by Ramy Vance
“What is that?” Toner’s hand fell to the multitool on his hip. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but Jaeger had denied his request to add a flechette pistol or even a stunner to their diplomatic mission equipment lists.
“HARMless,” Kwin said in that toneless mechanical voice. One of his long antennae made a slow sweep through the air, gesturing to the little orbiting baseball. Then he added, “For now.”
The sphere flashed with light. “Pardon my intrusion,” it said, “but what, might I ask, is unsatisfactory about my English translation services?” It spoke in a high, rapid tone, like an audio file played at double speed. Beside Jaeger, Toner winced. His acute hearing had its downsides.
“I—” Jaeger gaped at the whirring sphere and gave up trying to track it with her eyes. Doing so hurt her neck. What’s more, it made her look like a fool. Besides, Kwin seemed indifferent to it. “You’re the AI?” she asked, amazed.
“I am.”
“You look different when you’re not hijacking our ship, raiding our databases, and harassing our AI.” Toner’s eyes narrowed. Jaeger wished he had phrased it differently, but she had been thinking the same thing. “You sound different, too,” he added.
“Your onboard AI has not permitted me to upload or create my holographic interfaces for communicating with you on your ship. It leaves me with no choice but to utilize the templates already available,” the sphere said rapidly.
“It is quite inhospitable. Forgive my saying so, but without doing as you describe, none of the translation programs allowing you to have formal and useful communications with myself or my masters would exist. You do find them useful, do you not? If you find my services unsatisfactory, please tell me how I might better—”
Kwin lifted one antenna, and the sphere fell silent. Without another word, the AI bot spun in the air and zipped away.
“It ENjoys CONversation.”
“Half of it, at least,” Toner grunted.
“Please FOLlow me,” Kwin said. “The COUNcil has ASSembled, and it is not PATient. The ATmospheric BUBble will REmain CENtered on you as you move.”
With dizzying speed, the willowy creature did an about-face and scuttled down the catwalk.
Chapter Six
Jaeger had to run to keep pace. Toner, with his longer legs, loped easily alongside her. “This isn’t exactly a dignified welcome for the first interstellar conference.”
“I’ll have the fabricators make a red carpet for you when we get back,” she huffed.
“If we get back.”
“Look at this,” she marveled, gesturing at the thin mist of atmosphere that clung to their arms and legs as they ran after Kwin. “A self-contained, spherical force-field with an exterior generator! A docking bay big enough to birth the Osprey five times over, with real artificial gravity!” She was so enamored with the vast open space around her that at first, she didn’t notice that Kwin had pulled ahead of them by at least a hundred meters.
“Crap! We need to book it.”
There was no more talking as they fell into a dead run. Their boots made nearly no sound as they ran, nothing at all like the noisy clunking of mag soles, or even regular treads, over metal walkways. The steady, quiet thumping simply faded into silence.
It can’t bounce around and echo because there’s no atmosphere outside of this bubble, Jaeger thought. What is generating it? She scanned the open space above and around them, but the nearest support pylons were over a hundred meters away. She struggled to imagine what could be generating the forcefield and came up empty.
Magic. It was goddamned magic.
“Don’t go falling in love,” Toner grunted.
“Too late.”
They followed Kwin into a featureless ovoid chamber off the side of the docking bay. No sooner had Jaeger crossed the threshold half a step behind Toner than the door irised shut behind her.
Kwin turned away from a small panel on the wall, his mandibles clicking and his antennae waving in a breeze only he could feel. “Are you in DIStress?”
“Distress?” Jaeger realized she was breathing hard. She shook her head. “Not at all.”
“Should we be?” Toner demanded.
Kwin turned his expressionless tube of a face in Toner’s direction. “Your rate of RESpiration has CHANGed.”
“We don’t normally run everywhere at a dead sprint.” Jaeger laughed. She patted her thighs. “Our legs are much shorter than yours.”
“Plus, we have half as many,” Toner said.
