Terran Navy Commander Pavel Leonidovich Sidorov had a splitting headache. The shift commander for coordinating customs inspections for starships inbound to Earth, he was responsible for orchestrating the actions of over three dozen cutters that shuttled dozens of inspection parties from one merchantman to another, looking for contraband. Even with that many inspection parties, it was a daunting task: Earth had more ships to handle than any two other planets, with hundreds of ships arriving and departing every day. Customs control had several gateways at different orbital nodes spread around the equator, but all the inspection operations were run from this one command center, located at the primary Earth-orbit transfer node located over Africa. Attached to the “bottom” of Africa Station’s massive docking and embarkation facility, Sidorov and his crewmen were located in an expansive enclosure of clearsteel that gave them an unrestricted view of the space around them: Earth below, and dozens of starships spread out in orderly rows pointing toward the station.
While this type of duty was normally performed planetside by civilian customs officers or the wet-fleet Coast Guard, outside the atmosphere it was a Terran Navy show. Funded by the Terran Government, which was loosely based on the ancient United Nations but with funding and executive authorities that never would have been conceived for the UN, the Terran Navy had exclusive purview for security matters beyond the atmosphere. Ironically, that had come to include customs inspections after a few nasty incidents of incoming “merchantmen” turning out to be armed raiders. So rather than form a new bureaucracy, the Terran Government simply expanded on the existing one. As a general rule, it had turned out to be a good compromise: the customs inspections were run with Navy efficiency, and there was only one major tax burden to be maintained for exo-atmospheric defense.
But Sidorov wouldn’t have minded shoving the job onto someone else on occasion, like right now. “Negative,” he grated, his Russian accent barely creeping into his otherwise excellent Standard as he spoke into his microphone to the captain of the bulk cargo transport Manzanar, “you are not cleared to maneuver beyond customs until you have been cleared by one of the inspection teams. This has already been explained to you, captain.” About fifty times already, Sidorov added to himself.
“This is outrageous!” the captain of the other vessel sputtered. “We have been waiting here for two days, and have precious cargo that must be delivered immediately! You have no idea what an inconvenience this is for us, commander.”
Sidorov put his face in his hands and shook his head, eliciting grins from the other members of the inspection control crew and the civilian harbor masters who directed the ships in and out of Earth space. The Manzanar’s captain had been ranting at customs control every two hours on the dot since the ship had arrived two days before, with the man cursing the Navy and customs through both shifts. The man must never sleep, Sidorov lamented. And according to the ship’s manifest, the cargo that had to be delivered “immediately” was a load of old-growth lumber that had been harvested on Kelsey’s World and had been in transit for a month. Chances are it could wait a few more hours. With a sigh, Sidorov said, “Captain, as you have been told repeatedly, you will stay in queue, you will-”
“Holy shit!” one of the senior harbor masters shouted as he and several others suddenly stumbled back away from the massive viewports around the cylindrical command hub.
Outside, not more than one hundred meters away from where Sidorov stood gaping in shock, a ship had emerged from hyperspace almost directly below Africa Station. Such a navigational feat was unheard of, and coming out of hyperspace this close to a planetary gravity well was not only suicidal, it should have been mathematically impossible.
After the slightest pause where everyone was in utter shock, total pandemonium broke out. The comm panels were suddenly flooded with frightened or angry calls from the ships in queue, a hundred, and quickly far more, calls from passengers in the station who’d seen the ship appear, and the station commander, who had a dedicated channel.
“Chyort vozmi!” Sidorov cursed in his native Russian. “Get cutters 12 and 17 over to that ship, and I want her captain on the comm right now!”
“Aye, sir!” one of the controllers replied, still in shock.
“Sidorov,” the station commander, Captain Rhonda Burke, demanded from his primary video console, “what the hell is going on?”
“You know exactly as much as I do, captain,” Sidorov told her. “I’ve got two cutters on the way and am trying to raise her captain. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”
“Understood. Out.” With a brusque nod, Burke signed off so he could get to work.
