by Ian Douglas
“Well done!” The TR-3R’s external sensors were online again. There was atmosphere outside—about 80 percent nitrogen, with lesser amounts of CO2, hydrogen, methane . . . Damn! It looked a little like the atmosphere of Titan, the large moon of Saturn, back home. Pressure was a bit higher than the surface pressure of Earth. Definitely a reducing atmosphere, though—no oxygen, and with hydrogen likely being the principle active component.
It was chilly, too. The temperature outside was minus thirty Celsius.
He could hear . . . scrabbling noises, scratchings and probings and clatterings across the outer hull.
Then something slammed with a sharp bang against the left side of Duvall’s cockpit.
“What was that?” Bucknell cried. “What are they doing?”
He couldn’t make out what it was—but thought it might be some kind of machine. His guess was confirmed a moment later when he heard a high-pitched whine, and the tip of what might have been a high-speed rotary drill punched into the cockpit.
“Relax, Bucky. I think they’re sampling our air.”
After a moment, the drill head pulled out, but it left a small gray seal over the hole. Better and better. Their captors didn’t want them to asphyxiate or freeze in a hostile environment.
The cockpit lights came on full force. So did their life support, both in the cockpit and in their flight suits. And the lights came up outside, as well.
They were on a seemingly infinite flat plain, a deck stretching off into darkness on all sides. Looking up, Duvall could just barely make out the shadows of a ceiling high, high overhead.
And something was approaching their ship.
Duvall was having trouble processing everything he saw. So much simply didn’t make sense that his brain was trying to reject it. The alien was big—at least twenty feet long. It was tubular, like a snake or a worm, but a couple of feet thick. One end—the body, as Duvall thought of it—was thicker than the rest and somewhat flattened, splayed out as though it were gripping the smooth deck through suction. The other end—he thought of it as the head—was slender and more complicated, with things that might be sensory tendrils, things that might be highly mobile mouthparts, things that might be eyes, a dozen of them, black and beady, arranged in a circle around the outside of the mouth. There was a thick pad or callus on the sinuous neck a couple of feet below the head. The being walked by resting that pad on the ground, releasing the pad at the base, and supporting the body from the head while the base oozed forward and the middle section of the body formed an upright loop. Duvall had the impression of an enormous inchworm pulling itself along a branch.
It was also clearly comfortable with technology. Though it wasn’t wearing anything like clothing that Duvall could see, there were numerous devices adhering to its body, especially beneath the callus pad near the head. Things like strips of black plastic or metal zigzagged along that glistening body. Lights—most of them purple and orange, but a few white ones as well—winked and gleamed from various electronic devices. What were those for? Communication?
Communications, yeah.
Just how the hell were you supposed to communicate with something like that?
So, with no better ideas, Duvall raised a gloved hand as the creature glided closer, and said, “Hi, there!”
The power came back up on board the Inman. Lights flickered alive, and the gentle susurration of air vents reassuringly reactivated.
“All departments, report damage status,” Davis called. But Makilroy could tell from the instrumentation at her chair that weapons were back online, that the hull had not been breached, and that they had power and life support and gravity and propulsion.
“Comm! Report our status to the Big-H: we seem to be okay!”
“Aye, Captain.”
Okay, sure—but what the hell had happened?
“Science,” she said. “Tell me about these guys.”
“Clearly an advanced technology, Captain,” the ship’s science team head told her. Dr. Albert Kellog was an older man with a beard and a know-it-all attitude that grated at times, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. “They may well be more advanced than the Talis.”
“How do we talk to them?”
“I would suggest, Captain, that we remain in place and see what happens. With a technology that advanced, they may have their own means of communicating with other, unknown species. And they don’t seem to be actively hostile, at least—”
“Sounds good,” she said, not wanting him to go off on a lecture. “Comm, let the Big-H know our situation, and pass along my suggestion that they join us.”
Their best hope of communicating with these people, she thought, was to put them directly in touch with the Talis. The Talis had been exploring the Galaxy for thousands of years. If anyone had the know-how or the high-tech widgets to let them talk to aliens, it would be them.
“Hillenkoetter acknowledges, ma’am. They’re on the way.”
Good.
Groton was back in the CIC, looking over the shoulder of his tactical officer at cascades of data coming in from the Inman. Vashnu was at his side, his face giving away nothing as his fingers clacked and flicked across a keyboard.
“Are you in touch with them yet, Vashnu?”
“No, Captain. But I’m programming the computer to attempt a mass-lingual burst connection. I suspect that this civilization understands either Kudai or Chaktan, and possibly both. But I will transmit greetings in some 5,012 different galactic languages in order to see what they respond to.”
“Why would they understand either if you haven’t been in this system before?”
“There is, across most of the Galaxy, Captain, a network—parts of it transmitted over the neutrino channels, but most is through phase-entangled devices that can communicate instantaneously. You could think of this network as analogous to your Internet.”
And that explains why we could never eavesdrop on alien civilizations, Groton thought. SETI simply didn’t have the technology. We were jungle natives listening for drumbeats and looking for signal fires, totally unaware of the flood of radio messages passing all around us.
