by Greg Curtis
“Computer. Send programme one.”
Programme one was simply the first of many series of codes he’d prepared from the translations of the computer. If it failed, and he was fairly sure it would, there were another hundred and sixty seven to follow. It had been a busy couple of months. But the difficult part wasn’t sending the codes, assuming that one of them was the right one; it was knowing whether the city had accepted them. Or surviving its response if it hadn’t.
He watched nervously as the display showed him the message’s progress, a green bar tracking along the bottom of the screen. A second set of monitors showed him the activity below from a hundred different perspectives; electrical, physical, sonar images and so on. He was looking in particularly for any sign of either things powering up or down. But by the end of the first code, there seemed to be no change. Code one had merely been a phrase that had been repeated several times on the computer, and its translation, though incomplete, had indicated that it had something to do with space ships. It could have been someone saying, ‘let this ship in’, or ‘look at the pretty space ship’, and he had little chance of knowing which one it was, if either.
It failed. One down, one hundred and sixty-seven to go.
But the advantage of being cooped up in a sardine can for nearly two months was that he had one hundred and sixty-seven other codes already worked out. He’d had ample time to read, reread and then read again everything that had been on the Calderonian computer. In fact he could damn near recite it, every word and every garbled noise, from memory.
Code two was another repeated phrase, this time one for which he had no translation at all apart from some of the joining words, ‘and’, ‘or’ etc. Those at least the translator could now pick out. But it like the first one had no effect.
Undaunted he sent the third one out, and waited for any sign of a reaction.
And so it went on through the long hours until dawn, ship time. With an ever-present sense of hope and dread, he sent off each signal and then monitored the city closely for any reaction. And occasionally he did get some reactions. Nothing that actually said come on down we’re open. But a few that seemed to activate equipment below.
Code thirty-seven for some reason caused five actuator units on the western side of the city to suddenly spring into life. But all they did was to power up some land vehicles, and he figured that he’d just done the equivalent of calling for an urban transport. Nevertheless he took careful note of everything it did. Code thirty-seven was a series of translated words with random untranslatable spaces in it. And suddenly he knew that one of those unreadable spaces meant a type of land vehicle while another meant switch on. And every tiny clue was a step closer to a decent translation.
Code forty-two caused some of the lights in the city to turn on, briefly. A security light system perhaps. And code sixty sent the bolos below into a spin as they started massing in the city centre. A call to arms perhaps or maybe he’d just been identified as a perceived threat. Sending the same code again though returned the bolos to their assigned stations.
Seventy-two activated the city’s power plants, turning them from a steady trickle into a raging torrent of power production. For a while he thought the city was actually preparing to shoot him out of the sky, except that there was no sign of weapons being activated. Happily, repeating the code caused everything to shut down again.
Ninety-nine proved to be almost what he wanted. And he watched with his breath drawn as several of the city’s buried chambers suddenly opened far below. But just as he was beginning to think he’d cracked it and was preparing to celebrate, out of the chambers came a bright green beam that nearly tore through the Sparrow’s newly enhanced shields, and he realised that he’d just activated the city’s anti-spacecraft weapons. Apparently he’d identified the ship as an enemy. He shut them down again quickly.
One hundred and four proved to be a major breakthrough, though he didn’t know at first what it was. All he did know was that he was suddenly listening to some sort of translated warning, and he figured he’d just activated a warning beacon or similar. But even as he was recording the words, which conveniently came with a digital text equivalent, he realised he was listening to the equivalent of a Rosetta stone. One that could provide the link between the written language that they had examples of, and the spoken Calderonian which had never been heard in ten thousand years.
But the breakthrough was greater still as he noticed there was far more code being broadcast than the ship was playing. Some brief fiddling with the computer’s interpretation programmes, and he suddenly had images as well. It was a full media presentation. A public warning announcement. The only reason the Sparrow’s computers hadn’t understood that immediately was that the visual information was being sent as part of the same data stream as the rest. A strange if surprisingly efficient system.
It was a long warning. He sat back in his easy chair, his only luxury on the redesigned Sparrow, and watched as the Calderonian on the screen spoke at great length about their war. He knew he was talking about the war, if only because he was shown the stellar maps of the enemy, and the way they had progressed to overshadow the Calderonian’s own. But later he was shown the ships. Not in the detail he would have wanted, and not with advanced schematics of the Kaiwhare weapons, but enough to understand them.
Surprisingly the ships didn’t appear that advanced, though he had to remind himself that regardless, they had still overcome a technologically more advanced people. Appearances could be deceptive. Also, he noted that they were small. Mostly forty and fifty man light cruisers, not that much larger than the Sparrow itself. But what they lacked in size he realised, they more than made up for in numbers.
Nearly an hour after the message began, it became much more lively as he was shown a space battle, one both bigger and stranger than any he had ever seen. The Calderonians had three super heavy battleships, each of which could have put the Targ itself in their holds. By contrast the Kaiwhare only had their light cruisers. But they had at least fifty thousand of them.
