'W-what do you mean… you… lost it?' Churled the Daughter of the Revolution by the end of the working-week – when the gathering of the seniors of the security-state had been called-up to put their collective noggins into the day's problem-solver get-together now that the unwelcome news of both an anomaly of titanic-proportions lurking in the Oort Cloud and the disappearance of two-billion Marks in shipbuilding had reached the government's desk on Heimat.
'How – how do – do you just – lose – a Penrose-type ship?'
It was a question aimed at the interrogatee on the far end of the long and crowded table that terminated with him at its end and point of interest for the dozen or more important faces who'd made the long trip through the government megabuildings to be here, from the two Revolutionaries themselves to their most loyal inner-circle – which happened to also include the Director of the Ministry of State Security.
The Stasi's chieftain alone made him sweat by the gallon and shit by the bucket, not least when he'd tried to fumble-finger his last precious ciggy to life with a cheap butane-lighter to kill the nerves and she'd hand caught his wrist as quick as a whip and brought the cigarette down, cherry-first into the glass ashtray – an elephant's graveyard of just-lit, card-wrap tobacco-tubes, where the weekly nicotine-ration went to die on the receiving-end of the Daughter's more personal anti-smoking crusade during more regular meetings between the heads of state and their department chiefs.
So he slurped some water to kill the dry knot on the back of his throat before he answered.
'Through… no fault of our own department in the Navy.' Said Counter-Admiral Spaun, chieftain of the extra-solar scouting-programme's department within the People's Navy stolidly as he teased the corners of his manila folder that'd been stuffed-up to the brink of explosion with notes and papers – held back from a mass-assassination that'd gut the Revolutionary government's upper-echelons under an avalanche-tide of papers only by a single age-dried rubber band that twanged guitar-string notes of warning with each fidget.
"Touch me one more time…" that band said. "And you'll know the meaning of shit-creek river-rapids with no paddle and a drinks umbrella for a boat, drippy-nipps."
And the Spaun-clan had been born with a wet-finger held-up first into the world. So, he let it be and tried not to pinball his eyes anywhere other than those of the Daughter – which was herculean feat, as that's the last place in the known universe they wanted to look.
He made to touch the band around his triple-decker bus-sized folder again.
The Daughter's eyes snapped-down at his little dread-tune-coming and scowled, pulling her thin lips back over canines out of something the Owl-units from the kindergarten he used to attend warned would come and gobble him out of his bed if he didn't eat all the turnips on his plate like a good Young Revolutionary Scout.
He let the folder go before he committed history's first assassination by filing-disaster and put both of his clammy palms on the table, face-down. And felt the gluey-stick of warm perspiration like papier-mâché against what had been a cold and very dry surface a moment before. Then peeled them back off when they stuck to the faux-wood's glossy beeswax layer, loud and juicy and kept them thumbs-upward to air-dry them off.
'Well?' The youngest of the two-woman show that ran the Nation prompted, no less fierce than before, now that precious washing detergent needed to be expended wiping-off the chubby handprint smears during a national emergency where even toilet paper was in critically-short supply for all.
Spaun felt the single sweat bead sliding down his spine, where it nestled in the reservoir building up in his damp nethers, turning the gooch into a hot, damp-streak that could glue iron – wondered what exactly he could say to dig himself out of this hot mess now that Mr. and Mr. Spaun's young lad had been carted-up to the chair at the end of the long table to explain his department's most recent fumbling, where his betters in the armed forces and civil government could watch him squirm as they chewed the fat over his department's latest pothole after the whole debacle of massive budget and cost-overruns, LSTR-Replika shortfalls and staffing-requirements.
Then, thinking that he should help to clarify his position if he actually said something, he piped: 'I can say on good confidence that this has never happened before in the programme.'
