by Mel Keegan
“Are they trying to contact us?” Rusch asked shrewdly.
“It’s likely,” Jazinsky whispered. “Damnit, Mark – are they trying to talk to us? We smashed our way through the best defenses they could throw at us, we’re still here, and instead of launching a swarm against their platform, or running a bunch of Weimann jumps from low orbit, as Tonio suggested – sheer bloody xenocide – we’ve sent one inoffensive little drone to take readings and image them. They could be trying to open a dialog. Negotiate.”
It was Mark’s turn to groan. “If they are, we have no idea what they’re saying. For all we know, it could be ‘We surrender, don’t shoot!’, or it could be ‘This is your last warning before we launch the doomsday bomb.’”
“Oh, sweet,” Travers breathed. “Lai’a, we might as well say something intelligent to them … ‘Greetings from the Deep Sky, we come on a mission of peace to ensure the survival and prosperity of all.’”
Shapiro’s helmet turned toward him. “For a soldier, you’re quite the diplomat. All right, Lai’a. Go ahead and transmit exactly what Colonel Travers suggested. Transmit in as many human languages and Resalq dialects as you can.”
“We tried this in the outer system,” Dario warned. “Result: nada.”
“In the outer system,” Mark said musingly, “we were probably talking to a beacon issuing a recorded message. Here?” He turned back to the tank, where the image had resolved with proximity to target. “We’re certainly talking to an intelligent species, though I think it’s incredibly different from ourselves. Those sounds … if this is a spoken language, it’s not issuing from any larynx, mouth, tongue, lips, remotely like ours. You also notice, it never pauses for breath. Which suggests something like cyclical breathing. Perhaps gill breathing.”
Travers felt a prickle as the hair stood up on his nape. “I guess we were just lucky humans and Resalq are so similar.”
“Superficially, at least.” Jazinsky leaned down to watch as the shape of the platform became discernible through the haze and murk of cloudy liquid. “I’ve often wondered how the future would have shaped up if the Resalq had been arachnoids, three meters across the legs … Mark, are you seeing this?”
“Oh, I’m seeing it.” Mark’s voice was husky with reaction.
In the tank, Travers could make out a hull surface which seemed to be metal, off-white or gull-gray; no markings were apparent, but at irregular intervals dark shapes were recessed into the surface, and in any structure he had ever seen, he would have identified viewports. The platform was immense. The probe raced down its side for minutes before it reached the short end of the rectangular body, and there it dove under to image the bottom.
Great hemispherical domes bulged from the ventral surface, and every few kilometers along the length were the cylindrical openings of chutes which could have been exhaust stacks or garbage disposal. The Ops room was silent as the vid feed displayed, though the surface details simply repeated over and over until the drone reached the opposite end. Now it looped up over the top of the platform, and the superficial features changed. Anyone would have recognized the porcupine spines of comm arrays; but these were smashed.
“No wonder they’re almost totally off the air,” Vidal said softly. “Those are highband arrays, if ever I’ve seen ’em. Disabled.”
“Or damaged in an accident,” Rusch added. “Mark?”
“It looks like there’s been a … a collision,” he agreed. “Something hit these arrays, and hit them hard.”
“A comet fragment?” Jazinsky wondered. “Lai’a, can you enhance any of this footage enough to tell if there’s been a large scale impact of a body from orbit?”
“Enhancement shows no such evidence,” the AI responded at once. “Observable damage is consistent with the lateral impact of a body such as a ship or industrial drone, which destroyed the arrays either by accident or by intent.”
“An old fashioned crash,” Dario said slowly. “Maybe they got hit by some of their own junk – the system’s lousy with it. Damnit, how ironic would that be!”
“The question is,” Jazinsky added, “why the hell these arrays weren’t fixed inside of a day or two. We lose our highband, and we go ballistic.” She zoomed the image to maximum. “See this? The broken spars are crusted over with so much muck and algae, up close, you can’t even tell they are broken antennae.”
“Bloody hell,” Rabelais muttered passionately, “I’d forgotten how much I detest a mystery.”
