by Nick Webb
“And the risks? Besides, you know, turning me into a new Swarm agent that will rebuild their race?”
“Well, further memory loss. Cognitive decline. Impotence—”
“Wait, what?”
“Heh. Just kidding, sir. Seeing if you were paying attention. Little Timmy’ll be fine.”
And the kid had a sense of humor too. Any junior officer that had the balls to make a dick joke to an IDF captain who’d saved Earth three times and counting probably had the confidence to know what he was talking about. At least, that was the excuse Granger used to wave his doubts away, because, damn, he wanted his blasted memory back, impotence or not.
“And this will only help short term memory? No long term?”
“Not certain at this point, sir. We’ll know more after a few sessions.”
Long term memory. That was his main concern. The one thing that he did remember, very clearly, was that he’d warned Oppenheimer and Shelby, quite forcefully, that the Findiri were coming. That he had created them, billions of years ago. And that they were beatable. But that he couldn’t remember how. That was his mission. To figure out how to stop them. To remember.
“Okay. Let’s do it. When do we start?”
Lieutenant Commander Rice stood up from the computer. “Right now. Doctor Townsend is waiting for you.”
“You told him we were coming? Without knowing what my answer would be?”
Rice looked even more uncomfortable. “Well, let’s just say that I already knew what your answer would be.”
“Oh god. Don’t tell me.”
Rice nodded, very uncomfortably.
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
More nodding. “This morning, sir.”
“Okay. Let’s get this shit done.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Savannah Sector
Nova Nairobi, High Orbit
ISS Independence
Conference Room
“Tell them we can’t do it yet, but not in a way that turns them off. We just don’t have multi-plexed meta-space phase discriminators in stock—my god, it’s not like we’re a surplus supply store on Paradiso.” Admiral Proctor rubbed her eyes. They’d been at it for awhile. “Tell them we can get one the next time we stop off at Earth, but don’t imply that we’re actually going to Earth anytime soon. We don’t want to refuse to let them meet Granger again, at least not until we’ve had the chance to prepare him for it.”
Ensign Decker eyed the waiting Eru sitting across the table from them, and then eyed the insistent Admiral Proctor seated next to him. “Um, ma’am? I don’t know if my companion can communicate that level of nuance.”
“Well did you ask it?” she asked. Rather impatiently. It was not a pleasant feeling to be on the receiving end of an impatient Admiral Proctor’s questions.
“Not yet, ma’am—”
TELL HER WE CAN’T. YOU WERE RIGHT. TOO MUCH NUANCE. FOR NOW. The voice of the Valarisi companion in his head was not audible, nor did it communicate in actual English words to him. He just knew what it meant. And it was soothing.
“Well then ask it,” said Proctor.
“It confirms that, ma’am. Too much nuance.”
For a moment it looked like she might throttle him and toss him out of the conference room. For the former Fleet Admiral of IDF to not get her way when she’d been called out of retirement—he was lucky she didn’t just roast him alive over the q-drive in engineering.
“Very well. Ensign. Just . . . see what you can do.” Her voice had softened. But that was the result of years of practice and excellent acting on her part, because he noticed that her knuckles were white from clenching her armrest too hard.
The past day had been rough. IDF was still assembling a translation team like they’d done for the diplomatic mission to the Itharans, and so as the only officer on board with a Valarisi companion Admiral Proctor had laid the burden on him to do all the initial translating. He’d been awake for twenty-six hours and counting. The Eru didn’t seem to need sleep. Neither, for that matter, did Admiral Proctor.
“Okay. So.” He turned back to the Eru and raised his hands next to his torso. So far he’d never seen the Eru talk without raising their hands to about chest level, so he figured it would help to mimic. And he let the Valarisi companion within him take over his speech. He didn’t know how he did that. He just relaxed, thought about it, and then it happened. “Eyvasu . . . toveyyan . . . sa . . . da sa eyyandek . . . sa . . .”
