Silver Search

by Rock Whitehouse

  "With respect, screw you both. This one is going to be a pain in the ass."

  Janine Small shrugged. "I'm not so sure. I talked to FleetIntel, and they said she's a real loner, but not one to make a lot of demands."

  "I hope you're right. But I plan to spend as much time up here as possible, as far away from that woman as possible."

  "Well, Ms. Cardenas, we'll all take our turns up here and back there, and we'll just make the best of it, right?"

  "Yes, ma'am. If you say so." Cardenas slipped back out of the cockpit to return to her orientation duties.

  "You worried?" Compton asked his commander.

  "Nah, not really. She's a serious academic. I don't know exactly what's in the cargo, but there's a shitload of crates back there, so, she's not exactly going to Kapteyn on holiday. Most likely the Doctor will bury her face in her books, and we'll only see her at meals, if then."

  Compton nodded his agreement, and they went back to the more immediate business of the departure checklist.

  Antares

  At Inor

  Wednesday, September 7, 2078, 1730 UTC

  Carter Calhoun was a Southern gentleman in the best sense of the word. Of average height, thin and athletic in his appearance, he'd been asked by the United Nations to take over the diplomatic responsibilities at Inor. Sidney Johnston had been relieved not long after the Liberty crew returned home, and for the ensuing six months, the Second Secretary had been managing Terran affairs. The UN had strongly considered choosing someone other than another American. But, as the Deputy US Ambassador Calhoun had made a solid reputation for himself as a smart, flexible thinker, and someone whose word was reliable, so they decided he'd do.

  Senior Lieutenant Jack Ballard drew shuttle duty that day, bringing the new ambassador and the rest of the visiting party to the surface. Carol sat right seat in the cockpit, stealing an early preview of the city of Inoria as they descended from Antares. They disembarked into a bright, pleasant day. Carol flashed back to the day she had stepped off Liberty's shuttle with Marty Baker. She let herself have that feeling for a few seconds, then pulled herself back to the present as Gabrielle touched her arm.

  "What do I do?"

  Greg stood close by, also looking apprehensive as he viewed the receiving line.

  "Just go down the line. They'll each welcome you. You say 'I am welcomed' and shake their hands."

  "What? 'I am welcomed'?"

  "The Inori expect a response in the same manner as the prompt. You don't just give them a generic 'thanks.'"

  "How am I supposed to shake their hands? They're enormous!"

  Carol smiled. "Yeah, they are, but their palms are surprisingly soft. The Inori are used to new humans, so just go with it and you'll be fine."

  After the Ambassador and Terri Michael went down the line, Carol followed Gabrielle and Greg.

  Ron Harris elected to stay aboard Antares, and there was to be no mention that he was here or who exactly these additional people were. The Inori wouldn't ask, and Harris wanted to keep this mission as quiet as possible. Joe Bowles also skipped the Inoria trip. He didn’t give any reasons, just "No, thanks."

  Unlike Liberty's earlier visit, Terri Michael made sure Antares was fully staffed, ready to respond to any event that might happen while she was on the surface. The new Unity Class destroyer Aquarius was also on station, taking its turn watching the system. There was plenty of firepower overhead this time, and no need to worry while on the surface.

  Standing on the shuttle pad, which was on a small hill east of the city proper, Carol could see construction in progress at several places in the city. She was glad that the tall towers destroyed on that ugly day were on their way back up.

  The Inori provided transport for the Ambassador and his entourage, a typical open-sided tour bus. Carol and Jack jumped in the back row, away from the senior personalities. As they moved down the gentle grade and into the city, Carol saw that the city had been completely cleared of debris. When she left back in February, the cleanup had barely started, and Inori building materials were scattered everywhere. This day, the city was clean again, and the streets busy with Inori moving about their business. A high degree of normalcy had returned, and Carol thought that was encouraging.

  The loud, breezy transport stopped at the Terran embassy. The building itself had escaped unscathed in the attack, but the street and several nearby structures had been severely damaged. Today, those broken structures were gone, new construction taking their place. The elaborate 'Fountain of Earth' the Inori had constructed in front of the embassy had also been repaired, and water now flowed properly out of the North Pole, meandered through the oceans, and dripped off the Antarctic as intended.

  As the now-empty transport pulled away, Carol looked past the repaired fountain to the memorial across the street. It was a flat stone structure, a half meter thick, three meters high and two meters wide, rising from the center of a large open area paved in fine stone. As she and Jack crossed the street, she saw that at the top there was writing in Inori, but down the left side, there was a list of names, in English, with 'Captain Dean Carpenter' at the top.

  An Inori guide came to stand with them. "All Inori, Carol Hansen, all Inori shall remember what your shipmates did for us on that day. We are most grateful."

  Carol could only nod in response, and after a moment the Inori moved away.

  On the right side of the stone slab was a list written in the Inori language, which she took to be translations of those same names. About halfway down the list, she saw the name she was looking for, Ensign Martin Baker. Jack stood just behind her, reading the list. He could see which name her eyes rested on.

  "I never knew him."

  Carol reached out and touched the name, then spoke without turning around. "I didn't either, really, until we were on Liberty. He was good company. I'm sure he thought of himself as just a regular guy; plain, reliable, no drama, no problems."

