Rix assembled the messages to a singular screen.
**System Terran Message: He is not the last: 0451G-001-042D.
**System Terran Message** Seeking that which is lost. Coordinates 5871R-284-876X.
**System Terran Message** Do not attempt to return to origin. Coordinates 0101A-777-003M. Additional coordinates to follow.
~~~
Error:
System Terran Message begins: Depart. Flee. Run. Further messages to follow.
Error!
~~~
Strangely enough, he did recognize them as jumpspace coordinate system, but there was a message here too.
He hadn’t brought it up with Munto or Blyyn. Not that he could do more than basic communication with Blyyn without Munto’s help.
It was an old TSC code in any case. Just the presence of it made him suspicious. The only beings that knew he was from the TSC were the TACITs and himself.
Munto had indicated that they hadn’t said anything about the TSC, but if the TACITs were as interconnected as all that, it didn’t take a genius to look up their search history.
Or, and this was the part that made Rix more nervous, someone was monitoring the TACITs’ network and had managed to pick out that he was a Terran, was from the TSC, and had access to a jumpdrive.
It wasn’t an impossible feat.
In his own time, some 900 years ago, they’d had pseudo AIs which were capable of such network monitoring. That said, they’d have to be crazy complex to be able to manage to connect all of these dots, particularly in sending an encoded message with jumpdrive coordinates.
But then with artificials like Munto flying around the stars all by themselves, it would almost be surprising if there weren’t a full-bore artificial dedicated to such a purpose as network monitoring. Maybe that’s what the TACIT Matrix is.
Munto hadn’t been able to provide any particular clarifying information on the Matrix. The way Munto described it, the Matrix was more like a kind of master formulator of TACITs and coordinating the actions of various TACITs relative to organics.
Such a tasking wasn’t unusual. But even Munto seemed confused as to why a Matrix would have deliberate tasking specifically associated with Terrans, when equivalent ‘tasking’ could be included by default into formulations.
Rix had no answers for Munto. Not yet.
He brought up an old application on his scroll and started working to try and decoder-ring his way into a message. Without knowing the keyphrase, he wasn’t able to easily guess, so he tried for the old trick of re-arranging the words from between the messages.
He looked at the most recent message. ‘He is not the last.’ Munto had been shocked to read it and Blyyn had been surprised that Rix hadn’t been overwhelmed with joy at not being alone.
Rix wasn’t certain if it was the actual message, but it was at least a small comfort to believe for the moment that he was, in fact, not the last Terran in existence.
Blyyn had been taking some time to preen, her feathers having apparently gotten quite tangled from being in the void suit for so long.
Munto had wanted to immediately begin charging the jumpdrive and go to the coordinates, but Rix had insisted that Munto use the walking frame to scan through the remainder of the station with the Terran-grade sensors to see what could be salvaged and what could be learned about the station’s history.
Munto had insisted that this did not require their full attention and wanted to talk with the Terran, but Rix had waved them off and sat on the command deck with his scroll, locking off the scroll communications.
‘He is seeking lost origin. Depart,’ was one message.
‘Run to origin. Last is lost,’ was another.
‘Lost origin. Seeking he. Run,’ was the final variant.
Of those messages, Rix preferred the first and the third, but wondered about the second.
He wasn’t certain as to the origin coordinates for the TSC and he certainly didn’t know what it was for Old Terra. If those coordinates had been more widely known, even within the TSC, someone might have been tempted to use the jumpdrive as a kind of kinetic weapon.
Having seen the records on what happened in the colony system, Rix had a pretty good idea of what had happened on that count.
While his own situation was different, to manage to have the majority of the colony fleet emerge from jumpspace in or sufficiently near planets and planetoids as to effectively detonate them, it would have required either a major miscalculation or sabotage.
As much as Rix wanted to believe in incompetence having played a more significant role, he’d seen the probes be fired off to map the system and return. There was no way that the Colonial Administration’s Navigation group would have missed entire planets and planetoids as part of their scan.
Unless it was sabotage. Or… and this was sadly always a possibility, the probes had gone to the wrong system and some factor between the jump drive and the vessel size had sent them enough off course that between the probes and the colony vessels, there was enough difference with the jump drive to matter. Some calculation rounded off at the wrong place perhaps.
It wouldn’t have explained why they hadn’t caught the differential, stars still being adequately different such that it shouldn’t have been possible to mix up whatever the other system was. Which brought Rix back to sabotage.
