Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  “On bridge in three,” Tsubishi said, with a slightly sleepy salute of his own. His fresher had already cleaned and hung his uniform—a limitless supply of hard vac gave new meaning to the phrase “dry cleaning,” and the single-piece garment was as crisp as the ones he’d assiduously ironed as a kay-det on old Mars. He backed into the fresher and held his arms up while it wrapped him in the fabric. All on-ship toilets had an automated system for dressing and undressing uniformed personnel, while the away-teams made do with sloppier (but easier to shuck) baggies, or, in the rare event that a green ensign forgot to change before beaming down, relying on teammates to help with the humiliating ritual of dressing and undressing.

  The duty officer barked “Captain on deck” before he’d even managed to set his foot down, and the whole B-squad was on its feet and saluting before his back leg came up to join it. !Mota made a formal gesture of handing over the conn, and Tsubishi slid into his chair just as it finished its hurried reconfiguration to suit his compact, tightly wound frame. The ship beamed a double cappuccino—ship’s crest stamped into the foam—into the armrest’s cup-holder, and he sipped it pensively before nodding to !Mota to make zer report.

  !Mota—the model of second-banana efficiency—had whomped up an entire slideshow (with music and animated transitions, Tsubishi noted, with an inward roll of his eyes) in the time it had taken him to reach the bridge. The entire command crew watched him closely as !Mota stepped through it.

  “We were proceeding as normal in our survey of the Tesla Z-65 system,” !Mota said, the bridge holo going into orrery mode, showing the system and its 11 planets and 329 planetesimals, the fourth planet out glittering with a safety-orange highlight. “We’d deployed the forward sensor arrays here, to Tesla Z-65-4, for initial detailed surveys. Z-65-4 is just over one AU from the star, and pulls 1.8 gees, putting it in the upper bound of high-value/high-interest survey targets.” The holo swept forward in dizzying jumps as the sensor packages beamed each other closer and closer to the planet in a series of hops, leaving them strung out in a lifeline from the ship’s safe position among Z-65’s outer rim to Z-65-4, ninety AUs away. The final stage established a long, elliptical orbit, and beamed its tiny progeny into tighter geostationary orbits around the planet’s waistline.

  “The yufo was detected almost immediately. It had been on the dark side of the planet, in geostationary, and it came into the lateral sensor-range of two of our packages when they beamed in.” In a volumetric display, four different views of the yufo: a radar-derived mesh, a set of charts displaying its likely composition, an optical photo of the item in shaky high-mag, and a cartoon derived from the former, showing the yufo as a sphere a mere 1.5 meters in diameter, skinned in something black that the radar-analysis suggested was a damned efficient one-way sheath that likely disguised a Panopticon’s worth of sensors, spy-eyes, radar.

  The bolo transitioned—a genie-back-into-the-bottle effect—and was replaced with a bulleted time line of the encounter, including notations as to when radar incursions on the sensor package emanating from the yufo were detected. !Mota let the chart stand for itself, then clicked to the final slide, the extrapolated cartoon of the yufo again.

  !Mota ripped off another artful salute. “Orders, sir?”

  “Have you brought one of our packages forward to get a closer look?”

  “No sir. I anticipated that contingency and made plans for it, but have not given the order.”

  “Do it,” Tsubishi said, giving one of those ironical little head-tilts that the female kay-dets on Mars had swooned for—and noted the B-shift tactical officer’s appreciative wriggle with satisfaction—and watched the holotank as the packet changed its attitude with conservative little thruster-bursts, moving slowly relative to the yufo while the continents below whirled past as it came out of geostationary position. The cartoon yufo resolved itself with ever-more-minute details as the packet got closer, closer.

  “Packet reports radio chatter, three sigmas off random. Eighty-three percent confidence that it is communication.” The comms officer had an unfortunate speech impediment that she’d all but corrected in the Academy, but it was still enough to keep her on the B-squad. Probably wouldn’t accept neurocorrection. “Eighty-five. Ninety-five. Signal identified as ultra-wide-band sequence key. Switching to UWB reception now. Playing back 900 MHz to 90 GHz spectrum for ten minutes, using key. Repeating pattern found. Decoding.”

