Commodore Karyn Speckle paced agitatedly about the command deck of the Star Surveyor California. Her dark-hued skin absorbed the dim light of the helm control station, reflecting none of the green, amber and red lights flashing in their proper sequence. Her pale green eyes surveyed the navigational readouts coolly, showing none of the anxiety or tension of the last few weeks. But her repetitive tread gave away to the bridge crew the gnawing trepidation which consumed her gut.
The crew of the California held Commodore Speckle in reverence; more than once she had retrieved them and their ship from the grasp of destruction; more than once she had redeemed them from the fiendishly frozen vacuum of space, or from the billion-degree inferno of a stellar corpse. And, she had never lost the life of a crewmember because of a command decision.
But just now, they were concerned.
Karyn knew that she commanded her crew's respect. She knew that most of them would follow her orders even if it meant death. But she also knew that her indecision about breaking off the search for Lt. Commander Andrew Howe was eroding their confidence.
For two weeks her vessel had crossed and re-crossed the spherical region they had concluded was the most likely location of the missing surveyboat Ursine Ensign. Based on the last-known location and trajectory of the vessel, the assignment of the pilot and the physical characteristics of the area, the 'boat should have been within sensor range. Even if the vessel had been destroyed, there would have been debris or residual energy somewhere in the vicinity. But the sensor array had detected nothing. No 'boat, no debris, no energy residue, no ion trail, no gravitic fluctuations, nothing.
So Commodore Speckle ordered another two-week sweep of the adjacent space. And another. After six weeks, she had decided that Lt. Commander Andrew Howe was either captured by hypothetical aliens or dead. And of those two possibilities, the Commodore was inclined to think it was the latter.
But she refused to let her hope lag. Her will, like the implacable strength of gravity, holding stars, planets and comets in their respective orbits, refused to acknowledge the possibility that one of her highly-trained, experienced crew, one of her charges, could be killed in the line of duty.
Andrew Howe was somewhere, and though it might be hell, it wasn't because he was dead.
"Sir," Ensign Wilson interrupted her reverie, "I'm picking up some unusual emissions from an area 25 point seven thousand kilometers off, at coordinates, uh, 072, 037, double-oh nine."
"Give me a full report," snapped Karyn.
"Uh, sir, they are a unfamiliar phenomena to me. I think that Lt. Spanos would recognize the patterns better than me," the dejected ensign on watch replied. His eyes were pale, his skin, freckled. His cream, slightly rumpled duty coverall was rolled up to his elbows, exposing sandy hair on his arms that matched the thicker, regulation-cut hair above his young, thin face. His uniform boots were off and pushed beneath the console. Karyn remembered that he had rushed to his post ten minutes after the change of watch and had mumbled something about malfunctioning alarms as he arrived. Ensign Wilson was still young and foolish, she thought, but the embarrassment would be more helpful than an oral reprimand.
Pushing that out of her mind she queried, "Mister Tsen, is there any risk to the ship if we move closer?"
Lyn Tsen, the helm officer, replied, "Sir, at our present relative velocity our navigational deflectors can easily handle the energy level."
"Good. Put this ship within two kilometers of that position and hold," the Commodore ordered.
"Aye, two kilometers," replied the woman at the helm.
"Lieutenant Spanos, monitor that point. Have Ensign Wilson assist you. I want to know what it is and what it's emitting. This may be just the sort of clue we need." Karyn slumped into the firm softness of her chair at the center of the command deck. A frown creased her forehead as she ran short-nailed fingers through her wavy black hair.
"Aye, sir," said Lieutenant Spanos. "I've got the object on my scope now, although I'm having a difficult time isolating the type of particles it's giving off."
"Keep me apprised," ordered Karyn.
During the four minutes it took for the California to approach the object, Karyn scanned the bridge. Lieutenant Helen Alexander, lithe and alert, sat attentively at the life-support console on the port side of the claustrophobic deck. Her olive skin blended with her fine, black hair; her comlink, fastened behind her left ear, hid the mole just below her left nostril. Karyn envied her beauty.
Beside Helen sat Lieutenant Alejandro Spanos, leaning toward his console, his face obscured by the spectrograph visor at the science station; his neatly trimmed, dark brown hair hung at regulation length behind him, exposing the dark skin of his neck. His uniform was neatly creased, but the sleeves were rolled up, revealing thin brown forearms. To Spanos' left sat Ensign Wilson, fingering his control board at the scanning console with the intent expression of a novice trying to remember what to do next.
