The Celaran Refuge (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 8)

by Michael McCloskey

  “Hard to wrap my head around. Will this accelerate your investigations?” Telisa asked.

  “Yes! The ship discovered by the Space Force was much more primitive, but it still sheds so much light on their current cybernetics! This is a huge breakthrough. It will almost make up for the fact that we don’t have the aliens themselves working on the other side of the problem as we had with the Celarans. We have a decade of top Terran scientists’ work that explain that old ship... to Terrans.”

  “That’s great and creepy all at the same time. These aliens have been lurking at our doorstep longer than anyone realized. Can you split up the problem? I want at least one of you looking at communications as a priority.”

  “Will do, but please remember the wrinkle? There are two languages, the Destroyer coordination messages and the... Quarus’s native tongue.” Marcant said. “This breakthrough may shed more light on the former, but not the latter.”

  He kept the doubt from his voice. As far as he believed, no one was going to be making treaties with the Destroyers anytime soon.

  “See what you can accomplish. We’re preparing for an attack of our own, but it would be nice to be able to call it off and negotiate a truce instead.”

  Telisa did not say the rest, but Marcant thought he knew what it was: Especially given that we don’t know if we can win.

  ***

  Marcant walked out onto the hardtop under the strong light of the local star. It felt good to stretch his legs and walk after hours in his PV working on translating alien messages. He sipped a glucosoda and walked up to the building Lee supposedly occupied.

  Last chance to just connect to her from here.

  Marcant looked up at the wall before him. The Celaran building only had doors on the top facing panels, at least thirty meters above.

  I’m on the PIT team now, I can handle this. I need real exercise and practice.

  Marcant had gone through a phase in his life where he ignored the real world. It had not gone well. Even with modern drugs and amazing medical technology, many structures of the Terran body still needed to be used now and then to prevent degeneration. Even his nervous system had started to fail after months in sustained VR. Since then, Marcant had started to move around more in this level of reality (current baseline, a simulationist would say). Since joining the PIT team, he had redoubled these efforts. He told himself it was part of his training.

  Marcant resealed his drink and traded it for a smart rope from his backpack.

  “Here we are,” he spoke to Adair and Achaius. “On a primitive... er, an alien planet that is advanced yet hostile to Terran life, about to risk death to ascend this building for a face to face with a Celaran.”

  “You may be risking your neck, but I’m sure my core sphere can handle this fall no problem,” Adair said.

  “Delusions of grandeur,” Achaius said.

  “I’m not delusional in this case,” Marcant protested light-heartedly. I am a legitimate member of the PIT team and this is a hostile alien environ.” His rope snaked up the side of the building and pulled itself along the top until it found purchase. When it was ready to bear Marcant’s weight, it signaled his link.

  “Not so very hostile...” Achaius said.

  “Maybe a little bit, jelly-brain,” Adair added. Marcant ignored them.

  Marcant started up. He had done more dangerous climbs countless times—in virtual realities. Marcant could feel the difference. It was not a matter of what he saw, heard, or felt. The knowledge that the danger was real altered the experience immensely.

  You’re a simulationist, he reminded himself. You’re not supposed to believe this is real either.

  Marcant made it without falling. He puffed a bit at the top. Even with the smart rope to assist his climb, it had been exercise. He looked at his link map and found the nearest door.

  “You’re aware that this building is hollow, right? You can’t fly to Lee in there.”

  “Perhaps at this point, I could compromise and ask her to flit over and chat,” Marcant said. He walked over to the nearest door and pushed it open with his right hand, checking for a platform. He saw that although the building was hollow, there was a small platform just below the door that he could land on. He spun and pushed through the hexagonal trapdoor feet first, dropping inside.

  Lee hovered right at the entrance beside the platform Marcant had alighted upon.

  “Hi!” she said. Marcant accepted her presence.

  I must be a clumsy oaf to her. She’s probably been waiting here for a minute.

  “I’m here to ask for help again,” Marcant admitted.

  “What do you need, friend?” Lee replied. She did not ask why he came to see her incarnate. Marcant wondered if the alien was truly as happy as the translator made her sound. His translator had normalized the range of their moods and mapped them onto Terran emotions. It was based upon too many assumptions and anthropomorphizations.

  “I can’t make progress on the Quarus’s language. I know that the Celarans worked on it back when you tried to make peace with the Destroyers. I’m not as interested in the machine signals the machines use to coordinate, though, as much as in the native language of the Quarus.”

  “You’re right, we Celarans learned some things about it. However, we don’t know how successful we were; the Destroyers never relented despite our many pleas to stop. What do you have?” she asked.

  Marcant sent her the snippets from the alien flagship that had been captured during the battles. They were different than the inter-Destroyer transmissions seen during the battle.

  Lee referenced the majority of the snippets through their link connection.

  “These cannot be translated. They are only bits and pieces of one statement.”

  “There’s a lot of data there,” Marcant protested. “There’s one long transmission at the start of the battle.”

