The Coming Storm_A Pax Aeterna Novel

by Trevor Wyatt

  She really did want to know what was inside that damn ship. She frowned down at her instruments for a moment, and when she looked around to speak to Mahesh again, he was gone. In fact, he had left the CNC.

  She promised herself that as soon as she could, she was going to buy him a drink in the lounge.

  Jeryl cleared his throat. “What the devil are they doing over there, chipping their reply in stone?”

  Moments later, Mary spoke in a tight voice.

  “We’re receiving a visual transmission from the alien.”

  Jeryl grunted.

  “Put it on the main screen.”

  Jeryl

  Jeryl didn’t know what anyone else expected, but the image on the screen was no surprise. His first feeling, in fact, was a sense of relief and even vindication. He had always believed—though he had never shared this belief with anyone, not even Ashley or even his siblings—that if they ever found intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, it would resemble humans in general form.

  Think about it, he once told himself. We evolved from tree-dwellers who learned to walk upright. We were taller than many other animals, and we had our hands—with their opposable thumbs—free to grasp sticks or rocks both large and small. Our bodies had their primary sensory organs—ears, eyes, nose, tongue—at the top, a head that could easily swivel around to keep watch for enemies or food. We also keep our brains up there.

  Our shape is a good size for intelligence, too. We’re adaptable and can move quickly when we need to. In our bodies we carry a huge number of reproductive cells and information therein. We’ve also got fat to see us through times when food is scarce. For evolutionary success, it would be tough to come up with a better design.

  Apparently, the Captain now mused, these standards were broadly applicable elsewhere in the universe as well. Now, Jeryl saw on the view screen a face, somewhat similar to his own: humanoid, with two eyes in the front of its head, a nose, and a mouth. It had no ears; just slits. It was bald, with a large cranium.

  The eyes had no pupils, and were a deep blue in color. Its skin was blue as well. The being cocked its head when it saw him and furrowed its brow. Its mouth drew down, like a frown. The captain knew he should be wary of ascribing human emotions to an alien creature, but this fellow looked at all the world as if he were examining Jeryl and finding him wanting.

  There were murmurs of surprise and wonder from the CNC personnel at their stations around the captain. For a long time, no one spoke.

  A text message flitted across one of his screens. It was from Ashley, at her station: What are you going to say to him?

  Without taking his eyes off the alien’s image, he tapped for a virtual keyboard, and on it he replied: How do you know it’s a him?

  You know what I mean, Ashley responded.

  Of course. But I’m not going to say anything. Let “him” speak first.

  No “One small step for a man” stuff?

  I hadn’t thought to prepare any remarks. He hoped she could catch his sarcasm.

  The blue figure on the screen spoke—a weird click-pop noise, pure garble. The captain had heard something like this before...he ransacked his memory and came up with a name: the!Kung. They were a semi-nomadic African tribe who lived in the portions of the Kalahari Desert.

  The “!” in their name represents a sort of cork-out-of-a-bottle popping noise. The !Kung were driven to extinction in the years following the World War III, along with many other native and aboriginal people around the world. These disappearances were one of the worst results of the war.

  After absorbing the surprise of their language, he watched the alien closely. When it spoke, it showed no teeth in his mouth, just a solid-looking ridge of bone. Jeryl couldn’t tell anything from its expression. They didn’t have a philologist on board, but the computers ought to be able to analyze his speech and give them a good translation, figured Jeryl.

  The alien was long-winded, but after a couple of minutes it stopped and sat, staring at him.

  Jeryl typed a message to Lannigan: Are you getting a translation?

  Not yet, he replies at once. The written symbols were one thing. This click-pop talk is something else and I need some time. Engage him in conversation if you can...I need more information.

  He sighed. He knew they weren’t expecting a First Contact encounter, but even so, they should have had some sort of translation protocol ready to bring on line. He made a mental note to take this up with Admiral Flynn—If they managed to survive.

  All right, he typed to Lannigan. He looked over at Mary Taylor at Comms. She shrugged at him, as clueless as he was.

  He pasted on a smile on, and addressed the blue-skinned alien. Placing his hand on his chest.

  “My name is Jeryl Montgomery, Captain of the Terran Union Starship The Seeker. We have exchanged information via electromagnetic waves. What’s your name?”

  The blue captain—Jeryl assumed the being was the captain, anyway—looked at someone or something off-screen. Jeryl heard his words being repeated in a rather watery electronic tone. Close enough for government work, he thought. At least they got all my inflections right.

  Suddenly a thought popped into his head and he almost smiled.

  “Lieutenant,” he said to Mary Taylor, “I want you to analyze that transmission. They buried information in their earlier communications. In the carrier wave. Comb through this video signal, see if there is anything sub- or super-sonic, maybe. I don’t know. Work with Dr. Lannigan, will you? And Doctor, are you having any luck getting me a translation?”

  “I’m still analyzing,” he replied.

  The verbal exchange interested the alien, who leaned forward a little as if to catch their words. He still couldn’t see anyone else, so Jeryl decided to rectify that and see how the sight of other human beings affects him.

