The Incident at Kruger 60, Part 1 Read online

The next morning came soon enough. We made some breakfast, and I called Jochim about fuel. Jochim agreed to load us up, to full capacity. That would give us a really good long range, about enough for two years at full drive, if we needed it. We helped the techs load the fuel, and then buttoned up the ship. Laura was using the comm to discuss what she had read about signal decryption with the tech. That would be useful in any event, knowing something about signal decryption is always useful in space. Krazmin dropped us a call about 10 local time, and said he would be ready for take off at 2. We agreed to get underway at that time, and we would fly parallel but separate courses out to the planet.

  We got underway right at 2 pm. It would take us another ten days to return to Kruger 60, and at least a week, maybe longer for the journey to the planet from the edge of the solar system. We had plotted a course back that would take us to the orbital area of one of the furthest planets out, scan the system, and slowly work our way in towards planet number three. We would arrive on the far side of the sun, relative to most of the planets, which would give us a lot of distance, to escape if something went wrong. Hopefully it wouldn't.

  So once again we had ten days to do nothing. The old saying is, hurry up and wait. Or for soldiers, hours of intense boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Well, its a pretty good estimation of such situations. And it hasn't really changed in probably forty thousand years. Technology changes. The experience does not. You can quote me on that.

  Laura busied herself with her language analysis study. She was really into this. Apparently the sci tech on the Volga and her hit it off pretty well, and it must have motivated her to give it her best. That didn't bother me. I was too busy thinking about all the what ifs, and wherefores and everything else. It's really easy to say this is just a recon mission on a space station. It's a totally different matter when you are 3 light years from help, and all on your own. And that’s assuming that the so called help could actually do something, if anything went wrong. The truth is, that in a first contact situation all bets are off. There is no way to know what will happen, and no way to really prevent the worst from happening, if it's going to happen. Not just for us, for all of humanity. So, yea, I needed a some thinking time.

  So the first day I sat there and pondered all the possibilities I could think of. No contact, friendly contact, mass destruction of the human race. Actually that would be easy, if it happened because mass destruction meant we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Actually a pretty easy outcome if it came to pass. Hopefully it wouldn't. But one never knows. That's the problem. The grey areas. No one can predict the future, as much as they would like to be able to. Impossible. All you can do is make plans, for various situations, and hope for the best, and improvise when the time comes. Well, that is what we would have to do.

  Laura was quiet. Very quiet. Like she wasn't even really there. She was buried in some tech manual about decoding transmissions, using various algorithms. I saw no reason to disturb her, given my own thoughts.

  The afternoon, or what ever you call it in space, wore on. Eventually Laura broke the silence.

  “So who is making dinner tonite. You or me?”

  “Good question. Me I think. I think I need to get up and do something rather than just sit here and think.”

  “Funny, I was thinking the same thing. So, what is bothering you, Alex?”

  “Oh just all the unknowns ahead. Too many variables, and I can't really figure them all out.”

  “Well then maybe you should stop worrying about all of them. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. We can't change that. All we can do is do our best not to do something stupid. Besides what are the chances they will come back, three weeks after they left? They might be able to travel anywhere in the galaxy. That's like what, a billion star systems. Probability would say the chances of us running into them again are about zero, don't you think?”

  “Realistically yes. The human side of me is still thinking about it though”

  I looked at her, and wondered why it wasn't bothering her the way it was bothering me. Probably because she hadn't done this kind of thing before. There is an old earth saying, ignorance is bliss. In this kind of case it definitely applies. I closed my eyes, and tried to let my brain empty out. Avoiding close contact was probably the best idea, far and away. I doubted it would come to that, reasonably, and put it out of my mind and fell asleep.

  When I woke, Laura was back reading the manuals the tech had given her. She sat in the co pilots chair, with her reading tablet in hand, and was lost in her reading. I looked over at her but she was totally lost in thought. I looked down at the control panel. The usual series of messages was coming thru the comm. It was going to be a long 10 days back. I pulled my jacket and cape tighter around myself, and went back to sleep.

  The next few days passed much the same. Laura was buried in her books, I was thinking about the possibilities. She was running regressions and pattern analysis on the data from our last contact. She hadn't made any breakthroughs, but she thought she was making some progress, and had isolated some discrete blocks, that might be words or something. I kept an eye on her work, and she was definitely making some progress, or at least it seemed so to me. I'm not really a language expert, and while I can speak a few different dialects of space, I'm far from proficient. It was pretty clear Laura had a talent for this kind of thing. And her focus was impressive.

  As agreed, at the half way point, we would contact each others ships, just to verify our situations, and to let Laura and the Volga's tech share developments on their attempt to get something out of the alien comm signals we had picked up.

  We were coming up on the half way point. We had decided on using a coded burst transmission, quickest shortest transmission method, max two transmissions. Each.

  The countdown clock counted off the seconds to the burst. Krazmin sent first, and we took the transmission. Opening the files, there wasn’t much news. The journey out was totally uneventful, so far. There had been some progress on the tapes, and the techs had sent there results for us to look at. I answered the same, and suggested we remain silent, as there wasn’t anything to discuss. Krazmin didn’t send another transmission, so he agreed. No reason to talk to each other if there was nothing to talk about.

  We opened the files. Laura had a long message from Meyer, the tech, and the senior linguist, Ms Okayama. Apparently they had made some progress on the analysis. The message from Krazmin was short and simple, no news, nothing to report. The two ships in the quadrant had left the area, and it should be completely empty of anything buy our two ships, and whatever else was out there.

