Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

Kevin nodded, feeling tension running through his body. They’d prepared as best as they could for a month, but none of them had ever set foot on an alien world before. Even those of them who had experience with different human cultures had never experienced anything so completely alien . It was quite possible that they would make a very simple mistake and doom their mission.

“Disengage drive,” he ordered. He’d made the decision not to come out of FTL with shields up and weapons ready to fire, but all stations were ready to snap to alert if necessary. Who knew how the system’s authorities would react to a starship coming out of FTL at full battle readiness? And yet, there was no overall authority in the Ying System. “Take us out of FTL.”

There was a faint indescribable sensation and then the display suddenly filled with light. The stars didn’t look too different to the stars from Earth, at least to Kevin’s untrained eye, but the system was crammed with starships and industrial stations. There were thousands of starships and spacecraft making their way to and from the system’s inhabited planets, while the entire system seemed to be thoroughly developed. Each planet had at least a dozen habitable asteroids surrounding it, while countless more drifted in free orbits around the primary star.

Cold awe threatened to overwhelm him. This was the dream, a solar system so heavily developed that nothing could threaten to exterminate its inhabitants. The human race would be safe from all harm once the Sol System was as heavily developed as this one. And yet it was a very minor system by alien standards, their version of a free city, somewhere without an overall authority. Who knew just how heavily developed an alien core system would be?

“Send the locals our IFF,” he said. It had been carefully modified, although the alien had advised them that hardly anyone on Ying would care. “And request permission to approach the planet.”

He looked down at the display while waiting for the response. A stream of alien starships were making their way through normal space towards the gravity point, a tear in the fabric of reality. The aliens, masters of gravity and antigravity, had concluded that streams of gravity between stars created natural folds in the fabric of space-time, allowing spacecraft to hop from system to system without an FTL drive. Many of the oddities of galactic history, Kevin suspected, came from the simple fact that FTL was a comparatively recent invention. Before then, they’d been completely dependent on the gravity points.

“There’s no defences around the gravity point at all,” Edward Romford pointed out. “You think they don’t consider the system worth defending?”

“Or maybe they think it would be pointless,” Kevin said. “There’s no single authority in this system to coordinate a defence.”

He shrugged. Prior to the invention of FTL, the gravity points had provided a bottleneck that had forced any aggressor to appear in a known location if he wanted to attack. The defenders might be outnumbered, but they would be able to counter with fixed defences and minefields. But FTL had completely undone the defender’s planning and allowed the aggressor to appear from anywhere. It must have been an awful surprise, Kevin considered, for the defenders when FTL had first been invented.

But the whole system was yet another illustration of just how colossal the galaxy actually was, compared to Earth. Kevin had been in lawless cities, in places where enemies met and traded despite mutual hatred, yet they had always been isolated places where no outside power wanted to establish control. Here… it was the same, but scaled up to a whole solar system. Part of him just wanted to collapse in horror, his mind unwilling to grasp what he was seeing. The rest of him just wanted to get on with the mission.

“They’ve assigned us an orbital slot,” Jackson said, shortly. “And they’ve sent us a full set of charges too.”

Kevin accessed the interface, then smiled. They weren’t being charged for being in high orbit, but moving to low orbit would cost… as would hiring a hotel on the planet’s surface or hiring a heavy-lift shuttle. He smiled at just how human it was, despite the inhumanity of the planet’s settlers. Planetary orbit might cost nothing, but everything else came with a pretty steep charge. He’d been on holidays where the flight was cheap, yet everything else was expensive as hell. The basic idea was the same.

“Understood,” he said. “Take us into orbit.”

It was easy to see, as they approached the planet, why no larger interstellar power had laid claim to Ying. The planet might have been habitable once, but it had suffered a massive ecological disaster centuries ago. If there was a native race, it had died out as the surface slowly turned to desert. Even now, sandstorms rolled across the planet’s surface, far more powerful than anything recorded on Earth. The planet’s authorities, such as they were, seemed reluctant to invest in terraforming their homeworld.

But it makes a certain kind of sense , he told himself. If they made the system more attractive, someone might come in and take it .

“Entering orbit now,” Jackson said. He grinned, nervously. “We’re here.”

“So we are,” Kevin said. An odd feeling gripped his chest. It took him a moment to realise it was nerves. He’d been in tight spots before, but this was very different. There would be no hope of rescue if the shit hit the fan. “The away team will gather in the teleport chamber.”

“Good luck, sir,” Jackson said.

“Don’t forget your orders,” Kevin said. “We’ll check in, every hour on the hour; if you don’t hear from us for over four hours, assume the worst. And if you don’t hear from us in a day, take the ship back to Earth. No heroics, Commander.”

“None will be taken,” Jackson assured him.

Kevin smiled as he walked through the ship’s corridors and into the teleport chamber. The alien was already there, standing somewhat apart from the five humans who made up the rest of the away team. Kevin nodded to each of them in turn, hoping and praying that they would be capable of maintaining their calm on the planet’s surface. None of them had any real experience with aliens, apart from the Horde. And the Hordesmen were hardly typical Galactics.

“All present and correct,” Edward Romford said. “And we’re all armed to the teeth.”

“Just be careful not to start something unless absolutely necessary,” Kevin warned. There were no gun control laws on Ying, but the humans would be badly outnumbered. On the other hand, from what they had been told, if they shot their way out of trouble no one would bat an eyelid. “Onto the pads.”

He stepped onto the final pad and activated the interface. “Energise.”

The world faded away in silver light, then reformed as something different. The heat struck him at once, a wave of warm air as hot as anything he’d felt in the Middle East, but carrying with it a whole series of unfamiliar scents. He felt his body start to sweat as he stood upright,, fighting against the planet’s stronger gravity. Despite the augmentations he’d had inserted into his body, he had the uncomfortable feeling that they were going to have real problems until they managed to adapt to the planet’s environment. It was nothing like Earth.

He looked around. They were standing in a small stone chamber, bright light pouring through two open windows. An alien clicked impatiently, motioning with one long tentacle for them to step off the pads and out of the room. Kevin stared at the alien for one long moment, then remembered his manners and led the humans past the alien and through the door. Who would have thought that an octopus-like creature could develop the ability to walk on land?