Stealing Endeavour: Book 1 of the Forever Endeavour, Amen Trilogy

by Martin Tays

  “You think so? I’ll have to write that one down, then.”

  “Um, excuse me?” Sandar interrupted. “What about microbes? Diseases? Germs?”

  “That’s what we have the nannies for.” Moses replied. “And another reason why there’s only the four of us. We’re expendable.”

  “We are?” Her expression was sour. “Oh. That’s… that’s nice.”

  He smiled. “Now, let’s go meet our hosts.”

  They filed back toward the midships airlock. At the hatch they all paused. Moses looked around, meeting everyone’s eyes. “Okay, deep breath, people. It’s show time.” He triggered the hatch. They’d matched the pressure in the airlock to the outside atmosphere, but there was still a slight influx of air as the seal broke.

  Moses felt the air on his face and carefully, deliberately, took a breath. He turned back to the others. “Huh. Smells… smells like air. Something oily, too, and something almost… almost like cinnamon. Nothing bad.” Cath, Sandar and Ami all stared back, looking distinctly blue. “Come on, breathe, people. You’re going to keel over.”

  Just as the three of them began cautiously sniffing the air Moses grabbed his throat and started making gagging sounds. Sandar squeaked, Ami quickly reached for the airlock control, but Cath just smacked Moses on the head. “Quit it, you asshole.”

  “Sorry.” Moses straightened out and grinned. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  Sandar was staring at him angrily. “You… you…” Ami rolled her eyes and Cath just shook her head.

  Moses turned back toward the open hatch, hesitated, and pushed through and down into the alien ship. He looked around. “Are you guys back on the ship getting this?”

  Mattie responded over the comm. “We’re seeing everything. You’re a complete and utter goober, Moses.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Moses replied, distracted. There was an open area in front of the shuttle, and a hatch. The hatch was opening. Moses pushed over into the clear area, carefully avoiding the still cold outer skin of the shuttle. He touched his grippies onto the surface of the docking bay and waited.

  The hatch swung all the way open. There was a moment of breathless silence.

  Then a weasel entered.

  Moses blinked, then looked again. He decided that it didn’t quite look like a weasel, but it was a good start for comparison purposes. The creature seemed to be about a meter and a half long, over two if you counted the tail, and covered in short, downy gray fur. It had six limbs and moved with a remarkable agility, pushing off of the door frame and gliding over to the side to hang from the bulkhead.

  A mammalian head, hairless ears fanned out like a dog’s, and two eyes set in front of a wide, streamlined head for binocular vision. Moses realized that five others, all of assorted colors, had followed. Each had cleared through the doorway and moved to the sides.

  It was at about that point that Moses realized they were setting up for clear fields of fire. All of the creatures had weapons.

  And they were all pointing those weapons at him.

  He very, very carefully moved his hands out to the side, palms forward, to show that he was unarmed. The first creature to enter cocked his head at him in a disconcertingly fluid manner for a moment, then spoke. The voice was sharp and high-pitched, the language something between words and yips. It sounded like Arabic as spoken by a hyperactive fox.

  Three more of the creatures came through the door. Like the previous ones, these were covered with short, silky fur, belts with pouches, and little else. Two of them paused. One dark brown one continued, moving fluidly and quickly along the ground to pause directly in front of him.

  This close the smell ― cinnamon, sort of, along with something indefinable but sweet ― was much stronger. The creature considered his shoes curiously for a moment, then grabbed the soft material of the shuttle bay floor in the claws (claws!) of its hindmost feet to rise up and face him.

  Their eyes met. They didn’t look human, no, but they looked intelligent. There was a person in there, as curious and fascinated by him as he was by it. The creature nodded its largish, triangular shaped head, opened its mouth, and in a high pitched, clear voice spoke the first words ever communicated between species.

  “Kon’nichiwa! Watashi wa, wareware no fune ni anata o kangei shimasu! Go raiten arigato gozaimashita!”

  Moses jaw dropped as he stared at the speaker. Finally, he shook his head and replied. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

  ☼

  T’han-mri stared at the humaan, perplexed. She had pronounced the words at least mostly correctly. She was certain of that. The historical documents she had been studying had had, for some unknown reason, a transcript in their written language of each of the verbal statements, so she was also fairly certain that the meaning was correct.

  But the response from the odd, disturbingly hairless person in front of her had been complete gibberish. The person looked at his companions, and spoke to them. They replied.

  None of it made sense.

  The alien finally looked back at her and spoke again. She could only understand one word. She latched onto it. “‘Nippon’! Hai, Nippon!”

  The creature then placed his forefoot over the upper surface of his face and shook his head. He then held a forefoot out in front of him, single digit extended upward. She obligingly looked up to see what he was pointing at. He put his forefoot back over his eyes again, then shook his head back and forth rapidly.

  T’han-mri looked back at her father, confused. He came forward and rose up beside her. “I don’t understand. I know I’m speaking it right.”

  “Just wait, child. They know now that there’s a problem. Let’s see what they do to solve it.”

