First Contact

Chapter 861: Those Left Behind

The mountains were wreathed with clouds and fog, the road slick with rain as it curved and twisted across the mountainside. Thunder snarled from the sky, lightning flashed inside the clouds, and now and then large bipedal figures could be seen, in silhouette, struggling with one another, all impossibly huge.

On the two lane twisted highway that lacked guardrails and in many places a shoulder, a lone motorcycle sped along the asphalt path. The wheels sprayed water, the driver was hunched down behind the handlbars, facing the wind and the rain as they skillfully navigated the road.

A side road appeared and the driver turned the bike sharply, sliding slightly as the back wheel skidded on the wet road, but the rider got control of the motorcycle expertly, gunning the engine and speeding down the mountainside. There was an exit sign ahead and the driver gunned the engine.

Just in front of the exit sign, across the road and to either side as far as the eye could see, was a thick band of burning flame, sending up greasy smoke that contorted and often looked like hands or long limbed bipeds with faces made of holes in the black smoke.

The bike roared through the flame, coming out the other side shedding fire.

It crossed the exit markings and everything shattered into pixels.

In the pilot's armored shell protected couch, Francine "Call me Fran or Fanny" Frensky twisted slightly as her brain went from easing down out of the Theta bands until she hit the Delta bands, and from there a crash translation.

Her ship, The Football Headed Boy, was bigger than a Confederate Super-Dreadnaught or even a Max-Monitor. It was a Super-Heavy Eta-Class Freighter. Physically larger than the majority of naval vessels but massing less than a 10th. The biggest weapon the ship packed was a single plasma wave phased motion gun mounted along the spine and four sets of eight light nCv cannon batteries to cover the quadrants. The ship could drop over a hundred missile pods in a wave, and a wave every twelve minutes, but it wasn't like it was a Weber class podnought.

The huge ship burst into realspace with a splash of liquid protomatter that quickly evaporated away, huge sparkles with trails thousands of miles long, and a reverberating "RING A DING DING, BABY!" that echoed off the rings of the gas giants.

Franny gasped as her monitors realigned with realspace. She checked the stellar system's configuration and relaxed when she saw that she had reached her destination.

There was still no superluminal carrier wave reception.

The system was safe.

Maybe.

The sensors inside the ship went live and Franny checked them.

No phasic energy detected in the main ship's sections. She ran a check for Hellspace energy, which took a long moment, and relaxed when nothing came back. The massive cargo pods and holds were taking longer, drones sweeping the areas, sensitive systems looking all over the place.

Prior to a few weeks ago, the holds had featured walls of blank gray of endosteel hyperalloy. Now the walls were painted an even red color. The phasic shielding twinkled in the thin layer of sprayed salt crystals, although some people claimed the phasic shield just made things worse. Which is why Franny ran it in between the hulls.

It took nearly an hour to check the holds. Franny took a quick thirty minute nap, then had a snack.

She kept her command couch's shell closed. It was painted red now, with a thin layer of mylar that was doped with aluminum.

She double then triple checked the command deck.

Swallowing thickly, Franny ordered the shell to reconfigure into a captain's chair and relaxed as the memory metal reconfigured into an ergonomic seat with monitors and holocontrols around it.

The command deck was silent. The robots, VI driven, were leaving their protective cradles where they had stayed during the crash translation. Their brain cases were more heavily armored, more physical shielding on them.

Franny smiled to herself with the restrained power and near-clumsiness the heavily modified robots showed. She had deliberately gone with the crude looks and the jerky movement packages. It looked a little eerie at times, but she was starting to find it comforting to watch the robots move through the red lit command deck.

Her command systems had come back online and the first thing she did was ping for a buoy.

There was one only a few light seconds away.

She immediately tapped it with a com-laser and brought up the lexicon. She shot off a fast message.

