The Omarian Gambit: A Pax Aeterna Novel

by Trevor Wyatt

  I look around to see if I’m being observed by any of the crew mates. No one is watching me except, of course, the three security officers on the CNC.

  “Helm,” I say from my seat. “Show us the deviation in our course from that of the Fleet. Put it on visual.”

  The image comes up and I look up at it. The view of the energy shield around the ship is superimposed upon by a transparent map of the sector. I see three headings represented by short dashes. One is our previous heading which pretty much enters the nebula from the lower left and maintains a straight bearing to the upper left portion, where there are twenty one dots representing the ships predetermined course and rendezvous location.

  I see another bearing veering off from a certain point along the original bearing to the right. It terminates in a single dot, which appears to be in the right central portion of the map. Then I see a proposed bearing from where we are along the second bearing. This proposed bearing veers a little back to the left and terminates at the right corner of the map. It’s in the total opposite direction of where the fleet was headed to for the mission.

  I realize with a fresh onslaught of nerve-wracking terror that, if I pursue the course I’m laying down for the ship, we’re going to be travelling away from the fleet. That means if we run into trouble there’ll be no help or backup. If we’re able to get information across to the fleet for help, it’ll take them a long while to get to us, by which time we may be decimated by the same thing, whatever it was, that decimated The Mariner.

  “Sir, you do realize that the course will take us away from the fleet?” Ashely says from her console. “It will put is in the direct opposite direction of the fleet plus out of range should anything go wrong.”

  “I realize that,” I say. I glance at the navigator who has all the while been looking at me. “Set the course as amended and take us to that coordinate.”

  Without giving a fuss, he nods and returns his attention to his station. He issues the necessary commands to his system and there is a sharp whine as the Battle Cruise begins to change course. I get a call from engineering.

  “Hi, Robert,” I say in my friendliest voice.

  “What the hell is going on up there, Jeryl,” the chief engineer says. Aside from Ashley, he’s the only one crazy enough to call me by my first name.

  “Sorry, we have to make a course correction,” I say, 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.”

  I allow a strained smile on my face, even though this is only an audio communication. “Roger that, Robert.”

  “Robert, out.”

  “Status update,” I say, when I realize the ship’s whine is over.

  “Course adjusted, sir,” the navigator says. “We are en-route to the estimated position of the debris of Mariner based on the gravitation pull of the nearest star and the reduction in mass due to degradation.”

  “Very good,” I reply. “Dr. Taft, keep your eyes on the sensors. I want you scanning that area with all you’ve got.” I know the man is about to protest, so I continue, “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 replies.

  “Captain?” This from Henry, another CNC officer that’s monitoring navigations.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” I say.

  “I just wanted to let you know that Dr. Taft Lannigan provided me with the equation to account for change in gravitational pull as a result of reduction in mass.”

  “Oh?” I reply. “How is that significant?”

  “Mass determine gravitation pull, sir,” the navigator replies. “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,” I reply. “Without accounting for mass degradation, you most likely would have ended up with a wrong coordinate?”

  He nods and says, “But I didn’t…thanks to Taft.”

  “Good job, guys,” I say.

  “Captain,” the communications officer calls. “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 of our sudden change in course and request to be advised of our situation.”

  “Noted,” I say.

  There’s a silence, a tense one.

  “What reply should I send?”

  “Ignore the message,” I say, to the collective shock of the entire CNC crew. I notice that only the security personnel don't show any outward response to what I just said. I wonder if they’d shoot me if I revolt against the Terran Armada. I don’t think there is a policy for that just yet.

  “Sir, I have some information for you,” the tactical officer pronounces. This gets my attention.

  I turn in my 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,” I mutter. “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 yourself in the case of an attack.”

  “Noted, Lieutenant,” I reply. I turn 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 shakes his head. “Negative, sir. This is the best laid out course that takes us to the extrapolated position of The Mariner debris.”

  “Okay, proceed, then,” I say.

  In my periphery vision, I notice Ashley walk toward me.

  “Captain, can I have a word with you in private?” she asks me, her words just a whisper.

  “Okay,” I say. “My office.”

  Without replying to me, she turns and leaves.

  I make my way into my office, my heart beating like a war drum.

  Ashley is already talking the moment I walk 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.”