And on it went. After he stopped, the closest Eru raised up all four of its hands to near chest level and spoke. Ensign Decker wasn’t sure what it meant when the Eru raised the under-arms as well. When it finished, he focused inward to hear his companion.
“It says they can wait for the phase discriminator,” he said. “But that the damage we inflicted on them in the battle will make one necessary in the near future.”
“A battle that they started,” replied Proctor, too softly to be picked up by the video recorder nearby. Admiral Oppenheimer had insisted on a live feed of the initial sessions with the Eru, for opsec purposes he’d said, but Proctor hadn’t told Decker any more than that. He wasn’t even sure who exactly was watching the feed.
“I don’t think they see it that way, Admiral, based on what my companion is telling me. They think of us as the aggressors, and that they were defending themselves.”
“Well whoever was to blame, we’ve got a thousand dead throughout our task force, and a week of repairs just for the Independence herself. Don’t even get me started on—”
Admiral Proctor continued talking, but his focus had shifted inward to his companion, who was now talking excitedly. Not talking, as it were, but thinking at him, in as energetic a way as he’d felt yet.
IT’S HAPPENED. WE DID IT. WE DID IT. WE RELEARNED WHAT HAD BEEN FORGOTTEN. WHAT HAD BEEN ERASED. WE DID IT. FINALLY. WE DID IT. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. CAN YOU? IT’S DONE. WE DID IT, WE DID IT, WE DID IT—
He interrupted the firehose of emotion and thoughts. Wait! Stop! What did you do?
THE PROTO-LIGATURE. IT WAS JUST A SHADOW OF THE ORIGINAL THAT THE SWARM USURPED. IT ALLOWED US TO DIRECTLY TAP INTO ANOTHER MIND JUST THROUGH TOUCH ALONE. WHEN THE OLD LIGATURE WAS DESTROYED, THAT ABILITY WAS LOST AS WELL. BUT MY PEOPLE, IN OUR VAT ON KYOTO THREE, HAVE BEEN STUDYING THIS PROBLEM FOR MANY WEEKS, AND WE’VE MADE A BREAKTHROUGH.
Oh. That was huge.
Proctor was still speaking. “—before we can even perform a t-jump again. And artificial gravity hasn’t been the same since the battle, so there’s another week of recalibrations and re—”
He interrupted. And feared her wrath for doing so. “Admiral, my companion just told me that they have figured out how to do the touch communication ability that they once had. During the Swarm years.”
Proctor’s mouth hung partway open. “I . . . beg your pardon?”
“They used to be able to transfer part of themselves to a new host by touch alone. They still can’t do that. But what they can do now is directly communicate with another mind through touch. Something about the brain-waves and meta-space waves being more properly in-sync during physical contact.”
“Brilliant. What are you waiting for, Ensign?” She nodded over to the Eru, who were waiting serenely across the table from them. At least the buggers were patient.
He leaned across the table and extended a hand, face up.
The Eru did nothing, but watched his hand with what he assumed was interest.
With his other hand he beckoned to one of them. As clearly as he could he was signaling to them to reach out and touch it.
The closer one reached forward. One of its main arms extended across the table, and rested an eight-fingered hand on his own.
And a world of thought and feeling and images burst upon his mind. Flashes of what might have been memory, images of hopes and desires and intentions, colors and shapes that formed themselves into—not words, but the feeling of words, and he understood them. Parts of them, at least. Even alien
thought was, well, alien.
“Wow,” was all he could say.
“What do they want, Ensign?” said Admiral Proctor.
“I still don’t know. But I’m certainly getting a glimpse of their minds. Sorry, Admiral, it’ll still take months, years, to really understand them and their motives and culture. But this is . . . remarkable.”
“The gist of it, at least, Ensign. Throw me a bone here.”
He focused in on the shapes and the colors that most closely corresponded to feelings of immediacy and intentions and short term desires.
“Granger, for one. They desperately want to talk to him.”
“We knew that.”
