Chapter 47: Scramble |
There were two kinds of knowledge.
The first was the one you knew intimately, had made a part of yourself on the deepest of levels, available with nary a thought.
The other was something you just kinda sorta maybe remembered if given the right prompt, but was seemingly ejected from your brain at the first hint of adrenaline.
A rather prominent example of the latter category was the exact meaning of the hellish screech the comms panel emitted for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, making Derek jump and slam his head into the ceiling.
“What the hell ...” He groaned, more annoyed than hurt, a spell getting the coffee stain off his shirt and removing the puddle it had made on the floor, while he slid the toe of his boot under the metal cup the beverage was supposed to be inside and kicked it up into his hands.
Then, before he could reach it, the comms panel screeched again and Ye-in burst in, her hair in a state of utter chaos, Mimi following shortly after, fox ears flattened against the top of her head, and finally Atticus shot through the door past them, bouncing off the roof above the pilot’s station to land in the table in the center of the room upside down, before finally rolling off it to come to a halt next to the comms pannel, just as Derek reached it, the phrase “Emergency Response Request” splashed across the screen in bold, bright red letters.
Right, that thing. Basically, it pinged all comm nodes connected to the military system in any way whatsoever, asking for a positive reply from anyone in the relevant area, and then sent the alert to anyone whose computers gave such a reply. Which meant that they were, in fact, in the area of whatever was happening.
Shit. This felt like it’d be an “opportunity to excel” in the worst possible interpretation of that phrase.
He tapped the “accept” command.
While the ship had been registered as a multipurpose type craft, emphasizing this particular version of its capabilities felt correct here.
“I see. This is Lieutenant Commander Roberts, UEN. The emergency broadcast network has you near the Horizon system. Is that correct?”
“Hold on, I need to check …” Derek muttered. Jeesh, that was in the middle of nowhere. But it was nearby, slightly behind them, so he cancelled [Alcubierre Bubble] to prevent them from making any more distance, they’d just have to walk back if this was something.
“Yeah, we can be there in twelve hours. What’s going on?”
“There’s an unknown starship heading towards the Horizon system from interstellar space, not responding to hails but clearly active, with a power curve that suggests some degree of military purpose. We’d like someone with actual sensors to get a look at it and transmit the data back to us.”
“Isn’t that a job for the military?” Mimi asked.
“It is,” Roberts agreed. “But the nearest navy ship is a week’s travel away. No one is asking anything of you other than a long-range scan.”
That didn’t sound so bad …
“We’re doing it, right?” Derek asked, looking at the others, their expressions making their agreement clear. “Alright, we’re doing it, Lieutenant Commander. Where exactly is this thing?”
“Also, we’re offering haz- …” Roberts cut himself off with an awkward cough when he realized he didn’t actually have to sell them on anything. “I’m sending you the coordinates now, please head there at best possible speed. You’ll get any further information as soon as we do, stay safe, and hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll have a good story to tell and the equivalent of a couple of days’ worth of military hazard pay.”
Both the comms panel and the subsidiary comms channels at the other duty stations chimed, showing not just the location of Horizon, but also where the ship was relative to it, allowing him to reactivate [Alcubierre Bubble] and begin the Dragonfly’s journey towards their destination.
“Lieutenant Commander, I do have some questions,” Derek interjected. “For starters, how was this ship spotted, and how come they don’t have any scanner data to send you?”
“One of the colonists has a scouting build,” Roberts said. “No digital data, no real scale of anything, we all we know is that it’s about the size of a cruiser and, I quote, ‘has a hell of a lot more power than that ol’ freighter we took here.’”
That was … not exactly useful information. Freighters only really needed to power their engines via a reactor, lights, life support, even the computers were typically fuelled by cheap and plentiful mana to electricity converters that passing crewmembers would top up whenever possible.
Something with a significantly stronger power curve than one of those could be everything from a battleship to some kind of fast courier.
“Shoot,” Derek muttered.
“It’s also moving extremely quickly. We don’t know the exact speed, but we’re looking at something to the tune of a full third of light speed. Chances are they moved through interstellar space the long way round.”
“Wouldn’t that make it easy to backtrack and locate its point of origin?” Derek asked.
