DuBois 1
This piece was first born as a result of a scribble which itself appeared during a long ago creative writing class. Specifically, I came up with a spacecraft design; unfortunately, I had no idea what to do with it, and it nagged me until about 11:00 in the evening – when Mayes began to speak.
Ansible (c). Ursula K. LeGuin; the rest (c). 2009 by yours truly.
Ops came in flat over the desktop speaker. “Message coming in. It’s from DuBois.”
“Give me audio,” Mayes muttered, detaching her face from the screen. She didn’t want to think about how she must have looked just then, but the odds were that it was not the sort of face to show the passengers, if or when they had them again. She had a sneaking suspicion that the odd sensation running from one corner of her mouth was drool long dry.
“There isn’t any audio,” Perry said. “All static. Transcript came through clear, though.”
Well, well.
That wasn’t necessarily an emergency, she knew; in fact it was the entire reason that ships and stations were set up to send multiple waves from different locations. It’s harder to lose a message to malfunction if the ansible is firing from three places. To have all three drop audio at once, though…The only reason she could think of was that there had never been anything more than a transcript.
She shook the sleep away and stared at the screen through less-than-adjusted eyes.
“Show it to me, Perry.”
The screen blinked on. It held a single word.
HELLO
Mayes shook her head again, frowning to herself. “Perry,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“This is all we got, is it?”
There was a pause as Perry rolled his chair across the bridge. He knew she hated it when he did that. Mayes clenched her teeth against a light reprimand and waited.
“Yeah. Yeah, this is all we got.”
She swore under her breath, snapping a hand out in the general direction of the lightpad. A dull glow broke out overhead at her touch and she blinked a few times before bringing the lights up to full and walking across the hall to the mess. “Give me specs on DuBois if you’ve got ‘em,” she muttered. The ship’s com was active around its officers during all waking hours; her words went through to Perry on the other side of the starboard bulkhead without the slightest thought on her part—which was probably for the better because she was currently trying to fill a pinkish-orange coffee mug with something caffeinated and had nearly dropped it twice without distractions.
“I’ll send what we’ve got, but most of it’s just civvie trash.”
Mayes murmured into her coffee. Perry the long-run freighter pilot liked to pretend he wasn’t a civilian sometimes. Maybe it was his time in the navy. Maybe it was the long weeks of solitude with no one for company but a woman whose coffee cup had a cartoon character printed on it. Or maybe he just didn’t much care for popular culture. She shrugged. It wasn’t her business, really.
And he was right, anyway. Civvie stuff wouldn’t help you much with diagnosing technical problems from a light-week out.
“And send them a response, too,” she said, surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.
“What do you want I should say?”
“They said hello. Say hello back.” Satisfied with her sudden coherence, she took the coffee cup with her to her desk and pulled up the DuBois docs.
DuBois, the documents informed her, was a medium-size transit station spinning like a rock around a tiny sun some distance from the Horsehead. Its only friends in orbit were the asteroids and a couple mining stations, all of which did rather lucrative business in the area. The station’s main purpose was service as a shipping point, but it also housed some four hundred families and a nice little market junction and—of course—its own small police force complete with a complement of scouters.
Most of its broadcasts were commercial in origin. TV programs via ansible, for instance, sent from some distance off with all the impunity of faster-than-light communications, or the network fiascos that had followed man ever since the early twenty-oughts.
The only really funny thing going on in the area had been a joint project messing with the networks—something with the R&D divisions of a mining corp somewhere in the area, it said. The details were fuzzy, but the general gist of things seemed to be that they wanted to develop a more streamlined means of organizing data for the system. She couldn’t blame them. Looking at the netwaves from the area, she thought that perhaps no one had ever thought about the result of unlimited access to all employed households. It couldn’t be that simple—after all, only an incompetent would have left the nets that wide open. But the browser was complaining of pop-up ads already and it hadn’t even been a minute.
Hm.
“Mayes?” The voice from the com would have been tentative if her speakers weren’t such a wreck.
Mayes grunted distractedly.
“We’ve got a response, and I think maybe you should see it. I think that something weird’s been going on.”
“Beam it in,” she sighed.
The audio was nonexistent yet again, she noted. Transcript was fairly clean, though, and this is what it said:
HELLO MY NAME IS DBOIS WHATS YOURS
Mayes frowned. “They want to know our name?”
“Looks like. I told you, I think something weird’s been going on here.”
She thought for a moment, watching the transcript, vaguely hoping something else would appear in its place if she glanced back every once in a while. It didn’t change. But Perry was talking again.
“Nonsense. It’s got to be. But how would anyone manage to pull a prank like this? Station ops is crewed at all hours, isn’t it?”
She sighed and went back to the mess to get a refill, then after a moment’s consideration set the food machine on Eggs, Over Hard and (S)Turkey Bacon with a dose of (S)Wheat Bread Toast, Light.
“What do you think, Mayes?”
Mayes watched the orange light inside the food machine for a second before answering. “I think we should tell ‘em who we are,” she said.
//_CHines.lastfactor&c.
Donesta 