…
"God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."
(Ian Malcolm)
...
MFV Discovery, February 26th, 12:01 PM, 2185
...
As we exited FTL, I could feel minor g-forces as the magnetic field disengaged, mostly a side effect of the ship being so small. It was little more than a gentle feeling of being nudged forward, but it was a good reminder of how easily we could have be reduced to subatomic particles if one piece of our Reach System were to fail during a jump. A reminder of our mortality, I suppose.
It had been nearly a month since I had been forced into this two month "assignment" by the Admiralty, sent to survey uncharted systems in the Terminus. I was still a little bitter over how Koris and Mal had seemingly forced me into doing this, but in the end I understood most of it was just political posturing. They didn't want to look like they were playing favorites, and this was the result. It was better than a public trial, so I'd give them that much.
Even then, all of this was starting to feel like a waste of resources more than anything else. Surely our skills could be better utilized back at CASTLE Base where we'd have our lab spaces for experiments, or back on the Normandy with Shepard and the rest of his team… I still had no idea how their investigation into Cerberus and the Collectors was going. I hoped all of them were OK, especially Lydia, Jack and Pistis. Those three were the most... interesting.
Gerrel was a complete bastard for getting me to leave that ship under such awful circumstances, but I knew the angle he was going for. He didn't want me throwing my influence around while he and select captains restructured and expanded their operations in my facility. I knew the end goal here was war with the Geth. Regardless, I was in no position to argue with the Admiralty, 'specially Gerrel. Even before giving him that good hook in the gut I knew he'd be a threat not only to me, but to all the quarians.
I had to admit there were some positives to this assignment, though. It had given us a good chance to better know our three former Cerberus technians, Dixon, Tony, and Morgan. Dan still didn't like them one iota, but he had done a good enough job of keeping his gripes to himself. Personally, I liked all three of them, and enjoyed their company. Dan and I had also used some of the downtime to mull over the data I had retrieved from that "Quantum-Entanglement Communicator" on Pragia. We were certain we could reproduce it, but not without our lab spaces.
So, now we all sat on this small ship, wearing ill-fitting jumpsuits as we flew through space aimlessly. If it weren't for Dan and I's libraries of music, I might have gone insane by now. Luckily, it was my turn to play music today. Currently on my que was Antonin Dvorak's "Symphony No.9", conducted by Neville Marriner and performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Orchestra. It was my favorite classical composition. We were currently listening to the 3rd Movement of the piece, Molto vivace.
Dan sat at the cockpit, surrounded by his own little control station. He wore a USCSS Nostromo trucker cap on his head, stained with grease and soot from working on the ship's finer systems. He had let his unruly moustache and beard from before grow out even further, though I had convinced him to at least trim it.
Dimitri sat with his back perfectly straight at his station. He had perfectly maintained his steely exterior, hair perfectly slicked back and jumpsuit in crisp shape despite our lack of proper cleaning facilities. He occupied one of our two sensor stations, this one dedicated to cartography.
Kirva occupied the relatively inactive weapons station, with which she had decorated to her liking. In an interesting development, she no longer wore her necklace of teeth around her neck, instead keeping it draped over her console whenever she sat there. It was better than nothing, I suppose.
It wasn't like we'd be able to do much if we were attacked. While the ship did have two dual 155mm mass accelerator turrets and a single GARDIAN emitter on each side of the ship for worse-case scenarios, they would barely dent a Frigate and would be useless against anything larger than that. Our best chance of survival if attacked would be to crank up the MES and run like a bat out of hell.
Now, on the other hand, if the ship were still equipped with Dan's prototype "Knight" PLS, that might surprise anyone looking to take a bite out of us.
Lenlo was my second-in-command, much like he had been on the Explorer. Considering our close proximity to one another on a daily basis, he hasn't had much chance to actually delegate to people, but he was making himself useful helping Dimitri organize all the stellar cartography data among other things.
Dixon occupied our second sensor station, focusing mainly on communications. He had kept his hair perfectly trimmed, though he had allowed a goatee to start forming on his face. He was getting better at his job, and personally I was impressed with his knowledge of basic engineering, even without formal training. He was sharp.
