by R. M. Meluch
The names ended. Kerry was peripherally aware of Reg standing at attention next to her, shoulders slightly slumping, not called. Steele was giving orders for the chosen ones to collect weapons from the armory and to kit up in dress whites and dog collars. Steele exited as briskly as he’d come.
He had not ordered exo equipment—Arra had a nitrox atmosphere, hot, heavy, but breathable at sea level—not even sunglasses. It would not be hideously bright down there, even in the starry cluster; it would be nighttime where the Archon’s palace stood when the ship’s party went down. They were calling the leader of the three-world nation an “Archon.”
This was not just a prime mission, a first contact, but Kerry was getting out of the can and breathing real air. And she was not one of those poor sods who were sent on recon to the other two inhabited systems. She could not believe her luck.
At Kerry’s side, Reg hissed, “Hell, Blue! Who’d you go to bed with to pull this duty?”
Kerry could more easily name soldiers she hadn’t slept with, but fraternization with officers never got anyone anywhere but back to Earth with a dishonorable discharge. “Hell if I know. Steele musta drank something that killed the brain cell that knew who I was—and don’t you remind him.”
“Do you think if I trash Cowboy’s pod I can go on a first contact sortie? What’d you lay on Steele anyway?”
“Nothing!” She couldn’t even imagine that. “That man has never liked me. He thinks I’m a fu.”
Carly ganged in from Kerry’s other side: “Yeah, that’s why you’re going planetside. I think he’s hot for you, chica linda.”
“He’s got a hard-on for me, that’s for sure,” Kerry muttered.
“Wish I were on his shit list,” Reg sulked.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kerry conceded anything they wanted to throw at her. “Just tell me how to get beer stains out of dress whites.”
A snicker sounded behind them—that big baboon, Dak Shepard. “Right. Blue’s gonna try ’n’ tell us those are beer stains. Uh-huh.”
“Shut up, Dak.”
Wrinkled dress whites flashed down the ladder rails between decks, a crushed cap clenched between teeth. Captain Farragut blinked at the fleeting apparition, trying to identify the glimpse. Guessed: “Kerry Blue?”
“I didn’t give her the name, Captain,” said Steele, as if it were the name itself that provoked the captain’s skepticism.
“Cowboy’s Kerry Blue?”
“She does not belong to Cowboy,” Steele said.
Farragut knew who Kerry Blue was. “Your reports on her don’t exactly glow, TR. Why is she coming ashore? She’s not honor guard material.”
“She doesn’t get nitrogen narcosis.” Rapture of the deep, divers called it. Nitrogen at pressure could disorient the susceptible. “When the fur flies, there’s no she-dog I’d rather have at my back. I know she’ll be there. She don’t cross t’s, and she don’t pass inspection. But no combat-ready unit ever passed inspection.”
“You expecting combat?”
“Ready for it.”
Farragut nodded. “Make her pass inspection.”
“Yes, sir.” Steele took the captain’s dismissal.
Didn’t know what he was thinking when he chose Kerry Blue.
Kerry Blue. The tough/pretty girl Marine with the stupid name who had the starring role in all his wet dreams. Likable girl, good looking in a rough and ready sort of way. Better looking since she ran out of eye makeup. Girl-next-door pretty. The next car door. TR Steele had grown up in a trailer park. There was always a Kerry in the back seat of the next car.
Trailer park. An idyllic name for a slum where the landless lived in their mobile shelters stacked three high in the unpretty part of town with hard men, slutty women, and mongrel dogs. And when someone else needed the land, you hitched your gypsy home behind your current mode of transportation, be it pony, ox, automobile, or grid transit car, and moved to another park.
Kerry Blue was trailer trash, indestructible, rangy, loose-jointed. Breasts enough that you knew there was a woman under the uniform, small enough for you to know they weren’t bought. Wide shoulders, little waist, superb ass. A lot of motion in her walk. Kerry Blue wore her brown hair pulled back rather than buzz it off. It probably brushed the tops of her shoulders when she let it down.
TR Steele spent too much time thinking about what Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue would look like with her hair down.
