Rockhoppers Chapter 8
Consciousness is slow returning. The first thing Grubs becomes aware of is the vibrations of the deck plating he’s touching, telling his bones that the machinery in the engineering bay is working away. No real sound though, which means he’s not in the bay proper. So why is he lying on the deck?
Memory returns in a rush, along with a brief flood of adrenaline, and he’s completely awake. His eyes snap open, and he spins too quickly, briefly making himself dizzy. Fighting through sudden nausea, he looks around.
He’s in one of the secondary cargo bays adjacent to the engineering bay, left in place during the refit because taking it out would have caused structural instabilities in the frame of the ship. The floods are on overhead, filling the place with harsh brightness, and the Captain is drifting about three meters away from him.
He bites down on a curse and just watches her for a moment, much as she regards him. She’s shed her spider abdomen, somehow, and is now simply looks like a hugely pregnant woman clothed neck to toe in black, form hugging latex. The illusion persists until part of her clothing wriggles and pops free, a tiny spider spilling away on some task for another part of the ship.
Black streams still spill from her eyes, flowing down her cheeks and into the high neckline of her ‘clothes’. She regards him for a moment longer, and then opens her mouth.
—Please, I would speak with you.—
Her voice, tar crawling across gravel, startles him. Warily, the gruff engineer orients himself, and pushes himself over to a takehold where he can face her conveniently. He never takes his eyes off of her, and says nothing.
—You were not intended to wake until this craft had returned to Earth. The meteorite damage was unanticipated. This one was not cognizant of the emergency procedures the younger male had implemented.—
Grubs just stares a moment more, then replies. “Yeah, kid’s thorough.”
Her head tilts slightly, and swivels a little to one side, as though she were getting a more accurate idea of his precise location relative to her. It occurs to the engineer that binocular vision might be a novelty to this creature.
—I wish for sleep to resume. You will be delivered to Earth unharmed.—
“Unharmed like my skipper?”
The alien resumes speaking after a brief pause.
—What this one was can no longer be. This one will be mother to all future generations of your people.—
“Not yours?”
—We are not a species. We will not accompany you to Earth. Once you have left this seed we will cease being. —
“Seed?”
After a moment, it replies.
—You call it Sleepy.—
Grubs thinks about this for a moment, closing his eyes long enough to rub them for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you talk about what you see happening between now and the return to Earth, and I’ll decide if me and the kids are better off sleeping it away.”
—The young ones are not required, and you have already served your purpose.—
“My purpose?”
—You are the human genetic basis for those which this one carries.—
Grubs struggles with a renewed bout of nausea for a moment. “Answer my question. What happens next?”
—Then you sleep? The young ones sleep?—
“Start talking and find out.”
The pregnant woman propels herself to the portal to the engineering bay. It irises open, and she extends a finger to touch the enormous black spider waiting just on the other side. The material around her hand slips toward the creature, briefly exposing the flesh underneath, and they stand there for a moment, communing.
Just as suddenly, she lowers her hand, once more cloaked entirely in black. The portal irises shut, and she returns to her seat.
—Very well.—
Josh struggles with metal cauldron almost a meter tall, trying to drag it down the hallway without damaging the electronics within. Finally hauling it through the entrance of the crypt, he seals the door and then hooks his burden up to power. He watches readouts on a small inset display for a moment, and then turns to Faith, who is hunched over the lone ship console in the crypt.
“Well, we won’t starve as long as there’s power. Yeast vat is working.”
She nods without looking up. Streaks run down her face where tears have dried from when they fled engineering, leaving Grubs behind to that... thing. “Okay. I’ve got a lot of the systems routed here, and you can control your bots. Can’t get astrogation or main engineering. There are Captain’s locks on those.”
“She can still run the computers? She looked like an animal.”
Faith shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s possible this was from before. The ship isn’t exactly supposed to be run from the mausoleum.”
“Okay. Here, eat. She hasn’t come out after us yet, which means we either have plenty of time or none at all.”
Faith accepts a ration bar Josh fishes out of the pocket of his shipsuit. She unwraps it and begins chewing unenthusiastically. “I don’t know what we do now.”
“Survive, first. This is the only room outside of engineering that the bulkheads can be sealed from inside. Food is covered, and I’ve got a tap to the water lines over there.” He waves his hands, indicating a spigot extending from one of the pipes on the far wall.
“Now,” he continues, “can you fly the ship without the Captain?”
