He looked around the starkly silent bridge at his officers and crew. All of them were suited up in slender, form-fitting vacuum suits, and each one watched the steadily growing image of the Deltan formation as intently as he had been. All of them, that is, but Kris, who appeared less concerned over their journey’s resolution than she was over the state of the man leading it. She looked back at him with compassion, worry, and love shining from her eyes as brightly as the thrust from her engines.
He reached out to her and grasped her vacuum-suited hand with his own, drawing her floating figure close. As her face came up to his, he ran his other gloved hand through her short, silver-white hair and locked her into a long, emphatic kiss. It was a simple thing, a familiar intimacy, but this time, with all that lay behind them and all that still remained, this time it was special.
As he kissed her, and as she returned it with equal fervor and insistence, all the months of impatience, dread, petty annoyances, and fatigue began to fall away. Now, on the doorstep to discovery, the voyage’s slow-building weariness—a weariness which had even begun to strain the two of them—seemed to fade. It had dragged all of them down for week after endless week, but now it passed, leaving them both with a renewed sense of wonder and purpose.
Kris pulled back slowly, languidly, and favored him with a smile that suffused her whole face, her whole being. “Better, mon Capitan?”
“Oh yes, CHENG,” he answered, with a grin all his own, the first he had genuinely felt in some time. He let her go reluctantly. As she drifted off, he found that the rest of the bridge crew had also turned away from the frustratingly close enigma of the Deltans and were looking directly at the two of them, most with half smiles on their lips.
Dave Edwards, strapped into the Chief of the Boat’s seat to his left, patted Nathan’s arm and said, gently, “You know, Skipper, if you two are having a moment, we can put this whole first contact bullshit on hold. After a year and a half of waiting, I’m sure the crew won’t begrudge you a quickie with your main squeeze.”
Nathan turned to him with an expression gone from serene to baleful. “COB … .” he said menacingly.
To his right, Christopher Wright spoke up, his tone as professional and serious as ever. “Captain, we’re at two light-seconds from the objective, zero thrust, and bow on. Estimate a 015 by minus 20 relative target angle to the formation and opening. No reaction by the aliens, sir. Ready for your orders, Captain.”
“Thank you, XO.” Nathan turned back to the main panoramic screen forward of them. He touched the trackball control mounted to his armrest and scrolled around the image, highlighting and magnifying target tracks as he continued to speak. “All right, this is it. We are currently about ten times further out than the Promises were when they were programmed to initiate comms. We know that the first probe was safe up to this point, because she wasn’t taken out until she was almost on top of them. As for Promise II, it’s a wash. We don’t know if she either never made it this close, or if she made it closer but got smashed before she could reconfigure herself for communication. Either way, we haven’t been schwacked yet, so this is probably a safe range for the moment. This is our last chance to alter plans if we need to. After this, we’re committed.”
Nathan had highlighted and set off into inset windows of their own each of the visible ships that made up the Deltan convoy: the Control Ship, the Polyp, and the Cathedral. The Junkyard, in its quasi-Lagrange position on the far side of the Control Ship, was occluded by the drive-star, but the slow orbit of each of the vessels around the axis of thrust would soon bring it into view and obscure the Polyp in turn.
Nathan looked at the crew seated and floating around him. Along with Dave Edwards and Christopher Wright representing his command staff, and Kris here for Engineering, he also had Mike Simmons from Operations Department and Ivy Cho from Weapons Department, his other department heads. Also seated were four “enlisted” watchstanders at their Bridge stations for Helm/Maneuvering, Ops/Communications, Weps/Sensors, and Aux Engineering, but they kept their eyes on their duties and did not interject themselves into his powwow with the senior officers.
The Executive Officer held up a hand. “I don’t see any gains made in changing things at this point. I just want to reiterate that we have only one chance at doing this peacefully. Once we shoot or shoot back, we’ll have set the course for the whole planet, so I want to again urge caution and patience. What happened to the probes might have been either hostile or inexplicably benign. We cannot be sure how an alien intelligence would view our physical visitations to them or their reactions to that visitation until we understand their culture. Even if the Deltans take action that could be construed as hostile, I’d prefer to hold off counterfire until it becomes our last possible option. Maneuver defensively, continue attempts at communication, and hope that we can get through to them before they leave us with no other choice.”
Edwards shook his head. “I will never be able to get you straight in my head, sir. Gruff Army guy one moment, and pacifist diplomat the next.”
Wright smiled tightly. “Your experience in the Navy ranks might be different, but I’ve found that many of the best soldiers and the bloodiest warriors I ever worked with were, at heart, the truest of make-peace pacifists … something about preferring to argue over a conference table rather than over the sights of a gun, at least while the conference table is still an option.”
The Master Chief considered it and nodded finally. “I suppose so, and it’s not a bad attitude to have, especially for the guy leading our negotiations.” Edwards turned to look at Nathan. “Still, my druthers would be to set off a warhead or six in their path and let them start the talking. We’ve tried to observe the niceties twice already, and all it’s gotten us is two dead chunks of hardware.”
Nathan shook his head. “We’ve been over that, COB. All our simulations indicate that showing off our weapons tech before we use it decisively gave us zero advantage, and like the XO said, it pretty much closes off the diplomatic option. I’m hoping we can still chalk up the probes to a big misunderstanding.”
Edwards shrugged. “Hey, you asked. And, besides, you have to allow for the fact that those sims were all made in a vacuum—literally and figuratively. Just like we don’t know their motivations in torching our probes, we don’t know for sure that a show of force would give them an undue tactical advantage.”
Wright leaned back to look at the Master Chief past Nathan’s head. “That’s true, COB, but it’s also an unnecessary violation of operational security. Right now, they don’t know that we’re even armed. Why release that info and let them see the exact nature of that armament unless we’re positive it will give us an advantage? Those simulations may have been done in a ‘vacuum’, but they weren’t done with a lack of common sense.”
Edwards held up his hands. “I’m not arguing with either of you gents’ logic, I’m just a little more sure about our visitors’ disposition than you or the CO are willing to be. It’s part of my job description: keep the sailors—spacers, whatever—under control and advocate the hell out of the devil, so you at least have one voice of dissent when the pair of you get to agreeing too much.”
Wright grunted. “I appreciate your fervor in that role, Master Chief, but sometimes you enjoy being the contrarian a bit too much.”
“Hey, just because I’m contrary, doesn’t mean I’m not also right. Provable hypothesis or not, I’d be approaching this official first contact a bit more aggressively, and I think that position’s more than justified.”