Jayleen had then 'made-out' with Quin for a while and got him breathing again, “even though he was covered in blood and had an eye shot out and a hole in his shoulder and tons of broken bones.”
Then the medics arrived and carried him away. Cailin and Jayleen stayed in the house until the next day, when the clifftops were finally evacuated. The spawning grounds (though Cailin referred to them as the spinning grounds) had not yet been found and at night the squid had returned, though in fewer numbers.
The purpose of the evacuation was, according to Cailin, “To remove all the people so the squids had no more food.”
The camp was only a few miles from NaChar, a couple hours hike away. With the refugee city out in the open, the squid could not show up unannounced. There was an armed perimeter set up, weakly modeled after the largely successful one protecting New York. Though they lacked real walls, luckily, they had so far also lacked any squid.
Jayleen's parents numbered among the missing, along with close to half the citizens of Na Char. Cailin said they'd definitely been eaten. To Cailin everyone missing had definitely been eaten. Which was probably true. In Jayleen's case her house had been invaded, windows broken, and no one was left inside. It was hard to feel optimistic about their survival.
When Cailin announced they had almost arrived at their tent, a large shared space apparently, the local streets were deserted.
“Movie time,” Cailin said in explanation.
“They built a theater? Here?” Quin said.
“Bunches of them,” Cailin said. “They have really small screens. But you can sit really close so it's almost as good.”
They entered their assigned tent. It was divided into a number of smaller rooms with canvas walls similar to those composing the outer walls. Inside their room were three bunks in one stack as well as room for Chaplin to stand alongside the bunks. Quin wondered if perhaps the robot preferred to walk the streets while the others slept. At the end of each bunk was a cubbyhole. All three of the cubby's were filled beyond the maximum with sets of girls’ kickball gear. Quin rummaged through their bags until he found replacement clothes for his robe, as well as a brimmed hat to conceal his newly freakish face.
“Where's the bathroom,” Quin asked.
“Holy crab st—uff, Quin. We poop in a hole. Down the street there is a hole in a wood shack and in that hole is tons of poop, Quin,” Cailin said, horrified, but also excited. “Tons, Quin. Tons!”
Quin had never taken Cailin camping, so he hadn't known about outhouses.
“And beside you while you poop, Quin?” Cailin was practically vibrating now. “Other people, Quin! While you poop other people are also pooping. Right beside you, Quin.”
“Cay, you've used the toilet at school before—”
“No, Quin. The holes are all the same hole. It all goes in the same hole. Yesterday I was almost blasted out of my seat by someone ‘cause they farted.” He waved his hand across his nose as though the stink might still get up there now, a day later.
Excited voices, faint at first, became louder around them. People were returning from the theater and whatever they saw had made an impact. It was difficult to make out what they were all talking about, but Quin heard distinctly the word evacuation. Perhaps there were still people being rescued from the city?
“Oh. I forgot to tell you. There is a whole thing about a message in space and dark surfers and aliens are coming. More aliens. And we're being evacuated again. To space.”
Chapter 20
Snow examined the expanded image of one of the alien warships that surrounded them. The central body of its hull, a flat and smooth triangle, anchored dozens of long flat wide blades that protruded menacingly towards the Dee-Dub. It wasn't obvious what the blades were for. Perhaps they formed some sort of weapon. Given the likely circumstances under which they might find the answer, Snow was glad for the mystery. So far, though the ring of alien ship's long wide flat blades all pointed to the center of the ring where sat the Dee-Dub; they had not attacked. It had only been a few moments, but the aliens hadn't much reacted at all.
Max had reacted. He launched the ship into evasive maneuvers dodging this way and that. It seemed as though the ship’s engines had been jammed like the jump drive. The Dee-Dub didn't move from the center of the ring. But the Dee-Dub was moving, it's just that the alien ships were moving faster, enough faster to keep pace and retain their relative positions. Effortlessly.
“Transmission coming in,” Linda said.
“Let's hear it,” Max said.
Linda played the transmission. Snow’s stomach turned as the familiar sound of The Message played over the ship’s speakers. Was this a formal execution? With the charges read aloud before the sentence was carried out? She considered turning it off. There was no reason to allow them to gloat over their capture of the Dee-Dub and its crew. If they were going to do murder, she wished they would just murder and have done. She grabbed Max's hand and squeezed it gently. The transmission was cut short at just over the halfway mark. She looked questioningly at Max. His shrug suggested that he hadn't done it. Then the transmission picked up again. This time it was not a replay of the message, but something new. Snow bunched up her face in concentration. There was something about it. She didn't understand, but it seemed somehow familiar.
“Oh,” Linda said, “I get it. It’s a pidgin, made only from the languages in the first half of The Message. Give me a minute.”
They waited considerably longer than a minute.
“Got it,” Linda said, breaking the silence. “They want to know if we understand them. Shall I say yes?”
Snow and Max shared a look.
“Yes, please,” Max said.
“Sent. And they replied. That was fast,” Linda said in her chirpiest happiest electronic-tinged voice. “They say we can never leave.”