“Harbor masters,” he shouted above the din, “make sure those merchant ships understand that if they break out of line they’ll be fined until doomsday and if we catch them I’ll throw their captains into the brig!”
“Commander,” another controller called, “her telemetry’s active. It’s the Aurora, sir.”
Sidorov didn’t need the telemetry to tell him what ship it was. He could see the house-sized letters of her name from where he stood: TNS Aurora. “That’s Captain McClaren’s ship, isn’t it?” he asked. The controller who was monitoring the ship’s signals nodded. “What the devil is she-”
A face suddenly appeared on the central video monitor. It belonged to a young man, but his eyes had the distant look Sidorov had once seen on the faces of the old veterans of the war twenty years before on the Russian colony of Saint Petersburg. Those eyes, set in a gaunt face that wore a haunted expression, gave him a bone-deep chill. His hair was far too long for a man serving in the Navy; while it was clean and brushed out, it looked like it had been growing wild for months.
“Africa Station,” the young man said, “this is...I am Midshipman Ichiro Sato of the TNS Aurora...commanding. I...”
“What do you mean, ‘commanding,’ Midshipman Sato?” Sidorov demanded. “Where is Captain McClaren?”
“Captain McClaren is dead. As is the entire crew. All but me. Sir.” He struggled a moment for control of his emotions.
“Midshipman, if this is some sort of joke, you’ll wish you were never-”
“Sir,” Sato interrupted, his voice choked with emotion, “I wish to report that Aurora made first contact with a sentient race...” He paused again, his face assuming a cold mask of hatred before continuing, “and that human space is about to be invaded.”
There was total and utter silence on the control deck as everyone suddenly tuned in to what Sato was saying. Not just there in customs control, but throughout the station and among the waiting merchantmen, for Sato was communicating on an open channel.
For a second time in as many minutes, pandemonium erupted.
* * *
Stephanie Guillaume was standing in line with all the other human geese who were waiting for the next orbital transfer shuttle to take them down to the surface when the call came through on her vidphone.
“Stephanie!” her editor and boss at TransCom News, Simon Whyte, shouted at her from the tiny high definition screen. She always went by Steph. He never called her Stephanie unless she was about to get a bonus or a major ass-chewing. “Where are you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked sarcastically. “I’m still stuck on Africa Station because the Transit Authority boneheads can’t make the shuttles run on time.”
“Thank God,” Simon breathed, practically in tears.
“Simon,” she said, suddenly concerned, “what the hell’s going on?” She had never particularly liked the man, but he’d given her a chance when she’d been stiffed by most of the other news organizations she’d tried for. An attractive, if not quite beautiful, brunette with inquisitive brown eyes and a personality to match, she knew she was good enough, both in terms of looks and brains, for a spot on one of the major news-zines. The only real challenge was getting the break she needed to get into the big leagues. Simon was a pushy jackass, but she knew she could do a lot worse. At least he had never tried to push her toward his bed or pulled any other crap on her. As jackasses went, he really wasn’t so bad. Maybe one of his fifty thousand relatives has died or something, she thought, trying to come up with a reasonable facsimile of sympathy. It was hard.
“Listen,” he went on in a rush, completely ignoring her, “something’s happened. Something big. Right there on the station. We got a tip - shit, a pile of tips now - that a mystery ship suddenly appeared and there’s talk of an alien invasion.”
“What?” Steph exclaimed. “Oh, come on! How many times have we been sent on wild goose-”
“It’s the Aurora,” he said, cutting her off. “The research guys say it’s one of the newest survey ships that went out almost a year ago. Go find her. Find out what happened.”
Fuming, Steph grabbed her bags and stepped out of line, tossing them angrily against a nearby wall. That’s when she noticed that a lot of people were on their vidphones. More people than usual. Listening closely, she made out phrases that sounded an awful lot like what Simon had told her: “ghost ship” and “alien attack” among them. She saw a growing number of perplexed, amused, and even frightened expressions.
“Listen, Simon-”
“Just do it, dammit! This could be the biggest story since Christ got nailed to the cross-”
Her vidphone suddenly went blank. Then her vid screen filled with an unfamiliar message: “Network connectivity lost.”
