Darkness

"From the right perspective, viewed at the right time, an observer would witness a disturbance in the light from the stellar backdrop—an anomaly."

Archives of the First Son. Lives of the Ages, “Darkness: Luongo Halper on Contact.” First Ordinal Epoch.

It took nearly two months for Luongo Halper to even get to the mission site. To do the reconnaissance work the underground required, they needed a human pilot. That meant Luongo had to sneak away from Murell, spend two days in a cargo container getting to New Concordia, and make a trek through the hills for three days just to get to the shuttle that would take him to his ship. Slipping away from the ordinals unnoticed was an all-but-impossible task. During the long, empty weeks on the outskirts of mapped space, Luongo often wondered whether the monumental lengths he went to was worth it: was he making any difference at all—to the underground, to humanity? Luongo Halper had a lot of time to think about things like that. It required a tremendous force of will to stay anchored to the mission, to a purpose. For him, it always came back to defiance. Somebody had to push back.

“Some outlaw,” he often muttered to himself while surveying these empty systems. He was also debating whether this time, if the underground was amenable, he just wouldn’t go back to Murell. He was in discourse with himself about that very topic on the morning humanity confirmed the existence of alien intelligence.

“Nobody would miss me,” he said to his little companion, “Would they, buddy?”

Luongo’s co-pilot was a small black mutt, a five-year-old dog named Matches that the pilot credited with keeping him sane over the long periods of intense isolation in space. Luongo had never been exposed to dogs before he met Matches in the underground camp on his first flight. When they paired the two, he’d never expected to grow so fond of the creature. Within hours, though, he found himself talking to him, playing with him, and stroking his fur. It was unlike Luongo to grow attached to anything, and suddenly he couldn’t imagine boarding a recon flight without his four-legged partner.

This flight was number seven, all of which had revealed empty, lifeless systems with no sign of activity or visitation from the ordinals. The underground didn’t disseminate the details or discuss the grand purpose of these missions with their pilots. They issued sets of protocols, and it seemed to Luongo that the underground was trying to discover what the ordinals were doing outside the boundaries of established territory. It never occurred to him or anyone else in the underground that there might be anything out here other than humans or ordinals. The only other thought Luongo had considered as a possibility was scouting for a secret outpost where the underground could live and grow openly, away from the ordinals’ control. Alien intelligence was unthinkable then. The consensus at that time was that mathematically, with all the time humans had been in the stars, they’d have found any existing space-faring civilization thousands of years prior.

Still, the stealth approach to each system seemed sensible to Luongo Halper. If the ordinals were there or had been there, satellites, sensor arrays, or even settlements would detect an openly approaching ship, even a small vessel like Luongo’s.

Per protocol, the jump ended at the edge of interstellar space, and their ship began its long, dark drift toward the star within the cone of shadow cast by the penumbra of the system’s largest gas giant.

Even with the light-scattering properties of the stealth-scout’s nanotech outer skin, navigating  within the shadows cast by the system’s planetary bodies, their ship wouldn’t ever be truly invisible. From the right perspective, viewed at the right time, an observer would witness a disturbance in the light from the stellar backdrop—an anomaly. And observers as keen as the ordinals tended to investigate anomalies thoroughly. Luongo’s best hope if that anomaly was observed  by ordinal tech would be to be mistaken for a stray asteroid or other natural object passing through space. Until this day, though, that level of caution in the protocols seemed over-drawn. Luongo got his first indication of an anomaly of his own as he and Matches drifted into the heart of the outer system.

The alarm sounded, startling Matches, who was floating comfortably in the pilot’s cabin. He began to bark each time the speaker whistled its warning tone. Luongo couldn’t blame the little guy, the alarm had never gone off before.

“Calm down, bud.” Luongo said, pulling himself toward the captain’s seat. He shut off the warning tone and pulled up the alert. The trigger for the alarm was a light in the inner system, an unexpected reflection, possibly a metallic asteroid, a passing comet, or an unexpected refraction of undefined origin.  He trained a scope on it.

“Whoa,” he said as the screen displayed the object.

A blurry holographic icon of a ship streaked across their cabin, floating over the control panel in a clean ordered line.

