by Tori Harris
“Am I to conclude that I am also your de facto prisoner, Captain?”
“Not at all. But you are, nevertheless, subject to my orders, which are driven primarily by operational requirements. Before volunteering for the Legara mission, you told Admiral Sexton you wished to be considered an ally, fully independent from the Pelaran Alliance. I presume this is still the case, is it not?”
“Yes, of course. And at the moment, I believe I can best be of service if you will allow me to leave your ship.”
“Noted. And I will be happy to do so when I deem the timing to be appropriate. Look, Griffin, I’m sure you can appreciate that, as captain, I am not in the habit of explaining my orders. But Fleet very much appreciates your assistance with the Krayleck Empire, and it is our desire to continue to — for lack of a better term — cultivate our relationship with you. Over time, we will earn one another’s trust. Do you agree?”
“I do indeed.”
“That being the case, I need you to be patient and trust my judgement while we assess the situation on the surface. Extracting you from our cargo bay will take time — time during which we will be unable to respond to whatever events may transpire with the alien ship. We may well need your help, and having you aboard gives us the option to have you accompany us if we need to pursue the craft when it departs. That’s the best I can do for now. We will update you as more information becomes available. Prescott out.”
Drawing in a deep breath in an attempt to refocus his mind, Prescott glanced at his first officer and shook his head.
“You were more patient than I would have been,” Reynolds commented with a raised eyebrow.
“Mm hmm, maybe so. But it occurred to me we wouldn’t be much help in dealing with the aliens on the surface if the one in the back of our ship decided to blast its way out of the flight deck and then shortly thereafter attacked the Yucca Mountain Shipyard.”
“Well, there is that, I guess. In any event, while the two of you were having your chat, we received Fleet-wide Flash traffic from Admiral Sexton’s office at TFCHQ. There’s really nothing new other than the ship finally deciding to land in Berth 10. Captain Oshiro’s people are still attempting to communicate, but there has been no response so far.”
During the brief trip home from Legara, both Prescott and Reynolds had worked frantically between C-Jumps to gather what little information had been available concerning the arrival of the alien vessel. Although its actions thus far were troubling on a number of levels, both officers were relieved to hear that it did not appear to be outwardly hostile and had taken no aggressive actions while they were en route.
“Sir, we have received permission to join the Yucca Mountain vidcon,” Dubashi reported from the Comm/Nav console. “There are quite a few attendees, including Admirals Sexton and White, along with most of the Leadership Council. Stand by one, sir … we are also receiving a separate hail from the Yucca Mountain Shipyard.”
“Captain Oshiro?” Prescott asked.
“No, sir. He says his name is …” Dubashi paused, knowing that what she had been about to say would sound wholly ridiculous. “One moment, Captain.”
“Is there a problem, Lieutenant?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I was attempting to authenticate the source of the signal, but I am unable to do so at the moment. The sender claims to be one of the aliens aboard the Yucca Mountain ship. He says his name is ‘Rick.’”
“Rick? Seriously? That’s all he said?”
“Yes, sir. The hail is text-only at this point, but he is offering a vidcon signal. I did ask for a confirmation of his name, but he just repeated the same message as before.”
“Is our AI handling the translation, or theirs?” Prescott asked, simultaneously recognizing the familiar sound of Commander Reynolds stifling a chuckle from the seat beside him.
“Theirs,” Dubashi replied, grateful for the opportunity to turn back around in her chair to check her Comm console once again.
“Ah, I see. Probably just some kind of translation hiccup then.”
“Maybe so, Captain, but Yucca has been transmitting lexical data since they arrived. So either they already incorporated the data into their comm system —”
“Or they had it before they got here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s fine, Lieutenant, let’s not get weirded out just because we’ve got ourselves an unknown alien who prefers to be on a first name basis.”
“Do you think we should respond to his hail with most of Fleet’s leadership already sitting on Oshiro’s call?” Reynolds asked.
Prescott turned back to his XO, paused to consider her question for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders noncommittally before continuing. “I don’t see why not. For whatever reason, we seem to have become the preferred point of contact for introductions to new species. Besides, in my mind, TFC’s big picture goal is to make contact with the aliens and determine their intentions, regardless of who from the organization does the talking. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose you could make that argument,” she sighed. “Frankly, under the circumstances, I’d love it if they would just talk to Admiral Sexton or even someone from the Leadership Council. But since they’ve ignored all prior attempts at communication and chosen instead to contact us directly …”
“They did indeed. And given their timing, I think we have to assume they intentionally delayed making contact until we arrived.”
“Lovely — and there’s that vaguely nauseous feeling again.”
“It’ll be fine, Commander. I think we can also assume they would have already started shooting if that had been their intention. If our new friend … ‘Rick,’ I guess, asks us something we aren’t comfortable answering, we’ll just have to get back to him later. Lieutenant Dubashi, please let Captain Oshiro know what we’re about to do, then patch his call in with ours. As soon as you have them online, open a vidcon with the alien ship.”
“Aye, sir.”
