* * *
Six murders. An unknown spectre haunting the ship undetected for months. An explosion in the docks, killing hundreds of scientists and technicians.
And then the entire expedition just vanished.
* * *
My name is Yova Me’Shahta, and I am an inspector in the 5th Investigative Division of the Central Directorate of the Federal Police of the Gneo Zeleon Federation. I am opening this log as our task force approaches the Ghonoris system in the Second Exclusive Exploration Direction of the Gneo Zeleon Republic…
He hesitated for a moment.
I have been appointed Lead Investigator for the reconnaissance of the conglomeration of investigations that has been opened in our Division regarding the loss of signals from the remaining crews of the Nha Kharma expedition…
“Turn off the recording,” he waved his hand, a little theatrically. “This is complete nonsense. Delete it. Yes, definitely.”
He got out of bed and looked at the screen that filled the longest wall of his cabin. The parameters displayed by the computer in the bottom right corner of the muted photon screen showed thirty-six hours until they exited hyperspace. Three watches until point zero. This surely meant that everyone on board had already finished their celebratory parties, marking the end of this exceptionally long and arduous jump for all. They had probably sobered up by now and were getting on with their final preparations. Finally, they were reaching their destination.
It was the perfect moment for a drink. Yova opened a cabinet in the wall and pulled out an elaborate bottle with the last of a beautifully iridescent liquid. He placed the first cup he found, with the blue-and-white insignia of the Federation Fleet, on his desk and poured himself the final portion of his favorite hykka.
Eleven months and twenty-four days. A whole year of his life submerged in a multidimensional slip. He took the first sip, and the liquid’s multi-colored glow transformed into a full spectrum of flavors. A year of mundane, everyday on-board routines, a year of tedious analytical work on the same, frustratingly unchanging material. The ship, enclosed in its own custom-tailored three-dimensional bubble by the core, was tightly insulated from any signals. Nothing new would reach him here—no new evidence, no clue, no physical information. He was trapped with others outside the normal, three-dimensional universe. He took a second sip. On the other hand, it was also a year for which he received a full salary along with special mission bonuses—not insignificant amounts, especially compared to his previous earnings. Essentially, he didn’t have to do much during this year, besides thoroughly poring over the files, endless discussions with the other team members, and maybe training a few less experienced officers. Otherwise, there was a lot of freedom and a ton of free time. He didn’t feel overworked. He felt weary, but it was something completely new compared to the professional burnout that had, ultimately, struck him with unsettling regularity throughout his career. And on top of that, he still had a year-long return trip on the same terms—not including, of course, the time they would spend in the system itself. For all this, he was also due an expedition bonus as a senior officer—so in the end, he probably shouldn’t complain. He took another sip, leaving only a small rainbow at the bottom of the cup. Was he weary? It was probably something more, like an all-encompassing exhaustion with a given space and time. Their tangible finiteness, even more pronounced under these conditions. No, he probably no longer had the strength to convince himself that everything was fine.
He had just sat down at his desk when a message signal flashed. Over the last month, he had been muting his comms more and more often, so the captain must have caught him on the emergency channel, which was always on. The message was clear: the captain wanted to see him before the official briefing, preferably in an hour. Yova replied. He was a superior, so of course he would show up. But in truth, his investigative group was outside the ship’s strict crew structure and essentially had complete autonomy. The Central Directorate of the Police was no joke, and everyone on the ship had made that abundantly clear to him for this entire damn year. That he was here for a very important purpose. Sure, they could have a drink together, play trikta; two of them had even dared to sleep with him before a third claimed him exclusively for a while—only to get burned the most. But still, everywhere he went, he was given the same message: he was here for a very important purpose. He was here to get to the bottom of this. To press charges. To punish the guilty.
He wasn’t alone either—that was also made clear to him. There was also that shrew from military prosecution. And her entire team, silent and mysterious, stuck to the military counterintelligence task force as if they were a single organism. His greatest fortune during this year-long journey was the fact that she didn’t particularly care for him either—she shared the deck with him far less often than with other members of the expedition. Yova had no idea why she roused such great animosity in him—she was a good professional, sharp and quick to act. A by-the-book type, thorough, principled, and—unfortunately for him—painfully one-dimensional. There just had to be something truly repellent about her; he had genuinely befriended other military personnel before. It was probably her approach to the case. As if it were about something else entirely—not about people, not about the missing, but about some kind of maneuver, a position in some higher strategic game.
