Chapter 238

The Retreat

Shortly after lunch, Arlene went out to the Ship expecting to sit in one of the command couches and be swept away by the simulator to another very realistic space battle, but she froze as soon as she passed through the hatch.

Jeff had called Kayla and Art to his office, intending to ask them to begin training in the Ship's simulator. Before he could begin, the AI turned the TV on to show Arlene jogging back from the Ship. The AI didn't say anything, but apparently thought Arlene's hurrying back was worthy of the Prime's attention. It was.

"Something's wrong," Kayla voiced what all three were thinking.

Jeff came to his feet. "Let's meet her at the garage."

Arlene burst through the door at the top of the garage stairway just as the others got there.

"Something wrong?" Jeff asked.

Arlene was shaking her head. "Maybe ... I'm not sure. As soon as I walked through the hatch, the Ship asked me to come get you, Daddy. I could feel ... concern."

As they all went out the door and through the garage, Jeff leaned over to whisper in his daughter's ear. "If you had taken your radio with you, you wouldn't have had to come back," he quietly admonished. "All you would have had to do was step past the hatch and call me."

"Yes, My Prime," she answered formally.

Shortly, they were all on board the Ship. After two steps inside, both Jeff and Arlene had been briefed about recent happenings.

"Daddy, uh, I mean, Captain, do you suppose..." Arlene started, but left the sentence hanging.

"Tell Kayla and Art verbally what you just told us," Jeff instructed the Ship.

"I will endeavor to do so," the Ship said in his mind, "but I will not be able to properly translate the technical aspects of my discovery into human speech, although my interpreting process is improving."

Jeff turned to Art. "As I've said before, but just to remind you, Little One and the Ship think in whole concepts, and they use those concepts to communicate with each other and with telepathic races in their sector/dimension of space. Unfortunately, non-telepaths don't think or converse that way – well, at least human beings don't.

"Little One and I have learned to communicate fairly well by using compromises to both types of communication. The Ship, of course, has many times the computing power of the Healer, but still those concepts are difficult to compress and convert into English, and the translation leaves out a lot that can only be conveyed telepathically.

"Bottom line. She is endeavoring to translate all the information she has recently received and condense it into human speech for the two of you. While she's telling you what she has discovered, Arlene and I are going to the bridge so that we can fully merge with her mind and learn in more detail what she has discovered. You two come to the bridge when Ship has completed her discussion with you."

Arlene and Jeff hurried to the bridge and relaxed into the command couches. Soon, they were immersed in the Ship's brain, seeing, feeling and sensing through the Ship's mind everything she had discovered, including the process of her discoveries, with all the nuances that went with them.

In essence, what the Ship told and allowed them to experience was both interesting and frustrating. She had detected a ripple in the dimensions, presumably from a ship dropping from warp. If this ripple was, indeed, from a ship, the effect told several things about the vessel. Number one: The drive that caused the ripple was probably a rather crude one. Two: the ripple that washed across the dimensions seemed wrong, as if the drive were malfunctioning, causing a ripple instead of a true pulse, as a properly operating warp drive should when the drive was engaged or disengaged. Three: Because it was a ripple instead of a true pulse, it was difficult to determine direction or distance, but she estimated the effect to have originated from five to ten light years away, and was able to give them a very vague direction of occurrence.

"The ripple, or a pulse, should not have been of that high an intensity from a properly operating warp drive," Ship told Arlene and Jeff. "Extrapolating from what little data I have, the ship is either of monstrous size, or its drive has malfunctioned. A pulse resulting from dropping out of warp from a properly operating drive, even of a less sophisticated design, should be undetectable past a few light minutes, and it should be a true pulse, not a ripple across the dimensions. But this one is much farther away than that. It appears to have caused a ripple that has encompassed several light years."

"Can we investigate?" Arlene asked.

Jeff mentally answered her through the Ship's mind. "The unknown ship's personnel may not know that Earth is even here. If we investigate, assuming we can find the ship, and we're detected, we might very well reveal Earth to a more advanced civilization. Who knows what the result of that would be? Remember, I've told you how many aggressive races we've met through the portal. We've taken strict measures to insure we aren't traced back to Earth, and so far, we haven't met a race that has the equivalent of our portal technology. But as far as technology in general is concerned, we're way behind several of those races.

