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CHAPTER 48

December 27, 2099 (Earth timeline)

Proxima b, aka Fintidier

Ambassador Charles Jesus stood at the edge of the runway a few steps in front of the entirety of the ground team of the Proxima One basecamp that had been provided by the Proximans before their arrival. He was flanked by Captain Crosby and the rest of the flight crew of the Samaritan to his right—for this brief moment, only, would Crosby allow the Samaritan to be put on auto-AI-pilot and be crewless. At all other times, there had always been a minimum of three flight crew members aboard the ship. It had usually been Cindy and the techs who were doing much-needed maintenance and upkeep.

The SEALs and the rest of the international security force were to his left. Behind them were all of the various scientists. In all, forty-two humans from Earth stood waiting to meet in person—for the first time ever in the history of humanity—aliens from another planet. Of course, the Earthlings weren’t on Earth, and the aliens looked very human, but that didn’t matter. Today was the day for first contact between two alien races from different worlds and Charles intended it to go right.

“There it is.” Artur pointed in the star-filled sky. “That thing is loud.”

“Old fossil-fuel engines were loud,” Crosby added knowingly. “It has some fairly bright lights on it. How do you imagine they know where they are going?”

“Maybe radio navigation,” Victor Tarasenko replied.

“Or the stars and geography,” Roca added.

“They just flew across an ocean!” someone else among the group said. Charles didn’t turn to see who it was.

“Not really,” Tarasenko corrected them. “There is a naval vessel off the coast about one hundred kilometers that acts as a landing platform. I have great satellite and drone imagery of them if you’d like to see.”

“There’re two more of them! Smaller ones.” One of the physicists pointed. The name in Charles’s contacts was Dr. Tasneem Faruq, a South African theoretical physicist. While Charles had met them all, he was still learning all their names and backgrounds. The virtual display through his contacts was especially useful in that regards.

“Fighter escort,” the retired Space Force Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joni Walker replied. The bubble over her head when she spoke told Charles that she had expertise in spacecraft construction and repair, power and nuclear technologies, space and exo-terrestrial construction, and was a pilot.

“Commander Rogers, is there anything we should know about it?” Charles asked.

“Vic?” Commander Rogers nodded to the Russian intelligence systems expert.

“There are seven passengers in the midsection. It looks as if there are three pilots in the cockpit section. No surprises otherwise. Magnetic sensors, quantum ghost imagers, ultrasound, and penetrating radar suggest that they do have large metallic components with them.”

“Probably guns of some type,” Rogers said. “Ambassador, we’d expect them to be armed. We are.”

“Makes sense. But let’s make sure we don’t need to use them, right?” Charles said.

“Yes sir,” Rogers replied. “I hope the only need for them is to show that we have them.”

“Right,” Crosby grunted in agreement. “Rialto, make sure your firearm is visible at your side.”

“Right, Captain,” Mike Rialto, the chief of security for the Samaritan, replied.

“The other two vehicles?” Charles asked. “What about them?”

“The CW5 is right,” Victor continued. “Fighter escorts. I’d say very similar to early World War Two technologies. Looks like wing-mounted combustion-powered guns. Those things under the wings aren’t bombs. They’re fuel tanks. I suspect they are added for the long trip across the ocean here. The carriers they have are off shore over a hundred kilometers.”

“I guess they are taking the isolation overly serious,” Crosby said.

“Not a bad idea,” Dr. Sindi Thomaskutty, ship’s second M.D. and pathologist, added. “Considering we have no idea what they are afflicted with. And we might have a cold virus that could wipe them out. Although we’ve checked everyone thoroughly.”

“Fighter escort makes sense if that’s some big dignitary,” Rogers noted.

“Right,” Charles agreed.

They all stood pretty much motionless and watched as the alien propeller-driven aircraft approached them. The two smaller craft peeled off into an orbit above the runway and maintained positions there in a large elliptical track around the complex. The larger passenger vehicle approached and grew louder and louder. As it got closer lights lining each side of the runway self-illuminated. On Earth they would have been bright and blue. But these lights were a dull red and didn’t seem very bright at all in the visible. The contact lenses they were all wearing enhanced the visual spectrum making the lights seem much brighter. Clearly, the runway lights were designed by humans who evolved to see farther into the infrared portion of the light spectrum.

