Queen's Quest

Chapter 5

Chapter Five Queen's Quest

"This is certainly an interesting predicament," said Gravin. "Jina, when you nicked Mynce, did you feel anything?" Jina thought a moment, then shook her head.

"Umm not to my knowledge, but then I was pretty busy at the time."

"Do you still have that dagger?"

"Yeah, but not with me, I think it might be with the belongings I left back at the guild house in Bal Sera, the witches guild is pretty good about watching our personal stuff while we're away. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's in one of my bags."

"Well so much for that," replied Gravin

"If you were thinking about examining that dagger for hidden spells forget it," said Jina matter-o-factly, only the original caster would be able to tell what the spell was. That's one of the first things you learn is how to personalize your spells, it makes it harder for others to break them. You know this might be a good time to remind everyone here that while I'm listed as a 30th level witch, my main focus is that of a doctor and surgeon. Oh, I could probably turn all of you into frogs or rats or something like that but there's a lot I do not know about serious witchcraft. I cannot screw with the weather like a storm warden, nor do some of the things a full-blown sorceress can, I'm a doctor who uses her knowledge of witchcraft to further the healing process. My point is don't expect me to rush in at the last minute saving the day with wild feats of magic, it ain't going to happen."

"Well that's certainly interesting to know Jina," I said,

"But what are we going to do with our new and improved AI?"

"I say let's play this out," replied Jina, "We might learn something, and if nothing else she might eventually repent. I'll keep an eye on her, any sign of disobedience, however small, we change the AI back to its default mode…Agreed?" We all agreed before Jina called out to Mynce to de-activate secure mode.

After our meeting, things slowly returned to normal. All of us, especially Jina watched Mynce for even the slightest sign of defiance, but there was none. One thing was certain, and that was the ship's AI had been imbued with the complete persona and soul of a dead witch. As for Mynce, she thought her spirit was residing in a sort of purgatory doing penance for her misdeeds in life; none of us gave her cause to believe otherwise. At first, her demeanor was extremely caustic, but none of us chastised her for it, eventually her temperament mellowed…To a point. By the time we reached our destination, she had become the sixth member of the crew even to offering her own views on things. Both Jina and I took copious notes and recorded data we were witnessing something totally unheard of.

Finally, the time came when we neared the coordinates specified by the Morda and the point of beginning for one of two mysterious galaxies. Our long-range sensors picked up evidence of a sizeable sun as well as a series of planets. We slowed down to await the arrival of the Nessa in order to discuss our next move. Staying well clear of the sun to avoid the radiation we began to track eight planets of varying sizes. Captain Demlin was studying these plants as well, looking for one to orbit but it wasn't until we started picking up space chatter, and I mean LOT"S of it we knew we had found what we were looking for, At the time we were only picking up radio chatter, in a frequency range not normally used by us, if fact it was almost off our spectrum and required readjustment of our communications scanners to pick up all of it and enhance it's clarity.

Captain Demlin's team of communication specialists had determined that all the radio traffic was originating from the third planet from the sun, and had decided to take up an orbit around the fourth planet, which appeared to be dead. As we were still well out from these planets, I received a signal from the Nessa.

"Commander Gambein, check the very low end of your S-Band frequency, we're getting not only audio but visual as well this is incredible, it's still badly garbled but our computers are cleaning the images up. It's all coming in right at the very bottom of the range, so you might have to walk your pick-up over onto the next frequency range and do a cleanse but I think one member of your crew is going to be in for a big surprise." We all looked at each other,

"What were they talking about," I wondered.

Quickly making the needed adjustments and stretching the bandwidth, fuzzy images started appearing on our screen along with the audio.

"Mynce, clean up the picture please." (Unintelligible muttering) "That's good Mynce, I…Oh my…Will you look at that?" What we saw were not Elvin, but human images. Gretchen got right up out of her seat and moved right up to the screen. The image clarifier was as high as it could go. The images showed beings engaged in various activities but none of them appeared to have pointed Elvin ears. We had no more contact with the Nessa until we moved into an orbit over a reddish colored planet with what appeared to have canals criss-crossing it's surface. Rather than dock with the Nessa, we held a video conference to plan our next move.

"We're adjusting all our receivers to capture the full range of their video and audio transmissions," Announced Captain Demlin. "We'll transmit to you the proper settings and adjustment readings to properly pick up the full range of their transmissions. As yet, we don't know what this race calls themselves, but it's quite clear they are as of the Pyrrians. At the present time, we are attempting to translate their language as well as trying to determine clues as to how this world is set up especially if they have space flight, which is where you will come in Commander. I'm afraid you're going into the sharp end by approaching this planet in cloaked mode it's obvious they are not operating on more advanced frequencies so I think it's safe to use the stellar-com should you encounter any problems. Meanwhile we will maintain an orbit around this planet collecting data."