“Well, a third.” Jaeger gestured at Kwin’s forelegs, which he was using to tap on a darker patch of the wall. To her, it looked simply like a blurry mass of shifting shapes, but then, they’d probably designed it for compound eyes.
“What’s all this rushing about anyway?” Toner asked. “Where’s the fire?”
“Fire?” Kwin asked.
“It’s an idiom,” Jaeger said. The Overseer AI had patched together a serviceable English translation program, but from what Jaeger could tell, Overseers and AI alike struggled with figures of speech. “He means, are we going to see the Council directly?”
“Yes. There has been much DEbate over what to do about your PRESence. UNtil now, we had DEcided to IGnore it. Your REcent MESsage has made that IMpossible. CERtain FACtions are VEry UNhappy.”
“Unhappy about what?” Jaeger aggressively ignored the I-told-you-so-smirk she just knew Toner was shooting at the back of her skull. “What do—”
“FOLlow me.”
The sphincter door twisted open and Kwin was gone, scuttling down a long, shadowy hall in a blur of motion. Jaeger hadn’t even felt the elevator move.
“They have us running off to our own execution,” Toner hissed as he fell into a sprint beside Jaeger. Kwin was already a shrinking finger at the end of the corridor.
“I’m pretty sure they run everywhere,” she reassured him.
The corridor had strange proportions. At barely more than a meter across, it was narrow enough to give Jaeger a vague sense of claustrophobia, but the ceiling stretched more than three or four meters overhead. The dull, echoless thump of her boots made her feel like she was running across the bottom of a canyon of featureless steel.
It stretched for a few hundred meters before opening into a chamber so vast that Jaeger couldn’t pick out the ceiling or far walls in the gloomy, shifting light. The floor beneath them faded from hard metal into something soft and slightly springy, like peat. True to word, the bubble of human-friendly atmosphere had stayed with Toner and Jaeger, and it moved contrary to this chamber’s thin mixture of atmospheric gasses, creating swirling vortexes where the two atmospheres slid past one another.
The air smelled like a bog, tangy and damp.
Eerie twisted shapes loomed in the shadows: spindly, irregular structures like some kind of post-modern statuary.
Kwin slowed, and they found themselves walking through a sparse forest of barren trees, some of them barely higher than Jaeger’s waist, some of them stretching tall enough to vanish into the overhead shadows. Some kind of conduit structures? Jaeger wondered. Or perhaps purely for decoration? Maybe they were in a cultivated biodome environment, a section of forest lifted from the Overseer home planet and carried with them into space?
The chamber was silent. All Jaeger could hear was her breathing, the rush of her blood.
Kwin halted. Jaeger blinked. When the Overseer wasn’t moving, he faded instantly into the backdrop, becoming one of a thousand spindly shapes in the darkness.
“WELcome, CAPtain JAEger.”
Jaeger pivoted. The new mechanical voice booming through the silent trees was louder than Kwin’s. It had come from somewhere off to the left.
Instantly, she became disoriented, lost in the middle of a field of indistinguishable trees. She pivoted again, heart thudding in her chest, scanning the shapes surrounding them. There. Barely visible in this dim light, she picked out a pale blue blaze like a smear of lichen on one of the trees.
“You have PETitione
d the COUNcil for REcognition and NEgotiation.” A third voice, still mechanical but of a slightly higher frequency, spoke from another direction.
“Speak your piece,” said a fourth voice.
Toner stepped close to Jaeger, his eyes bright points of blue in the shifting darkness. He stared across the vast expanse of trees and structures and…things…surrounding them.
They can’t all be Overseers, Jaeger thought, casting an alarmed glance to the distance, where a spindly figure at least twenty meters tall arched over the others and faded into the darkness.
“Speak your piece.” The voice repeated, and a chorus joined it.
“Why does it not speak?”
“Is it INjured?”
“Why does it not speak?”
Jaeger couldn’t tell where the words were coming from. Each had a different timbre and frequency. Each came at her from another direction.
Kwin waved one long antenna slowly in the air, and the voices went silent. “Be PAtient,” Kwin said. “They are slow.”