She shakes her head. “I know how to, at least to get us close enough to somewhere to get a tow, but I have to have her codes to initiate the fusion drive. We’re dead in the water without it. Grubs might have been able to do it.”
“All right. I’m going to make another run to the mess, might as well clean it out. I’ll also see if I can jimmy the armory, but I’m not hopeful. In the meantime, you start trying to think out of the box, and I will too.”
Faith nods without enthusiasm. “Okay. I’ll see how much more of the ship’s systems I can get slaved here.”
He walks up behind her and crouches to hug her from behind. She leans back against him, and he kisses the top of her head. “We’re not done yet, Faith. Don’t give up.”
She sighs and closes her eyes, just resting against him for a moment. “Okay”
—You know much about machines.—
Grubs nods. “I’m an engineer, yeah.”
The thing that was Nomi extends a tar-covered hand, and a small spider extrudes from her palm and begins a little dance back and forth across her fingers.
—We... I... serve the same purpose for my Makers as your machines do for you.—
The creature indicates Nomi’s face.
—This one knew of machines your species has created that think, after a fashion. Do you know that of which I speak?—
Grubs nods. “Aye, artificial intelligences. Get on with it.”
—Be patient, if you wish to understand. You would likely define me as an artificial intelligence, because I did not evolve. As I am biological rather than mechanical, ‘created intelligence’ would perhaps be a more correct term.—
The engineer says nothing, waiting for the creature to continue.
—The bulk of me remains inside the seed, which was designed to strike a biosphere and spill me out, allowing my task to be performed directly. However, the star system the Makers sent me to was devoid of life, devoid even of the potential for life. —
The captain’s head turns aside, as though trying to recollect something.
—Your name for the barren star is Tau Ceti.—
“I’ll let the terraforming commission know.”
It stares at him for a moment before continuing.
—Examining the spectra of nearby stars, and watching the wobble caused by the orbits of planets, led me to attempt travel this system. I consumed most of myself as reaction mass, and exhausted the seed of fissile material in my journey here. I achieved orbit of your star, but I no longer have the capability of spaceflight.—
“When do you get to the part about attacking us and killing my captain?”
—The fissile material aboard this craft is more than adequate to the task of its propulsion, but could not nudge the orbit of the seed more than a few hundred thousand kilometers. I remain trapped, and so must complete my task using the alternative means represented by your visit here.—
Grubs chews on that for a moment. “What, precisely, is your ‘task’?”
—The Makers created me, and hundreds of thousands like me, to discover life-bearing worlds, and splice Maker biology into the biosphere. In this manner they pursued a sort of immortality for their species.—
“So, you... she... you’re pregnant with a Maker?”
—No. There are no more Makers. Their sun was old, and consumed them in a nova long ago.—
“Why didn’t they leave, if they had spaceflight?”
—The Makers had a societal taboo against genetic self-modification, and their biology dictated that they could only create offspring in the oceans of their homeworld, something like the spawning fish of your planet. No Maker ever left that world. They knew they would be consumed by their star, and they spent the last few thousand years of the life of their civilization creating me and my brethren, so that something of themselves could continue. The offspring this one produces is an amalgam of human and Maker.—
Grubs stands and paces the room for a moment. The alien just watches and waits.
“So, then, what, you just wanna have these... kids... share earth with humanity?”
—In a sense. I was not intended to fuse already sapient species to maker genetic data, but I have no choice, stranded as I am. The intended goal was to uplift non-sapient indigenous life. The first twenty or so generations of the hybrids will not be sapient. After that, the intellectual inheritance from both the Makers and humanity will begin to express in the genome, and their society will begin.—
“And how do you see humanity fitting in to this plan?”
Another brief silence.
—My children will all be male.—
Grubs stares at the alien.
“You intend to breed us out of existence.”
—Into a new one.—
“I hope your babies have guns for arms, because humanity’s not going to be wild about the idea of alien rapists.”
—My command of biology far exceeds that of your race. No human male in the presence of one of the children will resist them. The females will be pleased to submit.—
“I’ll have to take your word on that. So you don’t envision war.”
—No. Some degree of discretion for the first couple of generations, achieved by seeding remote areas initially, and then there will be no more need. I would predict that within the span of one of your lifetimes that unmodified humans will be outnumbered, and within another that only hybrids will remain. Generations later, the hybrids will rise to sapience, and make the planet their own. No one will fall to violence. All humans living today will complete their natural spans. Your captain will remain the only casualty we intend.—
“Hunh. Well, I’ve heard you out.”
