CHAPTER 14 - SILENCE

Fortunately, Blup was found before the rendezvous finished, curled up in a small nook down the corridor. They were dragged out by Elektra and Artur themselves.

"Did you like it?" Artur smirked.

"No. No no no no nonononono," they whimpered as two pairs of hands carried them back to the airlock.

Only then did Artur realize how much he scared Blup. "I… didn't think this would happen. I'm sorry. Fuck."

Blup said nothing, and the Canid felt emotionally hurt yet again. Hurt? Yes, hurt. Last time, he was hurt by injuring his friends and coworkers. This time, he was hurt by… blasting a sensitive alien with loud music. What caused this sudden softness? Artur was not sure.

The docking operation commenced soon, in any case.

"Bye Terrans, bye relmai!" Blup said as they slithered into the connected airlock.

"Thanks for the disk!" Kuw hollered… and blew a flying kiss towards them. Soon, the only sound was the silence that accompanied the stares that were now directed at her from everyone present.

***

The ship was under Jamaad and Artur's command when the ship entered warp for a mere six hours thirty minutes. Patch was also at its console. The voices were oddly quiet. Everyone chalked that up to the natural hypergraphy of the region.

"So, the Silents. Captain Warren, do you think we'll fight again?" Artur said.

Jamaad scowled. "If we pick a fight with the Gray Patrols, it'll be our last fight."

"How so?"

"I'll just say that the Silent Empire has been in control of its current territory for, at the very least, five thousand years. Likely more. We humans have been spacefaring for less than two hundred. You Canids, meanwhile, a bit less than fifty…"

Artur took that very light jab in stride. "I'm taking a leave for the… quintiversary when the time comes," he chuckled, "I bet the sky over Unity City will be on fucking fire. Anyways, I forgot they were precursors. Huh."

"The Silents are the only known extant precursors," Patch intoned.

"...and they aren't sharing their secrets. The clue's in the name," Jamaad added.

***

21 Apr 2231

Mournful Signal, according to Rachel's scan, was a white dwarf star, even older than Martin's Star. It had already started yellowing and dimming thanks to its residual heat radiating into space. Without the heartbeat of fusion, this stellar cadaver would gradually cool to orange, then red, then finally black. But that would take billions upon billions of years.

There were six planets, each of them terrestrial, and each of them clearly inhabited. However, this habitation was not quite in the same pattern as that of other civilizations. Each planet was dull and gray, without a drop of visible water, and was gridded with softly glimmering, white lights. This grid was fine enough that before zooming in, the planets looked as if they were glowing. But upon closer inspection, their true nature was revealed. Cities. Planet-spanning networks of cities.

There were many ships too, more resembling bquaa hiveships than terran or kjee vessels thanks to a solid construction. However, unlike the simple, round geometry of the hiveships, the Silent ships were instead complicated structures of interlocking rings, squares, and spirals, chaotic yet symmetrical. At their edges were smaller shapes, from which branched even smaller ones, making them resemble three-dimensional, fractal flowers or shards of coral. They traveled in tight formations, permitted by their oddly low-profile drives that nevertheless seemed many times more effective than the torches of other civilizations. None seemed to take any note of the Pheidippides so far…

The eponymous Mournful Signal emanated at varying intensities from each planet and each ship. It was merely a staticky, low-pitched buzzing noise. Apparently, no other Silent system had such a phenomenon occur.

Rachel explained everything she saw to the three others present.

"This is eerie," Jamaad said, "I heard of this place, but I have never actually been here… I'm out of words. Those cities? One of those planets probably has more people on it than the whole fucking Federation."

Artur stood up from his post to lean over the sensor screen. "What the… okay, I have seen some shit while on the Attila, but I have never in my life seen anything like this. Rachel, can't we learn anything from them if we just look at their ships closely?"

Rachel shook her head. "If a caveman saw a helicopter fly overhead, would he be able to learn anything from it? Or would he just see a loud hovering shape?"

