On Trackless Seas

Chapter 03
***

“Captain?”

 

I woke to a quiet voice and gentle jostling of my shoulder. “‘m up,” I grunted out, cracking my eyes open. The sight of a field of stars greeted me and the events of the past day came back as the fog of sleep quickly burned off of my mind.

 

“What’s the situation, Alice?” I finally asked as I sat up, the command chair shifting under me.

 

Alice stood in front of me to my right, a pensive look on her face. She gestured and a hologram filled the space before the chair. “We are here,” she began, as the display showed our current location.

 

“Single star system. M-class yellow star, roughly ten percent smaller than Earth’s sun. Six planets in system. Three outer gas giants acting as debris sweepers, one rocky planet outside the habitable zone, one small body orbiting close to the star, and one planet within the habitable zone… with life. Sentient life, captain! Sentient, humanoid life—”

 

“Alice,” I cut the excited avatar off before she could head further down that particular rabbit hole. As exciting as that was, and it was, it could wait.

 

Interpreting my tone and the mental command behind it, she cleared her throat and resumed her briefing. The hologram zoomed out, showing a disc shaped galaxy. Multiple blue dots lit up in various parts of the galaxy, with two red dots.

 

“Our current position,” she gestured and a beam of light rose from the red dot on the outer side of the galaxy. “I detected an emission matching the energy given off by the anti-superluminal warhead we used to escape coming from here. I think this is where the wormhole would have exited, had we followed it only a few more minutes. Virtually right next door.”

 

The hologram zoomed out a level, showing the cluster of local galaxies. Then further again, and again, until it stopped—a swathe of black space on one edge and a dotted orange line and the word ‘unknown’ on the other side—with a familiar blue line streaking into the unknown area.

 

The hologram expanded, a small black void in the middle, before another orange line denoted a border and a cluster of stars. A single green dot blinked in the middle, labeled ‘Earth.’ The blue line connected the two areas.

 

“I have only a rough estimate of the distance involved, but I do know the exact heading we would need to follow to get back to Earth via superluminal travel. At a guess, it would take thousands of years to cross the divide, best case scenario.”

 

Alice bowed her head, her expression full of regret. “I am truly sorry, my captain.”

 

Studying the map, I asked, “What’s stopping us from just hopping in that wormhole from this end and going back home?”

 

Alice winced. “Two things. Firstly, I am not certain it would allow us. Further study of my sensor logs turned up energy constructs along the wormhole’s path—the source of the scans. I believe it may have been some kind of IFF system. I’m not certain it would let us in a second time.”

 

I nodded at that. It made sense that, if an alien race wanted to set up a secret garden world to play God, they wouldn’t want people using their own method of getting there—let alone one that took them straight to the front door, so to speak. People leaving, on the other hand? Politely show them the door and tell them to fuck off. Or flush them down a suck hole and eject them so far away that they’d never find their way back.

 

“And the other?”

 

This time, the wince was worse. The display of stars on the wall around us shifted, putting the system’s sun dead center. The hologram sprang to life with a replica of the star in question. And there, on the edge of the star…

 

“Is that our exit?”

 

Alice nodded. “Yes, captain. When we dropped into realspace, the wormhole bridged the gap between subspace and real. It would have just sat there, but I believe the star’s magnetic field pulled it in. Currently, the wormhole is falling into the system’s star. And while yes, I could survive diving into the star to enter it, traversing the wormhole while it carries solar matter and ejects it as a plasma stream into subspace on the other side would be risky at best.”

 

Blinking, the corner of my lips turned up into a grin. “I shouldn’t laugh, but did we just flush a star down an intergalactic shitter?”

 

“Basically.” Alice sighed and the hologram zoomed out, centering on the second planet from the sun. “Which brings us back here. To the inhabited planet. I estimate six months before the star loses enough mass that the inhabitable zone shrinks to the point that life on this world is no longer sustainable and it freezes over, killing everything on it. Two years, tops, before the star is fully swallowed and the planets around it go spinning off into deep space with nothing holding them here.”

 

In other words, we were directly responsible for the xenocide of an entire alien planet, intentional or not. That did not sit well with me. At all. Well, unless they were degenerate, irredeemable monsters.

 

“They’re not—”

 

Alice shook her head, cutting me off. “The dominant race is civilized. More civilized than humans on Earth, even. They appear to be entering into an industrial age, in fact. Here, let me show you.”

 

The hologram changed again, this time displaying—

 

“Is this a joke?” I asked, shooting Alice an unamused look as I took in the familiar features of the beings she was showing me.

 

One clearly male, one clearly female. Two arms, two legs, one head covered in hair, ten fingers and toes each. One penis and set of testicles on the male, two breasts and a vagina on the female.

 

Everything there looked human, save that it was scaled down proportionately. Judging by the hologram of myself Alice put next to them, they were tiny. Text out to the side listed the adults as being three and a half feet tall on average.

