Defending Hippotigris

by Smith, T. L.

  “So did many of our own cultures.” Schaef gave me a ‘you should know’ glance.

  I rolled my eyes at him. “It’s the first thing on my agenda, figuring this part of it out. I’m going to assume you’ll be working on the mountain itself?”

  “It’s what brought us here.” He’d been more interested in it than the LR, running his hands over the rocky surfaces. “If we can reach some sort of deal…” He shook his head at my raised eyebrow. “Yeah, a deal. I concede. They’re fully sentient.” He let his eyes be pulled back up the cliffs. “Everything we know will change with this information.”

  Remy shook his head too. “Only yesterday I thought we were limited to our little bitty solar system and today I’m here.” He waved his hand out over the village. “People would kill for this opportunity alone.”

  “Which is a scary thought.”

  Remy looked at me, confused.

  “It was one thing when we had hopes of no sentient life forms here. Extraction would proceed by policy. Now we face a whole other set of rules. Greed can outweigh rules.”

  “True… but I don’t think it’ll be an immediate concern.” Remy looked perplexed, as he was trying to sound confident. “From what I picked up, you only have two functioning ships, which means a controlled extraction, if an agreement can be reached. It’ll still take years before new ships come off the line. By then the Corps should have the process secure.”

  “Yeah, but look at history, at every major ‘gold rush’ scenario. Eventually the bad guys always show up.” I was not so sure about the Alliance’s ability to control the future. “By now our report on sentience has been transmitted, so they’ll be shifting the plan.”

  Deep down I cringed. We needed the ore, but that hinged on communications. That was my game, Kazan’s.

  Despite conditioning, my Batista side was the one who’d come out enough to equate them with Zebra, enough to throw my brain into some mental short-out, maybe starting long before I returned home. At least that was the suspicion growing in my head as both sides found common ground. I tried not to resist them.

  We finished our breakfast in silence, then climbed down from our vantage point. Lizzy’s shoes plop-plopped behind us as we went in search of Yinet.

  It took a while, but we found her up another cliff, in a circle of other females. They were chittering intensely and I got the distinct impression it was about us, from the frequent glances at us. Yinet came off strong, determined, definitely a leader. Figuring out the politics would be an important step too, so we didn’t step on the wrong toes.

  We waited quietly, observing without staring, letting our lapel cameras record the proceedings. Eventually the other females quietly dropped out of the circle, giving us a wide berth and disappearing along the cliffs.

  Yinet took another moment, before extending her fingers in her beckoning fashion. “Ara. Litty.” She didn’t ask for our men. Maybe because Gerret wasn’t with her. Remy and Schaef got the message, remaining on their rocks.

  Lizzy couldn’t resist as she got up to follow me, turning back to Schaeffer. “Now, you be good boys. Stay. Sttaay!”

  “Lizzy!” She jumped and laughed at my snap, falling in behind me.

  Yinet only cocked her head. We all had a lot to learn about each other. Lizzy’s humor might not make the process easy. As I reached Yinet, I stuck out my face for the nuzzle. “Good morning.” I made the sun gesture I’d worked on with them, showing it in the rising position.

  “Gud morn!”

  Lizzy giggled at Yinet’s nuzzle, her fur tickling. “Good morning, Yinet.”

  I glanced back at Remy and Schaef, just as Gerret popped up the face of the terrace. He gestured to them to go with him. Schaef gave Remy the jerk of a head and they headed back down the face of the cliff. I turned back to Yinet. “I guess it’s just us. Where to start…”

  “Start with why we’re here, total honesty.” Lizzy smiled playfully, but spoke seriously.

  “Way too much, too soon. I need to understand them better, like all this.” I rolled my head back to look up the cliff, then reached my hand out to follow an artistic curl carved in the stone.

  “It wasn’t all done with chisels. Where’s their technology. Did they do it themselves, or someone else, another species? Or did they just find it like this, a previous civilization.” I pulled my hand away from the wall. Damn, now I was sounding like Schaeffer and his alien pyramid theories.

