Energy In Emptiness

[Vyslanté]

Originally written for Worldbuilding Exchange (and thus available on AO3) on the theme Law in Space, and the specific prompt

Article:

« Finally, for aliens—what laws do we put into place for first contact? What do regular people do if they encounter an alien, possibly for the first time? Are there regulations that spaceship captains must study before being able to purchase a ship? Is there anything like the Prime Directive?

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Energy in Emptyness​

"And… we're out!"

Edel's clear voice from the navigator's chair cut through the tense silence that reigned on the Bridge — or rather, the inescapable background of metallic noises, of the main hull groaning under the stress of transition, of the ventilation's whirring, of the propulsion systems' vibrations that passed as silence onboard the Naked Sun — as if the unmistakable feeling of fall and the sudden apparition of a field of stars on the main display screen were not enough clues. Captain Hoel spared a mere glance at his own screen, quickly checking that nothing was too much out of the ordinary, before immediately relaxing and leaning back in his chair.

"Alright people, you know the drill." Protocol demanded he re-explained what that drill was, how they had about two days of sublight before reaching one of the other jump points, how the remoteness of this nameless system should not be used as a pretext to slacking off as this was still technically uncharted space, how they have only five jumps left before their destinations; he did not bother. He knew the two other people in the room well enough, they had done this whole dance often enough, they did not need any reminder. Plus, what was the point of leaving the military if it meant he had to apply the same rigid stuffiness on his own cargo ship?

"Captain…" Except for that bit of properness, of course. It was his ship, so people had to call him Captain, and not even his closest friends would have escaped it.
"What is it, Nev?"
"I'm getting some… strange readings on the long-range scans."
"Ah… let me see." He contained a sigh. Would it be too much to ask for one jump without anything unplanned happening? He straightened and traced a quick query on the nearest display. The status menu was replaced by a colorful graph.

And just as Nev had said, something was off. The screen presented a complete view of the system, annotated to denote what their charts identified as a collection of useless planets and known navigational hazards, plus floating pieces of rock their automated anti-collision had flagged — and an anomaly. The computer had only placed an oh-so-helpful UNIDENTIFIED right next to what appeared as a single red dot near the main star. Hoel again managed to avoid sighing, half relieved that it was something this benign, half annoyed at the perspective of more work. It was not their job to investigate scanning artifacts, but they would have to report it when they reached civilization again; there sometimes were rewards to crew that expanded the maps. With a bit of time they'll have moved enough to get some more accurate parallax data, but there were few things they could do. The local hypergeometry meant they had emerged a good four light-hours from the star, and they had neither the time nor the fuel to investigate closer.
"Yeah, I see it too," confirmed Hoel. "Probably just some vulcanoid debris the first survey ship had missed."
"Rather large, for a piece of debris."
"Yeah, yeah, some small asteroid, whatever." He had a sweeping gesture, as if he was physically dismissing the topic. "Make a note of it somewhere, but it's too far away to be any of our concern."

The jump done, the immediate surroundings cleared of any danger, he wasn't needed on the Bridge any longer. That deep into space, the chances of anything unexpected requiring his immediate input were vanishingly small. And he had left a couple of very tempting drinks in the mess' fridge…

"Captain!" Nev's voice sounded way more alarmed than previously. Hoel resigned himself to stay a bit longer and, this time, openly sighed. He could not wait for this trip to end.
"What is it, now?"
"It's… not there anymore."
"What?" He furrowed his brows, but his own display corroborated it. There now was nothing at the unknown's position. "Probably some effect of the star's glare?"
"I-I don't think so." His voice was, somehow, even more strangled. "It looks like…"
"Shit!" Before he could explain himself, Edel had interrupted. Sensors weren't her area of responsibility, but it did not take a lidar expert to realize the magnitude of the latest update the computer had given.

The red dot had reappeared in a slightly different position, but the UNKNOWN tag had disappeared, replaced with an UNIDENTIFIED VESSEL one and a green arrow detailing some form of trajectory.

"What the—" A flurry of thoughts went through Hoel's mind without any conclusion managing to take hold. Someone brave — or stupid — enough to fly that close to the star without having their transponder on could only be bad news. "We're supposed to be the only ones on this route!"
"Yeah, I would not want to find that some other crew overtook us."
"Or… it might be some military ship trying to keep a low profile for its trials…"
"Oh, come on," exclaimed Nev, his eye-rolling almost audible, "don't tell me you believe in these stories."
"What stories?" Hoel tried to follow the ever-present gossip on the space stations of their regular journey, but he had never really heard something like that.
"Well, Captain," explained Edel with a conspiratorial tone, "rumor has it that there exist some black ops projects of secret ships capable of withstanding almost everything, built and tested in the harshest conditions to..."
"Yeah, yeah, and if they even find that some civilian saw them, they'll come and eliminate us without even looking back."
"Well yeah Nev, why not?"
"Wh– why not ?!" Nev's loss of words was enough for Edel to get a triumphant look on her face. "The better question is why?! They already have their systems, why would they even be here in the open testing things where civilians can see them?"
"Because it's just not the—"
"Alright, alright, alright!" cut Hoel. "Enough with suppositions, can we focus the 'scope and get some kind of ID on that thing?"

The remonstrance looked like it accomplished its goal and for a few moments silence and machinery noises were once more the only background to the bridge. The Naked Sun was not equipped with anything more than a standard sensor suite, but it should be enough to get some more precise data on that ship. Data started to pour on the displays, then supposition the software made based on these scraps.