 

“They call themselves the Eru. The population numbers in the millions and is scattered across every habitable zone of the planet, save for the ice caps. The largest gathering of them is on the eastern continent, which is roughly the size of Eurasia, minus Africa. They are, as you can see, amazingly close to humans in morphology. The only differences appear superficial. The height and, in many cases, additions that look engineered. Enough so that there are three distinct subspecies of Eru, easily distinguished by their features.”

 

Examples of Eru populated in the hologram. Eru with animal-like tails and ears, Eru with horns, Eru with elf ears. “It’s like someone decided to take base humans and attempt animal hybridization, with a focus on what looks best.”

 

“That very well could be the case, my captain,” Alice admitted. “Forerunner races liked to experiment and most weren’t particular about cleaning up after their tests. And it was a Forerunner site. I’ve detected a piece of their technology. Currently, it’s being used as a religious icon in the capitol of the largest nation on the continent. I believe it’s a beacon or a repository of knowledge, perhaps their notes on what was done to create the Eru. Deep scans don’t penetrate it though, as is typical of most Forerunner artifacts, so if we want to investigate further it will need to be done in person.”

 

Alice looked excited at the prospect of research, but quickly schooled her expression. “But I’m getting off track. Regardless of their origin, they are a race worth saving—even if only just enough for a breeding population to transplant them elsewhere.”

 

I sat starting at the hologram as I went over what I’d been told. There was no dressing it up. This was our fault. My fault, since I made the call. “How many can we take on?”

 

“If we crammed them in, a few hundred. With careful management and selective breeding, that would be enough for their race to survive and eventually repopulate, once they were established on a new world.”

 

A few hundred. Out of millions. “Do we have any other options?”

 

Frowning, Alice began to pace back and forth in front of my chair, her hair swishing just above her heels as she moved. “Give me a moment captain. I’m going to access more of my CPU.”

 

I nodded and her eyes went blank, glowing brighter as her body moved on its own, her attention clearly elsewhere. Her lips moved every now and then, but no words came out. I turned my attention back to the hologram.

 

After a few minutes of this, Alice snapped back into focus. “I believe I can save them all. It will be close, though. Right now, my hull is currently outfitted as a destroyer. If I moved up to corvette class, I could expand my facilities. Among various upgrades I could perform during a refit are spacial compression and adding a stasis crypt—essentially a cryosleep vault. The timing will be tricky though.”

 

She had returned to her pacing and, with a gesture, the hologram began to fill with blueprints, technical specifications, and lists of materials. A model of the system spawned beside the blueprints and sources for each needed piece of material were highlighted.

 

“I can send drones to harvest raw materials from the asteroid belt. At the same time, I’ll need to grow an expansion to my inner hull and body on the planet, using available water and biomass for fuel.” On the hologram, dots trailed away to the asteroid belt and the planet. Something that looked like a mass of roots spawned beside the planet.

 

“Once the raw materials are gathered, I’ll need to forge them into hypermatter before the star gets too cold and loses too much pressure to be of use as a forge.” Lines were drawn from the dots in the asteroid belt back to the sun.

 

“Then, I’ll need to take it all down to the planet and put it together before the water freezes over and becomes useless. I could heat limited amounts into liquid, but if I have to then by that time we’ll have failed and there will be no one left to save.” A model of the ship descended and merged with the mass of roots before pulling the newly created pieces of outer hull around itself.

 

Turning to me, Alice grinned. “And in the meantime, someone will have to convince the Eru to start packing. I could transport them all aboard ship by force, but this will go much smoother if I don’t have to. If they’re prepared to resettle on a new world. And especially if their governments are behind the move.”

 

I raised an eyebrow at the ship girl. “Me? Sure, I’ll just go down and tell them their planet is doomed and if they want to live they need to come with me. Surely nothing could possibly go wrong at all.”

 

My sarcasm did not go unnoticed. Alice responded in kind. “A man of your stature? I’m sure you’ll have them all looking up to you in no time, captain.”

 

“Why did I agree to this again?”

 

The woman’s response was immediate and sincere. “Because you wanted out as much as I wanted someone to share a lifetime of adventure with. I know almost everything about you. We complete each other in a way that others would alternately envy or fear. I don’t need to peek into your mind to know that that frightens you. That you need time and space to process. That’s why I think this would be good for you, in addition to being the best suited to the job.”

 

“Not to mention the only one available for it,” I muttered. I did not deny her assessment on the rest, however. It was too much, too fast, and while she seemed nice enough Alice was a bit overwhelming. Add to that the fact that I may not be able to go home. I may have wanted a vacation, but that didn’t mean I wanted to abandon my home, friends, and family entirely.

