Zeroth Contact

The Eye of Argon drifted with her force screens turned inside out, tuned for concealment rather than protection. Her reactor dim, her engines and weapons cold, active scanners silent. A void drifting through the void.

 

Thirty-six million miles off the port bow, a contraterrene detonation flashed. A continent-searing blast rendered almost ordinary by distance. Another, forty million to starboard. Another. Another. A new constellation was being born and dying before their eyes. A battle spanning an entire solar system, fought with weapons on the very edge of comprehension. A battle to which the Eye of Argon was a hidden observer.

 

Captain Zzrisha sat on the bridge, absorbing every drop of information brought by the scopes. It had been a hard voyage; the network of space-tunnels this new species had drilled warped and folded ultraspace around them, forming a half-invisible labyrinth where touching one of the ‘walls’ banished a ship to the Mirror Dimension. Her navigation team had never been so hard-pressed before. Their reward was a deeper look into how this strange civilization waged war.

 

And what a strange war it was! The attacker’s space-tunnels lurked on the outer edge of the system, orbiting icy, nameless planetismals, surrounded by minefields and escorts. Warships that were nine-tenths fuel by volume burned down towards the inner system, firing missiles that would take days to find their targets, exchanging ray-fire with asteroid fortresses at ranges of light-seconds. Every few months a ramscoop bomber, launched a decade before and light-years away, would storm through the system at half lightspeed, dropping kinetic missiles to shatter strongholds and scatter fleets. Battlefronts were spread across AU; engagements took weeks to resolve.

 

Compared to the battles fought by the Confederation, where a fleet would jump out of ultraspace but a few planetary radii from its target and battles were finished in hours, the times and distances were faintly absurd. Of the people who fought these battles? Almost nothing was known.

 

But Captain Zzrisha’s mission was not to unravel all the secrets of this strange civilization. It was to figure out where they were getting all their contraterrene from. The Confederation used CT in small quantities, painstakingly harvested from rare naturally-occurring asteroids and dust clouds composed of the substance. Reserved for the most powerful of strategic weapons. The amount being thrown around by the attackers was incredible, meaning that they had either discovered one of the richest contraterrene mines in the galaxy… or they had discovered some new way of getting it.

 

“Nav, plot a short-range jump. Five hundred thousand miles retrograde of Contact 33,” she ordered. That contact had been tentatively identified as a contraterrene tanker.

 

“Five hundred thousand miles retrograde of 33, aye,” the navigator confirmed. “Course set and locked, initiating in three, two, one, mark.”

 

A handful of seconds in ultraspace, and they moved millions of miles. Still concealed beneath their cloak, but close enough for the Eye of Argon’s scope array to really get to work. Cosmic tetryons and solar neutrinos ghosted through the structure of Contact 33, and the Eye drunk deep of the invisible winds. Bit by bit, they assembled an image of the interior structure of the mysterious ship.

 

—

 

Within the minds of the Dirac’s Lightning, an anomaly was detected. A thought arose.

 

{Transient occlusion at bearing 276-124, range one gigameter +/-25%. Low confidence.}

 

{Probability of threat?}

 

{…Sensor ghost, ~50%. Low albedo asteroid, ~30%. Berserker stealth asset, ~15%. Other, ~5%.}

 

{Retask sensor cluster 8-2 from skysearch to deep search. Lower the noise gate slightly. Better a false alarm than an ambush.}

 

{Compliance.}

 

—

 

The science team muttered around the projectors, examining the fuzzy scans of Contact 33. It swiftly became clear that it was not ‘merely’ a contraterrene tanker. Its CT traps were too small to contain large quantities of the stuff, and were hooked into a mysterious machine in the heart of the ship. A tiny kernel of involuted space. A space-tunnel to an apparent dead-end.

 

“It looks like a space-tunnel, but dramatically different from the others…” an analyst furrowed his brows in thought. “Did they drill into some kind of contraterrene dimension?”

 

“Not a tanker,” Zzrisha mused. “Some kind of mobile CT factory. Deployed as far forward as they dare to provide an uninterrupted supply to the front.”

 

—

 

{Re-acquisition of occlusion contact. Bearing 276-125, range 800 megameters +/- 5%. High confidence.}

 

{Identification?}

 

{Berserker stealth asset, ~80%. Low albedo asteroid, ~17%. Other, ~3%. Designating Wraith 470.}

 

{Task Graser Drone 4. Get a target lock ASAP.}

 

{Compliance. Firing bomblight.}

 

—

 

A hundred thousand miles from the Eye of Argon, a brief star flashed. Zzrisha’s frills twitched. “That was unusually close-“

 

“They’ve backlit us!” the sensor officer shouted. “Gun turning towards us!” Reaction was nigh-instant.

 

“Get us moving. Split all power between cloak and engines. Nav, begin preparation for ultrajump-“ Zzrisha began to order. Just slightly too late.

 

The antimatter-powered laser overloaded the cloak, carved off a primary sensor mast, evaporated several outer compartments, then jittered off target. It came back a few seconds later, carving a glowing question-mark scar across the top, wobbled back off into space, then cut out.

 

—

 

{Graser 4 overheat, taking offline. Partial hit. Assessing damage to target.}

 

{Weird thing, isn’t it? Totally unlike any other berserker design.}

 

{Target continues to maneuver. Assessment: moderate but not crippling damage.}

 

{Tasking Graser 7. Continue to service the target.}

 

{Compliance.}

 

—

 

“Damage report,” Zzrisha snapped.

 

“Cloak is gone, partial shields in ten minutes.”

 

“Engines are OK.”

 

“That was a glancing blow- I don’t think we’ll survive another one if it hits us dead on.”

 

“Nav here- ultradrive’s been thrown out of tune, we can jump but can’t guarantee where we’ll end up.”

 

“Sensors are… coming back online… they’re bringing another gun to bear!”

 

Zzrisha weighed their options. “Navigation, emergency jump. Get us anywhere but here.”

 

The navigator nodded, flipped back the cover, and put his palm on the big red button. “Emergency jump in three, two, one, mark-“ He hit the button, and everything turned inside out. The universe folded up, drained away, and vanished.

 

A second later, an antimatter-powered graser speared through the space the Eye of Argon should have been.

 

-

 

Cognizance returned slowly. Zzrisha tasted copper blood in her mouth. Emergency jumps were rarely pleasant, but this had been especially bad. No doubt a consequence of the space-tunnel network’s distorting effects. Still, they weren’t being actively shot at. An improvement.

 

“Nav, where are we?”

 

“One… ugh… one minute.” The bridge filled with low muttering, moaning, and the bleeping of computers as the crew re-collected themselves. “We are… in the Mirror Dimension.”

 

Zzrisha breathed in. Breathed out. “Well fuck.”

 

—

 

{Target has… vanished. No debris, no indication of hit.}

 

{Can we re-acquire a trace?}

 

{Firing bomblight... Nothing. Like it was never there.}

 

{A real UFO on our hands, here.}

 

{Hm.}

 

{Hm?}

 

{Design totally unlike any allied or enemy vessels. Bizarre hull spectra. Unusual stealth system. High acceleration without obvious engine emissions. Maybe it was an alien.}

 

{Run it.}

 

{…Working… Sensor ghost, ~5%. Novel berserker technology testbed, ~45%. Alien scout, ~50%. Extreme low confidence.}

 

{That high?}

 

{Existence of aliens is well-established. Present conflict is highly visible and potentially concerning to potential neighboring powers.}

 

{Well, fuck.}