Human Base, Earth
8 years 2 months after Eridani landing
Wandering time [283 years]
“You done? We should look inside the ship.” Klyn gestured towards the ramp that extended down to the ground from the Human ship.
Breaking herself out of her reverie, Ranlin turned around to her companion, who was already walking towards the ramp with his back to her.
“Inside?” squeaked Ranlin, hurrying after him.
“Inside. That’s where all of the military information and the like will be.”
“We’re not here for weapons, Klyn!” Ranlin stated.
“Well we’re not here to make you feel better either, so let’s just look inside the ship and see what we find, alright?”
Her ears fluttering in annoyance, Ranlin followed after him as he walked up the ship’s ramp, which turned out to be a set of tight stairs. The two Vakurian were slightly worn out by the time they got to the top; the gravity of Earth was only about 8% greater than standard, but it was noticeable.
Stepping up to the outer airlock, Klyn raised his gun and pointed it at the door.
“Let’s see how tough this stuff is.”
Ranlin’s eyes widened and she stepped forward. “Wait -!”
Klyn fired, the high twang of the particle weapon’s energy pack discharging sang out through the air. The door, along with some of its frame, disintegrated into a cloud of metallic atoms and sand which collapsed on the decking. Ranlin winced as the wave of heat from the reaction swept past her.
“Not so tough,” Klyn said as he stepped into the ship.
“There was a manual release on the side of the door!” Ranlin said, exasperated.
Klyn shrugged. “Well, now we know that their armor does nothing against energy weapons.”
“We already knew that! The humans fought one another with kinetics! Weren’t you just moments ago marveling at the guns or something!?” Ranlin took a deep, calming breath, but was obviously still angry. “You know what, never mind. You’re MY escort. Don’t blow anything else up, or even touch anything else, without my say so. Got it?”
Klyn frowned and his ears drooped slightly. Slowly, he nodded if somewhat reluctantly acknowledging her command.
“Good. Now help me find a computer terminal, I want to get as much data as possible before we have to go back to the Valiant.”
Stepping in front of him as quickly as she could, Ranlin strode confidently down the central corridor, her head swiveling around as she looked at the construction of the ship. Fragile looking ladders were hanging from the compartments above her, which matched those on the walls of the corridor. It took her a moment to figure it out – the ships had no artificial gravity and were built to operate in space. Inside a gravity well, the ladders were impractical. In zero-g, though, the ship was built to operate without any need to signify an up or down. All of the hundreds of other species in the Empire detested zero-g, but the Humans worked to embrace it and work with it rather than fight it.
Shaking her head, Ranlin continued forward. The lights in front of her slowly flickered on as she moved ahead; even as damaged and neglected as it was, the ship plainly still had some form of power. They would have to see if they could determine if the power was a reactor of some sort, or backup batteries charged by solar radiation; a reactor design that could operate for nearly a decade at minimal power without maintenance would certainly be useful, although not particularly revolutionary.
Moving into what had to be the bridge of the ship, Ranlin suddenly froze.
She called out for Klyn, panicked. Her skin unconsciously shifted into camouflage, or as much as she could manage turning all of epidermis skin a slight grey to match the paneling around her.
Quickly moving ahead of Ranlin, Klyn pointed his gun at the body slumped over one of the computer consoles. Moving silently despite his size compared to Ranlin, the soldier put his weapon to the back of whomever was slumped over the console.
“Don’t move!” hissed Klyn not caring if the creature he was threatening understood him or not. The intent was fairly universal.
The form slumped over the console didn’t move.
Slowly raising her own pistol, Ranlin circled around to the front of the console and was simultaneously disgusted and relieved.
“I don’t think he’s going to move again.”
“Why not?” asked Klyn, even as he pushed the rifle deeper into the back of the individual.
“He’s been dead for a while, if the state of his head is anything to go by.”
“Ugh,” Klyn took a step back, and in the process disturbed the corpse which slid to the side and onto the plating. It hit with a dull thud and rolled enough for both Vakurians to see the all too familiar markings on the suit of the corpse. Imperial rank insignia, marking this man as a crewman, but class A. Dorvakian.
