Caryn: Galactic Archaeologist (The MacDowell Saga Book 1)

by James Warner

  A real benefit of Scoutship exploration is that we can find really nice places and, if still alive, can stake a claim and set up a comfortable home somewhere out of the mainstream of crowded Galactic society. It’s called “taking our option”. And that’s what these three did. I saw that three years ago Last Chance stopped regular communication with the rest of us and no Admiralty ships had been out there since then. Apparently no reporters had either. There were a few entries, mostly banal news sent by them to the Net: births, deaths, the usual requirements for civilization. But no news is not good news for an outpost world. Something should always be going on. And the Admiralty had decided to extend a firmer reach of civilization into that sector, namely us.

  We were a month out of port and with Sassy’s legs at warp 2, I expected to arrive at Last Chance in a few more hours. Meph came in, interrupting my reverie.

  “Captain, I have been picking up strange signals in the hyperspace channels, a broadband sort of communication. It doesn’t match any known pattern in our database. Want to hear it?

  “Sure, Meph. Can you show me a fix on the source here in the map?”

  Meph punched a button (which one? Oh hell, I’ll probably never learn all about this setup!) and we heard a strange cyclic sort of white noise.

  “Let me see.” An orange line connected our ship to … to nothing, out a couple parsecs past Last Chance.

  “Meph, what’s it hooked to? What’s out there?” I asked, pointing to the missing terminus in the map.

  “Uh, I don’t know. Something not reflecting in hyperspace, maybe. Of course, that’s not possible. Everything reflects in hyperspace, unless they have some sort of cloaking device.”

  It had become a “they” now. Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Meph, cloaking devices have been around for thousands of years, in science fiction. No one really has one, do they?”

  “Well, before I entered the Academy I was working on a theory,” Meph mused “which might have produced one. I’ll send for those papers from my parents.”

  “Right. But what do we have right now which

  might work like that?”

  “Nothing, Captain,” he answered, preoccupied.

  The orange line connecting us to the “nothing” winked out.

  “What?” Meph exclaimed. Then he turned and ran (scurried? scuttled?) out of the battle bridge. “Going to the lab. Call you in a moment, Captain.” Then as he was disappearing down the hall, “Stay there!”

  I don’t argue with genius in action, so I turned on Sassy’s screens, sent off a new message to the Admiralty advising of current events and waited for something else to happen.

  “Sassy, do you detect anything out there?” I asked, wanting to get my closest friend into the puzzle.

  “No Captain. My sensors are not fully, completely and adequately integrated into Meph’s devices yet. Perhaps you could speak to him about that.”

  A moment later, “Captain,” Meph called over the comm link, not the ship’s intercom. “All the equipment checks out. Our sensors are being jammed or refracted. You should see an orange glow somewhere out there.”

  I walked around the tank to get a better look at our destination. Sure enough, a large area of the tank beyond Last Chance was glowing with a very faint orange light.

  “Sassy, dim the lights please.” The cabin lighting dimmed and I could see into the holo tank much better.

  There was a cluster of now familiar red lights at Last Chance and the orange glow out about a parsec beyond was beginning to form up.

  “Oh that’s much better” Meph exclaimed as he entered the battle bridge. “Yes, the orange is growing stronger.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, temporarily forgetting myself.

  “I checked out the sensors and they were all fine, so I set the scalar sensors for terminus just beyond the last contact point. We should see a bogey in a few moments as the computers analyze the interference patterns.”

  And there, with no fanfare, suddenly popped up six little orange lights, with vectors from our ship. They were spreading out and heading away from Last Chance into the uncharted sector.

  “Let’s go get ‘em, Captain!” exclaimed Meph.

  “No Meph. Our orders specifically state to go to Last Chance first and see what’s happening there. Then to proceed with the survey beyond. Besides, I’d like to talk to some of the local people about this.”

  “Right Sir. Sorry.”

  “Oh that’s all right. I know you’re anxious to try the screens. But I’m not. Frankly Meph, I’d rather test them here first and never have to use them again. Maybe someone at Last Chance can help out.”

  I glanced at the map as I said that and sure enough, a red bogey was approaching our ship from the general vicinity of Last Chance. The previous orange blips had again disappeared. Oh, to live and fight another day, that’s my motto. We’d run into them again soon enough.

  “Meph, go forward and entertain our company while I change into something more presentable.”

  “Sassy, set the audio proximity warning for Last

  Chance.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  I went to my cabin to dress. I was taking advantage of Meph’s obvious lack of sexual interest in an alien species Captain and running around with little or no cloths on, as suited my mood. He didn’t seem to be wearing anything either and I certainly wasn’t interested in the sexual mores of an octopus, so didn’t bother him about his attire, or lack of same.

