by Trevor Wyatt
Suddenly a thought popped into his head and he almost smiled.
“Lieutenant,” he said to Mary Taylor, “I want you to analyze that transmission. They buried information in their earlier communications. In the carrier wave. Comb through this video signal, see if there is anything sub- or super-sonic, maybe. I don’t know. Work with Dr. Lannigan, will you? And Doctor, are you having any luck getting me a translation?”
“I’m still analyzing,” he replied.
The verbal exchange interested the alien, who leaned forward a little as if to catch their words. He still couldn’t see anyone else, so Jeryl decided to rectify that and see how the sight of other human beings affects him.
“Comms,” he said to Mary, “give him full access to our camera feeds. I want to see what he makes of it.”
The alien’s head moved back and forth as the additional images come through to him. He must have had multiple screens on his console, as Jeryl’s crew did. Now, he was seeing the full complement of CNC officers. Jeryl wondered if he could tell the difference between the males and the females, or the different races.
“Now, we want to see yours,” he heard Pedro Ferriero mutter at the helmsman’s station. Jeryl almost smiled at that, but he knew Pedro had a point—they had shown their new acquaintance that there was more than one person manning their craft. He would like to get an idea of how many crewmembers were housed in his behemoth of a ship.
But the alien didn’t take the hint. He simply sat, staring at Jeryl through his inscrutable blue eyes. Jeryl was starting to get fidgety. This meeting was going nowhere.
“I’ve got it,” Dr. Lannigan said, through Jeryl’s earbuds. “There are two coded frequencies in that video transmission, Jeryl. One inside the other, so that you can’t get to the second one without decoding the first one. If we were only looking at the video we’d never see it. Good catch.”
“It’s purely out of my ass, Taft. It just hit me that they may do this two-level thing all the time. What I need to know is, can you decipher it?”
“I think so—give me a few minutes.”
“As quick as you can, Taft, please.”
“Aye.”
Jeryl watched the data stream on his screens as Taft ran the alien transmission through the computers. Jeryl felt himself sweat. After what seemed to be hours, Lannigan spoke again:
“Got it. The information is all sonic, and seems to be keys to intonation. Their language is similar to Asian tongues, in that the inflection you put on a word determines its meaning. Without computers, we’d never be able to understand what—”
“Okay, I get it, just tell me what this guy is saying.”
“I have to integrate the key with their stream; it’ll take a little time.”
“Quick as you can,” he said again. Lannigan didn’t take offense; he knew they were walking into the unknown here.
While he was chewing on the new code data, Jeryl thought about what he should say to the alien once they could fully understand each other.
Greetings from the people of Earth, he thought. Or, This is a moment that will be remembered throughout history, both yours and ours.
Jeryl shook his head. He had never been good at extemporaneous speaking; he liked having prepared remarks, maybe a few jokes. But what sort of joke would these blue people understand?
These two aliens walk into a bar...or the one about the blonde and the traffic cop? What was that one about the guy who cuts off his dog’s nose? Someone asks him, how does he smell? And the guy says—
“I have it,” Lannigan said.
“Good.”
The alien was speaking again. This time Jeryl heard a gravelly voice tumbling out of the speakers. In clear English, the alien said: “If you’re not able to understand me, perhaps you’re not worth my time at this point.”
Chapter 13
Ashley
All of them in CNC were so taken aback by the alien’s rude behavior that no one spoke a word. Jeryl stepped right into the breach, however. Without blinking, he said, with great dignity, “I understand you perfectly well.”
A look of what Ashley took to be surprise flickered over the alien’s face. Note to self, she thinks: they do seem to have a similar emotional spectrum.
“I’ll repeat my original greeting to you. I am Captain Jeryl Montgomery of the Terran Union Starship Seeker. If I may be so bold as to ask, whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”
The blue alien’s face was impassive as it listened to the popping and clicking garble their machines had made of Jeryl’s speech. It waited for a few moments, and then spewed a few moments of clicking babble. On our end, the translation was:
“Good, it appears you have solved the knowledge mazes needed to be able to converse with us.”
Are these people going to be totally insufferable? Or is this captain of theirs just a dick? I wonder if Jeryl is going to hand him his head, she thought.
But no, he was silent. All he did was stare at the alien with a perfectly level gaze.
She almost grinned. He’s going to wait the son of a bitch out.
The alien didn’t know that Jeryl Montgomery was famous throughout the Armada for being a top-notch poker player. No one could out-bluff him. He could have made a career as a gambler, had he been so inclined. Ashley had seen him bluff a table of crusty old poker players, including an admiral and a two-star general, into folding against a 2,000-credit pot when all he had was a queen in the hole. And this was against one player with a full boat. He was good.
After nearly two minutes of silence, the blue one spoke again.
Is it my imagination, or is he getting pissed off?
“We send a standard hailing frequency to all ships and races we encounter—” and for a moment, she heard nothing more. Jeryl’s tactics worked. He had gained a precious pearl of information out of the alien, a genuine game-changer: They now knew that there were other intelligent races in the galaxy, and that more than one of them developed the capability to travel in interstellar space.