“What the hell happened to him?” asked Klyn.
Ranlin put her pistol back in its holster and slowly approached the corpse. Running her eyes over it, she frowned, and her ears went up as she tried to take in everything around her. At their greatest sensitivity she could hear the wind blowing against the hull of the ship. Examining the corpse, she spotted what had happened.
“The hands, look at the hands!” she said, pointing at the melted gloves.
Stooping down, Klyn nodded. “That’s Imperial grade armor. What the hell would have done that to it?”
“Either a wiring fault… or a deliberate attack,” Ranlin said as she scanned the compartment. After a moment of thought, she reached into her bag and pulled out one of the small data devices she had retrieved from the human remains at the other site. Testing the weight in her hand, she stood back and tossed it onto the console the Dorvakian had been slumped over.
Electricity snapped and the small device melted into a mass of plastics and circuitry before shooting across the room with a final snap and hitting the far wall.
Klyn stared at the mass as it smoldered on the floor, eyes wide. “I have a hard time believing a fault in the console would do that.”
“I agree. The Humans must have been able to booby trap the ship. Meaning some of them survived the attack!”
“They might have, but it’s been, what, [ten years] since the attack? I doubt the Empire would have let them live for long after they set these traps.”
“So, there would be more traps right?” Ranlin asked. “I know I would leave a lot more than just a wired up console.”
“I would think so, yeah,” Klyn said. He looked around the now foreboding bridge of the Human ship, now seeing everything around them as another potential threat that might be able to kill them. It was probably only by sheer luck that they hadn’t trigged some sort of device already as they entered the ship.
“I’m going to try and get into the computer core. Seriously, don’t touch anything.”
Klyn glanced down at what was left of the Imperial officer and nodded. “You don’t have to tell me that again.”
Ranlin made sure she was electrically isolated, then stooped down to the back of the console, pulled the panel off, and peered inside.
For several moments she tried to correlate what she had seen of the electronic devices on the shuttle and what was inside the control panel, but there was hardly much overlap. The basic design principals and layouts were still like that of the previous technological iterations, but most of the components looked like they were closer to Imperial technology rather than what the Lovers had brought along on their ship.
It wasn’t surprising considering how quickly the Humans seemed to develop technology, but it also meant she was going to have to relearn how to interface with it.
“This is going to take a while.”
“Just don’t blow us up.”
Valiant, In Earth Orbit
“You are telling me that you stayed inside a ship that you knew was booby trapped for over [three hours] to download the computer core!?” Maunt was yelling, his ears straight up and his skin visibly shifting through the green color spectrum. Not a good sign.
“We were already there. I figured we should get the data in any case,” Ranlin replied, her ears flat to her head. She could feel a headache developing in the back of her skull near the pheromone spike. The glaring light shining through the window from the Earth’s single natural dull gray satellite was not helping matters either.
Maunt grabbed the report from the table in front of him. “[5 exabytes] of encrypted data, which is in an alien computer language. What possible use could we have for this data?” Maunt asked.
“I think I will be able to break the encryption sir, or at the very least gain something useful from it – if you’ll notice there are some unencrypted data files!” said Ranlin, pointing at the report.
“Most of which your own algorithms have tagged as the Human’s entertainment material. Useful to you for studying their culture maybe, but certainly not useful for the fleet!”
Ranlin quelled under his admonishment, her ears drooping down almost completely to her jawbone.
Maunt sighed, put the pad back down, and sat at the conference table.
“I was hoping we might find something other than this. Another burned out and destroyed species. That was wishing for too much, I suppose.”
Ranlin sat down as well. “We were closer this time. The other planets we’ve found were dead for centuries.”
Maunt nodded. “Still, they might be out there somewhere. I doubt they’ll be broadcasting their location though.”
“No, I doubt it.”
They looked at one another for several moments until Maunt broke the silence.
“You’re still in trouble for pulling that stunt.”
Ranlin frowned, but didn’t say anything.
“We’re going to leave the system when morning shift comes on. There’s nothing to do here but pick through bones. The Empire might also routinely patrol this system in case the Humans come back. I do not want to be here if they do.”
