Alien Contact (52 page)

The yufo twitched again and the blaster vanished too, tingling in his hands as it went. He looked down at his palm and saw that some of the skin had gone with it. It oozed red blood.

The yufo extended a tentacle in his direction and twitched. “Sorry about that. I’m usually more accurate. As to your crew, I annihilated them. I removed their tokens from the play area. You’re a game-player, you should be able to grasp this.”

“Game-player?”
Tsubishi’s mind reeled.

“What do you think we’re doing here,
Captain?”
The last word dripped with perfectly executed sarcasm. The yufo really did have an impressive language module. With creeping hopelessness, Tsubishi realized that ze couldn’t possibly have trained it from their meager conversation to date; ze must have been snaffling up titanic amounts of communication from the
Colossus II’
s internal comms. Ze was thoroughly inside his decision-loop. “Competing. Gaming. You’re clearly familiar with the idea, Mr. Role-Player.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“You’re starting to bore me,
Captain
. Look, it’s clear you’re outmatched here. You’ve got a lovely little play area up there in orbit, but I’m afraid you’re about to forfeit it.”

“No!” Tsubishi’s veneer of calm control blistered and burst. “There are hundreds of people on that ship! It would be murder!”

The yufo inflated zer throat-bladder and exhaled it a couple times. “Murder?” ze said. “Come now, Captain, let’s be not overly dramatic.”

This was the first time that the yufo appeared the least bit off-balance. Tsubishi saw a small initiative and seized it. “Murder! Of course it’s murder! We are not at war. It would be an act of sheer murder.”

“Act of war? Captain,
I’m not playing your game.
I’m playing—” Its tentacles whipped around its head. Tsubishi got the impression that it was fishing for a word. “I compete to put my flag on a pattern of planets. It is a different game from your little space-marines dramatics.”

On that plateau, on that remote world near that unregarded star, Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi experienced satori.

“We are not playing a game. We
are
‘space marines.’ Space navy, actually. We are not playing soldiers. We
are
soldiers. Those were real people and you’ve really, really killed them.”

The alien’s tentacles went slack and twitched against its upper slopes. It inflated and deflated its bladder several times. The wind howled.

“You mean that you haven’t got a recent stored copy of them—”

“Stored copy? Of them?”

The tentacles twitched again. Then they went rigid and stood around zer head like a mane. The bladder expanded and the yufo let out a keening moan the like of which Tsubishi had not heard anywhere in the galaxy.

“You don’t make
backups?
What is
wrong
with you?”

The yufo vanished. Instantly, Tsubishi tried to raise the
Colossus II
on the command-channel. Either his comm was dead or—or—He choked down a sob of his own.

The yufo returned to him as he sat on the mountainpeak. He hadn’t had anywhere else to go, and the seven-leagues had been programmed for it. From his high vantage, he looked down on wispy clouds, distant, lower mountaintops, the sea. He shivered. The command-channel was dead. He had been there for hours, pacing and doing the occasional calisthenics to stay warm. To take his mind off things.

He was the
Captain
. He was supposed to have
initiative
. He was supposed to be
doing something
. But what could he do?

“You don’t have backups?”

The yufo stood before him, a hill of tentacled flesh. It was closer than before, and he could smell it now, a nice smell, a little yeasty. It spoke in !Mota’s voice now.

“I don’t really understand what you mean.” He was cold, shivering. Hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.

“You have the transporter. You scan people to a quantum level. Store the scan. Annihilate them. Reassemble them elsewhere. Are you seriously telling me that
it never occurred to you to store the scans?”

Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the APP ship
Colossus II
was thunderstruck. He really, really wanted a cappuccino now. “I can honestly say that it never had.” He fumbled for an excuse. “The ethical conundra. What if there were two of me? Um.” He thought. “What if—”

“What is
wrong
with you people? So what if there were two of you?” There were two of the yufo now. Tsubishi was no expert in distinguishing individuals of this race, but he had the distinct impression that they were the same entity. Times two. Times three now. Now there were four. They surrounded him, bladders going in and out.

“Annihilation is no big deal.”

“Accepting it is a survival instinct.”

“You honestly drag that gigantic lump of metal around the galaxy?”

“What is
wrong
with you people?”

Tsubishi needed some initiative here. This was not a negotiation. He needed to make it one.

“You’ve murdered five of my crew today. You threatened my ship with torpedoes. We came in peace. You made war. It isn’t too late to rescue the relations between our civilizations if you are willing to negotiate as equals in the galactic community of equals.”

“Negotiate? Fella—sorry,
Captain,
I don’t speak for anyone—” Now there was just one yufo and shimmering space where the others had been. The yufo paused for a second. “Give me a second. Integrating the new memories from those forks takes a little doing. Right. Okay. I’m just here on my own behalf. Yes, I fired on your ship—
after
you fired on me.”

