Page 125 - The Chronicles Ser2 (6-10)

“Is that a solar shield? It’s a Krall probe ship. The last time anyone encountered one it was a derelict.
Where has this one been?” the Coms officer fired questions and disbelief. Hart ordered the probe
taken in tow until an away team could inspect it. The probe had some damage but was intact for the
most part; however there was something strange about it.
“Hart to Senior Archivist Krantz; please come to Command deck with a translator ring” Hart ordered.
Hubert Krantz was one of the Archivists the High Council had sent to document the discovery of The
Gardonna. That job was easy enough for his two juniors to complete on their own, so he had felt like
a spare wheel, until now, he was only there to confirm findings and authorise them for deposit into
the central archive on Terra Prime. He arrived on the Bridge still a little befuddled as to why he’d
been summoned
“Archivist Krantz; I’m at your service Captain Hart; How can I help you?” He asked. He was directed
to the Science station and to a view of the probe.
“It looks like a Krall probe, but that script isn’t Krall. Have you seen anything like it before?” Hart
asked. Hubert put on his translator ring and tried linking to the Hive-Net language matrix.
“It looks like a derivative of a script used by natives of a world in the Markab sector, but this is more
complex. Some of it translates; but … What does translate makes no sense” he said after a few
minutes “It’s more like instruction code for a computer; but in a form of prose?” he added looking
confused. Mortimer had entered the bridge. He saw what Hubert had on his screen
“How do those glyphs translate into sound?” he asked Krantz. Krantz linked his translator band to
the console and tried the translation matrix audio creation subroutines. From the speaker came a
sing-song rendition of the translation.
“Hah! I thought so. It’s the same as those weird signals we received earlier. They must have been
coming from this thing. I’ve also had time to think about those and these glyphs gave me an idea. I
think the language is based on metaphors, allegories and similes. Try a translation using the same
grammatical rules as Kirillian Beta 2 please Krantz and see what you get” Mortimer added excitedly.
Krantz modified the Translator band’s matrix and tied in the grammatical subroutine from the
Kirillian sub set. The output was sent to the main viewer.

What appeared on the screen was definitely a set of metaphorical phrases, the first being a
reference to some kind of battle or war between two races. The next a meandering verse on the
merits of justice prudence and the next two referred to locations of some sort, but without a way of
relating them to an origin point they made no sense. The key would be in the last two phrases. That
was where the ships Hive had difficulty and had only partial translations that read like complete
gibberish. This was yet another mystery to solve. The rest of Lorna’s team had arrived on the bridge
and Lennie asked to hear the last sections in the original sing-song sound of the message. As it was
played back he froze.
“Uh-oh! I’ve seen that happen before. Remember when the Mechanoids first encountered the
Electric Vines and the Radio Trees on Venosia Prime. They were given messages in base code. This
looks like what happened to them” Jonas said.

After the meeting and the display of the Artefacts, star map and what effect the staff had,
the High Command meeting chamber was awash with excited conversation, debate and one or two
radical vocalisations that were, quite frankly, offensive. Lyris and her team were inundated with
questions, all of which they answered as truthfully as they could. When word came through about
the two speeders the debate swiftly refocused. Julio and Lyris actually welcomed the shift of topic.
As the other debate was becoming heated with some people feeling wronged because of their
religious beliefs, others self-righteously taking the discoveries as vindication for their decisions in
exploring their realm. The news that contact had come with others from the outside changed
everything.
“One of the pilots is robotic!” cried one Command official in disbelief
“It would appear so. But the technology is more advanced than our people’s early experiments. We
can only assume that the Congress and the other ruling parties had advanced more quickly than we
did. We will know more when they have regained consciousness. They have been taken aboard the