Toner nudged Jaeger in the ribs and smirked. “He called you slow.”
That shook Jaeger out of her shock, and she took a step away from him, her boots falling softly on the springy ground. She had prepared for so much, played this scenario out in her head a million times, but being here was something else. She never felt so intimidated in her life, and being before them was one more reason why her back was against the wall.
How could she win this when they held all the cards? Jaeger wanted to run and hide. She didn’t. Instead, she cleared her throat. “Ah. Um. Good evening, esteemed council members.” She had no idea which of these endless, static structures she was supposed to address, so she fixed her gaze on an empty point in space beside Kwin and dug around in her memory. She licked her lips. Despite the humid air, her mouth was dry. She had practiced this speech in the mirror. She hadn’t imagined giving it to a still and silent forest.
“I thank you for agreeing to meet with us for the first of what we hope to be many conferences,” she said. “Here, we hope that goodwill meets in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.”
Something moved behind Jaeger, and she glanced sharply over her shoulder. Toner scratched the back of his neck. “Oh yeah,” he said, face blank. “We came as strangers and hope to leaf as friends.”
“We come as refugees.” Jaeger turned away from him a little too sharply. “We come as survivors of a dying race, seeking a new place to build a home, where we can live in peace and harmony with the people who have long called this star system home. Our initial encounters with your people were fraught with tragedy born of terrible miscommunication, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to grow beyond our initial clumsy attempts at diplomacy.”
“We were real sticks in the mud,” Toner agreed.
Jaeger turned, casually, and stomped on Toner’s foot. Without skipping a beat, she continued. “To that end, we wish to demonstrate to you our commitment to peaceful cooperation and—”
“Go AWay.”
Jaeger spluttered. The voice had come from somewhere nearby, loud and careful and pronounced.
Silence fell among the trees.
Jaeger waited one breath, then cleared her throat and started over. She’d prepared for resistance but not right out of the gate. They didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Her negotiation position just got downgraded from terrible to catastrophic. “We wish to demonstrate our commitment to peaceful cooperation—”
“Yet you come BEARing WEApons of mass DEstruction. Your people are PREpared for war. Go Away. Take your VIolence and your WEApons with you.”
Jaeger closed her eyes. She’d expected to face a few stone walls but had at least hoped she’d make it through her opening remarks before running headfirst into them.
“You speak truth,” she breathed. She opened her eyes to see Kwin shifting his weight. Dimly, in the shadows stretching behind him, she thought she saw the faintest motion of other figures, moving. Were they shocked? Dismayed? Riled up? Or simply stretching their legs?
“My people have a history of war and violence.” She said it quietly and trusted the atmosphere would carry her message as far as it needed to go. “I will not deny this. The humans who built my ship and all it bears did so in a spirit of war and conquest.”
She let this truth stretch into silence for two heartbeats before going on, her voice stronger. “We are not all the same. Me and my crew—we have no wish to repeat the mistakes of our people. We are not the architects of our ship or our weapons—”
“These WEApons destroy. If you CONdemn them, why do you COmmand them?”
“I stole the Osprey from those who meant to use it for war.” Jaeger’s voice threatened to tremble. “I meant to deprive the violent factions of my race of a terrible weapon, and at the same time, provide my crew with the tools necessary to begin life anew, in peace.”
“Yet you use these TERrible WEApons LIBerally. You still bear the WEApons and seeds of an ARmy you brought with you. You ENter our space PREpared for war. Your crew is SOLdiers bred for war and VIolence. Through them, you have ALready brought death to our young COUsins.”
Jaeger sucked in a deep breath. She knew what this nameless, adversarial voice was talking about. “This is also true. One of my crew betrayed us and killed one of the Locauri. Your cousins. When we discovered his treachery, we killed him. As captain, I take responsibility for my crew.”
Beside her, Toner stirred, lifting an eyebrow.
