Contagion

by David Ryker

  The Dri’kai got me into a bear hug anyway.

  I felt the air get squeezed out of my lungs, which pushed the respirator a bit off my face. It didn’t matter; I couldn’t breathe anyway.

  I couldn’t move either. The bastard had my arms pinned. The only thing I could do was kick at its shins with both feet. It grunted and groaned and tried to shift its stance, but it was obvious I was going to pass out before it was going to let me go.

  Then I remembered something about warrior cultures. Whether human or alien, they couldn’t boast of a victory unless it was won fair and square.

  So I cheated.

  With my tongue I pushed the respirator a bit more off my face.

  As soon as my mouth and nose became visible, R’kk’kar let me go.

  I slumped, managed not to fall flat on my face, and readjusted my respirator as R’kk’kar took a step back.

  Pretending like I was having trouble with one of the straps, I tried to catch my breath. After a few seconds R’kk’kar began to look impatient, so I got back into a fighting stance and punched him in the neck.

  He made a gargling sound and staggered to the side.

  Aha! A weak point. Who would have ever thought that bullet head and neck would have any weak points? I went for the same spot again.

  Only to have R’kk’kar block my punch and floor me with one of his own.

  When the stars faded and my miserable, violent, and mostly wasted life stopped flashing before my eyes, I saw R’kk’kar standing above me bellowing in victory.

  “I have defeated the great General Mitch Ayers,” the Dri’kai said, pumping its fists in the air.

  Valeria rushed to my side. A Dri’kai rushed to R’kk’kar’s side.

  “Well fought, friend Mitch,” R’kk’kar said. “Let us mate together to celebrate our new brotherhood.”

  “Uh, you’re not my type.” I tried to rise and failed. My head felt light because of my irregular heartbeats and I couldn’t find my balance.

  R’kk’kar laughed. “You are humorous. I mean I mate with my lover, and you mate with yours.”

  Before I could say anything more, R’kk’kar was stripping off for the second time that afternoon, and so was the other Dri’kai. Soon their jumpsuits lay on the floor, and they lay next to the jumpsuits.

  The most horrifying thing about that sight was that I still couldn’t figure out if R’kk’kar was a man or a woman. There was just too much going on down there—far more knobs and appendages than any being deserves to have.

  Within moments R’kk’kar and his boy/girlfriend were rolling around the floor like a pair of beached walruses in an earthquake. An appendage gestured at us. I almost threw up.

  “Come, Mitch. Let us see how the humans do it!”

  I glanced at Valeria, more out of instinct than as any sort of offer. She paled.

  “I … um … I’m not in heat,” she said.

  “Oh, I apologize,” R’kk’kar said, still rolling around and attaching stumps to knobs and tentacles to orifices. “I should have consulted with you before picking a fight with your lover.”

  I hoped that would stop the Dri’kai from continuing. It did not.

  Valeria helped me stand. I could barely look at her, whether from the shame of getting my ass whooped in front of her, or our first real date most definitely not ending in sex, I’m not sure. The sight on the floor sure didn’t help.

  And what the hell was with all these other species? Everyone was still watching, or sitting down to drinks again. The sand slugs had even pushed a device out of their hiding place that I was sure was taking pictures.

  And then came an even worse sight.

  My CO walked through the door.

  Commander Kristín Loftsdóttir was a no-nonsense sort of officer. Born in what used to be called Iceland, before the Global Government changed all the place names in the hope of building a worldwide unity no one ever felt, she was as tough as the land that bore her. She had also done surprisingly well after being woken out of stasis and told she had been promoted way above her skill set after everyone above her in the command structure had been assassinated by Biospherists. Actually a lot of us were in that position, yours truly included. I went from a middle-grade officer to commander of security.

  In her middle thirties with hard, angular features that rarely cracked a smile, she stood rigidly erect, hands clasped behind her back. A pair of crystalline blue eyes surveyed the scene—a beaten-up officer, a wrecked interstellar bar, and two Dri’kai doing the horizontal mambo in the middle of the floor to the intense interest of several alien species.

  She looked to me for an explanation and I could only shrug.

  Valeria came to my rescue.

  “Mitch, um, Commander Evans was participating in a Dri’kai negotiating ritual.”

  Commander Loftsdóttir’s features hardened even more than usual. She had gotten distant with me lately, although I wasn’t sure why.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Erm, yes. This Dri’kai here, the one on top, um, bottom now, challenged Commander Evans to an honorary non-lethal fight as a way to bury the hatchet. Quite common in warrior cultures.”

  Sounded good to me. My face and ribs had their doubts about the “non-lethal” part, though. At least my heartbeat was settling down to something close to normal.

  “I apologize for the confusion,” R’kk’kar mumbled around a mouthful of unidentifiable appendage. “General Mitch’s mate is not in heat, so we could not consummate the final stage of the comradeship ritual.”

  Commander Loftsdóttir stared at Valeria, who as chief science officer of the Nansen shouldn’t be talking about this sort of thing in some spaceport bar.

  I had to hand it to her, though, she proved herself to be adaptable.

