“Are you reassured, Captain Monique Catherine d’Aubege?” said a smarmy Midlands English voice that seemed totally incongruous coming from the lean, tightly-muscled Alien.
Hortense squeaked her reaction. Gail’s mouth moved silently. Max cursed low, a guttering string of Polish that didn’t sound pleasant. Hercule the Jesuit crossed himself. And Captain d’Auberge straightened her posture, slim hands pulling at her dark blue jacket. She focused on the screen image.
“I’m reassured, Link Destanu of the Pod Victorius.” She paused, stood stiffly before the motion-eye that returned her image to the Alien ship, and bowed slightly. “Welcome to Sol system. Have you been here very long?”
“Long enough,” said Destanu, its body plates rippling in a sine wave that matched the movements of its shark-like mouth. “Our custom when meeting species new to the Great Dark is to learn your language of power, study your culture, then seek a meeting at a spot outside of the species’ home space.”
“So you’ve met other lifeforms!” exclaimed Monique.
“Many others. The Great Dark is filled with life, some of which travels star to star.” The Alien glanced aside at some kind of monitor, then fixed its black-eyed gaze on Monique. “I see your ship is about to match our orbital footprint. Good. Our team awaits your team on the surface below. Do you accept our invitation to discuss Rules of Engagement?”
Jack thought the last question meant more than the obvious. The Alien acted far too relaxed. But Monique seemed unfazed by the incongruity of Brit-speech issuing from the shark-mouth of a red-and-black skinned Alien who’d come to meet humans on a deep space mission out at the very edge of the solar system. Slick, too slick, he thought. The ship’s maneuvering thrusters shut off and freefall replaced thrust-gee—which clued him to the fact the Rizen aliens looked glued to their floor despite no ship movement. “Captain?” he said, floating up against his restraint straps.
“One moment,” Monique said to Destanu, then gestured to cut off the visual and sound feed to the Rizen ship. She grabbed a wall hand-hold, then glared at him. “What! Can’t you see this Alien is peaceful? Not violent like your Belter Rebellion ancestors? A species that crosses from one star to another is not an automatic threat, just a puzzle to be understood.”
“A species that has gravity control, while we still use spin-gee for our habitat torus?” Jack shook his head, feeling stubborn. “Captain, why assume the Communitarian creed applies to Aliens? Why do you assume that evolutionary biology and natural selection don’t apply to intelligent species?” Monique’s stubborn belief in the Unity creed baffled Jack. He pointed at Hortense, their Ecological Biologist. “Hortie, you tell her what we discussed on the way out here? Tell her what red-and-black skin colors mean!”
The Captain glanced at Hortense. “Hortie? What’s he talking about?”
Hortense blushed at the personal question, though it would be hard for most people to notice thanks to her soot-black skin. The woman, who had seemed to enjoy their chats about sociobiology and cultural determinism, dipped her head, collected herself, then looked directly at Monique. “Captain, it’s the aposematic coloration principle of evolutionary biology. In short, extreme color variations in a species are a danger signal. Like the brightly colored poison dart frog of the Amazon Basin, which advertises to predators it is not wise to eat frogs that don’t try to hide.”
“Aposematic what!” Monique’s pale face slowly turned pink. “So we’re down to judging Aliens by skin color! Hortie, I’m surprised at you.”
Jack realized he had one more shot, if that, and sadly Hortie was not as tough-willed as her partner, Gail. “Captain, this is real stuff!” The glare in Monique’s eyes only motivated him further. “Hortie, tell her what the Alien bodyshape means? The talon-toes, teeth and body form. Please!”
Monique glared again at Jack, breathed deep, then looked tiredly at Hortense Muggeridge-Mbasa. “Go on. Destanu will keep for another minute or two. What has Jack been doing to you girl?”
