A Stark And Wormy Knight (22 page)

Anyway, this Balcescu was a strange sort of fellow – young and old at the same time, if you know what I mean. He had all his hair and he wasn’t too wrinkled but his face was thin and the rest of him wasn’t much huskier. He couldn’t have been much older than my cabin-mate Ping, which would make him late thirties, maybe forty at the most but he dressed like an old man, or like someone out of an old movie – you know, those ancient films from Earth where they wear coats with patches on the elbows and loose pants and those things around their necks. Ties, right. That’s how he dressed — but no tie, of course. He wasn’t crazy, he just thought he was better than everyone else. Wanted you to know that even though he was some kind of language scientist, he was
artistic
. It wasn’t just his clothes — you could also tell by the things he said, the kind of the music he listened to. I’d heard it coming out of his cabin a couple of times – screeches like cats falling in love, crashes like someone banging on a ukulele with a crescent wrench. Intellectual stuff, in other words.

“I can’t help but noticing that much ado is being made of this particular stop, Mr. Jatt,” he said when he stopped me on deck. “But I went through four Visser rings on the way out to Brightman’s Star and nobody made much of that. Why such a fuss over this one, this…what do they call it?”

“People call Rainwater Hub ‘the Waterhole’,” I told him. “You can call it a fuss, but it’s dead serious business, Mr. Balcescu.”

“Why don’t you call me Stefan, my young friend — that would be easier. And I could call you Rolly – I’ve heard some of the others call you that.”

“Couldn’t do it, sir. Regs don’t allow it.”

“All right. How about something else, then? You could call me something amusing, like ‘Mr. B’…”

I almost made a horrified face, but Chief Purser always says letting someone know you’re upset is just as rude as telling them out loud. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep calling you Mr. Balcescu, sir. It’s easier for me.”

“All right, then, Mr. Jatt. So why is Rainwater Hub such a serious business?”

I did my best to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the politics and history myself – that’s not our job. Like we rocket-jocks always say, we just fly ‘em. But here’s what I know.

When Balcescu said he went all the way out to Brightman’s Star and there was no fuss about wormhole transfers, he was right, but that’s because he’d left from the Libra system and his whole trip had been through Confederation space. All those Visser rings he went through were “CO&O” as we say — Confederation Owned and Operated. But when he hopped on the
Lak’
to join us on our run from the Brightman system to Col Hydrae, well, that trip requires one jump through non-Confederation space – the one we were about to make.

Not only that, but for some reason not even Doc Swainsea can explain so I can understand, the Visser ring here at Rainwater is hinky, or rather the wormhole itself is. Sometimes it takes a little while until the conditions are right, so the ships sort of line up and wait – all kinds of ships, the most you’ll ever see in one place, Confederation, X-Malkin, Blessed Union, ordinary Rim traders, terraform scouts out of Covenant, you name it. They call it the Waterhole because most of the time everybody just…shares. Even enemies. Nobody wants to shut down the hub when it means you could wind up with an entire fleet stranded on this side of the galaxy. So there’s a truce. It’s a shaky one, sometimes. Captain Watanabe told us once in the early days the Confederation tried to arrest a Covenant jumbo at another hub, Persakis out near Zeta Ophiuchus – the Convenant had been breaking an embargo on the Malkinates. Persakis was shut down for most of a year and it took twenty more for everyone to recover from that, so now everybody agrees there’s no hostilities inside a hub safety zone — like predators and prey sharing a waterhole on the savannah. Once you get there, it’s sanctuary. It’s…
Casablanca
.

I mentioned I like old Earth movies, didn’t I?

After I’d explained, Balcescu asked me a bunch more questions about how long we’d have to wait at Rainwater Hub and who else was waiting with us. For a guy who’d traveled to about fifteen or twenty different worlds, I have to say he didn’t know much about politics or Confederation ships, but I did my best to bring him up to speed. When he ran out of things to ask, he thanked me, patted me on the head, then walked back to the view-deck. Yeah, patted me on the head. I guess nobody told him that any member of a Confederation crew can break a man’s arm using only one finger and thumb. He was lucky I had things to do.

