by Jim Rudnick
Engines would wait for more technical-oriented investigators, but Lieutenant Hartford grinned at them and said that if it was up to him, he’d just cut one in half to see what’s what, which got him smiles but a negative head shake from Reynolds, their xeno team leader.
Along the enormous interior vault, on the sides between what must have been floors—even though there were no real floors—lay tubing and conduits or passages where items must have been transported around the ship. Again, as noted by the drones and mapped as to where they came from and where they went, to be left to others.
And today, on day three, they were going to go forward to the locked door, but slowly, and they took their time to walk the various walkways that went off in new directions.
“Like I said yesterday,” Professor Beedles, “form follows function—always has and always will. And judging by what we’ve seen in the past couple of days, the aliens who built this ship intended it to be used as sheltered space for them within the ship itself.
“Form, you all know,” he said quietly, “refers to the shape of the space, it’s one of the primary elements of architecture. It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things alien, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. There is nothing else.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment as they sat resting before the final long walk up to that locked door.
Doctor Bruce Boxer, the xeno team’s medical officer nodded but added, “At least in all things we build. God, however, made other decisions when he did the human anatomy architecture, that’s for sure,” and that got him a smile from some who also knew a bit more about how anatomy and evolution had disagreed before.
“Okay, let’s get this last bit done, shall we?” Reynolds said, and he led the way down walkway number one, and in a few hundred yards, they were met by the closed-in area and the locked door ahead of them, sealing them out.
The door was the same ecru color as the walkways. It had no ornamentation on it at all, no icons, no name—not a single thing at all to indicate how to open it or what it blocked them off from.
Beedles looked up at the very top of where the wall holding the door met the ceiling—and there was nothing to see. There was no switch, no security pad, and no buttons or the like. What there was, they all noted, was a simple circle on the coving that merged the flat bulkhead wall with the ceiling. A simple circle that looked like it was engraved onto the steel coving.
And they all noted on the floor a matching sort of empty circle too had been added to the single filled in circle that they believed said number one walkway.
He looked at that. Then he used his tablet to read the drone reports, the visit by the original entry team a week or two back, and the resulting coin toss test too.
He shook his head.
Reynolds said, “Ideas here, folks? The walkway goes through this door, but we can’t get by—and there appears to be a working field of some kind here too.” He went over to sit with his back against the outside hull bulkhead.
“Obviously, the circle on the floor is matched by the circle up there in the coving too, might that mean something?”
They pondered that for a moment, and then Professor Cheryl Scholes, the team language xenologist sat up.
“I’m probably wrong, but if these aliens were, say, nine feet tall with some kind of wings, when they got to this door, flight was not something they needed. They landed and say put a toe—or a talon even—in the lower circle. If they reached up and then touched the circle up there at the same time, that’d complete the circuit, right? Would that perhaps open the door?”
Reynolds said, “Okay, let’s give that a try. Professor Irving, you’re about the lightest here—can I ask that you get up on a piggy-back on Hartford—if he can press the floor circle, could you press the coved one?”
She grinned back at Reynolds, scooted around Hartford, and jumped up on his back. Hartford slowly moved over to stand with a foot in the circle on the floor. Irving reached up and could just touch the coved circle, and she placed her hand on it.
Nothing happened. The door ahead did not open, and Irving sighed and got down off Lieutenant Hartford’s back.
“Wait—flesh. Maybe you could take off your shoe and sock, Hartford?” Beedles asked. “As that would be the way that a flying alien might approach the door—flying animals do not usually wear shoes in my experience,” he said a bit lamely.
Hartford grunted, but he quickly took off his military boots and socks, and he again helped Irving to boost up on his back and placed one foot inside the circle.
She reached up with a bare hand and placed her whole palm inside the circle.
There was a flash of light from the lights in the ceiling, and the door opened to show a darkened room on the other side.
“Bingo,” Reynolds said, and he grinned at them all and went through the doorway right away.
Irving let go of the circle above the doorway, and it did not close but allowed them all to pass through.
While Hartford was putting on his boots as he leaned against the doorway jamb, he noted there was a simple toggle switch on this interior side of the doorway. Once the boots were on, he said, ”Give it a try” to himself, and he flicked the toggle. The door closed. He flicked it again, and the door opened.
Reynolds noted that too, and then they all turned to look at the room ahead of them.
The lighting must have been controlled by an AI that recognized occupants in the room, and the lighting slowly came up to what was lower levels but still allowed them to see.
This was the bridge, they all thought, but as usual, there was discussion.
“If your form follows function, Professor, then I’d say that this must be a bridge—but unlike any bridge we’ve ever seen before,” the doctor said.
And he was right.