“I understand, sir.” Ranlin’s disappointment was evident on her face.
“Good. Now, I want a full report from the both of you about the ship by morning.” Maunt said as he got to his feet.
“Yes, sir!” both Ranlin and Klyn said in unison as the Captain of the Valiant turned and left the briefing room.
Getting to her feet with a sigh, Ranlin collected the data tablet and turned to leave.
Klyn sidled over subtly, placing himself in front of the door.
“I’m off duty, and I know for a fact you are too, so no excuses. Want to grab a drink?”
Ranlin winced. It had definitely been a bad idea to choose him during her heat, but then again she hadn’t been thinking clearly. Still, it was hard to imagine someone so classically attractive would be so clingy.
“I’m exhausted, Klyn. I’m going to get some sleep and then get up early to write my report.”
Klyn put his hands up. “Alright, we’ll have to get them another night though.”
“Sure,” Ranlin agreed, being as vague as she could.
Klyn shifted on his feet, smiling. Quickly stepping past him, Ranlin rushed out of the room. He was getting more and more annoying. At some point, she was going to have to be clear. As interested as he seemed to be in pursuing a bonding ceremony, it was the last thing on her mind and he never seemed to get the hint.
Despite what she had told Klyn, Ranlin did not go to her quarters. She instead made her way down to the Valiant’s computer core, scrolling through the data on her tablet on the way, looking for some pattern. Not that she thought she was going to break the encryption just by looking at it, but it was something to do.
Stepping into the cold computer core, Ranlin shivered and sat down at one of the open workstations. Although it had been mid-day down on the planet, it was the middle of the night ship time, so the room was nearly empty.
Plugging the encrypted data from the Human ship into the core computer, Ranlin started to run it through the analysis algorithms. It would take a few hours to completely cycle through, Absentmindedly, Ranlin continued to peruse the data that had been pulled from the Lovers’ shuttle.
The Lovers had been determined to take as much data with them as possible, it seemed. They had everything from literature and fiction to technical specifications, and other still incomprehensible data structures, stored on the devices they had taken with them on the shuttle.
The literature section was one of the smallest in actual size, but the largest and most comprehensive in terms of content. From what she could tell, it was the section that showed the most about what it meant to be Human. They were an odd species, and their literature reflected that fact better than anything else.
Most of the class B civilizations in the Empire were focused and cohesive, but monolithic and stagnant in terms of development for the most part. Most class C species, in contrast, were destructive and disharmonious to the core. This resulted in dull and repetitive literature from the class B and A side, while the literature from her own world and others like it was only popular for a decade or so before fading into obscurity. The Humans, though, seemed to have mix of both.
Classics, as they had them labeled, were pieces of literature that had endured for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. In some instances they were so old that they had to be translated into the modern language of the world. Other works were popular for perhaps a few [months], and would then fade away to be forgotten.
All of Humanity seemed to be like that – a combination of old ideas and new. An amalgamation of what the previous generations had learned, and what the new generations thought was the best. The result was a world that should have by all rights have destroyed itself long before they developed nuclear weapons.
Her own world had been locked in a stalemate for as long as their history was recorded, with small, frequent skirmishes – but nothing on the scale of Humanity. Every year, every month of their calendar was consumed by death and suffering, yet it never completely consumed them.
The entirety of humanity was a crazed amalgamation of ideas and expression, a once in a billion combination of results that in any other mix would explode.
The door to the core room opened and Ranlin bleary eyes looked up from the display in front of her.
“Ranlin? What are you doing down here?” Drienil asked as she stepped into the central core room.
“Analysis. To be perfectly honest it’s out of my league, these encryption algorithms are far too complex.”
Drienil pushed her black-blonde hair out of her eyes and walked over to the console, reading the display.
“You want me to try?”
Ranlin shrugged and moved away from the station inviting her to try. Drienil was the computer expert on the ship, although that was with Imperial systems, not Human. Still there had been enough similarities between the two for Ranlin to pick up on them; for Drienil it should be easy.
Pecking at the console for several minutes, Drienil shook her head. “I’m not getting past this data encryption easily. It is a lot stronger than the Human encryptions you showed me before. I think this might actually be quantum based; if it is, we’d never crack it without the key device.”
