by Webb, Nick
“It’s because of what those letters are spelling, Admiral. It— it can’t be a coincidence. If it spelled nonsense? Sure, okay. If it spelled some random seven-letter word? Okay, maybe that could be a coincidence. But this?”
Proctor spun back to the screen and tried to do the math, losing count a few times. “Ensign? Are they— are they spelling what I think they’re spelling?”
“They’re spelling Granger, ma’am. The letters: they spell Granger.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Sol Sector
Earth
Omaha, Nebraska
Jak’s Cafe
“No, I want the salad, the steak, and the fries,” said Tim Granger, former IDF captain of the Constitution, the Warrior, and the Victory, and holder of the title of the longest living human, clocking in at thirteen billion years and change now. “Medium rare. The center should be redder than your face. Hold the pimples, please.”
The impeccably-dressed young waiter looked genuinely confused and embarrassed. His upraised eyebrows squished his forehead up until it broke the pristine shell of perfectly arranged hair. Upscale restaurants on Earth, especially the city hosting IDF’s HQ, tended to attract the best service talent in the Sol sector. But it was clear this young man had forgotten his order.
“Uh, sir, a few minutes ago you said you wanted the salmon. Salad, yes. But the fries were to be sweet potato fries. Have you changed your mind?”
“No, for God’s sake, I haven’t changed my mind. I always get steak, salad, and fries. Medium rare.”
“Of course, sir. I’ll go change your order right away.”
“But—”
The waiter was already gone halfway back to the kitchen, and before he pushed the swinging door open he glanced back with a half-glare, half look of pity.
“Goddamn kids.”
Except what he wouldn’t, couldn’t admit to himself was that the kid was probably right.
His memory was shot. Long-term memory. Short-term memory. Medium. Smell memory, taste, sight, sound, words, touch, the overpowering sensation of a kiss, the exhilarating feeling of winning—whether it be soccer, love, or a war—the unshakable memories of childhood, of the first time your father yelled at you, the first time a bully at school stole your toy, the first time you had awkward sex as a seventeen-year-old. All these and more.
Not gone. Just . . . in a state of confusing flux. Moving. Disappearing. Reappearing, sometimes changed from what he thought he knew. He remembered old friends’ experiences as his own, and inserted stories he’d seen on the news into his own narrative, unsure of what was his own, what was real.
All since he’d become mortal again, using Skiohra technology—technology that he gave them long ago, according to his long, long, millions-of-years-long plan.
The plan he couldn’t remember anymore, now that his memory banks were fragile folds of gray and white organic matter instead of the steady, reliable matrix of silicon, oxygen, germanium, arsenic, and modern technology. Or was it ancient technology?
Focusing was difficult since the video monitor up on the wall of the restaurant was blaring something about something-or-other. Talking heads arguing about politics or the various minor conflicts that had erupted in the vacuum of power and influence that had sprung up after Britannia’s demise. Noise. All noise. Focus, Tim.
He waved through his data pad, on loan from IDF Central Command Omaha. He was technically relieved of duty, command, and rank during this indeterminate period of time after his reincarnation, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t call in favors from old friends. At least he still remembered them.
Some of them, at least.
Their reports? Nothing. No sensor pings. No long-distance detection of any meta-space transmissions or disturbances. All the outlying colonies said everything was normal. No change.
No one had seen or heard anything about the Findiri until Nova Nairobi. And since he lacked security clearance, he’d heard nothing about the fleet sent to investigate.
He shoved the data pad away, half wondering if he’d already checked that same data a few times already in the past hour, and half wondering if his memory of creating the Findiri in the first place was real, or another of his new organic mind’s fabrications.
A soft beep from the data pad made him almost pick it up. Almost. It was the tone of a message reminder. He’d received one the day before, but hadn’t read it. Funny how he could remember that so clearly. It was from his lawyer. But he just wasn’t in a good place to think about that problem yet.
“Excuse me, sir? I saw you from across the street. Can . . . may I have a moment?”
He didn’t even look up. “No autographs.”
The young man who’d approached his table stammered. “Uh, sorry sir, no, I don’t want that. I just saw you and, well, had to come and hear you myself. You see, I—”
Granger focused on his data pad, making his best attempt to appear one hundred and fifty percent indifferent and annoyed, something which came all too easily to him. “Grangerite?”
“Uh, well, kinda, sir—”
“Then fuck off.”
“Sir?”
He finally looked up. The kid was gangly and thin, barely twenty by the looks of it, or maybe thirty, given he was now terrible at guessing age. Scarring on part of his neck—burns, most likely—the kid might have been on the receiving end of some of the recent Swarm destruction. Rumpled, mended clothes, but a steady, eager face. “Which part did you not understand, son? The fuck? Or the off? Should I have said fuck right off? Go fuck yourself? Get the everlasting fuck out of my face?”
The kid said nothing, apparently stunned into silence, but too stunned to actually walk away. A shame, really, the data pad was getting interesting. He looked back down and tried reading again through the last dense paragraph of strategic analysis drawn up by IDF Central Command, detailing potential strategies for long-term defense against the Findiri. An enemy that they hadn’t even met yet—how could they even think about strategy at this point? He saw nervous shifting out of the corner of his eye. Goddammit, he was still there.
