Darkworld: Earth

1.

Gabriel Nguyen studied the data for hours before coming to a decision. It was not naturally occuring, he was certain of it. He swallowed, checking the clock.

The captain would be asleep right now. Gabriel, a night owl, often ignored the strict schedules that the rest of the crew observed to maintain some sort of circadian rhythm. He logged over twelve hours out of every twenty four reviewing his assigned data, and nobody particularly cared if he did his job at any particular time as long as his reports continued coming through to their inboxes.

This report, however, warranted a face-to-face meeting. After some consideration, he decided that it warranted waking the captain up. She’d be annoyed with him, but she was a consumate professional. The XO might be a little annoyed that Gabriel was jumping rank, but on a discovery this large his only choice would be to consult with the captain anyway, and anyway Gabriel disliked the slimy bastard.

Checking his uniform and his hair to make certain he was presentable, Gabriel pulled himself out of his ‘dungeon,’ and floated along the hallways to the captain’s quarters, where he pressed the doorbell and waited patiently. After a moment had passed, he pressed the button again.

“This had better be important,” the captain’s voice said over the intercom.

“I believe it is, Captain,” Gabriel said.

There was a pause. “Gabriel?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

Another pause. “Give me five minutes.”

Gabriel waited, and eventually the door opened to reveal the captain. Her uniform wasn’t quite as emaculate as it usually was, but given that she’d thrown it on in haste he was willing to overlook it. Especially since his own uniform was generally wrinkled from being thrown into the storage locker unfolded.

“I’m very surprised to see you, Gabriel,” the captain said. “It’s been two weeks since the last time we’ve bumped into each other. If I didn’t know better I’d think you’re avoiding me, considering that we’re supposed to be on the same shift.”

“I’m not avoiding anyone,” Gabriel said. “I’m just consumed by my work. There’s so much data to go over from the probes, and when we’re talking about the fact that some of them traveled three thousand light years from earth before they rendezvoused with the Seeker. There’s petabytes to review and even with AI assistance it’s a lot to go through.”

“I understand. There’s a reason I’ve been tolerating your lack of military discipline.”

“Aside from the fact that I’m a civilian?”

“In an emergency, everyone is infantry,” she teased. “But yes, aside from that. You do your job and you do it well, and you do it best without constant oversight. Which is why I’m willing to give you some credence when you skip over my XO and come straight to me in the middle of the night. Unless you’ve suddenly become overcome with lust for some reason?”

Gabriel blushed and shook his head. “No, it’s not that.”

“Pity. It’s been months since the last time I’ve had to shoot down the hopes of one of the crew members. So then, what’s the big discovery.”

“Faint signals in the Ku-band of a star that probe three was twelve light years away from for eight months. There are definite patterns to it, and I can’t think of a single reason those patterns might be naturally occuring.”

The captain’s expression immediately shed any veneer of jocularity. “Okay. So if it’s not natural--”

“I said that I can’t think of a reason for it to be natural, not that it’s artificial,” Gabriel said quickly. “But, well, the thing is that it looks a lot like someone has satelites around one of the planets in that system, and that they might be using the Ku-band to communicate with them. It’s hard to tell from the data I have, but if you parked a probe twelve light years away from Earth, this is the sort of data you’d expect to see coming if you pointed it at Sol.”

“Are you certain?”

“Not even close, Captain,” Gabriel said quickly. “But I’m confident enough in the data to wake you up in the middle of the night.”

“And bypass Phil in the chain of command,” the captain said.

“He’d just wake you and we’d have wasted two hours of me explaining the data to him, only for me to have to repeat it.”

“We’re scheduled for another jump in six days,” the captain commented. “If we investigate this, it will put us behind schedule. If we don’t investigate this, then it might be decades before another mission from Earth is sent to this region of the galaxy.”

“It’s a command decision, Ma’am,” Gabriel agreed.

The captain stepped inside her room and grabbed a tablet. She typed on it for a few moments, and when she finished Gabriel’s own phone went off with a high-priority alert. An all-crew meeting in three hours.

