Explorations: First Contact

by Isaac Hooke

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she pressed, taking my hands in her own. I felt the smooth coolness of her skin touching mine.

  “But it did happen.” I turned and focused on her clear blue eyes. “It was me that pulled the trigger.”

  “And me that flew us there. And the intel geeks who gave us the target. The wrong target. It was no single person’s fault, we were all cogs in the machine—”

  “And that’s how you rationalize it to yourself,” I snapped, angry she was dredging up those memories. The reason I’d left the military I’d loved until that horrible day. I saw people behind glance over at us, their attention drawn from the sight of the Darklady departing by my raised voice. I lowered my tone. “Sorry.”

  Carol gave a tight smile in response. Her expression made it clear I wasn’t forgiven, but she was willing to move on. “The point I want to make is, you know as well as I do we could find anything out there.”

  “Your point?” I prompted testily, knowing full well what the true nature of her point was.

  “You have two months in quarantine. You can get Ranger fitted out with some firepower and get trained up on it.”

  “No. And I don’t agree with Harbinger’s loadout. What the hell are they going to think if their first sight of humans is a goddamn battleship?”

  “And what will they think”—she emphasized ‘they’ as I had—“if they can ride all over us?”

  “I’d like to think they’re better than that,” I retorted.

  We had reached yet another impasse on yet another argument. Only this one had gone from being a mere philosophical debate to being pretty damn pertinent, as both of our ships ramped up for their final departures. Mine was run by a survey crew from the civilian branch of the FCF and carried only the lightest of self-defense devices, equipment whose primary purpose wasn’t to impart death and destruction, just merely to protect.

  Her ship, though, the Harbinger? Well, I’d left the U.S. Air-Space Force. She hadn’t; her mission was military through and through and all that went with it. She even had a wing of fighters onboard.

  “And what if they’re not?”

  “We can’t know that.” Through the window I could see the Darklady clearing the forest of gantries and spires which made up the station. Now she’d moved, my own ship, the Ranger, was revealed. Her final fitting had been completed, and her test flights done.

  She was ready.

  “Look,” she said, working her fingers with gentle insistence between mine, entwining them. “You’re going to be a long way from home. I know how you feel after the war, but—”

  “You’ve made it clear you think I’ve turned into a damn hippy.”

  “Well, not quite. I know you’ll do what you need to do out there. But,” Carol’s voice trailed off. She seemed to want to tell me something. She caught herself and pressed on. “Look, all I’m saying is be careful, okay?”

  I could see the conflicted look in her eyes. They suddenly reflected the piercing light of the Darklady’s main drive firing. I cocked my head, trying to divine what it was she was thinking.

  Something in her expression told me she was hiding something.

  “Tell me.”

  ***

  I shivered with hunger and cold as, one-handed, I wiped the gloopy mess off of my body with a hand towel. Floating around me were hologrammatic displays, the multi-colored icons, graphs and charts giving me an overview of the Ranger’s status. Everything looked nominal, the ship holding up as expected in the long decades she had been racing towards the star Tau Sagittarii.

  The other members of the flight crew were similarly unselfconsciously naked in the brightly lit recovery bay, cleaning the slimy gunk off themselves.

  Beatrice ‘Rice’ Smith drove her finger in her ear, wiggling it around. “This shit gets everywhere.”

  Tyler Rhodes, Ranger’s pilot, gave the slightest twitch of a smile; it was more than enough for Rice to whip him half-heartedly against his thigh with her towel, causing him to recoil and cup his groin lest a second shot catch him somewhere more vulnerable.

  “Thirty years in the freezer and your mind’s still in the gutter.” Rice returned to wiping herself down.

  “Glad to see it ain’t cooled yer heels either, Beau,” Tyler quipped back, lowering his guard when it became apparent a second blow was not following. Quite why he felt the need to bait her I‘d never know, but Rice hated the Deep South spin on her name and I winced, expecting a fiery comeback or a further lashing to take place in front of me.