  “That’s the only thing it really said. They have a kind of batch communication,” Lee said. “It takes longer for them to say anything, but once decoded, every batch says a lot. They communicate the equivalents of pictures, books, or speeches in whole blocks. It may be hard to understand, but imagine a book that can be comprehended as a whole, but any one piece of it means nothing.”

  “It’s amazing you made that key insight,” Marcant said. “We were stuck.”

  “Our race was dying. We had to put a lot of work into it.”

  Marcant wondered what it would be like to study an alien language while those you wanted to talk to annihilated your planet. He hoped he would not have to live it.

  “How could any race have developed language like that? Surely at some point in their primitive past, one of them just had to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” Marcant wondered aloud.

  “I have no explanation for the apparent lack of simple primitives,” Lee said. “Perhaps they exist but we cannot understand, or maybe we were never exposed to them because they are no longer used.”

  Marcant hooked Telisa in on the conversation. She accepted the link.

  “Lee says that Quarus communicate in larger blocks that we do, not just mechanically, but maybe conceptually.”

  “That happened during the last battle?”

  “Here. I isolated the command message from the flagship at the start of the attack, but we only have pieces of it. The battle produced huge amounts of complex EM noise. There wasn’t anything else during the battle at all that I found.”

  “Then here’s another theory on why the Destroyers are relatively inflexible,” Telisa said. “They transmit the entire plan to the machines in one of their ‘blocks’ of communication. I imagine it’s quite complex, step upon step, contingency upon contingency, but the machines stick to the plan. If things go sideways, if the enemy does something unexpected, then they fall back upon a default behavior—say, all out frontal assault—rather than devise a new tactic.”

  Telisa is sharp. She has a strong imagination, Marcant thought. The standard theory that had been put forward was that t
he Quarus did not want their machines to be too smart to become a danger to their creators. The two ideas were not necessarily mutually exclusive, though.

  “That’s a lot of guesses based upon a bit of insight,” Marcant commented.

  “It’s a good theory,” Lee said. “Their communications are very limited during the battle. There are advantages as well. It also makes their servant machines hard to interfere with.”

  Right. If that theory holds, it rules out our idea of learning to speak Destroyer and trying to confuse them with fake orders during a fight.

  “Can we send the flagship a message?” Telisa asked. “Send them a demand for surrender.”

  “We need the big picture,” Lee said. “A single statement would be nonsensical to them. It would be like sending a Terran a message with a single letter. The message specifies no abstraction at that level. If they even realized we were talking to them at all.”

  “How can I send a picture of surrender?” asked Telisa.

  “No, we need your whole terms, what you want, what will happen if they refuse, everything about your position to distill into one block of communication,” Lee said. “Pretend you have to write a long document about your demands, your position in the negotiation, everything that might happen, your answers to any question they might have, your threatened responses to every counter action they might take.”

  “We can’t give away too much,” Marcant said. “We can threaten them with various actions we’ll take, but...”

  “We can use this to our advantage,” Telisa said. “I have an idea.”

  “Please share it,” Lee said excitedly.

  “We’ll outline two outcomes of this battle. One in which we kill them off, and one in which they accept our terms to leave and never come back. We’ll show them step by step how we’re going to go in there and kill them off if they don’t bow to our terms. We’ll show them how we’re ready to poison the ocean. If they do leave, we show them that we won’t pursue.”

  “Showing them our plan—” Marcant persisted.

  “I don’t intend to show them the real plan. I’m going to show them the obvious, straightforward attack that we all doubt.”

  “Aha. Let them prepare for something that isn’t really coming.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s the real plan?” asked Marcant.

  “I haven’t put the finishing touches on it yet,” Telisa. “For now, we just concentrate on setting the trap.”

  Chapter 20

  Siobhan knew it would only be a few more days before Telisa would have to order an attack.

  The Celaran ships patrolled far over the jungle between the industrial base and the enemy ocean. They did not dare gather or land for fear of a Destroyer strike. Yet when the time came, they would have to go even closer to the danger zone.

  Siobhan had an awful feeling about going into the ocean after the Quarus ship and the suspected Destroyer factories. It did not feel like a reasonable plan—but what else could they do? Surely another, even bigger Destroyer attack would emerge from the ocean in another week and threaten them again.

  Lee sent a report on the status of their preparations. The entire PIT team had permission to read it, so Siobhan checked it out. The Celaran ships allocated for the attack were empty, as none of the aliens would serve on a ship to be sent into the water after the Destroyers. The Celarans were clearly negative on the idea of assaulting the ocean. The report complained about an insufficient number of ships for an offensive operation and lack of production assets to quickly make more. It went on to discuss the limitations of their aquatic capability: ships that could not dive deep into the pressure of the ocean, and energy weaponry suboptimal for submarine operations.

  They don’t want to do this. And I can’t blame them. Going in after the Destroyers in the water will cost a lot.

  Even though Siobhan felt the same about the attack, she thought the Celarans had good enough weapons for use in the ocean, especially now that Lee had designed improved ones. That part of the report felt like an excuse. Perhaps their allies thought they needed to justify their position or the Terrans would abandon them?