Matches growled at it and then barked. Luongo grabbed his little friend by the harness and brought him down to the co-pilot’s seat, clipping him in.

“There,” he said to the dog, “Get your feet under you, boy. Bark with your legs, not your back.”

Matches howled at the little red triangle floating above him.

“Zoom closer,” Luongo instructed the telescope.

Both ships were moving fast enough that the scope was having a difficult time keeping the focus at such a distance.

“What are you?”

At that point, the moving object was a collection of blurry images being tracked by the recon ship’s optical telescope, and when Luongo directed the processor to aggregate the data to create a clear image, he was fully expecting to see the familiar outline of an ordinal tracer. Instead, the dull metallic hull took the shape of a jagged, gaping maw with spiked teeth and ornate, detailed ornamentation. It was certainly nothing an ordinal would build.

Matches growled at the menacing-looking hologram.

“What do you think, bud? Friend or foe?”

Matches barked.

“I concur. Looks like those shipbuilders script nightmares in their spare time.”

Luongo allowed the computer to compile data on the object. It wasn’t drifting, instead accelerating and decelerating as it approached the gas giant’s orbit. It entered orbit on a sharp turn.

The dog whined and looked up at Luongo. “True enough,” he said. “I don’t suppose they would guess what we looked like from looking at our hull either. You think they could be dogs?”

Matches whimpered and lowered his head toward the seat.

“Yeah, me neither.”

As the alien ship entered the shadowy penumbra behind the planet, the scope started following it on infrared. The switch in optics revealed two other non-natural structures, one seemingly hovering at the edge of the upper atmosphere and another in synchronous orbit nearby. The two objects appeared to be a sturdy ship and a space station hovering high above, a gas lifting operation by the looks of it.

“What are we using those gasses for, fellas?”

The question was in no need of an answer. The fact that there was gas lifting occurring at all signaled that these were not visitors. Somewhere nearby, there’d be a civilization of some sort. Luongo shifted the focus of their surveillance to scan for other ships or space-borne structures, and they began to search the EM spectrum for ordered signals. Initially, they couldn’t pick up anything confirming the presence of a settlement.

Modeling indicated the presence of at least two inner, rocky planets currently obscured by the mid-system gas giant where the alien gas mining ships were working.

The protocol following contact was clear at that point, Luongo was directed to remain hidden at all cost, retreat at the earliest opportunity, and return with whatever data he’d collected immediately. He began calculating routes through the system. The navigational processor spat out only three possibilities. Two were sensible options, the first of which met with standing protocols. It would keep them mostly within the shadows and bring them back out to interstellar space before even approaching the gas giant—observation from a distance.

“That’s what Hobbs would want us to do, isn’t it?” he asked Matches. “Report their presence and let management do the rest.”

The second course was slightly more aggressive, only it tracked along the outer orbit of an asteroid belt between the gas giant and the inner rocky worlds. It was higher risk certainly, but Luongo found its risk instantly unappealing, as it still didn’t approach the inner two planets at a close enough distance to get a decent look at them.

 The third option, Luongo knew, would be frowned upon by his underground supervisors. It wasn’t just the extended exposure in direct sunlight, it was the places in the route that exposure occurred. There was a turn through the moons of the gas giant as the ship borrowed from the giant gravity well to pull them toward the inner planets. Then, there was a long stretch between the asteroid belt and the inner planets. There were evasive tactics Luongo could take to disrupt the regularity of their progression, but ultimately, those measures were limited. The third option relied on luck and the hope that whoever these beings were, they weren’t hyper-vigilant about stealth observers.

“What do you think, Matches,” Luongo said to his companion, “we could go home early with a collection of blurry pictures and an incredible story, or we could stay late, tell a better story, and take some pretty, pretty pictures, maybe figure out who’s out there?”

The dog looked up at him as he talked, turning his head sideways when Luongo stopped.

“Yeah, when you put it that way, it almost seems like a good idea right?” Luongo said. “How do you feel about being vaporized by a planet-sized laser? I bet these guys got some toys like that, Matches.”

If Luongo wanted to take the outer course, the safest course, he had to make the decision in short order. The longer he deliberated, the more he drifted certainly toward the danger of exposure to these beings.