She was a great little dog soldier, but unfortunately there was no way in any conscience he could ever recommend her for a commission. So he could just forget about ever seeing Kerry Blue with her hair down.
“You’re not a lubber, are you?”
Augustus looked up from his headache. His glower through pain-squinted eyelids answered no.
“We have therapy for space sickness,” Farragut offered. And with his saying so, the deck gave a burp, setting them on an eight-degree list. John Farragut put a foot to the bulkhead to stay himself until the deck settled.
A battleship did not rest quiet on the vacuum sea. It heaved and bulged and adjusted within its distortion field. Merrimack was not a passenger liner. Fine-tuning was not worth the expense and maintenance of achieving it on a military vessel. The distortions—which allowed for shipboard gravity, for FTL travel, and for hard turns without fatal load shifts and crushing inertial drag—were tuned within working tolerances only. A semblance of Earthlike gravity was needed for the crew to maintain bone mass on long voyages; but it didn’t have to be pretty.
You could not even say Merrimack rocked. Sway, she might, but having done so, she felt no compulsion to fall back and cant the other way. She swayed and she kept going, drew up short against a damper and left one with an unsettled wanting to tip back upright. Space legs needed acquiring. New hands spent much time in the head.
Augustus roused himself up on one elbow. “I am not space sick. I have a lot on my mind.”
Farragut glanced about the torpedo storage bay, the bunk netting strung kitty-corner. “I’ll get you better quarters.”
“Don’t put yourself out.”
“I wasn’t going to put myself out. I was going to put the quartermaster out.”
Augustus let the issue pass with an indolent wave of his hand.
“I have an audience with the Archon of the Myriad,” said Farragut. “Coming down with us? You feel well enough?”
Augustus slowly uncoiled, rose. “The two questions are unrelated. The answers are yes to the first; the second is irrelevant.”
At the appointed time, John Farragut, captain of the Merrimack; Jose Maria Cordillera, civilian biologist and Nobel Laureate; Lieutenant Colonel TR Steele, commander of the Marine companies; Colonel Augustus, the Intelligence Officer; several of the xenos; and the Marine guard assembled in the ship’s displacement bay, each person posted on a transmitter disk, each with a dog collar snapped round his neck. Without the transmitters, receivers, and collars, the margin of error in displacement was far, far too risky for human transport.
The receivers—landing disks—preceded them down. The LDs arrived like an artillery barrage, banging into thick air and clattering and spinning down to rest on the palace’s gem-encrusted floor. One disk missed low; embedded itself like a bomb with a resounding crack and spray of semiprecious stones. Augustus wondered if anyone had told the Arrans what to expect.
Captain Farragut yawned, popped his ears, as the displacement chamber gradually pressurized to five Earth atmospheres, to prevent the abrupt transition to Arran sea level from hammering the party’s sinuses in.
Augustus, standing with the Marines, muttered aside to Lieutenant Colonel Steele: “It’s a pity your uniforms are so utilitarian. The Archon himself is dressed fairly sedately, but his guard has all the ceremonial gold-trimmed gewgaws that dictators like. Can’t your Marines loop some curtain cords round their armpits and wear big furry hats and hang gold mops on their epaulets? At least put on your medals, Steele. Don’t you have enough ribbons to fill up your che
st yet?”
Steele flushed. Kept his icy blue eyes fixed straight ahead. Hissed, “You are so full of it.”
“You make it too easy.”
The Merrimack vanished around them.
At the hour of the Archon’s command, just after sun-down, the beings from outer space thunderclapped into existence on the black disks in the Archon’s audience hall.
Heat enfolded Captain Farragut, air so thick you wore it. His first breath was fragrant, lush, heavy with sea air and living scents.
The landing disks, besides ensuring an intact displacement, bristled with sensors, so John Farragut already knew what would meet his eyes. He was not prepared for the vivid immediacy of it, the astonishing beauty. He could only afford a moment to take it in, the touch of breezes, hot and humid, on his skin; the sound of sea waves rushing softly from somewhere.
Lofty skylights let the starlight in. Wide arches opened to a terrace overlooking an expansive reflecting pool upon which the stars scintillated huge as moons in a deep blue heaven. The moons themselves shone like pale numinous wafers occulting the radiant stars.
