Note to readers: You may want to go back and read chapter 11 before this, if you did not already. I combined the Intro and Prologue sections, resulting in Chapter 10 being re-numbered from part 12 to part 11, and then uploaded Chapter 11 last week as part 12.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
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Captain Thanan Yates was normally quite a patient man. However, hunting for a legendary lost ship such as the Outbound Flight in an entirely alien galaxy, with absolutely no navigational charts available, was enough to test even the most patient of commanders.
So far, he had been in the alien galaxy for the better part of the week aboard his command, the Loronar Strike Cruiser Diversion. It had taken several hours after transiting the wormhole to make sure that they had not suffered any malfunctions aboard the ship, and several more hours to complete a survey of the local star systems and establish their position in the galaxy. Roughly speaking, they were approximately twenty thousand light-years from the galactic core, in a galaxy that appeared to be ten to fifteen percent smaller than their own.
The wormhole system itself hadn't been much help in their search. The only clues to Outbound Flight's existence was a small debris field with traces of durasteel and other alloys, and some other drifting garbage that hadn't been touched in at least sixty years.
They had then jumped to the nearest star system, some twenty light-years away, and had found more signs of activity. In addition to some debris, they found an asteroid that had been mined for yttrium, one of the components of durasteel alloys. But again, the actual ship had eluded their search.
After jumping through several more systems nearby, and coming up empty-handed each time, he had realized that they needed to think like the commander of Outbound Flight would.
You're in command of Outbound Flight, he mused. Your ship has just been seriously damaged and you fled through a wormhole into a strange galaxy. Your first priority is repairs, so you go to a system with the resources to fix the ship. What is your next step?
Well, that all depended on what the mission of Outbound Flight was, didn't it?
He held up the datapad that the Commodore had given him containing the mission profile and technical specifications of the ship. Outbound Flight was, for its day, a formidable foe. Six Dreadnaughts arranged around a central core, crewed by a mixture of Republic Navy personnel and Jedi.
Somehow, Thrawn still managed to fight them to a standstill. No mean feat for a commander with only a few picket ships.
He paged through the datapad, eventually finding what he'd been looking for.
Official mission: To expand the influence of the Republic beyond the known galaxy; to make contact with new civilizations; and to set up colonies on suitable worlds with the intent of later re-integration into the Republic.
A simple enough mission, with enough wiggle room for the commander to do practically anything he wished. No wonder the Emperor had wanted the mission destroyed. A group of Jedi-led holdout colonies outside the galaxy would have been a major setback in his plans. Not that it had mattered in the end.
So, if the mission statement had been more or less followed, then he should find several things. One, if there were any space-faring civilizations in the area, they had probably been contacted by the Outbound Flight and therefore might know where they went. Two, assuming that said civilizations were not hostile or were insufficiently advanced to pose a threat to Outbound Flight, he would find at least one Republic colony. Three, if one of the civilizations was advanced enough to pose a threat, he could find out if they had destroyed the damaged vessel.
It was the third possibility that he found most disturbing, of course, since if a civilization was advanced enough to destroy six Dreadnaughts, he was looking woefully unprepared in a lone Strike Cruiser. Then again, he had at least two advantages they did not: his ship was not previously damaged, and as a scouting mission, he had no qualms about fleeing back to the wormhole if trouble arose. Like most sane military commanders, he held absolutely no faith in the foolish notion of a "fair fight." A fair fight, as far as he was concerned, might as well be suicide.
There was a knock at the door of his quarters, but he barely bothered to glance up. "Come in."
It turned out to be one of the bridge crewmen. "Sir, I have the results of the scan you requested."
"What's the situation?"
"Sir, it appears there is a large amount of subspace comm chatter coming from a point in deep space. Comm-Scan is trying to decode the data."
He nodded. "Let me know when they finish."
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Several hours later, he and the rest of the senior officers were assembled in the situation room along with one of the Comm-Scan signal analysts.