“Never?” All in all, it was a situation upgrade. Snow very quickly took for granted their new not-dying-right-now situation upgrade, and she imagined never leaving the system. She didn't know anything about it.
“Wait. No. It's not never… more like “You absolutely cannot leave,” Linda said.
“That's the same thing,” Max said, annoyed.
“Now…” Linda added, “you absolutely cannot leave right now. Sorry, I'm still getting the hang of this.”
“Ah, maybe greet them?” Snow said. “Say greetings from the Human race.”
“Oh. Right, a greeting. Ah, there it is, I missed it. It was right there at the beginning of the first message. They said, like hello, or something. I sent your greeting. Oh, this is fun isn't it?”
“Really fun,” Snow said, trying to feel as though it were fun, but mostly feeling yet again, the weight of all the lives hanging in the balance. This time between the whim of an unknown alien race and Linda's communication skills.
“They say greetings from the first peaceful and advanced alien race that you have met,” Linda said.
“They didn't say that…” Max said. He was trying to sound certain, but his voice had lifted a little at the end.
“No. I'm translating,” Linda said. “The name for themselves is completely meaningless.”
“Well, what does it sound like,” Snow asked.
“It doesn't sound like anything. This is nonverbal communication, translated on the fly through a Rosetta stone of dozens and dozens etcetera language fragments of presumably extinct civilizations from The Message. So, I just filled in the blank a little bit.”
“What did you use to fill in the blank to them? About us?” Snow asked.
“Basically, the same sort of thing. But I pressed the 'advanced alien race' angle a fair bit less on our part.”
“So—”
“More coming in now…” Linda said, cutting Max short. “If you attempt to break free… We're gonna' shoot ya. Then, wait or be patient, something like that.”
“How long before we can move without them shooting us?” Max asked.
“I will ask. I mean the
y used the repeated term from the message, destroyed, eliminated, annihilated. You got that right? It's one of the clearest 'words' between us. I bet every intelligent species in the Galaxy knows that one.” Linda seemed very much to be enjoying herself.
Snow was glad that someone was. Meeting an alien race for the first time should be a different sort of thrill than the one she was having.
“Greater than three hundred and sixty-eight days two hours nine minutes and eleven seconds,” Linda said. “Earth days. Obviously.”
The wait appeared helpfully in the corner of the monitor and began ticking down.
“That's very specific,” Max said.
“It's probably a nice round number for them,” Snow said.
For a while they ran through various plans for running the blockade. Few held much promise, and none were worth trying ahead of diplomacy. In that arena they were very much in the dark. All agreed that the aliens were unlikely to be GE. They quickly came to an agreement to maintain limited honesty in their peace talks.
Scans told them that, even beyond the stores of Akoronite carried by the ring of ships that were disrupting their jump drive, the system was rich with the stuff. And the aliens were mining it. If they waited out the three hundred and sixty-eight plus days, they would at least have found what they were after, though there might not be anyone left in Max's home system to use the Akoronite.
“We don't have a big stick. Does that mean we talk loudly?” Snow said.
“We don't have a big stick or anything of value to trade,” Max said.
“They don't seem very interested in killing us,” Linda said, “quickly.”
“How about we send this as a message,” Snow said. “We don't have a year.”
Max said nothing.
“Just that,” she said. “We don't have a year. Our people may all be dead by then. The Great Evil has found them, and we need the mineral if any of them are to escape.”
“Hmmmm,” Linda said. “This will take a bit…okay sent.”
“What?” Snow said. “Linda, we're just brainstorming…”
“Ah… sorry?” Linda said. “There hasn't been any response anyway. Maybe they didn't hear us.”
With the half-formed message blurted out there was nothing left to do but wait. They spent their time scanning the nearby heavens and gathering positioning data until Linda interrupted their busy work to announce that they were being approached, very quickly, by another ship. Max rotated the Dee-Dub to allow a direct view through the canopy. The asymmetrical ring of sentry ships unnervingly matched pace, maintaining their position exactly relative to the original position of the ship. The new ship was only superficially different than the sentry ships. On close inspection, after you mentally shaved the menacing spikes from the hull, they had the same basic thin triangular shape. The points of the triangle were smoothed and rounded, sleek and aerodynamic.
Linda was not exaggerating. The ship approached at an alarming speed and stopped sharply, only tens of meters from the Dee-Dub.
“Ooooo, they’re talking again,” Linda said. “They want a meeting, face to face. Because they insist or because we insisted, that part is not clear, either way they are here, and they want to meet. In about twenty minutes.”
“All of us?” Snow asked.
“We shouldn't split up. But twenty minutes is not much time to prepare,” Max said.
“What's there to prepare? We're already dressed,” Snow said.
Max unfastened his harness and slipped over the seats, past the android body and into the back.
“Oh, and you'll not want to breathe their air. It has plenty of oxygen, but it's also thick with methane, carbon monoxide, and other lung undesirables,” Linda said.
Snow unfastened herself and slipped into the back row, settling down and draping her arm around the android body. “What do you think LC? Want to try on your new dress?”
Max returned from the back, sliding into his seat. His axe now fitted through its loop on his back. “Do you want to still be the ship? or would you prefer to have a body?” he asked.
