SWNOVELS Chapter 9
Hours later, Admiral Reshma Shan’s suite…
When she got out of bed to answer the call it was just after 2 in the morning.She still had her uniform on from the previous day!
Shan glanced at the interface to see who it was and to scan any news-flashes she might need to know about.She engaged the comm and it brought up Cadet Shawn Grainger’s young face.“Report, Cadet…”
“Ma’am, Communications just got the best lead of what’s happened to Justifier’s crew!”
Well, that caused the admiral to shoot straight up from her bed!She listened on.
“It’s footage from a private automaton that works for TQF Kuiper.It was working on a mining project for its company on Pluto…now, it was several miles away from Tombaugh municipal, where Captain Modune and some of his officers were located at the time, but the recording is good enough to give us a clue what happened!”
The admiral merely nodded; waiting for the cadet to patch the recording to her comm…
The footage was a bit shaky and slightly out of focus.Given that the autonomous mining-droid was one of several robotic droids working at a quarry when it captured the footage, it was no surprise to Admiral Shan.Indeed, she had a thought, upon seeing some of the other auto-miners in the recording.
“Grainger, how far did this recording go?”
“As in, was it able to function when the recordings at the other sites all simultaneously stopped?”
By this time, Admiral Shan was walking over to her terminal.“Exactly.”
“The recording goes on for several more minutes—really, a lot longer.We just extracted the footage relevant to our investigation.”
At that point, the recording was still of nothing more than of a landscape on Pluto with the township of Tombaugh in the distance with all its lights and a few of the other auto-miners working.
“I still wonder why those automatons were not affected by the blackout, like what happened at our bases,” she said out loud; more to herself than to the cadet.
Both had gone silent as they watched and listened to the recording…
The icy and rocky placid scene on Pluto with town-Tombaugh in the distance and the autonomous drones digging suddenly flashed brightly—as if a star had exploded!The flashing pulsated, but unevenly, and within seven seconds the landscape went right back to the mostly-dark setting it was before.Even the modular-town’s lights were still on…
Via his comm, Cadet Grainger could see the admiral’s face freeze for a few seconds, then the inevitable confused look.“What the hell just happened, Cadet?”
He waited before responding; the slightest sardonic smile on his face.“That, Admiral Shan, was our Visitors…”
She sat frozen.Cadet Grainger took advantage of the silence.He began working the shared recording that was linked to both of their comms.He manipulated the recording to go to a moment of the brilliant flashes—where even the shadows of the township’s bulbous buildings were stretched out by several yards, due to those flashes of lights!He then let the still image slowly play back…indeed, so slow, that Admiral Shan could finally see several structures within the lights!
“My word,” was all that she said; her eyes wide-opened.
“We wouldn’t have discovered them without the station’s Sentient.It tried to tighten up the vid, so we could get a better understanding of the objects, but they were simply too fast and the light too brilliant…Sentient clocked them at 198,000 miles a second—“
“That’s the same reading that Director Tuun’s team had measured on one of the recordings we viewed…right before they all vanished and the recordings blanked out!”
“Exactly, Ma’am…”
Admiral Shan took a few seconds to do a little calculating.“Well, you know what that means, Cadet Grainger:first of all, given what our Sentient has discovered for us, it’s safe to say that these phenomena are not natural.And given our Visitors are traveling a bit faster than light-speed—“
“It means they are strategically hitting us at certain points…otherwise, at the rate they were traveling they would’ve made it to Erth several days ago!”
“Right…”She was nodding at that point; deep into the sciences that the Sol Governance had taught all its political officials.“That would make sense why that automaton was able to record all this, and for them to even continue to function at all!”
“Well, in that case, Admiral, it shows a weakness on the Visitors’ end…given that we know they disrupt all recordings while they abducted our people, it stands to reason they should have taken out all those automatons on Pluto near Tombaugh; since they also have visual recording!”
Admiral Shan was nodding excitedly at that point; glad to see the Governance had some kind of advantage…in the old days, it was called ‘home field advantage.’
Now Admiral Shan’s eyes inquisitively looked upon Cadet Grainger’s image on her comm.“All the same, have you all continued to try to reach Justifier?”
“Yes, Ma’am.We tried several times with no results.”
She simply nodded in turn.They both sat quietly; looking at the looped-recording of that scene the cadet had shown to the admiral.
“Cadet,” Shan finally said after their long, pensive thoughts, “excellent work!Now I’m going to need you and whoever’s available to help set up another emergency meeting with the Members!”
“Ma’am!”
And the link was disconnected.