“Fired on you? You weren’t in that artifact. You wouldn’t fit in ten of those things. It was an unmanned sensor package.”

“You think I bother to travel around in giant hunks of metal?”

“Why not? You’ve got impressive transporter technology, but you can’t expect me to believe that you can beam matter over interstellar distances—”

“Of course not. That’s what subspace
radio
is for. I upload the latest me to the transporter on the sensor package and then beam as many of myself as I need to the planet’s surface. What kind of idiot would actually put zer body in a giant hollow vehicle and ship it around space? The resource requirements are insane. You don’t really,
really
do that, do you?”

Tsubishi covered his face with his hands and groaned. “You’re telling me that you’re just an individual, not representing any government, and that you conquer planets all on your own, using subspace radio and transporter beams?”

“Yes indeed.”

“But why?”

“I
told
you—I compete to put my flag on a pattern of planets. My friends compete to do the same. The winner is the one who surrounds the largest number of zer opponents’ territory. It’s fun. Why do you put on costumes and ship your asses around the galaxy?”

The yufo had a remarkable command of Standard. “You’ve got excellent symbology AI,” he said. “Perhaps our civilizations could transfer some technology to one another? Establish trade?” There had to be some way to interest the yufo in keeping Tsubishi around, in letting him back on his ship. The planet was cold and he was hungry. He wanted a cappuccino.

The yufo shrugged elaborately. “It’s remarkable what you can accomplish when you don’t squander your species’ resources playing soldier. Sorry,
navy
. Why would we bother with trade? What could possibly be worth posting around interstellar distances, as opposed to just beaming sub-molecular-perfect copies of goods into wherever they’re in demand? You people are deeply perverse. And to think that you talked
forty-two
other species into playing along? What a farce!”

Tsubishi tried for words, but they wouldn’t come. He found that he was chewing an invisible mouthful of speech, working his jaw silently.

“You’ve really had a bad day, huh? Right. Okay. Here’s what I’ll do for you.”

There was a cappuccino sitting next to him. He picked it up and sipped reverently at it. It was perfect. It was identical to the one that had been beamed down to him when he arrived on-planet. That meant that the yufo had been sniffing all the transporter beam activity since they arrived. And that meant—

“You can restore the landing party!”

“Oh yes, indeed, I can do that.”

“And you don’t trade for technology, but you might be persuaded to give me—I mean, the Alliance—access to some of this?”

“Certainly.”

“And will you?”

“If you think you want it.”

Tsubishi nearly fell over himself thanking the yufo. He was mid-sentence when he found himself back on the transporter deck, along with his entire away-team party.

First things first. Tsubishi headed straight for the fresher, to get out of his baggies and back into uniform. He held his arms over his head and muttered, “Do it,” to the computer, received the crackle-starched uniform and lowered his arms, once again suited and booted, every millimeter an officer of the APP Space Navy.

And it felt
wrong
. He didn’t feel like he was wearing a uniform at all. He was wearing a
costume
. He knew that now. He had the computer signal his officers to meet him in the executive boardroom, whose long table pulsed with realtime strategic maps of the known galaxy, and as he slid into his seat, he recognized it finally and for the first time for what it really was: a game-board.

“Report, Commander !Mota,” he said. Of course !Mota would have a slideshow whipped up by now. Ze had a whole executive staff dedicated to preparing them on a moment’s notice. The slideshow would give him time to gather himself, to recover some of the dignity of his office.

But !Mota just looked at him blankly from within zer exoskeleton, zer big Wobbly eyes unreadable. Tsubishi peered more closely.

“Commander !Mota, are you out of uniform?”

!Mota plucked at zer baggies with a tentacle-tip. “I suppose I am, Reynold.”

Tsubishi knew the first signs of mutiny. He’d gotten top marks in Command Psych at the Academy. He looked into the faces of his officers, tried to gauge the support there.

“Commander, you are relieved. Return to your quarters and await my orders.”

The Wobbly looked impassively at him. The silence stretched. The other officers looked at him with equal coolness. It wasn’t just his command he felt slipping away—it was the
idea
of command itself. The fragility of the traditions, of the discipline, of the great work that bound them all together. It wavered. Panic seized him, tightened his chest, a feeling he hadn’t known since those days at the Academy when he was breaking himself of the fear of transporters.

“Please?” he said. It came out in a squeak.

!Mota gave him a lazy salute. “All right,
Captain
. I’ll play another round of the game. For now. But it won’t do you any good.”

Ze moved to the hatch. It irised open. Behind it, a dozen more !Motas. !Mota joined them and turned around and gave him and the rest of the officers another sarcastic salute.

“You all enjoy yourselves now,” ze said, and they turned as a body and walked away.

Tsubishi’s hand was resting on something. A cappuccino. He lifted it to his lips and had a little sip, but he burned his lip and it spilled down the front of his nice starched uniform.

Costume.

He set it back down and began, very quietly, to cry.