The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  Ingram could have stayed there all day trying to have a conversation with the creature, but she’d reached the stage where she needed to talk to the biologists.

  “You’re fascinating,” she told the bird. “I wish I knew more about you. I bet we’ll get to know each other well, though. I’ve got to go now, but I’ll see you later.”

  She felt so discourteous leaving it in mid-conversation that she gave it a little wave as she turned away. She could’ve sworn that it bobbed its head politely at her.

  Now don’t get stupid about this. Lots of animals do that bobbing motion. You don’t know the first damn thing about avian biology, least of all here. Stop it.

  She drove off, half-expecting Mr Crow to come flapping after her, but it stayed put and she finally lost sight of it in the rear-view as she drove over the crest of the hill. She rushed back to the mess, bursting to tell anyone who’d listen, but it was empty and this couldn’t wait until lunch. She hunted for an audience. She found Bissey, Haine, and Jeff Aiken with one of the agri planners, Andy Braithwaite, in the dry lab. They were all leaning over a chart on the table.

  “You’re back early, ma’am,” Bissey said.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve had a conversation with one of the locals.”

  “Of course you have, ma’am.”

  “The big black bird.”

  “Take more water with it next time, Bridgers,” Haine said. He rarely called her that these days. “It worked for me.”

  “Come on, chaps, this is exciting science. The bird showed up and I started talking to it. And it mimicked me. Like a parrot. Only it didn’t stop there.”

  They all straightened up and forgot the crop map for a while.

  “Did you record it?” Haine asked.

  “I was too gobsmacked, to be honest.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “It reproduced my voice, and Solomon’s, and it used his name. I didn’t have to prompt it. I showed it a picture of a quadrubot and it said ‘Sol.’ It even called me ma’am.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then they all burst out laughing.

  “It’s encouraging that the local wildlife respects rank,” Bissey said. “But I hope you’re winding us up. Because that’s too weird.”

  “You buggers don’t believe me, do you? It even says bloody hell. I don’t think it’s just repeating what I say. It seems to understand context.”

  That just started them laughing uncontrollably again.

  “All right,” she said. “You try it. It’s bound to come back and hang around, because it’s curious, so if you don’t believe me, go and speak to it and tell me what happens.” Ingram turned to Jeff Aiken. “Chief, you were officially the most cynical man in the Royal Navy. What would convince you?”

  “I’ll engage it in a debate on Kierkegaard, ma’am. That’s my litmus test.”

  She had to join in the laughter now or lose her dignity. She knew what she’d heard, but like all apparently impossible things, it made her doubt herself. The debate continued on and off for the rest of the day, and carried on in the mess in the evening. This time the xenobiologists joined in. They were buzzing with excitement, which made Ingram feel less like she’d imagined more comprehension on the bird’s part than was actually happening. Nina Curtis kept going back to the image of the quadrubot.

  “That’s the significant thing,” she said. “You didn’t mention Solomon’s name before you showed it the picture?”

  “No, I just took out my screen. It definitely reacted to the image. It kept repeating Solomon and Sol, and it mimicked his voice.”

  “If it can understand that pixels on a flat piece of plastic are a representation of a totally different three-dimensional object, then there’s some conceptual thinking going on. Dogs and parrots can do that. Many species can. It’s still unusually intelligent, though. I’ll reserve judgment until we see it, but I’m excited.”

  “I think you just had first contact, Captain,” Haine said.

  “No. I think Solomon did.”

  Now Ingram was worried that the bird wouldn’t return and she’d have no way of proving its unsettling command of language. She looked out for it the next day, and even drove out to the site where she’d found it before, but there was no trace. The rest of the week turned into a vigil for her, waiting for it to show up and prove to her that she wasn’t losing her marbles.

  Maybe it only wants to know what’s happened to Sol. We might not be as interesting as something that doesn’t smell alive but acts like it is. Who knows? But isn’t it amazing that it cares?

  On Friday morning, though, Mr. Crow returned. Ingram was alerted to its arrival by Jeff rapping on the admin office door.

  “There’s a vulture here to see you, ma’am,” he said.

  “At last.” She jumped up and grabbed her jacket. Now she’d either look like a fool or she could show off her wonderful discovery. “Have you tried speaking to it?”

  “It asked for you personally.”

  “Hah.”

  “No, it really did. Commander Devlin was out front and it sort of ignored her, looked around, and then went back to her and said Ma’am Ingram Bridget a few times.”

  “Good grief.”

  “There’s quite a crowd down there now.”

  “Don’t scare it off, for goodness’ sake.”

  Ingram walked out through the front doors with Jeff behind her. The bird was sitting in front of the flagpoles — or standing, it was hard to define — and gazing up at the flags. Nina and her team were standing back a few yards, videoing it and having intense whispered discussions. Ingram went up to the bird, still wary of the big beak and those strong wings.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Ma’am hello. Hello hello.” That elicited a collective gasp from the biologists. It cocked its head to look at Jeff. “Chief. Chief.”