"So, Lieutenant Guyenn, what did you find?"
The analyst took a gulp of water from his glass on the table. "We first had to decode the digital signal. Identifying the carrier timing was the easiest part, but it took several attempts before we understood how the data was formatted. We had been expecting holographic data, but instead all we found was 2D video and audio streams."
Yates nodded. "So that means what exactly?"
"Well, that was our next hitch. While we had the video and audio, we didn't understand a word they were saying. We linked several of our protocol droids into the central computer and we believe they have produced a reasonable, if somewhat rough, translation of some of the messages." He slid a chip into the datacard reader on the table.
"Once the protocol droids had worked out a language database, we began examining the contents of the messages. Most of the traffic on the relay is to be from a race called the Hirogen. They appear to be a predatory species, as most of their communications were related to where the good 'hunts' are located."
He took a breath and continued. "However, we also intercepted what appeared to be several old messages from a United Federation of Planets to one of their ships in this area called Voyager."
Yates shook his head. "That's all fine and well, but what does it have to do with finding Outbound Flight?"
"Well, Sir, I'm sure you are familiar with human history, our origins in particular?"
The captain shrugged. "The common consensus was that we evolved on Coruscant."
"Right," the analyst replied, reaching for a button on the datacard reader. "Watch this."
A two-dimensional frame appeared over the table, which was fairly unremarkable. What was striking, however, was the face in it. A distinctly human face.
"Good work," Yates said after a moment had passed. "It looks like they were pretty busy. Although wouldn't it have been difficult to set up a regional government in only sixty years?"
"But not impossible," Commander Rowin, his second-in-command, replied. "After all, they had the capability to set up six colonies. If those colonies wanted to, they could very well form their own federation."
Yates had known Rowin Opgard for many years. They had started off as enlisted crew aboard a small patrol vessel in the Tungra sector, and slowly worked their way up through the ranks. All in all, Rowin was probably one of the few people that Yates would willingly entrust his life to.
"Which just leaves the question of where the hell they are," Yates remarked, then turned to the analyst. "Didn't you say they had a ship in this area? Maybe they were trying to re-establish contact with the Republic."
A thoughtful expression crossed the analyst's face. "There is one way we might be able to find out. We noticed that for some reason, the relay only forwards messages under a certain length. Any longer messages are truncated and I would expect that you would have to have physical access to the relay station to download the full message. So if the station has access and sensor logs, it might just help us identify the ship."
"Well, that settles it then," Yates replied. "We'll get a team together to take a look at this thing. Any other questions?"
The room was silent for a moment. "Dismissed."
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Looking through the shuttle's forward viewport at the massive space station ahead, Lieutenant Phong Guyenn was perplexed. The idea of a race of apparently nomadic hunters building such a station, not to mention keeping it working for years, was simply preposterous.
Then there was the question of, why? Why put a relay station out in the middle of deep space, light-years from anything of note?
The pilot took the shuttle into orbit of the station, which raised another question in Phong's mind. Didn't you need gravity to orbit?
He rubbed at the neck seal on the stormtrooper armor he was currently wearing, and wished he was in the pilot's position instead of being a damned SIGINT analyst. He'd had an uncorrectable eye condition that had disqualified him from being a pilot when he had enlisted in the Navy years ago. As a result, he had fallen back on his civilian training in communications and wound up assigned to Comm-Scan.
The shuttle's pilot continued circling the station until he apparently spotted a docking port. Then he deftly maneuvered the shuttle into place, and locked the magnetic clamps to create an airtight seal around the hatch.
After several attempts at unlocking the hatch, they finally wound up just cutting their way through. The first thing Phong noticed as he, the two other Comm-Scan techs and the squad of stormtroopers assigned to the team stepped through the still-warm hatch was the quiet clicking of the built-in rad meter in the stormtrooper armor. The only good news about the clicking was that the clicks were spread well apart; if it had been an almost continuous tone, he would have had only seconds to get out before receiving a too-large dose of radiation.
