"What?"
"Does that look like blood to you?"
There was a small, dark, rust-colored smear on the deck. The ship had been spotless up to now, something all the previous teams had commented on.
"Could be, I guess. That's the first thing anybody's seen." She took her camera and photographed the scene.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a hatch to the lower level."
"Maybe, sure." Melinda started her helmet video and looked over David into the compartment.
"It's a blood trail, Powell, look where it goes." She was pointing to another hatch opening, but since she was behind David's bulky EVA suit, he could not see where she was pointing.
"Look where?"
"Oh, sorry. Ahead and to your right a little." David, now stowed the flashlight, turned on his own suit video and turned up the brightness on his helmet-mounted lights.
"Yeah, looks like a blood trail to me. Are we online?"
"No." Melinda switched her communications settings, opening a link to Columbia and transmitting their suit video.
"Columbia, this is Hughes. We need Doctor Scranton."
Susan Scranton had been haunting the Communications position whenever someone was in the enemy ship. She snatched up a headset.
"Hughes this is Scranton. What do you have?"
"Are you seeing the feed, Commander?"
"Yes. I see something on the floor."
"It's thin and kinda smeared. We think it's a blood trail. It ends at this hatch."
Scranton asked the Surveillance tech to show her both feeds, so she could follow both Melinda and David at once.
"Where does it go, Lieutenant?"
David turned and looked towards the next hatchway. "It goes that way, Doctor. You want us to follow it?"
Katch and the Captain joined Scranton. She turned to them. "Gentlemen?"
"This is your project, Doctor," Dan said. "I think they should see where it goes but it's your call."
Scranton nodded her agreement. "Yes, Powell, follow it but watch your step. Stay out of whatever that stuff is."
"Understood. Because you'd mind, don't walk the line." That earned him a slap on the back of the helmet from Hughes.
They carefully moved through the new compartment to the hatchway.
"It goes straight on through the next compartment. Wait...Melinda...is that a footprint?" They both looked at the odd shape that crossed the blood trail.
"Maybe. If so, it ain't human."
"Lieutenant Hughes, can you get a hi-res photo of that?" Scranton asked.
"Yes, Doctor. Already on that." They got several good images, then continued to the next hatchway. David, now in front, suddenly came to a stop.
"Powell?"
"Well, I'll be damned."
"What?"
"See for yourself." David slid sideways, just enough for Melinda to get a look.
"Oh, shit."
Scranton, now out of patience, slammed down her push-to-talk switch. "Please stand still so I can see, and tell me what it is that's so damned shitty."
"Sorry, Doc, but there's a Bludgeon sphere embedded in the bulkhead, and there's what appears to be a forearm lying on the floor."
Scranton was not sure she had heard correctly. "A what?"
"A forearm, I guess. Ends in some really nasty looking claws." By now the entire Bridge was crowded around the Surveillance console.
Scranton stared at the image for several seconds, the recognition freezing her in place.
"Oh my God. Five digits."
"What?" Dan Smith asked.
"Five digits."
"So?"
Scranton recovered quickly, realizing she might have said too much too soon.
"Nothing, for now."
"That's a little spooky, Doctor," Alona Melville said quietly.
"Yes, Lieutenant, it's strange. We'll know more when we get it back here." She turned back to the image. "Can you look around and see if there's any more of him?"
"Him?" David asked as he looked around the compartment.
"It, whatever."
"There's a hole on the opposite bulkhead, bent inwards, so that's where the sphere came in. There's some serious blood splatter around where it embedded."
Melinda Hughes had worked her way across the compartment, avoiding the mess on the floor, and now looking back at David. "Sure, looks like the forelimb was taken off by the sphere, Doctor. I'll get some good images."
They heard Dan Smith's voice next. "That was some seriously good shootin' Powell."
"Thank you, sir. We did our best. I confess I would have preferred center mass."
"Where's the rest of him?" Melinda asked.
"My guess," David said as Melinda took photographs, "is that they took him."
"What now?" Melinda asked.
Scranton's response was clear. "Bag it and bring it back."
Melinda pulled a sample bag from her pack and handed it to David.
"What? Why me?"
"Shut up and bag the damn thing."
David carefully picked it up by one of the 'fingers.' It stuck to the deck at the stump and he had to move it back and forth several times before it broke loose. He looked briefly at the individual claws and noticed that they were trimmed at the end, almost like a fingernail would be. The appearance of the flesh reminded him that Scranton had suggested the samples would be freeze-dried. He placed it carefully in the sample bag.
"OK, let's get that back here soon as you can."
"Understood, Doctor."
They scraped up and bagged some of the concretized blood from under the rough end of the forelimb, then started moving back out. It still wasn't much, David thought, but it was a start. He still secretly hoped to find a whole alien body somewhere in the wreck. Given how enormous it was, they'd have to be very lucky to find one.
Still, they'd keep looking as long as they could.
David laid on his bunk for a half hour that night, then abruptly flipped the light on and pulled his journal off the shelf. It took him a minute to find a pen, but he had to get down what he was feeling.
