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Chapter 3

Captain Steiger

copyright (c) 2016 FarmWolf's player

Aboard KNV Ceokera, survey orbit of Polaris

Petra, Kurt Halley, and I materialized in a smaller forest clearing than the one we had seen. Steiger and two other officers were there to meet us. One was solid black, in a deep green uniform like Steiger's, the other was cinnamon in a deep blue uniform.

Over the light breeze rustling the tree leaves and insect and bird noises, Steiger said, "Welcome aboard the Ceokera. I'm Captain Steiger," and then indicated the black-furred officer. "This is my first officer, Commander Andrea Sitka. And this," Steiger said, indicating the cinnamon officer, "is Krena Kelvin Sirta, my science officer."

To this point, the universal translator had done an excellent job. But, for some reason, it had trouble with Sirta's rank.

"Krena?" I inquired.

"It is a rank between Lieutenant and Commander," Sirta clarified.

Ah. The word for Sirta's rank simply did not exist in English.

"We call that 'Lieutenant-Commander,'" I told Sirta.

Steiger approached me. "Allow me to greet you in the tradition of my people." The captain bent forward slightly, nose pointing directly at my face. I stepped out of the transporter area and bent toward Steiger, lining up our noses, stopping a few inches away.

"How's this?" I asked.

"Perfect," Steiger replied.

We straightened up, and then Steiger repeated the greeting with Kurt and Petra.

"A question, if I may?" Kurt ventured. "This is just for clarification, and you don't have to answer if it's too personal, but Captain Steiger, are you male or female? I don't know about your species, but humans can find it strange to interact with someone whose gender they don't know."

Steiger gave a small smile. "I'm female," she said, "as is Commander Sitka. Krena Sirta is male. I apologize for not clarifying it earlier. It's been a long time since I've dealt with another species. We could smell that you and Peter were male the moment you arrived.

"Is your sense of smell that good?" Kurt inquired.

"Certainly," replied Steiger. "But let's begin the tour. There will be an overview of our species later on."

Commander Sitka stepped forward and gestured to the edge of the clearing. "This way, please," she said.

A wide path began at the edge of the trees. After about a dozen meters we'd ended up in pairs; Steiger with me, Sitka with Petra, and Sirta with Kurt. As we walked I gave cursory glances to the alien crew members, as they did to us. Steiger and her science officer were a little shorter than my six-foot height. The first officer, Sitka, was a little over five feet tall. For the next few minutes, we walked down the path, past interesting-looking compounds and open areas, some of which Sitka identified for us.

"This leads to one of our main cargo bays," she said, indicating a stockade with a stout-looking door on our left. A short distance further, she said of a trail that branched off to our right, "A shuttle dock is that way."

Though the forest--ship, I reminded myself--was quite large, we didn't meet anyone else right away. We'd been walking for almost five minutes when the trees began to thin out and I could glimpse what looked like cliffs ahead. Then the trees stopped and we entered a river valley.

"We're in the recreation park for this section of the ship," Sitka explained. "Over there is a ramp that leads to the next level. And you can't see it from here, but the ramp continues to the level below us."

"How many levels are there?" Kurt wondered.

"The Ceokera has ten levels, each with a different ecozone," Sirta replied.

"And what is all this stuff, are we actually in a forest?"

"Yes and no. This is all functional biological machinery, but it's holo-based. We can make the inside of the ship look like anything we want and it is indistinguishable from the real thing."

As we continued into the clearing I noticed more details. Katarans were swimming in the river, sunning on rocks, climbing the cliffs, and running up a steep trail on all fours.

Steiger, Sitka and Sirta each gave a short howl as we approached. The Katarans in the park barked and howled back. Some of them stopped what they were doing and came over to us, greeting their officers with deferential barks and yips. Steiger introduced us and the crew members observed us with curiosity for a few seconds before returning to their previous activities.

"I just thought of something, Captain," Kurt said to Steiger. "I can see that you use paths to get where you're going in this ship, but I haven't noticed any signs. How do you know what leads where? Is there a map everyone memorizes or is it standardized for you or do you have GPS implants or what?"

"Do parts of your planet look like this?" she asked him.

"Yes."

"How do you find your way around them?"

"Well, ours have signs, but if I've been to one enough times, I know where everything is."

"Well, that's how it works here," Steiger said. "We know which path leads where, and we can smell and hear what's happening at maybe greater distances than you can. There are signs too, and the crew can call them up if needed and they can be turned on in an emergency."

Commander Sitka stretched out an arm ahead of us. "Our next stop is Engineering. If you'll come this way please."

When we left the rec park Sitka led us to the down ramp.

