Fiona Lee Clyburn turned, spotted Rev, and performed an outrageous salute. The Paxus geologist-slash-fighter pilot had gotten progressively more outrageous as she’d settled into the role of the expedition’s only pilot. Her flight suit, with its almost painful array of colors, might make an eighteenth-century British admiral envious with the epaulets and other accouterments. It wasn’t modern professional navy, that was for sure.
But as long as she performed the mission, she could fly stark naked for all Rev cared. He came to attention and returned her salute with his best boot camp version.
Beside him, Aspen raised a hand and touched her forehead. Clyburn laughed and made a short bow to the little girl, then climbed into her cockpit.
“She’s sure something,” Tomiko said.
“We’re lucky to have her.”
“We can fly the Shrike with the AI,” Tomiko said.
“Not the same thing.”
“I know. And yes, we’re lucky to have her,” she admitted.
The girls were getting a little bored as the spectators watched Clyburn go through her flight check. They had the whole hangar in front of them, more unconstrained room than almost anywhere else on the ship, and they wanted to run.
But hangars weren’t designed for little girls. And while the Shrike would be lifted with the tractors and shot out into space before her engines kicked on, emergencies were known to happen, so they were gathered in the rear of the hangar behind where the blast shields would deploy in the event of an emergency.
Finally, it was time. Clyburn saluted the yellowshirt, who signaled the tractor controller. The Shrike rose off the deck, turned around, and slowly moved to the curtain. The ready lights flashed down, and when the last red light turned to green, the fighter shot through the curtain and was gone.
Rev watched the tower personnel until one raised a thumb to the others. Clyburn’s Shrike had powered up, and she was on her way.
“I’m going up to CIC,” Rev told Tomiko.
“How did I know you were going to say that?” Tomiko asked.
“I’ll help with the twins,” Per Tiwari said.
“Trying to learn on our girls, grandpa?” Rev asked.
Tiwari harrumphed. “I’ve got kids older than you, youngster. I don’t need the lessons. But Cheetoh’s got morning sickness.”
“Then you should be with her,” Tomiko said.
“You don’t know her. She doesn’t want anyone to be around when she’s like this. I’ll give her a chance to rest up before I go hover over her.”
“Well, since Rev’s abandoning me, I’ll welcome your help.”
Rev took that as his permission to go, so he slipped out and made his way to CIC. They wouldn’t know anything for several hours, so there wasn’t a reason for him to go now, but he needed to be at the center of things.
The CIC was quiet, as was this section of space. It was chosen because it was close to EFP-07, but as far away from any system as possible. The chances to run into anything here in the middle of nothing were remote.
The captain wasn’t even there. Lieutenant Beaton had the watch.
She saw Rev enter and said, “The Shrike powered up and is heading to her jump point.”
“How long?”
“With a fighter? Thirty minutes, give or take.”
Fighters might not be able to jump as far in bubble space as the larger ships, but they had the advantage of being able to get to jump speed in far less time. Thirty minutes to jump. Then a short two hours in real-time to reach EFP-07. Another hour before her scans started to give out some results. Call it four hours before they heard anything.
For a moment, Rev was tempted to meet back up with Tomiko and the girls, but he knew his mind would be on Clyburn. Better to stay and be among the first to hear anything.
“Any updated scans on the system?” he asked the watch officer.
“We’re setting up now. But whatever we get will still be from decades ago. And it won’t be what Clyburn can get from within the system.”
Rev nodded and took a seat at the conference table. Within ten minutes, he was bored. When he had Punch, he had access to almost all of the entertainment produced by humankind, all directly inputted into his visual and auditory cortexes. What he had now wasn’t nearly so extensive. But it was still something.
He powered up his wristcomp display and selected a holovid he’d been meaning to watch. He extracted his data cable and slipped it into the jack at the base of his neck. Rev had never used a jack before he was forced into the Marines, and then he had Punch for this kind of thing.
He was still getting used to not having a battle buddy. Watching shows or listening to music wasn’t as seamless as before, but at least it was something. And as Clyburn hurtled through the black on her way to jump into bubble space, Rev settled in to watch “Lilac Blood.”
* * *
“She should be dropping out in four minutes,” one of the sailors announced.
“Roger that,” Captain Nyad acknowledged.
The CIC was full now as Clyburn was due to arrive in-system. The tension was building. No one quite knew what to expect. Humankind was in space 247 years after they entered the later periods of the industrial age, so it was entirely possible that the new race had a spaceborne presence. How they would react to the sudden presence of what to them was an alien craft was the mystery here.
Hopefully, the Shrike’s stealth capabilities would render her invisible to any primitive surveillance systems the native race might have in place.
“What’s happening?” Tomiko sent to his wristcomp.
“Four more minutes,” Rev sent back.
“We’ll find out soon enough. You’re not going to ask me what’s happening here?”
No, he hadn’t planned to. But he asked at her prompt.
