Terrific people brought us neededs. They are bring it to the door with relief in their eyes. Good people! Terrific people! They make us not die more.
-1- Lura
The pilot told everyone to strap in. Crosswinds and eddies in the current required occasional counter-steering and he would be piloting the craft down a river of energy. Straight down.
While this did not cause the common, vibrational shaking turbulence one might expect on terrestrial air travel, per se, it did cause the skiff to randomly slide from side to side. Lura had seen 1000 kilo storage crates break their moorings and fly from one side of the fuselage to the other. This hardly happened anymore; only every once-in-a-while. She gave it little thought anymore.
Lura had been through this so many times it had become second nature to her. Her assistant, a strong, short man in his mid-30s was strapped in next to her. She looked up from her tablet and noticed that he was gripping the harness so tightly that his fingers were actually losing their blood flow. So, "White Knuckling It," she thought, isn't just a quaint saying.
"Paul, you good?" She said, conversationally. Trying to make herself heard over the incessant drone of the engines, she nearly shouted "Paul!" He stared straight ahead, his eyes bulging, sweat beading up on his shaved head. The skiff made a sharp jolt starboard, the cargo chains groaned with the sudden change and he let out a little "Eep!" and gripped tighter closing his eyes.
"Paul," she said, hoping to get his attention, "You need to calm down." She patted his leg.
Still he ignored her, taking small, shallow breaths.
"You're a doctor. You should already know that if you start hyperventilating now, before the mix is finished, you could get sudden-onset osteoporosis." The last part she said with a laugh.
He turned his head slightly towards her and said, slitting his eyes. "Please shut up. Let my bones crumble to dust in peace."
She chuckled to herself and looked back down at her tablet. While the information from the satellite array was pouring down through the comms system into a vastly complex simulation of the planet's weather system, her thoughts drifted back to her first Fall.
It was the first time she had ever seen a relay. Theses structures (some as large as small moons), built by a race so lost to the ravages of time that no one, not even the ancient species who date their civilizations by millenia, could remembered exactly what they were even called.
It had been orbiting Pluto, tidally-locked to its host parent's daily rotation so that it never became visible directly from Earth. When the news broke about it being discovered by a long-range probe, she was only 13 years old. Everyone seemed to lose the ability to speak when the president came on the television in her classroom. She vaguely remembered how excited and nervous people were. Her mother seemed to be sleepwalking through her daily routine. Many of her friend's parents went out to purchase survival gear: Batteries, bottled water, and medicine. It was like the bottom dropped out from under all of the petty differences between countries, ethnic groups, nationalism and left everyone disconnected, looking for anything to clutch onto, anything to call their own.
Now, entering her 80th year, she reflected on how these incomprehensibly enormous and complex machines had so quickly become such an integral part of the make-up of civilization that there even could have been a time in Earth's history before the discovery. It seemed so distant; so disconnected from the day-to-day beats of commerce and war, leisure. Even with their seemingly incredibly-advanced technology, the relay remained a stark reminder that they should endeavour to remain humble. Humans really had no idea what lie in wait out there, beyond the distant relays. Was there some alien Rubicon or unknown boundary, the passing of which could never be undone? Had the beast already been awakened yet no one had had the foresight to realize it had been there all along?
Many years later, she had started her first Fall with the same kind of apprehension as Paul. It was one thing to watch a vid of the relays, to imagine their size, their age. To watch the thing come alive, automatically, filling the surrounding space with a completely foreign energy. It was something else entirely to see it in person.
Back then, it took more than 6 months to arrive at and establish an orbit around Pluto let get out to the relay. During their approach she watched it out of her cabin porthole, looming in the distance. As the skiff got closer, its apparent size grew. It can't be that big, she kept thinking to herself, but on it went, doubling, tripling, eventually invading the entire view of the porthole. The relay was not an abstraction anymore. It was as real as a heart attack and twice as serious. When someone would see one up close, their minds would occasionally have trouble taking in the reality of the thing. After a point the mind had had no mental structures to buffer itself against the scope. It was something profoundly alien; something beyond all experience and it had caused more than a few would-be adventurers to simply turn around and come straight back, disturbed to their very core. For this reason, she opaqued the windows near the forward cabin jump seats, where she and her assistant (a bad flier on the best of days) sat, strapped into a gravity couch. No need to tempt fate, she thought wryly. Let's just get through the relay.
"We're on direct-approach. Nova Gateway, we are holding at Hudson, requesting a vector to the relay at 3.2 knotts. How goes the weather?"
She tried to make out what the control system (a rudimentary virtual intelligence) was responding with. It seemed to be taking longer that usual. The VI ran the unmanned station on Pluto, named Hudson after the first astronaut to brave the relay. It was directly connected to the comms array used to manage incoming and outgoing ships through the relay. In essence, a very expensive traffic system.
Leaning forward from the jumpseat directly behind the pilot she asked, "What's up?"
"It seems there is a super-lifter coming through from "Parts Unknown."" He said, an edge in his voice. "Probably supplies for Luna station."
"Tell it we're on a priority one Fall and if the VI doesn't like it, it needs to get a different job." Paul said, still maintaining his death-grip on the straps.
"Yeah," she said, leaning back "It's very hard to threaten a VI. They immediately know what you're trying to do. Just let it do its thing." Looking over to the pilot, "How long does this set us back?"
The pilot looked over a translucent panel of readouts, brushing few empty food and omni-gel containers away from one side of it. He turned his head back over his shoulder, " right now."
I'm waiting on exact telemetry data now, but it could take up to 20 hours."
"That's just perfect." Paul said to no one in particular. Throwing his hands in the air. He quickly realized he had let go of the harness and grabbed back on, "Can you at least get us out of this turbulence then?"
