Leon was sitting in the mess hall, his attention completely occupied by the food in front of him. Natalia was already working with Joice and Myung on the hydroponics and so he sat alone today. This in itself however was not a detriment to his mood, he was feeling rather satisfied with the manner in which the last few days had progressed.
Leon took another bite of his breakfast and looked up. He was alone in the dining hall, the three large tables otherwise empty and the room quiet. Most of the crew had already come and gone, he himself had already done some work this morning which attributed to his late meal. The UNSS Leif Erikson had departed the system where they had discovered the ruined alien station just two days ago. They were now tearing through space at a modest three hundred times the speed of light, the feat still incredible to think about even after over six hundred and thirty days out in the depths of space. They had traveled farther than any human had any right to, but they were far from finished on their mission. In fact, they had barely even started. The mission had been planned to take over twenty years in total, covering thousands of light years and visiting hundreds of systems.
The fact that life seemed to be even more abundant than their wildest speculations could have hoped was also a source of constant awe and shock to him. They had seen massive oceanic microbiota as well as complex life on a variety of different worlds. Then there were the glimmer Drorns, those strange living bubbles they had found so early on. They had not seen them again so far and he wasn't entirely convinced there were more to be found. Surely such incredible life could only occur once? But then again, intelligent life hadn't, like many had previously thought.
Leon took another bite of his meal, savoring the food as he thought about just how incredible the last two years of his life had been. He had gone from not knowing if aliens existed, to being one of the first people to find confirmed evidence of intelligent life. Well, the cold remnants that intelligent life had left behind at least. But still, the fact that life had happened more than once was virtually a guarantee that it had probably happened even more. The thought of discovering living sentient aliens both excited and terrified him to his core. What if they were ruthless killers, or saw Humanity as nothing but resources to be exploited. Or what if they were so incomprehensibly alien that they could not interact on some fundamental level? Would he be able to cope with such a failure? He didn't know, and that was probably for the best.
He leaned back and sighed as the worries that had accumulated in his mind over the past few days made themselves heard once more. It was deeply troubling to him, the fact that the station had been so strangely deserted. He couldn't shake the feeling that something terrible had happened there, and not in the recent past either. There was the fact of the damage to the station, not all of it looked natural in origin. Some of the marks had the look of weapons fire to his military eye.
Potential ancient tragedies aside, they still had no clue what they were dealing with. Until they were able to decipher the strange alien text or crack the memory banks on the extracted data cores, they were still lost in the abyss about who or what had built the structure.
Leon was leaning towards some ancient alien race that had long gone extinct, why else would they not have come across more evidence of their presence. Surely they wouldn't leave such valuable hardware drifting unprotected in space like that if they were still around?
Thoughts and questions plagued his mind, the who and why were superseded by the ultimate question in his mind. When. When had they built the station, when had they left it? When had they last graced the plane of the living with their works of science and architecture? Well he knew a sure-fire way to find out, but not till Taylor, Chad and Sabine cracked the data cores.
The three were probably some of the brightest people that Earth had to offer in the scenario, but it was still a herculean task. He decided to go and check up on them, maybe they had been making better progress than he was envisioning.
Leon finished his breakfast and placed the dish in the proper receptacle before making his way out into the curving hall of the ship. The spinning of the habitat rings created the illusion of gravity at about seventy percent the strength of Earth. While it wasn't much, it was enough to form a sense of normalcy and to keep their muscles from atrophying entirely. That combined with the hour or two of mandatory physical exercise that they did every day meant that everyone on the ship was as fit and healthy as it was possible to be.
The habitat area he was in was located on the third ring of the Leif Erikson, the main research area was on the first. In order to get there he would have to take a ladder to the core and then scoot over to the first ring. Leon’s soft soled shoes made slight padding sounds as he strode to one of the access ladders that acted as the spokes of the huge spinning wheels. They connected the ship’s non rotating core to the spinning habitat rings and were the primary means of transport between them. The long forty meter ladders had originally been the bane of his existence on the ship, but regular exercise combined with frequent use had strengthened his body to the point that they hardly phased him anymore. He started to climb, the feeling of weightlessness slowly creeping up upon him till he was effortlessly pulling himself the last few meters.