Over the loop, Bill Grant’s light voice said, “Not to intrude on your explorations, people, but Barb and Neil might want to know. Richard’s in surgery right now. OR 1 is sealed. If anybody wants to follow the procedure, I’ll stream it to one of your workstations.”
“Just keep me informed, Bill,” Jazinsky said in an odd voice, high and taut. “We’re a little busy just now.”
“I’ve been listening,” Grant told her. “We just said hello.”
“Not,” Mark added, “that the people who speak this local language will know what we said. To a species without larynx or tongue or lips, the sounds we make will sound like gravel rattling around on a shovel. Lai’a, is there any response to our message?”
“None,” it said with the machine’s imperturbable calm. “I am repeating the message. The transmission received from the platform remains the same, repeating on an endless loop without variation.”
Travers’s steel gloved fingers drummed on the side of the threedee which had been coopted as the navigation tank. “Another recording.”
“Possibly. Probably.” Mark took a long breath as the probe completed the circuit of the platform and waited for instructions.
“Do you wish the probe to return?” Lai’a asked.
For a moment Mark hesitated. “No. Have it remain on station there and observe the platform.”
“Looking for what, Doctor Sherratt?”
“Machines or life forms moving outside the structure, waste dumping from the chutes in the bottom, drones working on the surface, lights inside, heat blooms of machinery, weapons coming online, somebody waving from a window! … anything at all to tell us the life forms inside are reacting to our presence.” Mark was still engrossed in the data racing through the side of the display. “This is definitely another recorded message. It’d certainly have been triggered by sensors when our probe appeared; but you can’t fail to notice, this time they’re not shooting.”
“Perhaps the probe’s too small to present a hostile target?” Marin wondered, and then, “no, that makes no sense. Not when the Zunshu’s own probes are a quarter the size.” He turned toward Mark. “They ought to be shooting. Everything we know from your own history and ours says they should have opened fire as soon as our probe came into range.”
“Exactly,” Mark agreed. “Yet they’re as passive as the big platforms out there by the Drift, which we called gatekeepers. One could speculate that they’ve had a salutary shock: they were comprehensively defeated in orbit. Lai’a, give me a report on the comm sky.”
“Silent, Doctor.”
“Can you estimate, from current data, how many life forms are aboard the platform?” Rusch asked.
“No less than twenty thousand,” Lai’a judged, “no more than ninety thousand. The lower figure is the more reliable, since many of the thermal traces I am tracking might easily be machinery. Biomechanical systems are difficult to differentiate from life forms, at distance. Be aware that domestic animals could easily account for a high percentage of the remainder.”
“Food animals?” Dario sounded doubtful.
“Why not?” Travers tilted his head to make out what Lai’a was doing with the scan data in the tank. “There’s cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, on any world where humans live. Just because the Zunshu mastered the transspace drive a long time ahead of us doesn’t add up to some shift to vegetarianism, or a passion for synthetic gruel.”
“Point,” Dario admitted. “Also, as far as we know, most highly intelligent species begin as carnivor
es, or at least opportunistic omnivores, since hunting skills appear to form the roots of technology. If this is the Zunshu homeworld – and the Ebrezjim data is absolutely specific – you have carnivores evolving in a liquid environment. They might hunt like dolphins, or even sharks; and the physical equipment for hunting and eating prey in an aquatic medium – jaws, teeth, claws – doesn’t lend itself to any radical switch in diet. Food animals,” he added thoughtfully.
Marin gave a low whistle. “They evolved hunting like sharks, and developed an intelligence that could master the gravity express? Would that kind of mind think twice about annihilating an enemy?”
“Evolution,” Mark said thoughtfully, “has a way of changing the mind as well as the body. Cro-Magnon man was a savage beast, more likely to break his neighbor’s skull with a bone hammer than to shake his hand.” He turned away from the tank and began to pace. “Harrison, I’m going to suggest we stand down from ship-wide alert. Repressurize, get out of the armor – give everyone, myself included, a chance to get clean, rehydrate, eat. Lai’a, if anything on that platform so much as twitches in a hostile direction, take evasive maneuvers and give us as long a warning as you can to re-suit and drop the habitation module back to zero pressure.”
