by Ian Douglas
"Well, let's grab some mat and maybe they'll tell us why we're here," Dev said. "Altair's not exactly prime real estate."
"So I gather." They found space in one of the rows and knelt side by side. His hand brushed her thigh, and he was uncomfortably aware of her closeness.
At last the room was filled, and the Emperor's portrait dissolved. Facing them was another, much younger man, in his sixties, perhaps, wearing the two-toned grays of a Hegemony senior officer. Gold insignia on sleeves, shoulderboard, and collar indicated his rank was chujo, lieutenant general.
"Good morning, men and women of the Fifth," he said. "I am General John Howard, former commander of Hegemony military forces on Loki."
Former commander. Dev leaned forward, interest piqued. He'd only seen Howard two or three times during his tour on Loki. At the awards ceremony, of course, and at a formal review or two after that. Generals had little to do with mere sho-i striderjacks.
"It is my great honor," Howard continued, "to have been chosen to command Hegemony forces in what may well be the most important mission ever undertaken by our species. I now can tell you that which has been a carefully guarded secret for months now.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Mankind has made initial contact with another starfaring species. Their representatives are here, orbiting the star we call Altair. After detecting our civilization's radio emissions many years ago, they voyaged here to seek us out.
"It has taken a number of months just to learn to communicate with them, though we did have some unexpected help with their language. They are . . . different from us, with an evolutionary background quite alien to our own. Like us, they have been engaged for years in a war to the death with an enemy they call the Chaos. We believe, from what their representatives have told us, that that enemy is our own, the Xenophobes."
General Howard's image vanished, replaced by a camera view of space. Altair was visible in the lower left, an intensely bright disk, tiny compared to Sol from Earth or Dagstjerne from Loki, but large enough to show a discernible disk, flattened by rotation until it was twice as wide as it was thick.
Centered in the screen, backlit by that dazzling sun, was what must have been the alien ship. Most of the hull was in shadow, masking detail, but it looked to Dev like something organic. He was reminded of a tree or giant plant of some kind, with thick, branching masses on both ends and with a gnarled, ropy texture that looked like thick bark. There was no indication of scale, but it looked huge. The shadowed side was completely black; there were no lights, no ports or anticollision beacons as on a human ship, no way to tell bow from stern.
The overall effect was intensely alien. If this was their handiwork, Dev wondered, what were the builders themselves like?
"We have only begun to communicate with them," Howard continued. "Already we have had some . . . surprises. They call themselves the DalRiss." As he spoke the unfamiliar name, the word typed itself on the screen. "That name seems to be a compound word that refers to certain aspects of their biology. They are friendly, highly advanced . . . as their being here, some one hundred fifteen light-years from their homeworld, should tell us."
"C'mon, c'mon . . . show us what they look like!" a voice said from the line of watchers seated just behind Dev.
"What is significant is that we may have found an ally in our long war against the Xenophobes. I promise you that as more information becomes available, we will pass it along to all of you."
"My God," Katya was saying at Dev's side, over and over with a gentle rocking motion of her body. "My God, my God . . ."
"In the meantime, let me just say that the DalRiss have asked us to return with them to their homeworld, and we have agreed. Needless to say, this mission will be strictly a volunteers-only assignment. Those who don't want to go will be left with that part of the fleet that will be staying here, with the DalRiss ship.
"The rest of us, with DalRiss guides aboard, will be embarking on an historic voyage, to meet the DalRiss on their own world, to begin an exchange of technology and culture, to lay the foundations for interstellar, for interspecies, trade.
"Perhaps most important of all, we will be able to learn much from the DalRiss about our common foe. Possibly we will learn at last just what it is we are fighting . . . and why."
There was more, but Dev heard little of it, so great was the pandemonium that exploded in the Common Room. He was surprised to find that he had his arms around Katya. No one else seemed to care, or notice for that matter. Everyone was on their feet, shouting, questioning, all trying to talk at once.
Another intelligent species. The news took the ship by storm. Those aboard talked of nothing else, and as more information came through over the next few days, the excitement rose in pitch until Katya predicted that they were all about to fly to the DalRiss world without resorting to the quantum sea.
In centuries of space exploration, Man had met exactly three other species that might, might share with him the spark of intelligence. Dev had long ago committed the details to his permanent RAM.
On the hothouse world of Zeta Doradus IV, forty-eight light-years from Earth, an Imperial explorer had encountered the Maias—Maiasedentis species—massive organisms that communicated by organic radio and sheltered their motile/sexual/juvenile-stage offspring inside their own immobile bodies. The adults were thought to be intelligent . . . but even that was unproven, and so far unprovable. Completely atechnic, without even fire or simple tools, or hands for manipulating them if they did have them, the Maias were so different that it was possible they would never have anything in common with humans.
On the second world of a K3 sun designated DM-58° 5564, over thirty light-years from Earth, was a highly social species called the Communes. Like ants, bees, or termites on Earth, they showed a remarkable and extremely complex social order, apparently based on chemical communication.
So far, though, there was no way to demonstrate that they were self-aware.
And then there were the Xenophobes, a technical species that killed for no discernible reason, that might kill without even realizing that it was doing so.