“Over tens of thousands of millennia,” Vashnu went on, “a number—a very large number—of artificial languages have been developed to enable the civilizations across the Galaxy to communicate with one another, despite extreme differences in sensory apparatus, in worldview, and in Mind. We’ve never encountered this particular civilization and know nothing about them, but the chances are fair to good that they have been listening in, have decoded the nested instructions for acquiring galactic languages they can use, and can communicate with us if they wish. They certainly are technologically advanced enough to do so.”
He struck the enter key with a distinct air of finality. “Transmitting.”
And in the next instant, the mobile planetoid ahead pivoted about on its minor axis, then began accelerating.
It was heading directly for the Hillenkoetter.
Chapter Sixteen
Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy.
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute, 2015
15 March 1983
“What am I signing?”
“The final authorization for the Strategic Defense Initiative, Mr. President.”
“Okay . . . there you are. So tell me, George. Is this going to go anywhere? There’s an awful lot of resistance to this in Congress.”
“Mr. President . . . are the tape recorders off?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Then I can tell you, Mr. President, that research into these weapons is already quite advanced. They’re working on things—particle-beam weapons, X-ray lasers, plasma weapons—that are straight out of the pages of science fiction! But corporations like RAND
and Boeing are going to need a bigger share of the budget, much bigger . . . and this way we can get the weapons and aircraft we need without, ah, spilling the beans, as it were.”
“You know, George . . . I’ve always hated the idea of MAD, of Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s insanity! It’s kept us and the Soviet Union standing with a knife to each other’s throat for thirty years!”
“It’s kept us from nuclear war, Mr. President.”
“I know what it’s supposed to do, George. But MAD really is insanity! And so, if we’re going to do this, I want to know that, along with a lot of this Buck Rogers stuff, we’re going to be able to break out of this trap here on Earth. I want a ballistic missile shield as well as a means of shooting down incoming UFOs, okay?”
“The technical problems are enormous, Mr. President. I can’t promise anything. But the high-tech spin-offs will be incredible, and I would not be at all surprised to find out you had your missile shield by the end of this.”
“Fine—however it works. As long as it does. At the very least, the Russians will be so pissed about this that they’ll break themselves trying to play catch-up. But I would think we had a better chance to stop Soviet missiles than these alien spaceships. The reports I’ve seen, the advanced technologies . . .”
“They have incredible technology, yes. But we have the numbers. And the will.”
“No question about the numbers. But I do wonder sometimes about the will . . .”
“So, Commander . . .” Minkowski said. “You know what some of the guys are calling the 1-JSST?”
“No, Mink. What?”
“The ‘Just One.’”
Hunter looked puzzled. “What, as in we mete out justice? Or as in we’re the good guy?”
“Neither, sir. As in ungodly alien monstrosities snacking on potato chips. ‘Bet you can’t eat just one. . . .’”
Hunter groaned. “God, Mink . . . that’s terrible!”
“Black humor, sir. The only way to face the unfaceable.”
The humor did tend to corroborate the general sense of fatalism and grim expectation that seemed to permeate the unit, though. Hunter hadn’t dwelt on it in his training sessions, but by now every person in the unit understood that if they went into combat, it probably would be against an enemy far better armed, far more advanced in their technology, and far more numerous than the tiny direct-action group from Earth. The mental image of a giant alien snacking on humans didn’t seem to be too far off the mark.
“Excuse me . . . Commander Hunter? The captain’s respects, sir . . . and would you please come see him up in CIC? I can take you there, if you want.”
Hunter looked up at the earnest-faced Navy lieutenant, then at Minkowski. “Think you can ride herd on these yahoos, Mink?”
“You go ahead, Skipper. Don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere without you.”
The JSST team was still on the flight deck, though Hunter had told them to stand down and simply remain in the area. “Hurry up and wait.” They’d removed their gloves, helmets, and their bulky backpacks, but kept their laser weapons close by.
The lieutenant led Hunter up to the bridge-CIC complex, riding most of the way on one of the quick little people-movers. Captain Groton was in the CIC, watching a series of huge screens that dominated the complex. At a glance, Hunter saw the vast bulk of an asteroid peppered with lights, but what grabbed his attention was the alien face.
There was no sense of scale from the televised image. He couldn’t tell how big it was. But the circle of small eyes and the writhing of the mouthparts seemed to suggest that it was large—bigger than a human, anyway. Blocks of words were scrolling down the right side of the screen, a translation, apparently, of whatever the inhuman creature was saying.
“Commander Hunter, reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Ah, yes,” Groton said, his voice low. “Thank you for coming up. I tried raising you on your radio . . .”
“We took our helmets off, sir. No sense in staying fully suited up when nothing was happening.”
“Makes sense. But I didn’t wish to make a public announcement over the shipboard intercom. Doesn’t matter.” He gestured at the big screen. “As you can see, we’ve made contact.”
“Aye, sir.”
A Talis male was speaking an alien language into a microphone. What sounded like a different language emerged from a speaker next to the big monitor, but a computer was translating everything that was said into English.