At Ensign Wilson's left was the door to the personnel lift, at the stern of the command deck. Karyn wanted very badly to go through that door and take the lift to her cabin for some critically needed rest. Her sense of fatigue and futility was nearly overwhelming; and the bridge crew could easily handle the investigation of an unusual physical phenomenon. She resisted the temptation momentarily, however, because she wanted to see the object on the bridge's high-definition viewscreen.
Still waiting, she scanned the starboard side of the command deck where the engineering, communications, and traffic control stations crowded against the bulkhead. Commander Yvonna M'khal, the engineering watch officer, scrutinized one of the three monitors at her console with dark brown eyes, brushed controls on her keyboard with light brown fingers and spoke quietly into her intercom with her soft voice. At communications, Lieutenant Erik Rhodes stared at the ceiling as he transmitted instructions to one of the California's six remaining surveyboats; his comlink poked in front of his mouth like a straw. Traffic Officer Lieutenant Kim tapped a command string into her keyboard as she glared at a blurry image on one of her monitors with narrowed eyes. The surveyboat pilots based aboard the California depended on her to schedule rendezvous and avoid collisions; Karyn was confident in Kim's ability to lay out a search grid for Lt. Commander Howe.
Just forward of the Captain's Chair and at the center of the bridge were the helm and navigation consoles. Both helm and navigation stations were situated to take advantage of the main viewscreen, the focal point and forward bulkhead of the bridge from a half meter above the deck to the ceiling. At that moment a swirl of dust and plasma was visible in the center of the screen.
Lieutenant Lyn Tsen sat at the helm and played her console with the artistry of a musician, keeping the California at station relative to the object. Her black, straight hair hung to her shoulders; her slender figure seemed ill-suited to the task of guiding a several thousand ton starship, but Speckle had total confidence in her ability. Next to Tsen, Lieutenant Akira Shibata studied his navigational displays with an expression of dismay on his un-lined face.
"Commodore," Lt. Shibata announced, "I'm having a really hard time determining position and heading; it's likely that this object is affecting navigational instrumentation. I'm attempting to compensate."
Speckle frowned. "Can you estimate a best guess, Lieutenant?"
"Aye, but I can't guarantee more than 85 percent positional accuracy. We won't be able to complete a Jump from this area."
"Understood. Spanos, what have you made of this object?"
"Sir, we're approaching a very small area of intense, localized distortion in space-time; the dynamics are similar to a warp field." Spanos intoned, still absorbed in the spectrometer visor, "the particles it's expelling are tachyons; however, I haven't determined what it is yet."
"Do you have a guess?"
"Sir, my best guess is that we're looking at a wormhole."
Karyn knew that because wormholes are literally holes in space, tubes connecting discontinuous regions, they are extraordinary phenomena. They are not known to occur naturally, but are usually associated with the moment of Jump. And they usually disappear within a few nanoseconds of their creation. A bad Warp, one that ends inaccurately or catastrophically, can result in a wormhole, too; but those generally last only a few moments. Occasionally a really big event had produced a wormhole that lasted for about fifteen seconds.
But, up until now, no wormhole had been observed to persist longer than that; nor had any exhibited any unusual secondary phenomena, like the distortions of time that produced the tachyons Ensign Wilson had detected.
"You're reasonably sure of that?"
"With information presently available, yes."
Taking in every detail of the wormhole's corona of swirling dust and gas, Commodore Speckle was struck by its resemblance to the fancifully colored, whirling veils of low-gravity dancers. She gazed intently at the screen while a minute lapsed.
Shaking off her musings, the Commodore ordered, "Mr. Spanos, I want a complete report of your findings in two shifts. Have Piotrowski look it over before I see it." After a moment, Karyn swept to her feet and announced "Maintain our position relative to the wormhole. If anything develops, I'll be in my cabin. Mr. Tsen, you have the con." She stepped to the lift door and jabbed the summon button.
Four minutes later she was asleep, sprawled over the narrow bunk in her cabin.
"...on the bridge." The worried face of Ensign Wilson mouthed on the viewscreen next to Commodore Speckle's head.
"What is it?" queried Karyn groggily, bleary eyes straining to focus on something more than Wilson's chapped lips, but failing.
"We've picked up an anomaly exiting the wormhole. It resembles a fragment of bulkhead, but we're not certain."
"Send out a probe and have it picked up." Karyn paused. "What do you mean exiting the wormhole?"
"Uh, that is, its trajectory and speed indicate it's traveling a very tight spiral about the wormhole. We think that it may be a piece of Andrew Howe's 'boat."
"I'm aware of that possibility, Ensign. Why don't you ask Piotrowski and Spanos to join me in the aft dock to inspect the fragment when it's retrieved by that probe. You have sent that probe, haven't you?" Commodore Speckle was beginning to awaken, and realized that Wilson had made no move to implement her first order. The news she thought, though not good, was a sign of progress. Perhaps the crew of the California would manage to find an explanation for Lt. Commander Howe's disappearance.