And Jeryl himself had given nothing away.
Ashley pushed her astonishment away and paid attention to what the alien was saying. He introduced himself as Command Legate Ghosal, of the Sonali race.
As unobtrusively as possible, she asked their computer for a definition of “legate,” because although she had heard of the word, she couldn’t recall what it meant. The computer came back with the definition: an ecclesiastic delegated by the Pope as his representative.
A what, now? She thought. This alien is a religious official? Captaining a starship?
Unless there was something seriously wrong with the translation—a possibility she was willing to entertain—what they had just learned was that God was a concept not limited to the human race.
Don’t get ahead of yourself here, she thought to herself.
Religion was still practiced on Earth and among the Outer Colonies, but it lacked the prevalence it once had. It had been reduced to the level of a hobbyist’s pursuit; organized religion perished in the aftermath of World War III. Too many bad things happened to too many good people for religion to sustain among the survivors in the ruins of the cities across the globe—people who had resorted to drinking filthy rainwater and catching rats and cockroaches for food hadn’t had the time to listen to sermons.
Do unto others was a splendid idea before, for people who had a warm place to sleep. But when they had no more than rags to wear, and were either too cold or too hot or too sick to feed their children, the basic human drive for survival took over. Rather than love thy neighbor, they were more inclined to clout him—or her—over the head and take the rat that they caught for dinner…and the neighbor himself may end up as dinner.
It happened over and over after the war. The race came closer to extinction than it ever had before. Two-fifths of humanity died. Maybe more. God hadn’t saved anyone. Nor did Mohammed, or any of the others who’d been held in high esteem for so long.
Yet, here they were c
onfronted with Ghosal, an individual who was apparently the representative of a theocracy.
Talk about unexpected, thought Ashley.
Ghosal continued. “We were on a routine surveying mission when we picked up the signals from your ship, and came in for a closer look.”
Jeryl was as cool as a chilled wine glass. “So you have no knowledge of our fellows aboard their ship?”
“I regret to say that we do not,” said Ghosal. “This is a region of space that is only a few lightyears from the border of Sonali territory.”
“You say you were on a routine surveying mission,” Jeryl said.
“That is correct, Captain Montgomery. We noticed the wreckage of your Mariner and are saddened to hear of the loss of life of those aboard.”
“Thank you.”
“I would like to offer our help. We will help you search for whoever or whatever is responsible for the tragedy.”
“That’s very kind of you, Command Legate Ghosal,” said Jeryl. “It’s an unusual coincidence to find you here so near The Mariner.”
“I am not sure I understand what you mean.”
“If I may be perfectly frank with you, Command Legate, this is the first time an individual of our race has encountered another intelligent species. For us, this is an historical moment.”
“How pleased I am, then, to be able to share it. I am deeply honored.”
Oh, you smooth SOB, Ashley thought. This was not the way she had ever imagined a First Contact would go. Ghosal spoke more like a politician than a ship’s captain.
She caught a telltale blinking on her console. It was Dr. Lannigan.
“Yes?” she said quietly.
“Something’s not right,” said the Science Officer. “Judging by what I see here, both our race and the Sonali seem to be more or less on an equal footing when it comes to technology. Their ship dwarfs ours, but if they are on a routine scouting mission...”
“Yes,” she said, getting the drift of his reasoning.
“I find it interesting that you have dispatched such a large vessel in a routine mission,” Jeryl was saying to Ghosal.
Great minds, she thought, smell the same rat.
“It seems like a big expenditure of resources.”
Interstellar travel was expensive; at least, it as for humankind. It was one reason why ships were relatively small, and why they ended up recycling the hell out of everything.
It’s why we have to pay for our own damn coffee.
If the Sonali were indeed approximately as developed as they were, then this little “routine scouting mission” of theirs was costing them deep in the purse. A ship as big as theirs wasn’t fit for a simply scouting mission. What they had was a full-scale research vessel, and probably one that was fully armed.
In fact, Ashley thought, I’d wager my lower left wisdom tooth that these guys are loaded for bear.
Something here was definitely not right.
Ghosal wasn’t taking Jeryl’s implication very well. “I am not sure I understand what you are saying, Captain Montgomery.”
The translation didn’t put an edge to his voice, but Ashley thought she’d bet her other lower wisdom tooth that there was one in his original clocks and pops.
“Oh, well, you know,” said Jeryl, being rather elaborately casual. “It’s simply that I wish my people could afford to build such an impressive vehicle simply for scouting purposes.”
“Captain,” said Ghosal, “I believe that the best course for you at this time would be to take the information we have gathered form our study of your lost ship’s wreckage, and return to your home world with it.”
“Yes, I appreciate your position, Command Legate Ghosal, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. We’re sticking around here until we determine exactly what happened to our people.”
