“I’m sorry, Garek,” Lucien said again.
“Yeah, well…” He shrugged and drained his drink. “By the way, I didn’t choose to wear these scars, and they’re not a badge of honor. They were supposed to be a badge of shame—part of my punishment, so that people would recognize me and know what I’d done. Garek the Butcher they called me. I made the scars work by aging my skin. Having a face like a newborn just made the scars stand out too much.”
“Seems like I misjudged you,” Lucien said.
Garek grunted. “You and everyone else.”
Lucien laid a hand on his shoulder. “If it makes you feel any better, if it were up to me, you’d be the XO.”
“I gathered that,” Garek replied. “That’s when I realized that I shouldn’t judge you by your parents.”
“They’re good people. If they testified against you, it was because they had to, not because they wanted to.”
Garek shook his head. “There’s always a choice.”
Lucien inclined his head to that. “I’m thinking of starting up a game of Bluff. You interested?”
“That would be stealing,” Garek replied. “I’ve got twenty years’ playing experience on you.”
Lucien gave a crooked smile. “Ever hear of beginner’s luck?”
“All right, you’re on. I’m going to get myself another drink. See who else you can get in on it. More’s the merrier when it comes to coin in my wallet.”
“Hah. We’ll see,” Lucien replied.
“You want me to order you something from the bar bot?”
“His name’s Kip.”
“He has a name? Since when?”
“Since Jalisa put me in charge of naming things.”
Garek snorted.
“I’ll have another beer,” Lucien replied. “Assuming you have something to sober us up before we jump?”
Garek tapped a pill box on his belt. “Right here.”
“In that case, make it a pint.”
“Comin’ right up,” Garek replied as he turned and headed for the bar.
Lucien watched Garek go with a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. If Garek’s daughter had joined the clerics to get away from the dangers she’d faced with the Paragons, then why join a mission headed for the cosmic horizon?
Maybe she thought she’d be safe so long as she stayed on Astralis. She was probably right about that, but still… if carnivorous, sadistic lizards were the worst that Laniakea had to offer, Lucien shuddered to think what evils the rest of the universe could conjure without Etherus there to bring order to the chaos. His mind flashed back to scenes from the spider people’s holo history—scenes of alien taskmasters whipping those spiders to death.
Lucien grimaced. He hoped they weren’t heading into a trap.
Chapter 14
“We’re ready to jump when you are,” Pandora announced as they all took their seats on the bridge.
“Good. Stand by, Pandora,” Tyra said. “All stations, report.”
“Lasers charged, and torpedoes loaded,” Jalisa said.
“All systems green,” Tinker put in.
“The comms is ready to be communicating,” Troo added.
“Sensors scanning, and nav systems ready,” Pandora said.
Lucien checked his station. Apart from monitoring shipboard security and his duties as XO, he was also in charge of the galleon’s three fighter squadrons. “Flight ops ready. All pilots standing by,” he said. The pilots were all bots, and hard-wired into their cockpits, so they were technically always standing by.
“Execute the jump,” Tyra said.
“Aye, Captain. Panda-2 here we come!”
“Hold on—”
“Something wrong, ma’am?”
“Who said you could name this star, too?”
“No one objected when I called dibs on naming it earlier.”
“We haven’t been here for the past four hours. Commander Ortane, why don’t you name this one?”
“How about Arachnai-1?” he suggested.
“Good enough for me,” Tyra replied. “Any objections?”
“I object,” Pandora said. “The numeral implies that this is the spiders’ home system, which is clearly not the case.”
“But we don’t know where their homeworld is,” Lucien said. “We can always call that star Arachnai Prime when we find it.”
“But—”
“No buts. Arachnai-1 it is. Execute the jump,” Tyra ordered.
“Yes, ma’am. Jumping in three, two, one—”
The viewports flashed white, and then the stars reappeared, all noticeably shifted from their previous positions, and now colored by a dark purple nebula.
“Sensors, report!” Tyra ordered.
“Detecting… multiple contacts in orbit around the fourth planet from the sun. Range four hundred and sixty-seven million klicks. Twelve capital-class vessels. They match the ones we saw in the hologram.”
“We is being hailed!” Troo said.
“On what comm system?” Tyra asked.
“Quantum.”
“They have quantum comms?”
“Probably jump drives, too,” Lucien said. “We should activate jamming to keep them from jumping anyone aboard our ship.”
“Activate jamming!” Tyra ordered.
“Field activated,” Tinker replied.
“Should I be replying to message?” Troo asked.
Tyra hesitated. “There’s no way they’ll speak the same language as us. Troo, I don’t suppose you can communicate telepathically from here?”
“No, I is not being able to do this,” she replied. “We is needing to be in the same room.”
“Then we’ll have to rely on the visual communicator for now,” Tyra replied. “I’ll configure it from my station. Patch us through and put them on the main forward viewport—assuming they’re transmitting a visual.”