  Right now I was wearing panties and a T-shirt from my vacation on the slopes of Hamarabus with The Hammer, a picture of a giant wielding a huge hammer, which was the logo of the ski resort on the front. That wasn’t proper greeting attire, even on an outpost such as Last Chance. At least I didn’t think so. The recordings never said. I ran back to my quarters to change.

  After dressing in my nicely fitting beige summer dress with a light green and peach blossom floral pattern that showed a little cleavage, I ran to the control bridge up front. The claxon warning sounded on my way. When I arrived Meph was holding a voice only conversation with the other ship.

  “Look, you should have signaled long ago if you wanted to land. This ain’t no xenoworld, ya know. Who’s your Captain, fella? Let me see who I’m gonna blast outa space.”

  “Yes sir. Just a moment and I’ll get the Captain.” Meph turned to me, cutting off the microphone for a moment. “Captain this guy is talking tough, but I

  think it’s just his way of saying hello.”

  “Okay Mate. Well done. I’ll talk to him now.” I signaled Meph to step out of sight of the camera then I turned on the video and reopened the channel.

  “Hey fellas, look at ... oh, excuse me miss, but I need to speak to the Captain of your ship about landing protocol. If you would please get him for me we

  can take care of this little problem.”

  Wearing a pretty dress does wonders to nullify an irate male human’s anger and usually instills another, more pliable emotion. I never fight fair.

  “First Mate, what’s this person’s name?” I asked frostily, purposefully turning away from the lens.

  “Mr. Summers, Captain.”

  “Thank you.” I turned back to the video pickup, glaring into the confused face of our problem.

  “I am the Captain, Mr. Summers. Captain Caryn McDowell, of the Admiralty Scoutship Silver Hornet, which,” I added even more coldly “you would know if your ID module and pickup were working.” Then a little more courteously “at your service.”

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed under his breath as he looked out of view to some significant as yet unannounced person, asking for help with his eyes. “Mr. Summers,” I continued, putting on a little more heat, “I notice your ID module isn’t functioning, as I remarked. Perhaps my First Mate can help your star base repair facility people in getting the local ships’ modules repaired.”

  “Uh, thanks Captain, but it ain’t against the law out here and the Buggers can detect our
ships with them damn things broadcasting all over the Galaxy. We lost three miners before we found that out. Hey, did you come here to help us out with them?

  That’s a pretty ship you got there Captain.”

  I didn’t know what his game was but flattery of my ship wasn’t going to get him anywhere, at least with me.

  “Thank you Mr. Summers. What is my landing bay assignment?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, just move on into Bay 13, no one ever uses that one. You have an open time limit, of course.”

  “Thank you Mr. Summers. It’s good to know courtesy extends out this far from civilization.” I switched off the comm channel. Meph had left the command bridge.

  “Sassy, find Bay 13 and dock us there.” I walked back to Meph who was leaving the battle bridge for his quarters and the equipment there.

  “Well?”

  Flustered, Meph said, “He was threatening everything from instant annihilation of our ‘puny toy spaceship’ to slow torture of the Captain for arriving unannounced and making him miss part of a local sports broadcast. I told him we just needed a berth for a few days and were only passing through. I don’t think he was listening to me at all. You sure got his attention, though!”

  “Ok Meph. Thanks for the rundown. Now let’s get ready for planet fall. I’m looking forward to talking to those old Scoutship Captains.”

  As Sassy moved into the gravity well of the gas giant, the map went out in the battle bridge.

  “Meph!” I called to his lab, where he was fiddling,

  “the star map just went out!”

  “What? What do you mean ‘it went out’?”

  “Well I just glanced at the screens as I was leaving the bridge and there was a little pop. I turned around and no star map.”

  I was randomly punching buttons when Meph arrived.

  “Captain, we’re in trouble, and quit punching those buttons!”

  “Oh? What’s happening in the lab?” I asked, not yet used to Meph’s way of getting right to the point.

  “It’s just fine, all the equipment is functioning correctly.”

  “Then why don’t we have a star map here?” I exclaimed as I pointed to the center of the battle bridge.

  “Dunno sir. Maybe we’re under attack,” he said.

  “Attack? That doesn’t seem right.” I said, still not quite appraising my First Mate’s statement for what it was. “None of Sassy’s alarms are going off. The

  screens haven’t come up but we still have power.”

  “Sassy, are we under attack?” I turned to face Meph.

  “What do you mean, Meph?”

  “You think?” Sassy answered sassily.

  “I mean we’re under attack, Captain,” he repeated.

  Meph slid over to the special command chair installed for him and punched up the screens while he strapped himself in.

  “You’re really serious about this attack, aren’t you?”

  I said, still incredulous. This was nothing like my previous experience with blasters, canons, nukes and all that sort of thing.

  “Captain,” he said as he got busy with the weapon systems, “you had better get up front and fly this baby. We’ve been totally blind for,” he glanced at the chronometer “at least a minute. We can’t do it from here.”

