by Trevor Wyatt
“Sir, you do realize that the course will take us away from the fleet?” Ashley said from her console. “It will put is in the direct opposite direction of the fleet, plus out of its range should anything go wrong.”
“I realize that,” he said. He glanced at the navigator who, all the while, had been looking at him. “Set the course as amended and take us to that coordinate.”
Without giving a fuss, he nodded and returned his attention to his station. He issued the necessary commands to his system, and there was a sharp whine as the Battle Cruise began to change course. He got a call from engineering.
“Hi, Robert,” he said in his friendliest voice.
“What the hell is going on up there, Jeryl?” the chief engineer said. Aside from Ashley, he was the only one crazy enough to call him by his first name.
“Sorry, we have to make a course correction,” the Captain said, sympathetic.
“Well, when you boggarts decide to make a course change during FTL space, do remember to inform engineering. You just might destroy our FTL drive in the process and leave us a drifting mass in space.”
He allowed a strained smile on his face, even though this was only an audio communication. “Roger that, Robert.”
“Robert, out.”
“Status update,” he said, when he realizes the ship’s whine was over.
“Course adjusted, sir,” the navigator said. “We are en route to the estimated position of the debris of The Mariner based on the gravitation pull of the nearest star and the reduction in mass due to degradation.”
“Very good,” Jeryl replied. “Dr. Lannigan, keep your eyes on the sensors. I want you scanning that area with all you’ve got.” He knew the man was about to protest, so he continued, “I know you don’t agree with this course of action. Your disagreement has been noted and will be inputted in the logs for this mission. But damn it—just do as I say. Inform me if you see anything unusual.”
“Aye, Captain,” he replied.
“Captain?” said Henry, another CNC officer monitoring navigations.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Jeryl said.
“I just wanted to let you know that Dr. Lannigan provided me with the equation to account for change in gravitational pull as a result of reduction in mass.”
“Oh?” he replied. “How is that significant?”
“Mass determine gravitation pull, sir,” the navigator replied. “The heavier an object, the more force gravity exerts on it. Also, the lighter an object it, the lesser the force gravity exerts on it. Now, The Mariner debris has experienced severe atrophy over the course of five years. With this, the gravitation pull has constantly reduced, and with this its velocity.”
“I see,” he replied. “Without accounting for mass degradation, you most likely would have ended up with a wrong coordinate?”
He nodded. “But I couldn’t have come up with it without Taft.”
“Good job, guys,” said Jeryl.
“Captain,” the communications officer called. “I’m receiving priority one slipstream alert from Armada Command. They have been informed that we’re proceeding and not deviating from our alternate course and that we have had a sudden change in course. They request to be advised of our situation.”
“Noted,” Jeryl said.
There was a tense silence.
“What reply should I send, Captain?”
“Ignore the message,” he said, to the collective shock of the entire CNC crew. He noticed that only the security personnel didn’t show any outward response to what he just said. He wondered if they’d shoot him if he revolted against the Terran Armada. He didn’t think there was a policy for that one just yet.
“Sir, I have some information for you,” the tactical officer pronounced. This got his attention.
Jeryl turned in his seat to face the officer. “Go ahead, lieutenant.”
“This current course is going to affect our battle readiness on all fronts, sir, based on my projection.”
“Uh-huh,” he muttered. “How so?”
“First, we are entering the nebula at this point. This means our communications capability will be severely hampered. Also, the radiation from the stars will affect our defensive screens. We will be losing some of our ability to defend ourselves in the case of an attack.”
“Noted, Lieutenant,” the Captain replied before turning to the navigator. “Is there any way we can amend our course to reduce some of these effects and still arrive at our destination?”
He shook his head. “Negative, sir. This is the best laid-out course that takes us to the position of The Mariner.”
“Okay. Proceed, then,” he said.
In his periphery, he saw Ashley walked toward him.
“Captain, can I have a word with you in private?” she asked, her words just a whisper.
“Alright,” he said. “My office.”
Without replying to him, she turned and left.
He made his way into his office, his heart beating like a war drum.
Ashley was already talking the moment Jeryl walked in.
“Sir, I get what you’re trying to do. But you need to step back and think for a moment. Is this really the right course of action? Look, I’m on your side. Never doubt that for a moment. All I’m trying to do is to keep you from making an even greater mistake.”
He wiped the sweat off his brow. “Look, I have no problem with the fleet planning to destroy an entire Sonali planet. I’m willing to do whatever needs to be done…but only after I know the truth about The Mariner. I can’t let it go. As captain of this ship it’s my responsibility to exhaust all the option before committing to a very terrible act. This is simply what I’m doing.”
“Are you?” she said, questioning his resolve. “Look, sometimes in war we have to do things…” she sighed, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but it’s true. We’re an unlucky generation.”
He approached her and held her shoulders in his hands.
