Wake the captain.
This was her first thought as sensors reported an unidentified contact, but she waited. Essa wanted to know more.
"What can we see?" she said.
From her station, the sensors operator projected the contact data onto the screens at the flight deck's left chair so she could look for herself. Essa cycled through the different arrays: visible light, infrared, radio, electromagnetic, x-ray, gravitational interference, particle detector. Visible light showed almost nothing. The others showed less, except that the contact was sitting at the bottom of a comparatively massive gravity well. The object itself was small. Perhaps it was just a previously unnoticed asteroid.
"We're sure it's not the probe?" Essa said.
"Too much mass," Sensors said.
Essa thought another moment. "Distance."
"Five million kilometers. Holding steady. It appears we are on parallel vectors."
"Right." She held her breath then said, "Wake the captain."
#
Twenty minutes earlier, the galley steward had brought up the mid-watch meal, pouches full of hot soup, tea, and the last of the ship's stores of fresh fruit. Essa had let the rest of the flight deck eat, while watching the stars rising over Tevura's night-dark upper limb. Auroras bloomed at the ice giant's northern pole. When it was her turn to eat, Essa counted three of Tevura's larger satellites rising behind the planet's narrow band of rings.
Beyond the spectacular view, third watch would likely be quiet. Never much to do, this time of night, aside from monitor the incoming radio traffic relayed—and more than two hours old by the time it reached them—from High Rock, and give the instruments an occasional scan to make sure everything was functioning properly.
They had been in Tevura's orbit for twenty days. Before that, they had made the fifteen-day journey from High Rock, a new installation still under construction on the largest of Parintha's asteroid. Half research station, half military base, it was becoming a formidable structure, the asteroid a virtual warren of tunnels and subsurface galleries, long range sensors, and all manner of antennae probing the darkness for who knew what. On the shuttle craft that had deposited them at High Rock, Essa had watched a battalion strength unit executing low-gravity maneuvers. Gearing for war, she thought, but with whom?
Ever since their arrival they'd been running a burn-and-drift pattern. Long, accelerations that slung them out on a high, elliptical path toward the far edge of the system, until the planet's gravity dragged them systemward again. At apogee, Parnitha looked almost as far away as all the other visible stars, but as Tevura reeled them back in, on their close pass, Essa could distinguish clearly between individual cloud tops, and count impact craters on the outer face of the innermost moon. All the while, they waited for the FTL probe that had departed three years ago on a mission to Orisoni, the star closest to Thessia's parent star Parnitha, to return.
It was ten days overdue, though this wasn't unexpected. The probe's automated systems were tuned to optimize speed and fuel consumption. And, of course, there were no instruments to accurately measure its speed. No, the probe would keep its own schedule. There was no reason to think it had failed. And the Nixia would be relieved from her vigil by her sister ship, the Desinna, in a few short days.
And so Essa concentrated on correcting the slight rotation that was making the Nixia gently tilt its nose toward Tevura. Perhaps if she hadn't righted the ship at exactly that moment the sensors operator wouldn't have spotted the contact.
Now Essa cycled through the different displays, each one showing a slightly different view of the elliptical bubble of space that lay before them. She tried the visible light telescope again. It showed nothing—almost nothing. The stars appeared to change behind the object as it transited across them. The contact was moving, she thought, but that was all she had time to realize before the captain emerged onto the flight deck. She was awake, her demeanor and uniform showing no sign of having been roused from sleep. Essa watched as she pulled herself across the open space to the sensor operator's station.
"What can we see?" she said.
Essa observed the captain going through the same thought process she had a few moments earlier. The captain righted herself, and pushed across the cabin to the flight deck's left chair.
"First officer," she said. "You stand relieved."
Essa began to speak.
"You're relieved, Lieutenant," the captain said, more firmly this time. Essa blushed, and ground her teeth, but did as she was told. The two other crew on the flight deck watched her unbuckle from her harness and push herself across the cabin to the hatch. The navigator and sensors operator each gave a salute. She left the bridge without another word.