The decision wasn’t so much a choice as a pathway carved before him. Mostly, at least as Luongo saw it, most decisions didn’t get deliberated on rationally. They just happened, and the rationalizing was about figuring out the reasons why.

Luongo listed every reason he could think to take the easy way out. It was protocol; it was safer; it stood the best chance of preserving secrecy; it was a far shorter travel time; he had no information on the inner system. Then Luongo set about knocking down each of these perfectly cogent points. Most of them lacked a viable counterpoint.

The reasons to go in weren’t remotely convincing. He was already here. That was both true and unconvincing. “We may never get another chance to catch them like this, bud,” he said to Matches, who looked up expectantly. “We’ll never know whether they spot us on the first pass. Could be they put up a tighter network to look for little spies like you.”

Matches whined.

“Of course we’re going in, pal. I’m not going home without high definition images of aliens in their underwear.”

Matches barked, as he often did when Luongo spoke directly to him.

“That’s true,” Luongo said. “They may not have underwear either. I don’t judge you, bud.”

Their first turn, at the purple gas giant, was far ahead. Luongo split his time along the way in interpreting incoming data and justifying the high-risk course. He wasn’t so much justifying it in a way that prepared him to explain it to his superiors. Luongo was more attempting to come to terms with his own motivations. Often this came in the form of debates with Matches, who despite being nonverbal, played the part of a surprisingly effective foil. Sometimes he whined, grumbled, or barked. Mostly, though, he just looked confused.

In truth, Luongo was the confused one. By day two, he’d drifted all the way to the point where he was questioning what had made him fit to be the discoverer of aliens, of all the trillions of humans who’d come before him. Luongo Halper of Murell, discoverer of aliens. Matches didn’t seem to think any more or less of him for it, which was precisely what he loved about Matches.

Ultimately, Luongo settled on the perspective that aliens were destined to be discovered by an explorer-type, not a rule follower, and his becoming the one was merely the luck of time, place, and membership in that small class of outlaws.

“Some outlaws we are,” he said to Matches. “Yeah, you too, bud. Nobody will forget you were here.”

As they approached the gas giant, the alien ships continued to traverse the planet to the space station. He didn’t have visual evidence of it, but Luongo gathered they were loading the gaslifted materials in the ships to take to the inner planets. Without a clearer picture of the inner planets or knowledge of the aliens’ technological capacity, even their best guess would just be a guess about what elements they were mining from the gas giant’s atmosphere.

“That’s why it’s important to get a look at them,” Luongo said. “Sniff ‘em? No, sorry, bud. We won’t get that close. That’s the plan anyway.”

Luongo had thrusters to fire if he was going to hit the window the navigational computer had laid out for the third course. He hoped to make that course adjustment while the alien ships were obscured by the gas giant, but as they got closer, the appearance of the ships grew more frequent. Luongo was starting to get more comprehensive data on their movements. They were faster and far more maneuverable than any ship he’d seen at sub-light speeds. They couldn’t have been using chemical or nuclear rocketry. Ion propulsion was out.

“How are they doing that?” Luongo asked himself.

After watching several of these vessels buzz in and out of the space station, Luongo began to awaken to the possibility that these beings could be significantly more advanced than even the ordinals.

Two alien vessels were docked at the space station at the start of Luongo’s window for course adjustment. He would have to fire thrusters, and as the window began to tick down, Luongo timed how long it took for the alien ships to disappear behind the planet. As long as another ship didn’t arrive, Luongo thought he might be able to fire the thrusters without eyes on him—if these creatures even had eyes.

As the final alien vessel disappeared around the planet, Luongo fired the ship’s thrusters. He kept both the optical scope and his eyes trained on the edge of the penumbra. He’d witnessed the arrival of several alien ships by then, visible as bright but tiny glints along the planet’s curve. Sure enough, halfway into their maneuver, another alien vessel appeared.

At first, Luongo wasn’t nervous. The thrusters emitted no visible light of their own, but the particles emitted from the thrusters would reflect light if they were seen from the right angle. In the planet’s shade, the ambient light was negligible, but negligible was not none. He had a course window to hit all the same.

