Incursion: Shock Marines by Gustavo Bondoni

Author:Gustavo Bondoni [Bondoni, Gustavo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2017-09-29T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

“Excuse me, sir. There’s a man called Frederic on the comm. He says he’s the head of maintenance on the Ismala, and that he has something he needs to tell you.”

The admiral sighed. It seemed like everyone on every ship needed his input on something. Over the course of his career, he’d come to learn that no one wanted senior officers around. Underlings tended to hide stuff from them and give them only as much information as they thought would keep them out of trouble while, at the same time, limiting interference from above.

Of course, that only lasted until the shit hit the fan. Then they all wanted someone else in charge.

For the other man’s sake, the admiral hoped the maintenance guy wasn’t just calling to give him a status report on the Ismala’s toilets.

“Put him through.”

The Ismala’s comms were still the worst in the fleet, but the voice on the other side could be made out over the static. “Hello, sir, I’m sorry to bother you with this, but with Commander Tau Coloni missing after her sortie on the planet’s moon, I didn’t have anyone to take this to.”

“All right, what is it?” He made a mental note to try to find out who the hell was in charge of the Ismala. He had heard that the Tau Coloni was still alive in orbit around the planet with a contingent of marines, but without any plan for the fleet to rescue them, it was unlikely that they’d survive much longer. They were well out of comm range by now, anyway. She’d been a bright one, but he had no time to mourn all the people they were losing, or the ones they’d likely still lose.

“When we first came into the system, Melina, the commander that is, had asked me to record the data our scanners were receiving from the installations on the moons when we entered the system. She told me to run it through the analysis, to see if we could make anything out from the transmissions.

“I’m not an expert on that, so I put some analysts on the task, they confirm that nothing in the system is of blob origin.”

“Yeah,” the admiral said. “We’ve figured that out already.”

“Yes, sir. I know. I asked them what the transmissions looked like, and they told me that the most similar thing to what we know is binary. They tell us that these transmissions look like corrupted, or maybe evolved, versions of our own telemetry.”

“So you think these installations are human?”

“I have no idea, but if they aren’t, they belong to a species that uses computer communications very similar to ours.”

“Were they able to tell us what the signals were saying?”

“No, sir. Everything seems to be encrypted.”

“Or transmitted in an alien language that we can’t even begin to understand.”

“That’s also possible, sir.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“No, that’s it.”

The man signed off and the admiral studied his bridge crew, lost in thought. He didn’t know if the information meant anything or if it was just more meaningless data in a sea of meaningless information.

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