Around her, everyone else who was using their phones must have experienced the same “connectivity problem,” because she heard a lot of cursing and people just staring into their blank vidphones.
“Network problem, my ass,” she muttered. Their connection had been cut off intentionally.
“Information,” she demanded of the console embedded in the wall. It still was working. “What can you tell me about an inbound ship called Aurora?”
“I’m sorry,” the disgustingly deferential female voice replied, “that information is restricted.”
Steph felt her pulse quicken with excitement. There might really be something to this! “Okay, who do I need to talk to for information on inbound ships?”
That information apparently wasn’t restricted. After she got what she needed, she bolted down the corridor toward the central elevators as fast as her high heels could carry her. She left her bags behind, completely forgotten.
* * *
“Cutters 12 and 17 are in position, sir,” one of the harbor masters reported through the din of frantic pleas and threats being made by the other controllers to keep the merchantmen from scattering in the wake of Aurora’s spectacular arrival and Sato’s equally spectacular claims of invading aliens. The two small vessels, looking like remoras alongside the much larger survey ship, had approached the main port and starboard gangway airlocks.
“Commander...”
Sidorov shifted his attention from updating the station commander back to the face of the midshipman who appeared to be Aurora’s only survivor.
“Sir,” Sato told him, “I strongly recommend that you consider first contact safety protocols before boarding. I don’t believe the aliens left any contamination. That wouldn’t fit with what I saw of how they do things, but...”
“Don’t worry, Sato,” Sidorov told him, “the boarding parties will be wearing full vacuum gear.” And weapons, he added silently. He didn’t know whether to believe the young man or not. He had said little before Sidorov had gotten him switched over to a secure circuit, but first contact? Alien invasion? He sounded delusional, and Sidorov half expected the boarding parties to find some sort of massacre that would wind up being made into a holo vid show for lunatic teens.
On the other hand, Sidorov couldn’t take any chances. If the midshipman’s wild story did seem to check out, things were going to get dicey very quickly. The station commander had already put through a call to the customs fleet commander, who wanted verification before he woke up the Chief of Naval Staff half a world away. Everyone was thus far taking the story with a big grain of salt, but one thing was indisputable: Aurora’s reappearance simply should not have happened the way it did, and they wanted an explanation. Fast. “I hate to say it, but you’ll probably be in quarantine for a while if this story of yours checks out.”
“Understood, sir,” the young man replied. “Sir, I have opened the outer gangway hatches and the inner hatches are unlocked. The cutters may send in their boarding parties.”
Sidorov noticed the change in Sato’s speech as he said boarding parties, almost as if he were gritting his teeth.
“Thank you, midshipman,” Sidorov told him. He glanced at the tactical controller who sat before a wide-screen console, who nodded in return: he had contact with the boarding parties, and both teams reported they were aboard and moving quickly to secure the bridge and engineering.
After a few minutes the team leader from Cutter 12 reported in. “Sir, so far as we’ve seen, there’s nobody here. Not a soul. No sign of a struggle, no bodies, no nothing. Just a spanking new-looking ship.” His video feed confirmed it. Empty passageways. Empty cabins. Empty work spaces. Nothing.
“Same here, commander,” the leader of Cutter 17’s team reported as he reached engineering. “There’s nobody home but the kid on the bridge.”
Sidorov could hear the stress in their voices. There were always people aboard a ship in orbit. The passageways might not be teeming with people, but a Navy ship returning from a long cruise would have half her crew at the airlocks, chomping at the bit to get off to shore leave. And there was always someone on the engineering watch, even if a ship was in space dock. Always. But this ship had just completed a hyperlight journey of who knew how long with no one but a midshipman aboard. It gave Sidorov the creeps.
“We’re at the bridge, sir,” the leader from Cutter 12 said quietly. There was Sato in the man’s video display, standing rigidly at attention. Sato saluted the ensign who stood before him. “Midshipman,” the ensign told him as he saluted, “you stand relieved.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Sato replied hoarsely, tears suddenly welling from his eyes. “I stand relieved. The Aurora is yours.”
