by Ben Jeapes
With a heavy heart, Barabadar set her helmet down and activated the comms console.
‘This channel to be assigned exclusively to me until informed otherwise,’ she said, and keyed in her personal encryption code.
‘Compose signal to commanding officer, Chariot of Rightful Justice, stationed Habitat One,’ she said. Compared to this far-flung location, Habitat 1 was almost in the Dead World’s hunting perimeter, and Chariot of Rightful Justice could make the trip in half a twelve-day. ‘Proceed at once to the Dead World . . .’
It took only a couple of minutes to deliver the gist of Chariot of Rightful Justice’s orders. Then Barabadar paused. She so desperately did not want to give the next order, but she couldn’t send the ship in undefended and unforewarned against an unknown and potentially lethal danger.
‘Upon approaching the Dead World,’ she said, ‘essential repeat essential that you enter along the following orbital corridor . . .’
Another minute and the orders had been finished, reviewed and delivered. There was a five-hour time lag between here and Habitat 1, but Chariot of Rightful Justice’s commanding officer was a niece and Barabadar had no doubt the ship would be under way in six hours, six and a half maximum. So, that was done.
It wouldn’t get to the Dead World in time to intercept the outlander ship, but it might get there in time to pick up the pieces.
Now for the hard part. ‘Compose signal to President Mother of the Scientific Institute,’ she said. She made her tone as impersonal as she could. ‘Pending verification of facts, regret to inform you of possible loss of My Learned Sister Oomoing . . .’
Oomoing nibbled carefully at the extraterrestrial food. It was dry and crumbly and tasted vile. She made an effort and swallowed it. She would see if the mouthful stayed down and if it did her any good; her hopes weren’t high, but she was starving. If it stayed then, perhaps, she would eat the rest.
She took a swig from the waterpack. That much, at least, the two races had in common.
Long, the two-legged extraterrestrial, had walked back down the cabin to the cockpit. I was right! It had been so difficult to tell in microgravity, but Oomoing had been sure, and now she knew. Long walked on two legs, Short on four. She was already forming yet another tentative hypothesis. Short had resumed his vigil over the two captives.
‘Learned Mother.’ Fleet murmured so quietly that Oomoing had to strain to hear him.
‘You can speak up,’ she said. ‘I doubt they understand us.’ Short looked up when Fleet started talking, but that was probably just because of the noises he was making. Short could tell Fleet was saying something, but neither of the extraterrestrials had made any attempt to communicate, so Oomoing doubted that they could.
‘I think I can jump him,’ Fleet said, still quiet.
‘He thinks he can jump you,’ Oomoing said to Short.
‘Learned Mother!’ Fleet protested, but Short didn’t twitch. The gun he was holding – if it was a gun – was still aimed somewhere vaguely between them, in their average direction.
‘He can’t understand you,’ Oomoing said, ‘and you’re not to jump either of them.’
‘It won’t be difficult.’ Fleet flexed his legs experimentally, took a breath. ‘The gravity’s a little lighter and I’d guess there’s more CO2 than we’re used to, but that won’t be a problem. Learned Mother, these two are probably technicians, engineers, not warriors. They won’t have met one of the Kin in battle rage before. I can do it, Learned Mother.’
It was good to know Fleet was capable of deducing something; Oomoing had already drawn the same conclusions about the battle fitness of their captors.
‘I don’t doubt you’re right, Loyal Son,’ she said. ‘On the other hand, Long does seem to be quite good at piloting this ship. Could you work out the controls?’
Fleet glanced down the cabin into the cockpit. Long was laid out in one of the couches there.
Those couches had attracted Oomoing’s interest and they gave weight to her latest hypothesis. They seemed to be designed to accommodate either Long or Short, which made sense; at the touch of a button they reconfigured their shape. Long lay down on his back; Short lay prone on his front. It seemed unnecessarily complicated . . . for two species from the same planet. Oomoing was more and more convinced she was correct, and it was a conclusion that she knew Barabadar and very probably Fleet would not want to hear. There wasn’t just intelligent life out there; there were at least two forms of it, and who knew how many more besides?
