Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) (18 page)

‘Something I’ve missed here?’ Marine Sergeant Jenson Agry asked as he stepped onto the bridge.

Doctor Schmidt replied for the Marine and the rest of the bridge crew, although he felt certain that many of them knew of the signal’s legend.

‘Over four hundred years ago, in the year 1977 and long before the plague that almost eradicated mankind, a radio–astronomer by the name of Jerry R. Ehman detected a narrowband signal while he was working on something known as the SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope at the Ohio State University. The signal bore the expected hallmarks of non–terrestrial and non–Solar System origin and was emitted from the globular cluster of M55, near the Chi Sagittarii star group. The signal was so pronounced that Ehman wrote the word “Wow” alongside it on the printout, and it thereafter became known as the
“Wow signal”.
’

‘The detection lasted seventy two seconds,’ Arianna explained, ‘and was never detected again. At the time mankind didn’t know what to make of it, and although the media wrote countless articles speculating on what the signal was and who might have transmitted it, the fact that it was never heard from again meant that its significance was lost on us for over three centuries.’

‘Until now,’ Agry guessed as he looked at Admiral Marshall. ‘Something the CSS top brass buried?’

‘The signal has since been identified as a sensor probe,’ Coburn explained. ‘The species likely responsible for it would have sent the probe some eighteen thousand years ago because that’s how many light years from us the globular cluster is located.’ The Director General sighed. ‘If the signal did indeed detect mankind’s presence on this Earth, then those who had sent it would have been technologically developed to at least human levels when they sent the signal. By now, they would be unimaginably advanced.’

The silence on the bridge deepened as Agry absorbed this information.

‘So you think that they’re on their way?’

Marshall heard Arianna’s voice fill the bridge in reply.

‘At the time the signal was detected, no,’ she said, ‘because it would have taken another eighteen thousand years for the detection of our species to be received by the senders, and then presumably another similar period for them to reach us. However, we now of course know that super–luminal travel is a possibility and that a species so technologically advanced would likely have found ways to expedite the process and would have developed technologies that would appear to a lesser advanced species to be nothing short of miraculous, to be magic.’

‘What did the signal say?’ Agry asked finally.

Now the silence on the bridge became extremely deep, as though the Marine had committed some unmentionable
faux pas
. Admiral Marshall sucked in air through his teeth before he replied.

‘The CSS doesn’t talk about that,’ he said softly.

Agry’s features twisted in a grimace, frustrated by the secrecy surrounding the signal. ‘Then why are you enacting this Drake Protocol, and how do you expect to defend against whatever’s out there if you don’t tell your own Marines about it?’

Marshall, despite his rank, deferred to Arianna.

‘It will be discussed at the senate level before any announcements are to be made. Right now, I want a total media ban and an exclusion zone around Titan and the Ayleean survivors. Doctor Schmidt, have your team run through every scan that was made of the Ayleean vessel. If there’s anything to be learned about what caused this, we need to know about it as soon as possible.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ Schmidt replied.

‘Admiral,’ Arianna went on, ‘nobody on Earth or in the orbital cities can know about what’s happened. I do not need to elaborate on the panic that may be caused if it becomes known that a technologically superior species has been detected on the very edge of our solar system, much less that it has already decimated an Ayleean ship.’

‘Understood,’ Marshall replied. ‘What of the rest of the fleet?’

‘I will place them all on alert, all leave cancelled and all media representatives aboard our ships ordered to remain in place. I don’t want them ejected from the vessels and starting speculating planet–side or on the orbital cities.’

‘Agreed,’ Marshall replied, ‘the tighter the leash we keep them on the more time we’ll have to figure this out.’

‘I’ll call an emergency closed–doors senate session and will report back as soon as we know what the council intends to do.’

With that, Arianna’s immaculate projection flickered out and left Marshall in the silence on the bridge.

‘Schmidt,’ he said, ‘what’s the chances that these new arrivals are hostile? Could the Ayleeans have provoked them?’

