Wonders From Beyond the Sky

A Lords of the Stars Short Story

Mattias von Schantz

October 4, 2140, Europa orbit, Jupiter, Solaris system

It was a historic day.

Jenny O’Sullivan, captain of the Sunguard Command Ship Wałęsa, looked out through the large window in front of her. Outside, in the emptiness of space above Europa, floated the 12th Army of the Sunguard. Of course, she couldn’t really see the ships—even the largest War Cruisers were just pinpoints of light moving across the starry background, but she knew they were there. Two hundred thousand soldiers, ready to embark on what could be the most important mission since the ground invasion of Kelar.

For the first time in sixty years, the Terran Federation was about to make first contact with an alien civilization. And the last time they had done that, things had not gone well.

She glanced around the busy bridge and smiled as she counted three Kelar officers working beside her. Well, she thought, initially it hadn’t gone well, but it had turned out all right in the end.

The last first contact had been only five years after the initial encounter with the Etarians around Alpha Centauri A. That, on the other hand, had been a first contact that went well. The Etarians had turned out to be fully aware of the Terrans’ existence, even to the extent of having already deciphered a handful of major Terran languages from leaked radio transmissions they had intercepted. They just hadn’t been particularly interested in making contact. When the Terrans suddenly arrived at Etar in their first hyperspace-capable ship, the Etarians greeted them politely in passable English, invited them to land and look around, but also made it clear they had no interest in diplomatic relations.

It had taken considerable effort on the Solar Council’s part to coax the Etarians into cooperation, but eventually, they had seen the benefit of working with the Terrans. In the end, it was Terran engineers who sealed the deal.

The Etarians had a technologically advanced civilization, roughly a century ahead of the Terrans in terms of scientific discovery. However, they were culturally predisposed to dislike wasting energy and resources. To a Terran, the Etarians could sometimes come across as a bit naïve or perhaps even obtuse. They most certainly were not, but they often had a tendency to reason more literally than Terrans. This literal mindset extended to their industry: to avoid wasting energy, they simply consumed as little energy as possible, which meant they didn’t need to produce much energy either. Minimal energy production equated to minimal waste. Their industries were quite advanced but not abundant.

The Terran engineers saw an opportunity. “What if,” they asked their Etarian hosts, “you started to produce more energy—but still used all of it within your industries? That way, you still wouldn’t waste much energy, but you’d get much more work done.” It was a line of reasoning that only literal-minded Etarians would find novel, but it worked. The Etarians were impressed by the energy efficiency Terran engineers coaxed out of their industrial systems, even while expanding them to operate continuously.

The Etarians enjoyed a rapid transformation through industrial efficiency and, in return, happily shared their more advanced science and technology with the Terrans.

What the Etarians never disclosed was that they were not the only intelligent species in the Alpha Centauri system.

Three hundred years earlier, the Etarians had made contact with the Kelar around Alpha Centauri B. At that time, the Etarians had only recently begun space exploration, while the pinnacle of Kelar technology was still the windmill. The first manned Etarian expedition to Kelar was conducted with a spacecraft propelled by nuclear thermal engines. After a 16 AU journey from Alpha Centauri A to B, lasting six years, the massive spacecraft entered orbit around Kelar, deployed unmanned probes, and eventually sent down a manned lander.

It is a biological axiom that life on different planets is fundamentally incompatible. Life is complex. Even the simplest organisms rely on thousands of specific proteins to function. Some are used for signaling, others for energy transfer, and still others as components of intricate chains of interdependent biochemical reactions. The likelihood of life arising independently on two planets using the exact same proteins for exactly the same purposes is infinitesimally small.

At best, life from one planet is biochemically neutral to life from another, meaning they can coexist but cannot interact biologically as food or hosts. At worst, they are biochemically negative, with benign proteins from one planet acting as toxins to life from the other. However, they are never biochemically positive—never compatible. Life from one planet can’t consume food from another, and viruses from one can never infect the other.

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In fact, most viruses can’t even cross species boundaries on the same planet. The idea that a virus could infect beings from another world and with a completely different biochemistry is simply preposterous.

Because of this, the Etarians took only basic planetary protection precautions, primarily focused on avoiding the introduction of seeds or spores that might grow in the soil alongside native Kelar species. They never even considered the possibility that something they brought could directly affect Kelar bodies.

The virus they carried was benign for Etarians, causing only mild inflammation in their paralungs. But three weeks after first contact, Kelar peasants living near the landing site began developing severe encephalitis. Within months, the disease became a pandemic, affecting roughly half the planet’s population.

