First Encounter Read online

  First Encounter

  (1st Edition)

  by Jasper T. Scott

  JasperTscott.com

  @JasperTscott

  Copyright © 2019

  THE AUTHOR RETAINS ALL RIGHTS

  FOR THIS BOOK

  Cover Art by Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Author's Content Rating: PG-13

  Swearing: Occasional

  Sex: Mild references

  Violence: Moderate

  Author's Guarantee: If you find anything you consider inappropriate for this rating, please e-mail me at [email protected] and I will either remove the content or change the rating accordingly.

  Acknowledgments

  This book comes to you in its polished state in large part thanks to the hard work of my editing team. A big thanks goes to my editor Aaron Sikes, my proofreader Ian Jedlica, and to each and every one of my advance readers, in particular: B. Allen Thobois, Bob Sirrine, Dara McLain, Dave Topan, Davis Shellabarger, Francis Hinnegan, Gary Matthews, Gaylon Overton, George Goedecke, George P. Dixon, Gordon Sears, Harry Huyler, Howard Cohen, Ian Seccombe, Jackie Gartside, Jim Meinen, John Nash, John Parker, Lara Gray, Lisa Garber, Mary Kastle, Mary Whitehead, Paul Burch, Raymond Burt, Richard T. Conkey, Wade Whitaker, William Dellaway, and William Schmidt. You guys are amazing! You make it so much easier to do what I do.

  And as ever, thanks to the Muse.

  To those who dare,

  And to those who dream.

  To everyone who’s stronger than they seem.

  —Jasper Scott

  “Believe in me / I know you’ve waited for so long / Believe in me / Sometimes the weak become the strong.”

  —STAIND, Believe

  Prologue

  2150 AD

  —One Week Before Arrival—

  Captain Clayton Cross stood on the bridge of Forerunner One in front of the viewscreens. Three hundred and sixty degrees of them. The majority of the ship’s control stations and officers were arrayed around the ‘front’ half of that circle, sitting right behind where he stood.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it, sir?” Commander Taylor said.

  “Quite,” Clayton replied, glancing at her. She stood straight as a board beside him with hands clasped behind her back. Commander Taylor was short and trim, dark-skinned, but with light honey-brown eyes. She was his second-in-command and the executive officer of the ship.

  Dropping his voice to a hushed whisper, he added, “Any sign of those blips we were tracking?”

  Taylor shook her head. Starlight from the viewscreens glanced off her black hair tucked into a bun. “No, sir.”

  “I see,” he replied, looking back to the fore.

  “Maybe they were comets. Or asteroids,” Taylor added.

  “Then why did they disappear when we got close?” Clayton challenged.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He nodded into the gleaming darkness of space. “That’s a calculated move, Lieutenant. A conscious decision to hide.”

  “But how? And if they could do that, why not hide all along?”

  “Maybe they had to maneuver first,” Clayton suggested.

  “Then we’re calling this first contact?” Taylor breathed. “Should we inform the Ambassador?”

  Clayton regarded her steadily. The United Nations of Earth had been clear when they founded the Space Force that space exploration was not a military enterprise, nor should it become one. As such, Ambassador Morgan was the civilian leader in charge of the overall mission. Clayton looked away from his XO. “Not yet, Commander. He’ll just run around like a chicken with no head, spraying doom and gloom everywhere.”

  “Colorful, sir,” Taylor replied, her lips curling under a wrinkled nose.

  “We need more info before we tell anyone about this. Keep scanning and let me know what you find.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Trappist-1

  Chapter 1

  —Two Days Before Arrival—

  Clayton sat behind his brushed aluminum desk aboard the UNES Forerunner One, staring at the watch in his hands. It was an older model smart watch. The wallpaper image behind the ticking black hands on the crisp display was Samara’s smiling face. Her blue eyes were an even richer and deeper hue than the sky in the background, her blond hair aglow with sunlight.

  That was back when they were the young, newly-wedded power couple that everyone else secretly wanted to be: high on life and destined to conquer the world together.