  It was the standard first contact drill. Any species plying the spaces between the stars was bound to converge on one of a few Rosetta strategies. The holotank showed realtime visualizations of the ship’s symbology AI subsystem picking a million digits of Pi out of the chatter, deriving the counting system, then finding calculus, bootstrapping higher symbols out of that, moving on to physics and then to the physics of hyperspace. A progress bar tracked the system’s confidence that it could decode arbitrary messages from the yufo’s originating species, and as it approached completion, Tsubishi took another sip of his cappuccino and tipped his head toward the comms officer.

  “Hail the yufo, Ms. De Fuca-Williamson.”

  The comms officer’s hands moved over her panels, then she nodded back at Tsubishi.

  “This is Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the Alliance of Peaceful Planets ship Colossus II. In the name of the Alliance and its forty-two member-species, I offer you greetings in the spirit of galactic cooperation and peace.” It was canned, that line, but he’d practiced it in the holo in his quarters so that he could sell it fresh every time.

  The silence stretched. A soft chime marked an incoming message. A succession of progress bars filled the holotank as it was decoded, demuxed and remuxed. Another, more emphatic chime.

  “Do it,” Tsubishi said to the comms officer, and First Contact was made anew.

  The form that filled the tank was recognizably a head. It was wreathed in writhing tentacles, each tipped with organs that the computer identified with high confidence as sensory—visual, olfactory, temperature.

  The tentacles whipped around as the bladder at the thing’s throat inflated, then blatted out something in its own language, which made Wobbliese seem mellifluous. The computer translated: “Oh, for god’s sake—role-players? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Then the message disappeared. A klaxon sounded and the bridge dimmed; flashing red lights filled the bridge.

  “Status?” Tsubishi took another calm sip of his cappuccino though his heart was racing. Captains never broke a sweat. It went with the territory.

  “The package has gone nonresponsive. Nearby telemetry suggests with high confidence that it has been destroyed. Another has gone offline. Two more. All packages nonresponsive and presumed under attack.”

  “Bring us to defcon four,” Tsubishi said. “Do it.”

  The A-team assembled on the bridge in a matter of minutes, freshly wrapped in their uniforms, unceremoniously pushing the unprotesting B-team out of their seats just as the ship’s computer beamed their preset high-alert snacks and beverages to their workstations. As a courtesy, !Mota was allowed to remain on the bridge, but the rest of the second shift slunk away, looking hurt and demoralized. Tsubishi pursed his lips at their departing backs and felt the burden of command.

  “Bring us to within five AU, Lieutenant,” he said, nodding at Deng-Gorinski in the navigator’s chair. “I want to get a little closer.”

  At five AUs, they could beam photon torpedoes to within fifteen minutes of the yufo. If it was anything like their own packages, they could outmaneuver it with the torpedo’s thrusters at that range.

  The lieutenant showed her teeth as she brought the ship up to speed, battle-ready and champing to blow the intruder out of the sky.

  The ping of another incoming message brought the crew’s attention back to the comms post. The progress bars went much faster now, the symbology AI now much more confident of its guesses about the intruder’s language.

  “Now what are you doing? Can’t you see I’m already here? Get lost
. This is my patch.”

  “In the name of the APP, I order you to stand down and power down your offensive systems. Anything less will be construed as a declaration of war. You have thirty seconds to comply. This—is one second.”

  He crumpled his cappuccino cup and tossed it over his shoulder; the ship obliterated it by beaming it into nullspace before it touched the ground. The holotank was counting down, giving the numbers in the preassigned ultimatum voice: female, calm, cold, with an accent that a twentieth-century Briton would have recognized as Thatcher-posh.