  “That’s a lot to pick apart at this stage.” Lizzy reached out her hand to touch the wall too, but stared sharply at Yinet. “You…” With her other hand she waved to the village below the terrace. “You and your people did this?” She faced back to the stone, letting her fingers slip into a crevice, pretending to scoop it out. “You did this?”

  Yinet studied her gestures for a moment. “Yettt.” She stood up from her bench. “Cum.” She held her hand upwards, pointing even higher up the cliff. “Tory.”

  I was willing to go wherever she wanted, but ‘tory’. I played with the word a bit. “Tory?”

  “Story, silly!” Lizzy grabbed my arm. “Remember, no ‘s’ sounds. You told them stories, now she wants to tell us one.”

  That made sense, I started so many drawing sessions with ‘I want to tell you a story’. Clearly Yinet had been putting my words together for some time.

  “Story time.” I gave our hostess a nod and she started up the cliff, walking, giving Lizzy a hand up. Flip-flops weren’t ideal for the task, but probably better than blisters.

  We climbed, higher and higher, all the way to the top terrace. There we entered another cavern, the ceiling covered with the plants that glow bright. She led us back into a long corridor.

  Immediately I found my drawings, stuck to the wall. In one row were the stories I’d told about me and Lizzy. In another were also the drawings where I’d tried to describe our journey to and from their planet.

  My cheeks felt hot as Lizzy laughed at my artwork. “I need to give you some lessons before you run into any other alien species.”

  “Hey, it got the message across enough for them to start talking to us.”

  Lizzy shrugged and went back to the art display.

  Soon my pictures were replaced by others, older, carved into the stone. Carved with a precision that excluded any chisel. I ran my fingers along the lines, feeling the sharp edges, no nicks, hesitation notches or irregularities. “Wow. How’d they do this?”

  “How, might not be the question you want to ask.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lizzy stood in front of another wall, staring at a mural. I backed up, taking in more of the carvings. It took a second before I realized what mesmerized her.

  I saw the mountain, the beautiful face so intricate in smaller detail, but it was only one of many carvings on the wall, interconnected drawings.

  I followed Lizzy as she took a step deeper into the artwork. The next image was of the same mountain, but no city cut into its face.

  Next came a city almost like our own, but it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t artistic like the cliffs. It was broken, destroyed, and from it came a flood of creatures, led by what had to be the LR.

  In three simple carvings, I’d learned these people came from a higher civilization, but I could see more carvings. I started back through history, standing before each panel to take it in, to understand what I saw and to record it in as much detail as I could.

  Lizzy was at my side, staying close and quiet. Yinet also made no sounds, offering no explanation. This wall needed no words. Art was our common language.

  By the time we reached the last of the carvings, I needed air. I needed the light of a real sky. We made the terrace and sat down on the long benches. Yinet sat down across from me, staring at me. She was waiting.

  “I don’t know what to say. Your people have been through so much, and survived. Now we’re here to upset everything.”

  Lizzy leaned on my shoulder. “I don’t think she wants us to be sad. I think she put your draw
ings in there for a reason. Did you notice how the ones of how we got here follow their lives? The others were placed above or below those, while our travel was in direct line. We’re part of their history now. They see us in themselves, at least I did.”

  So did I. At one point in the drawings, ships lifted off their world, up beyond their atmosphere. “Is that why you were curious about us? Because your people once went out there?”

  She scowled at my hand signals, so I repeated myself, slower. She gestured going out, but waved off coming back, pointing to us instead. She made several more gestures, playing with words. “Ara tee LR?” She turned her eyes outward.

  “Did I ‘see’ LR out there?” I repeated the question and she nodded. All I could do was shake my head. “No, but out there is so big, so far, and we are so small.” I did my best to translate the thoughts, but only got a frown from Yinet.

  Lizzy did better than I did, but she was accustomed to communicating larger ideas down to the simplest explanations.

