Synchronicity War Part 1, The (4 page)

While the 344 was accelerating in preparation for entering Jumpspace,
Shiloh realized that the energy drain from the multiple laser shots fired at
the alien vessel had used up a significant amount of their remaining fuel. In
fact, the ship had barely enough heavy hydrogen remaining to reach the
refueling tankers waiting for them at the other end. The only workable combination
of acceleration and jump time, followed by deceleration, required them to enter
Jumpspace at a slower than normal speed. That meant that not only would the 344
arrive at the exploration mission staging system with very low fuel reserves,
but also that it would likely arrive after the other ships of the squadron.
This in spite of the fact that those ships would have entered Jumpspace after
the 344 did, as a result of passing them while in there. Unfortunately the
means to communicate while in Jumpspace hadn’t been invented yet.

The extra trip time filled him with frustration.  He wanted
to get his injured personnel back ASAP! He knew that in their destination star
system, the Squadron had left behind a collection of support ships including
two small tankers, a supply freighter and a Command/Support ship containing
various support staff like medical personnel, scientists, engineers, etc. The
Command ship could handle most kinds of routine maintenance in order to keep
the Exploration Frigates in the Field as long as possible. Medical facilities
were capable of handling all but the most extreme emergencies. In any case, the
support ship had better medical facilities than did a Frigate, and some of the
344 crew injuries were serious.

Upon arriving back in normal space after a jump transit of
almost 42 hours – versus the usual time of 36 hours for the same distance –
Shiloh was again on the Bridge. He quickly fired off a message to the last
known station of the support ships in the expectation that they still would be
there. Because 344 had emerged from Jumpspace at the outer edge of the star
system, the signal would take hours to reach the gas giant where the tankers skimmed
for heavy hydrogen when necessary to top up their tanks. And since the ship
emerged from Jumpspace with the same velocity that it had entered Jumpspace,
the 344 was moving towards the inner part of the system less quickly than
normal. In order not to fly past the gas giant, the ship would have to
decelerate. That would require pretty much all their remaining fuel, and the
possibility that the tankers might not be where Shiloh had last seen them made
him sweat. They SHOULD be there. But the Demon God Murphy sometimes reached
down to muddy the waters, or as someone else long ago once said, ‘shit
happens’. So it was with great relief that almost 13 hours after dropping back
into normal space, 344 received acknowledgement from the support ships that
they were ready to refuel the 344 and take care of the wounded.

Shiloh received some other news as well. The message drone
had arrived. As expected, some but not all of the rest of the Squadron had
arrived ahead of 344. They were about to rendezvous with the support ships. The
bad news was that the 301 and 299 had been ambushed by at least three other
alien ships, roughly fifteen minutes after 344’s short, violent clash with her
opponent. Squadron Leader Torres had explicitly ordered the other four frigates
not to come to 301 and 299’s aid, because active scanning had confirmed the
fact that there were even more alien ships waiting to pounce once the other
frigates got within range. She ordered the rest of the Squadron to retreat to
the staging system. Communications with both the 301 and the 299 were lost
while they were still fighting for their lives. No one knew what the ultimate
outcome was, but the odds for survival were not good. Torres had also
communicated her belief that the ambush had been triggered early as a response
to 344’s confrontation with the alien vessel. Had it not been for that, Torres
believed that the entire Squadron would have been attacked once they had
regrouped. Her recorded message praised Shiloh for deploying the recon drones
and, as a result, springing the trap early enough that half the Squadron could
get away unharmed. The tone of that recording, combined with the unknown fate
of both ships, made the message particularly poignant. After sharing it with
the crew, Shiloh asked all off-duty officers and NCOs to assemble in the
Officers’ Mess where they raised a solemn toast to fallen comrades. Shiloh was
absolutely certain that it would not be the last such toast he would
participate in.

By the time that 344 entered orbit around the gas giant and
rendezvoused with the support ships and the rest of the Squadron, the other
frigates had already been refueled. Carrying all of the data from each of the
surviving frigates, another fresh message drone was already in Jumpspace on its
way back to a forward Space Force base. There the data would be further
disseminated via another drone, and so on. Shortly before commencing refueling
operations, Shiloh participated in a video conference with the other Frigate
skippers and support ship COs. They wanted to hear about 344’s battle first
hand and then compare notes. The general consensus was that all the alien ships
were more heavily armored, and armed with more powerful laser cannon, than
their Space Force counterparts. 323’s Skipper, Cmdr. Omar, in his capacity as
acting Squadron Leader – being the most senior officer present – had declared
his intention to wait another six hours. Then, if neither missing ship showed
up during that time, the four combat capable frigates would return to the
battle system to search for survivors. Omar had told Shiloh that since the 344
had a damaged hull and crew casualties, with no operational laser turrets left,
he would order it to head back to Sol System for repairs. Shiloh thought going
back to the battle system was a mistake and respectfully said so, but Omar was
adamant. Since there was no point in 344 waiting to find out if the 301 or the
299 showed up before heading home, Shiloh ordered the now fully refueled ship
to leave orbit as soon as her more seriously injured crewmembers had been transferred
to the Command/Support ship for further treatment. With that task accomplished,
and with plenty of fuel to burn, 344 left orbit at maximum acceleration. Her
destination was the same Space Force base that the message drone was headed
for. The message drone was not a waste of effort. Standard operating procedure
was that important data/communications were to be sent by more than one method
to create a redundancy that would minimize the loss of the information due to
unforeseen circumstances such as a malfunction.

