Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 3
“You wanted to see me, Ma’am?” Corey asked as she came to attention on the Flag Bridge.
“This is getting to be a habit,” Captain Johnson said, turning. She held out a cup. “Brew?”
“Thank you, Ma’am.” Corey gratefully accepted the cup. She settled cautiously in the proffered chair, favoring her right side.
“Are you hurt?” Captain Johnson asked when she saw that.
“No, Ma’am.” Corey smiled. “It’s an old wound. Last year I lost a piece of my behind, and sitting can be a pain if I’m not careful.”
Captain Johnson nodded; a lot of the girls in Fleet who had been around a while were nursing old wounds. The dark-haired youngster looked too young to be a pilot, let alone a Squadron Lead. She was so petite that she’d probably been mistaken for a teenager playing dress up in a uniform.
“I know what I’ve received from the message drones,” Captain Johnson said, settling in her own seat, “but you were there and talked with them. I want your impressions, and I don’t want them filtered through the Comm Techs on McCudden, or my staff.”
“Aye, Ma’am.” Corey described the fight, sketching it out on a pad of paper, gaining confidence as she described the maneuvers, her decisions, and the results. “So, after that last cruiser blew up, we paralleled the strange ship’s course and velocity. Svetlana and I began scanning the frequencies to see if we could find anything that sounded intelligent.”
“And you did.”
Corey nodded. “We found a signal in the near infrared, another in red light, another in yellow, and so on through the entire spectrum. Neither of us could make any sense of the signals. We could tell they were modulated, but that was all.”
“So that’s when you sent your Squadron Second back. Did you consider using your message rockets? That way, one of you would have still been around in case something happened to the other.”
“They’re too limited for something like this,” Corey said.
“You had two missiles each. I’m sure you could have--”
“Excuse me, Ma’am,” Corey interrupted. “It was my judgment that you needed more information than I could pack into a missile. There was a risk, but I weighed the consequences and decided that my personal safety was less important than your need to know what was happening.
“There was one other reason. I had a stranger in front of me, and it’s possible there are still Idenux in this system. I didn’t want them to know that we’ve been modulating gravity waves as a communication system.”
“Go on,” Captain Johnson said. She was impressed, but tried not to show it. Most junior officers would have gotten flustered and defensive at her question. Andersen had stated her decision, and had the courage to stand up for it. And that last part about keeping their gravity wave communicator secret; how many other officers would have fired the missiles off without a thought?
“It was clear to me, Ma’am, that they were trying to communicate, not fight.” Corey picked up the holopic. “I’m not sure they were in any kind of shape to fight. We could see hints of internal damage, fires, oxygen and water vapor venting, and so on. I have no idea what their casualties were like, but they had to be serious.
“After I sent Svetlana back, I tried answering in kind, using my multi-spectral scanner and adding a simple, patterned modulation. Eventually, I heard a response down in the infrared like some of the Commercial Service ships use. At first, they simply repeated what I sent, but as soon as we were both working that frequency, they switched to voice. It sounded like a deep voice; if it were an instrument, I’d say something in the bass register. I only had to work a little on the modulation at my end to hear the individual words.”
“After a while, it was clear they were speaking Standard, but their words were drawn out, like the drawl you hear from people who live on the southern continent on Home. So I modulated my own response to mimic that by creating a touch of delay in my transmission. That dragged out the words and made them sound like theirs. At least I think so. What I was getting from them, I had to speed up slightly to understand.”
Corey shrugged. “It worked, Ma’am. Some of their words were strange, but I don’t think that’s unusual. Whenever I encountered a word I didn’t know, I queried them on it, and they did the same back to me. We talked, if you can call it that, and after an hour or so, I had compiled a list of common references and alternate meanings.”
“What did you talk about first?”
“I confirmed that we were both using the Common Referents: seconds, minutes, and gravity measurements. They--”
“Common Referents?” Captain Johnson interrupted. “Most people don’t know what they are. How is it you do?”
Corey flushed. “When I was on the Auldearn, we had a lot of time on our hands,” Corey said. “We patrolled a part of the nebula where there was a lot of dust and gas, so Captain Abakumova insisted that all pilots be familiar with them in case we had to get a fix on where we were. I’ve taught my Flight Leads and Seconds what they are, but my squadron has been so busy patrolling that I haven’t had a chance to teach them to the rest of my girls.”
“I ... see.” Captain Johnson tried to hide her surprise. She’d commanded a fleet carrier with the Frontier Fleet and had totally ignored the work of the light carriers except in combat. She wondered what other things Andersen and the other pilots from that fleet knew that she didn’t know about. The rotation of pilots from the Frontier Fleet, what the Main Fleet derisively called the Buccaneer Navy, was benefiting everyone. She’d have to mention that in her report.
“What else did you talk about after you settled on the standard references?”
