“Launch Shrike in thirty seconds,” came over the 1MC.
Rev and Punch had come to send off Clyburn. The Galaxy Explorer was now twenty-nine light-hours from EPS-0014. At this close range, the ship’s instrumentation would be able to discern much more, but the key was Clyburn and her Shrike.
“Do you think it’ll be safe to go?” Rev asked.
“That’s what we’ll find out. I would think the possibility is high, though.”
“I hope so. It would be pretty cool to discover another sapient race. It would be good to use all those first contact protocols that were crammed into our heads before we left.”
“Most of those protocols were used with the Loman’s Haven,” Punch said.
“But they were humans. Who the heck knows if these work with an alien race? We’ve never really instigated a first contact in the history of humanity. The tin-asses and noxes forced their way on us, and the rest came during the heat of battle. Plus, we don’t know how these guys think or how they’ll take things.”
“Punt Six” was now a familiar figure aboard the ship. No one seemed to think it strange that the Genesians supposedly left a liaison on the ship. Rev found that remarkable. Who was Punch supposed to liaise with if the rest of the Genesians were back on Synty?
But this gave Punch the ability to roam the ship and spend time with Rev. And slowly, Rev was getting used to the situation. He often forgot that Punch was Punch, formerly embedded in his brain, and thought of him as just another friend.
It was progress.
“Launch Shrike in ten seconds.”
The tractor lights flashed green.
“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . launch.”
The fighter whooshed out on the rails, piercing the curtain as it headed into the black.
Twelve seconds later, the voice on the 1MC said, “Shrike engines engaged.”
“I guess that’s it. We’ll see what she finds in about three hours.”
He checked the time. They’d been in real space for seventy-six minutes, plenty of time for more data to be collected. He wasn’t sure how much would be analyzed and compiled for public consumption yet, but it wouldn’t hurt to go see.
“I wish I could bring you into the CIC,” he told Punch.
“That is a weakness of you telling everyone I’m a Genesian.”
Punch hadn’t exactly said he was against the idea of masquerading as a Genesian, but he implied it. On the one hand, Rev understood the sentiment. Punch was hiding who he was.
On the other hand, Rev didn’t want the villagers storming the castle with pitchforks and torches to burn Frankenstein’s monster.
How many would actually do that? Rev didn’t know. But it wouldn’t take much.
“Why don’t you go to my stateroom and wait there. I’ll record as much as I can and then brief you. And the girls want to see you.”
Even when the Genesians were aboard, they had to be invited into the CIC. With them gone, it had just become understood that “Punt Six” was not allowed inside. So, Rev and Tomiko’s stateroom was as good a place as any for him to wait, especially with the girls there.
The twins had taken a strong liking to Punch, and it seemed that the feeling was mutual. They were fascinated with his metal body and liked to climb on him. They’d seen the real Genesians before, and they’d never expressed much of an interest. But then again, no Genesian came over to their stateroom and hung out, something that was becoming more of a common occurrence with Punch.
“It won’t be as complete as if I were there,” Punch said. “But it will have to do.”
They split up, and Rev headed to the CIC. His battle buddy was correct on how complete Rev’s efforts would be. Even without Punch, Rev’s augments included memory chips and the ability to record what he saw and heard. But those were limited to what was directly in Rev’s focus.
When Punch was embedded, he had the ability to not only observe and record what Rev was seeing and hearing, but also anything else. He could observe what was in Rev’s peripheral vision as well as sounds that weren’t registering with him.
This limitation had been the standard situation for several centuries, so it was just going to have to do, though. Rev was simply going to have to be more conscious and concentrate on what was going on around him.
Rev entered CIC, which was a beehive of activity. Captain Nyad spotted him and nodded in acknowledgment before getting back to whatever he’d been doing.
Rev looked around. He almost approached Lieutenant Zybar, but the man looked frazzled. Instead, he approached Petty Officer First Class June Houta, the lieutenant’s Number 3.
“Anything?” Rev asked.
“It’s inhabited,” she said. “That’s for certain.”
Rev had expected that, but it was good to get the confirmation.
“How advanced?”
“Hydrocarbons in the air are indicative of heavy manufacturing, but our visuals don’t show artificial lights that would come with large, industrialized centers of populations.”
