NationStates Jolt Archive

It's raining again.

It always seems to rain in the mid-afternoon here. It's a hot, sticky rain, like sweat falling off of a laborer's back. All it does is move the grime from one alley to another.

My comm buzzes. It's Barney again. I don't need to look. I'll listen to his message later, but it's probably all the same. Another handful of ships going through the Bridge. To where? Hells if I know.

He's been at this for years now. Freaking out every time a torch flare winks out of existence near the monolithic structure in orbit around the sun. For ex-military, he's a jumpy bastard.

I pull my hood tighter and make my way to the garages. The rain is getting stronger, forcing the dealers and whores inside, into the buildings whose shadows they dwell in. This city is rotting from the inside. Sure, the higher ups may live in splendor above the sidewalks and travel in style in the lower magtubes, but everywhere else the crime and corruption is rampant.

Kush. Birthplace of human civilization. Some jewel of the Kiith Federation we turned out to be.

Barney's observatory is a few hundred kloms north of the city, nestled in some mountains overlooking the coast. I pull myself into the tubecar and send the coordinates to the central computer. I tell them I'm heading to my mother's apartment. The program I institute afterwards removes me from the tube system and puts me on the private road towards the mountains.

Paranoid as he may be, Barney's usually right. Half a lifetime fighting parasitic organisms and watching his friends become horrid mutations plays with a man's mind.

But now he has another foe. He's convinced the government is sending our ships somewhere. And, to be frank, I'm not sure I don't believe him.

---

Graveyard XT-281
8.3 LY from Corr-Farr, Dominion Border World
0924 Hours
Milky Way Galaxy

Mikael S'jet watched with half-interest as the UT-42 Workbee decelerated and began latching onto a piece of wreckage with its magnetic grapplers. They'd been at this for days now. His three dozen Workbees swarming over the several hundred thousand kloms of debris field and hauling back anything they thought was worth something.

Practically nothing had survived this battle intact. Whoever had fought here were long dead, and evidently had no interest in the remains of their brethren. They'd identified wreckage conforming to at least three different design styles, but nothing of worth had come of it. No new technology. No starcharts. Not even so much as a ship's log to feed into the Iliiraset's computer. So far, all they'd managed to do was haul in useless hunks of metal and components too far destroyed to be of any use. All of it had been dumped into the PDA to be broken down into their base elements and reassembled as good, familiar Dominion tech.

Mikael tapped into the comm network and listened to the idle chatter of the work crews and the CAP. Both groups were bored. He switched over to the inter-ship network as the warships of the 18th CVBG navigated the treacherous space in a constant patrol of the graveyard. Of course, the Iliiraset was right in the heart of it, holding an orbit over the gas planet which held the debris like an accretion disk. An outside observer it would seem almost beautiful - a massive ring of glistening metal surrounding the roiling storms of a world buffeted by it unusual orbit.

To the S'jetti Jak'phi, it was just another obstacle in a long string of recon and salvage missions. Hopefully this one would yield results, and they'd be able to get on with something at least a little interesting.

((This thread is open, but please no thousand-ship fleets. If you want to get into a fight that's fine but at least come up with a reason why you would jump into the system :P))

Two flashs of light hearled the arrival of the UHS Valiant and the UHS Defiant into the system. They had picked up interesting readings on Long Range sensors and had piqued their curisorty. So they altered course and investigated. AS soon as they dropped from warp they began to scan the area.

It is a truism that for something to be interesting, it doesn’t have to look interesting.

For example, deep in this debris field, was an unusually dense object – its mass, fifteen thousand metric tonnes. Originally one of three of its kind, with its triplets, it had been a central core of a vessel destroyed by a race called the Dra’azon. Now, without its ship, it was merely, however, a strange ovoid object, ten meters long, by two wide at its middle, dully reflective. Covered ports in its sides, had once been linked to potent information upload/download systems.

When it had found itself dumped in space, it had set course with its reserve field drives – burnt out now, along with its effectors, and everything else of any use in this situation but simple optical sensors – toward the nearest inhabited system.