'I should hope not!' Guffawed his interrogator from the far side of the long table, with zero inflections of good humour in those hard blue eyes that neither blinked, nor had any other setting beyond aggrieved anger. 'Sweet He-Heimat, I was almost under the im-mpression losing valuable resources… necessary to our… national-security… in a time of scarcity was a pasti-'
Her lantern-jawed noggin whipped-about on a naught-to-hundred jerk to the serving-EULR who'd come as quiet as velvet out of nowhere, discreetly tending to the small glass kettle with a top-up of hot water for the few scraps of tea-leaves that had been shaken out of the pantry tin for meeting. The Owl caught the eyes that were mad as all hell, and almost dropped the teapot, had the Daughter not joined flesh with plastics in an impromptu showdown of One Potato, Two Potato to snatch it before second-degree burns would be on the doctor's list.
But the moment of camaraderie with the Replika against the insidious encroaches of spilled tea didn't put the snuffer-clip to whatever internal candlewick of fury burning until the inevitable explosion – just stuttered it for a moment long enough that Her Mother chimed-in on Her behalf.
Disturbing Cop had her say, he knew. Silent-Psycho Rozzer was on the case now.
'While you can rest assured that a full investigation into your – culpability – in this affair will be undertaken by the Ministry for Sate Security… you have yet in the meantime to explain how exactly you have managed to lose one of our valuable scouting vessels that has come at National expenses of two-billion and thirty-million of our precious few remaining Marks – not to mention the valuable time and resources that could have gone into procuring a new missile frigate to help us alleviate the blockade of Vineta.'
Perhaps not an entire frigate… the room's almost-hidden KNCR almost heard Spaun retort in the very, very deepest part of his soul. Maybe just a corvette…
Out loud however, he cleared his throat delicately with a fist of fingers that tried their hardest to wriggle-off in all cardinal-directions away from the senior-management that still wanted his balls in the stewpot, while his other hand rattled a tune on the table and behind him, he heard the creak of beechwood and ersatz-leather shifting under two-hundred kilos of plastic, muscle and Play-Doh meat they grew in vats trying to tune-in on Radio Spaun.
Back there in the shadowy corner, making little attempt to remain inconspicuous, he knew the Crane-unit was prodding the edges of his mind with a stick for anything interesting and hopefully treasonous to start wriggling and tried not to think about the Stechkin machine-pistol the Replika packed in case someone got feisty. He didn't fancy a twenty-round, rapid-fire brain-rearrangement.
So, the man in the People's Navy colours cleared his throat with the sound of a peppermill working-down some particularly-obtuse grains that smoothed-out into the rattle of a salt-shaker instead after a sip of chemically-reclaimed bog-water minding its own ecologically-exciting business in the silver-bottomed mug the chairs came provided with.
'A… As you will think… see – see – I have brought with myself a team of our brightes… brightest minds on the subject from the Universities of Sector-A and Ö.' He managed with a voice like a diesel two-cylinder on a cold Winter's morning and flicked a finger over at a gaggle of specimens in home-knit cardigans, woven together by doting wives with love and not an indecent amount of swearing at the poor-quality yarn that had more in common with hairy jute twine. They looked like static-charged porcupines ready to explode if you held a balloon near them.
The other heads of departments and ministries of the table thought there was enough of a whopper charged between the three that if they as much as leaned in this place where the future was planned down to the individual ration's gram of synthetic-meat on a daily-basis by this cabal of wise people and their wise ideas of coffee-fuelled (and quite possibly-addled) minds, they might blast a crater this deep into Heimat, where possibly not even Earth's own enormous orbital-defence guns could reach.
And for this, two of the most scrotum-wrinkled brains this side of the solar system had been scraped up out of the dozens of government agencies, organs, classrooms and labs to sit down and explain in the terms of everyman just why the Nation's listening posts out on Leng were now being pelted by yottabytes worth of information.
And also, if there was still time after the tea, coffee and biscuits was served, just where had an entire interstellar reconnaissance and prospecting starship just disappeared to?