“You’re assuming that whoever they are need lights like we do,” Rev said.
“True enough. Still, we’re thinking that the planet isn’t heavily populated.”
“Do the civvies agree?”
Houta shook her head. “Don’t know. We haven’t collated our data yet.”
“We’re gonna haf’ to do that before we make any decisions,” Rev pointed out.
“Sure, Sergeant Major. We’re not holding anything back. They’re getting the same data as we are. We just haven’t had the time yet to compare notes.”
“Anything off the planet?”
“Nada. Nothing at all.”
Which meant it was probably safe for the Galaxy Explorer to make the jump to the system.
Probably.
The BG asteroid had been quiet, too, until it had been triggered into powering up.
Rev let Houta get back to her work. He wandered around a bit, pulling in bits of information as it became available, but from their vantage, the system hid no threats. Whatever species was on the planet was too primitive to reach out into space.
The most vital data, however, was what would be coming from Clyburn. The Shrike was not the most sophisticated platform for gathering data—nothing like the military or commercial scout craft—but being in system, it could gather much more than the Galaxy Express could.
Rev kept one eye on the timer clicking down. Work in the CIC started to peter out as everyone else did the same.
Finally, it hit zero . . . and there was nothing. Ten seconds, twenty, and still nothing from Clyburn.
Which wasn’t a real cause for alarm. Time passage in bubble space and real space wasn’t the same, and the variance between the two was not constant. So, despite billions of trips through bubble space and the massive power of the ship’s AI, predicting the exact moment of a vessel dropping out of bubble space was like hitting the lottery. It was luck more than anything else.
Rev felt his stress level start to rise until thirty seconds past the estimate, Clyburn’s voice came through over the CIC’s speakers.
“Howdy, howdy, Explorer! This is your friendly neighborhood Shriker, reporting from beautiful downtown Fourteen. I’m activating my scanners, and I’ll let you know just what our friends on Planet Five are up to.”
There was a collective sigh of relief at her voice, even from the comms chief who kept trying to get her to use proper comms procedures—which was an impossible task.
Clyburn was no longer in the Paxus Navy. She was a civilian and proud of it. Rev thought she took great pleasure in tweaking the sometimes stuck-up nature of the Union Navy with her complete denial of military protocol.
Rev couldn’t give a damn how she communicated. It was the information she was sharing that mattered.
And that data kept streaming in too quickly for Rev to interrupt anyone just to find out. But what he could see from the CIC projection was that the system ignored her presence. She was not painted with alien scanners. No ships appeared to chase her. No missiles were fired. No energy beams reached out to fry her.
From a space perspective, the system might as well be uninhabited.
Just shy of fifteen minutes after she’d dropped out of bubble space, she jumped back. Now they had to analyze the data she transmitted back. Rev would have felt more comfortable had she slowed down and gone into orbit around the fifth planet instead of a high-speed, brief pass in the system’s outskirts, but from what he’d seen so far, things looked good.
Nyad was in his command chair, buried in the reports as they were forwarded. Njuguna was in her command center, probably doing the same thing. Rev just sat at the conference table feeling somewhat out of the loop.
It didn’t take long. Eighteen minutes after Clyburn started back, Nyad checked with Njuguna, then asked her to come to the CIC. Rev thought they’d use Nyad’s stateroom, but evidently, the captain thought there was no need for privacy.
Nyad sat down next to Rev as they waited for the doctor.
“Pretty exciting, huh?” the CO asked.
Rev was a little surprised at Nyad’s attitude. The man was a cautious commander, even more so since the loss of the other ships. But he seemed pretty eager right now.
“Looks good so far.”
“Do you have any security concerns?”
Rev shook his head. “My concerns would be down on the planet. And I’m guessing I’ll have a ton of them. We’ll need to know a lot more about the people down there before we make an attempt for a face-to-face contact.”
“It’s pretty clear that whoever they are, they are not too technologically advanced, Sergeant Major.”
“A spear can kill a person just as dead as a beamer can.”
Nyad laughed. “Point taken. But I’m not saying that we just load up the shuttles and go on down. We’ll observe. We can send drones. Whatever is prudent, you know.”