“That’s the weird thing: we knowwhere it came from. It’s a straight line from the …” Roberts let out a strangled cough that Derek was ninety percent certain was hiding some kind of profanity. “So, some dumbass in astrographics renamed the system of origin ‘Grafiti.’ if you haven’t updated your star charts in the last few days, it’s here; we have very up-to-date scans of that system. There is absolutely nothing there that could build a ship like that. It came from somewhere else.”
Which meant it could have been flying around for a long time. The ten light-years from Grafiti to Horizon at a third of light speed would take thirty years. From wherever it had been previously to Grafiti, even from the nearest star, assuming it had taken that journey at the same speed, forty-five years, but none of the stars nearby seemed like a good candidate for a civilization to have evolved and advanced, which would put the point of origin even further away.
Further, and further, and further …
“Does thing preced the [System]?” Derek asked, quickly tracing the “probable” path on the nav computer and sending it back by way of explanation.
“Shit.”
Yeah … that was the last thing you wanted to hear in a situation like this.
“You can reach the United Earth Navy directly via this channel,” Roberts explained. “My shift will be over in six hours, but there’ll always be someone reachable here.”
“Thank you,” Derek said, made sure the others didn’t have any more questions of their own, then hung up.
***
An hour later, he was back on his seat in the bridge, staring at the nav plot, the adrenaline rush of the alarm having long since worn off.
It still had the chance to be something genuinely crazy, yet the fact that there were still eleven more hours before anything could even happen.
In fact, Atticus had headed off to his room with a “call me if something blows up,” while Mimi had, once again, buried herself in the guts of the Dragonfly, first double-, then triple-checking just about everything that might wind up being called upon in a fight.
That was when the comms panel chirped again, this time displaying the caller as “Isaac Thoma.”
What now?
“Hi, Isaac,” Derek began. “What’s going on?”
“I heard you’re going to be picking a fight with some kind of alien starship,” Isaac said.
“I mean, it’s not supposed to get that far …” Derek offered, “… But the Dragonfly’s a great ship. We’re not exactly helpless.”
“Just … stay safe, okay? I’m heading there now.”
“Why?” Derek asked, far more heat in his voice than he’d expected or intended.
“I …” for a brief moment, his older brother, the seemingly all-powerful Sage, seemed taken aback, and Derek was about to apologize and try to explain, when Isaac continued.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean I wanted to take over for you, or imply you couldn’t handle yourself. It’s a potential new contact, if they’re friendly, I can help figure out what they’re about before someone shoves a foot in their mouth, if they’re not … I can help with that too.”
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And now Derek felt bad. And childish, his burst of rage at the implication he’d need help suddenly … honestly, he couldn’t find a word that adequately encapsulated things, except “shitty.”
“Did they try to talk to them yet?” Derek asked. He’d have hoped Roberts would have shared if that had been the case, but honestly, people did sometimes forget to share pertinent information, even if it was blindingly obvious that it should, in fact, be shared.
“They did try,” Isaac said. “No response. But the guy who spotted it says he saw weapons get charged, he’s not sure, though.”
“Wonderful,” Derek sighed, but he could feel his heart beating faster, for whatever reason.
“Just … we literally just met,” Isaac said. “Don’t get yourself killed. Please.”
“I’ll try,” Derek sighed again. “Talk to you soon.”
“Talk to you then.”
And with that, Isaac hung up, Derek handed over the burden of maintaining the [Alcubierre Bubble] to Ye-in, and headed down to his quarters to rest.
***
Six hours into their flight, Derek was lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, somehow bone tired, bored out of his skull, and keyed up to the point where he was a hair’s breadth from bouncing off the walls all at the same time.
When his phone finally chimed, tearing away whatever vestiges of rest he’d somehow managed to claim, he was bolt upright in an instant and hurled himself across the room.
“Ye-in?” he asked after picking up.
“Get up here, we’ve got news,” she told him, and he all but sprinted there, skidding to a halt outside the open bridge hatch, the room beyond having a very blurry picture of some kind of starship splashed across the main viewscreen, with a video of a man in a rear admiral’s uniform next to it, though when the man reacted to his arrival, Derek realized it was a live feed instead.
Obviously, this situation had somehow gone from “concerning” to “awful.”
“What’s going on?” he whispered in Ye-in’s ear.