He entered into the spine of the ship, the complex system of gyroscopes and bearings that assisted the rings in turning were hidden from view. While the ship's core was a little more than twenty meters in diameter, the inside was only about five meters on average. The rest of the space was taken by life support conduits and water systems as well as electrical and heat. There were a great many things that had to be maintained to keep such a fragile system like the Lief Erikson operating correctly. One major malfunction and it might be game over without a second opinion.
Moving quickly along the wall handholds to the access hatch of the first ring, he proceeded up the shaft, gravity becoming more pronounced as he climbed till he was feeling the tug of the rotating rings towards his destination. He descended the last few meters quickly and hit the ground feet first after having flipped his orientation along the way.
Leon looked around quickly, it seemed he was on the right side of the ring. The rings themselves were like huge one-hundred-and-twenty meter wide stations in themselves. The floor ahead and behind him seemed to curve gently up into the ceiling, but he knew that if he were to follow that curve it would never end. He would just end up right where he had started off from in the first place. Casting thoughts of rings aside, he began walking down the hall, the padding on the floor combining with the soft rubber soles of his shoes to make his passage nearly soundless. He soon came upon the research wing and walked to the open door of the lab.
Leon took a peek inside and smiled as he saw three figures hunched intently over a piece of hardware. It looked like some mix between a microscope and a computer server but was likely neither.
Taylor, Chad and Sabine were all gathered together in a huddle, something appearing to excite them as he could hear murmurs of muted conversation. Leon sidled up towards them, not trying to be quiet but clearly not grabbing their attention as they remained fixed on the screens they were hunched over. Suddenly he did hear something that gave him pause.
“What did you just say Sabine?” he asked, a little apprehensive of what he had just heard.
“Waahhh!” Chad shouted which only furthered the small panic he had caused.
Sabine jerked as if stung and looked around frantically before her eyes settled on him. She at least had the sense of self to look a bit worried. Meanwhile beside her Taylor did a full one eighty as he reacted to Leon’s sudden appearance.
Sabine breathed out heavily and just said “Oh. Hello Leon. We were just..”
But he cut her off. Leon asked her again “What did you just say? Did I really hear you are using Henry’s cognition drivers?” before she could respond another voice issued from a speaker on the device in front of him making Sabine wince slightly and him step back apace.
“Yes indeed Captain. My complex rational thinking has been instrumental in solving their problems.” a smooth synthetic voice said with an inhumanly measured tone.
“Okay, that’s not… Henry, confidentiality setting, initiate.” Leon said commandingly. The computer did not respond, but he knew that it was now blind and deaf as to their conversation. It would only return when given hard approval with a code. A code that he had no intention of activating anytime soon.
Before he could continue his verbal rampage to the three younger people sharing the room, Sabine stood straight with her hands on her hips. “Hey! What was that for? Henry was acting under orders, not at all by themself.”
Leon just shook his head and turned around before swiping his hands over his face. Turning around once more he asked “Sabine. Are you familiar with the Jupiter Incident?”
She looked around at the others and said more slowly. “Well, yeah. But I don't see…” she started but Leon waved a hand to silence her. Chad and Taylor looked at each other and then at him, but he stayed silent for another moment as he gathered his thoughts.
He had been born in 2287 AD, and the Jupiter incident had happened three years before he had been born. But at the time of his youth it had still been a fresh enough wound in Humanities pride that it had been talked about religiously. It had instilled in him a strong impartiality from thinking machines. A mild distaste that bordered on distrust of artificial intelligences and the like. While Henry wasn't exactly an artificial intelligence level thinking machine, the limiters and logic inhibitors that were in place throughout their system were there specifically to keep them that way. And the three in front of him had just been discussing disabling the connection limiters on Henry’s system like they had no worries on the matter.
“Okay. What do you know?” was all Leon said in response after the pause.
Sabine paused, a rare moment of silence from the otherwise confident young woman. This wasn't her area of expertise and it showed. “Well. What they taught us in school is that a computer malfunction caused the deaths of half the crew of the Spirit of Gaia.” she trailed off a bit as she noticed the troubled look on his face.
Leon looked at Taylor “That's what they told you in school? A malfunction?” Taylor gave a small nod and Leon shook his head again. What were they teaching kids in school? Next he would be hearing from them that the collapse had been a miscalculation by the environment and not the explicit result of nuclear armageddon.
“Well, they might have mentioned some stuff about the ship’s computer going rogue too.” Taylor piped up.
