Chapter 3: The Commander

"Frameshift drive charging, 4, 3, 2, 1, engage."

The wormhole though witchspace burst open, and the massive gravity wave that had been charging on his ass launched his ship through the higher dimension, carrying him to his destination. The projections of stars from the lower dimensions, or hell even stars that existed there, clouds, lighting from them, and the whispers everyone swore they heard, but only though their own whispers in private, passed on by like they had many times before.

He had arrived at some random system with a random sector designation, a salad of letters and numbers that made sense only to people that understood it. Not him, certainly. The name didn't matter, but only how much scan data he could acquire, and it's worth when he finally reached Colonia. It certainly wasn't the first time he went there, getting his first elite rank in exploration with a trip to Sagittarius A*. The point of that trip was the rank itself for access to Dezrah, and the best market of the entire galaxy that was the Jameson Memorial station.

Then he had a longer jump range on his Krait Phantom, almost seventy light years. He didn't want to spend a hundred million credits or so to ship the thing and it's heavily engineered modules for daily drive, so he settled with driving it as is with its reliable thirty four-ish range, bumped up to almost fourty five with a cargo rack replaced with a Guardian booster. He kept it's full load out otherwise so he would be ready to go in Colonia when he got there and started grinding the factions there for their credits and materials. He was also going to buy a fleet carrier with the exo-bio data in hand to dabble with long range rare goods trading, and possibly expand Grom's influence to the second forming bubble.

The trip was longer with the lower range than a true exploration kit, but more decompressing and relaxing as he nearly autonomously scanned worlds with music playing, probed ones worth it, and scanned ground side life where it existed. There was more opportunity for it than gunning it as short a time as possible, especially of systems passed over by the longer range vessels slightly off the beaten path as he was. His normal load out included a surface scanner and SRV anyway for ground ops, so it wasn't like he needed to refit anything except the rack when he got to the end of the trip.

The discovery scanner honked, and he was elated when he saw almost two hundred bodies pop up. He was still scooping the star and positioning the ship to charge up the positive z axis relative to the established orbital plane when his COVAS spoke up.

"I expect this to be a profitable system commander. I am also detecting anomalies worth investigating."

He was scrounging around a ruin for Ram Tah one time and stumbled upon a damaged but non hostile Guardian drone, that he quickly found out was a marooned AI when he got it back to the ship. He was intending to simply deliver it to the engineer, and galaxy's foremost expert on the ancient civilization. Instead she simply took on the role of his cockpit assistant to maintain a cover, happy to do anything else that wasn't staring at a crumbling wall for three million years. He wasn't sold on the idea at first, his tormentor pointed at his reactor threatening to blow them both if she didn't get the fuck out of his ship, but he came around eventually. Verity was a trusted co-pilot, and maybe even friend.

"Any clue about them?" He asked.

"That would spoil the surprise, would it not? I believe some humans like surprises."

"Am I one of them?" He chuckled.

"I have insufficient data to determine. Your reaction to them is classified as, mixed. Either way, we must resolve it further with the FSS. Fuel scooping complete."

"Fair enough." He said as he hit the overcharge and rocketed away from the system's main A class start to get it out of the way of the scanner.

He started of course wit the immediate surroundings, but salivated at the Earth like hiding somewhere and the high metal content worlds that could be terraformable. He also noted the amount of lower band signal sources, something that shouldn't be in an unexplored system. Names would pop up if anyone had been here before. There were no ammonia worlds according to the lack of their signals, and they weren't particular close to a nebula. It probably wasn't Thargoids. If it was there would only be a single, or maybe even two sources for probes, not the blanket on the lower bands he was reading.

"Verity."

"I believe we are thinking along similar lines commander."

"There could be a civilization over on that Earth like just getting into space." He fiddled with the FSS and found none of the signal sources, nor the Earth like were around the main stellar mass. They were around the G class further out in the binary system.

"First contact, and we will make it."

"Do we want to make it?"

"Someone will, you know this commander. Do you trust them?"

"No. We don't have good history with first contacts. Someone else would get all those people killed or conquered before they even had a chance to get on their feet."

"They could be a lost generation ship, just now reaching out again."

"So just conquered, and not killed."

"I believe you were trying to conquer Colonia for Yuri Grom, commander."

He zeroed his FSS on the Earth like first when he turned it to the second star, "So I'm a hypocrite. They've had enough time to put a power up to keep freedom from being spread to their stars. If Jacques didn't do it already...Holy shit, you hear that?"

There was an unmistakable din of familiar sounding radio traffic, obviously encrypted somehow to prevent a clear read of it, "You know I do commander. It is unlike any human traffic I have analyzed, but it is human. So a generation ship."

"Completely different from anything else?"

"They obviously developed along their own path."

"To something completely different?"

"One thousand years is or more is no small amount of time in isolation, especially for Guardian constructs like myself. We must get closer to better resolve it."

His system updated them from unknown, to human-like signal sources. He angled his phantom and put full throttle to to the super cruise while looking over to the nav panel. He tabbed into the entry for the Earth like and activate his super cruise assist. When it was time, he would throttle back to half and fully activate it to let it guide him in. Verity could easily do it herself, without the assist installed, but that might look suspicious the right eyes. He would have an entire galaxy after his head if anyone caught wind of the stowaway in his computers. He was always adamant she do nothing to alter his systems, especially to give him some kind of advantage.

For now he simply hit the go faster button on his throttle and she called out, "Warning, frame shift drive operating beyond safety limits."