“Yes, they is. Computer is matching patterns in alien data… patterns is matched. Transmitting…”
The viewport directly in front of them cut to show a humanoid alien with smooth blue skin sitting at the head of a long, gleaming black table. Behind him was a startling view of a lake with pink blossom trees arcing low over pristine, mirror-clear water. The sun was setting on the horizon, splashing a pale blue sky with crimson light, and silhouetting the alien’s head with a halo of fire. Lucien wondered where the transmission was coming from. Could such a place exist somewhere on the surface of the desert planet where the spider people had been taken?
Lucien used his ARCs to query the transmission source, and found that it was coming from one of the cigar-shaped capital-class ships, meaning the view behind the alien had to be simulated rather than real.
The alien glared at them with glowing, solid blue eyes, saying nothing.
Tyra sent her first message with the visual communicator. The message played on the viewport beside the alien, so they could see what she was trying to convey.
Lucien saw their shuttle approaching Panda-1A-V, then descending through the atmosphere and landing in the field of black grass. The rest was a brief summary of their time on the surface that ended in the caves with them watching the spider people’s holo history.
Lucien studied the alien’s face as he—she?—watched Tyra’s message. The visual communicator was a Paragon’s greatest asset in making first contact. Silent stories could convey meaning long before alien languages could be studied and verbal translators calibrated. There were limitations, however.
Alien interpretations of visual messages tended to vary widely, and a reply wouldn’t be possible until the aliens could be given a visual communicator of their own to play with. Tyra’s message finished playing, and they waited to see what the alien’s reaction would be.
“That explains how you came to be here,” it said, speaking in flawless Versal, and a surprisingly pleasant voice.
A shocked silence hung in the air. Tyra’s mouth opened and shut a few times, but no sound passed her lips.
Of all the things they’d expected to encounter beyond the red line, humanoid aliens that spoke their language wasn’t one of them.
Arachnai-1
Chapter 15
“You speak Versal?” Tyra asked.
“I speak many alien languages,” the being replied in its pleasant voice. It angled its chin up slightly, so that it appeared to be peering down at them, and then flashed a stunning smile. Its teeth were white and perfectly even and straight. For some reason that smile made Lucien think of a snake, even though the alien bore no reptilian features—besides hairlessness.
“We are Human, what are you?” Tyra asked.
“I am a Faro.”
Tyra nodded. “It’s a pleasure to make contact with you. My name is Tyra, Captain of the Inquisitor. We are explorers and sci—”
“What are you doing beyond the red line?” the alien interrupted. Its smile vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared, and its glowing blue eyes seemed to radiate hostility.
Tyra appeared taken aback by the question. “You seem to have us at a disadvantage. We haven’t met your people before, yet you seem to know a lot about us—our language, the arbitrary boundary we imposed upon ourselves.”
“Arbitrary? The red line is not arbitrary. It was part of a peace treaty we signed a long time ago, the terms of which you are violating.”
Lucien blinked, wondering why Etherus hadn’t mentioned that.
“You signed a treaty?” Tyra asked. “With who?”
“Etherus.” The alien said His name through a sneer, as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.
“You know of the Etherians?” Tyra pressed.
“Don’t you?”
Tyra nodded slowly.
“Then why am I not speaking with Etherus?” the alien asked. “If he wants to renegotiate his territory, he should do so himself.”
“He is not with us,” Tyra said, shaking her head.
The alien cocked its head to one side, its eyes suddenly intense once more. “Why not?”
Lucien frowned. How much did these Faros know about humanity? Etherus had only come to power very recently in human history. Just three decades ago they had no knowledge of him, or any of the other Etherians.
“We now govern ourselves,” Tyra explained.
“You left him,” the alien clarified.
“We wanted to explore beyond the red line, and he refused to go with us.”
The blue-skinned alien began nodding. Abruptly, it smiled again.
Lucien suppressed the urge to shiver. There was something very wrong with this alien, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“I apologize for violating your treaty. We didn’t know,” Tyra said.
The alien regarded them a moment longer. “No apology is necessary. The treaty only applies to Etherus and his people. You left him, so you are not his people.”
Tyra nodded. “I’m still struggling to understand how you know so much about us if we’ve never met you before—especially since it sounds like the red line is a boundary for you as well.”
“True, we have not crossed it in many millennia.”
“Then how do you know about us?”
“Perhaps you should meet me in a more social setting, so that we can discuss this in more depth.”
“Thank you for the invitation. We would be honored. Just tell us where you would like to meet and if there are any requirements or customs that we should be aware of.”
“Here.” The image of the alien disappeared, replaced by a blinking red dot on the surface of the desert planet that the alien fleet orbited. After a few seconds, the dot disappeared and the alien was back. “No requirements,” it said. “Bring as many of your crew as you like. I’ll be waiting.”
“Before you go, could we know your name?”
“Of course. My name is Lucien,” It said, looking straight at the Lucien sitting beside Tyra, and smiling once more.
With that, the alien’s face faded from the screen, and the star field returned.
Lucien’s skin crawled, and his stomach churned. How was it possible that he shared a name with this alien? And somehow, without being introduced, it knew that they shared the same name, which implied that it could do what Troo couldn’t—
It could read his mind across more than four hundred million kilometers of space.
