Earth Interstellar_Proxy War

by Scott Olen Reid

  Throwing the question to the rest of the members of the meeting, the captain asked, "Any speculations on their transmissions, or lack thereof?" This was a concern to the captain as there were a number of theories for why an advanced species would avoid detectable transmissions.

  Exo-Planetologist, Gibson Brust volunteered several possibilities, "They may know we're here. They may have had a setback from a natural disaster, or nuclear war. Or, they prefer narrow beam communications technology. Or, maybe they're hiding from someone else or each other."

  The captain wasn't pleased to hear some of the Exo-Planetologist 's theories as any one of them could have negative connotations. "Do you think they've detected us?" she asked the sensors officer.

  "No, Sir. I do not."

  "So, they've blown themselves back into a stone age or they’re paranoid. With, or without, cause. Let's hope there's another explanation," the captain summarized. She checked the avatars of the crew members in the meeting for tell-tell positive emotional reactions indicating someone had come up with an idea. Seeing no reactions, she asked, "Does anyone else have a theory?" No one replied. "Whatever the reason, we need to figure out how to gain access to their communications, or at least figure out why they’re not using their satellites."

  Xeno Tech Linstrom offered some hope, "Sir, once we have analyzed the information coming in we will have a much better understanding of how to break into their comms."

  "Very well. You'll have some time to get that done before we get back. Once we complete transit of the system we're setting course for…."

  "We can't just leave!" Linstrom blurted out and jumped from his seat in an emotion-fueled outburst. This was the discovery beyond all discoveries and the xeno-technologist would not walk away from it without a fight.

  The captain, not bothering to respond with words, turned off Linstrom's comms and ejected him from the instance. The captain, whose emotional status was on full display for the crew to see, had streaks of red and orange in her emotional state that made it clear to everyone Linstrom’s outburst was unwelcome and would not be tolerated in her presence. Virtual environments had evolved a swift and oft-used solution for out-of-line subordinates.

  Composing herself, the captain picked up the discussion again, "As I was saying, after transit we will be doing a high-speed run to finish the surveys in the last two solar systems in this trinary to save time and fuel and to allow us to make a stealthy approach to P4."

  Deceleration during a solar system transit was a good way to be detected, no matter how stealthy your engines, and the captain had no intention of giving away their presence. "When we make our course correction to approach 48271 we'll launch our drone with the data we have back to Black Rock Three. That will allow it to carry our momentum in its speed run back to base and shave three weeks off the travel time. Then we'll make a quick survey of 48270 as we come around to head back here. When we return, I want us on a stealth approach and we'll max out the Epson Drive to make up for our lower velocity so we can get into a parallel orbit to P4 at one million miles above their ecliptic. I expect us to be back here in 26 days."

  Lieutenant Fox was sitting in Commander Kree’s virtual captain’s cabin. The virtual space was an instance with a small sitting room and low furniture bolted to the floor, a small coffee table, and doors at either end. One door went to the captain's berthing, and the other went to the passageway next to the bridge. It looked like any other captain's cabin, if the cabin was from a 20th Century ocean navy frigate. The XO and the rest of the crew considered the captain’s décor choice as one of the captain's little eccentricities. Instances were not limited any more than the vast worlds of a massive multi-player role playing game. The captain could have a castle for her cabin if she wanted but preferred an environment which, if only subconsciously, kept her reminded she was on a ship sailing in a vast ocean and needed to remain vigilant.

  The captain was swirling a golden liquid on ice in a round, heavy bottomed drinking glass you could have found in any of a thousand bars on Earth; taking an occasional sip of the digital version of her favorite bourbon. She was reluctantly satisfied to taste the neural net's synthesized flavoring that was fed directly into the neural receptors in her brain attached to her taste buds. Watching the play of colors in her glass, the captain said, "Keep Arnie busy, Milton. I don't want him coming to me twice a day trying to talk me into turning the ship around. I don't care if it is the first time ever a xeno-tech actually has a job to do, he's about to piss me off and it would be better if you redirected him rather than me chewing on his head."