  “Comms,” he said to Mary, “give him full access to our camera feeds. I want to see what he makes of it.”

  The alien’s head moved back and forth as the additional images come through to him. He must have had multiple screens on his console, as Jery’s crew did. Now, he was seeing the full complement of CNC officers. Jeryl wondered if he could tell the difference between the males and the females, or the different races.

  “Now, we want to see yours,” he heard Pedro Ferriero mutter at the helmsman’s station. Jeryl almost smiled at that, but he knew Pedro had a point—they had shown their new acquaintance that there was more than one person manning their craft. He would like to get an idea of how many crewmembers were housed in his behemoth of a ship.

  But the alien didn’t take the hint. He simply sat, staring at Jeryl through his inscrutable blue eyes. Jeryl was starting to get fidgety. This meeting was going nowhere.

  “I’ve got it,” Dr. Lannigan said, through Jeryl’s earbuds. “There are two coded frequencies in that video transmission, Jeryl. One inside the other, so that you can’t get to the second one without decoding the first one. If we were only looking at the video we’d never see it. Good catch.”

  “It’s purely out of my ass, Taft. It just hit me that they may do this two-level thing all the time. What I need to know is, can you decipher it?”

  “I think so—give me a few minutes.”

  “As quick as you can, Taft, please.”

  “Aye.”

  Jeryl watched the data stream on his screens as Taft ran the alien transmission through the computers. Jeryl felt himself sweat. After what seemed to be hours, Lannigan spoke again:

  “Got it. The information is all sonic, and seems to be keys to intonation. Their language is similar to Asian tongues, in that the inflection you put on a word determines its meaning. Without computers, we’d never be able to understand what—”

  “Okay, I get it, just tell me what this guy is saying.”

  “I have to integrate the key with their stream; it’ll take a little time.”

  “Quick as you can,” he said again. Lannigan didn’t take offense; he knew they were walking into
the unknown here.

  While he was chewing on the new code data, Jeryl thought about what he should say to the alien once they could fully understand each other.

  Greetings from the people of Earth, he thought. Or, This is a moment that will be remembered throughout history, both yours and ours.

  Jeryl shook his head. He had never been good at extemporaneous speaking; he liked having prepared remarks, maybe a few jokes. But what sort of joke would these blue people understand?

  These two aliens walk into a bar...or the one about the blonde and the traffic cop? What was that one about the guy who cuts off his dog’s nose? Someone asks him, how does he smell? And the guy says—

  “I have it,” Lannigan said.

  “Good.”

  The alien was speaking again. This time Jeryl heard a gravelly voice tumbling out of the speakers. In clear English, the alien said: “If you’re not able to understand me, perhaps you’re not worth my time at this point.”

  Ashley

  All of them in CNC were so taken aback by the alien’s rude behavior that no one spoke a word. Jeryl stepped right into the breach, however. Without blinking, he said, with great dignity, “I understand you perfectly well.”

  A look of what Ashley took to be surprise flickered over the alien’s face. Note to self, she thinks: they do seem to have a similar emotional spectrum.

  “I’ll repeat my original greeting to you. I am Captain Jeryl Montgomery of the Terran Union Starship Seeker. If I may be so bold as to ask, whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  The blue alien’s face was impassive as it listened to the popping and clicking garble their machines had made of Jeryl’s speech. It waited for a few moments, and then spewed a few moments of clicking babble. On our end, the translation was:

  “Good, it appears you have solved the knowledge mazes needed to be able to converse with us.”

  Are these people going to be totally insufferable? Or is this captain of theirs just a dick? I wonder if Jeryl is going to hand him his head, she thought.

  But no, he was silent. All he did was stare at the alien with a perfectly level gaze.

  She almost grinned. He’s going to wait the son of a bitch out.

  The alien didn’t know that Jeryl Montgomery was famous throughout the Armada for being a top-notch poker player. No one could out-bluff him. He could have made a career as a gambler, had he been so inclined. Ashley had seen him bluff a table of crusty old poker players, including an admiral and a two-star general, into folding against a 2,000-credit pot when all he had was a queen in the hole. And this was against one player with a full boat. He was good.

  After nearly two minutes of silence, the blue one spoke again.

  Is it my imagination, or is he getting pissed off?

  “We send a standard hailing frequency to all ships and races we encounter—” and for a moment, she heard nothing more. Jeryl’s tactics worked. He had gained a precious pearl of information out of the alien, a genuine game-changer: They now knew that there were other intelligent races in the galaxy, and that more than one of them developed the capability to travel in interstellar space.

  And Jeryl himself had given nothing away.

  Ashley pushed her astonishment away and paid attention to what the alien was saying. He introduced himself as Command Legate Ghosal, of the Sonali race.

  As unobtrusively as possible, she asked their computer for a definition of “legate,” because although she had heard of the word, she couldn’t recall what it meant. The computer came back with the definition: an ecclesiastic delegated by the Pope as his representative.

  A what, now? She thought. This alien is a religious official? Captaining a starship?

