Tresda POV
Supervisor Malorn had eased up on me when I dropped my unyielding obsession with the asteroid. Working normal projects within PAI’s actual hours was far more healthy than chasing shadows, but a part of me remained unconvinced that it was just an unexplained mystery. We would be observing the celestial object when it passed by Teska in a few weeks, so I could have a chance to check for signs of tampering; a collision would have to leave a trace. Such decisive readings might give a concrete answer.
In the recent tides of war, the Treysyl were backpedaling and losing the ground they’d gained in the initial invasion. The feeling I had from the insinuations made by my special forces’ ex-boyfriend, Kasre, was that we might be launching a counterattack on their hemisphere. Our breakup had been amicable, and I thought he had hopes of winning me back. However, I couldn’t be with someone who’d keep constant secrets from me; it’d driven me insane.
PAI had been canvassing our solar system for any sign of Treysyl activity to mirror our spaceplane program. Personally, I thought the Czar was looking for any excuse to militarize space, and I hated that we’d become part of the intelligence apparatus. It was an excuse to continue studying the local universe with a fine-toothed comb, under the guise of searching for a Treysyl presence. Our scientific communities used to cooperate on exploration missions, sharing data and calculations.
“What have you got for me?” Malorn asked, leaning over my computer.
I sucked in a sharp breath, rummaging through the zero morsels of evidence I had. “I, uh, monitored their satellite signals, but it seemed the only outfacing one was relaying signals to TAI’s Nomad probe. Do you ever imagine if aliens find that, sir?”
“If they found a Treysyl object first? Let’s hope that unlikely possibility doesn’t pan out. The odds that they could understand are slim, anyway. They put clusters of dots to signify the first 15 prime numbers. Do you know what already showed that we’re intelligent? The spacecraft. They communicated so little about our species, and they put our pictograph of an atom to show they were scientists. I doubt they’d grasp the intent.”
“Thank you for humoring the question, sir,” I sighed. “I suppose you can tell the military about this shadow that passed in front of the sun. It’s most likely a small comet or asteroid, but I guess we can…rule out that it’s a Treysyl spaceplane. We can get some data on CMEs and solar flares, um…sorry. I never thought we’d come to this.”
Malorn chuckled, a bitterness in his eyes. “Me neither. PAI was always respected, and scientific research had value in and of itself. The technological explanations came back home, and I thought the colonization initiative was about to take off. It still could’ve. We could’ve moved our civilians away, and then the Treysyl’s invasion does a fat load of good. Just because they won’t advance past this pettiness doesn’t mean we have to stay here too!”
“We have the ability to go much further than Nomad, to push the boundaries to other stars with a manned mission! There’s so much we could learn, and it has to be worthwhile to have those answers.”
“The public interest right now is winning that all-out fusudamned war. If this doesn’t end with warheads flying and we survive as an institution, they’ll come back to us. For now, we give them what they want and don’t give them any reasons to shut us down. Unless space becomes a gigantic, Teska-ending threat, they’re not going to care or bother to explore Klaide Tol.”
“And if we just did it anyway?”
“Then it’d be our last act. I don’t want PAI or space exploration to die. We have to look out for the dreams of the next generation. I’ll keep that solar thing in my back pocket. Keep scouring deep space for response signals, so we can say that we ruled out that it was anything other than Nomad phoning home.”
I rolled my eyes at the boring task, but pulled up the Mascos Relay data to parse for anything interesting. Perhaps I could find a strange pulsar or classify new exoplanets, though sifting through this much menial information made my eyes cross. I was more of the type that liked to focus observations on anomalies, or microanalyze particular properties to build upon my theories. Malorn walked away, and I resisted the itch to pull the asteroid data back up on a sidebar.
Whatever happened with the asteroid, it wasn’t invisible teleportation; we live in a sensible world. There was some factor that we couldn’t detect, and I don’t know if we can deduce it through reason. It could have been hit by a gamma ray fluke, it could be some kind of asteroid that actually has tectonic activity (that’d be quite the scientific find), or maybe someone here on Teska could’ve secretly used ion beams to deflect it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to focus on the screen in front of me. It wasn’t like a loud signal was going to come over our frequencies, screaming and directed at us. When I was new to PAI, I was hopeful that we’d detect a message from extraterrestrial life, but space was incredibly vast. I turned the array toward Klaide Tol, the nearest star to our system, and gave it a wistful sigh. It didn’t do much good to wish that I was there, yet I couldn’t help it.
My eyes had started to glass over, before I snapped upright in my chair from…an incoming transmission detected in our frequency; my frills puffed out and my fur stood on end. “MALORN! Everyone, you…there’s a repeating signal from Klaide Tol. Couldn’t b-be clearer. It’s really happening, oh my fusu…”
“What?!” Malorn raced over to park himself behind my chair, gawking. “It’s directed straight at Teska. You’re right. I…I need to loop everyone in. All hands on deck! If you had plans tonight, no you don’t. Not until we figure out the source of this. It’s too fucking clear, almost like it has to be a hoax. Play it, Tresda! The fuck are you waiting for?”
