B009NFP2OW EBOK (10 page)

Chapter Eight

11 November 2424

Slan Protector
Vigilant

Low Orbit, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

2029 hours, TFT

Clear Chiming Bell didn’t quite know what to make of the alien. How could it possibly
see
?

Held upright by a Slan soldier, it tottered into the control chamber on two stumpy, awkwardly stiff tentacles, and gave the impression of being constantly about to fall over. It had two more tentacles on the upper end of its body which branched at the ends; curiously, these protrusions appeared to be stiff and jointed as well. The creature must be nearly crippled in its lack of dexterity.

The upper end of the being was a perfectly round, smooth, and sonically opaque ball perhaps two
k’k’t!!
across which was almost certainly artificial, though it might have been some sort of natural shell. Clear Chiming Bell increased the frequency of its sonar scans, and managed to get a vague image of an interior air space, within which a smaller, roughly spherical organ rested. At first, Clear Chiming Bell thought that this might be the creature’s sound projector, its
!k’ch’t’t
organ, but there was no sound coming from it—nothing coherent and focused, at any rate—and with only a single projector it would be unable to see in three dimensions. Unless, perhaps, it could judge distances through minute time delays in its echolocation? That was possible but seemed far-fetched, and it would really work only for fairly distant objects.

Clear Chiming Bell turned its sonar to focus on and into the rest of the creature’s body. It appeared to be wearing some sort of fabric, apparently nanotechnically grown, with various devices wired into it, all clearly artificial. Beneath that, the creature had a smooth integument . . . though even here there were signs of some sort of bioengineering . . . minute wires and patches of circuitry grown in or beneath that extraordinarily thin and smooth skin. Deeper still, Clear Chiming Bell could see internal organs and cavities—a rapidly pulsing muscle that might circulate bodily fluids; two spongy masses to either side that appeared to be porous and full of air; a kind of twisting, close-folded tube that was probably associated with digestion; and lots of other organs of unknown purpose. The brain was probably
that
. . . a large and massive organ tucked into the right side of the body halfway down, partially enfolding and covering the muscular organ that most likely was a stomach.

After a long inspection, Clear Chiming Bell finally decided that the sound-producing organs were the twin globes of fatty tissue protruding somewhat from the creature’s upper body, just to either side of the pulsing circulation pump inside. They were roughly spherical, somewhat flattened, but cone-shaped enough to be analogous to Slan
!k’ch’t’t,
and tipped by small, rough-skinned patches with central protuberances that might serve to focus sound beams. They did not appear to be as mobile as Slan projectors, however, attached as they were to the creature’s torso instead of being mounted on slender, twisting necks. Indeed, Clear Chiming Bell didn’t see how the creature could aim them with any accuracy at all. In fact, if the roughened patches of skin at the tips were any indication, the creature wasn’t even aiming them in the same direction.

And while Clear Chiming Bell could hear the thump of the creature’s fluid pump, and a periodic rasp that might be respiration, it heard neither the squealing and rapidly pulsing chirps of scanning sonar, or the squeaks, buzzes, and clicks that might be speech. How did the creature communicate?

And above all,
how did it see its surroundings?

“Have you tried to communicate with it?” Clear Chiming Bell asked the soldier holding it by its upper tentacles. The creature writhed and twisted in the Slan’s grasp, and appeared to be in discomfort.

“It does not respond to speech at all, Lord,” the soldier replied. “We
have
picked up radio frequency transmissions, however, though these appear to be generated by artificial means, not by the creature’s organic substance. The transmissions do not appear to convey information, however.”

“We may simply not understand the code.” Clear Chiming Bell considered the creature a moment longer. “That covering it wears is clearly artificial, probably grown as a nanotechnic matrix. Likely it is an environmental suit, and therefore self-sealing. Take it to the medical labs and get a sample. We need to know the thing’s environmental and metabolic needs.” Clear Chiming Bell reached out with a pair of medium tentacles and touched what it suspected were the strange being’s sound projectors, eliciting a sharp, violent struggle as the thing tried to pull away. Interesting. “I suspect that these swellings are its
!k’ch’t’t,
” it said. “They consist of fatty tissue much like our own sonic projectors. Monitor them closely, for signs that it is trying to image its environment.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Tell the lab-Dwellers in Night that we
must
understand this being’s biological makeup and environmental needs if we are to learn anything about this alien species.”

