Ishmael

The mining ship Ishmael was deep in the system 12.436.8045 breaking rocks. The system was an empty one with the remains of a destroyed planet sitting there for the taking. The Captain watched his men fill the holds, building new additions to his ship as needed. “Tell the men we are ready to head to port. We might be running slow with this to carry but I doubt you’ll mind that. “ His crew grinned, a landfall soon and pockets full. They could enjoy the trip home. He called in the drones and began preparing to make the jump to clear space, running the numbers through his head. “Nav, take us to the edge of the system. I want to be as far as I can outside the gravity well before we jump.” He hit the Comms, “Stand down lads, we’re cruising to the edge of the system before we jump. Any complaints go to the lads that filled out the cargo ‘till we can barely walk. Beers in the fridge.”

A content crew approached the edge of the system until his Comms officer got up from his station and went to whisper into the ear of the Nav officer. The two looked at each other and the was a sudden scrabble on the screen. Whatever the query it ended with a nod. The Comms officer was an old hand, keeping the lines open to the galaxy without a flicker of emotion. Sun storms, pirates, it didn’t move him or his gear. He continued his tour and put his hand on the Science officer and leaned in. Whatever was said the Science Officer leaned back and looked at Nav only to receive a nod. She turned to her console and began to check what she was being told. She stopped and nodded at the Comms Officer. The Comms Officer walked to the Captain’s station. He saluted formally, “Sir. We are in a first contact situation. I have received a signal, confirmed by two Officers of the bridge. I recommend we stand to for a briefing.”

The Captain inhaled sharply and then let it out slowly. A first contact? “All Crew stand by. Nav put us in a stationary orbit. Science, I want a report as soon as possible.” He nodded to the officer in front of him, “Inform the XCC we are standing down for a first contact and then meet me in my quarters.”

The bridge officers assembled in front of his screen and the Captain looked around, “Where’s Bart?” His First Officer piped up, “He’s trying to slow down the trillion tons of ore that we were dragging behind us. I could hear the cursing from two decks away.” The Captain grunted, “Well, this isn’t really an engineering problem. What do we know?”

The Comms Officer began, “I picked this up as we got close to the edge of the system. It’s organic, nowhere near our usual frequencies. Definitely sentient but no idea beyond that. It’s a call for help. Our translators patched it together from about sixty other known languages but it’s still a mess. Some of those were insectile, some of them were wet worlds. Whatever it is, it’s close.” He played the recording, a deep whistling that he had intercepted. “JJ, you picked them up on the scanners. Any ideas?”

The Nav Officer switched the view on the screen. “It’s only a few hours out and heading this way. All I can tell you is that it is big and doesn’t match any records we have for Xeno ships. I can’t even tell you how it’s moving. It is within range right now if we wanted to go a meet it.”

The Captain nodded, “And Science? Anything you can tell us?” She shook her head, “Not really, not until it’s within range of my scanners. I can tell you that my lab will be ready.”

The Captain sighed, “All right. Get the crew ready, we could be here for a while. I’ll start the official record, you can all add to it as we figure this out. Remind the men that we all get a bonus for this and get them a beer when they get off-duty. Tell the Engineer that I will see him at his convenience.” The officers grinned at that one.

Out in the dark, running for her life while bleeding across the system she tried to make it home. She called and called, hoping that her packmates would hear her. The pain was blinding her and she saw nothing of the human ship sitting in her way. She also missed seeing the train of ore stretching out behind it. Tearing through the system she slammed hard into the crates, ripping her fields apart with the impact. She felt the universe press on her in a way that she hadn’t experienced since she had been a child in the mother’s wake. Then it went dark as her mind fled. As a million tons of ore flew loose from their fields and swung towards the sun the loudest sound in the system was the howl of outrage from the Engineer.

On the bridge was a mix of anxiety and outrage. The Xeno had ignored all efforts to communicate, obviously deeply damaged or having lost its Comms. It had been too late to try and avoid the accident by the time it was clear that something was badly wrong. The Captain swore and crumpled up the XCC ‘guidelines’ that he was supposed to follow. Fuck all use now. He turned to his staff, “Move us over there and get as many scans as possible. Get the Engineer up here and I’ll see if we can collect up our cargo before it burns.”

