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  Forward, the crew compartments and command section all showed good integrity, a plus since this was where Yates worked, slept and ate. Besides the habitable areas, some of the weapons were located in the forward part of the ship. The twin rail guns occupied the lower level of this section and stretched to the bow of the spacecraft. The display indicated both guns were ready for action. The three Defensive Laser System, DLS, nodes located on either side of the bridge cradle all showed one hundred percent availability.

  Yates double-checked the OLS, Offensive Laser System, at the aft end of the ship. Mounted in blisters above and below the reactor section, these four nodes were nearly as deadly as the rail guns. They also had the advantage of delivering a punch at the speed of light. The monitor showed green. Four more of the smaller DLS nodes were located in the same blisters as the OLS – also green.

  Yates ran his eyes down the stop-light chart showing the rest of the ship’s systems. Communications, fire control, attitude control, navigation, and environmental were all operating nominally.

  Turning his attention back to the screen, Yates noted only a few seconds had passed. He felt for Detrick, eight years from Earth at top speed and alarms going off. Whatever was happening to Explorer could not be good.

  Chinese Space Agency Ganymede Research Station #1

  Jupiter Space

  Wu hurried through the corridor to the Research Station common area. He brushed past other station personnel making their way to their emergency stations. Wu noticed none of them appeared particularly worried. They had no way of knowing what was going on outside and had become desensitized to the alarms through numerous exercises. Wu spared no time for the few who tried to ask him which drill they were running. Many, seeing the look on the Watch Officer’s face, picked up their pace.

  The Station was not overly large. Wu reached his destination in less than a minute. He burst through the common area hatch. Steaming coffee cups and half eaten breakfast platters littered the ten abandoned tables. His friend, Deng Xiang was standing alone by one of the long windows offering a view of Ganymede’s grey surface.

  “Look!” Deng said, waving out the window. “That crazy Major Sheng is up to something! Who else would have thought to bring accelerators to this forsaken moon?”

  “Do you have a current launch code?” Wu asked, brushing away Deng’s question. Deng was a shuttle pilot, but even he was unable to operate one of the station’s vehicles without an up-to-date security clearance.

  “Well, yeah, I was scheduled to hop a survey team, but…”

  “Hop’s cancelled,” Wu said. He nodded out the window. The rail guns flashed, looking as if they were spitting fire. The lights faded as the magnetic fields of the guns sucked up amps from the station’s main power plant to fling the rounds of depleted uranium into space.

  As they watched, one of the guns silently vanished in a flash of light and a massive plum of rock and dust. The Station rocked a moment later from the impact.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” Deng shouted, smashing his nose against the window.

  “Come on!” Wu grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled him toward the exit. “The guns won’t be the only things that get pulverized.”

  Even as Wu pulled him between empty tables, Deng could not tear his eyes from the sight of the one remaining gun firing over and over amid the slowly falling debris which was the other cannon. He turned to Wu, suddenly realizing his friend should not be here. “Why aren’t you in the command section?”

  “I’ll explain when we get to your ship,” Wu said, finally getting Deng out into the hall.

  Deng stopped and looked around to verify they were alone. In a low voice, he asked, “What did you do, Yan?”

  “Cripes,” Wu said. He grabbed Deng again and got him moving again. “It’s not me you idiot. It’s Lee and Sheng.”

  “The Administrator?” Deng asked and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Come on,” Wu insisted, hurrying forward. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Deng nodded and followed.

  Wu was relieved. Deng, for all his skepticism had always been a good friend.

  Deng grabbed Wu’s arm and pulled him down a side corridor.

  “The pads are this way,” Wu said, pointing in the direction he had been heading.

  “Shortcut,” Deng said, now leading the charge as their corridor rocked. “You spend too much time shut up in the command section.”

  “There probably won’t be a command section pretty soon,” Wu breathed.

  “What?” Deng called back.

  “How much further to your ship?” Wu said louder.

  Transmission:

  UNS Explorer, Millennium-Class Interstellar Craft

  Alpha-Centari Local Space

  “Proximity alarms,” Lal Ji said. He tapped a few icons on his control board and the beeping ceased. “Something just passed within three hundred meters of the hull.”

  A corner of the transmission display opened up, with a cycling view from each of Explorers’ external cameras as the news producers tried desperately to capture an image of the object the crew was describing.

  In the main frame, Detrick’s determined expression faltered for a moment. It took him a moment to switch from interstellar ambassador to spacecraft commander. “Mandi, please identify. Did the sensors capture composition and vector?”

  Mandi, the Explorer’s computer system, was tied into every aspect of the vessel. Originally, the computer system had been designated MAC for Millennium Advanced Core. During pre-launch preparations, the crew had reprogrammed the voice and personality module, much to the chagrin of the groundside developers.

  “I was unable to capture any conclusive data,” Mandi’s calm, feminine voice reported.

  “Whatever it was,” Ji said with a shake of his head, “it was moving too fast for a spectrum reading.”

