The Wobbly’s salute ticked off zer forelobe. “Sir, crew ready for transport.”
“Landing coordinates?”
“Here,” !Mota said, gesturing at the holotank, which transitioned to a view of the planet below them and quickly zoomed to a prairie at the foot of an impressive mountain range that unevenly split the smaller of the planet’s two landmasses.
“And our objective?”
!Mota gestured and the holotank skipped forward, superimposing a glowing field over one of the mountaintops. Tsubishi realized that this was another slide presentation. !Mota really loved slide presentations. It was a Wobbly thing.
“Commander !Mota.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If that mountaintop is our objective, why aren’t we just beaming down onto it?”
!Mota jumped to the next slide, which zoomed to the mountain range with a bluish bubble superimposed over most of it. “No-go zone, sir. Test transports of enzymatically representative samples proved…unreliable.”
“Unreliable?”
“The enzymes we retrieved had been denatured sir, as with extensive heat.”
“They were barbecued, Cap,” said Second Lieutenant !Rena, the mission science officer, a Wobbly who had made a hobby out of twen-cen Earth in a brownnosing effort to ascend through the ranks faster than Wobblies usually managed. It was an open secret on the Colossus II that the two Wobblies loathed each other. Tsubishi approved of this, and approved even more of !Mota’s forbearance in selecting !Rena for the landing party.
“I see.”
!Mota flicked to the next slide, a 3-D flythrough of a trail up the mountains. “This appears to be the optimal route to the peak, sir. The seven-leagues have a millimeter-accurate picture of the landscape and they’re projecting a 195-minute journey time, assuming no trouble en route.” Tsubishi rocked back and forth in his seven-league boots, whose harness ran all the way up to his mid-thigh. Running on these things was fun—the kind of thing that made serving on away-teams such a treat.
“I assume we can count on trouble, Commander !Mota. I certainly am.”
“Yes, sir,” !Mota said, clicking forward one slide. “These are alternate routes through the mountains, and in the worst case, the seven-leagues have a bounce-and-ditch they’ll deploy to get us onto the face.” That sounded like less fun: the boots would discharge their entire power-packs in one bone-jarring bounce on a near-straight vertical that would launch him like a missile into the mountain face, with only a couple of monosilk drogue chutes to slow him before impact.
“How many more slides, Commander?”
“No more,” !Mota said. Tsubishi knew ze was lying, and could tell that ze was disappointed. Make it up later. Time to beam down! His palms were sweating, his heart thudding. Outwardly, he was cool.
“Everyone ready?” All six in the party chorused “Aye, sir,” in unison. “Do it,” he said to the transporter operator. She smiled at him and engaged the system that would annihilate him and reassemble him millions of klicks away on the surface of a virgin planet. He smiled back in the instant before the machine annihilated him. Hominess was a hazard of his transporter conditioning regime at the Academy, but he could deal with it.
The transporter technician deserved a commendation. Not many of the techs on the bridge were thoughtful enough to land a steaming cappuccino on the planet along with Tsubishi. He liked the attention to detail. He made a mental note and had a sip.
“Report, Commander?”
!Mota had zer comm out and had been busily verifying from the surface all the readings they’d got from orbit, establishing multiple redundant links with the ship, querying the health readouts from the gutbots in the landing party’s bodies. “Nominal, Captain.”
“Let’s have a little reccy before we kick off, shall we? I was expecting company when we landed. Seems like our friend’s style.”
“Yes, sir,” !Mota said. Ze unclipped an instrument gun from zer exo’s thigh and fired it straight into the air. A billion dandelion seeds caught the wind and blew in every direction, settling slowly to the ground or lofting higher and higher. The little sensors on them started to measure things as soon as they were out of the muzzle, while the networking subsystems knit them together into a unified ubiquitous surveillance mesh that spread out for ten kilometers in all directions (though it grew patchier around the edges). “Sir, I have no sign of the alien or its artifacts. Nothing on this planet bigger than a bacterium, and the gutbots have already got their genomes solved and phaged. I recommend beginning the mission.”
