Tevun-Krus #53 - Return to First Contact

First Contact - A Short Story by @02K30C1

"Thirty minutes oxygen remaining"

The charming female voice inside Alex's helmet had been warning him of low oxygen levels for the past few hours. Amazing how calm she sounds, he thought. He had turned off the warning bells in his suit a long time ago, but kept the computer voice on. It was the only even remotely human contact he'd had in the last 24 hours, and he clung to it illogically.

He walked slowly around the jagged surface of the nearly barren planetoid, conserving what oxygen his had left, but never straying far from the crashed remains of a small space ship. The suit carried enough oxygen for 24 hours under normal exertion, and he had made it last slightly longer.

For Captain Alexander Cheruti, Interstellar Mining Company, yesterday was as ordinary a day as they could get. He and the crew of the scout ship Rocinante had been scanning this cluster of rocks in the Epsilon Indi system for the past 12 days. And then...

****

"Captain! I'm picking up a radio signal nearby!" Ensign Davon Mowdry sounded more surprised than alarmed as he relayed this information over the ship's intercom.

Alex sat up in his bunk, still half asleep, and toggled the nearby com unit. "Are you sure?" This system was supposed to be empty. At nearly 12 light years from earth, it had taken just over three months to get here in the tiny scout ship. There was no way another Earth expedition could have gotten here before them, and IMC was the only company with the resources or reason to go.

"Yes, sir! It's in a part of the spectrum we don't normally use, but it's definitely a signal. I can't figure out what kind of data it's transmitting, but it keeps repeating on a 12 second loop."

"Get the computers working on figuring out what it's saying. In the meantime, pinpoint where it's coming from. I'm on my way."

"Aye, Sir." said Davon. Of the four person crew, he was the youngest. This was his first tour on a mining scout ship, but he took to it easily, a natural at managing the scan computers.

Humans had been slowly expanding their reach into the stars for the last century, with colonies on the Moon and Titan, and stations in orbit at the nearest stars. Alex had worked for IMC for the last 15 years in scout ships just like this one, leading a small crew to scan nearby systems for their mining potential. If a system had the right combination of metals and other raw materials available, a later expedition would arrive to mine them and build a space station. Within a few decades, humans could live there and use it as a base for further exploration.

Alex pulled on his overalls and called on the com to his pilot. "Jenna, be ready to change course if needed. If this signal turns out to be something, we'll need to check it out."

"Aye, Sir!" she answered. He had worked with Jenna for his last two missions, and she was one of the better scout pilots in the fleet. She had an odd sense of humor, but could be counted on to do her job well.

Alex left his bunk and pulled himself through the tight passageway to the bridge, which didn't take long. The tiny scout ships of this class were made for speed and economy, not comfort. It took a special kind of mentality to survive being in tight quarters with three other people for months at a time, akin to the submarine crews of the 20th century.

"I've got a location, Sir." said Davon, as Alex entered the room. The bridge was barely large enough for three people, which it held now. Jenna was at the pilot's controls, and Davon at the scanners. Alex slipped into the captain's control station between them, and pulled up his view screens.

"See that bit of rock?" Davon pointed out a speck on the screen. It seemed impossibly tiny at this distance, but the scanner readout said it was roughly twice the mass of Earth's Moon. "The signal source is on the left side, as we're looking at it. It's rotating slowly, and just brought the signal around to our direction."