Space Station Euphrates
United Atlantic Coalition Ship Foundry
Low Earth Orbit
December 24, 2246
Gwen stared out the window at the slowly rotating globe far below.
“This sucks.”
Gwen fumed quietly, ‘Not only am I going to have to work on Christmas, but Troy broke up with me! By pulse!’
“Jerk.”
Frank walked in to the mess hall and asked, “Are you talking to yourself?”
Gwen whirled on him, “No! Yes. Not really.” She stood and walked over to stand near him.
“Well, which one is it?” Frank sat down and started dialing in his meal order on the table’s controls. He was a middle-aged man with olive skin and light brown hair, just starting to go grey at the temples.
Gwen flopped into a seat across from Frank. She was in her twenties, blonde, pale and fit, but already trending toward the apple shaped body of a spacer. “Troy broke up with me this morning.”
Frank finished placing his order and looked at her calmly over his glasses.
“Weren’t you planning on breaking it off with him once you rotated back dirtside?”
Gwen met his gaze unflinching and replied, “Well, yes. But that's not the point. He didn't even vid me. He just sent a pulse!”
“I see. That is monstrous. I assure you there are many more fish in the sea.” Frank’s said dryly.
“That's not the point. Now I'm going to be single on Christmas. Bad enough I got stuck working it this year, but now this. It's just discouraging.” She dropped her head on her forearms with an audible sigh as the mess droid brought out Frank's food.
He grabbed his utensils and pulled the lid off the plate. “Did you buy him a present?”
She bolted upright. “Oh God! Yes, I did. Now I'm stuck with it! He wanted a new vacuum scooter. I got him one of our new production run.” She slumped back down. “At least I got my employee discount…”
The intercom buzzed. “Commander Ramirez to the Operations Center, please report to Ops.”
Frank grumbled, “Always when I'm eating.”
****
Frank walked into Ops, munching on the tail end of his sandwich. Gwen followed, more from curiosity than need.
“Report.”
“Boss, we're getting some weird telemetry coming in from one of the ore drones,” Jill said, looking concerned. She sat at her data terminal, juggling feeds from a dozen mining drones spread all over the inner solar system.
“Hmm. Think it's claim jumpers again?” Frank slid into his desk chair and powered up his terminal.
“I don’t know what this is. I've never seen readings like this before.”
“Shoot it over to me.”
The feed in question came up on his screen, and Frank frowned. The emissions were totally unfamiliar to him. “That's the strangest thing. Those energy reading don't make any sense. It can't be a drone. Do we have a heading for these readings?”
Jill said, “I think I can calculate one, give me a minute to extrapolate… got it.”
“Pulse it to me. Gwen, want to get some use out of that scooter after all?”
“Sure thing, boss.”
****
“It just isn't fair,” said Ryn, “No one told me there were little unmanned ships out here.”
Yrpp patted its shoulder gently. “No one knew. It’s not your fault we nearly ran into one, just give the Librarian a chance to calm down.”
Qroo leaned against the bulkhead, heart pounding in her chest. That little ship had hurtled out of nowhere, nearly smacked right into their fore port quarter, and nearly killed her from shock. Space was too big to be running into things on accident! Calming, she gave real thought to the odds of something being out here. She adjusted her coat and strode back on to her bridge.
“Get me some more detailed scans of that ship, I want to confirm a suspicion. I think we’ll find they are mining that asteroid belt.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Detailed scans coming in, Librarian… looks like the hull is mainly composed of carbon-iron alloys meshed with a matrix of crystalline carbon. Incredibly low thermal output, that’s why we didn’t notice it sooner. It was basically ballistic, no engine output. I see a gimbal ring around the perimeter. That might be a crude Ion drive. There’s no crew space at all, just an open bay for cargo. And I’m showing several tons of asteroid ore on board, Ma’am.”
“Interesting,” said Qroo. “So they obviously have some form of space travel, even if only intra-system.”
“Auditor, please conduct a deep numerical scan of the system, check for any chaotic integer fragments. I want to know if anyone but us has used an FTL drive in this system.”
Yrpp acknowledged the order and began work at his station. Qroo sat down and continued to watch the data stream in.
****
Frank and Gwen sped through the darkness of the solar system in the factory fresh vacuum scooter. It was a sleek craft, seating five in a pinch and four comfortably, and had the newest model ion engines. It could make the run from Earth orbit to the belt in a matter of days.
Frank said, “This thing is pretty nice. You must have really liked this Troy.”
Gwen scowled, “Not that much, he’s always been kind of high maintenance. I actually got this for him to soften the blow when I left him.”
“And there’s the employee discount.”
“Well, yeah.”
“We should be getting close to the source of those odd emissions. See what you can find with the scanners.”
Gwen swung aside the restraints she had been wearing and moved to a console nearby. “Yeah, I’m getting some weird EM readings. Maybe angle fourteen degrees x axis, twelve degrees z axis?”
****
“Librarian?”
Qroo looked up from her notes, her crest rising with interest, “Do you have results for me, Auditor?”
His voice shook slightly, “Yes Ma’am, those results are coming in, negative results so far, but Ma’am. There’s another ship coming in…”
Qroo sat bolt upright and stared at the screen.
“Detailed scan! Prepare evasive and shields. We have no idea what their intentions might be.”
Ryn frantically tapped away at his console, “Small vessel, appears to be a transport, reading thermal bloom from a life support system, looks like ion engines, reasonable power output but getting a lot of plasma flaring. No visible weapons.”
Qroo thought, ‘Assuming their weapons look like our weapons…’
“Bring us to a stop relative to them. Let’s not do anything that could be considered hostile. We’ve been picking up their transmissions for three days. Communications, do we have anything resembling a translation matrix?”
Sub-Auditor Grix replied, “We actually have several. There seem to be six or seven main spoken languages that we have been seeing constantly, as well as what appear to be dozens more on lower powered transmissions.”
“Well, it’s time to pick one and transmit a friendship message.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m selecting the language we have the most records of and broadcasting on a range of frequencies we have seen in use.”
****
It was alien. That was the only word for it. Alien and beautiful. The ship, for it could only be a ship, was sleek and seemed to ripple through the void of space. It was impossible to tell scale from where Frank sat, but it had to be nearly as large as Euphrates Station. There was a geometric precision to the shape of it, something of a nautilus shell or a perfect musical chord manifest in three dimensions.
“What in the crap is that?” asked Gwen.
Frank Ramirez was not a religious man, but right then and there, he prayed for the first time in many years. ‘Father God, let me get through this alive.’
The scooter’s short range radio crackled to life.
“Saludos, venimos en paz y no les deseamos ningún daño.”
To be continued...
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