The expansion box set, p.25
The Expansion Box Set, page 25
part #1 of The Expansion Series
It turned at the door and shot back a final retort before leaving the chamber.
If they come, husband, you are to be the one to meet them. And if they are a danger to us, you must deal with them yourself. Or else I shall. And if that message brings the Va’alen down on us, there will be a reckoning for you.
With that, the queen left the chamber and her brooding king behind.
30
Proxima b orbit
“Captain,” Flight officer Sarvanto said. He addressed Torres but included in his greeting Brandt and a scientist neither of them had seen before. “We were due to survey this exoplanet in approximately nine days if the thorough plan was to be followed, however this is what we know so far. It’s a little smaller than Earth and much closer to the red dwarf it orbits, but the probes show liquid water at the surface, an obvious atmosphere and plant life, just not as we would recognize it.”
“How so?” Brandt asked.
This prompted Sarvanto to gesture to the scientist. He stood. A thin man with abnormally large and masculine hands for his small frame, he introduced himself as Cahill. He was an astrophysicist and had evidently been either drafted or volunteered to give the explanation of the unique way that life had evolved on the planet.
“Imagine if you can,” he explained in a British accent while moving his hands constantly, “that this planet has permanent night and day. It’s locked in its orbit. It doesn’t rotate like our Earth does around our sun, but then again this sun isn’t like ours. It’s all low spectrum, red light—”
“And?” Torres asked, trying not to sound as impatient as he felt.
“And it may not seem bright, but it’s still bombarding the planet with strong UV radiation, so the planet is scorched in one spot.”
“Mister Cahill?” Brandt asked as politely as she could. “Any chance you could give us the quick version that doesn’t require a lot of prior knowledge on the subject?”
Cahill looked at her with a mixture of dismay and pity, but he did as he was asked. He continued, speaking faster and with less theatrical excitement.
“One side faces the sun all the time and that side is burned in the middle for most of the hemisphere. The other side is in permanent darkness and is about minus fifty degrees for most of it. The only place life can exist, or at least safely exist, is in that ring around the face of the planet where the hot side meets the cold side and creates a kind of… temperate zone where the conditions allow for liquid water and for life to exist. There we can see vegetation, but I can’t see it being anything like what we would recognize.”
“Why?” Torres asked, pleased with the faster explanation.
“Because of the light spectrum,” Cahill said. “It’s all low spectrum red light and not the white light we have evolved with. You see, the sun is responsible for every living thing on Earth either directly or indirectly. The algae, the grass, the trees; all of these things are the first-level food source for our food’s food’s food, if you follow? Everything on Earth has evolved for our own spectrum of light. Everything down there has done the same thing with the red light.”
“So, no blue skies and green grass?” Brandt asked, clarifying.
“No, ma’am,” Cahill answered. “More like permanent emergency lighting and, if I had to guess, black foliage.”
“Black?” Torres asked. He frowned and shook his head, dismissing his question as irrelevant. “Is the atmosphere there breathable for us?”
“It could be,” Cahill said carefully. “But I couldn’t say for sure from orbit. It’s just a theory as none of the probes have penetrated the atmosphere. From what we can see there are definitely places that look like surface water.” Cahill paused before going on, as though there was a strong caveat to his guesswork. “Nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, helium, methane, hydrogen… it all depends on how they are concentrated at the surface, which I have to be clear—”
“Yeah,” Brandt said. “You can’t say from orbit.”
“Precisely.”
“Can we send a probe into the atmosphere?” Torres asked.
“We are, err, working on one, but sadly, we lack the delivery means. If we could requisition a few of your warheads for repurposing, then we might…”
“You can have one. Mister Sarvanto?” Torres addressed the flight officer. “We have a position for the signal’s origin?”
“We do, Captain. Alas nothing visible on sensors.”
Torres thanked the two men, watching them take their leave and he was left alone beside Brandt.
She shifted in her seat beside Torres and asked a dozen questions with a single eyebrow twitch. He answered her just as simply.
“Commander, would you kindly lead a team down there for me?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
She rose, trying to keep her excitement locked inside as she dropped a reassuring clenched fist onto her captain’s shoulder.
“I’ll need Rogers, if you can spare him from the bridge?” she asked.
“He’s probably expecting the order,” Torres answered.
Brandt left the room and entered the bridge, seeing Rogers’s raised eyebrows and boyish smile almost pleading for the chance to join the mission from the helm.
“Fall in, Rogers,” she said casually, before leaving the bridge to go see a man about a ghost.
Torres sat alone for a time, swiping his finger slowly up and down the datapad that contained the intelligence about the signal and the planet. He tapped the icon to listen to the rattling, croaking clicks that formed the alien language. The ship’s mainframe was still devoting almost a quarter of its processing power to trying to decipher the millions of possible translations.
