“What?” Tom demanded. He looked at the display ... and realised the helmsman was probably right. Enemy One was on approach vector to Primrose, but Enemy Two was definitely on an attack vector to Enemy One. They weren't racing to get to Primrose, he saw in astonishment; Enemy Two was trying to head Enemy One off before she reached Primrose. “What the hell are they doing?”
His intercom buzzed. “Sir,” the CAG said, “all fighters are ready to launch.”
“Launch fighters,” Tom said, gritting his teeth. A modern carrier would have had all of its fighters out in space by now. “Order them to cover the carrier.”
He stared down at the display, torn between several conflicting problems. If there had only been one enemy starship, he had to send his starfighters to attack it before it entered engagement range and blew his ship into plasma. But with two enemy ships, one seemingly interested in attacking the other, he wasn't sure what to do. It might be the first real chance to actually talk to the aliens ... or it might be a trick, one intended to lure the humans into a false sense of security. There was no way to know without taking a chance ... and if he happened to be wrong, he and his entire crew would die.
“Update the Admiral,” he ordered, although he knew it was pointless. There was no time to kick the issue upstairs in hopes of receiving orders. Besides, as a Captain in the Royal Navy, it was his job to be decisive. “Launch a stealth platform. I want a full recording available to the Admiral, even if we are killed.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. There was a long pause. “Captain, I’m picking up a message from Enemy One.”
Tom stared in disbelief. “What are they saying to us?”
“I think it’s the start of a First Contact Protocol,” the tactical officer said, after a long moment. “Either they don’t understand English or they’re trying to build up a new protocol for talking to us.”
“I ... see,” Tom said.
He recalled, vaguely, one of the courses he’d had to take at the Academy. The lecturer had pointed out that English had evolved over the years, not least by stealing ideas and concepts from other languages. It was the sheer flexibility of English, she’d said, that made it so useful for human development. But, at the same time, it was so flexible that certain phrases or figures of speech might be different from one place to the next. A British officer might as well be speaking German at times, when addressing an American officer. Having a more formal language barrier, she’d concluded, might have made it simpler to realise that there might well be errors in translation.
For aliens, he suspected from a later briefing paper, it would be even worse. English’s idiosyncrasies, hard enough for humans to follow, would be completely impossible for aliens to understand. Certain forms of data – mathematics, for instance – might well be universal, yet it would be very difficult to hold an open conversation with one of the aliens. And, given that the aliens lived underwater for the most part, it was unlikely that any such conversation could be held without a technological bridge being established.
“Send back our own protocol,” he ordered, “and then try to decipher their message.”
He cursed their luck under his breath. A modern carrier’s analytical staff would have been able to decipher the message, given time, but his ship carried no analysts. Hell, it would take weeks to build up a common understanding even with formal analysts. And they didn't have time ...
You’re supposed to be decisive, he reminded himself. It might well be a trap, but it seemed remarkably pointless. Luring Primrose’s fighters out of position was hardly worth the effort, not compared to the sheer level of firepower the aliens could throw at them. And this could be the chance everyone’s been waiting for.
He keyed his console. “The fighters are to engage Enemy Two,” he ordered. It was going to be bloody. He knew, far too well, just how many point defence weapons an enemy starship carried. “Enemy One is to be watched, but not engaged unless she does something threatening.”
“Aye, sir,” the CAG said. “Fighters on their way.”
He sounded surprised. Tom didn't blame him. If it was a trap, he was giving Enemy One a free shot at his hull. Not, he had to admit, that the aliens needed it. They had to know he couldn't avoid engagement, not if they chose to press the issue. He gritted his teeth again, feeling pain shooting through his gums, then forced himself to relax. They were committed now.
“Enemy Two is closing into engagement range of Enemy One,” the tactical officer warned. “I think they’re locking weapons on her hull.”
Tom found himself praying for the first time in a very long life. His forces were closing in on Enemy Two, but she had enough weapons to hammer Enemy One and fend off his starfighters at the same time. It was going to turn into a nightmare, he realised grimly; he didn't dare risk taking Primrose closer to either ship. The starfighters would have to hold the enemy ship off on their own.
At least they don’t seem to have missiles, he told himself. They don’t seem to have any long-range weapons at all. Why not? They’re well within their capabilities.
“Shit,” the tactical officer breathed. “Enemy Two has opened fire; Enemy One is returning fire.”
Tom sucked in his breath. The two ships were throwing blasts of plasma at each other, each blast capable of doing real damage to his ship if they struck home. The aliens didn't seem to have superior armour, he realised numbly; they were inflicting horrific damage on one another, even if they weren't using the super-cannons some of their frigates carried. But then, if the analysts were correct, those weapons had a very limited range and nothing else.
“Interesting,” the tactical officer mused. “Their plasma blasts seem to be deteriorating as they reach their hulls. Some form of countermeasure?”
