Analog SFF, July-August 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Oh, yeah. Like that's gonna happen here.”

  “No, not here. But maybe out there, on the Fringe.” He raised his eyes to the view from the bridge.

  The Fringe—you couldn't speak the words without thinking them in title case—was a shipboard term for the outer reaches of humanity's space exploration. The Fringe currently didn't extend much beyond the solar system, but new propulsion technologies offered the near prospect of reaching the nearest Sol-class star with its single, Earth-like planet.

  Janine laughed, restricting her decibel level to merely warping local space. “You're cute, Fringe Boy. Very ... ingenuous.”

  Naive, she meant. Nebbish, his mom would have said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Want to know what I think?”

  No, but he made an interested face anyway.

  “I think no matter where you are, the chances of First Contact are slim and none. And who's to say First Contact is a good thing, anyway? It may mean the end of the world as we know it.”

  “Are you always this optimistic?” Matty asked before he could stop himself.

  Janine grinned. “Yeah, that's me—Little Miss Sunshine. Oh, hey! We got one!” she added—a second before the scanner pinged.

  “How'd you do that?” Matty asked, keying the “catch” up to the main screen.

  Janine shrugged. “Caught the blip out of the corner of my eye. I've got excellent peripheral vision. I'll buzz the team.”

  She got up and moved to the communications console while Matty got the readings on the new acquisition. It was large and roughly cylindrical. A cast-off hab segment from the last Venus mission, he guessed, shaking his head. These big chunks of debris could be nasty, especially if they got to tumbling as this one was.

  “Old sucker, aren't you?” he murmured under his breath.

  “Huh?” Janine asked.

  “Old,” he repeated, nodding at the screen. “And big enough to use the primary recovery arm.”

  “Siraj and Tessa are on their way to the bays,” Janine told him.

  “Yeah...” Matty frowned as the HAZSCAN yipped at him. “This is weird. HAZ is picking up some sort of radiation reading.”

  “From an old, dead, hab module?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Residual?”

  “Active.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, running unlikely scenarios.

  “Instrument glitch?” asked Janine, seizing on the most likely.

  “I'll shield for radiation. Better have the team suit up for HAZMAT recovery anyway,” Matty said.

  He turned his gaze back to the scanner. Janine had to be right. When he'd first seen it, he'd have sworn the radiation signature was coming from a point beyond their acquisition. Now it seemed to be coming from practically on top of it. Weird.

  He focused the sensor array on the tumbling structure, taking measurements, calculating volume and mass, then checking their empty bays.

  “It's too big for a standard bay,” Matty said. “I'll pull the bulkhead between Bays Seven and Eight. Have ‘em use that.”

  “Sure thing.” Janine relayed instructions to the recovery team, then headed for the lockers to help prep the EVA suits.

  Matty moved the Terrapin into position to match the habitat's slow tumble through space. When the ship was in position he began arranging the external optics so he could monitor the operation. That's when it struck him how much this was like the maneuvers he'd watched early every Wednesday morning from the second-floor bedroom window of his parents’ house.

  He keyed the optics sequences with a groan. Matty Gurkow, he told himself glumly, you are a glorified galactic garbage man.

  As the optical arrays moved on autopilot to focus on the recovery bays and the target object, something on the view screen caught his eye. He glanced up and choked as a shriek lodged in his throat.

  Instead of the hab unit, the outward-facing optical array—OP3—displayed a swiftly panning shot of another spacecraft. It loomed, huge and gleaming and indescribable, dominating his entire field of vision. And it was completely unfamiliar—at least, that's what his senses told him in the blurred moment that the array caught it.

  “Janine!” Matty aborted the automatic pan of OP3, his fingers scrabbling over the control panel in a desperate attempt to reacquire the target manually. “Janine!” he shouted again, barely hearing his own voice above the clamor of his runaway pulse.

  That was when he noticed the magnification setting on the optical array: In his panic, he'd apparently bumped it to its highest level. Whatever he had seen must have been several astronomical units away. Of course, he couldn't tell how many now with the controls all discombobulated. He'd have to view the playback and take the range and trajectory readings from that.

