Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  On the other hand, there was a warship at her back.

  Just in case.

  “We covered this in class,” Hanna said patiently.

  Anticipation was high. Endeavor had pinpointed the star system that was home to the beings who had visited New Earth.

  Carl Ruck, the last of the team to join Endeavor, said stubbornly, “We’re supposed to be coming in peace. They’ve been peaceful so far. Mostly. That was one of your own basic postulates in Sentience.”

  He meant the work that had won Hanna her first award from the Goodhaven Academy for the Study of Xenopsychology. The second was for Shaping Reality, about Zeig-Daru. The third was for A Preliminary Study of Uskos, a work she had written while actually on Uskos, leaving it behind in an Ellsian data bank when she left that world for the forgotten colony of Gadrah, following a man who was finally going home.

  There had been some question about whether the Study should even be considered for the award, since Hanna had been a fugitive at the time of its submission (made on her behalf by Norsa of Ell). Then the Academy, one eye on Norsa, had said the hell with it and just given her the prize. In absentia, and good riddance.

  She said, “I know you read Sentience, Carl. It was our basic text, after all. But do you remember the book? Or didn’t you notice I was wrong in some respects?”

  He looked at her uncertainly. He was true-human and remained more comfortable with words than with thought, but he was not always comfortable with Hanna’s.

  “Girritt’s not even interested in technology, much less war,” he said. “Uskos never wanted war, F’thal never did. You said yourself, I remember from class. The capacity’s there, knowing you might have to defend yourselves, but peace is better. Peace is prosperous. The Zeigans didn’t really want war either. Zeig-Daru was a special case.”

  Endeavor was deep in space now, the target certain though still far off, and the team was meeting as a whole for the first time. Hanna had taught all of them. She felt like saying, Class, repeat after me: They are ALL special cases!

  She said, “If we ever, ever get even a hint that there is anything else out here like Zeig-Daru, I’m going back to New Earth and taking up farming. Carl, the Admiral Wu is a day’s transit behind us, and it will never show itself unless we scream for it. Mission protocol. No argument.”

  She looked around the conference room. Joseph had told her no one relaxed on this ship, or at least was not allowed to appear anything but completely alert, but there was no stiffness here: Joseph perched on the table, Glory Bosman curled exquisitely in her seat, Bella lounged.

  “Communications is pulling in a steady stream of data, randomly sampling radio and video transmissions,” Hanna said. “None of it was ever meant for destinations in space. They’re working on teasing out audio components, so we’ll have a grasp of a dominant language before direct contact. They’ll have something for us to start working on in a few days, so get oriented here while you have the chance.

  “Are any of you . . . D’neerans, I mean now . . . picking up anything you can identify as alien? That you suspect is alien?”

  “No,” said Dema Gunnar. “And if you’re not either . . .”

  “Not yet—”

  The telepaths caught a hesitation the true-humans missed. Arch Harm said, “Have you tried?”

  No.

  “No? Oh, that’s interesting!” He said it out loud, a courtesy to Glory and Carl. They might have heard the subtle mockery behind it; Hanna knew her face had changed.

  “It’s not going to be easy, you know! They’re not telepaths, like the Zeigans. They’re still so far away . . .”

  Truth, but not all of it. She had never forgotten the wild fear of her first telepathic contacts with the People of Zeig-Daru, before anyone knew anything about them and even her perception of their existence was questioned. It still haunted her, however much she tried to bury it, and to bury a further fear that burst into consciousness now and then, which made her look for distraction immediately: had too much fear, too much loss, damaged her beyond repair? The doubts slipped into her mind again; she felt herself sink into quicksand. Once I was whole but it was long ago and I will not be whole again. Whole in body, yes, but in spirit? I think not . . .

  They all stared at her; the telepaths had felt it, seen what lay behind the calm mask, and even the true-humans saw something strange in her face.

  “I’ll try,” she said, “when we’re closer,” and this time hid the following thought. She was not sure how hard she could try; and she knew she didn’t want to.

  • • •

  Shakedown time, she thought a little later, burying her reservations in practicalities. Endeavor Three had had its shakedown cruise while Hanna was still on Earth and was operating at one hundred percent efficiency, but her own team had some adjusting to do—to Endeavor, and to each other. The D’neerans had known each other at home because they were members of its small community of interest in nonhumans, but they did not know each other well, except for Arch and Joseph, who were related in complicated ways. D’neerans were as subject to personal frictions as anyone else, and the close quarters of Endeavor made a customary remedy—getting the hell out of each other’s hair for a while, often by taking vacations on opposite sides of the world—impossible. Hanna had talked to them about this, emphatically, across space. It was not part of her usual Contact curriculum and she made a note to herself to include it in the future for D’neeran students. Practice blocking, she told them. Review everything you were ever taught about tolerance and if you hadn’t already integrated it—all of it—do it now. You won’t be able to avoid each other.