"OK, let's focus on finding a computer terminal," he said.
As they began to walk down the narrow corridors of the station, boots clanking on the metal grate decks, he began to see what he at first thought was flecks of rust on the walls. The further they went, the more there was. Finally they reached a junction, and when he saw the giant, brown splatter pattern against the wall, he realized that it wasn't rust.
"Blood," he muttered.
There really was nothing that could help morale more than being on an ancient, dimly lit, blood-spattered space station. If he'd been in a holo-thriller, the only thing that would have been missing was the eerie, tonal music so common to those holovids.
The other techs must have been thinking the same thing, because one of them began whistling a tune from one of the most popular recent holo-thrillers he'd seen. Actually, he corrected himself, the music was probably the best thing from that thriller, which was so predictable as to be boring.
Even so, he wasn't really in the mood. "Knock it off," he snapped at the midshipman.
They continued toward the heart of the station in silence when suddenly, a crimson beam of energy sizzled through the air no more than a foot away from him.
Without any words spoken, the stormtroopers instantly dove for cover along the walls of the corridor, raising their carbines and sending a hail of blaster bolts down toward the source of the beam. Phong and the techs followed suit a moment later. Then they began leapfrogging down the corridor, continuing their suppressive fire, until they reached the end - and found nothing besides ruined machinery and blaster-marred walls.
"What the kriff was that?" he asked in disbelief.
Then there was a clinking noise from the side corridor behind them that took even him only a fraction of a second to recognize.
"Detonator!" he shouted, diving for cover around the corner along with the other troops. But instead of the explosion they had all been expecting, there was a quiet pop and a hissing noise. Moments later, smoke began to fill the corridor.
Detecting the change in visibility, the helmets automatically switched to enhanced vision mode, painting the formerly foreboding atmosphere of the station in vibrant false colors.
Another crimson beam lanced out through the smoke screen, and Phong turned just in time to see a brightly glowing figure duck back into cover.
"Contact at three o'clock," he said, swinging his carbine around and letting loose a quick burst of shots that blew smoking craters in their foe's cover. Once again, the stormtrooper squad began advancing under covering fire only to turn up a ruined packing crate and no sign of the assailant.
They continued advancing down the corridor until it came to a T-junction.
"Split up," the lead stormtrooper, Sergeant Kriglen, ordered. "Five and five. Keep your comlinks open."
Phong smirked slightly. In the holovids, whenever a group split up, it was almost always the first on their path to doom. Most holovid scriptwriters, however, had no military experience and so when they showed a group splitting up, it was almost always each being for itself. The smallest unit that a stormtrooper squad would typically split up into, in contrast, was a three-man fire team.
The other common cliché in holovids was that when a group would split up, either they would not have comlinks, or some technobabble excuse would be made to explain why theirs were not working. The reasons usually given in the vids might have been valid thousands of years before, but after all the time spent on SIGINT through the various wars in the galaxy, the end result had been a communication system that used tight band transmissions, randomly hopping frequencies and heavy encryption. Civilian models were restricted to a smaller chunk of spectrum but were still strong enough to preclude listening in or jamming in most cases. The only sure way to jam a comlink was therefore to put out as much high power hash as possible across the entire spectrum, which typically had the side effect of wiping out your own comms and required the sort of power output usually found on warships.
He somehow doubted these aliens were even familiar with the part of the spectrum that comlinks operated on.
"This side is a dead end," the other squad reported a few minutes later. "It ends at some sort of storage room with no exit. Storage room is clear."
"Return and re-group," Kriglen replied, then turned to Phong and the rest of the squad. "Look sharp. The hostile had to go this way, so chances are he's going to try and set up an ambush."
Phong nodded, mentally noting to keep at the back of the squad just in case. He'd had plenty of marksmanship training as part of his Navy regimen, but being shot at up close and personal just wasn't really part of his job description.
