“Dr. Grouse! Hey! It’s okay! You’re okay,” Lori soothed. He looked to her with those wide, staring eyes and some of the fight went out of him. “You just passed out,” she explained. A small twisting of the truth.
He didn’t seem to have heard her, and his eyes seemed to be staring right through her as if she wasn’t even there.
“They know.”
“They? What do they know?” She shook her head quickly.
He blinked and his eyes finally focused on her. He swallowed visibly and tried again, this time in a rasping voice, “They know where Earth is.”
Chapter 13
Clayton left the shuttle airlock at a flat sprint, darting past Doctor Stevens and his three new patients on their way to sickbay. The ship was under one G of linear thrust, so moving around felt perfectly natural. Clayton briefly noted on his way out that they had wrangled Dr. Grouse into a new pressure suit, one without the hole around the catheter in his chest. That was to keep him from contaminating the air aboard the Forerunner while they moved him down to sickbay.
Clayton was also aware of Dr. Grouse’s revelation about his avian captors. Apparently, the aliens had used their version of a Visualizer on him, and they’d picked his brain until he had literally bled from his ears.
The ambassador hung back with Dr. Reed, leaving Clayton to run up to the bridge alone. He made contact with Lieutenant Devon before he even arrived, asking for an update.
The news wasn’t good.
She told him that the inbound alien ships had changed course to match the Forerunner’s outbound trajectory.
Clayton reached the bridge and used his ARCs to open the doors. Heavy metal slabs rumbled open, and he strode through.
A Marine standing guard inside the doors came to attention and called out, “Captain on deck!”
The rest of the crew rose to their feet.
“At ease! I have the conn!” He strode quickly down the aisle between control stations to reach the forward viewscreens. Lieutenant Devon was waiting for him, her red hair a frizzy mess leaking out of a tangled bun and glowing in the light of Trappist-1 blazing through those viewscreens.
“Sir,” she said, inclining her head to him as he came to stand beside her and they turned in unison to face the viewports.
“Show them to me,” he ordered.
The stars on the viewscreens panned swiftly away, scrolling sideways until they came to rest on a cluster of small red target boxes. “Computer, enhance targets to maximum acuity.”
Those boxes blew up, zooming in until actual ships and discernible shapes appeared. They were black soul-sucking shadows that barely stood out from the darkness of space, six of them, all long and streamlined, as if wind resistance were somehow a factor. The ships were all the same type, and all flying in a close formation, with one in the lead and the others fanning out and trailing behind with increasing distance. It took Clayton a moment to recognize that formation as a V. Of course it is, he thought. But then he checked that thought: these creatures weren’t from Earth, so the idea that they might naturally flock together in a V-formation was likely flawed.
“How big are they?” he asked.
“Six hundred and ten meters.”
“Six hundred!” Clayton echoed.
The Forerunner was only four hundred meters long, and it was the largest class of spaceship that the UNE had ever built.
Clayton blew out a breath. Odds were six against one, and each of those ships could probably wipe them out in a blink. He was starting to question the wisdom of evacuating to orbit. Maybe they should have all gone down to the surface and run into the forests to try and hide.
“We need to attempt to establish comms. They need to know we mean them no harm.”
“We already tried to hail them, sir,” Devon said, shaking her head.
“Then we try again!”
Clayton rounded on the comms officer. An ensign he barely recognized. Celia Kolter. She had a round face and bright green eyes. Short black hair. He was less familiar with the men and women from Devon’s team than he was with his own bridge crew, but there was no point in switching them out now. These people had handled everything thus far; they could handle the remainder of this incident.
“Ensign, hail them on every frequency you can think of. Don’t stop until you get some kind of response.”
“Yes, sir! What’s the message, sir?”
The message. There was no way to communicate. No common language. Not even common encryptions. For all he knew trying to hail them with modulated beams of electromagnetic radiation could be interpreted as some type of attack. He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “Never mind. No comms.”
“Yes, sir...”
He turned back to the viewports with Devon.
“What are we going to do, sir?”
“We’re going to pray that those aren’t warships, Lieutenant, and while we’re praying, we’re going to arm every missile, rail gun, and laser that we’ve got and aim them aft at those ships. We’re also going to have our fighter pilots standing by and ready to scramble to their birds—” He broke off, grimacing at the poor choice of words. “—to their Scimitars,” he amended. “And we’re going to hope to God that we don’t actually need to defend ourselves, because if we do, I don’t think it’s going to be even nearly enough.”
“Yes, sir,” Devon replied in a whisper of a voice. She turned and nodded to the officer at the flight ops station. “You heard the captain! Get our pilots suited up and ready to go!”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Clayton stared hard at those streamlined shadows, all somehow racing toward them at ten Gs. If they had live crews on board, how were they able to survive that? Birds on Earth had hollow bones. They were fragile. Of course, being lighter than the average animal they might also survive higher G-forces with ease.
Clayton shook his head, dispelling those thoughts with a mental shove and forcing himself to focus on a strategy. Some plan to dissuade their pursuers or at least a way to give them hell if they couldn’t be dissuaded.
