She squatted next to Fleet and held out the bowl to Oomoing.
‘Learned Mother, take this Sharing of your Loyal Son as your sacred duty,’ she said. Oomoing reached out, took the Shareberry and placed it reverently in her mouth. She felt the saliva begin to flood around it, the Sharing enzymes starting to break it down and feed the information to her brain. ‘Will you take the others now or later, Learned Mother?’
‘Later,’ Fleet said. The Sharer pointedly ignored him and continued to look at Oomoing.
‘Later,’ Oomoing agreed.
‘Later it is, then,’ the Sharer said brightly, packing her instruments away. ‘Just call.’
She withdrew. Fleet studied Oomoing’s face carefully, waiting for her to absorb the new memory she had just been given. Oomoing shut her eyes, sat back on her haunches and let it come.
Even though the Shareberry had come from the side of his Sharemass (acquired memories, incidental thoughts) and not the middle (personal information, to be Shared only among Fleet’s family) there was the inevitable echo of Fleet’s other memories – shades, textures, feelings – and she ignored these with a practised mental flip. Not only would it have been bad manners to proceed down that road, but she could sense the looming motherlode of far more interesting and relevant information that the nodule carried. She moved her mind towards it and began to drink it in.
A dark rock, no name, catalogue number 136750#48,
half a mile long, a quarter wide, trailing the planet
Firegod. Discovered by astronomers eighty-seven years
ago, surveyed by robot probe twenty-four years ago,
attacked five days ago by armed units of the Space
Presence . . .
Oomoing convulsed with surprise, but even as one part of her mind was framing the obvious question, ‘Why attack an asteroid?’ further information was coming in.
. . . to reveal the presence of a base populated by
intelligent, non-Kin lifeforms.
It was like a physical shock; she had to go back to it again. And then again. Non-Kin!
Extraterrestrials!
Her mind was divided. Part of it, the scientific part, the part that made her a reasoning, thinking scientist, crowed
at last
! Proof of all those theories. There were others out there. They were not alone.
The other part, the part that made her Kin, shuddered. Extraterrestrials. Outlanders.
Not Us
.
She kept going.
Subsequent to its capture, surveillance equipment was
discovered orbiting the asteroid: painted black, floating
free in space rather than tethered to the rock where it
would be visible to any Kin who glanced that way
through a telescope, disposing of its heat by refrigeration
laser. It was virtually undetectable. However, it was the
refrigeration lasers which had first hinted at the
extraterrestrial presence: astronomers on Homeworld
observing the first conjunction of the planets Firegod
and Stormwind in nearly five centuries had noticed hot
spots moving across the surface of the former. The
hardest part of the subsequent investigation was
speculating what might be causing these spots. Once the
correct hypothesis had been devised then it was easy to
trace them back to their source.
Neat: Oomoing loved to see science and logic being used properly. She also had to admit that the logistics of getting the soldiers there were quite clever:
Armed units were chosen from those about to go to sleep.
They were launched into space on unpowered
trajectories that would take them to within a few miles of
the asteroid half a year later. Hence the ships carrying
them could be small, light, and much harder for anyone
on the asteroid to spot.
Utilizing the natural half-year sleep cycle was an elegant touch. But what about their waking frenzy? Launching a carefully planned attack on an asteroid would be the last thing on the mind of a recently woken soldier, so how. . .?
And again, with that question came the answer:
The waking frenzy can be circumvented by the
introduction of certain chemicals into the bloodstream.
‘Interfere with the frenzy?’ Oomoing said out loud, aghast. ‘That’s . . . that’s unnatural!’
‘But doable,’ Fleet said complacently. ‘Incidentally, that’s another military secret I must ask you not to talk about, Learned Mother, so please keep your voice down.’
Oomoing growled and went back to the memories, to learn the details of the attack: the lasers that took out the asteroid’s defences; the burrowing machines that let out its air; the more than sixty bodies discovered.
Prisoners? she thought.
No quarter was given.
‘Oh, brilliant!’ Oomoing exploded. ‘The first sign of non-Kin life and we go in with guns blazing . . .’ Fleet was looking, well, stony. ‘It was one of your mother’s ideas, wasn’t it, Loyal Son?’
‘Indeed, Learned Mother.’
‘I promise that from now on, if I’m to insult your mother I’ll do it to her face.’
‘You will have the opportunity, Learned Mother.’
She subsided into her chair again, but part of her mind was still whirling and it wasn’t just with the surprise revelation. To attack without challenge or proper warning – even extraterrestrials deserved that most basic of considerations . . . didn’t they? Not least from a reputable warrior like Barabadar.
Oomoing disciplined herself to take in the rest of the information; she could bother with her opinions of it later.
There were two survivors
.