* * *

The weird stuff started happening as we entered the zone. Captain Watanabe and Ship’s Navigator Chinh-Herrera were on the com with Rainwater Hub Command when things started to get scratchy. At first they thought it was just magnetar activity, because there’s a big one pretty close by – it’s one of the things that makes Rainwater kind of unstable. The bridge lost Hub Command but they managed to latch onto another signal – com from one of Rainwater’s own lighters – and so they saw the whole thing on visual, through a storm of interference. Chinh-Herrera showed it to me afterward so I’ve seen it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t.

First there was the huge alien ship, although even after several views it takes a while to realize it
is
a ship. Shaped more like a jellyfish or an amoeba, all curves and transparencies, and not particularly symmetrical. In another circumstance you might even call it beautiful – but not when it’s appearing out of a wormhole where it’s not supposed to be. The Visser ring wasn’t supposed to open for another several hours, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to open to let something
out
.

Then that…
thing
appeared. The angry thing.

It was some kind of volumetric display – but what kind, even Doc Swainsea couldn’t guess — a three-dimensional projected image, but what it looked like was some kind of furious god, a creature the size of small planet, rippling and burning in the silence of space. It just barely looked like a living creature – it had arms, that’s all you could tell for certain, and some kind of glow around the face that might have been eyes. Its voice, or the voice of the alien ship projecting it, thundered into every com of every ship within half a unit of Rainwater Hub. Nobody could understand it, of course – not then – it was just a deafening, scraping roar with bits along the edges that barked and twittered. “Like a circus dumped into a meat grinder, audience and all,” Chinh-Herrera said. I had to cover my ears when he played it for me.

If it had stopped there it would have been weird and frightening enough, but right after the monstrous thing went quiet some kind of weapon fired from inside it – from the ship itself, cloaked behind the volumetric display. It wasn’t a beam so much as a ripple – at the time you couldn’t even see it, but when we played it back you could see the moment of distortion across the star field where it passed – and the nearest ship to the Visser ring, a Malkinate heavy freighter, flew apart. It happened just as fast as that — a flare of white light and then the freighter was gone, leaving nothing but debris too small to see on the lighter’s com feed. Thirteen hundred men dead. Maybe they were X-Malkins and they didn’t believe what we believe, but they were still shipmen like us. How did it feel to have their ship, their home, just disappear into fragments around them? To be suddenly thrown into the freezing black empty?

A few seconds later, as if to show that it wasn’t an accident, the god-thing roared again and convulsed and another ship was destroyed, one of Rainwater’s lighters. This one must have had some kind of inflammable cargo because it went up like a giant magnesium flare, a ball of white fire burning away until nothing was left but floating embers.

This was too much, of course – proof of hostile intent – and a flight of wasps was scrambled from Rainwater Station and sent after the jellyfish ship. Maybe the aliens were surprised by how quickly we fought back, or maybe they were just done with their giant hologram: in either case, it disappeared as the wasp flight swept in
.
A moment later the wasps were in range and began to fire on the intruder, but their pulses only sputtered and flashed against the outside skin of the jellyfish ship. A moment later every one of the wasps abruptly turned into a handful of sparks flung out in all directions like spinning Catherine wheels – an entire flight gone.

* * *

After that, everybody fell back, as you can imagine. “Ran like hell” might be a better way to put it. The Confederation ships met up in orbit around the nearest planet, several units away from Rainwater, and the officers began burning up the com lines, as you can imagine. Nobody’d seen anything like the jellyfish before, or recognized whatever it was on that volumetric or how it was done. We accessed some of the Hub drones so we could keep a watch on Rainwater. The alien ship was still sitting there, although the Visser ring behind it had closed again. There were moments when the angry-god display flickered back into life, as if it was waking up to have a look around, and other moments when crackling lines of force like blue and orange lightning arced back and forth between the jellyfish and the ring, but none of this told anyone a thing about what was really going on.