He flicked over the atmospheric report for the planet, looking at the bizarre graphic that showed a planet with a curious halo of habitable land encircling a scorched circular section. Spinning the image around with his fingers, he zoomed in on the dark hemisphere where the edges were touched by the perma-glacier that covered it. He focused on the strip where the low light of the sun warmed the ground enough that ice gave way to rolling vegetation, wondering if it really was black and not green. That was just one of many unbelievable things he had been faced with in the last few weeks.
With a sigh of resignation, Torres tapped the screen to enlarge the communication subsystem. Inputting his personal authorization code to realign the subspace array, he waited for the call to connect.
And waited.
Eventually the screen sprang to life with the soft tone he had grown accustomed to. Instead of anyone he recognized, a red-eyed face filled the viewscreen wearing a look of fear tinged with excitement. The stranger realized his mistake in failing to gauge the distance to the camera, so he leaned back to reveal a relatively new uniform and an unblemished lieutenant’s rank badge on his upper-right chest.
“Hello, sir,” the young officer stammered. “Captain Torres.”
“No, you’re not,” Torres said with a smile. “I am.”
The boy didn’t get the joke and his child-like features melted into uncertainty. He worried he had offended the man that he so idolized. He visibly panicked, stuttering over his words until Torres calmed him down.
“Relax, Lieutenant,” he said. He noticed for the first time that the lights of the room behind the young man were dimmed. There seemed to be fewer people than he expected going about their tasks in the control room back on Earth. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
The young officer looked surprised as his eyebrows all but met in the middle. “Sir?”
“It looks abandoned there,” Torres said. “And dark.”
“Sir, it’s almost four in the morning here…”
Torres checked the device on his arm as though checking the time would magically change it. The excitement of the unidentified contact and the ensuing hours of busy activity had robbed him of all sense of time. And now that excitement had resulted in his oh-dark-thirty call home.
“So it is, Lieutenant,” Torres said recovering himself. “Who is your senior officer tonight?”
“It’s err…” the lieutenant hesitated. “It’s me, sir.”
Torres stopped the next words about to leap from his lips. The kid didn’t need to be reminded he seemed young and inexperienced.
“Lieutenant, can I suggest you go and find someone with a clearance much higher than your own? Tell them it’s a code nineteen.” The look of incomprehension on the young face looking back at him made Torres realize that the junior officer left in charge wasn’t fully briefed about their mission.
“Yes, sir,” he responded. “Code one-niner. Call back in ten mikes?”
“Affirmative,” Torres said, hitting the icon to terminate the call.
Ten minutes spent in silent contemplation later, Torres placed the call again. This time it was answered after only seconds. The screen popped up huge and he saw three faces crammed into the view. Behind them, almost jumping up to see was what he guessed to be the young lieutenant. One of the three faces vying for primacy in front of the screen noticed the young man, turned and glared until he got the message and left the room.
They were all in PT kit: sweatpants and hoodies used as comfortable, off-duty clothing. All three appear to have been roused in a hurry.
“Captain Torres,” the stern woman with the short haircut in the center announced. “You’re on with Crawford from UNID, Admiral Tozer—” the gray-haired man to her left raised a hand in greeting “—and Mister Chen from Hyper.”
“Good morning everyone,” Torres said. “I apologize for the hour, but I am about to order a mission to the surface of an exoplanet that we believe is inhabited.”
The two men started talking at once, each drowning out the other’s question with his own. Both Torres and Crawford shrank slightly from the sensory overload.
“One at a time, please, gentlemen,” she said.
“Are they capable of faster-than-light travel?” the admiral asked.
“Are there any signs of hostility?” the Chinese guy from Hyper asked.
“Both unknown at this time. You’ll be updated after the mission, but in the meantime,” Torres tapped at the datapad, “here is everything we have on the current situation. If there are no more questions?”
“Just one,” Crawford said. “What is a code nineteen? I can’t see any reference to it in the mission briefing.”
“A code nineteen is a means to get an excited young officer to wake up the people who know what’s going on.” He smiled slightly. “Torres out.”
“Specter,” Brandt said, greeting the man she still thought of as an old friend. She still wasn’t used to holding him at a distance like a work colleague and not engaging on the more intimate level they shared previously. “You up for a trip to shore?”
“Happily, Commander,” he said. Specter rose and began to disconnect his suit—his body—from the diagnostic wires running from his abdomen to the terminal in the lab. “I have reviewed the data on the exoplanet, and I presume you’ll want a small recon team in full armor?”
“Yeah,” Brandt answered simply.
“What configuration do you need from me?” he asked.
“Configuration?”
“I am able to adapt my loadout for fire support, sniper, recon, close quarter conflict, stealth and urban covert…”
“CQ, please,” she said. The environment on the surface of the planet was dark, and this minimized the chance of engaging any enemy at distance. “Docking bay in ten?”
“Of course, Commander,” he said, his scarred face giving her a small smile that threw her memories into a spiral. The face and the voice of her old friend radiated at her behind the terse and formal words of this… robot they’d rebuilt in a lab somewhere.
