by Ian Douglas
“Major Warhurst? I have a suggestion.”
“Yes, Cassius! What is it?” Warhurst was surprised. The command constellation’s AI was available at all times for inquiries, but it rarely volunteered information. Cassius was intelligent and probably was even self-aware by most definitions of the words, but his creative initiative was limited, at least in human terms.
“The alien prisoner clearly requires both air and water for survival,” Cassius said. “Removing it from this environment could easily kill it.”
Warhurst blinked. “I believe the plan calls for using an emergency escape bag. One of the large ones ought to accommodate our friend, at least for the time it would take to get him onboard a TRAP.”
EEBs were standard issue gear onboard TRAPs and most other spacecraft. They were plastic bags tough enough to resist hard vacuum. A crewman onboard a disabled spacecraft or station could climb inside one, seal it tight, and have air enough to breathe while space-suited companions moved him to safety. They came in various sizes; the largest could accommodate four humans, and ought to be large enough for a four-meter-long Wiggle.
“Indeed. But the being also evidently requires water. HM2 Lee’s medical scans suggest that it possesses lungs as well as gills, but the lungs appear to be somewhat atrophied, and the being does exhibit signs of respiration distress when its gills are exposed to air for more than a few minutes.”
“Well, we put some water in the bag….”
“We have no way of knowing whether the being will be able to breathe once the EEB is moved into zero gravity. The water would float around inside the bag as small globules, and the being might well not be able to breathe. Nor do we know how it will respond psychologically to being put in a bag and dragged into microgravity conditions. I also question whether any number of Marines could manhandle the being into a bag if it decided it did not want to go.”
Warhurst smiled. “You know, Cassius, I think you’ve bought us some time.”
“In addition, Major, I submit that removing the prisoner from these tunnels would constitute a direct violation both of Article IV of the Jerusalem Accords, and of General Order One.”
General Order One made removing an alien being from its natural habitat in such a way that its life was at risk a crime punishable by court martial. The Stockholm Accords, sometimes called the Civilized War Protocols, had superseded the old Geneva Convention two hundred years before, and, among other things, made it a crime to mistreat POWs.
“I agree. Have you discussed this with General Ramsey?”
“Discussed it, no. I left a message, however. General Ramsey is currently in session with General Dominick and the civilian members of this expedition. He privately told me that he needs to buy time for the Marines inside the Wheel. This was my suggestion.”
“Well done,” Warhurst said. “Very well done. This could be our ticket out of this mess.”
That, of course, was not guaranteed. Both General Order One and the Stockholm Accords were guidelines for military personnel rather than absolute law. Eight light-years from home they could not be anything more.
But they did mean that Warhurst would be more than justified in taking his time obeying the order to transport the prisoner. Hell, one misstep, one mistake in dealing with an alien physiology, and they could lose the prisoner. The thing could freak out when it was sealed inside a bag, have its equivalent of a heart attack…and then where would they be?
The only reason Warhurst could think of for keeping the prisoner was the chance that it could be used as a bargaining chip—perhaps an exchange for Corporal Garroway. To do that, they needed to talk with the bastards.
And right now the bastards weren’t talking.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he knew what he had to do. He walked over to the prisoner, which watched him with four alien, unblinking eyes. He unhooked the tether cutter from his armor, reached out, and snicked through the Nommo’s bonds.
“What the hell, sir?” one of the Marines holding it motionless said, startled.
The lines around the being’s arms and torso went slack. “Stand clear,” Warhurst said. “Let him go. If we keep him, he’s going to die.”
He said that last mostly for the benefit of the recorders in his helmet. He’d just disobeyed a direct order and he would face a court-martial for it, of that he was certain. He might as well state his defense now for the record.
The Nommo didn’t move immediately, but crouched in the water, rubbing its strange, webbed hands.
“G’wan, scat!” Warhurst said. “There’s no point in holding you and it’s dangerous around here.”
The Nommo hesitated a moment more, then, with a rippling twist, it turned and slithered into deeper water. Warhurst watched its tail flick once at the surface and then it was gone.
What, he wondered, would it tell its fellows? That the Marines weren’t such monsters after all? Or that they were gullible suckers, and it was time to hit them, hard.
“Thank you, sir,” Corporal Vinton said.
“Don’t thank me, Corporal. Some people aren’t going to be real happy with that decision.” But he was determined to take full responsibility for it.
“Sewer One! Sewer One!” a new voice cried, using the call sign for Warhurst’s advance HQ element here in the tunnel. “This is Sierra Papa Niner! We have enemy contact!”
He checked the tactical screen. SP-9 was one of twelve squad-level patrols now moving into the smaller tunnels branching off from this big one.
“Sewer One, Sierra Papa Three! Enemy contact! We are under fire!…”
One by one, other patrols began reporting massive enemy contact. So much for releasing the prisoner in order to facilitate peaceful communication. On the map graphic projected through his implant, it became obvious that the tunnel regions surrounding Sewer One were literally crawling with contacts, all of them hostile.
All thoughts of evacuation went on hold.
The Marines would need to win this fight before even thinking of a retreat.
CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
1612 hours, Shipboard time
The first part of his journey had been underwater. Garroway had held still, allowing one of the big aquatic beings to snag hold of his armor, grabbing the carry handle at the back of the neck, and dragging him through the depths. The trip was full of lefts and rights, ups and downs, and while his suit’s inertial navigator seemed to be keeping up with things, Garroway soon felt completely turned around and lost.
One thing was clear, though. The Nommo habitation within the Wheel was enormous, and it was highly sophisticated. At one point, they left the darkness and entered an area where the bulkheads of the tunnels themselves gave off a cool, greenish light. Everywhere, he saw oddly shaped, blocky looking vehicles like the ones that had attacked the Marines on the surface, except that these appeared to be simply transport of some kind, threading their way through the water-filled tunnels in unending streams, like red cells moving through capillaries.
A bit farther on, the tunnel opened into a vast water-filled and brightly lit chamber, one filled with rank upon rank of titanic machines, which vanished into the murky distance. Each looked as though it had been grown from the Wheel’s structural foundation and was more or less pyramidal in shape, with towers, spires, and angular constructs growing from their sides in dizzying forests of black metal. He tried to guess what those machines were for. Power generators? Water circulators or purifiers? Or devices somehow connected with the Wheel’s teleportational aspect? He couldn’t begin to guess. He looked at everything he could, letting both his suit computer and his implant record the images for later study.
If there was a later. He’d lowered his plasma gun with the understanding that he was cooperating, not surrendering, but how could he tell how the Nommo were perceiving his actions? He might well be a prisoner. In the sense that he was not free to leave, that he couldn’t leave if he wanted to, he was a prisoner. So far as the
Nommo were concerned, he might be their prize POW. Or the next sacrifice to their war gods. Or lunch.
He tried not to think about the alternatives. His first responsibility, as he saw it, was communication. As a Marine, his first responsibility as a POW was to attempt to escape…but he was choosing to interpret his current situation as something a little different. The more he could learn about the beings who inhabited the Wheel, the better.
He would worry about communicating that information to the Marine chain of command later.
Eventually, they surfaced. The bottom had been steadily rising beneath them, and suddenly he was able to stand up, his head and shoulders above the water. The panorama was…spectacular.
It appeared to be a city…appeared because nothing Garroway was seeing was making a whole lot of sense at the moment. Slabs of black metal grew from tunnel walls and cliff sides in asymmetrical profusion. Slender spans that might have been bridges arced across broad gulfs. The broad expanse of overhead was pierced by a number of uniform slits, each easily the size of a football field, and through these openings streamed a dazzlingly brilliant, pure, blue-white light.
This must be the side of the Wheel facing Sirius, Garroway reasoned. His suit told him that the light was harmless; it must somehow have been filtered coming in, to take out the ultraviolet and harsher radiations that made the naked light of Sirius A deadly to unprotected humans. The Nommo didn’t seem to mind it. A large number of the beings he was now thinking of as Walkers, as opposed to Wiggles, were gathered on pathways, bridges, and balconies overlooking the waters of the bay he’d just emerged from, and the light wasn’t bothering them at all.
The aquatic Nommo handed him over to a detail of four armored Walkers. They formed up around him in a protective square and led him along a broad pathway that steadily climbed up from the water’s edge. The crowds watched silently, but he could imagine there was an air of tension—or possibly of expectation—emanating from them.
Perhaps they simply saw him as a captured invader.
He was interested to see them without the military armor, however. The armored ones—and he saw lots of them within the crowds—seemed clumsy and relatively slow moving. The rest, though, went naked, or with only bits and pieces of what might be jewelry, or some sort of communications hardware, or both. These moved with a fluid grace Garroway found entrancing. Their skin was smooth, almost rubbery-looking, like a dolphin’s, and tended to be a subdued mingling of greens, browns, and blacks.
The city was a city of canals. Waterways were everywhere, and every building, it seemed, either jutted out above the water, or grew out of it. Curiously, there were no children that he could see—only the silently watching adults. He wondered if this place, then, was less a city than it was a work-place, or a military base.
He simply didn’t have clues enough to how these beings lived to make any rational guesses.
His escorts took him to a slab-building growing from the cavern wall high up, almost to the ceiling, and not far from one of the dazzling windows looking out into space. Through brightly lit corridors, up a ramp—and finally they ushered him into a room.
The chamber felt odd to him, though he couldn’t justify the feeling. It was octagonal in shape, but with uneven walls and a sloping overhead, and he decided that the strangeness of perspective was what was bothering him. There was furniture—recognizable sofas and tables, at least—though it was obviously designed for alien anatomies. The chairs and sofas, for instance, possessed wide slots to accommodate a short tail and were sloped in such a way that the sitter would be angled forward, with much the same posture as when they walked.
Well, they obviously hadn’t expected to be entertaining human houseguests.
“Okay, what now?” he said, turning…but his escorts were gone and the door was silently sliding shut. He didn’t hear a click, but he knew that he was, indeed, a prisoner. The cell was comfortably, spacious, and brightly lit, but these people obviously weren’t going to allow him the run of the city.
