Eve of War by R L Giddings

Author:R L Giddings [Giddings, R L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“So, what do you think?” Faulkner asked.

Webster released a long held sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. After receiving the down-load from the Renheim, Meyer and his party had been allowed to leave. Faulkner and Webster had said their goodnights to Morton before retiring to one of the smaller state rooms. They had a lot to sift through but Faulkner was keen for them to discuss their options first.

In the end, they had agreed that they would continue on with their journey but would only transition into the Allegra system if they were sure it was safe to do so.

Webster’s first job was to up-load a copy of the information they’d received and send it out on a drone. It had been remiss of Meyer not to do that himself but then he’d obviously been hoping to use the information as a bargaining chip for when he got back to the Admiralty.

Never a good move, Webster mused. Putting your own needs ahead of the service.

The video evidence that they did have – and there was a lot of it – was virtually worthless. What he was much more interested in was the records on the ship’s computer. The section that most concerned them lasted approximately four hours – from first sighting of the alien ships to Meyer giving the order to turn and run. They had already viewed that material once but now they were going through it again, stopping the river of information whenever they came across something puzzling, which happened quite a lot.

They could view the ship’s actions in real time on the three dimensional display which was like an enormous fish tank. Webster went round the rear in order to study the deployment of the alien ships. These were rendered as purple icons of varying sizes, one large vessel, a medium sized one and two smaller ships but, other than that, there was little to discriminate between them. The computer had randomly labelled them DV-101 through to DV-104 for clarity’s sake.

“I don’t understand why we don’t have more information on these craft,” Faulkner was saying. “It’s damn frustrating.”

Webster didn’t comment. Most of Faulkner’s frustrations lay less with the information on offer and more with his inability to access the software on anything more than a basic level. An ensign with his computer skills wouldn’t have lasted five minutes normally. He knew that the old man was working to address these shortcomings but Faulkner’s lack of progress in this area was starting to impact his ability to do his job.

“The problem is that these vessels don’t appear to be registering along the normal parameters of our active scans, sir. Technically, they’re only registering here as a thermal anomaly.”

“And what does that tell us?”

“Well, everything seems to suggest that we’re dealing with a fairly primitive technology.”

“And yet that’s not borne out by what happens next,” Faulkner approached the virtual console with some hesitancy.

By moving his hand laterally he was able to advance the action until the ships moved to the offensive, at which point they took on a life of their own.

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