While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 10

  Two days later New Horizon II was on its final approach towards the alien ship.  The two G burn phase over, the crew scrambled to ready last minute preparations for the encounter.  New Horizon II carefully refined its orbit around the star, getting ever nearer to the other ship until it matched its orbit around the sun and slid in beside it.

  “Commander Grayson,” Kathryn swiveled her chair towards her.

  “Admiral?”

  “Test the rift crystal.  I want to make sure nothing was damaged, and that we can still actually return home when we want to.  If you’re able to open a rift, signal Command that we have had a fire fight with an alien vessel of unknown origin in defense of our Escher crystal.  Tell them both ships were damaged but that we were able to disable them first and are now attempting to peacefully render aid to the disabled ship.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Kathryn watched as the collecting satellites fired energy down to the secondary collectors, and then down onto the crystal which exploded into its characteristic purple mist.

  “Sending message,” she said, then a few moments later, “message away, closing the rift.”

  Kathryn first watched the crystal quickly reassemble itself.  “Ops, how close are we to that ship now?”

  “Twenty kilometers,” Jaren reported.

  “Alright, snuggle us up Lieutenant Byrne.  We need to be within five.  Anyone see anything that looks like a docking port?”

  The ship was conical with a series of dark bulbs completely covering its exterior from base to tip, but now it had several large uniformly spherical excisions cut cleanly out of it in several places.  It appeared as though the antimatter weapon had cut out these recesses but that the annihilation which produced this effect had had zero effect on the surrounding materials.  She found it somewhat eerie how otherwise unaffected the ship seemed by the titanic explosions, how perfectly excised the section was.  Any material they were aware of or knew how to synthesize would just be gas after proximity to explosions like that.  Scary as the survivability of the material was, she nonetheless relieved that they at least had a weapon which could damage it to some degree.

  The relatively small ship, about a quarter the size of New Horizon II, was rotating on multiple axes at a moderate speed, fast enough that the tumble was certainly noticeable, but not so fast that it prevented good looks at every part of it.

  “No,” Margaret answered after they’d all had a good look.  “But to be fair if it had one we may have annihilated it.”

  “Right,” Kathryn acknowledged.

  “Admiral,” Felix spoke up.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I couldn’t map the interior before because the exterior scattered the beams, but I can now get some readings from the penetrating radar about the interior through the damaged sections.”

  “And?”

  “And… well, there doesn’t seem to actually be any kind of interior.  There’s a narrow central section which seems designed for maintenance access, but the rest of the ship is just more of those bulbs all the way down to the interior.”

  “Interesting,” Kathryn considered for a moment.  “Is there any kind of interior at all which we could enter?”

  “Scanning… yes, but barely.  At the very centre of the ship there is a section six meters long and a couple meters wide, but that’s it.”

  Kathryn leaned forward and rested her chin on tented fingers.  “No crew,” she suggested.  

  “Unless they’re so small that it’s all the interior space they require,” Patricia suggested.  Distracting as her presence could be, Kathryn nevertheless appreciated her often unorthodox observations and suggestions.

  “And you still can’t tell from scans what those bulbs are?”

  “Negative,” Felix answered.  “Best I can tell you is that their surface is the same strange material as the rest of the hull.

  “Ops are you getting any energy readings at all?  Power?  Comms?  Anything?”

  “No EM readings at all,” Jaren reported.  “Whatever it uses as a power plant is obviously down though.  The energy readings I am getting are weak, like what I’d expect from something running on emergency battery power.  Enough to keep systems alive but not actually running, I’d guess.”

  “I don’t think there were ever any life forms aboard,” Margaret suggested.

  “Not anymore at least,” Felix replied.

  “I don’t think there ever were,” Margaret said.  “It’s an automated probe, their version of the drone ship we sent here ourselves, just here to set up a rift node they could use from back home.”

  “And the voice we were talking to?” Kathryn asked.

  “The ship’s brain, an artificial intelligence like me.”

  “It certainly seemed to share your people skills,” Jaren suggested, looking over with a smirk.  Margaret didn’t even bother glaring at him, enthralled as she was at the prospect of meeting another advanced AI.

  “You still intend to board it don’t you?” Margaret turned to Kathryn and asked.

  “Definitely,” Kathryn answered definitively.  “Alright Felix, launch rescue stabilizers.”

  Six small robotics drones launched in quick succession out of their aft launch tube and maneuvered towards the alien ship.  The bridge crew watched as they moved about the ship and strategically attached themselves to key points on its hull.  When they were already in position, they fired their thrusters in concert to reduce and ultimately halt the multi axis spin of the ship, bringing it to a stop relative to New Horizon II.  The stabilizers would also allow slow manual maneuvering of the ship should it be required.