“Yes, Lord.”

Knowing that the aliens were
Trafhyedrefschladreh
was not enough. Not by far. A species could use oxygen to metabolize foods and water as a transport medium and solvent, and still be impossibly alien both in their biochemistry and in the way they perceived the universe. The Slan
must
learn how these aliens thought, what drove them, what brought them into deep space to colonize worlds to which they clearly were not adapted.

Clear Chiming Bell dismissed the soldier, which glided out of the chamber, its struggling captive in tow.

Another oddity, it noted. Slan were radially symmetrical, while the alien appeared to be bilaterally symmetrical, a right side mirrored by a left side. If those two prominent swellings were what Clear Chiming Bell thought they were, the creature must have a preferred front end, a side toward which it always moved, and its paired
!k’ch’t’t
would indicate that directionality.

It didn’t appear to
like
being dragged backward.

A
very
strange concept.
Alien
 . . .

Clear Chiming Bell gave the equivalent of a shrug—a deliberate rippling of the finer tentacles all the way around its circumference—and returned to the more pressing issues at hand. The alien fleet, it knew, would be here soon . . . possibly within just a few more
t’k’k’k’cht’t
, and it intended to be ready for their arrival.

12 November 2424

TC/USNA CVS
America

In transit

36 Ophiuchi A System

0725 hours, TFT

Emergence . . .

The tightly-wrapped bubble of spacetime surrounding
America
opened in an intense burst of photons. Gray watched from his command chair as the stars flashed back on, after more than twenty-five hours of unyielding, impenetrable darkness. In the navigational tank below and in front of him, other ships in the battlegroup, one by one, began dropping into existence, the nearest vessels first—the USNA destroyers
Bradley
and
Henderson
. . . the
Simon Bolivar
. . .
Napoleon—
then more distant ships as the light bearing their images crawled across intervening space and reached
America
’s sensors—
Kali
,
von Metternich
,
Normandy
,
Ariel
,
Caesar Augustus
,
Illustrious
.

After a transition of less than twenty light years, most of the constellations ahead remained recognizable—Scorpius, the teapot of Sagittarius, the backward question mark of Leo well off to starboard. To port, the familiar summer triangle was missing one star; Altair, only sixteen light years from Earth, now lay astern.

Astern, too, a faint yellow star had winked into being between the outstretched horns of Taurus, just north of the familiar constellation of Orion—Earth’s sun, now shrunken to a fourth-magnitude star.

From forty astronomical units out, the star system of 36 Ophiuchi showed as three orange suns, with two, A and B, appearing perhaps 20 degrees apart from this angle, and with C a dimmer companion much farther off to one side. Star A was a type K0 orange star, its close companion a K1, while 36 Ophiuchi C was a K5 that didn’t even orbit the other two, but simply shared their proper motion through the galaxy. Stars A and B circled each other in an extremely eccentric orbit, coming as close together as 7 AUs and moving as far apart as 169 AUs, the two taking about 570 years to make a complete orbit. Currently, the two were 30 AUs apart, about the distance between Sol and Neptune.

Gray studied in-head downloads of the triple system. The twice-per-millennium close passage of B around A sharply limited the size of A’s family of planets. There were four. Planet III, Arianrhod, was 0.766 AUs out from its star, a hair farther from its primary than was Venus from Sol. Planets I and II both were hot Jupiters, gas giants in the process of evaporating in the heat of their star like enormous comets, though both were closer in size and mass to Sol VII than to Sol V. Planet IV was the size of Neptune’s moon Triton, ice-clad and frigid at 1.5 AUs out, while beyond that was a ring of planetoids, left-over bits and pieces from the system’s formation, which could not form planets because of the periodic gravitational interference of 36 Ophiuchi B.