The aliens had been able to fly, as there were no real seats in the room. Instead, there were perches that were aligned with consoles with various screens sticking up out of the console frameworks. These perches were big—at least four inches across, Professor Irving noted. “Four inches to grasp by a set of talons, or some kind of lower grasping feet, meant that the feet themselves must have been at least a foot long,” Irving commented. “Which meant that the alien body mass was at least seven feet in height if not eight feet,” she added. ”I wish I had my tables on xeno-anatomy based on flying animals here with me.
Reynolds walked to one of the consoles and said, “Why, if these were flying aliens, did they place the consoles all down on the deck? Why not up in the air, where I’m sure that they were more comfortable?”
The doctor answered. “In my mind, as the bridge has a small footprint, is it not better to make them all walk as best as they could within the bridge confines? Flying would mean that the bridge would need to be so much bigger and wider and higher. By forcing walking or hopping or the like, the smaller space can be used.”
As a working hypothesis, there were some nods and notes taken, and Professor Scholes, the linguistics expert made the next observation for the team.
“And if these consoles run the ship, how come there’s only three of them? Does that not seem like ‘bridge-lite’ to anyone else too?”
More nods. More notes taken.
Hartford smiled. “Perhaps the actual running of the ship has been so automated that it can be controlled easily—hence these three consoles only. Or perhaps these aliens had, like, five brains and ten arms—of which only a couple were wings. We really do not have the facts yet to even try to understand this as yet.”
Around the exterior bulkheads, there were probably some kind of view screens or viewports, but with the nose of the ship buried into the hillside, all was black. No way to tell.
Hartford walked up to the one centrally located console, and with his PDA on record, he re
ached out to touch the flat black face of one of the monitors. Nothing happened. Nothing turned on and he could see no change either.
The rest of the xeno team crowded around him and watched as he half-turned, hooked an ankle over the perch bar behind him, and then touched the console face once more.
A shrill note sounded, and the console lit up like a Christmas tree.
He grinned over his shoulder at the team leader. “Figured if the entry to the bridge required that the alien had to touch in two places simultaneously, then the consoles might also require same. What is unusual is that—least to me, you folks might be more knowledgeable about this kind of stuff than I am—it accepts non-alien input. But that can wait, I think, for another day to look at—there’s more than enough right here, I’d say.”
And he was right. The console was what all of them were looking at.
“Careful here,” Reynolds preached, “this is fraught with danger,” and everyone nodded in agreement.
They looked at the back-lit icons, which could have been letters and words in another language and what also appeared to be a small star map in one corner. If those dots were stars, that was.
“No touching at all … just looking is what we’re going to be doing,” he said.
“Lots more to work on …” Reynolds said to himself and smiled.
Was going to be one hell of a report to the admiral today…
#####
He had been banging his gavel on the table for more than a minute, and Minister Gibson thought it’d last at least another one or two. He nodded to his clerk, and under the table at her station, she pushed the small hidden button, and in a few seconds, twelve security officers came in and took up positions around the whole room.
That got some attention from the Faraway traders who were all standing and screaming at each other—but it only slowed down the yelling. For another minute, the minister banged his gavel, and that made a dint in the arguments but slowly.
In another minute, the voices were lower in volume, and he was able to yell over them.
“We are not as yet allowing that motion to go forward—we still need, as you all know, to modify it before I ask for a seconder for same. My own personal opinion is that this is very much too soon and too early as a motion to send to our government for ratification. There has never been such a motion made by the Ministry of Commerce—nor, as I see it, should we ever do this.”
“Pretty bloody easy to say, seeing as you sit in an office and we are the ones who go out and face the Leudies and their trading tariffs all across the RIM!” one trader said as he slammed the table in front of him.
That got some nods, and the minister tried again to intervene in the acceptance of this motion.
“We all know that, yes, in many cases, the Leudies are at the helm of some—maybe most—of the new tariffs that you traders do face—”
“All of them come from the neck-snakers,” a trader somewhere near the back of the room yelled out.
Several table knocks signaled assent with that comment, and yet the minister went on.
“Yet, I will also point out that we too have filed, what, more than a few hundred of our own applications with the RIM Customs department for new tariffs too.”
“Just so we can try to fight back,” a trader yelled out, and more knocks followed.
The minister nodded his head. “Agreed … but at the same time, the real way to handle all of this is at the RIM Confederacy Council table. There, our Faraway member will present our own point of view and get the council itself to see that this is something that they need to look at and face. And they will do just that,” he finished off.
“And that takes way too long—we lose money on every single trading trip while the council studies the problem and then tables it or appoints a special investigator to look into it—while my Juliette’s revenues suffer. We need to do this to up the ante—so that the council sees that we are more than pissed off about these Leudie transgressions,” Master Trader Laird Goshwin said.
The minister nodded and thought back to the latest of those transgressions and how this had all come to pass.
