by S. H. Jucha
The fourth silver ship hadn’t followed the other three and was fast closing on Sheila. She signaled her two remaining Daggers to veer off. Her controller twisted and rolled her fighter as telemetry registered the energy building on the silver ship’s surface, signaling the forthcoming beam shot. Sheila eyed her gravitational bands. She was in the green, close to the blue. Come on, you piece of alien menace, she thought, just a little farther! Her controller rolled her fighter hard and shot up above the ecliptic at a forty-five-degree angle. Sheila searched for the icon of the silver ship. It wasn’t behind her; it was headed out into the dark.
“Got you,” she whispered and dove back toward the ecliptic and the receding silver ship.
* * *
Aboard the Rêveur, Alex watched first one Dagger icon wink off, then four more in quick succession. I’m not made for this job, Alex thought. The loss of each pilot felt like a stab in his heart.
When Sheila’s Dagger broke upward of the ecliptic and the silver ship didn’t follow, Alex urgently signaled Julien, who calculated the trajectory of the silver ship and sped the Rêveur to intercept.
“Admiral, we will intercept in 0.21 hours. We will be unable to latch on to the rear of the vessel as you had hoped. With its greater velocity, we have only one opportunity to intersect it before it is past us and gone.”
“Will we be in line with the fighter’s field of fire at any time?” Alex asked.
“Yes, Admiral,” Julien replied. “We have only the one angle of approach, and it will enable the silver ship to target the forward third of our ship.
Which includes the bridge, Alex thought.
Andrea signaled Tatia and Sheila, repeating Julien’s words, and asked for options.
True to her words, Alex wasn’t going to give up on this prize, just as he hadn’t given up on the idea of tethering to the Rêveur over a year ago. In either case, he had no idea what he would find. Fortune, I need you now, Alex thought.
“Julien, any guess as to whether that silver ship can generate enough energy to fire its beam out here in the purple bands,” Alex asked.
Julien knew what Alex was asking, and it hurt that he couldn’t provide the answer.
“Captain, secure the ship—emergency conditions,” Alex ordered. “Seal all bulkhead and cabin doors. Everyone in environment suits immediately.”
The crew had practiced for this moment, hoping to never need it. Now every crew member dived for their suits and immediately went about closing and locking every bulkhead and cabin door. Alex and Andrea climbed into their suits, stored in the rear bulkhead wall, and secured themselves in their command chairs.
Alex closed the comm. Too late, he thought.
Julien sent casually.
Alex replied.
Andrea listened to the two of them continue to pass the last few moments with barbs and taunts. She was tempted to join in to relieve her own anxiety, but it didn’t appear that they required a third player.
In an unusual display of emotion, Julien ran his calculations a second time, wondering briefly when he had begun to doubt himself. The results were the same. The final countdown seemed to last forever. In the blink of an eye, the Rêveur twisted in space, pushing the envelope of its inertia compensators. Strapped in their command chairs, Alex and Andrea lurched heavily to one side. Julien had reoriented the Rêveur in a move calculated to bring the port bay’s beams to bear.
“I have it, Admiral,” Julien said excitedly. “One moment … I will rotate its nose away from us.”
Alex and Andrea watched the central vid display as the silver ship, held motionless outside the port bay, was slowly rotated as Julien shifted power among the three beams until the silver ship’s aft end pointed at the bay’s open doors.
“Excellent job, Julien!” Andrea said as she and Alex freed themselves from their command chairs.
“My success was a forgone conclusion, Captain. The alternative was inconceivable. I would have had to suffer the Admiral’s smugness for years if I had failed.”
“Yes, there is that,” Andrea said, giving Alex an off-handed smile.
Alex requested a broadcast to his Daggers, officers, and SADEs.
Alex stripped out of his suit, helped Andrea out of hers, and let her store them.
“By the way, Julien, it was a nice job latching on to the silver ship,” Alex said. “Did I detect a moment of angst just before the capture?”
