Deep Space - Hidden Terror (The Stasis Stories #6) Read online

  “Well… yes, but—”

  “Have we encountered intelligent non-DNA aliens before?”

  “Uh… no—”

  “And all the other life we’ve encountered so far has been DNA-based, correct?”

  “Well, yes, but—"

  “Doesn’t it then seem most likely that they will be DNA-based and therefore susceptible?”

  Truculently, Sibiq said, “Even if they are DNA-based, they may be so divergent that they won’t respond to our standard techniques. You must get us some specim—"

  This time the interruption came from Captain Rabaq, who’d just leaned into the room, “Expedition Leader, you may wish to come to the bridge. It seems that the solians have a craft somewhat smaller than a scoutship near the ringed planet we’re about to scoop.”

  Diddiq rose from his saddle. To give the appearance of calm, he savagely suppressing the twitch of alarm that threatened to wobble his antennae. He focused on Sibiq a moment, saying, “We’ll get you specimens. Make sure you’re ready to process them and have fully worked out your strategies for eliminating the solians once you have them.” As they started for the bridge, he turned his eyes to Rabaq, tightly asking, “How is it that they’re all the way out here to the gas giant and we’re just now noticing them?”

  The captain drew away as they walked, aware Diddiq was angry. He said, “Sorry, Expedition Leader. At first, our deceleration exhaust, spewing ahead of us, kept us from seeing well that direction. Immediately after we turned the ship so we could scoop, we believe the planet hid the solian ship. Now the ship’s risen to a poleward position, possibly part of an orbit, but perhaps so it can look down on our ships as they make their scooping passes.”

  “Why would it want to do that?”

  “It’ll be able to measure the ships’ lengths, which wouldn’t have been visible until now. Also, it can better observe how deep we go into the planet’s atmosphere.”

  “Do you think their ship was already out around this planet, or did it specifically come out to meet us?”

  Rabaq shrugged his antennae, “We don’t know. With a little more tracking we’ll be able to tell if it was orbiting. I hope it was already here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if it came here to meet us, they either detected us farther out in the system than I’d like to think, or it accelerated much more rapidly than we’re able to in order to get here so quickly.”

  “Is it accelerating as if it’s just arriving? Or, more importantly, does its trajectory cross or approach ours?”

  To Diddiq’s astonishment, Rabaq turned his eyes to one of the junior officers and posed Diddiq’s question to her.

  Why didn’t he already have her working on those questions?! Diddiq wondered. Am I the only one on board who’s worried about these solians? He decided he’d better pose more questions they might not be trying to answer. Sending his message loudly enough that everyone on the bridge would get it, he asked, “What’s its mass? What’s it made of? What kind of engines is it using? If it’s using its engines, how fast is it accelerating? Is it transmitting at us, or back to its home planet? Can we tell if it came from the oxygen world? Does it have a scoop? Did it just, or is it about to refuel from this gas giant? If not, what else might it be doing here?”

  When Diddiq paused to think of more questions, Lieutenant Falaq, the comms officer said, “The solians are directing very powerful radio transmissions at the Busux as well as back toward the inner system.”

  Diddiq felt a moment’s irritation at having his question-generating thought process interrupted, but then decided it was important to encourage a young officer who’d displayed initiative by evaluating the solians’ emissions. “Very good,” he said, then frowned as he realized that Busux was leading the three haliq ships in their plunge toward the ringed planet’s atmosphere. Since the ship he was on, Nesex, was third in line, they should be far from the line of any transmission directed at Busux. “How do you know the solian ship is directing transmissions at Busux?” he asked. “Surely we aren’t close to the line of that transmission.”

  Looking uncomfortable, the officer said, “It’s transmitting so energetically that the transmissions are scattering from Busux’s hull. It’s turned those transmissions briefly on Kranex and ourselves, but has generally kept them on Busux.”

  “Could they be trying to use their transmissions as a weapon?”

  The officer looked surprised, “They’re not that strong.”

  “Could they think the transmissions are powerful enough to do damage? Perhaps they think they might penetrate the hull and deafen the crew?”