“I’m fine, Ash. Don’t worry about me. I want to make sure I have a solid reason to go ahead with this. Think about this for a moment. We’ve been fighting these guys for five years and never during that period have they demonstrated a capability that equals what we deduced from The Mariner’s destruction. They are, to an extent, more powerful than Terran warships, but not to the point where they can create beams as destructive as whatever obliterated The Mariner.”
Ashley wasn’t convinced. “We may have to accept it’s the Sonali in the end. You may not find what you’re looking for.”
He heaved a breath out. “It has to be someone else.”
“The fleet won’t wait for you much longer,” Ashley noted.
My commlink beeped. It was Dr. Lannigan. “Go ahead, Taft.”
“Sir, I’m picking up something.”
He turned and headed out onto the CNC, Ashley in close tow.
“Captain on deck!” came the security personnel’s voice.
Still headed toward his seat, he said, “Put it on screen.”
The screen dissolved into the image of star glittering in space—and a ship the same shape as The Mariner.
It was nothing like any Sonali ship the Terran Armada had ever seen.
Chapter 13
Ashley
“The Mariner,” said Ashley rather stupidly. There were no snide remarks in response. Jeryl, she saw, had halted dead in his tracks, staring at the image onscreen. What they were seeing simply couldn’t be real. The Mariner was reduced to floating rubble. She had seen it. Jeryl had seen it. One or two of the original crew of The Seeker who were also aboard this ship had seen it.
Jeryl shook off his astonishment and dropped into his command chair.
“What the hell is that?” he rapped out to no one and everyone. “Alert stations, everyone. Get ready to raise screens on my order. Lannigan, I want answers and I want them now.”
“Sir!” The CNC buzzed with action and muted conversation between stations as the
crew start scanning the stranger with their instruments.
Jeryl sat rigid in his chair. Ashley had no part in the science section, either, but it was her job to make sure that their investigations proceeded smoothly so she was watching her instruments as the scans continued.
Preliminary data came in. What they were seeing was no ghost, of course; it was a real physical object.
But how? Where did it come from? Are the Sonali taunting us?
She scowled at the thought. No, she didn’t think so. They had been steadfast in their insistence that they had nothing to do with the original Mariner’s destruction, and she believed them.
This was someone else. And as the realization dawned on her, her skin broke out in goose bumps. Someone else had destroyed The Mariner. Someone else had been watching the humans and the Sonali slug it out over the past several years.
Who? Why?
Ashley thought they were about to find out. Data from the preliminary scans continued to come in. She was seeing an odd pattern on the atomic level that tickled her memory.
Suddenly, her station blinked a number of red lights.
“Damn,” she said. “They’re painting us with ranging lasers.”
Maybe they thought the scanning beams were hostile. But she didn’t think so. Why she didn’t think so, she couldn’t say yet.
“Screens up,” Jeryl ordered. “Helm, return the favor. Get their range.”
Without consciously thinking through her hunch, she opened a station to Jeryl’s station.
“Sir? I want to bounce a spectro laser off that thing,” she said.
“What? Don’t you think that might be construed as a hostile act? They didn’t like the scanners much.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “No. I don’t think so.”
He was silent for a moment. “What’s your game, Lieutenant?”
“Not my game, sir. Not mine at all. They aren’t going to do a thing. I’ll bet my life on it.”
“And everyone else’s aboard this ship!” He muttered something else under his breath. “All right. Go ahead.”
Her fingers rippled over her controls as she called up a micro-pulse laser shot at the bogey. This was one thing she loved about Jeryl; he listened to his officers. He didn’t argue. He trusted them. He trusted her.
It was not a marriage thing. It was a captain-and-crew thing.
Moments later, she had her answer. She blew out a lungful of air she hadn’t known she was holding. Tamping down her excitement, she called Jeryl back.
“Look at this,” she said, and then sent a section of the original scans they got from The Mariner debris years ago. “Look at the energy signature.”
“This is old news.”
He sounded disappointed. “We know that whatever weapon was used practically transmuted the wreckage into different elements. Its spectrogram changed completely.”
“Now look.”
She superimposed the data from her new spectro scans on top of the old one.
“I—” he began, and then fell silent. The laser had vaporized a miniscule portion of the stranger’s outer hull, and their instruments had examined the little cloud of gas, tasting and probing it for its constituents and their energy signatures.
This would almost certainly be taken as an attack, if the bogey were so inclined. But it didn’t return “fire.”
The spectrograms were almost identical.
There were increased bands in the silicon range, something one would never normally see in a Terran ship, but which showed up in the original wreckage. Completely nonsensical, an artifact of the massive energy beams that blasted The Mariner.
Unless it wasn’t. Unless it was something else.
“It’s a message,” she said. “This boggart is telling us something.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, it’s not a Sonali ship. It’s certainly not The Mariner, returned to life. It’s real, but it isn’t real. It’s altered matter, sir. We’re looking at an actual physical ghost you can touch, sort of like a solid hologram.”