  “Coffee, then banter,” I cut in, shutting them down. Actually, I was quietly pleased they were with it enough to bicker good naturedly. It showed the cryogenic pods hadn’t had any unforeseen adverse effects, at least on the surface anyway. Rice nodded, then carried on wiping herself down.

  Tossing the towel in the fresher, I swiped the status displays out of the air. So far it didn’t look like anything was demanding immediate attention.

  Placing my hands in the small of my back, I pushed, stretching myself out until I felt a satisfying pop. I couldn’t contain the groan of pleasure as my body loosened up. Sure, cryogenics stopped the body’s systems in their tracks, but ultimately, you were still in one position for decades. I gave a final stretch. “Come on, folks. Stop your preening. I want to get the shower on.”

  Water onboard Ranger was a tightly controlled commodity. We even had a schedule for when we could take a shower. Right now, though, when we all needed one to clean the suspension fluid off, the easy solution was a group shower.

  The spigots unleashed a torrent of hot water that needled into my skin in a most satisfying way, driving the bone deep cold of cryo-sleep away.

  I scrubbed the last of the gunk off my body with a loofah and, all too soon, the water stopped.

  Now there was just the small matter of an empty stomach to take care of.

  Unfortunately, unlike that Canadian behemoth, the Halifax, there were no stewards aboard. Ranger was a small ship built on a tight budget. No, here even the Captain had to heat up his own meal.

  “Come on, folks, let’s go eat.”

  ***

  The subdued light of the bridge automatically brightened as we stepped through the hatch threshold. The room was spotless, not even a speck of dust to show how long it had been unoccupied. Like the rest of the ship, it was glistening, fresh and pristine.

  I pulled my seat around in the center of the chamber and sat down, spinning back into position before my console as the others took their own places.

  Holo-panels of diagnostics, schematics and readouts blinked into existence, floating unobtrusively around me, providing an instant summary of Ranger and her transit sphere.

  “Just getting the preliminary deep engineering reports through, skip,” Rice called over.

  I rotated in my chair and nodded my approval. Before the engineer, a complicated set of schematics showed a deeper working of the displacement drive and ship subsystems than I was necessarily interested in. I trusted Rice would feed me what I needed to know.

  “Power relays going through to node four have switched to the back-up routing,” she said as she squinted up at the board, as the view scrolled with dizzying speed over the conduits, circuits and machinery of one of the most complicated devices ever created by humans. “Non-critical at this juncture and looks like the system automatically shut down the primaries and switched to back-up as a pre-emptive measure.”

  “Fair enough. We’ll keep the secondary systems running and dispatch a bot to see what’s what with the primary,” I said.

  “Sending Alvin out now.”

  “Any objections if I get the main display up and running?” Tyler said between slurping down gulps of coffee, before setting the mug atop his console. I frowned; the man had had four since waking up an hour ago.

  “Yes, but go easy on the bean. I don’t want to run out before we go under again.”

  Tyler gave a theatrical whining noise as he activated the master display. Visible outs
ide was the lattice-filled interior space of the transit sphere containing the Ranger. The pilot rotated the view, focusing in on the spider-like repair bot, Alvin, swinging its agile way through the struts towards the offending power relays with an organic grace. With a few more key presses, Tyler switched the view to the external camera. Beyond the sphere, an orange-hued star, brighter than the others, lay dead ahead.

  Box icons swept repeatedly towards the screen’s point of view, expanding away from the star, each denoting us passing a light minute.

  “Have we been getting anything through the displacement skein, Tyler?”

  “Just reviewing what we got, skip,” the pilot replied as he hunched over his work station. The man clucked away lightly to himself as he scrolled through pages of information.

  “Come on, Tyler, just give us the summary. We don’t need War and Peace,” Rice called across, her gaze still focused on her own holos as she guided Alvin.

