Derelict

[l3wt]

Sarah floated alongside the long plastic table in the Galley’s mess, datapad clutched in one hand and the other curled around the top of a chair. The serenity’s life support was a low, comforting hum that reverberated through the ship. She hadn’t noticed the noise until the engines went silent, but it had been the only way to bring the crew together.

Long conversations in one and a half gees were very rarely more than grunts, and even more rarely productive. If they had been having the meeting for any other reason, Sarah would have welcomed the break. Instead, she held the datapad, and the message it contained at a distance, as though it were a venomous snake that might rear up and bite her. She eyed it nervously. Perhaps it might. It wasn’t as though anything else about that ship was making sense. Reality might as well be out to lunch too. She gritted her teeth, took a breath, and tried for a relaxed smile. Perhaps Leslie and James were too caught up in their own heads to notice. And perhaps she really was queen of Bretonia.

”So.” She said, tone flat. Her eyes drifted across the table and settled on Leslie. ”Chardon’s talking to you.”

James was loosely seated, hands folded in front of him. His thoughts were hidden behind an expressionless, if mildly expectant look. ”What, specifically to Leslie?” He asked.

”Yeah.” Sarah flicked her wrist and sent the datapad drifting across the room to James, folded her arms across her chest, and resisted the impulse to tug at her hair. ”To: Leslie Durant. Gone gone gone gone… It just repeats.” A ghost of a shudder crept its way up her spine. ”I kept the connection open for two hours, and that’s all it’s sending.”

Leslie rubbed her forehead tiredly. ”Great, the eight-hundred year old ship knows my name and wants me gone. Are we in a horror movie?” She looked up, at Sarah. ”Any idea what’s going on?”

James frowned down on the datapad. ”Why’s it sending this? I’m pretty sure it’s no emergency code. And if we’re just receiving this now, what changed from when we spotted it entering the system? I don’t like this, it’s too… cryptic.”

Sarah’s shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. It would have looked more convincing if she’d unfolded her arms. ”I don’t know why. I’m still working on how. Everything we’ve got says that ship’s almost a millennium dead. There’s nothing I know of that we can build now that lasts that long. Even big RTGs degrade after a couple of centuries, and they don’t have any moving parts. It shouldn’t be able to transmit.” She shook her head. ”And even if it could, our comms systems are centuries apart. I mean, the data packet’s just text, but… It’s surprising we can even receive that. I checked with the Barrier, and they didn’t pick anything up. It’s sending tightbeam transmissions at us, specifically.”

James gave the datapad a little flick, sending it spinning nearly in place. ”Times like these, I wish Lisa was here with a full JADE instance, the one on board my suit doesn’t have the processing power for a full signals analysis. Data transfer protocols change pretty regularly and legacy system transmissions can be a b-tch. There’s no standardization across the sector quite yet, you know? And by the time a standard can be met, a new protocol is implemented.” He paused, noticing the odd looks. ”What? I hang in Lisa’s spacement a lot.”

”To the eternal chagrin of all your other friends,” Leslie quipped, but her heart was not in it.

If the joke registered, Sarah didn’t show it.

”Right. And Chardon’s talking to us across centuries of systems. I can’t even pretend to know how it’s doing that.” She drummed her fingers against her arms. ”I’ve heard of building to last, but that’s just absurd.”

James had a thought. ”If it’s impossible for the transmitter gear to survive that long, then it could very well be the equipment… is not native to Chardon’s initial configuration. As in, we’re not the first to have found this thing.”

Leslie nodded slowly. ”Makes sense. And if they are using my name specifically, they know my ship is headed there…” She exhaled quietly as realization hit.

”Someone else has been on board.” Sarah frowned. ”Doesn’t really fit. We’re already heading out about as far as it’s safe to go, and it’s not like this thing’s course takes it past any other inhabited system. If someone else saw Chardon before we did, they’d need a set of eyes bigger than anything in the Barrier to do it.” The engineer shook her head. ”And that’s without actually getting to it. Someone would have seen them go.”

James shrugged. ”So which is it? An impossible transmission, or an equally impossible prior boarding action by an unknown party? Either way, something here seems very off.”

Leslie got up suddenly. ”I’m going to take another look at the thing, just to be sure.” She carefully got up and left the room.

”I don’t know, James.” Sarah whirled in space to face the lieutenant commander. ”I’m trying to find out. You don’t need to bite my head off for it.” She jerked her head towards the Galley’s bridge, auburn strands hovering around her. ”If you want to go up there and see if you can find someone else out there, be my guest, because I’ve been looking for two hours, and I’m telling you that there’s nothing there.”

James held his hands in front of him, a placating gesture he’d found himself using with some frequency lately. ”Relax, I wasn’t trying to be snappy. I’m just as frustrated as you are. There are a lot of questions right now, and what info we have doesn’t seem to cover a third of them.”

”Mhm.” Sarah didn’t exactly nod, but she let her gaze drift back to the floor. ”Long story short, I don’t know what we’re pointed at here. My best guess is maybe there’s a solar panel hiding somewhere on that thing that our sensors didn’t pick up. Maybe it’s close enough to scrounge up enough power to shoot off a couple of transmissions. I don’t know. It’s a lot of maybes. Still doesn’t explain how it knows Leslie’s name.

I’ve heard of power sources that might be able to survive that long, but...” Sarah paused, tugged a loose strand away from her eye. ”They’re not ours. Not human.”

James grimaced. ”Better not be squids. Didn’t come out here to become a puppet.”

”I’m not an expert, but this isn’t their style, right? It seems like way too much trouble to go to for little old us.” Sarah’s voice carried only the slightest hint of a woman trying to convince herself. ”Besides, we’d have picked up the output on one of their cells before we left the barrier.”

