by Tim Andersen
“I just said I’d be back,” I said.
“Good. That’s best, then they won’t know where to look for you,” he said. “I only need about five minutes here.”
“Wait,” I said, “why are we going behind your boss’s back and my boss’s back too?”
“Let me explain Goshan,” said Trexel. “Certain elements well above my head in this administration are concerned about the upcoming mission that you are about to participate in.”
“I don’t even know what the mission is!” I said.
“I know. Smith wanted to brief you himself. I’ll only give you the bare facts and leave the details to him, but, when he does explain it to you, remember to act as if you’re hearing everything for the first time.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We have been working with a new alien species for some time now called the Amida, coordinating diplomatic relations. Their existence has not been announced to the public yet at their own request. They didn’t say why, but we like to indulge new species, so we’ve kept it quiet. Language translation code and behavioral models have improved to the point where we feel confident about face-to-face meetings. Not that they have a face we would recognize as such,” he said. “I can tell you that this species is a bit odd-ball even as aliens go. They appear to be extremely peaceful, pacifists even. In fact, they do not appear to possess any weapons at all.”
“No weapons?” I said.
“None that we can recognize from numerous long-range observations and other information sources that I cannot divulge to you,” he said. “Nevertheless, their neighbors leave them alone for the most part, and at least some of them are afraid of the Amida and will not go near their world. Smith will tell you more of the details, but it’s Smith I want to talk about.”
“Smith?” I said.
“Yes, he’s been behaving strangely recently and that does not bode well for the mission. First of all, we have detected that he has been sending and receiving encrypted signals to and from the Amida homeworld outside of diplomatic channels. We cracked the encryption, but the messages made no sense to us. I confronted him about it. He said he’d never seen them before! Never sent any transmission. He accused me of forging them to tarnish his reputation. Ha! If I wanted to forge something, I’d have it make sense. Well, I didn’t believe him and told him so, but Smith stonewalled me and got Stoss to have me drop it. I took it to the deputy minister, and she decided that we could not stop Smith. The mission was too important. Anyway, she said, collusion with aliens is unheard of, so perhaps, she thought, Smith was telling the truth, and someone was trying to frame him, but I did not believe it.”
“But what do I have to do with this?” I asked.
“You, well, you are part of a plan that we have come up with to keep tabs on Smith. We can’t force Smith to take anyone on his team that he doesn’t want. He’d strike, but we wanted somebody in there who would be loyal to us. Lika Townsend is a Smith-woman through and through, she worships him, so we couldn’t ask her. She would never betray him. We were happy when he picked you---out of the blue really---because we know that, with your history, you will put the needs of the administration that your mother helped build over those of Smith.”
It annoyed me to hear this man whom I did not know well talking about what I would and would not do as if I were some sort of machine programmed for loyalty. Right now though, he was right. I had no love of Smith. “I thought you put me under Smith,” I said.
Trexel laughed. “No, no, Smith would never let me put anybody on his team. He was desperate to have you and only you, a real, live Fenn on his team.”
“What has my name got to do with it? It sounded like he hates my family.”
“Well, I don’t know about your mom, but he’s obsessed with Vanchar Fenn. He feels as if he’s in personal competition with the man and takes every opportunity to bash your grandfather’s achievements. I really think that Smith is jealous because your grandfather was known for having a wonderful way with people as well as aliens. Smith can barely have a conversation, and he knows that people hate him. You can bet nobody will be dedicating the Tolan Smith Building in the future. Anyway, enough talk,” he said, looking at his watch. “You have to get back before you’re missed.”
“Are you asking me to spy on Smith?” I said.
“Spy is a rather strong word, Goshan,” said Trexel. “We don’t want you poking through his files or recording his movements. It’s enough that, if you hear anything unusual or see Smith (or Lika) do anything that you think is not mission related, you inform us about it on a coded channel. The first thing you can do is find out if Smith had anything to do with the launch being rescheduled for today.”
“Today!” I said, standing up. “Smith just came in saying we were launching on Wednesday.”
“Oh, yes, it just came down; Smith’s probably getting the message right now, assuming he didn’t already know about it. It made this meeting all the more urgent. The Amida rescheduled the meetings, moved them up a few days. We think that Smith may have had some reason for wanting to go sooner, get off the planet right away, and asked them to do it in one of his messages to his ‘friends’. Anyway, you’re leaving for the Amida homeworld in a couple hours now.”
“Damn!” I said, starting to leave.
“Wait, Goshan, one more thing,” said Trexel standing up. I turned to face him. “If Smith seems to be at all endangering the mission, we’re going to have a warship standing-by at the edge of the Amidan system. If you can’t signal to us directly, take this,” he said, putting a small commtab in my hand, “and signal them via sublight. They’ll come and try to sort you out,” he looked down at my pocket and sniffed, “Better than a jar of pepper I dare say.” I reddened and silently slipped the tab in my pocket only to find that the pepper shaker had opened and spilled in there.
