First Contact Was Fire

Port Franklin Orbital Depot, Spindle Two Drydock. CNS Reliant (CL-64), Centerline Spine Bay B. 0640 Local, Sigma Draconis IV.

Captain Alan Bishop floated with one gloved hand on a grab rail, watching Chief Bosun's Mate Ben Tucker work his torque wrench down the starboard rail. With every panel unbolted for the annual hydraulic inspection, the open bay yawned a hundred and twenty meters from the dorsal gantry locks clean through to the ventral keel, exposing the vacuum of space. Tucker pulled himself along the structural ribbing, checking the bite of each 140mm maraging-steel shear-dog as his breath fogged inside his gold-tinted visor.

"Dog four's riding a half-thou loose, Captain," Tucker said. "Forty years on these rails and the maraging still creeps. I'll shim it before we button up."

"Make it a full thousandth under spec, Chief. I'd rather she's tight and slow than fast and wrong."

"Aye, sir," Tucker grunted, leaning into the torque bar. Bishop watched the chief's gauge needle settle. Even two tenths of a millimeter of slop along the guide rails would turn an eighty-ton missile pack into a battering ram under thirty gees of missile launch kick, shearing the gantry pins clean off their seatings the instant a salvo lit off.

Bishop hooked his suit boot into the guide rail tether, letting the cold vibration of the ship's 40-Hz hull harmonics settle his pulse before keying his collar mic. "Main Engineering, Bridge. Sam, how's the core behaving?"

Sam Yates's voice came back flat and unhurried over the circuit. "Continuity is clean across all forty-one toroid segments, Captain. Running a low-power spool test now, half a percent of rated flux. If I push her past two percent in drydock, the yard safety board will have my pension."

"Keep her at half a percent, then."

Below the open bay, through the gap where a ventral shield plate remained unbolted, Franklin rotated in cold silence nine hundred kilometers beneath his boots. Bishop rested his fingers against the lip of the structural frame as the dawn terminator peeled across the green expanse of the eastern grain belts. There, sharp against the rolling dirt, lay the dark geometric cuts he had studied through optics for five years: forty-two perfect hexagons of black basalt, each exactly one kilometer from face to face. The razor-cut edges threw stark black shadows across the prairie, unweathered and mirror-flat beneath the orbital horizon. They were catching the first direct rays of Sigma Draconis now, their vitrified faces shifting from dead charcoal to the bruised purple of tempered armor plate as the planet wheeled beneath him.

"Clear day over the colonies," Tucker said, sighting down past his boots toward the green terminator line.

"Good visibility on the basalt sectors," Bishop replied, checking the bay's port-side gantry readout. "Survey teams mapped four more drainage canals along the eastern edge yesterday."

"Means the survey transport will be cleared out of the low orbital slot before our engine trials tomorrow," Tucker said, consulting the digital readout on his torque bar. "One less civilian hull cluttering our egress corridor."

The CIC alarm tore across the bay's working channel: a high-pressure pneumatic shriek, cold and brassy as an unseated turbine seal, that sawed into Bishop's ear canal. Bishop kicked off the bulkhead ring before the second cycle finished, pulling hand over hand down the centerline guide rail and clearing the zero-G transfer run toward the forward access trunk in three hard pulls.

Inside the gimbaled CIC sphere the lighting had already gone to combat red. Lieutenant Mark Jensen was hunched over his console, tactical lenses throwing a green lattice of data across his eyes. His gloved fingers hammered the tactile switch matrix, slapping the ceramic tracker ball into its brass stops across three live fire-control layers.

"Captain, Gadfly... gone," Jensen gasped, throat working against the pressure suit collar. "Picket corvette. Hundred-diameter limit. Flash transmission at 0638, then flatline. Clean severance. No debris cloud decaying. No fusion flare. Reading a particle track... point nine-two c. Hull was slagged before the light from the shot even cleared the sensor mast."

"Show me the source."

The main plot resolved five contacts at the edge of detection range, hexagonal returns too clean and too symmetric to be rock. Four held steady mass signatures near ninety thousand tons apiece. The fifth, holding station along the tactical axis as a heavy anchor hull, read out at a hundred and forty-five thousand.

"They came in on a Cherenkov jump, Captain, high-energy burn, no deceleration profile we recognize. And listen." Jensen routed the gravimetric return through the CIC audio processor.

The sound that flooded the sphere was not static, nor the sharp chirp of radar. It was a sickening, low-frequency pressure pulse that hammered directly against Bishop's skull, a rhythmic sub-harmonic screech that twisted the inner ear like sudden vertigo as the active gravimetric wave sheared across Franklin and its orbital gantries in cold, grinding passes.

"It's counting in base twelve," Jensen said. "I've sent three First Contact hails on every band we've got. Nothing. They are not listening to us, Captain. They are listening to Franklin."

Bishop watched the waveform repeat, a header sequence buried inside the sweep, cycling in clean, unhurried intervals across the tactical display.

"Mark, decode that header for me. Now."

Jensen's hands blurred across the board, cross-referencing the pulse-width ratios against mathematical linguistic models and fire-control syntax algorithms. Ninety seconds crawled by in total silence, broken only by the rasp of Tucker's breathing over the open comm from Spine Bay B, steady and hollow against his helmet mic while the periodic sixty-cycle gravimetric acoustic pulses droned through the overhead speakers.

"Got it," Jensen said. "It's not a greeting, Captain. It's a warrant. Sigma Draconis is classified Tier-2, Noisy Jump Infestation. Scheduled sterilization window opens in four hours, twelve minutes."

The CIC went still around him, the hum of the gimbal motors the only sound besides his own pulse in his ears. Core Fleet was eight weeks out past Albion. Everything standing between those five hexagonal hulls and nine hundred and fifty thousand colonists on Franklin was floating in a drydock with half its hull panels pulled for inspection.

He unclipped the brass slide-rule from his breast pocket and snapped it into the console clip beside the stopwatch mount. Then he keyed the yard-wide battle circuit.

"All hands, this is the Captain. The outsiders aren't answering the radio because they came to execute a sterilization warrant. Chief Tucker, Mr. Yates, strip every live Mark 14 missile module out of drydock hull Perseverance and load Hephaestus to the gills. Reserve Squadron Four sails in two hundred minutes."