“Unknown,” Tom said. It didn't seem to matter. The aliens were still taking a beating. “But if they have a way of breaking up the plasma containment field before it reaches its target, I want to know how they do it.”
On the display, his starfighters were closing in on Enemy Two. The alien didn't bother to wait for them to get into attack range before opening fire, spewing out countless bursts of plasma weapons fire towards them. Tom winced as two of his fighters vanished in flashes of light, their comrades ignoring the losses and diving into engagement range.
“Picking up a second message from Enemy One,” the tactical officer snapped. Red lights flared up on the display as he spoke. “She’s sending us a shitload of data.”
“Store it in a secure dump,” Tom snapped. Trying to sneak viruses or malware into the enemy’s computer systems was a well-known trick and, if nothing else, Ark Royal’s last operation had proved that some human and alien systems could be spliced together. Hell, the aliens had certainly captured enough human computers to work out plenty of ways to slip unwanted programs into their systems. “And then ...”
He broke off as the display changed. Enemy One seemed to stagger, then blew apart into a colossal fireball. Moments later, Enemy Two altered course and started heading back towards Tramline Four, rather than attempting to engage Primrose. Tom watched her go, shrugging off the attempts by his starfighters to slow her down, then sighed bitterly. Whatever Enemy One had in mind, it was lost forever now ... along with the enemy ship itself. Unless, of course, the final desperate message could be deciphered ...
“Recall the fighters,” he ordered. It didn't look as though they were going to succeed in taking down the battlecruiser and he'd already lost seven starfighters in the attempt. “And then send the Admiral a complete update. Tell him that we will return to Target One at best possible speed.”
He sat back in his chair, then pulled up the records from the engagement and started to go through them, one by one. The Admiral might be understanding, but he knew what the REMFs on Earth would do when they saw the records. They’d probably accuse him of failing to protect Enemy One, even though there had been no way to know that Enemy One might be friendly. The only real proof they had was the simple fact t
hat one enemy ship had fired on another ... and blown her into flaming debris. Offhand, Tom couldn't think of a realistic situation where the Royal Navy would sacrifice a modern ship just to bait a trap.
But these guys are alien, he thought. If there were human cultures that were downright weird to his eyes, how weirder might an alien culture be? There were human societies that thought nothing of placing form over substance, men over women or even vice versa. They might have a different idea of what constitutes acceptable losses than we do.
It was a worrying thought. Losing Roosevelt alone had dented the Admiral’s fleet quite badly, even though most of her starfighters had survived. She was only an acceptable loss if they inflicted comparable – proportional – damage on the alien fleet. And there was no way to know if they’d done that ... or if the aliens could absorb all the losses they’d taken so far without wincing.
The Admiral will be the one to decide what to do, he thought, finally. All I can do is keep my ship ready for operations.
“Keep a sharp eye on the data,” he added. “If they did try to sneak programs into our computers, I want to know about it before they can do any real damage.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. There would be no argument, not when the dangers were all too clear. “I won’t do anything with the data until we get it to the fleet.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You know,” Charles remarked, “this is really very creepy.”
The Rhino snorted. “You wouldn’t be one of those people who think that dolphins are actually intelligent?”
Charles looked down at the dolphins as they were lowered into the water. They looked normal, apart from the handful of cybernetic linkages visible against their heads, but their behaviour was odd. Most dolphins were playful, even the ones that had been trained to work beside the Royal Marines or Special Boat Service. These ... just seemed to hang in the water, waiting for the command to move. They didn't even splash water towards the humans when they were lowered into the waves.
“They’re not human,” he said. “I find it ... disturbing.”
He scowled. He’d seen humans who were more machine than men ... and many other horrors, most of them perpetrated on one human by another. The Royal Marines were never dispatched to peaceful parts of the world; he’d seen looting, rape and mass slaughter, all horrible beyond imagination. Seeing dolphins turned into cyber-slaves shouldn't have bothered him, but it did. And he honestly wasn't sure why.
“Quite a few people do,” the Rhino said. “But, in the end, they’re not intelligent.”
Charles couldn't disagree with that, he knew, even though it still bothered him. Human geneticists had been making proposals to uplift dolphins, chimpanzees and gorillas for the last hundred years, ever since genetic manipulation became a viable science. They’d argued that, if humanity was alone in the universe, there was no harm in creating other forms of intelligent life to stand beside their human creators. For once, the governments of Earth had acted with complete uniformity and flatly banned the process. Even Sin City and the rogue asteroid settlements upheld the ban.
But the ban didn't preclude turning animals into cybernetic organisms.