It had gotten up to a considerable speed, on a nice orbital insertion path, when it saw the natives busily destroying themselves. This did not make it happy. That had been almost fifteen thousand years ago. Ever since, it had simply sat in orbit in this debris field, surrounded by the depressing remnants of what this system’s natives had done to each other.

This wasn’t quite as maddening as it could have been, for the software in the system’s core was all entirely intact, and it had distracted itself during this – to it – aeon of waiting, obsessively creating worlds in simulation, worlds with life, worlds without. Even worlds where the most insanely baffling physical laws applied, rendering life impossible, but stranger organized matter forms dominated.

It was for this reason, that its optics – invisible to the naked eye, hidden behind its surface – didn’t notice, for a time, the debris-collectors visible in the debris field as it revolved end over end in deep space. Eventually, however, a program within the Mind noticed this, and informed its dreaming sapience – currently enjoying the development of beings existing in strange, sub-chemical patterns – with the mental equivalent of tugging at its trouser leg.

Of course, the fact that it could see its potential rescuers meant nothing! It could merely hope they noticed it.

OOC: I hope you don't mind me using this as an intro thread!

The Mercury Class Battlestar appeared out of what appeared to be a empty lot of space as it finished its FTL jump. The ship was on one of the regular patrols for the Empire of The Wolf. The flight pods of the battlestar began to extend. This paticular jump had been made in haste however, the Battlestar had suffered a severe pirate attack. Whilst pirates were no match for the Battlestar, somehow a rouge pirate fighter had crashed landed into the flanks of the ship and had ruptured some patch repair pannels. Commander Fell was renown for valuing his crews lives over most things, so he had ordered a simi-random FTL jump. Which had lead them to this system.


TCAF Kingdom Of Heaven
Mercury Class Battlestar
CIC
"FTL jump complete! Flight pods extended!" Came the call of the wolf siting behind the ship status screen.
"CAP deploying,4$, 8 and 2 squadron performing CAP" Came the cry of the Raccon who was operating the Air Wing Console.
Commander Fell, a jet black wolf smothed down his uniform and head fur which had been slightly ruffled in the abrupt jump. He looked of the CIC crew and nooded to them, "Sub-leftenant Markson! What does Draydis show?"
"Multiple contacts sir! Assesing size and class now!"
"Very good, inform me when you have them"

Meat. How long could they take?

It had been several seconds already.

For a computer, this was almost an eternity.

Watching with interest and increasing hope, the Mind observed another ship pop into existence relatively close to it.

Okay, basic survival drill. What did it have:

Its thinking parts – tucked safely away in hyperspace, and fully repaired. Contents. One Mind. The mind-states of pretty much the entire crew, except its triplets. A suite of software current as of when the Gravitas Deficit was destroyed.
What else. Hopelessly broken effector, could be cannibalized for parts maybe?
Ten broken emergency engine fields. All of them broken.
One small warp unit. Mildly damaged.
One fully operational (out of eight), thankfully, power core, grid-linked, good for eighty thousand years between services, on minimal use.


Maybe it could do something with that, to attract attention.

One warp unit. Internal.

One power system…

It could try emitting heat. But that might be bad. Other than that, it had…

Ooh.

The object began to reconfigure its operating settings for the warp unit.

This device was normally used for distorting space around tiny amounts of memory, so that changes to single atoms could be effected. Now, however, it reset the system to target a few feet outside its smooth outer surface, at one end of a shunt-link, and the other, inside its reactor system.

It tested the system on a few grains of dust on its surface first though. Wouldn’t do to be too reckless.

It worked. The single grain of dust moved five feet.

Right…

What could it actually say.

It realized it didn’t actually have any idea what transmissions these people used. Or what they spoke, or… Never mind. Prime numbers. They had to know those, right?

It displaced a tiny amount of drive plasma using its improvised system, outside its surface, the super-charged matter making a most satisfying flash.

Two seconds later, it did the same again, twice.

Then thrice. Then five times, and so on.

Of course, as the Mind currently relied upon visual detection, it didn't detect the newcomer in any way.

Out of character: I've nothing against other Culture-esque nations, nor am I trying to wank, per se, or claim any sort of exclusivity, but I can't help but notice that that description of your nation doesn't really match with what you have posted in the past.

