Chapter Two Forty-Four Programs in Parallel (Patreon)

February 3rd, 064 SDE:

Xau adjusted her telescope; the latest rocket test had actually gone somewhere. They’d adjusted the fuel mix they were using, and if their calculations were right it should be in orbit just about now. She just had to find it. Peering in, she was greeted with a view of Mau’sar in the distance. The alien object wasn’t in sight but she wasn’t surprised. After it vanished behind the broken remains of Mau’sar it hadn’t been seen, but occasionally she’d seen smaller alien objects. They were hard to make out but their dark hulls meant they stood out when they crossed in front of the lighter colored fragments of the broken planet.

Her current telescope was even better than one she’d used to record the first alien object, so she’d made some really good observations on the alien objects. When she wasn’t working on calculations for the project or other odd jobs, she’d been watching the planet. Making observations and writing reports. A few engineers had picked apart her films of the smaller alien objects, which were full of mystery. The alien objects were a subject of much debate but they didn’t really know what they were. The military thought they were war machines conducting aerial patrols, or whatever the space equivalent was.

Panning over the view, she didn’t see their rocket but something else caught her eye. It was a small object, thirty-five meters long, twenty meters wide with an angular hull and short stubby wings on the side. The military and engineers weren’t sure exactly what these alien ships were for, but they’d seen the smaller ships with swept wings dock with them for extended periods on more than one occasion. The military suspected it was some kind of fuel carrier or something like that.

Regardless, this one was acting odd. The aliens seemed to move around the broken planet in set patterns. After months of watching them, she’d been able to predict where certain units would be, once she’d figured out which pattern they were using on a given day. They had almost fifty different patterns that she’d identified, but there was no telling which one they would use on which day. This ship was much further from the planet than it should be and lacked the usual escorts. 

Xau watched it with a frown and turned on her film recorder. The young woman couldn’t say why but her instincts told her to do so. What followed left her dazzled, the alien object seemed to shimmer, just moments before it vanished in a flash of light. A star bloomed and died in its place in a mere second but one point of the star was unusually long.

Frowning, she turned to her film, and rechecked what she had just seen. The replay showed that unusually long point, and she watched it thrice before a thought occurred to her. Why not look in that direction. Adjusting her telescope, she peered through the sky, looking for anything. Eventually, she spotted something halfway between Mau’sar and the homeworld; she found an alien object. Very similar to the one she’d seen before, but the rear half had ruptured, fire was burning inside the hull. Fragments of alien hull material floated behind it. Xau wasn’t sure what happened to it, but she made sure she was recording to film.

A moment later, someone came in, “Have you found our rocket yet?”

“I found something better,” she replied.

“Better? What could be better than confirming our...,” said the woman as she pushed her aside to peer through the telescope, only to trail off.

After a moment, she commented, “I guess the military types will be happy to know they can be killed, but... what hit it?”

Xau frowned, “I honestly don’t know.”

“Well, we better report it and then find that rocket.”

She nodded.

In the end they spent several hours watching the object by request of the military. They wanted to see if the aliens would retrieve their destroyed ship and by what means they would use. The answer to that was yes, they would, but it would be a few hours before they did so. She’d been getting bored watching the ship, it had stopped burning hours ago by then, when finally four alien ships appeared near it. Three sweptwings and a new ship they’d not seen previously. Using her optical measuring trick and the other alien ships as reference, she realized the boxy vessel was quite large, roughly a hundred and twenty five meters long by seventy wide. 

The ship maneuvered underneath the floating wreck, then a pair of massive doors on her dorsal opened. Her angle wasn’t the best, but from the rear a shimmering distortion projected outward. The light bent strangely around and through it, creating an effect like passing through water but not quite the same. The strange shimmering distortion had a bluish tinge to it and looked somewhat like a wide beam. Whatever it was, the distortion snared the floating object and pulled it closer to the alien craft, where small figures appeared. Humanoid clad in something dark and clearly controlling their movements out there as they flew around the object and helped to load it into the bay. Not even the fragments were ignored as everything about the former ship was collected and loaded into the alien salvage ship. Xau wasn’t sure what else to call the new ship.