“There’s no such thing!”
“It appears that there is. This is a technology we’ve never seen, something like our resequencers. An entire starship made of synthetic matter, constructed with the use of supercharged photons.”
Jeryl was silent. Then he opened a PA channel to the entire ship and described what she had discovered. “Get me confirmation," he said. “But no more lasers.”
She allowed herself a small smile. She didn’t think they had to worry about lasers. The bogey would have destroyed them already, had it wanted to.
Confirmation trickled in from other stations. The bogey represented a state of matter, a level of technology that they had never seen before. Whoever was responsible for it had some serious chops.
Jeryl came back online to Ashley. “Message all our ships,” he said. “Tell them we think we’ve found the party responsible for The Mariner’s destruction, and tell them to stand by while we proceed with our investigation.”
She did, and almost at once responses from the fleet came in. They all wanted to know what was happening. She answered as best she could, telling them to maintain alert while they collated information.
Minutes passed in the CNC as they attempted to figure out what they were dealing with. The bogey indeed seemed to be some sort of solid hologram. Did that mean it was masking something? Or was it a temporary construct, to be used and discarded once it fulfilled its purpose?
Jeryl had their screens raised, but they were not making any other overt acts. Their scanners had taken in as much data as they could, and the computers were chewing on it. While they did, the crew chewed on their fingernails. At least Ashley did...it was an old habit, one she thought she’d broken. Apparently not.
After half an hour or so, Jeryl had enough.
“Ashley,” he said to Ashley over a private channel, “this is getting us nowhere. Someone has to make the first move.”
“I know,” she said.
He switched to the ship-wide channel. “Comm, hail that ship.”
“Sir.”
She twined her fingers together. Her hands were sweaty.
“Response coming in, sir,” said Comm.
“On screen.”
An image swam into view on her monitor. It was... humanoid. It wasn’t Sonali. Ashley was looking at an enormous round head, with a fleshy snout fringed by short, thick finger-like things. Its skin was a deep purplish-pink in color, like a bad bruise. Above and beside the snout were two perfectly round yellow eyes with black pupils. Two pointed ears adorned the head at the same level as the being’s eyes. A bulging cranium above the snout was sprinkled with several warty bumps, beside which sat two long, jointed antennae hanging down over the face. The head sat, neckless, on a pair of broad shoulders.
A sort of green skullcap covered the head and was joined to a lighter green tunic like a uniform.
The being raised a limb, apparently in greeting. It was very long, with an elbow further along toward a forearm shorter than theirs. It had three fingers and a thumb.
Jeryl’s voice was perfectly level, and he sounded as though he met new species every day—maybe twice a day. Ho hum.
“I’m Captain Jeryl Montgomery of the Terran Hegemony starship Seeker,” he said. Ashley’s mind flashed back to their initial encounter with the Sonali. He used almost identical words to hail them.
“We are here investigating the disappearance of one of our ships. I see that you have knowledge of that craft,” he concluded, with irony in his voice.
The new fellow blinked slowly. His lids slid in and out from the side, not the top and bottom, and Ashley head a tik-tik over the speakers. He said nothing, but regarded them with an otherwise unwavering and unreadable gaze.
“This position represents our lost ship’s last known coordinates,” Jeryl went on, keeping his sangfroid. “I’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about this matter.”
Chapter 14
&nbs
p; Jeryl
Relief.
That was what Jeryl was feeling right now. But not just that—there was also anger, and all of it was directed at the image on the screen. In there, the thing that killed everyone aboard The Mariner stared back at him.
Yes, he had been party to committing acts of war. He had been part of raids where the Union had sent ships to glass Sonali words.
Yes, the Sonali had done the same to them.
But this being in front of him, though they hadn’t said anything, were responsible for the billions of dead in the galaxy because of this pointless war.
They had managed to link their comms to the alien spaceship, but now the damn thing just stared back at him in complete silence. Jeryl thought back to the argument he had with the first Sonali captain he ever met, and he was not sure if that was going to happen in here again.
He doubted they would have that kind of time.
Everyone was probably hounding the communications officer for a piece of his time. They wanted to know exactly what it was that they found. They wanted to know whether to get over there to bombard another species. They wanted to know what to do next. Some were probably even contacting the Armada HQ to advise them on his current situation.
Despite all that, Jeryl never took his eyes off the humanoid creature on the screen. It didn’t seem to speak or engage him in any way—it just stared back at him.
He had played this game over and over again. First with the Outers during their border skirmishes before the war; then with some space pirates, who shamelessly operated even during the war (there were rumors that some pirates even sell to Sonali). Then, with the Sonali; the one he met in this region and the ones he met and destroyed following that.
I’m a seasoned poker player, he thought. I refuse to be bullied into nervousness by the power of silence. Even though time was running short, he positioned himself like he had all the time in the world. It was not like that thing knew that his time was limited.