Chad nodded and Leon sighed. “Well, the truth of the matter is a lot more complex than that. It was a mix of design flaw and a heavy dose of user error. The moral of the story is more clear however. Thinking machines are dangerous, and unless we do our utmost to keep them contained, they will act against our best interests.” Sabine opened her mouth to speak but then closed it right after. “It's not that they are inherently evil, by no means. They are however not human, and as such don't feel human emotions like grief or rage in the same manner we would. You just don't know what could be the move that sets one off. It's like fire, it's a useful tool, but you play with it or let it get out of hand, and you get burned. Maybe even die.”
Chad asked “We weren't going to open the limiters all the way though. Just enough to get the job done.”
Sabine seemed to be in thought and didn't respond but Taylor asked “I think that's the point though Chad. How much is too much? Will we know before it's too late and something potentially catastrophic happens.”
Leon nodded and asked “So. We are all on the same page, correct? No feeding the fire right?”
Taylor and Chad nodded, after a moment Sabine made a small noise and nodded too.
“Okay.” Leon said, a bit happier now that they seemed to understand why he had been so wary of their direction. “Now that that’s over with, let's hear this progress you made. I am excited to see what you three accomplished, I am assuming that you did make progress right?”
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Chad looked around the stark room as he asked, Leon glanced around as well. The research room was oriented outwards like the rest of the rings, with the floor actually facing away from the core of the ship. As it was the first ring, there were small armoured windows set along the forward side of the room. The other side faced the hallway and thus had unarmoured plexiglass windows showing the hall outside.
Only the forward side of the first and trailing side of the sixth ring had windows that showed the depths of space, the only other locations where one could gaze into that vast emptiness was the bridge and observation deck.
Realising that Sabine was talking to Taylor quietly and that he had allowed himself to become distracted he spoke up “What's that?” speaking of nothing in particular.
Sabine looked at him and then stepped forwards, motioning to the machine next to them. “Well. We were using Henry to run a decoding algorithm for us but I’m assuming you are going to want us to finish it up the slow way.”
“The safe way.” Leon quipped back.
Sabine just raised a single eyebrow at him while continuing “Uh huh. Anyways, before you stopped us, we had already managed to decode enough to figure out what these are.” she motioned to the data cores that they had jury rigged interfaces for. They looked like small tubes that had ports on both ends. Through a manner of trial and error and using some of the detailed photos that Taylor had snapped from the station walk, they seemed to have been able to access the contents of the data cores.
Leon stood there dumbly for a second before he realised that they were waiting on him to ask. “Oh, what are they then?” he said quickly, his excitement overcoming his annoyance at their lack of safety protocol.
Taylor spoke up this time as Sabine looked towards him. “Well, at first we thought that they were some sort of abstract mathematical theorem, the numbers and symbols didn't make a lot of sense. Then we caught references to an old supernova event that is well documented as a planetary nebula. Well, the truth is we aren't sure of anything at this point. But these look like they are full of navigational data.” Leon gave him a bit of a blank look, the information not fully understood. Taylor said “Star Charts.”
Chad and Sabine seemed to be incredibly excited by the prospect, but Leon frowned. Star charts? What happened to the station though, the history of their people. Surely they had something about who had built the strange orbital habitat.
“Star charts. What about the station? Do we know anything about who built it?” Leon asked them.
Taylor leaned forwards and fiddled with the machine a bit as Sabine responded excitedly “Oh! We do have a little, actually come here, you will love this…” she stopped mid-sentence and zipped over to the other side of the small room.
Leon followed along with Chad as Taylor worked on the translation engine. The other side of the room had a row of low desks and computer consoles connected together into a small server. This would allow anyone doing work to research multiple angles of a problem at one time. At the moment the screens seemed to be filled mostly with mathematical data, the likes of which he couldn't parse.
Sabine was already there, tapping away at one of the terminals. Leon could see a few windows opening up and some being minimised, finally she seemed to get to a branch that she followed for a bit and then moved to the side. She motioned for him to take a look at the screen which he promptly did.
What he saw wasn't the alien language he was expecting, but instead a typed document describing their findings. “What is this?” he asked her as he started to read.
Sabine leaned back in her chair a bit as she began proudly. “This is the history of the Aori Unionized Republic Research Vessel, the two-and-a-half-kilometer station was called the March of Wisdom in their language as near as we can tell. It might be a little rough in the translation department, but we know it was a purely scientific vessel.”
Leon nodded in slight wonder at this new information, but then a phrase stuck out to him. “Wait, did you say vessel? You meant station surely?”
