by Ian Douglas
Two thousand officers and crew, plus God alone knew how many Marines and Mufrid refugees—gone.
God help them, he thought. God help us all….
Chapter Fourteen
15 October 2404
Koenig’s Office
TC/USNA CVS America
Inbound, Sol System
0940 hours, TFT
“Dr. Wilkerson, Dr. George, and Dr. Brandt are all ready to link in, Admiral.”
Koenig looked up. Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary was his personal aide, which meant he often served as admiral’s secretary as frequently as Koenig’s secretarial AI. “Very well. I’ll take it here.”
He switched off the report he was currently writing and reclined his seat back. His office was fairly luxurious as military quarters went, more luxurious than he cared for, actually. There was a small lounge area over by the door, but he generally preferred to stay at his desk.
It was just as well he hadn’t gotten too used to the place. He couldn’t imagine that they would let him hold on to it much longer.
He brought up the link codes in his mind, letting the circuitry in the office connect with his in-head display. A window seemed to open and he stepped through…entering the carrier’s main med-research center. Earnest Brandt, the center’s senior medical officer, was already there. The virtual images of Dr. Anna George and Dr. Phillip Wilkerson winked on a moment later. Wilkerson was the head of America’s neuropsytherapy department, while George was a psytherapist on loan from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and both had considerable experience with nonhuman psychology.
“Welcome to RC Central, Admiral,” Wilkerson’s virtual image said. “Thanks for linking in.”
“Does this mean you’ve gotten something, Doctor?” Koenig asked. “Something useful?”
Wilkerson shrugged, his lined face momentarily twisting in an expression of frustration. “That, sir, you’ll have to decide for yourself. We have established communications.”
“You know, sir,” Dr. George said, “it took over five years to establish basic communications with the Aglestch a century ago.”
“Yes,” Koenig replied, “and what we learned was LG. I thought you were using that with these…people.”
LG—Lingua Galactica—was an artificial language learned from the alien Aglestch. Evidently, it wasn’t one of that race’s native languages, but it was the way they communicated with the Sh’daar, their galactic masters. Koenig had assumed that the Turusch would know LG as well.
“We did, Admiral,” Wilkerson replied. “But it’s not that simple.”
“It never is.”
Wilkerson took a deep breath. “The Aglestch speak using phonemes generated through vibrating vocal cords like we do…except of course that they use air expressed from their first and second stomachs instead of from lungs or air sacs. The Turusch speak, we think, by modulating a humming or thrumming sound generated by vibrating diaphragms set within the dorsal carapace.”
“Meaning they don’t use words,” Koenig guessed.
“Exactly. Variations in pitch and tone, and the shifting harmonies created by four separate diaphragms, convey the information. Even the name ‘Turusch’ comes from the Agletsch. We don’t know what they call themselves.”
Brandt chuckled. “Maybe something like…” and he hummed the opening bar of a popular song, “We Were Strangers.”
“In four-part harmony,” Dr. George added.
“In any case,” Dr. Brandt said, “we did use LG as a basis—without it I expect it would have taken another five years or more to break the Turusch language and figure out how to speak it. We do appear to have established communication. At least…we’ve gotten some meaningful syntax out of them. But an awful lot of what they have to say doesn’t make much sense.”
“There’s also the xenopsych angle to consider, Admiral,” Dr. George told him. “I’ve been working with these two since we picked them up, and that was a couple of weeks ago. We don’t have a lot of leads on how they think.”
Koenig nodded. He knew how difficult it was to learn, not just another language, but a language spoken by a being with a completely nonhuman physiology and a completely alien psychology. One species—the primitive Glo of Epsilon Eridani II—appeared to communicate with one another by changing patterns of light and color on their black, oily torsos, using luminous chromatophores like the squid of Earth. The Glo had been known for almost two centuries now, and the experts still didn’t know if they were really talking…or if they even were intelligent enough to have anything to talk about. There was simply no comprehensible common ground from which to begin either a linguistic or a psychological understanding.