  "That shouldn't be a problem, Captain. He has plenty to do analyzing the data we've gathered. I'll pull him off the watch list, too. That should keep him off the bridge. Has he really been that bad?" the XO replied, not surprised the xeno-tech was still making a nuisance of himself.

  "He commed me twice today. Then he tried to corner me on the bridge. If I'd thought about it that he was on watch, I would have avoided going on the bridge. And, that! That pisses me off! That's my bloody bridge! If he keeps it up, I'm going to activate the long-term survival suite in his EGG and he can popsicle until we get home." That got a smile from the XO, who knew she wasn’t totally serious about the threat. At least not yet.

  There were no escape pods on interstellar ships. Since everyone was already living in what amounted to a survival pod in their EGG Habitats, and they were already submerged in breathable liquids, the pods doubled as survival systems in case the ship was destroyed. The crew could also be placed in suspended animation if the ship suffered catastrophic damage. Theoretically, a person could survive a couple hundred years in what was euphemistically called a “pod-sicle” by the members of the Exploration Service.

  Thinking to change the subject was a good idea, at least for Xeno-Technologist Arnie Linstrom's sake, the XO asked, "What do you think the UEG will do about our friends on P4?"

  “Not sure, but if I had to guess they’ll try to claim it as a protectorate and make them pay tribute. That’s what the Vrene did to us and they’ll want to do the same to get some relief for our own industries. It would be an economic windfall if we can get back the manufacturing facilities tasked to serve the Vrene,” replied the captain.

  “We’ve always hated what the Vrene are doing to us – you actually think they want to do the same to someone else? I can’t imagine people agreeing to that.”

  The captain laughed, “The UEG does whatever it wants. They’re all appointed representatives. They don’t care about elections and the national governments will scream bloody murder at the injustice without actually lifting a finger to stop them. And that’s because the governments are going to love getting back ten percent of their manufacturing base. I could be wrong, but don’t be surprised when it happens.”

  The XO was scowling. He liked to believe the government would do the right thing and the People would back his beliefs.

  Knowing the XO from their five years working together, the captain knew he was an idealist and decided to push the point a little. They were about to move out of the “What if?” of the past thirty years into the “Here we go!” phase of humanity’s second contact with an alien race. “Everyone hates the tribute the Vrene make us pay. But honestly, if not for the Vrene showing up, how many world wars would have happened in the last three hundred years? Would we even have managed to develop light speed travel? We can’t say the Rool and Vrene have been bad for us. Would we do worse by these aliens by taking advantage of them?" Maybe it was a rationalization, but in this case it was a rationalization of a bare-bones truth with the niceties of civil behavior folded up neatly and set aside.

  Starting to get worked up and climbing on his soapbox, the XO argued, "But what have the Vrene really done for us? They gave us some medical technology when they first arrived, but it was stuff we were already starting to research. Other than that, they gave us anti-gravity field generator units - just built units, mind you, not the technology. But that was only so we could build
ship hulls for them on Earth and deliver them to their base on the Moon until we could build our own asteroid based production facilities."

  The captain and XO spent hours in past discussions on the Vrene and generally agreed to disagree, but this time the captain was not going to let it go. She was about to be in the very real situation of sending an analysis back on the aliens and was determined to not bias the report with the XO’s sentiments. "Building ships for the Vrene exposed us to an incredible amount of technology," the captain stated, repeating a point she made often in their discussions on the Vrene and their custodians, the Rool, who managed their relationship with humans.

  "Yeah, but they didn't give us any of it. We had to steal it!" The XO’s forceful response was beginning to burst bright colors in his emotional monitor on his avatar. It was clear he was becoming agitated, so the captain turned it off so she wouldn’t have to look at it.

