by James Rosone
Trailing behind him were twelve Deltas, members of the second squad he was training with today. Each of his troopers had their weapons pointed outwards in forty-five-degree arcs as they scanned their sectors. Their heads-up displays showed them everything that was happening in their assigned field of fire. Suddenly, the point man twenty meters in front of Royce held his hand up. Everyone’s senses kicked into overdrive at the signal that something was out of place. Then the Delta balled his hand, then opened it and lowered it, telling them they needed to go to the ground.
Using his NL, Royce asked, What do you see, Price?
I thought I spotted some movement, two hundred meters to our front, the point man replied, pointing his rifle.
Lying still, Royce continued to use his senses to discern what was happening around them. Then he heard something alarming, or rather he didn’t hear something. The birds had stopped chirping. It had suddenly gotten quiet.
Everyone get ready, Royce said over the NL as he moved his rifle to point in front of where Corporal Price had his own rifled aimed. If they got hit, Price would need immediate covering fire to counter the ambush.
A fraction of a second later, Royce saw a dark object fly out of the forest in front of them, sailing directly for them. Price yelled, “Grenade!” Seconds later, it thudded to the ground several meters in front of Royce and blew up fractions of a second later, before he had a chance to move or get out of its shrapnel radius.
“Damn it!” Royce cursed loudly. His mind suddenly transported him out of the virtual reality training simulation. He flipped open the bed cover and sat up. His physical body was sweating from what it had just gone through. His pulse was up, as was his adrenaline.
“Sorry about that, Master Sergeant. Better luck next time,” Lieutenant Crocker said as he offered him a glass of water.
Royce shrugged. “It happens. I’m eager to see how Sergeant Wagman does in my absence.”
“That was the idea in taking you out. So far, he seems to be doing pretty well,” the lieutenant commented as he looked at the video display of the fight.
“LT, thanks for getting us some more time in the sims,” Royce said before he downed the rest of his water. “I know the RA guys have been using it a lot to practice their landing, but we also need more time in if we’re to stay sharp.”
In the troop decks of the Voyager, they had four training simulation rooms. Each room had thirty virtual reality training simulation pods or beds. They looked like those old tanning beds from earlier in the century. A soldier would lie on the bed while a technician attached all the bio feeds to the user. Once they were hooked up, they’d close their eyes, and then their mind would be transported into whatever simulation scenario had been loaded up. Most of the time, Captain Jayden Hopper, their company CO, had them practicing orbital insertions, small-unit patrols, or surveillance missions in preparation for their real mission on New Eden.
The lieutenant, for his part, was trying to get them as much time in the sims as he could. Lieutenant Crocker was a late addition to their platoon. They’d been down a lieutenant once the previous guy had gotten promoted and transferred to a different company—one that wasn’t deploying with the RA for this mission. Fortunately for Royce, Lieutenant Crocker was a mustang—he’d previously been enlisted, a sergeant himself. He mostly stayed out of his platoon sergeant’s way and let Royce run the platoon as he saw fit.
“Oh, hey, before I forget—the captain wants to see you up in his office,” the LT said before taking another sip of his coffee. His eyes were still affixed to the monitor, watching how the squad handled the ambush he’d set for them.
“Ah, OK. Do I have time to hit the showers, or does he need me up there right now?” asked Royce as he cinched up his boots.
Turning to look at Royce, the LT took a sniff and made a sour face. “I’ll tell him you’re hitting the showers. You’re not going to talk to him smelling like that. It’s my job to protect the man, and make sure you NCOs don’t get in trouble,” he joked.
Royce laughed, then made his way up to the team room. He’d clean up in their own spaces.
While the Deltas waited for the Voyager to arrive in the Rhea system, they continued to train hard. For three months, there was little else to do than train, train, and train some more. It kept their minds busy and gave them less free time to get in trouble.
Once they arrived in the system, it’d be the responsibility of the four Delta platoons to scout the area for suitable landing zones and escort the first contact team if they found signs of life. They’d be the first humans to set foot on the new planet, and that excited the hell out of the men.
Accompanying them to the surface would be a group of scientists and a first contact team, who’d verify that the location they identified was suitable for a colony and screen for any signs of life. Once that had been determined, the battalion of Republic soldiers would land and expand the base perimeter. A couple of days later, the first batch of Synths would land and go to work building up the base.
When Master Sergeant Royce knocked on Captain Hopper’s office door, he heard the man tell him to enter. Once inside, he saw the captain sitting at his chair, looking at a report and a holographic floating image of the planet they were heading toward.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
The captain nodded. “I did. Take a seat. We need to talk.”
Sitting down, Royce braced himself for whatever might be headed his way, not sure if this was a good or a bad talk.
Apparently, seeing the pensive look on his face, Captain Hopper said, “This is about New Eden, Royce. Nothing bad. As a matter of fact, I’ve chosen your platoon for a special mission.”