"Well…"

"No, of course no!" Rachel interrupted, "He would just watch in awe. We have the chohjozra sensors, yeah, but that just means we can see what those guys look like."

Jamaad nodded. "No ships that announced intent to get close enough to study the Silents ever returned. And future missions never saw any trace of them. No debris, no stray missiles, nothing." He then paused and yelled to Patch, "Tell the crew downstairs to push the engines to overdrive in one minute, for thirty minutes!" Immediately after this, he issued the usual announcement telling everyone to brace until the period of extreme acceleration passes.

"May I ask, sir, why?" Artur said, hastily planting himself back into his seat, "Nobody's coming at us. And our engines aren't unbreakable."

"Odd that you're so conscious now," Jamaad said, "but while they aren't paying attention to us now, I am not omniscient and I can't predict if one of those mofos will suddenly see red. The sooner we leave the better. We'll get to Glubb-enn faster, won't have to pass through the Abyssal Empire where we'll definitely all die, or the wkwqykawu warlord states which are pirate-infested."

Rachel sighed. "I'm still not too comfortable with Glubb-enn. They're an Abyssal Sphere member too. Aren't there reports of Abyssal fleets joining in their civil war?"

Jamaad laughed out loud. "Abyssals? Joining in the Glubb-enn Wars? The rebels pledged allegiance. Those shitters won't poke one tendril out of their little torture-empire. In fact, they promised an increased flesh-tithe, by a whole ten percent."

"...how do they even have any support then… if they say they will give out more of their citizens to get furniture made of them by the Abyssals?"

"The Glubb-enn are like oversized amoebas, you know. They split and split and split. Their young aren't even sapient until they absorb enough biomass. Their society doesn't care. Yet they're good enough for the Abyssals to sate themselves with their pain."

Rachel winced. "How did… the Abyssals… even become like this?"

"So, they're marine obligate carnivores. Imagine dolphins and orcas, but deep-sea. Now, in most biospheres, animals that die under stress and fear taste poorly. Unfortunately, in the Abyssal homeworld's biosphere, most of the species that the Abyssals fed on in their early days actually taste good after being put through hellish suffering. You can guess what kinds of traditions evolved out of that once they attained sapience," Jamaad explained.

Rachel gulped, her eyes wide. Then, the roar of the engines finally kicked in, and as usual during overdrive, an invisible weight pressed her into the seat.

For twenty-five minutes, the ship continued in overdrive. Twenty-six minutes after its start, however, everyone found out that it was, perhaps, a mistake. The closest group, consisting of three small Silent ships, suddenly made a 180-degree turn and began accelerating towards the Pheidippides.

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"Gray Patrol incoming!" Rachel said, "I think they noticed our increased drive profile!"

A thought crossed her head upon her inspection of the ships: they did not seem to have weapons out. Perhaps they wanted to communicate in some form? However, she did not voice or act upon that thought at the moment. After all, why would the Silents approach peacefully?

Everyone had a suspicion they would die soon, but being professionals, they had to handle the situation calmly. Jamaad sighed and called Kuw in. She rubbed her eyes as she sat down at her console. Rachel hastily caught her up on everything that happened, including what she saw through the sensors. Kuw froze up. She needed time to process what was going on here. While she was just staring blankly at the ceiling, Jamaad grew increasingly impatient.

"Where's the damn disk?"

"Oh, I just… here it is!" She took out a small box that Elektra would have recognized if she was present, and flipped out the lid to reveal that the disk was there, fitting in perfectly. The circuits embedded in its clear structure seemed to pulsate various colors by themselves now, in rhythm with the Signal.

"Open comms with them. Show them the disk."

"But–"

"No 'but's. They reverse-engineered Terran protocols decades ago. Do it!"

Kuw shrugged and hooked up a connection, not knowing what to expect except, perhaps, a swifter death. Only static was visible on the screen, and the same was heard through the headphones. Yet, the green light above the screen indicated that there was indeed a two-way visual feed. She was being watched by something unseen. Something powerful. She could feel fear through her whole body as she held up the pulsating circle, which seemed to blink harder and faster as she pressed it against the camera.

