by Trevor Wyatt
Instead of replying, I spread my fingers wide once more and zoom in on the debris. Jeryl’s eyes narrow even more, a dark shadow taking over them, and I know that he’s trying to escape the inevitable answer. The Seeker set out on a simple reconnaissance mission, its purpose to retrieve a small crew of scientist that probably got too excited and went into uncharted territory, but all that is about to change.
A deep exploration vessel turned into scrap right in the middle of nowhere? If Jeryl’s already fidgety about the whole situation, I can’t even imagine what the Admiral’s reaction is going to be. I can already see this mission’s folder stamped with a large red S, all this information turning into a slew of “on a need to know basis” facts.
It just doesn’t make any sense. I doubt any of the Outer Colony fleets would be this deep into outer space, and even smugglers and pirates wouldn’t be venturing this far. So what the hell happened here?
“Are you sure, Ashley?” Jeryl asks me again, looking up from the projected images and staring right at me, the lines in his face turning into deep trails of concern. “We have to be sure.”
“I’m positive,” I nod, taking a deep breath as I feel the words clawing up my throat. “We’ve positively identified the debris as The Mariner—and it was destroyed.”
Chapter 3
Jeryl
After staring at the expanded view for a few seconds, taking in the data readouts cascading down the side of the screen, I look back at Ashley’s face. Her lips are compressed into a thin line and her brow is knit.
I clear my throat. “The energy signatures from that wreckage...”
She’s nodding. “No radioactivity. No CP beams. Something—”
“Unknown,” I finish. Unknown. Alien. “But there’s no trace of any, uh, activity in this sector.” I don’t have to say that there’s never been a trace of activity in any sector. It’s a matter of historical fact that there's no intelligent life anywhere in the volume of space controlled by the Union. “What are we dealing with here?”
She allows a small smile to soften her mouth. “As you say, it’s unknown.”
Several thoughts flit through my head. Is this it? First Contact? No, I can’t buy that. Or have the Outer Colonies, despite my having ruled out their interference, upped their game with weapons research and come up with an advance they’ve come a long way to test? Has a new player entered the game? But why would anyone destroy the Mariner, which was an unarmed research vessel?
I draw a breath. “All right,” I say. “Let’s look at the facts. The Mariner is destroyed. We are ruling out something internal—sabotage, some experiment gone awry. Right?” I shoot Ashley a glance and she nods once. “So we assume an outside force. And yet—” I deliberately tap the top of my desk. “—there aren’t any. As far as we know,” I add quickly, seeing that she’s opened her mouth to reply. “It’s a big galaxy, but still.”
What I don’t need to say is that there are only a few billion humans scattered across a couple of hundred worlds. There’s plenty of room for weird things to be lurking in unexplored places, even in systems we’ve colonized.
She speaks anyway. “We have already agreed that it’s an unknown. Alien? Human agency? Or perhaps some sort of natural phenomenon.”
“Natural?” I think about that for a moment. “Well, they were out here on an exploratory mission. Our records show they were to investigate the Anderson Nebula.”
“That’s right,” Ashley says. The Anderson is a small planetary nebula, quite young, less than two thousand years old. It’s far enough from Earth that it was only detected by one of the more distant Union worlds. The Mariner was sent to investigate the neutron star spinning at the nebula’s center. It would be the closest neutron star to Union territory. Worth a visit, certainly.
I cast another glance at the readouts. “Well,” I say, “if you’re suggesting they tangled with the Anderson’s neutron star, Ashley—mmm, I don’t think it parses. Given the position of the wreckage, it’s clear they never got close enough to the nebula to be affected by its collapsar. Sensors give no indication of anything else in the vicinity like, I don’t know, a mini black hole... which in any case wouldn’t have torn the ship apart. Nor would the neutron star. Either one would have sucked the ship in.” I shrugged. “Gravity being what it is. There’d be nothing at all here.”
