CHAPTER 20 - CONTACT

DATE POINT: APRIL 19TH, 7 A.U. (AFTER UNIFICATION)

LOCATION: SOL SYSTEM, ABOARD UTRN INDOMITABLE WILL

CAPTAIN HENRY O’TOOLE

Henry watched as the last of his frigates returned to their saddles. The last of their restocking tasks had been completed, heat levels were down to normal, and they were finally ready to move on. He had taken Paul’s advice to take the opportunity to give everyone a liberty shift in rotation, and it had worked. Everyone seemed more alert, attentive, and ready. He even took an extra day after that to run some drills and fleet maneuvers, including a mock stealth frigate assault on the comet they had been hard at work hollowing out chunk by chunk where he again got to witness the raw destructive power of his combined arms forces led by their Patriot mech suit.

When he had heard that his stealth frigates were not going to be equipped with Archangel mech suits like he had on the Bull Run, he had been skeptical. Only until he saw the Patriot mech suits that replaced them in action did he reverse that position. They were similar in many ways, both being large, human piloted mech suits that were micro LFTR powered, giving them a nigh indefinite range. The dangers to the pilot from essentially riding a small nuclear reactor into battle were minimized only by the fact that the core could be drained in a flash and fission stopped thanks to the ingenious LFTR design, and due to the advanced shielding. The dangers of battle at the tip of the spear far outweighed any rad risk, not that either danger would deter the specific type of personality required to be a pilot of either brand of mech suit.

The best part may have been the suit was an American made prototype test model, giving one more avenue for competition in the new global world order. The designers, in true American fashion, added more weapons to the design compared to the Archangel mech suits being sold to the fleet currently by Quan-Tech industries. The Patriot suits even had a working competitor version of the Archangel neural link so they could operate at the speed of thought with an onboard ASI to handle the calculations required for the pilot to operate the mech in real time as if it were their own body. This was possible thanks an implant that read the signals coming from the brain at the connection to the spinal cord.

They were otherwise very similar, featuring largely human proportions with a absurdly large and broad torso to accommodate both the pilot and the tiny reactor. Instead of the four wings at the heart of the Archangel design, the Patriot had four snake like robotic arms that extended from an armored backpack. Each of the four arms had a TK field focuser in one segmented section, a null barrier field focuser in the middle one, and was tipped with a repeating rail gun with an attached ammunition hopper. Micro missile launchers were mounted on both shoulders, fed from a tall magazine inside the broad armored back. Last but not least, the primary weapon was their handheld semi auto .50 BMG rifle with active cooling and head management system integrated to manage heat in the airless void. Power was fed from the Patriot suit into the rifle through conductive plates in the palm of the hand and on the side of the rifle's pistol grip.

Henry had thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle as his forces lit up their targets like the fourth of July, making him somehow even prouder to be an American. He couldn’t wait to see them in action in a real boarding engagement. Giving everyone a chance to show off and flex their capabilities had definitely been a good decision, and morale was higher than it had been even at the start of their journey. In a few more hours, the last fruits of their resource gathering runs would be fully processed and stored away. In a few more hours they would be able to be on their way again to Alpha Centauri.

“Captain, CSP reports massive gravity wave distortions inbound! Local patrol forces are moving to intercept.” A sensor tech yelled in alarm. A jolt ran down Henry’s spine as he was drawn from his thoughts into the moment. There wasn't supposed to be anyone or anything out here. Henry fought back a foreboding feeling.

“Tell them to burn hard to intercept but not to fire unless fired upon. Let’s work on getting a visual. Sensors, get me an estimate of their inbound speed, vector, deceleration, size estimates and arrival times. Hell, get me anything and everything you can find on them!” Henry called out. Several heads snapped to as people dashed to their stations or typed frantically into their displays from their acceleration couches in the CIC below.

“Aye Captain! Orders confirmed, they’re already changing course. I’ll keep you updated, sir.” Henry nodded gratefully and then opened the comms app.

“Fleetwide Directive; We have inbound gravity waves, meaning we have probable enemy ships on an intercept course. I'm calling all personnel to general quarters! Launch screening frigates, standard formation. Stealth frigates are to launch under EMCON, you are to hide against a comet well ahead of our path of travel, and prepare for a boarding ambush on my order. Reactor control, fire up core number four and then route the excess capacity into keeping our capacitors full. Jump start all bomber squadrons, launch in standard formation to screen the fleet and to mass forces for an attack run. Helm, bring us up to combat acceleration after our frigates launch. All hands have thirty seconds to stow their gear and prepare for combat maneuvers. I want all missile launch tubes full! Four nuclear, six conventional, and four scrambler missiles for the first volley. Everyone is to hold their fire until the order is given. Marines, I want you kitted out and ready to fight!. I am giving squad leaders IFF unlock authority for your Paladin suits. You are to suit up and gather your squads, move to your assigned choke points, and prepare to repel boarders! We have trained hard for this moment, you all are ready. Godspeed to you all.”