“I make no excuses,” Jaeger went on, putting all of her cards on the table. Putting her trust in honesty and goodwill. “In our very first interaction with the people of your system, I failed to prevent a member of my crew from doing violence. Your suspicion is understandable. With your permission, however, I will work tirelessly to learn from the mistakes of the past and earn your faith—”
“After BRINGing VIOlence to our young COUsins, you COmmanded a BAttle Against our PEOple which led to INcalculable DAmage and REsulted in SEVeral more deaths. Death goes BEfore you and FOllows BEhind. Go back to where you came from.”
Jaeger inhaled sharply and glanced at the blue-streaked Overseer standing among his motionless peers.
Kwin had never mentioned that other Overseers had died in that battle. She was losing this debate. Mind racing, she opened her mouth to answer the prosecutor. Kwin waved one antenna. The translator bands faintly glowed as he spoke. “Be not DIShonest,” he scolded. “We INtended to DEstroy her ship. When the BATtle was lost, RAther than DEstroy us in turn, she OFFered COMfort and ASSistance.”
“Yeah!”
Jaeger jumped. Toner stood beside her, projecting his theater-trained voice into the forest. “What he said! Also, we can’t go back. The wormhole is closed. It bugs me too, but yew might as well tree to get along with us because we’re stick here.”
A murmur of mechanical voices bubbled through the mist, disembodied whispered in a motionless forest. Beneath the din, Jaeger leaned close to Toner. “When we get back to the Osprey, I’m going to surgically remove the section of your brain devoted to bad puns,” she murmured.
“If we get back.”
One voice, the voice she had come to think of as the prosecutor, cut above the rest. “UNtrue. More lies.”
Frustrated, Toner ran his fingers through his long hair and tugged. “Definitely not a lie! Wormhole. Closed. Pretty straightforward—”
A brilliant white light flickered somewhere far overhead, and Toner fell silent. A vast stellar map appeared, projected against the overhead mist. A crystal clear dance of stars and planets created a trail of light that represented an entire arm of the galaxy.
As she watched, speechless from the brilliant clarity of the hologram, a series of white bursts decorated the map, flaring and fading again. Squinting, she saw that a tiny line of indecipherable alien script accompanied each.
“The WORMhole SYStem is GOing through an UNusually ACTive phase,” the prosecutor said. “One LEADing to your point of ORigin,
will open AGain soon. When it does, you will leave.”
Toner gaped at the beautiful display but was never one to be speechless for long. “Right,” he said weakly. “Go directly back home just to get drawn and quartered for the mutineers we definitely are.”
There was a hissing, rustling sound. Jaeger turned, squinting off into the shadows. It might have been a trick of her eyes, but she thought she saw a wave of motion passing through the distant stick figures.
They’re speaking in their native language, she thought. It wasn’t terribly different from the clicking, buzzing cadence the Locauri used to communicate. Cousins, indeed.
“We do not know this EXpression,” said a new, unfamiliar voice.
Toner grinned, showing too many teeth. He opened his mouth to offer what was doubtless a lurid and very accurate description of the process.
Jaeger stepped in front of him, stomping hard on his foot again. “It means that our people, the very ones who built the Osprey and made the mutations, will execute us as traitors. We have a saying among our people. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. They see us as enemies. Our people have forsaken us as much as we have forsaken them. We cannot return. We must stay and build a home for—”
“MONsters.” The Prosecutor’s word clipped her neatly short.
Jaeger closed her eyes. “My people. They are not monsters. If we hatch them right, give them the right…” she struggled for the word, “upbringing in the right place, they will not be instruments of war, but other, new cousins for you to oversee.”
This wording must have landed because the Overseers visibly nodded and looked at each other in approval.
Another rustle, like wind through the trees in late autumn, passed through the chamber. Mechanical voices babbled. Amid the mass of voices, Jaeger could only make out a few words. Monster. Violent. Attacked the Cousins. Teach. Attacked us. New cousins. Help. No better than the K’tax.
She was disappointed but not surprised.
“USEless.” The Prosecutor’s voice cut above the noise again, and all other voices fell silent. “It is time to vote. Those who would EXpel the INvaders, speak now.”