Darkworld: Earth

The timer clicked down to zero and the oxygen mask abruptly filled with a burst of ammonia, shocking Captain Moon into wakefullness. She gasped and training took over as she slapped the button that would trigger her and her crew to be injected with the counter anesthetic. She spent a moment reviewing everyone’s vitals. She wasn’t a doctor, but she knew enough to see at a glance that everyone had survived the jump.

While the subspace jump was survivable and it was possible to go through it awake, that was an emergency option only. It had only been tested on animals. Animals who were anesthetized recovered without issue, while thirty percent of those who were subjected to the experience while awake showed behavioral abnormalities. Conscious translations had not been tested on humans for ethical reasons.

The crew had been required to sign hundreds of pages of legal wavers just to state that they understood that the Tunnel Drive was still experimental and that the long term effect on the human body was largely unknown. The addition of two jumps to the mission’s itenerary – one to jump into the anomolous star’s orbit and another to return them to their mission’s scheduled course – meant an almost four percent increase in the time that the crew would spend in subspace.

Nobody was particularly happy about that, nor about signing the additional waver to signify that they acknowledged and understood the necessity of the increase in their exposure, but everyone had agreed.

They would each have to go through the standard post-jump medical examinations, but there would be time for that later. Captain Moon, her XO and the rest of the command staff quickly pulled the IV’s out of their arms and disconnected themselves from their restraints before rushing to the bridge.

It wasn’t far; the stasis room for command staff was located strategically nearby. But it was still nearly fifteen minutes after the completion of the translation from there to here that the last of the officers and specialists under her command arrived at their stations. It was unusual that Gabriel was among them, but nobody found his presence out of line. Not when this entire jaunt off the mission specs was due to his discovery.

The other technicians began scanning the star system. While they’d seen it in the probe’s data from the probe that had been parked twelve light years away, and so they therefore knew that there were six rocky planets and three gas giants, they were now close enough to observe them with visual light.

And when the scans of the fourth planet from the star were thrown up on the screen, Captain Moon couldn’t help but gasp in shock.

It was perfect. Beautiful. Covered in oceans and blue-green forests. On the dark side, three locations showed the lights of large cities.

“Someone lives here,” she declared. She allowed her wonder to suffuse her for just a moment before she commanded that engineers begin immediate checks on the Tunnel Drive in order to prepare for another translation for an emergency exit, if that was required.

Mentally, she reviewed the doctrine. First contact. Her crew was actually set to make first contact with alien life forms. It had been theorized as enough of a possibility to warrant a section of their training. Now that the existence of alien life had been confirmed, the entirety of their mission’s purpose had shifted. Except nobody had actually expected it. Captain moon allowed herself to feel a moment of nerves that she and her crew were not up to the challenge before she steeled herself and assumed her professional persona.

“Okay. How far are we from that planet?” she asked.

“Approximately four light-hours,” one of the staff members supplied. “Precisely two hundred sixty-two light minutes, give or take a few seconds.”

“We are fourty-five minutes post translation, which means we have about three hours before any of their instruments see the arrival flash,” she said.

“If they’re looking for it,” her XO pointed out.

“Correct, if they’re looking for it. We’re going to assume that they are looking at the night sky. The arrival flash is more than bright enough to have been seen by the naked eye from earth at our distance. Any astronomical instrument pointed in our general direction is going to pick it up,” she pointed out. “Doctrine at this point is to signal that we’re friendly and have no hostile intentions. How do we do that?”

“We know that they use the Ku-band,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t we use that to try to say hello?”

“Can we even do that?” one of the other specialists asked. “We have no idea what they’re broadcasting. How are we going to talk to them?”

“There are a few signals that repeat very frequently,” Gabriel pointed out. “We’re not certain what they mean, but if we broadcast them with enough power we can be pretty sure that they’ll see them. It’s as polite of a method as I can think of to announce that we’re here.”

“Right. Continue observing the planet and scanning the system, but we’ll also begin broadcasting as Gabriel suggests. Gabriel, any idea what we should broadcast specifically?”

“Yeah. There’s two signals which occur in sequence quite often. I have no idea what’s inbetween those, but I’m pretty sure they signal a start and stop of transmission. We can use those signals to begin introducing them to our binary structure and hopefully teach them to talk to us. I’ve already thought of this to some degree and I think I have a broadcast which will at least say ‘hi, we’re here.’ After that we wait for them to acknowledge us with a similar response,” Gabriel explained.

“What, specifically, is the message?” Captain Moon inquired.

“It’s just the start and stop sequence with some time gaps in between them,” Gabriel explained. “If we broadcast those across each of the frequencies I’ve identified, then if their computers work anything like ours they’ll start downloading empty files of various sizes. Eventually someone is going to ask where they’re coming from, right?”

“Okay. Let’s try that. Begin broadcast as soon as you’re ready, Gabriel.”

“Right.”