Chantal looked at Henry in alarm, he looked back at her in grim determination. “Chantal, I need you to get down to C.L.A.P.P.E.R control. Now. Take Ariana with you.”

She stared at him frozen in fear for a moment before snapping out of it. “I’m on it, you can count on me!” She yelled as she bolted towards the quick lift. Flashes of her laying bandaged in the hospital hit Henry, sapping his concentration for a moment before he snapped out of it.

“I’ll keep her safe, Captain, on my life!” Ariana yelled over her shoulder as she scrambled after Chantal, stopping only to grab a rifle and two plate carriers from the closest arms locker and to stuff her BDU pockets with spare magazines.

Henry hated that they both had to leave the relative safety of the heavily armored inner core of the ship, but at least in the process he had given her the best bodyguard he could think of. Even if they did get boarded, Ariana would be up to the challenge of defending Chantal or evacuating her swiftly if needed. C.L.A.P.P.E.R control was designed with rapid evacuation in mind with its own spinal elevator. Furthermore, he had half a battalion of marines armed and armored that would die before letting the enemy access the core of the ship.

“Sensors, how many are we looking at, can we differentiate? Can we estimate at their size?” Henry asked as the ship continued to rhythmically shudder under their feet from the constant launching of their drone fighters and bombers.

“Sir! I have three on my scopes, they seem to be about two kilometer wide semi-spherical craft, maybe a disk? Their gravity wave distortions are off the charts, as are their mass and energy readings. Shit they’re closing in fast! We have at most three minutes before they will be in missile range.”

“Three capital ships against one... Alright, so be it.” Henry said with a predatory smile. “Good, with all our advantages this might actually be a fair fight. Reactor control, feed every spare kilowatt into the C.L.A.P.P.E.R capacitors, I want them ready to fire on my command.”

Off to his side, Paul was looking over the gravity wave sensor readings looking pale.

“Henry, we have a huge problem.”

“No shit, its three on one, you just focus on your job, and I will focus on mine. This is an actual fleet engagement, not a ground op. I don’t need distractions. Unless you have some new intel to add?”

“No, Henry, listen to me and look at these readings. These three gravity wave signatures imply something with an effective mass more than one thousand times our own, or an equivalently insane amount more energy output being pumped into their drive distortion. That is the mass-energy equivalent of a small moon, each, emanating from a craft not all that much bigger than our own.”

Henry’s eyes narrowed. “That’s impossible, even the TK drive distortions of the giant's motherships were no more than a few multiples of the that of the Indomitable Will. That reading has to be a mistake.”

“There is another possible answer.” Paul said cryptically.

“Spit it out, we don’t have time for you to play games.” Henry said, keeping a lid on his irritation to the best of his ability.

“Sir! Sixty seconds!” The sensor tech yelled. One after another, both C.L.A.P.P.E.R capacitors flashed green on his status readout showing they were fully charged.

“Fire both C.L.A.P.P.E.Rs on standby, and hide them out amongst the rocks ahead of us as well, in different locations. After that let’s refill those capacitors! Helm, flip us about and reverse course, let’s make them chase us straight through our traps along a path of our choosing.” Henry felt the ship lurch a few seconds afterwards as both barrels fired simultaneously. The strain of the electrical discharge knocked out the main lights and reset consoles across the CIC, bathing everyone in amber emergency lights. Moments later, the lights came back on as his console operating system popped back up on screen again.

“Maybe we fire one at a time from now on.” Henry said with a grimace. They gripped the rail as the ship swung about, centrifugal forces pulling at them before everything re-settled as the ship resumed its new course with the feeling of gravity from acceleration once more oriented below their feet.

“Henry! Listen! If I am right about what these are we cannot fight them! This fight is far beyond our capabilities, we need to recall everything and run! Straight back into FTL if we have to!” Paul said, sounding truly terrified.

“Stop being a coward Paul, it's too late to run! We have no choice but to bare our fangs, look as big and intimidating as we can, and be ready to take them down if we need to! I'll treat this like first contact though, gonna try and talk first.” Henry yelled, turning back to his station.

“How’s our satellite and drone fleet launch status looking?” Henry called out.

“Drone signal net is completed across the predicted battle-space; we are working on double saturation now. Forty six percent of shield squadrons and thirty five percent of sword squadrons are deployed, a jam in one of the port side armament elevator has slowed launch procedures in launch bay four. Unknown ETA on a fix.”