  They turned to look at the confused humaans as they conferred.

  ☼

  “Does anybody have any idea what’s going on, here?” Moses had moved back over to the other three in the bay and was whispering urgently. “And, more to the point, do any of us speak Japanese?!?”

  “No one here on the ship, Moses.” Leo replied from the Endeavour. “However, it turns out that Doug is a closet Otaku. He’s got a translation app. Standby for a squirt.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Moses brought up his pcomp and downloaded the program from the ship. Once he had it, he turned again and moved over to the patiently waiting aliens. He keyed the pcomp, held it in front of him, then spoke slowly and distinctly. “Can you understand me, now?”

  There was a brief pause, then the pcomp began speaking: “Anata wa ima, watashi o rikai suru doto ga dekimasu ka?”

  The ears of the aliens flattened, briefly, when it started, then straightened back up. they looked at each other, then the newcomer gestured to the one who had originally spoken. It looked back at Moses. “Hai.”

  Again a pause, then “Yes.” from the pcomp.

  “Yes!” Moses replied. The pcomp obligingly stated “Hai!” to the two creatures. Moses could have sworn that the newcomer, the one who hadn’t spoken, smiled at that.

  He looked back at his three friends, then turned to regard the aliens. He took a deep breath and began to speak.

  “Hello. My name is Moses…”

  “They’ve been telling us for years about how difficult it was going to be to put a stop to terrorism. And yet, without the politicians doing a thing, it pretty much just… ended.

  And it didn’t take reason, or logic or compassion, or even overwhelming firepower. It took the fact that seventeen year old boys who’d just been told that they could live forever suddenly didn’t find the prospect of immediately dying for God to be quite so… compelling.”

  Major General Armond T. Hamner, from “Bringing the Hamner Down”

  “I suppose North Korea was the last place to avoid the change. They were going on the assumption, see, that as long as the p
eople didn’t know about the fact that they could live forever, then they wouldn’t worry about the fact that the government wasn’t going to let them do it.

  Keeping the people uninformed. Oh, yeah. That always works. I always pictured Kim Jong-chul, the ‘Beloved Leader’ and heir to Kim Il-sung’s goofy little dynasty, waking up one morning, looking around, and saying ‘Hey! I wonder where all the people went?’”

  And from the North Korean refugees in China, and South Korea, and Japan, and the United States, there came the soft sound of snickering.”

  Kyoko M’Benga, former US Secretary of State, on “Charlie Varis Interviews”

  “I suppose the major thing that really snuck up on people about the whole longevity thing was its effects on politics.

  “I mean, back in the day, people were pleased by their Senators being in office for long enough to obtain power to help them. Thirty, forty, sometimes fifty years.

  “So, can you imagine how good someone gets at political infighting if she’s been in office for two hundred and fifty years? It’d make Cicero look like a rube, I’ll tell you that much. And the good ones? The good ones, they thrive on it. I kept thinking we’d have to bury Mom at a crossroads with a Senatorial gavel in her heart to get her to quit.”

  Chelsea Clinton, on “Charlie Varis Interviews”

  Chapter 21

  “One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.”

  Gene Brown

  “Brendan Myers is a dead man,” Cath growled.

  Moses looked toward the angry engineer from the image of a samurai at a fork in the road, throwing a stick in the air. The samurai looked off in the direction the stick was pointing, shrugged, and followed it down the monochrome roadway. “I thought Brendan Myers was a dead man.”

  “And a good thing, too.” Cath replied. “Or I’d kill him.”

  “Lucky break for Brendan, then, I guess.”

  “You know it.”

  “Kurosawa. Who’d have thought?” He turned toward the Japanese speaking alien. “The man who programmed the probe ― and named it ― was a big fan of movies… of visual stories… told by a man named Akira Kurosawa. He left all of his recordings of them on the probe. They’re not real.”

  “But how are they not being real?” The alien asked, cocking its ― her ― head at him. She spoke into Moses’ pcomp, which she was now carrying. “They were recorded.”

  “Hoo-boy.” Moses shook his head, then turned toward her in the crowded maintenance bay of the probe. “They were… look, do you have plays? Where people pretend they are someone else and recite lines written for them?”

  “Yes. Yes! I see… yes, the church often is making such things for to teach.” She pointed toward the vid window. “So these images are not… true?”

  He shook his head. “Some of them were based on truth, if I remember my Kurosawa correctly. Most were not.”

  “I was the wondering why you not have a sword with you.” She looked at the expression on Moses’ face as he grinned in response. “You are to showing your teeth. Why?”

  “I — we ― show our teeth when we are amused, or happy. It’s called ‘smiling’.” Moses replied.

  “Curious. We are show our teeth when we are angry.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “So, how do you show that you are pleased?”

  “As so.” She wrinkled her muzzle.

  “Huh.” He studied her muzzle for a moment, then continued. “I’m afraid our noses are a bit short to do that. I think we’re stuck with smiling.”

  “You are having my sympathy, then.” She replied through the translator. “It is to seeming very limiting.”