It took Dubashi only a few moments to accomplish this task, after which a chime from the Comm/Nav console indicated that Tom Prescott and crew were once again about to become the first Humans to formally greet a new alien species.
“On-screen, please,” Prescott ordered, not waiting for Dubashi to prompt him. In stark contrast to previous first contacts, the face that now appeared on the view screen, while undeniably alien, was perfectly familiar to everyone on the bridge. In fact, the creature’s appearance — huge, oval-shaped eyes, diminutive facial features, and grey-colored skin — immediately struck Prescott as stereotypical almost to the point of being comical.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he heard Ensign Fisher mutter under his breath.
“Hello,” Prescott began, surprised that he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he stared into the Grey’s depthless, black eyes. “I am Captain Tom Prescott of the Terran Fleet Command starship Theseus.”
“Fugitive,” the alien replied, the merest hint of a smile playing at the corners of its small mouth.
“I’m sorry?”
“The name of your ship is TFS Fugitive, right? You said ‘Theseus,’ but I’m pretty sure you broke that one. Hey, look, we sympathize. Miguel over there breaks stuff all the time,” the alien said, then leaned to his left to ensure the camera could capture what was behind him. “Say hello, Miguel,” he called, apparently without taking his enormous eyes off the camera.
In the background was a large, comfortable-looking chair facing a bank of what must have been workstations of some sort. Upon prompting from the first alien, a grey hand with long, spindly fingers — presumably belonging to “Miguel” — rose above the back of the chair, waved briefly, then disappeared once again from view.
“Don’t mind him, he really hates handling much of anything that’s not part of his daily routine, so he leaves all of this, uh, formal stuff to me.”
On Fugitive’s bridge, the first six Human beings to “formally” participate in the long-anticipated arrival of
“Grey aliens” offered nothing more than blank, dumbfounded stares in reply.
After several seconds of silence, the first alien took it upon himself to restart the conversation with his stunned hosts. “So … as I said in my earlier message, my name is Rick,” he began again, his ship’s AI prompting the camera to zoom out so that he could tap the embroidered, rectangular name tag above his left breast pocket for emphasis. To Prescott and crew, the alien’s uniform — if it could be referred to as such — looked more like a set of dark blue coveralls of the type often associated with auto mechanics.
“I, uh …” Prescott finally resumed, his mind still racing to process everything he was seeing on the view screen. “This is my first officer, Commander Sally Reynolds,” he finally said, hoping the introduction would provide him with a few desperately needed seconds to recover his wits.
“Hi, Rick,” she said as if chatting comfortably with a friend of a friend she had just met at a weekend social gathering. “I assume that’s not really your name, though, right?”
The alien made a brief chirping sound that she took to be a chuckle before answering. “There’s a classic animated comedy bit where a Human asks that very question of the first alien she meets. He responds that to pronounce his name correctly would require him to pull out her tongue.”
“That would probably be The Simpsons,” she replied without hesitation, “and I’m guessing it was one of the Halloween episodes, since they always seemed to include aliens. That show is beyond ancient but still has quite a cult following since it was the only series in the history of television to air for more than a century. You can still access the reruns online, believe it or not.”
In her peripheral vision, Reynolds couldn’t help noticing the “get to the point” expression now clouding her captain’s face. “Anyway … I don’t mind telling you this conversation seems exceedingly weird to me so far,” she concluded.
Rick repeated his chirping sound several times, then tilted his head inquisitively before responding. “Weird based on what, exactly? Your own preconceived notions of how first contact situations are supposed to unfold? I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that the reason we chose to speak with you rather than your colleagues down here on the surface is that — albeit largely by circumstance — your crew is the only group of Humans that has amassed some experience in meeting new species for the first time. Incidentally, how many species have you encountered thus far, Commander Reynolds?”
“Including you? Five, I think … six if we count both the Guardian spacecraft and the Pelaran we met as independent, sentient life forms.”
Reynolds had always assumed from the many descriptions of the Grey alien species she had read over the years that their faces would be largely inexpressive, but now recognized this notion to be completely inaccurate. Something about the way she answered Rick’s question had caused an immediate change in his face she recognized as a troubled expression — almost as if he had found her response to be either inaccurate or disagreeable in some fashion. Whatever it was, he had apparently decided to file it away for another time so that they might continue with the current thread of their discussion.
“By convention, we normally include so-called nonbiological intelligence in a separate category, although it can become quite difficult to classify which ones are biological, let alone which ones are intelligent. If you’re interested, we have a great deal of information we can share along these lines. It might surprise you to learn, for example, that there are …” Rick paused to call over his shoulder, “hey Miguel, how many planets with advanced, sentient lifeforms in this galaxy?”
Somewhere offscreen, “Miguel” could be heard mumbling something unintelligible that his ship’s translation AI chose to ignore. “Forty-two thousand six hundred and ninety-three,” Rick repeated after a brief pause. “That’s just the biological ones theoretically capable of eventually developing interstellar travel. Fortunately for all of us, I suppose, the vast majority of them never actually do. My point is that there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ first contact. And no matter how you expect the situation to unfold when you meet a new species — even one such as ours with which you already have a degree of familiarity — you’ll be wrong … every single time.”