The aliens swept the area, and after several passes using their strange distortion beam. They packed up the door and made their way out of the area. Xau watched their course, panning the telescope to watch and record their movement, but she quickly noted their course was taking them closer, not back to Mau’sar.

Why were they coming here? Her mind flashed to when they blew up Mau’sar. Surely they weren’t about to do that again? They weren’t ready. Her heart beat faster as she watched them draw ever closer. Time seemed to stretch on. Recalling the first object had been fairly large, she was praying that these were too small to kill a planet. Her mind reached out to every god she knew and prayed. Yet what mortal could understand the motives of gods or otherworldly beings. No matter what you wanted to call these beings, their actions were alien to her people. No one could figure out what they were doing or why.

Finally they drew surprisingly near, low orbit and she watched as they approached a familiar object. The object tumbling in the sky was their rocket, the one she’d been asked to find. It was still up there, but that flight wasn’t the stable, clean orbit their math had predicted.

The alien vessel hovered menacingly over their rocket for a moment or two before projecting that shimmering distortion again, this time from its ventral hull.

Xau watched amazed as the flight of their rocket stabilized, it ceased tumbling. The alien ship shifted closer to the planet and the rocket moved with it. Film recording she watched every movement as the course of their rocket was adjusted from the orbit they expected to one that was clearly deteriorating. Then when they were done, the aliens just left. Moving rapidly across the system to Mau’sar. They vanished behind a rock a few hours later and she could track them no more.

The rocket on the other hand, they tracked it on the way down. About halfway to the surface, it suddenly broke into pieces and rained debris on an isolated part of the ocean. Yet no one could explain why it had disintegrated like that. Did the aliens do something, or was it something else? Finding the debris might have shed some light on that but it would be hard to find it in the ocean. Leaving them with a mystery to solve and a question about what the aliens had been doing to their rocket and why.

The next day Xau walked into the lab cafeteria to find the entire room abuzz. The main team was at a central table and from the sound of it they were debating yesterday’s rocket launch.

“No, no, no. I keep telling you that should be a minus, not a plus! It’s why our rocket was tumbling.”

“And I keep telling you this number was wrong, our calcs were off because we messed up this variable.”

The two were pointing at equations scrawled on napkins making it hard for an observer to guess where in the equations they’d messed up. Xau had noted that rocket math tended to be fairly complex. She was just glad they were off to a good start. The team’s goals were pretty simple, the first task was to put a rocket into a stable orbit, after that they could work on a manned orbital flight and in time they’d figure out how to go farther. Simply making orbit was their first real goal and the upscaled test rocket seemed okay so far.

The military was paying a lot of attention to the work they’d done over the last few months. She’d heard some of it had been applied to military weapon systems. Xau wouldn’t blame them, this work did have military applications, and they had a war to win.

Taking a moment to get some food, she joined the men and women at the table, “So debating what went wrong?”

“We’ve narrowed down the error to a couple of possible spots in the equation.” A familiar woman remarked, “but we can’t be sure, so the boys have been arguing over who’s right.”

The two boys in question gave the other a look, but didn’t continue the debate. The first one said, “Well the next launch will prove which of us is right. It will be me of course, and Telmon here will buy us all drinks.”

“No Berxi, you’ll be buying the drinks.”

She rolled her eyes, “Right, so anyone have any thoughts on why our alien friends suddenly decided to come this way, and of all things, redirect our rocket?”

Telmon spoke up, “It’s hard to say. Not without more data points, we checked your telescope readings.” he sighed, “Might have been easier if we hadn’t lost it beforehand. Good news, the military finally approved our request for a radar array. That will make tracking the rockets easier. Downside is, it won’t be here for two weeks.”

“That’s nice, but the rocket?”

He shrugged, “It’s only a guess but the orbit wasn’t stable.”

Berxi nodded, "Definitely not stable and I don’t think it breaking up over an isolated stretch of water was a coincidence. I think that was their goal.”

She frowned, “A defect in the rocket? Or something the aliens did to it?”

The two boys exchanged looks, “We don’t know. Only thing we can do is try again and see what happens.”

Sadly that seemed to be the case. Next to her the familiar woman steered the conversation. “Never mind the interference, who can guess alien minds. Let's focus on what we can, shall we?”

Everyone nodded and she joined them in a conversation on new calculations.