  He reset OP3 for the recovery operation with a sigh; he was not, after all, about to have a close encounter, but still...

  “You rang?” Janine poked her head back onto the bridge and glided over to him; the reduced gravity shuffle looked awfully good on her.

  “The number three optic caught another spacecraft for a moment. Way out there ... somewhere...”

  “So? There are other spacecraft out here, you know,” she teased gently.

  “Yeah, but this one looked ... well, it didn't look like one of ours.”

  She gave him a bright, inquisitive stare. “You sure?”

  “Well, not really. The optics were on auto and moving pretty quickly, but I should be able to go back and look at the vid record and...”

  He started to initiate a playback, but Janine put her hand over his and stopped him.

  “Not before we get that old hab unit aboard, Matty. They're waiting for you to prep the bays.”

  “But...”

  “Matty, what were we just talking about? You're all hyped up on ‘what if.’ Odds are you got a glimpse of one of our colonials. Right?”

  “Right.” He shook himself free of his First Contact fever and let OP3 resume its program. Then he slumped in his chair and turned his attention to withdrawing the bulkhead between the bays, feeling more dweebish than ever.

  “It is most certainly some sort of gigantic vessel. Quite peculiar in its form.” Tefkleh om Bar studied the image in his viewing tank with unconcealed excitement.

  His nearest companion on the bridge of the Discovery Ship Pride of Barfaris, Ops Specialist Fez om AmBar, had not taken her eyes from the immense and obviously manmade object since their holo-array had acquired it three days earlier.

  “It is vaster than I could have imagined,” breathed Fez. She pointed a digit at the three-dimensional display. “Surely the rotation is for the purpose of creating artificial gravity. Perhaps it is a generation ship.”

  “Yes, that would be my guess, given its size,” agreed Tefkleh.

  “Are there life-signs?” Fez was so overcome that her voice oozed out like a breeze sighing through a wind flute.

  The science officer, Raus om Bar, checked his instruments for the third time. He smiled, his thin lips pulling back into a rippling curve. “Oh, yes. They seem to be concentrated in the aft section of the ark, but they are there: heat signatures, mechanical activity, the indication of communications...”

  “Can we contact them?” Fez asked Tefkleh.

  “Pray that it be so.”

  Fez accepted this as an order, and assumed a prayerful position and attitude in her jump seat, sending ardent pleas to the Supreme Being that, this time, they would encounter another race of men. They had been scanning the heavens and searching unrewarded for more than ten reigns. Two Manifestations of the Supreme Being had come and gone and still they searched, following false leads to dead ends. But this time...

  Fez peeked at the image in the tank. This was most definitely a manmade craft. She was awed. How far they must have come to require such a huge vessel. She closed her eyes again, apologized to the Deity for being so distracted, and resumed her prayers.

  Sometime later, Tefkleh interrupted them with a m
ew of frustration. “They do not respond. No matter what I send or in what frequency, they do not respond.”

  Fez opened her eyes. The titanic unknown continued to rotate on its long axis, its smooth, curving hull awash in the light of the distant star. “Look, Tef! Is that a docking bay?”

  Tefkleh brought their craft about, matching the rotation of the larger vessel. On one massive flank, there was indeed a portal of a size more than adequate to admit the Pride of Barfaris. Tefkleh brought them in close to the portal, still matching rotation, then shook his head.

  “I must assume the outer hull ceases rotation for docking. Attempting entry with it in motion would be foolish ... for any number of reasons.”

  “Perhaps if you try to hail them again,” Fez suggested. “If they see our orientation, perhaps they will understand that we wish to...” She could hardly bear to say the glorious words. “...to meet with them.”

  Tefkleh considered this for a moment. “Well, certainly, if they were inclined to violence they would have sent out war craft or threatened us by now.”

