Analog SFF, October 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then Ryan heard a tiny voice from somewhere in the booth's depths. “OH, SNIKE,” it said, or something that sounded like that. “WHAT THE FRAP ARE YOU?"

  Ryan looked down. There, on the floor, stood a half-inch figure, covered in a bright-red carapace of something shiny. A helmet and visor obscured what was probably its head, and tiny, gun-like objects were clasped in its four arms.

  Ryan took another step forward for a better look. “Gleimickr?"

  "SNIKE, SNIKE, SNIKE!” said the figure. “YOU'RE A HELL OF A LOT BIGGER THAN THIRTY CHOLTUS!"

  That took Ryan a moment to process, then he almost laughed. So that was why Gleimickr had been so interested in getting feedback on his silly scaling factors. Apparently the transfer allowed him to alter his dimensions at will.

  Ryan was suddenly very happy the booth's electronics were fried. Otherwise, Gleimickr might have been able to teleport back to where he came from and reappear at a more suitable size. Even so, he might still be dangerous. The Outer Vegans undoubtedly had good weapons.

  Gleimickr apparently reached the same conclusion because now all four of his guns were firing at once, though the aim was a bit random. Evidently, panic—like trickery—was a species-crossing characteristic.

  Ryan was a big enough target, though, that he was hard to miss. “Ouch,” he said, as blaster fire pocked his skin. “That hurts."

  Any moment now, Gleimickr was going to start shooting for his eyes, and that might do more than hurt. “Cut that out,” Ryan said. But Gleimickr either wasn't listening or hadn't paid attention to Ryan's explanations of what cyclists do when winning is no longer possible, because he was showing no sign of applying them to himself.

  Irritated, frustrated, but suddenly feeling truly superior, Ryan moved forward...

  ...and stomped, hard.

  He would later learn that all over the planet, other storm troopers met similar fates. Feet proved the deadliest weapon, although cats came in a close second. Apparently there was something about the storm troopers that they simply didn't like. Flyswatters and rolled-up newspapers also proved deadly, as did birds, for those who attempted to escape via antigravity.

  Within a week, there were no more reports of weird red insects, or anything else out of the ordinary. The tabloids continued to scream about alien invasion, but that led everyone else to chalk up the ruined transport booths to a power surge and dismiss the TV broadcasts as a prank.

  Meanwhile, Ryan got a pair of tweezers and began collecting alien equipment. Earth had survived one invasion by luck and miscommunication. If the Outer Vegans found a way to try again, the world's greatest inventor since Edison (and maybe before) intended to be much better prepared.

  And who knows, maybe he'd also find a medkit with the cure to aging.

  Copyright © 2006 Richard A. Lovett

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  FROM WAYFIELD, FROM MALAGASY by Robert J. Howe

  Every culture has its own ideas of “human nature.” When the differences become a matter of life and death....

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Illustrated by John Allemand

  * * * *

  Wayfield stood in the torrential rain, trying to wall off his feelings of despondency behind a professionally somber expression. He didn't think he was making a very good job of it. One of his officers read the traditional verse for the departed souls of Greene, Durban, and Mansourian, committing them forever to deep space. Though the ship had grounded, the verse was fitting, since the crewmembers’ bones would be forever entombed in the lethally radioactive hull of the Malagasy.

  He hadn't lost a crewmember in twenty-nine years of spacegoing, including several gunfights—one that holed his ship's hull. Now he was burying three of his crew in one miserable day. The rescue service's unofficial motto was “you have to go out, you don't have to come back.” It was one thing to lose crewmembers to a rescue mission, though, and another to lose them to a reactor accident. He felt like a failure for allowing three deaths under his command, and more of a failure for not being able to manage the kind of detachment required of a commanding officer.

  Though there was much to be done before sunset, the crew needed a few minutes to catch their wind, literally and figuratively. In addition to the deaths of three shipmates, the space-weak crew was wrung out from the mad scramble to offload everything portable that wasn't contaminated with radiation.