‘The ship seems automated,’ Fleet said, bringing her back to the present.
‘Long set the controls and now has nothing further to do. Could you override them?’
‘I . . .’
‘Do you know he hasn’t set scuttling charges to destroy us unless whoever operates the controls uses a password? Can you work out their language and their writing so that you can interface with their flight computer?’
‘I . . .’ Fleet said again.
‘Loyal Son, I commend your devotion, but these two are keeping us alive. We need to keep them alive in turn.’
Fleet subsided, doubtless thinking dark thoughts. It took a minute for him to speak again. ‘Learned Mother, that so-called food was revolting and probably did us no good at all. If it turns out to be useless to us then we may have to go to sleep to stay alive.’
‘That’s a risk we must take,’ Oomoing said. ‘You will not attack either of these two without my permission. Forgive me for making it an order.’
A concerted attack on an innocent planet; the calculated wiping out of an unarmed, Stone Age race. Like everyone else on SkySpy, Joel had seen the recordings of the XCs’ attack on their neighbouring world. He had had the routine briefing for all SkySpy personnel. But no-one giving the briefing had ever thought that the briefee might one day end up in charge of two of the creatures. Now finding out as much as possible about the XCs seemed like a good idea, and as he bathed in the luxury of the lifeboat’s powder shower he had the infofeed going in the background.
He very quickly found that no two ‘experts’ could agree on the available data and there were still huge gaps in the Commonwealth’s understanding. Tantalizing scraps of information swam around him. For instance, what the hell were culling games? The phrase was often referred to, but since they didn’t seem to be televised, no-one from the Commonwealth knew what actually happened at them. But the phrase itself was telling. It was only the survivors of the games that rose to genderless sentience and then, at the equivalent to puberty, became an adult of a fixed gender, complete with the ability to Share. With that kind of start to life, perhaps the race could be excused for being naturally . . . uppity.
And when you had the teeth and hunting instincts of a shark, and the claws of a bear and the reflexes of a cat, and no fear of death because your soul would live on in the memories of your loved ones who would eat you after you died . . . it was a wonder the race had lasted.
But maybe not. On the plus side, their conflicts were conducted in a highly ritual and regulated manner. XC nations would never go to war because one of them had invaded the XC equivalent of Poland, because that kind of thinking was alien to the XCs. It was difficult for an XC nation to run short of resources and need more land, when half the population was asleep for up to half a year at any given time. And those friendly culling games seemed to take care of excess population growth.
On the minus side, when they did go to war it was at the drop of a hat, ritual or no, and a large part of the ritual was to go at the other side hammer and tongs until both sides were so depleted they couldn’t go on. They didn’t target civilians, but that was only because there was no such thing. Warfare for the XCs had been such a constant that they didn’t even give their wars names for future reference. There were theories, based on what little could be made of their dating system, that their outbreaks of war and peace and war and peace had been cyclical, somehow predictable; but they were only theories and mentioned in a footnote. Joel was aft
er hard facts.
Another plus-fact was that XCs now spoke of the Era of War and there was no denying it was in the past. XCs hadn’t had a decent, all-out scrap on a global scale for nearly a century. The XC leaders did seem to realize what their technology could do, and XC politics was a constant struggle between reason, the awareness of possible self-extinction, and their instinctive desire to eat their opponents.
All of which was overshadowed by the whopping great minus-fact of what they had done to the third world of their solar system.
But that had been nearly a century ago; certainly nothing to do with the lifeboat’s two unwanted passengers. But at the back of his mind was the permanent knowledge of what their parents, or maybe grandparents, had done, and of what these two could easily do themselves if they so chose.
His stream of thought was interrupted by a beeping. It came from his aide. He frowned and looked at the display. The frown faded into a grin.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ It was past midnight, SkySpy time. It was 13 June 2153.
He thought about letting Boon Round in on the secret, then decided not to. Boon Round reversed the old saying that misery loves company. Boon Round’s company could easily be misery.