  “Oh. Really. Now. You want to shoot at each other? I’ve got a better idea. Let’s meet on the surface and duke it out, being to being, for control of the planet. Capture the flag. First one to get a defensible position on the highest peak of this mountain range gets to claim the whole thing for zer respective empire.” Tsubishi noted the neuter pronoun with some interest: neuter species were more common than highly dimorphic ones in the galaxy, and they had a reputation for being meaner than the poor he-she species like h. sap saps. Something about having your primary genetic loyalty to your identical clones as opposed to your family group—it created a certain…ruthlessness.

  “Why should I bargain at all? I could just blow you out of orbit, right here.”

  The tentacles writhed in a gesture that the computer badged with the caption “smirk, confidence 86%,” and Tsubishi pointed a single finger at the ship’s gunner, who flexed in her chiton and clicked delicately at the control interface, priming and aiming it. The computer quietly turned a patch of Tsubishi’s armrest into a display and flashed a discreet notification about the spike in hormonal aggression volatiles being detected on the bridge. He waved it away. He didn’t need a computer to tell him about the battle-stink. He could smell it himself. It smelled good. First contact was good—but war…war was what the Alliance of Peaceful Planets lived for.

  “You can try,” the alien said.

  “A warning shot, Lieutenant,” he said, tipping his head to Deng-Gorinski. “Miss the yufo by, say, half a million klicks.”

  The click of Deng-Gorinski’s talon was the only sound on the bridge, as every crewmember held zer breath, and then the barely detectable hap-tic whoom as a torpedo left its bay and streaked off in glorious 3-D on the holotank, trailed by a psychedelic glitter of labels indicating its approach, operational status, detected countermeasures, and all the glorious, pointless instrumentation data that was merely icing on the cake.

  The torpedo closed on the yufo, drawing closer, closer…closer. Then—

  Blink

  “It’s gone, sir.” Deng-Gorinski’s talons clicked, clicked. “Transporter beam. Picked it right out of the sky.”

  That’s impossible. He didn’t bother to say it. Of course it was possible: they’d just seen it happen. But transporting a photon torpedo that was underway and emitting its punishing halo of quantum chaff should have required enough energy to melt a star and enough compute-power to calculate the universe. It was the space-naval equivalent of catching a sword-blade between your palms as it was arcing toward your chest.

  “Take us back to seventy AUs,” he said, admiring the calmness in his own voice. He had a bad feeling, but it didn’t pay to let it show. The armrest gave him another discreet notifier, this one about the changing composition of the pheromones on the bridge. Fear stink. “Now.”

  The ship’s klaxon sounded again, louder than he’d ever heard it outside of the Academy war-games. He silenced it with a flick of a finger and peered into the holotank.

  “Incoming yufo, sir.”

  The tank showed it to them. It was sickeningly familiar.

  “That’s our torpedo,” he said.

  “Closing fast,” Deng-Gorinski said. “Shields up. Estimated impact in twenty-eight seconds.”

  “Evasive action,” Tsubishi said uselessly. They were already in an evasive pattern, the ship automatically responding to the threat, faster than any human reflexes. “Antimissile battery,” he snapped. The smaller missiles streaked toward the torpedo.

  “Can we make contact with the control interface on the torpedo?”

  The comms officer jabbed furiously at the air around his helmet, making hand-jives known only to the most highly trained communications specialists, each one executing a flurry of commands to the comms computer. “No sir,” he muttered around the helmet’s visor. “I can establish a three-way handshake with it, but it doesn’t respond to my authorization tokens. Fallback tokens no good either.”

  In the holotank, the antimissiles with their labels went streaking toward the missile. It dodged them, shot at them, dodged them. Then, one of them found its mark and the missile detonated, a silent fireball that collapsed in on itself, lensing the gravity around it and bending space.

  “All right then,” Tsubishi said. “Hail the yufo, Lieutenant.”

  “That wasn’t very friendly,” he said. “I get the feeling we got off to a bad start. Shall we start over again?”

  “I’ve already issued you my challenge, Captain. Personal combat, on-world, first one to the top of the highest peak claims the planet, the loser surrenders it. I’ll give you the whole system if you want.”

  “I see. And if I refuse?”

  The klaxon’s sound was louder than before. In the tank, dozens of photon torpedoes had just blinked into existence, relentlessly plowing through the depths of space, aimed directly at the ship.