  She turned to the two writhing heaps of brownish-greenish flesh slapping around on the metal floor. “Otherwise, was the comradeship ritual a success?”

  “Yes it was,” R’kk’kar said, thrusting and grunting. “The general proved to be a worthy and honorable opponent. We will fight the invaders together.”

  “You may get that chance earlier than you anticipated,” the commander said with a heavy tone in her voice. She turned to us. “We need to talk. Our new friends have detected a fleet of strange ships, and they’re headed this way.”

  3

  The main meeting hall in the space station was a large oval room with seats to accommodate the various species who sat within, or at least those who chose to sit. One creature that looked like a cross between a monkey and a lemur hung by its claws from the ceiling, and the tentacled pillars of the Subines seemed not to use chairs and simply stood, resting on the countless cilia that they used to move around.

  Like any time where I was suddenly confronted with the diversity of alien life in space, for a second I stopped in awe. When I had fallen asleep in my stasis pod fifty years ago, humanity had no idea whether or not it was alone in the universe. Lots of exoplanets had been found, including many that could harbor life, but no evidence of alien life had been detected.

  Valeria had explained that was because of the limitation of communication. None of these races had figured out a way to communicate with anything other than radio waves, which traveled at the speed of light. Since we were hundreds of light years away from Earth, none of the young civilizations in this part of the galaxy had invented radio long enough ago for their communications to reach us. Other races, older races, had been moving into the area, but their communications were also too new to be picked up by Earth.

  Lots of these races had developed faster than light travel, or traded for the technology from more advanced species, but they were still stuck with light speed communication. If you wanted to send a message in a hurry, you sent a small faster-than-light probe.

  None of these species had bothered to send a probe to Earth. Our first radio communications from the early 20th century hadn’t even gotten halfway to this spot in the Orion Arm, and no one had seen anything speci
al in the little blue and green planet orbiting a run-of-the-mill G-type star. There were hundreds of solar systems like ours.

  Maybe thousands.

  It hurt my head when I thought of the possibilities.

  As we came in, a Subine moved over on its cilia, greeting us with a wave of its tentacles on one side of its body, then the other. I had learned that was a greeting from one friendly acquaintance to another. The Subine had as many social gradations as they did tentacles. A friendly acquaintance was somewhere above a trading partner who was just beginning to be trusted, and just below to a workmate who had only started their job but had proven his qualifications. This individual considered me an acquaintance rather than a potential ally or friendly stranger because I had saved it from the alien parasite, thus bumping me up in the hierarchy. Acquaintance was about as high as a non-Subine could get in their hierarchy. Our brains were simply too different to expect any sort of closer friendship. All of these levels of status had their own greetings, signified by various movements of tentacles. The translator fixed to my shoulder strap came with a camera to interpret these movements.

  “The Subine has made a gesture of greeting to a friendly acquaintance,” my translator informed me in a tinny voice. The alien made a blubbering sound from a slack mouth ringed with little tentacles. “Translation begins: I am glad you got here Commander Ayers the cure for the parasite the screen shows has been sent by fast probe an invading force to all known inhabited planets I hope your comrade fight with the Dri’kai approaching at unparalleled speed and space stations ended fruitfully it must be the Centaurians thank you we are interested in your input.”

  The Subines have a divided brain in order to deal with all their appendages, and this has divided their thought patterns too. You can set the automatic translator to try and string their fractured stream-of-consciousness speech into coherent sentences, but it usually messes up so I prefer to figure it out myself.

  First thing: they were sending out the key to killing the parasite to everyone they could. Our medical and engineering teams had discovered the parasite that had infected so many in this section of the galaxy was vulnerable to ultra low frequency radio waves.

  Secondly, the Centaurian fleet was heading this way in ships faster than anything these critters had. We had discovered the parasite had been genetically created. Qiang, my assistant, theorized it was the first salvo in an invasion. Now it looked like he was right. I wished he hadn’t been. I didn’t want an invasion and Qiang always got all smug when he was proven right.

  Thirdly, it looked like this Subine, and probably everyone else, knew ahead of time that R’kk’kar had been planning a barroom brawl/orgy. I wonder what the alien had meant by the “fruitful” part. Were we supposed to impregnate our mates or something? Name them after our opponent?

  I could ask Valeria. She had a knack for figuring out alien psychology, but I didn’t dare. We were only beginning to explore our feelings for each other. We hadn’t even “mated” yet.

  Apparently that was because she wasn’t in heat.

  “The Subine is making a gesture to follow,” my translator told me. I’d learned that gesture. The Subines point in all directions at once. Not exactly the best way to indicate direction. Maybe it was some sort of trust thing, a way of saying, “I’ll show you the way.”

  The Subine led us to a group of seats that looked just like human chairs. A bit low, and a bit bigger than what a healthy young person would need—and the Nansen only had healthy young people—but considering some alien had to slap these things together at a moment’s notice, they weren’t bad.

  Executive Officer Tom Foyle, the Nansen’s second in command, was waiting for us.

  “Welcome to the zoo,” he said with a derisive grin. Valeria frowned. Foyle blinked as he got a good look at me in the low light of the meeting room. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Some sort of friendship ritual with a Dri’kai.”