Fortunately, the refreshment trolley had broken down a few floors up after it'd thrown a wheel on an elevator-gap, so there was ample time to power straight back on to business in the tradition of Vineta's old tech-company business meetings that bulldozed right over lunchbreaks before that world had been slagged, much to the consternation of the middle-management present, who hadn't eaten yet and were now experiencing the full wonders of class-egalitarianism with the proletariat until those pastries arrived.
Although most of the chairs could agree that what they had listened to in the meantime until that trolley had been manhandled into the meeting room was in fact words - a lot of them… a whole lot of them in fact – they had in the tradition of Vinetan upper-management – dozed-out halfway through and came back only at the end.
'We have no idea. Not really – at least not beyond wagering a guess that it had something to do with our opening assault on Kitezh and the use of bioresonant units for it. Beyond that… we really don't have any satisfactory answers – at least not yet that I care to say, lest we start getting distracted by treading into wild guessing.' Said the biggest chief scientist of all – and also coincidentally, the chief reason everyone had started getting a bad case of grumbly-belly-syndrome.
The Daughter could practically see the flexing and rippling brain muscles bubbling his skull to putty from the mental-horsepower on display. Truly it was a brilliant day for the Nation's science and industry if it took so much effort to say "fucked if I know, chief".
It was a sentiment shared by Empire-ACTUAL across the worlds.
Though this had only come after an hour of lowering the bar of explenation so far down the pegs that ants were about capable of belly-crawling under it.
'I d-don't s-uppose we've… had any luck deciphering what exactly… a-a-all these broadc-c-c-asts are saying?' The Daughter demanded of the speaker's colleague, who'd been staring at the big tile-mural wall vacantly for the past hour while playing with an old puzzle-cube.
He almost jumped when spoken to.
'Unfortunately-uh-yeah-uhm, no. Yes, not really. We're – well… I guess also not really entirely decided on the matter either – about whether this anomaly broadcasting is… oh-uh… oh dear, I am… so sorry Mister-ah-yum… Minister of Postal Services and Telecommunications… oh, now that's rather a long name… goodness gracious, I seem to have tipped a water pitcher down you – so sorry… ah? Oh! Yes… wholly synthetic in nature or something more sinister entirely… our department people haven't figured that one out yet – though I would personally wager that what we are hearing is in fact made by man and not nature.' He said and pushed the little shoebox cassette player over to the middle of the long table and bopped the big red go-button.
The sounds that came from the speaker sounded like its death throes brought about by gravy-drowning – sounds that in their own experience should not have been coming from any audio device that wasn't imminently going to explode for the sweet release of stereo-death.
'We aren't hearing the sounds of the cosmos?' Asked the Great Revolutionary in her tired grumble, ever the matters of state and now apparently space-time conundrums going boing! keeping her from too much sleep.
'No, it's nothing like what you'd get from a planetary body or even a black hole – what we're all listening to here is something else entirely. This is too… uhm… '
'Mechanical? Inharmonious?' Supplied the elder chieftainess and he nodded, happy for the help.
'Not really… I'd just say… well… loud. See, cosmic background noise typically comes at you in the double-digit megahertz-range – fifteen and over… up to about… say… thirty-something megahertz.' The recorder-machine was tapped a few times.
'This – all of this – is all in the double-digit terahertz-range… there's just nothing natural that can possibly generate this much… stuff to put it bluntly that we know of. Yes, well… I suppose, it could be something natural that we may not have discovered in the cosmos but please, consider this do: one of our ships disappears – then out of nowhere, we start receiving so much information through this anomaly that on Leng entire communications and listening facilities are effectively shut down by it. They're just overwhelmed by the amount of information they're receiving. Nothing in our current telecommunications-industry is currently producing anything that can transmit in the terahertz range… the main utility of such frequency-ranges would be interplanetary-communications.'
The Daughter cocked a brow at Her Mother and asked conspiratorially, though with little effort to keep her voice low enough to block the ears about them from eavesdropping: 'Y-ou know what th-they say about – about B-b-b-b…'
The chairs inspected the fine finish on the table when they heard the rippling pop-crackle of knuckles firing-off as two fists were balled knuckle-white. The members of the ad-hoc Synchronised Table-Inspection Taskforce thought it was a wicked thing to make fun of someone's disabilities and they weren't wicked people. They might sentence people to space-gulags, the firing-squads and secret government facilities that didn't exist, but they weren't bad people. Not as per such.
