Explorations: First Contact Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Newsletter

  Prologue (Stephen Moss)

  Déjà Vu (Peter Cawdron)

  The Signal (Ralph Kern)

  Status: Inactive (Richard Fox)

  The Bottom Line (Chris Kennedy)

  End of the Line (Robert M. Campbell)

  Mercurial Rescue (Isaac Hooke)

  The Mission (PP Corcoran)

  The Last Command (Nick Bailey)

  Sleeping Giant (PJ Strebor)

  The Darklady (Scott Moon)

  Triaxial (Stephen Moss)

  Harbinger (Josh Hayes)

  Epilogue – Empyrean (Jacob Cooper)

  Explorations: Through the Wormhole

  Journeys

  Heart Blade

  Explorations

  First Contact

  Explorations: First Contact

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright holders listed below.

  The stories in this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  ‘Explorations: First Contact’ copyright © 2017 Nathan Hystad and Woodbridge Press

  ‘Prologue’ by Stephen Moss copyright © 2017 Stephen Moss. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Déjà vu’ by Peter Cawdron copyright © 2017 Peter Cawdron. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘The Signal’ by Ralph Kern copyright © 2017 Ralph Kern. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Status: Inactive’ by Richard Fox copyright © 2017 Richard Fox. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘The Bottom Line’ by Chris Kennedy copyright © 2017 Chris Kennedy. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘End of the Line’ by Robert M Campbell copyright © 2017 Robert M Campbell. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Mercurial Rescue’ by Isaac Hooke copyright © 2017 Isaac Hooke. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘The Mission’ by PP Corcoran copyright © 2017 PP Corcoran. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘The Last Command’ by Nick Bailey copyright © 2017 Nick Bailey. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Sleeping Giant’ by PJ Strebor copyright © 2017 PJ Strebor. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘The Darklady’ by Scott Moon copyright © 2017 Scott Moon. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Triaxial’ by Stephen Moss copyright © 2017 Stephen Moss. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Harbinger’ by Josh Hayes copyright © 2017 Josh Hayes. Used by permission of the author.

  ‘Epilogue’ by Jacob Cooper copyright © 2017 Jacob Cooper. Used by permission of the author.

  All other text copyright © Nathan Hystad 2017

  Copy-Edited by Scarlett Algee

  Cover Art by Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Cover Back Layout by Deb Kunellis

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  Prologue

  By Stephen Moss

  Shadow was a hard line, dividing the Moon. On one side was almost blinding light; on the other, void. Mission Commander Skarsgaard didn’t have to order the switch: her specialists knew their jobs, and almost before she could think of the need for it, the blackness began to fill in, the probe’s many eyes scouring the spectra to find purchase.

  The probe itself glistened with light for a moment longer, then flashed into the darkness. Its sensors, shielded now from the stellar wind, adjusted once again, and now, finally, the object of the probe’s fascination, the reason for its dispatch, came fully into view.

  The probe surveyed the loose, spherical framework ahead of it, and unleashed its full array upon the object, looking deep into it.

  The image being projected into Susan Skarsgaard’s screens began to crystallize.

  “Not completely hollow,” she said.

  “No, apparently not,” said one of her analysts.

  They had struggled with the fact that all sensor data that had been returned from distance had seemed to show a vacuum within the structure, and indeed, as it had no walls, there certainly wasn’t any air to speak of in the object. But there was substance of some kind, or at least there were… things.

  A tech in the room, someone that Susan couldn’t see, was assigning object titles and starting sub-analyses and classification on each. Susan’s attention wanted to go there, to look at the details, but not yet. Not until they were past.

  “Approaching perigee, Commander. Shall I redirect?” said the probe’s remote pilot at Susan’s side.

  “No, not yet, Lieutenant,” said Susan. “Let’s complete this pass, then adjust outward on next orbit.”

  And so they did, the probe speeding by the massive alien object—for it was alien, there was no doubt about that.

  “OK,” said Susan, “let’s incrementally adjust. I want to halve the flyby distance for the second pass.”

  “Confirmed,” said the pilot, working the numbers and parsing them through his own networked subsystems for multi-phase confirmation. The part of Susan’s system that was linked to the probe registered the request when it came through.

  It was not a question of whether she would approve it, just a fail-safe, one of thousands, and it came with a four-second deadline until the numbers would have to change. She cleared the command sequence in less than one. Trust, built on training together for thousands of hours. Three seconds later, the order went out like stern words from a teacher, adjusting the probe’s attitude.

  At last, Susan’s attention came away and she blinked around at the sterile cockpit of her own ship, the Abeona, itself approaching the Moon at a lazy 11.06 km/s, or a little over twenty-four thousand miles per hour. They might have wanted to go more slowly, to take more time to analyze the object, but much more slowly than that and the planet Earth, being the gravitationally possessive mother it was, would simply not have let them leave.

