by R. M. Meluch
“What kind of signals?” Farragut asked.
“Same kinds, sir. Videos look like the same humanoids, and we have a computer match on the audio. An exact match on some of them.”
“Exact?” Farragut felt his brows contract in doubt. “You mean the same words?”
“No, sir. Identical audios. All three planets are rebroadcasting the exact same transmissions.”
Farragut believed the young man, but told him what he was struggling with: “Those three solar systems are ten, twenty, and forty-three light-years apart, and they’re sharing messages? You found FTL capability?”
“No, sir. Nothing other than the fact that they’re doing it. Somehow. Sir. We have no clue how those electromagnetic signals are getting planet to planet. We picked up no sign of ships in transit between the stars, and believe me, sir, we looked. They have spaceships, but every one we detected was flying inside one of the solar systems and clocking no better than seventy-nine percent c. We picked up no FTL-capable ships, and no FTL signals.”
“Obviously they do have FTL signals,” said Farragut.
“Yes, sir. But we can’t detect them.”
The captain did not argue with the report merely because it was impossible. “Any evidence of how these beings got to these three planets?”
“None, sir. Absolutely none.”
Farragut turned to a very young, very dark xeno who had come to the hangar deck in curiosity. “No evidence? No historical stories in those videos about the great journey to the globular cluster?”
The apprentice xenologist shook her head. “No, sir.”
“Not even in any of their children’s histories?”
“No, sir. Juvenile broadcasting doesn’t seem to be part of their culture. All the transmissions have—what looks to us to be—an official look. We can’t be sure, since we can’t understand a word. Well, we can understand a few words. Yes, no, and the like.”
All the resources at his command and John Farragut could not get an answer to a question as simple as how three planets separated by ten, twenty, and forty-three light-years were communicating. That was unacceptable.
Merrimack had everything. Provisioned like a small carrier, the space battleship had two compact automated fabrication plants—the technology for which had been lifted from Rome—that could repair the ship’s formidable armament. Above and beyond her strictly military defensive, offensive, communications, detection, propulsion, and navigational equipment, Merrimack housed in its small sick bay all the equipment of a major hospital. The Mack carried a hydroponics garden, raw grain in its two dry storage silos, and stores of meat and milk radiated, microbe-free, and vacuum-sealed. In the spirit of redundancy, the Mack also carried a small breeding group of pygmy cows, goats, quail, and ducks for fresh milk, meat, and eggs, just in case the food stores became contaminated or personnel become stranded on an alien planet in the Deep. The ship’s galley could be programmed to create anything the ship had ingredients for, from full meals to pretzels and popcorn. There were squash courts on board and a running track. The enormous virtual library was updated every time a launch cycled Fleet Marines in and out from their tours of duty. Merrimack had everything.
Merrimack had research labs for the ship’s many xenoscientists to analyze the unexpected.
The xenos weren’t working hard enough.
Farragut collected Echo Flight’s recording bubbles and made straight for the xenolinguist’s lab. Burst in, demanding, “Ham, I need a translation of the dominant language of the F8 planet and I need it now.”
Dr. Patrick Hamilton did not rise. He plucked a module from his console and tossed it to the captain in answer. “Here.” Then, regretting his flippancy, added quickly, “Sir.”
“What is this?” Farragut held the module up to the light. To all appearances it was a standard language module, lightweight, about an inch square, with a three-prong interface.
“From your Roman.”
“Augustus,” Farragut named him.
“That,” Ham confirmed in heavy distaste. “That thing is inhuman. Inhuman. That’s the word for it! Your Roman comes stalking in here like zombie cyborg from the stratosphere, wired and staring as if nobody’s home. Plugs into the main port. Dumps that out five hours later.” Patrick Hamilton jabbed his forefinger at the module in Farragut’s hand. “Five bleeding blinking bloody hours.” The linguist slumped back in his chair and covered his eyes. His hand was long-fingered and soft-skinned, an academic’s hand.