—Will you sleep?—
“I’ll have to put it to the kids. I’ll have to prove I’m not under your influence. I’ll need, uh, do you know what a day is?”
—I understand your measuring units.—
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna need three of them before I give you your answer.”
—Very well. Time is plentiful.—
Josh is rearranging equipment in the mausoleum to better suit their long term stay when the bulkhead intercom activates.
“Kids, you in the crypt?”
He quickly mashes the return button. “Grubs?”
“Yeah, it’s me. It didn’t hurt me, it just wanted to... chat.”
“No offense, uncle, but how do I know you don’t have some of that thing riding around in your head?”
“You got access to your bots?”
“Yeah.”
“Send one of em to the hallway outside the crypt to take a look at me.”
“One minute.”
Josh cycles through the bots actually on board the ship and finds one with visual. Faith moves up behind him and watches over his shoulder. A couple of minutes later it scampers up to where Grubs is standing outside the bulkhead.
“Okay, I see you.” Grubs isn’t wearing a shipsuit, just cotton undergarments and a t-shirt, leaving little to the imagination.
“Alright, lad, you see I’m not armed. My suggestion is you let me in there, I get in a casket, and you put me under for an hour. You saw what happened to the captain when we caught one of those things in her. The medical nanites will kill anything nonhuman inside of me.”
Josh looks up at Faith, and she shrugs. “Not a lot of options, as I see it.”
Josh nods and reaches for the return button. “Okay Grubs, I’m opening your coffin, then I’ll open the bulkhead. We’ll be on the far side of the room. You get in your coffin, get hooked up, and pull the drawer shut, then I’ll program it.”
“Sounds good. I’ll wait here.”
Faith pulls out the coffin, and then drifts back to the console. Josh nods to her and activates the cycle for the bulkhead, watching through the spiderbot to make sure Grubs stays alone in the hallway.
The engineer enters in and heads straight to his coffin. By the time the bulkhead has sealed again he’s hooking himself up.
“Alright, lad, we got a lot to talk about, so don’t leave me down more than an hour.”
“Understood, chief.”
With a nod, Grubs lays back and hauls the coffin shut, sealing himself in. Josh walks across and starts the stasis process. Hitting the coffin intercom, he says, “Hope to see you in an hour, chief.”
“Me too, kid.”
“Well, you’re not puking tar, so I guess you’re clean. What happened?”
Plucking leads off himself and pulling out the IV, Grubs sighs. “Christ, where to start. Well, I guess the big news is we can never let the ship leave this rock.”
Walking over to grab a spare shipsuit from the supplies Josh had begun hoarding, Grubs begins to tell them his story. It’s the better part of an hour before Faith and Josh have asked all the questions they can think of.
The three sit in silence, using the yeast vat and some boxes as an impromptu conference table and chairs.
Faith breaks the silence. “So, what, sabotage? Blow the reactor?”
“I doubt that thing would let me within ten meters of the reactor, lass. You’re on the right track, though. Lad, you still got telemetry on all the bots outside?”
Josh nods. “Sure, when they’re in range. Some of the ones working downrail might not be accessible.”
“We only need a few, with welder fittings. Come here, and look at this.”
Grubs pulls up a schematic of the Rockhopper. Zooming in and separating the engine section of the ship, he begins to point out precise areas near the baffles of the ship. “Okay, this is what we need you to do...“
—You return. Will you sleep?—
Grubs nods to his former captain, again ensconced atop the spider, her human legs concealed in its abdomen. “Yeah. Took some convincing, but the kids understand it’s in their best interests. How long until we begin the trip back.”
—You would measure it in years. There must be many children born before Earthfall.—
Grubs shudders, but makes no comment. “We will be in stasis within a day.”
—This one retains knowledge of those systems. Set no end to your sleep. I will monitor.—
This last with a gesture to one of the engineering consoles.
Grubs nods again. “We half expect not to wake up again. There’s no reason to if we’re not back home, and there are worse ways to die than stasis entropy.”
—As you say.—
With that, the titanic spider spins and begins to make its way deeper into the engineering bay, the access sealing behind it. Grubs returns to the crypt.
“Did you tell it?” Faith asks.
“Yeah. It seemed satisfied.”
Josh says, “How long did it give us?”