I would rather you didn't pick my nation up - by dint of having posted what is actually something of an antithesis, right down to the name... It would severely limit my options for any kind of enjoyable roleplay - well, I suppose being briefly mind-invaded and then expiring would be interesting to write, but rather short and terminal.

The Two Ships began to make their way towards the Debris field. Soon enough proximtry warning lights began to flicker on the bridge. Not long after, teh more insistant Proximitry Alarms began to sound. The Helm officers began a evasive course as they entered the debris field, sheilds raised.

Of course, as the Mind currently relied upon visual detection, it didn't detect the newcomer in any way.

Out of character: I've nothing against other Culture-esque nations, nor am I trying to wank, per se, or claim any sort of exclusivity, but I can't help but notice that that description of your nation doesn't really match with what you have posted in the past.

I would rather you didn't pick my nation up - by dint of having posted what is actually something of an antithesis, right down to the name... It would severely limit my options for any kind of enjoyable roleplay - well, I suppose being briefly mind-invaded and then expiring would be interesting to write, but rather short and terminal.

ooc: I'm not picking up your nation, I'm just returning to the concept that I had with my old nation (which ended up quite Culture-esque, although it went through a few iterations. If you wish I can point you in the direction of some samples.), one that I preferred to the RP style that I experimented with in a few posts recently and had planned to return to even before seeing your post. I didn't actually notice the antithesis in the name. Still, if it's only going to piss you off, it probably isn't worth it. Ignore my previous IC post.

((Oh good. The forums are back up.

Let me sift through this. I'll post again later today.))

Captain Jake Grogan woke with a start when he heard a very loud thump. Given that there should have been nothing on his ship to make a loud thump, he was understandably both curious and somewhat apprehensive. He slipped into his pants and shrugged on his jacket and made his way to the bridge. On the main screen he could see what looked like a rather large debris field. At the pilot's station, Corporal Knight's face was red and none of civilians on the bridge would look at either him or Grogan.

"Why are we in the debris field?" Grogan asked. "I'm pretty sure I said to drop out of hyperspace well clear of the ecliptic, and definitely away from here."

"I, uh, mistimed our jump, sir," Knight admitted.

Grogan shut his eyes and sighed, once more wondering what he had done to deserve this assignment. "Tell me we didn't hit something."

"We did," Chief Science Officer Horatius confirmed. He smiled. "But that's what the shields are for!"

"Wonderful. Just wonderful." Grogan sat down in the captain's chair. "Well. Anything out there?"

"Oh, there's a marvelous debris field, just as the rumors suggested. All sorts of things for us to examine. We could spend weeks, even months here and not scratch the surface."

"Ah, there are several powered contacts, sir," Knight added. "We were going to call you before contacting them."

"I really don't understand why that's necessary," Horatius said.

"Because they might be hostile?"

"Surely not. It's paranoid to believe every alien ship or species wants to kill us."

Grogan rolled his eyes. "Hail them. Standard greeting, Lantean ship Challenger, we come in peace, so on and so forth."

"Oh, and there's also some some of small artifact about a hundred klicks off our bow. It's flashing primes."

"Then flash some numbers back."

And so the Lantean exploratory ship Provacator arrived in the debris field, heralded first by the blue-green swirl of a hyperspace window and then the spectacular flash of a hundred-meter chunk of debris vaporising as the ship ran into it at the better part of five percent lightspeed. A hail was sent out to the other ships, while primes were returned to the artifact, followed by other sequences such as 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34-55-89-....

"We're being hailed by the Lantean Ship Provactor" Vaughn reported.
"Not met them before" Elizabeth commented "Open frequencies"
"Lantean Vessel Provactor, this is Captain Elizabeth Langely, or the UHS Valiant, welcome to...what ever this is" Elizabeth said

Provactor slid to a complete (relative) stop a mere hundred kilometers from the number-flashing artifact.

"We've got a reply from on of the other ships," Knight reported.

"See?" Horatius said. "They seem friendly."

"Seem doesn't mean they are," Grogan pointed out. "Open channel and transmit, 'Valiant, Provacator. Thanks for the welcome. I take it you're not from around here either?' Keep an eye on them and tell me if they alter course to intercept us."