My heart beat out of my chest, daring to consider the tantalizing possibilities—a great mystery lurking in space, contacting us! I played the signal and pinned my ears back at the crackling sounds that flashed in a repeating pattern. There was something familiar in the pulses, like I remembered this form of communication from something else. I grabbed my binder in a hurry, flipping through the top-secret code PAI had been given to communicate with the Pelsyl spaceplane when we sent Ralto up.
If this is a hoax, then it’s done by someone who has the highest clearance level and knows some very sensitive information about our spaceplanes. I guess that means it’s not aliens though.
“This is our code!” I listened carefully and scrawled out the message with pen, just as incredulous as Malorn that it seemed to be one of ours. I ran down the glossary of terms that were listed until I found the correct ones. “Captive. Killed in action. Cosmoshopper. All systems failure. Pilot nominal. Hostiles. Threats miscellaneous. Coordinates 13K.45E.67.8.”
I tilted my head in confusion, attempting to decipher what was trying to be said with the limited vocabulary of the Cosmoshopper code. Whoever sent this message began by claiming to be a captive, with the subsequent message that referenced the tag for Killed in Action? Both denominators couldn’t be applicable at once, but if they were connected, then…Cosmoshopper-3 was the only shuttle with a system failure. The pilot of that vessel wasn’t nominal.
“Ralto was killed in action on the Cosmoshopper-3, but we recovered his body. He can’t be…nominal, which seems like the best way here to stay alive,” I murmured, feeling my blood run cold while my brain malfunctioned. “What’s meant about hostiles and miscellaneous threats at these stellar coordinates? Some Pelsyl from…a more secret spaceplane project was taken hostage by…they didn’t use Treysyl, sir. Something else?!”
Malorn swallowed hard, staring at the message for a long moment. “This is our code coming from deep space, and it doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to notify the military and ask, on the down low, if we should even be looking into this. If this is something classified, they should handle it.”
“That’s where they’re taking the brains!” Breida exclaimed, doing a celebratory dance that made me scowl at her. “It’s Ralto. He was killed in action, but now he’s alive and being held there, with aliens. It’s really simple. I don’t like that he called them threats, though.”
My supervisor had tried to ignore the mad physician and sweep her under the rug, after I discussed her conspiracies with him, but he couldn’t afford to draw attention to her lunacy. I was willing to reevaluate that there could’ve been aliens that…some secret program encountered. However, it was laughable that they had been watching the Cosmoshopper and stepped right in to snatch Ralto’s brain, then whisked it off to Klaide Tol.
Perhaps there were native lifeforms in that nearest star system, whose attention had been piqued by a Pelsyl incursion into their home territory. Malorn had rushed off to speak with our spec ops military contact, who hurried over to my screen with what seemed like genuine confusion and alarm. He snatched the paper I’d written down off my desk, and muttered something about forwarding the data. He hurried to call some people, as if verifying…that we didn’t have this kind of program.
Our military contact, who’s as high up as they go, is unaware of the Cosmoshopper going out to deep space. It’d have to be at an incredibly secret level of government, unless he’s acting. Or unless something went wrong.
“We do need to figure out who sent this signal, and be certain it wasn’t our military. Or just the Treysyl running some kind of scam,” I managed. “I’m going to pay Kasre a visit, once he’s gotten his nose in this. I’ll get a sense for how much he knew and whether we have anything out there.”
Malorn coughed, trying to maintain his composure. “Good idea. We have to weigh the various responses and…try to zero in on these coordinates. At least until the point where we’re told to back off. For now, we’re treating this like it’s something else. Call me as soon as you learn anything useful, Tresda. This is…not something I ever expected.”
“Me neither. If we really found something that points to not-Arata life interacting with us, then we have to attempt to understand them. To communicate. Whatever’s waiting at those coordinates, I think we should go if there’s any chance it might involve aliens: we’d have definitive proof of aliens. It’s our job at least to try to resolve this peacefully, because it might just be the most important discovery in our species’ history.”
Malorn snorted. “Well, at least we don’t have to worry about funding, now that space is a threat. Even the Czar can see the importance of knowing what we’re up against and getting to the bottom of this debacle. Good luck with Kasre. We’re all counting on you.”
I grabbed my bag and scurried off, ignoring Breida pointing with excitement like this was proof that her corpse-diving was all worth it. If there was alien life, we couldn’t let our analysis of their motives get polluted by the crazies. What I couldn’t decipher if there was any connection between the asteroid deflection and this signal was why extraterrestrials would’ve interfered, only to become hostile to our explorers. For that reason, I was inclined to treat the two events as unrelated until proven otherwise.
A/N - 23! Tresda detects the recurring signal sent by the escapees from Klaide Tol, though she lacks that context. She goes to check with a military contact named Kasre that it isn’t one of their own signals. How do you think the intelligentsia will take the news? What changes do you expect to happen at PAI?
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