So Joel hummed to himself. ‘Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Joel, happy birthday to me.’
When he came out of the shower, he went straight to the medifac and dialled up a couple of stay-awake pills. He wasn’t going to sleep with the XCs on board.
Six
Day Twelve: 14 June 2153
The world was dead, and looked it; an ashen, powdery grey-black like the remains of a fire on a wind-swept hillside. Joel had stood at the windows of spacecraft and gazed upon the Roving and Earth, and he had basked in the warmth of the bright blues and greens reflected back at him. Looking at the approaching drab sphere before him, he shivered.
‘How are our guests?’ he said without looking away.
Boon Round glanced at the display which showed the interior of the airlock.
‘Still asleep,’ he said.
Eventually the two XCs had hunkered down on their haunches at the back of the cabin, rocking very slowly from side to side. Their eyes were open but a cautious hand waved in front of them produced no response. Joel had wondered if this was the long sleep he had heard about or just a kind of resource-saving semi-coma. But the advantage was that the XCs were right next to the airlock. He and Boon Round had been able to pull them in and seal the inner hatch; a frantic, quick-as-possible manoeuvre that seemed to have lasted twice as long as it actually took, both of them convinced that the XCs would wake up at any time and revert to being mobile masses of teeth and claws. But they had done it quickly enough and the two were confined before they could wake up fully.
To curb any possible waking instinct to open the outer hatch, go round the lifeboat and attack the flight deck from the outside, Joel had kept the XCs’ helmets in the cabin.
‘Do we land?’ Boon Round said. The Rustie had come forward and was looking out at the Dead World with interest.
‘No need at the moment,’ said Joel. ‘We’re way ahead of any of their ships. We’ll sit in orbit and wait for rescue.’
‘And these two?’
‘We’ll cross that one when we come to it.’ And who needs XCs anyway? he added silently, bitterly, as the world came closer and filled his vision. The surface was obscured by roiling, dirty masses of clouds; not the fluffy white things he mentally associated with a sunny summer’s day but masses of debris and dust thrown up from the surface. The planet had been subjected to a concentrated nuclear bombardment that had thrown it into a nuclear winter. Even before the attack, pictures showed it had been nothing to write home about; a cold, barren, rocky place. Yet there had been enough to support life, even a civilization of sorts. But now . . .
For just a moment, Joel felt very ill disposed towards the XC race in general. Then he winced as pain stabbed suddenly into the middle of his head and it felt like there was grit behind his eyeballs. He had been on the stay-awakes too long. The feeling passed after only a second and he could concentrate again.
Then the alarm sounded.
‘Caution: target lock on. Caution: target lock on. Caution: target . . .’
Joel leapt for the nav computer. Locked on? Who was out here to . . .? An option was already flashing on the display.
Evasive manoeuvres recommended.
‘So do them!’ Joel shouted. Next to the recommendation, the world ‘enable’ flashed in a little box; Joel thumped it and in the viewports the Dead World swung suddenly away as the lifeboat went into its pre-programmed shake-off procedure.
‘Explain,’ he ordered.
‘Analysing situation,’ said the voice of the lifeboat. The planet outside swung suddenly past again as the lifeboat went into another spin. ‘Evading lock-on,’ it said in a slightly different tone. Then it was back to the first: ‘Tactical suggests planetary shield of armed satellites.’ A schematic appeared on the main display to make the point: the smooth curve of the planet’s surface, speckled with an ever-increasing number of dots showing the location of satellites.
‘What the hell is that doing here?’ Joel shouted. What was the point of guarding a dead world? He could almost believe the XCs had done it purely to spite him, to foil his latest plan, just as things finally seemed to be working.
‘Evading lock—’ The lifeboat shuddered. ‘Direct hit on power compartment. Redirecting severed power and command feeds. Defence fields activated, starboard field nodes severely compromised. Recommend implementation of combat . . . (evading lock-on) . . . status. Evading lock-on.’
‘Do it!’ The lifeboat was swinging all over the heavens and every course it took just seemed to take it into the line of fire of another satellite. ‘Why didn’t you identify the satellites earlier?’