  That is, until a car on autopilot cruised through a red light at sixty miles per hour. The car’s cameras had been malfunctioning. It hit Samara and three others, killing her and an elderly man instantly. The other two victims had survived, but barely.

  Samara had been a practicing resident at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center. She’d had her whole career and life ahead of her. And maybe she still did. It was too soon to say.

  He studied the watch again, running his fingertips over the gold-plated bezel around Samara’s face. Before she’d died, he and Samara had their neural pathways mapped. He’d made several copies since, one of which was sitting in his hands, saved to the quantum crystal matrix of the watch. He’d bought it for himself and saved Samara’s neural map to it before he’d left Earth. Just in case something happened to civilization while he was gone. With Samara’s life at stake, he couldn’t be too careful.

  When Samara had told him about the experimental program at her hospital, he’d thought she was joking. But then he’d seen the results for himself: a browsable, searchable network of all the memories and structures that made a person who they were. Some couples might have balked at that kind of openness, but he and Samara had never kept any secrets from each other. Not big ones, anyway. A week later, they both joined the program and had their neural networks mapped in the name of science. He’d never imagined that they might actually need to use them. But now Samara’s mind map was the only hope he had for them to be together again.

  Clayton turned the watch over and read the inscription underneath.

  I’m waiting for you.

  It was a reminder to himself. A promise he’d made to Sam, even though she’d already passed on by the time he’d made it. In theory, he had a snapshot of everything that had made Samara who she was. Now he just had to wait for the technology to be developed that could breathe life into that digital effigy.

  One day.

  That was the reason he’d transferred from mission planning to an active duty role on Forerunner One. Moving at relativistic speed on their way to Trappist-1 was like hopping in a time machine. At half the speed of light, time was moving 15% slower for him on board Forerunner One than it was for everyone else back on Earth. But add to that the fact that he’d spent the past seventy-eight years in cryo, waiting to arrive, and it gave him the best possible chance of living to see the technology that would someday bring Samara back. Seventy-eight years plus 15%. That meant almost ninety years had already passed on Earth. And over one hundred and seventy-nine years would pass before he could possibly return. After all that time, they had to have found a way to bring her back.

  They had to.

  Clayton pushed those thoughts away and spun his chair around to the viewport behind him to distract himself with the view. It wasn’t a real window. Since there were so many internal rooms, and since radiation shielding wasn’t cheap, most of the viewports were actually digital displays tied to real-time holofeeds from the Forerunner’s external cameras. But that had the added advantage of making the windows all configurable, and they doubled as control interfaces for the ship’s systems.

  Clayton had set his viewport to show their destination. Dead center of the display was a pale blue-white dot of Trappist-1. Stars littered the void aroun
d it. All of them blue-shifted by the sheer velocity of Forerunner One’s approach. The stars didn’t look any bluer to him, but his civilian first contact specialist, Dr. Reed, had explained to him that stars emit light across the entire spectrum, so the doppler effect simply shifted visible light into the ultraviolet and x-ray range, and infrared light into the visible spectrum. Go fast enough and you’d actually be able to see radar and microwaves with the naked eye. Now that they’d flipped around and were decelerating in advance of their arrival, all that starlight was gradually shifting back to its usual wavelengths.

  Clayton spent a moment mentally tracing imaginary constellations around Trappist-1 using his augmented reality contacts (ARCs). Glowing green lines appeared like magic, guided by the power of his thoughts being channeled through his Neuralink implant. He drew a diamond. A lop-sided star. Then an elephant, and then—

  He stopped. In the process of removing lines and painting new ones, he accidentally drew a constellation that looked like a human skull. Suppressing a shiver, he wiped the image away and spun away from the viewport. Strapping his watch back on, he swiped over to the mission timer he’d set up.

  2d 3h 5m

  In just over two days Forerunner One would arrive and make history. By now Forerunners Two and Three had already reached their destinations. They’d been bound for Gliese 667 and Wolf 1061 respectively, both of which were a lot closer than Trappist, but that was balanced out by the fact that the other ships had all left after Forerunner One.

