Blasphemy (part 4)
I tightened the last of the bolts, all the parts carefully back in place.
"Try it now!" I said into the headset, so that Vortex could hear me from the cramped crevices of the engine room. The Corrado Field Generators were towers of copper tubing, silvered electromagnets and carmine plasma relays. They were all coated with the grease and lubricant that inevitably seems to coalesce wherever motive power must be generated.
"No effect," Vortex replied. "This completes the checklist for the fifth time. Do you wish to start a sixth pass?"
"You don't get any field? None at all? I was sure that replacing the McCann Eigenvectorizer would make a difference."
"No, Maggie, there's nothing. All of the components check out, to six decimal places. All the diagnostics suggest that we should be able to generate a hyperfield and return to hyperspace. For some reason, we cannot, and are thus limited to relativistic speeds."
"So, now what? We've got to be years away from Blift Minus Tau and civilization at these speeds. These engines are deader than I've ever seen - for no reason that you or I can find. They should work." I slammed my spanner back into the tool chest in frustration. "They don't."
"Why don't you take a break, then. Take a shower and get yourself something to eat." Vortex always made sure to take care of me, even when I didn't remember to do so myself. "I'll continue looking through the diagnostic database, for other things to try with the engines. When you're done, there are some signals on my sensors that bear looking at."
Over lunch in the galley, I had Vortex throw up a holographic display of the system ahead of us. Realtime signal displays floated above my tuna salad sandwich, the colors of the spectrum analysis bouncing reflections in the ripples of my coffee. The fifth planet sang with a strong technological electromagnetic signature. There was civilization and intelligence out here.
The planet's atmosphere was oxygen and nitrogen, a friendly and familiar mix, without the usual overpowering tang of oxides of unrestrained industry. There were large blue seas, towering and snowy mountain ranges, and long stretches of green across two main continents. There were also lights, an artificial spider web of cities and towns glowing across the darkened hemisphere. It was another lively and hospitable planet to add to the catalog of the Coterie.
As I was finishing lunch, Vortex snagged a video signal and figured out how to regenerate the original images. I couldn't tell whether the presentation was a documentary, a comedy, or some commentary on local politics, but the beings in the show clearly belonged to one of the aggregate Human classes on the Edwards-Hewitt scale. Outside of a few superficial differences, we were pretty similar in size and shape.
"Nice job, Vortex. It looks like we're heading for another First Contact situation. You know the drill."
"Already on it, Maggie. I'm building up a lexicon, and expect to be able to translate their language in another hour or two."
"Language, singular? As in just one for the entire planet?"
"That's what my analysis indicates. Interesting, isn't it?"
"Definitely. I think this would be the first First Contact I know of like that. Once again, it means that all the established protocols probably aren't going to work."
"Why is that?" The question was one of the reasons we get along so well. Most others would have asked me if it was just me being me. My reputation for First Contacts has always been unorthodox, and I've gotten in trouble for it before. There are those who say that I throw out the protocols because I don't like to play by the rules. Vortex knows that isn't the case; that there's usually some catch that makes the usual thinking invalid or dangerous.
"It'll mean an interesting history and sociology, I'm sure. There's something that brought them together, in a way that's different from every other First Contact situation I know about. It could make things easy. It could make things very dangerous. Let's just hope for the best and plan for the worst."
"Then I won't remind you that we still don't have hyperdrive yet."
I picked at my sandwich, watching the displays, pushing the sensors to look at different aspects of this new world. There was an array of satellites in orbit, which meant some level of space technology. I didn't see anything threatening, like the particle cannons or orbiting defense platforms one usually sees around worlds. It was another oddity for First Contact; no matter how peaceful a civilization might be, there's always a need for something to stop or deflect the chunk of rock or ice that might bring destruction to a planet. There was a recent impact crater on one of the moons of the world, so they couldn't be unaware of the danger.
"Maggie, they call themselves the Laasko."
"Excellent. If we talk to them..."
"Not if," Vortex interrupted. "When. Look." The display shifted away from the planet, to show our vector again. There was something heading towards us, changing course and accelerating to intercept. "I just started getting this, too."
The signal wavered and shifted, as Vortex tried to convert it into something intelligible, filtering out the differences created by our relativistic velocities. Space and time act weird when you're close to the speed of light, which is why I prefer hyperspace. The image solidified into something recognizable.
Vortex didn't have enough of the subtleties of the language semantics yet, but this was definitely a commanding presence, in some kind of uniform, shouting at us. They knew we were coming and they were pissed.