“I asked for another day. You be done with the work I gave you by then?”
“That’s already done. The Rockhopper is never leaving Sleepy.“
They all give that the moment of silence it deserves.
“What are you doing now, then, kid?”
“Something for myself,” Josh answers, hunched over the bot interface. “Might come to nothing, and it won’t affect our plan. I’d like to keep it to myself if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, kid. Don’t take too long at it. I’m gonna go to my cabin until tomorrow. If I were the two of you, I know how I’d spend my last night.”
Faith is long past blushing. “I do, too.”
Josh smiles at her from his seat. “Another couple of hours and I’ll be done. See you tomorrow, chief.”
“Yeah, kid. You too.”
The thing that had been Nomi watches the status indicators from the crypt, and is satisfied that the remaining humans have entered their sleep without end. It intends to keep its word to wake them when it reached their planet, although it will not speak for the actions of its children at that point. It’s likely the female will be among the first to carry the second generation.
She backs into the spider standing behind her human body, and it swiftly envelops her lower torso once more. As the fused alien turns to head deeper into the bay, it gasps. Clutching its human hands to its stomach, its begins to pant. The captain’s swollen belly visibly shifts, first expanding and then contracting, stabilizing at a slightly smaller size. It feels yet another of its offspring slip from its loins and into the collection already floating in the nurturing cradle of the bloated spider below it. Already this spider-mass and others like it, deep in the bowels of engineering, holds dozens of hybrid children. They remain suspended in a sleep of abeyance, unaging, in function not unlike the human stasis technology, though wholly biological.
Before the Rockhopper makes its journey home, towards the end of the lifespan of this human host, the first generation of sleeping children will number in the tens of thousands.
The AI overseeing the habitat of New Pangea registers iron ingot strikes from a new vector. It lases each of them as they approach. Radio-frequency identifiers, powered by the light of the laser, identify the slugs as originating from the mining contracting ship Rockhopper. The AI tracks the quantity of arriving metal for the purposes of accounting.
When the ingots stop arriving from that vector for a few months, the AI takes no special notice. The ship may have moved to a more promising location, or suffered some small mishap. Such things are common with asteroid mining. The ingots eventually resume, and accounting continues.
The Rockhopper’s contract with the UNS is not within the remit of the AI, so it does not note that the ingots continue to arrive for more than a decade after the expiration of the Rockhopper’s contract. The New Pangea project is decades from completion, and its appetite for raw material limitless. Should anyone ever ask, the AI can supply the tonnage of iron provided by the Rockhopper down to the nearest kilogram, so that the ship can collect its contract payment.
No one ever asks.
Nomi-that-was stands on the bridge of the Rockhopper, where its human body had not tread for more than fifteen years, as Earth measures them. Little had changed in the physical appearance of the captain since the last time Grubs had seen it, though the belly is now flat, showing no signs of pregnancy. The human shell is nonetheless approaching the end of its span, endless childbirth and constant microgravity having taken a great toll on the body of the former captain.
Now it approached its last task, returning the Rockhopper to the Earth of humans. Its memory, and the memory of the human it subsumed, remain flawless, and its hands dance across the console in the complicated pattern required to wake up the slumbering vessel after so many years.
Below the crust of Sleepy, the bulk of the alien watches through myriad spawnlings. Should the ship leave successfully, it will have done all it could to further its mission. The engineering bay of the ship teems with fat spiders, bulbous with the suspended offspring of the former captain and obedient to their purpose. Collectively, they have the necessary cognitive mass to manage the strategic deployment of their burden, aided by insight plucked from the human’s mind as needed.
Once the ship is gone, the remainder of Sleepy will turn its skills upon itself, rendering its biology inert, becoming nothing more than a collection of minerals and crystallized elements. It does not fear its impending end, this is its purpose. The mass riding in the Rockhopper will suffer a similar fate, once the payload is delivered.
Back on the bridge, Nomi completes the final preflight checks. The rail that for so long had been attached to the ship is gracefully unhooked, the spiderbots outside the ship quiescent, soon to be abandoned. The grapples have been retrieved, and the ship is ready to fly. She punches in the codes to allow the initiation sequence of the engine to begin, and prepares to leave Sleepy behind forever.
Maneuvering thrusters release puffs of inert gas, and the Rockhopper slowly drifts away from the surface of the planetoid, a small hail of pebbles and dust drifting from the landing struts back towards the tiny gravity of the planetoid. The ship drifts a few hundred meters clear, and the possessed fingers of its pilot key the sequence to start the main engine burn.