She sighs. “I know. But whatever it was, was more powerful than anything in our records.”
I’m having a little trouble concentrating on the conversation. I keep thinking back to the time we spent at the Oath, when we—no, better not go there. I shake my head to dispel the memory, and she misinterprets my gesture.
“There’s no use denying it,” she says sharply. “As you’ve said, it’s a big galaxy. Shit happens. Sir. Did you take a really close look at Lannigan’s report on the wreckage?”
Without answering I do as she suggests, and spend a few minutes going over the abstract that Taft Lannigan, the Seeker’s Science Officer, has prepared. As ship’s captain, I don’t have the time or the inclination to wade through screen after screen of technical data when all I want is a summary. The skinny, as my grandfather used to say. Dr. Lannigan knows that, and knows better than to waste my time. He’s a good officer. Now, though, what I find in his report makes me frown.
Unknown energy signatures, we already knew that. But the traces they have left behind indicate levels so powerful that it they’re not only unknown to Terran science, but also stronger than anything we've encountered before.
I’m starting to wonder about the Outer Colonies again. When they split off, they took some of Earth’s finest—and most malcontented—minds with them.
As though she were reading my mind, Ashley says, “It’s not the Outers. It can’t be them.”
I stare at her for a few moments. “I think you’re right,” I say after weighing the possibility. “I think they’re too busy trying to stay alive.”
“In which case,” she says, “what about someone else?”
I have to scoff. “Who?”
“One of the corporate fleets.”
While it’s true that the corpers brag about having more advanced hardware and AIs than the Union ships, that’s a fairy tale we let them believe. You find me an example of a commercial enterprise anywhere in history that has a leg up over the military. Oh, I suppose there are isolated examples, but for the most part, more technical advances have come through military necessity than through corper blue-skying.
Except genetics. And even there, I know for a fact that the Union has research facilities at least on par with the civilian stuff.
But bottom line? The corpers simply aren’t going to be found out here on the fringes of known space. There’s no money to be made in undeveloped areas. The corps aren’t humanitarian outfits. They are motivated by financial considerations, and not prone to much speculative exploration. Sure, once a promising world is located, preferably something thickly forested, with lots of foreign vegetation that may be hiding compounds that could be used to cure diseases or prolong life ... well, then the corporations show up, glad-handing the colonies and dumping money into research for a cut of the gain. It’s politics—and business—as usual, and no one has a problem with it.
“There’s just no reason to suspect any kind of corporate involvement here,” I say. “And what would they have to gain by destroying a Union starship?”
“Because they’ve stumbled on something lucrative? Like, so potentially lucrative that it’d be worth killing for?”
I have to shake my head. “It just doesn’t make any sense, Ash.” I wince, because I’ve used her nickname, but she doesn’t seem to notice my breach in professionalism. “That would be, I don’t know, renegade behavior. No one could get away with that for long. And what could possibly be that lucrative?”
She can’t answer that one. Instead, she says, “All right then, what about someone completely new?”
I have to grin. “How long did you say you’ve been an o
fficer on a starship?” She blushes. “There’s nothing. No one else. Look, excuse me for being obvious, but in 150 years as a space-faring civilization we’ve never found any other sentient life. Not even a trace. No ruins, fossils ... zero. Zip. Nada. Not even radio signals.”
“What if they don’t use radio?” Before I could object, she waves her hand. “I know, I know—you’re right. I mean, intellectually I understand perfectly well that neither the outers or the corpers could develop whatever destroyed the Mariner. But something did.”
“Undeniably.”
“Have you ever heard of Sherlock Holmes?”
I blink at the abrupt change of subject. “Uh, no. What ship does he command?”
She smiles. “He’s a fictional character, Jeryl. A detective, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Nineteenth Century.”
“Oh. Well, no, I’ve never heard of him.” I know she reads a lot, but I had no idea her tastes included pre-Union fiction. You learn something new every day.
