An angry murmur filled Sadaf’s ears as she drifted back to consciousness. Somebody was yelling off in the distance, and she wanted nothing more than to tell whoever it was to shut up and let her sleep. No, wait, this couldn’t be normal sleep, something was in her mouth. Something like a mouthguard…
Her eyes cracked open, and she saw a small red droplet floating above her face. It took a moment to realize that it was a bit of her own blood, floating in the clear gel about her. That fact made the Captain snap fully awake with a force of will. She took one look at the display above her and recoiled as much as she could within the confines of her pod. Far too much of her ship’s schematic showed horrific blinking-red damage indicators, especially near its rear.
The indistinct speech clarified into an urgent shouting from Grakosh. “Captain! We need to extend our radiators right now, but I need your direct order!”
She lay back in puzzled irritation for only a moment. Why did he need permission for something so trivial? But then memory returned and Sadaf realized the issue. They were no longer separated by a comfortable few years’ worth of space-time buffer. The Rithro was now right in the aliens’ home system. Any radiation or EM signal they emitted could be detected right away. Even their radiators’ waste heat might be seen, if someone happened to be looking in the right direction.
It was a terrible risk, but they either dumped their excess heat generated during the jump or else they’d cook to death. “I give you a direct order to extend the radiators, Grakosh. What’s our reactor status?”
“Not sure. It put itself into safe mode right after we jumped. I’m still getting a handle on all the other damage reports as well.”
Sadaf called up health reports of the crew themselves and felt a small measure of relief when she saw them all stable, if perhaps a bit banged up. She was grateful in particular to see that the two udhyr of her crew had regained consciousness.
She knew she had to keep her crew mentally healthy as well, and a big part of that was keeping them busy and avoiding any panic about their current predicament. “Well, my lovelies…I suppose that could have gone better,” she subvocalized into the intercom with a breezy, ironic air.
Laughter of various types filled her ears. “At least we’re alive,” said Kifa.
“Agreed,” replied Sadaf. “We’re definitely not fighting anyone for a bit, so let’s secure from battle stations and see how badly we’ve been hurt.”
Sadaf tapped a few more controls, and a faint gurgle sounded around her as the protective gel began to drain from her pod.
__________
“Chao, you gotta minute? I have something you need to see.”
The target of the question looked up from her screen, which at the moment showed a starfield with a couple of brighter stars indicated with white circles. Chao narrowed her eyes in annoyance at the red-haired young man leaning against the entrance of her cubicle.
Eleven months ago, Chao Me Chu had been truly ecstatic to achieve her dream of landing a job at Goddard Space Flight Center. Over the last few months, however, she’d realized that reaching such a dream position at NASA also came with a surfeit of that most dreaded of things, at least for her. Namely, the dreaded need to Interact With Other People.
“I am completely buried, Blake,” she replied. “Corbin dumped a bunch of image processing requests on me and of course he wants it by yesterday. Can it wait until I’m done with this?”
Blake grinned. “It’ll only take a minute. I’ll buy you a coffee.”
The petite Thai woman pointed silently at the large and steaming mug sitting next to her monitor.
“I’ll buy you two coffees! Trust me, you’ll want to see this.”
Chao rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She stood with a grumble and stalked past Blake to his own cube. The carpet beneath her feet, along with the surrounding fabric-clad cubicle walls, formed a medley of vaguely-beige which spoke louder than words the phrase ‘Made by the Lowest Bidder’. At least this particular cubicle farm had some daylight; outside the nearest window Chao could see a beautiful blue sky and an expanse of green trees stretching away from Goddard’s campus. It was a reasonably nice day despite them being in the midst of a Maryland winter.
Blake ignored the irritated set of Chao’s narrow shoulders as he bounced along beside her. “I’m processing some of the latest images from the Webb. There’s a likely candidate for solar system formation and the Berkeley group wanted to get some NIRCam images of it to see if it was getting hotter.”
Working for NASA required one to become fluent in acronym-ese. In this particular case, ‘NIRCam’ was pretty straightforward and stood for the near-infrared camera on board the far-off James Webb Space Telescope. Objects emitting in the ‘near’ infrared, that is to say infrared radiation closer to the relatively narrow window of visible light, were hotter than those in the ‘far’ infrared.