  “Lieutenant Byrne, please bring us within grappling range.”

  “Aye sir, one kilometer.  They all watched on the working wall monitor as the ship came closer and closer, offering them the most detailed look of the thing they’d had so far.  Its entirely matte black exterior gave it an ominous air as it grew larger and larger on the screen.

  Retro maneuvering rockets fired to bring them to a relative stop once again.  “Range one kilometer, Admiral.”

  “Thank you Lieutenant.  Fire grapples, Felix.”

  New Horizon II rolled to present its belly to the alien craft, and four lines fired out from its underside.  They watched as the magnetic harpoons bounced harmlessly off of the hull, then with their own small thrusters wrapped themselves around the ship like fine tentacles.  The lines were then gently pulled taught with soft but steady thrust from maneuvering thrusters.

  “Pull us within transit distance.”

  The lines reeled in until the two ships were at a distance of only one hundred meters, at which point soft jets from both ships stabilized their mutual position in orbit.  Ever so gently the ships thrust away from each other to keep the lines taught, as they would continue to do until the lines were withdrawn and New Horizon II pulled away.

  “One hundred meters Admiral,” Felix called out.  “We’re ready.”

  “Alright Felix, you’re with me.  Jaren the ship is yours.”

  Jaren nodded, but Margaret balked.  “You don’t seriously think I’m not coming with you, do you?”

  Kathryn smirked and rolled her eyes.  “Of course not, boss.”

   

  Down in the environmental suit room, Kathryn and Felix were pulling on their suits, made from a special fabric designed by the Koboli.  They stretched and fit fairly snugly as it was, but when a variable current was passed through the material they tightened and constricted in response, creating enough pressure on the skin to protect it from the vacuum of space.  All that was then needed was the thin thermal layer which could cool and warm the suit depending on the need.  Compared to the bulky space suits Kathryn had been burdened with at the start of her career on Haven before they’d met the Koboli, it allowed an incredible freedom of movement.

  A transparent fishbowl shaped helmet went over the head and attached to the suit about the shoulders by strong electromagnets, creating a seal for the air in the helmet which was fed by a tank worn on the back like a backpack.  The suit’s material was a light grey with a slight silver sheen to them.

  After the three stripped naked, they started to pull their suits on.  Kathryn only really noticed their collective nudity when Maggie entered the room.  One of the things Kathryn appreciated about Felix was his total disinterest in her female form, something that inevitably queered so many would be friendships with men over the years.  However good their intentions at the start, however close they may get, they inevitably all got around at some point to trying to get her clothes off.  She was able to get so close to Felix in part because she could trust this would never come up with him.  Felix worked out and she easily noted that he looked good naked but she tended not to out of friendship, something that seemed to come easier to her as a woman than it did to most of the men she’d known.

  She was pretty sure Margaret was into whatever she happened to find attractive, but never really came off as particularly sexual.  Maybe after so long a life the idea of sexuality had become boring somehow, or maybe her origins as a glorified sex doll left her with a profound distaste of sexuality in general.  In any case, she’d never noticed Margaret looking at her in that way or otherwise make her feel uncomfortable in situations like this in any way.  She far more commonly made her uncomfortable with her side jokes about her attraction to Patricia.  She’d seen pictures of Margaret’s original body when it had been intact and it had indeed been quite stunning, but Kathryn also rather appreciated the quiet dignity of the old woman’s body she now wore; it held up well and though advanced in simulated years, could still be quite attractive.

  “What are you doing here hon?” she asked Maggie as they all quickly pulled on their under suits in light of the sudden cause for modesty.  “We’re about to leave.”

  “I want to come with you,” the girl said.

  “You must be joking,” her mother answered dismissively as she reached for the suit’s outer pants and started pulling the tight material over her legs.  “We have no idea what we’re going to find over there.  It’s dangerous.  No way.”

  “This is what I’m here for,” the girl calmly insisted.

  “I don’t care.  You’re not coming.”

  Felix and Margaret looked at each other.

  “You’re going to let me come all this way, be in this much danger, only to now not come the rest of the way with you?  That really doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Kid’s got a point,” Margaret suggested..

  “You shut the fuck up right now,” Kathryn snapped at her with a sharply pointed finger.  She then sighed heavily and tried to relax.

  “If it’s really that dangerous, should you even be going?”

  “This is my job, Maggie.”

  The girl merely looked at her expectantly.  They’d been here before; the girl believed herself to be right, and her mother to be an altogether reasonable person.  She just had to wait for her to catch up.  They met each other’s eyes in silence for some time as they continued suiting up.