…

The static began undulating rhythmically, breaking from its uniformity. Soon, a single circle, somewhere in the upper-left corner of the static field, flashed red repeatedly. Kuw was not sure what to do.

The flashes continued faster and faster, and the circle started growing. Somehow, she felt that letting it grow too much would be an extremely bad idea. At the same time, she felt that the disk in her hand was now nigh-impossible to rotate, as if some invisible gyroscope was counteracting any angular momentum. She nearly sprained her wrist trying to adjust its rotation by just a few degrees… but when she did so, the red spot on the screen rotated along with it.

The three others stood up from their seats, braving the strong gravity, and curiously looked over Kuw's shoulder. She would sweat from nervousness, if she only had sweat glands instead of a sophisticated direct-evaporation-based cooling mechanism. The situation was too tense for Rachel to ask her why a bluish vapor was pouring out of her ears.

Kuw was deep in thought, but the ever-growing red circle made her more and more anxious. Finally, a realization cracked through her head like a bolt of lightning. She tapped the spot on the disk that corresponded to the red circle's location, and it shrank, seemingly undoing the last three seconds or so of growth. She did it again and again. The circle soon disappeared… only for the entirety of the screen-filling static to flicker to black for a split second. When the static came back, it was in the shape of a green X that gradually grew in thickness, surrounded by black.

Swipe, swipe.

It did not shrink. Repeated attempts at swiping only accelerated its expansion. Despite its much less aggressive color, this shape did not look any less foreboding in its behavior. Kuw panicked and panicked, but right as the cross was about to consume the last remains of darkness on the screen, she pinched all four of her fingers inwards along the lines on the disk corresponding to its four branches. It blinked and disappeared.

Then, something unprecedented happened.

"They're leaving! They turned around as suddenly as they started coming at us! What the hell?" Rachel announced incredulously, breaking the tense silence.

Cheers erupted through the command center. Rachel pulled Kuw into a hug, which was easy since she was so close, while Jamaad and Artur simply raised their hands and clapped. Patch pinged in simulated satisfaction.

"You saved us! You saved us all!" Artur shouted as he rushed over to her seat, joining in on the hug. Kuw struggled to breathe beneath his muscular arms, but was too happy to complain or try to break out.

Rachel kissed her on the muzzle, repeatedly. She wasn't embarrassed in the slightest.

While Jamaad just watched and smiled.

Rachel broke off from the hug to pay attention to a sensor alert. "And they jettisoned something our way at a very high speed, looks like a small container of some kind but even with these sensors I can't tell! Jamaad, should we intercept it? As in, go up and take it."

Jamaad's smile disappeared as he leaned back and thought. Whatever was in the container could be valuable or powerful. And yet coming closer to the Silent ships than is absolutely necessary could be very dangerous.

"Engineering Officer Patch, set the ship on such a trajectory that the canister is intercepted at the last moment before we enter warp."

He paused, worried that the robot would interpret his order literally. "And by 'at the last moment', I mean forty-five minutes until warp."

The ship rotated, and the situation returned to being highly tense. While all the other ships in the system were too far away to catch the Pheidippides, everyone was still understandably anxious. It was still over eleven hours until the ship could have exited the system. Overdrive was turned off and not reactivated, to avoid attracting any more undue attention.

***

Artur and Kuw were finishing up their meals in the mess hall. Even this bland food seemed to have a savory taste now. Both of them were happy to be alive.

"Hey, so do you have any idea why they up and left?" Artur said. "Did the slimeball tell you anything?"

"Nooooo, only that 'they will leave'. Blup didn't tell me anything else. And why do ya keep calling them a slimeball? They have a name. Aaaand a species name."

"Well they're kind of a ball, or I guess more of a sausage of slime, aren't they? That's why. I don't mean to disparage or some shit."