The technology was simple enough, he knew. A human would see the world through the animal’s senses, feel what the animal felt ... and be able to offer suggestions that were almost always taken as orders. There were even adventure parks where human children could ride along in an animal’s mind, despite lingering fears about what contact with non-human minds could do. Given the sheer power of modern VR technology, Charles suspected they had a point. If he ever had children, he promised himself, he was damned if they were being allowed to use VR until they were at least twenty-one.
But it still bothered him, not least because controlling animals was barely scratching the surface of the technology’s potential. Someone could plug themselves into another human’s body – there were places in Sin City where a man could be a woman for a few short hours or vice versa – or even control someone, directly, through cybernetic implants. There were even a handful of asteroid colonies where negative emotions, as defined by the founders, were carefully removed from the minds of the inhabitants. Where was the free will, Charles had asked himself more than once, if someone could be shocked every time they had a negative thought. Eventually, they would be brainwashed into compliance – or dead.
“I know,” he said. “But it only makes it worse.”
On an invisible signal, the dolphins came to life; they swam out, away from the shore, and plunged under the water. Unlike the drones, Charles knew, they wouldn't really disturb the aliens so badly; indeed, they might mistake the dolphins for native creatures they hadn't actually recorded yet. If humans were still recording forms of underwater life on Earth, why couldn't the aliens have the same problem on a colony world? But it still felt wrong.
The Rhino elbowed him as they turned to walk back towards the Forward Operations Base, which had expanded rapidly in the days since their landing. “If they were human instead,” he said, “like the mermen, would it be better?”
Charles had no answer. The mermen had altered themselves to the point they could live and work underwater indefinitely, not unlike the aliens themselves. A few mermen might have been able to open communications, he suspected, but none of them had volunteered to accompany the task force. He had a private theory – and he knew that some of the researchers shared it, because it had been discussed during his training – that the genetic modifications had done something to their minds. They were no longer entirely human.
He looked over at a team of Americans setting up a plasma gun and smiled to himself. If the aliens returned to the planet before the humans were ready to leave, they'd be in for a warm reception. They now knew, thanks to the alien weapons, that they could engage targets in low orbit without problems ... and, with so much space junk still up there, it would be harder for the aliens to move attack ships into orbit. But then, the aliens would probably do the same as their human foes and launch marines from a safe distance. It was a perfectly viable tactic, after all.
The Rhino grunted, then led the way into one of the trailers. Inside, twelve women sat at consoles, their heads linked to a mesh of cybernetic systems. Unlike the dolphins, they could disengage their minds at any time, although it might cost the program a dolphin if they did it at the wrong time. But then, Charles knew just what could happen if an animal died while a human mind was riding it, particularly if there were no filters in place. The human would go into neural shock and, perhaps, die.
He looked down at the women and shuddered, slightly. Their faces were hidden behind their helmets, but their bodies were twitching, as if they were swimming alongside the dolphins – and, in their minds, they were. He couldn't help hearing faint sounds coming from below the helmets, some creepy enough to make him sweat uncomfortably. The women seemed to verge between being in pain to moaning in pleasure. Part of him felt as if he was intruding on their privacy just by listening to them.
The Rhino, for once, had nothing to say as he led Charles into the deeper part of the trailer. A large holographic display hung in front of them, showing the live feed from the dolphins in a manner that looked faintly odd. Charles pushed his concerns aside as he watched the dolphins swimming deeper and deeper under the waves, probing towards the alien settlement in a casual, almost too casual, manner.
“Interesting,” one of the Americans said. Charles glanced at him and read the Army Intelligence patch on his shoulder. “Look at that.”
Charles frowned. For a moment, there was nothing there, but seabed. It wasn't until he’d stared at it for a long moment that ... something ... began to take on shape and form. It looked like a crab ... no, something much larger. He couldn't help thinking of it as a strange cross between a crab, a slug and a lobster. But it was far too large to be natural.
“It looks to be mechanical,” the intelligence officer said. “But it’s just holding position there, as if it were
watching for trouble.”
“A tank, perhaps,” the Rhino said.
Charles couldn't disagree. The aliens seemed to have stationed a number of the strange vehicles below the waves, blocking access from the shore to the underwater settlements. Did they imagine that humans would send their tanks underwater to hunt them down? It might make sense, he told himself, to a race that lived under the waves. He wondered, absently, just what evolutionary path they’d followed. Humans had crawled out of the waters long before taking on their modern form; the aliens, it seemed, had chosen to establish their factories on the surface, but not to remain there permanently.
“We may never know, unless we manage to talk to them,” the Rhino commented. He’d listened to Charles’s commentary in silence. “Maybe they devised ways to use the land before they ever set foot on it, just as we did in space.”
“It would make sense,” Charles agreed. Humanity had spent years planning the use of space before ever establishing regular flights to orbit. “But how did they even consider the possibility.”
The Rhino smirked. “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space,” he quoted. “No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.”
Ark Royal 2: The Nelson Touch Page 27