  “Right, Marcus, what do we have?”

  Marcus Daily, head of the analysis team, came to life as if a switch had been flicked. “Well, Commander, we have fully three hundred and twenty-six distinct objects within the main superstructure—each, apparently, bound to the framework, though we can see no interconnectivity other than the framework itself.”

  “Make up, purpose, materials?” said Susan.

  “I’m afraid all I can be certain of at this time is that they are metallic… mostly.”

  Susan frowned at this vagueness from her scientific lead, and the man shrugged.

  “They are heavy, that much we know. Dense… very dense, that is a consistent theme, but the materials themselves, well… there are… irregularities. Not the irregularities we saw from distance. Our sensors are returning, and, as hoped, once within the sphere’s magnetic envelope, we have been able to garner vastly more data.

  “So yes, good data, but…” Marcus glanced around, looking rather meek, then piped up, “What we can confirm is that several layers
of graphene are present around the superstructure itself. Maybe even a carbyne form as well. Bar that… let’s just say the data, while more complete, remains… non-distinct.”

  About to speak, to offer some form of leadership in the light of this rather underwhelming first pass, Commander Susan Skarsgaard suddenly felt very sick, then she felt very light, then she felt a hand clamoring at her skin, voices shouting, hers among them. Then Commander Susan Skarsgaard felt nothing at all.

  ***

  The “dark side of the Moon” is always a misnomer, thought Susan, as she looked at the big moon. Sometimes the so-called “dark side of the Moon” is in glorious sunshine, sometimes not. The only thing that makes the dark side of the Moon “dark” is that we can’t see it. Well, not from Earth, anyway.

  But I can see it, thought Susan.

  It’s right over there, thought Susan, as she perceived that part of the Moon that would, that must still be invisible to the greater orb to her right.

  It’s so very pretty, thought Susan.

  And so very close. We must be in orbit.

  Susan looked back, expecting to see her crew, but when she turned she saw only the night-black of space, dotted with little sparkling promises, light years away. She spun. Where was she?

  She quickly found the Earth, bright and so very detailed, countless facets marking its cloud-dotted dayside, and its night side riddled with tiny orange wisps, each a city, a network of highways, a moving flow of thousands of people, millions of people.

  She turned to the Sun, and for a moment she was just another satellite basking in its heat, facing it with the planet and the Moon as equals, all three of them dwarfed by the star’s magnificence.

  But she wasn’t a planet and she wasn’t a moon. She was a commander of something. A commander without a ship. And something else was wrong, too, thought Susan. She wasn’t only missing the Abeona and her crew, she realized, as she looked around more frantically now. She was missing her self.

  She balked at the thought, and something in the sensation, the sense of loss, echoed within whatever space she was really in, touching something deeper.

  Suddenly, she was facing the sphere, the ship, hiding within the darkness of the lunar night, and then she was surging toward it.

  A roar of memory came at her like the burst from a shot of tequila, only it kept coming, like the sensation was breaking through, the stringency rushing up her nose, in her ears, rushing in around her eyes.

  Susan…no, not Susan…the Sphere spiraled into orbit around the anomalous star, the one whose behavior was so strange. Flares looped out of the surface in a rhythmical pattern. Sun spots uniformly stretched across the surface. The Sphere ship reached out with its sensors, puzzled by the artificial nature. Could the star be engineered somehow? Could this be…information?

  As the curious explorer looked in wonder upon the star, something swirled on the surface beneath the Sphere. Was it responding to them?

  The Star bellowed, washing out every sensor on the Sphere’s surface. The Sphere felt its mind being invaded, memories drawn, unbidden, to the surface as the Star brutally dug through its past. Intrusively and unstoppably, the Star explored the Sphere’s history. Images flashed in front of Susan’s eyes. A city of ice cathedrals under a dying sun. A sub-mantle herd swimming in a planet’s core. A planet of herbivores that have commandeered evolution, removing all contest from nature.

  With a last burst of effort, the Sphere powered up its engines, desperate to escape from this brutal rape of its mind. It didn’t have the chance to even set a course, in its fear.

  Susan saw the Sphere slam back into real-space, tumbling out of control, half-lobotomized, but clutching on to a kernel of information. She felt her mind filling with information, the secrets of the mighty displacement drive. The shielding systems to protect it, the places it had visited and the wonders it had seen.

  And a stark warning.

  Stay away from the Star.

  ***

  Susan Skarsgaard awoke to reality with a start, thrown from the machine once her mind had reached its capacity. She vomited, the mass forming a vile set of orbiting globules in zero-gee, quickly starting to coalesce into little planets and moons in front of Susan’s face.

  She inhaled sharply at the sight, still reeling, and a stream of her own discharge was drawn in with the air, causing her to retch once more, with even more gusto this time.

