The Expansion Box Set, page 32
part #1 of The Expansion Series
“Can’t we just… wake up Lieutenant Rogers?” Sarvanto asked Torres quietly.
“The man suffered delayed-onset G-LOC; G-force-related loss of consciousness from a negative three-G spin. He’s not going anywhere until his brain stops trying to swell its way out through his ears,” Torres explained just as quietly.
“People,” he said more loudly, “I really don’t want to have to call up the admiral and explain that we can’t save the ship that saved almost the entire fleet, just because we don’t have a good enough driver at the wheel…”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the current helmsman said in a high, wavering voice. “It’s just too gosh-darned difficult to get it right.”
Too gosh-darned… who the hell is this idiot? Torres thought to himself. He fought the urge to haze the kid right off his bridge and off his ship.
“Perhaps it’s just a matter of co-ordination?” Paterson asked via the live comm link to his lab.
“Say what you mean, Paterson,” Torres told him.
“I’m saying, Captain, that perhaps we should let someone with very good hand-eye coordination try it? Like, maybe someone with the best eyes money can buy? And hands, for that matter…”
Torres thought about it. Rogers would have another fit and probably rupture another part of his brain at hearing his natural gift of flying boiled down to simple hand-eye coordination. When he thought more, he realized that it was actually a good idea; wasn’t the problem just a lack of anyone’s ability to process the input fast enough to adjust the output?
“Ask him if he’s up to it first,” Torres said. He knew what Jake would have said but he wasn’t sure what Specter would say now.
Specter, as it turned out, had retained Jake’s casual ability and willingness to try anything, regardless of how dangerous it was. He had agreed instantly, walked onto the bridge and stood behind the sweating young pilot wearing a smile. The kid relinquished the controls, getting up to almost curtsy to the heavily augmented man that some people called a cyborg under their breath. He stuck around to watch as Specter dropped into his place and adjusted the seat to be best placed to activate the controls.
“Matching angle and speed of rotation,” he announced in a voice that showed that he was so stone-cold that his heart only beat once a week. “Distance to docking bay eighty-nine meters… seventy…fifty… thirty… slowing approach… fifteen meters… ten…”
Torres wished he’d stop giving verbal countdowns to the collision he feared was about to happen at any moment. Just as he was forcing his eyes to stay open and not flinch from the impact, the hull reverberated with the sound of their docking clamps meeting the housing points on the bigger ship.
“Clamps engaged,” the tactical officer said. “We’ve got them.”
“Mainframe? Can you jack in to the Norton?” Torres asked their computer interface. He silently cursed Brandt for making him feel foolish every time he didn’t have a cool name for the thing that answered him back.
“Command not recognized,” the mainframe reported.
Torres sighed and gave a clear instruction using no ambiguity in his words.
“Interface complete,” the dull and unobtrusive sounds of the computerized voice replied. Torres could understand why it infuriated a couple of people who felt that it sounded too calm; like it was smug and knew something the humans didn’t.
“Power them up,” Torres said gleefully, “and hopefully we won’t have to board them.”
“Command not recognized,” the mainframe said again, as though being intentionally obtuse.
“Patch our power supply to the Norton,” Torres said, not bothering to hide his annoyance at the imperceptive computer.
An acknowledging tone answered him, followed by the readout showing their available power draining by almost forty percent. The bridge lights flickered ominously, showing just how fast the depleted battery banks of the frigate were sucking their lifeblood, until the comm burst into life.
“UNS Bōken sha Ichi, this is Captain Halstead of the Norton. Thanks for the bump,” came the croaky Australian voice of a woman who sounded like she had been smoking the shish pipes found in the less reputable of establishments on the lunar surface.
“Captain Halstead, this is Captain Torres of the Ichi. Good to hear your voice. What’s your situation, over?” The comm link, despite the ship’s horrific damage, was crystal clear.
“We have multiple casualties on all decks… no… no idea as to the full extent of the damage… We’re coming to an all-stop now, so you can disengage your dock and we should be good to dock to the Venture.”
“Understood, Norton, confirm you have propulsion, life support and containment?”
A pause on the other end before she replied.
“Confirmed. Shields are holding at four percent, we have two engines on our port side still functional and life support is active in all areas where we have people left. Norton out.”
“If that’s all, Captain?” Specter asked Torres, having relinquished the helm.
“Yes. Thanks for your assistance.”
Specter smiled, a polite smile that didn’t extend to his artificial eyes. He turned and exited the bridge, stopping as soon as the hissing sound popped closed behind him to leave him alone in the corridor leading away from the command center of the ship.
Specter reached his hand out to the wall to steady himself, feeling an unfamiliar sensation coursing through his body. His breathing, usually so slow and shallow that people were forgiven for thinking that he didn’t need to suck in air, became rapid and saturated his remaining organic parts with so much oxygen that he became lightheaded almost instantly. He recognized this, holding his breath to try and force the carbon dioxide levels in his body to rise and counteract the hyperventilation that was beginning to take hold of him. He staggered towards the ladder, half falling down it until he reached the level where the lab was and turned to bounce along the narrow corridors like a drunken pinball.
