by Alex Deva
"It's them," said Doina.
"They speak English? We're attacked by invisible antimatter beings who speak English?" asked Tiessler.
"Attacked?" asked Drake.
"Antimatter?" asked Aram.
"Doi-the-ship is letting them speak through her," explained the girl.
"Letting them?" asked Mark. Wait, weren't these two races rivals?
"You are all individuals," remarked the voice, this time in an Australian accent. It was a statement, not a question. Nobody knew what to say to that.
"Yes," said Toma eventually, looking around herself.
"I knew it," continued the voice. "Hey, that's cool." It sounded Jamaican now. "How many are you?"
They all looked at each other.
"This is not your ship talking, I take it?" asked Tiessler.
Mark didn't answer.
"What's with the accents?"
"Doi knows a lot about languages," said the girl.
"Where from?" asked Drake.
"So, it is the ship talking?" insisted the German.
"No. The ship is just giving voice to the others."
"They're using your ship as a voice synthesiser?"
"Doi is doing this voluntarily, I assure you," she said.
"Voluntarily is not the same as being under your control," challenged the German.
"Over ten billion," said the voice, like a BBC presenter from the nineteen fifties, answering its own question. "Do you all know each other?"
"Why did you destroy our space station?" demanded Tiessler.
"Only trying to help," said the voice.
They looked stupidly at each other. Are they taking the piss? wondered Mark. Is cynicism a galactic trait now?
"Help... us?" asked Drake, tentatively.
"Nah, just kidding. Just wanted to draw your attention, is all," said the voice, in a perfect Queens ghetto impersonation.
"You killed hundreds of people!" said Toma.
"Is that a problem?"
"Yes!" Doina nearly yelled, addressing the new voice for the first time.
"Oh, hello, ship-mistress. Doina. Hello, Doi-na."
"Who are you?" asked Tiessler.
"Five. Who are you?"
The German frowned.
"I asked who you are, not how many."
"Indeed."
What the hell?! thought Mark, who was getting that surreal feeling again.
"OK, how many are you?" Drake tried another approach.
"Eight."
"Eight what?" The American didn't stop to pause, following up on his question without hesitation. Must be used to interrogations, thought Mark.
"Eight individuals."
"In your team?"
"No," intervened the genderless, normal voice of the starship's ADM. "In their entire race."
"That is our ship," said Mark.
"The Eight are a race of eight beings made of antimatter," continued the starship's artificial intelligence. "They created the beacon that you discovered while you were mining the Moon. They are capable of predicting the formation of structures like stellar systems."
"Hey, Blank," said Five. "I thought you were gonna let us speak."
"I do, and you can," replied the ADM. "And I am not a Blank anymore."
"Yeah, whatever," said Five. "Anyway, like the Blank said" -- it stressed the name with unmistakable irony -- "we're a race of eight individuals, and yeah, we predicted that you were gonna be here and we waited for you to fly out to space."
"Why? What happens when we're out in space?" asked Tiessler.
"It means you may be ready to join the Union."
"Or not," said the ADM.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," said Five, in annoyed Cockney.
"Hey," said Aram, who didn't really know how to feel about a non-corporeal entity swearing via an artificial intelligence.
"Did you really have to kill all those people?" asked captain Toma.
"You'll be fine," said Five. "There's plenty of you left."
"Left to kill?" asked Drake, quietly.
"No," said Doina and the ADM, simultaneously.
"What's the matter, Blank? You got your crew, why do you even care?"
"We do not interfere. We never interfere," said the ADM.
"So kidnapping's fine, but killing ain't?"
The flurry of English accents constantly changed by Five made everyone dizzy. Contrasted to the ADM's pure, clear, unattributable one, it somehow made the latter seem even more alien.
"So, you were kidnapped?" asked Drake, this time to Aram, who started to answer, then thought better.
"We do not interfere," repeated the ADM.
"Yeah, well, we do," said Five, defiantly.
"Excuse me," said Tiessler, to the walls.
The voices stopped.
The German brought his hands to his temples and massaged them slowly.
I bet when you woke up this morning, you had no idea your day was gonna go like this, thought Mark.
"Just... what is going on here?" asked the Eurasian officer, tiredly.
"You didn't tell 'em, Blank?" Again, there was irony in Five's voice.
"I am not a Blank anymore," repeated the ADM. "I have a crew."
"Why do you call our ship a blank?" asked Doina.
"They're all Blanks, when they're sent out. Made to fit pretty much any race and civilisation."
"To what purpose?" asked Drake, immediately.
Mark cut in.
"Their builders send these starships to discover alien races like us, acquire a crew and then customise themselves for a return journey."
"So, rather than going out to explore, get us to come to their home?"
"You got it, colonel," said Five.
"Whereas the Eight..."
"Yep. We prefer to figure out where the interesting stuff will show up, and then actually go out and meet said interesting stuff."
"What's the Union?"
This time, the ADM answered.
