ON WAY TO THE SUN
I
“Captain Sanzo! I’m picking up an alien signal. It’s very faint but a clear line of transmission. Do you want me to track it?”
The voice of the navigator intruded into the captain’s consciousness like a wasp landing on a plate of fruit. The captain had, as usual, been absorbed in the news update from Earth; his blond head looked up from the screen of a gold-plated hand-held, the only compensation he'd been able to wangle out of Control for agreeing to accept the mission.
“How faint, Lieutenant? Are we likely to get anything on screen within the hour?”
Lieutenant Hakkai frowned and his hand flew to the keyboard. “Just let me make a couple of calculations”.
The captain returned to his article; the youkai infiltration of the food markets was becoming a serious problem. No amount of philosophy would calm a population in the grip of starvation or suffering regular poison attacks. What was the point of such a tactic? The youkai part of the population used the same food sources and had as much need to eat as their human neighbours.
And there was the navigator, again. “Unless the direction changes significantly, we should see the source on screen in 39.2782 minutes.”
The captain looked mildly interested. They hadn’t seen another craft for several weeks now. “Lock on then.”
“O - K!” The lieutenant was still looking his way and smiled at him with a flash of empty geniality that sent the captain straight back to his study of the news in distaste. Screw Hakkai – there was nothing to goddamn smile about.
The incident unsettled him. He made an effort to stop grinding his teeth.
How dare the man smile at him like that? Here they were stuck in a foul tin box hurtling through space - at a speed which was mathematically impressive but felt like they were going backwards half the time, because the progress was so blasted slow. But then the sun was a long way away – and the Sanbutsushin ("Control" as he was supposed to call them these days) had told him that the journeying itself was most important.
There would be nothing to be gained by arriving before the full effect of the journey had come to fruition. They said. Goddamn heads. All mouth and no brain.
He snapped the hand-held shut and stood up, looking mightily displeased.
His concentration was spoiled, and, although he glared pointedly at the back of the lieutenant’s head, his anger was mostly for himself. Why the hell did he let such a stupid thing get to him in the first place? Dammit; didn’t he have a mind that was true enough and sharp enough to pierce armour-plating with the power of a prayer? Well then.
He slammed his chair roughly under the table and walked to the hatch. “I’m going down to check on the power room. Call me if that alien ship shows up. At once.” His voice was deliberately powerful and harsh, a parallel to his roughness with the chair. He would have liked to have shoved Hakkai under the table too. Smug bastard.
Not that the sergeant was anything but a waste of skin either, thought the captain as he strode towards the power room, or strode as much as the weightlessness in the craft allowed. Viewed objectively, his progress looked more like a strained lurch, but they had all become accustomed to the oddness of their movements after so many months. The lack of gravity had even put some limits on the antics of their energetic fourth member.
The airlock seemed to take for ever. Time might be relative but, when Captain Sanzo was fermenting this level of irritation, any time at all was too damn long.
II
The power room had an atmosphere of its own, largely due to the sensitive equipment it housed.
The sensitivity of the equipment was, in the captain’s view, an ironic contrast with the blunt instruments who spent most of their time down there: blunt instrument Sergeant Gojyo, who was supposed to keep them moving, and blunt instrument Serviceman Goku, who was responsible for the weapons systems.
Of course, Goku should have made it to Leading Serviceman by this stage in his career, but there had been too many incidents of – ah, let us say, too many “unfortunate” incidents along the way.
It was undeniable that the boy was the best trainee in his year at the weapons side of things – goddammit, you could never get him away from the blasted console! He just sat there, hour after hour, playing different weapons games and surrounded by piles of nutrition pack wrappers. Despite the strict rationing imposed by the lieutenant, Serviceman Goku preferred to binge with his nutrition: he stockpiled the rations and then bloated his way through the lot during one of his endless gaming sessions. Freak.
There he was now – chewing gum, working the controls with a mad, hyperactive glee and making ridiculous sound effects. And where was Sergeant Gojyo?
“Serviceman!” yelled the captain over the din of clicking and the wild whoops and detonations issuing from the small form, kicking and ducking and swerving in the chair in front of him.
There was instant silence and a pair of large honey-brown eyes swivelled, like small worlds, to meet the captain’s angry glare.
“Will you shut the hell up?” Something like a missile exploded in the violet slits which pinned the serviceman to his seat. “Where the fuck is Sergeant Gojyo? I didn’t come down here for you, you mindless game-junkie.”
