Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (66 page)

While this system was at the
distant edge of the Empire, far from the Homeworld and the Empress,
its defenses were not lacking: of the dozens of starships in orbit
around the two settled worlds and the hundreds plying the asteroid
belt, four were battlecruisers built within the last century.
Humans might have considered them old, until they understood that
the warriors of the Empire had sailed among the stars for over one
hundred thousand of Earth’s years. Even the most ancient of Her
warships still plying the void between the stars was tens of
thousands of years more advanced than the arriving stranger. Humans
would barely have recognized them as starships.

But the warriors charged with
protecting this far-flung system had no way of knowing the
primitive nature of the incoming stranger. Nor would they have
cared. The Empire had encountered other sentient races over the
millennia, and the first contact protocol was no different now than
it had been in ages past: the stranger would be greeted with
overwhelming force.

In unison, the four enormous
battlecruisers left orbit for the gravity anomaly at maximum
velocity, safe behind shields that could protect them from titanic
energy discharges and made them all but invisible to anything but
direct visual observation.

Behind them, smaller warships and
the planetary defense systems prepared to welcome the new arrival
should it prove more than a match for the great warships sent to
greet it.

***

“Bridge, this is
Survey...”

Captain McClaren frowned despite
himself. He knew that Lieutenant Amundsen’s survey team worked
fast, but they had been in-system less than fifteen minutes. It
often took days for them to identify the orbits of any planets in
the temperate zone unless they had extensive perturbation data on
the star or stars in the system. And that they rarely had:
humanity’s rapid expansion to the stars didn’t allow for years-long
observations of any given star. His frown deepened as he took in
the expression on Amundsen’s face in the comms display. The
normally very reserved man was uncharacteristically excited. And
just as frightened. “What is it, Jens?”

“Sir...” Amundsen
began, his pale blue eyes darting away momentarily to another
display. “Captain...we’ve confirmed not just one, but
two
planets in the
temperate zone...”

“Hot damn!” McClaren couldn’t help
himself. One planet that might have liquid water was miracle
enough. Their pre-jump analysis had suggested there was one, but
two had been too much to hope for. “That’s fantastic!”

“Sir...they’re both inhabited,”
Amundsen said in hoarse whisper. Normally a quiet man, often more
at home with the stars and planets than his fellow human beings,
the volume of his voice dropped with every word. “We didn’t have to
find their orbits. We found them from their neutrino and infrared
readings.” He paused. “I’ve...I’ve never seen anything like this.
Even Sol system doesn’t have this level of activity. The two
planets in the temperate zone are highly industrialized. There are
other points of activity throughout the asteroid belt, and on
several moons orbiting a solitary gas giant. We have also observed
ships through the primary telescope. Hundreds of them. They
are...nothing like ours.”

The captain sat
back, stunned.
First
contact
, he thought. Humans had explored
thousands of star systems and endless volumes of space, but had
never once encountered another sentient species. They had found
life aplenty on the hundred-odd discovered worlds that would
support human life or could be terraformed. From humble bacteria to
massive predators that would have been at home with Earth’s
dinosaurs, life in the Universe was as expansive as it was diverse
if you looked long and far enough. But no one had discovered a
single sign of sentient life beyond the mark
homo sapiens
had left behind in his
celestial travels.

Until now.

“Jesus,” the captain breathed,
conscious now of the entire bridge crew staring at him. They hadn’t
heard Amundsen’s words, but they immediately picked up on the
captain’s reaction. “XO,” he ordered, pulling his mind back to the
here and now, “let’s have the first contact protocols.” He looked
pointedly at Kumar. “I want to make damn sure these folks
understand we’re harmless.”

“Aye, sir,” Kumar replied crisply as
his fingers flew over his terminal. “Coming up on display one.” A
segment of the bridge wraparound screen darkened as the standing
orders for first contact appeared.

“Lieutenant Amundsen,” McClaren
ordered, “let’s see some of these ships of yours on display
two.”

“Sir.” Amundsen’s face bobbed about
slightly in the captain’s comms terminal as he patched the
telescope feed to another segment of the main bridge
display.

“Lord of All,”
someone whispered. The
Aurora’s
primary telescope was nearly ten meters across,
and dominated the phalanx of survey instruments mounted in the
massive spherical section that made up the ship’s bow. Normally
used to search for and map stellar and planetary bodies, it could
also be pressed into service to provide high magnification visuals
of virtually anything, even moving objects that were relatively
close, such as nearby (in terms of a stellar system)
ships.

But what it showed
now was as unlike the
Aurora
as she herself was unlike a wooden sailing ship.
While the
Aurora
was largely a collection of cylindrical sections attached to
a sturdy keel that ran from the engineering section at the stern to
the instrumentation cluster at the bow, the alien ship displayed on
the bridge display was insectile in appearance, her hull made up of
sleek curves that gave McClaren the impression of a gigantic
wasp.

“Why does the focus keep shifting?”
Marisova asked into the sudden silence that had descended on the
bridge. The alien vessel shimmered in the display as if a child
were twisting an imaginary focus knob for the primary telescope
back and forth, taking the image in and out of focus.