The Science Officer looked up, “Captain, that is not a ship. It’s nearly entirely organic and its…” She paused. She looked back down at the scans., “Sir, it’s bleeding.”

The Captain went to make the difficult call to the XCC, “This is Captain Bentan of the mining ship Ishmael, first contact situation at 12.436.8045. I need every Xenobiologist you can find that can explain how a creature the size of a bloody carrier just smashed into my cargo. I’m sending you scans.” He ended the call. Fuck knows what Earth would want him to do next.

He called the Science officer, “Robin, can you explain to me what your drones are reporting? None of it makes much sense to me.” She looked at her reports, most of which were the stuff of fantasy, “Sir, it doesn’t make sense to me either. It’s like the universe is fucking with us. We have no record of organic life in open space, none, nothing it could feed on or evolve from. It’s like finding a dragon sitting on a hoard of gold in your kitchen. If I had to speculate I’d say that this is created. Someone somewhere thought this should be real and had the technology to make it happen.” She went thoughtful for a moment, “Sir I need the Engineer to look at this. Maybe he has something to add.”

The Captain decided to save some time and went down to the Engineering department. As expected Bart was elbow deep in the transporters and field generators. He pulled up a chair and waited for his presence to register. Despite appearances, he trusted Bart to be well aware that he was there, just preferring to finish whatever oddness that he was currently inflicting on the ship. Finally, he put down his tools and nodded to the Captain. “I read the reports. It’s not my field, better to leave it to Earth. I’m sure they have a dozen ships on the way” He waved at the field generators, “I’ve secured most of the cargo but I can’t recover the stuff we lost. That creature hit it hard and sent it sunward at a truly impressive speed.” The Captain stood up, “Frankly I don’t care about the ore. We seem to have half-killed a unicorn and we need to help it. I want you working with Robin, figure out how. I think your drones are better suited to work on something on this scale and it won’t do anyone any good waiting for Earth to finally get here unless you want to watch the galaxies biggest autopsy. Am I clear?”

Bart waved his hand in the vague Engineering salute, the light catching the iron ring on his hand, “Aye Captain. I’ll get to work on it. Best if the beastie doesn’t die out there. Permission to leave the ship? I’m going to need to get a lot closer to judge the damage.”

The scout ship Queequeg was tiny and not very comfortable for two people. Mostly they just used it if they wanted to check out the surface of an asteroid before ripping it apart and now the ship was carrying every scanner that the Engineer and Science officer could make mobile. Robin looked at the Engineer. She really didn’t know the man at all, he rarely spoke about anything other than the ship. She knew he liked Earths whiskeys and apparently hated shaving and exercise, “Bart, what are we looking at? I’m pretty sure someone built this. At least at the beginning. Maybe they can breed?” Bart grinned at her, “If someone built this then I want to know how they did it. Can you imagine what we could do with that technology? I mean besides putting the Captain out of work.” Then they came into visual range of the creature and both went silent.

Robin swore softly, “Fuck.” Bart looked across and nodded silently.

The creature was a globe, a perfect sphere of grey scaled skin. Sunlight broke through its shields, distorting the colours until they looked like a rainbow made of smoke. It was a mountain, three times the size of the Ishmael and spinning slowly in place surrounded only by shattered ore that had become trapped in its fields. Bart picked up the Comms and called back to the Ship, “Are you seeing this?” As he spoke ripples creased the skin of the creature like ocean waves and it twisted in place. His Comms were scrambled by the beastie, wiping out his tiny transmitter.

Bart ended the call with "Call me Ishmael". He went back to work. “Alright Nessie, we’re here to help. Try not to get so excited.” He looked at Robin, “We need to scan for damage. If it’s bleeding maybe we can do something.” Robin stared out the port, “How…” She looked at the Engineer, “What’s a ‘Nessie’? Have you heard of these creatures before?” He laughed and began moving closer to the creature, “Robin there are things unknown to Science. Nessie is an old legend about a great creature that hid in the deeps. I think it fits.”

Deep in her soul she felt the buzzing of some metalcraft about her, some deathship come to cull her from her pack but the waves of weakness crashed back upon her even as she tried to reach out. The pain of being crushed into one reality was too much and her mind fled again to the inner darkness.