Goku’s mouth opened, but nothing happened. There were no words. His eyes moved to the air-lock door. A range of lights showed momentarily green on one of the wall panels and something began a discreet whirring in the background.
“Well? Is the question too difficult for your ant-sized mental capacity?” The captain was breathing hard and took a step towards Goku.
That was enough; the boy began to babble. “He – er, he, he just went out, just for a bit and – and said he got stuff to see to, out -”
“Tch! What do you mean – “out”? We’re in a space-ship, for crying out loud; there isn’t any “out” except for an eternity of goddamn nothingness!” The back of Sanzo’s hand smacked against the young serviceman’s ear in a rebuke which brought the brown eyes back to the captain’s face.
There was a moment of silence, during which the captain’s anger stood down in the face of that intense desire to please reaching out to him with its offer of unreserved inability.
Sanzo sighed. “Be more quiet in future.” The brown head in front of him nodded vigorously.
Captain Sanzo turned back to the airlock. There were only two places that the sergeant could be, unless he had jammed his blundering frame into the missile tubes, and the choice was between the store-room (unlikely – the low temperature was no attraction for a comfort-lover like the sergeant) and their sleeping quarters.
Climbing up the ladder to the sleeping quarters, the captain deliberately clanged his feet crossly on the metal treads and shouted “Sergeant!” in warning. Whatever it was that Sergeant Gojyo was doing in there, he didn’t want to see it; the captain knew Gojyo’s inclinations well enough and had as much imagination as the next man. That was plenty to be going on with.
There was the hurried rustle of cloth and then the sergeant’s red head poked round the door frame. “Wha’’s up, cap?”
“Don’t call me that,” snapped Sanzo. “I want a power, speed and fuel report for the last week; get it matched against the Lieutenant’s readings for our position last Tuesday, today and the projection for seven days time. You’ve got two hours.”
Sanzo started to move back down the stairway. “Oh, and we’ve picked up a signal so we’ve got company. Keep awake, sergeant.” He spoke as though it was Gojyo’s personal duty to ensure that the “company” didn’t take them by surprise, and he had used a particularly insinuating tone, an implication by vocal colour that the sergeant was always likely to be the first one of the crew to doze off.
The captain could almost hear the sergeant mouthing an ironic “Yes, SIR” behind his back and was almost pleased enough to smile about it. Almost.
It occurred to him that the sergeant was about due for another nicotine injection, which meant that he would be due for another himself in about five days time. They were both heavy smokers back at base and were given slow-release subcutaneous capsules to prevent a withdrawal reaction during the flight.
Lieutenant Hakkai was trained in basic medical procedures and undertook the injections. The captain always assisted with the sergeant’s treatment, because the big man was uncommonly phobic about needles and had been known to pass out. Useless critter.
The captain, on the other hand, enjoyed the sharpness of the pain, enjoyed concentrating on the hard metal forcing its way under his pale skin, enjoyed the cold blush of the tolerated toxin spewing into his system. There wasn’t much else for him to enjoy, herded into a tiny, tin vessel with three rejects who couldn’t spell the word “frustration” between them.
III
On the command deck, he looked at the sheaf of printouts which Hakkai had put on his desk. There was the usual nonsense from Control. He’d better finish his log entries for the night, not that the word “night” meant anything out here in the pitch black. What was night, when there was never any day? At least there was never any rain out here either, so was that a good trade-off, he wondered? No rain for no day.
He forced himself to concentrate on his work.
Suddenly the lieutenant clapped his hands to his headphones and blurted “I can hear a voice!”
Sanzo stood up quickly and moved behind the navigator’s chair. Hakkai handed him the head phones. In his ears, there came a deep booming voice which grated slightly, like breakers on shingle, but the words were meaningless. After a few seconds, the captain handed back the headset. “Do you recognize the language?”
Hakkai listened intently again and then shook his head. “It’s stopped. There’s just an automatic ping now.” He laid the headphones down on the chart table and then leaned back. “Well, I’ve recorded the transmission and I can probably track down a converter if I’m clever.” He paused but the captain declined to volunteer an opinion on his lieutenant’s intellectual agility. “Ha ha. I shall enjoy the challenge. It makes quite a change from calculating distances and the like.”
Sanzo looked thoughtful. “Are the signal and the voice from the same ship, Lieutenant?”
