Referencing
“You’re sure?” I asked the vendor. “I don’t want to get halfway through these noodles only for you to frantically come yelling about how you checked the wrong vitamin complex and that I’m about to keel over dead.”
“I get the Organic Authority to check the indexes any time I add something new to my menu,” the Casti assured me. “My numbers are good, so as long as your index is right, you can eat the noodles.”
I nodded appreciatively and tried the noodles. This particular vendor catered to a multi-species clientele, and was one of the only joints on the entire rock that had any Vorak compatible food. So it was little wonder the little shack off one of the tram plazas had Farnata compatible food too.
I materialized myself a fork and slurped some of the concoction and was pleasantly surprised. Alien palates were pretty odd in my experience. Tastes and scents in a meal didn’t translate consistently. Sweet was usually a signal to our brains that there was an energy rich food. Savory was something with more protein or fat. Bitter meant poison, stay away. Those correlations went out the window with foods from outside Earth’s biosphere. There was overlap occasionally, but there was a chance these noodles would have tasted bitter and sour to my taste buds.
There was also an outside chance they might kill me, but a gun to my head couldn’t get me to go back to nutrient bricks.
The vendor’s noodles looked like udon or ramen, but even though they looked savory, they weren’t quite that flavor or texture. The noodles themselves were super light and airy, almost like cotton candy. That parallel drew itself further when the broth was faintly sweet rather than salty. Once upon a time, I might have called them bland. And they didn’t taste too strongly of any one thing, there were a variety of faint flavors to enjoy in the dish.
“They’re good,” I said appreciatively. “I’d definitely eat this again. Is this something I could recognize elsewhere, or is it more of a specialty of your place?”
“Speciality of here, sorry,” the Casti said.
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” I told them. “What do I owe you?”
“You mean what do I owe?” Nai asked.
“Of course,” I grinned.
“Two twenty-one.”
Nai rolled her eyes, but handed the vendor a half-dozen coins.
“Keep the change,” she said.
“Thanks. I get to tell people a First Contact—a Human—ate at our shop!”
She yanked the cup of noodles out of my hand, materializing a similar container to dump them into, before returning the vendor’s cup to the counter and giving me the now completely disposable cup full of noodles.
“You ready?” she asked.
“Of course,” I repeated, digging in.
“I can’t believe you stopped for food…” she sighed.
“I was hungry. You could have gotten something if you wanted too,” I said.
“You’d better finish those before we get to Geslyon’s hangar,” Nai said. “If you show up with a snack they might just vote all over again…”
“Come on, it’s like a ten-minute walk from here,” I said. “Besides, is it really that big of a deal?”
“How rude would you find it if someone desperate asked you for help, and they next talked to you while they were eating noodles?”
“I mean…the one doesn’t truly have any bearing on the other,” I said.
“Caleb…”
“Okay, yeah it would be a bit of a mixed message,” I conceded.
“And?”
“…A bit rude too, fine.”
“That’s better.”
Dyn and Shinshay were watching the ship while the other eight of us had paired off to follow various abductee leads. Nai was ostensibly with me for my protection, but who was going to go after me now?
I munched on my noodles while we walked toward the transport union’s hangar. Nai gave me the stink eye as we got closer.
A few dozen feet from the entrance and she plucked the cup right out of my hands, dumping it into a trashcan.
“Now who’s rude?” I asked. “I still had some left.”
“Like, one bite left. You’d just left it there this whole walk practically.”
“Hah, whatever. You ready?”
“That’s my line,” she replied.
Nai knocked on the hangar door, and a voice from within called out.
“It’s open!”
Inside the hangar was a very different sight than our first visit. Instead of dozens of workers milling about, hauling crates and sorting cargo, dozens of Casti were huddled in a clump around a table with some food and drink.
It was a small party in just one corner of the hangar.
At the far end, their ship was already lowered into the launch pit. They weren’t sticking around.
“You’re here,” one of the workers said. It was the same Casti as last time—a foreman, or something analogous to it.
“Had your vote?” I asked.
“We have,” the foreman said, adding a click.
“And you voted to party?” I grinned.
“That vote was a long time ago,” he said. “Every time we pack up in a port we have a little moment.”
“You should let Nai grab something,” I joked. “She didn’t get anything when we stopped for food.”
“Feel free,” the foreman smiled.
Nai shot me another glare, but did not actually object.
“This is my conversation anyway, isn’t it?” I reminded her.
“Fine,” she said.
It wasn’t like she was leaving me alone. Grabbing some food from the Farnata section of the table wouldn’t even take a minute, but it did leave me to take point.
“You guys seem like you’re eager to fly, so I won’t waste your time. How’d you vote?”
The Casti considered me for a few seconds without saying anything. One heartbeat too many passed, and I thought I might have been too pushy.
But the foreman produced a computer drive.
“The vote went your way,” he said, “by a pretty wide margin too. Children being abducted really doesn’t thrill any of us, alien or not. You wanted information on Humans? This is everything we have that might help. Free of charge.”