For the first few hundred thousandths of a second, everything proceeds as it should. As the fury of the fusion reaction passes through the magnetic chamber directing it to the baffles and out of the rear of the ship, tiny bends and weaknesses introduced to the ring securing the exhaust are struck by the superheated output of the engine, and begin to warp in a very specific way.
From the outside of the ship, if it were possible to view the process at tens of thousands of frames per second, the baffles surrounding the exhaust would seem to flex, and then fold in and back, something like a flower blooming in reverse. The individual fins are manufactured in such a way as to resist inordinate levels of heat and quickly shifting temperatures, so they survive direct exposure to the full output of the engine for almost a millisecond before collapsing and withering into component elements.
For the duration of that millisecond, the output of the engine is redirected back into itself. This isn’t long enough to cause a breach in the structure of the heavily shielded mining craft, but it’s easily long enough to eviscerate the drive of the Rockhopper. The ship essentially disembowels itself before providing any appreciable thrust along its chosen vector, and becomes no more than a slowly infalling satellite of the planetoid it so recently left.
The alien manipulates the wakeup procedure so that Grubs is thawed but still unconsciousness as it drags the coffin out of the enclosure. Its hand clamps down over his face, heedless of his ability to breathe. Black tar flows around it and into every opening in his head, quickly infiltrating his mind and reaming it in hopes of discovering a method of repairing the massive damage to the ship’s drive.
It can barely comprehend the fatalistic nature of his actions, in a species with the same survival instinct hardwired into it that all life elsewhere in the universe shares. The alien experiences something analogous to human frustration when it discovers that the engineer never expected to wake up again. He hadn’t been sure if the ship would be destroyed or just disabled, but he knew it would never reach Earth.
The alien simply holds its hand in place for the few minutes it takes the engineer to suffocate, and then turns to the coffin containing the younger male and has it thaw him and administer a drug cocktail that stops his heart. Neither of them wake before they expire. It hesitates in front of the readouts for the young female’s coffin, and then leaves her alone. She may yet have a purpose to serve.
Returning to the bridge, the alien allows the computer to calculate the trajectory of the infall, and then programs the remaining compressed gas maneuvering thrusters to return the Rockhopper to the surface with the greatest efficiency. The bulk of itself on the planet will have no doubt witnessed the calamity that befell the engines, and will have avoided suiciding.
Over the course of days, judicious with the remaining compressed gas in the thrusters, the Rockhopper slowly maneuvers its way back to its original position on the surface. When it is secure, the alien avails itself of the massive intellect of its main bulk at the center of the planetoid.
Half a day after that, as the frail human body of the Rockhopper’s former captain begins to show signs of massive radiation poisoning, the ship begins sending out its distress beacon. The chances of the signal being strong enough to lure another human ship close are infinitesimal, even over the course of centuries the remaining fusion reactor is capable of powering it. The being at the center of Sleepy is nothing if not patient, and the children, safe in their arachnid incubators, will keep.
“Admiral, we are clear of Galileo, and prepared to initiate the antimatter reaction.” says the captain of the UNS destroyer Widdershins.
Fleet Admiral Clarke, once a young ensign on the USS Kraken, nods to the younger man, and replies, “Captain, my presence here is simply the privilege of rank. I have not raised my flag, and the Widdershins is your command. Exercise the new drive at your pleasure and discretion.“
“Thank you, Admiral.”
Turning to the console built into the arm of the command chair, the captain addresses the aged face of the engineer displayed on the inset screen. “Chief, you are cleared to initiate the reaction. One gravity acceleration at your discretion.”
In the streamlined engineering bay of the destroyer, Chief Engineer Carlos Zink nods to the monitor the captain is displayed on. “Understood captain, initiating antimatter reaction. One gravity, aye.”
Toggling the shipwide channel, Carlos says, “All hands, all hands, high-g in one minute, high-g in one minute. Secure for acceleration.”
Carlos has no doubt that everyone on the ship is already strapped down. They all know this is the shakedown cruise for a new generation of starship engine, based on antimatter, and more than a few of them have the niggling suspicion that the Widdershins is about to vanish in a blaze of glory.
