Shadows

by Brian Whiting

  A note in Grissom’s message queue alerted him that the Latin Alliance would no longer accept payment in the form of comfort units but that the other payment options remained and the offer price for dark matter had doubled once again.

  He sipped his coffee as he looked out the large window. The last remnants of the tent city once outside their wall were getting cleaned up, as people either were offered various jobs in farming or logistics or were set up in one of the recently constructed settlement buildings.

  Any abandoned vehicles from the tent city were collected and recycled for the fabricators. His datapad lit up again requesting his authorization to launch another reconnaissance shuttle into Latin Alliance territory. He hit the “approved” button without a second thought. He then began to organize his files to give a better presentation when he requested increased armament time on the fabricators from the council. He wondered if this was a prelude to an unavoidable confrontation.

  Chapter 22

  Approaching the Center

  Alarms blared, and Alex jumped out of bed. It would be the third time this week. He didn’t bother to put on the remainder of his outfit as he left his cabin, taking off at a sprint toward the rear of the ship.

  “We have to shut the FTL down,” Ga Jute Pae yelled out in Gothan as Alex approached from behind at a sprint.

  “You know we can’t, not yet.” The door to the engine assembly room opened; it was unbearably warm. Alex entered anyway, and the Gothan jumped away from the door and covered both of its eyes due to the unbearable heat.

  Alex was busy removing a blazing hot panel to the FTL assembly when Annunen turned up behind him, looking over his shoulder. The alarm stopped, but the rooms still were bathed in a red hue. Alex removed the panel.

  “It’s as I feared: the last valence line fused. We are out of options. We must proceed with my plan,” Annunen said as he turned away from the relatively quiet engine assembly room.

  Alex was already starting to sweat. He knew Annunen was right. He pulled the handheld tool from the wall placed there for this eventuality, aimed the device at the fused line, and activated it. Alex cut the mainline, and the FTL began an emergency shut-down routine. The engine buzzed loudly.

  “What is that?” Alex yelled down the hall, hoping Annunen or someone would hear him. He regretted that he didn’t bring his headset. Somehow he managed to keep Symboli a secret for the whole trip.

  The FTL assembly, began to turn cherry red, and the heat in the room became too much, even for Alex. He stepped away from the engine and saw the display screens used to configure and maintain the assembly crack and shatter.

  Annunen and Tulie both ran into the engine room. “What happened?” Tulie asked Alex.

  “I cut the valence line like before and the engine began to shut down, except this time it didn’t. We have to eject the core. It’s going to explode,” Alex shouted.

  “No, it’s going to implode,” Annunen corrected him.

  “Really! Even now, you have to do that crap?” Alex yelled over the ever-increasing noise of the assembly.

  “We eject the assembly or find a way to cool it down until the fabricator finishes the valence line. It’s almost complete,” Tulie suggested.

  “I’ve got an idea: get everyone out!” Alex shouted, and all three retreated to the hallway corridor. “Back way from this area, go to the bridge,” Alex yelled to Tulie and Annunen.

  “What are you going to do?” Annunen asked.

  “For once, just do as I ask you without making me prove my damn point!”

  Tulie and Annunen looked at each other with obvious concern. Finally they turned and jogged back toward the bridge.

  Alex braced himself with one of the support poles in the corridors to be used in the event of loss of gravity. Then he aimed his device at the far wall in the engine room itself and activated the tiny beam. Alex tried his best to keep his arm steady, but it was impossible to keep the beam fixed on a singular point.

  Air began sucking out into space, and his arm began to move wildly, causing the beam to puncture locations within a one-foot section of the wall as the vacuum of space began taking its effect on the room. He made sure to open the wall up as best as he could. However, the atmosphere of the corridor began to diminish, and the door to the engine room closed, seemingly of its own accord, sealing off the room.

  Alex hit the deck, panting heavily as if he had just climbed a mountain, sweat poured down his face. He crawled away from the room, and the further he got the cooler he began to feel.

  “You did it!” Ga Ra Tor said over the intercom. The temperature in the room quickly decreased.

  “The engine will continue to overheat!” Annunen followed up.

  “Shut your perfect, over-righteous mouth!” Alex yelled, despite knowing that no one on the bridge would hear him. It took the life support system some time to completely repressurize the corridors. During that time Alex caught his breath until he felt OK to walk to the bridge.

  The moment he entered the bridge, the brightness of the star in the system they were in blinded him. Before Alex could complain about it, the Gothans had adjusted the brightness.

  “We are receiving a message, from the first planet in a system of fourteen.” One of the Gothans said from above.

  “What’s the status of the FTL?”

  “It continues to overheat, but at a much slower pace. We have about twenty minutes before it implodes. The fabricator will be completed momentarily. Tulie is getting into a suit so she can commit to the repair. Once installed the engine will complete its shutdown routine and then we will have to begin damage assessments. Best-case scenario we can jump into FTL about the same time tomorrow; in the worst case, we will have to build a replacement engine, which would take months and resources we currently do not have.”