  A musical chime dragged Clayton’s eyes up to the door. Mentally connecting to the ship’s intercom system, he answered and simultaneously saw an image of the person standing outside: a familiar woman, tall and trim with her brown hair tucked into a bun.

  “Doctor Reed. Did you need something?” he asked.

  She looked up at the camera mounted above his door, brown eyes wide and bright with excitement. Her head bobbed quickly. “We just had a breakthrough with the communicators. We—Dr. Grouse and I—thought you might like to see it for yourself, sir.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of Clayton’s mouth. “You mean you finally got them working?”

  “They were always working, sir.”

  “For us,” Clayton corrected.

  Reed dismissed the caveat with a shrug and a burgeoning smile of her own. “Well, now they’re working for Charlie, too.”

  Clayton felt his brow furrowing with genuine surprise. “You got one of them to read a dog’s mind?”

  “Not just his mind. His dreams.”

  That knocked Clayton back in his chair. He sat blinking in shock, staring at Dr. Reed’s grinning face. She was slowly nodding, observing his reaction on her end via the camera mounted on the ceiling inside his quarters.

  “So what do dogs dream about?” Clayton asked.

  “Uh-uh. No spoilers. You’ll have to come down to the lab and see for yourself.”

  Clayton smiled crookedly and jumped out of his chair. It flew back on a sliding rail, hitting rubber stoppers just before reaching the wall with the viewport. “I’ll be right there.”

  Chapter 2

  Clayton left his quarters at a brisk pace, forcing Dr. Reed to run to keep up. After just a few seconds they were both breathing hard. The ship was currently experiencing one point four Gs as it decelerated, making even light exercise a chore.

  Doors to the other crew quarters flashed by on either side. They reached a bank of four elevators at the end of the corridor and stopped. Clayton activated the call button with a thought, and Dr. Reed slumped against the wall, breathing hard, her brow beaded with sweat.

  Clayton nodded to her. “You need to schedule more exercise in your downtime.”

  Reed flashed a wry smile. “What downtime, sir?”

  He snorted at that. “Good point.”

  The elevator on the far right opened, and they strode in. A woman was already standing there. She came to attention and said, “Captain.”

  Clayton nodded back. He recognized the woman from her gray eyes, jutting chin, and bristly blond hair at the same time as he read the rank and last name over her right breast. His AR contacts made the name tape glow bright blue.

  PO3 Salazar

  “At ease, Petty Officer,” he said.

  She nodded back as he turned to face the doors with Dr. Reed. He used his ARCs to select the Science Lab on level nine. He noted that Salazar was headed down to Engineering on level six.

  The elevator slowed to a stop, momentarily adding to the 1.4 Gs already weighing on Clayton’s knees. The doors parted quickly, and he led the way around the circular corridor that surrounded the elevators. Other corridors branched off at right angles like the spokes of a wheel, each of them lined with doors to various laboratories. Clayton took the right-hand corridor and walked quickly by the doors and windows to various labs, pausing only once to check on the leafy green rows of vegetables and fruit growing under glowing blue UV lamps.

  Then came the labs with biologists and geneticists working in form-hugging white body suits. They were testing and splicing blood samples from the crew, trying to make the human genome more adaptable and resilient to alien environments. Those experiments were still in their infancy, but the hope was that some day colonists would be able to breathe alien atmospheres without the aid of filter masks or oxygen tanks.

  Dr. Reed stopped with him to look in on one of those labs. She rapped on the window and shook her head, pointing to a case of blood samples that was in danger of getting elbowed off the counter to shatter on the floor.

  She sighed and they continued down the corridor. “Sorry, sir. Those samples represent six months of work.”

  “Have they had any luck?”

  “Plenty,” Dr. Reed replied. “At this rate, we’ll be ready to breathe the air on Trappist-1E before we even make landfall.”