  Jeff, a man who would barely raise an eyebrow at an inbound missile on the radar, looked surprised. “Chief Petty Officer Jeff Aiken,” he said.

  “Jeff Chief. Hello.”

  “Blimey.” Jeff actually smiled. He looked at Ingram. “It’s a shame Sol isn’t around to see this. He never mentioned that these things talked. I assume he never knew.”

  “You make him sound dead, Chief,” Ingram said.

  The bird suddenly jerked its head up. “Sol dead no no no.”

  Ingram realised she wasn’t surprised at all by where this was going, but when she glanced up to make sure the biologists were getting all this, they looked as if they’d stopped breathing. Stunned didn’t begin to describe it.

  Jeff stood in front of the bird as if he was talking to a kid. “No, Sol’s not dead. Sol’s okay. But we can’t talk to him. Radio. Broken.” Jeff indicated the receiver in his uniform shirt pocket, held it to his ear, and shook his head. “No signal. No. Can’t hear him.”

  The bird just looked at Jeff as if he was an idiot. “Hear again,” it said. “Sol hear.”

  “I haven’t got a clue what it means,” Jeff said, “but I don’t need a PhD in big words to realise that thing knows what it’s saying. It’s trying to communicate with us.”

  He detached his radio from the lanyard and held it out very gingerly. The bird rocked slightly like a man sitting back on his heels and lifted its wings. Now Ingram could see what that joint on the forward edge really was, and it wasn’t like a bat’s wing at all. What she’d thought was a claw, the equivalent of a thumbnail in a human, unfolded from the feathers, and it was something entirely unexpected.

  This bird had fingers. It had hands.

  “Oh my,” Ingram said.

  There must have been thirty people out there now watching the spectacle, but there wasn’t a sound, not a breath, not a creak of boots, not a rustle of fabric. The world had stopped.

  The bird took the radio very carefu
lly, examined it, and somehow opened the plastic case to peer inside. It stared at the innards for a long time, then poked a thin, clawed forefinger into it, prodded it with the tip of its beak, and put it back together again.

  “Broken no,” it said to Jeff, holding the radio out to him. “Broken no.” Then it jerked its head back and looked up into the sky. “Up broken.”

  Every bit of colour had drained from Jeff’s face. He turned to Ingram.

  “Ma’am, I think our friend here is confirming there’s nothing wrong with the radio, but it might be a problem with the signal.”

  That was the only way Ingram could interpret it, too. She couldn’t even look at the biologists. For all she knew, they could have fainted by now. And she had no idea where this left Nomad or anyone’s view of humanity’s place in the universe.

  “Friend,” the bird said, giving its wings a shake. “Help friend — friend help.”

  It was very early days, but that sounded a lot like a plea for co-operation. Ingram wondered what help an intelligent avian might need.

  EPILOGUE

  Opis, Pascoe System,

  5 Kilometres Outside Nomad Base:

  two Days Later

  They’re odd things, humans. It’s their bones. The way that their skin stretches over their skeleton makes them look like something’s trapped inside and struggling to get out. But I mustn’t stare. We share this world now. We both have reasons for coming to this place.

  But they do look so much like fledglings. It’s that unfeathered skin.

  Jeff is a human I like to speak with, but much that he says makes little sense. He’s squatting on the hillside at the moment in the long garnet grass, glancing up and down between the sky and the device he’s holding, searching for something. His arm moves slowly. I think he’s looking for his link with home. But he puts the device inside his garment, gets to his feet, and stares into the clouds with one hand clutching the strap that holds his weapon on his shoulder.

  Without taking his eyes off whatever it is he can see, he raises his other hand with the palm towards him. Then he extends his middle finger. He’s so still for a moment that I wonder if this is some ritual I should copy to show respect. It takes some practice to mirror the way he isolates a single digit like that, but I manage. He doesn’t look at me.

  “You’ve got yours coming, arseholes.” He’s talking to the air. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood how their communications work. Can another human hear him? I thought their relay was dead. “Karma’s a bitch.”

  Jeff has done this twice today. I understand how upset the humans must be to know that they can’t talk to their comrades. I settle next to Jeff and try to coax out an explanation. Their language is linear and can be learned, but their thoughts... they’re layered and tangled.

  “Sad?” I ask.

  “Annoyed. Angry.”

  “With?”

  “Earth.”

  “Whole world?”

  Jeff does a twitch of his shoulders. I’ve seen the other humans do it. He’s still staring into the impossible distance between the hillside and his home world, which he can’t possibly see from here.

  “Feels like it.”

  He’s talking to himself now, as humans seem to. He knows I can’t work out what that might mean, at least not yet, so he’s saying it to hear the words himself. I must study this habit. They’ll be our neighbours for some time.

  But it would be very good if they stayed. They’re soldiers. Soldiers are good to have around when you have barbarians for neighbours. And they seem very like us in certain ways that matter. They watch out for one another.

  “I don’t think they’re going to get here,” Jeff says.

  “How you know?” My English is much better now. “They say?”