 

“That too,” she admitted. “I’ll have my hands full with everything going on up here. I can spare enough attention that I can be there for you on comms whenever you need, but beyond that… Well, a refit is a very involved process. In a way, I’m glad we’re doing this now, where I don’t have to worry about the threat of an enemy stumbling onto us while I’m vulnerable.”

 

“Mm.” I stood up from the chair and stretched. “So here’s a question: how am I supposed to understand and speak the language? Pretty sure they don’t speak English.”

 

Alice shook her head, sending her long hair swishing about her feet. “They do not. But that’s okay. I’ve already scanned their books and I’ve had drones listening and building a language database. Well, several. There are seven main spoken languages on Eruvia—that’s the name of the planet. I’ve already uploaded them to your secondary neural matrix. Translation should be automatic and so natural you won’t even realize you’re not speaking or reading English.”

 

That sounded like bullshit to me, but what the hell did I know? I was just a dumb human and even the tech we dreamed of seemed behind some of the things I’d seen so far. I decided to handwave it as sufficiently advanced magic and move on.

 

“Should I take anything with me? Is the food edible or will I die in agony if I eat it? What about disease?”

 

Alice hummed and nodded once. “The food is perfectly edible, though the taste may be strange or just off. That body doesn’t carry any diseases and it has a nanite medical suite, so even if it didn’t possess an over-engineered super immune system, the medical suite would pick up anything and destroy it before it became a problem. As for other threats, while your original body is safely tucked away within me, it would still be annoying if that one were lost or damaged. I’d have to make another and I don’t have the time to spare for it. Even if the Eru seem peaceful, I’d rather not take unnecessary risks. So let’s get you outfitted. I’ll beam us to the armory and testing room.”

 

Sending me the side eye, she added, “Don’t get used to it. Inter-ship teleportation is typically reserved for emergencies. Outside of emergencies, there are transport tubes.”

 

“Are you telling me I need to walk so I don’t get fat again?”

 

We were enveloped in white light and reappeared inside a fairly long room. Like the bridge, it appeared empty at first glance.

 

“It’s physically impossible for that body to gain more than a minimal amount of fat. In fact, you’ll need to eat about twice what you’re used to in protein and carbohydrates in order to maintain those muscles and the higher brain activity required of a psyker awakening—which we need to discuss later. It’s more about not letting my captain get lazy and dependent on luxuries that don’t exist in the field, or that could be detected by enemies scanning for certain energy signatures on a planet. Beaming technology is always fairly easy to detect, even if you try to hide it.”

 

That made sense, actually. I made mental notes about the psyker thing for later, though. I hoped it was what I thought it sounded like.

 

“This is the armory,” Alice gestured to the empty room. The wall closest to us split open and clearly recognizable forms of ranged weapons became visible where they had been stored.

 

There were long ones that looked like rifles, short ones that looked like pistols, and big weapons that looked like heavy arms—the sort of thing you use to take out a tank as opposed to a person. Reaching into the first locker, Alice withdrew a pistol sized weapon and passed it over to me. It was small in my hand, about the size of my subcompact concealed carry .380 pistol back on Earth.

 

“Kinetic pistol. It fires sand grain sized hypermatter particles weighing in at one gram each at about twenty percent cee by default, but that can be dialed up to fifty percent or down to one percent. Very ‘punchy,’ as you would put it. High penetration, very likely to result in multiple ‘splatter kills.’ It should annihilate any unshielded or unhardened target you fire it at. Think of it like a pocket Tomahawk at ten percent output—well, two Tomahawks.”

 

I very carefully made sure the pistol was pointed downrange. I trusted my own skills and discipline with firearms, but when someone told you that you were essentially handling something more like a missile launcher than a conventional pistol, a little paranoia was appropriate.

 

“Right. And this won’t accidentally splatter me?” I asked, inspecting it and finding a simple mechanical safety and trigger, but no other moving parts. No physical sights or magazine either.

 

“Oh, it’s very safe, so long as you’re not within the blast zone. It’s tied into my IFF targeting system so it won’t even fire if it’s pointed in your general direction unless you override it and it won’t fire at sufficient power to damage you if you’re firing at closer targets—it will automatically scale power output based on distance. You could press it against someone and liquefy their torso and you wouldn’t feel much more than a breeze. I don’t advise it because of the splatter, though. In case you’re wondering, the sights and manual power control are both HUD based,” Alice explained, and a moment later I felt something click in my head and the world was suddenly overlaid with a tactical display.

 

“Very cool, but let’s try to keep the clutter to a minimum,” I grinned, playing with it a bit and finding that it essentially let me look through walls thanks to being tied into a sensor suite apparently built into my body. “What if I just need to smack the shit out of something instead? Sometimes, physically beating someone to a pulp sends a better message than turning them into chunky salsa.”