“Well, Holmes once said, when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. So, if we rule out involvement by corpers and outers, and other human agencies, and natural phenomena, we are left with...”
She raises her eyebrows at me. I conceal my irritation.
“I don’t know,” I say in a clipped tone. I see a telltale blink red on my desktop. “Look, I have to report to the admiral. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Of course, sir.” She smiles. It’s a nice smile, a private one, like the ones she gave me at the Oath. I hope to see more of it. “Shall I talk to Dr. Lannigan? Have him bring some of the debris aboard for closer study?”
“Precisely what I was going to suggest,” I say. The telltale blinks again. Admiral Flynn really doesn’t like to be kept waiting. “See to it, please, Commander.”
She actually snaps off a salute, and I return it automatically. We both smile now, and there’s a lot of subtext in those smiles. At least, there is in mine. I want to say something else, something personal, but before I can sort out my thoughts she says, “I’ll be in CNC, sir.” She turns and leaves my office.
The telltale blinks.
I tap the comm link.
Chapter 4
Jeryl
“Dammit, Montgomery, I want answers. I need answers.”
“I understand, Admiral, and I’m doing my best to—”
Flynn waves an impatient hand as if to wipe my words away from the air. He’s a choleric man in his mid-sixties, still craggy and in great shape, his brush-cut hair gone grey. I know he’s an enthusiastic amateur boxer, and I personally wouldn’t want to step into the ring with him even though he’s shorter than I am and weighs less. He’s got a fire for personal best.
I don’t take offense at the gesture. I explain to him that I’m having some of the wreckage brought aboard for closer examination. “Just give me a couple of hours to get a more complete report together, Admiral,” I say, remaining calm in the face of his glare. I’ve dealt with Flynn before and I know that despite his bluster he’s really not a martinet. And he knows that I'm not stalling.
He scrunches his face up. “All right,” he growls. “You’ve got three hours. Fair?”
“Fair,” I say. I sign off and go down to the science section to build a fire under Dr. Lannigan.
* * *
Three hours later I’m back on the slipstream to Admiral Flynn at Edoris Station, sharing our findings. Even though there’s never been any evidence that a slipstream broadcast can be hacked, it’s customary to encode them on the off chance the Outers have made a breakthrough.
Flynn isn’t happy with what I’m telling him. “About all my science team can say is that whatever destroyed the Mariner was an energy weapon of some kind.”
Flynn emits a truly impressive snort. “Well, it’s good to know that we haven’t got one of Horatio Hornblower’s ships of the line out here blasting away with a fusillade of cannon fire!” I bite my lips to restrain a laugh despite his sarcasm. “Send me the reports. I want to see ‘em.”
“Sir.” I subvocalize a few commands to the ship’s computer it responds with a low compliance tone. “On their way.”
Even though Flynn is many lightyears away on Edoris, the slipstream, quantum miracle that it is, drops the documents into his computer almost at once. They won’t make him any happier. He calls them up on a readscreen, his scowl deepening as he scans through them.
“Unknown energy signature ... all remaining components give evidence of having been bathed in highly charged emissions. Super charged, in fact.” He grunts. “Whatever that is. No, no,” he adds as I start to explain, “I know what it means. You’re saying that whatever hit the Mariner basically disintegrated some of its components, destroying enough of them that the ship’s hull couldn’t maintain integrity. The Mariner exploded. The wreckage is brittle, some of it, like old bread.”
Admiral Flynn looks up from his report. “They were on their way to investigate a neutron star in that damned nebula.” He does the face-scrunching thing again. “Could they have been caught in a GRB?”
A gamma ray burst, he’s talking about. I take a few seconds to ponder that. High-energy physics isn’t my field, but like all ship captains I know my astronomy. I suppose a concentrated burst of gamma rays might do the sort of damage we found, but GRBs are very rare, maybe half a dozen per galaxy per million years. It’s true they are associated with the collapse of a dying sun into a high-density neutron star, but the Mariner’s target had been sitting in its nebula for centuries, at least.
