Alien Contact (49 page)

Hands grasped my shoulders, another took my arm. I was pulled away. My hand came free, but it felt cold and numb. I stared at the seti. It extracted its own limb and stumbled away from the transparency and nearly collapsed on the floor. It looked tormented.

“D-don—don’t—!” I tried to say, but my siblings were holding me and the biopole bled into them.

One screamed. The other jerked away, mouth open.

“Get them out of here!” someone shouted. “Now!”

More people crowded into the chamber and I was lifted onto a gurney. I couldn’t stop feeling the awful violation the Cursian had emptied into me. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to die.

It happened to all of us. It grew worse as we came together.

Logos spread back and forth, colonizing and broadcasting. We didn’t understand and that complicated it. We sought comfort from each other, but the enigma of alien rejection compounded, interfered.

It didn’t end till we were sedated.

And then there were dreams…dreams of anxiety and suspicion and insult…dreams of dying…

They showed us vids later. I don’t like watching them, but they make us see them, those of us who lived. The setis reacted. It’s obvious now, after the fact. They recoiled. That’s the only word I can think that fits. Recoiled. Some of them looked dead. Five of us died. Others wouldn’t stop screaming.

There are images in my head and I’m frightened to share them. I look at my companions and can see that they, too, contain things they will not, cannot share. It hurts. I understand Admiral Kovesh’s reaction to the logos. Nobody told us it might be like this. Perhaps we should have suspected because of the dog, but we had all dismissed that because it had been so disadvantaged compared to us, its mind couldn’t comprehend what was happening. But we know now. It was so simple an oversight—or perhaps not, perhaps it was assumed to be impossible, part of the dilemma of the situation: How can you ask permission when you don’t speak the language? That was, after all, our task—to ask them things. But no one had tried to tell them that we would invade their minds in order to do so. And when we did, they scarred us.

We can never live in each other’s minds again. We are separate now because we fear each other. We fear what we contain. We fear what we might give ourselves. We do not understand.

The seti ships had moved into positions of defense by the time the marines got us back up to our ship. They were frightened. We had hurt them. They had hurt us. We will all of us have to learn a new way to trust.

Perhaps, I think, we fulfilled our mission anyway. We had believed we shared nothing with the seti, but that’s wrong. We share fear. Humans have been basing relations on that for millennia.

A door opens and a marine comes in. She switches off the vid and pulls out a notepad.

“Admiral Kovesh says we have to see to it you get whatever you want,” she says. She smiles at me and I’m startled at how pleased I am. “What’s your name?” she asks.

I feel my smile fade.

“Name?”

aptain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the APP ship
Colossus II
was the youngest commander in the fleet. He knew he owed his meteoric rise through the ranks to the good study habits he’d acquired in the Academy: specifically, the habit of studying what people cared about and
embodying those things
for them. Thus he was an expert in twentieth-century culture (the mark of distinguished taste in the Academy for two hundred years); a sudden-death bare-knuckles martial artist; a rakish flirt; and a skilled three-harp player. He led nearly every away-team, didn’t screw the junior officers, and—

And he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about The Ball.

The Ball had been detected in the middle of the second shift, when the B-string had the conn and the bridge. No one called them the B-string, but they were. Some ships had tried evenly spreading the top people across all three shifts, but no one who was any good wanted to work ship’s night and anyone with clout filed for transfers to ships that let the As congregate in A spaces during “daylight” hours. So now it was the A-string from ship’s 9 to ship’s 17, the B-string from 17 to 1, and the miserable Cs on the truly nocturnal 1 to 9.

Tsubishi was in the middle of his first REM when his headband brought him swiftly to the surface of his mind, dialing up the lights and the smell of wintergreen and eucalyptus as the holo of First Lieutenant !Mota, framed by the high back of the command chair, filled the room.