This time it was Chad who spoke. “She spoke correctly, the March is actually fully… Well, was fully capable of movement in both space and warp. It looks like they liked to zip it around to get closer looks at different cosmic phenomena. It seems pretty practical if you think about it. Why look from a distance when you can just bring the lab to the star right?” Chad said with a small chuckle.
Leon looked from the younger man to the console and then back at Sabine. “It was fully warp capable?” he asked again. “Do we know what its top speed was? Was it faster than the Leif Erikson?” he asked.
Sabine frowned, her brows furrowing into a scowl as she turned to the document again. “No. we don't know. The data cores we grabbed seem to contain cultural and research information, not engineering data.” she said a bit dejectedly. Leon smiled slightly, she sounded like a child who had just gotten socks for Christmas instead of the shiny new toy they had wanted. Sure the cores were useful, and nice to have. But nothing like what she had been hoping for.
Leon waved a hand and asked “It's not what’s important here. I am more interested in the people that built the station. Do we know much about them?”
Chad nodded as Sabine perked up “Yeah. We actually have some pictures of them that we were able to decode from the cores with Henry’s help.” she paused a second and glanced at him, then continued “Well. What we know is that they were pretty similar to us in terms of how they thought. They had culture, music, and such things. We know that they were omnivores and had blue blood similar to cephalopods on Earth. Copper based I mean. They seem to have been warm blooded as well but that's up to debate still as their temperatures seem a little too high. But that could of course just be the result of their own unique evolution.”
Leon watched as she talked, going over the documents as quickly as he could before she switched them off the screen to be replaced with another. There seemed to be an absolute wealth of information in the data cores. Suddenly he drew back, his eyes being assaulted with an image of the alien for the first time. It was hard to describe.
“That… is one of them?” Leon asked a bit dumbly.
Chad nodded as Sabine chuckled “A bit different huh? I mean, they are aliens after all, so why would they look like what you would expect?” she said.
On the screen was what looked to his eyes like a Squid given scales and a coat. The alien in question looked slim, their body dividing into four tentacles that seemed to end in small hooves. They didn't look slimy, their skin having the distinct patterning and coloration of small scales across its surface. Looking at its face he was reminded of old artwork of dinosaurs. A beak for a mouth in the center of a face that looked wholly inhuman. Three red eyes looked back at him in a triangular formation over a small bump that could have been a nose of sorts. The thing had no ears and its shoulders were less distinct than a Human’s would have been. Instead its arms were similarly tentacle-like and ended in four fleshy tendrils that seem to serve the same purpose as fingers, although with a degree of flexibility that his own fingers would have been incapable of.
He blinked, they didn't look scary per se. But he would be damned if he didn't find the creature a bit on the repulsive side. Something about the impossible nature of its boneless structure.
“They are a bit… Different.” he stated simply.
Chad laughed “They are at that huh. First time I saw that picture I about fell out of my chair. They certainly don't look like anything from Earth. Look at their eyes too, they look so… menacing.” the man finished.
Sabine nodded and added “Yes, but they were obviously very intelligent. I mean, look at what they accomplished.” She pulled up another document. Leon leaned close as she opened a large file that seemed to be a series of numbers and letters strung together.
“What are these?” he asked, they looked familiar but he couldn't quite specify the reason that they made such a fuzzy connection spark in his mind.
Chad motioned to the screen and said excitedly “Oh those, those are just a list of stellar coordinates. All of them are labeled as inhabitable and potentially even colonised systems. You know, nothing to worry or be interested in.” he said with a huge grin.
Leon’s eyes widened at that, there were dozens of systems on the screen, all of them potentially inhabited in the past. Maybe some of them even holding ancient ruins. Ruins they could explore without the threat of a random coronal mass ejection wiping them out. This was big, potentially even bigger than their original discovery had been. Not only did they have direct and explicit evidence of intelligence other than their own, he had the potentiality to find some of that life still living somewhere. As he thought about it however another thought crossed his mind.
“Hang on, do we know how old this data is? That station was clearly ancient beyond reckoning. Do we have any idea what happened?” Leon asked Sabine as she turned back to the screen in front of her. Her chair creaked slightly as she leaned forwards and squinted at the list of documents she had.