Even the Politburo needed to know there was something even lower than its members… even if that was only earthworms six feet under that needed to bend-down to spit on them.
'B-Biores…resonance… about it being an… extrat-t-'rerrestrial phenom-menon…'
She let the words hang on the public washing line to aerate as was pleased. Just some food for thought and no concrete conclusions as of yet.
'You believe that all of this… unfortunate distraction is related?' The Mother opined while her offspring sipped delicately at a milkless sugar-deficient tea.
'Might be.' Came the response, before the Daughter cleared Her throat with a quick growl of someone who was neither clogged nor bothered by pesky phlegm and was bringing the conversation back on track to more important matters.
'I think that we shou.. should excuse the admiral's gen-ntlemen. I think what Comrade-G-estalt Prussa has to tell us will shed further light on this m-matter.'
And another follow-up nod had the egg-heads packing up their notes and folders for them, almost sloshing a small Gestalt's own neatly-organised leatherbounds with the water carafe kept topped-up by the hand-selected memory-wiping EULR servants, but the Daughter again caught the offending object and only the table's Bakelite wood-impersonator got caught in the splash.
The men left and two of the domestic Replika slipped silently into the room, unheard by anyone and started to towel the surface off while her comrade passed a tray to the small would-have-been-splashed woman who took it with a nod that didn't look at the Owl.
The Gestalt in question who had more in common with a prize-fighter than a civil-servant, all greyed and wrapped up in the bland olive uniform of the internal intelligence bureau's upper echelons, jewelled only by a single medal earned for saving the life of the Mother of the Revolution. She gestured to the mural-wall facing the two Revolutionaries as a screen lowered down over its hand-in-hand Gestalt and Replika wombo-combo.
When the Great Revolutionary's personal secretary of intelligence spoke in her stop-and-start way like a wind-up clockwork soldier, it was with a weight of gravitas carried by none other apart from the mother and daughter.
'As of two cycles ago… our interstellar observatories on Leng have lost all contact with the Penrose-type scouting vessel Five-One-Two… and have for that time between now and then, been wholly-unable to relocate the ship in question… All radar-returns have ceased from both terrestrial and orbital stations keeping these scouting vessels tracked and planned… and we are no longer able to establish radio-contact… with not even visual-means being successful...'
Droned the red-light/green-light oral-traffic more like a yawn as she stared at a wall somewhere over Spaun's head, speaking not to a security council as much as a rehearsal to a bathroom mirror.
'It should be noted that this particular craft has spent the last few years attempting to make a return to Leng in spite of standing orders received by them to continue on with their mission… regardless of however worn-down their craft might be…'
She peeled the clicker from one of the recesses cut into the black foam-filled bamboo display control packing box to screw it into the hidden spool of cable tucked almost-flush into the table by each of the seats and keyed the first slide which was little more interesting than readouts from the Leng observation teams and their timekeeping records compared with notes, dates and times both in local Leng and Heimat meantimes.
'What we have now started to receive instead is a massive flow of radiowave transmissions coming from the direction that the ship was lost in… of which, as our comrades have earlier explained to us… very little can be understood of it… which has greatly hampered our ability to come to grips with what it is we are dealing with as the frequencies change at random every thousandth of a second.'
Click went the little machine, and the projector set into the black slab of onyx that connected the two halves of nearly-wood-looking plastic hummed in mechanical reports as it tilted the image off and over the edge and slipped a new one in behind it: the sheer magnitude reports of such a massive attack opened up on the Imperial swine on the reddest desert.
'The internal and external agencies of intelligence-gathering believe that this may have come as a result of the massive bioresonant attack that we opened the impending liberation of Kitezh with… we believe that the combined output of the Falcon-units taking part in the assault might have caused a rift in the fabric of time and space... or so it has been explained to me over a great deal of time…'
Comrade Prussa clicked the remote one last time to bring up a slide of… something.