Doctor Schmidt inclined his head thoughtfully to one side.

‘I doubt that the Ayleeans would have chosen to provoke such a superior technology, and the likelihood of alien species being predatory has been a subject for philosophers for centuries,’ he replied, ‘with half of them thinking that no species that has reached such high levels of technical achievement to be able to travel among the stars would still wage unprovoked war on others, and the other half comparing the cosmos to our own planet Earth and pointing to our past and our current wars with the Ayleeans, our own brothers so to speak.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

Schmidt sighed.

‘Given what we already know, it would seem likely that they are a predatory species and we should prepare for the worst, admiral.’

Marshall was about to reply when the Tactical Officer called him.

‘Captain, the Ayleeans are here.’

Marshall turned to the main display, and the entire bridge crew saw the star field outside suddenly warp into a funnel and then four vessels burst from super–luminal cruise in a bright flash of light.

‘Contact Polaris Station,’ Marshall said calmly, ‘cease all communications, shut down all sensors that could provide intelligence data for the Ayleeans. I want a complete media blackout on this and no unauthorized transmissions while that ship is in orbit.’

‘Aye, captain.’

Marshall immediately identified three CSS frigates surrounding a single Ayleean cruiser, the cruiser as large as all three frigates combined and heavily armed.

‘The Ayleeans have jammed transmissions on all frequencies, captain,’ the Tactical Officer reported. ‘Do you want me to break through with countermeasures to keep emergency frequencies open?’

‘Negative,’ Marshall replied. ‘Let’s play along with their standard tactical procedures for now. This is a diplomatic mission unless they act provocatively.’

Olsen joined Marshall on the command platform and spoke quietly from the corner of his mouth.

‘They’re within striking range of Polaris,’ he pointed out. ‘They could charge cannons and hit them hard with a first salvo.’

Marshall frowned and shook his head. ‘They’re surrounded by our fleet, even the Ayleeans must know that any attempt at betrayal would be suicidal.’

‘That didn’t bother the last one we fought,’ Olsen said.

‘Transmission coming through,’ the Tactical Officer warned.

Marshall lifted his chin expectantly as he stood with his hands behind his back. Moments later, a holographic projection of a towering warrior who looked only somewhat human appeared before him on the command platform. The Ayleean was almost eight feet tall, but Marshall could see that the creature was unarmed, strange in itself for an Ayleean, and that it wore a robe denoting a dignitary of some kind.

‘Admiral Marshall,’ the Ayleean growled, ‘the Butcher of Boise. I am Vyree, from the Ayleean Council.’

‘Greetings, Vyree,’ Marshall replied in a tone that sounded as though he was chewing a wasp as he spoke. ‘Our thanks for you responding to our request for you to…’

‘We want to see our people, now,’ Vyree cut the admiral off. ‘There will be no discussion until I have seen them alive and aboard our own ship.’

‘They’re in quarantine for their own safety and ours,’ Marshall replied, ‘but we can have them…’

‘You mean they’re caged like animals!’ Vyree snapped. ‘I would expect nothing less from you
humans
.’

‘You’re every bit as human as we are,’ Marshall replied, needling the Ayleean just for the hell of it, ‘no matter how you try to hide it.’

Vyree stepped closer to Marshall, towering over him.

‘We stopped by the location where your senate said our ship was discovered. We detected CSS plasma residue in the vicinity, and the wreckage of what was once one of our most powerful vessels. What’s to say that
you
didn’t destroy her?’

‘Titan was nowhere near the area when the attack occurred,’ Marshall replied, ‘and neither was any other CSS vessel. What happened to her was an attack by an unknown species and that concerns all of us, human and Ayleean alike. That’s why the senate asked you to come here.’

‘I will believe nothing,’ Vyree snarled, ‘until our people are returned and they can speak for themselves. You have one hour.’

The projection vanished and Marshall sighed.

‘We can’t move them,’ Olsen said. ‘The only thing we can do is bring the Ayleean councillor aboard.’