  Helpfully, the tank tagged them with countdown labels. The ship was not going to make it.

  Tsubishi allowed himself three seconds———and then he cleared his throat.

  “We accept your challenge.”

  The torpedoes vanished, leaving behind their labels. An instant later, the tank helpfully removed the labels, too.

  “Sir, with all due respect, you can’t beam down to the surface.” !Mota was visibly agitated, and writhed uncomfortably under Tsubishi’s calm stare.

  “I don’t recall asking for your opinion, Commander.” He plucked at his baggies and wished for the comforting tautness of his ship-wrapped uniform. Such was the price of leadership. “The alien was very clear on this in any event. It’s calling the shots.”

  “Captain, you are being driven by the alien. You need to get inside its decision-loop and start setting the agenda. It’s suicide otherwise. You saw how much power—”

  “I saw, Commander. It’s well and good to talk about getting inside decision-loops, but sometimes you’re outgunned and all you’ve got is your own bravery and instincts. It’s not like we can outrun that thing.”

  “We could back off—”

  “We don’t know what its transporter beam range is, but it’s clearly far in excess of anything we’ve ever seen. I’m betting that I have a better chance of getting to some kind of resolution on the surface than I do of being able to pull back to warping distance ahead of its ability to turn us into shrapnel.”

  “Some kind of resolution, sir?”

  “Well, yes. We’re intelligent species. We can talk. There’s probably something we have that they want. And we’re pretty sure that there’s something they have that we want—their transporter technology, for starters. That decision-loop stuff is applicable to fighting. We already know we can’t do that. We need negotiation.”

  The Wobbly relaxed visibly. “I see, sir.”

  “What, did you think I was going on a suicide mission?”

  “Sir, of course not, but—”

  “Besides, I’m curious to see this thing face to face. That yufo’s barely big enough to hold my breakfast. Those ugly bastards must be about three millimeters tall—how do they accomplish the neuronal density to pack a functional intelligence into something that small?”

  “Good question, sir,” !Mota said. Tsubishi could tell that he’d won the argument.

  “Commander, I’m de-tasking you from the bridge for now.”

  “Me, sir? Who will have the conn?”

  “Oh, leave it to Varma,” he said. The C-string commander was always
complaining that she never got to run the bridge when important things were happening.

  “Varma.” The hurt was palpable, even through the thick Wobbly accent.

  “Of course Varma.” He gave forth with one of his ironic head-tilts. “You can’t possibly be in charge.” He waited for one beat, leaving !Mota trembling on zer hook. “You’re coming down to the surface with me.”

  Emotions chased each other across the Wobbly’s face. Pride. Worry. “Sir? Fleet procedure prohibits having two or more senior officers in a single landing party—”

  “Unless the crewmembers in question possess specific talents or capabilities that are likely to be of necessity during the on-planet mission. Don’t quote regs at me, Commander. I eat regs for breakfast.” Another head-tilt. The Wobbly’s exo gave an all-over shudder that Tsubishi recognized as a wriggle of pure delight. Tsubishi smiled at zer. Command wasn’t so hard, sometimes.

  When he was a kay-det, he’d hated the transporter drills. Yes, they were safe, overengineered to a million nines. But at the end of the day, Tsubishi just didn’t like being annihilated to a quantum level and reassembled at a great distance by a flaky, incomprehensible entanglement effect. Deep down in his cells, annihilation equaled dread.

  Command meant that you had to like transporters. Love them. So he’d gotten over his dread. He’d found a pliant transporter technician—an older career woman, the backbone of the fleet—and struck up an arrangement. For an entire month, he’d paged her whenever he needed to go anywhere in the Academy, and she’d beamed him there. A dozen transports a day. Two dozen. The fresher, quarters, classes, the simulators, the mess-hall. Her room, after hours, where she’d met him wearing a slinky film of machine-wrapped gauze and a smile.

  A month of that and he’d changed the equation: annihilation equaled yawn.

  “Status, Commander !Mota?”