Tsubishi looked around and finished his cappuccino. The terrain was as depicted in the holotank—sere, rocky, stained in coral colors that swirled together like organic oil-slicks. The temperature was a little chilly, but nothing the baggies couldn’t cut, and the wind made an eerie sound as it howled through the rugged mountains that towered all around them.
“All right then, form up, two by two, and then go full auto. Keep your eyes peeled and your guard up.” He thought for a moment. “Be on the lookout for very small hostiles—possibly as small as a centimeter.” The away-team, six crewmembers with robotic feet, baggies, and looks of grim determination, exchanged glances. “I know. But that is one tiny damned yufo, gang.”
They smiled. He finished his cappuccino and set the cup down, then put a rock on top of it to keep it from blowing away. He’d pick it up and return to the ship with it.
“On my mark then. Do it.”
And they were off.
The seven-leagues took great pains to establish a regular rhythm, even though it meant capping the max speed at about 70 percent of what the body mechanics of the crew could sustain. But the rhythm was necessary if their brains were going to converge binocular vision—otherwise the landscape blurred into a nauseous smear. Tsubishi’s command-channel, set deep in his cochlea, counted down the time to the mountaintop.
It was a marvelous way to travel. Your legs took on a life of their own, moving with precise, quick, tireless steps that propelled you like a dream of flying. The most savage terrain became a rolling pasture, and the steady rhythm lent itself to musical humming, as though you were waltzing with the planet itself.
At the halfway mark, Tsubishi called a break and they broke out hot meals and drinks—he switched to decaf, as three was his limit in any twenty-four-hour period: more just made him grumpy. They picnicked on a plateau, their seven-leagues locked and extended into stools. As they ate, Tsubishi and !Mota circulated among the crewmembers, checking in with them, keeping morale up, checking the medical diagnostics from their gutbots. The landing party were in fine form, excited to be off the ship and on an adventure, keen to meet the foe when and if ze chose to appear.
That was the devil of it, Tsubishi and !Mota agreed, privately, over their subvocal command-channel. Where was the yufo? The ship confirmed that ze hadn’t simply transported to the mountain peak, but neither could it locate zer anywhere on the planet.
“What sort of game is ze playing?” Tsubishi subvocalized, keeping his face composed in a practiced expression of easy confidence.
“Captain, permission to speak freely?”
“Of course.”
“The yufo’s demonstrated capabilities are unseen in known space. We have no idea what it might be planning. This may be a suicide mission.”
“Commander !Mota, I realize that. But as you say, the yufo has prodigious capabilities and ze made it clear that it was this or be blown out of the sky. When all you have is a least-worst option, there’s nothing for it but to make the best of it.” This was the kind of can-do thinking that defined command in the fleet, and it was the Wobblies’ general incapacity to embrace it that kept them from making the A-squads.
!Mota turned away and pitched in on the clean-up effort.
“You took a lunch break?” The voice came from the center of their little circle, and there was something deeply disturbing about it. It took Tsubishi a moment to realize what had made his balls crawl up into his abdomen: it was his voice. A
nd there was the yufo, speaking in it: “A lunch break? When I made it clear that the stakes were the planet and your lives?” It wasn’t two centimeters tall. It was more like three meters, a kind of pyramidal mountain of flesh topped with a head the size of a large pumpkin. The medusa-wreath of tentacles fluttered in the wind, twisting and coiling.
Tsubishi’s hand was on his blaster, and he noted with satisfaction that the rest of his crew were ready to draw. Via the command-channel, Varma was whispering that the ship was watching, prepared to give support.
Deliberately, he took his hand off his blaster. “Greetings,” he said. “You have an amazing facility for language.”
“Flattery? Please.” The yufo whacked its tail on the rock. “Not interested. And I distinctly said one-on-one. What are these things doing here?” It waved a flipper derisively at the crew, who stood firm.