  “Amazing,” Detrick said and turned back to the main monitor. He managed half a grin and continued, “Imagine coming all this way, on the verge of meeting kindred travelers only to be nearly hit by a bit of space debris. A close call indeed. Open channels and initiate contact program.” He sighed, sure his viewers would be sighing with him. He nodded to Lal Ji who was acting as the communications lead. “Let’s greet our new friends.”

  Ji could be heard speaking to Mandi as they coordinated the complex contact program.

  Along the bottom of the screen, the ticker tape began providing factoids of close calls between space debris and other ships. There was a note describing the dire consequences even shielded spacecraft faced if they were hit by high-speed debris.

  USS Schriever, Century-Class Orbital Patrol Craft

  Geosynchronous Orbit

  “Explorer just got a warning shot across the bow,” Yates said, unable to believe what he was seeing.

  “I thought Detrick said it was a piece of space junk,” Pearl said, looking up from his engine check-out.

  “He doesn’t know what the heck it was,” Yates said. He leaned forward against his harness, clutching his chair arms. A man of action, he wanted to do something for Explorer’s crew, at least warn them of the danger they could be facing. “They just got fired on and don’t even realize it. Now they’re going to blast away with their comm system.”

  “It’s their contact protocol,” Pearl said. “There’s a whole plan in place just in case this sort of thing happened. They always hoped to find someone else out there besides the Cohou.”

  The Cohou were the single extraterrestrial species mankind had encountered to date. To everyone’s surprise, they had shown an extreme disregard for humanity. Their ships passed through the solar system every few years but so far they had not seen fit to meet any human face-to-face. Earth had to be content with the reluctantly answered video exchanges.

  “The program will broadcast a series of mathematical sequences and standard greetings,” Pearl added. “The eggheads who designed the program hoped it would establish s
ome common communicating protocols. It was all over the electromagnetic frequency; radio, laser…oh crap…”

  “Yeah, ‘oh,” Yates said. “Laser’s good for two things – secure comms and target ranging.”

  Transmission:

  UNS Explorer, Millennium-Class Interstellar Craft

  Alpha-Centari Local Space

  Detrick was speaking to his crew arrayed around him at the eight other stations, double checking the ship’s status in preparation for first contact.

  The progress of the contact program was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. A color coded chart of the electromagnetic spectrum showed which frequencies had been tried and which were being sent out by Explorer. All common communications frequencies had been cycled through and the laser comm system had just run through its first calibration, shooting coherent light in the direction of the alien ship, hoping for an acquisition lock needed to align the transmitter for the narrow beam system.

  Ji put a hand over the receiver resting in his ear. “We just got something on the laser receivers.”

  “A message?” Detrick asked.

  “Not sure,” Ji said, shaking his head. “It’s just repeating pings. No pattern.”

  USS Schriever, Century-Class Orbital Patrol Craft

  Geosynchronous Orbit

  Yates could not sit still. Slipping out of his harness, he moved forward and steadied himself behind the weapon officer’s station. “Is that a targeting system?”

  Captain John “Billy” Mitchell, the Schriever’s Weapons Officer, had come to the bridge to see Explorer’s transmission on the big screen. He nodded. “That would be my guess, sir – they just got painted for distance and velocity.”

  “That’s the same thing we do before firing,” Pearl said, losing interest in his engine maintenance. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “Explorer was unarmed,” Yates said. He almost corrected his use of the past tense but stopped. There was nothing he could do for the crew in the four-year-old transmission.

  “Oh God,” Pearl muttered. He leaned back and ran a hand over his mouth. “Crud.”

  Transmission:

  UNS Explorer, Millennium-Class Interstellar Craft

  Alpha-Centari Local Space

  “Our companion is maneuvering,” Detrick said, his voice holding just a hint of surprise, enough to the let the audience in on the excitement. “They seem to be responding to our hails, aligning themselves with our vessel. They may be trying to communicate by positioning their ship in a relative orientation to our own.”

  The view screen caught several of the other Explorer crew members glancing at their commander, concern etched on their faces.

  The sub-window with the feed from one of Explorer’s drones showed something twinkling on the alien ship.

  Detrick continued to gaze at the main view screen, a commander letting his crew do their job, handling the minutia of controlling the ship while he plotted their next course of action.

  “Threat of conjuncture,” Mandi said as alarms sounded from several consoles.

  “Proximity alert again,” Ji reported. His background was pouring down one side of the view screen. A physicist by training, Ji was assigned the role of communications specialist. He would also be running several experiments on the solar coronas of the Alpha Centari stellar bodies. Unlike Detrick, his voice had taken on a note of alarm.

  “Our shielding should protect us from any micro-meteors,” Detrick uttered, his voice still managing to convey cosmic wonder at this momentous time.

  “These aren’t micro-meteors,” Ji stated.

  Bullard Space Elevator - Lift-car 47

  Earth Space

  “The Explorer is basically a Millennium III with hyped-up engines – the first operational anti-matter drives,” Ian was explaining to Jennifer. “It has additional shielding to help protect it while it is traveling at high speeds between systems.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jennifer said. “I dated this professor who helped with the composite design. He loved to talk…well, let’s just say he liked to talk.”