Dear Carol —
I held an enemy arm today. Honest. I'll show you the pictures. It's purple.
Melinda and I found it in the wreck. Looks like we severed it when we hit them with a Bludgeon.
Cool, huh?
I watched Melinda as she sat with Clark at breakfast before we went EVA. She looks at him with those huge blue eyes and he just keeps on talking. I thought about pushing him into a wall or something to knock some sense into him but decided against it. They're both such great people. I hope they can get out of their own way long enough to see what's up.
Miss you desperately. But I heard you in my ear today telling me I'm not as funny as I think.
Pretty sure M would agree.
—D
Antares
Big Blue
Sunday, October 17, 2078, 2030 UTC
It happened much as Greg Cordero thought it might. One moment there were only a few words with possible meanings out of the dozens of books that he had laboriously scanned into the translation engine. The process had identified thousands of words, tracked their associations and disassociations, their placements before or after others frequently nearby, and their position in what he now clearly saw as sentences. Whatever the Beta Hydri culture might call them, to Greg, there were words, sentences, and paragraphs. It made sense, he thought, since knowledge has to be organized logically. Combinations of individual words made complete thoughts. Then combinations of thoughts were added together to create more complex concepts. And on and on it went, each level of comprehension building on the last. Start with one plus one is two, and from there you eventually get to quadratic equations.
The translation engine had the semantic structure of every written human language to use as possible templates, and it would try to match those structures with the words it was given. Even lacking meaning, the process would try to match the words it found in
the Beta Hydri language with human syntax patterns.
This evening, messages from Swadish lit Greg's tablet up with three simultaneous notifications from the inference engine. Then, six more a few seconds later. Then twenty, and then they were coming faster than he could understand them. He turned the tablet off and headed for the Intel section. He called Gabrielle on the way, and she met him there, lugging a full mug of coffee from the wardroom.
Greg accessed the translation monitor from the large display in the workroom. Each book was identified by a reference number and whatever title they had located on the book's cover, knowing full well that they were only assuming it was a title.
As Greg watched the monitor, newly translated titles appeared next to the originals. Some were incomplete, and where it could not translate a word, it simply left the original in place. Gabrielle pointed to the top title, which Greg had called 'The Dictionary.'
"Greg, look: 'Path of Knowledge.' I think your grandfather would agree."
Greg nodded. "He would, absolutely he would."
More titles filled in as they watched, and the picture book they found that first day became 'Start of Knowledge.'
"It's a primer, just like we thought."
Gabrielle called in Ron Harris, Carol Hansen, and the rest of the team working on Big Blue. They opened the electronic version of the primer and could now read what it said on the first page. Not every word was confirmed, and the inference engine would sometimes equivocate if it wasn't sure.
Knowledge is start knowledge is end seeking knowledge [journey?]. Today [parent?] start future life [journey?].
Greg opened The Dictionary and looked at the inscription, which he had manually transcribed into the translator.
[NAME?] past [journey?] [good?]. [Wish?] future [consciousness?] long and knowledge grow [time?]. [love?] [parent?] [NAME?].
He turned to the first content page of The Dictionary. He thought he knew what it might say.
Knowledge: Knowledge [root?] life [together?] goal each [person?]. Knowledge past teach meaning future prevent error give [confident?] direction.
He flipped to the second page.
Consciousness: We alive [sentient?] [people?] we [aspire?] think reason apply knowledge in [strict?] application. We past future value preserve consciousness our life our [children?] our [neighbors?]. Attention thought seek new knowledge and [then?] find future [wisdom?] giving future knowledge. This our [path?].
It occurred to Greg reading the translation that while he'd found what amounted to a space and a period, there didn't seem to be a comma yet.
"So, it's not just a dictionary," Ron Harris said. "It's also a book of philosophy, a moral guide?"
"Yes, sir, I think so. Something like that, anyway."
"Past future?" Gabrielle asked.
Greg flipped to a detailed display of the translation, a word-by-word breakdown. "Maybe it means something like 'always' or 'forever,' but in the text, it is 'past future.' Perhaps there's an implied 'and' in there for them."
Carol leaned back in her chair, arms crossed as she frequently did when deep in thought.
"Can we try something, Greg?" she asked.
"What did you have in mind."
"Can we do a reverse comparison test? We're translating from their language into ours. It makes me wonder what words in the English language do not have a translation."
Gabrielle agreed. "Hmm. Interesting thought, Carol."
Greg took a few seconds to generate the reverse missing words. Kathy Stewart gasped at the list, prioritized by the 'weight of meaning' in English.
god
worship
supernatural
war
"So, a society that has no concept of the supernatural. Of any kind of 'god'?" she asked.
There was a moment of silence before Greg responded. "I would have expected to see those in the sources we've processed so far, especially The Dictionary, but it is possible that we just haven't found those concepts yet."
"Seems unlikely to me," Harris said. "Based on what else is being taught, wisdom and the search for new knowledge."