  I sat back as Lizzy cleared a space on the terrace, then from a nearby bush she plucked a hand full of leaves and a couple small twigs. She pulled one large leaf from her pile and put it on the ground between us. “Home… Hippotigris…”

  “Don’t use that name, it was a bad joke.”

  “Okaay… LR world. LR home.” She slapped the leaf, then held up one small leaf. “Star.”

  “Tar.” Yinet knew that word, pointing to the sky and giving the sign for night.

  With a flourish, Lizzy scattered the tiny leaves across the stone, around the larger leaf. “Many stars.” She took one twig and pretended to fly a space ship up and away from the planet, just as the picture had shown. “LR go to the stars.”

  From another direction she flew in the other twig. “Here come the crazy humans.” She made a few stops at stars along the way, shaking her head and lifting off again, until she came to the large leaf. “And here we are. Human and LR.”

  She went back to the LR stick, stopping at one star, then another, and another, but going further away, and not in the direction we came from. She went through them going away, our coming here and Yinet got it, nodding. “Many tar, go far.”

  Lizzy went over to sit beside Yinet. “Too many stars.”

  Yinet didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Finally she reached down to take the ‘human’ twig. “Human.” She broke the stick into two pieces and pointed one at me. “Ara.” She pointed out to the forest, the way we’d come the day before. “Ara.” She put the stick back on the leaf, pointing towards our camp.

  She held out the other stick. “Human.” She said in in a lower voice and stared at me for another second, then pointed off towards distant mountains. She growled and put the other stick on the leaf, harder. “Many human.”

  “What? No. No more humans!” I shook my head and started to reach for the stick, but Yinet’s long fingers wrapped around my wrist, stopping me. “Yinet. No more humans.” I pointed back in the direction of our camp. “Only in camp and here.”

  “No. Many human.” She pointed again in the direction she had before. With her hand curled, she pretended to dig, growling. “Many human.”

  “That’s not possible!” I looked out in the direction she pointed. She had no reason to lie, so what could she be talking about. “I don’t understand.”

  I reached for the second stick again, and this time she let me pick it up. “Many human, over there, digging.” I picked up a nearby rock and held it out, then put it in my pocket. “Taking rock?”

  Her head nodded.

  “LR over there? LR village over there?” I pointed to her, to the face of their dwellings, then pointed in the same direction as she had.

  “No LR.” She pointed further south. “LR hom.” Then to another mountain. “LR hom.” Whatever was happening was a distance between two more of these peoples’ villages, but close enough they knew about it.

  She pointed down over the face of the cliff, down to the terrace where we’d joined her. “LR…” She growled something in her language. She repeated herself, but when I still didn’t understand the word, she lunged her head forward, baring her teeth, then quickly pulled back, returning to her usual calm expression.

  It was terrifying. “Okay… Mad, ang… the LR are angry.”

  My stomach flipped over at the thought. “Those other females. Tribal leaders. Came here to be angry, at us.” Lizzy translated with drawings. Yinet nodded. “Damn!” I tapped at my lapel. “Schaeffer, where are you?”

  What if they brought us here for a reason? That was stupid. Of course they did. But they’d waited for me. Why?

  “Schaeffer here, what’s wrong?”

  “Where the hell are you, right now?”

  “Getting a tour of the village. It wraps around the western ridge. There’s got to be thousands of LR here.” He sounded fascinated. “What’s got you all freaked out?”

  “You tell me. Other than our camp, how many other humans are here, and why didn’t I know anything about it.”

  “Because there aren’t. We’re the only ones here.” Now annoyed was the prevailing tone in his voice. “We got people in orbit.”

  “No, we also got people at…” I used my scanner to get a reading on the distant mountains, even if I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. “…150 degrees to the south. The LR aren’t happy about this, not one bit. Though it seems they still trust me to answer them. So, tell me again, why do we have another camp and why are they mining without permission.”