As the battle had begun, the Kaiwhare had attacked from out of nowhere, somehow camouflaging themselves from the Calderonian sensors. Thirty thousand fleabites in the first few seconds proved to be more than the first battleship could clearly take, especially as they had attacked before the battleship had a chance to raise its shields, and it had detonated as something critical was hit. But the other two battleships had a better chance, and they managed to raise their shields before suffering the same fate.
From that point on the battle had been more even, as the two battleships went on the offensive and hundreds and then thousands of Kaiwhare ships had turned to interstellar dust. But the Kaiwhare had their own tactics, one of which was to concentrate all their fire power on only one of the ships, while keeping it between them and the second ship. Thus it quickly became a battle not of two to fifty thousand, but only one.
The Calderonians though had developed their own counter to the tactic, which was some form of torpedo that could actually go around their ships to destroy the enemy on the other side. Goodness only knew how they targeted the enemy. They seemed to be firing blind. But they were doing it hundreds of times per second without ever missing.
For a while it looked as though the two Calderonian ships were going to hold off the Kaiwhare, especially when they started tearing huge holes in the fleet with some form of chain-reacting explosive projectile. But then of course the Kaiwhare fought back with their traditional weapon, terrorism. From out of nowhere an image came of Calderonians, women and children he guessed, being held on the Kaiwhare craft. Human shields. Or rather Calderonian.
Daryl felt sick inside when he saw that. It wasn’t just the idea of using hostages against their families, even while trying to destroy them. It was the obvious signs of abuse that they had already suffered. The Calderonians were furry bipeds, but many of their coats, especially those of the children who for some reason were lighter than the adults, showed the
bright red of blood. Everywhere. Many were also missing limbs, even eyes, as they had apparently been mutilated, probably tortured. What sort of monsters could do such things? There was of course only one answer. The same monsters that now threatened the Community and his new family.
Though obvious the ploy worked and the second ship which had already been badly damaged suddenly came under renewed attack and refused to fight back. It, like its brother, detonated in an almighty explosion of fire and dust, leaving nothing but black space. A terrible testimony to the evil of the Kaiwhare and the Calderonian’s decency.
The third ship then took its own course of action, probably the only one its captain thought was still open to it. It started to run. Of course with a ship of that size, acceleration was not on its side, and the Kaiwhare caught it easily and began to play their own weapons over its hull. Shields or no shields they knew they could take it out.
But they had reckoned without the Calderonians own genius and desperation, Even as the Calderonian ship was taking off, and refusing to fire, it took a new course. It stopped and reversed suddenly as well over a thousand Kaiwhare vessels disintegrated on its shields. The captain had finally understood that the battle was all about survival. The hostages, whether they were alive or dead, were going to die. They all were. But at least they could die quickly. It must have been a horrible decision to make and yet it was the only one he had.
Turning far more quickly than should have been possible for a ship of that size, the Calderonian vessel then headed straight toward the middle of the fleet, where those that were quick enough got out of its way and started attacking from all sides. They surely still thought they were going to win with such numbers on their side.
They were wrong. The third ship activated what was surely its most secret weapon. Some sort of pulse wave that emanated from its entire hull and which then spread out like ripples on a pond. Naturally he couldn’t see the pulse. It was invisible. But he could see the effect as hundreds and then thousands of the Kaiwhare vessels were torn apart. Some exploded, others just leaked plasma and died, but nothing seemed to survive the pulse.
Close to twenty thousand craft finally ended up as scrap metal from its first blast, and the remains of the fleet, shattered by what had happened, started making plans to flee. But they were too slow. The Calderonian vessel suddenly went on the offensive, and Daryl watched in awe as beams from every possible square inch on the vessel suddenly shot out, and thousands more of the craft became space dust in seconds.
The Kaiwhare, perhaps finally realising their desperate danger and that they couldn’t flee, tried a counter attack, and the remaining half of their fleet regrouped quickly into an arrow head formation, preparing for an all out attack as they concentrated their fire power on one section of the ship. Pierce the shields, and then the hull all the way through to its heart. It was an ancient military approach, but one that while often successful, was also very costly to the attacker, as the spearhead disintegrated in the first charge.
In this case it was far worse. The Calderonians had anticipated the move and they had far more weaponry up their sleeves than they had shown. Some sort of globular ball of energy appeared directly in the middle of the approaching attack, and spontaneously detonated, sending at least another ten thousand ships to their grave and leaving the few remaining ships vulnerable.
In short order it was over. The Kaiwhare were either dead or had fled, and the Calderonian vessel, despite its obvious battle damage, was limping away to a base for repairs. The speaker, whoever he was, was back and talking. Actually Daryl realised, he had been speaking the whole way through. He just hadn’t been listening as his eyes had been glued to the screen.
