Chapter 1

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Chapter 1: The Encounter

Space travel doesn't quite work the way it used to. In the early days--the latter half of the twentieth century--you had simple rockets. That was pretty much it. You applied enough thrust to escape gravity. Going anywhere near a fraction of lightspeed was unthinkable except in the annals of science fiction. Warp drive, hyperdrive, sleeper ships, relativistic vessels, wormholes... yeah, people had a million ideas for how humans might one day travel distances that would normally take several lifetimes to cover.

As it turned out, someone had done most of the work for us. Not far into the twenty-first century, some strange properties were discovered in certain areas of space. One such area was near the edge of Earth's solar system. We soon detected others via telescope. Describing them accurately would require a lot of math, something that--despite my cybernetic processors--I was never too good at and never liked much anyway.

See, they're called "fold vectors" or "FVs." Created eons ago by the first sentient race to spread across the galaxy, they allow instantaneous travel from one point to another. Each fold vector is connected to one or more other fold vectors. With the right equipment, you can generate a field to activate a nearby fold vector and send yourself (and whatever happens to surround you, such as a ship) to another fold vector. It's a little like a wormhole, and a little like folding space. I leave the deeper details to the experts, of which I am most definitely not one.

The problem with FVs is that nobody knows where they all are. The Idaltu built them, and all the complete maps died with them. So, each race to ascend since has had to create their own maps, by sending ships through fold vectors and figuring out where they emerged, then hoping they can come back through the same FV (sometimes you can't.) The Oolians and their allies tend to be kind enough to share their maps with each other. That's how we puny humans got ours. It would have taken decades to map out the hundreds of FVs we now know about thanks to the maps.

What this all means is that, to control access to a given region of space, you have to monitor its fold vectors. Unwelcome visitors, you blast to pieces as soon as they appear. There are also some substances that can temporarily "foul" a fold vector. Outlaws have a habit of using them to avoid police pursuit, but the military applications are fairly obvious, too. There is no known way to completely destroy a fold vector. Were such a thing known to be possible, everything that follows might have been avoided.

February 12th, 2098. I, Captain Robert Maxwell, commanded the USS Protector, operated under the auspices of the Interstellar Space Exploration Administration, an arm of the government of the Terran Alliance. ISEA was really a huge bureaucracy--bigger than pretty much any other part of the Alliance government. It managed the vast swath of territory humanity had claimed, though it is more accurate to say the Oolians tolerated us saying "this space is ours, please stay out." My ship, you couldn't call top-of-the-line. Maybe ten years ago, that would have been apt. These days, it felt a bit long in the tooth, and the looming launch of the new Orion-class ships had me feeling like a bit of a relic. Forty-eight years old, commanding a ship the brass generally considered an afterthought, with a crew of mid-tier misfits the higher-ups thought were suitable for long-term deep space assignments, I felt like someone had tossed me into a raging river without a life jacket. "Don't worry, you'll be fine," they said. "Nothing ever happens out that way. The Oolians just want someone to keep an eye on it, an early warning system."

"What am I supposed to warn them about?" I asked during my briefing.

"Anything unusual," was their vague response.

Really, what's "unusual" in space? My cosmological specialist could talk my ear off for days about the properties of any region we ventured into, how special and unique it was. I always had to keep myself from yawning.

So, with their vague orders, we patrolled Jacob Sector. Named after my father, as I understood it. It figured. Their ship, the Good News, disappeared from this region about twenty-four years previously. The end result of that was the Oolians marking a bunch of FVs in this sector "Do Not Use" on our official maps. Real helpful. They refused to elaborate on why we shouldn't use them. It turned out they had good reasons for that, but I was never the type to take "no" for an answer, especially when it was for my own good.

That day, three weeks into our patrol mission, one of the FVs--a "Do Not Use" one--lit up on our scanners. Collins, my tactical specialist, looked a little panicked. "Sir, we've got something coming in on a red FV. Uhh... it's not ours."