“Right. Trying. Just a lot . . . to work through . . .” He focused and pushed his companion to help him. “Okay. They’re a peaceful people, except when threatened. Then they have no qualms using overwhelming force to secure their interests.”
“Clearly,” said Proctor, with a touch of a frown. “And their interests?”
“It’s . . . odd, Admiral. It’s like reading the diary of an encyclopedia author. There’s this overwhelming urge to catalogue and categorize everything. To know everything. To experience everything. I think that’s their primary motivation as a species. Just like humans feel the urge to explore and secure resources to survive, these beings want to know. To experience, to catalogue, and categorize, and make the transient more permanent through record. In fact, I think their big rotating drum of a generation ship out there is also the mainframe for a big electronic history of everything they’ve ever experienced as a species. Room after room of electronic logs and backups of backups of backups. They— they want to be one and connected with the universe, and the way they accomplish that is to understand, catalogue, record, categorize, and—”
He was lost in the mishmash of images and feelings and colors he was experiencing, so distracted that he didn’t even notice the doors to the conference room open, and didn’t notice the security officers until they’d wrenched his hand off the table and behind his back. Before he knew it he was handcuffed.
“What the hell is the meaning of this?” yelled Proctor. “Get your hands off him. Have you gone insane?”
“Sorry, Admiral, we’re under orders to take Ensign Decker into custody immediately,” said one of the security officers. With the skin-to-skin contact, he could feel the man’s thoughts. He was scared. Scared of him. Of Decker. And of the quandary the officer was in. Obey the commanding officer right in front of him? Or obey—
“Oppenheimer. It’s Oppenheimer, isn’t it?” said Proctor.
“Yes, ma’am. He ordered us to monitor the proceedings here, and to intervene if Ensign Decker were to ever initiate physical contact with the aliens. He’s to come with us now.”
Decker glanced down at the man’s insignia. It was IDF security all right, but the division was unknown to him.
“You’re on my ship, and you follow my rules, and my orders. I’ll sort it out with Oppenheimer later.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Admiral Oppenheimer ordered us to ignore your orders, whatever they were, and take Decker with us immediately to sickbay.”
“Sickbay?”
The next few minutes were a blur to Decker. When he tried to remember them later, he could only see a mishmash of images and a swirl of emotions—from him, from the companion, from the security officers making skin contact with him, and he would never sort it out for the rest of his life.
But one thing he remembered clearly.
They strapped him down to a chair in a room. Sickbay—he recognized it, barely. A man stood over him, and plunged a needle into his arm.
And then, what could only be described as a ripping sensation. And a loss. He felt . . . less. Smaller. Emptier.
And that’s when he knew what was happening. They were stripping him of his Valarisi companion. It was like a fading voice. Like he’d yelled something in a canyon back on Earth, and he was hearing the last echoes, replaced by an overwhelming silence.
The needle pulled out of his arm.
His companion was gone.
And soon, his consciousness was gone too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sol Sector
Earth
Omaha, Nebraska
Sally Danforth Veterans Medical Center
He’d just finished the first round of therapy and was laying on the hospital bed, recovering before he resumed his work, when the call came in.
His data pad beeped. The particular sound that indicated someone important was calling with something urgent. He groaned and reached down into his pocket, pulled it out, laid it on his chest, and waved it on.
“Tim? You there? I can’t see you. Just the ceiling. Are you in a hospital?”
It was Admiral Oppenheimer’s voice. He tilted the handset downward toward his face, still resting it on his chest. “What is it, Christian?”
“Are you in any condition to go out on a little recon mission?”
“Does said recon mission require remembering what I had for breakfast?”
“That bad, huh?”
Granger’s eyes were closed, but he could imagine the grimace on Oppenheimer’s face. He opened his eyes and lifted the handset upright. The other man had at one time been his tactical officer aboard the Constitution for a year or so, and then the Warrior for a few months until the end of the war, and for once he remembered something quite clearly. It was odd what things he remembered clear as glass. He remembered the look of consternation on Lieutenant Oppenheimer’s face the day the Dolmasi appeared for the first time over New Dublin, apparently to help the Swarm. It was a look of sheer hopelessness.
