let this situation break our family apart.”
Erryla took a step back, putting herself in line with the rest of the command crew, and her audience took it as a sign to converge. In an instant, most of the crew was on their feet and jogging down the amphitheater’s broad steps toward the center. Everyone else seemed too shocked to move, but even they looked like they were contemplating joining the growing throng.
Before the masses hid him from view, Halver caught Cira’s eye and tilted his head, silently asking if she wanted to talk. She did, but not to him. Shaking her head, she stood and wound through the crowd in search of one face in particular.
Adrienn had stayed to the edge of the amphitheater rather than sitting near the center like she had, and now ze was almost alone—everyone who’d been seated nearby had moved toward the officers fielding questions. Ze was sitting on the highest level of the amphitheater and leaning against the trunk of a tree, head tilted back and eyes closed. Cira almost would’ve believed ze was asleep if not for the constant clenching and unclenching of the muscles in zir jaw.
Making sure her approach made noise—she didn’t want to startle zem—Cira sat down nearby. For several minutes, despite the questions swirling in her head, she didn’t speak. She watched the crew. Over two hundred people lived and served on board Pax Novis. Fifty officers, one hundred sixty-five crew members, and fourteen—soon to be fifteen—children. Nearly all of them were crowded in the central floor of the amphitheater either to ask the command crew questions or to listen to the answers they gave others. The few who weren’t pressed into the ever-tightening knot of humanity were huddled in their own smaller groups, heads tilted together for whispered discussions as their eyes tracked the main assembly. Between them all, fear thrummed in the air like a sonic pulse, and Cira hated it. This feeling had no place on her ship.
“Do you think they’re right and it’s a virus?” Cira asked.
Adrienn’s jaw clenched and held for several seconds before ze said, “I diagnose people, not ships.”
“Unless it’s a person with ship parts.” She looked down at her silver and black hand.
“I do make exceptions.” Adrienn opened one eye and tilted zir head toward her, lips twitching into an attempt at a smile; it faded in the next breath. “This isn’t one of those times.”
“Yes, it is,” Cira countered a little too sharply. “Something like this is too important for you to not have an opinion.”
Head tilting, ze conceded the point, but ze still seemed reluctant to speak. Ze pulled zir knees in and rested zir wrists on top of them. Tapping out a rhythmless beat on zir legs, Adrienn thought in silence for a minute. Cira waited zem out.
“My biggest fear is the virus didn’t come from an external source,” ze finally admitted, the words spoken so quietly Cira had to lean in to hear. “In the worst scenarios I can think of, this will turn out to be either a coup by some group within the PSSC, or…” Ze shrugged helplessly and rubbed a hand over zir trimmed beard. “Out of every Pax citizen in the quadrant, you and I should both know how possible it is that someone snuck onto Feris and Amitis.”
“Possible, but not easy. If someone from the outside is doing this on those ships—” Cira cut herself off and shuddered, her mind spinning. “Think about it, Adrienn. We work hellaciously hard to get our kids on and off the ship. If everything going wrong is because of a saboteur on board, the easiest way for them to get on is to have inside help.”
“Oh, good. A new worst-case scenario,” ze muttered, dropping zir head to zir knees.
Cira’s heart dropped like a stone. She hadn’t even realized what she was implicating when she spoke. Her voice was filled with horror. “But why would any Pax citizen do that?”
“Why does anyone do anything?” Adrienn turned zir head to look at Cira, zir expression bleak and zir skin alarmingly white. “Maybe they got bought or threatened or converted. Maybe they were lied to and believed they were doing something to help the PSSC. I don’t know.”
Cira didn’t want to believe any Pax citizen would put their entire society at risk for some kind of personal gain, but history lessons had taught her not to underestimate the depths humanity could sink to. And, if she was being honest, wasn’t she doing the same thing in a way? Helping Riston and the other children escape their homes would’ve been trouble enough. Allowing them to stay had been a different kind of risk, one she hadn’t regretted until now.
Turning fully toward her friend, she tilted her head so her hair hid her face from the crew. “I told everyone to stay well out of sight, but with this level of panic, I’m worried, Adrienn.”
“Me, too.” Zir lip ring twitched like ze was wiggling it with zir tongue. Then, ze sighed. “We’ll be at Datax
Station in a couple weeks. Let’s see how that goes, and we’ll make a decision on the way to Paxis. Honestly, I’m hoping this mess gets cleared up before then.”