"It still feels kinda ruuude, ya know?"

A series of snorts was heard. "If that's rude, I wonder what you'd think of me talking to my fellow Canids."

"Okaaaay. I can respect your values. Even if they don't include politeness and courtesy," Kuw gestured to nothing in particular.

Artur just pressed the dish to his muzzle to eat the remainder of the noodles. There was a striking resemblance to a dog chowing down from his bowl.

"Anywaaays," Kuw continued, "I'm sorry for Rachel. I bet it's so stressful for her to watch if anyone is coming to get us right now."

"I hope she's doing okay. Well at least you and I aren't so needed now."

"I thought you liked shooting random things," Kuw giggled.

"Well I dunno. I don't think our particle guns are gonna do much to these 'Silents'. Our missiles probably would do jack shit either. I don't wanna piss them off."

Kuw erupted into laughter. "Scared are you?" she teased.

Artur grunted something garbled and kept eating.

***

Twelve hours passed since warp. The situation was, appropriately, very quiet. The crew had already started getting used to the system. As was ordered by Jamaad, the ship slowed down– just a bit, as the package was fired at a similar velocity to itself– to match its speed to its target.

The container became visible very easily through non-zoomed-in optical sensors. In fact, it was even visible from the bunk rooms' viewscreens.

It was the tail end of the second shift. Rachel already felt somewhat sleepy, and would have likely dozed off at the screen if not for coffee brought into the CIC by her partner, with the captain's permission of course. She watched as two engineers exited the ship in hardsuits with extra jetpack fuel, and hauled the container towards the main airlock. It was a silvery and opaque ampoule-like rounded cylinder, perhaps 130 centimeters long and half a meter wide, with no obvious lid or indeed any other features.

Seeing as the ship was about to reach total safety and thus the ship was not in high alert, everyone gathered near the airlock, as they did when Blup entered yesterday. It was at that time of the day when each of the six CIC officers were awake.

Two hardsuited engineers carried in the container and carefully placed it onto the floor.

"So this is their… gift?" Elektra said, "I just got out of bed. I barely slept due to that whole kerfuffle with their approach," she rubbed her eyes.

The ship's materials engineer, Mo Bao, stepped forward. He was a human-derived anthro-genemod of an indeterminate species, with grayish off-white fluffy fur, large black eyes, a short snout, a thick tail, and triangular dog-like ears. His shiny cybernetic lower limbs were only partially concealed by his yellow engineering jumpsuit. In spite of his unusual appearance, he was a very quiet, barely noticeable man. About the only thing anyone ever saw him doing is either keeping track of any faults in the ship's structure, or reluctantly and somewhat clumsily doing other engineering errands when that was not needed. He still kept his job because he did it very well.

Mo paced over to the metallic ampoule and knelt down beside it as he jabbed some kind of scanner into its surface. Everyone waited for a few seconds.

"This object's crust, around three centimeters thick, is composed of two three-dimensional, immensely intricate, interlocking fractal curves. The first is made of one-hundred-percent palladium, while the other is made of one-hundred-percent iridium," he recited from the scanner's screen, "There are no traces of any other materials above one part per billion–"

"...really?" Jamaad raised an eyebrow, "That's so ex–"

Mo continued talking, seemingly too focused to hear anything of the captain's question, "–except for an indeterminate amount of layers of nanodiamond strand networks that intertwine with the fractal curves, forming a hexagonal grid with a side length of about three micrometers. The acoustic and electromagnetic specifics of its construction prevent any attempts at acquiring information about any contents. In conclusion, the composition of this object betrays a pseudo-godlike level of fabrication technology."

Artur rubbed his forehead. "English please?"

Mo looked at the Canid as if he would have rolled his eyes if he had pupils or irises. "Ahem. Its internal structure is very complex and made entirely of some of the most expensive things known. We can't look inside unless we cut it open."

Jamaad sighed. "It's hollow and there's no latch or valve or the like, looks like it's meant to be. Engineers, bring in the angle grinders."