His voice grew very hard. “And we mean to collect their remains, if at all possible. They have families and loved ones back on Earth who will want to know what happened. I will do my best to tell them.”
There was silence from Ghosal’s end of the conversation. Then the alien said, “If I may suggest, you would do better to understand that this is Sonali space, and you are here only on our forbearance.”
“Thank you, Command Legate, I will take that under advisement.”
And with that, Jeryl reached out and tapped on the controls.
The communications link with Ghosal’s ship was severed.
“Well,” said Jeryl, sitting back and smiling at them. “That was an interesting little chat. What do you suppose they’ll do now?”
Chapter 14
Jeryl
Admiral Flynn wasn’t so sanguine about the encounter when Jeryl reported it to him, which he did shortly after he broke the link between The Seeker and Command Legate Ghosal’s ship.
Jeryl made the call via slipstream in his office, because he had a feeling he wasn’t going to approve of his actions. And at first, he didn’t.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Flynn said, smoothing back his hair with both hands. “Montgomery, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” the captain said, as calmly as he could. In the face of his outrage, he was having second thoughts. Had he screwed up humanity’s first contact with an alien species?
No, he decided, I won’t allow myself to think this.
“I’ve faced down an authoritarian by adopting an even more authoritarian stance.”
Flynn glanced to one side as though appealing to an off-camera observer for help.
“Listen, Captain...I know you have a reputation for thinking outside or above the parameters of a given problem. You were showing flashes of tactical brilliance as far back as your first year in the Academy.”
He leaned closer to the camera.
“But all the problems you faced in your schooling were hypotheticals...against human antagonists, whose responses you could rely on as being on a spectrum calibrated to human emotions. You could, in other words, use hunches and guesses to determine how an antagonist might respond.”
He shook his head. “You’ve tried to finesse your confrontation with Ghosal in human terms! You can’t be certain that he’ll react as a human being would.”
“I was willing to take that risk,” Jeryl replied.
That wasn’t the right thing to say. Flynn slammed his fist down on his console, and the picture wavered for an instant.
“You took that risk on the part of your entire crew!”
A commanding officer must take the welfare of his people into account. He could not put them in harm’s way.
It’s possible that I didn’t have that fact in the forefront of my mind when I cut off communication with Ghosal, Jeryl admitted to himself.
But when he looked around at his CNC officers, he saw no scowls or looks of fear. They glanced at him with approval on their faces, and he took heart from that. They trusted him.
“They trust me,” he said to Flynn then, with confidence. He glowered at Jeryl, but then a grin broke through.
“I know they do, son, I know they do.”
Thank the stars, he’ settling down, thought Jeryl. He’d never call him “son” if he wasn’t; Admiral Howard Flynn didn’t rise to his level of authority by being easy-going, but Jeryl always had the ability to “read” him, and vice versa. They understood each other.
The Admiral once told him, after a couple of drinks at some diplomatic get-together, that Jeryl reminded him of himself when he was young. The captain took that both as a compliment, and as a confidence. He had never shared it with anyone.
Since then they had shared a... well, Jeryl would hesitate to call it a bond, but he would go so far as to say that he believed they understood each other.
“Jeryl, I won’t sugar-coat it; your situation is being monitored at the highest levels.”
He nodded. This was the one time when he could make up his mind if he was glad that they had instantaneous communications capability via slipstream, or whether he regret
ted it.
On the one hand, it was good to know that someone had his back. If he missed a regularly scheduled report, Flynn would be on the case immediately. But on the other hand, what he was dealing with was essentially a committee that wanted to second-guess him.
Flynn knew this, and he also knew that it was in his interest to let Jeryl have full discretion. He knew the admiral was shielding him from a dozen officials who outranked him, and even from Flynn himself. Those of them in the field had to be allowed to make command decisions on the fly without interference from above.
“Let me ask you this, Captain,” Flynn said. “Do you have any assessment of their military capabilities?”
Jeryl had to shake his head.
“All I know is what I see, sir,” he replied. “It’s a big ship—bigger than anything we have. It could be fully automated, I suppose; even this Ghosal could be a hologram or a synth puppet run by their vessel’s AI. But what would be the point of that? Why would they bother? No, I think he’s got himself a flying city, more or less.”
Flynn considered this. “To what end?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s as he claims; they’re a research vessel. There’s no guarantee that an alien race would use small scout ships and research vessels like we do. But I think there’s something else going on.”
Bluntly, he asked, “Do you think they destroyed The Mariner?”
Now it was the captain’s turn to digest his words. “I...don’t think I do.”
“Why not?”
“Because, if he’s telling the truth about being in contact with other alien races, they would have learned by now that appearances can fool you. Sure, he’d be careful approaching The Mariner even though it’s like an elephant approaching a flea. But even if he sent off that puzzle transmission of his, he wouldn’t fire on them simply because they didn’t respond. He’s got to have enough experience to have tried something else.”
Flynn nodded slowly. “Yes, that makes sense...to our way of thinking. But as you pointed out there’s no reason to suppose that they think like we do.”