He still didn’t like the theory. A colony wasn’t a threat to anyone really. Especially with as far out as they were headed. Even the TCC was only likely to care about colonies in their own region, let alone one that was so far out as to require being almost entirely self-sufficient from day 0.
Incompetence again reared its head. It wasn’t impossible either that whomever had needed to certify the system as good for the colony had merely glanced at probe reports and the planned travel and simply stamped it as approved.
Given the distance involved and the associated time in jump space, it was possible that they had simply forgotten to account for the shift in system planet positions in the almost 100 weeks they were to be in flight and not the 10 that everyone onboard the vessels was to experience.
That at least would make sense for an oversight. Especially with the jumpdrive being so new and secretive to the TSC.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
And in a way, incompetence is a kind of sabotage, just not the deliberate malicious kind. After all, how many times had his own official documentation been screwed up by various officials over the years?
Rix decided that he liked the first one and used that pattern to decode the associated coordinate system.
0451G-001-5871R-876X-003M-001-777-284
Taking this, he pushed the coordinates into the navigator tool the colony leader had insisted they all install. For once, Rix was happy to have done so, even if the stellar cartography associated with it took up a very substantial chunk of the memory of the scroll.
It took a few minutes, the navigator tool conducting several checks against the approximated location before presenting it to Rix.
According to Rix’s stellar cartographic records, it was a white dwarf system that was almost certainly dead in Rix’s time, but no probes had ever gone there, so only some records were made.
It was only a five day jump from here though. Not a long trip, but long enough that Rix knew he’d want to have Munto check the destination against their internal stellar cartography.
“Hey Em, got a minute?” he asked the air, knowing Munto was almost certainly listening/waiting.
“I am available. What assistance do you require?” Munto’s mechanical voice rumbled from the command deck speaker.
“I need to check the coordinates of our destination and any information you have on that system. Keep us offline for now though,” Rix said as he tapped the coordinate pattern into a screen that Munto could see and control.
Munto took the numbers, noted that they were in a different pattern than initially presented, and paused.
“Why did you change the numbers?” they asked.
“Someone sent me a message. If I’m right, these coordinates should work,” Rix said, sitting back and swinging back and forth a bit.
“Did you attempt to check the coordinates as delivered?” Munto asked.
“No, but I can do that now. Please go ahead and run the system I provided against your internal data while I do that though,” Rix grabbed the scroll and pulled it towards himself.
--
Rix tapped away at the scroll in the silence of the ship. It was quiet in that way only a ship can be. Not quiet in terms of actually being quiet or silent, but being quiet in the kind of normal mechanical hum that most ships had which became a kind of constant in the background that nobody really noticed until it wasn’t there.
Not that the ship was normally loud, but there was a kind of special quiet that came from being in the void compared with being connected to a docking port or planetside. The vibrations seemed to bleed away into the void at times, making it even quieter.
Rix had a guess about where the coordinates in the normal format went and it turned out to be close to right.
The navigator tool threw out multiple ‘are you sure you want to go there?’ errors and pointed at a region of the void 38 weeks away from their current location. Rix hadn’t guessed it going that far, but given the enhanced coordinate system of the jumpdrive, he wasn’t surprised.
It was a smart move by whomever or whatever it was that had sent him the coordinates. For anybeing who didn’t know the old TSC codes as well as the right one, they would think that the Terran was running for a spot so far from this galactic community, if you could even call it that, so as to require a massive effort just to try and follow, if Munto’s TACIT friends were restricted to the more standard FTL systems.
It had taken several minutes, but he was ready when Munto was.
--
At the same time, Munto started looking at the coordinates and dug into their local database of stellar cartography.
The system was shown as a blue giant in the records with advice to avoid if possible. In fact, the whole region of space around it, almost every direction out to 15 light years, was marked for TACITs to avoid.
The systems in that region of space were unremarkable and marked at fully surveyed and uninhabited so it made sense that no TACIT would go to that region at all.
Munto turned to one of the sensor suites and looked in the correct direction to see if they could pinpoint the star.
It was difficult, the background of other stars making it a challenge even for the TACIT, but Munto could just see it. It didn’t look blue, but it was possible that the sensor were degraded.
Munto rechecked the entry for the system. No reason was given for avoiding it, simply a warning advising avoidance.
Munto returned their attention to Rix.
--
“I have located the system. It appears to be listed as a blue giant with notes for TACITs to avoid. The entire region appears to be cordoned off out to 15 light years with this at its center,” Munto said.
