dubious. She had become head pupil of her high school, top graduate of her college and top cadet of her year at Fleet Academy by having a high respect for authority, believing what they told her, and regurgitating it thoroughly.
‘Oh, come on’ she said. ‘Alien ships? The only ‘aliens’ we know are both bioengineered off-branches of homo sapiens. There’s the Marfikians, of course, with their cyborg adaptations and the quarians who’ve engineered themselves into different adapts for different environments. But there is no evidence at all of any truly non-human intelligent life out there.’
Once the shouting and the laughter had quietened down a bit, Pell looked at the cadet with more amusement than annoyance.
‘So,’ he asked her, not unkindly, as she was looking rather embarrassed at finding herself in the middle of such a row, ‘how do you explain the Firewall, then?’
Velda glared back at him. ‘I don’t even know what that is’ she said. ‘I know it’s the line our ships don’t cross but the details about it are classified and we’re too junior to be told about it.’ She indicated her fellow cadets. ‘There are rumours but we don’t know anything definite.’
‘Speak for yourself.’ The tall, thoughtful cadet chipped in at that. Maxi Hawarth, also seventeen, was never going to be top of her class at Fleet Academy. She asked too many questions instructors couldn’t answer, and even worse, had ideas of her own. ‘Everybody knows that we found the Firewall by mapping it from turnaround incidents.’ She said. ‘That’s fact, that is, not rumour. If our ships try to cross that border everyone on board is knocked out for a couple of minutes and when they come to their ship has been turned around. It’s a huge curved barrier around our arm of the galaxy and there is no way that is a natural phenomenon. We are being contained, and the big question in that is by who, and why.’
‘By whom.’ Velda corrected automatically, and told her classmate, ‘And that is rumour, because it hasn’t been confirmed by the authorities.’
Maxi exchanged glances with Pob behind Velda’s back, and he grinned a little.
‘Just because you haven’t been told it by an officer doesn’t mean it isn’t true, Vel.’ Maxi said.
‘And it is official.’ Pob put in. ‘It’s on star charts. An exclusion zone, with the space beyond it marked as unexplored.’
‘Yes, yes, but that could be anything.’ Velda said impatiently. ‘There’s no reason to believe that it’s aliens!’
‘But we already know at least one alien race from across the Firewall.’ Maxi was not going to let that go by. ‘The Solarans have been visiting our space for centuries. Their ships are said to be huge and able to go hyperlight.’ She looked at Pell, her manner becoming respectful, ‘Is it possible that that’s what you saw, do you think? A Solaran ship?’
‘No, definitely not.’ Again, Pell spoke above the clamour from the rest of the spacers saying the same thing. ‘We know what Solaran ships look like – they’re triangular pyramids, entirely different from the thing we saw. Whatever that was, it was organic, you know? It looked more like something alive than a starship.’
‘But how would that be possible for something that big even to be alive in space, let alone be able to move faster than light?’ Velda objected.
‘It’s theoretically possible’ Pell told her. ‘Microbial life can survive in deep space. There are theories about macrobial life forms, extremely tenuous, hardly more than balls of gas, which might survive on stellar radiation or mineral-rich space dust. It is also possible that life forms may exist which can transit dimensions. We use wave space to get our ships to go superlight, but there’s so much we don’t know about it yet. There may be all kinds of creatures existing trans-dimensionally.’
‘Theoretically.’ Pob nodded confirmation. ‘But on balance, it’s more likely that you’re looking at an alien ship. We do know that there are alien races beyond the Firewall, after all. Though it doesn’t seem to be hostile, does it, if its reaction to seeing our ships is to run away at high speed?’
‘Ah, but who’s to say it does, always?’ Pell argued. ‘I know they say that no more ships vanish in Sector 17 than anywhere else, statistically, but who knows how many ships have vanished out there and the authorities have covered it up the same way they did our sighting? And what about the dome on Tango?’