Those three examples had raised an important question. For centuries man had speculated about someday meeting a nonhuman species, about learning to communicate with beings who might be of an entirely different order of intelligence, who certainly had a different history, cultural perspective, and way of looking at things in general. Studies of the Maia and the Communes—and attempted studies of the Xenophobes—had raised the possibility that any alien species, no matter how intelligent, might be so fundamentally different from humanity that any meaningful communication would simply never be possible.
Now there was the DalRiss . . . evidently communicating well enough with Howard and others in the fleet to make their name, their history, and their wishes known. What were they like? What did they know about the Xenophobes?
With every other person in the fleet, Dev waited hungrily for news.
Chapter 24
Until we met the DalRiss, we didn't know what the Xenos were. Afterward, well, we still didn't know what they were, but we were closer to understanding what they weren't.
—Dr. Samuel Gold
Senior Exobiologist, IRS Charles Darwin
C.E. 2541
At Altair the fleet was designated as Interstellar Expeditionary Force One.
Officially IEF-1 was a joint effort between Hegemony and Empire. The Imperial contribution in ground forces included the Imperial First and Third Assault Legions, both just arrived from Earth, and the Imperial Guard Striders from Loki, all under the command of General Aiko. General Howard commanded the Hegemony forces, the First and Fifth Loki Warstrider Regiments, the Twelfth and Eighteenth Rainbow Regiments, and several militia outfits, including the New American Brigade and the Chiron Centaurs.
The ships, however, were all Imperial Naval vessels, from the Ryu-class flagship Shinryu to the stores ship Ginga Maru. There were seventeen ships in all, pulled together from three separate t
ask forces, and all under the command of Taisho-Admiral Masaru Yamagata and the civilian representative of the Emperor, Shotaro Takahashi.
While the Hegemony was certainly represented in the IEF, it was clear from the organization that Yamagata considered the force to be an Imperial war fleet, with himself its supreme commander.
None of that mattered as far as the Thorhammers were concerned. Volunteers already, all aboard the Yuduki volunteered again for what some were calling the Great Leap. Final preparations were made, several military vessels were detailed to remain at Altair with the DalRiss ship, and the fleet made ready to get under way. Three days after the Yuduki had arrived at Altair, the seventeen ships of IEF-1 accelerated outward, then made the translation into the K-T Plenum.
The Great Leap was an apt name. The world that DalRiss Translators called Home, it turned out, was well beyond the farthest regions explored thus far by Man—115 light years from Altair, 130 from Sol. Despite its distance, the DalRiss sun was a naked-eye star long known to Earth-based astronomers as Theta Serpentis; tenth-century Arabs had called it AI Haiyi, the serpent, and this had come down to modern sky watchers as Alya.
To be visible at all at such a range, Alya had to be bright. Dev felt an uncomfortable inner twist akin to disorientation when he learned that Alya was a double star, with Alya B a class A7 nearly identical to Altair save for its slower rotation, while Alya A was brighter still, an A5. It looked as though he was going to have to relearn much of what he'd thought he'd known. That such a star should have worlds and life, intelligent life, contradicted most of what Dev had assimilated on planetary bioevolution back in his starpilot days.
Fiercely radiating, white stars squandered their hydrogen reserves far more quickly than their more sedate F-, G-, and K-class brethren. Where a G-class star like Sol could expect to remain on the main sequence for ten billion years, stars like Altair or Alya A had less than two billion years before their spendthrift ways caught up with them and they collapsed, after a spectacular and planet-killing series of stellar pyrotechnics, into white dwarfs. On Earth, it was believed, life had appeared less than a billion years after the planet's crust formed, but it was another three billion years before those first primitive organisms learned to join into multicelled creatures. Another half billion years passed after that before those cells' remote descendants began clinking pieces of flint together to make tools and fire.
So how could intelligent life evolve on a world less than two billion years old?
The best guess any of the scientists who accompanied IEF-1 could manage was that evolution on such a planet proceeded at a frantic rate, at least compared with any of the life-bearing worlds so far investigated by Man. A-class stars, brighter and hotter than Sol, radiated far more energy. Ultraviolet and X-rays would be more intense in such a star system, as would the thin, hot proton soup of the solar wind. With lots more energy available for early biotic systems to draw on, mutations would appear more often, and natural selection, the great driver of evolution, would proceed far more quickly.
But it bothered Dev that his understanding of how things worked could have been so wrong. He wasn't alone. Two hundred astronomical, planetary, and biological scientists, half from Earth, half from other worlds of the Shichiju, were accompanying IEF-1 aboard the Imperial Research Ship Charles Darwin. Rumor had it that they all were in a collective state of near panic as they struggled to make sense of what the DalRiss emissaries had already revealed.
It was nearly ten more days before Dev and his companions aboard the Yuduki began to learn anything more about the DalRiss themselves. Most vessels capable of interstellar travel had an upper limit of two to three weeks before rising shipboard temperatures forced them to translate back to normal fourspace from the blue-fired fury of the godsea to radiate the excess heat. Since ship-to-ship communication was impossible within the K-T Plenum, Yuduki's passengers could learn nothing about what was going on aboard the Darwin until both ships emerged into normal fourspace. The journey had been planned as a series of twelve ten-day hops, with a day of coasting between each hop for cool-down and data exchange.