  "It does not matter how we got the technology. Being able to see it in action gave us huge insights into researching them. And we stole technology from them every chance we got; you can bet they knew we were doing it, too. Yet, they’ve not said a word about it, ever. With the Rool’s ability to monitor our communications do you think they didn’t know what we were doing?" Taking another drink of her Bourbon, the captain continued, "The Vrene stabilized us politically and saved us from ourselves. I think they’re not giving us any tech was their way of giving us the time we needed to learn how to use it without blowing ourselves up. If I was making the decision, and we had the choice to make all over again, I'd take the Vrene's deal."

  "And you think we should do to these people what the Vrene did to us?" The XO showed his distaste on his avatar’s face.

  "Yes, I do. The Vrene gave us a choice; take their deal and pay tribute to them as benevolent overlords, or wait for a not so benevolent overlord to come and enslave us. Remember, when we made it to Level 2? It was within a week of our first ship reaching Alpha Centauri and the Vrene gave us access to the Consortium's Level 2 historical libraries. I know you've read some of the histories. Did you notice some of those races have not advanced in technological level in thousands of years? How could that be unless they were held back? Whoever has their thumb pressing down on those races could have shown up in Earth orbit. What would that have been like? Slavery? That’s what could have happened to us."

  "I've read about them. And I have a pretty good idea how things would be. But, that doesn't mean the Vrene were right in making us pay tribute."

  "I would agree with you if we didn't get so much out of it. Hell, the average time a Level 1 race takes to make it to Level 2 is over six hundred years. We did it in two-thirty. If we were a protectorate of the Tig, we would never be allowed to travel outside our own solar system. We’re seventy plus years now as a Level 2 race and the Vrene have put no restrictions on us. We’re lucky."

  The XO would like to keep up the argument; he hated the Vrene. But even he had to admit a lot worse things than the Vrene could have happened to humanity. The captain let him out of the argument, saying, "It's going to take four to six months for a contact team to get here. Then we'll know if we're going to become overlords or if we stand by and let some other race decide the future of whoever is living on P4."

  Chapter 4: XSS Cousteau, System 48269

  A trinary star system made up the last three stars in the Cousteau's survey, including the alien's system. It was a loosely tied together trio of stars made up of two yellow dwarfs and a white dwarf. The survey of the yellow dwarf system, with a single mega-earth in the life zone showing no more than primordial signs of life and a toxic atmosphere, was uneventful. The white dwarf system had two asteroid belts in its life zone. It made the crew wonder if something was living on either of the two planets at the time they broke up into millions of asteroids.

  Between the two surveys the Cousteau aligned itself toward Waypoint Star, System 48127, where the remote exploration base, Black Rock Three, was located before making an extended main engine burn; the ship accelerated to twenty percent light speed and launched its drone carrying the data collected on System 48269 and planet P4. The drone, within seconds of launch, fired its own engines and activated its small, but powerful, Epson Drive. With its own inertia dampeners to maintain the structural integrity of the craft, the drone was able to accelerate to point-five light speed and have a spatial compression of two hundred times. Between the ship's velocity and the Epson Drive's spatial compression, the drone was traveling at more than a hundred times light speed for its trip to report the Cousteau's findings. In slightly more than two months the drone would enter Black Rock Three’s star system and deliver its message. Once the drone entered the Waypoint Star system, after spending its final fuel slowing as much as possible, the engines would shut down and the drone would make a high-density data dump as it coasted through the system at half the speed of light; it not having enough fuel to slow itself to a stop at the end of its journey.

  After launching the drone, the Cousteau reoriented and returned to its course to return to System 48269. To avoid detection, the ship completed most of its deceleration before reentering the system. To make up for the slow approach, the captain used the Epson Drive to compress space ahead of the ship, shortening the distance to their observation position by more than 180 times. It was a calculated risk the aliens would not detect the spatial distortion caused by the Epson Drive. The distortion created by the drive of a single ship would be difficult for even a Level 2 technological species to detect.