“I’m sure that’s good advice, thank you,” Reynolds replied, pausing to prompt her captain to take over the conversation once again. While Rick had been speaking, she realized with some alarm that she might have already divulged classified information, or, at the very least, information closely associated with things she had no business discussing with an alien species they knew very little about. Strangely, there was something about the Greys — even if it was nothing more than a built-in assumption of how advanced they were — that made the idea of having anything less than open, unguarded conversation seem a bit absurd. Is it even possible for us to reveal anything they don’t already know? she wondered, while simultaneously admonishing herself to get a better handle on what was coming out of her own mouth.
“Forgive me for asking this,” Prescott finally chimed in, “and I know there are far more important questions on the minds of our leadership team who are monitoring this conversation …”
“They’ll get their turn, Captain. Keep in mind that we called you, not them. As you might imagine, Miguel and I have done this kind of thing many, many times, and our people have been doing it for …” Rick paused as if considering how much information he was willing to share at the moment. “Let’s just say we’ve been handling what you call first contact situations for a very long time. And after all that experience, you know what we’ve found works best? Simple conversation. That’s it. We start a dialogue, we ask questions, and if everything goes well, we have a laugh or two. On the occasions we’ve tried to make the process more complicated or formal than that, things never seem to work out as well. So let’s hear it, Captain Prescott, what’s your first question?”
“Alright then, what’s the deal with the coveralls?”
“Oh, God, you thought we’d be mother-naked, didn’t you?”
“Well, I … yeah, I guess I did,” Prescott nodded with a candid smile. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a depiction of your species where you were wearing clothes of any kind.”
“Right, and we also weren’t ‘depicted’ as having any sort of, shall we say, equipment either, were we?”
“Not that I recall, no.”
“That, Captain Prescott, is an unfortunate, but somewhat typical example of the strangely misguided sense of humor long shared by many in our science officer corps. Although I’m sure Miguel here would be more than happy to take sole credit for this particular example, those of his ilk have been perpetrating this kind of nonsense for a very long time. It’s a bit hard to explain, but most Human encounters over the years with what you have generically referred to as the “Greys” did not involve actual flesh and blood members of our species.”
“So what are we talking about, then? Droids? Some sort of holographic projection?”
“I’m afraid without a common frame of reference, what they are is quite difficult to describe. But from your perspective, thinking of them as a type of droid seems reasonable enough. Our ship has a variety of missions, Captain, the vast majority of which are completely automated. Miguel and I are mostly aboard just to monitor the systems and fix anything that breaks. We’re glorified custodians when it comes right down to it. Anyway, on occasion, certain protocols do require physical contact with Humans, but we are strictly forbidden from participating directly. There’s only the two of us, so exposing ourselves to terrified Terrans twice our size would be far too risky. Oh, and the genderless thing … I don’t even know what to tell you about that. Somewhere along the way, someone apparently decided it would be hilarious if we were naked, but I suppose making us anatomically correct must have crossed some kind of line in their opinion.”
Behind Rick, a steady stream of enthusiastic, mirth-filled chirping sounds could be heard e
manating from the back of Miguel’s chair. Rick paused for a moment, slowly shaking his head with a surprisingly clear look of disapproval on his face.
“Anyway, back to your original question,” he continued. “I doubt my explanation of our coveralls will make much sense to you either. Let’s just say ships assigned to the same types of missions as ours have a tendency to encounter quite a few Humans who wear them. Over time, it became a sort of running joke until, at some point, I guess someone actually tried them on and realized how great they are. Since then, one of the first things we do when we begin a new mission series is to, uh … borrow a few pairs. You know, like a souvenir of sorts.”
“They must have stolen them off a pretty short mechanic,” Reynolds commented under her breath.
“Oh, good one, Commander. Ten minutes in and we’ve already progressed to height jokes. I’ll have you know that some of us exceed a meter and a half with our boots on … but, yeah, I guess the real Rick and Miguel must have been pretty short, although we didn’t have the pleasure of meeting either of them. Anyway, blue coveralls with embroidered name tags have more or less become our unofficial uniform.”
Both officers stared back at the alien for a long moment, neither one quite sure where to take the conversation next.
“Seriously?” Reynolds finally asked, glancing first at her captain and then back up at the screen. “Quite a bit of what you’ve said so far makes it seem like you guys are just yanking our chain for some reason.”
“Relax, Commander, we’re just having a conversation, right? How else are we supposed to get acquainted with each other? Surely you don’t think everything we talk about has to be some sort of dire warning about how your world is in imminent danger,” Rick said, glancing thoughtfully off to the side for a moment. “Although, now that I say that, your world actually is, but more on that later.”
“Wait,” Prescott began, “what are you —”
“Look, I’ll be happy to answer this or any other question I’m allowed to answer … which, it turns out, is almost anything you’re likely to ask. But I should go ahead and warn you up front that every question we answer will probably generate a great many more. There actually is a purpose to our visit, however, and at some point, we do have a few more serious items we must address during our time together. We’ll get to all that stuff when we have all the right people in the room. Sound good?”