Farragut marshaled his attention to the humanoids in the lyrically grand chamber.
Male guards, decked in uncomfortable, showy regalia, regarded him warily with dark, almond eyes.
Tall, deer-eyed, sylphlike women, with flowing manes and elfin faces, clustered along one wall, exchanging glances and private signals, their willowy forms draped to the floor in pastel gauze.
The Archon. The only one who did not gasp or shrink back as the visitors flashed and crackled into existence. Even on an alien face, the Archon’s look of satisfaction was unmistakable. His black eyes gleamed. A contained air of power. In charge and accustomed to it.
The Archon was short. Stately as a handsome animal. He wore a shirt of loose, crisp white linenlike weave, with wide boxy sleeves, and a v-slash down the back to accommodate his neat short mane. His loose black trousers would look quite in place in an Aikido practice.
Behind him towered a monumental inscription—what looked to be an inscription—carved in rose granite over a massive throne, but no translation came to mind as Captain Farragut tried to read it, and he feared his language module had failed him. This first encounter could be very sticky without an accurate translator.
The Archon took a quick survey of the aliens, seemed to be deciding which to address. He dismissed the rank of Marines out of hand. Regarded the scientists briefly, discarded them, too. Did not even glance at Augustus. Quickly narrowed his choices down to Jose Maria Cordillera and Captain Farragut.
The various colors may have confused him. The xeno, Dr. Ling was golden amber; Flight Sergeant Blue was brown; Flight Sergeant Jaxon blacker than the Arran night standing at attention next to Colonel TR Steele, who was as white as humans came.
We look like a litter of Labrador Retrievers, thought Captain Farragut amid the monochromatic Arrans. Farragut wanted to prompt the Archon, but had been advised to let the Archon speak first. And he got the impression that the Archon did not want to be helped. Black eyes flicked between Farragut and Cordillera, searching for signs of leadership.
Dr. Jose Maria Cordillera’s coloring was closest to the Arran red-brown; his bearing that of a diplomat. A striking man in any setting. Slender, cat-muscled. Jose Maria Cordillera made a dignified, aristocratic presence. His long dark hair, cinched with a silver clasp, flowed down his back like a Myriadian’s mane. The Archon wanted it to be Dr. Cordillera.
But he turned to the captain and recited in conclusion, “John Farragut, captain of the U.S.S. Merrimack.”
With a blinding smile, Farragut greeted him in turn: “Archon Donner.”
The Archon returned a very human smile, then corrected his visitor, “Archon. Or Donner. Together is insistent or redundant.”
“Captain Farragut,” Farragut also corrected. “The rest is too long.”
The Archon breathed a light gasp, delighted. “You understood me! You speak my language!” Reciting names was one thing. This alien had just spoken an entire Myriadian sentence.
“Not well,” Farragut warned.
The Archon took two goblets from a waiting server and offered one to Captain Farragut.
Customs varied as widely as the stars, but one stood nearly universal among humanoids as a symbol of unity, trust, and friendship—the sharing of food and drink. It sealed most friendships and just about all unions that could be called marriages.
Hesitation would not wear. There was no doubting the offering’s safety, and safety was not the concern. Protocol was. Farragut asked, “Does one just drink, or are there words to be said?” He did not want to slug back the drink if there was a proper ritual to be observed.
The Archon instructed, “If you choose to accept, you drink first.”
Augustus, his voice a low murmur across the room, like the waves’ rush, footnoted in English, (“The implication being: if you choose not to drink, you are enemies.”)
Farragut lifted his glass in a toast, Earth fashion. “To your health.” And drank.
In deathly silence, the Arrans glared at him. The Archon’s smile vanished.
The cold, sparkling drink went down tastelessly. Something wrong here.
Augustus again, in English: (“The crashing you don’t hear is the sound of a giant brick dropping.”)
(“What did I do?”) John hissed.
(“You ‘you’d’ the Archon as an equal.”)
(“I meant to.”)
(“He doesn’t like it.”)
Farragut lifted his brows in a kind of shrug.