“I need a much better answer than that from them with this next update, make that clear that I need a repair time frame I can work with stat.” Henry growled; this was just what they needed, that was one eighth of their launch capacity out of the fight.

“Aye, Captain!”

“Captain, contacts one through three came to a dead stop sir at the edge of the expected combat zone, no deceleration time. They were traveling forty thousand kilometers per hour to zero! How in the hell? Nothing can do that. A stop like that should have liquefied them.” His sensor tech reporting looked white as a sheet. Paul loudly cleared his throat while Henry processed things, drawing his attention.

“Henry, do you remember that silver craft you saw at S21? The only time I have ever seen a gravity distortion this large compared to displacement or impossible feats that seemingly defied physics was when I saw the readings during one of our test flights of their recovered craft. Listen to me! I know who they are, and we need to run! They are as far beyond our enemy as our enemy is to us. We can bridge the technology gap enough to fight the giants, but we cannot bridge the gap enough to fight this threat, we cannot afford to make them our enemy too!”

Henry struggled to make sense of what he had just heard. Paul was terrified, Henry started paying more attention. The more he thought back, he had never seen Paul's confidence broken like this.

“Listen to me, Henry! They have technology so far past our own that we have no chance in this fight. Of all the shit luck… The only reason we were able to keep those recovered craft without an invasion back in the fifties to get them back was because Eisenhower let them abduct as many people as they wanted in exchange for not bombing us back into the stone age. Letting the USA keep them was a sick prank anyway. Even to this day we can fly them all we want, but we can’t figure out how they really work, despite trying since the cold war!”

One AU in front of Henry’s assembling fleet, three kilometer-wide silver flying saucer craft sat menacingly in a perfectly synchronized rotating triangle formation, each wrapped in barriers of what looked like a translucent bubble of light, detectable primarily by a slight shimmer at the edge. Henry’s mind struggled with disbelief for a moment at the sight before his first contact class snapped to his mind.

“Send out the first contact packet on all frequencies!” Henry shouted, then, gripping the railing. He then turned to give orders to the fleet.

“Fleetwide directive; Hold your fire, we have a probable first contact scenario on our hands, standby for further orders! Make no mistake, we will not be the ones to start a fight here today, but we will damn well finish it in our favor if they bring one to us!” Henry’s mind was moving a thousand miles a minute as he made multiple contingency plans.

“The cipher!” Paul blurted out before typing quickly at his station. “Here, send this out with the second attempt, also, try microwave radiation bands as well. I remember overhearing a conversation about that. This was given to me as a just in case measure, thank fuck for that. Here, I uploaded the file to the comms terminal!”

Henry nodded at the comms tech. “Sir, I have the file, I can send it on your order.”

“Go ahead, send it out on all frequencies along with the first contact package again.” Henry said.

“Starting our second attempt now.” Their comms tech said.

Henry looked back over at Paul with burning anger. “You lied to me at S21. Don’t you think this would have been REALLY GODDAMN IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO SHARE WITH ME BEFORE WE ALMOST STARTED ANOTHER INTERSTELLAR WAR!?!”

Paul shrank back, seemingly unable to speak for a moment before he managed to say. “It was classified information, Henry, what do you want me to say? I was following orders in what I could and could not tell you. Plus, now you know everything that I know. Compartmentalization is a bitch, but it works to stop meaningful leaks.”

“You can shove those orders and compartmentalization up your ass. What else haven’t you told me that might spell doom for us all? I need to know these possibilities before they happen to be prepared for them! What if they had come out of the gate shooting? Did you ever think of that?!” Henry said, slowly bringing his anger under control again.

“Sir, we have a reply, microwave band like Paul said. It looks like an audio file, compatible architecture as our own file types. How did they figure them out and copy them so fast? Anyway, I have it in file containment right now, it looks clean of any viruses though I doubt we'd be able to recognize an alien computer virus anyway. I have physically unplugged my station from the ship intranet per first contact protocol, I can play the audio when you are ready. If this goes wrong I can force reboot from backup and plug back in.”

“Proceed.” Henry said. The recording began, speaking in English and with a flat, monotone voice.

“Greetings Humans of Earth. We desire a meeting with your captain on board our ship to discuss important matters to which we believe you to be ignorant, as well as to confirm our hypothesis at the origin of your improbable cipher message and contents. You may bring armed security if it helps you feel safe, as we recognize you may feel threatened by our arrival. Do not attempt to fight or flee, we do not desire your annihilation, laughably swift as it would be. We believe what we have to say will be of extreme interest to you and we will receive your delegation peacefully. We expect to see your shuttle soon.”

Silence reigned in the CIC as the contents of the message settled in. Henry and Paul shared a look.

“You cannot honestly be considering this?” Jenkins said, breaking the silence.