The alien vessel continued on its normal course. Luongo kept the thrusters on.

“Just another minute, bud,” he said to Matches. “Looks like they don’t see us.”

As soon as he said the words, the alien vessel slowed and then stopped. Luongo knew it was his imagination, but he had this image in his head of a hunter stepping on a stick in the darkness of the forest, only he didn’t know whether he felt more like the hunter or the prey.

The navigational computer chirped to signal the end of the maneuver. Matches barked. Luongo killed the thrusters. As he did, the alien ship began to move toward them.

“Incoming, incoming,” Luongo stated.

He fired the pneumatic thrusters. He knew that if the aliens had laser spectroscopy trained on the area they’d read the gasses along their course, but he figured better that than having them bounce a laser off their hull. It was all a guessing game, on both sides. What had they seen? Could they calculate a bearing from it? At that point, Luongo Halper was committed.

Matches picked up on Luongo’s nervous energy as the alien vessel approached. Luongo trained their telescope on the aliens. Their own ship shouldn’t have been visible. Their hull was designed to be nearly-impossible to detect—both on the visible spectrum and on infrared. They were built for stealth. But the way these alien ships moved made Luongo nervous.

There was nothing to do but wait and hope. Luongo unclipped Matches and pulled him into his lap.

“It’ll be fine, bud,” he said. “They can’t see us.”

The alien ship continued to approach.

By that point, Luongo’s ship was making a shallow turn toward the inner system, pulled inward by the gravity well of the great gas giant. In his mind, Luongo was puzzling out how he could be discovered. At their speed, the gas cloud they’d released would leave a trail, a trail that could give away a bearing if the aliens picked it up before it dissipated too much.

“No way,” he said, petting Matches to reassure them both. “We’re good, bud. They’re not going to see us.”

The dog whined. Luongo looked down at him.

“Fifty-fifty?”

As the alien ship narrowed the gap to within a few hundred thousand kilometers, Luongo could tell now the aliens were cruising toward his wake. Luongo kept the telescope trained on the ship, hoping that the further away he and Matches drifted, the less likely the aliens would be to calculate their bearing.

“Better than fifty-fifty,” Luongo reassured his little friend.

Luongo projected the images of the infrared on the viewscreen above the dash. The ship flew past their wake by a few thousand kilometers before circling back. The aliens missed their ship’s course again, this time by another several thousand kilometers. It was clear to Luongo that they’d seen something. He guessed they had passed between a star and the alien vessel and clipped out the light for a nanosecond, tripping a proximity alarm of some kind. Before long, the alien vessel resumed its course to the space station and Luongo relaxed, setting Matches down beside him, clipping the dog’s harness into the co-pilot’s chair again.

Only then did he realize what he’d missed while fixating on the alien vessel in their wake. Luongo gasped.

The inner system was a busy place. Luongo could see five bright lights with his naked eye—that, in addition to the multitudes of light-projected objects being enhanced on the viewscreen, likely asteroids. The ship’s alarm started singing.

Matches barked.

The navigation board lit up with moving objects in every direction, almost like a flight control panel on Murell.

“Oh, you really stepped in this one, Halper,” Luongo said to himself, observing so many contacts they hardly seemed distinguishable. “Space is big,” he reminded himself, “the screen is not.”

That period of long exposure entering the asteroid belt, though, he told Matches, would be a tense stretch.

“I don’t mind being wrong,” he said. “But, man, I hate being this wrong.”

There was nothing left to do but start picking through the data on all the contacts and the inner bodies. Surprisingly, the inner planets were littered with moons and other smaller satellites, which made it difficult to identify the primary alien settlement. The beings seemed to be mining everywhere, so even selecting the area to train the scope on was a challenge. There was a high traffic zone around the second planet, and there seemed to be a travel corridor between that planet and a specific point in the asteroid belt along their bearing.

Suddenly, the nav computer began to alarm with greater urgency. It alerted to a collision on their current course at an unspecified point. Luongo found it odd that the computer could tell him he was going to hit something but couldn’t say when, where, or what exactly the object was. Matches continued to let loose his objections to the whole situation.