"Sorry, Captain," said Nev, "but they're too close to the star for us to get a good sense of what they look like. It's too big to be a warship…"
"To be any known warship."
"...if that makes you happy, any known warship; but its acceleration exceeds what you'd expect to find on cargo ships this size."
"Yeah…" mumbled Hoel, deep into thoughts. The ship appeared to bolt towards the third jump point, effectively getting away from them. It almost looked as if they were trying to flee; that could only be some peculiar coincidence, as the light of their own arrival would only reach the unknown in three hours and some change. "They are quite big, aren't they?"
"We're certainly getting a lot of reflected light, so it's either that, or they've covered their ship in mirrors. Though given it's hanging out close to stars, maybe they did go for a more reflective paintjob, even if I don't really see why a cargo ship owner would do that sort of thing."
"Maybe it's not a cargo, but a research platform of some sort, doing some…" Hoel hesitated a brief second before just vaguely waving his hands. "...star science."
"Without its transponder?"
"Good point."
"That's because it's neither a cargo nor a science ship."
"I swear, Edel, if you say it's a black pro—"
"Because it's aliens."

Only a stunned silence answered her. Nev had been ready to answer something about how she had to stop with the conspiracies, but was clearly not prepared but such a preposterous proposition. Feeling the combined weight of their stares on her, Edel put up her hands in a defensive gesture.

"Hey, don't look at me like that! I'm just saying: unknown ship without a transponder, spectrography of its exhaust plume doesn't march anything in the database, has some weird behavior about stars, beelines towards the jump point that leads aways from civilized space, reacted to our presence as soon as we jumped…"
"That's a coincidence," opposed Nev. "They can't have seen us yet."
"They could, if they had FTL sensors."
"Come on, that's not…"
"FTL sensors are not possible, he said onboard a jumpship." That seemed to shut him up. "We don't know how to make them, but that doesn't mean they're any more fundamentally impossible than our drives."
"I think I preferred the conspiracies about secret military ships planning to destroy us," said Hoel, but now that the idea was there, he could not stop thinking about it.

There was a more rational explanation, certainly — several, even, from a sudden transponder malfunction in a survey vessel with classified propulsive systems which would not appear in their identification charts to a bunch of pirates or smugglers with custom ships trying to lay low in a seldom-frequented system — but Edel's conjecture had an undeniable appeal.

"But if it's aliens," she continued, "we have to do something."
"That's quite the if."
"What do you mean, Edel?"
"I mean, Captain…" She looked surprised. "You know…"
"Yes, I… know…" Then it came back to him, in a flash. Just like every other conceivable thing aboard a spaceship, there was protocol for it. "Right! Nev, try to look into the default messages of the high-gain transmitter.
"The… default messages?"
"There should be something relevant in there." Nev raised an interrogative eyebrow. "I had to learn it when I got my license for independent FTL ship operations, but I can't say I really remember it. It was… quite some time ago." He put his head in his hands, trying to search his memories for the decade-old remembrances of the classes he had been forced to take. He couldn't say they had left much of a trace; he knew how to calculate a jump and how to pilot a ship from his military days, and the mandatory lessons had mostly served as a refresher about life in space. Now that Edel had pointed it to him, though, he thought he could vaguely remember a module on outside-context problems.

"Wait, no." Hoel left his chair and started to pace back and forth around it — there was not much free space on their cramped bridge, and he had to regularly lower his head to avoid hitting one of the many pipes on the ceiling. He was thinking aloud. "The standard message about peace and good will and linguistic material to ease translation is for later, when you know you can have a communication channel. The first step is…" He knew it, he was certain of it! "Something about prime numbers? Blinking along the Fibonacci sequence to assert intelligence? No, no, we both have ships, we already know they're intelligent, that must be something else…" He caught a glimpse of Nev and Edel exchanging worried looks, but did not pay them much attention. "If we have seen them, we can assume they have seen us, but we have to signal our intention to communicate somehow…"
"Captain," tried Nev, "you're not actually planning to do it, are you?"
"What?" He had been more curt than he liked, suddenly grabbed out of his thoughts.
"I mean, the whole First Contact thing. We don't know if it's… the case."
"We don't know that it's not not the case, either."
"Edel, please, I'm trying to be serious. Doesn't it seem too much to jump to such a conclusion that quickly? We see one weirdly out-of-the-ordinary vessel, and we're immediately ready to… to what, sequentially activate our sublight drive to signal in morse code with our exhaust?"
"No, that's for when you're in distress and all other means of communication have failed," answered Hoel straightforwardly. "In this case we'd need to… Damnit, it was one module twenty years ago, how do they expect us to remember? I think there was something about using com lasers instead of general radio messages to show that we're trying to reach them specifically, but at their lowest possible setting, to avoid looking like they're weapons." He sat back into his chair, traced a few characters on his screen. He might not remember, but their computer must have some things to say on that topic, wouldn't it?
"Captain! It's… it's too late."
"Too late?" His eyes went frantically between Nev's apologetic face and his own display. "What do you mean?"
"They're gone. They… it looks like they've jumped."
"That deep into the system?"
"You know what that means," added Edel, looking too proud of herself. "It's jump technology way beyond what we have. So… black ops project… or aliens."

A new stretch of silence welcomed that declaration. Hoel, finally, decided to break it.

"In both cases, you both know what that means." He took the time to stare Nev and Edel, to lock eyes with them. "Not. A. Single. Word. To. Anyone."

​

 

[Blazinghand]

I liked the need to consider other possibilities besides just aliens when there's an unexpected thing that could be aliens. A fun read!