  “Jesus…uck…oh God,” Susan spluttered as she brought her hands up and covered her mouth, trying to clear away the cloud of disgustingness in front of her.

  “Lieutenant? What is our status?”

  Nothing.

  Susan felt under her seat for a sick bag, something she should have done by instinct when she felt nauseated. But her instincts had been stripped away, along with everything else.

  Susan scooped up as much of her vomit as she could with the bag, getting the bigger masses, and then looked around. Everyone was still there, eyes closed and apparently catatonic. They’re asleep, Susan thought, but a little voice inside her head told her that was wrong as well.

  After glancing at the screen to her left to confirm that the ship was still intact and progressing well, Susan looked to Marcus, hoping the head of her analysis team might have some answers, and as if in response, Marcus’s eyes flew open.

  She knew what was about to happen before Marcus did. She could see it in his face. She was almost quick enough. She even managed to catch the bulk of it in a bag as it flew from him, but still got splattered far more liberally than she would have hoped.

  Her stomach twitched again, threatening further incident, but she managed to quell it. She was getting control again, at least over her stomach.

  “Marcus!” Susan said. “Marcus, calm down. It’s okay. You’re back on the ship.”

  Marcus nodded his head—not out of agreement, but surrender.

  “Marcus,” Susan said after a moment, wanting to let the tech recover, but needing to know. “Were you…” She didn’t know how to phrase it. “Did you…did you feel it?”

  “Yes, Commander,” said Marcus, tears coming to his eyes.

  She did not need to ask more, not just yet. She knew where he was right now. He was deep in the pain of the loss. It had been the most powerful emotion Susan had ever felt.

  But there had been so much more besides. So much she didn’t understand yet. Marcus might have gotten more. But that would need to wait until they, had gathered themselves a little.

  She was about to say something, to try to soothe some measure of the remembered pain they were both still experiencing, when another of her crew screamed suddenly. Susan was at the woman’s side the next moment, trying to console her, and so they all began to come back, each finding the terrible memory hidden within the machine in their own time, each reacting in their own way.

  Though, it seemed, pretty much all losing their lunch in the process.

  ***

  It was nearly an hour before she had a semblance of order restored, between her crew, and the ship’s unstoppable onward motion, and Mission Control having a baby on the other end of a jury-rigged secondary comms laser.

  She had noticed when Marcus had started typing, furiously inputting into the system. She hadn’t stopped him. She hadn’t even interrupted him. A quick page through her command system had confirmed that he was only working in a log file, so she had left him to his work.

  “Marcus?” Susan ventured, eventually, when he started to slow.

  Marcus blinked hard, shook his head, looked up at her and smiled. Now that Susan was able to focus on just talking with the scientist one-on-one, she was disconcerted by the look of calm on his face.

  He looked…well, he looked high. Of course, Susan wasn’t exactly sure what the “appropriate” expression would be, given what they had just been through.

  “Marcus, are you all right?” Susan said, quietly.

  “Marcus is fine,” said Marcus, then grinned at the slip-up, the wee faux pas of having fo
rgotten his own existential place in the universe for a moment, and corrected, “I am fine.”

  “Marcus,” said Susan, her voice guarded, “how is the log file going?”

  Marcus looked pensive for a moment, as if looking for the words, then nodded his head.

  “Right. Yes,” he said, “it’s all been rather…I’ve been trying to get it all down.”

  He gestured at the screen. “It’s like trying to write down what your own voice is saying. No…no. That’s not it.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s…disconcerting.”

  They smiled at the understatement. Like a wounded soldier saying he is having an off day.

  Susan looked at the notes on Marcus’s screen and knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to capture it all. In case this was their only shot. In case they never got the chance to speak with it again.

  “So…” said Susan, rather meekly.

  “So,” said Marcus.

  “What did you see? What did it tell you?”

  Marcus took a deep breath and set his shoulders, looking back at his screen before saying, “Everything…and nothing.”

  Susan frowned, and Marcus shrugged.

  “It can’t tell us anything. But it can show us. And it did,” said Marcus.

  “But what…” Susan began, but Marcus cut her off.

  “There is so much I don’t understand. But I will, or others will, when we bring them here. For now, though, I have enough to keep JPL, DARPA, the DRDO, Qinetiq and everyone else I can think of busy for a decade,” said Marcus.

  “How much can it show us?”

  Marcus gulped, then shook his head, gathering his strength. “Maybe just a glimpse, or maybe….” He went silent for a moment.

  “It can’t show us everything,” Marcus went on, “it only has so much left. But it is still a thing of marvels. It thinks it can give us what we need to get out there, if we let it. And it isn’t just offering us a list of where not to go, a Pandora’s box. It knows where we can go, too. It cannot tell us what. Only where. But it has found others out there. Other intelligent life.