Tony and Morgan held the dual jobs of maintaining the ship's computer and mechanical elements. Morgan had kept her hair short and tight, level with her ears, while Tony had the familiar style of perpetual bed-head. Both did their jobs well, and occupied the auxiliary consoles in the back of the bridge.
Dixon and Morgan were a good couple, and it was easy to see the attraction they had towards one another. If only they'd fully commit... the tension between the two was unbearable sometimes. It reminded me of Jim and Pam from The Office.
"Status?" I asked in a dull tone, leaning against the armrest on my chair with little actual interest in what was going on as I listened to Dvorak's composition. Making eye contact with Dan, I received a very similar expression back.
"Hull is good, kinetic b-barriers are good, engines at one-hundred percent." He answered, giving me the short version this time around. "Good, good, good."
"Yeah, we're good all right." I replied with a nod, looking over at Dimitri. "Alright, same deal as last time. Begin mapping, celestial bodies first then planetoids."
"Da." He quickly said, turning around to face his station again.
As the gravity drive could be heard audibly spinning down, I tapped the display built into my armrest, dropping another micro buoy from the back of the ship. As it powered on, I connected it to the beacon we had dropped in the previous system, getting a connection surprisingly fast this time around. I knew we hadn't jumped as considerably far as last time, but even I thought that was pretty impressive.
At this point in our journey, we had scouted seventeen new systems, all weeks away with conventional FTL, but only a few days with the trusty Gravity Drive. None of the systems held anything that interesting other than a few dead planets, some gas giants, and some asteroid belts. The last system did have one interesting anomaly, that being LO-089 Śnieg, Polish for "snow", a smaller ice planet with no life, but a stable atmosphere. I was going to call it Hoth, but NASA had already taken that one back in 2005.
Other than that, It had started getting boring at this point.
"Dixon, anything on scanners?" I swiveled in my suspended chair, seeing both him and Morgan at their stations. Dixon wore half a headset for listening in on frequencies, just in case we happened to run into any Cerberus bases by accident.
"No comm traffic or unusual signals." He announced to the surprise of no one, turning to face me before making a confused face and turning back to his console. "Actually…"
"What is it?" I inquired with renewed interest, getting out of my chair to more closely inspect his station in person.
"Hold on... I'm detecting FM frequencies coming from one of the planets." He remarked, leaning towards his console. "It's more than static through… this sounds like it has some kind of pattern."
"Anything in the databanks to compare it to?" I suggested, watching him flick through the display, only to find nada.
"Nothing at all, sir." He shook his head as the rest of the crew began to take notice.
"You don't think it could be Cerberus, do you?" Kirva asked, leaning back and forth in her seat compulsively.
"Not according to these readings." Dixon dismissed, eyebrows still cocked upwards in confusion. "This is completely different."
"What planet is it coming from?" I inquired, looking back to Dimitri who had an etched, serious look on his face.
"This one here." He replied, tapping his finger against the display so I could see it. "LO-095, newest planet logged in system. Appears to be in temperate zone."
Hearing this new bit of news, I stood there for a few moments, rubbing the underside of my chin. While we had been taking extreme caution, making sure to keep ourselves out of trouble the last weeks, this seemed, at the very least, like an interesting diversion from the soulless grind we had been forced to endure.
"Focus our scans on that planet, and give me any updates as they become available." I ordered, taking a seat in my chair again and lowering the volume on the music. "Dan, take us towards that planet, but be ready for any changes. I want at least fifty-thousand kilometers between us and that planet."
"Afirm." He nodded, a smile crossing his face as I felt the ship shudder again, the engines roaring to life as we jumped using conventional FTL.
An anomalous FM signal could always be a number of different things, though many of them not good. According to the vague directives given to me for this mission we were required to investigate any signals or anomalies if deemed unusual, but something was telling me this was different.
After watching the narrow view port for a few minutes in anticipation, the blue-shifted stars returned to normal as a planetoid peeled into view.
"Alright, give me a visual." I ordered, watching Dimitri tap a few commands into his console before a holographic view of the planet appeared in front of me. The mapping process hadn't been completed yet and was low resolution, but there was plenty here already to get an idea of what we were dealing with.