  “Listen Kazan. I already told you. We don’t have anyone else here.” He paused. “We’re heading back your way. We’ll contact the ship and get them to do a scan. If you don’t like that answer, we’ll take the shuttle over to find out for ourselves. Deal?”

  “Deal.” I turned down the pissed off dial. He wouldn’t compromise if he was pulling something, and I’d worked with him long enough to know when he was telling me the truth. But so was Yinet.

  When I turned around, Lizzy had been busy, doing her interpreting of my argument and the plan. It seemed to placate Yinet. It also brought on a wave of jealousy as Yinet gave her a nuzzle. I’d spent countless months of my life here, hiding what I was from my dearest, and in a matter of two days she’d gotten just as far.

  I sighed out the unexpected jealously, not knowing which of my personalities let it out in the first place. I focused until I had Kazan front and center again. We had a mission here. If Lizzy could talk to them better than me, good. I needed to be using my head for other things, like figuring out what the fuck was going on, and who was doing it.

  “Okay, we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding. Maybe a survey team got over-zealous.”

  “Maybe we got bad guys already.”

  “Maybe you better not translate that. Let’s get off this cliff and find out what we can.”

  Lizzy followed me to the steps. Yinet led the way, helping us down the huge steps, almost making it a game with Lizzy, swinging her down from one step and over the next to the ledge below.

  To not be the stick in the mud, I played along, even had a bit of fun before we hit our terrace. Schaef and Remy were waiting.

  Schaeffer wasted no time. “I called the ship’s captain. She said our other ship is a thousand light-years off in the other direction. She’s running an EM scan, but you know as well as I do, we only have these two ships.”

  “That you know about.” Remy chirped in. “Remember where the science came from, private industry. They wouldn’t let something this major get past them.”

  Remy had a point, though neither of us wanted to hear it. Schaeffer scowled. “Nothing’s impossible, so we need to address the likelihood that either the Corps or the corporations are scamming the LR, and head it off before they get really pissed off.”

  “Yeah…” I looked up at Yinet. “You really don’t want to see what an angry LR looks like. Not so warm and fuzzy.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Can we fix one thin
g before we go any further?” Lizzy still had an arm wrapped over Yinet’s, like they were now best buds.

  I squashed down another wave of jealousy, Batista’s jealousy. As much as she loved her friend like a sister, Lizzy always had a knack for becoming the center of attention among their friends. Kazan knew it was a benefit here. “Fix away.”

  “They have a name. Calling them LR is like calling them It.” She glanced up at Yinet. “Pa-re-dat.” She said it slowly.

  “Par-red-et.” Yinet rolled the r’s, a half-growling sound, the last syllable sharp.

  I repeated it precisely, getting what passed as Yinet’s smile. “Parredet. Sorry if I offended.” I bowed my head to her. “I should have asked as soon as we started talking.”

  “Well, Babe, not like you run into aliens every day. At least not yet.” Remy wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get details, how you came by your info.”

  Thanks to the lapel cameras, we replayed the scene from the art gallery, wowing our men who’d been deprived of the private showing. Schaeffer was pissed off, but kept it hidden, even as I told him of the Parredet once achieving space travel.

  But it was Yinet asking about the ‘other humans’ digging up the far mountain that broke Schaeffer’s calm. He pulled up a topographical map of where we were, our camp and the mountains.

  Yinet liked the holographic technology, not the least bit afraid of it. Rather, she located her village without his help. She ran her long finger through the mountain range, over several peaks, to a precise target.

  Armed with specific coordinates, Schaeffer passed them along to the captain, and again we waited. It seemed to take an eternity, but soon enough she came back on-line. “Col. Schaeffer, we did a full sweep of the area and got some unusual readings.”

  “You’re picking up activity? Human activity?”

  “We’re picking up something we shouldn’t be, a lot of scanner interference. I have my guys working to get a better reading.” Funny how distance did little to distort her underlying message. She didn’t like being jammed.