"I'm sending it now" said Ensign Wilson. His face flushed, momentarily hiding his freckles in a haze of expanding capillaries. "I'll have Lt. Commander Piotrowski and Lt. Spanos meet you right away, sir." Karyn saw Wilson banging ineptly on his keyboard to launch the probe. "Ensign Wilson out." Wilson moved his hand up to his screen to cut the channel.
"Wilson, one more thing." As Karyn spoke, the Ensign froze, a frightened look on his face.
"Good work," said Karyn. "I'm surprised anyone could locate anything in such close proximity to a permanent wormhole."
"Thank you, sir," responded Wilson, his expression mutating into something approximating a grin. "Lieutenant Spanos helped me a lot."
"Then thank him for me, would you? Commodore Speckle out." Karyn stretched her arm and toggled off the connection with a touch to the appropriate icon displayed in the corner of her viewscreen.
She peered at the time now blinking on the screen, rubbing her eyes in dismay. Less than three hours of sleep in the last twenty-four, a pattern that she'd been holding for two weeks as her anxiety about Lt. Commander Howe deepened. As with this time, it wasn't always her choice to deny herself the slumber she needed so badly that her hands trembled if she stopped clenching and unclenching them, but it continued to decrease her ability to think clearly.
She often wondered if she was getting burned out, too old for command responsibility. At forty-two, she was not the oldest command-level officer in the Exploratory Service still captaining a vessel, but no one else in the fleet had spent so much time in deep space; no one else had come this far, this fast and given up all the comforts and security offered by returning to the home planet.
But the fringe of human-explored space was no place to be doubting her ability to command, Karyn told herself.
Now was a time to make decisions.
Karyn shoved her calloused, un-stockinged feet into her polished boots, wondering why hard-soled boots were regulation footgear aboard a starship in deep space.
She missed the days of her childhood in Louisiana, on Earth, when she had wandered through the bijou south of New New Orleans, in the Mississippi delta, toes soothed by the cool black mud of the swamp; she hadn't worn shoes more times than she had toes until the day, in the summer of 2194, when her parents had taken her to New New Orleans to have her evaluated for the Academy.
She longed for those simple, ignorant days more and more as she grew older, and didn't know if her nostalgia was a result the conservativism that comes of loneliness or age or fear. She also wondered why she had forgotten her socks.
When Karyn arrived in the aft dock seven minutes later, Piotrowski and Spanos were waiting. The meter-high cylinder of dull metal encasing the standard collection probe stood on end in the center of a service bay, dwarfed by Piotrowski's bulk; Spanos was removing a twisted fragment of heavily oxidized metal the length of his forearm from its pincer array.
"Comments?" Karyn invited.
"I'll have to analyze this more carefully, but I'd lay odds that this is not a piece of Howe's 'boat," responded Spanos. "The materials aren't right; this is more of a ferrous metal than a carbonmetal. And it doesn't have nearly enough rigidity to be anything that we'd use in one of our vessels." He demonstrated his conclusion by holding one end of the fragment and waving the other end about, making a noise like baritone thunder as the metal bent and quivered.
"But in the environment around this wormhole, even something we built could have been weakened enough to behave like that," countered Piotrowski. "I'll take your odds, and bet that it is a hull fragment of Howe's 'boat. In fact, I'll wager that it is from just aft of the secondary sensor array on the port side." He pointed to a score mark about twenty centimeters from the wider end of the fragment. "See, right there's the slot for the low-EM band antenna."
"We'll see," said Spanos. "But I'm sure a full analysis'll demonstrate that the materials are all wrong. In addition, I think that this piece is much too old to be a chunk of Howe's 'boat, assuming it's a piece of an Earth vessel at all."
"Are you suggesting that this thing may be of alien origin?" interjected Karyn.
"Utterly impossible!" Piotrowski sputtered. "Unheard of! No one is suggesting anything of the sort. This is definitely a fragment of Lt. Commander Howe's 'boat. I suspect..."
"Not necessarily," replied Spanos, cutting Piotrowski off in midsentence. "However, my initial observations of this fragment plainly show that it can't originate from the Ursine Ensign. The materials are simply too different. It's certainly possible that it's of alien origin."
"I want a complete report at the end of the shift."
"Yes, sir," chorused Piotrowski and Spanos.
That afternoon in the officers' lounge, several of the first shift officers sat around the center table, shaped like a crescent moon, and discussed the developments of the morning. "I think the Commodore is right about one thing, though," said Lyn Tsen, "We might be able to figure out what happened to the Ursine Ensign by investigating the fragment we've found and the other traces around the wormhole. I'll bet we get this thing closed within the next two or three days."