She moved through some of the data and then seemed to pull back a bit as she replied “Um, yeah. And no. We have a minor clue as to what happened, the station seems to have been purposefully abandoned by the Aori Unionized Republic due to something they refer to as, the Ruiners. But that's all the information we have on it so far. Sorry Leon”
Chad coughed a bit and then said “Well. It's a lot more than we had initially. We know two things for sure. The Aori abandoned the station on purpose, and they were under attack from a hostile alien race they called the Ruiners. So we can deduce that they must have been at war. And maybe they were losing. They don't seem to be a militaristic race. The March had battle damage on it, signs of conflict at the very least.” Chad pointed out in a matter-of-fact manner.
Leon nodded. It lined up with his own personal thoughts. The multiple damaged bulkheads they had observed looked more like the effects of forced entry than accidental environmental damage. The station on the inside had the eerie stillness of a hastily abandoned home, something he had seen too much of during his peacekeeping years.
“Well. then that explains where they went and who they were. Do you have a time frame?” Leon asked nobody in particular as he looked closer at the documents.
Taylor called from across the small room. “We have extrapolated the potential time period of the astronomical data using the stellar drift of known pulsars. We have narrowed it down to as little as one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand years old.” he said with a nod to the machine next to him.
Leon blinked at that. Over one hundred thousand years? He had been prepared for him to say something like twenty or thirty thousand, not that mind boggling sum. “Woah. That’s incredible.” he said under his breath.
These Aori seemed to have been very advanced, far more so than Humanity at least. With all their technology and experience, they had been wiped out by some hostile race they called the Ruiners. Were these cosmic horrors still around? Could they be after such an incredible time period? He found himself worrying about the possibility of encountering such a dark and malevolent force. Surely such a power would be able to crush them as if they were nothing, their anti-asteroid weapons notwithstanding.
Leon looked at the data and said, pointing at the screen. “So, knowing the rough estimate of time that has passed, we could figure out the relative locations that these stars would be now, right?”
Sabine smiled and nodded. “Yes, in fact we were already working on that when you walked in. We have decoded the current location of this star system here in fact.” She said, pointing to one of the closer stars on the map. “It was listed as inhabited in the records. It’s possible that the planet could still be inhabited.” she said with more confidence for the idea than Leon was feeling.
He looked at the chart. The star in question was a young yellow sun similar in size and composition to Sol, with an inhabited inner system of planets it seemed. This would be a remarkable find even if the ruins remained as silent as the station.
“It’s almost ninety-three light years away, that's pretty close all things considered. It's going to take us over one hundred days to make it there though. Do we have a visual of what the system looks like now?” Leon asked curiously.
Chad motioned to the screen he had been standing next to, it showed a faint bluish light superimposed over a fuzzier background of lights. A telescope image from the Lief Erikson’s observatory.
“This was taken before we left the station’s system, it's fuzzy due to the radiation interference from the red giant, but you can clearly see there is a star there.” Chad said while zooming into the faint dot.
Leon nodded as Sabine spoke “I guess we could drop out of warp to make some additional observations of it. That seems like it would be a good idea to me.” He gave her a nod as well and thought for a minute.
Leon spoke “Taylor, you and Terry can get a solid reading on the system if we were to stop for a bit right?” Taylor gave a nod and Leon continued “Alright. Then that's the new plan. I am going to run it by Joice and Samuel to make sure they agree, but I see no downsides to this. We might find a whole lot more than a single abandoned station there. But I'm not going to jinx it. Okay.” he said with a long pause as if waiting for a response.
Nobody else seemed to have anything to add and so he straightened and turned slightly to leave. “Keep up the good work, but leave Henry out of it please. They are running very close to the edge of their limiters already, it wouldn't take much more of a stretch to break them and cause an issue.”
Chad nodded severely and Sabine grumbled a bit before nodding as well. Leon smiled and waved to them as he left the room, the three going back to their work.
It had been a productive trip to be sure, and the wealth of information they had gathered from the station would already have made them famous beyond comparison back on Earth. The fact that they had discovered not only signs of intelligence, but received artifacts as well. The good they could do with this new information was beyond imagining.
Leon smiled widely, not even the dull constant ache in his chest could detract from his good mood. He walked along the gently curving floor of the ring with a new spring in his step, confident in the future of their mission like never before. Even as they had launched he had been skeptical they would find anything of note. But already they had made discoveries beyond his most ardent hopes and wishes. As he began to climb the ladder he laughed out loud, his good mood demanding he share the news with the others as soon as possible.