Seeing incomprehension on Velda’s face, he explained, ‘That’s a survival dome on a slimeworld midway on the run, used for shoreleave. It’s been stripped out loads of times, supplies and even tech taken. That’s been going on for at least three hundred years, too, with at least one or two incidents a year where stuff goes missing from Tango. Don’t tell me that’s pirates. There is no pirate activity out in Sector 17. There’s just not enough shipping or any cargoes of value that would make it worth their while. And don’t tell me that spacers are doing it, either.’ He pointed a challenging finger at the cadet. ‘Spacers always, always leave survival domes fully supplied and do maintenance and upgrades on them, because our own survival or that of another ship may depend on them one day.’
‘So, what are you saying, then?’ Velda’s tone had become sarcastic. ‘You’re saying there’s a space monster that periodically raids a survival dome?’
‘No. I’m saying there’s something we don’t understand going on out there.’ Pell said. ‘And whatever it is and whatever it’s doing, it is huge, incredibly fast, and who knows how powerful? There are far stranger things out there than are in your textbooks, believe me.’
It was apparent that Velda didn’t believe him. She set her chin firmly and hunched her shoulders.
‘There’s no reasoning with people once they believe this kind of thing.’ She observed, and glanced at her wristcom. ‘Come on’ she told the other cadets. ‘We’ve got homework to do.’
‘I’ll catch you up.’ Maxi said. The other three followed Velda, though Pob gave an apologetic look as he trailed out in the other cadet’s wake.
‘Kids these days.’ Pell got down off the bar, shaking his head, looking enquiringly at Maxi as he saw that she was still wanting to talk to him.
‘Sorry about them’ she said frankly. ‘But I’m interested. So, what do you think it is you saw, then?’
‘Me?’ Pell shrugged. ‘I think it’s an alien ship. I think they’re studying us. I think they’re taking samples of our tech from the Tango dome and watching and waiting till they either consider us advanced enough to make contact with, or so advanced that they consider we may be a threat.’ As the cadet stared at him, he hunched his shoulders again and dropped them fatalistically.
‘On my good days,’ he said, ‘I hope they’ll turn up at our worlds one day doing the ‘we come in peace, take us to your leader’ thing. On my bad days, I wonder if one day we’re going to arrive at a system and find dead worlds, humanity just wiped off the map. And at three in the morning when I remember that thing looming out of the dark, I know that there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait.’
Maxi looked at him. 2.8 seconds nearly ten years ago had changed this man’s life, instilling a fear so deep that it kept him awake at night even now. Being a spacer meant more than risking your life on long, dangerous interstellar journeys. It meant being out there facing the unknown in an infinite wilderness. If you were like Velda, with no imagination, anything you didn’t understand could just be dismissed. If you were like Pell, perhaps with too much imagination, anything you didn’t understand was so terrifying you could only see it as a monster. Perhaps in the middle, she thought, you could be both open minded and unafraid.
‘One day,’ she said, ‘I want to go out there and see for myself.’
Pell shivered a little. ‘Rather you than me’ he said. ‘I just hope that if you do see it, you’re one of those who lives to tell the tale.’
Maxi smiled.
‘I will’ she assured him, with blithe confidence. ‘But let me buy you a drink.’ She offered, feeling that she owed him t
hat for his story and for Velda’s rudeness too.
‘Well, I won’t say no’ said Pell, and finished what was left in his glass, handing it to her empty.
‘On the house for both of you.’ Tam grinned at the surprised cadet as he drew two cornbeers and set them on the bar. ‘Maxi, isn’t it?’ he queried, and at her nod, smiled in a way that made it clear that he would remember her name. She had become one of Kluskey’s regulars. It was a rite of passage into life as a spacer, which was rather more important than getting her engineering homework in on time.
‘Thanks, Tam.’ Maxi accepted the beer with a blush of pleasure, toasted him with it, and settled down happily as the ‘monster or alien ship’ debate looked set to go on for the rest of the evening.
Whatever the Space Monster of Sector 17 was, only time would tell. The universe was weird and wonderful and held much that was beyond human understanding. But Maxi Hawarth was ready for everything it had to offer.
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Skipper Alex von Strada and his corvette Minnow are sent on a makework mission after a disastrous PR mess up. Inspector Mako Ireson goes with them, still trying to work out which is the front end of the ship as they hurtle into deep space. The last thing anybody wants is for them to get caught up in a
Spacer Tales: The Space Monster of Sector 17 Page 2