  After about 30 minutes Laura looked up from her reading and at me. “Well, it looks like they might have some numbers figured out. Hard to say, but at least they may have got the basics of something numerical.”

  “Not surprising. That would be what I would have expected them to get to first. So it must not have been heavily encoded then?”

  “Apparently not. Maybe. Its hard to say, its a preliminary analysis. But Meyers definitely found something that looks like a base sixteen number system. Certainly within the realm of possibility that it is a hit.” She continued on. “And she might have some of the basic grammar structure resolved. It's still pretty theoretical though.”

  “It's some progress. Every little bit will help.”

  “True.”

  She was quickly buried in the report, and its content. The number patterns were pretty unmistakeable. The rest of it was still gibberish. Laura buried herself in the details, and I dozed in the commanders chair.

  The next four days were much the same. Laura was running tests on the comm tapes, looking for patterns. I was thinking about what options we would have if something happened out there.

  We were on the edge of the Kruger 60 star system, finally. Far on the outer edge. As per the plan, we maintained radio silence as started the reentry to normal space. Once again the light in the windows changed from multi colored strands
of light into inky blackness. We had arrived. Back at Kruger 60. We reentered far from planet 3, in the emptiness of space. Krazmin came out of warp as well, about half a million kilometers away, at an equal distance to the planet. From here you couldn't even see it, hardly, just a small speck of light where the sun touched its face.

  We brought ships to a complete halt, and started the passive scans. Nothing. No warp trails. No radio signals of any kind. No heat signatures in the area. Dead quiet. A very good thing.

  We let the scans run onwards, and kept on with the radio silence. If neither of us detected anything in the next two hours, then we would start our approach. Laura was focused on the computer readouts, and reading her manual on code breaking. I sat and watched the computer output. All quiet.

  The two hours passed without any contact. As per our plan, we started our approach to the planet. I cut in the sub-light engines, and the ship started to hum. We accelerated towards our goal, Krazmin in his ship and us in ours. We took two wide paths, not near each other, hopefully to give us some time to warp out of the area, if anything went wrong.

  We both headed for the planet, at one quarter power. That would allow us to quickly reverse and warp out of here, if something appeared on the scanners. Nothing did. We finally accelerated to full sub warp, and make our way to the target.

  We were finally within arms reach of the planet. It slowly, ever so slowly, grew bigger in the windscreen, and on our scanners. Everything appeared quiet on the scanners, no transmissions of any sort, warp signatures, nothing. We glided through space, behind the dark side of the planet, headed for the zone between night and day. Back to our landing site. I fired the decent engines, and we came into the box canyon from above, once again. I set the ship down in the same general area, but more under an overhanging rock wall this time. It was a little like being at the opening of a cave.

  We were down in the same ravine we landed in last time, but I had nudged the ship under a rock outcrop. It didn’t cover the whole ship, but a good two thirds of it. It would take someone really checking the data to find us. I shut down everything except life support and computers.

  The Volga set down about two kilometers away, on the edge of the plain where the ship we had seen had landed. She wasn’t as sheltered as our position, but it gave her some cover. I ran a series of local scans on the area, and it was dead silent.

  It took over an hour for the Volga to ready itself for an external ship excursion. We established comm with the lasers, giving us better security. Krazmin wanted to run the excursion out first just from the Volga, but then have us join him after the area was secured. We could both take samples and carry them back to Kroatzys'. Finally Krazmins' party left the ship. Krazmin had landed on the other side of the ridge, off to our right, on the edge of a long low ridge line that clearly turned into a low line of mountains in the distance. Three vehicles left the frigate, and headed for the the spot where Laura and I had first seen the ship. The trip took less than thirty minutes, and was totally uneventful. Krazmins' landing team secured the area, and took some scans, which showed nothing.

  “Alex, Krazmin here, area is secure, why don’t you come join us.”

  “Roger that Krazmin, be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Laura and I suited up, and entered the airlock. Once we decompressed, we left the ship and opened the vehicle bay in the rear. We got the buggy out and took our seats. It took less than ten minutes to reach Krazmin. We pulled up about fifty meters from the landing sight and stopped, where one of his men was. We left the buggy and walked out to the site.

  There wasn’t much to see, some indentations in the earth where the ship had landed, and some burn marks where the engines had fired on decent. But it was clear something had landed here. Krazmin took us around and showed us the basic layout of the site. three landing pods, and the burn marks. Nothing else.

  After an hour we loaded up with some sand samples from the burn marks, and the landing indentations. Krazmin and we said a short good bye, and headed back to our respective ships. The buggy drive was short and we loaded the samples and the buggy back into the bay. We entered the airlock, and two minutes later we were back on board. We peeled off the suits, and I made some coffee. I poured two cups, and we sat at the galley table.

  “OK Alex, we saw something real out there, that we know, agreed?”

  “Yes, agreed.”

  “What was it?”

  “Given lack of any other evidence, we apply Occam's Razor. It was an alien ship. And we are in the biggest mystery of humanity to this point in our history.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “At this point, we cant do much else here. We go back to the station and report. Maybe they establish an outpost here, and wait and see what happens. Or not. There would be good arguments for both positions. Probably they establish a carefully concealed outpost and then monitor the area for disturbances. At some point they try to establish contact. That will be dangerous. Especially since we don't have any idea what we are dealing with. Other than that, well, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “OK. Yea.”

  We finished the coffee, and after awhile we both decided to crash. Maybe sleep would bring some insight.

  The Disappearance