It was hardly unknown for a life-bearing world never to develop an intelligent race and the survey crew had almost been grateful, for an alien race would mean surrendering their settlement rights to the Federation Alien Development Agency. They hadn’t noticed how…orderly the planet’s small animals had been—the planet hadn’t developed any larger animals—nor how they tended to stay well away from the human settlers. The animals might have been unintelligent, but the creatures that used them were alarmingly smart. The Hivers—tiny parasites that shared a group mind and infested living beings, controlling them once they took up residence in their brains—slowly took over the entire colony, and then the star system. The colony’s low tech base helped; the infestation wasn’t easy to detect and was impossible to remove.
By the time The Hive started sending out infection parties to other worlds, they owned the entire system. It was too late to do anything for the infected, even with the most advanced Federation medical technology.
They’d overplayed their hand, fortunately, and they’d been discovered long before they could infect most of the Federation. The Federation Navy had sealed the Asimov Point—luckily, The Hive hadn’t had access to real warships—developed a nanotechnological counter to the alien infestation, and invaded the system. Once the pitifully small defense fleet had been brushed aside, The Hive—and every other world in the star system—had been bombarded with antimatter bombs. The entire star system had been sterilised. There were still rumors that some infected humans had escaped on a starship, somewhere in the void of interstellar space, but nothing had ever been proven. The Hive was dead.
Roman settled back in his command chair, waiting patiently. Once the survey of the system was complete, they would proceed to another system, and then another, until they returned to the rendezvous point. He wasn’t expecting trouble, but he’d done everything he could to prepare for it. Besides, it kept the crew on their toes.
How quickly things could change, he mused. As a younger officer, he’d resented the endless drills, but as a captain, he appreciated them. He could not afford to allow his crew to become complacent.
Absently, he glanced down at the reports from the probes they’d launched towards The Hive, an action that had sent shivers of fear down the spines of some of his crew. RockRats didn’t suffer from taboos (at least, not the same taboos) as planet-born spacers, but Roman had to admit that they might have a point. The Hive had given birth to a deadly threat, one that could have proven lethal if they’d managed to infect more star systems before being discovered, and one that touched on humanity’s worst nightmares. It was one thing for humans to collaborate with alien invaders, but quite another to face the prospect of losing all individuality and merging into a hive mind.
“Captain,” the communications officer said suddenly. “I’m picking up a distress beacon, bearing…”
Roman swung around in his command chair and scowled at the display. There hadn’t been anything there a moment ago, but that proved nothing. The problem with passive sensors was that they could only pick up objects that were actually emitting energy signatures. A starship that shut down all its drives and sensors would be effectively invisible, a needle in a haystack the size of a planet. And if it was emitting a distress signal…his mind raced, considering possibilities. No warlord, he was sure, would stoop to the level of using a distress beacon to lure in an unwary starship, but pirates had been known to do so. They were already dead if they fell into Federation hands, so what did they have to lose?
And if it was a real distress beacon, they had a moral duty to respond.
“Helm, set course to home in on the beacon,” he ordered. The distress beacon was nearly forty light-minutes away. Whatever had happened, he reminded himself, had taken place forty minutes ago. A battle between two starships would be very hard to detect at that range. “Keep us under cloak. I don’t want them seeing us if it is a trap.”
“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said.
Midway hummed slightly as she turned in space and set a new course towards the source of the distress signal. It would take over an hour to reach the beacon, by which time it might all be over. The Federation insisted that all starships—particularly civilian craft—carried lifepods and emergency shuttles, but The Hive was almost always deserted. There shouldn’t have been anyone to come to the rescue.
His XO’s face appeared in the small display.
“Kind of an odd coincidence,” Janine pointed out. “We get here, then something decides to happen.”
Roman had been having similar thoughts, especially due to the nature of travel through the Asimov Points. It was theoretically possible to see a cloaked ship just as it came out of the Asimov Point, but whoever observed it would have to be in exactly the right place at the right time to do so, and the odds were vanishingly small.
“We were in the system for nearly a day before they set off the distress beacon,” Roman countered, even though he appreciated Janine’s thoughts and suggestions, as she had more practical experience than he did. “We have no idea what the traffic through this system is like in wartime.”
ONI’s intelligence had suggested, quite seriously, that The Hive was being used as a transit point for smugglers and pirates. Roman couldn’t fault the logic, particularly if smugglers were working with the warlords. Even so, they’d have to be careful about operating too blatantly in the system, not when half the planets in the sector would refuse to allow them to dock if they knew that they’d been anywhere near The Hive. It wasn’t particularly logical—not when there was little chance of infection unless they actually landed on the dead homeworld. Yet humans had never been logical creatures. Apart from the Hooded Sect, who tried to embrace lives of logic and reason, somewhere out on a hot desert world no one else wanted.
“True,” Janine agreed. “Still, best to be careful. They may have no idea what they’re trying to trap.”
“No argument,” Roman agreed. “We’ll assume that we’re heading into a trap and prepare to face the enemy when they show themselves.”
The minutes ticked by slowly as Midway inched across the star system towards the squawking distress beacon. Roman had to fight the urge to stand up and pace on his bridge, knowing that it would upset the crew if they thought that the Old Man—which was a joke, given that he was the youngest captain in the Navy—was nervous or fearful. It struck him, not for the first time, just how vast space truly was, even though Asimov Points could take them from star system to star system virtually instantly. It could still take hours to respond to any emergency within a star’s mass limit.
Roman ordered the launch of a stealth drone as soon as they entered range, trusting that the drone—using passive sensors—would pick up enough signs of a waiting ambush to allow the ship to escape before any trap might be sprung.
“I’m picking up residue traces of weapons fire,” the sensor officer said suddenly. “It reads out as fairly standard plasma fire, perhaps from old-style pulse cannons. No trace of nuclear or antimatter warheads.”
Roman looked up at Janine’s face and knew that she shared the same thought. Pirates.
“Take us in,” Roman ordered harshly. Images of his dead parents danced before his eyes. “Set condition-one throughout the ship. Prepare for engagement.”
Alarms howled as Midway went to battle stations, ready for anything.
“Captain, the source of the distress beacon is coming into visual range,” the sensor officer said. “She’s no warship.”