by Jim Rudnick
“Mostly more ship cubicles, rooms, and in one case about half the xeno folks had an idea that that one led to a sickbay type of space. Hanging from the ceiling normally, but now lying on the floor, were large metal barred cages—open on one side, and the perches had both wires and tubes leading out from same. Beedles had hypothesized that an alien could simply fly into the cage while sickbay staff would hook them up to those tubes or wires—and in that way, the alien could be treated.”
Alver had no idea if that was true or not, and he was sure the rest of the xeno team didn’t either, but that was not his job here on the wreck site. He was to, as of this morning, Commander Williams had told him, accompany the captain anywhere she wanted to go. On the wreck. Off the wreck. If she wanted to go skinny-dipping, that too, the commander had said dryly—and these orders came directly to him from the Baroness and not Admiral Vennamo.
Alver had pondered that but not enough to figure out the real reason the captain was looking around. He was just the tour guide, and today, that was fine.
When they reached the bridge entryway, Alver held out his hand. “The controls to gain entry to the bridge we had propped open—but the recent big change in that happened when that hum happened and the ship ‘powered up’ we were told by the xeno team. That closed the pocket bridge door—it simply snapped right through the wooden brace we were using. Now, the only way in is to pretend to be alien, Ma’am,” he said a bit sheepishly as he nodded to the two marines waiting for them.
One went up the ladder quickly to touch the circle carved into the coving about eleven feet from the floor. He then stuck a bare foot down to touch the other marine who had popped off his shirt to accept the skin-to-skin contact. The lower marine then placed his own foot carefully into the filled circle on the floor, and as soon as he did, there was a puff of air as the bridge door slid open quickly.
Motioning the captain inside, Alver nodded to his two marines and said, “Well done, lads.”
The captain half-turned to see what would happen, and as she did so, the door slid closed once again.
Alver nodded. “Any entrant to the bridge has all of ten seconds to go through the opening before the door slides shut. Oh, and I’ve also included in the docs, for your perusal, all of the info that the xeno team has assembled on the ship itself—as well as the collateral information from the two alien warehouses we’ve found here too. Three maybe, but that third one is still an ongoing mystery, Ma’am.”
He didn’t stand at attention, but he did maintain a position slightly off the captain’s hip and to her left as she walked the bridge.
With a small degree of wonder in her voice, she said, “They could run and manage a ship this large from only three console positions—am I missing something?”
Alver nodded. “Yes, Ma’am, just these three. Since the power-up of a few days ago, all the screens are now up and live and showing, I’d suspect, what they ‘see,’ Ma’am. One, of course,” he said as he pointed, “shows only the blackness of space and galaxies in a grouping off to the right. We’re still trying to find out where that view might be coming from, Ma’am,” he said.
The blackness was very black, and yes, the galaxies off to the right of the screen’s center were few. Five, he counted, but some of his younger lieutenants said they could discern six. Kids, he thought, great eyes but can’t see what’s in front of them often enough.
She nodded to him. “And that is?” she asked, pointing at a screen that showed a rock cavern, jammed with what looked like fortifications, equipment, dollies, and stacks of something on skids—the kind of items one would find at a landing port on a planet. The view, they both noted, was not changing—there was no live action. Just those items and windows of glass separating out some rooms on the one side of the huge floor.
“We know that one, Ma’am. Just discovered a few weeks back—we think it’s a brand new warehouse that we only found after drone audits of that tip of a southern continent. We notified the commander as well as the admiral, Ma’am. But as yet, we’ve not sent a team down there. But, that screen is up and live, we think ...”
Probably correct, he thought. He’d been on the flight down there and had seen the spot with his own eyes.
Daika looked around at more. She went to the first console and tried sitting on the perch—but that put her head too far below the console monitor to see anything. She then balanced on the perch with her feet and that got her still low, but she could see the monitor’s screen at least. She looked. She touched not a single button below the monitor nor the screen itself, but she asked, “Is the screen enabled, Major?” to which she got a positive nod back.
She looked. She gazed all around the large screen, and then she jumped back off the perch to look behind the screen as well. No wires. No cables. Not a single thing connected the monitor with the ship.
Alver was about to say it, but she did that for them both. “Some kind of wireless connection, I’d assume?” she said, and he nodded his assent.
She went to all three of the consoles and did the same thing. The console that was set back, alone and slightly higher than the two that sat side by side between it and the huge view-screen, the xeno team had figured was the alien captain’s console. That must have occurred to her, Alver noted, as she went back and forth between all the consoles, noting which icons were lit up on each. She tapped her left shoulder, and a flash happened, and it was obvious she was taking photos of the three screens. She returned at last to lean her hip on the captain’s console perch.
“Major, this is all interesting. But what do you think these aliens are all about?”
He heard her question, but he knew this was not a question for a soldier. “Ma’am, the xeno team will be able to answer that kind of query much better than I can,” he said plainly.
She nodded and clapped her hands together with a solid slap. “Then let’s get them here—all of them please, Major?”