“Sounds like my guess was right then. Although I’m surprised, because my records show it being a white dwarf,” Rix noted.
Munto checked the sensors again. That would more closely align with what they could sense, but it would exceptionally odd that the Terran’s database would be more up to date than Munto’s.
“That appears to match the sensor readings I can make from here, but I am confused as to how your database is more accurate than my own,” Munto said, flatly.
“I’m no astronomer, but I know some people spent their whole lives looking into the sky. Maybe they just happened to look hard and long at that general direction. Some of the most major projects of Old Terra pre-FTL days involved long distance astronomy,” Rix shrugged.
Munto wasn’t terribly happy with this answer, but kept it quiet. The strange process in the back of their head appeared to grumble as well.
“I checked the location as delivered. The coordinates call for a 38 week jump to get there if they’re accurate and not encoded,” Rix said and tapped in the cartographic coordinates for Munto.
“38 weeks? As in 38 weeks within jumpspace and 380 weeks in standard?” Munto was surprised and was already feeding the coordinates as Rix tapped them in to the cartographic database.
“That’s right. We wouldn’t be able to make it without starving or running the fusion system dry. Max duration for the Esperanto is 22 weeks without refueling and there’s no mass to pull onboard in jumpspace, at least not that I’ve ever been told,” Rix gestured vaguely at the digital gauges.
Munto wasn’t about to doubt the Terran now and could only stare at the cartographic record so far outside of the local mapped region as to be little more than a ‘here there be dragons’ annotation on an old Terran hand-drawn map.
It seemed almost ridiculous, but it appeared the Terran was right.
“How do you propose we proceed?” Munto asked.
“Let’s finish our salvage. Anything that we can get to make the next five days easier on us all. Speaking of which, how’s Blyyn holding up?” Rix nodded.
“She appears to be still processing her departure from her work or her duty as it is commonly described by the Quinn,” Munto said. “I believe she is taking it better than most Quinn would as she is house-less and therefore something of an outcast even within Quinn society.”
“I don’t entirely understand that. I know we talked about it and it even showed up in old Terra cultures, but it just seems strange to me,” Rix shifted a bit in his seat.
“Did none of the Terran cultures in your time maintain the habit of ‘shunning’, if I’m translating the word correctly,” Munto asked.
“Oh definitely. But that was usually more of an issue for people jumping star-nations, not picking one job or another. Still happened, but that was more of a ‘family business’ kind of experience instead of being a flat out getting disowned for becoming a doctor instead of being a farmer,” Rix explained.
“Different cultures maintain different values and different connections,” Munto said simply.
“I guess. Still seems weird to me. But I guess it should. It’s a whole different culture for a whole different species,” Rix shrugged again. “So why did she stay if she’s such an outcast?”
“The majority of species keep to themselves as far as the galactic community is concerned. There are actually very few species who interact on any more than a business basis and even those few xenophiles who do travel often experience significant hardships, making it that much less desirable for any species representative not conducting official business,” Munto spelled out, going for so long that Rix was surprised the artificial didn’t stop for breath (even if it wasn’t needed).
“I know I always dreamed of meeting xenos and seeing the start of galactic society and stations with hundreds of species all coexisting,” Rix mused, his eyes glazing slightly.
“To the best of my awareness, that is either not possible or has not been attempted on a scale to what you are describing,” Munto checked their records and found them to match the statement.
“I’ll say it again, this isn’t the future I figured it might be. So far, the most advanced things are you, the fabricators, and your galactic internet,” Rix stood almost abruptly.
“I am afraid I cannot comment given my limited understanding of what you perhaps expected relative to the current state of galactic society and technology.”
“Well, I’m going to go find Blyyn. Let her know that we need to figure out whatever is left that we can take from the station before we cut it loose,” Rix stretched. “Definitely would love to crank up the gravity, but I know she probably can’t take it, at least not for as long as I’d want it turned up.”
“If we can take a bit of time, I might be able to work out some variable controls for specific rooms,” Munto suggested.
“Well, we can certainly try, but ultimately, it will still come down to how much we can salvage and what our food stores look like. In fact, food should probably be our first challenge. If we can’t stay fed over the next five days in jump space, it won’t matter what’s on the other end, whether it’s a blue giant, a white dwarf, or a black hole,” Rix said.
Munto was already eyeing the Esperanto, trying to figure out just where to try and put the extra equipment in the already cramped interior.