She huffed an irritated breath. “So. You have a bunch of hot gas around a star that may or may not have some planets forming in it. Why are you dragging me into this? I’m serious about Corbin, this guy is emailing me every five minutes for an update.”
Blake jogged ahead of Chao into his cubicle, which was every bit as not-spacious as hers. That meant she had to squeeze in closer to him if she wanted a good view of his screen. It could be worse; at least Blake showered every day and used deodorant. She supposed she should be thankful he was the one bothering her. There were more than a few of her coworkers who thought that the notion of bathing was some kind of sinister conspiracy pushed onto the sheeple by Big Shampoo.
“Have a look at this,” said Blake. The image on the screen was so blown up that it only showed a couple of light gray pixels against a black background.
Chao crossed her arms. “That’s your candidate young solar system?”
Blake shook his head and with a few clicks brought the image back to normal size. “No, that’s over here.” He pointed at a larger, less-pixelated blob in the image center, then he pointed back towards his mystery dot. “This thing caught my eye, since it wasn’t in the previous images. It’s not a star…I don’t think. I mean, I can’t correlate it with anything in the catalog. Pixel artifacts on the detector focal plane, maybe?”
She leaned over his shoulder as he zoomed back in to the object in question. “Might be,” she said. “But those tend to saturate to one hundred percent. This has some grayscale to it…can’t be a comet or a Kuiper belt object, not if it’s radiating in that much in the near IR. Is it in any of the other images?”
“It’s in the next three, then it’s gone. The exposures are about an hour apart.” Blake clicked through the subsequent images to demonstrate. “I mean, the way it vanishes is why I assumed a detector glitch. But if this is a failure mode, it’s one I’ve never heard of.”
Chao straightened back up. “Me either. Huh. Are there any more shots planned?”
“Yeah, Berkeley has time on the scope through tomorrow.”
“Hmm…it must be nice to have that much money to burn. Well, let me know if it crops up again, and we’ll see if we can nail it down.”
Chao tilted her head as she regarded the dot. What the everlasting stink was that? Something about the sequence of images bugged her, but she couldn’t say what. The solution danced right at the edge of her conscious mind…and then her phone buzzed with another anxious text from Corbin, distracting her and pushing the half-formed thought out of her brain.
__________
“Our reactor is still nominal, Captain,” said Grakosh. “It’s running on low-power mode at the moment.”
Sadaf nodded her horns as she extended a suction nozzle towards a floating blob of errant gel. The rest of the crew floated around her, either securing the ship’s bridge from battle conditions or directing the ship’s drones in repair efforts.
She braked herself to a stop in front of the main central display which sat wrapped around the ship’s spine. “That’s one thing gone right, at least. Now show me how bad we’re hurt.”
Once more that hateful damage schematic appeared, with lots of panicked red blinking that showed the many places where the Rithro was wounded.
Grakosh pushed off and sailed his long, limbless body towards the Captain. She caught the smaller creature with ease as he gently bounced into her. His voice was dry as he gestured his tail-hand at the display, but Sadaf could still feel the tension in his body. The engineer was truly upset about the injury done to his pride and joy. “The atomic beam from the Breaker got in a glancing hit on our rear armor; we just got clipped by the outer edges of the beam. If it’d hit us dead center, we would have been fried. Anyways, our rear armor absorbed most of the impacting energy but some of its material spalled in the process. Those armor fragments then sprayed out and damaged one of our fusion engines. That damage is such that I don’t know if we’ll be able to repair it without a drydock. But there’s worse news.”
Sadaf made sure her posture was upright and untroubled, for the sake of the surrounding crew’s morale. “Hit me.”
“The spalling armor also created a lot of punctures in our fuel tanks. The self-sealing mechanisms kicked in, but we still lost the majority of our onboard hydrogen. I estimate that with our current fuel supply we have less than…let me check…yes, less than twenty hours of full-power burn available."