“Son, are you going to just stand there, or will you finally get those legs to move your ass out of here?”
He glanced back up, but the kid’s eyes were riveted, not on him, but on the news video screen on the wall. “Wow,” the kid finally looked at him. “What does it mean, sir?”
Granger focused on the video monitor. On half the screen was the image of a vast metal cylinder in space, orbiting an idyllic green and blue world, which the chyron explained was Nova Nairobi. Only it wasn’t just a cylinder. As his eyes pored over the thing he saw it was a … not just a spaceship, but definitely some kind of craft. Gargantuan. As large, if not larger, than the Skiohra generation ships. And . . . it was rotating. Its form of artificial gravity, most likely.
“Huh,” was all he could manage.
“They’re saying it’s another new alien race that just reached out to us. They say they’ve been in hiding for thousands of years after the Swarm destroyed their world, and now they think it’s safe to come out. I don’t get it. That’s two now. How do we just miss aliens right under our nose?”
“Space is a big place, kid. You’d be surprised.”
Granger saw where the kid was reading all that—in the chyron at the bottom of the screen. He pointed toward the monitor, then tapped upward in the air to increase the volume. The arguing talking heads on the other half of the screen suddenly became intelligible.
“—like so many times before. But I think this time it’s different. We have two races, one after the other, declare themselves peaceably to us within a matter of days. And not like with the Dolmasi decades ago where we only first met them on the battlefield. They were controlled by the Swarm, and Tim Granger blew their first ships out of the sky. It’s arguable that they started off as our enemy, and events of the last war didn’t help. So it was inevitable that xenophobia and racism would run high. But these beings are manifesting themselves to us
peacefully—after a brief mishap—extending the hand of friendship right up front. It’s ludicrous if we don’t take their offer of talks to—”
The other interrupted. “Mishap? We lost thousands of lives at Nova Nairobi! No, no no. It’s all the same. An alien is an alien is an alien to some of these folks. Jesus himself could show up at the head of an alien marching band and these uneducated racist xenophobes would try to string him up at the end of a rope. And the president is a little boxed in here because half of his base are these people. He can’t just accept them as our old buddies like the opposition wants, much less form an alliance with them, or they’d kick him to the electoral curb—”
“I think you’re underestimating his base’s ability to be pragmatic and see that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. In fact, senior party leaders told me, off the record, that the government is going to invite all three new races, along with the Dolmasi, Skiohra, and Valarisi, to a conference to lay the groundwork for something.”
“A what? Like an alliance? A cooperative defense agreement?”
“Unclear. But I know that things are in the works behind the scenes.”
“Well if that happens I think you’re going to see, when their cards are laid out, that their voters are going to abandon them in droves. I think we’re witnessing the next great political realignment….”
The talk of politics made his head hurt, but the mention of the potential summit or conference caught his interest. Why hadn’t Oppenheimer told him anything? Or Shelby, for that matter. Maybe they were already on the outs with President Sepulveda. For a new, unelected president, he sure was spending his political capital with gusto these days. Which made it all the more surprising that the idiot had called for an early election. Guess he wanted legitimacy or something.
He glanced up to tell the kid to beat it, but was surprised to see he’d already retreated. And in his place was the snooty waiter.
“Sir? Your lobster. But I’m afraid the chef said that we’re out of butternut squash soup. Will the tomato bisque be acceptable?”
The waiter set the plate down in front of him, the lobster tail still steaming, basmati rice glistening with squeezed lemon and an aromatic butter and plum-based sauce drizzled over the whole thing. “But….”
“Yes, sir?”
“What happened to the steak?”
The waiter closed his eyes for nearly two seconds, and when he opened them again, it was with a thin, tight, patronizing smile. “Sir, if you’ll recall, you changed your order again the last time I came by your table with the Guinness. You said you hadn’t had lobster in, and I quote, at least a few billion years, and you were dying to taste it again. I’m afraid I can’t change your order for the fourth time.”
He waved him off. “Fine. This is just fine. You’re right, I haven’t had lobster in at least that long. Maybe longer. Thank you, son.”
The waiter gratefully retreated.
He was two bites into the lobster when he noticed an alarm that had been going off on his data pad. A wave of his hand revealed a message, marked urgent. He noticed the sender’s name. Lieutenant Commander Tim Rice. Odd. The name didn’t ring a bell. He was sure he’d never met the man. But he waved the message on anyway, and soon, a fresh-faced young IDF officer popped up out of the data pad, the holographic projection getting bigger until it was a ghostly representation the size of a normal human torso, sticking up out of his dinner table.
“Captain Granger, I have something very, very interesting you should look at. If this is true, it might be a huge breakthrough in our problem. Can you come to my lab right away? If not, send a message. If so, just come whenever you can—I’ll be here another few hours. Rice out.”
Huh. Another Tim. And apparently they knew each other. This shared name thing was going to get confusing if it turned out he had to talk to this kid more than once. He waved the message off and brought up his most recent messages.