  While the crew stood at attention for a moment of silence, Wayfield's eye wandered over the heaps of gear hurriedly salvaged from the ship, calculating their short-term needs for survival. He hoped they wouldn't end up missing the twenty-one rounds the honor guard used to salute their dead shipmates.

  He worried whether the Unmanned Communication Vehicles made their jumps intact, and if their beacons would be picked up. He hoped his wife and daughter wouldn't find out that Malagasy was declared overdue and have to endure a long, tense search. Luba was a service wife—she would probably handle it well enough—but Lydia had never gotten used to his long patrols, and even as a young woman still got weepy when he left for the port. It would break her heart if they weren't recovered soon.

  Wayfield was yanked abruptly from these maudlin thoughts by calls from the sentries posted at the far edge of the field. The crew stared as one in the direction of the treeline, straining to hear the sentries’ words over the din of the heavy downpour.

  Petty Officer Soyombo came splashing back toward the group, his weapon at port arms, groundside weather gear streaming water. He pulled up breathlessly in front of Wayfield and the others. Though tall and thin like a runner, Soyombo hadn't had the chance to jog ten meters since he'd come aboard the ship, nor were his muscles used to planetary gravity.

  "Skipper, there's people coming up from that village,” he gasped out. “Three or four of them."

  "Humans?” Commander Nylund, Malagasy's executive officer, asked.

  "Yes, ma'am, appeared to be. Mixon is watching them,” Soyombo said. “They're coming right along,” he added anxiously.

  Wayfield looked at his executive officer. “Okay, XO, get ship's company deployed in a perimeter. Make sure all the weapons are safed."

  Nylund nodded and turned to the division heads, who'd already heard the captain. “Jan,” she said to the operations officer, “put your people along the treeline.” She turned to Lieutenant French, the engineering officer. “Put yours about halfway back to the ship."

  As the officers got their crewmembers disposed, Nylund raised her voice to a bellow to address the entire ship's company.

  "All right,” she shouted, “weapons on safe and pointed at the ground. Watch your officers for their lead."

  They all looked nervous, Wayfield thought. Only a very few of the veterans had ever been in a fight, and none had ever made first contact. Still, they carried out their orders steadily enough, especially for a crew that had just survived a ditching and the deaths of three shipmates.

  By the time the crew was spread out in defensive positions, Petty Officer Mixon walked out of the treeline followed by the three natives.

  The three men were all tall, dark-haired, and bearded. They were apparently trying to talk to Mixon, who was ignoring them and heading straight for Wayfield and Nylund. Wayfield noticed that the two petty officers guarding them held their weapons with white knuckles.

  "Easy does it,” Wayfield said in an undertone to the nervous guards. “Nobody's going to get hurt today."

  From their similar height, rusty complexion, and features, the natives could be brothers. Their clothes were slightly unusual—jumper-like tops and close-fitting trousers—and the weave of the garments was a bit loose and uneven, but nothing that would have gotten a second look in any cosmopolitan port. None carried anything that looked like a weapon, though they could well have them concealed under their clothes.

  The natives continued to try to talk to Mixon once he stopped in front of Wayfield. After Mixon shook his head vehemently and pointed at the captain, one
of the trio—distinguished by a missing patch of beard where his chin looked scarred—turned to Wayfield and appeared to pick up the conversation where he'd left off with the sailor.

  The natives’ language wasn't remotely familiar to Wayfield, and he'd heard a lot of strange tongues in his years of service. He motioned over Carde, the ops officer, who'd recently been through Boarding Officer School.

  "You recognize this language, Jan?” he asked.

  "It's an outworld dialect of some kind, Captain,” Carde said. “I think..."

  The native who'd been addressing Wayfield looked from him to Carde and back, then said in passably accented Standard, “It's an outworld dialect of some kind, Captain."

  * * * *

  Most of the crew was already at their stations when general quarters sounded on the SGC Malagasy: the delta-vee alarm always brought curious off-watch personnel to the pilothouse and engineering control room.