At last! Oomoing was transfixed by this final portion of the memories Fleet had given her. The mental images were fuzzy and indistinct: he had only seen them on a display and the camera images were obscured by the soldiers carrying them. They weren’t moving.
The captives put up resistance but were subdued
eventually.
They were dressed in spacesuits, that much was obvious. And at first glance they looked very different. One tall and thin with two legs, a rough analogue of the Kin shape but with not enough arms; the other shorter and apparently with four legs, nothing like a Kin at all. Two sexes? she wondered. Interesting diversity. . .
‘Fascinating,’ she said.
Fleet smiled. ‘Your brief, Learned Mother, is to find out all you can about these things. My mother wants to know their strengths, their weaknesses . . .’
‘Their level of threat?’ Oomoing said sardonically.
‘Most especially. And, if you can, to work out how they were able to reach our solar system.’
And hence, whether we can travel in the opposite
direction
. Oomoing read between the lines without difficulty. She searched carefully: there were no further revelations lurking at the back of her skull. ‘There’s still information I need,’ she said. ‘If Barabadar wanted to find out about them, it would have been a lot more . . .
constructive
to capture some alive. Why was no quarter given?’
‘I know what I know, Learned Mother,’ Fleet said apologetically. ‘My mother is on her way – she’s coming from the other side of the system – and she might allow you to Share.’
Might
, Oomoing reflected. Naturally she would ask, but Barabadar would be senior enough to say ‘no’ if she chose.
‘I look forward to meeting her when she gets here,’ she said.
‘Um, not here,’ Fleet said. ‘At the asteroid. We’ve had a ship on standby for two days, waiting for you to wake. We leave in two hours.’
Three
Day Eight: 10 June 2153
The airlock door slid into the hull and the asteroid was in front of her, a mountain in space that filled the constricted vision of her space helmet. Oomoing gazed at it hungrily, her eagerness conflicting with the conviction of her senses that the millions of tons of rock were poised above her, ready to fall on top of her at any moment.
Even her inexpert eye could see that the asteroid had been in the wars. She could see the furrows ploughed by the assault squads’ lasers, the gobbets of molten rock left in their wake. She could see the three surviving assault craft; the attack over, they hung in space next to the rock, sleek and dark.
Her eyes settled on a particularly big hole. ‘Mother of the Sky, that must have a big bang!’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realized the battle was so fierce.’
‘That was the launch bay for their ship, Learned Mother,’ Fleet’s voice said in her helmet speakers, with the kind of respect that only comes when someone says something very stupid. ‘It’s where we’re going in. Colonel Stormer is keen to meet you.’
‘And I him.’ Oomoing covered her embarrassment with genuine feeling. Stormer, the male who had led the attack, would only have been obeying the orders of Marshal of Space Barabadar, but the unreasoning ferocity of such an assault still appalled her.
A line strung from the ship’s airlock faded into the distance, merging into the colours of the asteroid, and Fleet clipped her suit’s harness onto it. ‘Just step out, Learned Mother. I’m right behind you.’
‘You’ve got the equipment?’ she asked.
‘Right here, Learned Mother.’
So Oomoing jumped out into space. Her Reserve training came back to her and she didn’t make too bad a job of going down the line. It only took a minute. Now she could see that the pit in the surface of the asteroid was indeed artificial, with smooth, regular walls and equipment around them embedded in the rock. It was dark, the only light coming from the end of the pit, and it was like sinking into the gloom of a deep pond with just a small, forlorn bubble of light and warmth at the bottom.
A crew of suited soldiers was waiting, and by the light of two emergency bulbs they unclipped her from the line and led her to a makeshift airlock set into the wall. It took two minutes for her and Fleet to be cycled through, and then they were in the asteroid, actually
inside
an extraterrestrial base, and two soldiers were helping her remove her suit. Her helmet came off and the familiar, slightly stale smell of ship’s air came flooding into her olfactory pores. Oomoing looked up and down the passage; it was a circular tunnel bored into the rock and a floor was provided by a grating laid along it. The grating was completely redundant in the lack of gravity and it immediately set Oomoing to hypothesizing. Subdued red lights set flush into the rock emphasized the natural chill of the asteroid’s interior. Colonel Stormer came out of the gloom to meet her, pulling himself with his feeding arms along a line strung down the passage.
‘Wakefulness,’ he said. ‘And are we glad to see you.’ He was a grizzled, middle-aged male and his expression was dour.
Oomoing was about to express surprise and delight at such a warm welcome, when Fleet spoke instead.
‘The supplies are being unloaded, Worthy Brother.’
‘Good. We can use them.’ Stormer was older than Fleet and had much more prestige. His bow to Oomoing was almost equal-to-equal. ‘Learned Mother, I’m instructed to place myself and my troops at your disposal, subject to security restrictions. We’ve already started trying to inventory the equipment we’ve found here but we will value your scientist’s input.’