He reached the double doors of the lab, his breath now loud and ragged as his ocular implants began to lose focus on his surroundings. HUD information flashed up irrelevantly and the implant in his inner ear wirelessly connected at random to a ship-to-ship channel from the Norton without him selecting it.
“…very low power. Estimate approximately one-nine minutes to docking.”
“Understood. We’re coming to you.”
Specter shook his head to clear the unwanted conversation from his head and severed the comm link he had accidentally hijacked. He staggered into the lab, his breathing louder and labored. He fell to his knees in the open space inside the doors as they hissed closed behind him.
“Help…” he gasped, sucking more air in and it all worse. “Some kind of… malfunction…”
Just as Doctor Paterson and two lab assistants rushed towards him, he blacked out slamming his head onto the rough metal of the deck.
“Yes, Lieutenant.” Torres’s voice came patiently over the poor comm line to Eze on the surface below. “I understand, but right now I literally don’t have a ship to send for you. I’ve requested one from the Venture, but they are all currently engaged in rescue ops with the two damaged frigates. Wait it out.”
She pursed her lips, fighting the urge to growl her frustration out. She refrained, not knowing how the nervous Kuldar skulking around in the shadows would react. She had first thought that there were only a few of them, but the translation software worked better as it learned and added to the database of sounds. She had spent her time stranded on the planet learning more about them.
“My people came here a long time ago,” Asha had explained to her.
She asked if he minded her recording their conversation so that she could review it later, but she realized she had confused him by her request. Instead, she demonstrated how her suit could capture a video of him talking and played it back for him to understand. He gave his consent, speaking an excited chatter of click and croaks behind him to prompt two smaller Kuldar to come forward. They must have been Asha’s children, because they sat by the sides of his chair and listened intently as he spoke.
“My people came here a long time ago,” Asha said again, beginning the story of his race, “from another planet connected to the red sun.”
Eze racked her brain for other red dwarf stars. Unfortunately, her knowledge of the cosmos was pretty poor.
“Our legends say of a ship that made the time and distance…” He rattled off a sound in his own tongue that didn’t translate into English through Eze’s earpiece. She glanced at the comm device on her forearm and saw the list of possible translations.
Irrelevant. That was the word she picked out. So they had a Fold Drive?
“We did this to flee our planet because the Va’alen”—Eze watched as the children flinched at the sound of the word—“destroyed our places with their machines. We took to the black beyond the sky and left our world. We came here on a very enormous ship, and our small ship came to here. We had camps on this place and started to build homes with the things we brought with us, but the Va’alen came after us and killed many. Our big ship, the one that moved through time, had to go or else be destroyed. We are all that is left of the Kuldar. Our other ship never came back, and our small ship cannot hold us all or move through time like the ship of our ancestors. We have stayed here ever since, hiding from the Va’alen.”
The smaller aliens, the ones she had assumed were his children, hung their heads in sadness. Eze felt a wave of despair too, a feeling of such overwhelming melancholy and hopelessness that she had to stifle a small sob and blink away the tears she had felt prickling her eyes.
“So you’ve been stuck here, stranded without a way to get home or to another planet ever since then?” she asked.
She had to wait for the comm device to change her words into the complex kind of Morse code they understood. Asha had managed to hiss a few words in English, but that was mainly copying the simple sounds they had made. He learned fast, but not fast enough to tell the story of his people in a language he had only heard hours before.
She had asked about that, about how she felt emotions that weren’t her own, about how she had known that Asha meant them no harm when they had first found him in the clearing almost half a day ago.
In answer, he smiled—his approximation of a smile that translated effortlessly between alien races with vastly different physiologies, between beings that existed trillions of light years away from each other. He lightly touched his large forehead to indicate that he could transmit emotions telepathically. Eze had understood, in a way that she couldn’t comprehend or explain. She had understood that they could project their feelings and intentions, as if the Kuldar possessed some higher brain function that humans had either not yet developed or lacked the capacity to unlock.
“So… what do you want from us?” she asked tentatively.
“We are stuck on this place,” Asha said passionately. “We cannot grow, and we cannot expand. We must keep away from the surface for fear of Va’alen patrols discovering our homes. They have usually left us alone since they believe we are only a few and of no consequence, but not when they have other priorities in this system.”
“What priorities?” Eze asked intently.
Asha smiled.
“This is something I must speak to your queen about.”
“We don’t have a…” Eze paused, a smile creeping up one corner of her mouth. “Asha? Did you just ask me to take you to my leader?”
39
Deep Orbit of Proxima Centauri
“Ground team from Cortez shuttle five… Ground team, Cortez Five, come back, over?”
“Cortez Five from Viper,” Eze said into her comm. “Transmitting my coordinates to you now. Be advised that the LZ has an enemy ship on the ground; do not engage it.”
“Roger that, Viper. Be with you in eleven mikes. Out.”