The Archon declared coldly, “I am not accustomed to being talked to so!” Then, suddenly amicable again, declared, “From you, I shall take it.”
Donner had changed his own choice of you. He upgraded Farragut to an equal. The Archon’s glass lifted in imitation. “To your health.” Donner drank, and the room exhaled.
The empty glasses went away so unobtrusively John Farragut did not notice them going. The Archon’s servants were well practiced at being unnoticeable.
Donner introduced no one and asked no names of Captain Farragut’s delegation. There was only Donner and Captain Farragut. Everyone else in the room was furniture.
Ill-mannered furniture. Two of the xenos were whispering together, taking great interest in the floor—a mosaic of precious and semiprecious stones set in lead. Cracks in it and in the marble pillars suggested an unquiet earth. The xenos were discussing seismology; the Archon only saw them eyeing the jewels.
“You came prospecting!” Donner accused Farragut.
“I don’t know how you boys do things on Arra, but where I come from you don’t call your guests thieves,” said Farragut. This encounter was being recorded. Farragut imagined LEN diplomats having seizures at this point in the replay.
“Then you are not claiming my world?” Donner asked, somewhat mollified.
“Of course not. You got here first.”
The whites flared in the Archon’s dark eyes. The room stirred.
(“The discreet approach, hm, John?”)
(“I was just imitating the Archon. He’s blunt.”)
(“Dictators can dish it out, but they don’t usually take it well.”)
And the Archon had had quite enough of the English backchat. He raised his voice, “This is the same as whispering! Thou shalt not whisper in my presence! When you speak, speak to me!”
“I need advice on how to speak to you,” Farragut explained. “I’m new at this language. No disrespect intended. (And, oh shit, Augustus, what did I say now? He’s glaring at me.)”
(“You used the imperial ‘I.’ ”)
But the Archon resumed a magnanimous air and allowed, “You speak my language better than I speak yours.”
“Thank you.”
Augustus: (“He’s not as pissed as he pretends. We’re on camera. A lot of this posturing is for show.”)
The Archon stalked across the vast expanse of jeweled floor to give Augustus a hard look up
and down. At five foot seven, the Archon looked absolutely diminutive before the six-foot-eight Roman. Donner asked dubiously, “This is a female?”
Colonel Steele smirked.
(“It’s the height, shrimp,”) Augustus shot back in English to six-foot Steele, who had never been called “shrimp” in his life. (“Look at the women.”)
Farragut answered the Archon, “He is not female. He is tall.”
“Where are you from?” the Archon demanded.
“My planet is called Earth. Augustus’ planet is called Palatine, but his people came originally from Earth.”
The duality surprised Donner. “Where is Earth? Where is Palatine?”
“A long way from here.”
“Outside?” Donner circled the air with a forefinger. He had human hands, four fingers per hand, opposable thumbs. “Outside my Myriad?”
“Outside the globular cluster, yes.”
“Where? How far?”
(“Okay, somebody give me a distance in local units!”) Farragut called to all present.
A xeno fed him the Myriadian translation of six thousand, four hundred parsecs.
The Archon looked profoundly impressed by the reply. The females looked quite vacant, as if they could not count that high.
Donner asked in wonderment, “Where is the kzachin you came by?”
Farragut glanced to Augustus, as all the xenos tapped at the language modules.
(“I’m pulling up ‘hollow,’ for kzachin,”) said Farragut, perplexed. (“Is he saying they travel between planets by ‘hollows’ or did he change the subject again?”)
Augustus answered in Myriadian, “Ask the Archon if his people used the kzachin to travel to this world from Origin.”
Donner reacted as if a chair had spoken. He would not address a minion, so rather than ask Augustus to explain himself, Donner demanded from Farragut, “What do you know of Origin!”
Farragut deferred. “Colonel Augustus, what do we know of Origin?”
Augustus answered immediately, “The sun is orange. The air is thin. The oceans are less than one percent saline. Origin is larger than Arra, but it is sixty percent the density. Native-born T’Arraiet have a much higher bone density than natives of Origin. A day on Origin is thirty percent longer than on Arra. The period of revolution around Origin’s sun is roughly half a T’Arra year. How are we doing?”
