Izara raised her eyes from the holotablet, everyone was looking at her, expecting… demanding an instruction, a command. She was this ship's Commissary after all, wasn't she?
"We could send a probe under the water surface. Test for any signs of life...", she said to the operator sitting at the drone console.
The operator looked back at the Captain, who simply nodded.
The following minutes were tense at the bridge of the Restrained Wind. Every operator looking at their own consoles as they waited, Captain Kisner looking out the window at the blue planet.
Izara was lost in her thoughts. Her mind going over all the books she remembered, all the tales. Could the Human be an aquatic species? The idea was tempting, but she knew it was far-fetched. Many in the Confederacy had theorized about aquatic civilizations, but they had never found any, so the prevailing thought nowadays was that underwater creatures couldn't naturally develop far enough to become sapient civilizations.
"Sir, we have an incoming stream from the drone", the operator said, "It appears there are some aquatic life forms living under the surface. We are picking different species of fishes, large warm-blooded creatures, a variety of vegetal life… no sign of civilization, though"
Izara sighed. "Perhaps we could send two more probes to each hemisphere and look for underwater ruins. If this is the world we are looking for, there might be some left overs..."
"No", Captain Kisner interrupted.
Izara looked at him, perplexed. "Pardon me? Our mission is to..."
"This mission is over. We are not a science vessel, we were not sent here to study the local fauna. We are at war, and this is a military ship. There is nothing here worth our time."
Izara clenched her jaw and glared at the Captain. "As far as I remember, I'm still the Commissary in charge of this ship, Captain"
The Captain quickly closed the space between the two, towering over her "Are you going to pull rank at me, Commissary?". When he said it, the word sounded like an insult.
"Sir! I'm picking up something!", another operator said.
The Captain turned to glare at him. "What?"
The operator looked down, his voice trembling. "T… there's an object... in a stable orbit around the planet.... I'm sorry, Sir, I thought it was an asteroid, but it doesn't match the profile."
Izara walked towards the Navigator. "Get us there", she ordered.
The Navigator looked back at Captain Kisner, who glared at Izara again. She met his gaze, forcing herself not to flinch. After a few long seconds, he finally turned to the Navigator.
"Set trajectory for rendezvous. Approach the object from a higher orbit".
"Yes, Sir"
Izara felt a deep relief, her muscles relaxing as everyone on the bridge concentrated again in their tasks rather than looking at her. She had never liked to work under pressure, much less be confronted by an angry tall man, but she felt she had handled it well so far.
She glanced again at her holotablet and took a look at the data coming from the object. It was a quite massive sphere, their own ship a diminute blip when compared to it. It was no wonder the operator took it for an asteroid or a small moon at first, but she could tell there was something strange about it.
All objects, no matter how big, created gravity. Even their own ship created a small depression in the space-time fabric that permeated the whole universe, a depression any scanner could easily detect.
Except for this object. There was no depression, no gravity. It didn't seem to interact with the space-time fabric at all.
Izara grinned and repressed the sudden urge to burst laughing.
She was right. She had been right all along.
She had found them.
She had found the Human.
As the Restrained Wind approached the object orbiting the blue planet, its artificial nature came into full view. The sphere, eerily still, was completely white. From what Izara could read in her holotablet, it reflected all electromagnetic radiation that it received. This time she had no problem reading the information overlaid on the windows. Most of it simply said: "No data available"
A few minutes later, the object was close enough that a visual inspection could tell it had no irregularities. Its surface was perfectly smooth. No signs of any door or entrance.
When the Restrained Wind parked itself next to the object, Izara realized its true size. The Confederacy was a great civilization, and she had thought its space stations to be great works of engineering. But this was in a whole different scale. She felt like an insect next to the colossal sphere. Powerless. She realized the rest of the bridge crew, hardened soldiers as they were, were also looking out the windows in amazement.
"Any ideas?", Captain Kisner asked.
