NationStates Jolt Archive

RNXSS Viking - in orbit around Dryten III
January 1, 2998 (Military Calendar) - 22:56

Docking permission granted.

The communication impulse resonated through the back of Lieutenant Nadia Baryshkina's mind. The experimental Advanced Mindgate technology allowed her to manipulate the teardrop-shaped starship like her own body.

Her mind showed her a three-dimensional map of the area - with the station one hundred kilometres distant, a trajectory had been plotted to her designated docking bay. She sent an impulse to the engines to adjust course slightly, with the ventral directional regulators keeping the starship aligned straight on its path.

A few minutes later, the starship glided into the cocoon-like docking bay, which contracted closed behind it. Babryshkina donned a thruster pack and popped the bridge's top hatch. Pushing herself out into the now fully-oxygenated bay, she jetted over to the corridor entry doors and mentally sent the code to open them.

The station was entirely computerised, designed to be run by one person. She had gained that "august" duty. Making her way through the shiny new metal and glass corridors, she finally made her way up to the station's spire. The Advanced Mindgate technology had been installed here to link her into the system, and interfaced with the Kostemetsian subspace internet to provide social interaction and message transmission.

She linked into the sensors and settled back for a twelve-hour duty shift.

(OOC: Basically this is a first contact mission for any late-PMT or FT nations. Feel free to enter the system however you like. Possibly some battling later on.)

Bump

Nadia's first act while linked into the system was to send an impulse to the communications beacon.

Let it be known that the Unified Kostemetsian Republic's borders start here, at Novus Centaurus. Those who enter our systems with maleficient intent will be vapourised on sight. I am Nadia Baryshkina, and at the time of this message's recording, I am a Lieutenant in the Kostemetsian Star Navy. To those who seek not to do harm, I wish you well in your voyaging.

The message was picked up by the Novaen scanners, being diverted through the ir diverse communications network it was directed to the Novaen Council, the executive and judicial branches of Novaen society.

"Seems a bit hostile."

"Not really, It's to warn off those with hostile intent, it says so right there."

"Well, we need to welcome them anyway. Just need to be prepared incase anything untoward happened."

"So are we in agreement?"

There was a general murmer of ascent from the councillors. Some time later a ship vanished from Novaen space only to re-appear at the edge of the Kostemetsian space at Novus Centaurus.


Dear Lieutenant Nadia Baryshkina;

Greetings from Nova, We have received your message and wish to welcome you to the galaxy. We would like to engage in a useful exchange of knowledge, we are intrigued and would like to know more about you and in return we will be happy to answer any other questions you may have for us?

Nadia jerked upright.

Holy crap! she thought, then immediately had to cancel the comms impulse. She had always subconsciously "known" that aliens existed, somehow, but had never really believed.

Running the message burst through decryptor algorithms yielded no known encryption. It was irrelevant, as the message had been broadcast in the clear - just another verification of alien origin.

Trying to send a message back to the Unified Republic Naval Command yielded only static. Using a neural command, she tilted a camera stalk upwards to the comms antenna, and swore loudly when she saw it was frayed and abraded around the edges. Someone hadn't been looking after this station in the six months since its construction. She'd have to handle this one on her own, she thought, with a momentary then squashed-down-as-improper burst of glee.

Using the middle-range sensors, she formulated another message in a few seconds and squirted it back to the Novaen ship through the higher dimensions.

Novaen ship:
This is Lieutenant Nadia Baryshkina of Kostemetsian Remote Sensing Station nine-nine-one. I wish to initiate a peaceful contact with you, and will allow you into Kostemetsian space... er, that is, assuming you have no hostile intentions.

She knew the message would have distinct undertones of shellshock, but didn't really care. This was The Big One.

>startlog?
>>>yes
>Aligning disentanglement matrix to DEid 214ab-f01c93bcb
>Establishing master control using codeClass 542 //542 means that a controller using 4.2 standard control allowances is taking control of the subject probe.
>USE NSB? //no_sensor_boundaries means edges of maximum resolution won't be culled anyway, this is not recommended for military scans
>>>yes
>startscan?
>>>yes, parametric CULL_OPPOSITES; parametric CHECK_FOR_LIFE; logical CHECK_FOR_LIFE; heuristic CHECK_FOR_LIFE; ai_disable = "0", initAnalysis in "32" seconds

The landmark Kajali Visitation and the succeeding Second Contact with the Elsani City States both contributed to a massive growth of interest in - and a corollary surge of funds to - deep space exploration, on the part of the Grand Unified Federation of Perimeter Defense. Of course, these two encounters with very large alien civilizations were opportunistic and fortuitous; consequently, the focus of further exploration was not tertiary contact, but rather the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the rest of the universe. Still, the possibility of yet another extraterrestrial race being detected and met was fresh in the minds of scientists and the common citizen alike, and so every probe sent outside was programmed with the umbrella cvar "CHECK_FOR_LIFE" which ordered it to apply a set of logical analyses to every system it checked, in accordance with what would be expected for intelligent life.