All heads, save for Prussa turned to the slide-door as the three-piece deadbolts snapped back into the black blast door hidden between the wood latticework and paper panels that covered it and in marched a pair of Heimat's finest STAR commandos, bearing between them like a litter, a tray of the same deep mahogany Bakelite that bore whatever was shown on the screen.
Prussa pointed at the indistinct cylinder of black titanium and resin plating, who's dark-as-midnight finish left everyone (including the venerable old intelligence spook) at a loss for which end was which, exactly.
'We have also come into the possession of a probe-drone not of our own design recovered from Heimat orbit, travelling at some speed… It isn't ours… and neither is it of Imperial manufacture... See not only the sensory equipment… which is not only purely electronic in nature… but also rather advanced… much more so than our own probes of similar size which run off a mixture of onboard fission reactor and solar panels… while this machine here runs exclusively off nuclear fusion in a micro-reactor no larger than your palm… which is a technology that has long-eluded our best efforts to achieve…'
She then excavated a telescoping pointer of stainless steel from the first box that took up her leather mat and tapped it on the casing. 'Though we may not currently see it under present environmental conditions… there is in fact information that has been painted onto the side of this object here… and here…'
Click when the remote and whir went the projector.
Same image as before now under the purple haze of an UV-lamp. Lit up now like a Christmas tree unknown nowadays to the Nation, was lettering and numbers – none in the standard-issue Nation or Imperial fonts – none carrying any information telling of either.
The largest of all was the acronym UNSC that covered the upper half of the semi-hard-edged prove over the smaller SLIPSAPCE MARITIME SURVEILLANCE CORPS. Furthermore, there were just numbers – C319 and others – a random assortment of alphanumerical spaghetti that meant nothing to either the table's resident intelligence subject-expert or the rest.
'As you can see… this is also not written in the standard languages as codified by Revolutionary Manifesto… nor even any approved-font that we are familiar with… however we were able to backtrack and have found a matching language dating to pre-Imperial Vineta… Unfortunately, our lexicon for this dead language is hardly complete… and we are not entirely sure what these…' She gestured the words SLIPSPACE and SURVEILLANCE. '…mean… but we have managed to translate the rest to "UNSC Maritime Corp"...'
Appreciative silence reigned-large for a moment before department head of ӔON was the first to break their silence with a sip of water from her own glass. 'Are you saying that we have found signs of alien life, Comrade Prussa?'
'Yes, Comrade-Gestalt… Although, so far, we have managed to ascertain only that these people are likely Gestalts in their nature like us… if we correlate language and this machine's recognisable technology… However, despite the advanced technology on display… we have as of yet not seen any evidence of their own Bioresonance abilities… in either this machine or their transmissions… though here is where I have to state that the technology we are using to take these measurements is struggling to operate over not only such distances… but also through a special anomaly such as what we are looking at…'
The head of the secret-service turned to look about the whole room as the collective whole and the executor of the state-coming to make the gravity of their shared situations felt by her tired, baggy eyes.
'Please keep in mind that what I say from this point onward is purely theoretical guesswork at the moment… but if we are to come to any assumption… it will be off of two things only... which is that a language otherwise dead to the Eusan system for generations is still in use… as well as that their technology being so similar to ours in spite of its more-advanced nature... it might perhaps be that we are looking at a parallel timeline of our own world that we inhabit… one perhaps either further forward in time than us… or where Bioresonance never became a technological crutch to these people... as some of our own thinkers would have us believe…'
With a thrust, the pointer shuttered down on itself. 'This probe has already been examined by the science committee of the Nation… and already we're hard at work reverse-engineering this machine for not only its civil and military benefits to our great Nation… but also if we were to encounter these others face-to-face… now I would only ask us all to come to a concrete agreement on our next course of action going forward from here...'