"Engineering is at the bottom of the ship. We'll be going down several levels to get there," she said. "Can you run?"

"What do you say, Kurt, up for a jog?" I asked.

"Let's go!" he said.

The ramp was a wide, gentle spiral worked into part of the "cliffs". It appeared large enough that two small groups could easily pass each other. Below the level we just left was another, denser forest. Below that was wooded hills, then wooded mountains, then jagged naked peaks and ridges, until the ramp bottomed out in a cave.

As our eyes adjusted to the dimness, we saw dark regular shapes illuminated by glowing moss. I sensed the vibrations of the place and as I looked closer, I saw massive equipment, installed in regular patterns, dominating the area. After a moment's observation, I realized that these pieces of equipment were transwarp reactors, but on a massive scale. They seemed far more massive than the Lindbergh's, even considering the Ceokera was much bigger. How fast could she go?

"The Ceokera's maximum cruising speed is about Transwarp Factor 50," Steiger answered when I inquired. "That's fifty thousand times the speed of light. If we pushed the engines, she might top out at about fifty-five or sixty."

"When did your species achieve transwarp flight?" Kurt inquired.

"We operated the first successful transwarp drive system a little over a century ago. It took nearly ten years to develop, mostly from the challenges in formulating a suitable alloy for the intermix injector assembly. Just coming up with an injector that worked took over three years. That was the single most challenging part of the project, I think."

"You seem to know a lot about the program. But I suppose it's only to be expected that a captain know a great deal about the important systems of her ship."

"It's more than that," Steiger replied. "I was the chief engineer on the transwarp project. This system is called a Steiger transwarp drive."

"You developed it yourself?"

"No, not by myself. A while after enlisting in the Kataran Navy, I volunteered for the program and soon showed my value as a system designer. Before long, I was in charge of the design process, and just as active in it as everyone else. I did much of the development on the injector." She indicated Sirta. "Kelvin was my primary design assistant." With a gesture at Sitka, she said, "Andrea commanded the experimental ship's support crew. And my mate, Felix, was the chief pilot. He flew that ship most of the time."

I found this fascinating. "Your mate was a test pilot? I would like to meet him."

"Unfortunately that is not possible. You were accurate when you said Felix was a test pilot. He died when the Experimental imploded shortly after the first successful transwarp flights."

This revelation was unexpected, and sobering. "I'm sorry to hear that, Captain Steiger."

"Thank you. Let's continue with the tour."

At the last row of propulsion equipment a team of engineers appeared to be running diagnostics. Steiger greeted them and said, "Silva, how's it going? You got the upgrade done, I see."

"Yes, but now there's another problem. The coolant sequencer is glitching at random. We'll have to pull out the thing we just put in."

"And why wasn't the coolant sequencer repaired when you had access to it?"

"Well, Captain, it wasn't malfunctioning then."

Steiger smiled, barked a short laugh and said, "I know how that goes." To all of us she said, "I had the same sort of thing happen with the Experimental. I'd just finished installing a rebuilt transwarp core when the injector module malfunctioned. I had to pull everything back out to get at it. On the second Experimental, we made sure we could get at everything without bothering anything else." She turned back to the chief engineer. "When we get back to spacedock, I might take a leave of absence to redesign these engines. I don't know what people are thinking when they put them together this way."

We left the engineering staff and a short walk brought us to another transporter clearing, except here it was made out of rocks, not trees.

"We can move throughout the ship using a network of hardwired transporters," Sitka explained.

We grouped ourselves in the middle, Steiger gave it the destination, "Level Eight, Meeting Spot Five," and the air became suddenly blurry. When it cleared we looked out at a rolling mixed-grass prairie.

Following Steiger's lead, we strolled along another wide path toward a creek. We made our way down a trail cut into the bank and saw a group of rocks in the shade of an overhanging shelf. As we seated ourselves, the surface of the stones contoured to cradle our bodies.

"You said there are ten decks, er, levels on the Ceokera," Kurt began. "May I know what is on each of them?

"Certainly," Sitka replied. "You've seen what was on Levels One through Five; caves, high-altitude mountains, low-altitude mountains, ancient mountains, old-growth forest, and middle-age forest. Level Six is a rainforest. Level Seven has mixed forest and prairie. Level Eight, where we are now, is all prairie. Level Nine is a desert and Level Ten is an arctic ice cap."

"Wow, you carry an entire planet with you on your ship," Kurt said.

"Well, not exactly. While the ecozones are nice, they're not really a substitute for the real places they represent. A fifteen-hundred pace section of prairie is no substitute for a prairie where you could run for thousands of heartbeats. And we don't have all the planetary ecozones here. The crew is mostly from inland places. If we had a lot of people from the coasts and islands, we would bias the ship in favor of those."