Thank you, I thought, relief washing over me.
“Sorry, but we couldn’t assemble a psionic copy,” he said. “We’re still figuring out what you shared. Going to be for a while, I think.”
“You’re not billing us,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”
“Charging for this information would have been low.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, taking the drive. “Anything you can tell me about the contents before we look at it?”
“Most of this is comm traffic and ship transponder data. We scrubbed out stuff we need to keep confidential, but transmissions on public bands? We record them along with data to calculate the position and trajectory of the transmission’s source. Any transponders our ships have passed in the last few months are catalogued there too.”
“Wait, ships? Not just this ship?”
“Geslyon transport union isn’t the biggest in the system, but we still have five ships moving cargo all over this system and some of the neighboring ones. We got the other ships to transmit their data to us too.” “I think you’d mention it if anything matched the hull profiles we gave you,” I said, “so I take it none of your union’s ships came across any humans directly?”
The look the foreman gave me was not straightforward.
“Not…exactly,” he said. “Nothing matched the hull profiles exactly, but some were…close enough to at least catch our attention. The highlights of that drive are in the distress calls. The rest of the radio chatter we had to share was pointless; mostly debris calls, some pirate hunters asking for pointers, that sort of thing.”
I nodded.
“We’ll be sure to start there,” I said. “…Listen, I’m really grateful you guys were willing to just give this away. Real work went into this data, and I want to make sure it was worth it for you.”
“We voted to share it,” the foreman said. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Yeah but I didn’t agree not to pay—somehow, at least,” I said. “Tell you what, I know you’re still figuring out the basics of psionics, but let me leave you with something valuable for when you do. One of my crewmates and I have been working on a series of protocols and methods for psionic recordkeeping on a ship. Tracking inventory and organizing a ship’s supplies so they can be checked with a thought. What we have is still a work in progress, but I’m giving you a copy.”
Staring the Casti in the eye, I thought he might object out of habit, but whatever he saw on my face must have convinced him.
“Okay.”
Transferring a few copies of my and Shinshay’s logistics model didn’t take long, but the few minutes that it did consume surprised me.
We were only talking about a few minutes’ difference, but I found myself hung up on the fact I still couldn’t get the superconnector to work with anyone except Nai.
The only other person to even come close was Nora, but she’d been more observing the superconnector’s link rather than participating in it.
I couldn’t figure out what I was missing.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
·····
The fact we were finally finding anything at all was a new development.
Sidar and Sodar had proved to be dead ends despite how much time we’d spent there, and we’d never managed to stay on or above Mogh long enough to put any new data together. Before today, all our other attempts had culminated in asking local facilities if they’d seen any humans and then shrugging glumly when no one had.
But today we were doing what we couldn’t afford to before: appointments.
Rocks like Doriga were waystations for any ship leaving Mogh. Lots of traffic came through its ports, and the station had communications infrastructure to contact any other inhabited rock in Mummar system.
It was almost coincidental how the timing of everything was working out. The day after we achieve new financial stability, we make staggering progress in our abductee hunt. Obviously the two were related, but it would be easy to suspect that our investigative progress arrived too quickly after getting the ship in the black.
But the truth was, our Captain Serral was rather good at arranging things, even from the other side of a star system.
Even when the Jack had been running on fumes, he always arranged so that no matter where we were headed, there was always exactly the job we needed waiting for us there.
So neither I nor Nai were surprised when we found what Serral had arranged for us at the Organic Authority.
Doriga on its own wasn’t big enough for a fully dedicated Organic Authority lab, but the two local hospitals each had their own Org office attached.
Walking in, I recognized a few of the faces from our psionic seminar the day before. Nerin and Weith were standing at a computer scrolling through documents.
“You guys sounded pretty excited,” I said. “What did you find?”
“For starters, we’re going to need your help carrying this,” Nerin nodded to a stack of plastic crates and clamshell cases that came up to my chest.
“Whoa, medicine?”
“Org leadership is going ballistic over how messy Terran First Contact is,” one of the employees commented. “They’re trying to get compatible medicine to every rock in every system, and we wound up with extra.”
“Offices and personnel stay put, but we’re actively tracking down the ones who might benefit from having the meds,” Nai followed. “Much appreciated.”
“Okay, more human medicine is always good,” I agreed. “But what are you looking at there?”
“Food supply,” Nerin said.
“Ah,” I nodded, peeking over her shoulder.