“I hoped that we could dispense with challenges and move on to some kind of negotiation. A planet isn’t nearly as interesting to the Alliance as a new species. Once again, I bid you greetings in the name of—”
“You don’t learn fast, do you?” The flipper twitched again and the crew—vanished.
Tsubishi drew his blaster. “What have you done with my crew?” But he knew, he knew from the telltale shimmer as they went. They’d been beamed somewhere—into deep space, to the landing spot, back onto the ship. “You have three seconds. Three—”
The yufo twitched again and the blaster vanished too, tingling in his hands as it went. He looked down at his palm and saw that some of the skin had gone with it. It oozed red blood.
The yufo extended a tentacle in his direction and twitched. “Sorry about that. I’m usually more accurate. As to your crew, I annihilated them. I removed their tokens from the play area. You’re a game-player, you should be able to grasp this.”
“Game-player?” Tsubishi’s mind reeled.
“What do you think we’re doing here, Captain?” The last word dripped with perfectly executed sarcasm. The yufo really did have an impressive language module. With creeping hopelessness, Tsubishi realized that ze couldn’t possibly have trained it from their meager conversation to date; ze must have been snaffling up titanic amounts of communication from the Colossus II’s internal comms. Ze was thoroughly inside his decision-loop. “Competing. Gaming. You’re clearly familiar with the idea, Mr. Role-Player.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“You’re starting to bore me, Captain. Look, it’s clear you’re outmatched here. You’ve got a lovely little play area up there in orbit, but I’m afraid you’re about to forfeit it.”
“No!” Tsubishi’s veneer of calm control blistered and burst. “There are hundreds of people on that ship! It would be murder!”
The yufo inflated zer throat-bladder and exhaled it a couple times. “Murder?” ze said. “Come now, Captain, let’s be not overly dramatic.”
This was the first time that the yufo appeared the least bit off-balance. Tsubishi saw a small initiative and seized it. “Murder! Of course it’s murder! We are not at war. It would be an act of sheer murder.”
“Act of war? Captain, I’m not playing your game. I’m playing—” Its tentacles whipped around its head. Tsubishi got the impression that it was fishing for a word. “I compete to put my flag on a pattern of planets. It is a different game from your little space-marines dramatics.”
On that plateau, on that remote world near that unregarded star, Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi experienced satori.
“We are not playing a game. We are ‘space marines.’ Space navy, actually. We are not playing soldiers. We are soldiers. Those were real people and you’ve really, really killed them.”
The alien’s tentacles went slack and twitched against its upper slopes. It inflated and deflated its bladder several times. The wind howled.
“You mean that you haven’t got a recent stored copy of them—”
“Stored copy? Of them?”
The tentacles twitched again. Then they went rigid and stood around zer head like a mane. The bladder expanded and the yufo let out a keening moan the like of which Tsubishi had not heard anywhere in the galaxy.
“You don’t make backups? What is wrong with you?”
The yufo vanished. Instantly, Tsubishi tried to raise the Colossus II on the command-channel. Either his comm was dead or—or—He choked down a sob of his own.
The yufo returned to him as he sat on the mountainpeak. He hadn’t had anywhere else to go, and the seven-leagues had been programmed for it. From his high vantage, he looked down on wispy clouds, distant, lower mountaintops, the sea. He shivered. The command-channel was dead. He had been there for hours, pacing and doing the occasional calisthenics to stay warm. To take his mind off things.
He was the Captain. He was supposed to have initiative. He was supposed to be doing something. But what could he do?
“You don’t have backups?”
The yufo stood before him, a hill of tentacled flesh. It was closer than before, and he could smell it now, a nice smell, a little yeasty. It spoke in !Mota’s voice now.
“I don’t really understand what you mean.” He was cold, shivering. Hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.
“You have the transporter. You scan people to a quantum level. Store the scan. Annihilate them. Reassemble them elsewhere. Are you seriously telling me that it never occurred to you to store the scans?”
Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the APP ship Colossus II was thunderstruck. He really, really wanted a cappuccino now. “I can honestly say that it never had.” He fumbled for an excuse. “The ethical conundra. What if there were two of me? Um.” He thought. “What if—”
“What is wrong with you people? So what if there were two of you?” There were two of the yufo now. Tsubishi was no expert in distinguishing individuals of this race, but he had the distinct impression that they were the same entity. Times two. Times three now. Now there were four. They surrounded him, bladders going in and out.
“Annihilation is no big deal.”
“Accepting it is a survival instinct.”
“You honestly drag that gigantic lump of metal around the galaxy?”
“What is wrong with you people?”
Tsubishi needed some initiative here. This was not a negotiation. He needed to make it one.
“You’ve murdered five of my crew today. You threatened my ship with torpedoes. We came in peace. You made war. It isn’t too late to rescue the relations between our civilizations if you are willing to negotiate as equals in the galactic community of equals.”
“Negotiate? Fella—sorry, Captain, I don’t speak for anyone—” Now there was just one yufo and shimmering space where the others had been. The yufo paused for a second. “Give me a second. Integrating the new memories from those forks takes a little doing. Right. Okay. I’m just here on my own behalf. Yes, I fired on your ship—after you fired on me.”
“Fired on you? You weren’t in that artifact. You wouldn’t fit in ten of those things. It was an unmanned sensor package.”
“You think I bother to travel around in giant hunks of metal?”
“Why not? You’ve got impressive transporter technology, but you can’t expect me to believe that you can beam matter over interstellar distances—”
“Of course not. That’s what subspace radio is for. I upload the latest me to the transporter on the sensor package and then beam as many of myself as I need to the planet’s surface. What kind of idiot would actually put zer body in a giant hollow vehicle and ship it around space? The resource requirements are insane. You don’t really, really do that, do you?”
Tsubishi covered his face with his hands and groaned. “You’re telling me that you’re just an individual, not representing any government, and that you conquer planets all on your own, using subspace radio and transporter beams?”
“Yes indeed.”
“But why?”
“I told you—I compete to put my flag on a pattern of planets. My friends com
pete to do the same. The winner is the one who surrounds the largest number of zer opponents’ territory. It’s fun. Why do you put on costumes and ship your asses around the galaxy?”
The yufo had a remarkable command of Standard. “You’ve got excellent symbology AI,” he said. “Perhaps our civilizations could transfer some technology to one another? Establish trade?” There had to be some way to interest the yufo in keeping Tsubishi around, in letting him back on his ship. The planet was cold and he was hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.
The yufo shrugged elaborately. “It’s remarkable what you can accomplish when you don’t squander your species’ resources playing soldier. Sorry, navy. Why would we bother with trade? What could possibly be worth posting around interstellar distances, as opposed to just beaming sub-molecular-perfect copies of goods into wherever they’re in demand? You people are deeply perverse. And to think that you talked forty-two other species into playing along? What a farce!”
Tsubishi tried for words, but they wouldn’t come. He found that he was chewing an invisible mouthful of speech, working his jaw silently.
“You’ve really had a bad day, huh? Right. Okay. Here’s what I’ll do for you.”
There was a cappuccino sitting next to him. He picked it up and sipped reverently at it. It was perfect. It was identical to the one that had been beamed down to him when he arrived on-planet. That meant that the yufo had been sniffing all the transporter beam activity since they arrived. And that meant—
“You can restore the landing party!”
“Oh yes, indeed, I can do that.”
“And you don’t trade for technology, but you might be persuaded to give me—I mean, the Alliance—access to some of this?”
“Certainly.”
“And will you?”
“If you think you want it.”
Tsubishi nearly fell over himself thanking the yufo. He was mid-sentence when he found himself back on the transporter deck, along with his entire away-team party.
First things first. Tsubishi headed straight for the fresher, to get out of his baggies and back into uniform. He held his arms over his head and muttered, “Do it,” to the computer, received the crackle-starched uniform and lowered his arms, once again suited and booted, every millimeter an officer of the APP Space Navy.
Alien Contact Page 33