  I wipe the sweat off my brow. “Look, I have no problem with the Sonali planet the fleet is headed to destroy. I’m willing to do whatever needs to be done…but that 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 am doing.

  “Are you?” she says, questioning my resolve. “Look, sometimes in war we have to do things…” she sighs, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but it’s true. We’re an unlucky generation.”

  I approach her and hold her shoulders in my 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 isn’t convinced. “We may have to accept it’s the Sonali in the end. You may not find what you’re looking for.”

  I puff out air. “It has to be someone else.”

/>   “The fleet won’t wait for you much longer,” Ashley notes.

  My comm link beeps. It’s Dr. Taft. “Go ahead, Taft.”

  “Sir, I’m picking up something.”

  I turn and head out onto the CNC, Ashley in close tow.

  “Captain on deck!” comes the security personnel’s voice.

  Still headed toward my seat, I say, “Put it on screen.”

  The screen dissolves into the image of star glittering space and a ship the same shape as The Mariner.

  It is nothing like any Sonali ship the Terran Armada has ever seen.

  Ashley

  “The Mariner,” I say rather stupidly. But there are no snide remarks in response. Jeryl, I see, has halted dead in his tracks, staring at the image onscreen. What we’re seeing simply can’t be real. The Mariner was reduced to floating rubble. I saw it. Jeryl saw it; one or two of the original crew of The Seeker who are also aboard this ship saw it as well.

  Jeryl shakes off his astonishment and drops heavily into his command chair. “What the hell is that?” he raps out to no one and everyone. “Alert stations, everyone. Get ready to raise screens on my order. Taft, I want answers and I want them now.”

  “Sir!” The CNC buzzes with action and muted conversation between stations as the crew start scanning the stranger with their instruments.

  Jeryl, who has no specific scientific responsibilities, acting as he does as a clearinghouse for all data in order to formulate the ship’s response, sits rigid in his chair. I have no part in the science section, either, but it’s my job to make sure that their investigations proceed smoothly so I am watching my instruments as the scans continue.

  Preliminary data starts to come in. What we are seeing isn’t a ghost of course; it’s a real physical object. But how? Where did it come from? Are the Sonali taunting us? I scowl at the thought. No, I don’t think so. They have been steadfast in their insistence that they had nothing to do with the original Mariner’s destruction, and I believe them.

  This is someone else. As I have that realization, my skin breaks out in goose bumps. Someone else...destroyed The Mariner. Someone else...has been watching us and the Sonali slug it out over the past several years.

  Who? Why?

  I think we are about to find out. Data from the preliminary scans continue to come in. I am seeing an odd pattern on the atomic level that tickles my memory.

  Suddenly my station blinks a number of red lights. “Damn,” I say. “They’re painting us with ranging lasers.” Maybe they thought the scanning beams were hostile.

  But I don’t think so. Why I don't think so, I can’t say.

  “Screens up,” Jeryl orders. “Helm, return the favor. Get their range.”

  Without consciously thinking through my hunch, I open a station to Jeryl’s station.

  “Sir? I want to bounce a spectro laser off that thing,” I say.

  “What?” I hear his intake of breath. “Don’t you think that might be construed as something of a hostile act? They didn’t like the scanners much.”

  I ignore the sarcasm. “No. I don’t think so.”

  He is 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 mutters something else under his breath. “All right. Go ahead.”

  My fingers ripple over my controls as I call up a micro-pulse laser shot at the bogey. This is one thing I love about Jeryl; he listens to his officers. He doesn’t argue. He trusts us. He trusts me. It’s not a marriage thing. It’s a captain-and-crew thing.

  Moments later I have my answer. I blow out a lungful of air I hadn’t known I was holding. Tamping down my excitement, I call Jeryl back.

  “Look at this,” I say, and send a section of the original scans we got from The Mariner debris years ago. “Look at the energy signature.”

  “This is old news.” He sounds disappointed. “We know that whatever weapon was used practically transmuted the wreckage into different elements. Its spectrogram changed completely.”

  “Now look.” I superimpose the data from my new spectro scans on top of the old one.

  “I—” he begins, and then falls silent. The laser has vaporized a miniscule portion of the stranger’s outer hull, and our instruments have 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 are almost identical.