“Not much at first,” Corey admitted. “They identified themselves, and I did the same.” She covered that part of the story briefly. It had taken more than 20 minutes before she understood that they called themselves the People’s Star Kingdom, whatever that was. She still wasn’t sure they grasped The United Families.
“They acted like the Idenux were new to them, though it’s possible they know them by another name. Anyway, after we got that cleared up, we agreed on some standard protocols, exchanged navigation information, lists of Cepheid variables, and the like, harmless stuff, mostly. We used the local star as a reference. I suppose we could have exchanged biological data, but I didn’t know how to begin doing that. The McCudden arrived about the time we finished with the navigation information.”
Captain Johnson shook her head. “After your Second got back, I had my staff and three Communications Techs dig through Jellicoe’s library, trying to find everything the Survey and Commercial Services had put together about initiating contact with strangers. They have a list of what should be done, how it should be done, the order in which to do it, and which references had to be established first. And you did almost everything on that list without access to any manual, and while sitting in your fighter hours from any support. This is one for the books.”
“There was one thing I noticed,” Corey said. “When I bumped the gain on my analyzer, I could hear background voices on that ship. I passed that on to the McCudden after I’d briefed them, and I suggested we record that background talk and see if we could isolate the voices and figure out what they were saying. I also told them to watch what they said around a microphone; we wouldn’t want to give away any information by accident.”
“We’re strangers to each other,” Captain Johnson said, “and I’d be surprised if they had a clue about us. Until we know more about them, let’s not help them find out. You did very well, Squadron Lead, very well indeed. I am officially commending you and Squadron Second Federova for your actions.” She refreshed her cup and politely offered Corey a refill. “Was there anything else you noticed about them?”
“Their ship was alive with radio energy,” Corey said after some thought. “Most of it was low-level, and from the patterns I suspect that it was internal telemetry, not unlike what we get from our probes. That would mean they have a lot of automatic machinery, which suggests their crew is very technical, not like the Idenux where half the crew are ground troops. I’ve always thought that the Idenux were a barbarian culture that somebody gave space flight to. If I’m right, that would suggest that the People’s Star Kingdom is a refined culture with a high technology base. They either developed space flight on their own, or never lost it.”
“Where did you learn to observe like that?” Captain Johnson asked quietly. “The Frontier Fleet?”
Corey flushed at the praise. “Just after I joined my first squadron, the lead taught me the first rule of Patrol Ops: watch everything. I had a lot of time on my hands until the McCudden arrived, so I tried to do just that. Squadron Lead deGraff would have us spend our idle time working through problems she would give us. We’d have information, but it would be jumbled up with pieces missing, much like we might encounter while on patrol. We just had to put everything together the right way and learn when to make inferences. I’ve been trying to do the same thing with my squadron.” She shrugged. “It must work; we’re always being picked for Patrol Ops, probably because we get better results.”
Captain Johnson nodded. “That answers a question my Exec raised this morning. I’ll tell Fighter Eldest Gibson to have other squadrons take their turns patrolling. They won’t get any better if your girls do all of it. I’ll also want copies of your training problems. I want to distribute them to the other squadrons in the Battle Group. If it worked for one squadron, it should work for all of them.
“But that’s for later. I’m going to send a report back to Home with everything we know about these strangers,” Captain Johnson continued. “I want you to prepare a record of everything you saw, everything you thought about, and everything you concluded. Your vids are going back also, so I’ll want a narrative of the battle.
“After we’re finished here, sit down with my staff and tell them everything you can. Review what they already have for accuracy and content. Information is easy enough to corrupt, let’s not have it start out that way.”
“Aye, Ma’am.” Corey hesitated. “Is there anything else?”
“Did you get a chance to investigate that cluster of rocks while you were waiting?”
“No, Ma’am, I deemed that less important than what I was doing with that stranger. After McCudden finished picking up Idenux escape capsules, they sent their Marines over. By then, one of my flights had rendezvoused with us, and they joined the hunt. The Marines found a small garrison on the base and a dozen of our kin. I think that PSK ship interrupted the kin-stealers when they were trying to evacuate. It would have been about the right time for somebody to realize we had won the fight in the inner system. If not for the stranger, all we’d know about that Idenux cruiser would be whatever our scouts picked up on their scans as it left.”
“I’ll have someone check each clump of rocks for a base,” Captain Johnson said. “Don’t worry, it won’t be your girls; they’ve done enough scouting for right now.
“That’ll be all, Andersen. I know you’ve been up for a long time. Talk to my staff and then get some sleep.”
“Thank you, Ma’am.” Corey stood and came to attention. “With the Captain’s permission?”
Captain Johnson nodded. “Dismissed.”
Captain Johnson’s staff let her go four hours later. She stood in the passageway, yawning and totally drained. If she had been tired when she’d landed, she was exhausted now. In the last three days, she’d flown two missions, one of them lasting over 18 hours, fought in two engagements, and had been grilled by Captain Johnson’s staff.