Hakkai pressed a key on the console to his right and the Galaxivue panel lit up, showing their own position as a familiar gold square. Hakkai used a red light pointer to indicate a dark grey smudge. “That’s the last bank of meteor dust we came through.” He flicked another key. “That green line shows the signal strength and position over the last forty minutes and there - ” The pointer landed on a small black shape near the edge of the panel “ – is the source. I’d say it’s not as large a craft as ours, but it’s moving much faster. It’ll catch us within three or four days.”
“We’d better find out what it’s trying to say to us then,” growled the captain. “If we can see them, - ” He broke off.
“I bet they’re looking at us too,” chirped the lieutenant brightly.
For nearly an hour there was silence. The blond head bent over a pile of papers whilst the dark-haired man sat in his head-phones and clicked through programme after programme searching for the right translation engine.
The captain’s fingers worked methodically, typing and clicking to file, label, delete, copy and store in the most efficient manner he could devise; when the pressure was on, he wouldn’t have the time to waste looking for what he needed. He had to know where it all was and to know that he could access it in the quickest possible way. He also had to leave everything stored and labelled so that the others could find and use it, in case he wasn’t there any more. If that ship was hostile, anything could happen.
Was the alien ship hostile? He glanced round at the screen. Hakkai was right: it looked small but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t armed with something deadly and with a longer range than their own. As he liked to remind the sergeant, size wasn’t everything.
After another twenty minutes, the Lieutenant came and stood beside the captain. “Excuse me, sir. I’ve managed to convert the message into English; there is a voice recognition written document file, for Control, but I wondered if you’d prefer me to put the voice on speakers, so that the others can hear as well?”
Sanzo looked at the bland, satisfied face in front of him and tried not to be annoyed at the blatant manipulation. The lieutenant spent far too much time with Sergeant Gojyo, and thought that there was a point in including him in matters which should only be a concern for officers. The sergeant was scruffy; he wasn’t even bright. Why Hakkai bothered with him the captain would never understand.
However, in this case, it was logical for them all to hear. They were all under threat if the ship was hostile. They were all critical to whatever the required response might be. “You’d better call them up, then.”
When the sergeant and Goku were standing together in the room, taking up most of the space as it seemed, Sanzo swivelled round in his chair and said evenly, “About an hour and a half ago, we picked up a signal from an unidentified ship.” He nodded at Hakkai, who clicked the light pointer onto the small black shape, still edging its way towards them on the panel. The two crew members from the lower deck stared. They did not see this equipment in use often.
The captain continued, “There’s nothing of our own anywhere near here, so we have to view it as alien, if not hostile. The craft is sending out a ping but also made a broadcast in an unknown language, which the Lieutenant has, -” Sanzo hesitated deliberately “- cleverly, managed to translate. Listen to the message. Then you will know as much as anyone else. Lieutenant.”
Hakkai bent forward over the table. "I'm afraid the voice has a rather heavy Russian accent; it was the best I could do in a hurry." The lieutenant rattled his keyboard for a few seconds and then turned round in his chair, as the deep, booming voice rasped in the ship’s speaker system.
“ – have been following an apparently larger vessel on our screen for some time. We cannot recognize your outline and do not understand your identification markings: “J11-pu”. Our trajectory will bring us close to you and we are giving you notice of our intention to dock; we have all the necessary equipment.”
The lieutenant raised his eyebrows at this point.
“There is no need for you to undertake any alteration or modification of your vessel. We adhere to high standards of civilization and would therefore welcome your invitation for the visit.”
“Huh!” snorted the captain.
“However, we intend to take boarding action in any event as our meeting is patently of mutual benefit, as will be the subsequent exchange of information.”
“ – not!” exclaimed Sanzo.
The impassive voice continued to deliver its message. “Our craft is a Lectron-powered G-R 055E with a crew of two and my name is Sergeant Gatski. I am pleased to end this message by extending a courteous greeting to you all from my commanding officer, Captain Hazelarin. Until our next meeting, goodbye.”
There was a click and the speakers lapsed into a faint hum.
Three of the crew exchanged glances and looked at their captain, who now sat with his eyes closed and wearing a frown that was dusted with disdain.
“I really don’t care for the sound of that. I am not going to like this Captain Hazelarin. Not one little bit.”
The violet eyes snapped open like a snake taking a fly. “Just my luck. No-one around for light years and then I get picked on by a basket case with a crush on my ship. This cannot be good news.”
For once, nobody disagreed with him.