“That’s what I was
about to say,” Amundsen answered, McClaren now having shifted the
survey team leader’s image onto yet a third segment of the bridge
display. Before he had seemed both excited and frightened. Now it
was clear that fear was crowding out his excitement. “That is one
of at least four ships that is heading directly toward us from the
outer habitable planet. The reason you are seeing the focusing
anomaly is because the ships are moving at an incredible velocity,
and the telescope cannot hold the image in alignment. Even what you
see here has been enhanced with post-processing.” He visibly
gulped. “Captain, they knew we were coming, hours, possibly even a
few days, before we arrived. They knew right where we were going to
be, and they must have left orbit before we arrived. They
must
have. It’s
theoretically possible to predict a hyperspace emergence, but...we
now know that it’s not just a theory.” He looked again at one of
his off-screen displays, then back to the monitor. “I don’t know
exactly what their initial acceleration rate was, but they’re now
moving so fast that the light we’re seeing reflected from their
hulls is noticeably blue-shifted. I estimate their current velocity
is roughly five percent of C.”

Five percent of
the speed of light
, McClaren thought,
incredulous.
Nearly fifteen thousand
kilometers per second
.
And they didn’t take much time to reach it
.

“I’m trying to estimate their
acceleration rate, but it must be-”

“A lot higher than we could ever
achieve,” McClaren cut him off, looking closely at the wavering
image of the alien vessel. “Any idea how big she is?”

“I have no data to estimate her
length,” Amundsen replied, “but I estimate the beam of this ship to
be roughly five hundred meters. I can only assume that her length
is considerably more, but we won’t know until we get a more oblique
view.”

“That ship is five
hundred meters
wide
?” Kumar asked, incredulous.
Aurora
herself was barely that long
from stem to stern. While she was by no means the largest starship
built by human hands, she was usually the largest vessel in
whatever port she put into.

“Yes,” Amundsen told him. “And the
other three ships are roughly the same size.”

“Christ,” someone
whispered.

“Raj,” McClaren said, turning to his
exec. “Thoughts?”

“Communications is running the
initial first contact sequence now.” He turned to face the captain.
“Our signals will take roughly thirty minutes to reach the inner
planets, but those ships...” He shook his head. “They’re close
enough now that they should have already received our
transmissions. If they’re listening.” He looked distinctly
uncomfortable. “If I were a betting man, I would say those were
warships.”

McClaren nodded grimly. “Comms,” he
looked over at Ensign John Waverly, “keep stepping through the
first contact communications sequence. Just make sure that we’re
listening, too.”

“I’m on it, sir,”
the young man replied. Waverly seemed incredibly young, but like
the rest of
Aurora’s
crew, he did his job exceptionally well. “I’m well versed in
the FCP procedures, sir. So far, though, I haven’t come across any
emissions anywhere in the standard spectrum, other than what
Lieutenant Amundsen’s team have already reported. If they use
anything anywhere in the radio frequency band, we’re sure not
seeing it. And I haven’t identified any coherent light sources,
either.”

So, no radio and
no communications lasers
, McClaren thought
uneasily. Even though the aliens knew that company was coming, they
had remained silent. Or if they were talking, they were using some
form of transmission that was beyond what
Aurora
was capable of seeing or
hearing. Maybe the aliens were beyond such mundane things as radio-
and light-based communications?

“How long until
those ships get here?” McClaren asked Amundsen, whose worried face
still stared out from the bridge display screen.
Aurora
herself was
motionless relative to her emergence point: McClaren never moved
in-system on a survey until they knew much more about their
environment than they did now. And it made for a much more
convenient reference point for a rapid jump-out.

“At their current velocity, they
would overshoot us in just under three hours. But, of course, they
will need to decelerate to meet us...”

“That depends on their intentions,”
Kumar interjected. “They could attack as they pass
by...”

“Or they could simply stop,”
Marisova observed quietly. Everyone turned to gape at her. “We know
nothing about their drive systems,” she explained. “Nothing about
those ships registers on our sensors other than direct visuals.
What if they achieved their current velocity nearly instantaneously
when they decided to head out to meet us?”

“Preposterous,” Amundsen exclaimed.
“That’s simply not possible!”

“But-”

“Enough, people,”
McClaren said quietly. “Beyond the obviously impressive
capabilities of the aliens, it all boils down to this: do we stay
or do we go?” He looked around at his bridge crew, then opened a
channel to the entire ship. “Crew, this is the captain. As I’m sure
most of you are now aware, the system we’ve entered is inhabited.
We’re in a first contact situation. The
only
first contact situation anyone
has ever faced. So what we do now is going to become part of The
Book that will tell others either how to do it right, or how not to
do it if we royally screw things up. I’ll be completely honest with
you: I’m not happy with the situation. We’ve got four big ships
heading toward us in an awful hurry. They could be warships. I
don’t blame whoever these folks are for sending out an armed
welcoming committee. If it were my home, I’d send some warships out
to take a look, too.

“But I’d also make sure to send some
diplomats along: people who want to talk with their new neighbors.
What bothers me is that we haven’t seen anything, from the ships or
the two inhabited planets, that looks like any sort of
communication. Maybe they’re just using something we can’t pick up.
Maybe the ships coming our way are packed with scientists and
ambassadors and they want to make it a big surprise. I just don’t
know.

“What I do know is that we’ve got
about three hours to make a decision and take action. My
inclination is to stay. Not to try and score the first handshake
with an alien, but because...it’s our first opportunity to say
hello to another sentient race. We’ve been preparing for this
moment since before the very first starship left Earth. It’s a
risk, but it’s also the greatest opportunity humanity has ever
had.

“So here’s what we’re going to do.
We’ve got a little bit of time to discuss our options before our
new friends reach us. Department heads, talk to your people. Get a
feel for what they’re thinking. Then all department heads and the
senior chiefs are to meet in my ready room in exactly one hour.
I’ll make the final decision on whether we stay or go, but I want
to hear what you all have to say. That is all.” He punched the
button on the touchpad, closing the circuit.