The big, noisy, metal-winged vehicle rocked and buffeted due to slight crosswinds and appeared to be turned a bit sideways like a crab walking. Then just as it neared the surface at the end of the runway it immediately straightened itself and flared its nose upward. The vehicle appeared to almost float in the air as it sank slowly to the concrete and then it bounced to ground at the end of the runway twice before all of its wheels stayed on the surface. The vehicle was traveling faster than it had appeared to be while in the air and screamed past them at over a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Then it slowed significantly in bursts at first accompanied by loud metal-on-metal screeching sounds. Then it slowed more steadily finally coming to a halt after braking the three sets of eight large, what appeared to be black rubber, wheels. The noisy and quite smelly behemoth then started to roll toward them, turning itself in the direction from which it had just come. Once it reached the taxiway nearest the Earthlings it stopped and the engines motivating the propellers chirped and then belched white smoke out from around their cowlings, followed by very loud explosive bangs. As the engines cut out the two smaller aircraft approached together only a few meters apart and landed much more quietly and gracefully, pulling into a stop position not far from the passenger vehicle.

“That’s quite a show. I’ve never seen anything like that,” Charles overheard a female voice behind him that he didn’t have to use his contacts to identify. He’d known her long enough and recognized the voice as Rain Gilster’s. He turned with a schoolboy’s grin and agreed.

“I’ve seen them in movies, but never been to an old airshow to see one in person,” Charles said.

“Can you imagine how exhilarating it must be to ride in one of those things?” Yoko Pearl exclaimed.

“Exhilarating? Hell, scary must be more like it,” Dr. Renaud said. “And how loud must it be inside one of those things?”

“Hold it down, everyone,” Rogers ordered. “Something is happening. Team on the ready.”

There was another metal-on-metal screeching sound that made Charles think the first technology he wanted to bring to this planet was modern synthetic dry lubricants and seals. The large rectangular hatch on the side of the vehicle facing them popped and hissed as it opened and started slowly descending to the ground as if held up by hydraulic compression cylinders. As the hatch door lowered it became clear that there were steps on it rather than a ramp as Charles had been expecting. He wasn’t sure why he’d been expecting a smooth ramp rather than steps, but he had been. His surprise to the difference was very self-amusing. What an opportunity to see things from a completely different perspective, he thought. Everything was alien and that excited him.

“Steps, hmmm.” Somebody from behind him must have had the same thought. He didn’t recognize the voice and didn’t bother to turn to get an AI ID tag. Oh, he could have just asked his AI subvocally or with pull-down menus but he wasn’t really concerned about it that much.

After a moment or so two men wearing dull gray uniforms, black boots, and hats that looked most like French-style burgundy-colored berets walked down the stairs shoulder to shoulder, taking up posts at the bottom with what appeared to rifles held at the ready position across their chests. There was something about the fashion of the uniforms that looked familiar, but Charles couldn’t quite place it.

“Looks like standard guard protocols,” Rogers said quietly to Charles and Captain Crosby. Then with his head on a swivel he whispered to his team subvocally, “Eyes open, team. Vic, the fighter pilots are likely soldiers. Get me some INT data on them.”

“On it, Mike.” The Russian intel specialist started swiping his hands about before him at virtual icons only he could see.

Two women, who looked to Charles like they might be in their late thirties or early forties, wearing burgundy-colored button-up dress jackets over noticeably short skirts came down the steps next and walked about five meters, stopped and separated, and then took station facing each other on either side of the aircraft steps like the guards did. As far as Charles could tell the two women were not carrying any weapons. He wasn’t quite sure where they would hide them as their skirts were just that short. One of them held up a device about the size of handheld datapad, but thicker, and it had a small rod protruding from the top of it. The woman said something into the device.

“Radio transmission,” Victor Tarasenko alerted everyone quietly. “That’s a radio device. Spectrum analyzer has it around eighty megahertz.”

“Can you tell what they are saying?” Charles asked.

“No. It’s in their language,” Victor replied. “I haven’t set up my intel dashboard with a translator app yet.”

“Can you pipe it to me?” Dr. Oliveira-Santos asked.

“Dah. Hold on a minute.” Victor waved his hands about his head in front of him quickly and moved some virtual icons about. He tapped twice at the air and then nodded at her. Then in Russian he said, “Tanya, please transmit audio to Dr. Oliveira-Santos’s AI.”

Tarasenko’s AI replied something to him in Russian and then Dr. Oliveira-Santos nodded that she was receiving the signal. Most modern AI systems not only could connect through contacts, but also ear implants for audible signals. There were new direct-to-mind implants being experimented with but none had been approved for use yet at the time they’d left Earth. She tapped at various virtual icons in front of her and then whispered something to herself.

“There. I’m activating the translation algorithm and sending it to each of you for visual captioning. Just tap the icon if you want to read what they are saying. If you want audible, it’s in the pull-down menu,” she explained.