  She was not seriously worried about them; they were stable and good-humored men and women, or she would not have accepted them for her program in the first place, and she reminded them of that (in case they needed reminding). She let them know too that their presence was a luxury for her personally. It felt good to relax into the natural habits of a born telepath, to know she was hearing the truth, that no one was crunching away at hidden grievances. She had been painfully homesick for exactly that for a long time, and had been homesick for something else without knowing it: her fellow D’neerans knew her for herself. True-humans were inclined to see a hero or a criminal or, in some cases, a piece in a political game or even merely, dismissively, as Starr Jameson’s inexplicable and no doubt temporary sexual partner. D’neerans only saw H’ana ril-Koroth (though even they could not get into the habit of thinking of her by her original name). Hanna was satisfied with them.

  She thought Carl Ruck would be satisfactory, too. Her only concern about him was that he had proved himself, while he was at Contact Education, over-earnest. He liked statistics and concrete facts; he had had difficulty understanding that Uskosians, for example, could be as devious as true-humans if they thought their motives good. Norsa had known exactly what he was doing when he invoked his stature on Uskos to help Hanna, and he had not done it because of an interest in justice, but from affection for Hanna. Carl, when Hanna told him this, had been appalled.

  “They’re no better than human beings?” he had said.

  “So far nobody is,” she had assured him, and at the conclusion of his studies at Admin arranged for him to do fieldwork on F’thal, where innuendo was the primary political tool and operated with a speed and complexity that made true-humans look naïve. She was pleased to see that Carl had made some progress. Living with a group of D’neerans who did not hide their motives, even those that did them no credit, would further the eye-opening process.

  Glory Bosman was not quite as satisfactory. She was extraordinarily pretty, and accustomed to using her bright curls and flower-face for the kind of manipulation many true-humans thought Hanna practiced. Hanna had thought of making Glory do her fieldwork on D’neera, where manipulation was virtually impossible. She had decided regretfully, however, that she could not really pass her own people off a
s alien. So Glory had gone to Uskos, where she looked like just another human, and there weren’t any secondary sexual behaviors for her to absorb and mimic, because there weren’t any sexual behaviors at all. Her appreciation of the intrinsic differences between humans and nonhumans was genuine, though, and she never minded for long when a D’neeran poked at her ego. That ego was too healthy to be permanently damaged; it might sustain a minor dent, but would repair itself quickly.

  Which left Hanna, who had not even started to do her job.

  • • •

  She knew quite well why she had postponed trying to get a sense of the whistling beings. A fear that could not be vanquished in twelve years’ time had deep roots. Time was kinked. There was a ghost at her shoulder.

  She reported to the team. Team members could not keep secrets about things like ghosts. A ghost that could keep you from acting needed to be made visible. You did not want it slipping up on you and paralyzing you at the wrong time.

  Team protocol. No argument.

  “The ghost is me,” she told her team. “I’m thirty-six now, in Standard years. The ghost is still twenty-four. She hasn’t figured out true-humans yet, and she’s the only one of her kind among them. This is Endeavor Three, but she still thinks she’s on the first Endeavor. She’s expecting to breathe and sense unrelieved hostility from almost everyone around her. No one on that ship invited her. They didn’t want her. She was forced on them.

  “We’re looking for beings we’ve designated Species Y. That sounds too much like what the ghost was looking for; it was called Species X, then. Now we call them Zeigans. And she knows what Species X did to her when she found them.”

  She watched them think it through. Dema had tears in her eyes. They all knew what had happened to the ghost, the wraith of a Hanna who had been almost destroyed in body and in mind.

  Bella Qu’e’en said quietly, “H’ana, as long as you know the ghost is there, you should be all right. And with a little time, so will she.”

  Hanna nodded.

  “Just don’t forget she’s there,” Hanna said. “You don’t want her commanding this team. She’s far too young.”

  • • •

  Communications put together an audiovisual loop, at first an hour long but extended constantly, starting with the oldest electromagnetic traces from Species Y that Endeavor could detect. It would be updated as Endeavor moved in. Hanna watched perhaps two minutes of it, and then went to Communications and with absolute sincerity told the men and women there that she honored them for their skill and dedication.

  Then she called her team together and they went to the auditorium and stayed there for days, watching the ever-lengthening loop.

  • • •

  Their faces are small, she thought. It was not so apparent in that old holo. The beings’ heads altogether were proportionately small, mounted above slender necks, and the breathing tubes were covered with an insulating layer of downy hair or fur. The mouth, the eyes, and the bony plates that hid other eyes crowded faces that looked like afterthoughts.

  Someone appeared at the corner of Hanna’s own tired eye and she glanced up. Cork or Cock? She had been on Endeavor long enough to pick up the crew’s nicknames for Officers Corcoran and Cochran. One or both of them accompanied Captain Hope Metra everywhere.

  “Captain wants to see you, ma’am,” this one said. Corcoran.

  Finally, Hanna thought, but she got up without saying anything. Her attempt to report to the captain on boarding had been diverted to Cochran, a later attempt at a courtesy call to Corcoran.

  Jameson had gotten some information about Metra from official and unofficial sources. First major command. Strict disciplinarian. No combat experience. Old Heartworld family, not top-tier but connected by marriage to Edward Vickery’s. He hadn’t liked the appointment but had no power to veto it.