  Ian looked sidelong at Jennifer. She looked back at him then eyed him up and down. “Don’t sweat it. I’m so over my ‘mature man’ phase.”

  “I’m not sure that was a compliment,” Ian said.

  “Don’t worry, it was,” Jennifer replied.

  Chinese Space Agency Ganymede Research Station #1

  Jupiter Space

  Deng and Wu ran down the deserted corridors of the research station. The ground jumped and the floor plating vibrated. Deng staggered but managed to lead the pair at last to the access tube leading out to the shuttle field. Wu muscled the airlock hatch closed behind them then stumbled down the narrow corridor after Deng.

  Accompanied by a deafening roar, the floor heaved more violently than before, casting the two men into a sprawling heap at the foot of the airlock leading to Deng’s jumper.

  Wu looked up at the ceiling, fearing the tunnel would crack, leaving him and his friend to die quick but painful deaths. When it was clear they were not going to die immediately, Wu pushed Deng aside and pulled himself up to a monitor set into the wall. He tapped a few keys to access the central computer core. All he got back in way of a response was a flickering error message.

  Deng tapped Wu’s shoulder.

  “Give me a second.” When Wu’s repeated attempts to access the station’s sensors failed, he popped off the hatch cover to check the network connections.

  Deng grabbed Wu’s chin and turned his face to a small porthole on the opposite side of the corridor.

  “Oh no,” Wu muttered. He dropped the network card he had been holding and squeezed next to his friend to get a better look outside.

  The shuttle pad they were on sat at the far side of the base. The porthole here usually showed the mound of Ganymede rock and soil which had been piled over most of the station’s structures for added radiation protection.

  “Where’d the station go?” Deng asked, breathlessly.

  Wu could find no words to answer his friend.

  Past the landing field, Ganymede had a new crater.

  Transmission:

  UNS Explorer, Millennium-Class Interstellar Craft

  Alpha-Centari Local Space

  “Multiple impacts on the shield,” Ji called out. The shield used on Explorer was the first of its kind. Constructed of high-strength, carbon-nano-tube reinforced polymers; it was large enough to provide protection for all the ships’ modules from any stray debris which might be encountered during the trip in deep space between Earth and Alpha-Centari. As far as the logs showed, nothing larger than a few stray atoms had hit the shield during the entire trip. The four sections of the shield had been rotated to face the stern of the spacecraft during negative acceleration midway through their trip. The crew had rotated it back into the forward position just a few hours ago to clear the drone launch bays and airlock to the rear of the habitation modules.

  Detrick’s smile faded. His very own meeting of races was not going as smoothly as he had hoped. Detrick tried to cover the crack is his façade by switching to his ‘concerned commander’ look but only managed a ‘what else is going to interrupt me now’ scowl. “Damage?”

  “Pressure’s dropping in Tank 2,” Lyle Campbell added. The unflappable engineer’s voice was steady despite the building crisis.

  “Tank 2?” Detrick glanced over at this engine specialist.

  Eight tanks were attached to the reinforced spine of the ship which ran from the engine housing at the stern of the vessel to the deflection shield mounted at the bow. Tanks 5 through 8 had been emptied of the water used for reactive mass in the drive unit on the out-bound trip. They would be jettisoned in the course of their years-long observation and travel about the Alpha-Centari system. Tanks 1 through 4 were needed for the return trip home.

  “Are we losing water?” Ji asked the question implied by Detrick.

  “Possibly,” Campbell said, intently studying his display
s. “The tanks were only moderately pressurized to begin with to fill the ullage space. Maybe a valve popped open to the feed lines. Could just be a nitrogen drop. Full pressurization wouldn’t take place until we started up the engines again. Then the system works by gravity feed.”

  “Yes, we know how the engines work,” Detrick interrupted. “Check external cameras.”

  A new sub-screen opened on the transmission display, showing the view from a second drone flying in formation with Explorer. The crew members were using it to zoom in on their ship to check for signs of damage.

  The external view on the transmission display slewed, focusing on the huge tanks hanging from the rear quarter of Explorer’s frame.

  White crystals were sprouting from one of the water tanks.

  A second stream of crystals was emanating from the tank on the opposite side of the ship.

  “Two tanks venting,” Campbell said after a moment of silence. He looked up at Detrick. “We’ve been holed.”

  Detrick started nodding. He brushed the back of hand over his mouth and cleared his throat. “Okay. Impact checklists! Response Team Alpha, prepare for emergency EVA.”

  “I’ve got good trajectories,” Ji said.

  “And?” Detrick said, reaching for a red binder velcroed to the side of a console. “Whatever is hitting us is coming from the other ship,” Ji said.

  Detrick stared at the main view screen and the dark ship arrowing toward his own and flexed his jaw.

  “Whoever they are,” Campbell said, “they’re hitting us with high-velocity projectiles.”

  “You can’t prove that!” Teft shouted as she turned on the engineer, “We pose no threat! There is no reason for them to attack us. It’s got to be some sort of coincidence!” She glanced around the command center, looking for agreement.