#
Down the long companionway that separated the bridge from the other decks of the ship, and wondering why she'd been dismissed, Essa arrived on the crew deck, lights dimmed and the usually noisy area empty at this hour of the watch. Ten crew members were asleep in bags strapped to the bulkheads, some pointing head-up, others head-down, depending on what was available. An unsecured drinking pouch hovered in the center of the room. Only the captain had a semi-private space, in a niche hidden behind the galley. At the moment, all the bags were full, as most of the crew kept to the same day-night cycle as the staff at High Rock. Essa and the rest of the third watch crew took any bag that was available when they were relieved in the morning, and perhaps because of this had grown accustomed to sleeping through all manner of noise.
But Essa suddenly wasn't thinking about a warm bed. Instead she let herself drift to the hatch to the deck below, opened the companionway and continued aft in the direction of the labs.
The Nixia had taken on an extra dozen crewmembers at High Rock, two additional science officers and a "security team"—their purpose a mystery to her and the rest of the crew—who all kept to themselves in the hold below, the hatch barred from the aft side. The scientists were working on something down there, something noisy, the sound of their work traveling up through the struts that braced the hull. And the security team kept silent, sitting together and not talking to anyone at mealtimes, not even each other. Their uniforms bore no insignia, not for rank, or specialization identifiers. Not even their names.
The captain didn't discuss their purpose, and Essa knew better than to ask why their leader wore the black double-chevron shoulder patches of the Serrice Guards.
A generation ago a Guards commander might have sparked more interest with the crew than it did now. At one time in the relatively recent past the Guards had been the enemy, the elite of the Serrice military, back when they'd had fought against Armali and an alliance of smaller republics.
Respected. Feared. Hated. All those applied. It was rumored that a single team of Guards had assassinated three Armali matriarchs, in three separate locations, all on the same day. The war had eventually gone from hot to cold, had become a score settled through proxy conflicts—worker uprisings, mostly, the kind of unrest that blossomed readily in the poor working conditions of the offworld mining colonies founded in the asteroid belt and in the orbital shipyards being constructed over Thessia.
The Guards' commander was old enough to remember the conflict. She had a coil burn down her right arm, a reminder of the plasma torch that she'd once worn. She'd been a breacher during the war, one who made entry points for their comrades, cutting holes in the walls of buildings, or the hulls of spacecraft. The tubes that directed the hot gas to a nozzle on the operator's wrist were notorious for their poor heat shielding. Often enough they would injure or—especially in the vacuum of space—kill an operator who let it burn for too long.
Even so, the coil-scar that the commander liked to show off, always leaving the sleeves of her jumpsuit rolled to keep it in view, appeared to draw little attention from the Nixia's young crew. The Nixia—named after a small, swift predatory bird, known commonly as the "little wing"—was a maiden vessel. Most of her crew was well under two hundred years old. The youngest were on their first postings out of the academy. They had all studied the history of the centuries-long conflict between Serrice and the republics, but none but their captain had lived through any of it. That had been a long time ago. Stories their mothers might whisper among themselves, but never let trouble their daughters.
And now, peace between the republics. That was the era they lived in, the era most of the young crew had been born into: rapid scientific advancement, economic prosperity, expansion beyond geostationary orbit. The asari had, in the past fifty years, ascended from their homeworld of Thessia and were spreading throughout the system, establishing orbital stations around the gas giants Jainiri and Athame. That an old soldier was on boaard, a former enemy of many of the crew, should have seemed like a sign of continued progress. Or at least it would have, if the commander and her team weren't always locking themselves in the cargo bay, only coming up for meals, or to access the main airlock for live fire drills on the outside of the hull.
The regular crew all wore the green uniform patches that identified them as members of the peacetime scientific corps. None of them seemed that troubled by the commandos, though some asked why they had come. When asked, Essa told her crew to mind their business and focus on their work, advice she told herself to follow as she let herself drift down the passageway to the astronomy lab. On the way down to the science deck, she'd got the idea to access the more powerful telescope in the observatory.
She arrived at the terminal and buckled herself into the observatory's chair before she began running the search program that would help her aim the telescope toward the object.
"You won't be able to see it from here."
Essa jumped hearing the voice behind her. She turned to see the leader of the Serrice Guards hanging from one of the ladder-rungs mounted here and there to allow the crew to maneuver in microgravity.