A General in olive ceremonial dress twitched the fingers of her steepled fists she leaned herself on in gesture. 'What options do we realistically have? I'm under the impression that there's not much we can do at the moment. This anomaly is out at the edge of the Oort, yes?'
'That would be the case – maybe…' stressed Prussa. 'We don't actually have any firm data on where it ends, but this could be it.'
'But it would take years for any ship of ours to get there as I understand it.'
'True, unfortunately. Existing methods of propulsion would mean us arriving decades at the earliest under constant Vinetan-standard acceleration. We could shave that down to maybe some years with a very, very fast ship with either a Replika crew or none at all – but then you'd still need to reverse-burn when you got there, lest it just carry on going and hit something we might not want it to... say a planet or another ship of a people more advanced than us…' Explained a Gestalt who's stomping ground was the People's Navy.
'Not now while we're still fighting a fully-mobilised war against the pigs on Buyan…'
And there was a moment of silence as some thought and others waited for the answer.
'What if…' the Daughter started, rattling her manicured fingers on rolling thuds that brought the table to subconscious heel. 'What if…'
She turned her Mother – who together, she made up the chiefs of all Falcon-operations. 'How… how would – shou… How best should I… phrase this? Would one or more F-alcons working together be able t-to place a probe of our own by the anomaly?'
'Perhaps.' She thought aloud. 'It would take a tremendous amount of effort on the unit's part and would likely leave them catatonic afterward, but I see it as a possibility that we could explore if no other alternatives have presented themselves.'
'Unfortunately, we don't have any other alternatives. The tremendous number of resources being expended on both the war and the Penrose Programme as well as the elevated priority of the Navy's needs above scientific ventures has left us in a difficult position.' Said the Navy's spokesperson on the ground, who had already brushed-up on the numbers beforehand.
She shook her head. 'Even if we recycled an already-existing class of fast starship in use for this mission and modified it only ever so slightly with the necessary equipment, the shipyards wouldn't start for the better part of seven years from now and even then, it could take a year or more to get the product and about another fifteen before it even gets there.'
'So…' the Great Revolutionary reminded the company present of her existence again as she often did when her subordinates counseled and spoke flaws and merits about their plans. 'If we want to get a ship there, we could wait twenty years or if we wanted a probe there now, we would be looking at a one-way mission for whoever would be involved?'
There was a quiet for a moment as the heads of departments, corporations and other government organs retreated back into their own professional fields of thought to fart up any of their own solutions, but found none, which was largely unsurprising for the Chief of Public Cultural Enlightenment (read: propaganda) in particular, who could do no more than throw the leaflets of emancipation and liberation at the same Imperial soldiers who used them to wipe their arses with in lieu of proper bumfodder.
The Daughter rattled her fingers. 'Right now… our – our campaign has gone…. Wonderfully – on Kitezh… we might – may-maybe have comm-mmissioned too many Falcons for this great en-ndeavour.'
'Now there's a thought.' Echoed Her Mother, tapping her chin with forefingers. 'We will give this some serious thought…'
The younger of the two turned to Spaun, who'd tried to huddle in his chair – which is on the same level of impossibility as pulling yourself up by the bootstraps because it's not physically possible to huddle by yourself.
'W-well… I th-think we can… be per-suaded to let you off the hoo-hook, Admiral.' She said with a winning smile that was far too much teeth and little mirth to ever put anyone at ease. The sort you get before someone hauls-off and beats you to death with a spanner if you breathed too loudly.
She turned it into the grin of a shark at the orthodontist's. 'A-at leas-st you haven't lost-t - lost another!'
And Spaun said nothing.
Nobody else said anything.
Sometimes silence comes with its own megaphone and subwoofers to make itself known.
And by the Revolution, wasn't Spaun just saying a whole lot of nothing.
It was louder than any scream.
'You – you…' Spluttered the Daughter, who's eye twitched in anger-regenerating, aimed like a rifle down a calloused finger pointing head-on at him. 'H-ave lost one – ano… another… You have… haven't you?'