"About twenty five lightyears from here" Elizabeth replied "We've had no reports of this recently, as far as we can tell its pretty recent"

S'jet instinctively held his palm to his head as so much happened so fast, the data bombarding his mind as it was fed in a constant stream through his CNI uplink.

"Condition one!" he heard himself yell. "Set condition one throughout the fleet!"

Instantly, he felt the tug of the CNI ease as his mind became more closely tied to the ship's central data arrays. The world slowed to a crawl as he entered combat time and, with the help of the ship's internal A.I., began thinking at ten times speed.

"Jaina, what the hells happened? Where did these contacts come from?"

The image of a female face appeared to the left of his vision. She looked generally concerned.

"Unknown, Jak'phi. However, I'm tracking four individual contacts. Two seem to be of similar design - propulsion systems are scanning as nearly identical torch drives. Third contact using an eight torch propulsion system. Putting out enough wattage for very high delta-V. At its current speed, I'm guessing it's a large capital ship, massing greater than a Majiirian, sir."

That was troubling. He didn't like the idea of being out-tonned by an unknown contact.

"And the fourth?"

"Very little data. They just jumped in, and my readings are being thrown off by the debris field. Recon picket being redirected now."

"Mr. Mikael!" came a gruff voice into his consciousness. Immediately it was ID tagged as Jak'sa Toraan S'jet of the Siege of Nalboor. "Get yer engines firin' and get outta that sand cursed field! We're movin' in ta take yer flank!"

"Immediately, my Jak'sa," replied Mikael. He sent a sub-vocal command via TacNet to his workbees ordering a priority fallback to the Iliiraset's primary hangar bay, while simultaneously ordering the HSC-42 squadrons to scramble and take up defensive positions around the carrier. The Iliiraset's primary torchdrives flared to life, accelerating the heavy carrier away from the debris field and toward the approaching envelope of Dominion warships as Raptors and Hussars darted about on orbital paths to defend the carrier from incoming weapons fire.

The following transmission was sent via broadwave communication using the language that had come to be known by the Dominion as "Galstandard" or "Common".

"Attention, inbound vessels. You will immediately decelerate and deactivate all offensive weaponry. Failure to comply will result in defensive measures. State your origin and business here."

---

As the Iliiraset began accelerating away from the field, a proximity alarm sounded in the cramped cabin of Workbee 17.

"Drive plasma. What the hells?"
"Quit yer muckin'. We gotta get outta 'ere!"
"Take a lookit this."
"So it's flashin'. Grab it and let's get back ta th' ship."

The boxy, yellow-painted utility craft unfolded its numerous grapplers and extended them towards the beacon now flashing its prime numbers like a basic school student.



((and before you ask, yes, my guys ARE this paranoid))

CIC
TCAF Kingdom Of Heaven
"Commander! We have multiple contacts! I repeat Multiple contacts! DRADIS has em' all, we seem to have two similar ships and then the others are complelty new to me." The redish vixen operating the DRADIS boards yelled out contacts as they appered. Commander Fell considered his options and looked at the central display board. Pacing over to the commanders table he picked up the ships phone, flicking the switch next to it so he could adress the entire ship plus the nearby CAP.

"This is the commander.....we have jumped into an unkown system and so far we have no idea what we are up against. So in light of this the CAP is to remain close to the ship and all point defence guns are to load. However we don't want to start of an incident here so main guns and missile tubes are to stay de-acivated for the time being. That is all" Fell placed the ships phone down and was about to pace over to observe the CAP status when the elderly anterlope operating the comms desk spoke out. "We have two incomming hails sir! which one you want first? We have one from what appears acording to DRADIS and explorer ship and another from what appears to be the local inhabitents"

Fell yet again returned to the ships phone and picked it up, nodding to the anterlope. "Get me an open channel.......This is Commander Fell of the Tainith Central Armed Forces Kingdom of Heaven, we are a mercury class battlestar. We are in system after we sustained some damage in a recent firefight" Cutting the line with the press of a button, commander Fell walked to the center of the room and began conversing with his XO.