Sadaf eyes widened as she took in the full implications of her engineer's statement. "Wait. The fusion reactors also power our jump drive. If we have so little fuel left, then..."
The engineer gave a glum nod. "Then we do not have enough power for even a single jump. We're stranded within this star system until we can repair and refuel."
That flat statement made all of the crew pause and stare at the center display.
“Oh, frinx,” muttered the Captain. “Okay. What’s in our immediate neighborhood?”
“A few icy bodies,” replied Tofa. The astrogator pushed off of the wall and sailed over to her acceleration couch to recheck the display. “Yes, there’s one close by that we only need a few meters per second of delta-vee to match with. It’s ten kilometers in diameter, plenty large enough to hide behind.”
Sadaf rubbed one horn. “So that’ll hide us for the moment, but we don’t dare use our fusion drive to get there.”
“We could use the gravitic drives on the landing boats to move the entire ship,” mused Grakosh. “It won’t be very efficient, but it will move us without emitting visible radiation.”
“Do it. We need to get ourselves out of sight before we figure out what the frinx we’re gonna do next.”
__________
Matt hefted the last bag of groceries onto the passenger seat of his truck. As he shut the door a black-and-white SUV pulled up next to him. Matt figured it was Ernie’s car through stunningly intelligent deductive reasoning. Well, that plus the fact that this SUV had ‘KENOSHA COUNTY SHERIFF’ emblazoned upon its side.
The SUV’s driver window whirred down to reveal Ernie’s unsmiling face. Matt kind of suspected what had gotten the sheriff ticked off, but he hoped he was wrong.
“Morning, Toke. Can I talk to you for a moment?” Ernie pointed his thumb at the SUV’s passenger seat.
Matt figured he’d play this casual, so he shrugged and shut his own truck door before climbing into Ernie’s car. He all but batted his eyes in innocence as he asked “What’s up?”
Ernie stared ahead, not looking at Matt. He gripped the steering wheel as if it had offended him personally. “Got a call from a dude in DEA this morning. It seems they have a couple of inside sources who’ve passed them some very interesting information. Ever hear of Javier Venegas?”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Nope,” replied Matt. “Should I have?”
“He runs a crew out of Pueblo. They do some robbery, maybe a bit of smuggling. But their main income comes from making and selling crank.”
“Ah. This have something to do with those pictures I gave you?”
Now Ernie did look at him, his eyes flat and expressionless. “Why would you think that?”
Matt shrugged. “Hey, you were the one who said it looked like someone was cooking meth at that campsite. It seems like a logical inference.”
The sheriff leaned back in the driver’s seat. “’Logical inference’? Are you sure you’re a Marine?”
“Last time I checked, I eat crayons with the best of ‘em. Ernie, tell me straight. What’s this all got to do with me?”
“The reason is that Javier’s brother is also in his crew. That brother is a little shit-stain who goes by the name of Vincente. Word is, about a week back Vincente got his nose spread right across his face by someone. Javier’s up and declared a Dune-style kanly on whoever did it. According to that DEA source…well, they’re looking in this area for that particular someone.”
Matt stared back at Ernie but didn’t respond. The sheriff finally turned and stared out the windshield again with a sigh. “I know it was you, Toke. I guess I should be grateful you just smashed in that shit-stain’s nose instead of killing him.”
“I-,“ began Matt.
Ernie held up a meaty hand. “No. Just…just don’t say anything. That way you don’t have to lie to a peace officer, and I don’t have to take any official action.”
After a long pause Matt decided to speak anyway. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“Not at the moment. I played dumb with the Feds, told ‘em thanks for the tip. So now I’m telling you, as a courtesy… you need to watch your ass. Hell if I were you, I’d move into town for a while. You know I’ll put you up at my place as long as you need.”
“Thanks for the offer, Ernie. But I can take care of myself.”
“Toke, please. You’re only one guy. I got some idea of what you did in the Marines, but there’s at least four in Javier’s crew, plus there’s some hints that he’s shopping around for extra muscle.”
Matt said nothing.