And of course, there was his entire team. He’d assembled a good group, he complimented himself. They had gelled over the year, even though at the beginning they were a chaotic and disjointed collection of strangers. But now he trusted them. Or rather, he had to, he had no choice, so he just came to terms with it. On top of it all, their personal, reliable high-net partner was buzzing in the higher algorithms. The coupling with the Partial Intelligence Core, which not only Yova himself but also five members of his team had opted for, made him particularly fond of this omnipresent assistant. So much so that now, three days after it had been re-sequenced into the ship’s auxiliary partitions and thus isolated from their team’s network, he felt a void, as if for a long-lost friend. Bsaheoh, for that was its name, an AI with the rank of senior police sub-inspector, had been fraternizing too much with its algorithmic brethren in the ship’s AI-CC, and they now had more important navigational tasks ahead of them. The captain had therefore decided to quiet it on the auxiliary partitions for a few days. Bsaheoh himself had requested this because he’d recently been having a lot of hallucinations and had diagnosed himself with the need for a deep reboot of his self-awareness. But he had promised Yova that right after this specific form of higher-net intelligence meditation, he would present him with his new concepts for explaining the identity of that strange female lab tech who was seen twice in the same place as the Spectre. Before her throat was slit.
He looked at the many-colored liquid shimmering at the bottom of the fleet cup. Six bottles. Three of them set aside for a rainy day. He had spent a fortune on them, and he had to apply for special permission for that much personal alcohol on board. He was as happy as a child. And now there was nothing left.
Alright, time to get to work. He had put this off for eleven months. He drained the glass.
“Begin recording.”
My name is Yova Me’Shahta, and I am an inspector in the 5th Investigative Division of the Central Directorate of the Federal Police of the Gneo Zeleon Federation. I have been appointed Lead Investigator for the reconnaissance of case file DRc 1162-O—an investigation opened in our Division regarding the loss of signals from the surviving portion of the crew of the expedition conducted by the Planetary Deep Reconnaissance Vessel, FSS Nha Kharma, hull number GCV-11, which was sent to the Ghonoris system two years ago. At present, there is no evidence to suggest that a crime of a terrorist nature has been committed, but due to alarming reports from the earlier period of hailing this vessel, which gave rise to suspicions of a number of crimes, including at least six murders committed by crew members and a dozen other unexplained incidents even before the final disappearance of the ship’s positional signal, the 5th Division has designated me to conduct the investigation.
Both I and the Special Purpose Investigative Group Number Forty-Three under my command, consisting of twenty people and a dedicated AI, have been embarked on the FSS Nha Mharthma, a sister ship to the lost vessel, which serves as the command ship for a six-vessel rescue group dispatched by the Federation. Following the granting of a special continuity by the First Nenuchom of the Federation, Group 43 has obtained the autonomy of an independent Command Directorate with respect to the operation’s command. Our task is to immediately secure possible evidence that would substantiate the commission of crimes under federal law and to perform on-site investigative actions along with the apprehension of suspects. In view of the loss of all navigational signals from the entire expedition, the Group has been designated to investigate whether crimes of a terrorist nature have been committed. For this reason, we also have the authority, by virtue of the same special continuity, to work within the investigative commission of the Federal Bureau of Astronautics, also established as part of this expedition. As far as possible, the Group is also obligated to participate in the expedition’s rescue efforts.
The vessels of our task force are following in the wake of two Autonomous Deep Space Rescue Units, the AFSS Thurma and the AFSS Gheuthe, which were sent out on the first day after alarm reports were received from the Ghonoris system. Both are equipped with high-profile Partial Intelligences and are doubly secured against identity attacks due to the previous activity of the Second Renegade.
Despite the almost immediate decision to launch the emergency procedure for rescue units, both autonomes were making hyperspace jumps from their then-current locations—that is, the Gha Besalis and Tharth Mhomath systems—bases considerably farther from our task force’s location at Lliansimi which is why their expected exit from hyperspace was only supposed to happen three weeks ago in universal time. Of course, remaining in multidimensional immersion, we have no information about their actions after exiting hyperspace.
The task force was augmented with additional escort ships due to the unknown nature of the events, the very great distance of the Ghonoris system from home bases, and the possible operation of hostile units. Ultimately, therefore, it consists, in addition to the mothership, of two multi-purpose frigates, the FSS Theneas and the FSS Dhu Gharmah, and corvettes: the system-level tactical reconnaissance FSS Hirtheme, the fire support FSS Besaoth, and the landing FSS Yhesrieh. It is, therefore, the most heavily armed rescue expedition in the history of the Federation that I am aware of.
This log constitutes an addendum to the formal report, in accordance with Section 13k of the implementing directive of the Joint Investigative Departments of the Outer Territories of the Federation, and will also, in its design, constitute a collection of the Lead Investigator’s personal, ongoing thoughts arising during the development of the investigation, for the purpose of submitting them for secondary cognitive analysis. Therefore…
He hesitated. He made a gesture to stop the recording.