“And what is this?” said Farragut, turning the module over and over, as if he would see what was so remarkable about it.
“Myriadian. The language. Fifty-five thousand words of it with grammar and idioms.” Dr. Hamilton sounded about to cry.
Patrick Hamilton was from Mars. Not Mars the colony, Mars the place where odd people come from. A quirky man of science, Dr. Patrick Hamilton hadn’t the steel in him of his line-officer wife Glenn—Hamster—Hamilton.
Farragut did not know what Glenn saw in him. Patrick Hamilton was a reasonably attractive man, in a boyish way. Boyish in the sense of puerile. Perhaps because Glenn’s career allowed no time or place for a child, she had married one instead.
“Myriadian?” Farragut echoed. “Is that the major language on the planet in the F8 system?”
Patrick Hamilton, PhD, Chief Xenolinguist on board the Merrimack, lolled in his swivel chair, leg hooked over one armrest. “That is the only language on all three worlds.”
Farragut felt his brain knot. “How did you know there were three inhabited worlds?” The captain had only just learned it himself, and Patrick Hamilton had not been on the hangar deck to hear the recon flight’s discovery.
“Oh? Did you find the other two?” Patrick gave a most unhappy, useless laugh. “It’s in the words. There are three inhabited planets in the Myriad—that’s what the locals call this cluster—the Myriad. The planets are called Arra, Rea, and Centro. The three worlds are all one nation. They also talk about a planet called Origin, which is not in the Myriad. Origin is someplace far, far, far, far away.”
Of course there would have to be an Origin. Three planets with only one language among them could be nothing but colonies. So where was Origin? “Do they have a word for FTL?”
“Captain Farragut, everyone has a word for FTL from the moment they discover one hundred eighty-six thousand, two hundred ninety-one miles per second. Doesn’t mean they have FTL. It’s dangerous business trying to piece together a culture from its language. Language comes with a lot of antique baggage; tends to be full of anachronisms and fictions. Elves, emperors, perpetual motion. And a royal furball has nothing to do with royalty or fur. Your Roman says the Myriadians are not flying FTL.”
Patrick Hamilton grew more morose in his envy. The despair of the obsolete and inadequate. “Five frazzin’ hours.”
“And this works?” Farragut held up the language module.
“Plug that in, and all these recordings make sense. It’s—it’s elegant. I could not have made that with seventeen years and a bevy of graduate student slave labor. It’s like I’m sitting here with a bow and arrow and he comes along with a disrupter and a triangulated sight. Where’s the justice?”
Sad to see an educated man whine like that. Sadder still that a man with a strong, pretty, classy wife like Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton should be referring to his graduate students in terms of a bevy. Made the captain want to slap him. Said instead: “Don’t sit there crying in the dust, Ham. I need you.”
Captain Farragut brought many a man back to life with those three words: I need you.
And Farragut did need his xenos. Cluster IC9870986—the Myriad—was turning into one of those upsetting, wholly baffling discoveries like the Xi artifact—a slab of lead five billion years older than the universe itself—existing just to piss people off.
“Where is Augustus?”
“Oh, he turned white, unplugged, and left a few hours ago.”
The quartermaster had billeted Augustus with the
spare torpedoes, partly in intentional slight, partly in consideration of Augustus’ height—torpedoes were seven feet long, just four inches better than Augustus—and partly to keep the Roman clear of the American officers, who wanted nothing to do with him.
Captain Farragut found his IO lying half in his pod, half out, looking none too well, nursing a headache with a hand over his eyes. The Roman did not look up at the captain’s entrance into torpedo rack room number six.
Farragut paused. “You look like you’re fighting to hold onto lunch.”
Augustus lifted a three-fingered shrug over his eyes. “Lost that battle.” He lowered his hand and demanded flatly, “What do you want?”
“I’ve been listening to the recordings with this.” Farragut held up the language module. “This is amazing.”