“Damn it,” growled Ranlin.
Drienil looked up from the workstation. “You were expecting a different answer?”
“I was hoping for a different answer. The older encryptions from the data in the lover’s shuttle was easy enough to bypass, although not much of the stuff was encrypted to begin with.”
Drienil leaned back against the console and considered Ranlin.
“Why do you care so much about this? We’ve encountered the ruins of other species before.”
“But none of them knew about us! A Human and a Vakurian – they represent something we’ve never found in nearly [three centuries] of wandering the stars… a friend! They were together – they were in love! And she grew up on the home world right after the wars! We still have issues with family lines today, yet somehow, she got past them.”
“Well, she was desperate, right?”
Ranlin blinked, stunned. “What?”
“She thought everyone was dead, so she made the best of her situation and mated with one of them to get past the urges. You know what kind of bad decisions you can make during that time.”
Ranlin groaned. “Don’t remind me.”
Drienil gave a knowing smile. “Klyn’s quite popular, but he’s got few repeats. That bad?”
“The guy won’t shut up about how perfect he is,” Ranlin growled.
“He looks pretty perfect.”
“That’s a big part of the issue, he looks perfect so he’s never had to rely on anything else. The man can’t hold an intelligent conversation! I might be looking for a mate, but I am not going to settle for him! I’d rather not mate at all!”
“Well, I doubt you’re going to find any Humans to mate with, if that’s why you’re so obsessed,” Drienil said, snickering.
Ranlin put her head down on the desk, her face going green with embarrassment. “That is not why I’m so interested in the shuttle!” she said, her voice muffled by the metal plating.
“You just need to focus a little less on your work. Hanil and I worked together in here for months before we both figured it out.”
Turning, Drienil displayed the metallic band on her forearm with the two deep scratches in it.
“You can’t force it.”
Ranlin simply grunted in annoyance at her friend’s advice.
“You done with your analysis?” asked Drienil.
“Why?”
“You seem like you could use a good meal. It might be a little late, but I’m sure Hanil could whip something up for us.”
Ranlin glanced one last time at the data on the screen, but her stomach let out a vicious growl, making the decision for her. “I’m done.”
Maunt, along with everyone else on the bridge, could feel the crackling hostility rolling off of Ranlin. As impolite as it was, she was emitting pheromones that were warning every male away from her.
The Captain was fairly sure that he was the target of her displeasure, but he ignored the breach of protocol. Ranlin was passionate, something that would one day make her good leadership material. At the moment she was too young and emotional, which combined with the headstrong attitude, made for a difficult combination.
As much as she understood the logic of leaving the dead system behind, she wasn’t happy with it.
“Break orbit and spool the engines up for FTL,” Maunt commanded.
“Yes, sir!” replied the helm officer, jumping to work.
The Valiant slowly pulled away from the blue-green planet, once the home of Humanity. Burning her sub-light engines, the ship quickly clawed out of the gravity well of the planet.
“Sir, I’m getting an odd reading,” Drienil reported from the communication station.
“Define odd,” Maunt replied.
“I don’t know. It’s a short message on an odd radio wavelength. It seems to be repeating.”
“Play it.”
Drienil quickly routed the sound to the main display. A harsh clipping language spewed forth from it with mechanical precision.
“Ranlin?” asked Maunt.
“I don’t know! It must be another of the Human languages! They had hundreds they used!”
Ranlin quickly pulled up the data she had from the shuttle and found the translation programs that had been included there, running the sound through them. There was no way she would be able to adjust for the natural drift of languages over two hundred years, but hopefully it would be close enough to get the message across.
Receiving the garbled result as text, Ranlin’s eyes bugged out and her ears went straight up in alarm.
“Shields up! Cut the engines!” Ranlin shouted.
The weapons officer quickly carried out the orders, glancing at the Captain for a scant half-second. He figured Ranlin would be the one who would get in trouble for issuing orders, and he would rather be safe than sorry. The ancient shield generators of the Valiant cracked and spluttered in protest, but the energy field of plasma and electro-magnetic energy quickly formed around the ship.