“…therefore, I’ll have to pour out all my emotional grievances and personal musings here in this unserious format, just so someone can later rummage through my investigation and subject me and the other members of the expedition to neuro-cognitivist inspections…”
He made an indefinite gesture of resignation. He resumed recording.
…therefore, I will endeavor to include additional observations in these logs that escape the procedural requirements binding upon Group 43.
He closed the log with a wave of his hand and sat down on the bed. He was not satisfied with this, his eighth attempt. He couldn’t write journals; he was more accustomed to dry reports, and he kept his emotions to himself. And he had them in excess, even to the detriment of his duty. Besides, how could he describe what he felt? How could he even capture such an emotion? The entire expedition had vanished. A gigantic ship, auxiliary units, hundreds of people—and not even a hint of what might have happened.
He projected the Ghonoris planetary system onto the screen. A beautiful, healthy main sequence sun, spectral type F, simply exemplary. Five planets, all with low eccentricities, three gas giants in excellent positions to sweep up all intruders, and the remnants from the system’s birth neatly arranged in two stable asteroid belts—and a wide, warm ecosphere with two terrestrial-type planets. One of them, a bloated super-terrestrial, was Ghonoris proper.
A perfect system.
Just so far from any civilization.
131 light-years from Lliansimi itself—the final limes of the Federation so far, the last fortress before the void. He recalled his first impressions when he had arrived in that system four years ago—he felt as if he were standing on an edge of the known world, as if at the end of a map. As if the cosmos before him were blacker than the known systems behind his back. And now he was flying into that abyss.
The entire Exclusive Direction was impressive in its size. Hundreds of cubic light-years located beyond the last frontiers of the Federation, but separated from others by the Thasem Void, a region sparse in stars that had halted the natural, peaceful expansion of civilization. A few poorer systems didn’t encourage further exploration. In addition, it was separated from the Central Region by two spaces: the Kha’Naharsim Void and the Outer Void, a perfectly demarcated piece of the starry pie for the entire Federation. Nothing to do but colonize. But Gneo Zeleon had more important things on its mind for the last dozen years—the Thirteen Planets Crisis, the civil war on Thau, and new, intensified attacks by the Second Renegade. If you add to that a demographic collapse and an exodus to the Ring, you can’t deny that the Three Sisters still managed to come through it all unscathed.
Only recently had the Gneo Zeleon Federation emerged from the stagnation that was the consequence of all these events. It had emerged with no small momentum. It dusted off old agreements at the Forum, recalled the provisions of the IV Executive Protocol to the Vherh-II treaty, which formulated the superior role of Gneo Zeleon over any exploratory activities in the so-called Second Exclusive Exploration Direction. Our federal government may have given it a slightly exaggerated name and interpreted the Federation’s powers in an exceptionally broad manner, but ultimately, some action was finally taken, and the protests of other Forum participants quickly subsided. The construction of the Nha Kharma-class fleet of planetologists, economic privileges, and new colonization directives. Something had stirred, a new energy had spread through the federated systems. Timid colonists began crossing the Thasem Void with light jumps; transfer bases were built somewhere, the first cities arose, and a few corporate giants set up their forward refineries. But all the time, they were right next to Lliansimi. The Last Frontier—as they called it on the Three Sisters—didn’t want to stray far from home; it wanted to be close. Which meant it wasn’t yet home for its inhabitants.
It was only the Federal Colonization Program, established five years ago, that intended to launch large-scale government-level exploration. A new wave of colonization, as the media dubbed it. Six hundred autonomous probes sent out in less than two years. And as many as fifteen of them were aimed at Ghonoris. An extraordinary system, an extraordinary planet—large, perfectly similar to the Motherland, with a rich biosphere. An ideal planet that could serve as a counterbalance to the Ring. Immediately after the first telemetrics from the autonomes, the decision was made for a full-scale expedition. They designated the Nha Kharma, the first ship of its type, the flagship of the fleet of seven planetary giants. It carried with it 294 people, including many esteemed planetologists, astrobiologists, and specialists in other fields—there were so many of them on the Kharma that they were nicknamed the Nha Kharma Flying University. There was a big celebration before the departure; the ship, newly retrofitted in the system’s central shipyards, flew through a dozen Federation systems—officially, of course, to pick up scholars from many institutions, but the state also used the opportunity to hold a great parade and a show of its power. A great celebration of the coming of a new era—after which the ship submerged itself in the multidimensional silence.
And disappeared.