‘Satellites were identified. Level of threat was not assessed due to insu ficient pilot information.’
Joel swore. Earth had a network of satellites in orbit, the Roving likewise. The lifeboat saw nothing intrinsically wrong with a planet being orbited by satellites and expected its pilot to tell it different. Had SkySpy never noticed? Probably not, because it only looked where the XCs went, and they never came here. The XCs said it was a dead world, the explorers from the Roving who had actually landed there had concurred, and so the Dead World was of no interest to anyone.
‘Get us into a higher orbit,’ he said.
‘Higher orbit . . . (evading lock-on) . . . not recommended. Tactical analysis suggests this course will put us in line of fire of a greater number of satellites.’ A graphical display underlined the advice, showing any of the courses the lifeboat could take to get up and away. Each one showed the lifeboat being targeted by three or four satellites and each one ended with a well-rendered explosion.
‘Direct hit received on defence fields,’ the lifeboat added.
Red lights, many more than Joel knew how to deal with, were flashing on the control desk. The Dead World swept past his vision again and the lifeboat reported two more direct hits.
So, if up was out . . .
The pain stabbed again and the grit at the back of his eyes felt more like grinding boulders, but again it went as quickly as it had come.
‘Then configure forceplanes for maximum aerodynamic effectiveness and dive,’ he said.
Oomoing dreamt, and that itself was unusual, because dreams rarely came in the Small Sleep. And one part of her mind was fully aware that this was the Small Sleep, a measure forced upon her by the lack of food. Dreaming wasn’t unusual at all in normal sleep, which lasted the usual half year, but now?
Still, it was a happy dream, so Oomoing sat back and enjoyed it.
She was with her family, and she was glad. It was her Waking Day and her three sons – she had never bred a daughter to be another mother, but her sons compensated more than adequately – were around her. There was First Son, proudly clutching the breeding contract Oomoin
g had negotiated on his behalf with her best friend’s eldest daughter. Second Son, the day he joined her in the laboratory as her assistant. And her own Third Son, after gaining his pilot’s licence. Chronologically it made no sense, but that aware part of her mind saw the connection – for each son it was the proudest day of his life.
She had fed in the waking frenzy, and then bathed, and now she reclined on a couch while they tended to her and brought her food and drink. Then they offered their Sharings to her and she took them in and lived the lives they had lived for the last half year. She shared in their joys and their sorrows, and the family was as one.
And someone else was there. Someone not of the family, someone Not Us, and Oomoing felt irritation, then anger that someone should gatecrash the occasion. But there was no-one there and she sprang up from her couch, and she could hear him but not see him, and smell him but not touch him; a presence all around, worming its way into the bonds between them.
And suddenly they were not her sons, they were rivals, they were impostors, they were after her for her name and her memories.
‘It’s not right!’ she cried, but still it pressed down on her and now it was all around her, worming its way into her mind, into her body, into her being, stripping away her identity, her essence.
It’s not real, said a small part of her mind, but that part of her mind felt itself rapidly receding.
She was Oomoing. Not Learned Mother Oomoing the forensic scientist, not My Mother Oomoing the mother of three sons, but Oomoing , the hunter, the fighter, the invincible.
You are not! shouted a small voice in her mind from a long way away, and she recognized it as the pretender Oomoing, the Oomoing of those other titles, the Oomoing that she was in her waking hours. You are a captive on an extraterrestrial ship. Now is not the time to give up your mind. You must concentrate.
Oomoing swatted the other, the impostor, the traitor away with an angry growl and sprang up, eyes open, fully awake. All her senses were confused. She didn’t know where she was – a cave of some sort, but it was strangely light and dry. She breathed in deeply, but instead of the smells she would have expected of frightened food animals and moist earth and rotting plant life underfoot and trees and bushes, all that came in was a dry, alien scent that wasn’t alive or dead. And where her ears should have been full of the rustling of plants, the passage of animals through the undergrowth, the wind through the leaves, all she heard was an annoying hum, a deep vibration through her membranes.