“Acknowledged.” Lai’a paused. “Captain Vaurien’s collar bone, ribs and humerus have been successfully welded. Nano has diffused all bruising to the leg and torso, including organ bruising. Transfusion continues. Procedures are underway on ulna and radius. Left leg has been incised, hip to ankle; bone fragments are being realigned in preparation for welding. Nerve tissues have been scanned; synthetic neural bridges are under manufacture. Captain Vaurien remains tolerably stable on life support.”
As it spoke, air pressure and temperature across the habitation module rose steadily. Travers was watching numbers tick over, and as adequate conditions were restored he began to hear groans and curses of relief over the loop. Kravitz and Choi remained in armor, working in the old Ops room, wrangling drones, welding plate armor over the inside of the hull breach. The compartment was fully decontaminated by now, and in a few minutes the armordoors would be permanently sealed.
Only Tonio Teniko remained inside, his armor wrapped in a cocoon of hazmat blankets. There he would remain until he was interred in space, a burial in the Deep Sky, perhaps even in the Lushiar system, where he was born. Travers approved, yet the spacer in him still fretted that a soul passing over in alien space might never find its way home. Or did it cling to its mortal remains? Would it hold tight to the last part of its physical self to survive, and ride home with the flesh and bones it has cast off? Freespacers believed this and for a moment, as he lifted off the armor and stacked it in the passage right outside the makeshift Ops room, he wondered what Harrison Shapiro believed.
The man’s face was gray, immobile, and of a sudden he looked older, as if many years had caught up with him all at once. Every thought, every feeling, was shuttered as if he refused to allow himself the luxury of emotion. The time for grief would come later, Travers thought. Shapiro knew all this at firsthand. Neil had not forgotten the portrait of Lauren Russel in the office back at Fleet Borushek – a Kuchini woman, big-boned, far from physically beautiful, but imbued with an intelligence, a wit and compassion that came through even in a still image, and which had inspired a man like Harrison Shapiro to fall in love with her.
“He must be thinking he’s jinxed,” Marin said quietly as Shapiro walked stiffly away to the crew lounge, where one of the autochefs had come online and coffee was brewing. Rusch was investigating its inventory for quick, cheap carbohydrates. “He’s had two partners and he’s lost both. I … don’t know how he handles it. I try to imagine losing you, Neil, and then I think of going through it twice.” He shook his head. “It’s a strength I don’t know that I have.”
Travers caught his hand, laced their fingers. “None of us knows. One day, we either find it or we don’t.” He studied the way Marin’s fingers meshed with his own and smothered the rush of unruly emotion. “Come on and eat.”
“Not hungry.”
“Force yourself,” Travers insisted. “You need the fuel.” He drove Marin ahead of him to the ’chef, where Leon, Roy and Asako Rodman were already taking anything the machine would offer.
The coffee was under-brewed, but he did not care. He dumped cream and sugar into it as Lai’a announced, “Bone welding is on hiatus in hand and femur. Captain Vaurien has become unstable. Cardiac and pulmonary functions are on override; nano have eliminated four thromboses prior to coronary artery incursion. Standby.” Several moments passed during which Jazinsky and Travers looked hauntedly at each other, and then Lai’a said, “Captain Vaurien has stabilized. Bone welding re-commencing in femur and hand.”
“Damn, that’s … well, damn,” Jazinsky said tiredly. She was visibly trembling, and dropped into the recliner in the corner by the door. She took a mug from Mark, and her face was gloomy.
“Trust the AI,” Mark told her. “It’s working with a precision few human surgeons can match, and it’s performing several procedures at once. Richard was always very strong. Tonio paid a high price to buy him this chance to live.”
“Tonio,” Jazinsky sighed. “You know, at the end I actually admired the little bastard. And I guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, if I don’t want him to come right back and haunt me!” She raised the mug in salute. “Here’s to you, Tonio, wherever you are. You were a right royal pain in the ass, but … I owe you. Richard owes you. As they say on Pakrenne, may clear skies break over you, may the sun shine down on you, and may you find what you’ve wanted all along.” She drank on the words, and her voice roughened. “Now I’ll probably miss the little bugger. He was a thorn in my foot for so long, not having him around is going to be weird.”
