“Can we talk to them yet?”
“Now that we’re not being shot at, we’re making good progress,” Torborg Africano told him. “That progress is slow for a slew of reasons, but we’re getting there.”
“What kind of reasons?” the Captain asked. The first waves of tsunamis beneath them appeared to be over, but he knew that aftershocks would follow. Everything on the coasts facing the impact zones was gone, and it looked like most of the locals lived along the coastline.
“Well, did you happen to grow gills and a second mouth since I last looked at you?” Africano asked brightly. “Or do you think you can fake a two-point harmony with underlying echolocation chirps for emotional tone?”
Octavio studied his com officer for several seconds.
“Seriously?” he asked.
“I’m not confident on the gills,” she admitted. “But their language works with dual speakers, basically, and two secondary sets of chirps that my system thinks are echolocation pings that also serve a purpose for carrying emotional content.”
“Can the translation protocols handle that?” Octavio asked. That set of software was outside his particular focus, but that still sounded like more than their computers could do.
“Bluntly? No,” Africano told him. “Hell, they’re using a trinary machine code, with minus one, zero and one as their states. How they do that mechanically, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing they had some really interesting natural silicon formations.”
“Echolocating aliens with two mouths,” Scorpion’s Captain summarized. “What do they even look like?”
“I can show you that, at least,” Renaud cut in. His XO was working on her tattoo-comp, and she flipped an image file from her tattoo to the main display. “We got some pretty close-up imagery as we were trying to identify surviving population centers. This is the ‘main street’ area of one of the larger surviving cities, but I’m focusing on one individual.”
It looked…weird. The central torso was broad and almost barrel-like. There were two muscular legs that linked to the middle of the torso, more like an Earth frog than a human-like biped, and two delicate arms with six-fingered hands attached directly above those legs.
The torso ran directly into the head, with two extended sections of darker, web-like skin along the shoulders and “neck.” Bulbous eyes likely provided nearly three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, each eye above a small lipless mouth.
Gills ran down the neck as well, the most recognizable part of the creature, and tucked next to the weblike structures Octavio guessed to be ears. The whole being was a mottled green color, with spots of gray across the skin.
“We’re processing individuals into our database now to try and take a guess at aging and, well, everything else, but that’s your local,” Renaud concluded. “Guessing that weird dark thing is their ears—which also function as echolocation receivers. Analysis says the size of the eyes is deceptive. They’ve got near-all-round vision, but it sucks.”
“So, they primarily see by sound,” Octavio said. “They certainly look amphibious.”
“Yeah, that main street I mentioned?” Renaud pulled the image back, showing the street continuing down and entering the water. “About seven kilometers long, all told, and four of them are underwater. A lot of public areas I can see look to be covered in about fifty centimeters of water.
“Our new friends really like being wet, so I’d guess amphibious, yeah.”
The Captain shook his head.
“Going to take some getting used to,” he admitted, part of his mind already considering how that water would impact their systems if they went planetside. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll leave them to die. Keep working on those coms, Lieutenant Commander Africano,” he ordered. “I’m waiting to hear back from home as to what we can do to help them—but I’d love to talk to these people once I know that.”
The datasong from the drones surveying Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’ home was a nightmare the old commander wasn’t sure she had the heart to hear. The litany of ruined cities and shattered protective reefs just carried on and on.
Her own home was gone. The spawning pool she’d been born in, that she’d left her own eggs behind in to be fertilized by the males selected by her Clan’s mothers-of-the-spawning-pool, was gone. The stone dome that had protected it against a thousand orbits of storms and waves had failed, and her Clan had died with it.
The People-Of-Ocean-Sky had siblings and cousins in the thousands, an entire year’s hatching for a Clan raised as a single group—and Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters knew in her heart of hearts that she was the sole survivor of her hatching.
Few of her eggs-of-same-hatching had gone to the void-sea, and those who had had returned to their home city long before. Her hatching was gone. Her Clan was gone—and what was a matriarch without a Clan?
“The settlements around the Orange-Sunset-Waters appear to have been protected by the lands surrounding them,” her flagship’s Voice-Over-Voices told her. Dances-On-Sun-Warmed-Grounds was an old friend, a fellow matriarch whose Clan had told her to return home long before.
“Long-Night-Waters was…mostly protected,” Sings told Dances as well. She knew the Voice-Over-Voices wouldn’t have checked. That was where Dances’s Clan had lived. “It appears your Clan pools have survived, though many of your Clan have perished.”
“Then that is…everything,” Dances-On-Sun-Warmed-Grounds admitted. “Every other shore is shattered. We prepared for every possible disaster…but we did not prepare for this.”
The cities of the People-Of-Ocean-Sky were built on the shore, crossing ground and water alike. The largest covered hundreds of square kilometers of ground and shallow waters. All of them, even the smallest settlements, were protected by gardened reefs and artificial barriers to muffle storms and hold back tsunamis. They’d been built to hold back thousand-year storms and to weaken any storm that somehow managed to overcome them.