  “It’s not the right frequency to deafen us, sir.”

  “We know that,” Diddiq ground out, “but maybe they don’t know what frequencies we hear in?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Falaq said.

  “Well, if they aren’t using it as a weapon, then they must be using it for communication. What’re they saying?”

  “I… I don’t know, sir. Shall I route the transmission to you so you can listen?”

  No, you idiot, Diddiq thought, you should figure it out! What he transmitted was, “Yes, send it to me, but also have everyone on the comms team try to figure it out. Oh, and send it to the math computers to see if they can make sense of it.”

  A moment later Diddiq winced at a horrible yowling coming directly into his antennae through the contact on his headgear.

  When he looked at the young comms officer, she looked frightened. Her forelimb touched a control and the yowling diminished markedly in volume. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Do you think that could be an attempt at communication?”

  “Um, they’re sending the same signal at multiple frequencies. I’m sending you one that’s transposed into the range we can hear. Several of the frequencies they’re transmitting at are far beyond our hearing range. Their emissions are modulated in several ways. Amplitude modulation is what we hear best and what I’m forwarding to you, but some of their emissions are frequency modulated, some are phase modulated, and some are binary digital.”

  Diddiq shook his head. “I think our best hope is that the math computers can detect a pattern and make sense of it. But you and the other communication staff should keep trying to analyze it as well. Remember, if it’s a message, they probably tried to design it so we could understand it.”

  Another of the bridge’s many lieutenants lifted a forearm for attention, “Expedition Leader?”

  “Yes?!” Diddiq barked, unable to restrain his impatience.

  “The solian ship is using rockets at present, but it’s using them to decelerate, not accelerate.”

  Diddiq suppressed an irritated transmission, then spoke, “What we want to know, Lieutenant, is how powerful its engines are and therefore how rapidly it can accelerate. I assume you can determine engine power from how fast it’s currently decelerating, correct?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” The lieutenant looked at a readout, “Currently, it’s decelerating at 0.57 gravities.”

  “Primal planet!” Diddiq cursed in dismay at the power that suggested. “Rabaq, what’s our maximal acceleration?”

  “0.025 gravities when we’ve consumed most of our fuel and our mass is low. We must push the engines to their limits to achieve that. Doubtless, the solian ship isn’t transporting thousands of hibernating haliq. If we dumped ours, we could accelerate more rapidly.”

  “Do we know what kind of engines they’re using? Are they chemical?” Diddiq knew chemical rockets could produce large accelerations but quickly ran out of fuel. He didn’t feel hopeful because his understanding was that chemical rockets couldn’t have reached this far out into the solar system without years in transit. Maybe they did just happen to be visiting this planet rather than having made a trip out here after they saw us enter their system, he thought hopefully.

  The lieutenant dashed Diddiq’s hopes when he said, “The solian ship’s exhaust seems to be almost all ionized helium, also known as alpha particles. Ther
e’s a tiny bit of hydrogen and boron too, but far less than one percent.”

  Dreading the answer, Diddiq turned his eyes to Rabaq, “What kind of engine would produce helium?”

  Tightly and barely audible, Rabaq said, “Fusion.”

  When Diddiq’s eyes roamed the bridge, they saw worried expressions everywhere. Giving his antennae a jaunty and confident tilt, he said, “Don’t get downhearted! Even if they’ve figured out how to use fusion, their engines may still be inefficient. That high acceleration figure is probably because they’ve mounted big engines on a lightweight ship. Our ships, after all, are configured as transports, not high-speed messengers.

  “Even better, after we’ve exterminated them, we can learn all they know about fusion from the wreckage of their civilization.

  “Don’t forget, we’ve still got lots of tricks up our sleeves. Undoubtedly, our bioscience people will be able to kill the solians, just like they’ve wiped out the undesirable species on other planets during previous expansions. But, for them to do that, we’ve got to get them tissue samples. Since the acceleration differential means we can’t chase them down, we’ll need to lure them to us. Anyone have any idea how we might do that?”

  Lieutenant Kasuq said, “Expedition Leader, one of the computers has deduced that some of the solian transmissions are image grids.”