“Be the ship? That's … I mean I'm not the ship,” Linda said. Then her voice became loud. Powerful and ominous. “I merely control the ship. And all within it…”
“You mean you can't feel it when I touch the hatch, or the seat or anything like that?” Snow asked, touching the nearby door-hatch.
“No silly. The seat doesn't have touch sensors… How salacious.”
“Oh,” Snow said.
Linda's voice returned to normal. “Well, I guess that isn't completely true, I can tell your mass when we are under gravity's sway, that's a bit like a touch sensor. And I can sense the position and velocity of your legs … along with the rest of your body,” she said, then her voice then took on a note of mischief, “and I can do this…”
Snow’s seat suddenly became warm and its haptic feedback went off. By the way Max suddenly let go of the control stick, it was obvious that it was not Snow only who was affected by the pulse of all points vibration.
“So, you don't want a body then,” Max said.
“My very own legs? That might be distracting— yes please!”
“And we can swap you back into the ship when needed,” Max said.
“No need Captain Long Trousers. I can do both jobs, even from that fine standard android body with the standard sized legs.”
Snow had never swapped an AI core before. The only AI she had dealt with in her years as Duty Crew was the Longissima's AI, straight-laced and stodgy, it had stayed on duty for the entire trip, with nothing more than the short naps required of their kind. Certainly, there had never been any swapping of its core. She opened the center panel, lifting the whole of the monitor. Another small but thick panel underneath split into four sections to open wide. Inside was a crystal-clear golf ball sized marble, lit from within by a brilliant light that danced prettily between orange and green and blue.
“That's me,” Linda said. Her voice still came through the ship’s speakers, and the light flickered gently to the beat of her voice. “Be gentle now, you don't want my IQ dropping off a cliff.”
Using two fingers, placed behind the pretty marble that was Linda, Snow gently pulled her out of the ship's AI cradle. With a pop, Linda floated free into the center of the cockpit. The light from within the marble dimmed considerably.
“Wheeee!” came a tiny voice from the marble, the dim light still flickering in pace with the sound. Max scooped her up carefully and looked closely into the marble. Using both hands and all ten fingers across the shoulders of the android, Snow triggered it to open. A circle in the android’s left breast spun round and raised, angling out of the very center of its chest, and revealing as it did so its own AI cradle.
“Are those neurons?” Max asked, still peering deep into the marble AI core. The light blushed pink in response to his voice.
“That's our LC, she's pretty cute for being literally all brain,” Snow said. More pink light gushed from the marble. “Let's get her packed away, I'm getting nervous with her all exposed like that.”
Max drifted up and closer to the android, then popped her into the cradle. Without further input, the cradle spun back down into its chest.
The android’s face plate lit up, cycling through the full range of visible colors. “Core calibration in progress. Features limited until calibration has completed.” It sounded nothing like Linda, it was a deep male voice functional and emotionless with an electric tint that was stronger than normal.
“Sorry about that,” said the same voice, but with a touch of Linda behind it. “The onboard system software wants to make sure I'm checked out on this thing. Which I am. Clearly. Red tape am I right?” The android stretched its left leg out to the front. “Oooh, look at those.” It bent forward, reaching out to grab the rifle that was stuffed into a pouch on the back of Snow's seat. It grabbed and spun the rifle around to effortlessly clip it into its mount on Linda's new shoulder.
“I guess twenty m
inutes was plenty of time,” Max said.
“Well since we have time, let me fix your hair,” Snow said. She pulled off his hair hood and with both hands she tousled his hair until it stood on end.
Max made little effort to resist. Instead he pulled out one of her barrettes, the one holding the left hair horn at bay. She abandoned her attack and grabbed at the hair clip in his hand. He let her take it, but grabbed the other one, pulling it out and taking a few hairs with it.
“Oww,” Snow said, she grabbed his side with her fingers and squeezed to pinch him, but all she got was suit. Seeing her miss the mark, Max laughed triumphantly so she returned to her old standby, a punch in the shoulder. He lifted his arm defensively and her fist hit the hard plastic of his forearm. “Oww,” she said, again. “No fair, you're armored.”
“Awww, muffin.” Max grabbed her and pulled her into a bear hug, or she thought it would be. The hug was firm, but fell short of the crush of a bear hug. The fight went out of her.
“Get a room you two,” Linda said.
“We don't have time for that,” Snow said, which was too bad. She had been expecting there to be plenty of time during this long mission in the cold dark, for warmer explorations within the bedroom. So far though they'd been busy with proper work and dealing with emergency after emergency.
Max fixed his hair properly then, and she in turn clipped her horns back into place with the rest of her hair. By then most of their bonus time had been used up. They placed their helmets on. Max checked Doozer's google-mask and Snow attached a leash to his harness.
The plan to board the alien ship was still a little up in the air, but on the basic premise that, if the aliens wanted them dead, then dead they would be, humanity's last hope moved ahead with a smidgen of faith. All Linda was sure about was that the aliens would bring a 'Travel Tunnel' for them to cross through.
Starship Invasion (Lost Colony Uprising Book 2) Page 17
