Kris began to get edgy; this was her first initial alien contact. This was humanity’s first new alien contact in eighty years. The last one had gone horribly wrong.
This one looked to be going along the same downward path.
Kris didn’t much like the trip. Worse, Kris didn’t like that this one was her responsibility.
Just as Kris was about to open her mouth, Penny’s gaze dropped from the overhead. She took a deep breath. “Okay, I think I can see how to brief this.”
“We’re ready,” Kris said.
“Nobody will ever be ready for this one,” Penny said, half under her breath.
Across from her, the wall screen lit up. Abby turned to face it. Jack pushed his chair away from the table so he could see, without losing sight of the door.
The screen opened on a view of the moon as a large explosive blew out in a gale of expanding gases. Some of the debris cloud achieved at least orbital speed, maybe escape velocity.
“First things first. The explosion on the moon. It was a chemical explosive, conventional. Not something we use. That stuff is corrosive and dirty. It’s in our books, but it hasn’t met environmental standards since before we broke loose from Earth. I’ll leave it to the boffins to give you all the gory details if you want more.”
“Was it done intentionally?” Kris asked.
“No doubt in my mind,” Penny said. “Both because of the type of explosives and the timing. It blew within five seconds of the ship destroying itself.”
“Isn’t that an opinion?” Abby shot at Penny.
“A well-founded one, I think,” Penny countered. “When you have the same explosives letting go within seconds of each other, coincidence must take a backseat to facts. Once can be an accident. Twice, we should start looking for hostile activity. Three, and only a fool doesn’t assume enemy actions.”
Spoken like a true paranoid, Kris thought, raising an eyebrow to Penny’s other listeners. The rest of the room took a moment to mull her viewpoint. No one chose to express a dissenting opinion.
“Go on,” Kris said.
The view on the screen changed to show the unknown ship charging up to meet them. In slow motion, Kris’s laser beam shot into the aft-most sphere of the ship.
“I put it right where you wanted it,” Nelly said.
“Exactly,” Kris agreed, and watched as the fusion engines sputtered, throwing the ship off its steady course.
“Oh, and for what it’s worth,” Penny said, “the hostile was on a collision course with the Wasp until Kris’s hit in the engine room knocked it off track.”
“Nasty little beggar,” the colonel observed dryly. “Shooting first and hell-bent on ramming. I’m developing a serious doubt that they ever intended to ask questions.”
“It’s too early to start applying salve to our souls, Colonel,” Kris said. “But thanks anyway.”
“It wasn’t a cheap Band-Aid I was offering, Princess, but a quite serious observation. I’m starting not to like these bad actors.”
“Here’s one to look at,” Penny offered, to bring them back on topic.
A body appeared, whirling out of the explosion. Two arms, two legs. A head. The face was hard to make out, but there was a most prominent jaw. Even hair.
“They look almost human,” Jack said.
“We’ve identified the Three alien species who built the jump points,” Kris said. “All had their own evolutionary trails and look nothing like us. Or the Iteeche. Now we run into these bug-eyed monsters. They come out shooting and look amazingly like us!”
“Very much like us,” Penny said, and a section of the explosion filled the view screen. Several bodies were clearly visible. Two looked to have a pair of large mammary glands on their chests. The screen cycled through the next few frames slowly, letting the bodies rotate. They certainly looked female.
“What’s that other one holding to her breast?” Kris asked.
A third “woman” held on to a small bundle. In the next couple of frames she lost her grasp. The wrappings around the bundle also came undone.
“I think that’s a child,” Penny said.
“Dear Mother of God,” the colonel said. “They blew up their ship with their women and children on board! What kind of monsters are we dealing with?”
Kris turned away from the screen, not that she could ignore it. She focused on Penny. “You’re sure they blew up the ship themselves.”
“The explosion started in the forward sphere,” she said, and the screen’s view changed to show the entire ship, again. It began to come apart, starting, as Penny said, with the forwardmost of the spheres, then the second, then the third. The aft sphere, Engineering from all appearances, was the last to go, and seemed to fly into the least number of pieces.
“I think they expected their destruction to involve the reactor,” Penny said. “That’s just a guess, but if the reactor had blown, it would have taken the fragmentation and dispersal of debris to a whole new level.”
Kris nodded. She had already done a postmortem on a ship where the reactor finished off its destruction. The wreckage had been little more than atoms and molecules. Her ongoing nightmares, however, were much more substantial.
“So, Princess,” the professor said, “your hit on the power plant seems to have resulted in our having wreckage to examine that they did not intend for us to have.”
“It looks that way,” Kris said.
“Look at those bodies. No space suits,” Abby said, pointing at the picture still on the wall screen. “No survival pods. They all were in a shirtsleeve environment, then some bastard opened that ship to vacuum for all of them.”
“I don’t think survival was ever the intention,” the colonel said. “I’ve heard of ‘Victory or Death’ as a battle cry, but in all my study of human history, I’ve never encountered anything like this.”
Kris could only shake her head. “This is our first human encounter with someone else’s history. I know we humans have had our nasty and desperate times. I think we’ve found someone or something willing to take nasty and desperate to a whole new level. God help us.”
Those who shared her room seemed unable to expand upon that observation. Kris looked at her options and found only one to start with.
“Nelly, tell Captain Drago that I would like for the Wasp to make orbit around that moon so that we can examine both what our alien was doing down there and recover as much of the wreckage as possible. I’ll want to ship as much of the wreckage and bodies back to human space as we can.”
“That will involve unloading one of the cargo ships,” the captain answered Kris immediately.
“I figured as much. You said it would take two or three days to refuel.”
“Refuel and resupply the ships from the replenishment ships, yes, Kris.”
“We might as well put our time to multiple uses. Penny, put together a short report on what just happened and flash it to the rest of the fleet whenever we get a line of sight on one of them.”
Most of the fleet was on the other side of the gas giant. With the Wasp trying to make orbit around the target moon, the two elements of Kris’s fleet were likely to make “ships passing in the night” seem downright familiar. “I’m sure they’re curious.”
“I bet they are,” Penny said, and went silent as she began to arrange her data drop.
11
Kris would have preferred that the other ships of the fleet had stayed in low orbit around the gas giant while they took on reaction mass. However, she was discovering the difference between leading a fleet and commanding one.
Where she led, they followed.