With that, Sato collapsed to his knees and wept.
* * *
Steph stood at the back of the command deck near the access portal from the central elevator shafts, staring in disbelief at the drama playing out on the video monitors around her. Dressed in a tight red dress that didn’t leave all that much to the imagination - she was damned if she’d look like a frump while traveling first class on the company’s dime - she stood out like a collision beacon among the starched khaki uniforms of the Navy crewmen. But that dress and her press ID had gotten her past some tough gatekeepers before, and certainly hadn’t failed her this time: the Navy security people she had to get past to get in here had both been men, and had been easily manipulated into believing that she’d been summoned there by the commanding officer, but she was to keep a low profile until he had a free moment to speak with her. She figured it wasn’t too far from the truth. The dress and her curves distracted them, while the ID and a sharp tongue gave her credibility. She looked harmless enough, so they let her through.
She watched as the young man on the main screen, the sole survivor of the ship’s crew, broke down in tears after the space-suited figure of a member of one of the boarding teams officially assumed control of Aurora. For a while she simply stood against the back wall of the command center, about a dozen paces behind where the person in charge, Commander Sidorov, one of the guards had said, stood watching the main monitor. She could see and hear everything, and so could the mini vid-cam array that was clipped to her ear, the video array and microphone on a wire-thin boom that extended forward next to her cheek. With the network shut down she couldn’t get her data off the station, but an idea was churning in her brain to not only get around the little problem of censorship, but to make it work to her advantage. She added audio notes quietly, whispering so as not to draw attention to herself too soon.
* * *
A part of Sato was ashamed for breaking down and crying like a child in front of everyone who might be watching him, but the greater part of him pushed it away. It was an emotional release from the burden he had borne alone for the last few months. He hated to admit it to himself, but it was the first time since the slaughter of the ship’s crew that he had felt a positive emotion of any kind. In this case, it was simply relief. Relief that he was back among his own kind. Relief that he was no longer alone on a ghost ship with the nightmares that plagued his sleep each and every time he laid down.
The voyage back had been entirely uneventful and mind-numbingly boring. As he had suspected, the aliens had made more than simply cosmetic changes to the ship: they had modified some of her systems to allow her to function entirely on her own. The things the crew normally had to do to keep her systems in good working order were no longer required, at least for the months it had taken to get back to Earth. Aurora had sailed for six months from her last port of call on the Rim to reach the alien system, but had taken about four months to return to Earth. It should have been impossible for the ship to go that far in only four months, even taking a direct transit. So the aliens must also have altered the ship’s engines in some way, making her faster in hyperspace than should have been possible. He had tried to learn about the course settings and what the ship was doing, but while the blue-robed alien had warned him away from the command console, the warning appeared to have been unnecessary: he could get no navigation information from the ship’s computer at all, no matter what he tried. He couldn’t retrieve any information that could even corroborate his story of where the Aurora had been since she left the Rim: all evidence of the aliens had apparently been stripped from the ship’s records. And the aliens had locked him out of everything that had to do with the ship’s drives, navigation, sensors, everything. About the only thing he had free access to were the educational and entertainment sections.
And their sense of navigation...Sato had cried out in surprise when the ship had emerged from hyperspace, literally right next to Africa Station. It was impossible for at least half a dozen reasons. Not just the accuracy - how could they have known that Aurora wouldn’t intersect another ship when she emerged? - but because of how close they were to the Earth’s gravity well. The formulas were complex and handled directly by the navigation computer, and of course varied depending on the gravity index of a planetary or stellar body, but the nearest safe jump radius for Earth was well beyond the orbit of the moon. But the aliens had somehow brought the ship right here, matching the orbit with a moving object from an unimaginable distance. It wasn’t just a coincidence. It wasn’t luck. They had done it intentionally.
At the start of the lonely months aboard the ship, after he realized that he had been locked out of everything he wanted so desperately to know, he became listless, falling into a dark depression. Had there been liquor aboard, he had no doubt he would have spent most of the trip in a drunken stupor, even though he didn’t normally drink alcohol.