A Leudie trader had been using knock-off products over on Randi and had gotten caught. When the big iron ore mines there realized what had been happening, they’d immediately asked for new products from Amasis—and had asked for the Juliette to do the transportation, disregarding their contract with Leudies only for FOB ORIGIN shipping. Trader Goshwin had jumped at the chance to crack open the shipping contract and had delivered the new parts in record time and at a great price for his ship too. The Leudies, however, had immediately filed charges of breach of contract with the Customs department over on Juno.
While that was not unusual—the fact that the Leudie then stopped all shipping to Randi until the case came to court meant that no one else could ship to Randi either. While highly unusual, it guaranteed a much earlier date for the docket to get to the courts. And to top it all off, all payments were put on hold too—so Trader Goshwin hadn’t been paid for those new products.
He was the one who was most adamant about the motion, and he once again said formally, “I move that we go ahead with the motion, and if the minister will not call for a second—then I do so now.”
The look on his face read try to stop me, and he stared directly at the minister, who shook his head.
“Aye, Master Trader Goshwin. I call for a seconder to this motion,” he said as he looked down at his tablet.
“Whereas, we, the undersigned, feel that the RIM Confederacy member planet Leudie is using the normal Customs application process to hurt our Faraway trade practices, we hereby declare that if the RIM Confederacy Council does not adjudicate our claims at the next council meeting, we will begin the process of having Faraway leave the RIM Confederacy as a member planet …”
The minister once again shook his head—leaving the Confederacy had never been done before, but just the threat, he thought, was more than the proper response to such a trade war. i
“Seconder, please?” he said, a dozen hands were raised immediately.
He nodded and the clerk made notes. The motion then went to discussion.
“Anyone actually know what leaving the Confederacy might mean?” One trader voiced a question they all wanted to know.
All heads turned to him.
“No idea—it’s never happened before, but I’d think that if you think living the life of a trader is tough now, it’d be a lot harder from outside the Confederacy …”
That sentence sat there, and no one spoke until Trader Goshwin broke the silence.
“With no standing, then we’d never have to obey tariffs, would we?” he reasoned.
That got a whole host of table knocks, and the minister was going to interrupt and speak on the fact that it might also mean no Faraway ship could land on a Confederacy planet either, but he let that go.
“Motion vote?” he asked, and the clerk read the role.
Every single trader in the room voted AYE, and in moments, the clerk made the note that the vote to accept the motion and send it on to the Faraway government for inclusion at the next RIM Confederacy Council meeting next month was unanimous.
The minister wondered what that might mean for the council. While he thought this would be a bombshell on their agenda, he also wondered if there might be a way to shortcut the motion and work behind the scenes.
On that note, he called for acceptance of the motion and then gestured for the clerk to go on to the next item.
Somehow and in some way….there might be an alternate answer…
#####
The Ansible that she used was always going to be suspect in her world. She knew that her PDA, when hooked into the closest Ansible network, was running at the best 128-bit encryption. Not that she was a tech person by any stretch of the imagination. She was a full professor of languages, and Cheryl Scholes had the degrees and years of academic teaching to prove it.
As a human from Thrones, she
understood about loyalty. She understood about respect too. And she knew she owed the Caliph more than what he asked for in return.
She had met him on Juno at the university more than thirty years earlier as an undergrad. He was in three of the same classes as she was, as he too had a thing for languages. Everyone knew he was an heir of the Caliphate, but here as a youngster at his university, the backgrounds of each of them was unimportant.
She was from Thrones, a small realm of only three planets, and had the genes of all Thrones citizens. She was tall, slim, and had very muscular legs and thighs, and as most Throne women, she was beautiful. By human standards, she was the best-looking woman in her class—at least that’s what she was told over and over.
She had a need to know languages, and most of her class felt this meant something was wrong with her. They took what they called the “bird courses” where they could attend or not and yet still pass and receive that all-important degree.
Yet not her. She really liked languages, and she found in her quest to be number one in her class, she really was only ever challenged by one other student, Sharia al Dotsa, an heir to the Caliphate.
He was taller than she was by almost six inches. He was as thin as she was, but even though he was a male, which meant he should have been bigger and more muscular, she outdid him when it came to musculature.
His brain, she had learned, was more than she assumed, and he did beat her periodically on course tests and mid-terms.
They grew close over beers in the student pub, hiding back in the stacks in the library, and over coffee in the cafeterias After first year, they ended up as lovers, and that lasted right through to their graduating year.
He knew where he was going—to sit as the Caliph when his father passed on—so he had to go back to Neria and live there.
She knew where she was going—to a job offer as an adjunct professor of languages as a PhD candidate over on Carnarvon, and that was a major argument that they had all Senior year long.
Each couldn’t imagine not going ahead with what they saw as their destiny—and each was upset their lover wouldn’t come along. During the few study weeks they had, the arguments had flared up, and they’d been at each other’s throats more than not.