‘He won’t come without a full escort, which then puts Titan in jeopardy,’ Marshall said, but he knew that Arianna Coburn would want him to extract all possible assistance from the Ayleeans. ‘Prepare the Ayleeans for transport back to their own ship.’

***

XIX

CSS Titan

Doctor Schmidt walked up and down the sick bay as he awaited the technician’s report on the emergency capsules recovered from the Ayleean warship. Although now all three of the Ayleeans were confirmed as alive, he was still uncertain of something about the way in which the survivors had been discovered.

He stared again at the three scans of the Ayleean warriors that had been completed before the capsules had been opened and cursed his digital mind. Despite all of mankind’s remarkable fecundity, the spark of genius that had allowed Schmidt the chance to become immortal, there were still faculties of the human mind that he felt were not quite reproduced as well in digital form. He felt as though he had a word on the tip of his tongue, something just beyond his grasp that the data banks and holographic memory that made up his sense of “self” could not quite reach, and that maybe had he still been
fully
human his organic brain might somehow have reached just that little bit further.

The scans looked identical, revealing in microscopic detail every single cell of the Ayleean bodies. Schmidt had studied them now for some time, and for the afterlife of him he could not see what he felt sure was staring him in the face: there looked to be nothing out of place and yet somehow there was…

‘Doctor?’

Schmidt sighed and turned as a pair of senior technical officers approached him from where they had been working just down the corridor on the three capsules.

‘What have you learned?’ Schmidt asked.

‘That there’s nothing wrong with the capsules,’ the senior officer replied. ‘All three units were functioning perfectly.’

Schmidt sighed again and furrowed his brow as he thought furiously. ‘You’re absolutely sure, that they would have suffered no malfunction at the time of or after the attack?’

‘None of the capsules had been reset,’ the technician confirmed, ‘meaning that they were activated once and then remained in stasis until we encountered the ship. We checked the alert beacons and they too were working normally, which means that the signals must have been blocked by debris or other factors external to the ship itself.’

Schmidt frowned. The entire point of survival capsules and their powerful beacons was to be able to survive the aftermath of a destroyed ship and at the same time signal across the cosmos for rescue, that signal also containing basic lifeform data to assist medical teams. The capsule’s beacon used a feature known as quantum–entanglement to reach through any debris or interference, simply because “entanglement” meant that no signal was required to be passed at all. The very fundamental particles of the universe were created in “entangled” pairs, rather like a
yin
and
yang
, and one of the bizarre features of such entanglement was that even if two particles were separated by the width of the observable universe, what happened to one would happen to the other. Thus, by manipulating the natural spin of these entangled particles, the capsule was able to signal its distress instantaneously to another location without breaking the laws of physics. When the Ayleeans had left Earth for a future elsewhere in the galaxy, their ships had nonetheless carried beacons compatible with CSS vessels, ensuring that in time of distress each would detect the other’s signals and in compliance with the laws of the cosmos would come to their aid.

Yet Schmidt had detected no life signs from the otherwise active capsules when Titan had arrived on the scene.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ he said to the two officers, who promptly turned and left the sickbay.

Schmidt stood with his hands behind his back and stared at the scans for a moment longer, aware that the more he looked at them the less likely he was to be able to identify what it was about the images that bothered him.

He turned and strode from the sick bay and down the corridor outside toward the quarantine area. The three Ayleeans detained within represented the only real means of learning about what had happened out there on the edge of the solar system, and yet they too seemed to have little knowledge of the fate that had befallen them, save the fact that it was swift and devastating.

Schmidt reached the quarantine block to find four Marines standing in silence, their weapons at port arms as their superior officer saw Schmidt coming and turned to face him.

‘All quiet, doctor,’ he said.

‘An oddity in itself,’ Schmidt replied, well aware of the raucous and aggressive nature of Ayleeans, especially when trapped against their will. ‘I will be but a few minutes.’

Schmidt strode straight through the quarantine wall without missing a pace and found himself confronted by the three Ayleeans, all of whom remained strapped firmly to their respective beds.