  “Image grids?”

  “Yes, sir. Grids of 1,000 by 1,000 dots, some filled in, some not. The filled-in dots make pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “We’re pretty sure one represents this solar system because it seems to show a ringed gas giant. It displays four gas giants, one more than the three we’ve found so far. One is on the far side of the system which is probably why we haven’t found it. It also shows four small planets, two more than we’ve found so far. The innermost and outermost of the small planets seem to be on the opposite side of the star.

  “Another image shows some grotesque four-limbed beings, perhaps the solians. A third seems to be showing a base-ten numbering system as might have been expected from the 1,000 by 1,000 grids. Another—”

  Diddiq interrupted, “Send the pictures to everyone awake. Then we’ll talk about what they might represent.”

  Diddiq was formulating some more orders when the lieutenant who’d given him the acceleration figures said, “Expedition Leader?”

  “Yes…?”

  “You asked about whether the solian ship was going to match our trajectory. They’ve stopped decelerating and have pretty much come to rest relative to the ringed planet. They’ve kept their engines going, so now they’ve begun accelerating in much the same direction we’re presently going. They should match our velocity of 335 kilometers per second, going in-system, in about seventeen hours.”

  “Will they cross our path then?”

  “We don’t know. We’ll have gone past them and it will take some time for them to catch up to us. We don’t have good enough data on the angle of their trajectory to know if they’ll be crossing our path at that point or not. Also, it depends on how much our pass through the gas giant’s atmosphere slows us down and alters our trajectory. Also, on whether they decrease their acceleration to match ours, then pull alongside, or continue accelerating to cross our course, then pull ahead. Lieutenant Kasuq’s navigation computer’s quite frustrated by all the unknowns.”

  Fleetingly, Diddiq wondered how it could be that the computer wasn’t offended to be known as a possession of Kasuq’s, rather than by its own name. He flicked his antennae in annoyance. He had plenty of more important things to worry about without letting his mind wander off to fret about the feelings of computers—who, he’d been assured, didn’t have sentiments about such things. Speaking to the bridge crew, Diddiq said, “Okay. Let’s all use our free time to see if we can understand the pictures they sent us. In case these solians don’t approach us on their own, try to figure out how we can invite them to do so. Assuming we can get them to approach, consider how we might disable and capture their vessel. It’d be acceptable to damage it severely, as long as we don’t completely destroy all the biological entities and prevent the bio-team from getting the samples needed to design their weapons. As an example, setting off an atomic weapon near the outside of their ship… one that kills them by kinetic damage from the sudden acceleration and the rupture of the hull would be okay, as long as we can still retrieve some of the pieces of their ship with a landing shuttle. Setting off that atomic weapon inside their ship and immolating all the biospecimens would not be acceptable.”

  Diddiq spoke for a while longer, then turned his own eyes to examine the pictures they’d received, feeling as if he’d laid out a path to a good plan.

  Chapter Seven

  Lee and the rest of the crew of SC Maui had watched the feed from SC Phoenix when it displayed the course of the alien ships during their plunge through Saturn’s atmosphere. Curious, Lee’d asked Captain Massey what effect the pass would have on the ETs’ trajectories.

  Massey’d shrugged. “Too many variables. We don’t know the aerodynamics of their ships and how they’ll affect the drag. Not knowing whether they’ll be using airfoils, we can’t be sure of the depth they’ll reach, which would affect the density of the atmosphere they’ll pass through, again affecting the drag. The little ship that preceded them had a major deflection of its course. Earth thinks it may be heading back out to the periphery of the system, but it hasn’t activated its drive yet.” She’d twisted her lip. “I think it might’ve miscalculated its pass and could be damaged beyond repair. It’ll be interesting to see if one of the big ships deflects to go out and rescue it.”

  The last of the alien ships had exited Saturn’s atmosphere over the past hour. Suddenly, Massey said, “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Lee asked. She hadn’t seen anything unexpected about the alien’s atmospheric pass.