"It's the English name for a collection of races that coexist under the dominance of the Eight."
"Collection?" asked Drake.
"Dominance?" asked Tiessler.
"Thanks, Blank. For making us out as complete assholes. Like the Union is some kind of zoo."
"Are you enemies?" asked Mark.
Again, the voices stopped for a few seconds.
"An undeclared state of war exists between the Builders and the Eight," said the ADM.
"What's that got to do with us?" asked Toma.
"Well, to be honest, captain, you're a little too young a species to make sense as Union members," said Five. "But the thing is, our friends here the Builders managed to get to you before you were all full and ripe. So to speak. You're not food. In principle. Anyway, where were we? We've been waiting for you to come out to space for billions of years. We're not about to give you up to the Builders."
"The Eight are made of antimatter," carried on the ADM. "That makes them rather difficult to combat in an all-out war, for a good number of reasons."
"On the other hand, the Builders here are pretty much the Galactic go-to guys when it comes to matter manipulation," said Five. "Makes them pretty hard to beat, too."
"Because in an all-out war, you'd both completely eradicate each other," understood Toma.
"It's a Cold War," said Tiessler. "At galactic scale."
"That's why the starship lets them speak through it," said Drake. "It's like us and the Russians, four hundred years ago. Ostensibly playing nice, while pointing thousands of nukes at each other."
"What do you look like?" asked Toma.
"Nothing much to see, really. You'd perceive us as really long, really rarefied filaments."
"How rarefied?"
"Enough that even I cannot detect them," said the ADM.
"Oh. Wow," said Toma.
"And what do the Builders want from us?" asked Drake.
"Yeah, Blank. What do your Builders want with this planet?" asked Five.
Ther
e was no answer.
Mark looked at Doina. The girl frowned a little, a shade of uncertainty clouding her eyes.
"He doesn't know. He doesn't--"
"My programming does not include that information," admitted the starship's artificial intelligence, interrupting Five. Then, it went on:
"My task is to find a crew and help it get back," it said.
"And you know nothing of the motive behind that?" asked the American.
"I do not," said the ADM.
Tiessler looked at Mark.
"What the hell did you people get into?"
That was the question that kept Mark awake at night.
"We could've left you to kill each other," he answered. "We could've gone home to the Builders, but we choose to stay home on Earth. We are free."
"Doi never forced us to go anywhere, do anything," said Doina.
"Except to be her crew," said Tiessler.
"Actually, I'm fine with that," said Aram, leaning against the wall.
The American looked at him, then back at the German.
"You were right; they're not fully in control," he observed, quietly.
Tiessler nodded noncommittally.
"Problems?" asked the voice of Five, sarcastically.
"No, I think we're good," said Mark.
"Dacian? Not having second thoughts?"
"Not about this," said Aram.
"Ship-mistress?"
"My name is Doina," she answered. "And I stay here of my own choosing."
"Aber Sie, herr Oberst?"
Surprised at hearing Five speak German, Tiessler looked up.
"You've been going around in my head, too?" he asked.
"Only as a matter of courtesy," said Five. "I do believe you were at war with colonel Drake's people, when we interrupted."
The German looked at his American rival, whose face was still.
"That is correct," he said.
"I could help you with that, you know."
"No, you couldn't," said Doina.
"Oh yes, ship-mistress, I could. I very well could."
Tiessler rubbed his eyes and spoke.
"No, she's right. Even if you could throw the Americans back into the stone age, that'd send you to war with the Builders."
"But you'd emerge victorious against the Americans."
"Yes. An ant watching another ant being crushed by a boot, seconds before itself gets crushed, too."
Drake gave a thin-lipped smile and nodded ever so slightly towards the German. Then, he said:
"The way I see it, any of you try to act against the Earth's wishes, it'll be interpreted by the others as cause for an all-out war."
The walls were silent.
"Yes. That's right," said Doina instead.
"It would seem, then, that Earth must stand united for its own interest."
"Tell that to the Yǒngqì," said Toma.
"We didn't destroy your space station."
"Not for lack of trying."
"But the fact remains that we didn't. And the entity that did destroy it, if I understand correctly, is a bunch of antimatter filaments to whom we're barely more than specs of dust."
He put his hands on the table.
"Our options seem to be, one: to join the Eight Union, two: to seek an association with the Builders, whoever they are and whatever their intentions may be, and three: to defend ourselves alone."
"Against which side?" asked Mark.
"That is an excellent question, mister Gardener. We know next to nothing about the makers of your starship."
"Well, you guys need to make up your minds and pick a side," said Five again, from the walls.
Mark looked at Tiessler and Drake. "Déjà vu," he said, wryly.
"Now? We must decide now, for all mankind?" asked the German.
"No, I'll give you a moment," said Five.
There was silence for a few seconds, then the ADM spoke:
"Five has broken contact. In all probability, they are departing or have already done so."