The officers' lounge was an arc-shaped cabin, like a nine-meter reflection of the center table. Comfortable benches were arranged on the inner bulkhead, taking maximum advantage of the vista available through the rear bulkhead. The lounge had a great view of the stern of the California, the ceiling and rear bulkhead made entirely of transparentsteel windows stretching from one edge of the room to the other and from the forward bulkhead to the aft deckplates. The outer hull toward the stern of the ship was visible, sweeping from the rear window back toward the drive section, the smooth skin glinting faintly of the multiple hues of the wormhole's corona.
Most of the officers of the first shift -- Commander Yvonna M'khal, Lieutenant Erik Rhodes, Lieutenant Commander Lyn Tsen, Lieutenant Akira Shibata and Lieutenant Helen Alexander -- usually sat around this table after their duty times to discuss priorities during their off time and to prepare for upcoming assignments; today they were spending their meeting time on an argument about the mission delay to search for Andrew Howe.
All but one of the six chairs around the central table were filled, each occupant sipping a preferred beverage.
"I don't think this's even related to Andrew's missing status," said Helen Alexander. "I think we've found the first evidence of intelligent life out here... an obviously manufactured artifact, possibly the remnant of an alien spacecraft. And, I doubt that Andrew's 'boat is going to be found. If it's still in existence, we'd've found it by now."
"You might by right," said Erik Rhodes, "but I've been picking up some really unusual echoes out here. They're almost like a distress call. Not really decipherable, and not on a bandwidth that the Exploratory Service uses, but a slightly variable, short, distinctive, repeating pattern. I mean, not enough to really call Commodore Speckle's attention to, but enough to catch my interest. They could be alien, but they're also really old. I'd guess between five and six hundred years old. And something that was here that long ago would've been likely to turn up sooner. Like in archaeological evidence, or in Earth orbit or someplace like that."
"So you think an alien species that was here that long ago would have visited Solar space?" said Helen.
"Well, we may be far out by our standards, but over that period of time, I expect that they'd've come calling. We're close enough and likely enough as candidates for that. I guess what I'm saying is, if it were an alien transmission, we'd've met the aliens by now," said Erik.
"So you're saying, what, that this is a transmission? And that it comes from a human source?" said M'khal. "Isn't that a little far-fetched? How could a transmission have made it to this quadrant without it having been noticed somewhere else already?"
"That's fairly simple to explain," replied Erik. "We're near this wormhole, which causes any number of relativistic paradoxes." He covered his mouth with his left hand, wiped a crumb from his lip, cleared his throat and continued, "for example, this transmission might be of fairly recent origin, but in the process of traveling from point A, its origin, to point B, where we are now, it may have traveled through this wormhole, which may produce a temporal as well as a locational shift. In other words, the wormhole ages stuff." Erik paused while he collected his breath, "And, in the process," he continued, "there is a shift in the bandwidth of amplitude and modulation, making the signal look unfamiliar. So, essentially, we could be looking at any transmission somebody made. The easiest way to tell is if to find out where and when the other end of the wormhole is."
"So, what you're saying is," said Akira Shibata, taking a breath, "is that we're gonna have to send something through that hole? Why can't you just figure out the shift and all that and then come up with a formula to determine the actual age of the transmission without wasting a perfectly good piece of equipment?"
"Well," said Erik, "that's just one explanation. I've also been thinking that it's possible that the signal I've been monitoring is just a reflection of the stream of EM radiation the California has been beaming into the hole. It's possible that our scanners' and probes' transmissions have been going into the space near the hole, been scrambled, jostled and distorted, and then bounced back into my instruments. Or there may be any other number of possible explanations, including that Howe went through this wormhole and the signal is his. That's why I haven't mentioned these to the Commodore. I don't want to give her any other reasons for insomnia until I've got a better grip on these ideas. That's why I'm presenting them to all of you," Erik concluded, "because I want your help in finding the source of the signal."
"But didn't you just say that this was fairly easy to explain?" said M'Khal.
"Yeah," replied Erik, "but just the part about why nobody in adjacent quadrants has picked up the signal."
"So, what do you want us to do?" asked Akira.
"Well, first," said Erik, "I need access to all of your telemetry data. I need to know the precise position of this ship in relation to the wormhole every time I've received one of these signals. I need you to tell me the exact moment you send signals of any type into the wormhole or nearby space. And I'll need help searching the archives for similar occurrences. Then, when I've gathered all this information, I'll want all of you to meet with me again to discuss what we've figured out."
"If anything," said Lyn.
"Yeah," echoed Erik, "if anything."