by Trevor Wyatt
I remember Professor Guss’s course. Just because we use radio, there’s no reason to assume that other forms of intelligent life will. “Very well,” I say after a moment. “Run it through the computer, see if you can decipher it. Get the AIs online if you need ’em. Not Gunny. The other two.”
Taylor nods. “It may take a couple of hours to figure it out.”
“Fine. Keep me apprised.” I look around the CNC. “Let’s cancel that meeting,” I say to my crew. “I want to see what we come up with as far as communication from that ship.” I leave CNC and head toward mess hall. Their coffee is crap, but I want a cup. Badly.
Chapter 9
Ashley
I leave CNC a short time later and follow along after Jeryl to the mess hall. It’s one of my favorite places in the ship. There are windows there, not video screens, so you get the full experience of looking out into space. This doesn’t work so well when the ship is in hyperspace, because there is nothing at all visible outside. This is inevitably disappointing for anyone who grew up watching old movies—or even new ones. All they’d have to is think for a moment, and they’d realize that faster-than-light means faster than light; as in, you can’t see anything because light can’t bring it to your eyes. The force bubble surrounding the ship and shielding it from the stress and energy fluxes of FTL travel render the outside universe invisible. All navigation is done by computer. In the early days of FTL travel, a lot of ships went missing before the energy levels required to go a given distance were properly measured. Most of them still haven’t been found.
I find Jeryl sitting with a cup of coffee off to one side, tapping at his tablet. He doesn't look up when I enter. I go to the resequencer and order a coffee for myself by scanning my comm badge and tapping the BLACK 1 CREAM NO SUGAR combo.
Cadets are invariably surprised when they find they have to pay for food and drink aboard a starship. I guess I was, too, the first time. But when you think about it, it makes sense. A starship is a closed system. While it’s in space, nothing gets out and nothing gets in. This means that any food and drink that we need is either carried with us, or else synthesized along the way. Early space explorers brought everything with them in terms of food, but even back then they recycled their urine for water.
These days, with advanced 3D resequencer technology, you can get a wider range of food and drinks, as well as other items, but some of them require chemical compounds that must be carried in the ship’s supply stores. It’s not unreasonable for me to be charged for more for, say, a latte than it is for a simple drink of water. But it isn’t cheap, so I don’t often splurge on lattes.
The plain-vanilla coffee, so to speak, is nothing to write home about, but it is better than no coffee at all. Marginally.
I just wish it wouldn’t take so damn long for the resequencer to work its magic. Smart folks put their orders into a queue while they’re still in their quarters, but people on duty have to catch theirs on the fly, like me today. And it can take up to five minutes.
While I’m waiting for the thing to gather its molecules I think back to how I’m here now. So far, so fast. It’s crazy because I joined the Armada when all I wanted was the Armada to pay for school. I had every intention of becoming an astrophysicist, but before I could I had to put in three years of mandatory space service. I forgot about astrophysics after a couple of months. The thrill of actually being aboard a Union starship washed all that away. I ended up becoming a career officer and joining the Academy and rising in the ranks. I’ve never regretted it. I’ve seen things and been places that a career in the sciences would never have given me.
Finally the machine is done. It beeps at me and I withdraw my cup from the slot. Jeryl is still tapping at his tablet, so I go over and sit down at his table.
“So what do you think?” I ask.
He grunts: I don’t know. “I’m getting sick of playing chicken with these people, though, I can tell you that.”
“Do you think they’re going to... you know. Hit us with what they used on the Mariner?”
Another grunt. “I just sent a notice to Engineering to keep EngPrime ready for emergency thrust,” he says. “At the first hint of them powering up that ship of theirs, he’ll kick us into FTL. I don’t care if it removes us from the scene, we’ll be safe in the drive bubble. Not even a particle beam can get through that.”
He swirls his coffee in its cup, and frowns down into it. “Ashley,” he says after a moment. “This is a game-changer, you know.”
“You mean, the aliens?”
“Yeah. So now we know for a fact we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe.”
“It’s historic,” I say. And I can’t help feeling a little thrill at my own words. “This is it, Jeryl... people will always remember our names. Like Neil Armstrong.”
He growls. “You know whose names they ought to remember? The crew of the Mariner, that’s who. They’ve already had First Contact.” He scowls into his coffee. “And we know how well that went.”
“You’re right, of course,” I say. “I’m just glad we were able to get those reports sent back to Edoris Station.”
“So am I, but I’m not sure what’ll ever become of them.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
He gives an ironic chuckle. “Flynn’s a good guy, but if he takes those reports up to Armada Command on Earth, and they think it looks embarrassing, they’ll bury it.”
All I can do is stare at him for a moment. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say anything so cynical. “Is that really true?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “We’ve been out in space for what, a hundred and fifty years? Forty-five billion human beings spread out over 198 colony words. Another 4 billion human beings in the Outer Colonies. How is it we’ve never found another trace of anything like this?” He inclined his head toward the screen, and the image of the alien vessel. “That’s a sophisticated ship.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they don’t like Earth-type worlds. Suppose they’re from a place like Titan, hellishly cold with a methane atmosphere. Not all star systems have worlds like that... they would have no reason to visit a system with Earth-like planets but none of their preferred type.”
