Chapter 1: Blackout

August 27, 2803 AD, Sunguard Headquarters, Europa, Jupiter, Solaris system

“Millertown Control, come in. Millertown Control, please respond.”

There was only silence.

Colonel Reynolds was disappointed, though not surprised. The indicator light on the communications board before him showed there was no handshake. Radio communication through hyperspace was, of course, entirely digital. In both directions you continuously sent packets, each containing a fraction of a second of encoded audio protected by error-correction codes, and you received acknowledgment frames in return. Whether you spoke or not was irrelevant. The packets were still sent, and the receipts still returned, even if all you transmitted was silence. That way, you knew the channel was always open and ready to be used.

Except it wasn’t.

Three minutes ago, the handshake had been lost, and digital transmission to Eta Boötis was no longer possible.

Still, it wouldn’t do to lose contact with a Terran colony because of a technical glitch. Redundancies were always built into the systems, and if the digital handshake failed there was always an analog backup available. It wasn’t encrypted and it was susceptible to noise and degradation, but for emergency purposes it was perfectly adequate.

“New Caribbean Control, Millertown Base, please come in.”

Silence still reigned supreme.

Colonel Kelile Reynolds sighed, then leaned forward toward the technicians seated at the comm station before him.

“Try the Special Agent in charge.”

The two junior officers glanced back at him. One of them, a small Kelar woman in her early twenties, nodded and switched channels.

“Special Agent Myan Lami, please respond. NL-27, please come in.”

Still nothing.

That was significantly more concerning, Colonel Reynolds thought. What he and everyone else had initially assumed was just a technical glitch now filled him with dread.

It was easy enough to imagine plausible scenarios for why a remote colony world, thirty-seven light-years away in the rough direction of the galactic east, might momentarily lose contact with the Terran Federation. Perhaps a power outage had shut down the transceivers, or some natural disaster had damaged the communications infrastructure. New Caribbean was tectonically active, and earthquakes or volcanic eruptions weren’t unheard of.

Colonel Reynolds didn’t really consider the lack of response from the Special Agent an issue—not on its own. Whether they wished to communicate or not was their prerogative. It wouldn’t have been the first time Special Agent Lami had gone incommunicado, and you didn’t question the decisions of a Special Agent. With genetic loyalty to the Terran Federation hard coded during manufacturing, they were implicitly trusted to operate entirely at their own discretion.

But two entirely separate communication channels failing at the same time? That was concerning, indeed. If something had happened to the colony, one would think the Special Agent in charge of it would be more inclined to talk to Sunguard Headquarters, not less. Which meant whatever disaster had struck New Caribbean was serious enough to have taken their Special Agent offline as well.

And that thought scared Colonel Reynolds to the bone.

Because as far as he knew, short of Project 47 or a nuclear detonation to the chest, there wasn’t really anything man made out there that should be dangerous enough to kill a Sunguard Special Agent.

Perhaps he allowed his imagination to run wild, but if you were to discard those two scenarios, there were precious few events that could take out both a well-established colony and a biotic Special Agent at the same time, and most of them were literally astronomical in scale.

“All right,” he said, trying to stay calm, despite the seriousness of the situation. Surely there was a natural explanation for what had just transpired out there at the edge of the sphere of space controlled by the Terran Federation. An explanation that was less extreme than the scenarios his imagination spun in his mind.

It was time to think outside the box.

“All right,” he repeated, trying to buy himself time to think. “Contact Aphrodite.”

“Yes, sir,” the Kelar technician replied quickly, with a soft lisp slipping between her hard lips. The Kelar were always eager to serve the Terran Federation. Always ready to do their part for the Sunguard.

Her small, blue fingers flew quickly over the keyboard. The scales on her digits rasped faintly as they rubbed against each other. Moments later, the handshake indicator lit up as communications were established with the Sunguard base at Procyon.

“Aphrodite Command,” Colonel Reynolds said into thin air. The intelligent computer running the communications central would pick up his words and filter them out from the noise of the room before transmitting them across the hyperspace link to Von der Layen Base at Aphrodite.

“Be advised,” he continued, “we have encountered a communications issue with Millertown Base, Eta Boötis 4. Repeated attempts have failed to reestablish the link, including attempts to reach the Special Agent on site. We’re requesting your assistance to confirm our findings.”

“Yes, sir,” the duty officer replied across the light-years. “Give us a few seconds and we’ll get back to you.”

The Sunguard officer at Aphrodite kept true to her word. Less than a minute later, the reply came in the form of the crisp voice of Colonel Singh, the communications liaison officer for Von der Layen Base, now replacing his subordinate. But to Colonel Reynolds, those seconds seemed to stretch into hours.

And when the reply finally came, his heart sank.

* * *

“I trust you’ve verified the issue isn’t on our side?”

General Talerk squinted as she looked at him across the desk, her black fur rippling as her facial muscles contracted. From their places on her collar, the emblems of the Sunguard—the grinning black wolf’s head over a burning solar disk—greeted him with their comforting presence.

“Of course, ma’am,” Colonel Reynolds replied, glad he had thought to do so before escalating the issue. “Aphrodite Command confirms our findings. We appear to have simultaneously lost our links to both Millertown Base and Special Agent NL-27.”

She looked down at the tablet he had provided her, scrolling through the briefing document without so much as a word. When she finally looked up again, he could see on her face that she now shared his deepest fears.

It would, however, turn out that she did so for entirely different reasons.

“I notice in your report you’ve focused on astronomical explanations. An extreme solar flare event or an asteroid impact. Both would certainly be powerful enough to cause the loss of the colony and could possibly even lead to the total shutdown of a Special Agent.”

