Dark Echoes - Part 3

Boy! Aaen silently exclaimed, thinking in the back of his mind, that guy wasn't kidding! He mentally noted the stars were barely visible at such speeds. Frankly, it was hard to visually track so many fading blurs through the hysterical swirling Translight funnel. But what piqued his immediate situational curiosity was the fact that there seemed to be increasingly fewer stars by the moment. Where the heck is 'here' he wondered. 

"Jones—you getting anything?” Aaen asked.

Jones turned her head and threw her palms in front of her in frustration. Something about the seeming ‘nothingness’ out there spooked her—reminding her about part of her past—as she formulated her response, “Negative. This is almost a freaking dead zone. Even long-range sensors aren’t detecting anything—not even microbes!” What she didn’t do was verbally marvel at how much more precise even the long-range sensors had become after the little ‘tune-up’. As though things hadn’t already been advanced by leaps-and-bounds already!

The crew manning stations at the front of the bridge felt a reverberating cold chill down their spines. Hayes looked over her left shoulder at Smith. They exchanged a direct look; while Smith Hayes’ was more steely than concerned. Something in the way he was subtly lowering his eyebrows. . .

A sensor alert. Wilson’s computer screen flashed thrice. Both officers snapped, deeply immersed in the data feeding to their respective screens.

“We’re four minutes away from destination!” Wilson declared.

“Yeah. And the density of the space in this area—wherever we are—is. .increasing!”

“What?” Smith asked bluntly.

“Captain!—We’re slowing down!” Wilson shouted.

“How far out are we?” Aaen asked. Jones noticed the sensor resolution had, she guessed, quintupled.

The engines’ muffled hum gradually groaned to a digital whine, an effect that was also quickly declining—“We’re dropping to sublight speed!” the chaotic funnel dissipated; the stars became visible, Aaen and Smith noted. Wilson couldn’t help but notice and was caught off-guard at the fact that there weren’t any stars visible to his navigational instrumentation. He found himself wide-eyed as he looked over his right shoulder at Hayes.

—Hayes’ screen flashed. She snapped to access the message. It was a long-range message that had come in from a source. . .which was also coded, she mentally noted. This encoding frequency was going to take a little work. It was work she was swift in starting and was intent on finishing quickly.

“How far out?” Aaen asked.

Wilson checked the data his computer, “Three minutes—if we maintain maximum sublight,” he was still trying to get used to reading the new way to describe ‘impulse’ speed, much less accustomed to using that term regularly. None of the crew were, yet.

“Commander!” Jones shouted, eyeing her computer. “I just saw like. . .” Smith turned and saw her tracing her finger around the external sensor grid. . . “what appeared to be fifteen sensor echoes. They appeared and disappeared like someone walked fast in front of a spotlight,”

Aaen and Smith shared a steely look, then Aaen turned to Wilson, “Standby to engage sublight engines at full power,” Aaen commanded, his attention quickly turned directly to the aft-most section of the bridge. “Commander Jorgensen, what do you make of the new stealth system?”

He saw Jorgensen’s torso moving slightly left to right as he finished a technical diagnostic.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, Cap. Whoever built this technology—they weren’t human. I’d say we could theoretically pass within ten feet of a Star Base—” er-‘Forward Operating Base’, or whatever they’re called here, he reminded himself, “and they wouldn’t know it. Heck! I’d say we’ve got a good chance of being able to fire weapons while this thing’s running and we still would be pretty much completely invisible!”

That’s what Aaen needed to know. Smith anticipated his Captain’s next order as he watched him turn around in his chair at Wilson, “Proceed, Commander! Commander Sandberg: engage silent running. Lieutenant Connors: activate the stealth system,”

“Dimitri to Keptin! I concur with de’ Engineer! I’m steel trying to figure ze’ new stealth system out! This tech is unvelievable!”

The sublight engines’ activated without a problem. The crew enjoyed the smooth, subtle mechanical grumbling. Jones noted they crossed the edge of known space in ten seconds. . . She asked herself, what were those sensor anomalies?

In what seemed like seconds later, Hayes' screen flashed thrice again. She snapped upright at the data pouring onto her screen—there it is! “Senor contact at twelve o’clock!”

Aaen sat upright in his chair and commanded, “On-screen!”

*****

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