  PT3 Mansourian, on throttle watch, was the first to notice the radiation leak, and the first to die. Because of a design flaw in the ventilation system, there were some dead spots in the air circulation, and the steady ooze of highly radioactive coolant hadn't reached any sensors to trigger an alarm. Mansourian used the IC to tell the engineering officer of the watch about the leak.

  On the bridge, Wayfield didn't know how widespread the leak was, but he had to assume the worst.

  "What's the nearest jump point?"

  "Captain, the nearest loop takes us further from a known system; so does the next closest,” the watch officer said.

  With Wayfield looking over his shoulder at the nav screen, the officer found a jump to a charted solar system with a habitable planet, though one without a port, or even a full descriptor in the files. A G-type star, with one E-type planet, noted in passing by a survey ship, but only sampled from orbit. “Probably no IIL,” the surveyor had written: no indigenous, intelligent life. As if they could tell from a few orbital passes.

  The jump was nineteen hours away at maximum sustainable acceleration—weeks closer than their destination port, and almost two months closer than their point of departure. Not knowing how long he'd have reactor power, Wayfield ordered a course to the newly surveyed solar system at two-thirds MSA.

  Once Malagasy was underway toward the jump point, Wayfield ordered its three UVCs launched: two for the jump back to the ship's point of departure and a third for the jump to their original destination.

  From where they were, sending a radio message though straightspace was useless. It would take thousands of years to arrive at the first habitable outpost, much less one that could launch a rescue effort. The UCVs were programmed to send a Mayday once they reached the far side of their respective jumps, continuously broadcasting Malagasy's situation report, intended touchdown, and course and speed information.

  If the UCVs worked, their chances were fair that another ship would raise the beacon, but the version Malagasy carried was being phased out of the fleet because of intermittent jump failures. The vehicle would run up to the hole, then the logic circuit would fail to pull the trigger, and the UCV would sail on uselessly in straightspace forever.

  Whether a rescue could be mounted before they ran out of food, or succumbed to disease or hostile fauna, was an open question. Some uncatalogued planets had Earth-normal strains of flora and fauna, seeded during successive pulses of human expansion through loopspace, but that also increased the possibility of lethal indigenous microbes.

  * * * *

  The landing itself would be the moment of maximum danger, when the thrust required to settle the ship gently on the ground would call for considerable power. Everything that could be quickly offloaded from the ship had been stacked in orderly piles along the passageways that served the cargo elevator, with foodstuffs and the most critical gear—weapons, Field Nanodox, and ground weather clothing—preloaded into the elevator.

  The leak worsened on the run-up to the jump. When the ship adopted its stern-down attitude for landing, radioactive coolant was going to pool on the aft bulkhead of the reactor space, what would be the overhead of the control room. The gastight bulkhead would prevent any leakage, but depending on how much coolant ran off the reactor during descent, it could give off a lethal dose of radiation to the operators standing in the compartment just below.

  It was how they lost Greene, and Durban, who went in to get him.

  Wayfield was immensely relieved when the cutter dropped into straightspace and found the planet right where it was supposed to be. They made two passes to survey the planet for a drop site. On the second, Carde called him over to the IR display of the groundtrack.

  The ops officer pointed out a cluster of red hotspots near a cooler blue band. “Skipper, I make those cooking fires along a stream,” he said. “And these,” he pointed to a series of warm yellow blobs around the hotspots, “I make people—almost certainly humanoid by body temperature and conformation."

  No indigenous, intelligent life, my ass, Wayfield thought. “Very well,” he said. “That's where we'll drop the ladders."

  * * * *

  When the native mimicked Carde's words in Standard, his two companions stopped trying to talk to the other crewmembers and gave Carde their undivided attention. Likewise, all the hushed talk among the crew stopped immediately. Carde pointed to the captain, the XO, and himself in turn, and said their names and ranks.