It was a fairly Earth-sized planet, even featuring a single moon much like back home. It had oceans, continents, and appeared to have a stable atmosphere if the reading were anything to go by. There wasn't much time to go into the major details, however, as Dimitri called me over.
"Sean, come take look at this!" He bellowed out, getting me out of my chair instantly as I jogged over to examine his screen. "There are several objects in orbit of planet. Look at this one."
He pulled up a blurred image of what appeared to be an artificial object in low orbit of the planet. Seeing it brought back memories of the old space missions back on Earth, and immediately alerted me to what we were possibly dealing with here.
"My god…" I stammered, feeling the sudden weight that had fallen on my shoulders. "Scan the surface!"
My crew silently complied, getting a higher fidelity image of the planet. With the increased resolution, I could finally make out what I had suspected to find. Cities, urban centers. Civilization.
All of us sat in deafening silence, each of us knowing what this meant.
We had unintentionally found ourselves in a First Contact scenario.
"Captain?" Lenlo called out, snapping me out of my minor daze. "What should we do?"
"Well… if they have the technology to send objects into orbit, that means they've likely spotted us with some kind of radar or scanning technology." I theorized, taking a seat in my chair. "Dixon, any of those signals change?"
"As a matter of fact, the frequency of these signals have gone crazy the last few minutes." He answered, getting me to reflexively bite the inside of my mouth out of nerves.
"They must have seen us… damn." I exclaimed, grasping at the arms of my seat tighter. "If I had known those signals were terrestrial, I wouldn't have moved us in this close."
My friends stared at me, waiting with baited breath to see what I'd do. I hadn't counted on actually finding anything of this caliber during this assignment, but now that we had been spotted, I had no choice but to do something I thought I'd never do.
I was about to make first contact.
"OK… now's the time for caution." I said in a relaxed tone, holding my hands together and turning to Lenlo. "I need you to find me that handshake package. I know it should be in the ship's memory banks somewhere."
"Sean, is that wise?" Dimitri asked in a lower tone, his stoic expression changing to one of worry. "Standard Alliance "First Contact" protocols dictate forty-eight hour waiting period to disseminate information and analyze signals, followed by congressional approval."
"Well, that would be the best course of action if we had encountered a signal, and not have made visual contact with each other." I shot down, knowing the protocols already. "Besides, we aren't Alliance. You don't need me to tell you that."
"Doesn't the Admiralty have their own set of protocols for situations like this?" Kirva questioned, sounding more confused than anything else. "Maybe we should contact them first?"
"It would take hours to establish a proper connection this far from the network." Lenlo remarked, shaking his head. "Besides, Captains are permitted to engage in first contact scenarios under quarian admiralty law."
Part of me was surprised by how knowledgeable Lenlo was regarding quarian rules and regulations. Unfortunately, right now I didn't have the time to thank him for his support.
"Sir… the signal has changed." Dixon announced, getting my full attention once more. "It's almost as if they've stopped communicating at all. Barely any signals aside from a few, weaker sources."
"Lenlo, do we have the package ready for transmission?" I asked, beginning to bounce my left foot up and down off the edge of the foot rest.
"Uploading it now, sir." He nodded, the status screen embedded in the side of my chair confirming it. After a few seconds, the bar went green, giving me the option to transmit.
I felt sweat beginning to build up on my brow, something I hadn't experienced since I was under fire back in that "Overlord" facility. With some reluctance, I pressed the button, sending out the broadband package on several different frequencies and wavelengths. Hopefully, they'd be able to decipher the package and would be willing to… chat.
Now we would play the waiting game.
…
MFV Discovery, February 26th, 6:54 PM, 2185
…
After nearly seven hours, we had yet to receive any transmissions from the planet. It was nearly impossible for us to know how long it might take for them to decipher the package, let alone send a message in a format we could understand, so I had decided to remain on station for at least three days. Any longer than that, and we risked stretching our resources too far in one system.
Even though we could easily return to Reach in just a few hours regardless of location, we'd need to backtrack a few systems to reduce the risk of flying into something at FTL speeds, and that would take at least two days. That was a lot of time and fuel, which we had calculated to give ourselves perfect efficiency.