The Kajali had sent out probes in many directions already; it being a rather old race of well-read and well-explored people, surely it had seen much of the nearby universe already. However, for whatever reason - laziness or oversight - the star system known earthly as FK5 1172, or popularly Novus Centaurus, had never been examined closely by Kajali ships or detection probes. This system was not a topic of much importance to the Perimetrians, but probes were cheap, and so were disentanglement transceivers, as were the small-scale Allendale drives that achieved a goodly speed of 1,900c without acceleration time. As a result, this one particular probe, with DEid 214ab-f01c93bcb, came across the star system without much consideration as to what it would find.

On arrival, the probe, whose Allendale drive shielded it from most cosmic radiation during transit, was suddenly overwhelmed by a blast of electromagnetic radiation. It wasn't technically that much, actually, but its sensors were set to extremely high sensitivity due to the non-presence of any radiation of the sort in other regions. All sorts of escaped wavelengths, from the lower radio oscillation rates to obscure amounts of gamma radiation, were detected by the probe, as it reduced the sensory aperture in order to get a better fix on what exactly it was receiving.

Meanwhile, the constant disentanglement and re-entanglement of tiny subatomic particles on the probe was being reflected back in a small communications pod some five hundred light years away, and it was through this pod that a Perimetrian consoleman, who was using the 4.2 standard allowances system, accessed the data feed and controls of the probe. He first was overwhelmed by the "oscillospike," as bursts of radiation were often called, but he soon manually tweaked the aperture and started checking the radiation for consistency with known communicational templates. First there was FFT, then frequency doubling, then analog reconversion, and all manner of algorithms ranging from the commonly used to the never-before used, and it was really a lot of work for this poor man to do alone - which is why he had called Secondary Command to inform them of this discovery.

Within the hour, a team of experts who had arrived from a nearby system were working on what the probe had seen. They applied advanced AI programs that ate up the information like angry gluttons, and spat out stuff that ranged from convoluted to insane. But with each passing minute during which scans were allowed on the radiation, more information was gathered, and thus more clarity was offered on the messages that may or may not have been contained within. So much attention was being placed on this single probe's sensory stream.

So much, in fact, that no one bothered to activate the electromagnetic transparency device, that would prevent the probe from being seen by sensors that were either primitive or low-end, if they were looking. So much, in fact, that the probe was stopped very close to the source of the radiation. So close, that it was almost instantly detected by whosoever was broadcasting that radiation - whosoever almost surely an alien civilization.

So the probe was seen by all the people of Novus Centaurus.

The small colony on Dryten III's surface almost immediately detected the new new object. However, the one-woman crew of Remote Sensing Station 991 detected it first. Firing a quick comms burst down to the surface ("don't worry, I've got it covered"), Nadia quickly and calmly dealt with the new situation.

Sending a comms squirt to the probe, Nadia queried its internal processors. No reply, except what appeared to be some sort of identification signal. She couldn't decipher it, so queued it at the semiorganic language decoder.

She transmitted her emotions at the probe. Engrams of shellshock soared out into the void.

Lieutenant, please rest assured that our intentions are peaceful and like you we wish to initiate peaceful contact. Where would be a good location for us to locate ourselves to facilitate such contact and interaction?


The Novaens well understood the need to not spook the locals, they wanted the contact to be peaceful and from the hints they received they were sure that this was perhaps the first contact that these people ever had.

Relief washed over Nadia like an ocean wave. They were benevolent! One less thing to worry about.

Novaean ship: Not right here. Perhaps we could facilitate an interaction near Novus Centaurus "Dryten" Seven? That is our outer gas giant planet. The effects of the communication pollution will be much-reduced out there, and I have a ship that can travel that distance in seconds.

Understood; we will be waiting



The Novaens sub-light engines fired up as they manuevered quickly into place orbiting around the designated gas planet, of course scanning for any tricks or traps that might be laid. They were friendly but not dumb.

Nadia jumped down into the old-new, familiar, and slightly smelly cabin of the Viking. Activating the air freshener, she sent an impulse to the bay doors to open, then shot off into the space beyond.

A second later, the progressive wormhole drive activated. An interstice in the fabric of space opened, and the Viking slid in. Three point five seconds later, it slid out, two thousand kilometres above the roiling clouds of Novus Centaurus VII. In the distance, a small star grew rapidly, resolving itself into a starship of some description. Of a rectangular description, specifically. Nadia throttled back the realspace drive to stop at a distance of about five thousand kilometres from the other starship.

As Nadia entered realspace the Novaen ship was there lain out before her, Coming in from the side it almost looked like a large warehouse, if it wasn't for the lights and whole array of things mounted on the ship. It was many Hundred of metres long, perhaps 40 metres deep and who knows how wide it was.

Soon the comms spurred into action once again.

"Docking Bay 42, is open and ready to receive you. Look for the purple lights."

As Nadia got closer she could see, the purple lights and all she had to do now was get her ship in there.

With a couple of quick engine pulses, Nadia was lined up nicely on a trajectory to Docking Bay 42. It seemed to be the fairly standard rounded-rectangle shape, which meant she'd have to keep the Viking in hover mode rather than landing it.