  “No, Fred, they don’t say. That’s the problem. Something bad happened, they wouldn’t tell us what it was, and then they cut our comms link.”

  My name isn’t Fred, but it’s what he calls me. He can’t pronounce our initial hreh, so that’s as close as he can get. Humans are very poor at sounds.

  “They have attack?”

  Jeff looks at me and wrinkles the skin between his eyes, his sign that he doesn’t understand. Then it vanishes. “We don’t know. They just cut the link. So we still can’t talk to them. And Solomon can’t reach us.”

  I don’t understand all the words, but I think he means that his people have abandoned him. Whatever the detail, he’s angry and upset. Your kin should never leave you to your fate. This is wrong. I share his outrage.

  “You ask others come?”

  Jeff moves his head quickly from side to side. “We can’t send a signal, but even if we could, it would take them forty-five years to get here.”

  “But talking link got here fast.”

  “Ah, but it’s very small.” He makes that smallness gesture, digits forming a circle, almost touching. “Our FTL’s limited. No big ships.” Then he holds his hand as if there’s an imaginary sphere clutched in it. Humans are quite good at making signs. “Only small objects. And messages.”

  Have I understood him correctly? “But you here. How?”

  “We set off a long time ago. Many years. Cryo? You understand cryo?” He puts his hands together and rests them against his cheek, head tilted. “Sleep? Suspended animation? Stasis?”

  “Sleep through long go?”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  “We help.”

  “Thanks.” I know when he makes sounds to be friendly but doesn’t mean them. I can see the muscles tense under that fledgling skin on his face. “We appreciate it.”

  Ah, he doesn’t understand. I spread my wings and hold them level. Humans use that gesture to mean flying. “We know how make ships very fast.”

  “You’ve got ships, have you?” He wrinkles his skin again and looks me over as if I’m hiding something. “Do you build ships? Do you travel around the system?”

  “Had ships. Many, many worlds.” It’s a lot to explain. I don’t have the words for it. And perhaps I shouldn’t tell him yet about the wars, the barbarians, and the hateful ones we won’t work for. Would it do any harm to bring more of his friends here? We’re clever, but weak and few. Humans, though — they’re clever, they seem to be many, and they know how to wage war. I’ve seen their reverence for it. “We still know how move. We send numbers. And we get talk in the now for you to home again.”

  That sparks a light in Jeff’s eyes. He looks right at me. He’s suddenly very still.

  “Do you mean drives? You know how to build FTL drives?”

  Jeff makes another gesture, holding his arms out in front and skidding one hand across the other as if it’s taking flight. Humans make much more sense with their hands and faces than they do with their words. Yes, we know what we both mean, more or less.

  “Drives, gates, paths,” I say. Does he understand what I mean by that? That we can show them how to travel timelessly, to move around and communicate as easily as we once did? “We know where. Ways from there to where to where, quick, safe.”

  “And you’re willing to share this?”

  I understand share. I’ve watched them eat. “Yes. Needs for friends.”

  “What can we give you in return?” He points from himself to me. “What we give? What you want? What you need?”

  Ah, we’re really making progress. “Be friends.”

  Jeff blinks and shows his teeth. This is a smile. It’s the first thing I learned about humans. They smile when they mean well or when they like something. It goes all the way up to their eyes. Sometimes being able to see the beast trapped inside that featherless skin is very useful. I think we both mean the same thing by friendship.

  “Okay.” He folds his arms and nods. “Friends.”

  “Friends. We help.”

  Friends are important in this part of the galaxy. S
ometimes the strife of the barbarians nearly catches up with us, and we need as many friends as we can find. Friends don’t let you down. Friends stand by your side and defend the citadel, as we would defend theirs.

  We will help the humans, and they will help us, and we’ll both survive what’s to come. We have an understanding.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Traviss is the author of a dozen New York Times bestsellers, and her critically acclaimed Wess’har books have been finalists five times for the Campbell and Philip K. Dick awards. She also writes comics and games with military and political themes. A former defence correspondent, newspaper reporter, and TV journalist, she lives in Wiltshire, England.

  WANT TO READ MORE?

  For more information, visit karentraviss.com, where you can sign up for news and exclusive previews of forthcoming books, or contact Karen by e-mail. You can also follow her on Twitter via @karentraviss

  ALSO BY KAREN TRAVISS

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  Black Run

  WESS’HAR

  City of Pearl

  Crossing the Line

  The World Before

  Matriarch

  Ally

  Judge

  COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

  View Of A Remote Country

  HALO

  Glasslands

  The Thursday War

  Mortal Dictata

  GEARS OF WAR

  Aspho Fields

  Jacinto’s Remnant

  Anvil Gate

  Coalition’s End

  The Slab

  STAR WARS

  Republic Commando: Hard Contact

  Republic Commando: Triple Zero

  Republic Commando: True Colors

  Republic Commando: Order 66

  Imperial Commando: 501st

  Bloodlines

  Sacrifice

  Revelation