“Easy, bud,” Luongo kept telling Matches, reaching over to scratch his neck. “I’m not going to crash. If we do that, they’ll never know what happened to us back home. Or about the aliens.”

The nav computer spit out two bad options for course correction. The first had him firing thrusters in the heart of that long exposure window, for the entire inner system to see. The second put them nearly nose-to-nose with the second planet, so close they’d come between the inner moons and the planet itself.

“I might have lied about not getting close enough to sniff them, Matches,” Luongo said.

He accounted the closer shave with the second planet the safer option. The thruster firing was a shorter duration, relying on gravity assist from two of the planet’s moons and several asteroids, and the approach was mostly within the second planet’s penumbra.

“If we get out of this, we’re going to have some pictures to show, boy,” he said to Matches.

Luongo fired the thrusters and crossed his fingers. About a half hour into the maneuver, the nav computer started howling. Matches followed suit. Five dots on the nav readout had changed course and were heading in their direction. They still had another three minutes left in the maneuver. Luongo switched off the alarms and waited for the dog to stop barking.

“Hope it’s your lucky day, Matches.” The bemused dog looked up at him. “What? It’s not my fault. Don’t look at me like that.”

The closing ships were still millions of kilometers away when Luongo terminated their course adjustment. He just hoped they were still far enough out that the aliens couldn’t calculate his heading.

The nav computer started howling again, warning of an impending collision. Again, it couldn’t identify any specific object. Only this time, it had no suggestion for a course correction. Whatever it was, they were going to hit it before passed the second planet’s gravity well.

Luongo and Matches were deep in the shadow of the second planet by the time they passed the incoming alien ships. He was optimistic that they might skate past unobserved until he realized he hadn’t factored in the most conspicuous sign of their presence yet. They were relying on a gravity assist from one of the larger asteroids to pull them on course to the second planet. The earlier slingshots had used the gas giant and her moons, and their pull against those massive bodies had been negligible, a rounding error. This time, though, they were going to move that rock. If the aliens caught it and had the coordinates from Luongo’s last maneuver, the aliens would have a vector, one that put them right on course for the second planet. And the time between the two incidents would give away their speed. Suddenly, Luongo grew very nervous. Matches could tell.

The collision alarm kept going off. Luongo silenced it. He unclipped Matches and pulled his little friend into his lap.

“We may have to light it up on their doorstep, bud.

“I know it’s very aggressive. So is spying.

“I didn’t mean to spy. I mean, yeah, of course we did, but we didn’t expect to run into aliens. Did we, pal?”

The turn around the asteroid was coming up. They were going to feel it. Two-plus Gs.

Luongo held onto Matches tight. He checked on the alien ships. They were dead on his course.

“Fingers crossed we don’t wiggle that rock too much,” Luongo said. He crossed Matches paws. “Why not? Couldn’t hurt, right?”

Matches grumbled as Luongo started to feel a pull in his gut. They got sucked down into the seat, and for several seconds the intensity of the pull increased, then rapidly released them back to weightlessness. Luongo let go of Matches, who floated in front of him for a moment. Then he set the dog back on the co-pilot’s chair. Luongo kept the optical scope trained behind them for several minutes, looking for any sign the aliens had witnessed the asteroid’s sudden, abnormal shift. The aliens didn’t change course. Somehow, they’d missed it.

No sooner had Luongo exhaled than the collision alarm sounded through the silent setting. It warned of immanent impact, yet there was still nothing visible.

Only when they approached the second planet could the computer nail down the object in their path. To his relief, it appeared to be a group of devices Luongo guessed to be networked drones. Small, kilometers apart, yet spread out over a vast area of space encircling the planet. As their ship got closer to the edge of the net, the nav computer projected them to pass between two of the drones, the closer of which would fly past their hull less than fifty meters beneath them.

“See us?” Luongo said to Matches. “Just our shadow if we block a signal between those suckers. We’ll see.”

Luongo started to take readouts of the planet. It was what they’d come to do, and at that point, he couldn’t control whether they were spotted. He trained the scope on the planet’s surface and instructed the system to keep the main array pointed at the planet for the duration of their pass. There were numerous alien ships running between the moons and the planet. The traffic was busier here than Murell.