He taps two fingers on the tabletop, repeatedly, still frowning. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Or, I dunno—how about this? The Union has been so focused on restoring Earth to environmental health that we simply didn’t pay close enough attention. We might have missed something. We’ve been completely occupied with looking for suitable ores and so on... and the scientists have been kept busy enough with the vegetable life we’ve found, and microbes. We couldn’t spend the money and time digging down into each planet looking for fossils or artifacts.”
“I had a professor at the Academy,” he says. “He had this course in First Contact.”
I nod. “Professor Guss,” I say. “I never took the course; it was an elective and it seemed like a waste of time to me. But I’ve heard of him.” I didn’t say that most people regarded Guss as eccentric, to put it kindly.
“His whole point was that we might not recognize intelligence if we found it. We judge other species by our own standards, and we think that there’s only two states of being: asleep or awake, alive or dead, conscious or unconscious, intellectual or material. But what if it’s a spectrum, like autism? There might be degrees, and we might miss something simply because we’re not capable of recognizing it.”
I can only shrug. “Well, that ship out there is a pretty plain indication that whoever is inside it is intelligent.”
“Agreed; but we’ll know that only because we have the evidence of the ship itself.” He shook his head. “All I’m saying is, we have to be very careful not to judge them by our standards.”
I look at him for a moment, and feel a surge of—something I’d rather not call love. He is a thoughtful man, and I find that attractive. I frown myself, now, banishing those thoug
hts.
“Are you afraid?” he asks me.
I lift my eyebrows. “No,” I say honestly. “Excited, yes; apprehensive, nervous, yes. But afraid? Nope.”
“Good. Because I need you, Commander.” He stares deep into my eyes and what I read there makes me a little uneasy. There’s a spark... dammit, we’re about to make contact with a possibly inimical alien race, and I’m getting hot for him! This is not professional behavior, you knothead, I tell myself firmly. He needs you to be the First Officer of this ship.
I open my mouth to say something inane, but fortunately his communicator beeps just at that moment and he taps it.
It’s Mary Taylor at Comms. “The computer has deciphered the frequency.”
“All right,” he says. “My office, three minutes.”
“Sir.”
He looks at me, and that spark is gone, erased by determination and dignity. “All right, Commander,” he tells me. He drains his coffee and stands. “Let’s go see what they’re saying to us.”
Chapter 10
Jeryl
Within a few minutes of my having called the meeting all my officers are seated around the table in the conference room adjoining the CNC. Present, besides Commander Ashley Gavin and myself, are Taft Lannigan, our Science Officer; Mary Taylor from Communications, Lieutenant Eiléan Docherty, head of Navigation, and Dr. Mahesh Rigsang, Chief Medical Officer. I’ve given Ferriero the helm. The engineering, navigation and armory AIs are present via commlink.
I turn the meeting over to Mary Taylor, who summarizes her efforts to decode the transmissions from the alien. “It took some time to figure out what they were doing,” she says. “It’s not straightforward, as you might expect. There were numbers, but not anything simple like 2 plus 2, to establish a mathematical baseline. Instead, it was a series of primes, running from 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 on up through 100,000, all indicated by a series of fluctuations in the carrier wavelength. So I responded with the series through five hundred thousand.”
“That sounds like a pretty firm basis for communication,” says Eiléan, a trim, dark-haired woman in her late fifties.
“Well, you would think,” says Mary. “We batted primes back and forth for a while, so rapidly that I figure they must have a computer on their end as well. Then they started in on factoring pi.”
“Are they using base 10?”
“No, it’s tridecimal, base 13,” Taggert replies. “It’s easy to work conversions for it. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do it in my head.” She glances at Eiléan Docherty, who can do that sort of thing in her head. Eiléan was a math prodigy who was studying trig at age 8 and matriculated from MIT with dual master’s degrees in math and computer science at age 19. “From there the transmission got more complex. The fluctuations became multi-phasic, being superimposed on one another. What they were doing was sending schematics of molecules—but with missing covalent bonds.”
“They’re trying to judge how advanced we are,” says Dr. Lannigan. “Sending us fill-in-the-blank puzzles.”
Mary nods. “I think so. They know we’re capable of interstellar travel, but for all they know we could have been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years. And that, I think, is why the last question or puzzle they sent was an engineering question regarding the equations for the FTL drive.”
“What?” I bark, startled.
“It is so, Captain,” says EngPrime, the Engineering AI, speaking for the first time. “Analysis indicates that their propulsion systems must be very similar to our own, given the specificity of the question, which had to do with the containment system that allows us to warp space around the Seeker. Which leads to the further conclusion that when it comes to traveling faster than light, there is only one way to do it. They could not possibly have known what to ask, otherwise. The universe doubtless will not allow for more than that one path to violate Einstein’s law.”