“I believe my circuits and crystal were operating at minimum temperatures, Admiral.”
“Mm-hmm … Must have been my mistake,” Alex replied as he headed off the bridge.
As the bridge access way slid closed, Andrea commiserated with Julien. “Hard to keep up with the man … At least as a SADE you have a head start on the rest of us.”
“I will admit, Captain, this capture was one of the most difficult maneuvers I have ever attempted. That the Admiral latched on to the Rêveur, traveling at over twice his drive velocity, appears to have been nothing short of impossible for a human. Yet here we are.”
-17-
After Alex left the bridge at a run, he headed for a lift to the lower deck. When Andrea ordered an end to emergency conditions, the crew flooded out into the corridors and snapped to attention as Alex passed, but he paid them no mind. His focus was elsewhere; his implants were occupied.
While Mickey and Stan rigged up hull transmitters, the ships that had taken part in the fight joined up with the Freedom far outside the heliosphere.
Renée entered the bridge in time to hear Andrea conversing with Julien.
“Julien,” Andrea said, “we need two crew members for EVA to the silver ship. Who has the most experience?”
“First and foremost, Captain, would be the Admiral, and second would be our Chief Engineer.”
Andrea and Renée exchanged concerned looks, and Andrea rephrased her question. “Julien, who would be the next best qualified?”
“That would be Chief Peterson,” Julien replied.
“Now you know why they are our senior people, Ser,” Andrea said.
“And we would risk two of these people to plant devices on the hull of our enemy to discover if they wish to talk to us, Captain?” Renée asked.
“That’s not the worst of it, Ser,” Andrea replied. “We will have to turn off our beams to allow the EVA crew to cross to the silver ship, plant the transmitters, and return. They will be exposed to the fighter’s potential maneuvers for an estimated 0.6 hours.”
Renée was about to add that turning off the beams would expose all of them to the enemy fighter, but Julien interrupted her. “Ser, Captain,” Julien said. “I believe your discussion is moot. Per the Admiral’s orders, I have turned off the beams, and two crew members are starting their EVA trip as we speak.”
“Let me hazard a guess, Julien. One of them is the Admiral,” Renée said, anger ringing in her words.
“And the other is Mickey,” Andrea added.
“Inimitable deductions, Ser, Captain,” Julien replied, his own voice subdued.
Renée threw up her hands in exasperation and stared at the central vid display, which showed two EVA-suited figures employing their jets to navigate toward the silver ship that floated twenty-eight meters from the Rêveur. The two men reached the fighter’s aft end, crawled forward along the hull, and planted multiple devices. Each device would transmit its signals to Mickey’s Engineering Suite, which would relay the data to Julien.
On the bridge, the two women waited anxiously for the men to complete their job. Julien had an enormous number of sensors trained on the silver ship, looking for any deviation in its position. If the sensors detected movement, he had conceived of a radical idea to side-slip the Rêveur and scoop up the two men into the port bay, but the concept was fraught with so many variables that his algorithms assigned an extremely low probability of survival for the men.
After a half-hour, the suited figures returned to the bay.
“The Admiral and Chief Engineer have regained the bay, Ser, Captain, and I’ve engaged our beams.” Julien announced, hiding the great relief he felt.
* * *
After doffing and storing their environment suits in the airlock, Alex and Mickey hurried to the Engineering Suite, where techs were bringing the transmissions from the silver ship’s hull pickups online. As each signal appeared, Alex and Mickey hovered over it, moving from display to display, anxious to see which one might impart the best information. The infrared device picked up movement of a warm-bodied creature crossing the central cone of the sensor.
“Is it my imagination, Admiral,” Mickey asked, “or did that look like a giant crab?” They watched the heat outline of two- to three-meter individuals scuttle past the pickup cone for a few more moments before they were shaken out of their reverie by Claude.
“Admiral, the audio pickup is very active,” Claude said. “I’ve been recording since it came online.”