A sense of relief washed over Royce. “Should the lieutenant be here?” he asked.
“No. I already briefed him earlier this morning. He knows what we’re doing. He’s going to start tweaking the training sims for you over the next few weeks to reflect your new mission. What I wanted to talk with you about is a sensitive mission that’s been handed down to us.”
Royce’s interest was now piqued. He’d worked on a few sensitive missions during his career. His last mission on Mars, however, had broken down, and he’d ended up in a training mission assignment as a penance.
“What I’m about to show you is strictly confidential, Sergeant,” the captain continued. “You don’t talk about it with anyone else in the company, and certainly not anyone on the ship until we’re cleared to. Is that understood?”
Royce nodded.
“One of the key reasons why we are heading to New Eden as opposed to the Alpha Centauri is this.” The captain pulled up several images of a cave entrance and what appeared to be some mining equipment nearby. “When we first left Sol, the admiral mentioned the possibility of life on the planet. We’re not sure how old this is, but it was clearly made by someone or something. It’s the surest sign of intelligent life outside Sol that we’ve found, and it appears to be active. That mine looks like it’s being regularly used. As you can see, there isn’t any overgrowth around it. Space Command wants us to investigate the site and see what’s there.”
Royce held a hand up. “Captain, you’re saying there really are little green men out there?” he asked sarcastically as he looked in awe at the still images.
The captain laughed. “Apparently. In any case, I’ve selected your platoon to have the honors of escorting our first contact team down there to check it out. Putting aside the debacle on Mars, which I don’t think was your fault, you are the only Delta in the unit with any real experience doing reconnaissance missions deep behind enemy lines. This mission is a chance of a lifetime, Master Sergeant. But it’s also a complete unknown. We don’t know if these are friendly aliens or if they’ll be hostile. What I do know is I’m jealous I can’t go with you—but someone needs to stay with the rest of the company in case you do find aliens and they aren’t friendly.”
Royce shook his head in disbelief. “This is incredible, sir. I don’t even kn
ow what to say. Is there anything specific you want me to have the platoon train up for in anticipation of this mission?” he asked. The gravity of the situation was fully sinking in.
Thinking for a moment, the captain finally replied, “Maybe do some additional training on clearing caves and tunnels. Throw in some protective detail training as well. If you look at the surrounding area, you can see it’s pretty rugged and heavily forested. I’d work on doing some sim training in environments like that. We’ll have a better idea of what the place looks like once we get in orbit and we can start sending some recon drones down.”
Royce nodded. “Roger that, sir. I’ll make sure we work this stuff into our training cycle. If I’m not mistaken, we still have a few months until we arrive.”
*******
RNS Voyager
Science Deck
Professor Audrey Lancaster gazed at the video monitor. She never got tired of seeing the swirling colors and the faint glimmers of stars zipping past the Voyager as it traveled inside the warp bubble. It was one of the most incredible things she’d ever seen. It almost reminded her of when she was a kid living in Wisconsin during the winter. As their minivan drove through snow at night, the vehicle’s headlights would illuminate it, creating the illusion that they were flying through space. It was one of her favorite childhood memories.
Finally, prying her eyes away from the image, she returned her focus to the computer terminal, completely in awe of what she now had access to. I wish I’d had this kind of raw computing power back at Harvard, she thought wistfully. The way this program could crunch numbers was genuinely incredible.
For the past two weeks, Audrey had been working on the programming to solve a sociolinguistic problem that had been bothering her for decades. When Audrey was a graduate student, she had traveled to Iraq and Russia to study changes in the Chaldean language. She had done her dissertation on how the three mass waves of migration to Russia following the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, World War I, and World War II had affected the Chaldean language. What she found most fascinating was how rapidly the English language had evolved when compared to a language with nearly six thousand years of history attached to it, even despite the major world events that impacted the Assyrian-Chaldean diaspora.
Two years ago, when Space Command had approached her about being a part of the group’s first contact team, she had been ecstatic. It had meant she’d have to give up her tenured professorship at Harvard, but being one of the world’s leading sociolinguistic specialists meant it shouldn’t be hard to reobtain it when she returned from the expedition. She was only supposed to be gone for five years.
For Audrey, this was an incredible opportunity. If humans discovered sentient life on Alpha Centauri, they’d need a team of scientific experts to understand the alien language so they could effectively communicate. When the mission changed, she had begun to have second thoughts about going, but Dr. Katherine Johnson had intervened and had been able to get her read onto the real reason for the change in missions.
Seeing those images—images of what appeared to be a functional mine on an alien planet—had sealed the deal for her. She knew this expedition wasn’t going to have a chance encounter with an alien race; they were actually going be the ones to make the first contact. Audrey wanted to be a part of that, so she opted to stay on the mission.