Chapter 16
All eyes turned to Lucien.
“Don’t look at me. I don’t know anything,” he said.
“That alien looked at you when it said its name is Lucien,” Tyra said.
“Yes, most curious…” Pandora said.
“Maybe he is being lies,” Troo suggested.
“It obviously knows a lot about us,” Tyra replied, “but our names? That seems too specific.”
“Not if that thing was reading our minds while we spoke to it,” Jalisa added.
“How?” Lucien asked.
“Our AR implants and ARCs are tied in with our thoughts, and they also have quantum comm connections,” Tyra said. “They may have somehow hacked into our network and gained access to our implants.”
“AR implants are designed to read our thoughts—not broadcast them to others,” Tinker said. “We have to actively make an AR connection with someone to do that, and even then, we can only make conversation, not read each other’s thoughts.”
“They must be incredibly good hackers to get into our network and reprogram our implants to read our thoughts,” Tyra said.
“A strong AI could do it,” Pandora suggested.
“A very strong one, maybe,” Tyra replied. “Pandora, can you pinpoint the location on the planet where the Faro indicated we should meet?
“Right here, Captain,” Pandora replied, putting an image of the planet on the main forward viewport. A red dot marked the spot.
“Give us a close-up of that location. Maximum magnification.”
The surface of the planet became more detailed. A few stray white wisps of cloud blurred their view, but they could now see that the red dot was at the bottom of some kind of ravine. The top of the ravine was sealed with the telltale blue haze of an energy shield, which implied a different atmosphere inside the ravine, possibly a different climate, too. The Faros had probably terraformed it to suit their needs so that they could walk around without pressure suits down there.
“All right, everyone, let’s go,” Tyra said, rising from the captain’s chair. “Pandora, you have the—”
“Conn,” Pandora finished dryly.
“What’s the matter?” Lucien asked. “Last time you were practically begging for the conn.”
“I am beginning to think that having the conn in the crew’s absence is not a privilege. Why do all of you get to explore the surface of a new planet and meet aliens, while I’m stuck up here?”
“Are you questioning your orders?” Tyra asked. “I could always assign you to latrine detail instead.”
“It is an honor to have the conn, Captain,” Pandora said brightly.
“Glad to hear it. Everyone else, let’s go. Lucien, please inform the rest of the team to meet us in the shuttle bay.”
Lucien nodded. “Aye, ma’am.” He used his ARCs and AR implant to send them a message before rising from his control station to follow the others off the bridge.
* * *
Lucien listened to Tyra summarize the details of their first contact with the Faros for the crew members who hadn’t been present while he prepped the shuttle for launch.
“Why do you think it chose your name?” Jalisa asked as she went through her preflight check.
“Assuming it was lying?” Lucien shook his head. “I know as much as you do, Guns.”
She stopped what she was doing to regard him with a frown. “It must be significant. You didn’t recognize him? Maybe you met the Faros during your field training?”
Lucien shook his head. “I’d remember meeting hairless, blue-skinned humans that speak Versal.”
“They’re not exactly human,” Jal
isa said.
“No? Paint me blue and shave off all my hair and I could pass for one of them.”
“Are we ready to go?” Tyra called from the cabin of the shuttle.
Lucien nodded and disengaged the shuttle airlock from Inquisitor’s boarding tunnel. “Setting out for Arachnai-1D…” he announced.
After a few minutes, they made a microjump to a point just outside the planet’s magnetic field, and glided down the rest of the way, flying past one of the Faros’ cigar-shaped capital ships.
“The atmosphere is 97% carbon dioxide, 2% nitrogen, and 1% other gases,” Jalisa announced as that atmosphere buffeted their shuttle and roared loudly against the hull.
A wisp of cloud drifted past the cockpit, and then the shielded ravine swept up below them, a jagged slash of blue running through an endless, rocky brown desert. The desert gleamed with metallic rocks and flat metal squares that looked like landing pads.
Lucien dropped to an altitude of one hundred meters before he leveled out and circled the ravine, looking for a place to land. There appeared to be several landing pads inside the ravine, one of which was empty.
“The shields over the ravine are low-intensity,” Jalisa said. “We shouldn’t have any trouble getting by them.”
Lucien nodded. “Then down we go.” He hovered over the empty landing pad and dropped straight down into the ravine. Its shields sizzled briefly against theirs, and then they were through—
And hovering down into a beautiful garden.
“Wow…” Lucien breathed. The shields had hidden a lot of details from view: trees with black trunks and pink blossoms; pristine white grass that gleamed like beach sand in the sun; a river so calm and clear that it looked like glass. Walkways and streets ran through the garden, with blue and green-skinned pedestrians. The green-skinned ones were more numerous, but they kept to one side of the river, while just a handful of blue-skinned aliens walked on the other side. Both sides of the ravine were lined with the balconies of dwellings built into the rocky cliffs. Tall blossom trees lined the river, blocking the view from one side of the ravine to the other.
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