  At last I caught on. I bolted out of the room and up the corridor with surprise on my face. Blind? I had forgotten Sassy needed me on the command bridge. The usual thoroughness of Meph’s new systems had blinded me to the good old systems built into Sassy. If Meph’s equipment was not operating and all the gear checked out, we must indeed be under some sort of attack. And the only way I wanted to confront an attack was in my command chair.

  As the chair buckled me into its soft breathing fabric I hit buttons all over the panels in front of me. The screens came to life with a bang and was I worried! We had stumbled into a real mess this time. There was a fleet of ships, some shaped like walruses and a few like arrowheads, still at extreme range thank goodness, apparently up to no good.

  “Perhaps,” I called up Meph, “we got caught in a general emissions cloak, or something.”

  “What do you mean, Captain?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the electronics expert. What do you think is going on? Have they spotted us? My sensors tell nothing about the energies your equipment uses. I read negative so far.”

  “The star map is still down, but my sensors show negative also. Apparently we are in a fine position for a surprise attack,” Meph enthused, probably wringing his tentacles in excited anticipation.

  Gawd what a bloodthirsty son of a squid he is!

  “Look Meph. This is an exploration ship. We’re supposed to maintain friendly relations with the natives, remember?”

  “Well yes, Captain, but this is a distant human outpost and I am sure those are not human ships out t...” and with that our intercom went down and I was alone. Was this really an attack? Shit! I pounded the arm of my command chair. I hated feeling helpless!

  A few moments later Meph came in carrying the earphones from my antique disk player spliced into a long wire trailing behind him.

  “Captain, our voice communications have, I believe, been detected. Here is a low power communicator which hooks up directly back to me in the battle

  bridge. Let me see your throat mike.”

  He pulled an electronics repair kit from somewhere on his body and proceeded to modify my throat mike by hooking it up to another wire trailing back to the battle bridge. Meanwhile, for some reason I didn’t understand, we were not being fired on by any of the ships out there. It was as if they could hear us, but not see us.

  “Meph, I think they haven’t located us yet. I’m going to shut down the main engines and coast here a while and see what’s going on.”

  “Right, Captain. Good idea. There,” he handed me back the throat mike “that should fool the buggers.

  Where is that ship from Last Chance?”

  “How stupid. Of course. Let me see.” I scanned with the sensors on low power over the general area the watch ship had been. All I picked up was a faint trail left by their engines. Sloppy maintenance on these outposts allows me to track them every time.

  “From the trail I have they probably didn’t detect this fleet,” I said at last.

  We coasted there talking on Meph’s instant intercom for about a half hour, when something happened: one of the smaller ships left the main force and started a spiral search pattern out our way.

  “Someone’s coming, Meph.”

  “Captain, if we could get just a little bit further from that fleet, I think we could get out from under the scalar wave blanket they’re emitting and my equipment would work. Then we could get on the other side of the gas giant and hide from them while monitoring their actions, as well as being able to talk to someone at Last Chance.”

  “Okay Meph. I don’t like waiting here to be picked up by those ships anyway.” I used the forward braking thrusters to start us backwards, using short widely spaced blasts, hoping to keep from being detected. Finally the alien ship was approaching too closely.

  “Meph, I have to shut down now and shut down most of the screens or they’ll be able to see us with opticals.”

  “That’s fine Captain. I’ve been calculating while you were pushing us back and if we coast for another quarter hour we should be out of the fleet’s field.”

  So I shut down everything but the close shields and crossed my fingers. I don’t know what Meph crossed, since he has tentacles. Maybe he doesn’t get nervous.

  Meph came onto the bridge and began fiddling with something at the auxiliary computer console. He had it all apart with circuit boards piled up around him and wires all over the thing. Sassy was muttering in the background.

  “What ‘ya doin’?”

  “Shhh! Captain!” he whispered forcefully. “They’re right by the ship, stopped out there” a tentacle waved in a general port side direction “and I’m trying to rig a snooper.”

 
“Oh.” I watched him for a few minutes, trying to figure out why he was into the auxiliary computer for a snooping device.

  I didn’t mention it before, but our close shields are electronically enhanced to make the ship look like a large meteoroid to all electronic and optical instruments; as long as they don’t penetrate that shield we are a rock to them. I was guessing that this had kept us alive so far.

  Aha! The auxiliary computer held the memory for that screen enhancement. And Meph was messing with it.

  “Meph!” I whisper-shouted at him. His head was under the panel inside the guts of our salvation, “that computer maintains the shield that’s keeping us alive!”

  He pulled his head out gently and turned to peer at me with amazement on his alien face. “Really? Why would you set up something like that in here? Ohho, I understand. The last resort ploy, eh?” With that he proceeded back into the computer. I suppose the shield board was still in place and functioning since we were still in one piece.