Each scrap of new data was eagerly devoured by every one of Yuduki's passengers as soon as it was available. Simulations beamed across from the Darwin allowed them to "meet" a DalRiss during their scheduled recjacking time and even question it, though most questions were turned aside by the simulation's AI with a polite "I'm sorry, but that information has not yet been made available to Darwin's researchers."
Dev scheduled his first meeting with a DalRiss simulation so that he could share the experience with Katya. Linked to each other and Yuduki's ViRsim AI, they entered Lab One aboard the Darwin, a gleaming room of sterile whites and silvers and mirrored surfaces. The atmosphere, Dev learned through his link, was predominantly carbon dioxide, with unhealthy percentages of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and suspended droplets of liquid sulfuric acid. The composition might have mimicked the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, but the air pressure was low enough—less than one atmosphere—that the temperature hovered around a balmy forty degrees Celsius.
The heat, of course, was not accurately presented in the simulation, any more than was the corrosively poisonous air. As Dev and Katya stepped into the DalRiss habitat, the air felt dank and steamy, with just a trace of the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide, and the light was just harsh enough to make things unpleasantly bright. The air seemed to shimmer a bit, like the mirage above a hot stretch of ferrocrete, but it felt no more uncomfortable than a tropical bioenclave hothouse back on Earth.
There was little in that room that Dev could relate to anything on Earth. What waited for the two of them was definitely alive; it, no, they moved with a quivering, eager jerkiness. There were three of them, though at first they'd been so close together that Dev had trouble separating them in his mind.
"These are the DalRiss emissaries." The inner voice belonged to their AI guide, which would be there to lead them through the simulation. "If you wish to converse with them, you will need Translators."
A white-topped table appeared next to Dev. On it were two . . . creatures, black and glistening. He was reminded at first of the slugs he'd seen emerging from the travel spheres at Norway Ridge, but these were clearly something else.
What, he wasn't quite sure yet.
"The DalRiss create, through genetic and subcellular manipulation, life forms the way we create machines," the guide's voice said. "The organisms on the table are called comels. They are artificially created beings that the DalRiss call Translators. All you need do is touch one."
Dev hesitated, then, ashamed of his reluctance in front of Katya, stuck out his hand. The Translator's skin was wet but not slimy or unpleasant. It quivered, then began sliding up his fingers.
"The process is painless," Dev was told as he watched, morbidly fascinated. He was not reassured. The thing looked like a blunt, flat-bodied leech.
"Is it intelligent?" Katya asked, holding out her hand for the second Translator.
"Not in the way humans would understand the term. Like certain AI systems, it is intelligent but not self-aware. Its sole purpose is to serve as a bridge between a human and its makers by attuning itself to the human nervous system while at the same time maintaining communication with the DalRiss."
"Communication?" The creature had embraced Dev's hand now, a thin, translucent membrane that fit like a rubber glove. He looked from it to the patiently waiting . . . things a few meters away. "Telepathy?"
"Of a sort. The Translators consist of little more than modified DalRiss nervous tissue and an organic radio transmitter. An analogous organ exists in the Maias of Zeta Doradus IV."
"Consider them to be an extension of ourselves," another voice, high-pitched, almost feminine, said in his mind. "A way for our thoughts to touch."
Dev jumped. Katya, whose hand had not been fully engulfed yet, was startled. "Dev? What is it?"
He shook his head, unable to explain, unable to spe
ak. A thousand questions chased one another through his head. How had these creatures acquired the symbology to understand him and to make themselves understood? How had they tapped into his implant? . . . For that, surely, was the only way they could speak in his mind. If the Translator was actually tapping his nervous system somehow, was there a danger of infection, or of an allergic reaction to alien tissue?
Dev's thoughts raced, stirred by fear of the unknown. He had to remind himself that this was a simulation, that he was not really aboard the Darwin, but still tucked away safe and sound in a link module aboard the Yuduki.
But the questions remained. Someone, obviously, had already gone through this for real.
"The comels are quite safe for your species," the voice continued. "Long ago we learned how to tailor servants such as the Translator to other body chemistries. There is no danger."
Dev's eyes were adjusting now to both the light and the strangeness. Picking the closest of the DalRiss towering above him, he focused on it alone. Working step by step, he began to recognize general anatomical features and relate them to things he knew.
Those, for instance, were legs. The lower body resembled a starfish, with six blunt, flexible appendages that held a spiny orange belly a meter or so off the deck, and a red-brown, leathery hide studded with bony lumps the size of Dev's thumb.
And that must be a head, an erect crescent on a slender, jointed neck rising from the center of the body, with fleshy, horizontal folds down the concave side that might have been a kind of face, and a pair of rubbery-looking protrusions to either side like those on a hammerhead shark. As Dev and Katya approached, the assembly swung their way as though it were watching them, a disconcerting effect because, so far as Dev could see, the thing possessed nothing like eyes.