It had been nearly an hour since the strange spherical ship had arrived. The Topokan’s were growing restless and increasingly nervous as the ship simply sat there, unmoving aside from its initial velocity. It was moving slightly inwards towards the star, but the pace it was moving at was so slow that it would take decades to arrive. The computer predicted its tragectory once the various gravity wells of the stellar system had begun to effect it.

In twelve years it would pass between the orbits of the second and third planet before being flung out by the star’s gravity into the oort cloud, where it would eventually leave the stellar system completely.

A thought occurred to Eolai, and he began running projections on the computer. He didn’t share his thoughts aloud to avoid alarming the Topokans. Discounting the bending and fluctuations in the subspace dimensions, this method of FTL travel was largely undetectable except for the light emitted in a sudden flash on translation. If the species on board believed that the arrival light was the only method of detection, they might believe that this large ship was undectable.

Which meant that this could be a spy ship. He discounted the idea that it was an ambush. He’d had the computer do a threat analysis on the ship and come back with a zero-point-five on the Krevtal scale. The two most dangerous possibilities were that the ship could administer some sort of bio-attack on the planet, or that it would ram the planet itself.

Eolai would not give them the chance. He was content to allow them to spy, but if they made any unannounced movements toward the fourth planet – the planet where his children lived – he would order the ship to be destroyed.

He was about to send a secure message to the other humans of the Topokan fleet when he heard a slight beep. Out of a habbit, he checked his Rockata for the message that one of his children had sent to him. Nothing.

It beeped again, the small device strapped around his wrist. And it beeped again, and again, and again.

It was so strange that for just a moment he was confused who would be using that particular frequency to send empty messages. Then, on a hunch, he changed the receiving frequency.

It beeped every few seconds, just like the frequency which was reserved for Eolai’s family.

The Rockata was not a secure communications device. It was, in fact, the very opposite. Anyone could view a message sent by it. That was the very point. When you had something you wanted to say to the universe itself, you used the Rockata. Mostly it was used by children who believed that they had something very important to say and wanted the entire universe to know about whatever thoughts were in their head at that moment.

Abruptly, Eolai began to laugh as he figured it out. He suddenly knew why the ship had come to this world, what had lured them here, and he had a sneaking suspicion about who was on board. This would be fun.

The Topokans turned and waited for him to speak. He probably shouldn’t have laughed, human humor was sometimes difficult for the Topokans to understand, and they probably wouldn’t put together what was happening on their own for some time yet. The military vessels in orbit of this particular world weren’t set to scan the Ku-band for one very simple reason.

It was almost exclusively used by children.

“All ships, stand down. Our guests are attempting to communicate peacefully,” he announced to his crew and across the secure network with his peers in the other security vessels.

“We detect no communication attempts,” one of his compatriots objected. “My crew is beginning to grow nervous.”

“There are children on that ship,” Eolai declared sternly. “They are attempting to communicate their presence to the universe.”

A pause as the severe statement he had just made was processed by his human peers and all of the Topokans who had heard it. A few of the more clever Topokans put it together and began scanning the ship for emissions between twelve and eighteen gigahertz, and Eolai was not surprised at all to see the results.

“Standing down,” the voice who had spoken confirmed, and one by one each of the other ships confirmed that they were powering down their weapons.

“Send word to the civilian authorities of the human government,” Eolai said. “There are a lot of toys which will soon begin acting very strange, and many children will soon be receiving very strange messages on their Rockatas.”

“We’ve received a response,” Gabriel announced, looking at the readings.

“Already? I thought our light wouldn’t reach the planet for another hour,” the captain said.

“The response isn’t coming from the planet. It’s much much closer than that,” Gabriel said. He paused, then ordered the optical telescope to examine a series of coordinates.

The other technicians obeyed his instructions despite the fact that there were no gravimetric readings in those directions at all. Captain Moon pulled up the results as soon as they became available to her, and she did a sharp intake of breath.

Large crystaline conical structures appeared on the telescope. The surfaces of the superstructures were slowly shifting through the spectrum, changing color as time passed with ripling prismatic patterns. Attached to the primary structures were many substructures of various shapes, some of which Captain Moon readily identified.

Missiles. Launch bays. Weapons. Things which were visibly and obviously dangerous, even if she didn’t know precisely how dangerous they were.

“Tell the engineering crew to speed up their post-translation checks on the Tunnel-Drive and prepare it for a potential emergency translation,” she said.

“Are we leaving?” her XO inquired.

“Not yet,” she said, “but if the situation changes I want to be ready to turn tail and get the hell out of Dodge. So far they haven’t done anything that we wouldn’t do in their situation. Their space assets detected our entry, somehow, and they either moved into position or were already in position to respond to any move we made. That’s not hostility, that’s just practicality. Once we announced ourselves, they started speaking back right quickly. We have a method of communication. Now we just need to work on speaking the same language.”

The crew all nodded, many of them barely containing their excitement.