Knowing I'd be reprimanded if I didn't inform my bosses about our discovery, I sent them a single, priority-level text message through our micro buoy network, saying "We've encountered what appears to be an intelligent civilization in Grid 116-15 between the Rosetta Nebula and Sigurd's Cradle. We're pretty sure they've detected us, so I've initiated contact with the standard "handshake" package and decided to remain on-station for three standard days anticipating a response. More messages will follow as the situation progresses. -Sean Michaels, MFV Discovery"
If they had a problem with it, they could shove it.
I currently occupied the crew quarters with Dixon, Morgan, Dimitri, and Lenlo, drinking a cup of "freshly-brewed coffee" spat out by our noisy brewing machine. The coffee, which was limited in supply, was technically not supposed to be drunk until after we had finished surveying a system, as a kind of "reward", but I had lifted the restriction for this particular scenario.
Meanwhile, Lenlo got Tupari, some sports drink with an aggressive marketing strategy. He and Kirva loved it, but I remember Biss saying he hated it, touting it as "teeth-rotting garbage" shortly before we left. My guess was it was the modern equivalent to Monster Energy.
We all just needed something to calm our nerves. The only ones who seemed super-excited about this were Dan, Kirva and Tony, who had decided to stay on the bridge to monitor everything. Dan had taken advantage of the situation to play "Terran 1" from the Starcraft OST, which could be heard playing faintly from where we were.
I had to give the man credit, his music tastes were great where it mattered.
Sitting down in my usual spot with coffee in hand, I leaned back and let out a deep sigh before popping both sides of my neck. Dixon turned to me a confused look before dismissing it and taking a seat with a cup of water.
"Well, this day has turned out much different than I had imagined it would." He said with a smile before drinking from his cup deeply. "I need a proper vacation."
"I just want some kind of response soon. The idea of waiting here for three days is maddening." Morgan remarked, ignoring Dixon's previous remark and rubbing her hands together, leaning side to side before sitting down.
"Be careful what you wish for." Dimitri chastised, sounding surprisingly annoyed by her comment as he sat next to me. "You are like privates fresh from basic, always so eager for things to happen for own sake. Take relief in downtime."
"That's easy for you to say. I haven't even had a proper shower in weeks, and now we're trying to talk to aliens we've never seen before." She shrugged, seemingly unfazed by Dimitri's attitude as she sipped at her coffee, wincing. "Damn! Why does this stuff have to be so hot?!"
"Some of us like it that way." I said in a nonchalant tone, looking away from her as I leaned my head back and drank half my cup in one go. "If you don't like it, either wait for it to cool or buy your own coffee machine."
"I still don't understand, what's so appealing about drinking that stuff?" Lenlo asked, sounding bemused. "I tried a dextro-amino version of it on Earth, and I couldn't stand it. It's so bitter."
"Some people prefer to mix it with other things such as sugar, milk, and creamers. I just happen to like it served black, or in any form for that matter." I replied, half answering and half deflecting his question in an attempt to get an interesting response out of him. "Besides, it's the easiest vector for putting caffeine into my body… and the safest."
"Caffeine is a psychoactive substance, right?" He asked, going in the direction I wanted him to. "Wouldn't that make the consumption of coffee a form of recreational drug use?"
"Unless I'm drinking more than fifty cups a day or taking three NoDoz tablets at once, probably not." I denied with a smile on my face, moustache still filled with coffee. "In comparison to that Tupari shit you're drinking, which has enough sugar and chemical preservatives to mummify a small dog, I'd say I'm doing just fine."
I could see Lenlo roll his eyes through his faceplate, getting a good chuckle from me, Dimitri, and Dixon as Morgan sat in silence, watching us as she blew on her piping hot cup.
"You ever read story about Finnish soldier, Aimo Koivunen?" Dimitri asked all of us with a big, friendly smile on his face. "He fought through forest for days, slipping in and out of consciousness after ingesting thirty Pervitin tablets at once."
"I do remember that story. The first Finn to overdose on military-grade speed." I cracked up, getting confused looks from our three other listeners. "Let me explain… Pervitin was a brand of amphetamine tablets marketed to militaries as performance enhancers, aiding in alertness and energy. They didn't have the same medical standards back in the 1940's that we do now."
