Kellen hesitated. “I will send data back to Central Command, but it will take time to get a response back. In the meantime, all we can do is assess. We are only seeing one side of the situation.”
“So, you concur that we need to send a team to the surface,” Tim said.
Kellen hesitated, then nodded with clear reluctance. “If Dr. Walker weren’t down there? I’d advise a wait and see for now, but…we need to ascertain his condition and situation.”
“Hasn’t he acquired a side chick?” Lt. Dish asked.
“A…” Riina looked at her.
“A girlfriend?” Lt. Dish prompted. “What about her?”
“It’s not as if we haven’t evacuated at risk individuals before,” Riina said, “but I believe there is her father. And she has family. It could get complicated very quickly.”
Tim found he could grin. “Because that’s never happened before.”
Riina looked at him with her eyes and smiled as they both remembered their mission with General Halliwell and how that had gone.
The moment of connection helped. For just that second, he felt they were friends again.
10
They’d had to move quickly. Their point-of-no-return was coming up faster than Riina liked.
The shuttle had been kitted out with first contact kits, both physical and as much data as the system had space for, but now they were adding weapons loadouts, which she didn’t like at all, but accepted were necessary.
Captain Kellen seemed resigned to being left alone on the Quendala, though Riina had the sense he wished he could come with them.
Veirn was sending a smaller function of itself with the shuttle. It was hoped that it would be able to help them maintain contact and also serve as a backstop to the fact that they were all human and prone to errors.
Not that it could shut them down. But it could try to talk them down. And it could assume control of the shuttle if something catastrophic happened.
Lt. Dish appeared in the launch bay, flanked by Tim and Trac, who seemed to be carrying her gear for her. Trac didn’t have gear—unless the skitterfin counted as gear—but Tim did or should, despite his remaining cybernetics.
The warmth from their brief moment of real contact faded at the sight of the lieutenant. Like she and Tim, Lt. Dish had donned Garradian interstellar flight gear—rated for in and out of atmosphere. But she didn’t look like them in that gear. She looked…more.
Riina suppressed a sigh and turned back to checking their gear.
“I believe the alien entity deployed an electromagnetic pulse against the planet,” Veirn said.
Riina paused and glanced at the others, but they didn’t react. So Veirn was speaking just to her. She waited until they’d moved deeper into the shuttle and said, “So it disabled their electronics. Power, etc?”
“Correct. The blackout appears to be planet-wide. If I am reading the data correctly, this would not just shut down their electricity but ground all their vehicles.”
That would restrict movement and affect communications. Dr. Walker had been left with a land flyer, but that would be down as well.
“Do you think we’ll be affected by it when we pass under the entity?”
“This shuttle is protected from EM weapons, but it will make communicating with Dr. Walker and Harold…challenging.”
“We know where they were supposed to be,” Riina said. “We’ll have to start there, I guess.”
“We also have a known location he was communicating from, but it is a considerable distance from our rendezvous point.”
Riina blew out a breath. “And they might have trouble traveling after the EM weapon was used. I guess we have to assume it was a weapon? A hostile act?”
“I am always,” Veirn said, “reluctant to make assumptions. It is against my programming to assume. However, I am able to postulate that it appears to be a hostile act.”
The AI was threading a very small needle there, but Riina couldn’t argue with its logic.