  Accordingly, he pinged the other ship and sent a simple mathematical message on all frequencies. A moment later, he gasped as the message was answered with a short burst of peculiar static from the alien. Then the huge hull began to slow its rotation. In a matter of moments it had stopped and light could be seen within the docking aperture.

  Tefkleh turned to look at Fez. “I believe we are being invited aboard.”

  Fez took a deep, calming breath. “Then let us accept the invitation.”

  They glided up to the ark's massive flank and navigated through the docking port into a space that was so immense and cavernous as to be mind-boggling. They barely had time to register this, however, before all light was extinguished. The holotank went dark. Completely dark.

  Fez's eyes sought the aft view. It was chilling. “The stars are gone,” she whispered.

  “The holotank is down,” said Raus softly.

  “Can we retreat?”

  “Alas, no,” said Tefkleh. “Our instruments are dead. I have no sensors by which to steer. We shall have to wait to see what our ... our new friends wish to do with us.”

  * * * *

  “There it is! Right there!” Matty pointed at the image that flitted across the screen.

  Siraj stopped the playback, then ticked it back several seconds.

  “Well, it's clearly not natural,” he allowed. “But look at the bearing. Aimed in that direction—out past Mars—it's almost certainly manmade. Besides, look at the mag-level. It's got to be out on the Fringe. And pretty big.”

  “Not according to this range reading,” said Janine.

  They looked to where she tapped a well-shaped fingernail. The range reading put the ship virtually on top of them.

  “That's nuts,” said Siraj. “There's no way that's right.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Janine, “thing'd have to be the size of a lunchbox.” She raised a brow at Matty. “You reset the controls while the array was in motion, didn't you?”

  Hangdog, he nodded his head. “I sort of panicked when I saw it. Hit all the buttons at once.”

  Janine shrugged. “Then it's probably just one of the deep space stations.”

  “But it doesn't look like one of ours,” Matty protested. “Look at this section here.” He pointed at a peculiar marking at the extreme top of the image. “That looks like some sort of symbol or letter. It's all ... sweepy and elegant. We don't put lettering like that on our spacecraft.”

  “Sweepy?” repeated Siraj, raising one glossy black eyebrow. “Maybe it's from the Persian States. We sometimes put Arabic or Farsi designations on our ships along with the Roman-Cyrillic ones.”

  Matty subsided. Siraj was right. That lovely, graceful figure could just be a blurred portion of a Persian character. He sighed and shook his head. “I'm sorry, you guys. I know I'm being a real wingnut.”

  Siraj put a hand on his shoulder. “You're just a very imaginative guy. But now we've got work to do. Time to start dismantling the hab unit.”

  Matty found it hard to raise any enthusiasm for the chore.

  Seeing the downward tilt of his mouth, Janine leaved over and gave him a gamine grin. “C'mon, big guy. Just think of all that cool space junk in there. I'm sure they'll find something you can add to your little collection.”

  True enough. First Contact was probably just a pipe dream, but contact with some spacer's old junk was always fun.

  He looked up at Siraj. “Well, what're you waiting for? Bring me my booty, ye scurvy dogs—arrrr.”

  Siraj saluted him. “Aye-aye, sir.” He marched smartly through the hatch—well, insofar as one could march in low gravity.

  Chuckling, Janine followed him. “Matty Gurkow, Space Pirate, sails again.”

  The recovery crew moved in to scour the habitat for anything that was not bolted down. It became immediately apparent that this recovery was particularly rich with rummage—some of the rooms had been abandoned almost intact, apparently due to a fast leak in an outer bulkhead. According to the computer records Matty called up on the hulk as his crew worked, the spacers had been just able to evacuate everyone successfully before a catastrophic failure occurred. He was glad of that—he'd hate to think any of his swag had belonged to someone who'd been killed in such an accident.

  He watched the recovery process for a while—feeling little surges of excitement over this or that object—but after awhile his mind went back to their not-so-close encounter with the not-so-alien spacecraft. It had seemed to him that the vessel was too large to be one of their colonial craft, and too shipshape to be a deep space station. He let his mind take that extra step into the Gosh-Wow area of “what if"—what if the ship was alien and was even now entering their space to make contact ... or to conquer?