Daryl was horrified. It wasn’t just the horror of seeing the battle and knowing finally, that it really wasn’t war they were talking about; it truly was genocide. It wasn’t the obvious foulness of the Kaiwhare as they sank to ever greater depths to destroy their enemy, and in the process brought the Calderonians down almost to theirs. It wasn’t even the understanding that the Calderonians had developed at least four major weapons systems he’d never heard of, all of which could be devastating in a space battle against the massed Kaiwhare fleets. And all of which he’d be unravelling as quickly as he could and sending back on the message torpedo. It was the understanding that this was the nightmare the Community, the Force and Karen faced.
How could you fight such an enemy? A foe without any scruples? An enemy that would literally do everything within his power to destroy you? No matter what. And worse still, if you did fight them, what would it do to you? To your soul? That scared him. To see people change from being decent citizens to becoming the monsters they needed to be, just to survive. Death and destruction weren’t the only threats the Force faced at the hands of the Kaiwhare. The loss of idealism and the sacrifice of morality were perhaps even greater risks to the Community.
For the longest time he simply sat there after the warning had finished, stewing in his own fear. What chance did Karen have? Or the Community? Or even the Earth? But in time he returned to his senses and started remembering why he was here after all. Which was to find out all he could from them. And despite the horror of what he had been given, it was the key to unlocking their ancient secrets.
Being no linguist he had set up the computers to do the translations based on what they had already gleaned from the records. But with these new ones he realised, he had much more for them to work with. It was time to start replaying the message, and begin filling in the blanks. He would begin with an untranslatable word, see the context in which it was used, find other places in the recording where it was also used, and then try to guess its meaning. From there he would use those new words to flesh out the message and whatever else was contained in the other records.
It was going to be a long few days he realised, as he would probably have to listen to the message fifty times over before he had a decent translation, but he was abruptly filled with energy, as he realised it was a goal he could achieve. It was only a matter of hard work. And once he had it, he would surely also have the key to entering the city below. Because the warning or history lesson was surely designed for other Calderonians who might one day have followed and as such it contained the key for them to enter.
Better yet, as he studied the screen prints of the messages, he realised that just as he had suspected on Calderon Six, the computer system itself was capable of learning, something that no one either on Earth or in the Community had yet been able to duplicate. But the miracle of the technology was less important than the fact that a learning computer could be reasoned with. In theory. He might not need a code, just a good argument, and by definition he and the Calderonians themselves were allies, ten thousand years removed. For they fought the same enemy and the Calderonian computers were surely still fighting that war, even if their creators had perished. That was why they were so well defended.
And once in the city, he had to get the schematics for the new weapons systems, and anything else he could lay his hands on, and send them back home at top speed.
Chapter Eighteen.
“That’s not a ship!” Daryl was speaking to himself again as he stared at the image of the glowing firefly floating in front of him. There was no one else to speak to. It was a bad habit he’d been trying to curb for months, without success. But right then he didn’t care. No matter how many times he’d caught himself in the past five months and tried to stop it for fear that he might be cracking up, for once it didn’t matter. Not compared to the impossibility in front of him.
But if it was impossible for him to accept the ship, it was worse for the Sparrow. All of the ship’s instruments were going haywire as they tried to examine it and failed. Its size, though surely massive was unable to be measured. In fact the only way he knew it was so large was from looking at the amount of room it took up in the view screen and calculating its distance by parallax from the Sparrow and the world behind it. But if that was any true estimate, i
t had to be nearly the size of a small moon.
Its shape, which he could see in the screen was roughly cylindrical, couldn’t even be measured. He watched with mute shock as the ship’s plotter, which recorded and mapped everything from other ships to asteroids in relation to the Sparrow, showed it as a constantly changing free form. An amoeba in space. Clearly the instruments saw something he didn’t.
All scans of its structure came back as impossible, which annoyed him a little. They didn’t even have the decency to come back as though it was something they couldn’t analyse. They came back as if it was changing from millisecond to millisecond. One instant it was metallic, the next organic, and the one after that, pure energy. The same was true of everything else about the vessel. Its power sources - assuming it had some - its drives and even its weapons. Nothing was constant, or at least consistent enough for his instruments to measure. Yet he could see it clearly in the view screen, calmly sitting there waiting for him.
About the only good thing he could say was that it didn’t seem to be hostile. The Sparrow was still cloaked, he’d kept it that way for nearly four months after starting to detect signs of more alien civilisations and realised he was moving well beyond the Community’s reach. He had no way of knowing whether these might be friends or foes. Fortunately, none had noticed him, or if they had, none had paid him any attention. But the cloak was no barrier for this thing. Even as he’d been slowing as he entered the system, he’d watched the ship appear from out of nowhere, calculate to a millimetre his eventual stopping point, and wait for him there. Directly on top of where the next Calderonian base should be. Except that it wasn’t.