The waves that had crashed over them had been ten times the maximum heights they’ve been built to withstand. Even the underwater settlements were gone, domes crushed under the force of rushing water.
“How many?” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters asked. She could hear the fear and sadness in her own echolocation chirps, let alone Dances’s. Her entire Clan was gone.
“We will need to make contact with the cities around Long-Night-Waters,” her flagship commander told her. “But assuming optimal survival in the two untouched seas…a billion.”
One billion souls. View-Over-Starry-Oceans had been home to over ten billion of the People-Of-Ocean-Sky.
Worse, the datasong from her ships’ scanners warned of the clouds filling the sky. Neither the water nor surface crops grown by her people could survive without light, and the impact winter would soon deprive their entire world of that.
Even the survivors were doomed.
“We must bring together the Mothers of the orbital industrial concerns,” Sings said aloud. “And any major leaders who survive on the surface. New orbital colonies must be constructed. We must evacuate our people to the void-sea and wait.”
Wait to see if the long winter to come on their homeworld outlasted their ability to live in the void-sea.
“What about the new Stranger?” Dances-On-Sun-Warmed-Grounds asked. “They helped us fight. They are the only reason as many survived. Can they help us?”
“I do not know,” Sings admitted. “My Voice-Of-Computers is working on translating their computer code and language. Both are strange.” She spluttered water from her gills in negativity.
“I have faith,” she said. Her chirps made the words a lie, but she uttered them anyway. “It will not be easy to communicate with them, but I have faith it will happen.
“What I fear is that they cannot help us further. They have one ship, a quarter of the size of our guardships. They cannot carry thousands to safety in that ship.”
“Even if they could, where would we go?” Dances said sadly. “I fear, my First-Among-Singers
, that it will fall to us to watch over the death of the People-Of-Ocean-Sky.”
“It’s not looking great,” Renaud told Octavio. “If it had been a human-inhabited world, day-one fatalities would have been on the order of sixty percent, but while we like coasts, we don’t live on them exclusively.”
“And these people?” he asked.
“Ninety-plus percent of their settlement wasn’t just near the coast; it was on the coast and spilling down into the ocean,” she explained. “Everything facing the oceans where the impactors hit is just gone.
“And luck was not with us.” Renaud shook her head and highlighted the impact zones on the globe hovering in the middle of the room. “If they’d hit land or one of the smaller oceans, the impact might have been mitigated. Instead, an impactor landed in the middle of each of the two largest bodies of water on the planet.
“Only one major body of water is unimpacted, and another looks to have only seen partial damage, but I’d guess day-one fatalities in excess of ninety percent.” She swallowed hard enough for him to hear it.
“Something on the order of ten billion dead.”
Octavio stared at the holographic orb and tried to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach. Cold math said there was nothing more they could have done. If he’d focused on the terraformers early on, Scorpion would have been destroyed and the Matrices would simply have corrected their courses.
“What about the control Matrix?” he asked. “I thought we saw a Sub-Regional Construction Matrix hanging around here.”
“They disappeared at some point when we didn’t have sensors,” his XO told him. “That’s about a twenty-two-minute window, but pretty clearly they gave this system up as a lost cause after we managed to kill two combat platforms.”
“They’ll be back,” Octavio said grimly. “And we’re almost five months from reinforcements, even if Admiral Lestroud got them moving as soon as he received our message.”
It was still strange to him to refer to Isaac Gallant as Isaac Lestroud, but the Admiral had been married for almost eighteen months by the time Scorpion’s original three-year scouting mission had wrapped up. Given the man’s mother, Octavio could see why he’d taken Amelie Lestroud’s last name.
“I’m not sure what the point would even be, sir,” Renaud admitted. “Either we can evacuate these people or we’re going to lose ninety percent of what’s left as they move onto locally-built space stations.”
“And I don’t see how we can evacuate them,” he agreed. “I’m hoping the locals have some ideas—or that command back home does.”
His tattoo-comp chirped at him and he looked at the forearm that his uniform specifically left bare.
“Speaking of which, it looks like we have a communique from home,” he told Renaud. “It’s not flagged as my eyes only, so I’d rather you sit in. Is there anything here that’s urgent enough to go over first?”
They were in the small breakout conference room attached to his office. It was big enough for a cramped eight-person meeting and had more than enough space for the warp cruiser’s two senior officers to play with all of the media equipment available to them.
“Nothing that ranks over what the Admiral has to say.”
Octavio nodded and hit the command on his tattoo-comp to open the communique on the holoprojector they’d been using for the globe.
The image that appeared was two-dimensional, not three. Even with that and data compression, it had probably taken twice as long to transmit to Scorpion as it had taken Lestroud to record it.
Lestroud looked less tired than anyone aboard Scorpion, but he was wearing the full white dress uniform Octavio had rarely seen him in. That meant he’d been in a Cabinet meeting and hadn’t bothered to change.
“Captain Catalan,” Lestroud’s image greeted them. “Octavio. This wasn’t what we expected when we sent you out, and an ignoble part of me wishes you’d arrived a few weeks later. That said, I fully agree with your actions. You could have done nothing else and kept with the traditions we want to build for the ESF.