Hortie looked briefly incensed, glanced at a sympathetic Gail, then shrugged her slim shoulders. “It’s called Müllerian mimicry, Captain. A basic principle of predation and natural selection biology. In short, the Rizen’s shark-like teeth, lean-muscled body shape, and lion/hippo shape all reinforce the signal ‘don’t mess with me’. Like how the nomadidae bee resembles a yellow jacket, yet both species possess stingers. Or how the hunting cats resemble one another despite continental drift. Or—”
“Enough!” hissed Monique, angry disgust replacing the irritation of moments ago. She twisted in space and shook a finger at Jack. “You would have us judge Aliens on the basis of appearance? Racist! We Communitarians reject the outmoded sociobiology theorizing of that crazy professor E. O. Wilson! Genes do not control intelligent people! And out there is the first non-Earth culture and people we’ve ever encountered. I’m not going to insult them by refusing to play along with this Engagement ritual of theirs.”
Jack gave up. It would do no good to debate Gause’s Law, the role of keystone predators in a closed ecology, and sociobiology genetics with his Captain. She seemed to be automatically fighting him, and defending the wishful thinking of her social dogma, rather than questioning the motivations of dangerous-looking Aliens. But maybe he could convince her to be a little suspicious. “Captain, just what the hell are the Rules of Engagement?”
“Exactly!” Max said a bit too loudly “Monique my dear, you’re no diplomat, nor are any of us. Let’s go home, tell the topsucks about this, and let them take the chances.”
Monique stiffened at the challenge to her authority and at Max’s allusion to their romantic relationship. “No! The dome and the Rizen Aliens await us. There has been no assault on our ship, no threats, nothing to warrant an unfriendly response by us. We’re going.” She free-floated around to face the motion-eye, gestured and Hortense restored the AV comlink. “Link Destanu, please pardon the interruption. We accept your invitation to meet your team in the dome. But if you don’t mind explaining, what do you mean by Rules of Engagement?”
Destanu peered at them, its unblinking black stare fixing on each crew member one by one. The toothy mouth moved swiftly. “Why, just what I said. Rules of Engagement mean the rules for how we Rizen and you Humans behave toward each other. I think you call it etiquette, or diplomacy, or some such thing.”
Monique smiled triumphantly, but kept her attention on the Alien ship captain. “That’s what I thought. Since there are four of your people down below, four of us will also journey down. Is the dome atmosphere—”
“Oxygen-nitrogen?” interrupted Destanu. “Of course. We breath the same mix as you, at nearly the same pressures. And our home world and home star are near duplicates of yours. But come in your environment suits, if that reassures you and your team.”
Gail leaned over and whispered to Monique, who nodded distractedly, then faced the motion-eye camera. “Good. Our landing craft will leave shortly. We look forward to meeting your people. D’Auberge off.” The Rizen image blanked out. The Captain twisted in mid-air, faced them, and put hands on slim hips.
“No arguments! We’re going down, the only question is who goes and who stays. Any volunteers?”
Everyone stayed frozen in their seats, except for Hercule, who raised a pudgy hand. “Me. I’ll go with you.”
Monique nodded, then eyed Jack and Max at the back of the cabin. “The ship’s Technologist and ship’s Engineer are excused from this trip, in view of their racists and archaic reactions. Gail, Hortense, Hercule and myself will leave just as soon as our can put on our EVA suits. Move, people!”
Everyone undid belt locks and free-floated out of the cabin. Jack was the last to leave, unable to resist a glance back at the screen. On it hung a globe-and-spearhead spaceship, its red, yellow and black-banded hull a striking contrast to the reddish ices and snows of QB1. His gut still jumped. His heart still raced. And fear nearly froze his joints. Would have frozen them, except for the idea that had occurred the mome
nt he saw the Alien’s teeth, saw its body build, and decided not to believe what he heard from either Destanu or Monique. Maybe he could help the landing party, which would land unarmed, unwary, and at the mercy of the unknown. Maybe.
CHAPTER TWO
Jack watched as Max closed the hatch leading to the Lander, locked it down, then depressurized the launch module. Their four crewmates waved at them through the thick plexiglas porthole of the hatch, then entered the Lander, a box surrounded by an Eight Pack of chemfuel rockets. The Lander had enough fuel to land five times on the Moon and over 50 times on the low-gee comet worlds they’d visited in the last six months. Their job had been to check on Kuiper Belt comets not locked into a 3:2 orbital resonance, to look for signs of outgassing, for any evidence they might deviate from their orbits and plunge inward as deadly Centaur groups. It was boring, simple work. But it kept them busy enough not to get on each other’s nerves. And it meant peace of mind for the Unity and a purpose for Charon Base.