  “Okay,” Tyler started. “Looks like we’ve got an interesting result on the Transit Photometry package. Over the last fifteen years of cruising towards TS we’re showing a periodic drop every four hundred days or so.”

  I nodded. The TPP package simply measured the luminosity of a star. If a planet passed in front of the star, relative to us, we would see a small but measurable dimming. “Sounds like with that period we could have a planet orbiting in the Goldilocks zone and—”

  “Skip, I’m showing it’s at a five percent drop.”

  “Say what?” I leaned forwards and, with a few taps on my own console, brought up what Tyler had been looking at. A graph appeared, showing a dim in the stellar luminosity every four hundred days. A one percent drop, if that, was more usual for a terrestrial sized planet, especially when physically, the star Tau Sagittarii was around 16 times the diameter of Sol. “That must be a damn big planet to cause so much of a drop. We looking at a gas giant here?”

  “Possibly, or more likely a body with a pretty damn big ring system.”

  “Fine, run it though the system. Hopefully at some point we’ve managed to grab a direct observation.”

  “Reviewing now.”

  I thought for a moment. Mission profile said we would wake the science crew when we were safely in-system, but we were already getting some good data here. “Wake up our sleeping beauties.”

  ***

  “We’re heading straight into the pocket, skip.”

  I nodded tensely. Back when I’d started flying space missions, in the heady period when it felt like a new piece of salvaged technology from the Sphere ship was being test flown every day, the most dangerous parts of space travel were still take-off and re-entry. I knew from training though that the dangers of dropping out of displacement drive made even those risks seem trivial.

  I gripped my arm rests in a vain brace against the objective millions of gees of deceleration we would be undergoing. The laws of physics were apparently on our side, but the sad truth was, we didn’t entirely understand how the displacement drive worked. We knew it needed a gravity well, and the deeper the better, to catch a ship coming into a system, or traveling between bodies. That meant coming in close to a star, or failing that, a big planet.

  Ranger breached the skein, going from an apparent speed of four times the speed of light to a mere handful of kilometers per second in an instant.

  The engines lowered in pitch, going from a deep throbbing to a light hum.

  We were here.

  Ranger raced low over the broiling orange sea which made up the surface of the K1 star, Tau Sagittarii.

  I glanced at the ship status holos. One subtly pulsed red, showing that temperature was rising. Other than that, so far, so good, the ship was intact and the ship was where it supposed to be.

  And even better, we hadn’t been smeared all over space as the displacement drive had shut down.

  “Climb us up out of here, Tyler.”

  The pilot grunted as the conventional engines on the transit sphere fired again, lifting the ship out of the low orbit of the star. From the transit sphere’s poles, radiators extended, furiously dumping the phenomenal heat building in the ship’s hull back into space.

  My inner ear began to do strange things as Tyler activated the barbeque roll program, causing the ship to spin to spread the thermal load. A wave of nausea washed through me. The artificial gravity plating of the decking, another poorly understood piece of technology, still had to compete with the laws of physics.

  “Tyler, have you got a fix on that planet? The big sucker?” I asked, my voice terse. If we could use the displacement drive to get to the planet, it would speed up the mission transit time significantly.

  “Looking for it now,” Tyler called out. On the main screen before him, a dizzying performance took place. The telescope image zoomed in and out as it picked out likely candidates for a planet.

  A huge gas giant rushed into view. Green and white bands crossed its surface. “Nope, this one is around five AU out. Around Neptune-sized.”

  The view twisted again as the telescope hunted for that huge planet. It focused in again, a softly glowing object. “Who’d have thought, we have a companion here, one hundred AU out. Looks like a brown dwarf.”

  Again, the view spun around and revealed another world.

  I couldn’t help but swallow at the spectacle before me.

  Scale bars appeared next to the planet, showing it to be little bigger than Earth. One side of it was blackened, the other side was a chaotic, swirling mass of clouds. But it was the vast, thick ring system surrounding it which caught my eye.