He’d hoped he’d never have to see it again. But the look on Oppenheimer’s face now looked similar to how it did that moment thirty years ago.
“It’s been a rough few weeks. But I think I’m starting to feel a difference already with this new therapy.” Granger rotated a shoulder into view of the camera. “See? They did an infusion and everything. I can take the bandage off when I stop bleeding.”
“You’re bleeding?”
“I can’t remember,” he replied. When he saw Oppenheimer’s look of consternation, he added, “Joke, Christian.”
“Ah. Well. Okay then.”
The man had never really been known for his sense of humor aboard the Constitution, so that was about as good as he was going to get.
“What’s up, Christian?”
“You remember the research studies on the Swarm before the war? The Second Swarm War? The ones where our exoarchaeologists discovered the concentric circles of destruction around the Penumbra System for hundreds of lightyears around? They found evidence of at least ten different civilizations that had been snuffed out. Most were pre-spaceflight. But a few weren’t. Our science teams have been combing over them again, just out of an overabundance of caution so we can make sure the Swarm are really and truly gone.”
A pause. So Granger prompted, “And they found something?”
“Maybe. At a few of the sites, they found patterns of destruction that don’t quite match anything that we ever saw from the Swarm in any of our three wars with them.”
Interesting. “What kinds of patterns?”
“Well, at one site they found evidence of almost complete destruction, followed by a period where a much smaller civilization lived, but with different customs and activities, followed by more destruction, this time complete. Totally wiped out. That doesn’t match the Swarm’s pattern at all.”
Granger closed his eyes again. The drugs had given him a slight headache and even the dim light felt piercing. “Aren’t you forgetting Swarm War One? They attacked us, and then they left. We had no idea why. We found out later it was because the cycle of the Penumbra black hole was coming to a close and they had to wrap things up and wait for another hundred and fifty years to try again. The black hole could only serve as a modified Einstein-Rosen-Rao meta-space bridge for a few years at a time before the orbital dynamics of that star system close
d it off. But, turns out they only had to wait seventy-five years thanks to our good friends in the Russian Confederation and their actions in the Khorsky sector, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“No, Tim, this is different. Look, the Swarm only ever did two things. They either completely enslaved a race, like they did with the Valarisi, Dolmasi, and Skiohra, and were attempting to do with us, or they completely wiped it out if they determined the civilization would be of no use to them. These civilizations that were almost wiped out were the non-space-faring ones. Low tech. Just a few minutes of orbital bombardment and even one of our ships could end them. No reason for the Swarm to keep them around, right? But they did. For hundreds of years. And then they wiped them out.”
He had a point. Very strange.
“Okay. What do you think it means?”
Oppenheimer snorted. “That’s why I’m sending you out there. Given your . . . long history, I thought maybe you’d see some patterns there that our scientists didn’t. Figure out what happened to them. Make sure we’ve properly assessed the threat. And there is also the chance that this applies to our current problem.”
“The Findiri.”
“The Findiri. It’s possible they attacked the colony on Zion’s Haven. Other than that, still no sign of them beyond the deep-space signals our long-range meta-space detectors picked up weeks ago. But you told us before that the Findiri were very active before the Swarm showed up. I want to know if they were active near Penumbra.”
Granger sighed. Looks like he’d have to cut his convalescent vacation short. “Okay. I’ll need a ship.”
“There’s one already waiting for you.”
He opened his eyes again, and squinted against the low light. “What is it?”
Oppenheimer grinned. “Sorry Tim, but all I can afford to give you is a hand-me-down. I hope you understand. Every other ship we’ve got is either on patrol or helping with disaster relief efforts at Britannia or New Dublin or Mao Prime or any other number of worlds the Swarm hit before we took them out.”