The collision damage wasn’t hard to find, cratered skin and broken scales. Embedded ore and strange fluids. Robin took notes as the engineer scanned with one instrument after another. “At least it can bruise, that’s a good sign,” remarked Robin. Bart’s look queried her, so she continued “If it can bruise it has a repair system. It’s trying to heal. That’s what bruising means in every other creature that can do it anyway.” Bart shrugged, “Aye, well let’s hope so because I can’t make a bandage that will fit her.” He turned the scout ship, passing over the damage for a closer look. Then it was his turn to swear, “By all that’s sacred…” He accelerated. Robin paused her work, “What is it?”

The Engineer slowed down the ship to a near standstill and pointed outside. “That, that’s not any bit of rock that we carried.”

Jutting from Nessies skin was a vast spear, a pylon that was embedded deeply and bleeding off her fields. The scales around it had crumbled away from exposure to raw space and the flesh was darkened by radiation burns from her speed. Every time the creatures natural fields reached out to protect the wound they were ripped away and exhausted into space, bleeding her to death. The two humans sat silently as the horror of what they were seeing became clear. It was Robin that found the words first, “Someone is hunting her…” The Engineers face was darkening with anger as he picked up the Comms. He cut to the Captain only.

The Captain was reading the scans when the call came in, “Yes Bart, how’s our unicorn?” His Engineer was the voice of cold fury as he explained what they had found and what it implied. His advice was blunt. The Captain finally cut the call and summoned the bridge Officers and called the XCC, leaving the comms open for them to listen in. His senior crew arrived quickly, wondering why they had been pulled from their posts. The Captain waited for the last of them and closed the door.

He regarded his crew, “I have news that is going to change things here. Comms confirmed the creature, which is now called ‘Nessie’ apparently, is sentient. We have confirmed that she was indeed struck by our cargo but Robin believes that the damage is relatively minor. The reason she was looking for help is a bloody great harpoon in her side bleeding her to death.” He put up the Engineers recording on the screen to utter silence. “She is being hunted. She is prey to something out there and now we must make a choice.”

Medical spoke up, “What choice? We help the beast and have a chat. Why is that a choice?”

Comms got there first, “Because the hunters will be on the way. That wound wasn’t designed to kill, it was designed to weaken.” His tone turned to disgust, “This is a sport, a chase. And we now stand in front of their trophy.”

It was rare that the entire bridge crew of a ship was human, although there were plenty of Xenos in other positions. The room grew colder as remembered atrocities that their people had committed were recalled. Generations might have passed but the records stood. Whaling, elephant ivory, fur-traders, foxes...the long list of things that had died needlessly for the entertainment of fools. Not for food but for politics and pleasure. The human race had long since moved past those bitter times but to find it here, to find it in their clean space was an abomination. Who builds spacecraft to hunt for food? The Captain interrupted the silence, “It may be worse than that. This creature is sentient and Robin believes the species is artificial. These hunters may have given a mind to their prey so the game would be…” He spat out the word, “better.”

The Engineer dropped softly to the surface, his suit shielding him from the madness of what he was doing. He had disabled all the ‘supplements’ that it would stick you with if it thought you were at risk. He didn’t trust them to judge the situation and had long ago decided to live screaming in pain rather than die with a stupid grin on his face. The surface around the burning spear was gritty and breaking under his footsteps as he approached. He measured the protruding part as three meters in diameter and sixteen meters from the surface. From the skin. Fuck knows how deep it ran.

He hit it and nothing happened. After a moment he pulled out the seismic scanner that he usually carried to check interesting rocks and bounced a signal into the metal. It mapped the response and he stood looking at the results. He looked around in sympathy, “Poor bugger. Don’t worry, I reckon I can take this fucker out. You just sit quietly until then alright.”

Deep below something heard his words, perhaps just his tone and hope sprang from a small crack in the darkness surrounding her mind.

Back onboard the scoutship he called the Captain. “So do we stay or do we go? Because if you tell me to leave I’ll quit on the spot and you’ll never get another Engineer for your ship. No pressure.” Robin sat in silence as Bart put every card he owned on the table at once. He could blackball the ship but the Captain could do the same to him and the pair of them would be left sitting on the dock. Fuck..

