“We’re ready to swallow in,” Syrinx replied. “Shout if you need us.”
“Okay, people,” Joshua announced. “Let’s go with the plan.”
The crew brought the ship up to normal operational status. Thermo dump panels deployed, radiating the starship’s accumulated heat away from the gleaming photosphere; sensor booms telescoped up. Joshua used the high-resolution systems to make an accurate fix on the diskcity, not using the active sensors yet. Once he’d confirmed their position to within a few metres, he transferred the navigational data over to a dozen stealthed ELINT satellites stored on board. They were fired out of a launch tube, travelling half a kilometre from the fuselage before their ion drives came on, pushing them in towards the diskcity on a pulse of thin blue flame. It would take them the better part of a day to fly within an operational distance when they could start returning useful data on the artefact’s darkside. Joshua and Syrinx considered it unlikely the diskcity could detect them in flight, even if their sensors were focused on space around
With the satellites launched, he brought the starship’s active sensors on-line and conducted a sweep of local space.
“We’re now officially here,” he told them.
“Aligning main dish,” Sarha said. She followed the grid image, waiting until the coordinates matched the diskcity.
Joshua datavised the flight computer to broadcast their message. It was a simple enough greeting, a text in the Tyrathca language, spread across a broad frequency range. It said who they were, where they came from, that humans had cordial relations with the Tyrathca from Tanjuntic-RI, and asked the diskcity to return the hail. No mention was made of the
There were bets on how long a reply would take, even of what it would say, if all they’d get back was a salvo of missiles. Nobody had put money on getting eight completely separate responses beamed at them from different sections of the diskcity.
“Understandable, though,” Dahybi said. “The Tyrathca are a clan species, after all.”
“They must have a single administration structure to run an artefact like that,” Ashly protested. “It wouldn’t work any other way.”
“Depends what’s tying them together,” Sarha said. “Something that size can hardly be the most efficient arrangement.”
“Then why build it?” Ashly wondered.
Oski ran the messages through their translator program. “Some deviation in vocabulary, syntax and symbology from our Tyrathca,” she said. “It has been fifteen thousand years after all. But we have a recognizable baseline we can proceed from.”
“Glad to see some sort of change,” Liol muttered. “The way everything stays the same with these guys was getting kind of spooky.”
“That’s drift, not change,” Oski told him. “And take a good look at the diskcity. We could build something like that easily; in fact we could probably do a much better job of it like Sarha says. All it demonstrates is expansion, not development. There’s been no real technological progress here, just like their colonies and arkships.”
“What do the messages say?” Joshua asked.
“One is almost completely unintelligible, some kind of image, I think. The computer’s running pattern analysis now. The rest are text only. Two have returned our greeting, and want to know what we’re doing here. Two are asking for proof that we’re xenocs. Three say welcome, and please rendezvous with the diskcity. Uh, they call it Tojolt-HI.”
“Give me a position on the three major friendlies,” Joshua said.
Three blue stars blinked over his neuroiconic image of Tojolt-HI. Two were located in the bulk of the disk, while the other was at the edge. “That settles it,” he said. “We concentrate on the rim source. I don’t want to try and manoeuvre
“The dominion of Anthi-CL,” Oski said.
“Sarha, focus our com beam on them, please, narrow band.”
Joshua ran through the message from the rim to get a feel for the format, and composed a reply.
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT
TOJOLT-HI, DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL.
MESSAGE
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. WE HAVE TRAVELLED HERE IN THE ANTICIPATION OF EXCHANGE OF MATERIALS AND KNOWLEDGE BENEFICIAL TO BOTH SPECIES. WE REQUEST PERMISSION TO DOCK AND BEGIN THIS PROCESS. IF THIS IS ACCEPTABLE TO YOU, PLEASE PROVIDE AN APPROACH VECTOR.
CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
COMMUNICATION TO
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
MESSAGE
YOU ARE WELCOME TO MASTRIT-PJ. IGNORE ALL MESSAGES FROM OTHER TOJOLT-HI DOMINIONS. WE RETAIN THE LARGEST DEPOSITS OF MATERIAL AND KNOWLEDGE WITHIN OUR BOUNDARIES. YOU WILL GAIN THE MOST BENEFIT BY EXCHANGING WITH US. CONFIRM THIS REQUEST.
QUANTOOK-LOU
DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES
“What do you think?” Joshua asked.
“Not quite the kind of response you’d get from our Tyrathca,” Samuel said. “It could be their attitude has changed to adapt to their circumstances. They seem to be tinged with avarice.”
“Resources would be scarce here,” Kempster said. “There can be no new sources of solid matter for them to exploit. A kilo of your waste may well be more valuable to them than a thousand fuseodollars.”
“We’ll bear it in mind when we start negotiating,” Joshua said. “For now, we have an invitation. I think we’ll accept.”
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
COMMUNICATION DIRECTED AT
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
MESSAGE
WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR INVITATION, AND CONFIRM THAT WE WISH TO EXCHANGE EXCLUSIVELY WITH YOU. PLEASE SEND APPROACH FLIGHT VECTOR.
CAPTAIN JOSHUA CALVERT.
DOMINION OF ANTHI-CL
COMMUNICATION TO
STARSHIP LADY MACBETH
MESSAGE
ARE YOU UNABLE TO COMPUTE APPROACH VECTOR? ARE YOU DAMAGED?
QUANTOOK-LOU
DISTRIBUTOR OF DOMINION RESOURCES
“Could be they don’t have traffic control here,” Joshua said. He ran a search through his neural nanonics encyclopaedia file on Hesperi-LN. “The Hesperi-LN Tyrathca didn’t have any formal control system before they started receiving Confederation ships.”
