Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (67 page)

“In the meantime,” he told Kumar and
Marisova, “get an emergency jump sequence lined up. Pick a
destination other than our inbound vector. If these ships come in
with guns blazing, the last thing I want to do is point them back
the way we came, toward home.”

On the display screen, the alien
ship and her sisters continued toward them.

***

The four battlecruisers sailed
quickly to meet the alien vessel, but they hardly revealed their
true capabilities. While it was now clear that the alien ship was
extremely primitive, those who guarded the Empire took nothing for
granted. They would reveal no more about themselves than absolutely
necessary until they were sure the new arrival posed no threat. The
Empire had not lasted through the ages by leaving anything to
chance.

Aboard the lead ship, a group of
warriors prepared for battle with the unknown, while healers and
other castes made ready to learn all there was to know about the
strangers.

They did not have much longer to
wait.

***

There was standing
room only in the captain’s ready room an hour later. At the table
sat the six department heads, responsible for the primary
functional areas of the ship, the
Aurora’s
senior chief, and the
captain. Along the walls of the now-cramped compartment stood the
senior enlisted member of each department and the ship’s two
midshipmen. The XO and the bridge crew remained at their stations,
although they were tied in through a video feed on the bridge
wraparound display.

The emotional tension ran high among
the people in the room, McClaren could easily see. But from the
body language and the expressions on their faces it wasn’t from
fear, but excited anticipation. It was an emotion he fully
shared.

“I’m not going to waste any time on
preliminaries,” he began. “You all know what’s going on and what’s
at stake. According to the Survey Department,” he nodded at
Amundsen, who was the only one around the table who looked
distinctly unhappy, “the ships haven’t changed course or velocity.
So it looks like they’re either going to blow by us, which I think
would probably be bad news, or their technology is so radically
advanced that they can stop on a proverbial dime.”

At that, the survey leader’s frown
grew more pronounced, turning his normally pale face into a
grimace.

“Amundsen?” McClaren asked. “You’ve
got something to say. Spit it out.”

“I think Lieutenant Marisova was
right,” he said grudgingly, nodding toward the video pickup that
showed the meeting to the bridge crew. But McClaren knew that it
wasn’t because Marisova had said it. It was because he was afraid
to believe that what she said could possibly be true, or even close
to the truth. “I don’t believe they could accelerate to their
current velocity instantaneously, but even assuming several days’
warning - even weeks! - the acceleration they must have achieved
would have to have been...unbelievable.” He shook his head. “No. I
believe those ships will not simply pass by us. They will slow down
and rendezvous with us sometime in the next two hours, decelerating
at a minimum of two hundred gees. Probably much more.”

A chill ran down
McClaren’s spine.
Aurora
had the most efficient reactionless drives in
service by any of the many worlds colonized by Mankind, and was one
of the few to be fitted with artificial gravity, a recent
innovation, and acceleration dampers. She wasn’t nearly as fast as
a courier ship, certainly, but for a military survey vessel she was
no slouch. But two hundred gees? Not even close.

“Robotic ships?” Aubrey Hannan, the
chief of the Engineering Section suggested. “They could certainly
handle that sort of acceleration.”

“It doesn’t matter,” McClaren
interjected, gently but firmly steering the conversation from
interesting, but essentially useless, speculation back to the issue
at hand. “From my perspective, it doesn’t matter how fast the
aliens can maneuver. We’re not a warship, and I have no intention
of masquerading as one. It’s clear they have radically advanced
technology. That’s not necessarily a surprise; we could have just
as easily stumbled upon a world in the pre-atomic era, and we would
be the high-tech aliens. Our options remain the same: stay and say
hello, or jump out with what I hope is a fat safety margin before
they get here.” He glanced around and his gaze landed on the junior
midshipman. “Midshipman Sato, what’s your call?”

Ichiro Sato, already standing ramrod
straight against the bulkhead, stiffened even further. All of
nineteen years old, he was the youngest member of the crew.
Extremely courteous, conscientious, and intelligent, he was well
respected by the other members of the crew, although his rigid
outer shell was a magnet for good-natured ribbing. Exceptionally
competent and a fast learner, he kept quietly to himself. He was
one of a select few from the Terran Naval Academy who were chosen
to spend one or more of their academy years aboard ship as advanced
training as junior officers. It was a great opportunity, but came
with a hefty commitment: deployed midshipmen had to continue their
academy studies while also performing their duties aboard
ship.

“Sir...” Sato momentarily gulped for
air, McClaren’s question having caught him completely
off-guard.

The captain felt momentarily guilty
for putting Sato on the spot first, but he had a reason. “Relax,
Ichiro,” McClaren told him. “I called this meeting for ideas. The
senior officers, including myself, and the chiefs have years of
preconceived notions drilled into our heads. We’ve got years of
experience, yes, but this situation calls for a fresh perspective.
If you were in my shoes, what would your decision be? There’s no
right or wrong answer to this one.”

While Ichiro’s
features didn’t betray it, the captain’s last comment caused him
even more consternation. He had been brought up in a traditional
Japanese family on Nagano, where, according to his father,
everything was either
right
or it was
wrong
; there was no in-between. And
more often than not, anything Ichiro did was
wrong
. That was the main reason
Ichiro had decided to apply for service in the Terran Navy when he
was sixteen: to spite his father and escape the tyranny of his
house, and to avoid the stifling life of a salaryman trapped in the
web of a hegemonic corporate world. Earth’s global military
services accepted applicants from all but a few rogue worlds, and
Ichiro’s test scores and academic record had opened the door for
him to enter the Terran Naval Academy. There, too, most everything
was either right or wrong. The difference between the academy and
his home was that in the academy, Ichiro was nearly always
right
. His unfailing
determination to succeed had given him a sense of confidence he had
never known before, putting him at the head of his class and
earning him a position aboard the
Aurora
.