  "But?"

  "But, men like that aren't really all that ordinary. And I was fresh out of a relationship with someone who wasn't that way at all. But Marty was happy just hanging out. He called himself my sidekick, like Batman and Robin or something. But I knew all along he was searching for someone for himself."

  "You seem to have a knack at collecting regular guys as sidekicks."

  She turned and slipped an arm around him. "Oh, Jack, I couldn't have made it through the whole Sigma thing without your support. I know that."

  "I didn't mean it as something negative, Carol. You must realize how people respond to you, how they feel around you."

  "I don't think about it, no. I can't, Jack. To actually believe you're somehow 'something special' is the start of a road to conceit that I never want to travel. If you and Marty are just regular guys, I guess I'm just a regular girl."

  She'd given the perfect answer, Jack realized, and he wasn't going to pursue that thought any further. She was unusually both self-aware and sensitive to the feelings of those around her. Her openness was part of the magnet that drew others to her. Her genuine caring for her peers, her crew, and others she encountered was something remarkable to watch, Jack knew. He'd seen it. He'd experienced it. Perhaps her most engaging trait was that there was no artifice to her, nothing false or feigned. It was all genuine, all just who she was down to her core, and he realized she had no idea how unique and admirable she really was. He felt slightly jealous of David Powell for a moment, then reminded himself that she was completely genuine in that commitment, too.

  He shook off his analysis of Carol Hansen. "We have an hour before the ceremony. Shall we have a look around?"

  "Yes."

  She released him, and they started walking northeast, retracing some of her route with Marty. Rorina was high in the sky on this clear, warm day, and Carol and Jack wore their Inor-specific sunglasses to filter the light down to something their eyes could tolerate. While the city again looked beautiful overall, scars could still be seen here and there — patches in the
masonry that would eventually fade to match. Large scaffolds wrapped around the taller structures being rebuilt. They went up step by step: steel forms were placed, then filled, then removed after the concrete-equivalent core set. Then, the external and internal coverings were added, a hard masonry layer with those iridescent inclusions that made Inoria so 'otherworldly,' as humans often described it, frequently without noticing the irony in the sentiment.

  It was a long, slow process, and Carol could see that the reconstruction of Inoria would take years. Watching it also told her something about how old Inoria was, how it must have gradually developed from smaller roots. The Inori were content in their place, with what Ino had provided for them, and how their society prospered in Ino's world. They mourned the lost, but they persisted with life and with the job of rebuilding. In the Inori, she saw peace, quiet determination, and caring for each other that she didn't frequently observe back home.

  Humans could learn a lot from the Inori.

  Carol and Jack arrived back at the embassy as the ceremony was about to start. She joined the line of Liberty veterans on the left. A line of Inori stood to the right, many showing white scars from wounds received during the attack, the color stark against their sandy-colored skin. The young Builder that Terri had carried to the beach was there, and he thanked her with a small gift of Inori pottery. He didn't speak English, so the interpreter explained that the characters on the cup included his name and an expression of his gratitude.

  The Inori council was present, and they spoke effusively of the humans' help, both during and after the attack. They welcomed the new ambassador warmly, with no mention of the uncomfortable time when they didn't have one. Carol stood next to Warrant Officer Denise Long, whose experience the day of the attack was nightmarish. Her two friends and two guides were killed beside her in the first moments of the attack, while she was left standing, untouched. Carol slipped an arm in Denise's when she seemed to be faltering a little, and with Carol's help, she managed to get through the ninety minutes of diplomatic and emotional discourse.

  As the ceremony ended, Long looked up at Carol, "I was such a coward," she said with thick disgust in her voice.

  Terri Michael heard that and moved swiftly to her side. "You were unarmed, alone, with death falling all around you. The Fleet never prepared you for that, Denise. Don't criticize yourself for being normal."

  "With respect, Captain, by that definition neither you nor Lieutenant Hansen is 'normal.' I needed to be more like you that day, and I wasn't."

  "You can't change the past, Ms. Long," Jack said, having joined the conversation. "You can only go forward from here."

  "Perhaps." She was clearly not convinced. She left the small group alone, walking in the general direction of the shuttle pad, away from the embassy and away from where her friends had died.

  Another survivor, a senior reactor tech who worked with Long regularly, saw her leave and came to Terri.

  "You want I should go with her, ma'am?"

  "What do you think? You probably know her better than I do."

  "Well, ma'am, I think she believes she deserves to be alone. She talks about that day from time to time, Captain, and she's not too happy with herself."

  "So?"

  "So, I'm going, ma'am. She shouldn't be alone."

  "Good. Carry on."

  "Yes, Captain."

  The man trotted the fifty meters or so to where Denise Long was walking away. He fell in stride beside her, and they continued on together.

  Antares

  Enroute Beta Hydri

  Monday, September 12, 2078, 0530 UTC

  Greg Cordero dragged his sore butt out of his bunk and partly walked, mostly limped, to the toilet. The necessities dealt with, he switched on the light over his wash basin and cleaned up well enough to be presentable at breakfast. He had signed on to this trip as an expert in language reconstruction, not a pack horse or marathon runner. But the physical work was necessary, and he found that even while his muscles ached to the bone, it sharpened his thinking and supported his excitement as he contemplated the task ahead.