"What I'd give to have a mouse droid right now," one of the troopers muttered to himself.
"Wouldn't work," one of the other troopers replied. "Its wheels would get caught in the grating. Now, one of those repulsor scout droids... that would be perfect."
"Keep it down back there," Kriglen said. "Unless you want me to make you two point men."
"No, Sergeant," they both replied in unison.
"Then move out," he barked.
"Yes, Sergeant."
They began moving again cautiously, and Kriglen called a stop after they had gone about twenty meters forward.
"Laser tripwire," he said quietly, pointing at a small emitter that had been placed across the corridor. "Explosives are probably hidden. Corporal Landot, it's your call."
Rob Landot was the explosives tech of the squad, and was also the heaviest member. When Diversion was on patrol duty in the Outer Rim, some nutcase saboteur had managed to get on board. Rob had just gone off duty when he discovered the saboteur, and without his sidearm had tackled and then suffocated the unfortunate idiot. The exact method had never been disclosed, but the rumors were that he had merely sat on him. Rob, of course, had never confirmed or denied any of the rumors.
"How far are we from the outside hull?" Rob asked.
Kriglen pulled out a datapad and checked. "About one hundred meters."
"Good. Then I won't hit anything important if I use a det," Rob replied. "Smallest charge, of course," he clarified when he caught the questioning look from the sergeant, then pulled one of the small metal spheres off his belt. He tossed it in the air experimentally a couple of times to get a feel for its weight, armed it and sent it rolling down the corridor.
"Damn, I'm good," he said when the thermal detonator rolled to a stop just short of the sensor. Then he took cover behind some obstructions in the corridor, and Phong and the others did likewise.
When it finally detonated, there were two explosions, the second one being larger than the first. The combined effect of both, however, was to send a fireball expanding through the corridor, knocking Phong back on his ass.
After the smoke cleared, the pulled themselves up, dusted the soot off their armor, and carefully moved forward to see what the damage was.
"Well, we wiped out all the oxygen in this area with that stunt," Kriglen remarked as he looked at the damage. Where the detonator had gone off, it had completely vaporized a hole in the deck plating and the nearby wall. Several feet away from it was an even larger gash torn in the metal, which presumably had been caused by the explosives intended for them. "It should be safe to proceed, but watch your footing. Especially you, Rob."
"Thanks a lot," Rob muttered under his breath.
They picked their way through the rubble and continued on, watching for more laser mines or any other traps. None were to be found, however, and they eventually stepped into a large circular chamber.
"Lot of cover here," Phong remarked as he took a step back into the corridor. Almost as soon as he had spoken, there was the crack of a discharging weapon and a orange-yellow beam streaked through the air next to his head. He had taken the safety off his carbine before he'd even thought about it, and had it up and ready to fire off a return shot by the time the second shot came, searing one of his plasteel shoulder pauldrons. His E-11 carbine flared to life in response, followed shortly afterward by the carbines and rifles of his squad mates. For a good several seconds, they blasted away at the accumulated junk in the general vicinity of the shots' origin.
"Move," Kriglen barked.
They dashed forward into the cover of what could possibly have been a ship's bulkhead. After lining up their sights and blasting away for another several seconds, they made another mad dash for another covered location several meters closer to the source, then paused to check their surroundings.
"Lifesigns?" Landot turned to Phong as he asked the question.
Phong shook his head. "I'd need a sensor grid in place. Suit's not giving me anything useful right now... too many shadows and other interference."
"Then I guess we just have to do this the hard way," Landot muttered, pulling another detonator off his belt, arming it, and lobbing it over the stack of debris toward the location of the mystery shooter. "Fire in the hole!"
A moment later, the detonator went off, its shockwave sending debris flying into the piece of armor plating they were all crouched behind. The plate shifted slightly from the impacts and blast wave before starting to creak ominously.