  “Fuck…  Okay fine, suit up.  I can’t believe I’m doing this.  Your father is going to kill me.”

  “Well at least I’d still have one parent,” Maggie offered mischievously.  Kathryn had been noticing for a while that she’d developed the same mischievous smile she recognized all too well from her father.

  “Nice,” Margaret offered, commended the girl’s wit.

  After rolling her eyes at Margaret, Kathryn touched the wall panel to open a channel to the bridge.  “So Jaren, um… guess who’s decided she’s coming along with us?”

  Jaren obviously tensed and pursed his lips before answering through gritted teeth, “I’m assuming not Maggie.”

  “And you would be wrong,” Kathryn answered in a dramatized game show voice trying to soften the blow.

  “Kathryn, no.  It’s not safe.  This is a terrible idea.”

  “Nothing about this mission is safe at this point Jaren.  Safe would have been going home as soon as we saw that ship, or immediately after the attack.  I don’t see how her going over to that ship at this point is any more dangerous than staying here with you at this point.  Anyways, that was her point and I bought it.  I’m certainly not ecstatic about the idea either, my dear.  We wanted to awaken her adventurous spirit, and I believe we have.  God help us.”

  Jaren considered for a few moments.  “Fine.  Let us know when you’re ready.”

  “Will do.”  He was obviously angry but knew he couldn’t overrule her.  She could tell there would be hell to pay for this later.

  After sending Maggie into an adjacent room to strip and get into her under suit in private, the rest finished suiting up themselves, and when Maggie re-emerged, they helped her into the rest of her suit, carefully double and then triple checking all of her seals, equipment, and safety features, periodically giving each other mildly worried looks as they did so.  What they were about to do was stressful enough and this was only adding pressure.

  Margaret gave up helping half way through, instead leaning back against a wall and relighting her now more than half gone cigar.  She watched them help the girl get ready with an unusually blank look, more lost in thought that Kathryn usually saw her.  Maybe she was usually more inclined to just say whatever was on her mind, but now instead just puffed on her cigar as she watched them.

  As a simulant she’d originally been programmed to lose consciousness and become inactive in a vacuum to simulate a human dying in the exposure, but her spate of upgrades had clearly unburdened her of this concern.  She also presumably didn’t need the communications equipment in the helmets either, she could speak to them by direct thought transmission to their helmet speakers if she wished and receive their comms to her through the same link in her head.  She still chose for whatever reasons were her own to don a full environmental suit for this mission.  As she blew thick smoke out of her mouth, her usual mocking demeanor continued to have an odd seriousness about it.

  As confident as she could be about the proper workings of her daughter’s suit and equipment, Kathryn signaled to Jaren that they were clear.  He seemed to have reached an acceptance of the situation if not a calm about it.

  “Understood.  We need a code name for your team,” he observed.

  “How bout Hero?” Kathryn offered.  “We are ostensibly here to render assistance.”

  “Be real,” Margaret scoffed, choking a little on smoke she hadn’t finished blowing out in the process.  “More like Bandit… or Pirate maybe.”

  Kathryn laughed but Jaren cut in with “Hero it is.” before anyone could take Margaret’s suggestions too seriously.  “Ship’s designation remains ‘Boss’.”

  “I’ll be One,” Kathryn said, “Felix Two, Molly Three, and Maggie Four.”

  “Understood Hero One.  Proceed when ready.”

  “You realize that’s more syllables than your actual name, right?” Margaret noted, but Kathryn ignored her.

  “Entering the airlock now Boss.  Closing inner door and depressurizing.”

  There was a slight lag in the automatic response of her suit’s tension and temperature, leaving her to feel a constant sense of low pressure and cold as the suit matched the increasing vacuum in the airlock.

  “Engage mag boots,” she ordered her team.  They obliged and all slowly sank down to the floor with a thunk as their boots locked to the floor.  Maggie was lucky she’d opted for EV suit training last year or there’d have been no chance at all of her coming along.

  “Opening outer door.”  Kathryn touched the flexible control panel contoured around her suit’s wrist, and the outer door silently opened onto the vacuum of space.  “Comms check, everyone.”

  “Check,” she heard them all say.

  “Good.  Okay I’ll go first, then Maggie, then Felix with Molly behind.  Clip your harnesses to the grapple line just outside the door and slowly pull yourself over to the other ship.  Maggie I know you’ve done this for fun back home, but this isn’t a game here.  Take it seriously.  Be methodical and cautious.  Do you understand?”

  “Yes Mom.”  Her total absence of teenage snark satisfied her mother that she was taking this adequately seriously.

  Kathryn stepped to the edge of space and reached up to clip her tether onto the grapple line.  This one had deliberately been shot with a sticky tip directly towards the exposed end of the central section, the only place where it made any physical sense for them to go.