"So, sir, you think this is an atheist society?" Carol asked.
"Well, in a way, yes, but I would not say they're 'anti-God' like a human atheist might be. A human atheist has at least heard about the idea of an omnipotent God but rejects it for whatever reason. If this list is right, and I do agree we need to remember our research is not complete, but if it is correct, the concept of a supernatural deity just does not exist for these people."
"Nor does the idea of worship — the emotional reverence for someone or something," Jack Ballard added. "So, a society based solely on rationality, on the preservation of conscious existence, and the accumulation of knowledge?"
"That's what I'm hearing," Carol responded. "And, you know, in a way it's a bit like the Inori. Very different from us, but somehow a people we can still understand and admire."
"Agreed," Ron Harris said, thoughtfully. He turned to Cordero. "So, Doctor Cordero, what shall we call these people? Just calling them the 'Beta Hydri Culture' has gotten pretty awkward."
Greg nodded, looking at Gabrielle. "They're searchers of wisdom, seekers of knowledge. So, the 'Seekers'?"
Gabrielle agreed. "Makes sense to me."
Terri Michael had watched most of this process standing in the doorway, ready to run back to the Bridge if necessary.
"Congratulations, Doctor Cordero. I do believe you've earned your pay today."
Cordero smiled and continued looking through the translations, making notes and fixing ambiguities as best he could. It was all a draft, he knew. The final translations might be different in tone or nuance of meaning, but for now, he was getting real results. His thesis about language and his translation algorithm were correct. That, in itself, was an enormous accomplishment.
Gabrielle was reading his mind as he worked. "So, thinking Nobel?"
Greg snorted a laugh. "Actually, not that. I was thinking about how I was going to explain it. It's gonna be a monstrous paper to write."
"So," Carol asked, "this language is, what, Seekerish?"
There was laughter all around.
"Yeah, I guess that's as apt as anything," Greg responded. "Seekerish it is."
The Fleet officers left after a short time, off to other duties. Joe Bowles was in the sickbay working with Marcia Soto on cultures and studies on the remains they had brought back from the surface.
"Congratulations, Greg. It's really an amazing accomplishment," Gabrielle said quietly.
He sat back and looked at her, the relief clear on his face and in his voice.
"I wasn't really sure it would work, Gabe, not until this moment. I was terrified I had missed something obvious, and the whole thing was just bullshit."
"That," she said, pointing to the translation display, "is the very opposite of bullshit."
"Thanks, Gabe."
They sat in silence for a long time after that, watching the words fill in, the new pages flowing across the screens.
Antares
Big Blue
Monday, October 17, 2078, 0900 UTC
Jack Ballard presented his results to stunned silence. He and Carol had held the secret until they had enough orbital passes to raise their confidence level to where they felt they could credibly present to the senior officers. But this was Jack's idea, and Jack's show. Carol was happy to support and be his cheerleader, but he was the expert this time. His images were unmistakable, irrefutable. There were several images that appeared to show figures — presumably Seekers — on the beach, apparently fishing. What kind of gear was unclear, but the figures moved into and out of the surf, then back into the low forest just behind the beach. Whether they were using nets or poles or something else, Jack couldn't tell.
"So, to summarize, we think there are some hundreds of Seekers still alive down there. They're living a decent but subsistence lifestyle. The best comparison I can think of to consider them as 20th-century peopl
e living with 18th or early 19th-century tech. They're fishing, but I'd be surprised if that was all. There is an interesting area just to the south of where we see these fires. It's several square kilometers of grassland and small trees, cut off on each end by cliffs. It's a natural corral, and we see quite a few small animals living in a natural enclosure, kinda penned in by the sea and the cliffs. They may be consuming those as well."
"Yes," Carol added, "those could well be the same small animals, the 'goats,' we found out in the farm areas in the original settlement."
The next bombshell came from Cordero and Este.
"You want to do WHAT?" Harris asked, incredulous.
"I want to go down and talk to them," Greg repeated.
"Out of the question," the Admiral responded.
"Sir, hear me out..." Cordero and Este reminded the Admiral that one key question had never been resolved: What was the point? The enemy had come here, killed a lot of people, then left. They didn't seem to take anything; they didn't use the planet for any purpose. So, why bother? It was a conquest with no measurable spoils. It didn't seem to make much sense.
"You've been talking to Ballard, haven't you?" Harris finally asked.
"We've discussed it, sir. But even without the intelligence value, we have a chance to sit down with a new alien species."
Harris looked at Carol, then at Terri Michael, who was suppressing a smile.
"Do you think you have enough of the language to even have a conversation?"
"I think so, sir. We'll have to keep it simple, and we'll have to be flexible in how we explain things to one another, but, yes, I think we can."
"I agree with them, sir. They should try it," Kathy Stewart offered.
"Et tu, Stewartii?" Harris asked, surrendering.
"Sorry, sir, but they've got the goods on you this time."
"What are you going to talk about? What could you talk about?" Michael asked.
"I don't know," Cordero answered, "I'll say hello and see where it goes."
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