Charles immediately tapped the icon before him and set it to quiet mode and captions only. Suddenly, each time one of the individuals spoke in the alien tongue the translation appeared in a speaking bubble graphic above their heads in his field of view.

“ . . . the ambassador is safe to egress the vehicle . . . ” he read over the woman on the right side of the steps.

“Alright, here we go, folks.” Charles straightened up and took a deep breath. “Smile, everyone, just don’t look like a lion smiling before he eats his prey.”

“And for God’s sake, don’t look like the prey.” Crosby giggled but then quickly regained his composure. “Sorry about that.”

A much older woman, wearing black robes like the style seen in the first images the astronomers had received from Proxima veiled about her and over her head, began slowly making her way down the steps of the aircraft. Two men on either side of her, wearing what appeared to be black business suits with white collared button-up dress shirts and black ties, helped her down carefully. The men were even wearing tie clips with some sort of flag on them but they were too far away to make out.

Charles wasn’t quite sure how to estimate the older woman’s age as people on Earth now lived much longer than they did back when fossil-fuel-based propulsion was the norm. He was guessing maybe a hundred and ten Earth years old, but he also suspected he could be off as much as forty years. He was beginning to realize just how primitive in comparison this culture was and how little humanity from Earth could recall from an age similar in their history. That was only a hundred and fifty years ago or so. Charles considered how different a culture a hundred and fifty years more advanced than Earth’s might appear to them. Frightening was his most likely answer.

“Their clothing is very similar to Earth fashions of the turn of the millennium.” DR. RAHEEM RAMASHANDRA: HISTORIAN, POPULAR CULTURE AND FUTURISM STUDIES EXPERT, HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY EXPERT appeared over him when Charles turned to look and see who’d said that.

“What do you mean, Doctor?” Charles asked.

“It would appear that other than the older woman, except for her shoes, they are Earthly fashion, all of them are wearing Earth-style clothing from around the year 2000 or so. I’m sending you all comparison images now,” Dr. Ramashandra explained. After a couple of hand movements in the air he continued, “There, look at these comparisons.”

“Amazing,” Charles said. “Why that period?”

“Did women actually wear skirts that short to work?” Dr. Carrie Shavers, astrogeologist and planetary astronomer, asked.

“According to this image here they did.” Ramashandra sent them a still picture of a very slender woman wearing a very short dress skirt, white button-up blouse with a large collar, and a buttoned dress coat over it. “This is from a popular television show of the time. The woman, Ally McBeal, I think it was, was supposed to be a high-priced attorney in Boston. This was what was considered highly fashionable for business professionals of the era.”

“That’s it!” Rain said loud enough that one of the guards leading the elder woman actually looked up. “Sorry. But that’s it. The culture part of the Encyclopedia.”

“Explain it quickly, Rain,” Charles said while trying to maintain his disarming smile and undivided attention on the approaching dignitary. “And lower your voice, please.”

“Yeah, sorry. As part of the Encyclopedia we sent them an entire volume on culture, which included popular culture from various decades. This time period must have appealed to them for some reason, so they emulated it.”

“This is good to know,” Charles said. “And it would explain their clothing. Maybe they are trying to make us feel more comfortable—at home, so to speak.”

“The ambassador’s shoes are great Nike running shoe knock-offs for that time period. Running shoes haven’t changed that much since,” Ramashandra added. He held up his right foot and pointed at it. “It’s hard to beat a good running shoe.”

“If I were them, I would have chosen the 1940s. Men in fedoras, women in knee-length dresses with padded shoulders. Classy,” Rain added.

“Why am I just now hearing about this?” Charles asked to no one in particular. “This is very important diplomatic information.”

“Well, Charles, I just thought of it,” Rain replied with a shrug of her shoulders and turning both hands palms up.

“Mike,” Victor Tarasenko interrupted them. Then they all were given an image of the Proximans with a red circle around a part of their attire. “The pilots are carrying hand combustion-based projectile weapons on their sides. They are visible here. If my analysis is correct, they each house seven rounds. They do have reload magazines on their gear.”

“Got it, Vic. Keep your eyes peeled. No grenades or anything?”

“None to speak of.”

“Armor?”

“No, Commander. They have no armor.”

“Estimates on our armor against their weapons?”

“The projectiles all appear to be soft lead as best I can tell. Completely useless against our armor. Other than a shot to an unprotected area like the face.”

“That’s good to know.” Commander Rogers cleared his throat, getting everyone’s attention. “Alright, folks, let’s hold the chatter down now and let Ambassador Jesus do his thing.”



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