When Etarian scientists, shocked by the outbreak, compared Kelar biochemistry to their own, they were stunned to discover that Kelar cells bore striking similarities to their own, using most of the same proteins for identical purposes. The explanation for this came too late: at some point in prehistory, a small asteroid impact had likely ejected microbe-laden rocks from one planet to the other. Protected within these rocks, microorganisms had traveled through space and seeded life on the other world. A lot of things had to go right for this to happen successfully, but asteroid impacts aren’t exactly uncommon during the lifespan of a planet, and it only had to go right once for life to spread from one world to another. The biochemistry of Kelar life was compatible with Etarian viruses because they shared a common ancestor.

The Etarian expedition of eight scientists and four crewmembers lacked the resources, knowledge, and time to treat an entire planet of dying Kelar. Back on Etar, their entire civilization united in an effort to find a cure, but it was too late. Constructing and dispatching a hospital ship would take over a decade, and by then the pandemic they had unknowingly brought with them would have already run its course.

The Etarians were left with only one option: leave before causing further harm. Reluctantly, they departed, willing but unable to help.

To the Kelar, the Etarians became known as the devils-beyond-the-sky. When the Terrans later made contact with Etar and began flying through the Alpha Centauri B system, the Kelar—now technologically on par with the Terrans and possessing rudimentary hyperspace capabilities—misinterpreted this as a renewed existential threat. To prevent another devastating first contact, the Kelar struck first.

Six years and a hundred million lives later, the Kelar War ended with their unconditional surrender. The Terran-Etarian alliance had waged a grueling urban war through the bombed-out streets and buildings of Kelar cities, facing partisan resistance at every turn. The Kelar fought to the bitter end, still mistakenly believing that they were facing yet another existential threat from the stars.

Captain O’Sullivan glanced around her bridge again, this time appreciating the sight of Etarian and Kelar officers working side by side.

No, she thought, it hadn’t been easy. But in the end, all sides had recognized they couldn’t hold the current generation responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors. Now, they were all part of the Terran Federation. She was proud of what the Federation had accomplished and of her officers. The past was behind them. It was wise to learn from it, but this was a new day, and a chance to do better.

Behind her, on a raised platform at the back of the bridge, Admiral Jian Ekberg was concluding his speech. The soldiers of the 12th Army were professionals; they didn’t need his words to do their jobs. The speech wasn’t for them—it was for posterity. Millennia from now, it would still be remembered. Captain O’Sullivan understood the importance of history better than most.

“Initiate pre-jump sequence,” she ordered. To her right, the Kelar hyperspace navigator currently on bridge duty immediately set to work.

She turned to her left, where Alistair Oliveira, the Sunguard Special Agent assigned to the 12th Army, was sitting. He was a dark-skinned man in his late 40s, with short black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. While Admiral Ekberg commanded the mission’s military aspects, first contact itself wasn’t a military operation. The Sunguard soldiers were there for support and protection in case something went wrong, but ideally, most of them would never see action. Special Agent Oliveira was in charge of the true mission: establishing contact with the alien civilization, learning about their history, culture, technology, and their perspective on the universe, and assessing whether they should, at some point in the future, be invited to join the Terran Federation. The 12th Army was there to support him in this. But while he would lead the mission, he would not be the public face of it—that would be her role.

“We have successfully connected to the spacetime bus,” the Kelar navigator hissed between blue lips. “Handshake successful. Protocol established. We’re uploading coordinate offsets now.”

Using the ship’s field generator, local spacetime had been melted and the intelligent computers controlling the jump were now rewriting some aspects of the local laws of nature—specifically, the coordinates of a volume of space encompassing the ship a few minutes into the future.

What came next always made Captain O’Sullivan nervous. Since, by necessity, the coordinate shift was created at a future point in time—after all, it took some time to upload the new coordinates to the fabric of spacetime, and that process had to be completed before the jump—she could never be absolutely certain the ship would actually be there when that volume of space suddenly exchanged its coordinates with an identical volume of space light-years away. The hyperspace jump was, at that point, inevitable, and if the ship wasn’t there—or worse, only halfway within the volume—the ship would not reach its destination. But she also trusted her crew. The position, speed, distance, and acceleration of the Wałęsa were known with extreme accuracy, and her pilots would make sure it was precisely in the middle of that sphere when the jump took place.