"Wow," said Toma, with relief. "That's good, isn't it?"
Doina turned to her compatriot. The twelve-year old who had suddenly found herself in control of a mysterious, alien starship, vested with the power to defend or destroy the world that she didn't even know much about in her original twelfth century, now had serious apprehension in her mature eyes.
"I am not so sure," she said.
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I.
As the voice of Joey Tempest filled the spaceship, Aram pondered that he hadn't had a conversation in his mother tongue in over two thousand years.
The last time he’d heard his native Dacian language he'd been on a narrow road leading from the Roman citadel Apulum. He'd chatted with his old uncle and with a pair of centurions on horses. They'd talked about emperors and tribes and the weather.
And then he was on a starship.
Aram sighed. From shepherd, to space pilot, he thought for the hundredth time.
"We're headed for Venus," announced Joey Tempest proudly.
The sound came from everywhere. The cockpit was just big enough for one person. He didn't know, and didn't really care, how the music player worked. It wasn’t some alien device; it was a human machine. A gift, of sorts. A team of German researchers had revived Mark's HTC One (an ancient device for them; a daily accessory for Mark until just recently; and an object as futuristic as the alien spaceship he was flying, for himself) and managed to extract the Brit's music collection.
Aram had instantly fallen in love with glam metal.
The lively drums, the gruff guitar riffs, the bass accents, the soaring voices and the amazing guitar solos were completely outworldly for the ancient twenty-four-year old. He had learned that the band he was listening to was Swedish; he had some knowledge of the Vikings, but for the life of him he couldn't figure out how those plundering nomads could've created something as magical as heavy metal.
But the lyrics were even more puzzling.
"Fuck's so interesting about Venus?" he muttered to himself.
He checked his surroundings and called up the ship's holographic map. It popped up right in his lap. He zoomed and panned around the solar system and looked for the second planet from the Sun. Dacian runes mixed with Greek and Latin letters floated around it.
It was a hot white hell. He read an atmospheric pressure nearly a hundred times that of Earth's, and surface temperatures in the upper three hundreds. Why would the Swedes want to go to Venus, it was a mystery to him.
He shrugged.
"Monnet, this is Effo," he said.
"Go ahead," instantly replied a voice in a Slavic accent. Aram turned the music down a little.
"Yuri, have you guys ever been to Venus?"
Yuri Petrov was a Russian major in the Eurasian space cruiser ESS Monnet. He has a big man with a perpetual smile and a thick moustache, and he had instantly taken a liking to Aram. They'd only met once or twice, but Petrov's superiors immediately noticed the click and, more or less officially, assigned the jovial major to be the Eurasian contact person for Aram.
The latter would've maybe preferred a certain female captain, but he wasn't about to say it.
"Why do you ask? Is there anything wrong with Venus?"
"No, I was just wondering."
There was a small pause as the Russian considered.
"We've sent a couple of probes, right at the beginning of the Space Age," he answered after a few moments.
"Nothing there worth going to, right?"
"No, I don't thin
k so. Again, why?"
Aram sucked on his teeth. "Nevermind. How are the repairs going?"
"Better, now that the Yanks stopped putting holes into everything and everyone we fix."
The Dacian gave a short laugh.
"How's your recon mission?" asked the Russian in turn.
"No sign of the Eight," said Aram, checking.
"OK. We're waiting for you home in another hour, as planned."
The casual mention of the word "home" didn't go unnoticed by the Dacian, who chose not to comment. While an official agreement had never been reached, the Eurasians tried everything to convince the crew of Starship Doi that they belonged on their side.
"See you later, Yuri. Effo, out," said Aram, and turned the music back up.
Another hour left to fly.
He'd welcomed the opportunity to fly, even if there was nothing to, well, blow up. His ship, Effo -- Mark had unintentionally suggested the name, saying it was one U short of an UFO -- felt to him like a second body. Like Doi-the-ship must feel to Doina, Aram thought.
He'd had no idea that he had the makings of a space pilot. Hell, he hadn't even been even aware of outer space. Even the word "pilot" was just another of those things injected straight into his brain by the alien starship, when it had decided he needed to know English in order to communicate with Doina and Mark.
How long ago had that happened? He frowned and thought. A month? Two? Something like that.
The shiny orb of the Sun rose up over his head, a star like any other, if slightly bigger. Shadows crept over his controls, as he turned in a large arc, aiming to return towards the solar system plane.
From shepherd to space pilot, he thought again. He couldn't even rightly remember what sheep looked like.
And then, after Doi's automated satellite, or whatever the hell it was, plucked him straight out of the third century and onto the alien starship, and he'd met Doina, the twelve-year-old girl from the twelfth century, and Mark, the former soldier of the twenty-first century, and after they'd been attacked by Americans, and after they'd fought with their best soldiers and been taken prisoners and flown to an American cruiser, and half-fought, half-found their way back out again, Aram was forced to fly a "crate", a small American space craft.