"This man, Aimo, fleeing from Red Army, ingested entire squad's supply of Pervitin after collapsing in snow." Dimitri picked up, barely able to keep himself from breaking out into laughter as he told the story. "He wanders Finnish wilderness for week, in and out of consciousness whole time before he is rescued and taken to hospital. When doctors measured heartbeat, was two-hundred beats per minute!"
Dixon put his hand over his mouth, suppressing a chuckle as Morgan widened her eyes in surprise, drinking her coffee with a bewildered look on her face. Lenlo's body language expressed more disbelief than anything else as he sat there with his arms folded.
"Don't forget the part where he ended up weighing only ninety-six pounds after he was found, with almost no memory of what had happened." I added, getting to the best part. "To top it all off, the entire time he had eaten only pine buds and a single bird that he caught and ate raw."
That last part got Morgan to reflexively gag and nearly spit coffee all over the table. Lenlo could only shake his head as Dixon and Dimitri laughed at her.
"Captain, may I speak freely?" Lenlo asked in a cautious voice, sounding curious.
"By all means." I nodded, finishing my cup of coffee in another large gulp.
"Is it normal for humans to do crazy things like this all the time?" He inquired with genuine curiosity, leaning against the Y-shaped table. "Any time I heard stories from or about humans, it always involves some outlandish feat of endurance or skill. I've seen this pattern too many times for it not to be a recurring element."
"Well, the answer to your question is simple, Lenlo." I began, sitting forward in my chair and devoting all my focus to him exclusively. "Humans, and humanity in general, are stupid. Idiot, knucklehead, baka, dummkopf, there's a endless number of ways to call someone stupid in human culture. We love to laugh and poke fun at other people doing dumb things, and that leads us to try and one-up each other, inventing new and more exciting ways to shorten our lifespans."
"How does that relate to skill, exactly?" He asked, still confused.
"Well, those that do survive and build up followings can turn their dumb hobbies into even dumber professions or fads." I snarked, not really taking the question all that serious. "The best way to tell if someone is dumb or smart is to see who does or doesn't follow these things."
"Wait, you're talking about sports, aren't you?" Dixon budded in, sounding mildly amused.
"Not all of them. Just some." I deflected, shrugging. "I remember when the NFL was covering up all those studies in the late 90s and early 2000s showing how much brain damage playing football could cause to players over time. As someone who wasn't really into organized sports in the first place, I couldn't understand why people would put themselves at risk like that."
"But you were on professional paintball team, no?" Dimitri called out, getting me to smile again.
"Paintball is different. People generally don't break bones or get concussions shooting paintballs at each other." I argued, acknowledging some favoritism on my part. "My point is humans will do dumb things no matter how smart they are, whether to show off or fulfil some kind of personal goal or challenge. It's a trait we all seem to have in common."
Lenlo accepted my little explanation with a nod, sucking in the Tupari attached to his helmet as we all shared a moment of silence.
"So… what so you think'll happen?" Dixon asked with a sincere expression, pressing against the tip of his disposable coffee cup. "This kind of thing hasn't happened since… the Vorcha, I think?"
"If species end up being anything like vorcha, I say we abandon and isolate system." Dimitri remarked with some disgust in his voice. "They are animals."
"That, I think we all can agree on." I nodded, finishing off the remainder of my coffee and immediately pouring myself more. "Still, the vorcha never developed any technology as sophisticated as satellites."
"The krogans did." Lenlo pointed out, leaning back as far as he could in his chair.
"I know, stop trying to upset me." I acknowledged, acting just dramatic enough to get Dimitri and Dixon to smile. "We have no idea what could happen here. We just have to keep our wits about us as we monitor these people."
"Well, if their te-technology is anything to go by, we could be dealing with something re...really interesting." I heard Dan suddenly announce, walking over to us with a datapad in hand. "Sean, look at this."
He handed me the datapad, which had a full technical readout on the large satellite we had originally spotted in orbit. It was roughly can-shaped, but it was noticeably different in regards to both its design an apparent mechanical makeup. It utilized a lot of rounded edges and seamless panels, and featured what appeared to be a set of RTGs along the "underside" of the object. Best I could describe it, it looked like a mix between the Hubble Space Telescope and a Soyuz spacecraft. Strangely enough, it seemed to lack any kind of solar panel system.