The sound, which had been repeating, suddenly cut out and solidified into a single continuous whine. Before Maunt could ask what was going on, the Valiant rocked to the side.
“Impact on the port side!” shouted the weapons officer.
“Ranlin!?” growled Maunt.
“The message reads ‘Warning, you have entered Euro-Asia air space, you have thirty seconds to transmit IFF or be fired on.’ It must be some satellite still functioning!”
“Sir I’ve identified it!” the weapons officer interrupted.
“Destroy it!” ordered Maunt.
The Valiant twisted in space, and let loose a single blast from her modified guns. Originally a plasma weapon, the Vakurians had modified the ship’s weapons to act much like their handheld weapons. A beam of energy flashed outwards and hit the offending satellite, completely destroying it despite the massive amount of armor encasing it.
The satellite, used to defend Earth during the war, was programmed to send out a signal to all other orbital assets if it was destroyed. That signal quickly made its way through the failing network of satellites in Earth orbit.
Although the Euro-Asian and North American powers on Earth had been competing during the Martian war, both had agreed to share this common distress signal if only to ensure that Mars never gained the upper hand. With the destruction of the single satellite, every other weapon in Earth orbit automatically turned its sights on the Valiant.
Calculating the trajectories, every single satellite fired its main weapon.
The weapons officer saw it immediately. “Incoming fire!”
“All power to shields!” ordered Maunt.
The Valiant was old, but she had been maintained well. The shields flared stronger to protect the paper thin walls of the hull. Twenty tungsten rounds in total hit the shields of the ship, and nineteen of them were stopped.
The final round hit the Valiant as the two dorsal shield generators cycled to ensure they did not bypass the power output of the main reactor. The quarter-second delay was enough for the projectile to slip underneath the defenses and hit the ship’s engines. The entire frame of the ship shook, but she held.
“We’ve lost FTL capabilities, as well as everything but maneuvering thrusters!” shouted the officer at the helm.
“We’re still in orbit, but our orbital period has been raised to about a [day]!” said the helm officer.
“What about the satellites? Any further fire?” asked Maunt.
Ranlin looked at the sensor readout for a moment, trying to sort out what was debris, what was a satellite, and what was an armed satellite. “Not at the moment.”
Maunt considered this for a moment. “Are they going to fire again?”
“If we have a high energy output when we loop by these detectors again, most likely yes.”
Maunt’s ears went down against his skull as he grimaced. “Alright, then. Engineering, how long until we have FTL or sub-light engines back online?”
The engineering officer on the deck was silent for a moment. “A while, sir. A lot longer than a day.”
“Give me an estimate!” said Maunt, annoyed.
“It’s extensive. I don’t have an estimate right now. At least [three days].”
Maunt growled in frustration. “It seems these Humans are intent on killing us, even after they are dead themselves.”
“Sir,” Ranlin started, turning around in her seat.
Maunt held up a hand, stopping her. “I can’t blame them, I suppose. It is still annoying, however.”
Ranlin, mollified, turned back around. “Are you going to call in reinforcements?”
“Not unless you can guarantee that the Humans haven’t left any further surprises.”
Ranlin shook her head.
“Then we’ll hold orbit with minimal power, repair the engines, and jump out of the system as quickly as we can. Hopefully sometime in the future we can make contact.”
Mare Tranquillitatis Base, Moon
“You able to get anything from the Phobos array?” asked Commander Pastore,
Allen shook his head, “We can’t resolve a laser link. I don’t think we’ll need it though, from the looks of it the old satellite defense systems were able to punch through their shields.”
“Still just the one ship?”
Allen nodded. “Still just the one ship. They did send shuttles down to the surface, but those are back now.”
Pastore absentmindedly hopped on one foot, floating up to the ceiling of the tunnel in the 1/8th gravity, then casually raising a hand and pushing himself back down.
“We can’t afford to be discovered. With the destruction of the Mars bunker, we’re all that’s left.”
“I’m aware, Commander,” said Allen, slightly annoyed.
The man was talking as if not everyone on the small observation post understood this point. It was hard not to think about the fact that you and a few dozen people were the last of your race.