“You are easily amazed.”
“How did you do this?”
That made Augustus laugh. The laugh was neither happy nor kind. “Superior Roman technology. And we surrendered to this?”
Farragut either missed the insult or didn’t care. “The commander of my Marines wants to know how you found us when we never sent coordinates to Fort Ike.”
“When you started blowing up things at the cluster’s perimeter, you were visible for parcs on the low band. You looked like a puffer fish.”
Gravitational murmurs were instant but of limited detectable range, becoming quickly tenuous at an inverse square ratio to distance.
“Puffer fish do it out of fear,” Augustus added.
“I wasn’t afraid. I’m trigger happy.”
“I hear that about you. Are the Myriadians still alive?”
“Yes!” Farragut said happily.
“I was afraid of that.”
Not a sentimental sort, this Roman. And life was not what either of them had come looking for. Where there’s life, there is no Hive—unless the Hive was eating the life. Merrimack was hunting the Hive.
“You lost the gorgon trail,” said Augustus.
“Looks like it.” Farragut returned to the language module, eager as a child on Christmas day to try out his new toy. “If I wanted to say ‘we mean you no harm,’ how would I?”
Augustus stirred his long limbs. “You want to talk?”
Language modules at this stage of alien contact were normally used for listening.
“What would you like to say to the Myriadians? ‘Why aren’t you lunch?’ ”
Farragut ignored him. “I’m pulling up a dozen words for we and two dozen for you. I don’t know which to use.”
Augustus gave a wry smile of disbelief and amusement. “Do you just dive into a pool when you can’t see the bottom, John Farragut?”
“These people talk over distances of light-years without resonance or FTL. I need that technology. Imagine talking over astronomical distances without the Hive picking it up. And I need it before the LEN kicks us off the site.”
Augustus conceded the point, sat up, and became abruptly helpful. “Myriadian yous and wes are very specific. Your choices immediately establish what you are in relation to your addressee.”
“If I say Ila kendi ru nacon di, will they at least know I’m friendly?”
“The moment you say that, they’ll know you’re an idiot. Ila is juvenile feminine. And your choice of yous—intended, no doubt, to be friendly—is insultingly familiar. The road to war is paved with good intentions. And you forgot the significator.”
“The what?”
“That initial click you hear at the beginning of every Myridian phrase. The pitch signals whether the mood is indicative, interrogative, or imperative.”
“Ham says you knew there were three inhabited planets in the cluster before the recon flight knew there were three inhabited planets.”
“When you understand what they’re saying, it becomes obvious.”
“So are there any clues in the words as to how these people are traveling between planets?”
“Only implication by omission,” said Augustus. “The words suggest that the Myriad is an autocracy, which suggests that things of strategic importance will not be broadcast. Knowledge is power. Power is tightly held in an autocracy. The really good stuff is not floating about for just anyone to pick out of empty space. There is a lot not said about interplanetary travel—except that the Myriadians travel between planets regularly. By spaceship.”
“Not the spaceships I’ve been seeing.” Echo Flight’s recordings showed only very primitive vessels.
“The very ones,” Augustus assured him.
“We’re missing something.”
“That’s obvious.”
“How are they sending messages between worlds?”
“Courier ship.”
Farragut made a sound of impatience. “Back to those ships again! Isn’t there any mention of some—I don’t know—extra step that gets the ships from one place to another. Displacement? Boost gate?”
“Of course there must be. But it’s phrased in dubious and alien terms.”
“What terms?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one with the language module. You find it.”
“But you made this,” Farragut gave the language module a shake. “I can’t sift through years of broadcasts. You have to know.”
“I forget.” Augustus lay back down, coiled his long figure, one arm cradling his abdomen, turned his back on his captain, and closed his eyes, leaving Farragut standing in the compartment, as good as alone. Augustus had either gone to sleep or passed out. Outlets for cable connections showed in the base of his skull.