Ernie rolled his eyes. “C’mon. I know you love doing this whole lone-wolf thing out in the middle of nowhere, but there is a time and a place where you should put some faith in your fellow man.”
“I’ve done that before, and been burned every time,” replied Matt. After a long moment where neither man spoke, he continued. “Can I go?”
Ernie let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a grumble. “Sure.”
Matt hesitated after opening the door. “Um, thanks for the heads-up Ernie,” he said.
“Just get the fuck out of here. And don’t do anything that’ll result in extra paperwork for me.”
__________
The holographic display at the center of the Rithro's bridge showed the planet nearest to their current sheltering chunk of ice; the planet was a moderately-sized gas giant of a deep blue color.
Kexal, their resident udhyr planetologist, stood fully upright and gestured into the display with his two right hands. "It’s simply incredible! This gas giant's spin axis is tilted almost parallel with the star system's ecliptic. This planet must have suffered a truly mighty collision at some point in the past."
Sadaf sighed. "Very fascinating, I'm sure.” She gestured herself and expanded the display back out, showing the multitude of planets of this system along with their estimated orbits. The third planet from the star was circled with a blinking indicator; Nadash said it was the source of most of the transmissions from the natives and it was clearly their homeworld. “My main concern right now is concealing our presence,” the Captain continued.
"I think we have a way to address your concern," said Takh. "As you said, our primary worry is detection. At the moment I have the bulk of our repair drones restructuring our remaining armor material into a light-absorbing shell which we will lay along one side of the Rithro. With the appropriate absorbing material sprayed on top, it’ll look like nothing except a hole in space. It’s not a perfect solution, but at the very least it’ll keep us out of direct line of sight of the natives' planet. If we extend all of our radiators out along the other side of the ship from the shell, then we should be able to keep everything cool enough. That’s even with the landing boats’ gravitic drives at full thrust."
"What about our fusion engines?" asked the captain.
Grakosh now spoke up. "At the moment our maximum acceleration is limited thanks to that damaged engine. I had a closer look at its damage with our drones, and a field repair might be possible but tricky.”
“Noted. Well, it’s a moot point at the moment,” said Sadaf. “There’s no way we can run the fusion drives and still remain unseen. The next worry is fuel. Can we repair the tanks? “
Takh gave an udhyr shrug. "We can always make patches. The question is, will they hold up for ten months of return travel?"
Sadaf's clawed fingers tapped on the display's podium as she thought. "Let's assume for the moment that they will. That brings us to the next issue, that of refueling. This rock we’re hiding behind is mostly water-ice. We could melt some of that and then distill out the hydrogen, yes?"
"We could," said Grakosh. "But that entire process will generate a lot of waste heat and subsequent infrared radiation, and that generation will extend over the course of many months. The radiation will, without a doubt, be noticed by the natives."
"Frinx and broken horns," muttered Sadaf. Why couldn't anything ever be easy? She crossed her arms and stared into the display as she thought. She was stuck between their need to keep hidden and their need to repair her ship and then fulfill her reconnaissance mission. At the moment, it appeared she couldn't fulfill both needs at once.
Sadaf's taloned feet clicked in an uneven rhythm on the deck. "At least we can maneuver with the boats’ gravitic drives," she mused. But where to go? The longer they stayed in this star system, the more they risked exposure. Not to mention their supplies weren’t limitless. They already recycled almost all of their water, but food was always the most limiting factor. The Rithro couldn’t just hide behind an icy boulder forever.
But on the tail side, if exposure was inevitable why not lean into it? Sadaf turned to Nadash. "Can you receive better data on these sapients in our current orbit?"
"I have already received much more information than in the last star system," replied the Exalted. "However, at present they are moving towards a tight-beaming approach to their EM communications. I could get more details on them if we were to get closer." Her silver eyes peered at the Captain. “Which types of data analysis should I prioritize?”
“Societal,” replied Sadaf. “We need to determine if this species is reflexively xenophobic or if they would be amenable to us contacting them.”
