Breach

fiction by michael werneburg

2002.07.26

"Nah, it's not what you think. It's coming from down there," pointing at the planet behind her.

"How is that possible?"

She suddenly realized that she and the Ensign had only been woken by Mother ten minutes ago, and that Marl wasn't yet fully in uniform. She'd noticed how easily the Prince could become distracted when she wore just the simple halter-top that made up the first layer of her uniform. Wanting to avoid that discomfort, she stood and fetched her jacket. "They call it 'convergent music'; it’s like music is a natural law that emerges every time an intelligent species develops. Somewhere in that alien civilization, we’ll find everything from "Dancing Queen" to "Donguri Korokoro"."

The Ensign looked up at the planet above in renewed wonder.

She regarded the Prince's door, frustrated. "Where is that man? Have you scanned the cabin to check if he’s up?"

"May I?"

"Permission granted."

The Ensign typed at an invisible surface before him through his ocular heads-up display. "Sound asleep."

"How long have we been out of subtime?"

"Four hours."

"That's on top of a seven-hour sleep cycle?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Please don't call me that, Ensign. It makes me feel old."

"Oh! Apologies."

"So, two or three hours to come out of stasis, plus maybe eight or nine hours of sleep. He's in his late thirties, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes."

There was a part she liked coming up in the song they were hearing in the broadcast. She told the Ensign, "A curiously long sleep. Bring up the lights in his room and initiate a gentle white noise audio track, would you?"

"Yes, Lieutenant."

The music playing on the bridge did something that surprised her. "Oh, you hear that? They have moved to a minor key. That’s different from the human version of this song."

Hiram made his way back to her. "10:35. We have commenced the audio track to wake the Prince."

"I’ve sent the probes," she told him, sitting.

"I saw that in the automatic logs written by the probes," he confirmed. "Lieutenant, why are we still listening to this music?"

"I think it’s nice. And you must agree that it tells us something about these people?"

"That they're advanced enough to have colonized a planet is all we really need to know."

"I suppose so. But listen to the aggression in the song. And look at the lyrics," she gestured at the English translation on the screen. "Violence and nihilism. They're advanced, perhaps, but I doubt they are at peace."

"War?"

"Not unless they start something with us. It wouldn't be the first time a repository breach led to conflict. Who knows; perhaps it's a time of flux in their society."

He frowned and said, "It says here that when this planet was selected as a waste repository, it was in part because there were no known space-faring races within two hundred light years."

"It's one of the dangers of this business. We build the repositories, and some up-starts break into them."

"So why build on habitable planets? Why not just dump into some giant gas planet?"