Chapter 1

SUBJECT: Oasis System Rift Gate Control, Spec. Carver

WARNING: UNSCHEDULED TRANSIT.

WARNING: TRANSPONDER INACTIVE.

WARNING: TRANSIT SPEED BELOW SAFE LIMITS.

“WARNING”, the transit console blared for the fourth time before being forcibly silenced by a harried Transit Control Officer Carver. “What in the fuck is this? Derrick, wake up and look at the console!” 

Derrick, Carver’s supposed shift supervisor, was fast asleep behind his station. The warnings and shouting apparently weren’t enough to break through his fancy new noise-cancelling headphones. Carver didn’t blame him- they regularly took turns sleeping through the long periods of nothing-to-do when there were gaps in the transit schedule. And there were always gaps out here.

Carver turned back to look at the console just as another warning sounded, this time for an automated comms hail being ignored by whoever just came through the gate. And sure enough, someone had come through. About 50 meters in front of the gate’s transit membrane sat a lone ship moving at an irresponsibly slow 12 meters per second. The computer helpfully marked it as “UNIDENTIFIED SHIP”. 

“Derrick!” Carver shouted again as he threw a stylus across the small workspace, hitting Derrick in the side of the head.

“AH! What…”, Derrick began to protest before his eyes caught the red flashing warnings emanating from his display. “What is this? How long have they been there?” Derrick asked soberly. He pulled the headphones off of his head and held them to his chest, his expression flashing from anger to shame to bewilderment.

“It just came through, and way too slow too. Computer has it at 12 meters a second.” Carver looked over the data coming in from the array of active sensors aboard the gate’s control center. “I’m not sure it’s a ship; the computer says it is but there’s not supposed to be anyone coming through for another what, almost six months? And there’s no transponder. Or drive signature. And it’s going crazy slow.”

“Yeah,” Derrick replied, “computer’s not getting a hull profile match either.” 

“WARNING”, both consoles lit up yet again, “SENSOR QUIET ZONE VIOLATION. BE ADVISED-“ Carver silenced the alert and quickly toggled off audible alarms.

Quiet zone violation? The damn thing is running a high power sensor sweep. You aren’t supposed to run active sensors this close to a rift gate, every spacer knows that. It’s outer space 101. Active sensors this close to other active sensors confuses everything. You’re also never supposed to transit without an approved flight plan. Or without a transponder. Or that damn slow.

“Okay it’s a ship,” Carver proclaimed while selecting the unidentified ship icon on his display and hitting the comms button. “Unidentified ship, this is the Oasis system rift gate control center. Disable active sensors and identify yourself.” Carver turned back to look at Derrick, who gave an unhelpful shrug and silently mouthed I don’t know. Carver pressed down the comms button again, “if you are suffering a communications failure, accelerate to 500 meters per second heading towards the formation of safe haven navigation buoys.” 

Carver lifted his finger off the comms button and turned his head to face Derrick. “This doesn’t make any sense, this is like the last place you just wander into. It takes forever to get here and for what?” Both men stared at each other, the whole situation being entirely bizarre. The Oasis system is basically a dead end rest stop. Oasis III, the system’s one borderline-habitable planet had at one time been a promising candidate for colonization, but now the whole place is on lockdown for biological hazards. It never even got it’s own name. Smugglers don’t even come into the system. Every six standard months a supply convoy for the fleet security flotilla comes through, and the occasional group of fleet ships stop by on their journey to the furthest reaches of known space, but they always have a scheduled transit time. Not only that, but to get to the rift gate you’d have to travel for months in rift space, and there’s nothing else out this far. It’s not like you miss your exit and use Oasis to turn around.

“Alright, I’m hailing Captain Russo.” Derrick was standing now and tucking in his uniform shirt, not wanting to embarrass himself in front of a fleet captain on his first day of real work since rotating into this post. “I’m thinking the ship has a bunch of structural damage or something, and thats why it’s flying so slow and the computer can’t recognize it. They’re probably going active sensors to warn other ships that they’re flying around out here. I think they probably need rescue.”

“Yeah, that seems plausible,” Carver turned to his workstation monitors and toggled the display from the simplified transit control view to the optical sensor view. LiDAR and hyper spectral sensor data from the safe haven buoys and the control center’s sensor clusters painted a three-dimensional view of the unidentified ship. Derrick started talking to some member of Russo’s staff over the comm link; Carver tuned it out and zoomed in on the view of the ship.

It was unlike anything Carver had seen before. Humanity had been building space going ships for a long time and the general design philosophy hadn’t changed much. Longer than they are wide. Engines at the rear. Studded with navigational lights and fuel tanks and cargo containers. This ship wasn’t like that at all. It looked like some sort of mutated sea creature, like an octopus with its tentacles fully extended and angled backwards away from a tiny head. It was totally chaotic at first glance, but the more Carver looked at it the more symmetry revealed itself. Twelve limbs, with some sort of protrusion sticking forwarding from the joints between each pair. A rough cylinder in the middle with what looked like hundreds of tiny antenna sticking out of the front of it. Carver zoomed in to get a better look. 