Her last words made the entire crew stop whatever they were doing to stare at their Captain. The implications of her last statement weighed upon them all. Takh was the first to speak up, and the XO’s mandibles held a stern set. "Captain? Are you proposing what I think you’re proposing? With respect, that’s far outside of our standing orders. In this sort of situation, they say that we should only gather intelligence on any natives and not to initiate first contact.”
Sadaf's horns rose in determination. "Under normal circumstances I’d agree. But let's go through our options. As I see it, we have two. Option one is to hide here and perform whatever long-range surveillance we can achieve, while we do field repairs and refuel. But refueling carries a significant risk of detection by the natives. If they do spot the Rithro they might try to interdict us. Let’s assume they can’t reach us in time, and we leave without any attempt at communication. What will they assume of us?”
“That we were an advance scouting party for an invasion,” said Dhuz. The auhn biologist and medic rubbed one of her horns in a nervous tic. “That’s what I’d think, if I was in their place.”
Takh said nothing, so Sadaf pressed on. “Therefore, that leaves option two. We try for contact.”
The XO’s mandibles set even more grimly. “And what if it goes wrong? The Bureau’s unofficial motto exists for a reason!”
“We can’t remain hidden forever,” said Moquon, the knuall-toua life-system expert. She was currently riding on Dhuz’s shoulder. She coiled in on herself a little tighter, an instinctive sign of stress. “Even if we go onto strict rations, we only have enough for two, maybe two and a half years at most before we all starve to death.”
Nadash’s emotionless voice cut in, her tone acting to soothe the upset udhyr. "Before we all get into any prolonged argument, let me say that I think the Captain has the right of this. I have been computing the probabilities, and there is a ninety-percent chance that we will be detected even if we try to repair and refuel while staying hidden. That probability is going up as I continue my monitoring. The inner portion of their star system is practically infested with space-based telescopes and other robotic probes. Logic dictates that they have even more detection equipment on their planetary surface. All it will take is one errant look in our direction and we will be found out."
Sadaf raised her hand to further placate her number one. "I'm not saying we just go flying towards their planet with our radiators spread. We need more data. How soon before our ‘stealth shell’ is in place?”
“Another few hours,” replied Takh.
The Captain thought for a few moments. “All right. Once the stealth-shell is operational, we’ll head sun-ward towards that third planet. It’ll take us some twenty cycles or so to get there, so in the meantime we capture what signals we can and analyze them under Nadash’s direction. If the natives don't appear to be reflexively xenophobic, then we'll make a closer approach their planet while still keeping as hidden as possible. We’ll use that time to plan out how exactly to make direct contact."
__________
Blake Hawkins jerked awake when his phone bleated at him. He fumbled around on his nightstand, finally grasped the sought-for device, and then on autopilot answered with a bleary “…hnngnrh?”
“Blake, it’s Chao. Where are those image files?”
“…manfhnng?”
“Wake up, you idiot! The files you showed me today. Send ‘em to me. Now.”
Blake held the phone away from his ear to verify the time, then brought it back to his ear. “Uhrgh…it’s two in the morning, Chao. Where are you?”
“Still at work. Got Corbin’s stuff done and then I realized something about your mystery dot. But I have to see all of the images to make sure. Where can I find them?”
“They’re on the server, but they’re encrypted. I have to access them from my work computer. I’d have to come in to…”
“Then get your ass IN here!” And with that imperious command the call went dead.
Blake let out a whispered curse then set about getting dressed. His foul mood had lessened somewhat by the time he’d reached Goddard and slouched his way into the red brick building which held his workspace. As he entered, a nearby motion sensor tripped and turned on the overhead lighting.
With a buzz of fluorescent lighting the expanse became illuminated. Chao’s head popped up amongst the sea of beige-ish cubicles, her black hair still in a neat ponytail in spite of her being at work for the better part of twenty-four hours. Blake’s remaining irritation faded away completely when he saw the dark circles under her eyes. At least he’d gotten some sleep tonight; from the look of it, Chao was running solely on coffee and adrenaline.
He nodded a greeting at her and headed for his cubicle. She fell into lock-step at his elbow and practically bounced with impatience as he sat and booted up his computer.
“What are we looking for?” asked Blake.
“Call up your four images and boost the contrast.”