“Very smart, Claude,” Alex said to the Méridien and patted his shoulder. “Put its output on speakers for us.”
The suite was filled with the sound of whistles, tweets, and warbles.
“What in black space is that?” Mickey demanded.
Alex listened for a moment, his head cocking one way then the other as he absorbed the sounds. “It’s not random, Mickey. I pick up repeating tones or notes. It’s communication.”
“Claude, are we sharing the audio signal with Julien? All of it?” Alex asked.
“Indeed, Admiral,” Claude acknowledged. “All signals have been routed to Julien since we activated the monitoring devices.”
Alex exited the suite and ran to the bridge. As he burst through the bridge access way doors, Renée stood in his path with hands on hips and stern words poised on her lips. Alex picked her up, kissed her firmly, swung her out of his way, and sent,
“Julien, do you have the recorded audio?” Alex asked.
“Yes, Admiral,” Julien replied. “I have been monitoring the audio signal and heard your comment to Mickey. I believe you’re right. There is repetition of sound. The most obvious answer is that it’s their language.”
“Can you do anything with it?” Alex asked, hopeful.
“All my language libraries, Admiral, are based on the human voice, and these sounds are more like—”
“Music,” Alex and Julien said simultaneously. Andrea and Renée shared a look of disbelief at the twining of the two minds. Then they heard them both shout: “Mutter.”
“Transferring the information now, Admiral,” Julien said.
“Please loop in Cordelia as well, Julien. Mutter may have the musical sense, but Cordelia as an artist may make intuitive jumps for us.”
Alex slid into a command chair, leaned his head back into the rest, and closed his eyes.
* * *
It wasn’t a short while. Terese made two trips to Alex, who did not even twitch as she applied her hypos of nutrients and electrolytes. With her reader’s attachments, she monitored his vital signs. That Alex sat so still, while Terese administered to him, puzzled her. She had never seen someone subsume themselves so deeply into their implants. Pia and Geneviève had once voiced their desire to her to experience the slipstream of communications between the Admiral and the SADEs. To which Terese had loosed her hearty laugh on them, saying, “I’d sooner stand behind a Dagger’s engine when it fired.”
Mutter examined the recorded audio and built a scale for the frequencies she detected. She added symbols to the notes when they were held, modulated, or otherwise changed from the base tone.
The first major hurdle was that several individuals were often speaking over one another. Julien aided the group by applying filters to identify a single speaker that Mutter could diagram. Alex moved the group onto the next phase once they had the tones of three individuals mapped out for over three-quarters of an hour of communication.
Cordelia cleverly laid the three individuals into a threaded matrix, much like two strands of DNA would entwine, except this was for three strands. She laid them out in a time sequence allowing Alex and the SADEs to identify that when one particular individual spoke, all other individuals were quiet. Alex labe
led that individual the group’s leader. The other individuals Cordelia had mapped had responded to the leader at different times.
Edouard, who had been on bridge duty for two and half hours, was startled by his Admiral bolting out of the command chair and racing off the bridge after having been sitting absolutely still the entire time.
Having seen this level of intensity before from his friend, Julien did two things. He intuited where Alex was headed and sent messages to individuals along the route to clear the way. At least our people aren’t panicked anymore when they see their Admiral sprinting. He sent a second message to Renée.
Renée stepped into a ship suit and boots and left her cabin for the meal room, calculating the number of volunteers she would need to wake to feed a hungry group of New Terrans and Méridiens, not to mention Alex. She had once joked to Alex, seemingly a lifetime ago, that she would fabricate a special half-meter meal plate for him. Perhaps I should have had a good ten or twenty of them fashioned, she thought.
Alex found only two techs in the suite, asleep at their benches, and he paced back and forth, waiting for the return of his senior people. When they did arrive, Alex stared at their bleary eyes and hastily donned ship suits and realized his error. He raised his hands out in an apologetic gesture, but Mickey interrupted him.