"I think I understand," Kurt replied. "You take passable representations of the homes of most of your crew members with you. We try to do the same thing, although our homes don't look like this. We live in...large, multi-chambered boxes, and we travel and work in other boxes that are not usually as pleasant as the ones we live in."

"Most of us do," I said, "myself included. I'm a farmer, I grow food for people. I do a lot of work outside, but I must confess, even I don't interact with the natural environment as much as I could. Since I've seen your ship, it seems ironic to me that a person who grows food should live in a box." Petra had been projecting holos of the things Kurt and I had been mentioning and when I stopped speaking she finished the show with a holo of Alliance Castle on its low rise with a field of wheat around it.

"This is were you live, Captain?" Steiger asked me.

"Yes. If you like, I can give you a virtual tour when you visit our ship."

"That should be very interesting."

Sitka touched a control pad on the surface of the stone table in the middle of the group of seats. A large three-dimensional star map glowed to life.

"Our current location is here," Sitka said, touching a star near the center of the map. A red globe of light encircled it. At her touch, a green globe engulfed a star about halfway to the edge of the map and significantly closer to the surface of the table. "This is our star."

"Okay, let me see if I can show you ours," I said, examining the map. "It should be...right about here." I identified a star a little opposite theirs and about halfway between Polaris and the surface of the table. I touched the star and a blue globe highlighted it.

"What size is your territory?" asked Kelvin.

"Territory?"

"Yes, how many systems and planets do your people have?"

"Oh, well, it's just the one planet, actually. What about you?"

"Our homeworld, Katara Prime, is the seat of the Kataran Republic, a co-operative formed about twelve hundred years ago. It has grown to include dozens of species on hundreds of worlds."

"Twelve hundred years," I mused aloud. "How did it begin?"

"The early Republic was a grouping of colonized planets in our solar system," Sitka explained. "It expanded to include worlds we had colonized in nearby solar systems. After we developed warp drive, we were able to meet face to face many of the cultures we had talked with on our transwarp communication systems."

Petra spoke up. "You had transwarp communication before you invented warp drive?"

"Making audio-visual information travel through various levels of subspace was easy for us," explained Sitka. "However, we didn't have elements with an energy density to send physical structures through subspace. It wasn't until much later that we discovered the elements that allowed us warp, and more recently, transwarp, flight."

The briefing went on, explaining more Kataran history. Their current calendar had begun nearly fifteen thousand years ago--the year the Katarans adopted a base-ten measuring system and other "modern" methods of scientific study. Their current calendar year was 14,946.

"All right," Steiger said after the history was over, "It's time to show you our physiology." She and Sirta removed their uniforms.

We watched, slightly uncomfortable but mostly interested, as they revealed their forms to us. We saw that, with a few differences, they resembled what you would see when a dog rolls over. Their chests were not as deep front to back as a dog's and their torsos, while longer than ours, and were more human scale than dog scale compared to their legs. Steiger's fur, as I had guessed, was indeed silver all over her, and when I compared her and Sirta to Sitka, still in her uniform, I decided that Katarans looked better in fur than in clothes.

"I'm afraid we won't be doing the same," I said to Steiger. "We're more comfortable in clothes than out of them. But we can show you what humans look like." Petra projected holograms of male and female unclothed humans standing opposite Sirta and Steiger.

Steiger took one look at the holograms and said, "I can see why you had trouble telling our genders apart. Your females are quite top-heavy by our standards."

"Your sheaths are different," Sirta said. "They don't seem like they'd help keep your equipment out of trouble. Does the fur on your heads keep you warm?"

"I suppose it does, a little," Kurt Halley replied, "but it mostly has to do with genetics and to some extent what temperatures we're acclimatized to. How about you?"

"Sort of the same." He ran a hand backward through his chest fur, revealing a shorter, softer, denser coat. "Most of us have a double coat like this. A vest and pants are usually all we wear for clothing. Below freezing, we wear more clothes sometimes, and twenty degrees colder than that, boots start to sound like a good idea."

"Except for Admiral Koy," Steiger said, and Sitka worked her remote. A Kataran appeared who at first glance resembled a young polar bear. He looked nearly seven feet tall and had to weigh at least three hundred pounds. "His people are from the antarctic and I don't think he's ever even shivered."

"You sound like you know him," I said.