[RED USE ONLY TEXT OR AUDIO NO VISUAL WITH BETTER RESOLUTION THAN 480P FULL DYNAMIC COLOR RANGE OR 720P STANDARD RGB/CMYK RANGE OR 360P BLACK/WHITE CONTRAST WILL NOT ACCEPT COMMUNICATION OUTSIDE PREVIOUS PARAMETERS COLOR 880808 TINT IS PREFERRED INQUIRY: HAVE YOU BEEN ATTACKED BY MALEVOLENT PHASIC ENTITIES IF SO PROVIDED AUDIO FILES WILL CAUSE ENTITIES TO RETREAT IF PLAYED AT AT LEAST 40 DECIBELS ADDITIONALLY COLOR 880808 WILL KEEP THEM AT BAY COLD IRON WEAPONS WORK TO DISCORPREATE THEM AS WELL AS INJURE THEM SODIUM CHLORIDE IN ATTACHED AMOUNTS CREATE A BARRIER WHEN CRYSTALS ARE USED IN UNBROKEN LINES PLEASE RESPOND THROUGH TEXT ONLY]

She put her ID number on it, attached the emergency files, then sent the message six times. When she got her receipt she prepared the outline of a reply and then spent the time waiting swinging by her hands on feet on the bars attached to the ceiling of the command deck for just that purpose.

It was nearly four hours before she got a return.

The words were in 880808 color.

[FRANCINE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING FUR AND INTELLECT WHO PLIES TRADE ALONG THE VAST AND WONDERFUL STARWAYS OF THIS WONDERFUL UNIVERSE I RED GREET YOU ONCE AGAIN WITH PLEASURE MIXED WITH SLIGHT APPREHENSION THERE HAS BEEN NO REPORTED MALEVOLENT PHASIC ENTITY ATTACKS OF WHICH WE ARE PROFOUNDLY GRATEFUL HEADING YOUR WARNING OUR BENEVOLENT AND WISE QUEEN HAS ORDERED THE PLANETARY COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND INFORMATION NETWORKS TO CEASE ALL VIDEO TRANSMISSIONS AND MOVE TO TEXT AND VOICE ONLY AND THERE HAS ONLY BEEN SLIGHT OUTCRY OF DISMAY AMONG THOSE ENJOYING VISUAL/AUDIO ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA BUT IT IS WITHIN EXPECTED DISSATISFACTION METRICS TO THE LOSS OF SOMETHING HELD SO DEAR BY SO MANY THE HIGH QUEEN, BENEVOLENT AND KIND AS WELL AS WISE AND GENEROUS WISHES TO KNOW WHAT TYPE OF EVENT HAS TRANSPIRED TO CAUSE YOU SUCH DISTRESS AND TO CAUSE YOU TO ISSUE SUCH A GRAVE WARNING]

Franny breathed a sigh of relief and took the time to doublecheck her text message that would inform the peaceful, if long winded, Mantid of the planet, as well as their companion species, about the disaster that had befallen the entire galactic arm spur. She added the protective measures.

It took nearly sixty hours to pass the messages back and forth, the whole time Franny hung out in the black space, not coming any closer than a half light minute to the buoy.

Her cargo holds were full of goods, but she'd need to inspect them at least twice before she began to move in-system.

She was grateful that Max Yo Ngyn had managed to broadcast out the countermeasures across the Junker/Trader Guild communication systems before the entire system had self-destructed at the same time the hypercomm wave system had collapsed.

Moving through the vast cargo spaces, cubic miles of storage space, was nerve wracked. Setting the phasic bait charges and the boxy traps had jangled her nerves badly, but after another 20 hours it was done.

She headed in-system, advising the Mantid Speaker known as "Red" to advise Overqueen Klakataka that the entire Galactic Arm Spur was still in danger and that it only took a handful of phasic shades to quickly become a plague across an entire world.

The messages started with disbelief, but quickly moved to sharply directed questions.