“You coming?” Max asked as he headed for the Spine corridor that connected the midship Lander module with the Pilot cabin up front.
“Yeah.” Jack floated away from his wall-hold, kicked gently, and floated after the ship’s Engineer. “Max, why didn’t you just tell Monique to kiss off, start the Main Drive, and vibejump us out of here?”
The dark-haired man chuckled. “Defy Monique? What an earthquake that would have precipitated!” The stocky Engineer twisted in air, grabbed the corridor handholds, and pulled himself along the Spine, heading for the Pilot cabin and its bank of instruments that would keep them in touch with the Lander—and with the Alien ship, if need be. “Anyway, Jack, maybe she’s right?”
“I hope so.”
Jack noticed the man’s cloth boots were dirty, the grip-threads half-filled with food fragments, plastic debris, carpet fiber balls, and the shiny gleam of body fluids that adhere to everything after six months in space. They enjoyed thrust-gee only when leaving one comet and vectoring toward a new one, a choice mandated by the need to stretch out their deuterium-helium 3 fuel. The spin-gee of the ship’s habitat torus helped some, but not enough. This last month they’d all let personal hygiene slip a bit. Had their judgment also slipped as badly?
“Jack,” called down Max to him as they passed the habitat torus. “What were you doing with the EVA suit backpacks? They’re totally fail-safed, like the rest of this ship.”
Tell him? Not tell him? Jack felt his neck muscles tense up. “Just something I thought of at the last minute. I don’t like our people heading down there with no backup and no way to defend themselves.”
Max halted his forward drift and looked back over his shoulder. “Jack, this scene has us all vibed out. But Monique is competent. She’ll do fine.” He smiled reassuringly, then twisted around and resumed his weightless float forward using the Spine handholds.
“Sure.” Jack was less sanguine about the team’s chances. No one from Brussels had loaded any First Contact software into the ship’s NavTrack computer. No one had fitted the ship with gas lasers or kinetic kill vehicles or any of the stuff that had been used in the Asteroid Belt’s rebellion against the Unity, back in 2072. No personal weapons had come on board. They had nothing, except for the scientific instruments needed on a deep space mission. He prayed and hoped they would not need to resort to violence. While skeptical of the Unity’s “We’re All One Happy Family” social dogma, he had no desire to revisit war, or violence, or dead bodies. But the voice of his old cultural anthropology professor at Vanderbilt still spoke in his mind, still said—“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and expect a mess.”
“Here we are,” Max said as they reached the Pilot cabin.
Jack watched Max take his seat at the Main Drive station in back while he floated forward to Gail’s Pilot seat. He strapped in, touched on the front screen, and observed the image of a striped globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead, now a hundred kilometers away and ahead of them in equatorial orbit, as it floated above the reddish ball of QB1. Jack keyed the external maser tube into search mode for the Lander’s beacon, waited for acquisition, then punched in the vidlink. “Monique, how soon to touchdown?”
The screen flared white, then the Captain’s space-suited figure filled it. Her clear glass helmet hadn’t yet polarized—no bright Sun to make it do so. Her pale lips thinned at his informality. “Technologist Munroe, please observe ship procedures. This is not the time for informality.” She looked aside, then back to face him. “Our polar orbital track is nominal. In fifteen minutes we land a half kilometer away from the dome. Until then—”
“Will you leave on the Lander vidcam?” he interrupted before she could switch off. “So we can watch your landing?”
Captain d’Auberge nodded stiffly. “Of course. I’ll also keep my suit vidcam active as we traverse to the dome. Satisfied?”
Tell them now? But surely Destanu the Alien was monitoring their com chatter. “Satisfied. But please, keep your suits on and pressurized even after you enter the dome.”
“Why?” Monique said, her tone suspicious.
“Rules.” Behind him, Max shifted in his seat as the Engineer leaned forward. “EU rules for EVA on airless bodies mandate it. A precaution, Captain.”
“Agreed. And our suit vidcams are in autorecord mode with an uplink to Uhuru through the Lander.” On screen, petite Monique d’Auberge turned away from the videye, floated over to her Lander seat, and strapped in.
Jack exhaled loudly. “Thank god!”