"Oh, we all do. He was in charge of the transwarp project when he was a commander. Felix and I visited his home once. He never wore clothes then, even when he went hunting. We just sat in his ice den and I speculated that his paw pads were thicker than my boots. Of course I only have a single coat, so the cold was probably exaggerated to me. I'm from the middle latitudes."

Overall, Katarans looked like a tasteful blend of humanoid and animal. They were not simply bipedal wolves, nor were they humans with animal heads, tails, and fur. Kataran legs and feet were different enough from humans' that it was quite easy for them to run and walk on all fours as well as upright.

They held their hands out for us to see. Kurt and I looked at Steiger's hands and Petra examined Sirta's. Our dog had killed a raccoon once and before I gave it a decent burial, I examined its appendages. The Katarans' hands resembled scaled-up raccoon paws. They had similar dexterity to human hands and featured tough padding on the palms and at the fingertips.

When we had finished looking at their hands, Sirta and Steiger turned around so we could examine their tails. They attached in the expected place, looked like wolves' tails, and were proportional to their bodies.

When we let go of their tails, they sat on the rocks and let us look at their feet. They had five toes like ours and were configured something like a bear's. Their pads were even tougher and thicker than the hands, and had a protective coat of fur between the toes and where there was no padding.

"So you don't use footgear unless it's really cold?" Kurt asked.

"In certain other situations we will," said Sirta. "On-duty security officers and emergency workers in challenging terrain and situations will wear protective pawgear because they might quickly encounter hazards in their duties."

While I was examining the fangs in Captain Steiger's muzzle, which was a little shorter than a dog's, I noticed something move under her neck fur. When I asked her about it, she pulled out a multicolored ring on a short, strong gold chain. "Felix gave me this at our mateship ceremony. He made it out of several colors of diamond wafers, cutting a ring out of each one and then gluing them all together."

"Woah!" Kurt exclaimed, dropping Sitka's arm. "That must have cost him a fortune!"

"It only cost him the time and effort he put into it," Steiger said. "After Felix and I became mates, he asked my mother for materials and equipment to make the ring, which she gladly provided. After Felix made the ring, he returned the rest of the diamond."

"He glued several slices of diamond together?" I asked.

"Yes," Captain Steiger said. "Would you like to observe it more closely?"

"Um, yes, please," I said, honored that she would let an alien examine something so important to her.

She removed the chain from her neck and handed it to me. I felt its weight when it landed in my palm. I looked at the substantial chain long enough to realize its superior craftsmanship, then checked out the ring. It was about a quarter of an inch wide but looked a little thinner because the outer edges were beveled and faceted. There were five layers, the middle one black, the next two clear and the outer two blue.

"It's very beautiful, Captain," I said.

"Look at the inside."

Tiny figures had been cut into the inner surface of the ring. They were similar to the script on the hull of Steiger's ship.

"What does it say?" I asked.

The captain touched her claw to one line of script. "This says, 'Yours for all time--Felix.' And this," she said, turning the ring around and touching the other, "says, 'Yours for all time--Kisara.'"

"That's...lovely," I said. Did you give him something in return? Another ring, or something, I mean. In my culture people will exchange rings during the marriage ceremony and a man will give a woman a fancier ring as well when they decide that they want to be married. It's called an engagement ring."

"This is like your 'engagement ring,'" Captain Steiger said. "Felix made it as a token of our bond. We do not exchange rings during our mateship ceremonies. The ceremony is like a celebration that two people have become mates. We don't need a physical signal for this because we can smell that they have been in continual contact."

"Umm, okay. Why do you wear it around your neck, if I might ask? Is that usual? In our culture the lady wears her engagement ring on this finger," I said, touching Captain Steiger's ring finger.

"I did used to wear it on my finger, although not that one," she replied. "But, as I mentioned, I'm an engineer, and in that and other activities, I reach into confined spaces. The ring would sometimes catch on things. But what really concerned me was an incident that happened when I was running on all fours on the shore of my father's lake. I hit a stone hard and later worried about hitting the ring on a stone. I've worn it around my neck ever since."

After admiring the ring and chain once more, I gave it back to Steiger. "That is truly beautiful, captain. Thank you very much for showing it to me."

Sitka was demonstrating another Kataran feature. She held out a hand and the claws went from kind of pointed to long, curving, and razor sharp. Steiger held up a hand with what looked like a screwdriver, a file, and a set of lock picks protruding from the fingertips.

"How do you do that?" asked Kurt.

"We have a morphogenic matrix in each fingertip. And at the tips of our toes."

"Is that part of your original biology, or genetically engineered?"

"God has seen fit to include the feature in our evolutionary process."

"You believe in God? For some reason I had thought an advanced species must believe that nature or scientific principles created the universe."