  Unless there was something seriously wrong with the translation—a possibility she was willing to entertain—what they had just learned was that God was a concept not limited to the human race.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself here, she thought to herself.

  Religion was still practiced on Earth and among the Outer Colonies, but it lacked the prevalence it once had. It had been reduced to the level of a hobbyist’s pursuit; organized religion perished in the aftermath of World War III. Too many bad things happened to too many good people for religion to sustain among the survivors in the ruins of the cities across the globe—people who had resorted to drinking filthy rainwater and catching rats and cockroaches for food hadn’t had the time to listen to sermons.

  Do unto others was a splendid idea before, for people who had a warm place to sleep. But when they had no more than rags to wear, and were either too cold or too hot or too sick to feed their children, the basic human drive for survival took over. Rather than love thy neighbor, they were more inclined to clout him—or her—over the head and take the rat that they caught for dinner…and the neighbor himself may end up as dinner.

  It happened over and over after the war. The race came closer to extinction than it ever had before. Two-fifths of humanity died. Maybe more. God hadn’t saved anyone. Nor did Mohammed, or any of the others who’d been held in high esteem for so long.

  Yet, here they were confronted with Ghosal, an individual who was apparently the representative of a theocracy.

  Talk about unexpected, thought Ashley.

  Ghosal continued. “We were on a routine surveying mission when we picked up the signals from your ship, and came in for a closer look.”

  Jeryl was as cool as a chilled wine glass. “So you have no knowledge of our fellows aboard their ship?”

  “I regret to say that we do not,” said Ghosal. “This is a region of space that is only a few lightyears from the border of Sonali territory.”

  “You say you were on a routine surveying mission,” Jeryl said.

  “That is correct, Captain Montgomery. We noticed the wreckage of your Mariner and are saddened to hear of the loss of life of those aboard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I would like to offer our help. We will help you search for whoever or whatever is responsible for the tragedy.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Command Legate Ghosal,” said Jeryl. “It’s an unusual coincidence to find you here so near The Mariner.”

  “I am not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “If I may be perfectly frank with you, Command Legate, this is the first time an individual of our race has encountered another intelligent species. For us, this is an historical moment.”

  “How pleased I am, then, to be able to share it. I am deeply honored.”

  Oh, you smooth SOB, Ashley thought. This was not the way she had ever imagined a First Contact would go. Ghosal spoke more like a politician than a ship’s captain.

  She caught a telltale blinking on her console. It was Dr. Lannigan.

  “Yes?” she said quietly.

  “Something’s not right,” said the Science Officer. “Judging by what I see here, both our race and the Sonali seem to be more or less on an equal footing when it comes to technology. Their ship dwarfs ours, but if they are on a routine scouting mission...”

  “Yes,” she said, getting the drift of his reasoning.

  “I find it interesting that you have dispatched such a large vessel in a routine mission,” Jeryl was saying to Ghosal.

  Great minds, she thought, smell the same rat.

  “It seems like a big expenditure of resources.”

  Interstellar travel was expensive; at least, it as for humankind. It was one reason why ships were relatively small, and why they ended up recycling the hell out of everything.

  It’s why we have to pay for our own damn coffee.

  If the Sonali were indeed approximately as developed as they were, then this little “routine scouting mission” of theirs was costing them deep in the purse. A ship as big as theirs wasn’t fit for a simply scouting mission. What they had was a full-scale research vessel, and probably one that was fully armed.

  In fact, Ashley thought, I’d wager my lower left wisdom tooth that these guys are loaded for bear.r />
  Something here was definitely not right.

  Ghosal wasn’t taking Jeryl’s implication very well. “I am not sure I understand what you are saying, Captain Montgomery.”

  The translation didn’t put an edge to his voice, but Ashley thought she’d bet her other lower wisdom tooth that there was one in his original clocks and pops.

  “Oh, well, you know,” said Jeryl, being rather elaborately casual. “It’s simply that I wish my people could afford to build such an impressive vehicle simply for scouting purposes.”

  “Captain,” said Ghosal, “I believe that the best course for you at this time would be to take the information we have gathered form our study of your lost ship’s wreckage, and return to your home world with it.”

  “Yes, I appreciate your position, Command Legate Ghosal, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. We’re sticking around here until we determine exactly what happened to our people.”

  His voice grew very hard. “And we mean to collect their remains, if at all possible. They have families and loved ones back on Earth who will want to know what happened. I will do my best to tell them.”

  There was silence from Ghosal’s end of the conversation. Then the alien said, “If I may suggest, you would do better to understand that this is Sonali space, and you are here only on our forbearance.”

  “Thank you, Command Legate, I will take that under advisement.”

  And with that, Jeryl reached out and tapped on the controls.

  The communications link with Ghosal’s ship was severed.

  “Well,” said Jeryl, sitting back and smiling at them. “That was an interesting little chat. What do you suppose they’ll do now?”

  Jeryl

  Admiral Flynn wasn’t so sanguine about the encounter when Jeryl reported it to him, which he did shortly after he broke the link between The Seeker and Command Legate Ghosal’s ship.