Captain Farragut ordered to his comatose back, so he would not have to bring him up on charges, “Stand down.”
Merrimack had on board a distinguished civilian of immense knowledge and experience, Don Jose Maria Cordillera, a quietly magnetic presence on the space battleship. He was revered, even loved, by the company and crew for his humanity and for his personal mission, which he shared with the Mack: the complete destruction of the Hive.
He rose courteously from his desk as the captain entered his small quarters. A holographic projection had erased the close walls and opened the compartment to vistas of horses running across green-gold pastures, purple mountains on the hazy horizon, and swallows cavorting in the deep blue sky. Chlorophyll scents and a warm zephyr came from unseen vents. Potted plants, real ones, blended the illusion into the reality of Jose Maria’s small living space.
“To what do I owe the honor, young Captain?”
Farragut handed Augustus’ language module to Jose Maria Cordillera. “Can a man, even a Roman patterner, really have decoded an entire alien language in five hours? Or has Rome already been here and Augustus just brought this aboard with him?”
“Augustus can and did create this,” said Jose Maria. Unrejuvenated, he still looked much younger than his fifty-seven years, even with the silver streaks in his long black hair. “I watched him do it. We had to excise parts of this module, actually. Sometimes his mind would digress into interesting patterns until he forced himself back to the translation project.”
“That kind of ability—” Farragut started, searched for the right word. “It’s inhuman.”
“Yes,” said Jose Maria. “It is. What must have been done to Augustus to make him so is also inhuman.” He handed back the module gravely. “I was just reviewing some of his observations now. I have many questions for him.”
“He’s asleep.”
“I shall not try to wake him.”
Farragut doubted he could. Apparently, Augustus slept like a corpse.
A second recon patrol approached within two light-days of the F8 planet, Arra, and immediately spun around and came hying back to Merrimack as if in flames. “They know we’re here!”
“How can they?” Farragut asked.
“You were seen,” Steele accused his Marines.
“Not us, sir. You were. They’ve seen Merrimack.”
And the recon flight played back a news broadcast from the planet Arra:
“Alpha Flight, what is your situation?”
“Up screwed! Man down! Man down!”
“That’s Colonel Steele and Flight Sergeant Blue.” Farragut recognized the voices. “Where did this recording come from?”
“From the planet,” said the flight leader of the second recon patrol. “Arra. Every channel, every station, every city. They’re playing it over and over like a national disaster. And they’ve got video.”
On the playback, Merrimack appeared as a silhouette of menace, backed by the cluster’s glow. Her shape vaguely approximated an antique spearhead, from the long angular shaft that was her central fuselage, to her flight decks delta-swept back on either side, and her top and bottom sails, also back swept to aid deflection. She made a majestic, cruel profile, half seen in the dark.
Then the Swifts—angry little hornets—bulleted from her wings to score the surrounding space with red tracers. Mines detonated with fiery sprays on all sides. And Merrimack herself opened up and heaved out a broadside. Vapor briefly shrouded her, hissing from her gunports. The halo of it caught the light of her guns, and the battleship seemed to be on fire. Her volleys, like lightning flashes, gave evanescent glimpses of her true dimension. Turrets swiveled like malevolent eyes.
“The natives have seen this?” Farragut asked, aghast. “They’ve gotta be scared to death.”
“They are.”
“This is scaring me, and it’s my Merrimack!”
The transmission went abruptly black. “And right here must be when we took out the space buoy. Camera was in the buoy. The angle fits.”
“So these pictures were taken way back there at the Rim. How did this signal cross the one hundred and ten light-years from the buoy to the F8 system?”
“That’s a hell of a question, sir. Given that even two light-days from Arra, the best they’re sending out is laser and electromag. We don’t have a living clue how they received this.”
Farragut turned to his XO. “Commander Carmel.”
“Captain.”
“Time to step it up. Get me to the planet—Planet name, somebody.” He snapped his fingers.
“Arra,” someone provided.