"We're from a fair bit further out ourselves, just out doing some... exploration. Huh. If you'll excuse me, Captain, the locals appear restless."

The transmission to the Valiant was cut off as the crew of Provacator studied the angry beehive of activity that was taking place in another part of the debris field. Large capital ships thrusting, strikecraft scurrying about madly, messages being broadcast - it was all quite interesting.

"Look at that," Horatius said as the crew studied the sensor readings. "Fusion drives. How quaint. I believe those things on the hull are primitive projectile and energy weapons, as well."

"Primitive can kill you just as dead," Knight said.

"Please. Those things are no threat to us."

"Maybe, maybe not," Grogan replied. "We'll be careful anyways. Hicks, keep the hyperdrive ready to get us out of here. I'll arm weapons, if we do it now they might not even get good enough scan for comparison to realize they're charged." At the same time he used his chair's mental interface to power the ship's small array of weapons.

"Honestly, they're always so paranoid," Horatius said quietly to one of his colleagues.

"I agree," Leceuthea said. "Its a wonder they got off their planet without destroying each other."

"They nearly didn't."

"True."

"Let's see, what to say, what to say," Grogan said. This was supposed to be a simple poke around the block, not a four-way first contact.

"We could just ignore them," Horatius said. "They may not even know we're here. I say we just sidle up to that floating numbers-machine and see what makes it tick."

"We lit up the area like a decent-sized bomb when we jumped in," Grogran said. Ahead of him Knight cringed and blushed again. "They know we're here."

"So? They're not the bosses of us."

"Oh, for - just do your science stuff and leave this to me, okay?" Grogan cleared this throat and sent a transmission on the same frequency as the broadcast. "Unknown vessels, this is Captain Jake Grogan of the exploratory vessel Provacator. We are here on a mission of peaceful exploration. We mean you no harm."

"We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill," Hick quipped.

"Funny. Move us closer to the blinky thing, slow-like, say a hundred meters a second, and bring us to a relative halt fifty clicks off. No reason we shouldn't keep investigating, since we saw it first."

"Uh, sir? One of those other ships just snatched it."

"Well, crap."

Provacator scooted closer to the artifact and its new 'pal' at an astronomical snail's pace, still flashing away its own signal lights in mathematical patterns. The ship was relatively small, barely more than two hundred meters long, although it was radiating what might be a rather worrying amount of energy. There were few visible weapons beyond some dorsal VLS hatches, a few long barrel-like extrusions here and there, and some hatches that might be gunports.

A reply. For long, lingering seconds, the Mind waited. Considering.

The irritating thing was, it was surprisingly difficult to work out a way to step up communication from this level to something intelligent. Oh, it could think up quite a few things it could do if it knew anything about the language or even the nature of the inhabitants of the craft. So for now, it was pretty much limited to the set of integer sequences.

Well. On the one hand, it had a contact. On the other, it had been grabbed. So it didn’t actually have much say in where it went. As a relative afterthought, it switched to square numbers, increasing its rate of speed, then after the first fifty of them, tetrahedral numbers and binary numbers, before moving onto more esoteric things like the decimal expansion of the seventh root of seven, and other things.


As seconds ticked by, it spared the blank spaces in these sequences to snag particles from the ship that was carrying it, from the hull, and cabin, operating the system in reverse, tiny, single molecules of the aliens’ vehicle and air were placed in its plasma chamber. This was all to the good – for that chamber was fully operational, and immediately reported the nature of the impurities as they were dropped in. They seemed to be air-breathers; at the same time, it was listening to the vibrations of the craft that held it, through its casing. It couldn’t actually hear that well, over the workbee’s engines, but it thought it could just about detect the right sounds for a humanoid voice-box.

It could give it a shot, it supposed. It switched its warp unit to displacing a much lower energy plasma, and setting the interval between displaces to something in the hundredths of nanoseconds, creating an almost-blinding three dimensional humanoid outline and plunking it a few feet from where it guessed the craft’s cabin was, arm upraised in greeting.

