“Captain?” You keep your voice level and the entire Command crew grits their teeth harder. You all feel it like a buzzing in your jaw, like bass pounding in your ears but only in the temples and your chest.
Elian has put a hand towel in between his teeth and Dr.Jones can’t stop staring at him as he does his tasks around it.
“I don’t know what it is,” Hannah and Mali have been working on the resonance frequency for two minutes already but the instruments just keep saying nothing there over and over again. Hannah has started getting angry but Mali just doggedly continues scanning. She glares at her wife and Hannah turns back to you. “Commander what do we do?”
You look back at Captain Diresko, who still hasn’t moved in his seat, staring out the view screen window at the nothing floating in the blackness of space. The sensors show no ships of any kind, the encounter on record offering no insights into what caused the Robinsons ship to explode a circadian cycle ago in this very stretch of space.
“This is what exploded their ship.” Dr.Jones had bargained for his brother Bacari to be on the crew as miscellaneous staff in exchange for Jones accepting the Chief Medical Officer position. Bacari has taken to the ship well. You write like him. Yet when his voice rings across the bridge, grating on your eardrums, you wish with every fiber of your being that you had bargained for the SECOND best CMO for your ship and not taken his brother along.
“How?” Elian, being the only one able to deal with the Jones siblings with any degrees of success, has pulled the damp hand towel out of his mouth to speak. His husband looks pained.
“I’ll tell you how,” Captain Diresko snarls. “Mr.Roque, fire up all torpedoes.”
“Um?” Elian Roque turns to you instead of obeying, smart man that he is. You change your mind about letting the Jones Brothers on your ship, because they came with the best Gunner in the fleet, and the best third in command you could have asked for.
“What are we shooting, sir?” You make your voice calm and professional while the buzzing in your jaw intensifies.
“Everything!” Captain Diresko slams a fist on his arm rest. “Fire in all directions!”
“Open all hailing frequencies,” you manage to say, and Mali hastens to comply, the little red light turning on to indicate you’re broadcasting. “Attention foreign object, your frequency is vibrating a compound known as hydroxyapatite, commonly found in our species. Please retreat or disable your frequency and we can open communications.”
There is no reply. You wait, engines idling, The Allegienne floating through space.
The vibrating in your mouth grows worse, like your teeth are chattering.
You hear Elian arm the torpedoes, the little ding-ding-ding indicating he’s armed the most powerful warheads you have.
Your head is about to split open. The vibrating is in your ears, your shoulders, the back of your throat. You feel like you’re going to suffocate.
“Fire!” Captain Diresko slams both fists on his armrests.
Elian frees the torpedoes in all directions, the gyroscopic targeting sending bright flashes of light streaking away from you like rays from the sun.
The explosion happens so close it throws a shockwave into the Allegienne and you all nearly fall out of your seats. There’s the groaning of metal and the popping of successive secondary explosions and Hannah is quickly activating engines so you pull away to port.
As you swing around, screen lighting up with the view you left behind, you see the Carteran ship, its hull peeled apart like a stuck pig. It took the torpedoes at point blank range and it’s oblong shape now looks more like a crushed can from the depressurization.
“How did they get so close?” Bacari is helping Lianne of the floor where she’d fallen.
“No idea,” Mali is doing calculations again, Hannah over her shoulder keeping the view target on the Carteran ship as you pull around to a better angle.
“Their weapons were charged,” Elian sits back in his gunner position, the lower lumbar support pressing up and correcting his posture automatically. “But their life support system and primary power is now offline. We hit square on.” You like Elian because he sounds grim about the shot where most gunners would be proud of their victory. Elian is the best gunner in the fleet but he doesn’t revel in the killing.
“How’d they get so close?” Bacari asks again like he didn’t just say that. You have a headache again.
Wait a second.
“The buzzing is gone,” you stand up and move over to the view screen, and for a single moment there’s silence on the bridge as you all listen to the blissful quiet.
The torpedo bays ding to indicate they’re ready to fire again.
“Shhhhh,” Elian coaxes the ship, dismissing the notification lovingly. There’s another beat of no sound, like stepping outside after a concert. Like coming up for air after diving deep. Like stepping into air conditioning on the hottest day.
Elian exhales in relief. Everyone shares smiles.
“So they were making the buzzing sound,” Captain Diresko finally says, breaking the joyous atmosphere.
“Seems that way,” Hannah turns to Mali who is already bringing her findings up on screen. “Thank God it’s over though I was going nuts.”
“Did the Robinsons ship self donate?” Elian is examining the data on screen closely. “Maybe the buzzing is like Mars Attacks.”
“No.” You shake your head and use a laser pointer to gesture on screen to the scorch marks on the bit of hull that was recovered. “Let’s cross reference these with Carteran weapon systems.”
There is less chatter on the bridge as everyone works for a while. Hannah keeps you in a stable orbit around the Carteran ship as you enjoy the quiet and try to figure out what happened.
You scan a box on the Carteran ship, but the box is the size of a small hangar and when you scan it, your system shows errors or nothing at all. Using an energy probe on it makes your teeth rattle, which makes everyone angry at Mali until Hannah gets mad at them for it.
You all savor the silence.
In a senior staff meeting later, you determine that the horrible buzzing was caused by the box on the Carteran ship and that it was most probably their stealth tech. None of your instruments work on it.
Elian scowls.
“No wonder Carterans are so good at conquering systems. They never see them coming!” He labels the box ‘stealth tech (buzzy) on the diagram until Mali corrects it to say ‘stealth tech (hydroxyapatite frequency resonant)’.
You’re all formulating the report to send to HQ about the new stealth tech and the sudden interests the Carterans have in Terran space when your teeth start vibrating again. Your head snaps up from where you were editing and you make horrified eye contact with Elian. It isn’t even the connotations of the horrible pressure in your ears that upsets you. Oh no, you’d fight a thousand wars to make the horrible buzzing in your head stop.
“Oh hell no,” Captain Diresko snarls, even as Hannah confirms there are no ship signatures anywhere near the Allegienne. “Mr.Roque!”
Elian is already leaping into his gunner chair.
“Not today, Satan!” Elian slams his thumbs onto the gun turret trigger even as your headache comes back in full force.
You can’t even reprimand him for jumping the gun on stopping that horrible bone vibrating sensation. You’d start wars and destroy systems to stop that pressure on your skull.
Bacari has taken out a bag of chips and as he crunches loudly. You consider firing him out a torpedo bay too.