  Hanna walked into Metra’s private office in Command and stopped dead at the sight of her.

  The captain was huge. She was the tallest woman Hanna had ever seen, her frame was heavy, and Hanna thought everything under that green uniform might be muscle. Metra was standing and Hanna did not think the reason was politeness. She widened her perception: yes. Metra meant to have exactly this impact. She was used to intimidating people—with rank, with ultimate power aboard ship, with sheer size. Her skin was very dark; it was like standing in front of a granite mountain.

  Corcoran moved up on Hanna’s right. Cochran stood behind Metra. All three of them looked first at her right hand, and only then at her face.

  Telling her what they thought she was.

  Hanna wore a ring. The setting was simple, the stone at first glance unremarkable except for being the same deep blue as her eyes. Appearances lied. The gem was a scarce commodity from Zeig-Daru. It was incredibly rare, wildly valuable, and possibly, in some sense, alive. At infrequent and unpredictable intervals it pulsed with blue light generated, apparently, from within, but by no discernible mechanism. Not even the People of Zeig-Daru knew how that light was made. The jewels were too precious for one to be taken apart to find out. Jameson had given the ring to her; his reasons seemed as confused and ambiguous as her reasons for accepting it. They knew it acknowledged a bond, but could not describe the bond and could not find the words to discuss it. Others had been less economical with comments about the costly gift. It was evident that Metra had heard some of them.

  The ring chose this moment to emit a flash of extraordinary light, as if flaunting itself. It was there and gone so quickly that Hanna might have imagined it. But Metra blinked.

  No courtesies were exchanged. Metra said, “It has come to my attention that you have not responded to Officer Cochran’s directive to assign members of your team to regular watches.”

  “I apologize for not responding,” Hanna said slowly—but she thought fast. Arguments that favored flexibility would not find an audience here. Draw the line now, she thought (and almost heard Jameson saying it). “We are not Interworld Fleet personnel. We are civilians and the Contact team is an independent unit.”

  Metra said, “There are detailed protocols addressing the respective roles of crew and civilian scientists under transport on Fleet vessels. If you haven’t bothered to develop rotas, you probably haven’t read the protocols either.”

  “No,” Hanna said. “I am relying on personal assurances from members of the Coordinating Commission.” She wasn’t—yet; but she would talk to Jameson and he would get them before the day was out.

  Metra said, “Your department reports to Commissioner Vickery. I think you’ll find that in this regard he is a strict constructionist. You won’t find him as—flexible—as his predecessor.” Her eyes slid to Hanna’s hand and away again. Her expression did not change, but what Hanna felt in her was contempt: Sex buys you nothing here.

  It was not the time to mention Vickery’s well-founded fear that Jameson would get that Commission seat back again, and how close the change might be.

  Hanna said pleasantly, “I believe you’ll find the Commission as a whole will support Director Jameson in this. But I’ll read the protocols at my earliest opportunity.”

  “Read them now,” Metra suggested.

  “I’ll read them now,” Hanna lied.

  She was not escorted back to the auditorium, she was quite alone in the corridor outside it, but she heard a whisper, and even turned around before she heard it again, and this time knew who it was.

  i told you this was just like Endeavor One

  The ghost.

  • • •

  Hanna won her round with Metra, or Jameson won it for her, and there was no duty roster for the team. You took a break or you had a meal or you got some sleep, and you went back to the auditorium. Fascinated members of the ship’s crew came and went as their duties permitted, but they had other responsibilities. Hanna’s team did not. Even Joseph Luomobutu had been released from his
routine assignment in Communications.

  The Y beings looked and spoke exactly as Maya Selig had described. But Joseph said Maya had been wrong about the human inability to make analogous sounds.

  “I’ve studied the part of Earth my ancestors migrated from,” he told the team. “It’s written in my DNA, and I know exactly where that was. A people lived there even in historic times who spoke a language unique on Earth, and the oldest records describe it as using whistles and clicks. But it’s dead.”

  “Was it swallowed up by Standard?” Hanna asked.

  “No, exterminated—long before interstellar spaceflight began. H’ana, you can’t imagine what Africa endured. Someday when there’s time I’ll teach you some history.”

  History again. Hanna smiled for the first time in several days.

  • • •

  They started paying closer attention to the content of the transmissions. Arch was the first to say, “It’s all the same. I don’t see any variety. No evolution. And there should be. We’re moving from early to present-day transmissions. We ought to see change. How could a civilization this static develop starflight?”

  “There’s some movement,” Hanna said. “Communications says there are changes in the vocalizations, changes in what they wear—look, those ‘baggy coveralls’ Maya Selig wrote about must have come later.” They were looking at a crowd, and the loop switched to a series of stills of individuals dressed in identical multipart uniforms.

  “No fashion sense,” Dema said. Hanna lifted an eyebrow. It was a comment she might have expected from Glory, not from the dignified Dema, whose garments were uniformly black and white (to save the bother of matching colors). Dema added, “There seems to be a lot of war.”

  “And a lot of speeches,” said Bella. “War and speeches and public assemblies, I guess you’d call them. And war. Is Communications doing some kind of selecting? This can’t be all there is.”