‘Excellent,’ Oomoing said. ‘I suggest we start by Sharing. I’m anxious to find out everything you know.’
‘I’m sorry, I was specifically told by Marshal of Space Barabadar not to Share.’ Stormer didn’t look all that sorry; he almost looked relieved.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Oomoing said.
‘I was specifically told—’
‘I insist on a Sharing!’ Oomoing was outraged. ‘How am I expected to do my job without proper background knowledge?’
‘I gather it’s a matter of clearance, Learned Mother.’
‘
Clearance?
’ The talons of her hunting arms slid out by reflex and Oomoing didn’t know whether to laugh or cuff him for his insolence. Doing the latter in front of Fleet would be bad military discipline. ‘Listen to yourself, Loyal Son. I’m cleared to be on a top-secret extraterrestrial base. I’m cleared to study their equipment and try to work out how they travelled faster than light, I’m authorized to study the creatures themselves, but I’m not cleared for the details?’
‘Precisely, Learned Mother,’ Stormer said, impassive.
Oomoing could see she wasn’t going to get anywhere. She began to compose a blistering complaint to deliver to Barabadar. In the meantime . . .
‘Then, let’s start with the extraterrestrials,’ she said.
‘Of course, Learned Mother. That’s why you’re here. The
outlanders
are this way.’
Stormer pulled himself back down the passage, followed by Oomoing, followed by Fleet. Oomoing, still not used to this way of travelling, found that the trick was to use her feeding arms for pulling on the line, and her hunting arms for the times she pulled too hard, or swung away from the line towards the walls. Every time they came to a junction or passed the entrance to a room or a chamber, she looked yearningly down it, wondering what marvels of extraterrestrial technology lay that way.
‘How much of the base have you explored?’ she said.
‘A fraction,’ Stormer said, without looking round. ‘It’s a maze and it’s big. We’ve sealed off this local area and repressurized it but we just didn’t have the gear to do a full job. But now we’ve got the supplies, we’ll be able to do it properly.’
Oomoing had already worked out that the plan had been for Stormer’s men to sneak up on the base in small, lightly armed spacecraft, and for a much larger ship – her ship – to bring supplies after the base was taken. No-one seemed to have expected that the supply ship would stop off at Habitat 1 and wait for her to wake. It seemed a bit of an oversight.
‘But you have troops exploring the rest of the place?’
‘Of course. I can show you a map of what we’ve found, if you like. Those outlanders dug in deep.’
That word again. Oomoing remembered her own reaction upon learning of the extraterrestrials’ existence. Stormer, a military male not given to scientific lines of thought, would have felt it all the more strongly. She felt the dislike, the loathing behind the word: to him,
outlander
was barely removed from Not Us, and it was probably only politeness in front of a female that kept him from using the ultimate term of contempt.
‘Thank you, I will want to see it,’ Oomoing said. ‘My brief is to assess the entire situation.’
‘Well, you can start here.’
They had stopped outside a doorway, and hanging by the doorway were two empty space suits. She could immediately tell which suit belonged to which extraterrestrial – a basic eye for shape told her that the wearer of one would have stood on two limbs and have two limbs free, while the other would have used all four for standing. Seeing the clothes that the creatures wore, but without the creatures inside them, somehow emphasized the sheer alienness of their species. She reached out a feeding arm and caressed the alien material, which wasn’t unlike her own suit.
‘Are you getting anything, Learned Mother?’ Stormer said.
‘You’re the expert spacer, Worthy Son,’ Oomoing said. ‘They probably tell you more than they tell me.’
Stormer shrugged, as if to say,
whatever
. ‘The tall one had this,’ he added. From a box he produced a narrow circle of plastic. ‘It was worn on one wrist.’
Oomoing took it in a feeding hand, turned it over and over. White, tough plastic; embedded in it was what looked like a headshot of its owner and a series of black and white parallel lines, probably some kind of computer code.
‘An identity tag?’ she said. Stormer’s people all carried something similar. It occurred to her that if they could only read that code . . .
‘Probably,’ Stormer agreed, sounding surprised that he and the Learned Mother could agree on something. ‘But press that red plastic square, there.’
Oomoing did, and a holo appeared next to the bracelet. It was a shapeless mass of colour that hung in mid air, the size of one feeding fist. It was a picture of something; but unlike a still photograph, which anyone could look at, it was attuned to the frequency of vision of an alien race. Eyes other than hers were meant to understand it.
‘And that’s all it does?’ she said. ‘No hidden keys, no access to computers, anything like that?’
‘As far as we can tell.’