“Sir,” !Mota said, ripping off a precise salute (zer exoskeleton made all routine movement precise, but the salute was a work of art, right down to the tiny “ping” as the tip of zer metal-sheathed tentacle grazed zer forelobe), “my apologies for rousing you. The forward sensor array detected a yufo, and, on closer inspection, we believe it may be evidence of a potentially hostile garrison.” The B-string commander was actually pretty good at zer job, and would have likely had zer own command by now but for the fact that the admiralty was heavily tilted to stock humans and loathe to promote non- and trans-humans to the higher echelon. As a Wobbly (not a flattering name for an entire advanced starfaring race, but an accurate one, and no one with humanoid mouth-parts could pronounce the word in Wobbliese), !Mota was forever doomed to second-banana.

“On bridge in three,” Tsubishi said, with a slightly sleepy salute of his own. His fresher had already cleaned and hung his uniform—a limitless supply of hard vac gave new meaning to the phrase “dry cleaning,” and the single-piece garment was as crisp as the ones he’d assiduously ironed as a kay-det on old Mars. He backed into the fresher and held his arms up while it wrapped him in the fabric. All on-ship toilets had an automated system for dressing and undressing uniformed personnel, while the away-teams made do with sloppier (but easier to shuck) baggies, or, in the rare event that a green ensign forgot to change before beaming down, relying on teammates to help with the humiliating ritual of dressing and undressing.

The duty officer barked “Captain on deck” before he’d even managed to set his foot down, and the whole B-squad was on its feet and saluting before his back leg came up to join it. !Mota made a formal gesture of handing over the conn, and Tsubishi slid into his chair just as it finished its hurried reconfiguration to suit his compact, tightly wound frame. The ship beamed a double cappuccino—ship’s crest stamped into the foam—into the armrest’s cup-holder, and he sipped it pensively before nodding to !Mota to make zer report.

!Mota—the model of second-banana efficiency—had whomped up an entire slideshow (with music and animated transitions, Tsubishi noted, with an inward roll of his eyes) in the time it had taken him to reach the bridge. The entire command crew watched him closely as !Mota stepped through it.

“We were proceeding as normal in our survey of the Tesla Z-65 system,” !Mota said, the bridge holo going into orrery mode, showing the system and its 11 planets and 329 planetesimals, the fourth planet out glittering with a safety-orange highlight. “We’d deployed the forward sensor arrays here, to Tesla Z-65-4, for initial detailed surveys. Z-65-4 is just over one AU from the star, and pulls 1.8 gees, putting it in the upper bound of high-value/high-interest survey targets.” The holo swept forward in dizzying jumps as the sensor packages beamed each other closer and closer to the planet in a series of hops, leaving them strung out in a lifeline from the ship’s safe position among Z-65’s outer rim to Z-65-4, ninety AUs away. The final stage established a long, elliptical orbit, and beamed its tiny progeny into tighter geostationary orbits around the planet’s waistline.

“The yufo was detected almost immediately. It had been on the dark side of the planet, in geostationary, and it came into the lateral sensor-range of two of our packages when they beamed in.” In a volumetric display, four different views of the yufo: a radar-derived mesh, a set of charts displaying its likely composition, an optical photo of the item in shaky high-mag, and a cartoon derived from the former, showing the yufo as a sphere a mere 1.5 meters in diameter, skinned in something black that the radar-analysis suggested was a damned efficient one-way sheath that likely disguised a Panopticon’s worth of sensors, spy-eyes, radar.

The bolo transitioned—a genie-back-into-the-bottle effect—and was replaced with a bulleted time line of the encounter, including notations as to when radar incursions on the sensor package emanating from the yufo were detected. !Mota let the chart stand for itself, then clicked to the final slide, the extrapolated cartoon of the yufo again.

!Mota ripped off another artful salute. “Orders, sir?”

“Have you brought one of our packages forward to get a closer look?”

“No sir. I anticipated that contingency and made plans for it, but have not given the order.”

“Do it,” Tsubishi said, giving one of those ironical little head-tilts that the female kay-dets on Mars had swooned for—and noted the B-shift tactical officer’s appreciative wriggle with satisfaction—and watched the holotank as the packet changed its attitude with conservative little thruster-bursts, moving slowly relative to the yufo while the continents below whirled past as it came out of geostationary position. The cartoon yufo resolved itself with ever-more-minute details as the packet got closer, closer.