Stranger Stars

10 November 1940

“You know what they say Petyr,” Jon said as he cranked the camera, with a grin on his face strongly influenced by the subject he was shooting, “Red skies at night, sailor’s delight!”


“They also say that it’s bad luck to have a woman aboard, and that certainly isn’t slowing you down.” Petyr nearly grumbled under his breath, but the click of his lighter and a sharp inhale of his cigarette cut the quip down to nothing perceptible. The sunset was stunningly beautiful, he thought—made all the more so by the fact that now, halfway through their journey south, they were finally approaching the border to the high pressure zone that had rendered their skies abnormally clear. On the horizon through which the sun was descending a thick bank of grey clouds hovered, a marine layer that had been held at bay and the absence of which had resulted in obscenely starry skies. Skies which the subject of Jon Warsch’s fascination had been likewise obscenely delighted with.

She laughed, clearly delighted with Jon’s attention. “You’re not much of a sailor though, Jon. I’m sure the weather is a bit more complex than that.”

“No,” Jon retorted with a grin, “but I am delighted regardless.” Behind him at a respectable distance, Petyr cringed. Why? Did he have to be so…that? For the last two months, ever since the roster of students and professors accepted for this expedition had been announced, Jon Warsch had been absolutely infatuated with Anna uff de Monteburgs, a blue blooded aristocrat’s daughter who delighted in moving from one social circle to the next and leaving in her wake a trail of heartbroken young men—and women, if the rumours were true—wondering what had happened and where they’d gone wrong. In Jon’s eyes, her appeal was irresistible—though Petyr wondered if ‘eyes’ was the most accurate bodypart to use to typify his condition—and to himself…

He was, of course, not interested in her. She was a woman. But to Petyr, she did have some redeeming characteristics—an incredibly keen astronomer and mathematician, Anna had a sharpness for numbers that potentially even exceeded her ability to woo suitors and yet keep them carefully disconnected from her own life. The rumors trickled out with her passing, but uff de Monteburgs paid little attention to them. Those who paid too much attention, like Petyr Rupp himself he conceded, suffered bad luck with a degree of consistency that even she, if she ran the numbers on it, would find unnatural.

Jon lowered the camera and grinned. The Mariner’s Star, which she had pointed out to him two nights prior, was clearly evident in the crimson afterglow of the sunset, and he pointed it out to her so she would commend him for spotting it while Petyr nursed his cigarette and begrudgingly slipped a hand into his pocket and slipped out a small book of notes. He turned away from the railing and slumped against the opposite wall, his back slipping along the metal until he settled onto the deck, and began writing. Jon and Anna could flirt all night long, he thought, though he knew they wouldn’t. They certainly hadn’t after a certain hour the night before. Amazing, he thought dryly, how an uff de Monteburgs could arrange for a little privacy on a ship like this.

Since they’d left Bonhaven behind and picked up their escort for their journey south, the journey had been fairly uneventful. Jon had divided his attention equally between Anna’s ass, tits and his own biology studies—the more scholastic ones, he amended with a smirk--which accordingly were probably suffering a little. Left to his own devices, he himself was focusing carefully on his chemistry work with the usual degree of precision—though a slightly nasty taste rose in his mouth. The lieutenant who ran the small chemistry lab aboard the ship—thoughtfully buried deep in the hull where the sea had the least effect—had discussed with him at length the first night a series of chemical equations he was interested in. The lieutenant claimed privately that the next wars would have to be fought with chemical weapons, and painted a bleak image of future conflicts where dead hulks were coated in lethal chemicals by air attacks and left to drift unmanned for months. He had humoured the man with few words, polite but curt, until he’d eventually moved on to more receptive audiences.

Petyr hated soldiers. He also hated the rich, the aristocratic, and the stupid. He was, he admitted privately, a surprisingly hateful young man—but there was much wrong with this world, and the poor were misused by the rich and the intelligent set one fool against another far too easily. He had only managed to claw his way into Bonhaven through sheer force of will and a head for books—his two brothers remained working on farms along the border—

“Look at that!” Jon shouted, and then Anna shouted instantly a cry of exultation that made Petyr glance up from his equations with a surprising degree of interest. There were more shouts going from across the ship, though few—perhaps a dozen people were on deck that weren’t in the employ of the Royal Confederated Kingdoms’ Navy. But those that were saw the light, literally, and then saw the light grow.