“I have a responsibility to the people of Earth and to the sailors in the fleet. I don’t have another choice. We have to trust their actions, if they wanted a fight then we would be shooting at each other right now.” Henry said slowly, deliberately.

“Fleetwide directive; All ships, Flip orientation and fall back to your new formations being sent through FleetNet. We want some room to kite them and take them out one by one if they get aggressive and first contact negotiations sour.”

“If you're going then Jenkins and I are coming with you.” Paul said in a firm tone. Jenkins looked like he was about to complain but seemed to think better of it.

Henry looked over to Commander Alvarez. “Commander, you have operational control while I am gone. Have Lance and the gang accompany us in full kit.” Henry motioned to Paul and Jenkins to follow.

“Sounds like good old fashioned fun. Happy hunting, sir. I’ll keep the helm, keep things calm back here. Avoid an incident while you are in the belly of the beast.” Commander Alvarez said, snapping off a salute. Henry walked up close and patted his shoulder, leaning in close to speak to him privately.

“Here’s the plan, designate whichever craft we enter as contact one, designate the others as contact two and three. If they make any false moves, hit contact two with the C.L.A.P.P.E.R rounds we have hidden and focus fire on contact three with the drone fleet before turning back to harass one and finish two. If that doesn’t force a surrender, you have my permission to atomize contact one rather than attempt boarding actions if they looks like they are going to power weapons rather than surrender or run. We cannot waste our chance for a peaceful first contact, but ultimately, the safety of the fleet comes first over my own life. We have no idea what kind of weapons they have, so killing them fast is our safest bet to survive. Right now, they claim to want to talk, but you have a higher mission to stay alive for. Let’s push the boundaries a little and bring one of our reserve Patriot mech suits with us for the Q-Comm link. They said we can bring armed security after all. At the very least it can help secure the gunship while we fight our way out to link up and escape.”

The commander looked uncomfortable with the order. “Aye, sir, I will use my best discretion. I am not just going to abandon you to die without at least some effort to recover you, but I will view my duty to the mission as paramount if the survival of the ship comes into question.”

“I know you will, you of all people understand the stakes at play here. For that reason alone the crew couldn’t be in better hands. I would rather have a brand new ally than an enemy gained here today, but we both know how tricky working with non-human intelligences of unknown character and motivations can be. Let’s hope things go better this time around than our first experience with first contact. The Indomitable Will is in your capable hands, Space Wolf.” Henry said before he turned and walked towards the quick lift with Paul and Jenkins in tow.

They rode the lift up to the docking bay, where two men already in their bulky Paladin suits joined them and ushered Henry and the group into the armory. Lance stood with his helmet off, having just stepped away from his armor cradle.

“You familiar with how to step into one of these? It’s pretty easy, you find one marked for your height range, step into the boots, place your hands into the gauntlets, hunch down and stand up straight into the shoulder padding. Once you do that, it signals the armor flaps to seal closed against your arms and legs and the backpack section of the hauberk lowers down to seal against the chest plate assembly and you’re in. Then you grab a helmet, grab the air hose here and connect it here, then you call for a seal check. That easy!”

Henry then each stepped into the boots of a waiting set of Paladin armor suspended in its wall cradle and leaned forward into the padding. The armored life support and capacitor backpack then lowered itself down and sealed itself shut against the chest piece. The backs of the armor frame around his arms and legs closed in from either side on their backs and pressed themselves against his muscles, providing tension and adding power and leverage as he went through enough of a range of electro-muscle assisted motions to feel confident in his movements and of the suit’s proper functionality.

“I didn’t want to interrupt your textbook explanation, well done by the way, but I was rated for one of these as part of my training for the role. Pretty sure you saved Jenkins some headaches though, so... carry on.” Henry said with a laugh.

Lance smirked and shook his head, taking it in stride. He then turned to Jenkins and grabbed a helmet from the rack.

“I trust you know how to wear one of these right?” Lance asked in an arguably condescending tone. Jenkins stared him down and snatched the helmet from his armored hand, otherwise ignoring him.

Henry, Paul, and Jenkins grabbed a helmet each off their charging cradles in the wall and sealed them against the magnetized hard points on the exposed necks of their BDU’s. He then grabbed the air hose retracted into the hauberk and connected it into the back of his helmet. Finally, Henry heard the familiar hiss of pressurization as the suit OS finished booting up and connected with the helmet. Multiple systems check prompts flashed on the inside of his HUD as his eight-hour life support timer began to tick down steadily. Henry switched to filtered air to save his life support for when they boarded the alien vessel. The six armed and armored men then grabbed their weapons, loaded every mag slot in their armor full, checked gear and seals, then walked toward the waiting gunship and towards their destiny.