  I could be missing the whole source of their reluctance. Maybe they just don’t want to hurt anyone, even the Destroyers.

  Telisa checked in on Siobhan in the new factory often. The factory had been set up within a matter of days and had not stopped producing parts for explosive mines and disk machine missiles since Siobhan had launched it. Raw materials came in by air several times a day, brought in from distant automated mining operations.

  Siobhan expected Telisa to show up and inquire on progress any moment. Lee connected to the team again while Siobhan waited.

  “Our message to the Quarus has been answered,” Lee announced.

  Wow! That’s more than ever happened before.

  The Celaran sent a pointer with the message. Siobhan followed it and found a complex body of translation notes. She could not decipher the data.

  “What does it say?” asked Caden, echoing Siobhan’s confusion.

  “If I may summarize,” Adair said. “The response is an outline of an assault plan that starts with the destruction of our ocean assault force. It then continues with a description of the annihilation of the Celaran race. It ends with the threat of following any survivors back to the Terran homeworld.”

  “That would be a ‘no’ to our suggestion for ending the war,” Telisa transmitted. Siobhan saw Telisa spoke from only a quarter of a kilometer away; she was outside the compound fence, on the way to see Siobhan.

  “We expected such a response,” Magnus said on the team channel. “This doesn’t change anything. We know we can talk to them now, even though it isn’t quick and easy. Time to deal them a major blow.”

  Siobhan mulled over the response as she waited for Telisa to arrive.

  Are we in bigger trouble this time than before? Is this how it’s going to end for us at last?

  She had a sudden quirky idea to run off with Caden into the jungle and just survive out there. It might be a rational thing to do. If they waited long enough, a fleet from Sol might arrive and rescue them.

  Is he thinking of the same plan? Or would he call me a coward? Would Telisa brand me a traitor?

  Siobhan took a deep breath. She did not want to run. The Celarans needed their help and the PIT team was going to give it to them. They at least had control of local space, and the hope of reinforcements from Shiny.

  Telisa came into the factory from a ground level door—something only Siobhan’s factory had. Telisa did not smile when she saw her—only Caden would do that in times like these—yet the PIT leader seemed relaxed. She walked up to Siobhan on a narrow path that led through the factory, another Terranized feature of the Celaran-built factory.

  “Let’s talk about the ocean assault,” Telisa said aloud, surprising Siobhan. Telisa usually spoke with Magnus or Marcant about their attack strategies.

  “Okay.”

  “What’s your opinion?” Telisa asked.

  “It would be a mistake to attack now,” Siobhan said. “This won’t work. They’ll have technologies for underwater energy weapons use, while ours scatter and dissipate alarmingly. We don’t have any good torpedoes or guided weapons optimized for the ocean. Even if we did, I think the Quarus’s would be better.”

  “As you recall, our submarine assault threat is a distraction,” Telisa asked.

  “Sure, but what’s the real attack, then?”

  “I’ll tell you, but we need mobile gravity spinners from the Celarans.”

  “You need what?” Siobhan asked.

  “Gravity spinners in mobile bodies. We’ll put them inside the asteroids to soften the impact by dropping them slowly into the ocean.”

  “It’ll be like dropping boulders into a lake to smash fish,” Siobhan said. “They’ve already shown the ability to deflect huge chunks of sinking rock and even some iron-cored asteroids.”

  “Let them deflect the rocks. The spin
ners will exit the boulders later, all at once. If a few of them can grab onto the Destroyer ship, or even get near it...”

  “Then we can bring it to the surface!” Siobhan said. She thought it over for a moment.

  “By now there must be several other factories down there,” Siobhan said.

  “We need the original. Put one or two of Marcant’s new sensors on these things so they can find it. If we capture some of the Quarus, I bet we can force them to stop the next Destroyer attack.”

  “They’re not going to stop. They already said so. If they stop just to save their own lives, well, that’s not a real peace treaty.”

  “I’ll be thinking about that more as we ramp this up. Even if we only get a temporary halt to the attacks, that might be enough.”

  “We should just hide mobile bombs inside the rocks,” Siobhan said. “If we can get a gravity spinner close, we can get a torpedo close. Just blow them up.”

  “That approach is simpler, but spinners would have a better chance of making it through, if they’re configured correctly.”

  “How so?”

  “Spinners will be faster than any reaction or propeller driven torpedo we could make,” Telisa said. “Also, spinners can use their own gradients to defend themselves to some degree.”

  “Oh. But surely that’s only against kinetic attacks? Wouldn’t energy weapons still be effective?”

  “Yes, but the Quarus have been using the missiles to break up the rocks. We’ll distract their energy weapons elsewhere.”

  Perhaps it could work...

  “Unfortunately, the gravity spinners are the most sophisticated thing that Celarans are making. They’ll need one for each ship they produce, so there’s no surplus. I don’t know how many they would provide.”

  “Four might be enough. Six would be better.”