Poor guy never had seen combat. His cybernetics--patterned after mine, believe it or not--were implanted voluntarily. He once thanked me for "blazing the trail," for proving the stuff could work, that a human body wouldn't shrivel up and spit out every last piece of technology attached to it, if it was cared for properly. I really wanted to tell him to fuck off, but dammit, the kid was sincere. I laughed a little, thanked him, and a few years later, the request for a transfer to my ship came in. I approved it, naturally, figuring I could count on him to do my bidding without question. It didn't quite end up being that simple, but he made a good addition to my crew, nevertheless. I just hoped I wasn't there the first time someone took a shot at Lieutenant Collins. He had "potential headcase" written all over him.

Those fears surfaced as Collins tried to parse the scanner readings from the "forbidden" FV. He didn't know what was going on, and neither did I. The Oolians gave us ship profiles for every species they knew about, or so they said. This one triggered a specific but odd response in our computer: "HOSTILE SHIP. IMMEDIATE RETREAT ADVISED." These words flashed, bright red, at Collin's face. He looked across the bridge at me. "It says we should retreat."

"Retreat? Are you kidding? It won't even ID the ship?"

He shook his head. "It claims not to have any details, just that we should run."

"Which is exactly why we aren't going to," I said, adding an authoritative tone to my voice. No, we weren't going to run. We were there to monitor unusual activity, and by God, this was damned unusual. I wasn't about to head back to base with nothing more than, "some weird ship popped up and we split."

I activated the console in front of me, getting a visual read on the ship. It looked nothing like anything the Oolians told us about. The thing about most ships is that, regardless of species, you could normally identify the significant features: support craft bays, engines, weapon emplacements, things like that. This one had the form of a sphere covered in long, deadly-looking spikes. It had a crystalline quality to it, and glowed internally. Even without visual enhancement, it was plenty bright. Ambient power readings went beyond most everything in our records. Only an Oolian Cruiser seemed like an even match to this ship. Suffice it to say, this beast projected power. It wasn't enough that the ship was dangerous--it deliberately wanted to appear so. Something was innately aggressive and hostile about it.

I turned to Rydia Arnold, communications tech. The Oolians gave us some pretty good translation technology, enough to (they said) muddle through even a first contact scenario without much trouble. "Please tell me they are hailing," I pleaded.

She shook her head. "They're ignoring our automatic greetings, too. I don't think they want to talk."

"Of course not. That would actually be helpful. Tactical, let's put up a defensive posture... limited weapons, charged armor." I called her "Tactical" because I really, really hated saying "Starsmyth-Kennedy." No, I mean it. Such a mouthful. It drove me insane. Why did I ever accept someone with a name that long when I knew full well I'd have to blurt it in the heat of battle to issue orders? Sooner or later, I'd probably start calling her "Tac," just out of laziness.

She stood there, steely and unshaken, working the computer to carry out my orders. Deep down, I admired her resolve. I wondered if dangerous situations didn't really bother her at all, or if it was just a very effective front. With me, there was always alarm, just beneath the surface. I'd been in enough firefights and enough hostile situations to know when the shit was going to hit the fan. My heart palpitated, quite annoyingly, as if I needed to be reminded this situation was not good, threatened to go completely out of my control, and jeopardize the hundreds of people for whose lives I was directly responsible.

The ship glowed even brighter for just a moment--you could almost call it a flash--and one of its sharp spines rapidly ejected, making a beeline for my ship. If their vessel design left little room for ambiguity, their weapons might as well have been billboard advertisements. THESE ARE SHIP-KILLING SHARDS! THEY WILL KILL YOUR SHIP!

Oh, I got the message loud and clear. "Get us the hell out of here! Seriously! Now!"

The ship took a moment to cycle up its FV drive, and we were gone. I imagined the shard soaring through the empty space my ship had occupied only seconds before. I got a tiny bit of satisfaction from it, but really, I was disturbed. Who were they? What did they want? Why did they show up and start shooting at an obviously inferior enemy?

The Oolians would be called to account. I wanted to make sure of that.