The problem was, he had absolutely no idea what kind of threat those ships presented. Were they armed? And if so, with what?
His mind flashed back to laser weapon the creature from the lab had used to kill Commander Taylor. It was a bad sign that these aliens had developed such lethal handheld lasers. The ones they mounted on their spaceships would undoubtedly be a lot more powerful. For all he knew, the Forerunner might already be inside of their effective weapons envelope.
* * *
Lori lay strapped to a gurney in sickbay, peering over the tips of her boots at Dr. Grouse and Delta. They were strapped down, too, but the straps were for their safety—in case the ship needed to make any sudden maneuvers.
The idea of a firefight in space was absurd. Just a day ago even first contact with an intelligent alien race would have been a milestone. Now they were talking about a military engagement with one.
Lori couldn’t help thinking that it was some kind of misunderstanding. There had to be a way to communicate to these beings that they meant them no harm—that their intentions were peaceful.
Dr. Grouse cried out, and Doctor Stevens barked an order at his assistant. “Get me suction, damn it! Yes! Now more gauze! Pack it in! There...”
The erratic beeping of Dr. Grouse’s heart rate monitor set the tone for Lori’s own heartbeat. A gloved hand reached into hers and squeezed. It was Richard, smiling down on her through two separate layers of faceplates and pressure suits. She wished they could peel those layers away so that he could hold her for real. This was probably the end—death had come for them aboard six, six hundred-meter long starships. Add one more six to that, and it could have been the Devil himself who had come for them.
“There, he’s stable,” Doctor Stevens sighed. Tools clattered to a mag-locked cart, and the doctor came striding over. “You’re next,” he said, smiling tightly at Lori. “Ready?”
“Next for what?” she asked slowly, her e
yes on Dr. Grouse’s boots.
“No, no, just routine testing. He was a more delicate case because of the device lodged in his chest.” Doctor Stevens tried smiling more broadly to put her at ease.
Lori nodded, but didn’t smile back.
The next two hours were filled with blood tests and scans of every type imaginable for both her and Delta. Stevens eventually left them alone and went to an adjacent lab to test those samples. He returned after what felt like an eternity to give them the results.
“You’re both clear to leave,” he said. “No sign of any alien organisms in your blood, saliva, feces, or urine.”
“Great,” Lori said. Her eyes strayed once more to her colleague on the gurney opposite hers. “And what about Dr. Grouse?”
Doctor Steven’s expression turned cagey behind his helmet. He glanced at Dr. Grouse, lying sedated on his gurney, his chest now stuffed with gauze and wrapped in bandages.
“I’d like to keep him here for further testing.”
“That wasn’t an answer,” Lori pointed out.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Stevens replied. “We don’t know enough yet about what was done to him.”
“Are there alien organisms in his blood?”
Stevens’ shook his head, but said nothing.
“Come on,” Richard said, already unclipping the restraints that pinned her to the gurney. He helped her up, and she swung her legs over the side and dropped to the deck. Across from her, Delta did the same all on his own.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said, and breezed by them on his way out.
“Remember to wait for the decon cycle before you leave! Don’t take off your suit before you’ve done that,” Stevens called after him.
“I’m not an idiot, Doc!” Delta called back.
Stevens looked back to Lori. “There is one other thing...”
A sharp pain erupted as fear sent acid boiling up her throat. “Yes?”
Stevens looked to Richard, then back to her, and put on a grim smile. “This may or may not be good news, but...”
“But?” Lori prompted. “Just get to the point, Stevens.”
“You’re pregnant.”
Lori’s world tipped on its end and slid off into absurdity. A giggle escaped her lips, and she shook her head. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Richard looked to her with a furrowed brow, as if there might be something that she had failed to tell him about.
There wasn’t.
“But that’s impossible!” Lori said. “I have an implant!”
“Implants can malfunction just like any other contraceptive. No birth control is perfect, Dr. Reed.”
Richard grabbed Lori’s hand again. “This is good news,” he said.
“Is it?” Lori challenged. “We’re talking about bringing a new life into... into what? Vacuum?” Lori said, throwing up her hands. “We’re all going to be dead soon, so this is neither good nor bad news. It’s just another death to tally.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Stevens said quietly.
“He’s right,” Richard added.
Lori shook her head in frustration. Her throat had constricted with a painful knot and her eyes burned with the threat of tears. She turned to leave, stalking after Delta.
This was everything that she and Richard had talked about and dreamed about, but it was all wrong! They were supposed to be colonizing a new world together, and starting their family down there, not up here in space, with hostile forces chasing them. No joy could be derived from an accidental pregnancy soon to be aborted by forces beyond their control.
“They might not have hostile intentions!” Richard called after her. “They might just want to talk to us!”
Lori wasn’t listening. She couldn’t bear to hold onto empty hope.
Something very bad was about to happen. If anyone needed any proof of that, they need look no further than Dr. Grouse and Commander Taylor.
We’re all going to die, Lori thought as she entered the quarantine airlock and initiated the decontamination cycle. Crimson light pulsed all around her, making the decon sprays look like blood.