“Cell phone picture,” she whispered back. “They still want actual scans, but … that’s definitely a warship.”
“This is obviously an old ship, potentially built to fight wars across interstellar distances,” the admiral was saying. “The problem is that it matches no known civilization, and we’d have spotted the ruins of a dead civilization capable of building such vessels.”
Rear Admiral French, as his name was revealed to be when he turnd far enough towards the camera to reveal his nametag, continued to talk doom and gloom while people outside the camera’s field of view responded, argued, and just in general left Derek wondering whether it was always like this when there weren’t cameras watching, and the fact that the crew of the Dragonfly was watching had been outright forgotten, or was this more a matter of this situation being unusually serious.
And then, the sound of a door slamming rang out from the speakers, followed by a new voice yelling, “We found it!”
French glared at somewhere to the left of the camera, causing the same voice to say, at a more normal volume, “We know what civilization built the ship.”
They hadn’t narrowed it down not to the world, or star system, or anything of the sort, but the specific civilization.
It wasn’t human, obviously, no human craft could have gotten all the way out there at STL speeds. In fact, no civilization Derek knew of could have done so, at least not at a point in time sufficiently far back to have allowed the vessel to travel here, even had it, somehow, managed to make the trick at just under light speed.
As such, all known civilizations were out, yet unless the navy had somehow managed to keep knowledge of an entire people under wraps. But that only took into account “living” civilizations. What if …
To his credit, French came to the realization Derek had slowly been working towards before the newcomer could make their own announcement.
“Please tell me this has nothing to do with the Dyson Sphere …”
“Sorry, Admiral. We found references to these ships on the Dyson Sphere. Apparently, whatever civilization lived there was a tad paranoid and tried to send out automated probes to check out the surrounding star systems, to make sure there wasn’t another, more warlike civilization rising.
“According to the official history, a self-destruct command was sent out the first time one of the probes reported back as having annihilated the ‘target.’ Apparently, that was a lie.”
“Are you trying to tell me there have been genocidal automated starships flying around the galaxy this entire time?” French snapped.
“Yes, Sir.”
The Admiral then turned to look straight at the camera.
“Captain Thoma, I presume you heard all that?”
“Yes,” Derek replied after a moment of surprise.
“Assuming you are still willing to continue your current course of action and scan that ship, stay clear. We need information, not dead heroes.”
Flattering. And scary.
“We’ll be careful,” he promised, and was about to say something else when yet another new voice made an appearance.
“How the hell did no one find the goddamn killbots in half a year of tearing apart that Dyson Sphere!? Those people need to be court martialed for sheer goddamn incompetence!”
“I’m not surprised this was missed. We are talking about several ronnabytes of data, organized in a way that is alien to us in the most literal of ways, spread out across … at least a dozen separate and no longer networked storage devices,” the still-unnamed researcher replied in a surprisingly calm voice. “It’s a goddamn miracle that they found anything, even knowing what they were looking for, and the only lesson to be taken away here is that more people should have been sent.”
“Are you trying to tell me that ‘potentially genocidal threats’ weren’t the priority?”
“I …”
“Enough,” French sighed, his voice cutting off everyone. “Captain Thoma, be careful. Captain Smith, keep comments productive; yelling won’t help here. Mr. Grey, Fleet Admiral Hunt will want a word. So, Captain Thoma, what are you going to do?”
Derek guessed that the guy yelling had been Smith, while Grey was probably the researcher, and French was probably quite unhappy at being forced to rely on a single civilian ship.
“Go in, get a scan, don’t die, make further plans from a position of safety, that’s the plan thus far.”
French sighed. “Just … stay safe, I don’t need your siblings coming for my head.”
Derek glared at the screen, trying to decide whether to hang up, storm off, or curse out the admiral, before settling on creating a privacy barrier, pulling out his phone, and calling Isaac. He might not have had the mana to create something capable of preventing anyone of a decent Level from overhearing him, but he didn’t have to; he just needed to get below the detection threshold of the microphones on the comms gear.
“Hey, Isaac, apparently, we’re looking at some kind of automated ship from the Dyson sphere. I figured you’d want to know that.”
“Shit,” was the only reply that came from the other end of the call for long enough to reply.
“How eloquent, I can see why they call you ‘the Sage.’”
