Encounter 1 (Patreon)

In the chat, we were discussing the possibility that the geordians were the ones to actually discover the krakun and they brought gate technology with them. That's an interesting notion!

Anyhow, I wrote up something short.

———

Captain Nikau entered the bridge with a yawn. “What’s all this foolishness about a ship?” he asked. “It’s the middle of the…”

His words tapered off, and he stood, frozen, with finger extended toward the large monitor hanging on the wall. When he finally regained his ability to talk, the grey feline stammered, “Th-that’s a spaceship!”

All around him, the rest of the bridge crew nodded in silence.

The captain looked to Lieutenant Kiri. Technically, she was in charge of scheduling, but whenever the ship was coordinating with other ships, she always handled communication. “Did you signal them?” he asked her.

“What’s the point?” asked Subcommander Winiata. The science officer explained, “It’s clearly an alien vessel. What’s the odds that they modulate radio waves like we do? That they are monitoring a band of the radio spectrum that we happen to use for signaling, that they could recognize that the signal encoded sounds, that those sounds were words, that they could understand our words, that they could reconfigure their transmitters to reply with the same sort of modulation on the same frequency, that they could encode their own words—”

“Enough!” groaned Captain Nikau, his paws flattening down both of his ears. “I got it. Zero chance that they will understand and respond. Check. But signal them anyhow. That would be the logical first step.”

Kiri nodded and spoke into a microphone that protruded from her console. “This is Lieutenant Kiri of the Undaunted addressing the alien vessel stationed some three hundred kilometers in front of us. Are you receiving my transmission? Could you please respond?” She tapped a couple buttons then turned back to the bridge crew that had been waiting in silence. “I’ve set the message to repeat with a ten second pause between each play, so they’ll have a chance to reply without us talking over them.”

Nikau turned back to Winiata. “What do we know about them so far?”

“It’s probably a generation ship,” said the science officer. “There’s no sign of a gate for resupply, and the ship is enormous. It must hold thousands and thousands—”

“Of people that are what height, precisely?” The captain grinned.

“Okay, fair,” said Winiata. “We don’t know how big they are. Let’s just say that the ship could hold thousands and thousands of geordians. Prevailing wisdom is that if we ever encountered another intelligent lifeform, that it would be a safe bet that they’ll be much like we are, that evolution would independently come up with a very similar body plan and set of characteristics that worked so well for us.”

“Fine. Their ship is big, and they have no gate,” said Nikau. “Anything else?”

“No gate that we can see,” repeated the white feline. “With them being a generation ship, they could easily go decades or even centuries without needing to contact their home world. They might find it safer to keep the gate disassembled and stored, but then put it back together when they need it.”

“Anything else?”

Winiata straightened up. “It looks like their ship is composed of three—”

The communication console crackled to life, and a series of strange, very deep and very alien words emanated from it for several seconds before it went silent once more.

Everyone’s eyes shifted between the captain’s, Kiri’s, and the science officer’s. Winiata looked frazzled, her ears out and wide. “That was … fast,” she whispered to no one.

“Tell me you got a recording of … whatever it was they just said,” Captain Nikau nearly shouted. The lieutenant only nodded.

She tapped a button. “Discontinued recorded loop, Captain,” she said. “What do we do now?”

He hesitated only a moment. “Well, keep talking to them.”

“Sir?” she asked. “I don’t have any idea what they just told us. They couldn’t possibly understand us either, could they?” She turned to the science officer.

Winiata shook her head. “No, that would be impossible. There simply isn’t enough information in a recording that’s only a few seconds long. Not possible.”

The two turned back to the captain. “So?” he asked. “Neither of us is ever going to understand the other until we have more data to work with. So, talk to them. Perhaps they’ll talk back. Winiata, start going through the recordings as Kiri is making them. Look for patterns.”

“Uh, sir?” gasped the science officer. “I’m not a linguist!”

“True,” the captain admitted as he turned to leave, “but you’re the closest we have at the moment. I’m sure command will pack a shuttle full of linguists as soon as they hear the news. Until then, focus on a way to write out the words they’re saying. Look for patterns and which words are repeated the most.”

“Sir?” asked Lieutenant Kiri. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to need some javea,” he sighed. “No way am I calling this in until I’m more awake.”

He turned about, his ears wide in a smile. “I promise I’ll bring back a pot. I suspect we’ll all need it.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19PWkyckcOtfcV1sPxAZ1vDtLZflE-BziMRj2pwUxfQU/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?