Chapter 14
Twenty Hours Later...
The air on the bridge could have been cut with a knife, thick and sour with sweat and fear. Clayton considered himself cool under pressure, but this standoff was even beginning to wear on him. His scimitar pilots were all sitting in their cockpits, their legs no doubt cramping to the point of paralysis by now. The gunnery chief on the bridge could have been wrung out like a wet cloth.
“Lieutenant Devon, any change?” Clayton asked, his eyes fixed on the six black bullet-shaped vessels chasing them away from the pale blue star that was Trappist-1. He sat at his control station in the center of the bridge, leaning on the armrests with both elbows, his hands steepled under his chin.
“No change, sir,” Devon said from the XO’s chair beside him. “Range is holding steady.”
He nodded, but gave no reply. The alien ships had closed to just one million klicks without launching a single fighter or firing even so much as a warning shot. Clayton had given his crew strict orders not to launch or fire anything either.
He knew they were outgunned. They would be vaporized in seconds if they started a pissing contest. This was like an unarmed hiker running into a grizzly bear in the wild. No sudden moves. Back away slowly.
Clayton let out a breath and rolled his head and shoulders. His neck cracked loudly as he did so. Six hours. The alien ships had been in range of the Forerunner’s lasers for six hours. Surely that meant that the Forerunner had been within range of their adversary’s guns for a lot longer. The effective range of a laser was a simple function of its power level and the sophistication of its focusing tech. The Forerunner could shoot a dust mote at a billion klicks and vaporize it, but that wouldn’t do more than tickle an armored target.
“What do they want?” he asked of no one in particular. “They’re not closing on us anymore. Not firing their guns. Not trying to contact us in any way...”
Lieutenant Devon glanced at him, her green eyes gleaming in the low light of the bridge and its viewscreens.
“Something on your mind, Lieutenant?”
She nodded. “Yes, sir. What if they’re following us?”
He frowned. “Obviously that’s what they’re doing, but why are they following us?”
“To get to Earth.”
That idea clicked, resonating inside of him. He grimaced. It had occurred to him, too, but he hadn’t wanted to say it aloud. Saying it made it seem somehow more likely.
“Let’s say that’s true. Do you think that they’re going to keep it up for the next ninety years while we fly home?”
“Maybe. Maybe they have cryo pods like us. Or maybe they’re immortal and time means nothing to them.”
A muscle in Clayton’s jaw twitched. “Anything is possible.” This was why they hadn’t set course for Earth yet. They couldn’t afford to reveal anything else about its location. It was bad enough that Dr. Grouse claimed the aliens had somehow stolen its location from his brain.
“Captain, we are coming up on the heliopause,” the officer of the helm announced. “ETA four minutes and seven seconds.”
Clayton nodded. “Carry on, ensign. Alert me once we’ve crossed it.”
“Aye, sir.”
Trappist-1 was an ultra-cool red dwarf eleven times smaller than the Sun. All of its planets orbited within tiny fractions of the distance from Earth to its Sun, which meant that Trappist-1’s solar wind was pathetically weak. Even though they’d only traveled about forty million klicks from the star, they were already about to cross the outermost boundary of the solar system, marking their return to interstellar space.
The seconds ticked away, silence gathering like a storm inside of Clayton. His chest felt tight. His head hot. He pulled up a map from his control station, a colorful hologram that hovered in the air before his eyes. He watched a green-shaded 3D icon of the
Forerunner inching steadily closer to a sky blue line that circled the system’s sun.
They flashed across that line, and a subtle vibration shivered through the ship as they left Trappist-1’s influence.
Then something else happened. An alarm squawked.
“Sir! The enemy ships are changing course!” the ensign at the sensors station reported.
“Ready all weapons!” Clayton barked. “Flight ops, tell our pilots to—”
“Sir, they’re not accelerating!” the sensors officer said. “They’re peeling away. Look—”
Clayton minimized his map to see a more detailed version of it appear on the forward viewscreens. Six black, bullet-shaped vessels were turning and burning toward Trappist-1, their aft ends glowing bright red.
“Their acceleration is increasing. Two Gs... four... five... holding steady at five. They’re beating a hasty retreat, sir.”
“Must be their cruising speed,” Lieutenant Devon muttered.
The pressure in Clayton’s chest released, and he slumped in his chair. The standoff was over. Even better yet, it looked like they weren’t planning to follow the Forerunner back to Earth. So why had they been so determined to learn its location from Dr. Grouse?
Maybe he was mistaken. Or maybe they were simply curious where humans came from.
Sighs and muttered curses filled the air. People stretched at their stations. Relief flowed out from the crew like a wave, but Clayton wasn’t ready to give into it. Not yet.
Coming to a decision, he released his safety harness and stood up on creaking knees. “Lieutenant Devon, set condition yellow throughout the ship.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. A bright yellow light pulsed through the bridge and an automated voice declared the reduced alert level over the intercom. “Going somewhere?” Devon asked.
“Sick bay. You have the conn, Devon. Alert me the instant anything changes up here.”
First Encounter Page 8