“I wasn’t expecting miracles, people,” Koenig told the three. “Let me have a look.”
“Yes, sir,” Wilkerson said. “Um…brace yourself. This can be unsettling.”
“We’ll be projecting into NTE robots,” Brandt added.
Koenig felt an inner shift, a momentary dizziness, and then he was someplace else, a ship’s compartment with blank, white-painted walls and one transplas wall. There were a number of machines in the compartment attached by universal joints and articulated metallic arms to the low overhead. Koenig’s own point of view now seemed to be residing within one of those devices, a white sphere supported on the end of a slender, jointed arm.
Non-terrestrial environmental robots—NTEs, or Noters—had been in wide use for almost three centuries, exploring places as hostile as the surface of Venus, the ice ridges of Europa, and the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The earliest versions had relayed photographs and telemetry from Mars and from Earth’s moon; later models had let human consciousness piggyback within their circuitry.
Readouts at the bottom of his visual field showed data on atmosphere, pressure, temperature, and other factors. It was as hot, Koenig noted, as boiling water, and the lighting in the room was sizzling with ultraviolet.
The Turusch were there, both of them, mottled black and dark brown, and gleaming wet in the harsh light. It was difficult to judge distance within this new body without practice, but they seemed to be about four meters away. If so, they were each half again longer than a human was tall and half a meter thick. The body might be described as slug-like, at least where the bare, mucus-wet skin was exposed, but large patches of its body were covered by what looked like sections of shell or carapace—large and irregular on the blunt end, and segmented like the scales of a snake along the belly, leaving most of the rest of the body nakedly exposed. Half-meter tentacles, black, whip-thin, and in constantly writhing motion, sprouted at seemingly random points from everywhere on the body except the armored parts.
One end was pointed. The other end, Koenig decided, must be the head, rounded and sheathed in three close-fitting sections of carapace, and showing recesses for at least two dozen eyes or other sense organs arranged in three lines running back from the blunt end. If those were eyes, they were deeply recessed and small, like tiny black marbles. Koenig wondered if that meant the Turusch were from a planet orbiting a star hotter and brighter than Sol. The ultraviolet baking the compartment seemed to validate the idea.
He saw nothing that resembled a mouth. He did see the diaphragms used for speech, however, two set on either side of the head carapace, which took up nearly a quarter of the creature’s length.
“So,” Koenig said. “Cephalopod? Reptile? Sea cucumber?”
“None of the above, Admiral,” Brandt said. “Remember…any resemblance to anything we know from Earth is superficial…either a matter of parallel evolution, or pure coincidence.”
“Right. My mistake.” He felt clumsy. He knew that aliens were never easily categorized. But faced with the truly alien, the human mind always sought points of similarity, easy starting places, something recognizable.
“At this point,” Wilkerson pointed out, “we’re not even sure about whether to call these things animal, vegetable, or mineral. They’re carbon-based, we know, but they appear to manufactur
e at least part of their metabolic energy with a chlorophyll analogue in the skin pigmentation. Dr. George figured that much out from skin samples she took on Haris.”
Koenig looked at the young woman with new respect. “You actually went in and got a skin sample from one of those things?”
“We used robots, Admiral,” she replied. “Still, they seemed pretty passive. They might have known we were simply trying to find out about their physical needs.”
Koenig nodded. He wondered what his reaction would have been if he’d been captured by a pack of these slimy, tentacled slugs, and they—or their machines—had come after him with a sampling probe or scalpel.
How intelligent were they, really?
“Their biochemistries appear to be driven by both carbon and silicon,” Wilkerson continued. “They also use a lot of sulfur chemistry.”
“What kind of environment?” Koenig asked.
“Hot,” Wilkerson replied. “We think their homeworld is a less-extreme version of Venus. Carbon dioxide atmosphere with traces of sulfur, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and droplets of sulfuric acid. Temperature in the one-hundred-degree Celsius range. Not our kind of place at all.”