  The native with the bald patch on his chin appeared to understand immediately. He repeated the names, nodding to each of them, then pointed at himself and said, “Boget.” He then pointed to the other natives and said names that sounded to Wayfield like “Plensow” and “Garr.” He then waved to indicate all of the crew and pointed at the grounded Malagasy, then pointed up into the streaming sky.

  It was an intimidating display of composure and intelligence, Wayfield thought. Strange people had apparently come from the sky in an unfamiliar object, yet the native had immediately inferred those facts and seemed unfazed by them.

  "Yes,” Carde said, nodding his head. He indicated the crew and the cutter. “We are off the ship."

  Boget said “Ship,” and started walking toward it.

  "No!” Carde had to take two steps to get in front of the native. “Radiation—dangerous!” he said.

  Boget stopped short and looked surprised. He pointed at his eye and at the ship, then made to step past Carde. His meaning was clear: I want to get a closer look.

  The armed crewmen held their weapons self-consciously, not sure if they should intervene. Wayfield shook his head and made a palm-down motion to them.

  Carde yelped “No! Wait!” and again stepped in front of the native, who was now plainly annoyed. Carde looked around, obviously trying to think of a way to explain the invisible threat of radiation without provoking the man. He bent over and picked up a fist-sized rock.

  "Look” he said, pointing at the native, then at himself. Carde pantomimed hitting himself with the rock while grimacing theatrically.

  "Bad,” he said, “Dangerous!"

  Boget looked blank.

  Carde repeated the action, saying “Dangerous!” emphatically. Then he pointed at the ship again: “Dangerous!"

  The native looked at Carde, then at Malagasy. “Ship dangerous,” he said.

  "Yes, yes!” Carde said, nodding extravagantly. “Dangerous, bad."

  Once again, Wayfield was struck by the native's quick grasp. Boget wasn't just mimicking Standard. Given even the slightest context he understood the language almost as fast as he heard it.

  * * * *

  All of this was taking place in a cold, drenching rain. Even wearing groundside weather gear, the crew was suffering from the wet and the five-degree temperature. Who knew what bugs this planet had? The weaker the crew's resistance—already compromised by stress—the more likely they'd sicken. Malagasy's single medical corpsman, Durban, lay entombed in the dead hull.

  "Lieutenant, ask him about shelter,” Wayfield said. Carde seemed to be doing well with Boget, an
d Wayfield didn't want to muddy the waters.

  Carde launched into the question, mostly through pantomime. The native seemed to grasp the idea of shelter, or at least protection from the rain, quickly enough, but the officer couldn't get across the need to get the crew out of the weather.

  Carde turned to him. “Captain, why don't a few of us go back to the village with them?"

  Wayfield hesitated for a moment. This was a tough call. They hadn't long until nightfall. Would the temperature drop below freezing at night? It seemed possible. On the other hand, they'd set the ship down less than a kilometer from the native settlement.

  Finally he said, “Okay, Lieutenant, good idea. Have Soyombo and a couple others go with you, and make sure you have lights. You should start back in, say, two hours."

  Wayfield wasn't happy about having his ops officer go off with a lightly-armed party, but they needed information, and there was too much work to be done getting the salvaged gear sorted out to mount a larger exploration party.

  "XO, let's get as much of the salvage under cover as we can,” he said. “Get them started on some kind of shelter, and get at least one fire going.” He gestured to the treeline. “There must be some standing wood dry enough to burn, even in this downpour."

  "Most of the food and weather-sensitive gear is under tarps, so we're okay there,” Nylund said. “Once we get a cover overhead, I'm going to start resting them in sections."

  Wayfield assented, and Nylund went off to organize the crew, shoulders slumped with fatigue. Like many of the crew, she hadn't slept much since the reactor emergency began. Despite logging more than the required hours on the shipboard exercisers—he was a stickler for that—the planetary gravity was wearing them all down rapidly.

  Watching the crew gamely get to work in the cold and wet, he tried to suppress his own exhaustion and the creeping defeatism that came with it. Despite the fatalities, things weren't as bad as they could be. If the natives could scratch out a living here, his crew could probably survive long enough to be rescued.