As I climbed the stairs back to the fifth floor, I shook out my pocket and dropped the shaker down the gap in between the flights, hearing it shatter as it hit the sub-basement level. I carefully replaced the commtab.
I arrived back at the office, where Smith was shouting, “where is he? Why did you let him leave now? How many times have I told you---” He turned to me, and I could see that he was shouting at Lika. “Fenn, do not,” he said, voice shaking, “disappear like that again. I need to be able to find my team at all times.” He walked back toward his office and, turning for a moment sniffed, and murmured, “pepper?” and slammed the door.
Lika looked at me and said, “where the hell were you? They moved the launch up, and, when he couldn’t find you, he exploded at me.”
“I was in the bathroom,” I said.
“Do you already roll in pepper when you go to the bathroom?” she said.
I considered saying that I got lost and somehow slipped in a pile of pepper but decided to change the subject instead. Trying to be as innocent as possible I said, “so when’s the new launch date? Tuesday?”
“In two hours,” she said.
“Two hours!” I said, trying to sound surprised with only moderate success.
“Yes, and we have to leave for the spaceport in half an hour to make the launch, so just sit down and shut up while I try to get all my files downloaded to the ship.” She seemed not so much angry at me as frustrated. Whatever she was working on still was not right. As I sat there quietly, I gazed at the revolving Buddha above her screen, noticing again how it had appeared only after Smith had left the room.
Chapter 2 – The Drunken Seeker
The freeway ride to the spaceport was tense. Smith sat up front next to Lika, and I, thankfully, sat in the back by myself. Crispin had already gone ahead to check the supplies. Lika carried no personal items with her while Smith carried a small bag. I had nothing with me of course and would have liked the opportunity to swing by my apartment to pick up some things, but there was no time, and I did not even ask.
I was preoccupied with my “mission”. I stared at the back of Smith’s head, wondering what
was going on in there. Were there traitorous thoughts in there? The man was supposed to be a genius. Even Trexel, who was deeply skeptical of him, admitted that. Like many geniuses, Smith was arrogant and competitive, bent on beating any rival, even a dead one like my grandfather. Still, I could not imagine that Smith would be plotting with aliens.
Truthfully, I could not imagine anyone plotting with aliens. It had never happened before because humans and aliens so far encountered rarely had any goals in common outside of basic survival. The main reason for having any communication with them was based on that goal alone, mutual survival, i.e. that we not try to exterminate one another. In the case of expansionist species, we establish some means of dividing mutually habitable worlds between us. Technical specialists like Smith and Trexel were our ambassadors to alien worlds, not the political appointees sent to human worlds, because of the tremendous technical difficulty involved, far beyond mere translation, of relating to them. For a single human being to try to make some sort of deal with an alien species seemed absurd. If one were going to commit treason, it would be far easier to deal with breakaway or wannabe breakaway human colonies, where ideas such as contracts, property, transactions, schedules, and human-style ethics were in force to some degree. Aliens never understood things the way you expected.
The spaceport, which occupied the old Dulles airport location, was only fifty kilometers away. Smith, Lika, and I maintained total silence for the 15 minute trip. Once there Smith told us both to go on and that he would be there soon, then he said, ominously, that he and I would have things to discuss once he arrived on board. I wondered if he was still angry with me for leaving, but I had little time to ponder as Lika powered ahead of me towards the gates. I ran to keep up.
I had not gotten off to a good start with Lika, which was disappointing because our positions under Smith should have brought us together for mutual support. She was also attractive in a mousy way. Never good with people myself, especially women, I struggled to break the ice. “So,” I said as we walked, “how long have you been with Smith?”
She spoke without looking at me. “Two years.”
“I guess you’ve seen a lot of people come and go.”
She glanced at me now. “Yup,” she said.
“How many of these trips have you been on?”
“One.”
“Oh? Where?”
“The Shader homeworld.”
“Wow, what are they like?”
“They’re very secretive.” That was something everybody knew and little else.
“Like how?” I said starting to sweat, more from her lack of response than the brisk pace she was setting.
“They move a lot,” she said.
“Move?”
“Change homeworlds.”
“Why?”
“So nobody knows where they live,” she said.
This was better. “Don’t you know since you’ve been there?” I asked.
“No, they picked us up and kept us in a bare room the whole time,” she said. “I never knew where we were. Hurry up.” She raced ahead of me cutting off the conversation.
When I caught up to her, I could see a shuttle out the window. She was heading for the gate where I saw that Lars was waiting. Getting to know Lika in private would have to wait.
“You made it I see,” he said, still smiling warmly. “I thought we would miss our launch window and have to reschedule everything. Damned short notice. I had to leave some of the niceties behind.”
“Good Lars,” said Lika, rather haughtily I thought. “Please make sure that the equipment is well-stowed. We don’t want anything to break like last time.”
“I double checked,” he said, but she was already brushing past him into the corridor. I saw him roll his eyes at her as she passed.
I was about to comment on her coldness towards him when I heard Smith calling. “Fenn! Get on board. We’re already late.” I whirled around and saw Smith’s face, not angry at all, but almost happy. He was also carrying a small brown package, which he was in the process of stuffing into his carrying bag.