By way of answering him, the pilot jabbed in a new path on his panel, rotating the ship into a perpendicular alignment with the array. The river of energy stopped flowing into the engines and everything became silent and still. "Better?" He asked.
As the pilot worked to set the ship into a new holding pattern a small green panel lit up, blinking. As he moved from one screen to the next, he would absently tap the panel when it started to blink to quickly.
"What is that?" She asked, hating to bother him. She gestured to the green blinking panel.
"What? That? It's in incoming call from Hudson station. Probably new vectors or something."
"Seems impatient."
"Hudson station is always impatient. It seems grouchy today." He laughed at his own joke and kept poking at the controls. Eventually accepting the incoming call.
Sounding bored he answered with, "Yes, honey?"
Their ship exploded. The port engine sheared off grinding along some unknown surface. The ship began to spin, air and heat escaping from a gaping wound. The violent crash snapped Lura against her restraints so hard she nearly passed out. Her ears popped as the ship violently decompressed. There was just enough air that she could hear the pilot shouting over the chaos into his coms set.
"The superlifter! It came through early! We've had a collision… say again?" A second explosion as the braking drive was ripped from the aft section of the ship. He was trying to bring up a spherical panorama of the ship and its surroundings.
"What are we hitting," He shouted to Lura, "We should be clear of debris by now." Paul, lay limp in his restraints, either dead or unconscious. She de-opaqued the windows, looking past him and couldn't quite register what she was seeing.
"I think we're in the superlifter!" She shouted over the howling wind.
The pilot stopped typing and looked back at her for a moment. Their eyes locked in disbelief. The spherical panorama flickered into existence as a lumpy blob, showing the crude interior of the lifter and their shattered ship floating in one of the cargo hulls. A piece of the skiff's engine protruded from the nearest wall.
The air filled with a kind of crackling energy TELLING? of an ME generator powering up. The emergency mass effect fields slammed on, locking the cabin and jump seats in their own protective bubble. The cabin began to flood with atmosphere and heat. The beeping of alarms became louder and louder. The pilot hit a button, silencing them.
As the din died down they both heard Paul groan. "What is going on?" he said trying to rub his eyes.
"We're effectively in an escape pod. The ship reports one fully functional engine but most everything else is either gone or severely damaged."
Suddenly, the cargo hull flooded with hideously bright light like a god flipping on a light switch. The three refuges all looked out through the front screen. The hull was a cube, easily 100 kilometers to side. An enormous, cavernous space, filled with hundreds of ghost shapes, some easily twenty times larger than the skiff, anchored in place by the cool, blue streams of highly refined mass effect fields. An artificial sun burned at the center of the space, also a creation of the mass effect. A small part of her mind, always the observer, reflected on how well the older species could manipulate the effect to do pretty much anything they wanted.
Lura felt the same dropping sensation she had when she first saw a relay up close. The scale of this new world, unlocked by the relay, was so far from human experience humans didn't even have words to describe it.
"If this is the kind of lifter I think it is, this is just one of at least 10 such cargo hulls on this ship…" Her voice trailed off, looking out the main screen. A confused expression on her face spread across her face.
"Turn the exterior lights on, please." She said casually.
"And broadcast our position?" He shot back.
"They wouldn't have lit the bay if they didn't know something new was in here. Their ships are quasi-sentient."
"Who's ships?" Paul asked, but she did not respond.
The pilot flipped a physical switch on the console and the skiff's paltry lights blinked on, a few of them bursting or shearing sparks from the damage.
"What are you doing?" Paul said. "We should wait for help."
"I need to see this." He slowly trickled power from the generator into the ship's one good engine and they moved, almost imperceptibly slow at first, but gaining a slow steady speed. He was guiding the skiff closer to one of the shadowy shapes.
As they closed the distance it became apparent it was another ship. This one, which seemed, from the harsh light of the hull to make roughly half of the ships in the space, was not as large as some. It seemed very sleek, its wings swept back in a way reminiscent of the old terrestrial war planes. Aerodynamics were generally not a concern when operating in space, but these had a very strange feel about them.
As they crested the top of the ship they saw weapons bristling from various gates, portways and lifts. The ship, clearly a machine of war, capable of atmospheric operations just sat there, the more ominous for its silence.
"There's got to be hundreds in here." He said.
"Thousands, by my reckoning. And the biggest ships are used as low-orbit weapons platforms and to support supply sortis." She said quietly.
"How do you know that?" He asked, looking back at her. She met his gaze, but again didn't respond.
The pilot stiffened, his attention drawn to the voice coming from his ear piece.
"Put it on loudspeaker." She said in a tone that did not invite discussion.
"It's from Hudson station," he said and turned up the volume.
"Unidentified vessel-you are in direct violation of UN charter concerning the passage of space-faring vessels through the Sol relay. Report your position and intention immediately. Repeats. Unidentified vessel-"
"It's just looping on every channel I can find.." he said, "There is a whole bevy of information packages below the audio, though. It looks like it has all of the images, history, and things intended for contact with a new species. I guess the station doesn't know what's going on anymore than we do."
"Has the super-lifer replied?" She asked.
"No, not directly. It did send out a small encrypted packet, but it didn't seem be aimed at the station and didn't contain the header needed for the station to accept it as legitimate." He paused, "Hudson station is also simultaneously sending queries to our ship. My guess is it can't read the responses. We're being jammed."
"How are they jamming an entanglement communicator? I didn't know that was even possible." said Paul.
Lura leaned back. The ozone smell of the protective field filled her senses. I haven't been this tired in a long time, she thought, rubbing her temples.
"I guess we made contact, then. Too bad they don't seem interested in bringing us doves of peace." She said and closed her eyes, considering their next move. "Turians..."