Suddenly, the ship turned invisible. Carver shook his head in disbelief and changed the display back to transit control view, which was a simplified view of space around the rift gate. A red banner lit up around the console and a red exclamation mark with the text MAXIMUM SAFE SPEED EXCEEDED flashed in red characters next to the unidentified craft. In the space of a blink the thing had gone from basically a standstill to careening dangerously towards the safe haven buoys, way too fast to slow down in time to make use of the designated rescue space. 

“Holy hell, yeah! Get Russo on this!” Carver looked at the readout again, not believing his eyes. There’s no engine signature! It’s not just that the computer doesn’t recognize it; there’s no engine signature at all. The ship’s drive was, apparently, reactionless, exotic. Another warning flashed on the console, a second ship emerged from the rift gate in the same spot the first had entered. This one also traveling at a snails pace. No transponder, no nav lights, nothing normal at all. 

The control room lit up with red light. Derrick had hit the station lockdown, apparently startled by the sudden activity. It didn’t seem real to Carver. This is like some kind of weird dream he thought, where logic doesn’t exist. This had been the most boring post of his career by a long shot. So boring, in fact, that his previous supervisor with the Transit Authority had practically begged him to take the post and offered bonuses and perks for taking a short-term rotation, only three years instead of the standard five. It seemed like a great deal at the time. It did not seem like a deal at all anymore. 

The door to the control center cycled open and three angry looking people stormed in, the other shift’s control officers and the station engineer. Derrick stood, turned to face them, and then straightened and rolled back his shoulders in an active attempt to fix his posture. He spoke, “two unidentified ships have come through the gate without filing flight plans. One just shot off towards the safe haven and the other is lingering around the transit membrane. The fast one has a reactionless drive, I guess. No engine plume. They’re both extremely weird.”

The anger melted off the other crew as realization of the potential of the situation settled in their minds. Everyone started talking at once, the other shift supervisor hurriedly giving advice to Derrick while the engineer yelled about the active sensors. The other shift’s transit officer, Carver’s peer, kept asking to the room, “are they fleet ships? Have we asked if they’re fleet ships?” Carver’s attention was drawn back to the monitor. 

The second ship had now zoomed off towards the first, which had pulled off a miraculous deceleration, stopping a few dozen kilometers from the safe haven. A unidentified weird ship had taken it’s place by the transit membrane. Captain Russo, the squadron commander for the three fleet ships that made up the gate’s security detachment, was apparently aware of the situation now. Carver could hear him talking loudly over Derrick’s workstation comm link while Derrick tried to brief both him and the other shift at the same time. It wasn’t going well. 

Carver had always held pride in how well he’d done his job as a transit officer. He’d held a five year rotation on a central system gate right out of the academy and was on a supervisory track. Controlling traffic on a busy gate network was a high-stress adventure in problem solving; everyday a different puzzle to be solved. It was mentally exhausting, but personally rewarding. Carver took a great deal of satisfaction in making order out of the chaos. And now, even though the situation was completely unprecedented for Oasis, the professional side of himself that Carver hadn’t needed since arriving in system took over. 

He immediately flagged the space around the gate network as a no-fly security zone, and got to work coordinating the system. He sent a priority notification to the rest of the fleet back at Oasis III and opened a direct SAECOM channel, the FTL communications system he was the hub operator for in Oasis, between Russo’s squadron and the flotilla’s admiral. He started preparing a sensor data package to send out to everyone, but just as he started choosing data to attach, a warning lit up across the screen. The room went silent.

WARNING! WEAPONS DISCHARGE IN SECURITY ZONE.

The first and second of the weird ships had stopped, flanking two sides of the safe haven buoys. The third ship was accelerating towards them, while a fourth ship had come through the gate. The first two ships were firing on the buoys with some sort of beam weapon. Each shot erasing the targeted buoy from existence. 

Captain Russo’s squadron of three ships normally loitered around the gate in a loose formation intended for a rescue operation. It had been years since an actual security action had taken place in the system, and, until just a few minutes ago it seemed unlikely that one would happen again. All three ships started turning towards the intruders, burning their main engines and RCS thrusters. 

Triton, a frigate, normally waited about 200 kilometers out and another hundred kilometers spinward from the edge of the controlled space around the front of the gate. It was the closest to the unidentified ships. From behind the gate, the patrol cruiser Warlock with Captain Russo aboard started burning for a better angle on the intruders while the last ship, an ancient destroyer, waited from a vantage point directly in front of the gate a few thousand kilometers away. 

The first two unidentified ships finished destroying the dozen buoys and then turned towards Russo’s ship, which was just starting to crest over the top of the huge, flat disc that was the rift gate. The other two ships formed together and angled towards the Triton. A fifth unidentified ship came through the gate at a snails pace. Warnings floated across the screen. Everyone was still, watching in feverish anticipation. 