The captain wasn’t wrong in that, but Rev didn’t like the man telling him how to do his job. Making the jump into the system would be under his command, but anything having to do with the planet was Rev’s call.
The door to CIC opened, and Njuguna and Cierce came in. The civilian leader was beaming, her smile so broad Rev was surprised her mouth didn’t simply crack open. She sat down and leaned over the table in her excitement.
“We’re not done, but we’re confident that the level of technology is roughly equivalent to the Fifteenth Century Earth.”
Rev had understood that the planet was in an industrial age, which would put it later than that, but he wasn’t going to argue. He sure didn’t know.
“So, you don’t see a threat to the ship?” Nyad asked.
Njuguna’s smile faltered just a bit. “No, we don’t. Do you?”
“No, no,” Nyad said, and Njuguna’s smile returned. “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here.”
“I’m recommending that we jump to the system. We can conduct much more detailed scans of the planet and build a robust analysis of the situation there.”
“And then?” Rev asked.
“And then, we make a rational decision on whether we initiate First Contact Protocols,” she said, leaning back to take in their reactions.
Nyad raised his eyebrows. “We’d be the first, right? I mean to initiate First Contact.”
“Fifty years ago, our names would go down in history. But even with the two wars and all the other races we now know about, this would still be epic. We’d be the first human beings to initiate First Contact, and that’s still historic.”
Rev knew that many, if not most, of the civilians wanted to discover new things, but it was dawning on him that this wasn’t the end of that. Njuguna was concerned about her legacy. She wanted to go down in history. In retrospect, it should have been obvious since the beginning, but Rev didn’t notice it until now as he watched her, a racehorse at the gate.
Not that there was anything wrong with that, per se. It was good to have a goal. But back on Earth, the American Army General George Custer wanted to go down in history, and that hadn’t worked out too well for him and his men.
Rev wasn’t about to step on the doctor, but he also wasn’t going to let her desire to be part of the history books put the expedition in danger. That was for another time, though.
“I think I’m fine with jumping to the system,” Nyad said.
Both turned to look at Rev.
“I’m fine, too, but with a caveat. You said we can conduct a detailed analysis from the Explorer.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I want to hold you to that. And I mean detailed. Before we even begin to consider whether to try and make First Contact, I want to know who the inhabitants are, how many are there, what weapons they have, what they eat and drink, who their favorite talk show host is, and where they go to take a crap. I want to know everything.”
“I don’t have a problem with that, Sergeant Major,” Njuguna said.
Rev shifted to Nyad, who just nodded.
“Well, it looks like we’ve got an agreement, and I guess we’re going to the system,” Rev said.
* * *
“Dropping in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
Rev looked around the CIC. There was a general feeling of excitement that permeated the space. The boredom and malaise that seemed to be everywhere such a short time ago had disappeared. A sense of purpose had taken over.
“. . . three . . . two . . . one . . . drop.”
The now familiar sense of distortion washed over him. He never bothered to mention it anymore. Dr. Rima and the rest told him he was crazy. There was no way he could sense it. But his body knew when it was stretched between bubble and real space, no matter that the others told him he was crazy.
The projection winked into existence, showing a bright sun and ten planets. They’d made it in one piece.
“Disposition error fourteen-point-one six, Eight-point-two-eight, and twenty-one-point-four-four,” the helmsman announced from his console.
Rev had never bothered to understand what the numbers meant. A ship as large as the Galaxy Explorer had greater disposition errors than a smaller vessel, which is why they dropped out of bubble space farther away from planetary masses than a Shrike, for example. The ship’s repeller fields could push away space debris as the ship emerged into real space. But emerge into a planet, and bad things happened.
Captain Nyad considered their position for a moment, then announced, “We’re good here. Let’s get started.”
“Commencing Phase 1 scans,” Lieutenant Zybar said.
The Galaxy Explorer had hundreds of different programs and AI modules to cover a wide range of objectives, but the ship had only limited antennae, guns, receivers, and other means to collect all of the types of needed data. The workaround was to schedule each scanner in phases.
Rev and Top Klipsinger had sat around the scanner conference. Rev wanted to go security forward while the civilians and the ship had other priorities. He was pretty confident that the ship was not in danger out here on the edges of the system, but he was not nearly so sure that the planet’s inhabitants were not a threat. In the end, Rev was mostly pleased with what he’d managed to get into Phase 1.