Overhead, moving from west to east, a trail of incendiary light was stretching out from one horizon towards the next. It was silent now, but as the seconds moved on a sound like thunder began to rise. The meteor was large, slowly throwing off fragments at an increasingly rapid pace, and was rapidly turning the dusk into daylight.

“The camera, Jon! Use the bloody camera!” Anna was shouting with a fierce tone well known to aristocratic sorts. Jon, not used to being commanded like this, obeyed blindly, cranking the camera swiftly and tracking the progress of the meteor across the heavens. She was talking rapidly about its approach—not steep enough to bounce off, but steep enough that it was liable to burn into nothingness before impacting the sea—and Petyr wondered as he watched if the dinosaurs had taken the time to look up on a particular day or if it’d passed unrecognized until a few minutes later.

Then, Petyr Rupp watched as the central cluster to the object—which he abruptly realized was not the asteroid he thought it had to have been (and perhaps his sight payed tricks on him?) almost imperceptibly shifted its trajectory. He watched it carefully, the sound of Jon and Anna fading out of his consciousness as the object—whatever it was—continued to streak east, descending into the growing dark. Once it was gone, Anna and Jon’s excited words reassumed their loud banter.

“That was phenomenal! How soon can you get it processed? We have a lab on board you know—Petyr! Petyr, you must process that—won’t you?” Anna asked as she rushed up on him, her voice abruptly changing from its previous commanding tone to a very conscious request?

Petyr blinked at her, the enthusiasm for the meteor—or whatever it had been—instantly having drawn all of her attention away from Jon, who though excited was beginning to suspect his night wouldn’t be as pleasant as he’d thought it might be.

“At this hour?” Petyr protested softly, closing his notebook and rubbing his temples. “You know we have a mandatory meeting tomorrow morning for role assignment once we reach the island—“

“Do it for me, won’t you?” Anna asked. She had pegged him pretty quickly as someone whom her persuasive abilities didn’t touch in the least, and Petyr’s political persuasions certainly didn’t ingratiate her to him at all either. At some level then, he relished the request—because he could say no. But then behind her, he saw Jon, beginning to realize that she wasn’t nearly as interested in him as he thought. And that was worth something, wasn’t it?

--oOo--

11 November 1940

“Good morning everyone! Hopefully you’re all beginning to get used to needing sea legs.” Doctor Vought, the head of the university team aboard the ship, began the following morning. “Captain Ross tells me we’ve been going through record amounts of seasickness medication these last few days.”


A short, forced chuckle. Then the real discussion began.

The 1940 Bonhaven Expedition was, officially, a mutually cooperative operation between the RCKN and the University of Bonhaven. In exchange for allowing the use—as it had traditionally for the last four years—of the Professor Kyle Reed for their research purposes, the students and professors aboard her would participate in a number of experiments requested by the navy, as well as give the navy a relatively rare opportunity to leave the relatively uneventful duties of coastal patrol and partake in deep sea operations. But this year, the mission had an alterior goal.

“With the support of the navy, the University of Bonhaven will be erecting a research station on the island, which will be manned and operated in tandem by a cooperative staff of naval personnel and university faculty as a weather station and naval outpost. Those students who were approached earlier with this opportunity were asked to keep their opportunity private until now as a matter of political precaution as rival powers may have had interest in the island and beaten us to the point of claiming it…”

The talk went on for a solid hour. Petyr, Jon and Anna didn’t have the opportunity to discuss what they’d filmed the night prior yet, and amongst talk of tasks—who would spend the first week shipboard assisting with the offloading of supplies, who would be ashore offloading, who would be building the collection of huts on the island—there was a silent and unspoken excitement quite separate from their peers. Petyr, quietly disgusted as he often was with the coopting of science for political purposes, was more interested in the film because it had confirmed what he’d seen—that the object was no meteor, but had changed directions midflight in a decidedly unnatural manner. Anna was excited too, but more so than the others in that now she could finally reveal that she was going to be one of the select few who’d be spending the next six months working on the remote little island, and Jon was far from excited—rather, the first cracks of a heartbreak were spider-webbing across his thoughts. Petyr didn’t quite understand why a socialite like herself would crave being stationed for half a year down there—perhaps there was a degree of family pride in a uff de Monteburgs being involved in what basically amounted to a land grab—but at least it had woken Jon up to the fact that his infatuation was not a wise one.