  Alex sat down in his chair, thankful for its comfort, since his heart was only now beginning to settle to normal rhythm. “Let’s hear the message.”

  “Gresshkt Psttova doi derta may do.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Anyone?” Alex knew it was hopeless, but even after they fed the message into the computer, there was no translation.

  “This is Captain Alex of the UEF Hermes, we do not understand your language. We will begin sending you a transmission that includes a translation code of sorts.”

  Alex looked to the Gothans. The closest one to Alex, which he knew now to be Gs Port Tha, nodded his head many times, the best Gothan approximation of a human nod, with some emphasis on excitement.

  “Well, we know that will take some time to transmit via audio, how close are we to the border?”

  A map of the charted galaxy appeared on the viewscreen, more than 99.9% of which was shrouded in unscanned area. A relatively straight line appeared toward the center, approximating their direction of travel. Much of that area was also unscanned due to the necessity of having to drop out of FTL to conduct a scan of the system.

  “Captain, a program was just installed onto our computer system.”

  “What! What kind of program?” Alex asked. He wondered if Symboli would be able to overtake the program if needed.

  “I feel inadequate. We have no idea.” Gs Port Tha said.

  “Receiving a response from the planet,” Annunen said.

  “Have we finished sending the audio translation message?”

  “No, sir.” Gs Port Tha replied.

  “Is there a point to hearing it then?” Alex said, and shook his head no. “Go ahead.”

  “Welcome, traveler, you have reached the confederate of friends. Unfortunately a large majority of our population has been relocated, to flee the approaching infestation. We have facilities open and available. Would you like to dock with our facilities?” asked a calm, controlled, and friendly voice.

  Alex quickly motioned his hand across his throat toward Annunen, indicating that he should cut the signal. “The infestation might be what we are looking for,” Alex said. “Perhaps it might be best to visit and get i
nformation from them.”

  “We have plenty of information to share about the infestation, from public knowledge to highly classified. Please indicate your preference.” Said the calm computerized voice.

  “I thought I told you to cut the signal.” Alex said in a low mumble.

  “Is that what the hand thing you did meant?” Annunen responded with a curious expression.

  “Classified,” Annunen stated clearly.

  “Our records indicate you are not licensed to view this information. If this is in error, please submit your license information now.”

  “That’s OK. How about public knowledge?” Annunen tried instead.

  “Please clarify desired source material. News, documents, reports, scans, visual, audio, spectrographic, tactical, biological, mechanical, phr—”

  “News,” Alex responded.

  “Apologies, you do not have sufficient credits.”

  “Oh, come on,” Alex tossed his hands up into the air.. “Share with us all free information about the infestation.”

  “Accessing public service announcements.”

  The viewscreen switched from a frontal view of the star system to a frontal view of an ugly being. It was not wearing clothes, as far as Alex could tell, and the camera was careful not to cut out any portion of the thing that was speaking. The alien was pink and orange. It appeared to have six or eight limbs. Each limb was spaced equally around the alien’s midsection. It rested on only three of those limbs; the other limbs were wrapped around its body, with the ends of those limbs hidden from view. The head looked like a down-pointing whale tail, or perhaps the bottom quarter of a Christmas tree. Hair, lengthy hair, grew straight down from the head. Two locks of hair were braided and adorned with jewels.

  “This is your Archon. By now many of you have heard the rumors of an unstoppable alien race with a love of conquest. The few interactions we have had with the race have all ended with extreme violence. We have witnessed the systematic elimination of the populations of over three star systems. What you see on the screen now was what appeared to be an advanced alien civilization well beyond our borders; what you are viewing is telemetry from one of our deep-space scout vessels.”

  The screen went black, then returned with a video showing an emblem of some kind that appeared to be two different limbs reaching out and embracing in the center. An alien script ran top to bottom on the right side of the screen. The video zoomed in on a planet, around which a large space station was in orbit. Some distance away, arrayed before the space station, was a large fleet of vessels: thousands of tiny ships, fighters, Alex assumed, and other ships of various sizes. A huge ship sat in the center; it was hard to gauge its size, but it was obviously very large. Then, without warning, a large square-like object appeared not too far from the fleet, followed closely by two rectangles. Alex guessed they were enemy ships of some sort; immediately the fleet defending the space station shot out countless lasers, missiles, and other ordnance at the large square and the rectangles—which immediately began to blur on the screen. Explosions were evident within the blurring shapes.

  The video zoomed in for a tight shot of the blurs, but now they no longer had shapes of any kind. Instead of one large square and two smaller rectangular ships, there were countless numbers of two different kinds of ships, both shaped like capsules or pills with fixed appendages. Hundreds of thousands of them. Alex noticed the pill ships had two different metallic sheens, one more reflective than the other. The video focused on a group of the shinier ships as they began to shoot something at half-second intervals. The collection of ships approached a medium-sized defending ship, which sent out a sweeping laser beam that cut down several of the attackers almost effortlessly. But then the medium-sized ship was struck by unknown alien weapons, then immediately began venting gases in multiple areas all at once before several internal explosions blew huge holes in the hull. Once the shiny pills passed the damaged ship, they focused their attention on another just like it. The video then switched its focus to the nonreflective pill ships. They collided with the medium ship rather hard, and it now appeared to be adrift on little to no power. The video zoomed in on an even tighter shot of the hostile craft now attached to the hull. It appeared that dozens of spider bots flowed from the nonreflective pill ships and quickly found or made entry into the evidently powerless ship.