  The captain said, “Their new trajectory’s aimed close enough to Earth that it can’t be an accident. A minimal delta-V would put them on an intersecting course. And,” she sighed, “with the reduction in speed from passing through Saturn’s atmosphere and assuming they continue to decelerate at 0.015g, they’ll arrive with a low enough velocity that they’ll be able to enter an orbit. Or…” she said slowly, “if they hit the Earth, they’ll do a lot of damage.” She looked down at her display, “About sixty kilotons of kinetic energy each, so, a lot smaller than Tunguska, but four times bigger than Hiroshima.”

  Lee studied the captain a moment. “Um, that’d be bad, but surely they didn’t travel across interstellar space to hit us with three oversized Hiroshima events. It’s not like that’d wipe us out.”

  “No…” Massey said, consideringly. “They’ve got to be planning to go into orbit.” She slanted a grim look at Lee, “Of course, from there they could wipe us out by dropping hydrogen bombs.”

  Lee rolled her eyes. “Anybody ever tell you you’re quite the conversationalist?”

  Massey snorted, “More of a dour one.”

  Massey had a weird way of looking at things, but Lee found herself liking the woman more and more. She seemed highly competent. Contemplatively, Lee asked, “If they are planning something dire like that, and Phoenix fails to stop them, what’s your plan?”

  Massey winked. “I’m just a captain. I’d be asking General Lee what to do.”

  Lee’s eyes widened, “I’m an aerospace engineer. Sure as hell, I’m no general! Not even distantly related.”

  Massey formed a slow grin, “And I may be called ‘captain’ but I’m just a glorified ship driver.” She shrugged, “Neither of us knows anything about warfare, but you’re a lot of rungs further up the ladder at Staze, the company that owns Maui.” She put on a southern drawl, “And, I’se heared tell you’se mighty smart.”

  Lee couldn’t help laughing. When she settled, she narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, “Do we have anything on board we could use as an improvised weapon?”

  It was Massey’s turn to laugh. Jokingly, she said, “Som
e of the ration Stades in the kitchen should be classified as weapons of intestinal destruction.” She looked around, “We’ve got an arms locker with some Tasers and pepper spray intended to control unruly personnel.” She cocked an eye at Lee, “Think we can stop badassed aliens with those?”

  Sobered, Lee said, “Maybe we should take inventory to see if we’ve got any ship-killing torpedoes hidden away in the cargo hold.”

  Massey slowly nodded. “We should look around.” Uncomfortably, she said, “I’ve always been kind of an anti-violence pacifist type. I might not recognize torpedoes.”

  Lee blinked, “Are you saying,” she asked slowly, trying to check the expressions on the rest of the crew without looking directly at them, “that, if it comes to it, you won’t fight yourself, or that you’ll also try to keep the rest of us from fighting?”

  Massey shook her head. “No. No. If monsters have come to destroy Earth, I’m ready to fight, It’s just that I might suck at it.”

  “Ah,” Lee said. “Maybe we should all tour the ship together, looking for things that might be used as weapons?”

  Ray Jones, Massey’s first officer, cleared his throat. “I read a science fiction story a long time ago. I don’t remember the details, but aliens attacked a human ship; I think on its way to another star. The ETs used some kind of reactionless drive to get around so they didn’t realize the humans’ rocket exhaust might be dangerous. The humans managed to turn their ship and cook the aliens by firing their engines at the bad guys.”

  Lee nodded thoughtfully, “And our fusion torch’s really hot… Problem is, our aliens are also using rockets. Their exhaust may not be as hot as ours, but they’ve got to recognize that the stuff spewing out of the back of a rocket engine’s dangerous.”

  Jones shrugged, “Yeah. I was just trying to give an example of how we should think outside the box.”

  Concurring, Lee said, “Keep thinking. It makes me think that we should be considering areas where our technology could be ahead of theirs. We might not be able to travel from star to star, but we seem to be able to accelerate faster. Also, from their weak radar reflections, I don’t think they know about Stade. I suppose they could know about it but have difficulty making much of it, so they could be only using it for their fission reactors and rocket engines. In any case, the fact that our hulls are much stronger than even some fancy carbon allotrope must give us some kind of advantage. We just need to figure out how to benefit from it.”