“Sounds like Eta Boötis Four,” Koenig said, thoughtful. He was wondering if the Turusch had attacked the place not because they were working for the Sh’daar, but because they wanted the place for themselves.
“Only superficially,” Wilkerson said. “Eta Boötis is colder, has less CO2, more sulfur compounds, a lot more oxygen and ammonia, and not as much carbonyl sulfide. We think the Turusch homeworld has a much lower surface gravity, too—less than one G.”
Koenig scowled. “Then we’re back to square one in understanding why they attacked us.”
“They appear to be the right-hand…ah…right-tentacle representatives of the Sh’daar,” Brandt said. “I thought that was understood from the beginning.”
“So far as these things are concerned, nothing is understood,” Koenig said. “Remember, we’ve never even seen a Sh’daar…and this is our very first look at the Turusch. For all we know, the Sh’daar could just be some sort of Turusch ruling caste, and not a different species at all.”
“Go ahead and ask them,” Wilkerson suggested.
“How?”
“The language software is running. Just use this to access it.” Wilkerson passed a mental icon to Koenig. He mindclicked it. “Who are you?” he asked, deciding to stick with the basics, at least to begin.
Two alien heads whipped around, facing the white robotic sphere. Damn…these things might look like giant slugs, but they were quick. Koenig could hear a kind of humming or buzzing as the robot spoke. A moment later, the aliens answered with the same pulsing buzz…but they answered together, and the audio translation came out unintelligible as two computer-generated voices spoke at the same time.
Fortunately, a text version of both replies printed itself out in a side window in his in-head display.
“This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one said, while the other replied, “Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?”
Koenig read the answers, and blinked, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said without using the translation software. He was addressing the other humans.
“Don’t feel bad, sir,” Wilkerson said. “No matter how clear your question, the answer always feels fuzzy…like you’re missing something.”
“Can we separate them? Question them singly?”
“We tried that on Haris, Admiral,” George said. “They went into a mope, and appeared to be wasting away. And they wouldn’t answer anything. Our working theory is that they have some kind of gestalt going, a hive mind, maybe. If they’re alone, they don’t function as well. They might even die. Like worker ants.”
“I…see.” This was getting more and more complicated. He mindclicked the translate icon again. “Why do you work for the Sh’daar?”
“The Sh’daar reject your transcendence and accept you if it is only you,” one said, while the other said, “The Seed encompasses and arises from the Mind Below. How would it be otherwise?”
“What do you mean, they reject our transcendence? What is that?”
“Your species approaches the point of transcendence,” one said.
“Transcendence is the ultimate evil that has been banished,” said the other.
This was going nowhere. “Are your needs being looked after?” he asked them. “Are your nutritional needs being met?”
“We require the Seed,” said one. “We are the Seed,” said the other.
“Not exactly helpful, are they?” Koenig asked the others.
“Actually, they seem to be very cooperative,” George told him. “We just don’t have enough background yet to make sense of their answers.”
“They mentioned something…what? Mind Below?”
“Mind Here, Mind Below,” Brandt said. “We’ve also heard them reference something called ‘Mind Above.’”
“Might that be like the human subconscious?”
“Since we’re not even sure we can define what the human subconscious is,” Wilkerson told him, “I’d say it’s a bit early to speculate about that.”
“Point.”
Both of the Turusch were thrashing about now, and he heard the buzzing once again. This time, he could understand the computer-generated audio, because the two were in perfect synch. “Threat!” they said in unison. “Kill!”
Abruptly, shockingly, the heads of both Turusch split open, the tripartite armored covering separating in thirds and yawning wide. Instead of a mouth or teeth, however, Koenig saw that the openings were blocked with dark-pink tissue, glistening and moist. Something like a slender harpoon, black and a meter long, was stabbing out from the center of the tissue mass, however, together with a shorter but wider fleshy tube growing from beside the harpoon’s base.