“The old boy must be spinning,” Dr. Lannigan says with a chuckle.
“I think,” Ashley says, “the first thing they wanted to establish was that they could talk to us at all. You know; how much have we got in common?”
“I agree,” says Mary. “Now they know we can talk to each other. These puzzle questions were probably designed to tweeze out how much physical science we know.”
I lift a finger. “Clever of them, if a bit obvious,” I say. “But it leads me to wonder...”
“Sir?”
“Is that the way a hostile species would act?”
Everyone casts glances at one another. I know I’m on to something. If these people attacked the Mariner, would they subsequently go to all this trouble just to establish a basis for communication with us?
“I can think of two reasons why they might,” Ashley says. She’s quick. That’s one of the things I like about her. Quick, and funny, and she can—but enough of that. “For one thing, the Seeker is a good deal bigger than the Mariner. Not as big as their ship, of course, but even so we look like we might have teeth. We show up and they think ‘Uh-oh, it’s Mariner’s big brother come for revenge. We better play nice, pretend to be innocent explorers, trying to communicate.’ In so doing, they’ll learn how advanced we are, like Myrna suggested. Then they’ll decide if they can kick our tail or not.”
Nods and murmurs of agreement around the table.
“And just showing up wouldn’t be a coincidence,” Eiléan says. “They can deduce that we’re either able to communicate over interstellar distances, or else we’re an immediate follow-up force such as might normally be sent.”
“Possible, possible,” I say, stroking my chin. “And your other reason, Commander Gavin?”
She shrugs. “They’re exactly what they seem to be.”
“Wait, what are you saying? That this ship isn’t responsible for blasting the Mariner?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, now, wait a minute,” Dr. Lannigan puts in. “Just wait. You’re saying that there’s another intelligent species in the area!”
“I don’t know,” Ashley says. “I know it sounds silly...”
“Boy, does it ever,” says Dr. Rigsang, who hasn’t said one word thus far. “Do you have any idea what the odds against that are?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” she says. “It’s a crazy universe out there, Doctor.”
“I think I get your reasoning,” I say. “The aliens seem to have deliberately made it hard to decipher their communications, burying them in a carrier wave. I have a hunch that they’re not much more advanced than us, if they’re using that methodology. I mean to say, we’re not dealing with godlike powers.”
“Right,” Ashley says. “They haven’t teleported over here, or sent a software avatar or something... they’re barely past the dot-and-dash stage, like us.” She shrugs again. “Figuratively speaking.”
“We’re more or less equals,” I say, thinking about it. “In terms of cultural and technological development.
“That’s how I read it,” she tells me. “And they could be terrified. Let’s assume for a moment that they did not destroy the Mariner. We could well be looking for any excuse to blow them to atoms, how are they to know?”
“This is damned confusing.” I can’t keep an edge out of his voice. “Wait, though; what if they put the Mariner through this same examination? This series of puzzles?”
Ashley shakes her head slowly. “If they did, they were probably wasting their time,” she says. “She wasn’t carrying the kind of equipment we are... She wasn’t more than a scout ship, really, with no room for more than one AI and not much in the way of weapons. Gunny?”
“Ma’am?”
“What were the Mariner’s offensive and defensive capabilities?”
“Standard CP beams and lasers, nothing that could stand up to a ship that size,” says the armory AI. “Standard screens.” There’s a blip of static that he uses as a shrug. “They could have smashed her flatter than piss on a plate, excuse my French.”
She turns to me. “So there you go, sir. Mariner probably never got past the signal buried in the carrier wave. All she would have seen was the carrier wave itself, which doesn’t carry any information. Sure, she’d have known that she was facing an intelligent alien... but she probably wouldn’t have been able to talk to it. And you heard Gunny. If the alien took offense, or got nervous....” She lifts her eyebrows. “Goodbye, Charlie.”
I heave a sigh and sit silently for so long that some of the others start to fidget. I can’t help it my wheels turn slowly when I’m faced with a serious problem. And this is possibly the most serious problem the human race has ever faced. It may be existential, because if the alien is smart enough to somehow trace us back to Sol System who’s to say that they won’t send their own armada? I know it’s idiotic to think that interstellar war is even possible—except for the fact that we’re engaged in one with the Outers.
I sit quietly, turning all this over in my head. At last I say, quietly, “Lieutenant Taylor.”
“Sir?”
“You can reply to them, can you not?”
“I can.”
“Good. Then here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to craft a response that is neutral in tone... we’re not angry or confrontational; we’re not jumping for joy at finding other intelligent life forms. This is a purely mundane exercise for us. Savvy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. How long will it take you to do that?”
She licks her lips. “I can uh, I can do it now, if you’ll give me fifteen minutes. I’ll run it by you of course, before I send it.”
“Perfect. Do it.” I push back from the table. “The rest of you, to CNC right now. I want everyone in on this.”
No one says a word, but they all follow me out of the conference room and into CNC.
I don’t believe that I am the only person who is sweating. I hope to hell I know what I’m doing.