"What if we determine they have no capability of space travel?" I ask.

"If that's the case," replied Demlin, "Transmit a coded message informing us as such, then continue on to the other planets if they are devoid of life or show no signs of having space travel, return to us and we will decide on a further course of action." Captain then added a few more thoughts before we signed off.

"Commander Gambein…And this would impact you too Lieutenant Geardot. From what we are picking up from the video scanner, it appears that the inhabitants of this planet are as you Pyrrian's. I do not intend to let this deter us; I do not discount the fact that there could be Elves, Dwarves of even Faerie folk down there. It could also be possible that we elves came from this planet fled, or for one reason or another simply left. We aren't leaving here until our questions are answered, one way or another. But again, make certain these other planets are not inhabited or show any signs of ever being inhabited. So Commander, you and your crew have your orders, please proceed."

Turning to everybody I smiled and said,

"We've got our orders; shall we go get into trouble?"

Everybody laughed as they took their seats as I prepared to break orbit and head for the planet we were calling Proxima twelve. Gretchen made the proper adjustments to the communications scanner adjusting it to receive in the very bottom end of the spectrum. The closer we moved to the planet, the heavier the chatter got. Although the Nessa was better set up to analyze and decode the language, we had a decent ability of our own; however, we just weren't prepared for the amount of chatter we were receiving.

"What kind of civilization could we possibly be dealing with that blasts this amount of radio signal out into space," came Fashar's voice swirling in my brain.

"well it is a rather large planet," observed Gretchen.

"Hold on there, I'm starting to get some readings here indicating a spacecraft of some sort."

The rest of us immediately swung into action,

"initiating cloak, shutting down engines going to mag drive, closing exhaust flaps," I announced.

"We are being scanned people," announced Gretchen, "Scan seems to be of a primitive nature, still taking readings."

"Let's move right up to them," I announced over my headset, "Let's see if we can rattle their cage." Slowly we approached the spacecraft, which just seemed to be drifting in orbit two large hatch doors appeared to be wide open revealing a cargo bay with a long mechanical arm tucked in there.

"I detect no weapons on that thing," said Gravin.

"They're really too far away to get a good impression," suddenly popped into my mind from Fashar, "But I detect no overwhelming hostile vibes."

"We are really getting hammered with some sort of primitive scanning device," replied Gretchen, "They obviously know we're here, I guess the next move is theirs."

"Moving right up to the craft," I announced, "If this doesn't provoke them I don't know what will." I brought us within a few hundred feet; we could see a face at the window looking our way. The craft was long with a bullet type nose, white with a black underside. Short stubby winglets.

""Their scanner is telling them something is out here but they can't see us," observed Gretchen. "This could be a research vessel of some kind, I detect no other craft approaching, which I would expect to be the case were there fighters in the vicinity. I'm also picking up a lot of chatter coming from this craft, being directed back to the planet, however I have no idea what they're saying."

"Are you feeding it all through the voice analyzer?"

"Correct," replied Gretchen, we're starting to get some matches but nothing we can use yet."

"What are these other things I'm seeing," I said.

"They appear to be satellite's of some sort," replied Gretchen, "Now that you mention it I'm seeing an incredible amount of data transmitting through the nearest one."

We sat out there for a good hour, just watching and recording voice traffic, waiting for a horde of fighters to come looking for us, but…Nothing.

"I don't think these people have any sort of inter-stellar spacing ability," I observed.

"If they did we would have certainly been aware of it by now, I think we're dealing with a civilization just taking it's first steps into space, but I'm going to try something here, Gretchen, let's find another one of these satellite's somewhere else."

We didn't have far to look.

"What are those things that look like fans?" Asked Gretchen.

"Solar collectors, I'd say," I replied, "We don't use them anymore, but they collect the sun's energy to power the craft in question. All right Gravin, just a very short burst at that satellite if you will." He fired a single burst exploding the satellite immediately; we then moved off to await the response. We waited for around an hour then the spacecraft we had been watching appeared, the pieces of the satellite had drifted into space, so there wasn't much to see, but we continued to record the data between the spacecraft and ground. Obviously, they had been requested to investigate what had happened, but we saw no spacecraft coming at us, so my initial hunch was right, this planet had no ability as far as interstellar space travel went, we could breathe a little easier.