“Take the ship out of jump procedures,” Captain Nyad said.
A moment later, the Petty Officer on Watch passed that over the 1MC. Throughout the ship, the crew, civilians, and Marines would go back to their routines. But the hub of the activities was right here in the CIC and the civilian command center. Rev didn’t know how long it would take, but the analyses the two groups developed would decide the next course of action.
There wasn’t much of anything for him to do in the CIC, but he settled in to wait. Some of the data would be coming in almost immediately, and he wanted to see the reports before he left.
His wristcomp buzzed.
“Are you coming back?” Tomiko asked. “I’d like to hit the gym, and Kat’s in the armory.”
“Can’t Punch watch the girls? I wanted to wait until I see what’s going on.”
“You told me this could take weeks, Rev. Are you going to camp out there until then?”
“No, of course not. But the Phase 1s have gone out, and at least until we get a feel of what they might find.”
He could see that Tomiko wasn’t happy with that. She didn’t feel comfortable with Punch watching the girls. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Punch. But her take was that he was still a child in many ways, and he didn’t have the ability to handle the twins.
Punch could jack into the ship’s AI and have the processing power to do a decent job keeping the vessel running, but he couldn’t watch two three-year-olds?
Rev thought that she was going to insist that he come back, but she surprised him by sighing and saying, “OK, I’ll call Punch. But don’t stay there forever. I want you to put them to sleep tonight. They’ve been after me to ask you to read The Hungry Dinosaur.”
He checked the time. The girls went to bed at eight, so that gave him a little more than four hours. The first of the analyses would be done by then.
“Promise. I’ll be there to read to them.”
* * *
Rev leaned his head back and burped loud enough for the nearest sailors to look up in surprise.
“Real professional, Sergeant Major,” Lieutenant Commander Norton said with a scowl.
“Sorry, sir. My abject apologies, sir. I’m just a crude enlisted slob who never went to no finishing school, sir.”
Norton just rolled his eyes before taking another bite of his sandwich.
“Finishing school,” Umman said with a laugh. “They’d never let the likes of me or you there. We’d corrupt all the little midshipmen with our crude and rude ways.”
Rev lifted his pack of apple juice, and Umman toasted him with his.
Norton was the senior Academy graduate on the ship, and he embraced the rah-rah alumni stuff. Rev hadn’t specifically meant the Academy when he said finishing school, but when Umman made the connection, Rev was happy to go along with it. Anything to get under Norton’s skin.
Besides, it was Umman who’d fetched the sandwiches and juice. Rev’s stomach had been growling, and he’d contemplated grabbing some chow before he had to be back to read to the girls, but this way, he had another half hour in the CIC.
Not that the place had been a wealth of information so far. The data had been pouring in, and while there might be a few anomalies, what they were receiving looked pretty much like they expected. The analyses were being conducted in real-time, but nothing had been put into easily digestible synopses yet. And from what Lieutenant Zybar had told him, the first report probably wouldn’t be disseminated until morning.
Rev popped the last bit of the pastrami sandwich into his mouth, then licked his fingers clean.
“Thanks for the chow, Hank. My belly was hugging my backbone there.”
“Any time.”
Rev’s relationship with the command master chief was evolving. He couldn’t say they were friends, exactly, and there was still a bit of the two alpha dogs trying to protect their turf, but the outright animosity that had opened their relationship had faded, and at times, they could be downright friendly.
It could be that with the Genesians gone, that removed one of the issues between them. Rev still didn’t exactly trust the man, but he thought the two could work together for the betterment of the expedition.
Besides, when it concerned officers like Norton, who wasn’t a bad guy, the holy bond of SNCOs was still in effect, even when the other was Navy.
“Is the skipper going to relieve you?” Umman asked Norton.
“No. He said to get him only if something major came up. Otherwise, we’re to leave him alone.”
“You’re going to be on all night?” Umman asked in surprise.