The late summer rain patters on the transparent hood of my tubecar. I barely notice. Outside, the jungle is blurring past. It's almost miraculous that so much of the natural world has survived man's rise to the stars, let alone the wars that have consumed its inhabitants. I make out the vague outline of a kep-mok farm through the trees. I realize with some vague interest that their warrens probably sprawl across the underbelly of half the city, and probaly as far out as the mountains. All it would take is for one of their worker drones to bore in the wrong place, and we'd have photosynthetic insects spilling all over the MagTubes.

Appropriately, I pull a dried grub from my coat pocket and chew it thoughtfully. It has a satisfying crunch, and is seasoned just the way I like it. The kep-moks would overrun us if we let them. Massing as much as a man when fully grown, and able to take down an enraged skaal when organized, the blind insects still allow themselves to be corraled to an extent and slaughtered for their meat.

My thoughts are shattered by a roar overhead. Through the rain I can just make out the shape of a D77 flying at high speed. Civil Protection. Awfully far from the city limits for one of their modified dropships. I unconciously shift back into my seat, trying to make myself smaller. It's a useless action, and I reprimand myself for it. They've seen my car, and if anyone on board decides to run a check I'm screwed. Mucking with the transit computer is a serious offense.

The CP airship disappears over the treetops, and the roar of its engines are swallowed by the wind and rain. I'm safe...for now at least. The mountains are still a few hours out.

---

The Workbee pilot instinctively jerked the controls at the sight of a glowing person raising his hand outside the viewport.

"What th' hells?!"

"Get us outta 'ere, Mickey! Th' sand cursed place is haunted!"

In a blaze of light, the twin fusion torch drives of the Workbee ignited and accelerated the tiny craft towards the retreating carrier with the beacon in tow - completely unaware that the "ghost" originated from their cargo.

---

"Jak'phi, one of the contacts is closing with Workbee 17," said the Iliiraset native A.I., Jaina. "I'm detecting an increasing thermal profile eminating from the craft."

"Weaponry?"

"Unknown. Scans of the hull suggest numerous vertical launch systems. Possible kinetic and energy weaponry."

"How far is it from Seventeen?"

"Eight hundred forty-seven kloms and change, Jak'phi. Closing fast."

"Too close." Mikael sent another sub-vocal command to a squadron of Hussar drone frigates providing cover as well as a handful of recon probes littered throughout the field. The probes activated, bombarding the Provacator with a variety of active scanning wavelengths. The Hussars - unmanned sub-capital ships designed generally to harass the enemy and draw fire from more valuable assets - began a steady acceleration on an intercept course. No need for randomized acceleration profiles. No time either.

"There's some ships heading our way," Knight reported.

"I see them," Grogan replied. "And yet, no reply to our message. Kinda rude of them, isn't it?"

"Rude is stealing that artifact," Horatius said. "We started talking to it first, and then they blunder along and snatch it up like it belongs to them. They're humans, no doubt, perhaps from the local Earth cognate. That seems to be the usual MO for them."

"Or maybe they're Alterrans, who stumble around the universe like they own the place and all the lesser species in it," Grogan said. He transmitted again, "Unknown ships, I say again, we're here on a mission of peaceful exploration. We were just going to look at that flashing artifact, until you snatched it."

"Hmm hmm, integer sequences," Leceuthea said. "The problem here is, of course, that we have little basis for expanding upon this, as we don't share a common language or a common data format. I've sent them the classical periodic table... now let's see, what else."

Provacator, flashing much faster now, sent a new message. First, it flashed off a long sequence a few hundred flashes in a row. Then it began sending in binary, using long and short flashes, seqeuences of the same length, a pause, then another sequence. The end result would be a very primitive black and white image, with a rough humanoid shape. More images followed, such as examples of the alphabet and numerals.

With no reply from the vehicle holding it, the Mind decided to conserve its intellectual resources, and watching the reply it was getting instead. It flashed an immediate reply, this one a differently posed human figure, before going through a few atoms of its own, and then, rapidly scrolling through numerical sequences describing the relative tonal difference of languages in the Culture’s knowledge base of common galactic languages - a signature of an air-breather's audiable language, basically – that would take a while, unfortunately, as English and similar tongues were well down its list.