“What was that all about?” asked Max.
“Nothing.” That was a lie, but a needful one. “Max, I’ll tell you all about me and my stupid idea when they return. Fair?”
“Fair enough, I guess,“ Max grunted. “Look, they’ve gone into landing mode. The NavTrack radar’s got them in a nice glide.”
Jack watched as the Lander repeated what it, and some of the crew, had done 23 times over the last six months. Set down on the water-ice surface of a Kuiper Belt comet, autocycle to emergency departure mode, power down to maintenance mode, then exhaust air from the EVA airlock preparatory to the geological survey work they did each time they landed. The routine had been . . . put down sonophones, embed small explosive charges, move two hundred meters away, put down a radioisotope powered transmitter that would send back to Charon the dozen or so geophysical readings their sensors looked for, take a sample of surface ices, return to the Lander, lock up stuff, leave the comet before setting off the charges, confirm transmission of the sonophone readings that built a subsurface image of the comet, and hightail it down the line to the next big iceball. This time, the routine stopped with the depressurizing of the Lander airlock.
He and Max watched as their four crewmates entered the lock, cycled through, climbed down the ladder attached to one landing leg, then bounce-glided toward the clear dome that gleamed in the silvery starlight. From this distance, they could see the red-and-black striped bodies of Destanu’s ‘team’ inside the dome. And also the airlock set into the side of the dome. Minutes passed as their friends coped with the comet’s extremely low gravity. Then they stopped before the dome, looked around, observed the distant shape of an Alien lander, and stepped into the large airlock. It was big enough to accommodate all four of them.
“We’re entering the dome,” Monique said a bit breathlessly over the channel that fed through the Lander’s companel. “Air pressure checks out. So does air composition. I think—wait, the Rizen aliens are lining up against the far wall. Must be some kind of greeting ceremony.”
“Hey!” Max yelled from behind Jack. “You be careful Monique! You too, Hercule, you smart-assed Jesuit!”
The suited priest smiled good-naturedly at Monique’s vidcam, waved briefly, and then focused on the four unsuited, red-and-black striped Aliens who had risen up on their hind legs, leaving two feet-pair suspended in the air. “Hey,” Hercule murmured, “no booze, no chairs, no table, nothing for our vibechat. Captain?”
“I noticed,” said Moni
que, her tone tense. “Jack, set up a piggy-back comlink to Destanu. I’d like to speak with him.”
Jack reached over to Hortense’s companel, tapped in a preset function, then watched as the screen image split into two, one showing the team via Monique’s vidcam, one showing the Rizen ship in low orbit. “Done, Captain.”
“Link Destanu?” Monique called. “Would you please reply? We are in the dome with your people.”
The local stars around the Alien ship blurred, the ship changed orbit from equatorial to a polar track, and Jack suddenly realized the Rizen possessed a gravity-pull drive able to move at right angles to its apparent inertia. Before he could comment, Destanu’s sleek bulk filled the screen. The Alien looked the same as before, but the assistant was not present. “Replying, Captain Monique Catherine d’Auberge. Please be patient. The discussion of the Rules of Engagement will commence shortly. Tell me, you are inside the dome? You are ready to begin?”
“We are,” said Monique, sounding impatient. “If you would just tell your people to—”
“Watch out!” screamed Gail.
Red and black bodies flashed in sudden movement on the split-screen. They raced toward Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, shark-mouths opening wide.
“No!” cried Max.
Jack froze. Unable to move, he watched as a Rizen alien jumped on one of his crewmates, talon-slashed through the suit fabric, then sank white shark-teeth into human flesh.
“Get it off!” screamed Hortense, whirling into the center of the dome as she beat at the Alien that had locked its mouth onto her midbody.
“Noooo!” whispered Monique, then she turned and reached for the airlock controls—just as the final Rizen hit her from behind. Red blood fountained into view as severed neck arteries gushed redly. Her shoulder vidcam twisted with her dying convulsions.
On the screen, the vidcam arced past the still, wine-red bodies of Gail, Hortense and Hercule, each the victim of buzzsaw teeth and talon-toes of a blood-spattered Alien. The side split-screen that carried Destanu’s image showed him unmoving, unreactive. As if he—
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