He performed as instructed, forming a quartet of pictures on his screen. “Okay. Still not seeing it…”
“Make those pictures into a slide show and then click through them.”
With a silent grumble Blake complied. Any remaining resentment towards Chao washed away as he did as she instructed. That resentment was replaced with excitement.
“It’s…that spot is moving,” he whispered. Under that higher contrast, the few little pixels of their mystery dot now clearly crawled along with each advancing frame. “A planetoid? No…like you said it’s too hot. And a planetoid wouldn’t vanish.”
Chao crossed her arms and nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly. And for us to see motion? With that short of a time between exposures? That means that it has to be close.”
Blake leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah, that object has gotta be within the solar neighborhood. If we can figure out its distance, we can work out its speed. So how do we do that?”
She sighed. “First things first. I don’t like the way it vanished. That smells like some kind of sensor artifact. What does the Webb’s NIRCam use for its focal plane array?”
“Mercury Cadmum Telluride…I think? Don’t know much about them, but I know a guy who might know a guy…or gal, in this case.” Blake’s excitement began to be mixed with a feeling closer to…awe? Dread? “Chao…” he started, then paused. “Something close in, moving fast, it’s a lot warmer than any icy body, and it disappeared after a few hours. Could it be, maybe-”
“It’s not aliens,” said Chao with certainty. “It’s never aliens. Let’s just grind through it from first principles before we leap to any conclusions.”
“Yeah, you’re right. What do we tell the Berkeley group? I have to get these images to them within the next twenty-four hours.”
Chao blew out a breath. “Tell ‘em the truth as we know it for now. Flag it as a detector artifact, and tell ‘em we’re still chasing down the exact cause…” She trailed off and continued staring at the screen with such intense concentration that Blake finally waved a hand in front of her eyes.
“Chao? You okay?”
“Other spectra,” she murmured.
“Eh?”
She swiveled her laser-like gaze towards him. “If we don’t see anything in other EM bands, then it’s for sure just a sensor glitch. Send me the Earth-based azimuth and elevation of those images, plus the time. Let’s see if anyone else looking in that direction also saw something weird.”
__________
Thanks to Ernie’s warning, Matt now made sure he had a gun close to hand at all times. While in the workshop or elsewhere on his property that meant a pistol on his hip. As for trips into town, he had to make do with concealed carry to avoid scaring the civvies. He’d also secreted more than a few rifles around his property; like any trained soldier Matt went by the maxim that a pistol was only useful for fighting one’s way to a rifle.
Such preparation only went so far, and during the next few days he made sure to keep his head on a swivel, especially on the one or two times per week that he spent in town. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary the first few times, but on the second week that changed.
It happened as Matt stepped out of the hairdresser’s, bitching internally about having to pay fifteen dollars for a five-minute buzz cut. He remembered with fondness the barber shop which had closed only a couple years ago, which set off another round of mental grumbling about the inevitable gentrification of Manitoba Springs. Damn it all, he’d moved out into the boonies to get away from such fucking nonsense.
His sour mood turned into a cold calm as he recognized the car a few blocks up the road. He’d seen it twice before, always parked on the main drag. It was a slab-sided Cadillac SUV with windows tinted way past legality, but otherwise it carried no other external bling. Matt scratched behind one ear and used that motion to disguise a closer inspection of the vehicle. He didn’t see anyone in the driver or front passenger seats, but there might be someone in the back seat.
__________
Declan plucked the small binoculars away from his face. His hands shook ever so slightly.
“So?” Javier sat way too close for Declan’s comfort, somehow looming over him in spite of the spacious rear seats of the drug lord’s private ride.
“I think that’s him,” replied Declan.
“You think? We need to know, puta. I’m not dealing with heat for months just because you think it’s him.”
Declan closed his eyes and pictured the masked man. It wasn’t hard; he’d seen the same image every night as he tried to sleep. “Those black eyes…yeah it’s him.”
His boss was satisfied for once. “Good. Now we need a name. Ask around and get his address too. If this fucker wants to play with us, well then…we’re gonna play with him.”