Eze smiled, looking forward to getting back to their ship and getting out of the armor. She had been in it for close to sixteen hours and felt the un-soldier-like need to step directly out of it and directly into a deep, hot bubble bath. The second colony ship, the Cortez, had jumped in only an hour before and had docked one of the ravaged frigates directly to its ventral bays. Desperate work was underway to repair it. The rest of the available fleet had simultaneously launched every shuttle they had with medical and damage repair teams onboard to stabilize and fix up the Norton. The Cortez had apparently been late to the party as they had suffered damage during their last jump, but they had arrived in time to help pick up the pieces, at least.
Somewhere in that confusion, a request had come through for an empty shuttle to be sent to the surface with two squads of UN troops and a mobile base station. The orders were to set up a position and guard the acquisition of an abandoned enemy spacecraft, and commander Brandt’s team from the surface was to be taken directly to the Venture to meet with the admiral.
The contents of that shuttle, just as the alien craft on the surface, were to be treated as classified. The pilots were to stay sealed inside the cockpit. The troops sent were a double dose of CP units; all dark armor and brooding silences exuding mystery and awe.
Two suited UN personnel stepped up the ramp, the shorter one of them in armor matching the incoming troops. She paused to relay information to the new ground commander. The other was a regular UN seaman by the look of him, but the third and fourth members of the party were altogether different.
Shrouded in a long cloak with a hood that set the large head in shadow, the tall aliens stepped curiously alongside the humans. Their long legs and stooped bodies seemed so different from the humans’. Beneath those cloaks were the two Kuldar, Asha and another male called Sharga, who Asha trusted. He wore gilded armor not unlike Asha’s, with an intricately chased breast plate of swirling, interlocking patterns and matching greaves that seemed more ceremonial than functional. Eze had been told that Asha was their king and Sharga their general. Both of these titles sounded impressive until she realized that the race only numbered a little over three hundred and neither of these two was actually in charge. That honor fell to Asha’s mate, Nerisha, who held the royal bloodline.
Neither was armed. Eze had explained that it would be considered hostile to greet another race armed. Asha had replied without saying anything, merely projecting the feeling of seeing herself approaching tactically and carrying a gun.
“That was different…” she said, trailing off. She had no way to refute his answer. As weird as it felt, she was getting used to the mostly one-way telepathic communication.
Asha stayed still and resolute, slipping a small, clear mask over his face as the shuttle pressurized and made the environment slightly too oxygenated for the aliens’ comfort. Sharga did the same, but he could not hide his nervousness as easily as Asha did. The shuttle took off, heading directly for the Venture.
Eze tried something new. She projected her thoughts to Asha, thinking of getting his attention and trying to convey that she was going to contact her immediate leader, her captain. He made no response to her mental efforts. She told him in English, hearing the translation. She felt his understanding wash over her. Bringing up a secure private channel, she boosted her signal through the shuttle’s systems.
On the bridge of the Ichi, Torres saw the incoming channel request blinking on his terminal and recognized the CP code beside it for the encryption. She wanted to talk in private, so he asked Sarvanto to take his seat.
Stepping quickly into his cabin, he hit the blinking icon on his terminal and sat down.
“Amare,” he said, using her first name warmly, “I’m glad you’re safe.”
“You worried about me, my little Taco?” she teased.
This earned her an annoyed look from him that quickly turned into a smile.
“I’m always worried about you,” he said. “You know that.”
She switched the conversation, giving her private opinion on the facts that had been relayed in her official report to the senior officers in the fleet.
“Just watch yourself around Dassiova,” Torres warned her gently. “He’s a hard-ass and doesn’t like waiting for anything.”
“Well, he’s really going to enjoy having the aliens’ feelings transmitted directly into his brain then,” she replied sarcastically.
“Just keep it tight, okay? Did you get a look at the alien ship?” he asked.
“Yeah, just not inside. Asha said the Va’alen are sneaky assholes who like to leave booby traps.”
Va’alen, Kuldar, Torres thought. How in the hell does a classified research recon mission become a science fiction story in the space of a couple weeks?
“Anyway, approaching the Venture now. Will I get to see you later?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he told her. “I’ll need a thorough, personal debrief in one of the spare crew quarters as soon as I can stand both of us down for a while.”
“Looking forward to it,” she answered playfully. “Viper out.”
“People,” Dassiova said gruffly, “I’ll keep this as brief as possible…”
He addressed the combined fleet captains and their flight officers in a bland and undecorated briefing room on the command deck of the fleet flagship.
“Where we expected to be doing and what we expected to be at this point in the mission are not as things have worked out,” he said. “The Hammer and the Norton are both badly damaged, and we have no way of knowing if they can be made jump-ready in good time. We have launched deep space probes in all directions to give us advanced warning of any more alien ships incoming, but as far as we can tell, there aren’t any in the immediate vicinity.
“My thanks and my condolences to Captain Hayes and Captain Halstead. The bravery and sacrifices of their crews have not gone unnoticed. You have our gratitude, for what it’s worth.”