"We do. Our definition of God is the universe and everything in it. Various religions' ideas of God are merely interpretations of the force responsible for the universe's existence and operation."

"I...never quite thought of it like that before." Kurt looked thoughtful for a moment, then turned his attention back to the crew. "So, what's next?"

"The holos you've seen so far have all been Techworld Katarans," Sitka said. There are those who never adopted advanced tech, as well as those who used to have it but rejected it for one reason or another. This holo will do for both of them."

She touched the control again and another Kataran appeared. She was about five feet tall, solid matte black and wore just a knife belt and shoulder strap.

"This is my mother, Senior Fleet Admiral Aurora Sitka," Commander Sitka said.

"What kind of admiral doesn't wear a uniform?" inquired Kurt. "She just has a tool harness."

"She has her rank insignia on it, doesn't she?" Steiger said, and the Katarans all chuckled. I looked closer at the holo and she did indeed have a rank attached to her shoulder strap, but I didn't get the joke.

"What's so funny?"

"Sorry, it's kind of an inside joke. You see, we're supposed to wear uniforms on duty, but Aurora somehow got around it from the moment she entered the Academy. Probably from being even more persistent than the few other ferals who've chosen a Techworld career. Anyway, it's funny because once she got to the command ranks anyone who asked why she wasn't wearing a uniform was answered with words to that effect," Steiger explained.

"How old is the admiral?" I asked. "On our world, high-ranking leaders usually show their age, but she doesn't look any older than you do."

"Admiral Sitka is two hundred and eighty years old," said Commander Sitka.

"Two-eighty?!" Kurt said, when he picked up his jaw from the sandy ground beneath us. "How long do you live?"

"Well, our average lifespan is a little over three hundred years, though some of us live a lot longer. The admiral is one of those whose genetics predispose her to long life. Physically, she is similar to many half a century younger. Another reason that we do not readily show our age is that from the end of adolescence to the beginning of senescence, our aging curve is rather flat. We begin to age obviously and quickly near the end of our lives."

"Okay, thank you. Um, may I ask how old you are?"

"Captain Steiger is one hundred fifty years old, and Kelvin and I are one-forty."

"Wow..."

Sirta said, "We don't have any animals on our planet that look like you. Do you have animals that look like us?"

"Yes, well, kind of," I said. "Petra?"

She projected a wolf, a golden retriever, and a dachshund. "These animals resemble you the most. Not the small one, I just showed it so you could see the genetic variation in the species. The wolf, here, is the original type, minimally modified by humans. The golden retriever is a hunting dog, bred over centuries and eventually looking like this. The dachsund is for hunting burrowing animals. It was also modified from the wolf by selective breeding, but all three of these are genetically identical otherwise."

Steiger asked me, "May we examine these to see how we are similar and different?"

"Certainly, go ahead," I replied.

The alien crew dropped to all fours and greeted the canines just like another dog would. The dogs responded and they all ran around on four legs for a few minutes. Sirta drew my attention, possibly because he was playing with the golden, whose fur was similar to his, although longer and lighter in color. When he stopped for a breather, he examined the dog's head, top and sides, then crouched down and looked underneath.

"His chest is really deep," the science officer reported, "and his sheath goes way up his belly. If mine went that far, I'd have trouble wearing pants."

Steiger checked out her playmate, the wolf. "This one's nipples are a little smaller than mine, but she has eight of them like I do."

Sitka caught my eye and indicated the holos. "Kelvin's looks like him sort of and Kisara's looks like her except for being multicolored. Do you have anything that looks like me?"

"I believe we do, Commander. Petra?" The dachshund changed to a Newfoundland, which quite resembled Sitka, except for having floppy ears. "Science Officer Sirta, we have a dog that is colored even more like you. Would you like to see one?"

"Let's have it, Captain!" he replied, and Petra changed the Golden to an Irish setter, whose fur color indeed bore an uncanny resemblance to the alien officer.

"What about you, Captain?" I called to Steiger, now over twenty meters away. "Would you like more silver in your wolf?"

She paused in a wrestling match with the hologram. "No, thank you!" she called back to me. "This one is fine. She looks a little like Felix."

We watched the aliens play with the holos, joining in and running around with them from time to time. After a while we all slowed down and just sat on the rocks or on the sandy creek bank. I checked the time and we excused ourselves, thanking the Katarans for a wonderful visit and inviting them over to the Lindbergh the next day.

Before we left the Ceokera, I asked Steiger for a copy of the Transwarp project's documentation, which she gladly provided before showing us to the nearest transporter clearing. We did the almost-touching-noses gesture again and beamed back to our ship.