What shocked him out of it was his obsession with watching the replica of Keran. Three months after leaving the alien system, he noticed that the northern pole had turned from its previous pristine white to a dirty gray as it had when the big warrior had shown him how the globe would change as the time for war drew closer. That’s when it struck him that he had only four pieces of evidence to prove what had happened: the alien clothes he’d worn back aboard; the changes the aliens had made to the ship; the cyan-colored disk that had been his “ticket home”; and the replica of Keran. There appeared to be nothing in the ship’s computer memory, and certainly no trace that aliens had been aboard the ship.
That meant that everything else, everything, was in his head. Everything to show how his shipmates had died. And that was when he finally got a grip on himself again and started acting like the young Navy officer he wanted to become. He started to log all his impressions, everything he could remember, down to the tiniest detail. Then he broke it down into sections, organizing the information into logical categories and cross-checking it for accuracy and consistency. He drew diagrams of what he could remember of the alien ships, outside and inside; of what the warriors and the robed aliens looked like, and how many different kinds of robed aliens there were. Sights, smells, sounds, the taste of the food they’d been given, the texture of things he had touched. Everything. In the end, it was not only a vital exercise in giving humanity some intelligence information on the foe they would soon face, but helped him deal with the crushing survivor’s guilt he felt, and the penetrating sense of loneliness and isolation.
But that horrible voyage was finally over. His tears expended now, he stood up and faced the ensign who led the forward boarding party. “My apologies, sir,” he said, gathering himself again to the position of attention. “It has been a...difficult trip home.”
* * *
Steph watched as several Navy officers suddenly burst into the room, led by a stern-faced female officer who was all business. Steph frowned to herself, because women like this one were almost impossible to manipulate. She sometimes felt guilty about pulling strings on people, but it wasn’t a question of morality, it was a question of getting the job done. It was a part of her job that she wished she didn’t have to do, but that’s not the way life was. Not hers, at least.
She directed the microphone pickup toward the woman and waited to see what would happen next.
* * *
“I’m not sure how to handle this, captain,” Sidorov told Captain Rhonda Burke quietly as the boarding teams quickly finished scouting through the rest of the ship. He had muted the audio channel with Aurora so they could speak in relative privacy in the hubbub of the harbor masters working around them.
“I don’t see the problem,” Burke replied sharply. “You’ve implemented the first contact quarantine protocols, and fleet is up to speed on the situation for now.”
Sidorov didn’t take offense, because he knew that she wasn’t impugning his judgement, just making a direct observation. She was direct about everything. But sometimes she didn’t see problems that came at her from an oblique angle. “I’m not worried about that part, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m worried about containment of any sensitive information. I don’t want to speculate, but if news of some sort of ‘alien invasion’ gets out, there could be some ugly repercussions.”
“I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation to what’s happened that doesn’t involve aliens,” Burke said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “We’ve had stranger things than this happen over the years. There’s not going to be any alien invasion. That’s ridiculous.”
“Excuse me, but how can you possibly assume that?”
Burke and Sidorov turned to see a civilian woman in an eye-popping red dress stalk forward as if she wore the stars of an admiral.
“And who the bloody hell are you?” Burke demanded hotly. “Security! Get this civilian out of here!”
“Captain,” Steph said quickly, recognizing the woman’s rank and knowing she only had seconds before she would be bodily thrown out of the command center, “I’m a journalist,” she quickly flashed her press ID, “and I can tell you that the secret’s already out of your hands. The best you can do is control it and spin it the way you want. And I can help you do that.”
“Bullshit!” Burke spat, motioning to the same two guards who had let the mystery woman into the command center. The captain’s expression left no doubt that they would get the ass-chewing of their lives later.
“I was up in one of the transit lounges when Aurora came in,” Steph rushed her words out as the two men gently but firmly took her by the arms and started hauling her out, “and there were dozens of people on their vidphones a minute later talking about it, with their noses pressed up to the observation windows, looking at the fucking ship and talking about an alien invasion!”