  “Um, excuse me?” Moses looked at Cath, then back to the alien. “That… was that a joke?”

  She cocked her head at him. “Yes. I was intended for it to be. Was it not the funny?”

  “It was the funny, actually. Thank you.” Moses smiled, then attempted to wrinkle his nose at her.

  She imitated the move back to him, then said “Perhaps you should remain to showing your teeth.”

  Moses nodded, still grinning, as the older looking alien came up beside the speaker. He spoke to her quietly, and she turned back to Moses. “My… father? Yes, my father is the asking of if it is possible to for we to exchange statements using the text. He has studying your written language extensively since his childing, but was not capable to grasp the verbal one.” She cocked her head at him. “Why is the verbal language on these documents so the differing?”

  “Because they were originally… oh, never mind. It’s not that important.” He waved his hands. “I’ll explain later. So your father understands English?”

  “As it are writing, yes, and better than I me. He has been studiousing the interloper since he was a cub, after all.”

  “Excellent.” He held his hand out. “Let me see my pcomp.”

  She looked at him blankly, and he gestured at the device she was holding. She handed it over, and Moses brought up the controls. After a moment, a vid window formed over it and an image of a keyboard appeared.

  “Now, when I speak…” He pointed to the window, where the words ‘Now, when I speak’ had appeared. “It will come up here. And when you enter text here, it will also appear here, as a response. Do you understand?”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then turned and conferred with her father. He stared at the pcomp as he replied. She finally looked back at Moses and answered. “No. I am the sorry, but you are pointing at empty the air and speaking as if there being something there. Why?”

  Now it was Moses’ turn to regard her blankly. After a moment, though, he screwed his eyes shut and smacked himself on the forehead. “That’s why you were using the maintenance pads. I’m an idiot.”

  “I… see.” T’Han-mri replied. “And that is why you are of the seeing things that are not there?”

  “No! I mean, yes, I mean… let me explain.” He gestured toward the pcomp. “When my device, here, generates a display, it sends out a signal. That signal is intercepted by… by machines in our bodies.” He held his hand up, finger and thumb together. “Small machines.” At the expression on her face he squeezed them together. “Very, very small machines.”

  She peered at his hand, then looked back at his face. “And these machines cause you to visualizing the display as it be generating?”

  “Exactly!” Moses beamed. “You’re a bright kid.”

  “I am the thanks.” She gestured toward her father. “Please to a moment for me to be explain.” She turned back and began speaking. He glanced up at Moses, with what Moses was certain was an appalled look on his face, and spoke. T’Han-mri turned back to Moses. “My father is of asking if you all have these very, very small machines in you.” Moses nodded. She looked back at her father, who gestured. She turned back again. “My father wishes to know if you are of the crazy.”

  Moses snorted, startling her. He looked back to the father as he replied. “Please tell you father that we are no more crazy than he is, probably, all things considered.”

  She turned again to her father and spoke. His muzzle wrinkled as he replied. T’Han-mri turned back to Moses and translated. “He speaks that you are then very of the crazy. And he approves.”

  Moses grinned at the father, then picked up one of the maintenance pads. He ported the routine from his pcomp to it, then turned it to show to her. “Again, as I said, I speak and the words show here. You may use this keyboard to respond. Got it?”

  “Hai.” She studied the pad, peered at the keyboard, then typed. The words ‘Yes, I understand’ were displayed in the window.

  Her father gestured, and she obligingly turned the pad toward him. He examined it for a moment, then reached out toward it. He seemed
to grasp the concept readily enough and began entering words.

  “Thank you.” Read his message on the screen. “I was beginning to feel ignored.” He wrinkled his muzzle.

  “You’re a two meter long, six legged talking weasel who flies spaceships. How could I possibly ignore you?” Ami smacked the back of Moses’ foot, the only part of him she could reach.

  The alien looked over at Ami, then typed a question into the keyboard. “The one who struck you. She is your mate?” appeared on the display.

  Moses grinned. “How did you know?”

  “It is the same with us. Only our mates chastise us in public.”

  The female spoke to him sharply, and he turned back to the keyboard and added “Or sometimes our children.”

  Moses laughed. “It seems our people have a lot in common.”

  “Indeed.”

  Moses turned back from the pad toward his hosts. “I asked before, and the Japanese translator refused to, um, translate. What are your names?”

  The father gestured to the female. “This is my chief researcher and eldest daughter, T’Han-mri.”

  Moses turned to her and attempted without much success to pronounce her name. “Tan Mree?”

  “T’Han… Yes. That is close enough.”

  He looked back to the father. “And you are?”

  “S’Nhu-gli.”

  Moses blinked. “Your name is… Snuggly?”

  “No, my name is S’Nhu-gli.”

  “Exactly. Snuggly.” He looked back to Ami. “I am so glad Doug’s not here.” Ami nodded.

  A thought struck Moses. He looked back over at S’Nhu-gli. “I’m curious. I think your daughter just said that you’d been working on the probe all of your life.”

  “Yes.” Came the reply on the screen. “As my father was fortunate enough to do before me.”