“What happened here is that Aspen decided to pee in the playroom. Standing up.”
“What?” Rev asked, Clyburn momentarily forgotten. “She’s been potty-trained for months now.”
“She said she wanted to pee like Daddy, then just bam. She did it.”
Rev closed his eyes and put his head on the table. He must not have read the fine print on the contract for having kids. He’d heard of the terrible twos, of course, but maybe subconsciously, he figured that he was a sergeant major, used to handling what sometimes amounted to little kids.
He couldn’t believe how wrong he was. Parenting had to be one of the most difficult things he’d ever done.
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I cleaned it up and told her she can’t do that.”
“Does she understand?”
“I think so. But that doesn’t mean she agrees. You know how she is.”
“Yes, I do. I swear, she’s gonna either be the counsel general or a serial killer.”
“Which one is better? Nowadays, I’m not sure I know.”
“Do I need to come back?”
“No. Per went back to check on Cheetoh, but I’ve got it. You stay there.”
Without seeing her, Rev couldn’t tell if she was being serious or if she expected him to come back. He could go check and make it back to the CIC before Clyburn’s reports started.
But if she was telling him to stay, he was going to latch onto that. He felt guilty about it, but he wanted to know what was going on in the target system.
“OK, Miko. I’ll stay here. Clyburn’s about to drop out of bubble space. I’ll keep you updated. Give the girls my love,” he wrote before shutting down his messenger.
And on cue, the sailor announced, “The Shrike’s back in normal space. We’ve got full comms.”
Aspen and her latest antic forgotten, Rev focused on what was going on. Clyburn checked in. She conducted an immediate area scan, and there was no sign of a nearby space presence. With her own safety confirmed, she turned her scans to the fifth planet.
This was going to take a while. A Shrike was not a Navy scout. She was not designed to analyze planets. But she had an array of scanners that could reveal a decent amount of data. With only limited antennae, though, each type of scan had to be programmed for a specific interrogation, and then the active scans needed time to reach the target and return.
The passive scans could start analyzing almost immediately, though. They wouldn’t provide much in detail, but they could help set the stage for the later tranches of data.
Fourteen minutes after Clyburn started her scanning, she came onto the net.
“I’ve got the initial atmospherics, and I’m sending them over. They seem a little odd to me, though. My spectrometer isn’t as sophisticated as on the ship, but the densities seem off. They’re way lower than I expected.”
“That is reasonable, Fiona,” Lieutenant Zybar, the ship’s science officer, said. “In human history, the atmosphere recovered from the horrendous results of the industrial age after environmental concerns were raised and changes were made.”
“I don’t know. And the lights. I don’t see anything, and I’ve got two-thirds of the planet in view during its night-time.”
Captain Nyad cut in. “That isn’t necessarily unusual, Pilot Clyburn. We don’t know anything about the natives. They might be nocturnal, for all we know. And your Shrike doesn’t have the most sophisticated gear on board. We’ll be able to figure out more with the data here on the Explorer.”
“Understood. I’ve got the actives working, and I’m closing the distance. Still no sign of anything in space, so my flyby is still on.”
Over the next forty-five minutes, Clyburn’s data came in a steady stream. It was immediately analyzed, and sailors and civilians put their heads together as they discussed what they saw. Rev and a few of the others without specific jobs sat around the table as they tried to make sense of the various snippets they could catch.
There was an overall feeling growing in the CIC, but one Rev couldn’t put his finger on. It wasn’t fear, so his warrior/security self wasn’t alarmed. It was more like confusion. But with an alien civilization, that made sense to him. Who was to say that anything about the aliens would make immediate sense to humanity?
“Is Dr. Njuguna there?” Clyburn asked.
The civilian head had been standing beside Captain Nyad’s command chair.
“Yes, I’m here, Fiona.”
“Uh . . . can everyone hear me?”
“Yes. Everyone in the CIC, that is.”
There was a pause, and then Clyburn said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. Um . . . I’ve got some good, solid scans. Visuals, too. I can’t see every detail, but I can see enough. This was a large and, I assume, thriving civilization.”
Rev’s heart gave a little lurch at the word “was.”
Dr. Njuguna didn’t miss it, either. “What do you mean, Fiona, when you say was a thriving civilization?”
“I can see signs of cities. Really big cities. They could be human from my perspective. And there are a few other things that don’t make sense. They have to be manmade. Alienmade, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a geologist. Some of what I can see, even from this distance, well, they aren’t natural.”
“We know there’s a civilization there, Pilot Clyburn,” Captain Nyad interrupted. “That’s why we came.”
“That’s just it, Captain. There was a civilization here, but it isn’t here now.”
There was a moment of shocked silence in the CIC before Dr. Njuguna said, “Please be clear, Fiona. What do you mean by there isn’t anything there?”
“I mean, there’s no sign of life. It’s a dead planet. Whatever civilization there used to be here, it’s gone now.”