“ I wasn’t the only one eagerly looming over Nerin’s shoulder. Nora’s group had found more humans in a Vorak system, confirming that ENVY wasn’t lying when they said more abductees were out there alive. And they’d been eating somehow. This was a clue we’d had from the start that had actually punished us for pursuing it. ENVY’s not-so-cryptic hint remained our best hope for finding the abductees. ‘Man does not live on bread alone’. The nutrient blocks our ships had been stocked could be sourced from Farnata food production, which, given the state of their homeworld, meant most Farnata-made agricultural products were fairly rigorously tracked. Everyone wanted to make sure none of it went to waste. But the last time we’d tried to identify possible producers, we’d practically drowned. Not because there were too many producers—there was still a huge number—but because of the thousands of different destinations. Without more information to cross reference, we’d been stuck. But now, we had a compiled list of emergency signals received by a transport union that went everywhere in this system, as well as a list of tracking data the Organic Authority had on bulk orders of Farnata-derived nutrient rations. “So any hits yet?” I asked. “Not so far,” Weith said. “We have to give the search some parameters though, and I’m not sure a million kilometers is enough.” Three times the distance from Earth to the Moon wasn’t actually that big of a region of space. Checking for any distress signals within a million kilometers of the delivery trajectories the Org shared with us… I had no idea if a million miles was the right distance or not. “ “…You guys are psionically communicating,” the Org employee remarked. He’d attended our seminar and sported the intro module. “Why can’t we hear you?” “Our transceivers are more complicated than the average [bear],” I said. “They take more to learn, but they come with some extras…scroll through the data for me, Nerin. No, I mean—stop, no back to the top.” “You know what the numbers mean?” she asked. “ It took a few minutes of switching between an unjustifiable number of alien spreadsheets detailing orbital vectors and timing. But once Shinshay had both complete sets of data, they gave back an interesting result. “Yes!” Nai and I both cheered. “ “ “ “ I looked at Nai, and she wore a shocked expression. “How rare is that?” I asked. She nodded toward our pilot. “ “ “ “Why?” I said, not disagreeing. “Bad precedent,” he elaborated ominiously. ····· “Wolshu Kemon,” Weith introduced us, putting a personal dossier on projector screen. “Native of Hexiam—that’s Askior system, C6, Caleb. He was a legal advocate before the planetary governors cracked down. He didn’t renew his credentials, and has taken up pirate-hunting ever since. Until last year, he was a Coalition asset now and again.” The crew of the Jack had assembled in the ship’s mess to receive Weith’s briefing on this mystery figure who’d been ordering food, seemingly for humans. “What soured the relationship?” Captain Serral asked. “Nothing, technically,” Weith said. “But this koievaiwalta is not someone we want to get involved with if we can help it.” “Why?” Nai asked. “He’s dangerous,” Weith said. “His definition of ‘acceptable losses’ is…to put it generously? Barbaric.” “You have personal experience with him?” Serral asked. “I flew a couple missions coordinating with his ship and crew,” Weith nodded. “Remember Admiral Ketter?” Every jaw that wasn’t mine or Shinshay’s gaped. Everyone else recognized the name. “That was this guy?” Nai asked. “Just how involved was this scrape?” Tasser asked. “Officially? Tangentially,” Weith said. “But as someone who was there? He was directly responsible for the formation breaking apart.” “He wasn’t court martialed?” “Can’t court martial someone who’s not formally a Coalition soldier,” Weith said. “Slow down?” I asked. “Someone care to fill me in?” “And I,” Shinshay frowned. “A few months before you first showed up, Admiral Ketter died in the biggest—and one of the only—ship-to-ship engagement the cosmos have ever seen,” Serral said. “Mind you that means eight ships in total, peeking out from behind asteroids and taking potshots with railguns.” “The Coalition side was holding out fine, with other ships flying in to reinforce. We were holding defensive positions, because a draw still benefitted us,” Weith said. “So the Vorak get desperate and ring up some of their pirate allies in the system—C6, again—and Kemon decides to attack the Vorak ships before the reinforcements can arrive. Without his ship to provide crossfire, the Vorak ships follow his example, go on the attack, and they destroy the ship carrying the Admiral with the momentum.” “I don’t understand,” Shinshay frowned. “If Senior Kemon wasn’t part of the Coalition navy, why were they in the formation?” “Have you ever been a formal member of the Coalition navy?” Nai asked them. “No, I’m an individual contractor,” they replied. “Ah. I see.” Serral click-nodded. “The Vorak and the Assembly’s opposition is bigger than the formally recognized Coalition. Both sides have allies, not all of which are pleasant.” “I confirmed the contents of Kemon’s order with Dyn while we were rendezvousing,” Weith said. “He ordered four metric tonnes of supplies. By what we know about Caleb’s similar rations, and expecting twenty-four abductees per ship? We think he’s feeding two ship’s worth of abductees.” “When was his order?” I asked. “How far behind are we?” “He ordered the food almost twenty-seven hundred hours ago,” Weith said. Wait… We’d been in Mummar system for just over four months now… “He ordered the food before we got to this system,” I said. “He found them before we got here!” “Nora’s broadcast only went out a few hours before you woke up the Beacons,” Nai said. “The only way Kemon orders food for humans before Nora tells everyone they need aid…” “He knows something everyone else doesn’t,” Serral said gravely. “How soon can we launch, Captain?” I asked. “…Give me twelve hours to get the rest of our business arranged,” Serral said. “In the meantime, warm up our transmitters. We’re going to ask every Coalition watcher post in five systems where Wolshu Kemon’s ship is.”