The fighting started, and ended, in an instant. The unidentified intruders fired beam weapons at the Triton, cutting it in half lengthwise. The Warlock crested over the top of the gate and was hit by a beam amidship by the fifth intruder that had just come through, and was then speared longways down the middle by another beam. The energy beams fired by the intruders pulsed on and off like a strobe light and danced side to side as it burned through it’s target. The ships of the security squadron were ripped into pieces instantly, their thick armor apparently presenting no meaningful defense against the energy weapon unleashed on them.

Carver’s mouth went dry and his vision narrowed. Panic edged around his senses. This could NOT be happening. Oasis, out on the edge of fucking nowhere was under attack by something, some unknown bunch of freak ships shaped like goddamn squids or something. Why here? It does’t make any sense! There’s nothing here! And out of the rift? That’s entirely unheard of. The rift lane connecting Oasis to the Dominion is a pocket dimension, there’s nothing alive in there. That meant that these ships must have come through a gate in another human system, but there hadn't been any warning. All the gates are connected with FTL comms, there would have been a warning if another gate was under attack. How was this happening?

The third and final surviving member of the security fleet, the destroyer Palisade, launched a barrage of missiles at the two intruder ships closest to it and fired it’s massive spinally mounted railgun. The railgun dart hit one of the intruder ships and blew two of it’s tentacle-like arms off. A spray of dozens of small objects emerged from the other intruder ship and raced towards the missiles. Just before impact with the missiles, the objects detonated into a pulse of energy that detonated the missiles’ warheads. The Palisade launched another flurry of missiles and fired it’s big railgun again, hitting the damaged intruder ship a second time and scattering it into a half-dozen pieces. A sixth intruder ship came through the gate. They all rushed towards the Palisade.

“STOP!” A woman’s voice cried out, Carver turned to see Kate, the A-shift supervisor pointing a finger at Derrick. “These are fucking alien ships and you know it. Look at them! They have reaction-less drives that are way faster than ours! And those energy beam weapons are killing our ships in a single shot! We have to pull the failsafe!”

She was right, Carver didn’t want to face it, for fear that thinking of it might somehow manifest it into being true. Oasis was under attack by unknown alien warships. They completely and utterly outclassed the fleet ships put here to protect this system. And they came out of the rift. The procedure for this occasion is pretty straightforward; warn everyone and destroy the gate to deny the enemy of one of humanity’s greatest assets, and access to the rest of the Dominion. 

“Self destruct the station? Are you fucking crazy? Kill ourselves? We don’t even know what’s happening out there!” Derrick screamed at Kate. He was manic. Panicking. 

“They’re coming through the gate, we have to shut it down! If we stop it now we give the rest of the fleet a chance to get organized and fight them!” Kate yelled back. Carver looked at his monitor, in the handful of seconds he had turned to watch the argument unfold he’d missed the demise of the Palisade, which was now in three different sections floating aimlessly away from each other. One of the alien ships fired it’s beam, cutting the pieces into smaller and smaller sections. A seventh alien ship had come through while they were distracted.

“She’s right”, Carver said, his voice far too quiet for anyone to hear. Carver cleared his voice and shouted to be heard, “she’s right! Kate’s right! Russo is dead, whoever these fuckers are they’re still coming, one at a time. If we don’t shut this thing down now who knows how many will come through?”

“Oh I can’t believe this! Carver! You’re supposed to-“, Derrick began but trailed off as his eyes turned to the destruction on his workstation display. They were alone, standing against an apparently endless horde of alien ships. He looked up at Carver, eyes wide. “I’m supposed to- I-,” Derrick scrunched his face and then looked at the ceiling and let out a half-sigh, half-cry. He knew they were right.

Carver turned back to his station. Kate ran to his side. 

“Did you send a sensor package to the admiral?” Kate questioned.

“Yeah, sent. And I sent a mayday back to the central system with sensor data from the battle,” Carver responded.

“Has anyone responded to you?” Kate’s eyes were intense and determined.

“No. Not yet. I have confirmed receipt from both the fleet and the central system, but no one has said anything back yet.” Carver met her gaze with his own best impression of stoicism. 

“They’re probably trying to sift through the data. No one is expecting this. We have to do it now.”

Yeah, the failsafe. We have to do it now. An eighth ship came through the gate. Five of the functional alien warships had finished killing everything to their liking and had formed into a circular cluster around the gate. A sixth was edging in close to the gate’s control center, less than a hundred kilometers away and getting closer. 

 Carver was an exceptional transit officer. He always brought order to chaos. He always did the right thing, even when it was the hard thing. The failsafe was four nuclear devices built into the gate’s ring like structure, with one directly under the control superstructure. Four was overkill, the rift gate was a fragile creation.

Carver stared down the approaching alien ship like a predator about to leap on his prey. He pushed the failsafe key into a slot on the side of his terminal. Kate did the same with hers. They turned their keys in unison, no hesitation.

In an instant, the gate was annihilated by nuclear fire. With it, any meaningful connection between Oasis and the Dominion was gone, severed. The approaching alien ship dying alongside the doorway back home. Oasis, the furthest point of human control in the galaxy was now entirely cut off from the rest of the Dominion. 

The remaining six alien ships formed together, and began sliding down the gravity well.