  Clayton snorted. “We don’t even know what the atmospheric composition is yet.”

  “No, but we have some idea. And so as long as there’s a reasonable amount of oxygen present, we can adapt the same principles to almost any atmosphere.”

  “What about pathogens?”

  “We can prevent allergic reactions, but if you mean hostile alien microbes, we’ll need to work on vaccines and countermeasures for each strain that we encounter.”

  They reached the door to the comms lab, and Clayton turned to Dr. Reed with eyebrows raised. “What happens when we head back to Earth?”

  Reed’s brow furrowed, and she shook her head. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

  “We’ll be engineered to breathe alien air. That means we’ll need filter masks and O2 tanks for Earth.”

  Reed snorted a laugh. “I guess that’s true.”

  Clayton went on, “If we’re not careful, soon we’ll be making first contact with ourselves.”

  Dr. Reed looked amused by that thought, but she gave no comment. She waved the door to the comms lab open and led the way inside. Dr. Grouse was the only other person in the room. He was short and round, chosen for this mission because of his brains and in spite of his physical condition. Dr. Grouse looked up as they approached, his plump face stretching into a grin. He hefted a malleable electrode helmet with a big glossy black visor. A goofy grin sprang to his lips that was complemented nicely by his bouncing, curly brown hair and vivid blue eyes. “Captain! You’re just in time!”

  Clayton’s eyes scanned the room. There was a chimp strapped down to a stretcher with a matching helmet on its head and wires trailing to a nearby computer console. The visor on the chimp’s helmet was down, and by some miracle, it wasn’t fighting its bonds. Must be sedated, Clayton decided.

  A second stretcher bore a Golden Retriever—Charlie—with another electrode helmet on its head, but no visor. The dog’s eyes were closed, its legs kicking spasmodically in its sleep. Clayton noticed drool leaking from the corner of its snout.

  Clayton frowned and crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes back on the chimp. What was his name again? He jerked his chin to
the chimp.

  “In time for what?”

  Dr. Grouse held out the electrode helmet to him. “Put it on and you’ll see.”

  Clayton hesitated and glanced at Dr. Reed for confirmation. She nodded. “It’s safe, sir, don’t worry. We’ve both tried it plenty of times. I was using it to look inside of Charlie’s head just a few minutes before I came to see you.”

  Clayton uncrossed his arms with a sigh, and took the helmet from Dr. Grouse. The other man helped him put it on and shaped it to his head. Electrodes pressed firmly to Clayton’s scalp through his razor-short black hair.

  “Dr. Reed said you learned how to read a dog’s thoughts, so what’s the chimp doing here?”

  “Archimedes is here to join the conversation.”

  “The conversation?”

  “You’ll see, Captain. You’ll see! Are you ready?”

  Dr. Grouse’s enthusiasm wasn’t as infectious as he probably thought it was. If anything, Clayton found it unsettling. He was about to have his brain wired to a dog’s and a chimp’s via a device that was somehow capable of reading and transmitting mental images directly between all three of them.

  “I’m ready...” Clayton said slowly.

  Bright images flickered over Dr. Grouse’s eyes as he used his ARCs to configure the communicator, and then a prompt appeared on Clayton’s own contacts, asking him to authorize a connection between his Neuralink and the communicator. Clayton approved the request, grateful that the technology wasn’t so invasive as to somehow project images into his brain without his permission. A glowing green countdown appeared on Clayton’s ARCs:

  Ten, nine, eight...

  Dr. Grouse folded the visor down in front of his eyes, blocking out the lab. Clayton frowned, disoriented. He heard a chair rolling on mag wheels. “Here you are, sir,” Reed said. “You should be sitting down for this.”

  He felt around blindly for the chair and then flopped into it with a whuff of escaping air from the cushion. The countdown hit zero, and suddenly he was flying through a grassy green field with a bright yellow disk hovering in the air before him. A golden snout with a wet black nose protruded from the lower portion of the screen. Suddenly, his view jumped up, and the disc was protruding from that snout.