Our first major clue came when one of the Hub’s own lighters got close enough to pick up some of the wreckage of the Malkin jumbo. The ship had not been blown apart in any normal sense – no shear and no heat, or at least no more than would be expected with sudden decompression. The carbon ceramic bones and skin of the ship had just suddenly fallen apart – “delatticed” was Doc Swainsea’s term. She didn’t sound happy when she said it, either.

“It’s not a technology I know,” she told Captain Watanabe the day after the attacks. “It’s not a technology I can even envision.”

The captain looked at her and they stood there for a moment, face to face – two very serious women, Doc tall and blonde, Captain W. a bit shorter and so dark haired and pale skinned that
she looked like an ink drawing. “But is it a technology we can beat?” the captain finally asked.

I never heard the answer because they sent me out to get more coffee.

About two hours later, while I was bringing more whiskey glasses to the captain’s cabin – which meant, I assumed, that the doctor’s answer had been negative — I found Balcescu standing waiting for the lift to the bridge.

“I think I have it, Mr. Jatt,” he told me as I went by.

I was in a hurry – everyone on the ship was in a hurry, which was strange considering we obviously weren’t going anywhere soon – but something in his voice made me stop. He sounded exhausted, for one thing, and when I looked at him more closely I could see he didn’t look good, either: he was pale and trembling, like he hadn’t had anything but coffee or focusmeds for a while. Maybe he was sick.

“Have what, Mr. Balcescu? What are you talking about?”

“The language – the language of the things that attacked us. I think I’ve cracked it.”

Two minutes later we were standing in front of the captain, Chief Navigator Chinh-Herrera, Doc Swainsea, and an open com line going out to the other Confederation ships.

“I couldn’t have done this if it had been pure cryptography,” Balcescu explained, standing up after all the introductions had been handled. His hands were still shaking; he spilled a little of his coffee. He obviously needed some food, but I was damned if I was going to leave the room right then.

Sorry. We spacemen swear a lot. But I wasn’t going to rush out to the galley just when he was about to explain.

“What I mean to say is,” Balcescu went on, “if it is anything like the languages we already know – and I think it is – then they haven’t given us enough of a sample to do the standard reductions. For one thing, we couldn’t know that we were even hearing all of it…”

“What are you talking about?” asked Chinh-Herrera. “Not heard it all? It nearly blew our coms to bits!”

“We heard the part that was in our audio register. And there were other parts above and below human hearing range as well that we recorded. But who could say for certain that there weren’t parts of the language outside the range of our instruments? This is a first encounter. Never make assumptions, Chief Navigator.”

Chinh-Herrera turned away, hiding a scowl. He didn’t like our Mr. Balcescu much, it was easy to see. The chief navigator was a good man, and always nice to me, but he could be a bit old-fashioned sometimes. I actually understood what Balcescu was saying, because I’ve spent my life living with other people’s assumptions, too. That’s what happens when you’re my size.

“So you’re saying the sample wasn’t enough to form a basis for translation, Dr. Balcescu?” This was Doc Swainsea. “Then why are we here?”

“Because it
is
a language and I know what they’re saying,” said Balcescu wearily. By his expression, you’d have thought he was being forced to explain the alphabet to a room full of four year olds. “You see, we’ve enlarged the boundaries of human-contact space quite a bit in the last couple of hundred years – the Hub system has seen to that. Just a few weeks ago I was out in the Brightman system doing something that would have been unthinkable only generations ago – xenolinguistic fieldwork with untainted living cultures.” He gave Chinh-Herrera a bit of a sideways look. “In other words, speaking alien with aliens. Our linguistic database has also expanded hugely. So I figured it was worth a try to see if there were any similarities between what we heard at Rainwater Hub and any of the other cultures we’ve recorded on the outskirts of contact space. I spent hours and hours going through different samples, comparing points of apparent overlap…”