  He toyed with the idea of looking at the replay of the sighting one more time, and had even fired up the recovery log when Siraj beeped him.

  “We're done in here, Matty. Pretty good haul, if I do say so myself. We're saving the best of it for you.”

  “Oh, right. And what would that be—a pair of mismatched shoes?” They'd actually found a such a pair shoes the last time they'd recovered a habitat and they'd all gotten a laugh at the thought of the shoes’ owner unpacking his hastily gathered belongings only to discover he'd left those two odd shoes behind.

  “Toys, my man,” said Siraj cheerfully. “Some kid left half his childhood in here.”

  * * * *

  “We are under attack!” Tefkleh cried as the ship was buffeted by yet another barrage of unseen energy. He strapped himself into his seat and grasped the edge of the control console until his knuckles turned gray.

  Fez and her fellow crewmen followed suit. From her position at the ops console, she prayed she might yet be able to return to their disabled ship some sort of power and sensory input. If this horrific attack continued, however, it would be too late.

  She fought to stabilize herself, and slipped the tips of her digits into the computer's input sockets, concentrating with all her might on the virtual array of circuitry she could now “see” suspended before her eyes. She traced the sensor circuit back through its web of slender fibers to its core. What she saw confused her.

  “There's some sort of damping field in place.”

  Tefkleh's face went to palest mauve. “The power necessary to do that—to take out all our instrumentation—would have to be immense. We have fallen into a trap. We have been captured!”

  “Then why are they bombarding us?” asked Raus. “We are at their mercy.”

  Even as he spoke, the damping field began to ease. Then, with a suddenness that was startling, it was gone altogether.

  “They've stopped jamming us.” Fez turned her full attention to the ship's controls, reaching again into the virtual web of systems. They were a riotous jumble—quite nearly as confounded as she felt. “I'll have to reset the entire system.”

  It took long, tense moments, but after a time, she was
able to get the heart of the Pride to respond. One by one, the precious systems revived: life-support, artificial gravity, engines, weapons, communications, and—at long last—sensors and optics.

  The holotank flared to brilliant life, nearly blinding the bridge crew. The scene it displayed when it was stable was enough to inspire horror. They were in a cavernous chamber and they were not alone. Arrayed against them, bristling with armaments, was a motley fleet of alien ships.

  “Dearest Deity!” breathed Tefkleh. “Are these also prisoners of the alien ark?”

  “So they must be.”

  Raus checked the sensors. “No life signs,” he said dreadfully. “They are all dead.”

  “But there is light coming from that one,” said Fez, pointing to a sleek, winged vessel with an ovoid bridge. “From its weapons port.”

  “Yes! I have it. There is some sort of power concentration there at the bow. It must be on automatic pilot.”

  “Captain?” asked their own weapons officer.

  “Fire!” cried Tefkleh.

  * * * *

  Sitting at the desk in his quarters, Matty considered the collection of “pirate booty” he'd amassed. Some action figures from the latest Star Trek franchise (action figures that had actually been in space), a selection of holo-pics from several wishful science fiction movies, and a cute little communicator badge from the second-generation Trek series. Very cool.

  His com unit beeped. It was Janine.

  “Hey, Matty? Come to the bridge for a moment, would you? We're getting some weird readings from the sensors.”

  His heart picked up its pace. “That ship I saw earlier?”

  “Not exactly. That odd little radiation profile we were picking up.”

  He was disappointed. “Oh, okay. Be there in a moment.”

  He started to rise when he heard a strange whistling sound. A blob of something hot splattered on his desk to lie there bubbling. It was plastic. Molten hot, green plastic.

  He looked up. His scale model of a Klingon Bird of Prey was rocking from side to side on its invisible tether. Its starboard nacelle had been reduced to a melting lump. As he watched, a narrow beam of blue-white light struck the little model, spinning it around.