The fact that the shades had come from some kind of mistake made by the Atrekna in attacking Terran worlds did not seem to disturb Overqueen Klakataka.

She had determined that Terrans were extremely dangerous and were best handled at a distance and through several layers of intermediaries.

To be honest, Franny couldn't argue with that.

Franny had packed her holds as if it would be the last trade run she'd ever make.

With jumpspace and hyperspace infested by phasic shades, she wasn't sure her nerves could handle another run.

-----

The turkeys ran from inside the barn to outside, many of them following the drone that scattered seed corn and wheat grains on the ground rather than stopping to eat. The gobbled and pushed at one another, often knocking each other off balance as the fat ungainly birds eagerly chased the food giving robot.

Outside of the barn, Cordexen was leaning against the tractor, chewing on a stalk of reddish wheat, relishing the taste of the stalk's juices, when one of the green mantids scurried over to him. It was moving so quickly it had opened up the carapace on its back and fluttered its vestigal wings to run faster.

It stopped next to him and Cordexen felt surprise at how fast the equations went by.

"Comm... hurry... disaster... terrible... Terrans... hurry... comms..." his translator said, then flashed what he had learned was a 'sad face' and stopped trying to translate.

"Speak slower, little one. The translator cannot keep up," Cordexen said, reaching out and carefully soothing the little green engineer caste mantid.

The engineer fluttered its wings, stroked its bladearms together for a moment, still trembling. Its mind reached out to Cordexen, seeking support and order.

Cordexen was concerned as he had his translator repeat the words.

He remembered what a Terran was. He had seen one in a powered exoskeleton and even at a distance he had felt the malevolence, wrath, and terrible eagerness for carnage.

Cordexen bent down and picked up the little engineer, heading into the house.

He was still fifty paces from the house when he heard the warbling alarm.

Hurrying, Cordexen ran to the comlink, stopping and staring at it.

The words were all one shade in the red visual light range.

He read them several times, very carefully.

There was an addendum, that the stellar system he lived on was under interdiction, so be wary of any ships attempting to land. Demand proof of life through text or numerical broadcast only.

He stood there, for a long moment, staring at the communications equipment that connected him to the network, from there to the sats, and from there to the superluminal arrays.

He looked down at the engineers.

--take it all apart-- he ordered. --you and your peers make something else out of it. no visual broadcasts until further notice--

The greenie perked up at the news and the others rushed in.

When he went out of the room the combat servitors all asked what was happening, their black carapaces shiny. He told them and many of them wanted to get power rifles and try to fight off the shades.

Cordexen put on an episode of Charlie the Moo Moo, handed out foil bags of juice, puncturing the bags with the straws himself, then gave them all strips of sweet fruit pounded into inch wide and quarter-inch thick strips that had been rolled up.

Seeing the black mantids calming down, he walked out and went over to the tractor.

The nearest 'town' was thirty miles away. That would be a little over two hours.

He got some water canteens from the barn, picked up Corey the Turkey, then got on the tractor and headed for his neighbors to see if the neighbor was willing to go to town.

And hour later his neighbor and he pulled into the 'town', Cordexen driving his tractor, his neighbor driving his beast pulled cart. The other nearby warriors were all discussing what to do.

Cordexen got down off his tractor and pulled his power rifle from the inlaid leather boot it rode it.

"We must do this," Cordexen said. He aimed his rifle at the top of the tower where the repeaters were and pulled the trigger.

The top of the tower exploded.

"Pass the word. Audio only. Radio waves to be audio only. No visuals any longer that were not encoded onto visual mediums that have been checked for phasic residue," Cordexen said.

The other warriors and the sole speaker all nodded.

Cordexen walked back to his tractor, putting the power rifle with its inlaid and carved stock back into the leather boot. He reached over and petting Corey the Turkey, who was alarmed by the power rifle discharge and the explosion of the top of the communication tower.

"It's OK," Cordexen said, petting the fat fowl. "I'll take care of you."