Galactic Thunder by Cameron Cooper

Author:Cameron Cooper [Cooper, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stories Rule Press Inc.
Published: 2020-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

—18—

The Supreme Lythion remained on the platform for three more days and Lyth stayed with us for the whole time. He contacted Arnold Laxman and told him he would be absent for a while and while Arnold was still gawping, closed off the channel and got back to work.

The work Lyth was doing aboard the Lythion was nothing short of brilliant in concept, but far more difficult in practice, and he reached exhaustion in the first day, but still pushed on.

We all lingered in the area which had once been our stellar cartography room, but was now given over to a virtual lab for Lyth. He and Lyssa worked to build the tools they needed to do the job that Lyth had proposed the first night he’d sat at the diner table.

He’d listened to everything we said, rewatched the footage, absorbed it all, then sat back and said; “It seems to me that we need to first figure out where they come from. What is their point of origin? Is it a world that we’ve come across in the last few years? Is that how they found us? What are they doing out here? And why are they so aggressive?” He shook his head. “I have far more questions, but no one can answer them but these blue beings.”

“So why is finding their point of origin the priority?” Marlow asked.

“So we can find them when we need to,” I said.

At the same time, Dalton said, “We have to know where to strike back.”

“Once we’ve got Mace back,” Fiori said sharply.

Lyth frowned. “We’re not at war,” he told Dalton.

“We will be, if this race acts consistently,” Jai assured him. “Knowing where they live will give us options. It could even divert a war,” he added, with a musing air.

Jai wasn’t exaggerating. It was possible we might have to use their home world as leverage to extort them into a peace they didn’t want, but without knowing where they lived, that wasn’t a possibility at all. They could pop into real space without warning, with the same dire results as the first time, when they had abducted a whole ship’s crew.

Lyth’s plan was to build a virus protocol to scrape all communications in the last year. As a benign virus, it could self-replicate across the entire galactic communications grid, spreading faster than anyone could manually distribute it. Then it would get to work looking for any mention of aggressive non-humans.

We had spent the rest of that first evening brainstorming terms and keywords to prime the virus to look for, including ‘blue men’, ‘slavers’—which had been Fiori’s idea—’visitors’, ‘strangers’, ‘non-crescent ship’ and other offshoots and weird associations. We tried to channel the minds of the average, unaware human and guess what terms they might use to describe what they had seen if they encountered the aliens.

Then Lyth locked himself in the map room with Lyssa and coded the virus, then set it loose upon the galaxy. The rest of the three days, he spent examining the reports that came back.

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