Essa allowed herself to catch her breath before she said, "Goddess, you frightened me."
The commander smiled, though for her even this gesture seemed hostile. Even with only dim light from the outer passageway Essa could easily make out the scar on her arm. Perhaps she was staring.
The commander glanced at her arm, too, before moving closer. "You haven't even asked how I know."
Essa blinked, wondering what was coming next, and whether she could unstrap herself quickly enough to get free if there was some kind of confrontation. "I'm not sure what you're saying," she said.
"Ask me then. How do I know what you're looking for?"
"I don't," Essa said.
There was a pause. The commander moved closer. Even if Essa tried to escape now, she gathered she wouldn't be able. The commander stared hard then said, "You've been relieved from the watch, yes?"
Essa agreed that she had.
"I know that because third watch is yours. You should be running the ship."
All this time she was coming closer. Now her hand, her menacingly strong grip, was on Essa's shoulder.
"Do you know who I am?" the commander said.
"No one does. You or any of your—your foot soldiers." Essa bore down on the word foot, hoping the commander might take offense. The commander, unfazed, held out her hand. A little blue light, not unlike a flame, appeared in her palm, flickered and disappeared. A threat, Essa imagined. Her free hand reached to unlatch the straps of her seat. The commander pushed her back down into the seat.
"In my business, no one likes it when people go spying where they shouldn't."
"Business?" Essa said. "You're a killer."
"In my day, I was." She let Essa go, at the same time allowing herself to drift back against the bulkhead. "Now—now, I listen, and I watch. We may be at peace, but threats are everywhere." The way she turned her gaze, she seemed to be searching for the object, too, that was floating out there, just beyond their sight. "This object. Perhaps."
Essa blinked at her in the dark. The commander slowly drifted toward the ceiling. Let her try to frighten me again, she thought. Let her see what a green-patch can do. Perhaps the commander sensed this. Perhaps this was simply how she greeted everyone. Now she held out her hand, scarred flesh and all for Essa to take.
"I'm First Commandant Amair Razia, Serrice High Command, intelligence section."
They shook hands. Razia's scar seemed to leave an impression on Essa's palm.
"I'd ask why you're on my ship," Essa said.
"Be patient," Razia said. "Your mission and mine are about to converge."
With that she withdrew to the bulkhead on the far side of the compartment, hovering there, her hands braced against the padded ceiling. Essa stared again at the display, the search program having run its course showed no results, aside from the expected objects. Cryo-volcanoes on Tevura's third moon were jetting a plume of ice crystals a hundred kilometers high. Essa tried again.
"You won't find it," Razia said again. "What do you think I was doing up here?"
Essa shook her head. She should have known. She was about to say something, when an automated voice called out, "All hands. All hands. Secure for acceleration. Secure for acceleration. Three minutes. Sound off."
Essa heard the crew beginning to clamber out of their bags, and individual crewmembers began reporting in over the open channel.Navigation secure. Sensors secure. Galley crew secure. She buckled herself back into the astronomy station. Razia did the same in a seat nearby. She pressed a key on the wrist of her jumpsuit, saying "XO secure."
The automated voice sounded again. "All hands. All hands reporting secure. Countdown to acceleration in five, four…"
The engines kicked in, a hollow roar that shook the bulkheads and seemed to go on forever. She felt the force of the acceleration pulling at her face, her limbs and breasts. Equipment stowed in nearby drawers began to rattle. Essa watched as Commander Razia pulled a ration strip from the shoulder pouch of her uniform and casually chewed it as the burn went on. Five million kilometers and holding steady, Essa thought. A long distance to cover, even in space. When at last the engines stopped the ship grew quiet, unnerving after all the noise. There were a few more pops and bangs from the maneuvering thrusters, then the automated voice signaled the all clear. Essa undid the straps on her seat and let herself drift out into the center of the room. Razia followed her. Over her earpiece, she hear the captain call in, "XO report in for your mission briefing. On the double."
"Yes, ma'am."
Razia pushed her way through the hatch before her then reached out to pull Essa through. "You want to know what we've found?" she said. "Come with me and let's find out."