  “You sure that’s what it was?”

  It was getting harder to see him because one of my eyes was swelling shut. It felt like someone had inserted a hypo and was steadily pumping air into one side of my face. While it didn’t hurt too much—my whole body was a uniform haze of pain—it was an odd sensation.

  I shrugged. “Both of us are still alive.”

  We sat. The Subine curled its bottom cilia to make a pad on which it rested. A huge screen along one wall came on.

  It showed a detailed star map, a pattern of stars that was incomprehensible to me. Two huge bands of stars took up the top and bottom thirds of the screen, with a lighter sprinkling of stars in between. To my right, Valeria dragged in a sharp intake of breath and leaned forward. I was glad at least someone was getting something out of this.

  A Vrimjlen, one of those bipedal anteater things, moved up to a spot below the screen and addressed the crowd. Good. If a Subine gave this lecture, we’d be here all day.

  “As you can see,” the Vrimjlen said through its long nose/mouth into a translator hanging from its belt, “this is a map of the inner edge of the Orion Arm and the outer edge of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm.”

  I nodded. Now it made sense. Valeria and a team of scientists had sat down with the aliens for several days while the Nansen was in repairs, trading vocabulary words. One of their main tasks was to give the translator boxes our own terms for various parts of the galaxy. We had also learned a lot more terms. The alien races had been mapping this section of our own Orion Arm of the Milky Way for years, and had discovered a wealth of information that we as newcomers didn’t know.

  They sure had been generous with their knowledge. I wondered if they were holding anything back.

  Figuring that question was unanswerable for the moment, I focused on the presentation.

  “From the intelligence we have managed to gather, we are convinced the invaders have traveled from the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. It is unknown from where in the arm they originally came, but they have crossed the relatively sparse region between their arm of the Milky Way galaxy and have entered our own Orion Arm. This means they have traveled a distance of at least 10,000 light years.”

  The crowd moved restlessly. The Subines writhed their tentacles in a gesture of what my translator box told me was surprise.

  I gaped. The Nansen could go at most 20 times light speed. At that rate, it would take 500 years to make that journey. Some of the other races had ships that could go more than twice that, but even at that rate, it still was a hell of a long voyage.

  It also meant they had some kickass technology.

  A line appeared in the middle of the gap between the two arms of the Milky Way and traced a path to the inner edge of our own Orion Arm. The image zoomed in to show several star systems. The labels were all in some different language.

  Valeria held up a tablet that replicated the screen with English translations.

  “There’s Earth,” she whispered, pointing. “That dot on the far lower left.”

  I felt a tug inside me. Earth. I’d never see it again. Sure, it was a shithole, and the only people left there, assuming there was anyone left there, were a bunch of savages scrounging off the toxic ruins, but it was home.

  I straightened my spine. No, the Nansen was home.

  “Information about the Centaurians is sparse,” the Vrimjlen continued. “They are still many light years from us, so we cannot see them with telescopes, but we have had some messages from a race on the inner edge of the Orion Arm. This race is an old one, highly technological, who we have known about for some time owing to their development of radio technology some 800 years ago. Our furthest probes picked up these signals. They are 900 light years away from us. The Centaurians are no doubt closer.”

  I glanced at Valeria. That didn’t sound good.

  “We know this,” the Vrimjlen said, “because the race, who call themselves Ofrans, sent us some remarkably fast moving probes to warn any races further inside the Orion Arm that the invasion was coming. It took some time to dec
ipher their language. They gave us a detailed report which is being sent to every ship docked at this station and is being sent by fast probe to every world. The report is too lengthy to go into at this meeting. I think it is sufficient to show you some of the visuals they sent with the report.”

  The star map on the screen disappeared and was replaced by a view of a solar system. A bright glow off to the left was the local sun. Below was a brownish planet with a few small patches of blue. Along the edges of the blue glittered cities. A partial desert world, from the looks of it. A bright point of red in the upper right might have been another planet.

  Orbiting the planet was a fleet of wedge-shaped vessels. Each had a rectangular turret on the top with a tube sticking out much like a tank. The Ofran ships looked large, but it was hard to tell without any perspective. I supposed the video was being shot from one of the ships.

  From another point in the sky, I noticed a star appear. It grew in brightness into a hazy blob, then defined itself as several small dots. These dots grew. The video zoomed in and I saw the strangest ships I had ever seen.

  They were thin black ovals with a seam around the center, reminding me a bit of clams. Each flew in formation with several others, a shimmering ray of green light connecting each ship to every other ship in formation.

  The formations, and there were dozens of them, came in different patterns—a pentagram, a hexagram, several octagons, and simple lines. The straight-line formations had the most ships, up to twenty, and those formations headed for the planet, escorted by some of the other battle groups. The rest of the Centaurian formations headed for the Ofran ships in orbit.

  The Ofran fleet split up to meet both threats, the ones heading for the planet dwindling into the distance.

  The camera focused on the battle in orbit. The Ofran ships spread out, moving toward the invaders in an open formation that gave the maximum amount of support to each ship while minimizing the targets.