Because then we won’t have to make them leave the ship. Cira hated herself for the thought, but that seemed to be what it was coming down to.
Halver had been right—times were changing. The patterns of war were shifting. What was once an acceptable risk was quickly becoming untenable. Unless PCGC sent out a report explaining how the problems with Feris and Amitis really were major communications glitches and nothing more, Cira might have to make Riston’s little family leave. No matter how much she wanted to help them, her family and Pax Novis came first. They had to.
Cira didn’t have anything else.
Public Video Log
Posted by the Intersystem Legal Council
and Refuge Center (ILCRC)
Speaker: Zoyani Ilunga,
President of the Araean chapter of the ILCRC
Terra-Sol date 3814.131
Transcript below
Three days ago, my home system and two others—Tau Ceti and Draconis—abruptly left the Seventy-seventh Intersystem Peace Summit. No matter the reasons they gave when they publicly announced their departure, this decision is a short-sighted disgrace. This is a quinquennial tradition nearly four centuries old, and yet one of the only lasting, positive impacts it has had was the ratification of the PCCS Charter.
While it might have been naive for the public to expect a lasting cease-fire to come from an institution that has not proven useful thus far, I held on to hope until three days ago. There were new ambassadors and representatives attending, and recent events the systems have been struggling with should have brought into sharper focus the importance of cooperation if we want our way of life to survive. Now, I no longer hope. I am afraid.
The history of humanity has proven once again that only a global—or in this era, universal—threat of danger or extinction will force our species to change or to place the greater good before personal gain. The disintegration of the peace summit shows this needs to happen again if this war is ever going to end, but I’m afraid very few of us will be alive to see what the quadrant looks like when that happens.
Jeopardy
Private correspondence
Message encrypted; channel secure
From: AuxAg345
To: Admiral Koda Survid, Pavonis Destroyer Exandri
Terra-Sol date 3814.241
The situation on Syèlifi: Protests against the current regime have been on the rise, and there are numerous pressure points we could use to destabilize the Alula System. More details are being sent back by courier. They should be in your hands by the end of the week. I will await further orders on this.
There is one other subject of note. I hesitated to include this at first, but it’s better to pass along the rumor than risk not acting until it’s too late. A new player has entered the shadow game, and they already seem to have hooks in several systems if stories are true. They—and it’s unclear if it’s a person or an organization—call themselves Prometheus, a name that originates from an ancient Earth myth. According to various sources, they’ve been buying up tech, resources, and personnel for cycles, have instigated riots on three planets in three separate systems, and have never claimed credit for any of it. There’s also no real identity trace or facial scan on them. It seems like the only way to know Prometheus exists is by looking for the vague shadow they leave behind. I have no details on their loyalties or goals yet. They’re talked about like specters. While I wait for orders regarding the current mission, I’ll be digging into this to learn more.
--------
Private correspondence
Message encrypted; channel secure
From: Admiral Koda Survid, Pavonis Destroyer Exandri
To: AuxAg345
Terra-Sol date 3814.244
This is a priority one order, Agent. Contact your handler for an in-person meet to repair an apparent glitch in your implanted tracker. Your signal has been flickering for the last eighteen hours, and mission control has been unable to get a solid fix on your location. Acknowledge receipt of this message and proceed to designated meeting place.
Additionally, your rumor report has been recently corroborated by several other agents. Pursue this research as allowed by the constraints of your primary mission objectives.
Chapter Seven
Cira
Terra-Sol date 3814.250
Cira had always believed attacks were swift and decisive. A bomb. An ambush. An invasion. Those were the events that’d defined “attack” before someone had launched an incremental assault on Pax ships, disabling them and apparently making them disappear slowly, one by one, without any wreckage to prove the violence or violation had ever happened. The current situation was changing the concept of an attack for her, and she wasn’t happy about the shift.
It’d been almost a week since Pax Feris disappeared, and nothing had changed. Pax Amitis was still out of communication but consistently checking in at every passive sensor. Every remaining vessel in the fleet had been keeping an always-open data stream back to Paxis Station, and no new communication issues had cropped up. Yet.
The yet kept the whole of the PSSC on high alert and pushed Cira to reanalyze the data and details she’d already seen a dozen times, just because it was something she could do. The problem was so far away that nothing else she could think of would have any impact at all.