Sliding in through the final kilometre, she throttled back the last vestige of engine power, gliding to a complete stop in the docking bay. She couldn't see any docking crews, though, which was odd.

Setting the thrusters to low-power hover, she donned the thruster pack again and jumped out, this time using much more thruster power for a standard-g environment. The docking bay looked to be protected by a forcefield, presumably so the currently-invisible docking crew had something to look at during working hours.

She called out "Hello? Is there anyone there?"

There wasn't anyone there to meet the Lieutenant, however soon there was an announcement over the internal address system that permiated every part of the ship.

"Lieutenant Nadia Baryshkina please make your way to the conference room, Lieutenant Nadia Baryshkina to the conference room please."

Sticky-taped to the exit of the docking bay was a fairly hastily written note. "In a drawer to your left, you will find a map to help you find your way."

And there was a drawer to the left hand side of the door, a set of three of them and in the top drawer was a single hand hand device that activated if she picked it up. It would give the Lieutenant directions to the conference room. The other draws contained various odds and ends, tools or some such as one might expect to help repair ships that docked inside it.

But the question would remain, why the odd method of first contact... though to be honest she never did see what they looked like.

After the shocks of the last half-hour, Nadia was almost startled by the public address system. However, her astonishment soon faded.

She perused the note and followed its directions. After finding what appeared to be some sort of mapping device, she followed it through the rather empty corridors of the ship to a conference room. The doors slid open, and she stepped inside.

Once the doors opened her eyes where directed to two beings who were sitted on a seat on a table about that could hold around 16 people very easily. The first being was for intensive purposes human, at least as far as she could tell, but there wasn't any signs that it wasn't human. She perhaps wouldn't even think twice that he was human if it wasn't for the creature sitting next to him.

A creature that could only be discribed as a 4-legged dinsoaur sitting next to the human. After a moment allowing Nadia to take in what she saw, they spoke, together perfectly in time in tune with the same nuances in their voices. The only difference that seemed to exist from what anyone listening could tell was the fact that they were of different species but still, there was a harmony to their voice.

"Welcome Nadia, to the Novaen Star Ship Harmony, We are Fk'rt Simmons. Sorry about the unusual welcome. We would assume that you have alot of questions and we will do what we can to answer them."

"Er... Fk'rt Simmons... I must first tell you that this is the first First Contact that the Unified Kostemetsian Republic has made. My apologies if I offend you in any way. I'd just like to welcome you to Kostemetsian space, and I'd like to ask what brings you here. I'd like to give to you this disk," at this point sliding a small square device out of her pocket, "which can probably explain our culture much better than I can. I'd like to enquire, if I may, about your culture."

They both smiled, "Thank you," they both said with a short dip of a bow. "Somethings we believe are better told as stories rather than cold lifeless facts. Please come with us, and you shall understand."

Getting up from their chairs the Novaens left the conference room through a door on the other side of the room. They waited on the other side, the first contact disk in their hands/paws. Well it was actually in the humans hand but it would be soon evident that there was no distinction between the two.

Unlike the halls that she entered the conference room, these halls actually had other Novaens walking through, a human and a Sauron, as the dinosaurs were called but she wouldn't know that yet.

Nadia followed the two Novaens, trying to cover her deep shock. Part of her mind was screaming this is impossible, you're insane, this isn't happening, this is impossible...! but she just let it scream to itself behind closed doors. This was not the time to fall over the deadly brink of insanity.

The halls she walked through seemed to be populated by the same type of people. Oddly, they were never alone. In each case, a human was always accompanied by a reptiloid companion.

The decor of the ship seemed to be fairly subdued. The lighting was embedded and the internal lines were crisp, with a blue streak about twenty centimetres wide at the bottom of the wall, blending into the floor. Otherwise, the ship's interior seemed fairly utilitarian.

After a couple minutes of walking passing through what perhaps seemed a labyrinthine set of passages (despite the map device always directing Nadia back to the official conference room)

They entered a room, an elderly Human/Sauron pairing is sitting down on some chairs obviously relaxing.

"We take it you are hear to be told a story, a story of a people and how they came to be as they are?"

The elderly pairing's assumption was confirmed by the nodding of the heads of Nadia's hosts.

The story tellers started their story weaving a tale of two cities, of two races, but of most importantly of two children. The story started out by explaining, through the eyes of the children what was happening in each of the cities. How speciest prejudices on both sides attempted to tear them appart. The story described how each city and race in truth wanted the same thing, peace but until the "us vs. them" was dealt with there could be no peace. Finally a tragedy befell our two children. United in grief the peoples of both cities and races finally heeded the calls of the children. The Novaen council was formed of both human and Sauron. It came to unite the people of Nova, under one banner and how in memory of the chilldren that a unique relationship between a newborn human and new born Sauron. A life partnership, these 2 beings would become one. They'd share a life and identity, what one felt they both would, the life partnership the foundation of Novaen society, of it's culture and of it's law.