“I don’t consider the asteroid hypothesis likely,” he replied, careful not to seem as though he were contradicting his superior. But they didn’t have time to focus on a hypothesis he had already discarded.

General Talerk agreed. “No, that would be highly unusual. Any asteroid or comet large enough to pose a threat would be tracked closely by their mass detectors. They’d have known about it days in advance, at worst. It’s inconceivable that they wouldn’t have told us if that had been the case.”

“Eta Boötis is a subgiant,” he chimed in. “It’s a main-sequence star, but it’s old and now expanding. It’s not violent, but it’s considerably more chaotic than Solaris or Tau Ceti. Strong solar flares are common. If one were to happen at the wrong time, the mass ejection could potentially fry the electronics of the entire colony, or worse still, incinerate it.”

The general nodded. As a Jerrassian, she would have shaken her head affirmatively, but she had learned the Terran mannerisms and had, with considerable effort, adopted them as her own. It made social interactions in the rigid military structure of the Sunguard smoother.

“It’s not an ideal colony world, I give you that,” she said. “The climate’s good, and there’s an abundance of life and resources there, but its sun is certainly a problem. We don’t usually colonize stars near the end of their lives. Too unstable. But given Nova Solaris, I can understand why you sent your people there anyway.”

Colonel Reynolds nodded, almost imperceptibly. Those two words had hung as a specter over the Terran race for four centuries now. The certainty that they would lose their sun had driven the Second Expansion, claiming worlds they would otherwise have ignored as their own.

“It’s also quite far away,” she continued. “Not the furthest of the colony worlds, of course, but it’s still twice the distance of the systems we settled during the First Expansion. The nearest Sunguard base would be… Arcturus, right?”

He confirmed her assessment. Mandela Base was just a little over three light-years away. As bases went, it wasn’t prominent. Nothing like Von der Layen, and certainly not like Headquarters. Still, it was large enough to have several Sunguard Armies stationed there.

“We could have a rescue expedition mounted and ready to go within days from Mandela.”

For a moment, General Talerk didn’t say anything. When she did, her voice carried a faint undertone of sorrow.

“I can’t authorize that, Colonel Reynolds. I don’t mean to be insensitive to your people’s needs, but sending in a fleet large enough to evacuate a hundred thousand citizens without knowing first what has happened there would not be prudent. It could be something other than a flare. For all we know, what will befall Solaris in half a century could have happened to Eta Boötis, too. I can’t allow a Sunguard Army to jump into an ongoing nova event, if that’s the case.”

She wasn’t wrong, of course. He knew that. But her refusal put the Sunguard into an impossible situation. If it was too dangerous to send in ships to investigate what had happened there, they would have to wait until the light from a potential stellar event reached Arcturus to determine the cause. By the time the Sunguard observatories in orbit there could collect spectral emissions from the distant star, three years would have passed. Three years that would render any rescue attempt meaningless.

“But discussions about astrophysics aside, Colonel Reynolds, there’s another possibility we haven’t talked about yet. One I find far more terrifying.”

She clasped her fingers together as she leaned forward toward him.

“What if,” she asked, “this was not a natural event?”

He had considered it, of course. Perhaps Special Agent Lami had simply ordered Millertown Base to shut down communications for the time being. If that were the case, everything was in order. Whatever the Special Agent did was by definition in the best interest of the Terran Federation, and if he had shut down the comm systems, he obviously had had a good reason for doing so. If so, everything was as it should be, and he could be trusted to reactivate them again when the time was right.

“It could be deliberate, yes,” Colonel Reynolds admitted. “But we can’t know that. I don’t want to assume a best-case scenario and get caught with my pants down, so to speak.”

General Talerk glared at him, though something in her eyes suggested her annoyance at his choice of words was more form than true irritation. Had they been sitting in a bar downtown instead of in an office at Sunguard Headquarters, she probably would have laughed.

“No, I don’t mean that,” she corrected him. “If it’s a deliberate act on his part, fine, that’s great. But you’re right, we can’t assume that. It’s our job to identify situations like these and handle them before they become problems.”

She paused for a moment before continuing.

“What’s the closest indigenous people to Eta Boötis?”

It was a rhetorical question, but he answered it nevertheless.

“The Sonmai.”

“The Sonmai,” she repeated, nodding slowly.

The little furry six-legged creatures had always creeped him out. Something about their movements made him think of slithering snakes, or perhaps spiders, and not the paramammals they truly were. Still, he had to remain professional and not let his personal revulsion for them cloud his judgment.

“Pax Lupi has reigned supreme for six centuries,” he eventually said. “I have a hard time imagining any of the races assimilated during the Second Expansion would dare mount an attack on the Terran Federation. They might not have known us for long, but they know us well.”

“So does Jerr,” the general countered. “And Jerr has been a member for all six of those centuries, yet my people are still waging a war of terror on the Federation. Knowing we will crush any insurgencies is by no means a guarantee they will not bloom. Remember that the new races have even less rights than my people.”

It was a sensitive issue, and he didn’t press it further. But in the end, General Talerk agreed with him.

“I don’t think the Sonmai have the psychology to initiate an insurrection,” she concluded. “They’ve never shown a propensity for violence. They’re shrewd, yes, but they tend to take advantage of their adversaries in monetary terms, not military. But there’s a far more serious possibility, I think.”

Sometimes you needed a little help to think outside the box. The Sunguard was the military and police of the Terran Federation. Its role was to protect the interstellar state from threats, both from within and from without. But after six centuries of peace, successfully enforced across known space by the Armies of the Sunguard and by its artificial soldiers, the biotic Special Agents, it was all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking only of threats from within.