  She turned and pushed off from the ship, holding the grapple line as the bottom half of her flew gently out in front of her with the momentum, only arrested by her grip on the line.  She then slowly put one hand over the other, periodically looking back at the others as she went.  She was impressed with how calm her daughter seemed to be.  Despite never having shown much appetite for adventure in the past, she nevertheless seemed to have it in her blood.  Now that she was out here with them in the thick of it, Kathryn was impressed by her daughter’s composure.

  “Halfway there, Hero One,” she heard Jaren call out over the comm.

  “Acknowledged.”  She focused her attention on the ship they were approaching, trained not to look out at the void behind them or the blazing star in her face, dimmed by her helmet.  Looking down at her wrist display, she noted that temperature was reaching the limits of the suit’s ability to cool, but they should be okay as long as they remained in the shadow of the small ship they were approaching.  They were halfway to the end of the line, but with the large sections cut out of the ship, they’d be at the outer hull if it was still intact.  A chill ran up her spine.  Something didn’t feel right, but she brushed it off.  Just a healthy and rational fear of death in the face of the unknown danger, she figured.

  She was newly amazed at the resilience of the rest of the ship as she reached the surface.  She could see various unrecognizable equipment and surfaces all shorn cleanly along the spherical blast radius of the antimatter warheads.  She reached out and touched the ship.

  She moved inside and magnetized to the floor of the small interior of the ship once she was able to.  “At least we can magnetize to it inside.  Maybe the outer surfaces being nonmagnetic is a defensive measure.”

  She helped Maggie to the floor where she could likewise magnetize her boots, and Felix came next.  Kathryn caressed the edge where the explosion had cut so cleanly across the ship.  “Look at all of this inner machinery Felix, it seems just as resilient as the hull material.”  She turned back to the interior of the ship.  “What the hell is this thing made of?” she asked.  “Everything in it is hardened like it’s made of the same material.  I could understand the hull being defensively hardened in this way, but… all of the inner mechanism being just as resilient and seemingly build out of the same material as the hull?”

  “I haven’t a clue…” Felix admitted as he stepped to the ground and Margaret finally touched down and joined them.  “I don’t know of anything that can do this.”

  Kathryn turned around and looked out of the opening out into the vastness of space, tempting vertigo.  They were on the opposite side of the sun, leaving the New Horizon II was beautifully lit, so bright that it washed out all but the brightest stars behind it.  The ship still made it a stunning view and she physically turned her daughter around for a moment to appreciate the sight.

  “So, what do we have here…” Felix asked of the ship as he moved further into the space.

  “You look a little worse for wear up there Boss, but you’re still beautiful,” Kathryn offered, remarking on the ship’s battered condition.  It looked worse from the outside than the description she’d gotten on the inside from the damage reports.  She found herself newly concerned about the integrity of the ship’s hull, but she brushed it off.  “We’re proceeding inside Boss.”

  “Understood Hero One.”

  “Yup, so… I think this is it,” Felix remarked.  They were in a cylindrical shaped area approximately six meters deep and two meters wide.  Like the interior of their own bridge had been before the battle, the entire interior seemed smooth glass as though it were also one continuous display, interrupted only by the opening created by the damage to the ship.  Deep inside.

  “What’s this?” Margaret asked as she moved to the far end of the area.

  The wall end of the tube was not surfaced the same way.  It had differently coloured concentric rings on it which were fractured and disjointed, seemingly by design and not by battle damage.  Green curves, blue and yellow, and some spaces where it appeared there should be similar lines but were not.

  “It’s ultraviolet,” Margaret explained.  “Where it looks like there should be lines but aren’t?  They’re there, you just can’t see them.”

  “But you can?” Maggie asked.

  “Upgrades,” Margaret answered with a mischievous smile towards the girl as she tapped the side of her helmet.

  In the centre of the circular wall, at the centre of the rings was a large object which projected out of the wall.  It was less than a meter long, oval shaped, and about half a meter wide and a quarter meter high.  It had fine linear ridges from the wall all the way to its tip which looked like very short heat sync fins.

  “What is this…” Maggie asked as she reached out to touch it.

  “No, don’t!” Kathryn called out but it was too late.  

  As soon as the girl touched the surface of the central projection the entire space around them came to life.  The curved lines on the rear wall began flashing menacingly, and display panels everywhere came to life, revealing what appeared to be status and control displays, but of a configuration and language completely alien to them.  An eerie blue light emanated from the recesses of the ridging along the central projection, and they flashed along with the booming voice they heard vibrate through their boots well enough to make out the single ominous word: “INTRUDERS!!”