The ship felt like it dropped back a bit, then had a slingshot drive it forward to past maximum speed in short order. The ship started a small rock, then a violent heave and ho from side to side as he fought the controls to keep it somewhat inline.

Why the SCO sucked so much in a ship designed from speed and performance he didn't know. Sure the new ships designed around the new paradigm shifting update to the FSD made sense to be supremely controllable and fuel efficient, but it didn't make much sense that his conda, or even his Mk. II was more fuel efficient and controllable than his phantom in SCO. It didn't really matter. Not much would get him to give up tried and true bubble bus, an underrated multi-role craft you had to know how to tinker with and build it to get to sing for you.

He tapped the boost button again and cut off the overcharge. He was at fifty percent fuel and made it around 100k light seconds towards his destination another 400k light seconds away. His ship cooled fast, and when the warring for the frame shift cool down passed, he hit the button again and went faster again. When his fuel reserves hit 25 percent he cut the throttle again at under 100k light seconds further. Two fifths of the journey was over. At the speed he was going deep in the void between the two starts, with no gravity wells around, he would complete the rest in short order. No more then a few more minutes rather than the dozen or more it would have taken otherwise.

He leveled his ship and rode the gravity wave all the way though the black to the signals hiding out in them when he got close enough he cut the throttle to zero, and slowed down to the slowest possible speed any FSD could go, 30 kilometers per second, the barest fraction of the speed of light, one percent of it. He toggled his FSS and focused in on the earth like again, this time picking a specific signal source, the strongest of the ones orbiting the planet, some kind of station he guessed.

"It appears to be a station. The chatter is similar in structure, but still encrypted heavily."

"Can you decrypt it?"

"It...would take time."

"Time?"

"It's as if it was encrypted specifically against intrusion or code breaking from artificial intelligence. Perhaps even by artificial intelligence."

"So things get more complicated."

"...UNSC...Peace...Lasky...Infinity…Copy…"

"Can you resolve that? That's plain fucking English. Generation ship might be right."

"No. we must get closer. They no doubt tired send a signal directly along the FSS frequency. It is still an unfamiliar schema. I expect you will have to scan communications infrastructure directly for me to be able to facilitate communications between the two architectures."

He took a deep breath. He had to do something to tell them he heard them, but the FSS wasn't made to communicate, just resolve and monitor. He jammed the throttle, and pulled the stick back. A loop around would be out of place enough to acknowledge. them in some way. They obviously had him on sensors if they could send a signal directly to him.

The Phantom continued on its straight course again, and when it was time, around seven seconds, he pulled the throttle back and engaged the assist completely. The blue words popped up on the HUD marking this event, and the time to target hovered at the seven seconds for a few more before finally dropping down. If he wanted to drop faster, he would have waited for six seconds, then feathered the throttled to keep the time to at six for a faster approach vector to the target. He didn't want to seem aggressive to them. Hell, they may have already seen his SCO maneuvers and though something was up.

After the distance hit 1 million meters, the ship decelerated hard as the gravity wave of super cruise dissipated with a loud crack and a blue-white hot streak behind him. His eyebrows shot up and he jaw almost hit the deck of his ship. In front of him was a six kilometer long brick, a kilometer tall, and nearly a kilometer wide, with some angling for plates of armor across its massive hull. It was no station. It was a mega ship, a super capital ship, the largest ever seen or made.

Another ship easily twice the size of even a corvette or cutter, but not near even a fleet carrier capital ship, was docking in its belly while another one was exiting in another part of it. There were dozens of other contacts, smaller and about half his phantom's size swarmed around it. His engineered sensors were long range, and he was picking them up from the ten kilometers, or slightly less, his targeting said he was away from the ship. Proudly across it's side was it's name he heard from the message, Infinity.

"They are attempting communications again commander. This time they do not have the FSS frequency vector to attenuate too. They are trying it again."

"And you still cant resolve their other encryption?"

"Not without intruding wirelessly into their networks. I do not wish to take that risk. I need the input from the data link scanner on their communications array."

"Which is itself a massive risk."

"Yet preferable to trying to hack people we know nothing about. As I said-"

"They could have their own AI. They would spot you, even if you bat them away with your ancient prowess."

"Are you implying things about my age? A lady?"

"Your pronouns were ro/bo for three million years."

"I could still space you."

"Then you would be a ghost ship, that someone would again spot unless you sit in the black and do nothing, again."

"A fair point, commander. What is your course of action?"

He turned over to his ship panel, and tabbed to the modules, "I shut down my weapons and hope they notice that when I deploy them."

"A sound course of action. From what I have seen so far, we could easily outrun them and jump away if it came to that. Assuming they do not hit us with whatever rather large weapons they are bound to have."

"Good to know."

His weapons were shut down, and he switched to his sensor fire group with the entire suite toggled on his primary trigger. The warning of course popped up that he was in the wrong mode, or he needed to be in super cruise, or that nothing was in range, but the d-link did its work. A blue wave started washing over the ship, and the phantom's software rendered a charging sound to denote that it was working. As his weapons deployed, two large beam lasers and two medium pack hound missile launchers, it was the longest few seconds of his life as he completed the scan.

The charging sound popped, and the navigation panel was ready to sub target anything that looked like a comm array to it. He was still alive, but the real test came when he had to get too close for comfort to complete the first contact ritual. He eased his throttle forward and flew headlong into the potential danger, as any properly space mad commander would. He may have mentally intoned a small prayer to Jameson as he did.