Knowing she’d have six and a half months of travel time, Audrey brought some linguistic projects with her that she’d meant to get around to. With a lot of time on her hands and access to a quantum computer and a super AI for the first time, she would work on some of the toughest linguistic challenges she could find. When she returned to Earth in a few years, she’d have solved some of these lingering issues and further cemented her status as one of the world’s leading researchers in her field.
As the computer plotted the changes from ancient Chaldean to the language it was today, she saw patterns emerge. As warring factions interacted, new technologies were introduced, people migrated to new regions, and plagues ravaged, the language morphed. The changes would become more pronounced over time. For posterity’s sake, she began running these same calculations across all the different languages still in use on Earth, and the dead languages no longer spoken. The infographic the AI created was fascinating. Seeing the ebbs and flows of styles over time and then cross-referencing those changes with the transient nature of humans explained a lot. Couple that with the spread of diseases, plagues, and wars, and it was the most complete explanation to date of how a language would evolve over time.
After completing her PhD in sociolinguists, Audrey had become very interested in studying comparative linguistics, though she had never formally sought a degree in that field. She was the consummate academic, always learning anything to do with language and branching out into various areas within her field. Between her studies of syntax and morphology across many diverse languages and her understanding of how languages changed over time, she was hoping that they would have enough information in their computer models to be able to understand and dissect any new languages quickly. As the lead linguistic expert on the ship, it was going to be her job to decipher the alien language and develop a means to communicate with them. It was a big task, but one she relished.
*******
Three Months Later
RNS Voyager
Admiral Abigail Halsey walked out of her office and onto the bridge. One of the crew members had sent her a message letting her know they were about to cross into the Rhea star system in ten minutes. She walked over to her chair in the center of the bridge and sat down, observing the others around her. Everyone was excited. After months of travel, they were about to enter the system New Eden was a part of.
The images of starlight whipping past them at high speeds intermixed with a multicolor aurora around the warp bubble, made for some stunning, almost hypnotic views. Halsey thought how easy it would be to just get lost staring at it for hours if she were to let her mind wander.
“Dropping out of warp in ten seconds,” the navigation officer announced calmly.
The warning was echoed throughout the ship, letting everyone know to prepare. Even with the inertial dampeners, it was still a little bumpy when they came out of warp. Moments later, the Voyager and the four other ships she was traveling with made their grand entrance into the system.
As soon as they were out of the warp bubble, the crew went into action, just like they’d done in previous drills.
“Ops, I want a system-wide scan. Use our full spectrum of systems and send a message to the Rook that we’ll hang back and protect the Gables until they clear us a path,” Admiral Halsey ordered as she began the process of getting a picture of what they’d just jumped into.
After twenty-six FTL jumps, they practically had the procedures to follow when they dropped out of warp on autopilot, but this was their end destination. They weren’t just passing through.
“Beginning system-wide scan now,” called out Lieutenant Moore, her Ops officer.
The Operations or Ops section of the bridge consisted of five people on duty at all times. Three of them worked the active and passive scanner suite while the other two consisted of the senior enlisted on duty and the officer in charge of the department.
It would take some time for their electronic sweeps to return with some usable data. In the meantime, they’d hang back with the transports while they waited to see what all was in the system.
Looking at the monitor, Halsey saw the Rook starting to engage her main engines. In a way, Admiral Halsey was jealous of her friend Hunt, whose mission was to explore, protect, and fight if need be.
She turned to her chief science officer, telling him to have his department get ready to analyze the data that would start pouring in from the probes they were launching and the scans of the system. She wanted them to get to work on identifying the location Dr. Johnson’s team had told her to investigate. If there was life down on that planet, then she wanted to find it.
&nb
sp; *******
RNS Rook
With the jump complete, Captain Hunt ordered the ship to secure from FTL and begin regular operations.
“All right, people, this is it,” Hunt announced. “We’re finally in the system. Ops, I want you guys to go ahead and raise our search radars and electronic antennas. I want full sweeps of the entire system. Start looking for any signs of ELINT or MASINT happening in the system. Pay special attention to New Eden and her moons. If someone or something is transmitting from the surface, then I want to know about it.”
Tapping the sensor on his communicator, Hunt pinged his engineering section next. A moment later, his engineering chief pinged that he was ready to receive. “Commander Lyons, let’s get the main engines up and running. I want us underway as soon as possible.”
“On it, Captain. Give us five minutes to finish securing from FTL and transition to the MPD drives,” his engineering chief replied.
Next, Hunt turned to his Ops section. “Lieutenant, start launching our satellites. I want one sent to each of the moons. Let’s get a few of them in orbit around New Eden itself. We need to get a sense of what’s down there and in the immediate area.”
While Hunt waited for Engineering to tell him the engines were ready, the Rook’s active sensor systems blanketed the system, in search of whatever might be out there. Their incredible array of deployable antennas and radar systems were running at full power. It would now be a matter of waiting for the returns. Some of them might happen in a few minutes, while it would take hours, and in some cases days, for others to return to the ship and provide them with a better picture of the system.