But the text seemed pretty disjointed.
“. . . war . . . you invade . . . sacred . . . why . . . war . . . find base . . . war . . . you remove . . . annihilate . . .”
“He isn’t making much sense, is he, sir?”
“I hate to think what he’s making of what we have to say. But Vashnu seems to be making progress.”
“Have we learned anything, sir?”
“Quite a bit, actually. These people call themselves Dreamers, which in Dhopak—that’s an artificial language suited to the physiology of their speech patterns—comes across as ‘Xaxki.’”
“‘Dreamers’? As in Mexican nationals trying to come to the United States?”
“No, Commander. As in the Xaxki population in this star system, if I’m understanding correctly, is something like four hundred quadrillion. That’s four hundred million billion. The vast, vast majority of that obscene number are asleep, hooked up to virtual reality machines and living in what seems to them to be a life fuller, richer, and more interesting than what you or I would call real life. They are all but immortal, are kept alive by intricate machinery, are electronically fed whatever illusions of life they wish to experience by sophisticated computers, and in general are completely unconcerned with what’s happening in the rest of the cosmos.”
“Huh. Nice work if you can get it.” Hunter thought a moment. “So what happens if something threatens their idyllic existence from the outside?”
Groton pointed at the image of the black mountain adrift in space. “That is the responsibility of our friends, here. They call themselves K’kurix, which I’m told means ‘Guardians.’ Turns out that the debris field surrounding Zeta 2—the inner portion of it, anyway—consists of hundreds of billions of asteroids that were hollowed out and turned into habitats for the Xaxki, okay? But a few asteroids were set aside as habitats for the Guardians, given gravity drives and weapons, that sort of thing. They’re heavy naval vessels, of a sort, and they keep an eye out for anything that might threaten the Dreamer population—rogue planets, incoming alien battle fleets, whatever.”
“Seems unfair that the military has to stay out in the cold and protect the peacefully dreaming population on the home front.”
Groton gave Hunter an odd look. “Isn’t that the way it is for us?”
“I guess. But forever?”
“We haven’t learned the details yet, Commander, but I assume there’s some sort of rotation. Maybe they figure that a few years of military service followed by an eternity of happy dreaming isn’t such a bad thing.”
“Well . . . this Guardian seems a bit grumpy,” Hunter observed.
“Yes indeed. He wants to know why we attacked them.”
Hunter felt a cold breath down his spine. “Did we, sir?”
“Not that I’m aware. At first we thought they were just objecting to the arrival of the Big-H and her escorts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Seems the Guardians are concerned about a planet inside their inner habitat ring. They say we colonized it, and we’re a threat to their Sleepers.”
The computer programs that were translating between the two vessels appeared to be learning moment by moment, though it was still hard to follow the alien’s thoughts.
“Remove base . . . never return . . . we annihilate . . . remove base immediate . . . break sacred place . . .”
“I called you up here, Commander, because we’re going to do what they want. And your people will definitely play a part.”
“But we haven’t colonized one of
their planets!”
“Yes, but we’re beginning to think that somebody did, Commander. So we’re going to deploy the 1-JSST to the surface, make contact with whomever is there, and find out what the hell is going on.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dr. Vanover here will give you what little we know about the objective.”
Vanover was a small and fussy civilian, introduced to Hunter as the expedition’s chief planetologist, and a senior member of the Hillenkoetter’s science department. In a small briefing area off the main bridge, Vanover transmitted several pages of data from his iPad to Hunter’s.
“We don’t know very much at all as yet, Commander,” Vanover said. “But we did detect what may very well be a settlement of some sort on the surface.”
“A settlement? Just the one?”
“That’s what I said, Commander. Here . . .”
He keyed a command on the iPad, and brought up the image of a planet. It was a bit grainy with a lot of magnification, and most of it was black, with a thin sliver of daylight curving around one rim. There was some light flare to one side. Hillenkoetter was looking toward Zeta 2 in order to image it.
“We’re calling it Zeta 2c,” Vanover said. “So far, we’ve seen three other small, rocky worlds, Zeta 2d, 2e, and 2f. Zeta 2b is farther out, much farther out, beyond the limits of the debris field. We guessed its existence a few years ago when we saw anomalies in the debris field.”
“So what have you been able to learn?”
“It’s cold. Mean surface temperature of about minus twenty, minus thirty Celsius. Reducing atmosphere—mostly nitrogen, but with gaseous carbon dioxide, chlorine, and methane as the active gasses. Air pressure at the surface . . . we’re not sure, but it’s probably greater than the surface pressure on Earth. Very similar in some ways to the moon Titan, though a bit warmer. Diameter is about eight thousand kilometers, making it considerably smaller than Earth. Less dense, too. Probably a lot of water ice in the crust. Surface gravity is just 0.7 G. No natural satellites. Slow rotation—we estimate fifty hours, and 2.5 AUs from the star. Period—its year—would be a bit less than four years. At that distance from the star we would expect the planet to be a lot colder, but the high concentration of CO2 appears to be acting as a greenhouse gas. It warms things up on the surface, at least somewhat.”