"If we reveal ourselves to a space faring race, and they are aggressive, Earth, without Ship's help, would be no match for them. Dodging the few missiles that Earth might have that would reach high orbit would be child's play to them. All they would have to do would be to back off a few thousand miles. And ... even using only kinetic weapons, they could reduce Earth's cities to rubble in short order. They wouldn't even have to use their own ordinance or energy beams, just nudge a few asteroids into our atmosphere."

"But we have the Ship," Arlene argued.

"A mental pulse that drained all her energy, though," Jeff responded, and then he remembered something.

Little One?

{{{ Yes, my Prime. }}}

"Oh, wow," Arlene said through the Ship's mind. "It's so neat to clearly hear Little One." Then to Little One, "Hey, my friend who saved my life."

After several minutes of the two dissimilar females "talking," Jeff mentally cleared his throat to attract their attention, even as he heard the Ship's mental chuckle in the background. Finally, Jeff got a thought past the two. Little One, you mentioned something when I was trying to form snowballs. Something about a telepath being able to hear me for miles?

{{{ Yes, Prime. You were projecting strongly. }}}

So, why can't I "hear" a telepath, if I can project? I can "hear" you just fine as long as I'm touching you, but a few feet away – nothing. And as far as "projecting" is concerned, to my knowledge, no one has noticed me telling them something mentally.

Before Little One could answer, the Ship stepped in with, "Little One, as you refer to my Healer, has continued the enhancement process I began on your body. As we have previously discussed, the result of those enhancements in you and your brother Alphas is that latent talents and abilities that certain individuals in your race once had are becoming active in each of you. You as a Prime have retained more of these abilities than the other Alphas. You can communicate with my Healer if you are touching, and that same 'mechanism' in your brain also controls your ability to send telepathically, as well as receive, of course. Your spouses' abilities to know where you are is proof that you do project to some extent, and have even before the enhancement. But to further develop this ability, I need to stimulate that part of your brain. I was hesitant to do this earlier, but now that you have developed some of your abilities, and that area is obviously functioning to a larger extent, I feel that the enhancement of that area to both send and receive will go quickly without any danger to you – or your mates.

"Thought is the only thing that will penetrate my shields, and my primary line of defense is those shields. It is an involved process to drop them, and an even more involved process to restart them again."

There was a long hesitation. Arlene reached over and took her husband's hand, smiling at him.

"So, this is going to suddenly turn me into a telepath?" Jeff asked the Ship.

Both of the humans felt the Ship's amusement. "I strongly doubt it, but since I have never done this, I have little to go on to allow me to envision the end result. I am fairly certain that the process should proceed at a relatively slow pace. Remember, however, that prior to our meeting in the cavern I was born in, I knew nothing of the human race. Granted that I have studied your body's functions, as has my Healer, but your brain, as well as any brain of higher intelligence, is a very complicated thing. I was hesitant to enhance this atrophied area, even though it should have greatly improved our ability to communicate, but I was not certain of the end result. At this point, I better understand the makeup of your brain, but I am still far from completely understanding it. Understanding your ability to love, hate, feel aggression, fear, sympathy, and the many other emotions you humans are aware of, is far less clear, which forces me to be very tentative with any changes to your brain. Consequently, I intend, with your permission, to begin the enhancement very delicately."

"So, how long will this take?" Jeff questioned.

"Perhaps one or two of your hours for the first stage of the process," Ship responded.

Jeff let out a laugh. "Oh ho, you have, finally, decided to use our system of measuring time."

"It is a ridiculous system that does not even consider the dimensional aspects of time," the Ship responded, her tone somewhat huffy in their merged minds.

Hesitating a second, Jeff asked, "Can we do it now? Initiate this process, I mean?"

Arlene immediately broke in. "Wait. There is something else, or rather someone else, who we need to consider – Mom. Daddy, if you go into that chamber without her being here, I don't want to be around when she finds out, especially if Ship is doing something to your brain."

"He is a Prime," the Ship began. "He does not have to..."

But Arlene continued, "Mom is a very sweet person until ... you get her pissed. And if I let my husband do this without Mom's knowledge ... Well, it just isn't going to happen." Reaching over, she grabbed Jeff's hand while still talking to him mentally through the Ship, "Promise me that you won't do this before I get back with Mom."

Jeff sat up, mentally disengaging himself from the Ship. "Baby, this isn't a big thing. Ship won't hurt me..."