Rev looked on with interest. When Captain Bane, the previous CO of the ship had returned with the Loup-Garou, Nyad had been promoted a grade and had been given the command of the ship. Norton, however, had not fleeted up to take the XO position. But despite keeping his none-too-easy job of being the ship’s first lieutenant, he’d assumed most of the XO’s tasks. Now, it looked like he was being left with the entire night in the CIC.
Norton put down his half-eaten spamaturk sandwich, sniffed, and said, “I don’t think so. Lieutenant Shivdasani’s the Officer of the Deck, so if the skipper can rack out, I think I can, too. I’ll hang until twenty-one-hundred, and then if things are quiet, I’ll bug out.”
Umman seemed surprised, but he said, “Good on you, sir. There’s no reason for you to hang. Like you said, Shiv’s the official OOD, and nothing much is going to happen that’ll need an officer for quite a while.”
It had been a long time since the gods of war had messed with Rev, so Umman’s declaration didn’t raise any concerns.
Foolish.
“Lieutenant Shiv, I’m getting some weird readings here,” the petty officer on the comms station said.
Rev, Umman, and Norton swiveled in their chairs to look on.
“You shouldn’t be transmitting, Bartosiewicz,” Zybar said. “You could be interfering with our scans.”
And letting them know that we’re out here.
If they really were in the Fifteenth Century, then it wouldn’t matter, but Rev would rather be safe than sorry.
“I’m not transmitting anything, Lieutenant. I’m receiving.”
That got everyone’s attention, and Shivdasani stepped across the CIC to stand over her. “What do you mean, you’re receiving?”
Bartosiewicz just pointed to her console.
Rev and Umman exchanged glances, then both of them stood up in unison, followed a split second later by Norton. As they started toward the comms station, the projection of the system flickered.
The motion caught Rev’s peripheral vision, and he turned just as the image of the system went dark, to be almost immediately replaced by a . . .
“It’s a dragon,” Umman said in awe.
It wasn’t like any dragon that Rev had seen depicted, but he’d forgive Umman the comparison.
The creature staring at him was somewhat reptilian-looking, with either scales or mottled armor covering its body. A narrow head was mounted on a long, sinewy neck. Pointed frills flowed back over the top of the head, giving a vague feeling of an outlandish medieval helmet. What had to be teeth protruded from a wide, frog-like mouth, but what made Rev’s soul shiver were the three red eyes that burned with demon fire.
The body shimmered with energy, the skin revoltingly shifting as if maggots coursed under the top layer. Arms or claws sprouted from the back and came together in front. Almost lost in the apparition were a dozen or more centipede legs.
“What the hell is that?” Umman asked.
“And how are we seeing it?” Norton added. “This is fifteenth century tech?”
The creature was staring right at them. The projection was only able to receive inputs. It couldn’t be used to transmit images. But Rev was sure the thing saw them, as impossible as that was.
Other than a few gasps and heavy breathing, the CIC went silent in the face of this impossibility. That was broken twenty long seconds later with a few shouts when the thing unfurled its arms, if that was the right term, and spread them like some massive bird of prey ready to strike.
Rev didn’t know what was going to happen next, but it certainly wasn’t the three human figures materializing in front of the dragon. That was surprising enough, but it didn’t take the cake as to who the images were.
Rev didn’t need the shiny, metallic prosthetic arm on the middle one, nor the shouts from some of the others in the CIC, to know that was him, flanked by Umman and Norton.
We’re the closest to the projection. That must have been why the dragon chose us, he thought rationally in the midst of his shock.
The right arms/claws/wings pointed to where an image of the planet suddenly appeared. The three human images rose off the ground as if the rapture was calling them to heaven, and they flew toward the planet. The view shifted. The dragon disappeared, and the humans rapidly approached the planet, where continents soon became visible. Lines appeared—latitudes, longitudes, and diagonals.
Within moments, the three continued to the ground toward a fairy-tale tower. They slowed, then passed over a wall and into what could be a courtyard. Their dragon, or one that looked like it, was waiting for them. The three humans lightly landed in front of the creature, then all four of them—Rev, Umman, Norton, and the dragon—turned to stare into the CIC for just over ten seconds before the projection ceased, and was replaced a moment later with the one of the EPS-0014 system as a whole.
“It wants us to come to it,” Rev said in awe.
“We’d better get the skipper,” Norton said. “I think this classifies as something major.”