Burke glanced at Sidorov and saw the indecision on his face. Again, if she was anything, she was direct. “Commander?”
“Ma’am, she may have a point,” he said as the guards continued to haul the woman out. “If she’s a legit journalist...”
“Hold it!” Burke suddenly ordered the guards. “Take her in there.” Burke pointed toward a small briefing room at the rear of the command center. “We’ll join you in a moment.”
* * *
Steph’s heart was hammering, not with fear but with excitement. She didn’t have a “yes” from the captain, but she had at least put off being tossed out on her ass.
The guards led her into the conference room and left her there for a few minutes before the captain, Burke was her name, according to the name placard embedded in her khaki uniform, and Commander Sidorov came in. The guards closed the door and waited outside.
“You’ve got precisely one minute to convince me why I shouldn’t put you under arrest,” Burke ordered brusquely.
A minute, Steph thought. Please. “Captain, Aurora’s arrival is news already. Look at any of the info channels and I’m sure you’ll see it. And somebody heard something to make them worry about an alien invasion. I don’t know where that angle came from, but that’s why my bloody editor called me: because he’d gotten wind of it from someone else!” She leaned closer. “And even if the invasion bit isn’t true, people are thinking and talking about it. The cat was already out of the bag before you took the station data networks down.”
That elicited a stage-perfect “I-told-you-so” look from Sidorov to the captain.
Her frown deepened. “Thirty seconds.”
Thirty seconds, my ass, Steph thought. You know I’m right. “Listen. I’m a legitimate journalist,” she flashed her ID again, holding it right under the captain’s nose, “not some idiotic independent blogger. I can help you spin this the way you want, tell the story the way you want it told. Otherwise,” she nodded her head back toward the station core where thousands of people were still gawking at the Aurora and murmuring angrily about their lost network connectivity, “those idiots out there are going to fuck it up royally for you. I’ll bet there are a hundred journalists and five thousand bloggers who just bought tickets to come up and visit Africa Station to see for themselves.”
“Give me a break, lady,” Burke growled, not impressed. “No news hound is going to give us a free ride. What’s in it for you?”
“All I want,” Steph said in a rare moment of total and absolute truth, “is exclusive access. I’ll agree to any conditions you want, as long as they’re legal, but I get access to the ship, your personnel, the survivor,” her mind conjured up the image of the haunted-looking young man, wondering at the tale he had to tell, “and whatever else I may need to tell the story that wouldn’t normally be classified. Your way. In exchange, you keep all the other newsies out.”
“And why shouldn’t we just hold the usual press conferences and not tell any of you anything?” Burke countered.
“Because you won’t have control of shit,” Steph replied bluntly. “People are going to talk, and you can either make it look like the Navy is being up front and honest, or we can play the usual stupid government cover-up game. And you know how those end up.”
Burke looked at Sidorov, who only nodded. The captain suddenly leaned down and slapped the controls of a nearby comms terminal.
“Yes, ma’am?” a young navy rating answered.
“Get me Admiral Schiller,” Burke told her, directing the call to the commanding officer for public relations at Terran Navy Headquarters. “He’s expecting my call.” She turned toward Steph, her lips twitching upward in what might loosely be called a smile.
Steph’s eyes widened as she realized that Burke had played her. The bottom line hadn’t changed: Steph would still get the exclusive access that she had wanted. But instead of negotiating from a position of strength and possibly getting out from under a pile of restrictions that Burke would probably slap on her story, she had practically begged for it. She felt a flush of anger and embarrassment at being manipulated so easily by the captain. It was a sensation she wasn’t used to, and definitely didn’t like.
“Schiller.” A middle-aged man with an olive complexion and a hawk nose appeared on the screen. “Has she agreed?”
“Yes, sir.” Burke glanced at Steph again. “We’ve got what we need.”
“Then get moving, captain,” Schiller ordered. “We’ve got to get on top of this situation before we have an interstellar panic.” He leaned closer, his eyes narrowing. “We need to know exactly what happened out there. And fast.”