“You have three hours to prepare a presentation of your data, Gabriel,” the captain said. “Is that enough time?”

“I’m already ready for it,” Gabriel answered, pulling out a flash drive from his pocket.

“Good man. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to make some coffee.”

He left her and went to the mess, preparing a meal and drinking some coffee. He’d been awake sixteen hours, but he was used to pulling all-nighters. He began to feel a little anxious about presenting his data to the entire crew – public speaking wasn’t really his thing – and he went to medical to take something to help with the jitters.

Three hours later, he gave his presentation.

Six hours later, he was asleep, and the rest of the crew was either going through his data, double checking his findings, or they were preparing for the possibility that there would be a deviation from the mission schedule.

Eighteen hours later, a probe was sent to the next rendezvous point to signal that the Seeker of New Discoveries would be delayed for an indefinite amount of time.

Six hours after that, the Tunnel Drive was engaged, and the Seeker vanished into the subspace dimension that allowed it to travel faster than light.

~~~~~~

Eolai was laughing with his family as his youngest son was recounting his accomplishments for the week since they had spoken last. The boy was six years old, and he was Eolai’s thirty-second child. Despite the fact that Eolai had only once held him in his arms, the bond of father to son was very important to both of them, as it had been with all of Eolai’s children.

Which is why he was surprised when the emergency beacon flashed. Eolai frowned, apologized to his son and explained that something was happening in space which required his attention. He ended the transmission and walked from his quarters to the bridge, not terribly worried about whatever ‘emergency’ was taking him away from family time.

He was aboard a Topokan vessel, and the Topokans were a nervous people. They would slam the emergency button if a trade vessel was two minutes early in its scheduled arrival time. It would take some time for Eolai to calm them down, and then if not too much time had passed he would see if his son wanted to speak with him some more. Or he would wait until the next communication came from the surface to demand his attention.

“What is so important that you have called me away from my family in the bonding time of my youngest son’s sixth year?” he demanded immediately.

The Topokans, despite being half again larger than Eolai, flinched at the tone of his voice. It was an act on his part, he was very fond of the crew of his vessel, but during an emergency it was best if the human in the room acted imperious. For the Topokans, at least. Acting imperious assured them that the human was in control of the situation, and was thus reassuring, even if proximity to such a man was intimidating to them.

After all, according to their own laws, Eolai could execute every single one of them on this ship and not have done anything wrong.

Not that he would ever do such a thing. But there was a procedure for him to request such a purge, and ‘because I felt like it’ was an acceptable reason.

One of the Topokans – Eolai had a long relationship with most of the crew but the exact pecking order of his allies was complex and if he was not paying close attention to it the lowliest janitorial servitor might suddenly rise to become the ranking officer – nervously began growling. Holograms appeared as the ship’s computer accompanied the verbal report with the data which was alarming his subordinates.

Fluctuations in one of the subspace fields which could theoretically be used for FTL travel. Nobody used that particular method because there were better options. Quieter options, faster options, and ones which required less energy.

The Topokan’s report concluded with a request to fire upon the phenomena the moment that anything resembling a space faring vessel appeared, which Eolai immediately countermanded and rebuked the furry biped for suggesting. The Topokan’s ears flattened and it quietly left the room. There was a subtle shifting as the crew readjusted to the new hierarchy.

Eolai wasn’t particularly paying attention to his allies’ political maneuverings. His rebuke would likely mean that the one who had suggested pre-emptive violence would spend the next few months performing unpleasant tasks. He also knew that it was a bit of hazing by the other crew members; anyone who had served with Eolai would know what his response to such a suggestion would be. The fact that the young Topokan had verbalized such an idea meant that he was young, new to the ship, and not particularly accustomed to dealing with humans yet.

He knew enough about his crew’s culture to know that he had performed exactly as they had expected him to. Which was reassuring to them. Humans were often unpredictable to the Topokan sensibilities, and although the dupe who had suggested violence was probably very surprised to find himself in his present circumstance, the rest of the crew was very reassured.