‘I see.’ She put it in her pocket. ‘Well, looking at their discarded equipment is all very interesting but . . .’
‘Through here,’ Stormer said. He pulled himself through the door next to the suits. After a moment to collect her thoughts and control her excitement, Oomoing followed.
And she finally saw what she had crossed millions of miles of space to see.
‘They’re doing it again,’ Stormer said without a lot of interest. The two extraterrestrials were kept in a large, circular room; Stormer had chosen it simply as a secure place to put his captives, with no idea what the room was for. There was only the one entrance and two armed sentries waited by it. The two creatures lay still and motionless against the far wall in what Oomoing recognized as freefall hammocks; apart from them, and a cubicle containing a freefall chemical toilet, the room was bare, though it stank. This would be the smell of unwashed extraterrestrial; she wondered if they found it as unpleasant.
Oomoing feasted her eyes on the two forms in the hammocks. She was already familiar with their general appearance and the facts of the case from reports that had been beamed to her on the way here, but actually to
see
them . . .
‘Are they still keeping to the timetable?’ she said.
‘By and large. They do it less and less.’
The first time Long and Short, as she thought of them, had lapsed into this coma, there had been a major panic amongst Stormer’s men and frantic, long-range, time-delayed calls to her on the ship, asking her advice. A Kin deprived of resources would lapse into the Small Sleep, but these two had food, so what was happening? Were they dying?
The fuss had died down abruptly when someone actually approached the two, and suddenly they started moving again. When it happened again, half a day later, Oomoing had given orders that they were not to be disturbed. The creatures always got into their hammocks before passing out, so obviously they were expecting it. She surmised it was indeed like the Small Sleep, some kind of resource-conserving coma – just one which happened on a regular basis. Or maybe it was just a way of passing the time when nothing was happening. It clearly wasn’t life threatening, and that was the main thing.
‘How are they eating?’ she said.
‘They drink the water we provide,’ Stormer said. ‘And you remember what we decided were emergency rations from their canteen? The tall one fell on them when we produced them, but since then it’s gone off its appetite. The short one hasn’t touched a bite.’
‘That’s worrying.’ Oomoing gazed in concern at the unmoving form of Short in its hammock.
‘As the Learned Mother pleases,’ Stormer said, and Oomoing remembered that Short had apparently despatched five of his soldiers before being subdued.
‘Can I see this stuff you’ve been feeding Long? I mean, the tall one?’ she said. Stormer nodded at one of his men, who handed Oomoing a slim, rectangular object wrapped in some kind of plastic.
She looked at it curiously, turning it over and over in her feeding hands. It was about the same size as two talons side by side and was covered in what she suspected was script. The plastic crinkled in her grip and a tab at either end practically begged, ‘pull me’.
So she did. The plastic peeled away and revealed a dark brown, waxy substance. It was divided into rows of three squares and without any difficulty she broke an entire row off. A strange odour, pungent but very rich, tickled her olfactory pores. Embedded in the broken edge she could see what looked like some kind of dried fruit.
‘Remind me why we decided these were emergency rations?’ she said.
‘They come out of a machine mounted on the wall,’ Stormer said. ‘If I’d built this place, I’d want emergency rations to be easily accessible to anyone who needed them. And smell it, Learned Mother! It’s bursting with energy.’
Oomoing sniffed the dark slab and had to agree. And yet – she looked back at Long – the extraterrestrial had gone off its feed. Maybe they didn’t need to eat that much. Or maybe they needed a more varied diet.
She could try and second-guess them for ever. It was time to start using Barabadar’s authority.
‘I want the tall one let out,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Stormer said, so outraged he even forgot the ‘Learned Mother’.
‘It’s the safer one, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I, I mean . . . well, yes, the tall one hasn’t killed any of my people, if that’s what you mean,’ said Stormer.
‘Then I want it let out. Don’t worry –’ Oomoing held up all four hands to placate him – ‘we won’t give it free rein. I want to follow it, with an armed guard, of course, just to see where it goes and what it does. It might show us interesting things, and it probably has a better idea of how to look after its kind than we do. Now, please do it.’
‘An armed guard? I’ll follow it personally,’ Stormer muttered. ‘Well, as the Learned Mother pleases. We’d better revive them.’
‘How do you do that?’
‘Nothing simpler.’ Stormer kicked over to Long and slapped his hands together loudly. ‘Get moving! Come on! The Learned Mother has come halfway across the solar system to see you! On your feet!’
Long twitched, its eyes opened, and it recoiled at the sight of Stormer hanging over it. It may not have understood the words but it seemed to understand the gestures, and it slowly freed an arm and released the tabs that opened the hammock up. It came free and pushed itself gently off the wall. Even in free fall, Oomoing fancied she saw a measured caution about its movements.