She thought for a moment. There wasn't any door, that was for sure. Perhaps they could create one using the ship's lasers, but she doubted it. Probably the mirror surface would reflect the lasers back at them. And she didn't want to start with what could be seen as an aggressive move, in case the Human were observing them from inside the object.
Though, for all she knew, there might not even be an "inside" to this object.
"Why don't we start with the usual? Sending a docking request"
The Communications operator looked surprised. "Commissary, we have no reason to think they will understand our protocol"
"It doesn't really matter", said Izara, "if we can get them to notice our presence and react somehow, that should be a good start"
The operator nodded and started typing in his console. Seconds later, he shook his head.
"The signal is just bouncing off the sphere's surface"
"Keep sending it over and over", said Captain Kisner
They all waited, looking at the sphere. After a few minutes passed by, Izara sighed. This was going nowhere. There had to be something else, some other way to interact with the object they were missing. Perhaps the old stories had some clues buried in them. She picked up the holotablet again and starting browsing through her collection of archaeological reports, hundreds of stories and recorded artifacts, in search for terms like "key" or "door".
After a few minutes, she stopped, defeated. The problem was there were many possibilities, many metaphors and double meanings, many of which didn't make any sense. It would take days for a full team of researchers to go through all of them.
A new idea formed in her mind. She tried looking for different terms: "help" and "code".
One result.
A paper from the University of Rokalwen on an old dig site and its artifacts. She glossed over the report until she found what she was looking for. There it was. A plan started forming in her head. A fat chance, with grave consequences for all in the ship if she was wrong. But, wasn't this whole mission a shot in the dark, to begin with?
She walked up to the Navigator.
"Theoretically, could we use the quantum tunnel stabilizer to send a message codified through gravitational waves?"
The Navigator looked worried at the Captain. "Yes, but..."
"… the Vograh would detect us", Kisner finished for him
Izara nodded. She already knew that. What she was proposing was using the ship's engine to pound on the fabric of space-time itself. Like dropping stones into a pool of water, that would create waves, gravitational waves that perhaps wouldn't bounce off the sphere's surface.
But the waves would travel far, far into space. The Vograh would hear them, and they'd know where they were coming from. They'd be there in days, if not hours.
But, this was her only idea.
Izara looked at the Captain, dead in the eye. She knew she had to convince him first, and she had to talk in his language.
"The way I see it", she started, pointing at the gigantic sphere outside, "is that we are as good as dead for the Confederacy if we can't crack that thing open. The whole point of this mission is to end the war. We can refuse to take this risk now, turn back and join our people at the front lines and die with them in some random battle… or we can go for the big prize, risk it all and stop this war once and for all"
It sounded braver than she felt, but she wasn't ready to give up on this. She had got too close to the answer to pull back now.
"Even if this works", Kisner said, "and the sphere opens, the Vograh will still find us. They will come, and they will outnumber us. Are you sure you want to do this?"
He wasn't asking her. The operators in the bridge all nodded, one by one. Finally, the Captain looked back at her, and nodded too.
The Navigator looked at Izara, expectant. She gave him her holotablet and pointed at the code in it.
As soon as the Navigator pressed the buttons in his console, she could feel the gravity waves going through her own body, her stomach dropping as the space-time itself curved around them. She could feel the pattern she had given the navigator: three short pulses, followed by three long ones, then another three short ones.
OneTwoThree… One… Two… Three… OneTwoThree...
She had seen the pattern in one of the photographs, carved into a massive stone block, next to the figures of two humans, and the old Foldan word for "help".
They waited again, looking at the sphere. One minute passed, then another. They all contained their breaths.
"We have movement!", one of the operators exclaimed
Izara could see it herself. A small opening was growing on the sphere's surface. It had worked. The bridge operators cheered and congratulated each other. The Captain started giving out orders through the ship's intercom to set ready a shuttle. Izara walked up to him.
"I want to lead the expedition inside", she said
Kisner paused and considered her for a moment. She could tell there was something different about the way he was looking at her now. A newly found respect?
"Of course", he said