“That bad?” Isaac asked. “Or good? Or, I don’t know … what usually makes you snippy?”
“Annoyance,” Derek sighed. “A whole lot of people used to being able to order their subordinates around are snapping at each other because they can’t snap at us, and I don’t think I can just turn off the damn video conference because some of that stuff is useful.”
“Tell me if it gets bad enough that someone needs to knock some heads together. Good luck, and stay safe,” Isaac replied.
“Bye,” Derek said and hung up.
Stay safe. Don’t die.
Neither of those sentiments was exactly wrong, but they both came across as one and the same: you’re too weak to do anything here.
***
Over the next few hours, Derek found himself unable to leave the bridge, even if the arguing was seriously getting on his nerves, and that was on top of the way he was being reminded of his shortcomings.
Yet it felt like something important would happen the moment he stepped off the bridge, something that was even proven correct when he headed off to the toilet and came back to partial blueprints of one of the automated killer starships.
It really was a partial one, showing that the ship had lasers and particle beams for weapons, far more advanced than what humanity had, but potentially not actually superior, depending on how much of a difference magic, something the vessel decidedly lacked, made.
Also, all hails had gone unanswered, the search for some kind of override/shutdown command had proven unsuccessful, and overall, the certainty that this ship was going to trash the colony was growing with every passing second.
And even the Dragonfly was hours from being able to do just about anything, never mind anyone actually capable of changing the outcome …
Just like that, the hours passed. Tense, anticipatory, shitty.
***
One of the more exploitable side effects of being able to move faster than light was the ability to leap ahead of “old light,” aka the light showing something that had happened much earlier but was only moving away from the origin at the just under three hundred thousand kilometers a second, that was, well, the speed of light.
For example, had the Dragonfly’s sensors been good enough and aimed at Earth, they’d have been able to watch the crusades occur, almost exactly a thousand years ago.
As such, unless the alien starship had absurd sensors of the FTL kind, which they knew it didn’t, jumping in behind it, roughly five light hours behind it, their scanners more than sufficient for observing something like that.
And not only would it take five light hours to catch up to the target, but in that time, the ship would have moved almost another two light hours, meaning that even after they’d dropped back into real-space, they’d have nearly seven to plan before the alien vessel would even know they were there.
And it seemed like they’d need most of that time …
It took less than a minute after their return to realspace for the Dragonfly’s sensors to happily report just how bad the situation was.
“Yeah, I don’t like that power curve,” Derek said, then commed engineering. “Mimi, any chance we’re just looking at a ship with poor shielding?”
“I mean …” she paused, biting her lower lip. “I don’t think so. Their radiators are mostly facing backwards, so it’s looking a little worse than it actually is, but not by much.”
“Radiators?” Derek asked before he could stop himself.
He knew what those were, of course, starships generated a lot of heat via their various systems and given that they were surrounded by vacuum, one of the best non-magical insulators in existence, they needed a specialized way to get rid of it, but he’d never actually seen a ship with real, mechanical radiator outside of a pre-[System] museum. Civilian ships had enchantments, and military ones had the cooling runes reinforcing their anti-laser armor pull double duty.
“Yep,” Mimi declared.
Well, if they hadn’t known the shipw as pre-[System], that’d have settled it.
“You want to go for those,” a voice Derek only belatedly recognized as Captain Smith declared, the man sounding quite different when he wasn’t in the middle of an apoplectic fit. “We don’t know how tough that armor is, but the radiators have to be fragile.”
“They’re not fighting it,” French declared.
“How many people are down there?” Mimi asked.
“Huh?” Someone, not French, asked.
“How many people are on that colony, right now, who can’t get off it before that ship arrives?” Mimi repeated.
“Is there an acceptable number we could leave down there?” Ye-in added, leaving Derek to sigh in relief.
“What?” she asked, voice sharp.
Derek shrugged, not entirely sure why he’d done that.
“Let’s go save a colony.”
“Yeah, let’s,” Atticus added. “But first, a plan?”
Derek mentally reached out to [Scholar of War], the [Skill], rather unhelpfully, declaring, “You’re fucked.”
So he poked it again, getting a slightly more “nuanced” reply in “going by the historical precedent, you’re fucked.”
Yeesh …
But they had to at least try.