Nodding to one of his juniors, they wait for the countdown to complete, then key the dual station interface simultaneously. Deep in the bowels of the machinery behind them, a complex magnetic containment system to begin allowing a small stream of hydrogen and anti-hydrogen atoms meet in a controlled reaction. Positrons and electrons attract and interact, and both the matter and the antimatter of the colliding atoms are completely annihilated, releasing their energy to drive the ship.
Everyone on board is slammed backwards as the ship instantly achieves and maintains acceleration just shy of two gravities. Checking the figures, Carlos sees that the engine is putting out roughly forty percent more thrust than the eggheads had predicted. Carefully, mindful that his arms are twice as old as usual and his bones have almost a century of wear, the engineer begins using his console to go over the numbers scrolling in front of him. Soon, he dials back the flow of elements until thrust relaxes to achieve gravity equivalent to earth at sea level.
“Captain, we are at one gravity. Sorry for the rough start, the numbers the manufacturer provided were... conservative.”
“Understood, Chief, medical says there are no reports of injury, and the Admiral offers her compliments on a successful first trial. We’ll get some more distance from Jupiter and then you can let it off the leash a bit, and we’ll see how she performs.“
“Aye, Captain.” Rubbing his bald head, the Chief lets out a sigh of released tension. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we might live through this.”
Chuckles answer him, although they and he both understand he wasn’t really joking.
The Widdershins travels a little over two and a half million kilometers in the next six hours, and Jupiter is only visible as a slight occlusion of the sun as the ship heads away from it, aimed at the edges of the solar system for the engine’s shakedown cruise.
The captain gives the order for non-essential personnel to enter stasis, rendering them more or less immune to the level of acceleration even the new antimatter engine can produce, and the remaining skeleton crew, including the Fleet Admiral, secures themselves in the semi-confining gel of acceleration couches. Medical nanites, generations more advanced than the ones on the Rockhopper, begin to flood the systems of those still awake, strengthening their bones with a species of interlocked buckyball/nanotubes, and cradling the more delicate organs in a sort of cellular scaffolding.
Once Medical gives the all clear to the captain, he addresses engineering through his console. “All yours, chief. Thirty gravities, to the inner edge of the Kuiper belt, if you please.”
“Aye, Captain, thirty it is.”
Down in engineering, the Chief satisfies himself for the dozenth time that the plot programmed by navigation is correct, and that the ship is set to flip and decelerate midway, bringing it to a halt relative to Sol at the inner edge of the rocky belt surrounding the solar system.
As satisfied as he’s likely to be, he keys the shipwide intercom, and his voice echoes through the corridors. ”All hands, all hands, massive and sustained acceleration in five minutes. Secure for massive and sustained acceleration in five minutes.”
He and the single junior engineer holding watch with him spend the next three hundred seconds staring at the countdown clock. When it gets down to twenty, he says to her, “Well, Millie, this should be one for the record books.”
She replies, “I hope it’s not about to be one for the astronomers trying to identify a shiny new star in the sky.”
His chuckle dies in his throat as they’re almost swallowed by their couches. Movement becomes impossible, and will remain that way for the next sixty hours. Deciding that he’d rather rely on the emergency wakeup routines than spend that long feeling his (well reinforced) old bones weigh thirty times what they normally do, he subvocalizes the command that has his couch put him into chemically induced sleep until five minutes before arrival.
He wakes to continuing discomfort, but a quick scan of his monitors shows that he’s woken up precisely when he desired, and that the ship is about to finish decelerating. He has enough time to wish that he’d set the alarm for three minutes later when the hand crushing him into the couch relaxes and blessed weightlessness engulfs him.
“Lets hope for a trip home at a more sedate pace.”
Millie’s reply is a groan.
Satisfying himself that the Admiral came through the trip unharmed, the captain begins scrolling through the reports that are flowing in from all over the destroyer. Medical reports no issues, amazingly, and all other systems seem nominal. When he gets to the bottom, he sees one station missing from his checklist.
“Comm?” he says, looking over to the senior tech manning that station.
“Sorry, Captain, I just wanted to be sure.”
“About?”
“We have a distress signal.”
The Captain stands and walks over to look at the man’s station for himself. Out of curiosity, Fleet Admiral Clarke joins him. She runs her eyes over the transponder sequence, and then they light on the ship name belonging to that particular signature. She pales.
The technician is saying out loud what the admiral is reading for herself. “It’s from a miner, Captain. Registered as the Rockhopper. The fleet registry says it was on a contract with the UNS for New Pangea, but they lost contact almost eighty years ago.“