  The Marines running Greg and Gabrielle and Joe Bowles around the hangar knew what they were doing, and while it hurt like hell at the moment, he enjoyed the workouts. And honestly, the Marines were fun once you got to know them and let them know you. Now dressed, he made his way to the wardroom, which at 0545 was already half full and alive with conversation. He gathered his breakfast and a large cup of coffee and sat with some young officers. A female warrant officer from Engineering greeted him in between bites and asked him about how he would manage to translate the Big Blue language.

  "So," she continued, "with all these symbols, how can you work that out? Seems awfully hard to me."

  Greg thought before responding. "It works by association and context, and as we gather more samples, it weighs the strength of those associations, and disassociations, to build a multi-dimensional graph of the relationships among words." He looked across at her, realized she was following so far, and continued. "That's the easy part, the mechanical part. The hard part is to impose some kind of meaning on the relationships, but once we start to break those down, the algorithm can open up large parts of the data tree to us, and we can begin to see what the language is saying."

  "So, are you doing translation, or decryption?"

  "That's a good question; the process is actually something of both. Think of those two approaches as running on parallel tracks, passing whatever hints or nuggets they find back and forth, both processes trying to get to a coherent solution."

  "So, does this system have a name?"

  "'Swadesh,' after a linguist who worked on language families."

  "That's an odd name. Sounds like Swedish and swaddle had a baby."

  Greg had to smile at that. "Yes, it does. I suppose I could have used his first name, Morris. But, whatever, he came up with a set of universal words that we should look for to find the connections between languages."

  "Wasn't Morris a cat or something?"

  "Uh, yeah, maybe."

  "Well, Doctor Cordero —"

  "Greg"

  "OK, Greg, I have a degree in physics I thought was hard, but this sounds even worse. Will you be able to speak it?"

  Greg snuck a peek at her name. "No. Ms. Long —"

  "Denise."

  "Probably not. Unless there are recordings or some other sound reference." Again, he paused before continuing. "I might guess that a letter is a vowel or consonant, or what passes for those in the language, but without something to tell me what phoneme or syllable the symbol represents, we'll never speak it."

  "Pity."

  "It is, I suppose. But if we can manage to extract the meaning, then we can read their literature, learn their names, know what they believed. That is something in itself, don't you think?"

  "I suppose," she said, with some finality. "But if you can't say their name, what's the point?" She took a final gulp of her tea and got up. "Sorry, but I have a reactor to run."

  "And you thought my job was hard?"

  Long smiled in response and headed out of the wardroom, back to the reactor and her comfort zone. Cordero was less remote than she assumed a Ph.D. would be, and his explanations managed to bring the uninformed along without being condescending. She liked that about him.

  Greg was left thinking about her final comment. There really was value, he knew, in being able to extract the meaning from a language without being able to speak it. They could, after all, run it through a translation and read it in English. But, on another level, Long had a point. Poetry is pointless without the sound of the words. Maybe they'd get lucky and find something. He'd been focusing on isolating and identifying the numbers and letters already seen in the drone images. The Fleet people had been right, the seven symbols were almost certainly numbers. He'd provisionally defined them as base-six numbers, 1-6, with a separate symbol for zero. He had also defined the alphabet, with forty-three characters so far. There might be more
once they got on the surface.

  He thought briefly about Long as he turned in his plate and coffee cup and started for his quarters. She reminded him a little of Gabe: attractive, but tough and very smart. She wore no rings. He then reminded himself that he had just come out of a bad and expensive relationship, and he really didn't need to be complicating his life with a new one just now. He had more than enough work to do as it was, and he'd be well-advised to stick to that.

  The officers and academics held several long planning meetings, punctuated with stiff arguments, on where to start and what to prioritize for exploration. The military types argued to explore the battlefield first, while the academics made a forceful case for a more prosaic starting point.

  "Put me in the room with the goddamn portrait!" Cordero had thundered at Harris. "I can't tell you why they were willing to die until I understand what they loved. I need to figure out who they are first. Then maybe — maybe — I can tell you what they were defending."

  Gabrielle put her hand on his shoulder to keep him in his seat, and as he finished, she shook it gently to pull him back.

  "But, Greg," Harris responded, sincerely and without offense to the volume of Cordero's feelings, "we need to know about their weapons, what tactics they might use on the ground. We need to get to the battlefield to know that."

  As they talked it out, they devised a plan, first outlined by Ballard and Hansen, that laid out a middle ground that both sides could live with. Carol reminded them of the forty-seven-hour-plus day on Big Blue and the futility of working the whole of over twenty-three hours of daylight. They would take advantage of that to split the day into two eight-to-ten-hour exploration shifts, with time between to recover one team and deploy the other. The additional Marines would be useful in providing assistance and security. They could really do both, and she and Jack showed them how.

  "This is pretty much what Jack and I did with the drones when we were there before," Carol pointed out. "We split the day because there was no way we were going to be able to work all through the daylight."