He did a double take. His eight most recent messages were from Lieutenant Commander Tim Rice. And it looked like he’d replied to several of them.
“Dammit.”
The waiter had been passing by his table and stopped when he heard the murmured expletive. “Sir? Is it not to your liking?”
“It’s fine. I’ll have the steak to go, please. I’ve got to get somewhere urgent. But—” he glanced around the table, knowing he was missing something. “But I can’t remember exactly where that was.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Veracruz Sector
Chantana III
ISS Tyler S. Volz
Shuttle Bay
Captain Whitehorse waved a hand forward toward the door to shuttle bay two, indicating her XO go through first. When she caught up to him, she saw the Itharan shuttle had just landed. “You told the translation team to be here too, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Shin-Wentworth.
The translation team, composed of a xenolinguistics professor, a translation software tech, and one diplomat from UE’s foreign service, arrived a few seconds later, and Whitehorse waved them in. “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” she said. “Professor? Are we ready? How much can I expect to understand?”
He shrugged. “Maybe two-thirds? Depends on what they talk about. Pleasantries and technical topics are the easiest. Anything regarding emotions, intentions, opinion, most things subjective—we’re veeeery slowly making steady progress. But it’s been . . . slow.” For a linguistics professor, his vocabulary seemed unusually pedestrian.
“Okay. Just keep me from insulting them.” She saw the security chief and the marine escort arrive, and she waved them over. “Chief.” She acknowledged him with a nod. He nodded back and rested a hand on a holstered sidearm, taking up a position several yards back, giving himself a clear view of the shuttle.
With a piercing cranking noise, the side hatch on the shuttle began to open. And then got stuck. To Whitehorse’s eyes, it looked rusted and patched, as if it had broken and been repaired numerous times. The cranking sound started and stopped several times more, to no avail. She waved down a shuttle bay tech. “Yeoman? Anything you can do to help?”
The young man’s eyes were wide as if starstruck that Captain Whitehorse, the Captain Whitehorse was actually talking to him, but he recovered quickly. “Yes, ma’am.” He reached down to his tool belt and got to work on the door from the outside, and on the inside Whitehorse could see one of the Itharan aliens attempting to get it unstuck.
She took the brief moment to study him. Or her? She still wasn’t quite clear on Itharan gender characteristics. The three digits on the being’s hands were remarkably dextrous for being so large—each almost double the size of a human thumb—and the arms had two joints instead of a single elbow, making them look almost like crab legs.
Their ears, if you could call them ears and not extra-wide antennae, protruded from the sides of the head slightly higher than where a human ear would be, except they were longer, almost tubular, and extended upward. This one’s hair was beet red, though she’d also seen various shades of yellow and orange. No black or brown hair yet that she’d seen, and most of them let it grow long and bound at multiple points by some kind of fabric into ponytails that swept side to side across their backs.
The hatch began to open again, this time with far less noise, and to her shock, as soon as the hatch’s bottom half touched the shuttle bay floor, several small beings dashed out and started running toward a stack of supply crates nearby.
“Stop!” yelled someone behind her, and Whitehorse turned to see her chief of security aim his firearm at the things galloping around the crates. “Stop!” he repeated, and pointed the gun back and forth between the two tiny aliens before he swung it back toward the shuttle at two more small aliens that had also jumped out of the shuttle. “Captain! Behind me, please!” He motioned to one of the nearby marines. “Get her out of here, Johnson. And call for backup.”
“Mr. Oldham, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Whitehor
se, and before the younger marine could take another step, she shook her head and stared him down.
“It’s not safe, ma’am. Four Trits just jumped out unannounced and are making hostile movements. Best that you—”
“Oldham, they’re kids. Itharan children. Stand down. Put that thing away. Now.”
Lieutenant Oldham glanced sidelong at her, then back to the tiny running aliens, then back at her, then swore and holstered his weapon. “They shouldn’t be running around like that. Not when we can’t understand them and have no idea what their intentions are.”
“They’re kids, Mr. Oldham. Did you prefer that they lodge a formal request for permission to romp around the shuttle bay?”
“But their parents—”
“Are right there,” she said, pointing to the larger Itharans now descending the ramp. They were tall, yet seemed to waddle back and forth as they walked, their ponytails swinging behind them.
She knew the Itharans valued their children, as most beings do, and that they were present in most of the translation sessions with the diplomatic envoy that had been sent. It seemed they took their children absolutely everywhere. But this was the first time she’d seen them.
The lead Itharan extended a hand toward her. It had apparently already learned a few human customs. She accepted it, shook it firmly, and then attempted a rudimentary Itharan greeting. They seemed to have at least five different greetings and she still had no idea which to use when, so she performed the easiest, an elaborate series of sidesteps and hops. She counted them off precisely in her head. One and two and three and hop and shimmy and one and two . . . and couldn’t help but wonder if this was a race of dancers.
The Itharan bellowed out with what may very well have been a laugh, and spoke several words of the Itharan language. The computer tech nearby tapped a few commands on his data pad, which translated. “You greet well, Leader Mare of All Colors.”