The first images that came back were stunning. The world had a shallow, thin atmosphere—so thin that many of the rocky peaks protruded out into space high above the misty clouds that huddled at the base of those mighty mountains. In the valleys of those high mountain ranges, great metallic structures rose all the way to space, thousands of meters above the atmosphere. As the first valleys stretched into the plains, Luongo could see only structure after structure. The planet looked like the stories he’d heard of the great ecumenopolises of the past—cities that covered over entire planets. Only in this case, as far as he could tell, these aliens had ignored the mountains.

Then, as they passed farther and the planet turned to reveal more of itself, the land opened up, almost as though there were a line on the map beyond which the aliens simply hadn’t built.

Luongo thought about it.

“It’s not their home world,” he said aloud as he realized it. “These guys are visitors.” It made more sense. He just wasn’t expecting it.

“Colonists in the neighborhood.”

Luongo wasn’t talking to Matches as much as himself. That news changed everything.

They kept taking pictures, of the planet, the moons, the mining operations in the asteroids—as much as they could see them.

They’d made it through without being overtly discovered. None of the ships tracked them as they drifted out into the asteroid belt. Luongo didn’t talk much. He was too deep in thought to even hold a one-sided conversation with his little companion.

Their mission presented one final surprise as they approached one of the outer gas giants on the far side of the sun. Luongo picked up a reflection approaching the system slightly less than a quarter light-year away—a tiny pinpoint of light. He kept the optical scope trained on it for several hours, and when the images were aggregated, it was clearly a ship, and between the shape of it and the destination, Luongo surmised these colonists didn’t have FTL capability. They were making a slow crawl across the galaxy, spreading out star by star. He kept the scope on them to see if he could get a good estimate of the ship’s speed, which came back between point-two and point-three C.

It was simultaneously a relief and a problem. Luongo did some rough calculations in his head. The good news was that they had a few centuries to prepare for alien arrival. The bad news was that he couldn’t jump in plain sight of that incoming ship.

He looked down at Matches.

“Yeah, that would be a boss move, buddy. You want to drive? Oh, you’re just going to punch in the numbers. That’s so generous of you to allow me all the glory. You’re a good friend, Matches,” he said, petting the dog.

Luongo made a final course adjustment that brought them around the gas giant, directly between the star and the alien ship’s line of sight to it. He calculated their FTL jump to coincide with the moment he came between the ship and the star, covering the light of the jump in the light of the star. At the interstellar ship’s distance, Luongo hoped their jump could be mistaken for a sizeable coronal ejection. They probably wouldn’t be staring at the sun anyway.

There was no reaction from the inner system to their final course adjustment. Again, Luongo grew quiet as the jump approached. Their trip had been so hectic he hadn’t properly reflected on the magnitude of their discovery. It was possible the ordinals knew about these creatures, he knew. Otherwise, how had the underground known to send him out here looking. But now they did know. And now they knew humans weren’t alone. There was more in this galaxy than human intelligence and the intelligent beings they’d spawned.

“I do want to talk to them,” he said to Matches. “I do. It’ll probably never happen in our lifetimes, I know.”

Luongo sat in silence looking out at the tiny pinpoint of light he convinced himself he could see, a ship, right at the edge of visibility—somewhere in all that blackness was life.

He looked down at Matches as the moment approached, finishing off the checklist.

“Some outlaws, Matches,” he said, engaging the jump drive. “You and me both.”

The light from the jump, fully obscured from the observation of the alien colonists on the second planet by the body of the star Sei-Gin, appeared only as a ripple in steady starlight, unobserved, and to all but a few human outlaws, the consequence of that covert flyby remained totally unknown for thousands of years—both to the obscure star’s colonizers and to the humans of that era, who lived totally in the shadow of knowledge cast by their ordinal descendants.

In the later centuries of the First Ordinal Epoch, Luongo Halper and his dog Matches, hidden in the darkness of the Sei-Gin system’s many shadows, were the first creatures of Earth to set eyes on true extra-human intelligence.

Entry from the Archives of the First Son: Lives of the Ages. “Darkness.”