The craft's makeup was the more interesting bit. The majority of it was built with high-grade titanium and aluminum alloys, which was normal by our standards, but the odd bit was the RTG-style devices on the underside. They were filled with refined Element Zero. If the power readings of this satellite were to be believed, most, if not all, of the power was being supplied by these things. The power readings themselves were interesting. If this Eezo was providing all the power and was present in these quantities, it must have been incredibly concentrated in its current form. While we believed we had pushed the refinement of Element Zero as far as it could possibly go, this suggested to me that they were using something with nearly 99% purity, well past and exceeding Alliance quality control standards.
This tiny tidbit of information suggested to me that this civilization had an incredibly good understanding of Eezo. Dan must have thought the same thing, otherwise he wouldn't have brought this to me in person.
"You see what I'm s-seeing too, aren't you?" He asked, confirming my thoughts as I gave him a nod, handing the datapad back to him.
"I do. We have some industrious little fellows down there." I smiled, taking in another deep gulp of my coffee. "More and more questions keep piling up."
"If they've developed a process of Eezo re-refinement that's better than ours, imagine what kind of technology they might be using d-down on the surface." He replied, handing the datapad to Dimitri to read.
"Perhaps this is why we detected high levels of Eezo in planet atmosphere." Dimitri added, still reading the datapad.
"So, you're saying these guys are more advanced than us?" Dixon remarked, confused as to what we were talking about.
"Not necessarily. They seem to be pretty good at using Element Zero though." I nodded, looking over at him, Morgan and Lenlo. "If our reactor ran with a quantity of Eezo of that refinement, we'd possibly get another 8.21 gigawatts from the reactor per hour."
"But you'd also have to f-factor in the increased power of the mass effect fie-" Dan began to add before Tony's voice could be heard shouting at us from the bridge.
"Hey Sean, we've got something here!" I shouted as loud as he could, immediately spiking my adrenaline.
"Everyone to your bridge stations now!" I ordered, leading the charge to the bridge. Climbing the ladder as fast as I could, I immediately ran to Tony's station, wanting to know what this "something" was. "What do we have here?"
"We've received what looks like a binary signal, or at least what appears to be some variation of it. It could be hexadecimals." He answered, pulling up what appeared to be random numbers and letters. "Let me try… running it through an ASCII translator, maybe that'll work."
He ran the numbers through the table, cracking a smile as the message was successfully translated for all of us to see.
"We are the Raloi, represented by the United Technocracy of Turviss and the Great Seven Houses. Who are you, and for what purpose do you enter our domain?" The simple message from the planet read, filling me with equal amounts of relief and worry.
I'd have to choose my words very carefully. I had no way of gauging their cultural sensibilities or military capabilities. I most certainly didn't want to risk an incident like the Turians with Relay 314.
"I am Sean Michaels, captain of the MFV Discovery and representative of the quarian Migrant Fleet and human Systems Alliance. My crew and I come bearing no ill will towards your people." I spoke into the text-to-speech communicator, standing ramrod stiff as my crew watched me in bated silence. "We entered this system as part of our long-term exploratory mission. Have you deciphered the handshake package we sent you?"
Sending the message back to them in the same fashion, we waited for two minutes in total silence.
"We have examined the information you have sent us, and are intrigued. We wish to engage in further dialogue." The response quickly came, getting a smile to slowly creep onto my face.
"Well then, we might have just made some new new friends." I grinned from ear to ear, looking at the faces of my friends who shared similar expressions.
Something interesting had come out of this assignment after all.
…
A/N: Well, this one sure came out fast, didn't it? I do occasionally still get bitten by the writing bug, and when it bites, it bites HARD. I've been looking forward to introducing the Raloi for a while now, and knew this would be a fun one to write anyways. Considering I'm kinda stuck in my house due to snow, that likely also contributed to a large part of this one.
I'm hoping the next chapter will really interest people. I'm looking forward to how all of this goes, because part of me wonders what'll happen too. Who knows, Sean might start another war for all I know. :)
As always, I'd love to read any reviews, I'm always up for suggestions or constructive criticism. Stay tuned!