  There are increased bands in the silicon range, something you’d never normally see in a Terran ship, but which showed up in the original wreckage. Completely nonsensical, an artifact of the massive energy beam that blasted The Mariner.

  Unless it wasn’t. Unless it was something else.

  “It’s a message,” I say. “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. And entire starship made of synthetic matter, constructed with the use of supercharged photons.”

  Jeryl is silent. Then he opens a PA channel to the entire ship and describes what I have discovered. “Get me confirmation," he says. “But no more lasers.”

  I allow myself a small smile. I don’t think we have to worry about lasers. The bogey would have destroyed us already, had it wanted to.

  Confirmation trickles in from other stations. The bogey represents a state of matter, a level of technology, we haven’t seen before. Whoever is responsible for it has some serious chops.

  Jeryl comes back online to me. “Message all our ships,” he says. “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.”

  I do so, and almost at once responses from the fleet start coming in. They all want to know what is happening. I answer as best I can, telling them to maintain alert while we collate our information.

  Minutes pass in the CNC as we try to figure out what we are dealing with. The bogey indeed seem to be a sort of solid hologram. Does that mean it’s masking something? Or is it a temporary construct, to be used and discarded once it fulfills its purpose?

  Jeryl has our screens raised, but we’re not making any other overt acts. Our scanners have taken in as much data as they can, and the computers are chewing on it. While they do so, we chew our fingernails. At least I do...it’s an old habit, and I thought I’d broken it.

  Apparently not.

  After half an hour or so, Jeryl has apparently had enough. “Ashley,” he says to me over a private channel, “this is getting us nowhere. Someone has to make the first move.”

  “I know,” I say.

  He switches to the ship-wide channel. “Comm, hail that ship.”

  “Sir.”

  I twine my fingers together. My hands are sweaty.

  “Response coming in, sir,” says Comm.

  “On screen.”

  An image swims into view on my monitor. It’s...humanoid. It’s not Sonali. I’m looking at an enormous round head, with a fleshy snout fringed by short, thick finger-like things. Its skin is a deep purplish-pink in color, like a bad bruise. Above and beside the snout are two perfectly round yellow eyes with black pupils. Two pointed ears adorn the head at the same level as the being’s eyes. Above the snout the bulging cranium is sprinkled with several warty bumps, beside which two long, jointed antennae hang down over the face. The head sits, neckless, on a pair of broad shoulders.

  A sort of green s
kullcap covers the head and is joined to a lighter green tunic like a uniform.

  The being raises a limb, apparently in greeting. It’s very long, with an elbow further along toward a forearm shorter than ours. It has three fingers and a thumb.

  Jeryl’s voice is perfectly level, and he sounds as though he meets new species every day—maybe twice a day. Ho hum.

  “I am Captain Jeryl Montgomery of the Terran Hegemony starship Seeker,” he says. My mind flashes back to our 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 concludes, with irony in his voice.

  The new fellow blinks slowly. His lids slide in and out from the side, not the top and bottom, and we hear a tik-tik over the speakers. He says nothing, but regards us with an otherwise unwavering and unreadable gaze.

  “This position represents our lost ship’s last known coordinates,” Jeryl goes on, keeping his sangfroid. “I’d be very interested to hear what you have to say about this matter.”

  Jeryl

  Relief.

  That’s what I’m feeling right now. But not just that – there’s also anger, and all of it is directed at the image on the screen. In there, the thing that killed everyone aboard The Mariner stares back at me.

  Yes, I’ve been party to committing acts of war. I’ve been part of raids where the Union has sent ships to glass Sonali words.

  Yes, the Sonali have done the same to us.

  But this being in front of me. Though they haven’t said anything – I know they were responsible for the billions of dead in the galaxy because of this pointless war.

  We’ve managed to link our comms to the alien spaceship, but now the damn thing just stares back at me in complete silence. I think back to the argument I had with the first Sonali captain I ever met, and I’m not sure if that’s going to happen in here again.

  I doubt we’ll have that kind of time.

  Everyone is probably hounding the communications officer for a piece of my time. They want to know exactly what it is that we found. They want to know whether to get over here to bombard another species. They want to know what to do next. Some are probably even contacting the Armada HQ to advise them on my current situation.