He nodded, half-turned away, and then turned back. “’Ma'am, I need to leave the ship to find them to get them here. Since the ‘big hum,’ as we call it, our own comms do not work within the ship. Will you be okay here, or should I have the marines just outside in the bridge entryway come in to stay with you?” With no way of knowing how she’d accept that question, he hoped she’d just see that he was offering her two armed guards just in case. Of course, that led to the “in case of what” question, and he had no idea what the answer was.
She shook her head. “Not necessary, Major. I’ll be fine. Tell them they won’t need tablets or the like, I just want to chat,” she said.
He nodded and spun, and as he walked to the door, the lights in the bridge flashed for a second or two a bit brighter, and the pocket door slid open. He went straight through, and it closed moments later.
She sighed, got off the captain’s console perch, went over to the wall, and opened up a cabinet that was there.
As she noted a large shielded cable coming out of the floor inside, she grunted. About halfway up the inside of the cabinet, the cable was plugged right into a socket. This cabinet was powered. The lights on the bridge were easily now bright enough to show that. There were some flashing blue and green lights from what might have been circuit boards on the one wall of the now powered cabinet. She took a photo and closed the cabinet.
She went to each of the next twenty-six cabinets, which all stood in a row on the exterior bulkhead bridge wall. Each was opened, and Daika noted each had a power cable that was now plugged in, and she took photos at each cabinet.
She returned to sit once again, if uncomfortably at least, and looked up at the main view-screen. As the ship had plowed into the grounds here on the watery shore, the bridge was buried into the Ghayth soil so all that could be seen was blackish dirt and a rock a bit to one side. Beside it to starboard, the screen showed that as yet unexplored new warehouse, and the one to the port side showed the deep space and galaxies view.
She sat to contemplate what she knew and what she had learned fro
m her visit so far. After reading all the notes, reports, and details of the xeno team that were in the Barony database, she did know one thing.
The “big hum,” as the marines called it, was indeed responsible for turning on the ship. In all twenty-seven cabinets along the wall, the power cables had been plugged in. She did wonder how a ship’s AI could do that, but as she well knew from all her years out in space, aliens do things their way. Sometimes, so surprisingly different that it was not possible to even countenance such AI capabilities. And on each of the three screens, the icon in the top right-hand corner was no longer flashing. It was on and amber in color.
Power. The wreck was powered. She knew that, and the Baroness would know too.
#####
On the Sword, Tanner sat in the tiny meeting room with Bram and Admiral Higgins. Before heading to Ghayth for a recon mission and trying to stay low-key, he had asked these two—his best advisers—to accompany him.
They had left Neen only a half hour ago and had used the Barony Drive to get to Ghayth in seconds. They had checked in with the Ghayth space station, the Wilson, just a few minutes ago.
Lieutenant Cooper had notified them that the Sword carried the duke and some crew—and it was their intent to just look at the alien intruder ship that hung above Ghayth.
The Wilson replied and made the request that the Sword stay at least twice as far away from the alien ship as their force fields reached out—about twenty miles or so was judged safe—and the lieutenant had acknowledged same.
They sat about a hundred miles off and watched the enormous alien ship just sitting there in orbit, doing nothing. The usual ultra-bright teal ray reached out from within the alien ship’s force field, centered on the Sword for a second or two, and then winked out.
“They see us,” Cooper had said. “That’s how they find out who’s around—or so they tell me.”
More than a mile long, it’s upper and lower tubed areas maintained their position in space while the huge central disk was slowly rotating around that axis. That central round disk was about seven or eight hundred feet tall and jutted out at least a half mile from the ship’s axis. There looked like some landing bays, and one disappeared as the disk rotated and another came into view. There were also portholes—hundreds of them—lit from within too.
Like everyone else, Tanner tried to figure out what the different things on the ship were. The disk rotated and what Tanner believed was the top came into view. On the top of that disk were arrays and pods that one might guess could be this or that, but all the humans truly had no idea at all.
“Using human standards to figure out what something is for is always a lesson in futility,” Bram said, and the three of them nodded as they watched the view-screen in their meeting room.
Admiral Higgins began. “Duke, we need—well, sorry, Your Grace, we think that we would like to—”
“Don’t pussyfoot around me, Admiral—you have more experience than I do in this kind of situation,” Tanner said.
The admiral nodded. “Sir—we would like to come up with a plan—rules of engagement for this encounter. It’s a first contact for sure—and at this point, one that is still up in the air. We’ve no idea if it will turn to be adversarial—but like all admirals who may have to send navy ships into battle, we want as much on our side as we can muster, Your Grace.”
He tapped a finger on the table and went on. “We need to consider this—that in their minds, we may be just vermin here. That they will, when it suits them, just take out every RIM realm ship the same way that they took out that Novertag drone ship.” His voice was firm. He’d been here before, and he wanted enough cards in his hand to win the pot.
Tanner held up a hand to stop his admiral. He had decided how far he could spread out information, and these two were surely a part of winning. It took almost a full thirty minutes for him to bring the two of them up to speed.