“Status update: guns and Arago projectors are online,” Lai’a reported. “Ammunition stores are at 95%. Armor cover to the habitation module is restored. Exterior decontamination has commenced. Drone manufacture is complete.” It paused. “A single high-energy comm pulse has transmitted from a point on the platform. Duration, 0.02 seconds.”
The hackles rose on Travers’s nape. He looked sidelong at Marin as Vidal asked sharply, “Was the pulse directed?”
“Yes, Colonel. The transmission was aimed at the Zunshu Drift, with a high probability that it is targeted for the science platforms.”
“The gatekeepers.” Shapiro set down his empty mug and rubbed his palms together. “Why now? Are they calling in the cavalry? Why wouldn’t they send for their topcover during the battle, when we were vulnerable? They might have taken us then.”
“Why now,” Mark echoed, “after we’ve traded comm signals neither of us can understand. Lai’a, any progress with translation?”
“No, Doctor. The sample remains insufficient and there is no point of reference,” Lai’a told him.
“You recorded the high-energy comm pulse.” Mark lifted a brow at Dario. “I don’t suppose any of it’s accessible, Lai’a?”
“Not yet. Its encryption is entirely unfamiliar and the sample is so small, translation might not be possible. Analysis is underway.”
“We’d better launch a flight of surveillance probes,” Shapiro said grimly. “The big, Weimann-enabled probes. Get them into the outer system, Lai’a, between us and the … the gatekeepers. If something nasty is coming at us, we want as much early warning as we can get.”
“Yes,” Mark agreed, “and if it’s nasty enough, Lai’a – don’t stand on ceremony. Get out. Make for the Weimann exclusion threshold, best speed, and then jump us back to the Drift.”
“Put us well out of range of the gatekeepers,” Rusch added.
And Vidal, in a tone like a razor: “They still haven’t made an attempt to get through your firewalls?”
“They have not,” Lai’a affirmed, “which is most curious, and entirely unexpected. Probe 107 reports minor power fluctuations within the platform; suspected AI activity was monitored for just 2.4 seconds before
it was gone again.”
“AI activity – on and off, like flipping a switch?” Travers demanded.
“In any terms understood by an artificial intelligence,” Dario said slowly, “2.4 seconds is a very, very long time. Long enough for an AI that was hiding to come online and analyze about a zettabyte of passively-collected data.”
“Is it hiding?” Marin drained his mug to the grounds and went to the ’chef for a refill. “Perhaps their species goes to ground when it’s threatened. Plays dead.”
“Plays possum,” Shapiro said bleakly, “as Earthers call it, after some small animal that plays dead to avoid predators.”
Jazinsky issued a rude snort. “Try that one with a carrion-eater and you’ll get yourself eaten alive. Lai’a – what’s going on with Richard?”
“Commencing synthetic neural grafting,” Lai’a said in the same calm tone. “Nano has been deployed to correct hepatic function. Intravenous rehydration is increasing. Preparing to sever critical nerves to curtail transmission of pain signals from surgical sites. Captain Vaurien has become unstable and is receiving intense chemical-mechanical override. A cryogen tank is standing by. Brain chemistry is severely imbalanced. Doctor Grant is assisting, to correct it.”
“Jesus God,” Jazinsky murmured. “Neil.”
A creeping coldness had begun to seep through Travers’s marrow. His voice was hoarse. “Hey, Barb, in any other century he’d have died. Have a little faith.”
It was Vidal who said angrily, “To hell with faith. I’ve had enough of faith – and that, from a Daku! Mark, Harrison, Lex, we shouldn’t be sitting here just waiting for them to throw something at us! We either get the hell out of this shitpit of a system, or we get in there, on that platform, and find out … find …”
“First, a way to learn their language,” Mark said with surprising gentleness. He had taken a seat at the long mess table beside Rabelais and Rodman, and he stood now, hands thrust into the pockets of pale tan slacks. “He’s right, Harrison, Alexis. We’ll achieve no more from here. If we’re to learn anything, we need to get access to their computers. Lai’a, is it possible to put a probe into their computer core from here?”