Chronicles of Sol: The Fall

November 8th, 001 SDE:

Countryman paced the lower bridge. For once he wasn’t up on the command level, but in the lower area where all the controls were located. At the moment not much was happening. The test of the shuttles outfitted with the new mining equipment had begun just a few short hours ago. The significance of this was something Countryman understood very well.

Standard practice for extracting minerals from a planet or asteroid that doesn’t yet have existing infrastructure was pretty textbook. A mining shuttle would land near the area of interest and deliver a crew and equipment to the surface. They would set up a camp and start digging in the area. Gathered ore would be loaded onto a shuttle, and then taken to a ship in orbit for processing. Naturally, several shuttles would service each camp, and they would need a fair number of ground-based crews to maintain volume. Most of those ground crew personnel would be technicians there for on-site monitoring of mining robots typically used for the actual mining of ore.

This little project was a remarkable leap forward in orbital mining techniques. Unfortunately, they couldn’t yet do it all from orbit, but this little scheme had the advantage of eliminating the need to establish ground-side mining camps. Something like this could be done with asteroids already, but that had been with a few caveats. Even there the new mark II mag tractors would solve problems, and increase production efficiency. Hell, this would even be useful for salvage operations.

Countryman had plenty of reasons for hoping this would meet expectations. Being able to mine more effectively with no ground-side infrastructure would hopefully increase yields, reduce the time needed for a mining operation, and reduce the number of people needed for the job. Freeing up crewman for other tasks. The biggest one of those being the time needed to complete an operation. The sooner they had what they needed and could leave the better. So far this system had been calm, and they had been here without incident. It was anyone’s guess as to how long that would last.

That thought must have been a bit of a jynx. As Misaki suddenly looked up from the Ops console, “Hyperspace window detected. Bearing 31 mark seven. Distance 1.27 million kilometers.”

Countryman blinked. That was a drive system they had only encountered relatively recently, and knew little about it. They couldn’t even track ships in hyperspace yet. Detecting a hyperspace window, however, was something they could do.”

Countryman glanced at the tactical display. He quickly found it, and noted the nearest ship. It was the Coto. She was on a return course to the Enterprise after spending the last few weeks harvesting deuterium. They had taken their time so as do the mission safely, but thanks to that they were now in prime position to intercept.

“Alert the Coto, and standby to begin recovery operations.”

“Aye, sir”

“Can you tell me how many ships are coming through?”

Misaki shrugged, “I cannot be sure, but I believe it is just one.”

A moment later that statement was confirmed as a single ship exited the vortex. A medium vessel from the look of it in terms of tonnage and size. The unidentified vessel measured about seven hundred meters long, and spanned two hundred at the widest. Long range scans indicated it had about twenty decks. Countryman looked over the tactical scans, and scoffed. It didn’t look like much. Interestingly enough it was protected by polarized hull plating, thirteen meters thick. He also noted evidence of a shield grid. That was unusual. He had never seen an alien ship with powered armor of any form, and here he saw both shields and powered armor on a ship. Quite intriguing.

Her weapons however were completely unremarkable. It had multiple high-energy laser batteries of a configuration not dissimilar to those used on Colonial ships near the end of the second colonial war, but from the look of it they would deliver a yield of a few dozen terajoules higher with a slightly higher recharge rate as well. That made them somewhat interesting, but he had seen more powerful laser cannons mounted on civilian vessels and some of the converted vessels that had been pressed into the fleet to help bolster ship counts during the final months of the war.

The other weapons on the alien ship weren’t even worth mentioning. Its main batteries appeared to be a number of gauss cannons 1200 mm guns no less, but frankly that was the only thing to note about them. There wasn’t much to really say about such weapons. They weren’t particularly effective against modern starship armor anyway, and that was assuming you hit. Something that was already unlikely given their rather short effective range, and low relative speed.

It was an odd ship to be sure, but it didn’t seem to be a threat. The design was hard to place as well, but he noted a few aspects that left him concerned. He figured it best to err on the side of caution and be ready in case a battle broke out. Not to mention he had no way of knowing if there weren’t more ships waiting in hyperspace to drop in unannounced. Of course, he didn’t even know if hyperspace allowed such a tactic. Until recently the domain of hyperspace was only a theory, an old one but theory nonetheless. One that until some aliens used it against them in the middle of a battle they had never been able to prove. The Krall FTL jammer is supposedly capable of jamming hyperspace. The particulars of that they were still figuring out, especially since htey were still studying the hardware. In fact at this moment it was probably in thirty or so pieces in one of the shipboard labs.

“Send the Coto to intercept, and investigate these newcomers. Set all decks on alert, and deploy the reserve squadrons.”

“Aye, sir”

The young officer watched the sensors as the ship returned to normal space. They had checked several systems on this course, and honestly, she wasn’t expecting anything different this time either. The aliens were likely already long gone if they had been here in the first place. With these aliens, she knew it would be largely impossible to tell. They didn’t really leave fingerprints about their presence behind. If anything the usual marker of them having been somewhere was an odd lack of evidence when you knew there should be evidence of something having happened.

Behind her, she could hear the crew securing the ship from hyperspace. For a moment or two, the sensors were blind as they crossed between hyperspace and normal space. It was a well-known issue with hyperdrives, and a weakness often exploited. It always made her nervous, as for a brief moment they were completely blind. The other issue was that transitions were also notorious for disrupting a ship’s shield grid. A problem she didn’t have to deal with since they didn’t have working shields in the first place. Unfortunately for her that just made her more nervous about each jump.