(OOC: Sorry for the brevity. Can’t really do much more than that!)

"Hello? Hello? Is there even anyone still out there?" Grogan looked at his crew. "I did hit the 'transmit' button, didn't I?"

((Apologies))

"Unknown ships, I say again, we're here on a mission of peaceful exploration. We were just going to look at that flashing artifact, until you snatched it."

The Hussar frigates were nearly past the Workbee now, their courses taking them a scant few dozen kilometers from the utility craft and its prize. Energy coursed through their hulls as their primary coilgun capacitors charged and their particle cannons came online.

Jak'phi S'jet was just about to draft a reply, when his signal was scrambled.

"Mr. Mikael," came the Jak'sa's voice again. "Do I need to hammer into you engagement protocols once more? Contacting an unknown vessel without clearance could cost you your ship!"

"My Jak'sa," stammered Mikael, having clearly forgotten the protocol in the rush of this first contact. "Sir, they claim their intentions are peaceful. The Iliiraset is closer, and we can only communicate with comm lasers," the Jak'sa scoffed at Mikael's statement of the obvious. Still, the Jak'phi continued. "Surely, we should at least let Jaina handle the diplomatic tasks until your ships come closer."

"Well, A.I.? Can you handle it?"

"My Jak'sa," said the Iliiraset's primary intelligence. "I am fully versed in all Dominion diplomatic protocols and have just downloaded a compilation of all currently known galactic languages. I am fully capable."

"Do it."

---

<\ \> PRIORITY TRANSMISSION XX087R-XX
<\ SYSTEM.LOCAL.CONTACT4
<\ SOURCE: IFNAI JNA-9781-9
<\ TRANSMISSION START

PRIORITY TRANSMISSION TO POTENTIAL NONHUMAN VECTOR

UNKNOWN VESSEL
CEASE ALL FORWARD ACCELERATION IMMEDIATELY
FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OVERTAKE UTILITY CRAFT
FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE
PRESENT ANY CLAIM TO UNKNOWN OBJECT 7158 FOR REVIEW
STAND BY

<\END\>

---

Simultaneously, the Iliiraset, having noticed the strange goings on concerning the object now being towed by its Workbee, redirected a communications laser towards it. A single burst transmission was sent. It contained a basic handshake protocol, as well as a query for data access.

Jaina had serious doubts that she would be able to interface with any alien archive or computer system without physical contact between her systems and its own, but it was worth a shot.

"They couldn't even bother to put a real person on the line?" Grogan asked.

"Maybe they're all robots," Hicks suggested. "You know. We. Are. Robots. We. Do. Not. Understand. Human. Etiquette."

"Corporal?"

"Sir?"

"Shut up." Grogan opened the channel again. "Unknown vessel, this is Grogan on Provactor. We are coming to a halt relative to the debris field. By the way, you wouldn't happen to have a name I could call you, would you? Anyways. We came here to investigate the debris field and started exchanging some basic signals with the object, but then your little utility pod thing swooped in. I don't know if I'd say we claimed it, exactly, although we weren't aware that anyone else had a claim to anything around here. I'm certainly open to discussing some kind of agreement over access to it." He paused, then added, "Oh, and lethal force will be met with a lot more lethal force, but I really don't see any reason that'd be necessary. Over."

Cutting the transmission, Grogan turned to the scientists. "Can you keep talking to the artifact on a more secure method?"

"For low values of talk, yes," Horatius said. "We don't even have a common language. Still, we can use the forward phased arrays to generate a tight-beam laser."

"Do it."

---

Provacator, true to Grogan's word, came to a relative halt. A low-intensity laser beam was directed from the forward defense arrays at the artifact. A series of simple pictograms were sent that indicated that Provacator belonged to a different group from the ship that had the artifact in its clutches and the others that had just passed. This was accompanied by a frowny face.

Provacator:
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g132/slybrarian/nationstates/ae_challenger_front_thumb.jpg (http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g132/slybrarian/nationstates/ae_challenger_front.jpg) http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g132/slybrarian/nationstates/ae_challenger_rear_thumb.jpg (http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g132/slybrarian/nationstates/ae_challenger_rear.jpg)