"Kriff, I think you dislodged our cover," Kriglen remarked. "Let's move."
They picked their way through the debris to where the detonator had gone off, finding a small crater and not much else.
"How many exits are there-" Landot began to ask before an orange-yellow bolt slammed into his breastplate, causing him to jerk back reflexively. The plasteel armor held, although there was a scorch mark where the bolt had impacted. "Alright jackass, that's it. Your ass is MINE."
"Don't do anything rash, Rob," Kriglen warned him.
"Rash?" Had Rob's helmet been off, he would have given Kriglen an innocent and offended look. As it was, he simply unclipped a heavier-yield detonator, armed it, and sent it flying toward the origin of the shot. They all hit the deck a moment later, just in time to see the flash from the miniature thermonuclear device as it initiated.
There were no further attempts to shoot at them as they picked their way through the debris toward the epicenter, and when they finally reached it they found a humanoid figure lying on the ground, its metallic armor scorched and blackened but still mostly intact. The humanoid's flesh had been seared in the few places it was exposed, but it was still drawing regular, if weak, breaths.
As the squad assembled around it, blasters pointed at the figure, it let its distorted and damaged weapon clatter to the deck, where Phong kicked it aside.
"Check the perimeter," Kriglen barked. "Make sure there aren't any more of them.
"All clear," they reported after a quick search.
"Bind him, then I want the four of you to take our prisoner back to the transport. Lieutenant Guyenn and the rest of the squad will continue searching for an access terminal."
"At once, Sergeant."
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Trying to figure out how to work the computer terminal, once they had found it that is, was another story entirely. The data that Phong had collected from the transmissions had allowed them to put together a translation database, but the systems aboard the relay station completely failed to follow everything they knew. There were some stickers that had been applied next to the terminal which listed Hirogen words next to the alien glyphs, but there was no way any protocol droid or translation program would be able to infer the meaning of an entire language from a handful of notes.
Which left them with the option of pressing buttons to see what would happen. Phong just hoped silently that the designers of the system had been smart enough to lock away dangerous functionality behind some type of security system, to prevent them from inadvertently blowing up the station or anything else of the sort. So far it had worked out, but every time he tried guessing at an entry on screen he hesitated.
Calm down, he told himself. No sane engineer puts self destruct or reactor control in a terminal without protecting it somehow. In fact, those shouldn't even be accessible from any random terminal!
Finally he saw one of the entries on the sticky notes, which roughly appeared to translate to "Start". He tapped it, and on the screen one of the alien messages began playing.
"You're recording this, I hope," Kriglen remarked quietly.
Phong reached up and tapped his helmet. "Holocam's on... they're seeing what I'm seeing back on the ship."
"I hope there aren't too many messages saved on this blasted thing," Rob remarked. "Because if we have to stand here and play every message, this could take forever."
"Tell me about it," Phong muttered. "I wish this had a droid socket so we could just download the messages and get out of here."
"Can you tell how many messages there are?" Kriglen asked.
"I'm not sure," Phong replied. "I think I've found the time elapsed, since the glyphs are changing pretty rapidly. Let's see... Huh."
"What is it?"
"I've got twenty-five glyphs on this counter. Base-25 seems like a pretty odd number system. At least that explains the 5x5 keypad."
The message ended shortly after, and Phong leaned in toward the screen. He frowned and pulled out a datapad, then began scribbling notes on its screen. "Looks like there's at least a few thousand messages here."
Behind him, Rob sighed loudly.
"I think there's a data port here," he added a few moments later, pulling out a meter and probes. "Sergeant, can you bring in the slicer droid?"
While Kriglen contacted the transport, Phong began checking the pins on the connector for voltage with his meter. By the time the droid arrived, he already had all of the pins wired up and it only took a few more moments to hook up the signal analyzer. The droid beeped its readiness, and he told it to begin working. The only thing left for them to do now was to sit and wait for the droid to finish.