The blindness lasted for only a moment, as normal space resolved itself. Along with a warship on an approach vector. They didn’t look to be readying for battle. Their energy readings were minimal, no sign of weapons charging or shields being raised. No sign of any kind of energy buildup at all, and she was clearly accelerating, yet there was no sign of engine exhaust either.

“Contact, sir. One ship bearing 116 mark three on approach vector.”

Her mentor responded instantly, “All hands set condition orange.”

As the others began polarizing the armor, energizing defense fields, and bringing the weapons to hot standby mode. He turned to her, “Can you identify our contact?”

“It looks to be our mystery friends sir.”

He blinked, “You mean we actually caught up with them?”

“Looks like it sir.”

“Full scan. I want as much information as you can get about them.”

“Sensors are having difficulty penetrating the hull. I’m getting minimal readings from her, but she is bigger than us. Length: ‘nine hundred, and seventy meters’. Estimated tonnage of nearly ‘three-quarters of a million metric tons’ I’m reading numerous gun ports, fore and aft torpedo launchers. Her hull is heavily armored. No discernable method of propulsion. She’s a predator, sir.”

He leaned over her console looking over her readings, and chewed over her report so far. “Yes, she does look like one. Those lines are very aggressive. Clearly built for war., but it doesn’t look like she is targeting us, just yet.”

A moment later the other ship’s movements changed. The aliens slowed dramatically and changed course. Bring themselves into a parallel course about “50,000 kilometers” distant. That put them well outside of the range of the main guns, but they were inside laser range. The young officer suspected that the aliens could also shoot back at that range. An instant later her console beeped.

“High intensity scanning beams. They seem to be just as curious about us, as we are of them.”

Her mentor nodded, “they do. Open hailing frequencies. Let’s see if they respond.”

She pressed a few buttons on her console and opened a channel. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, then something locked onto their signal. Almost instantly her computer started speaking with an alien one. Well attempting to, it took a few minutes of exchanging data before they locked onto a language they both understood. It took a few moments more after that as they generated a translation matrix.

As she waited for the computers to figure out a translation matrix, she decided to run a system wide scan. It likely wouldn’t bring up much, but perhaps she might learn a bit about why they were here. At first that scan didn’t reveal much, until she noted an anomaly. It took her a moment to resolve what she was looking at.

As it turned out, it was the big ship, and a second smaller one not far from her. Along with a number of smaller craft conducting operations in orbit of the only remotely habitable planet in the system. Not that anyone would want to set up a colony there. It was barely habitable, and the planet was somewhat unstable geologically. That didn’t mean no one was interested in the planet. The planet was minerally wealthy, and she knew that several powers were interested in establishing a mining outpost here.

What had really drawn her attention were the energy bursts, on the planet itself. It took her a couple more moments of enhancing the images to resolve what she was seeing. “Well, I think I found out what they are doing in this system.”

“Hmm? Already? We haven’t even spoken with them,” responded her mentor.

She placed her scans on the main screen. “Looks like they are conducting some kind of operation on the planet. Those shuttles are unleashing focused energy bursts. Some kind of resonant particle burst. Not dissimilar in profile to modern mining lasers, but with much greater range. I think we are looking at some kind of aerial mining operation.”

Her mentor frowned, and blinked a few times. Utterly silent without a word as he studied the scan. Images of the alien ships were somewhat fuzzy, but it was nice to see their adjustments to the scanners did help penetrate whatever stealth mechanism they were using. Not completely but enough that they could see the ships, but only with active scans. Passive scans revealed nothing.

After a moment, he finally said, “You know I never thought I would hear the words aerial and mining used together quite like that.”

“Nor did I.”

The science officer at that moment interjected, “If I may. The concept isn’t entirely alien. We explored it ourselves after the advent of tractor beam technology. The idea does have its limitations. The biggest one being the method being of little use against deeper mineral veins. Honestly the concept never gained much traction, and was largely abandoned.”

“I see. Well evidently these aliens are using the concept.”

“Or at the very least experimenting with it. That planet would be a prime candidate given the rich surface-level deposits that make the world such an attractive mining target.”

In any case it gave them something to ask the aliens about. As for the planet itself, honestly they didn’t care if the aliens were planning to strip mine it or something. It was well beyond the current borders of the Commonwealth. Besides they had enough wars as it is. Hell keeping those damned Valorians out of their territory was trouble enough. They didn’t need those walking contradictions peddling goods in their territory.

Before she could think too much further on the meeting, the console beeped. She glanced over and noted the translation matrix had been completed. She even noted the computer logged using Valorian, Cathamari, and interestingly Krall lexicons as references for creating the new translation matrix.

She informed her mentor, and a moment later they established a channel. A dimly lit alien bridge was soon revealed on the forward viewscreen. The most notable source of light was a pair of horizontal yellow bars in the background. What really caught her attention was the alien prominently positioned on the screen. Her first thought was that she was looking at a Valorian, but something struck her as wrong about that. It took her a moment to realize the skin color was all wrong, and while it was hard to tell he was notably larger than most Valorian males. Yet he was clearly male.

Perhaps a distant relative, a cousin species? No that couldn’t be. Their languages shared no common roots. It was only used as a reference since both computers understood the languages in question. There was no such thing as a universal translator, but computers could certainly build translation matrixes in remarkably short order. The more understood languages known by both the faster for such a matrix to be built.

“I’m Captain Reynolds of the Sol Refuge destroyer, EFS Coto, and you are?”