But the biggest strike against implicating a GRB is that there’s never been one in our galaxy: All observed GRBs have originated from outside the Milky Way. An event of that size would have lit up radio telescopes dozens of worlds. A GRB in the Milky Way, in fact, if it happened to be pointing at Earth, could trigger a mass extinction event. It could potentially sterilize the planet, turning it into a lifeless cinder.
I explain my reasoning to Flynn, and he nods as if he’s already figured it out, as he probably has.
“Well then, this last bit,” Flynn says, flicking a paragraph up onto the screen so that I can see it, too. “Lannigan is saying that he suspects a concentrated, highly charged beam of photons. Mixed in with a population of some unknown particle.”
“Yeah, um...” I hope I’m not blushing, because I hadn’t noticed that particular datum in the findings. Unknown? Damn! Not that it was surprising, since everything about this situation smacked of the unknown, but even so I should've caught it. Instead I nod sagely.
Luckily, Flynn takes this as an agreement with his assessment rather than me trying to cover my posterior.
“So we’re left with a particle beam of a previously undiscovered nature that can cause molecular breakdown,” I say, summing up for myself as much as for the Admiral.
He nods.
I scan the rest of the report as quickly and unobtrusively as I can. “Lannigan says that only something focused could do this, not something dispersed, and the focusing device, platform, agency, whatever we call it, has to be something relatively small. Not the size of a star. Not the size of a planet, even.”
“Something the size of a ship, you mean,” Flynn says in a low voice.
We lock eyes through the slipstream viewer.
“All right, listen to me, Montgomery,” he says after a few moments. “This is strictly need-to-know, but I think that at this point you need to know. The Armada has been developing a gamma ray weapon for a number of years now.”
“I had no idea.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he says. “It’s an Intelligence issue. I’m in the loop because some of my technical team members are involved. They’ve been testing the thing on Tau Ceti 2.”
Tau Ceti 2, I know, is an airless chunk of planetary real estate about the size of Mercury, orbiting its primary at about as far as Venus is from Sol. It’s lifeless and therefore would be a good place for weapons research.
>
“I see,” I tell him.
“It’s still being tested. They’re having problems with shielding the—well, never mind. That’s information you don’t need to know. The short version is, it’s not ready for official deployment yet. I’m told they’re still at least three years away from that.”
“But if we’re working on something like that, then the Outers could be also.”
“That’s right, Captain. Yet Armada Intelligence has not reported any sort of activity that would suggest the Outer Colonies have something even close to this kind of capability.”
It’s my turn to scrunch up my face. The standard service joke is that Armada Intelligence is an oxymoron. Oh, maybe that’s a little unfair. The official intelligence services do their best, and sometimes that is very good indeed. But it’s long been an open secret that they rely overmuch on informers and embedded operatives whose reports are often unverifiable. “The Armada could be off the mark,” I say.
He shrugs. “We have a new president,” he says. “We have a new council. They are a bunch of mid-level bureaucrats who only care about the damn bottom line.”
Not everyone shares this view, but I do. The new administration has been cutting funding in favor of channeling more money to the renovation of Earth’s environment, which was so severely devastated during the widespread collapse of mankind’s interlocking social and technological edifice during the 21st century because of overpopulation, a stressed environment, and World War III. Analysts were predicting after the end of the Third World War that it would take roughly 500 to 1,000 years for the planet to recuperate and humanity to once again be able to live on the planet sustainably. But over the last one hundred and fifty years, that number has come down dramatically. To the point where most areas are now habitable and full renovation is something we should see in the next ten years. Most of the planet has been rehabilitated and no one can argue that it isn’t money well spent. You couldn’t tour some of the places in Africa and Europe—and North America—and not come away with tears in your eyes and a determination to clean that mess up.