“I have fully endorsed your actions. So have the President and the entire Cabinet. If you manage to live through this mess, I’ll probably have a medal to hang on you.”
The Admiral shook his head.
“But you’re in the middle of a nightmare for us all,” he noted. “I don’t know what the loss rate for the kind of impacts we’re looking at is, but it won’t be pretty. The analysts here say that the planet is going to be uninhabitable, which means we have to evacuate.
“If we were to try and evacuate to Exilium with our handful of one-twenty-eight freighters, we’d probably only get one load to safety before it was too late, and that wouldn’t be enough,” Lestroud told him flatly.
“Fortunately, our President decided to lean on the Matrices. This whole mess is their fault, after all. In about ten days, you’ll see a Matrix recon and security node arrive in your system with an escort of recon nodes.
“You’ll want to make sure the locals don’t shoot at them—because they’ll be hauling all ten of our one-twenty-eight warp freighters with them. Uncrewed, obviously, but we’re hoping to be able to run them with Matrix remotes.”
That was…far more than Octavio had dared to hope for. He wasn’t sure how he’d be able to crew ten ships if the Matrices couldn’t remote them, but he suspected the locals would be able to help him there. The sublight ships they’d built had been impressive enough in many ways.
“Their destination will be a Constructed World approximately six light-years from your current location that we are designating Refuge,” Lestroud continued. “It was almost certainly built by the Matrices who bombarded that planet. It seemed the least the Matrices can provide to make up for the atrocities committed.
“I’m also dispatching a task group of one-twenty-eight ships immediately. I can’t afford to send Dante, but you’re getting Galahad and four Icicles.” Lestroud paused and sighed. “In five months, at least.”
Galahad had been built as a missile cruiser. Like Scorpion, she’d traded in those armaments for matter-conversion power cores and light particle cannon.
The missile cruiser, however, was much bigger than Scorpion.
“I should have the new Vigil and some of the strike cruisers there either shortly before or shortly after,” he continued. “I will command that task group myself, and we’ll be bringing at least one two-fifty-six freighter that will effectively be a custom-built evacuation ship.
“I need you to keep those people alive if we can’t get there before you. The Matrices can help you with a lot of things, but they can’t fight the Rogues for you. I don’t know if the locals will be able to spare any resources to rebuild their defenses, but you are authorized to turn over any technology you believe they are capable of manufacturing to help in either the evacuation or rebuilding their defenses.
“Beyond that, there is an attachment to this message granting you plenipotentiary authority on behalf of the Republic of Exilium in my absence,” Lestroud told him. “You’ll officially be our ambassador to these people and authorized to do whatever you think is necessary to preserve as many of them as possible.
“Our command-and-control loop isn’t bad for being fifty light-years away, but no one is going to micromanage the deployment from here, Captain. Your mission is to save these people. Do whatever it takes.
“ESF Command out.”
9
Even once they finally managed to get enough of a translation setup sorted to allow Octavio to talk to his counterpart, there was no video. There was apparently an audio sub-channel to the locals’ protocols that created the equivalent of their echolocation, but the human crew wasn’t up to translating that into visuals or vice versa.
“I am Captain Octavio Catalan of the Exilium Space Fleet cruiser Scorpion,” he introduced himself. “Is this translation working?”
“I am Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters, First-Among-Singers of the Guardian-Star-Choirs of the People-Of-Ocean-Sky,”
a flatly mechanical translated voice replied. They’d need to work on that, he supposed. Still, despite everything, he couldn’t help but feel a giddy thrill at being the first to speak to an alien species!
“You are the commander of the armed ships around the planet?” Octavio asked. His question was so prosaic, but the thousand questions he might have asked paled in importance against the task ahead.
There was a pause after he spoke, presumably as Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters parsed whatever odd twists the translator had given her.
“I lead the Guardian-Star-Choirs, yes,” she finally replied. “I stand watch over View-Over-Starry-Oceans.”
Concepts that would have been a word or distinct phrase were being blurred together into compounds, from what Octavio could tell. They’d probably have to program in alternatives that were easier to say.
He certainly wasn’t going to refer to their new friends as “the People-Of-Ocean-Sky” every time.
“I am sorry we were not able to prevent all of the terraformers landing,” he told Sings. “We have known this enemy before but, well, my ship was not sent here to fight. We were on a survey mission.”
“For a ship not sent to fight, you aided us greatly,” Sings told him. “Your aid in our darkest hour was appreciated.”
“I have to ask,” Octavio said, hoping the translator carried his gentle tone. “What is your assessment of the future of your world?”
“Poor,” Sings said, her frankness clear even in the synthesized voice. “We have lost most of our cities and people. The surface is in chaos. I have failed to make contact with any functioning remnant of the national governments.”
“We know a great deal about the devices that landed on your world,” Octavio told her. He’d studied the tech himself after learning of its existence. The systems seemed much less cool now than they had a few days before, though. “They are terraforming constructs, designed to reshape a world to the specifications of their creators.”
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