Brandt walked to the armory, then stepped into her suit and wriggled her left arm as a knot of material from her flight suit caught uncomfortably. This obstruction forced her to open the suit and adjust it before sealing herself up once again. She took a pistol and a carbine, loading herself out with full complement of charged magazines and fitting the singularity pods to the weapons. She sighed to herself, in apprehension about the drop that would take her directly to the docking bay below. Her helmet blinked into life as the HUD came online. She stepped inside the tube, weapons locked to her metal skin, and crossed her arms across her body. The plate beneath her feet slid away quickly and dropped her down.
She clanged to the deck of the docking bay. Her left knee bent to absorb the energy as she placed her left palm out to stop her downward momentum and threw her right hand out to her side to balance her upper body.
“Awesome!” Rogers yelled as he ducked under the stubby delta wing of the Tanto to pop upright wearing a massive grin. “You did a superhero landing!”
“I did a what?” Brandt asked as she stood, annoyed with herself. She should have been able to catch the movement in time and not drop to her knee.
“You did the thing… with the knee and the hand…? Aaahh, forget it,” Rogers said, recovering his professionalism just in time for everyone to ignore his comments.
Brandt dismissed his words with a shake of her head and called out to her team.
“Okay, when we get to the surface I want Specter on point, with me and Eze behind and Butler at the tail. Marcus, Byrne and Chopra: stay and guard the LZ under the command of Zero. I don’t want anything eating Rogers.”
Those suited soldiers she named, the current team on standby, gave away their acknowledgments through shifts in body language. The one team member not named also shifted, looking around and checking if anyone else had been omitted from a task. Brandt addressed his growing disappointment.
“Davis, I want you on one of the gun turrets,” she said, “and organize three others from the off-duty roster to suit up with you. Watch our backs up here, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he rumbled, clearly unhappy at not getting to go down to the surface.
“You’ll get your chance,” Brandt told him.
He perked up a little and nodded. She turned, walked along the line of suited soldiers to inspect their armor and loadout. Her HUD flashed red on their outlines, giving her their basic information. She blinked to add them to her current team selection—far quicker and more intrinsic than having to use the wrist-mounted device with the last generation of technology.
She assigned them to alpha and bravo teams, the former with her and the latter guarding their ship and pilot, and then paused as she got to Specter. She’d managed to stop thinking of him as Jake and watched as his readout gave her no information other than his callsign. She scrolled through the options with his suit, which differed slightly from theirs in many ways, and she opened a private comm channel between them.
“I need your vitals on my HUD,” she instructed.
“Commander, my vitals aren’t exactly standard,” he explained. “My heart rate and blood pressure would register as dangerously low for you because—”
“Understood,” she said, not wanting to re-live the details of his arms and legs being blown away. She didn’t need to learn about whatever else they did to him in a lab over the years she had thought him dead. “Can you give me anything to monitor?”
A pause hung before he answered. “Giving you basic brainwave activity, Commander. That should satisfy your needs?”
It did. Brandt cut the link before their silence became noticeable to the rest of the team. She called out for them to board and stepped on the tail ramp of the Tanto ready to be the first person to set foot on an alien world.
31
deep space between Earth and Mars
“All ship systems report ready for jump, Admiral,” one of the tactical officers on the bridge of the Venture called out.
There were almost three times as many bridge officers than there were on the distant Ichi. Venture was a far larger ship and acted as the focal point for the three other big deep space vessels in the fleet family. It also had to manage the dozens of smaller dropships flying between them all,
“Order the rest of the fleet to close all docking bays and hold current positions. I want us at least a thousand kilometers away when we jump. Sound general quarters.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” one of the comm officers—the one responsible for inter-fleet traffic—answered.
He called into the mic on his wireless headset. A single klaxon, muted so as not to cause panic onboard, sounded long and insistently to give the entire crew the order to lock down. It was the same signal they used when approaching danger. It communicated to the crew not quite battle stations but almost, and Admiral Dassiova reckoned that an inaugural faster-than-light jump qualified.
He surreptitiously wiped the palms of both hands in turn on the pant legs of his flight suit. He now bore the admiral’s crest on the right side of his suit and his name on the left, just above the embroidered legend of Venture. He resisted the urge to stroke the name of his ship, to feel the bumps of the stitching beneath his fingertips to reassure him in his hidden superstitions.
Dassiova waited.
He waited until the helmsman called out their all-stop after forging ahead the required distance to leave the rest of the fleet behind.
“Comm? Get me Captain Wright,” he said.
The officer turned away and tapped at his display, turning again to nod at the admiral in his chair not unlike a throne. Dassiova stood, announcing that he’d take the call in his quarters before stepping to the suite of staterooms off the main bridge. He tapped the screen of the data terminal at his desk and saw the connected call waiting to go through. He liked it when his troops recognized what he wanted and did it, as the comm officer did putting the call through to the right terminal without needing to be instructed.
“Captain,” Dassiova said stiffly when the red face of the UNS Cortez’s commanding officer came on screen.