  The video zoomed out to reveal the cloud of gray again and zoomed into the center of the expanding cloudy mass of hostile ships. It was obvious there were other, larger ships near where the center used to be. Never once did Alex have a clear view, since smaller passing ships heavily obscured the line of sight. The video zoomed out again and focused on the largest defending ship. It appeared that the aliens defending it, wearing spacesuits, were on the hull using handheld weapons, but were quickly overrun by the bots.

  There was an explosion in an area where the video was focusing on the hull, and many spider bots were flung into space along with ship debris. One of the pill ships, apparently out of control, slammed into the now-exposed section of this larger ship’s interior, setting off another explosion within the hull. The video zoomed out; despite the heavy destruction in that area, it appeared the ship as a whole was still faring well in the fight, as it emitted dozens, if not hundreds, of laser sweeps that destroyed lots of attackers with each pass of a beam shot. Despite the damage the large ship managed to dish out, it was no match for the seemingly countless ships that showed no evidence of fear, no tactics, just a single-minded purpose: to end the fight as quickly as possible with no thought of their own losses. It was over within another five minutes or so, when the last defending laser sweep burst out of the large ship and raked the sky of enemy vessels—of which tens of thousands still remained.

  The ship went dark, and the alien fleet continued toward the space station.

  A red icon appeared in the upper left of the video, and it zoomed out completely and zoomed in on a small collection of hostile ships on a direct course toward the scout ship but still a great distance away. The scout ship turned, and the video ended.

  The orange-pink alien appeared again, and Alex shuddered as the disturbing sight startled him.

  “Given the length of time the enemy stays in a system before it moves, our best people predict we have eighteen cycles before they arrive.”

  Alex used his display screen to timelapse the rotation of their planet around the star. Five hundred and nine earth days per rotation. After a quick calculation, he figured just over twenty-five years.

  “…Please add your available credits into the defense fund. We are all in this together.”

  The video ended, then indicated that the second of three videos was being activated.

  “This is your Archon. By now you are all aware of the increased timetable on the arrival of the nearest invasion fleet, three cycles from now. While many believe resistance is hopeless, we ask that you find every credit you can and provide to the defense fund. With it we will repel our borders, like water over a stone. All class two and class three citizens between the time of murtae` and fretal are to report for defense service. Harshest punishment for those who deviate from this lawful order. We will not wait for the enemy to come to us; we will meet them at a nearby system. Their success will be met with celebration; their failure will allow us time to escape.”

  Alex watched, oblivious to the meaning of what he was seeing, as Archon brought four of its tentacles together to make a knot of them in the center of the screen.

  The screen went black and indicated the third of three videos.

  This video started just like the others, except this was clearly a different individual, with orange and a bit of purple on the edge of the frills at the roots of its hair. “This is your Archon. Our fleet was decimated. Please use careful haste and evacuate the planet with whatever means you have. Contact your nearest fleet commander with rendezvous coordinates. It is a considerable distance. Provision yourself well.”

  The video ended, and the sys
tem’s star reappeared on the viewscreen.

  “In terms of cycles, how long ago was that last video originally transmitted to the public?” Alex asked.

  “Two-point-seven-nine cycles,” the calm voice responded.

  “FTL is powering down,” Tulie advised over the intercom speakers.

  “Confirmed the core temperature is decreasing,” Ga Jute Pae advised.

  “That would leave us approximately one hundred days before they arrive,” Alex said, ignoring them.

  “They evacuated. It explains why the system seems deserted,” Annunen said.

  “Let’s dock and see if there’s anything we can use, acquire, or learn,” Gs Port Tha suggested.

  Alex thought about the invasion fleet approaching, then thought about acquiring some new kind of tech that might be helpful.

  “We will accept your invitation to dock. Can we expect to meet you there?”

  “Excellent. Please proceed to docking pad one. I am not a biological individual.”

  “Are you sentient?”

  “No.”

  On the viewscreen a red line appeared that led straight to the large orbital space station.

  “Follow that course,” Alex said as the ship began moving toward the station, which was still too far to see.

  “I am not certain this is a wise course of action,” Annunen said.

  “We’ll dock, take a quick peek, and leave, no worries. But is there any way to verify the arrival time of the invasion fleet? That’s what I am worried about. Until we get our FTL online, we are a sitting duck.”

  “The scanners are limited by the time it takes light to travel. It’s generally only practical for system-wide use. Unless we scout the neighboring stars, there is nothing we can do,” Annunen advised.