It was with a wistful sigh that Shiloh examined their
intended jump route back to the Sol star system. Exploration Frigates had
enough fuel capacity to travel up to 12 light years in a series of short jumps,
or a maximum of 18 light years in a single jump. The Sol system was just under
90 light years away, but places where they could refuel weren’t spaced out
evenly enough to permit the ship to make the trip in just five jumps. It would
take a total of seven, and almost 440 hours of transit time. That was almost 18
days, a long time to ponder recent events ... and the future.

Though his duty shift was over before the ship reached the
specified pre-jump velocity, Shiloh stayed on the Bridge until 344 was safely
in Jumpspace. He then spent some quiet time in the Officers’ Mess, which he had
to himself. Soon he was thinking about the vision that had led to his
deployment of the recon drones. Had he not had the vision, he doubted he would
have taken the action on his own initiative. Shiloh had never considered
himself a spiritual person. If he looked deep within himself, he supposed that
at the most basic level he believed in some kind of higher power. Most Space
Force personnel eventually came to believe in one version of God or another.
The universe had so many awe-inspiring vistas that it was hard not to feel at
some emotional level that it had to have been planned that way. In Shiloh’s
case, he also had a thirst for knowledge about the sciences. The order that he
had seen and heard about, ranging all the way from the inner structure of atoms
up through the mind-boggling complexity of human DNA and the marvelously
perfect functioning of a human body, all led him to the conclusion that it was
just too complex and too perfect to have been the work of mindless random
forces. From that deep basic belief in a higher power, he now wondered if that
higher power had intervened, and if so, why? Was it to save him personally? He
didn’t think that likely. Maybe it was someone in the crew whom God or an angel
was looking out for. As he often did when he was pondering a mystery, he
started making a list. At the top he wrote ‘Possible explanations for the
vision’. Under that he wrote the following.

It was a hallucination

It was a use of unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents

It was the result of external intervention

intervention by God

intervention by aliens

intervention by humans

from within the ship

from within the squadron

from the future

from some other source

He looked at the list and couldn’t think of anything else to
add. The only possibility that seemed to be halfway plausible was the use of
unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents. He remembered scoring above average when
he was a student in a university lab experiment testing for esp ability, but it
wasn’t above average by enough to be considered significant. Even if he did
have some unsuspected esp ability, he was at a loss as to how to turn it on or
off. If he couldn’t control it, then what good was it? Would it happen again? And
if so, when? He discounted the other possible explanations, mainly because of
the similar experience as a teenager, long before he joined the Space Force. It
seemed unlikely that aliens would intervene at that stage in his life to help
him save a friend who, this far at least, had no obvious connection to the
Space Force or any human colony. And intervention from humans, whether from the
future or from within the squadron, was unlikely for the same reason. That left
intervention by God, or a hallucination. In both those cases he would have
expected to experience an auditory sensation, such as a voice instructing him
to deploy recon drones. Instead he’d had what appeared to have been an out of
body experience. He had actually watched himself standing in front of Admiral
Howard’s desk. The key was to see if the Admiral actually did compliment him on
coming up with the recon drone deployment idea. If he did, then hallucinations
or divine intervention would also appear less likely than a spontaneous
instance of precognition.

Satisfied that he wasn’t crazy – for the time being at least
– he decided to turn his thoughts to other matters. HQ would obviously want a
detailed report on the whole mission. He had plenty of travel time in which to
write it, and he was probably going to need every spare moment for that task.
Having served for a year on the staff at HQ, he knew they would be expecting
more than just a dry, factual, minute-by-minute account of what happened. They
would also want some analysis, even if only guesswork, about the nature and
capabilities of the unknown enemy and, even more importantly, recommendations
on what should be done next. Shiloh already could think of quite a few
recommendations, but he wanted to get some input from his XO too.

Shortly before Johansen’s duty shift ended, Shiloh called her
and asked her to stop by his cabin for a short chat as soon as she was free.

When she arrived he said, “The Powers That Be will want a
detailed report from both of us, XO. You can bet your last credit they’ll be
asking us for analysis and recommendations. I suggest you start giving that some
serious thought, and have something ready for them by the time we arrive.”

Johansen nodded and said, “I’ve already thought about that.
Can I bounce some thoughts off you?”

Shiloh nodded in return, and she began to speak.

“I’ve been trying to figure out WHY those aliens attacked us
without attempting to make contact. I can see them being angry or trigger-happy
if we had stumbled into an inhabited system, but from the brief time we were in
that system, there was no data to indicate any kind of colony, station or resource
extraction facility. If that was an uninhabited system, why the big panic? The
fact that they had multiple ships in that system suggests to me they were
military vessels, and the nature of their response to us tells me they were
either defending a border against incursion, or they were engaged in, for lack
of a better phrase, reconnaissance in force. If Space Force had stationed ships
at our borders to guard against alien incursion, wouldn’t it be reasonable to
expect that we would at least try to make peaceful contact with any ‘visitors’.
Why piss off somebody if you don’t have to? So the only thing I can figure out
that would explain their actions is that their psychological makeup as a race
has made them either extremely aggressive or extremely paranoid. Both of those
alternatives give me the shivers. They may come after us, even if we don’t move
any further in their direction, assuming that we find out what that direction
is.” She paused, waiting for a response.

Shiloh nodded again as he began to reply. “Your analysis
makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking, but now I have
to believe that we’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, and we better get ready to
deal with them fast. Any other thoughts you want my reaction to?”

Johansen shook her head. “Not now.”

“Okay. We can talk more at a later time. I don’t want to
take any more of your sleep time.”