Drop out of hyperspace into the Reshe system. S.E Spence and his team busily scan for planetary bodies.
Another lifeless rat hole.
Except for the incoming message on the broad band receiver that the Comms Officer is desperately trying to decipher.
Big screen of jumbled static flickering crazily.
Captain Wally orders the gravimetric survey shut down, pronto.
Scan for neutrino emissions. Find those, find the life forms. Somebody in the system is trying to talk to us.
Twenty minutes later and S.E Spence has got a lock. Empty looking system, not that many places to search.
Reshe 1, a blue gas giant on a 3 AU orbital slot from the G-class sun has an artificial base in close orbit. Signs of activity. Definitely not abandoned.
Comms Officer cracks the code. Message replayed in passable English.
Alien life forms make first contact. Another milestone for humanity.
A potentially curly moment over who gets to handle diplomatic relations is easily side-stepped. I offer to assume the burden and Captain Wally distractedly agrees.
Apparently, so I’ve heard, a crew member is unaccounted for. Ensign Oates. Missing. Probably stepped out for a while. “I may be some time,” mutters he.
Regardless, it’s none of my business. Let Captain Wally sweat the search. In the meantime I’ll deal with the bugs.
Bugs with big teeth. Very big indeed.
Scaly reptile bugs.
T-Rex bugs.
Dinosaurs existed for eons on earth up until the point where they suddenly died out.
Palaeontologists clearly got that story wrong.
Always had me suspicious.
Humans have only been around for a hop skip and a jump. It didn’t take us long to evolve to the point of space travel. Dinosaurs clocked up an almighty 160 million years of evolution.
You could – if you had a mind to - do a lot more in that time than run around leaving fossilised footprints and piles of poop.
You could, for example, invent hamburgers. Plasma t.v’s. “I love Lucy”.
But why bother once you had figured out Space Ships? Very large space ships. Ones with strengthened decks and enough head room for a towering T-Rex crew.
So much for all those animated reconstructions of late Triassic life.
Dinosaurs running hither and yon, naked, hungry and aggro. Biting chunks out of anything that came within reach. Huge beasts with tiny reptilian brains full of nothing more than primeval instincts.
Supposedly an asteroid took out the lot of them. Changed the climate. A planetary-wide biological failure to adapt.
Might have been the case for a few of them. The dumb ones down the back of the class. The ones who slept through Evolution 101.
The smart ones had left already. Shot through to the stars. Lurking out there in space. Waiting for the hairless mammals to finally get their act together and stumble into the arena.
At which point they rob them.
Pirates.
Isn’t evolution grand? Millions of years spent evolving Tyrannosaurus Rex into an advanced space-faring civilisation and the best they can do is become glorified muggers.
Probably an inbuilt limitation of the reptilian mindset. A Universal Peter Principle in action.
I peer at the crackly image on the main communications portal. Bits of the vid feed keep dropping out but there’s enough there to form an impression. Audio is all computer generated. Converts the bug babble into recognisable sounds.
Dinosaur says he is of the Naxxilian race. Never heard of them.
How the heck do they manage to form words?
Look at the size of that jaw. I bet it has all the flexibility of a block of concrete. Teeth the size of swords. Enunciate the letter ‘s’ and there’d be blood gushing in all directions.
Little gadget beneath their aural orifice must serve as a ‘grunt converter’.
Introduces itself as the representative of the ‘Adarluun Gangsters’. Running a protection racket. Wants payola.
It’s a bit of a mental leap but I understand gangsters and can relate to a predatory, reptilian carnivore.
Captain Wally, unfortunately, stumbles.
“Battle stations! All hands on deck!”
I remind him that his ship has no weapons. Worry about your missing crew member, I reassure him. I’ll take care of the meat eating thugs.
“No, no,” insists Captain Wally. “This is a matter for the High Council. Only they can decide on such matters of interstellar diplomacy”.
That so? And they are here with us to make a decision are they? Perhaps we can tell the angry looking T-Rex on the screen to sit tight for the next one hundred and twenty days while we hyperspace back to Zion, sort it out, and return with an answer.
Or would you, perhaps, like to assume the burden of responsibility and act on their behalf?
Captain Wally, as I suspected, turns out to have the constitution of soggy pasta once the going gets tough. Muttering nonsense about the ‘rules’ and ‘proper procedure’ he slinks back to his command chair and resumes pulling out his hair.
Maintaining the initiative I inform the Naxxilian that, as much as we’d like to hand over lots of credits, unfortunately we can do without their protection.
Ask if there is anything else they would like to discuss?
Sure there is. Thought as much.
Gangsters are business-beings. Won’t attack you while there is a chance they can make a buck first.
Keep your discoveries and colonies, I tell him. I’m on an Explorer.
Zzzzzzttt! The communications link goes dead.
S.E Spence reports inbound ship from the location of pirate base. Destination us.
It might, I suggest to Captain Wally, be an opportune moment to depart.
I experience a newfound enthusiasm for exploration.
A rare moment of minds, both great and diminutive, thinking alike.
To be continued...
Lancer