Crispin and I boarded the shuttle, and I took my seat behind Lika who had pulled out a tablet, apparently from the baggage that was already on the shuttle, and was busy working. As Crispin passed her she gave him the same look I had seen before, as if she disliked him intensely. Crispin seemed to take no note of it this time.
Smith and Crispin both went to the front where a large bay window showed the trees and grassy fields of northern Virginia. I realized that I was about to leave this beautiful Earth behind, perhaps for many months as we worked to communicate with an alien species that only a few had even heard of.
The shuttle was entirely automated so there was no cockpit. Each seat was equipped with a flat screen showing a globe of the Earth. A small figure of a spaceship showed the shuttle’s location in Virginia. I buckled my harness. Once everybody was buckled the ship began to move.
This particular shuttle was a vertical take-off ship and so a tractor towed us out to the launch pad and then set the ship on its rear. Now the bay windows showed nothing but fluffy white clouds and blue skies. A nervous feeling crept over me as I heard the countdown commence from two minutes. The seconds displayed on the screen in front of me. When five seconds was reached the screen flashed, “engines fire,” and I heard the buzzing of the giant magnets in the tail of the ship accelerating ions downward. At zero the screen read, “lift off,” and I felt a slight pressure on my chest, similar to that of a high-speed elevator. The ascent was smooth. Force actuators cancelled vibrations.
The acceleration continued for several minutes, and the sky out the window changed from blue to indigo to inky black, and the stars began to appear as if in twilight. The ship turned, and the curve of the Earth appeared below. Involuntarily, I gasped. I could see Africa passing below and Asia in darkness beyond.
The transfer station was throbbing with activity. Earth had only one old one at the moment, although another was under construction as its replacement, with a long awaited space elevator eliminating the need for the shuttle system. Instead of docking, our shuttle parked a distance away.
“Aren’t we going to dock?” I asked.
“The station is beyond its capacity,” said Smith.
“That’s an understatement,” said Crispin, “It used to be, you would dock and hop right on your Pipe ship. Now, you can be out here an hour or two waiting for them to come get you. Oh but look. There it is now.”
I saw a transfer shuttle coming toward us.
I leaned over the seat, “fast service, eh?” I said to Lika.
She looked annoyed and said, “we’re priority.” She glanced around at me, giving me a “don’t bother me” stare for a second before going back to her tablet.
I sat back, and, while we waited for the transfer shuttle, surveyed the other ships arrayed around the station. Most of them were shuttles like ours, dull and non-descript space taxis. A couple looked like outer world resupply vessels, used to take on supplies for their ships parked in geosynchronous orbit. These were more interesting with their decorative designs. It was rare to see an alien ship here. There was, in fact, a kind of sport called station watching, in which people down on the planet would access cameras set up around the outside of the station and watch for aliens.
As I surveyed the ships, I saw one of a kind I’d never seen before. Human ships tended to contain a lot of protrusions and hard edges. Sleekness was added only when necessary for atmospheric maneuvering. Alien ships varied a lot and most of them looked bizarre, although human ships were borrowing more and more from alien designs as technology transfer accelerated, but I had never seen one like this. It was a perfect sphere. It appeared to have no visible engine, docking port, or weapons. In fact, I would have said it was not a ship at all, except that it was maneuvering. It was nearer to us than any of the other ships, and, as I watched, it accelerated past my side window and around the front. Then I saw something even stranger, the surface wa
s rippling, as if in flux, not a solid material like metal or carbon-composite or nano-fibers, more like a liquid or a living thing.
I saw Smith look up at it and the corner of his mouth jerked up a little in a smile. I looked back to the window, but the sphere had vanished.
When the transfer shuttle docked with us, Crispin transferred our cargo first, all packed in a large supply container. A robot arm simply maneuvered it out of the cargo hold of the shuttle and connected it to the outside of the transfer shuttle. Then we floated through the port and entered our new shuttle, which was much the same as the old, but considerably smaller, more like a large ground car.
Our Pipe ship did not look like a long term ship because it was not wheel shaped. I guessed that we would stay on the alien planet or perhaps one of their own gravity simulating wheel-ships to prevent bone and muscle loss. The ship was sleek, which indicated that it could land on a planet if it needed to. Its ion engines were small, suborbital even, just enough to clear the atmosphere of a planet before Piping to another star system.
We docked and floated into our new ship. The ship was oddly arranged. There was a large room, which also seemed to double as the kitchen on one side and office on the other. There were chairs too. I could not imagine what they were for since zero-g provided the best chair in the universe. I was examining the sleek upholstery when I heard Crispin’s voice call, “hold on to something.”
Smith and Lika both grabbed metal rails that were set into the walls. Confused at what was happening, I set my hand lightly on one.
I felt a pressure on me as if I were in an elevator accelerating upward. My hand slipped off the rail, and I was on my back, staring up at Smith and Lika who both, for once, looked bemused. “You could have warned me,” I said. It was the first time I had seen either of them smile.