That realization, and his desperate
desire not to lose face in front of the captain and ship’s
officers, gave him back his voice. “Sir. I believe we should stay
and greet the ships.”

McClaren nodded, wondering what had
just been going on in the young man’s mind. “Okay, you picked door
number one. The question now is why?”

“Because, sir, that is why we are
here, isn’t it?” Loosening up slightly from his steel-rod pose, he
turned to look at the other faces around the room, his voice
suddenly filled with a passion that none of his fellow crew members
would have ever thought possible. “While our primary mission is to
find new habitable worlds, we really are explorers, discoverers, of
whatever deep space may hold. With every jump we search for the
unknown, things that no one else has ever seen. Maybe we will not
find what we hope. Perhaps these aliens are friendly, perhaps not.
There is great risk in everything we do. But, having found the
first sentient race other than humankind, can we in good conscience
simply leave without doing all we can to establish contact, even at
the risk of our own destruction?”

The captain nodded, impressed more
by the young man’s unexpected burst of emotion than his words. But
his words held their own merit: they precisely echoed McClaren’s
own feelings. That was exactly why he had spent so much of his
career in survey.

“Well said,
Ichiro,” he told the young man. The two midshipmen on either side
of Sato grinned and nudged him as if to say,
Good job
. Most of those seated at
the table nodded or murmured their agreement. “So, there’s an
argument, and I believe a good one, for staying. Who’s got one for
bailing out right now?”

“I’ll take that one, sir,” Raj Kumar
spoke up from the bridge, his image appearing on the primary screen
in the ready room. “I myself agree with Midshipman Sato that we
should stay. But one compelling argument for leaving now is to make
sure that the news of this discovery gets back home. If the aliens
should turn out to be hostile and this ship is taken, or even if we
should suffer some unexpected mishap, Earth and the rest of human
space may never know until they’re attacked. And we have no way to
let anyone know of our discovery without jumping back to the
nearest communications relay.”

That produced a lot of frowns on the
faces around the table. Most of them had thought of this already,
of course, but having it voiced directly gave it more
substance.

Kumar went on, “That’s also a
specification in the first contact protocols, that one of the top
priorities is to get word back home. But the bottom line is that
any actions taken are at the captain’s discretion based on the
situation as he or she sees it.”

“Right,” McClaren told everyone.
“Getting word back home is the only real reason I’ve been able to
come up with myself for leaving now that isn’t tied to fear of the
unknown. And since all of us signed up to get paid to go find the
unknown, as the good midshipman pointed out, those reasons don’t
count.” He turned to the woman sitting to his left. “Chief, what’s
your take?”

Master Chief Brenda Harkness was the
senior enlisted member of the crew, and her word carried a great
deal of weight with McClaren. Completely at odds with the
stereotype of someone of her rank, she was a tall, slim, and
extremely attractive woman in her late thirties. But no one who had
ever worked with her for more than five minutes ever took her for
granted: she was a hard-core Navy lifer who never dished out
bullshit and refused to tolerate it from anyone else. She would
move mountains to help anyone who needed it, but her beautiful deep
hazel eyes could just as easily burn holes in the skin of anyone
foolish enough to cross her.

“I think we should stay, captain,”
she said, a light Texas drawl flavoring her smooth voice. “I
completely agree with the XO’s concerns about getting word of this
back home, but with the alien ships so close now...” She shook her
head. “I can’t imagine that they’d be anything but insulted if we
just up and disappeared on them.”

“And the crew?” McClaren
asked.

“Everyone I had a chance to talk to,
and that was most of them, wanted to stay. A lot of them are uneasy
about those ships, but as you said, we just happen to be the
‘primitives’ in this situation. We’d be stupid to not be afraid,
sir. But I think we’d be even more stupid to just pack up and go
home.”

All of the other department heads
nodded their agreement. Each had talked to their people, too, and
almost without exception the crew had wanted to stay and meet with
the aliens.

It was what McClaren expected. He
would have been shocked had they come to any other conclusion.
“Okay, that settles it. We stay.” That brought a round of bright,
excited smiles to everyone but Amundsen, whose face was locked in
an unhappy grimace. “But here’s the deal: the XO and navigator have
worked out an emergency jump sequence, just in case. We’ll spool up
the jump engines to the pre-interlock stage and hold them there
until we feel more confident of the aliens’ intentions. We can keep
the engines spooled like that for several hours without running any
risks in engineering. If those ships are friendly, we get to play
galactic tourist and buy them the first round at the
bar.

“But if they’re not,” he looked
pointedly at Amundsen, “we engage the jump interlock and the
navigation computer will have us out of here in two minutes.” That
made the survey leader slightly less unhappy, but only slightly.
“Okay, does anybody have anything else they want to add before we
set up the reception line?”

“Sir...” Sato said formally, again
at a position of attention.

“Go ahead, son.”

“Captain, I know this may sound
foolish,” he glanced at Amundsen, who was at the table with his
back to Sato, “but should we not also take steps to secure the
navigation computer in case the ships prove hostile? If they took
the ship, there is probably little they would learn of our
technology that would be of value to them. But the navigation
charts...”

“It’s already
taken care of, midshipman,” Kumar reassured him from the bridge
with an approving smile. Second year midshipmen like Sato weren’t
expected to know anything about the first contact protocols, but
the boy was clearly thinking on his feet. Kumar’s already high
respect for him rose yet another notch. “That’s on the very short
list of ‘non-discretionary’ actions on first contact. We’ve already
prepared a soft wipe of the data, and a team from engineering is
setting charges around the primary core.” He held up both hands,
then simulated pushing buttons down with his thumbs. “If we get
into trouble,
Aurora’s
hull is all they’ll walk away with.”