  I estimated the planet’s axial tilt at around 45 degrees, which accounted for why the planet’s rings must have obscured so much of the star’s light as it passed before it. The rings were splayed in front of us. They were thick and dark, an occasional sparkle in the middle reflecting the light of Tau Sagittarii.

  A rocky world right in the center of this star’s Goldilocks zone. Could this be it? The source of the Wow! signal from all those years ago?

  As I looked at the world, though, it occurred to me: the dark side of the planet wasn’t the night side. After all, we were looking at it from the direction of the star. No, it looked burnt. Burnt to a damn crisp.

  I keyed the com, calling down to Ranger’s lab where the science crew was hungrily absorbing the data we were picking up. “Leila, we have a Goldilocks world here. I’m piping down the imagery to you now.”

  On the console screen the woman nodded, and glanced down as she checked the scope images I was sending her. I saw a tick of a frown cross her face.

  “That doesn’t look—”

  “Promising, I know.” I watched as Leila took control of the scope and focused it on the blackened half of the world. “What the hell did that? A solar flare?”

  I watched her scratch her cheek, as she contemplated. “Possibly, would have had to be a big one to reach out there. And short-lived. It appears to have washed over just half the planetary body.”

  “Okay, enough remote observation.” I thought back to the caution Carol had impressed on me, about strange and aggressive races out here. And then there was the tightly classified information about the Star, a being with the ability to manipulate stellar objects. “There doesn’t look to actually be anything left there alive. Whatever was there was gone. We’re going in unless you give me a reason not to.”

  “I can’t see one at this time. It certainly looks like it could have been a garden world, but not anymore. Anything which was alive there is going to be long gone. Either roasted by the initial event which caused all that damage, or killed in the ensuing destruction to the environment.”

  “Tyler? You listening in?”

  “Yup, skip. I’ve already got a displacement drive solution laid in.”

  “That ring system going to cause us a problem?”

  “Yeah, about that.” Tyler turned and gave me a grin. “The long and short of it is, no, they’re not going to create a problem.”

  I raised a
n eyebrow as I saw the expression on the cocky pilot’s face. “I know that look. You better send me the solution to look at.”

  Leila’s face was replaced by Tyler’s proposed course, a line reaching from the star, straight to the target world. “Seriously, Tyler?”

  “Seriously. If we want to go into a planetary pocket, we have to go in close.”

  I spent a few moments checking his work. It wasn’t that I mistrusted him, but good practice meant it was important to confirm.

  I satisfied myself it was only the world’s unusual ring system which made the destination point so ropey-seeming.

  “Okay, execute.”

  Tyler spun around in his chair and, with a few swipes of his console, retracted the radiators, telescopes and science packages which poked through the sphere’s surface. Once Ranger was set, he activated the displacement drive. Immediately the engines throbbed in response.

  At an apparent speed of four times light speed, we raced towards the speck of light which was the former garden world. Box icons emanated from it, washing over the view screen every fifteen seconds.

  The speck grew from a point of light to a small orb, revealing itself to be a world. It carried on growing, expanding on the view screen. The rings grew out, spread for tens of thousands of kilometers on either side of the world. A trick of perspective meant it seemed as if the rings were arms, reaching to grab at us.

  In the blink of an eye, we came out of displacement drive, nestling into low orbit, squeezed between the planet and the vast arc of the ring stretching over us from one horizon to the other.

  “You’ve picked a hell of a spot to park up, Tyler,” Rice murmured.

  I couldn’t help but agree. The ring system was comprised of a glittering collection of dust. As far as I knew, this was the first time we’d seen a terrestrial world with such an extensive system.

  “Tyler, let’s get out there,” I said.

  “Finally,” the pilot said. “Automated pre-flight checklist is running through now. Stand by for main door opening.”

  The view screen switched to a natural view. In front of us, the soft light of the interior of the sphere washed through the screen.