James shook his head. ”I don’t think there’s much use in trying to make more conjecture at this point. All we know is, we’ve got a creepy message that by all means should not have been transmitted to begin with. I say we just continue on with that in mind, and be ready to flee if something’s up, though… that’d be the captain’s decision.”

”We’ve already burned a lot of fuel to get here.” Sarah sighed. ”And it’s not like there aren’t other scavengers on the barrier waiting to take a shot. If we turn around we’re not going to get another shot at this thing. I don’t like it, but I can’t really see any other option but staying on course. It’ll be an adventure, I guess.”

Silence settled in the Galley’s mess. Sarah shifted a little in place and reached across the table to retrieve the datapad, still drifting above the surface in a slow arc, spinning like a carousel. Logically, she knew there wasn’t anything she could do about the message, but the mere fact of its existence was unnerving enough. Either someone had somehow evaded every sensor in the barrier and made it out beyond the edge of the star system without being spotted, or… Or a ship eight centuries old was talking to them. Neither possibility was a happy one.

How can he be so calm? Arland lounged in his seat, hands folded neatly across his lap, blue eyes untroubled. The bretonian could have been discussing plans for the weekend, and he wouldn’t have looked any less relaxed. Tired, yes, but they all looked tired. Fluctuating gravity really took it out of you, but Arland had handled it better than most. Sarah’s fingers drummed a beat on the datapad. Some system or another beeped. Sarah absent-mindedly swiped her thumb across the screen, powered it off.

”So, you and Leslie.” Sarah coughed, the cramped mess sending echoes bouncing back at her. ”Did you two grow up together or something?”

James’ eyebrows rose, and for a second he said nothing. Then he slowly pivoted his head toward the door into the hallway, to ensure that some cosmic sense of comedic timing hadn’t sent Leslie marching - or, well, floating - into the mess right as they were having this discussion. He turned back to Sarah, bemused. ”Nope. Frankly, I haven’t even known her that long. Couple months at most. Why do you ask?”

”Just curious.” Sarah gave a shrug that she hoped looked nonchalant, raised an eyebrow and twisted a little to look at Arland. ”I mean, the way you two talk to each other, I assumed that you’d known each other for years. Not many people make a habit of taking a month off-duty to help someone they barely know, and after what Leslie said about the Admiral… You two have been through a lot.”

James grunted something that could have been assent. Then he explained. ”We made fast friends. And that whole business with Admiral Sakuma… well, high-pressure situations helps cement trust and establish where two people stand in relation to each other very quickly. And we are in agreement on the Gaul question, which helps. As for why I’m taking a month off, last op I was on was exhausting in more than one way. Really, thus far, this has been my vacation.”

”Riding a bomb out to the far edges of the Barrier is a vacation for you? Remind me not to-” Whatever Sarah was going to say was interrupted by a creak from the Galley’s cargo compartment. A moment later, a pair of hands wrapped themselves around the hatch. The rest of the Galley’s captain followed shortly after.

”Right…” Leslie lowered herself back into a chair, huffing. She looked equal parts annoyed and tired, and her bobcut hair had fallen out of place, strands drifting over her place, which she adjusted with irritation.

”I really doubt it’s the ship itself sending that. The probabilities are too bad, which leaves us with the other option.” Leslie glanced at James meaningfully, then continued. ”Someone’s probably already made it there, and they knew we were coming.” She shrugged. ”Two possibilities...either they are still there, waiting...or they have left, leaving us with a spooky message to scare us off.”

”We’d have seen anyone leaving in the past week or so.” Sarah said. ”And why bother scaring us off if our hypothetical visitors already got what they came for and left? I mean, why bother sending the transmission at all if they’re trying so hard to be sneaky? They may as well write ‘we’re here’ in hundred foot letters on the hull. It’d be more subtle.”

James undid the strap holding him to his seat, floated gently above it. ”If there’s someone - and that’s a big if - it seems to me, they want to avoid a confrontation to the point that that they’re willing to sacrifice secrecy. So either they’re desperate, or there’s something to this we’re missing. Again, too many unknown unknowns.”

”Because what I needed was more mystery in my life.” Sarah straightened out, ignoring the momentary disorientation as her brain tried to reconcile James floating perpendicular with her with the idea of down. Almost a decade in space, and the vertigo never quite went away. She just got used to dealing with it, like an irritating roommate. Albeit a roommate that made you feel nauseous whenever she entered the room. After half a second’s panicked signals, her sense of spatial orientation gave up and went to sit in a quiet corner somewhere.

”So, we keep going.” She glanced at Leslie and continued. ” If someone’s there, and if they’re that desperate to keep us away, there has to be something valuable out there. People don’t go to that sort of trouble over thousand year old scrap.”

Leslie nodded, after blowing an errant strand of hair out of her eyes. ”We’ve come too far to turn back now. But I’d think we should prepare for the worst. There’s probably someone there already, and they probably left us some unpleasant surprises. James can take care of that.” She glanced at the soldier, then back at Sarah. ”I’d suggest lowering our acceleration, and diverting as much power to the sensors as they can handle. Think you can manage it?”

Sarah shot off a lazy salute that would have had any sergeant worth his stripes frothing at the mouth. ”Yes ma’am. I’ll dial us down to one G when we fire the engines up again. There’ll be a bit of wastage, but we’ve got enough dee to cover it. I don’t know how much more we can get from the sensors, but I’ll keep our eyes open.”

”It’ll have to do. We don’t want to court more trouble than we can handle.” Leslie was now leaning back, hands clasped behind her back, a lazy grin on her face. The expression was reminiscent of ancient predatory cats, and she could feel the fear, and the excitement. In this moment, Leslie Durant was in control. ”Let’s see what the future holds for us, shall we?”