If the tables were turned, he couldn’t imagine letting one of them run around loose in Washington, D.C., say, not until humans knew them better than was the case now and could communicate to them on a level deeper than “Go there.”
He began studying his suit readouts. The atmosphere, he saw, was breathable. Oxygen was registering at fourteen percent. That, together with the low atmospheric pressure meant a low O2 partial pressure which might be a problem for marathon runners, but the suit electronics judged it to be marginally breathable, at least. Nitrogen was high—eighty-four percent, but unless he planned on doing high-pressure work or deep diving, that wouldn’t be a problem either. The temperature was chilly—9° Celsius.
There remained one problem that Garroway’s Mark VIII vac armor could not say anything about, and that was the possibility of contamination by some alien microorganism. Nommo germs might be deadly to humans, simply because humans had never been exposed to them.
Or hadn’t been in several thousand years, if these were the guys who’d visited the early Sumerians, like Dr. Franz said. Still, the current wisdom of all of the downloads on the topic said that it was very unlikely that any microorganism that had evolved to feed off one species was going to be able to jump the gap of an alien biochemistry to a different species altogether. Humans had mingled with the An of Ishtar for years and there’d never been a problem.
“Hell with it,” he said. His armor was uncomfortable and heavy. Reaching up, he popped the release catch, unsealed the helmet, and took it off his head.
The air, as predicted, was chilly, and there was an undeniable whiff of something like fish—just a taste of it. Garroway wrinkled his nose at first, but after a few breaths he scarcely noticed it. He set the helmet down on a table and unsealed and removed his gloves. He was wearing suit utilities under the armor—basic dungaree-type overalls with special nanoconverter packs strategically placed to handle urine, excrement, and sweat—but he decided not to strip down that far just yet. He would wait and see what his hosts had in store for him.
The lights dimmed. He looked up sharply, then turned to face the wall opposite the door to his cell. A deck-to-overhead screen was glowing now, and as he took a step closer, the movie started.
Okay, this was encouraging. Apparently they wanted to communicate, and this was an obvious first step. The images were not three-D, but they were in full color and extremely high definition; looking into the screen was like looking into the actual scene, a scene, he realized with a start, that must have been recorded on Earth itself some six thousand or more years ago.
There was a village…a human village, though it consisted of little more than lean-to affairs made of logs and mats of woven reeds. The people were nude or nearly so, with animal skins wrapped about their hips. The men were bald, and many sported tattoos on their faces and upper bodies, patterns of dots and circles outlined in blue ink. The landscape around them was completely flat, an endless panorama of marshland and plain in one direction, and metallic-blue-gray water in the other. The sun overhead was harsh in a brassy sky.
The humans, Garroway saw, were gathered around their visitors, who evidently had just emerged from the waters of the Gulf. He was watching, he knew, a recording of one of the early contacts between the Nommo and humanity; if Franz was correct, this scene had played itself out at the headwaters of what today was the Arabian Gulf, what in later eras would be known as the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.
There were three of the visitors—not counting the being who, Garroway presumed, must be operating the camera, though that job could have been entrusted to a small flying eye or other piece of technological hardware. He was startled to see that the Nommo were, in fact, the aquatic beings. They rested in the water at the water’s edge, with small wavelets breaking around them. Their upright torsos weaved slowly back and forth, their long faces at the same level as the faces of the gathered humans, the rest of their bulk coiled in the water, glistening with an iridescent gleam in
the sunlight.
One of the Nommo was apparently speaking with a human—possibly with the village’s head man, since he wore a particularly elaborate pattern of tattooing on his forehead and chest. The Nommo extended one black arm, raised one webbed finger. “As,” the Nommo said quite clearly. He held up a second finger. “Mina.” And a third. “Pes.”
It seemed fairly obvious that the aliens were giving the humans in that recording their first lesson in basic arithmetic.
He was aware of a kind of running commentary in the background, a low, ragged gargling sound. It took him a while to decide that he was hearing two languages in the record. The Nommo were teaching the humans in an easily pronounceable tongue, quite likely their native language. What was it…Sumerian? The commentary, if that is what it was, sounded completely other, completely alien.
Suddenly inspired, Garroway turned to face the empty room, looked toward the overhead, extended one finger, and said, loudly, “As!” A second finger. “Mina!” A third. “Pes!”
And Garroway’s language lessons began.
21
4 APRIL 2170
CPL John Garroway
Sirius Stargate
0915 hours, Shipboard time
According to his implant, this was his second day of captivity; he’d been a prisoner—there was no sense in calling it anything else—for forty-one hours.
It was not an unpleasant captivity, however. Garroway remained in the octagonal room, continuing to watch the video records of an ancient expedition to Earth. He was witnessing, he now realized, the genesis of human civilization.
His captors had offered him food—something that looked like raw fish, and something that looked like bits of kelp. The testing kit in his armor had promised that nothing in the bowl would harm him and he’d eaten it all. Holding his nose helped with the swallowing. He’d supplemented each meal with pieces of food bar from his armor’s survival kit, just in case there were vitamins or amino acids he needed missing from the local fare.