He talked first of the red metal ships—Xithricite-encased frigates—from the Caliphate. Both of them had known about the red metal, and both had also had high enough rank to have seen the lab reports about the metal back when they were all Barony Navy men. The lab reports had shown the Xithricite was impervious to any thermal attack but susceptible to projectiles. The Caliph had used ten-inch thick plates on the frigates, and they’d survive up to a full .50-caliber projectile.
The admiral looked excited at that piece of news, and he pointed over at the alien ship. “And from what we can see—reports from the Wilson argue the same—their ship appears to not have any weapons arrays, and there’s not a single piece of evidence that they have any projectile weapons either. Good news that is, Sir!” he said and slapped the table.
“That’s the good news,” Tanner said, “and now here’s the bad ...”
He then went on to explain to them that the Praix had appeared here in the RIM Confederacy to get their Issian slave masters back in the fold. It was complicated, but he did try to explain as much as the Master Adept had given him, in respect to reconnaissance.
“The Praix, the owners of the alien ship just sitting there, had been on Ghayth twenty-thousand years ago. They had been looking into colonizing the Milky Way, and the Issians were a part of their crew. The colonization plans had gone astray, and there’d even been a huge crash down onto Ghayth, which the Baroness was trying to find technology from.
“When the Praix had arrived those weeks ago, we all thought they did nothing but sit out there. Not true. They sent a message to the Master Adept via some kind of mind link that had included the twelve members of the Issian inner circle. According to this message, the Praix wanted the Issians back. They needed the Issians to start to conquer this new—to them—galaxy, beginning here on the RIM.
“The Master Adept shared with me that the Issians had all agreed—they wanted no part in this. Their independence was all that any Issian would countenance. She confirmed that the wreck below and the warehouses found, located, and now in study were, yes, all Praix owned.
Bram had tried to interrupt three times, and each time, Tanner had stopped him, but now he bared his arm, sliding up a sleeve, and offered it to Bram. Bram nodded and gripped the duke’s arm—linking their minds. A minute later, Bram nodded and let go.
“Bram, as you can see, I believed the Master Adept when she told me that the Issian race would rather die—than go back to being the Praix slave masters. Now you’ve seen what I saw ...”
Bram agreed and looked at his duke. “Your Grace—yes, I do see that. But where does that leave us? If these Praix want Issians, and they—we—say no, will that not lead to a war?”
The admiral jumped in. “What we need to do is to get those three ships here ASAP. Put good captains in charge. Your Grace, you should not be a part of that force. Instead, sit here on the Sword so that you can oversee the action—when and if there is some, Sir,” he said.
Tanner looked out at the slowly rotating alien ship, sighed, and nodded. “Same advice I got this morning from the wife,” he said, and that got a couple of chuckles from them.
Tanner leaned forward. “Oh, and I would also add this strange fact—the Master Adept said that I was ‘destined’ for this. That so much here on the RIM has been with me at the focus that this too would be something that I was supposed to be a part of too.” He sighed once more, noting that the admiral had a look on his face of dawning knowledge.
“Your Grace, that does begin to resonate with me ... after all, wasn’t it you who—”
Tanner held up his hand and nodded in agreement. “Yes, and I’ve no idea why that has happened nor for that matter whether or not it will again lead to success in the future,” he said.
Bram smiled. “Your Grace ... like an old instructor of mine used to say back at the Eons Naval Academy—why worry when you’ve still aces to play ...”
Now all three of them smiled and turned once again to look out on the Praix ship, still in orbit and still waiting ...
#####
“Engineering flock
leader—any changes in the past few days?” the Praix captain asked right out loud, as he jumped up on his captain’s perch and touched the screen in the top left corner.
While the ship’s AI would, of course, recognize that someone—a Praix—was now seated at the captain’s console, only touching the corner of the screen let the AI validate that Praix as the true captain. The touch meant that an instant DNA test had been done, and yes, the captain was in his chair.
It was a holdover from thousands of years in their past, when the first basic AI routines had been written to validate the entry of a Praix in a nest. Was this the nest that this particular Praix should have entry to was the sum of that routine, and even now, the same routines were being used.
The engineering flock leader, sitting to the right-hand side and in front of the captain, swiveled on its perch and looked at the captain. Pointing at the display in front of it as it shifted its feet on its perch, its beak snapped as it sent the answer to the captain with a mental push.
“No changes since yesterday, when a single new ship arrived. Small, what we’d call a shuttle in size, we beamed it, of course, and it had only four occupants. They stayed about two hours—and then left. Which leaves what appears to be the same four—the space station and three warships just sitting and watching us.”
The captain clacked his beak to say good, and then he looked over at the other console on the bridge and sent through a message to that Praix bridge officer. “Any word from the Issians? We have been waiting now almost long enough. Send the message once more to their Master Adept and remind her that it is our last attempt. After, say, another three days, we will take it that their silence means a no—and we will proceed with that answer in mind.”
He shook his right wing and flexed the feathers along the middle coverts of that wing, stretching the tendons below and easing a bit of a cramp. These Issians, according to what he’d originally read in the Praix database, should have jumped at the opportunity after twenty millennia of being without the Praix to serve. They had been marooned here in this galaxy that was empty of the Praix masters, and that too should have meant they wanted back into the flock.