Both 36 Ophiuchi B and C had planetary systems of their own, but surveys made during the late 2200s, while Arianrhod was being set up as a base, had established that none of those other planets even came close to the idea of habitability for human visitors. Ice giants, ice-cloaked moons, heat-baked and barren rocks, hot Jupiters, planetoid belts—worlds of interest to planetologists, perhaps, but not to xenobiologists.

At least, not
yet
. There was life beneath the ice of several of the gas-giant moons in Sol’s planetary system, as well as the recently discovered alien growths at the radiation-warmed deep boundary beneath Pluto’s icy surface and its still-hot interior. If life could exist
there
, under such extreme conditions, it might well have evolved here as well . . . but for the time being, humanity’s focus on the 36 Ophiuchi system was centered entirely on planet AIII, the oceanic and poisonous super-Earth named Arianrhod.

Gray still wondered if the place was worth it. . . .

“We’re starting to pick up the opposition,” Commander Mallory reported. “Fifteen targets, clustered in close orbit over Arianrhod.”

“Very well.”

“Captain Gray?” Connie Fletcher’s voice said. “All strike squadrons are ready for launch.”

“Thank you, CAG. Stand by.”

Gray turned in his seat, glancing up and back at the closed bulkhead behind him.
America
possessed two primary bridges, one immediately behind and “above” the other, though both resided in the command tower rising from
America
’s spine and therefore were in zero-G, where concepts such as “above” or “below” were meaningless. The bulkhead between them could be opened, but during combat operations it was generally sealed shut to avoid losing both in the event of catastrophic depressurization. Gray’s was the ship command bridge, from which he ran the ship. Aft was the flag bridge, formerly Admiral Steiger’s domain, but now ruled by the Confederation’s Admiral Delattre. Steiger was wired in next to Delattre, and Gray didn’t envy him one bit.

According to long-fixed tradition, the admiral commanded the entire fleet, while the captain commanded the ship. As
flag captain
—the commanding officer of the admiral’s flagship—Gray was also expected to serve as the admiral’s chief of staff, offering both strategic advice and coordinating the admiral’s tactical planning staff.

Delattre’s arrival had risked scrambling the USNA battlegroup’s command structure, however. Rather than demoting Steiger to the post of
America
’s CO, or putting him ashore at SupraQuito, both moves that would have seriously affected shipboard morale, Steiger had been shunted off to one side. In theory, he still commanded the 23-ship USNA battlegroup, but only under Delattre’s direct supervision. Technically, he was on Delattre’s staff and served as a senior advisor, but everyone in the fleet knew this was a polite fiction masking the fact that the Confederation didn’t trust the USNA CO, or the forces under his command.

So morale had plummeted anyway.

Gray was aware of shipboard morale as a graph created by
America
’s AIs. Electronic monitors throughout the ship recorded overall levels of efficiency, and also picked up certain key words in overheard conversation. Those sound bite recordings were supposed to be anonymous—a human could listen in on them only with a court order or a direct and unanimous request from a court-martial board—but certain words and phrases, taken
en masse
, could provide a snapshot of the emotions of the entire crew.
Bastards, gold braid, mutiny, stupidity, idiots, damned Confed, REMFs
 . . . there were actually several hundred key words and word groups in the database the AIs used to assess crew morale.

The words themselves were not the problem . . . even potentially nasty ones like
mutiny
or
take over the ship
or
disobey orders
. Naval personnel
always
griped, bitched, and complained. It was considered a time-honored tradition, and “a griping sailor is a happy sailor” had been a cliché in the Navy’s lexicon for at least five hundred years, perhaps more. But when the frequency of those words picked up in overheard conversations shot up nearly 300 percent literally overnight, something was seriously wrong. Efficiency was down by 8 percent, too, with more mistakes and slower reaction times from sensor suite, engineering, and flight-deck personnel. Not good. Not good at
all
 . . .