After the meeting was adjurned, the three met up hastily prior to attending to their duties.

“Did we get it? Does it show up? Anna asked quickly, starting to reach for the manila folder under Rupp’s arm but stopping when it was evident he wasn’t going to meet the gesture by giving it to her on the spot. Jon, tagging along in the background, looked something between hopeful, confused and sad.

“We did. But this isn’t the place to talk—“ Petyr began, before Anna insisted yet again. “Come on with it Petyr, don’t hold out on me!” Petyr Rupp looked past her for a moment, licking his lips while thinking of how to word his next sentence.

“This is more important than you realize Anna, and this is something we need to talk about privately. Jon,” he said and gestured, “we need to be somewhere quiet.”

--oOo—

So he showed them. Petyr Rupp skipped the first class of his life on the tenth of November, nineteen hundred and forty. In a darkened cabin full of bunks, Jon and Anna helped him set up the projector. Bedsheets were thrown over the bunkbed on one side of the cabin, and with the projector set up on the other side of the cabin they turned the lights off and watched the flickering ghosts of the evening prior—Anna grinning coyly at the camera, much to Jon’s pain now, and the sunset. Then came the lights.

Silently, in the dark, Rupp reached out towards the projector, and with practiced precision—he’d spend most of the night up and knew which frames fascinated most—switched to manual advance, slowing the film down. He said nothing as the meteor, passing between them and the mariner’s star, changed course. Leaving the frames afterwards paused, he clears his throat.

“Anna, you know of course that asteroids don’t do that.” He said simply to the darkened room.  There was a puff of light as he lit a cigarette, the ember of which glowed softly as he stepped in front of the projector and tapped the bed sheet. “That object is not of this earth in a way beyond what we previously imagined.”


Anna shifted her weight in the dark. “Coming from west to east like this implies a launch from the Republic of Tenebrae or the Canar Confederacy, and neither of them have a rocketry program..”

The light of the projector played across Rupp’s face as he brought the cigarette to his lips, saying nothing while Anna’s voice faded out. She was working through the logic now, Petyr knew, as he inhaled deeply.

“…and even then the length of the reentry would imply that its trajectory had been high orbital, which is another step into the theoretical…”

He exhaled, impatiently.

“It’s not of this world, Anna,” he said, his free hand tapping the sheet. “It’s not of this world and it can turn in defiance of the laws of physics. It’s expending energy to counter entropy and it’s not from around here.”

“So you’re saying it’s some kind of…vessel? A rocket from another world?” Jon asked uncertainly. Petyr nodded.

“We filmed some kind of a rocket last night. Something beyond any known technologies from this world for certain.”

“It didn’t look to be doing too well—“ Jon said, and Petyr laughed softly in agreement.

“No, no it didn’t.”

The talk then moved to its logical conclusion—where did it go? In the dark, Anna’s pencil scribblings scratched out softly as their discussions continued. Half an hour of talk passed, Anna silent save her pencil, Petyr’s cigarette dwindling away with soft, deliberate consumption, the smoke glowing like fog between the projector and the sheet. Then, without a word, she left.

--oOo—

12 November 1940

They arrived at the island shortly before sunset. This time most of the students and professors were on deck, eager to see land again. Among them, uff de Monteburgs, Warsch and Rupp met silently at the stern of the ship.

“I checked my watch when we saw it,” Anna explained, “and cross referenced that with an estimate of our position according to the navigator. Based on the relative angle between us and the Mariner’s Star, I can pin down where the central fall would have been centered, more or less.” She handed her work to Petyr, who was pulling his collar up against the wind. It was going to be a cold night. “It’s the Irju Islands. But this is where it gets interesting—“

“More so than rockets falling from the sky?” Jon quipped hopefully, but Anna was too intently focused on the matter to humour him. “The navigator says they’ve lost radio contact with the Irju broadcasts as of two nights ago.”