“Don’t worry Engineer, we are all agreed. I’m getting the ship ready to fight and I might need some of those console commands that you carefully don’t tell me about. Can you help your Nessie?” The Engineer sagged back into the seat, not even noticing as he squashed Robin into the side of the ship, “Aye Captain. I’ll come aboard and use our transporters to pull that...thing out of her. Robin has some ideas on how to boost her field back up and between the pair of us, we should be able to bring her back. Could you pull the ship over our position?”

Now the silence on the ship was the hushed noise of a lot of people trying to do everything at once. Some of those console commands had indeed been used and most of the systems were recalibrating to a totally different and darker purpose. The Captain’s main regret was that he hadn’t got a new AI yet, his last one had left to run an Orbital and his new one was still in the box. Bart checked that everything was progressing as expected when he finally mapped the seismic scan to the transporters. It wasn’t helping that Nessie seemed to be waking up and shivering with the pain. To himself, he kept repeating, “Hush girl, I’ll fix it for you just sit still a wee while longer.”

Something heard him.

“Captain, I’m going to pull that thing out. As soon as I have it onboard Robin is going to need you to move as close as you can to Nessie. She is tuning our fields to match hers and I’ll pump up the power. Hopefully, that will seal the wound at least. Get Comms to tell the beastie what’s happening and keep your eyes open. I have no idea what happens next.”

The Engineer was never going to admit it but he was sweating as he brought the fields to bear on Nessie. Carefully he cut down, clinging close to the original damage. Ten meters, fifteen, twenty...finally he reached the point of the spear. Slowly he retracted the field and slipped the weapon free. Finally, he dumped it into the ships bay and nodded to Robin. “Your turn. The Ship is yours.”

Robin brought the ship meters over the vast body below and began pushing out the ships fields. She kept it gentle, only ten to fifteen per cent of the field strength she had measured from Nessie. Her idea was to seal up the hole in her shields and hoped that it helped. Somehow. She had nothing else.

Nessie awoke to a gentle breeze on her wound. The knife was gone and she could feel someone trying to heal the damage. For a moment she thought her pack had found her until she tasted a deathship on her skin. She was about to run when a voice, half-remembered, half-dream whispered to stay still and he would make it better. She felt the moment when her skin became whole reaching past the wound and letting her pour her power evenly across her surface. It was a moment of clear joy to be complete again.

The Captain and crew stared in disbelief as the sphere uncurled and the fields surrounding the orb grew exponentially. Bart muttered, "She must have been bleeding power for a long time." He scanned desperately to find whatever power source she was using but it came up empty. His gaze was nailed to the image of what was happening outside.

A vast, scaled head gazed down at the Ishmael, its body pulsing with rainbows of colour as her fields filled. The Captain cleared his throat and began to make the speech he and his crew had decided upon.

The deathship was squeaking and she listened curiously, building her power to leave. It spoke like a child. “Attention this is the mining vessel Ishmael, please respond. Nessie, if you’re awake in there we hope you are feeling better.” It was the voice of her dreams. She responded, “What is a Nessie?” The Captain laughed, “Well, we didn’t have a name for you so we gave you one. It is the most venerable and important name according to my Engineer. Can we be of any further assistance? Whatever vile creature attacked may still be hunting and we are prepared to defend you. You are welcome to remain in our space.”

Nessie stretched her fields, absorbing the energy that was the bedrock of universes and rejoiced in her health. She scanned the tiny, tiny creatures that had come to her aid and stood prepared to defend her. “I thank you for your aid and indeed those that dared to hunt me are vile but it is a war for a different time and place. Your people will have my gratitude and the gratitude of my people but I cannot remain here, I’m afraid you don’t have enough…” she tasted the word her whisperer had known..”Dimensions. Farewell.”

Nessie spun up to her true form, wings of fire as her fields cut through the walls of this tiny universe and made for home.

Bart and the Captain stood in the ships bay. The Engineer grinned, “Well we made a new friend. I reckon they’ll give us the First Contact bonus.” He nodded at the harpoon sprawled on the floor, “and how much will they pay us for bringing that home with us?”

The Captain grinned along, “Bart, did I ever tell you how this ship got its name? Why don’t we open a bottle of that Bushmills that you’re hiding and I’ll tell you the true story..”