Chapter One
Bill
The day started predictably enough. Signifier Nonus was being a tool, like always. Commander Norder woke up cranky and hogged the coffee. Funny Bone tried to make Captain Stone laugh, and instead made everyone in the mess groan and threaten to tape his mouth shut with high-tensile adhesive.
Par for the course, all of it.
Which made it the last day Captain Bill Henderson would have expected to receive an unsettling signal from an unknown source, broadcast in a dead alien language.
He stepped onto the bridge and found Ensign Longfield staring at the comms.
“Something the matter, Longfield?” he asked.
She didn’t even look up from the controls, just kept staring down at them with the same bemused expression on her face. “I’m getting a signal,” she said. “It’s short and it keeps repeating, but it’s scrambled.”
Of course, Signifier Nonus chose that moment to appear out of nowhere. “Have you tried running it through the translation software?”
Longfield’s eye twitched, but when she turned to face the Monitor, she smiled pleasantly enough. “I have, sir. Nothing’s come up. There’s too much interference.”
Playing nice with the Ornu always put Bill on edge, especially when they spoke in that sibilant, condescending tone they reserved for the so-called Empowered members of the empire. He’d never heard the Ornu talk to one of their own like that, except when they were dealing with their young. Nonus was a thorn in Bill’s side, and he’d never bothered to hide his disdain for the Tennyson’s crew. But having a Monitor aboard was a necessary evil.
Rather than punch the serpent right between his spectacled eyes, Bill kept his attention on Longfield. “Can you at least get a read on the location? Where’s the message coming from?”
“That’s the strange part.” Longfield swiveled her chair to face him. “It’s being broadcast from somewhere aboard our ship.”
Bill was still processing this revelation when his XO strode onto the bridge. Commander Bina Chakravarti had been Bill’s second in command long before he became captain of the Tennyson. The two of them had risen through the ranks together, and he was fairly certain that she’d been offered command of her own ship on more than one occasion. Over the years, they’d managed to develop the kind of rapport that allowed them to communicate without words—a helpful skill, given that the Ornu were constantly hovering over their shoulders, listening to every syllable they uttered in anticipation of the day one of them slipped up.
The moment Bina met his eyes, she froze. “What have I missed?”
“According to Ensign Longfield, there’s an untranslatable message being broadcast from somewhere aboard the Tennyson.” Bill kept his tone light. “Care to investigate with me?”
“Of course, Captain.”
Bill pulled out his personal comm unit. “What channel?”
“2117, sir.” Longfield adjusted her earpiece. “I can tell you when you’re getting close.”
“We’ll let you know what we find.” Bill nodded to the Monitor as he headed back off the bridge. He was silently praying that Signifier Nonus would consider the matter beneath his station, and for once, it seemed he might be lucky enough. When Bina followed him back into the lower corridors of the Tennyson, their Monitor did not follow.
She waited until they were out of sight before signing, Do you understand? They’d developed a simple sign language on their first assignment, and it had grown a little more complicated over the years. It wasn’t possible to hold full conversations, since their private language was quite rudimentary, but it had the advantage of being so subtle that even if one of the Monitors happened to oversee them, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that they were communicating at all.
Bill shrugged one shoulder and kept walking. He had the uneasy feeling that he did know what was going on, but he hoped he was wrong.
“You’re getting warmer,” Longfield said. “Turn left.”
They turned in unison, and the speaker crackled faintly with some sort of background noise.
“There it is,” Longfield said. “Follow the signal. Once you get close enough, I’m hoping we can get a clear read on the message.”
Bill did as she asked, navigating through the corridors until the static cleared enough to allow him to make out individual sounds, although they still weren’t distinct enough to tell what language they belonged to. None that he knew, that was certain. It would have been baffling to intercept a message like this anywhere, but the fact that he was back in the ship’s mess, where he’d watched Norder chug most of a pot of coffee less than half an hour before, was even more mystifying.
He shuffled into the corner and held up his comms unit. “Is this any better?”
Longfield didn’t need to answer. He hit a sweet spot and the crackling died, allowing Bill to hear the message in perfect clarity. It was an alien language, but not one he’d ever heard before. Every few seconds, the words repeated.
“Are you getting this?” he asked Longfield.
“I’ve sampled a recording, but I don’t understand it. There’s nothing in the general translator, either. I suppose it might be some sort of transmission malfunction, but I’ve never heard anything like it before.”
The sound ended abruptly, and Bill was left waving his comms unit over his head for no good reason. He brought it back toward his mouth. “The transmission must have cut out. We’ll head back up shortly to review the recording, all right? See if we can’t solve this particular mystery.”
He switched the comms unit to standby before turning to Bina. Her mouth had fallen open, and her brown eyes were so wide that he could see the whites all the way around. “Bill,” she breathed, “was that message being transmitted in Primeval?”
“Sure sounded like it. Not that I’m an expert.”
Truth be told, Bill Henderson knew more than most people about the Primeval language, mostly in its written form. His father and grandfather had made a business out of digging up ancient alien tech on asteroids all over the empire…tech that the Ornu Imperium had been more than happy to repurpose for the further enslavement and oppression of humanity. The Ornu never let an opportunity to profit off the knowledge of the ancients slip by. One message in an alien language wasn’t going to make a big difference, but messages didn’t show up of their own accord. They had to be transmitted using tech, which meant that somewhere nearby lay a new piece of Primeval machinery. It was only a matter of time before someone snapped it up.
Two options lay before them. Bill could try to keep Nonus from figuring out what they’d learned, and they could continue on their usual route. If no one else had heard the message, so much the better, but keeping his nose clean would mean leaving a bit of undiscovered tech around for someone else to find. Alternatively, he could try to find it himself, which would mean involving the Monitor. Either way, whatever had emitted the signal would likely end up in Ornu hands sooner or later.
“Well then,” Bina said. “This is a bit of a situation.”
“Yeah.” Bill closed his eyes and rubbed one temple, wishing the day had stayed perfectly normal. “You can say that again.”
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