Cira was on bridge duty again, and she’d decided at the beginning of her shift to use her security station access to dig a little deeper. The results of those searches were now spread across every extra screen and holo-display the station had access to. They still felt cluttered. She leaned back in her chair to get a better look at it all, pressing into the contour gel and forcing it to adjust to the extra weight. It wasn’t helping—seeing every official report on Pax Feris and Pax Amitis laid out side by side hadn’t clarified a damn thing. The situation had only gotten fuzzier.
Pax Sustis and Pax Auxis, the two ships sent to investigate Feris’s disappearance, had reached their destination late yesterday, and the first reports came in a few hours after. New details dropped into the shared PSSC system every hour after. So far, they’d found nothing, just like the collected sensor logs of other ships in the area told them they would. There were no new debris fields to hint at a lost battle. No signals had been detected, not even the low-frequency radio waves ships used when all other communication systems were down. Even the residual energy a ship left behind when it passed through space at superluminal speeds seemed to simply stop suddenly. It truly did seem as though, seven days ago, Pax Feris vanished midflight somewhere between one passive sensor in the relay and the next.
The most reasonable current hypothesis was that Captain Adriano ordered Feris to shut off the SLD and travel by thrusters while the crew attempted to fix the communications problems, but almost no one believed it. If Feris were anywhere in the area, someone would’ve seen them by now or at least found them on long-range sensor sweeps.
“Specters,” Cira murmured to herself as she went over the reports again.
“What was that?” Erryla looked over.
“Nothing, Captain, it’s just… The reports coming in from Sustis and Auxis make it sound like an old ghost story.” Cira guiltily swiped all displays back to the default, her eyes automatically checking for new interdepartmental alerts or external threat warnings. It only showed simple green checks as status reports from Novis’s departments and a small green alert in the bottom corner: No Threats Detected. “Vanishing ships. It’s creepy. I don’t like it.”
Erryla grimaced. “None of us do, Ensign.”
Cira bit her lip, nodded once, and turned her full focus back to her tasks.
The last few days had been strange. Everyone was on alert to the point of acting jumpy, like someone had pumped a tincture of adrenaline directly into the air system, but schedules and routines proceeded as normal.
Cira hadn’t known it was possible to fluctuate this quickly between anxious fear and sheer boredom. Even within the span of a single shift, incoming alerts or a new ship popping up on her display sent her pulse superluminal only for that energy to plummet fast, leaving her yawning and struggling to focus. And then it happened all over again.
One way or another, something needs to happen, Cira grumbled to herself. Either give me a problem to solve or let me get back to my predictable life.
Guilt hit her along with the thought. Wishing for a problem to face felt too much like wishing for trouble. Even wishing for answers felt like asking too much—what’d happened to Feris and Amitis might very well be awful.
Then the ping of an incoming alert caught her attention and dragged her back into the ghost stories.
More detailed scans of Pax Feris’s last known location have revealed an oddity. In an area only about fifty square klicks, there is an extremely high concentration of photinos and squarks with no clear source or cause. Both raw sensor data and our initial analyses have been included with this report.
Cira blinked and read the brief update again. Concentrations of photinos were usually only found near astronomical objects like nebulas and black holes. The path Pax Feris was on shouldn’t have taken the ship within a thousand light-years of anything like that, which is exactly why the readings Cira was seeing made zero astrophysical sense. By the time waves of particles traveling outward from a nebula reached the farther reaches of space, concentrations of matter became diffuse. Better sensor arrays could still detect particles like photinos and squarks, and sometimes track them to their source, but the concentrations found by Sustis and Auxis were so high even a centuries-old ship with half its systems on backup generators would be able to recognize them.
With a few quick motions, Cira closed the report and checked the access logs on the file to see who had read it so far. Most of the command crew had at least acknowledged the alert, but there were a few people in both the engineering and science departments who hadn’t. She pushed specific alerts to their terminals with a link to the message. Then, hesitating only a second, she also saved a copy to a folder in her personal archives, one buried deep within the system. Riston had access to the folder. After another brief vacillation, she compiled the entire backlog of alerts and reports regarding Feris and Amitis and dropped it in as well. Her stowaways were incredibly intelligent in their own ways. Giving them these details meant giving them a chance to spot something important. After all, if Pax ships were in danger, so were they.
Pax Novis Page 11