Petyr looked down for a moment, then back up at the island that was growing on the horizon. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all.”

He looked down again, then towards Jon. “Too odd to blame coincidence, I think.” He said aloud. “Jon, did you ever read that book by Sinks? G.H. Sinks, This Cosmic Conflict?”

Jon started to nod, but opened his mouth and spoke instead. “I’m surprised you read Sinks. You don’t seem like the fiction type.”

Petyr shrugged slightly.

“Science fiction. You never know when it might have something, really.”

Jon nodded again thoughtfully. “But there’s just one of these rockets this time, Petyr—in Sinks’ book, these pods land all over the world before the machines emerge from them. Irju would be a hell of an odd place to start an invasion.”

Petyr nodded, looking towards the island and beginning to walk back towards the crowd.

“Cat must have their tongue then. Pure coincidence, alien visitors and no desire to talk to anyone.”

“Petyr, where are you going?” Anna called after him. “You’ll sound mad, you know that right?”

“The chances of anything coming from out there are a million to one, he said!” Petyr Rupp called out triumphantly, quoting from Sinks’ book. “But still they come!”

--oOo--

13 November 1940

Doctor Uulliam Vought was busy that night. While Petyr Rupp was coming to terms with the fact that travelers from another world had in all likelihood crashed in the Irju Islands several thousand miles away, Vought was being photographed with several high ranking companions on the island, the flag sticking out of the barren rocky beach with the lights of the Professor Kyle Reed and the Goblin glimmering in the background. So Petyr Rupp had little luck finding someone to discuss the matter with formally, and the following morning Anna and Jon caught up to him, holed up in a familiar spot on the deck writing in his journal.

“Petyr, are you sure you want to do this?” Jon asked carefully. “They’ll make a laughingstock of you for this you know. Petyr Rupp, comes up from his chemistry lab talking of invaders from other worlds. They’ll think you took something and fell asleep atop Sinks’ book.”

“Anna uff de Monteburgs”, Petyr said without looking up from his writing, “we have Jon’s photographic proof, your calculations, and the silence coming out of the Irju. Beyond that, I am supposed to be loading boats, and you are supposed to be getting in one of them. I’ve skipped one day of class in my life, and you think I’m anything but serious about this?”

“It’s absurd!” Jon stammered.

“You’re absurd.” Petyr responded blandly, closing his book and standing up. “I’m going to find a way to talk to someone about this. Are you two going to help me, or are you going to play ostriches about it and bury your heads in the sand?”

Jon looked at Anna.

“He’s serious!”

Anna turned to Petyr and made an imploring gesture with her hands.

“Do you really think there’s…there’s no simpler explanation than alien invaders? It’s a small island in a quiet part of the world, Petyr. Who in their right mind would launch an invasion of this planet on the Irju Islands?’

Petyr said nothing for a moment, before conceding. “Not very likely. But it did appear to be breaking apart, didn’t it? Perhaps it was crashing. Anyway, the least I can do is have this forwarded to the astronomy department at the university—

“—you’ll ruin me! Petyr Rupp, you’ll ruin me!” Anna protested wide eyed. “Attach my name to it and they’ll make a laughing stock of—“

“Anna, they’ll think you’re brilliant. They’ll know you’re brilliant. You,” he said, “Jon and I will all be known as the people who blew the whistle first on this. There’s no other logical option. I promise you, this isn’t a mistake. This is almost predestined. We’re being thrust into something great and cosmic. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”

--oOo—

Later that day, the chain of events began. No one wanted to hear them until Petyr Rupp, who apologized before doing so, punched the commander of the Professor Kyle Reed in the chest—meagerly, as it turned out in retrospect. Thrown in the brig, the captain and Doctor Vought were summoned.

There, from behind bars, he explained quiet calmly, nursing a bloody nose, that an alien craft had crashed in the Irju Islands, and that he had proof of it. With Anna and Jon on the opposite side of the bars with the captain and the doctor, Rupp unfolded the story.