If it was a mouth, it was like no mouth Koenig had ever seen or heard of.
The humans withdrew into the virtual recreation of the outer research lab, not because they were in danger—the NTE robots were pretty much invulnerable—but because conversation had become impossible.
“So that’s the enemy, eh?” Koenig said, shaking his head. “How’d we get them?”
“We recovered one of their Toad fighters,” George explained. “It crashed near the perimeter, and we sent a SAR and a weapons squad out to pick it up.”
“So you don’t think they were trying to surrender deliberately…or infiltrate our lines, or anything like that.”
“No, sir,” George told him. “It certainly didn’t look deliberate, anyway. General Gorman was wondering the same thing. He was wondering if they were berserkers. Suicide troops.”
Until their psychology was better understood, every move the two made, everything they said, was going to be the subject of long and careful analyses.
“My orders,” Koenig told them, “are to get them both to Port Phobos. The xeno department there will want full reports from all of you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And…I’d appreciate it if you would keep me in the loop, let me know if anything else happens with our…guests, or if you learn anything new.”
“Absolutely, Admiral.”
The Senate Military Directorate, he knew, was extremely anxious to have these two aliens safely secured and under Directorate supervision. They were already assembling a high-powered xeno contact team to keep working on the language, the culture, and the psychology, in hopes of finally learning something useful about humankind’s interstellar enemies.
“Admiral?” Nahan Cleary’s familiar voice spoke in his head. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the Political Liaison wants to talk to you. He says it’s most urgent.”
Koenig sighed. Since ordering Quintanilla off the CIC deck, he’d been trying to handle the man more tactfully. Diplomacy and tact, however, did not seem to be helping matters.
“Very well. Have him wait in my office. I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
He looked at the icon-images of the three psychs. “We’re twenty hours from Deimos,” he told them. “You have that long to get them ready for transport again.”
He ended the in-head conversation and pulled back out of the virtual research lab, opening his eyes to see Cleary and Quintanilla standing in front of his office desk.
“Excuse the wait, Mr. Quintanilla,” he said. “I was checking on our two special passengers.”
“They are safe?”
“Seem to be. It’s tough to tell when they’re screaming ‘kill’ at you.”
“That’s something, at any rate,” Quintanilla said, frowning. “It at least partly makes up for your mishandling of the battle at Eta Boötis.”
“Mr. Cleary…out,” Koenig said.
“Yes, sir.”
When the aide had left, Koenig stood up behind the desk. “I will thank you not to criticize me in front of my subordinates, sir.” His voice was hard, sharp-edged. “My decisions at Eta Boötis will be judged by a court of inquiry once we’re back at Mars, not by you.”
“Had you accelerated in toward the target planet sooner,” Quintanilla pointed out, “we could have retrieved Gorman’s Marines more quickly. There’s also the matter of delaying your withdrawal in order to take on board all of those refugees. That, I remind you, was not part of your original—”
“This is not a topic for discussion, Mr. Quintanilla. Now back off!”
“Your failure to cooperate with a duly appointed representative of the Senate Military Directorate is noted.”
“Note whatever the hell you want, Quintanilla. Get out of my office.”
Quintanilla scowled, but withdrew.
“God save us from political micromanagement,” Koenig said, staring at the door after it irised shut behind him. Throwing the bastard out made Koenig feel a little better; whatever he thought of political liaisons like Quintanilla, he had to agree that the battle in Haris space had not gone as well as it might have. They’d carried out their orders—gotten in and out, picking up the MEF and their prisoners along the way, but they’d lost too many ships doing it…especially the Spirit of the Confederation. Battleships were expensive, both in money and in the huge crews they carried, and there would be wolf packs both in the Senate military and budgetary directorates and within the senior military leadership who would be howling for blood. Assigning blame and finding scapegoats both were time-honored traditions for the brass and for politicians alike.