  Technological levels for species was a system of categorizing races introduced by the Rool. Tech Level 0 would be a pre-space flight intelligent species. A Tech Level 1 species was limited to their own solar system, with as little as a satellite presence in space up to colonies and robust commercial operations. Tech Level 2 species had efficient interstellar travel and Tech Level 3 had major populations on more than one planet. What qualified as Tech Levels 4 and 5 was never explained to humans as the Rool did not see it as information they needed to know.

  Sliding into a parallel solar orbit to P4 at a million miles, the Cousteau deployed a drone to move in closer to the planet. When it was in position, they were finally able to pick up on the communication streams from the planet’s inhabitants. They were using directed transmissions exclusively; it was inefficient by human standards and the Cousteau’s sensors were able to intercept data streams from transmission side lobes; the energy bleed spillover from inefficiently directed communication streams.

  Sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge, Commander Kree opened a comm channel to the ship’s communications officer, "Mr. Hent. Do you have an update on the alien's communications technology?"

  Mr. Hent was working with quantum computers specifically programmed for making first contact to decode the now steady stream of alien communications intercepted. "Yes, sir. We have identified four distinct communications technologies. The most common communication is not encrypted and appears to be digital audio-video. We should have those transmissions available for viewing by 15:00; the emulators are almost ready. The second comm system is unencrypted analog. I'm guessing they are in transition to digital communication and the analog is falling into disuse. It's a heterodyned signal similar to what we used back in the 20th Century. Audio-video for the analog system is for viewing now and is what the xeno team is working on. If you want to observe it you will need to exit from the neural net and go into the stand-alone system. The last two are both encrypted – one we can decrypt fairly quickly. It's a 48-bit encryption and they’re using a trinary code for their data that is a little bit tricky. It was giving the quantum analyzer a bit of a headache, but I think we have it figured out now that we've set up a trinary quantum processor from one of the spare cores. There was a patch available for it in the translation kit of our first contact package, which was damn good thinking it was included.”

  "Great. When will it be finished?"

  "The decryption program should be done in the next nine hours
."

  "And what about the fourth type of signal?"

  "It’s the most complex,” explained Hent, “My guess is it is military or at least government communications. The quantum analyzer is still chewing on it and I'll report once it gives us its initial findings."

  "I'm sure you're aware the xenos are pounding on the airlock doors to get at these comms, so stay with it."

  "Yes, Sir. They were calling down here every ten minutes until I uploaded the bulk of the analog stuff. We’re streaming six feeds right now for them."

  "I’ll bet they are. Keep up the good work. Kree out." It won’t be long before we find out whether these aliens watch entertainment programming, or if they're all business, she thought.

  Walking across a burgundy colored grassy field, a four-legged, scaly predator the engineers called a kimodo-panther stalked a much larger, four-legged, scaly beast with horns. Both had colorations similar to the colors of the grassy field; the predator with multicolored shades of red and burgundy, and the prey with a striped upper body and darker, solid colored legs, belly, and chest. The landscape was a spectrum of earthy colors from a light tan to dark browns and yellows. A voice was speaking in an alien language and highlights kept appearing on both animals, seemingly to point out some feature of the animals. The first video ever from an alien race Humans saw was a Wild, Wild World of Animals knockoff.

  "This is awesome, but the evil kitty needs to either eat the big grass muncher or go eat some tofu,” snarked Eddie Hanks, who, like the rest of the crew not on watch, was viewing the program. “Do we have a vid with an alien in it yet?" he asked, looking around the virtual theatre. "I need popcorn."

  "Shut up, Hanks. I can't hear the narrator," was immediately shouted by Navigation Tech, Becky Vitahl, as if she could understand what the alien was saying and who was still occasionally punishing Hanks for how he treated Vrega, her Post-Apocalyptic Barbarian. That is when she was not letting him be her boyfriend. The two were logged into a private instance of the analog system watching a mirrored version of what the xeno-techs were watching. Hanks was kicked out of the main viewing theatre earlier because he wouldn't stop talking and Vitahl tagged along.