 

Gesturing vaguely with the pistol I added, “And what about a holster? Aside from looking like an idiot if you put it down the front of your pants, I don’t want to point it in the general direction of my dick.”

 

Chuckling, Alice pulled a short rod from the locker as well and tossed it to me. The little light brown thing had to weigh at least fifty pounds, leaving me wondering where all the weight went. “To holster the pistol, press it against your pants or wherever you want it to go. Your clothes will do the rest.”

 

I pressed the pistol against the side of my pants and the smart matter they were made of flowed over it, covering all but the grip to allow me to draw it if I needed it. I drew it and the holster remained, looking more like a pocket attached to my pants than an accessory. After another two test draws, I holstered it and left it there.

 

“The hilt I gave you is a smart matter tool, reinforced with hypermatter strands and particles. It can change shape as needed with just a thought. Any blade created with it will be molecular sharp and the leading edges reinforced with hypermatter for added durability, but like your sidearm there is no chance of accidentally injuring yourself.”

 

Pointing at the hilt she added, “If you need something sharper, or a shield, there is a force field protector built in that can produce fields capable of slicing through even hypermatter with enough time or which can take a hit from a weapon with comparable output to your sidearm.”

 

Downrange, a man-shaped target rose from the ground. “Go ahead, give them a try. The walls here are reinforced hypermatter. The only thing tougher is my outer hull. After this, I’ll brief you on the area I’ll be sending you into first.”

***

The world of Eruvia was divided into nine large continents, with only one of those not bearing life at the planet’s north pole. The continent I was being sent to was home to an empire composed of about a dozen smaller kingdoms making up a larger empire ruled by a single empress. Technologically, they were just stepping into the industrial age.

 

Hand built lights and water or steam powered electricity were, if not widely available, at least present in the capitols and major cities. According to the Whisper’s scans, there were even a few automobiles and the beginnings of a train and rail system, but they hadn’t quite figured out large scale manufacturing and production yet, let alone automation. They were probably ten, maybe twenty years out from the assembly line.

 

Conversely, their weapons technology was almost nonexistent, even if they had a comparably better understanding of or more investment in chemistry than Earth had during this period of our development. In fact, wars were few and far between. The Eru were a scholarly, industrious people on the whole. Inventors, thinkers, artists, and the like.

 

Alice even took the time to put together a demonstration of some of their more popular music for me. The instruments were not unlike what could be found on Earth, just sized a bit differently—which, given the nature of physics and the materials used, produced a lot of higher notes, with less emphasis on low notes.

 

The nation I would start with was currently ruled by a young empress, but while they were ruled by a single family, they were neither patriarchal nor matriarchal—rather, the first born child inherited the throne, regardless of gender. Someone who married in would become emperor or empress, but the trueborn of that house held ultimate power. It was surprisingly egalitarian for a society just entering the industrial era.

 

Population-wise, the Eru were unevenly divided, with numbers skewed heavily towards women at a 3.5 to 1 ratio. Alice couldn’t tell me for sure why that was without generic samples, but their historical texts showed this to be the case for as long as they’d had written history. The Eru had adapted to the reproduction problem by throwing numbers at it, essentially encouraging breeding and multi-partner relationships, built around a strong nuclear family structure modified for more than one wife per household. This likely also contributed to their lack of desire for war. War meant population decline, death of the rarer male Eru, and that would put them in even more danger as a species.

 

By the time I was ready to head down, I honestly felt like going in armed and armored in smart matter as I was would be overkill, but I decided on a pragmatic ‘better to have it and not need it’ approach just in case someone got cute. After all, I was an alien coming to tell them their world was going to be destroyed. I couldn’t put it past someone to act out of panic. Even a mouse bites if backed into a corner.

 

 

“At least we come offering salvation,” Alice offered. “Ready to go?”

 

“Yeah. See you in what, a few months?”

 

Alice hummed with a nod. “Around that. Be safe.”

 

“Thanks. You too?” I tried and got a smile in return. Then, it was time to go. “I’ve waited my whole life to say this. One to beam down. Energize.”

 

The last thing I heard before I disappeared in a flash of white light was Alice’s warm laugh.

 

Instead of the empty field we had been aiming for outside of the capitol, what I materialized into was clearly the interior of a building. White walls with gold filigree, decorated with painted scenery surrounded me. The floors looked to be something akin to marble, white streaked through with veins of light red. Sunlight steamed in through stained glass windows set in the walls and ceiling, giving the whole place an otherworldly vibe.

 

Gasps drew my attention to the crowd of onlookers, all Eru dressed in fine clothes and seated on benches. Or pews.

 

A quiet “My word” from behind me had me turning around to see an Eru woman sat atop what was clearly a throne in the front row, dressed in a long, white gown and wearing a crown that settled on her brow. Pointed, elfin ears poked out of her head from between strands of blonde hair and bright blue eyes met and held my green.