With one side of his mind, Eolai began reviewing data. There were three species which used this particular FTL method as an emergency backup to their primary drives, and when he realized that he reached out to the human fleet that was two stars away to inform them of the situation. While the Topokans would provide assistance to two of those races if possible, the third was of a biology inimical to his allies and would require human intervention.

With another side of his brain, he kept a sliver of attention on the Topokans to judge their morale and stress levels. While they wouldn’t fire without his authorization, he did care about his fuzzy friends and he tried to think of ways to reassure them that the situation was under control.

With the third side of his mind, he began planning for the few scenarios he could think of to explain the situation aside from a ship in distress.

Despite his orders to stand down from hostilities, he had to consider the idea that this was an attack on his world. By treaty this was a Topokan world, independent of the three local human empires. There were forces out there that might seek to destroy it or enslave its populace, and those forces were barbaric enough to not realize how completely outmatched they were. They might believe that simply because they couldn’t detect the faster than light emissions in the subspace fabric which proceded the arrival of a vessel using that method, that nobody could detect them.

With the final side of his mind, he began speaking to his allies on the other Topokan ships, who were in the same situation as he was. They began repositioning throughout the star system strategically.

Twelve ships to defend the inhabited fourth planet, two for each of the space stations, and five to stand guard around the phenomena.

He barked orders at the Topokans or he spoke quietly with his colleagues while his fingers danced through the holograms, pulling up data and reviewing it as the Topokans moved his ship into position. He felt a faint tingling in his bones as the short-jump FTL translation was made. If he was aboard a human ship, he would have experienced nothing at all during the translation, but the Topokans lacked the ability to tune their drives well enough to fool the human senses.

And, of course, if the Topokans were aboard the human vessel with him, then he’d still feel the tingling in his bones because the human vessel would tune its harmonics to accomadate the Topokan senses and not his own.

Sixty-four minutes after the anomoly was detected, a flash of violet light appeared in normal space. The ship sitting in the center of the phenomena was the damn strangest sight Eolai had ever seen. He dedicated one corner of his awareness to scanning the computers for any ships that match the appearance of the vessel before him while he repeated his instructions to his crew to hold fast and observe the vessel patiently.

Even with the computer assisting him, there were millions of ship chassis to sort through, but there were simply no matches.

It was a sphere, approximately six hundred meters in diameter. He spent a moment investigating why anyone would build a spacecraft in a sphere when such a shape wasn’t well adapted to the inclusion of a gravity system. There were several objects that the computer suggested might be either weapons or ion thrusters. Whatever this was, it was built in space and was not meant for traversing an atmosphere.

He entered a few queries into the computer to identify the parameters of any species which might produce a ship like this for various reasons and came back with none. At least, none that were native to this galaxy.

The ship made no moves that he could see at first, so he spent his time simply trying to identify his visitors. The Topokan ship had already scanned it for any weapons that might be considered particularly dangerous, but they found nothing except for a fusion reactor, two fission reactors, and of course the drive which allowed them to traverse the subspace dimension.

If anything, the ship was dangerously unarmed. It looked completely unable to defend itself.

The computer pinged back a suggestion for the shape; the methodology they were using to travel faster than light enveloped a perfect sphere of space with subspace foam and then traversed that sphere from source to destination. In terms of energy expenditure, it would be most economic to place the drive in the center of the ship, then build outward in a sphere while remaining within the volume that the drive’s energies would encase.

Which meant that the subspace method of FTL travel was not a backup but the primary drive.

“It has been five minutes,” one of the Topokans growled nervously. “What shall we do?”

“Our guest has shown no hostilities so far, aside from showing up unannounced. So we wait for them to announce theselves,” Eolai declared, and in a corner of his awareness he knew that his peers on the other Topokan ships had agreed with him.

“How long will that take?” the nervous Topokan asked.

“As long as it takes,” Eolai answered.