Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (23 page)

“But Dad,” Tiona said plaintively, “you’d have opened a
portal
to another star!”

He shrugged again, “I know. But once I’d proven it
could
be done, there didn’t really seem to be much point in actually
doing
it.”

Holy Mother!
Tiona thought, staggered by the implications. Not just the implications of a star portal, but what her father’s answer said about him and what
he
thought was important. “Let me think…” she trailed off, trying to come to grips with what it all meant.

“Is it okay if I keep working on the wheelchair?” Vaz asked curiously.

Tiona waved weakly, trying to hold distractions at bay, “Sure…”

Vaz turned back to the wheelchair.

Several minutes had passed before Tiona turned to her father feeling like her head had just broken the surface of the water. “Dad?”

He stiffened momentarily, like he did sometimes when he was interrupted in the middle of something. Then he set the wheelchair back down from its tilted position and turned to her. “Yes?” he said, his eyes rising slightly, but not all the way to her face.

“I should tell you more about these aliens, because I think you may be able to help in… understanding and dealing with them.”

Vaz frowned, “I’m not very good at understanding people. I’m probably even worse at understanding aliens.”

“Understanding their technology is what I meant.” Tiona went on to explain how a daughter-ship had broken away from the main alien mothership and appeared to be headed toward Earth. “The military is worried that they might attack us.”

Vaz looked startled, “
Why
would they do that?”

“Um…” Tiona paused since she had no idea why aliens would want to travel to another star and attack the beings there. “Because they need something we have here?”

“What could we
possibly
have that they wouldn’t be able to get more easily in their own solar system? Transporting anything from one star to another is so difficult and resource intensive that the transportation costs alone would make
anything
you moved far more precious than gold.”

Realizing she had
no
idea why aliens might attack, she said, “Do you have any thoughts on why they might have come here then?”

“Knowledge is the only thing that has high enough value and low enough transportation cost to make it worthwhile.” He frowned, “Is there any reason to think that we know things they don’t?”

“Well,” Tiona said, “I would have said that they
must
be more advanced than we are since they have a star drive and we don’t… But I guess they’re actually only more advanced than everyone else in the human race if we except you.”

Vaz tilted his head curiously, “Why do you say that?”

“Because,” she said patiently, “apparently you know how to get from one star to another just like they do.” She waited a beat. When Vaz said nothing, she mentally snorted at herself and continued, “They’re accelerating their daughter-ship with a plasma drive, so I guess in some senses we’re more advanced than they are because we have thrusters.”

Vaz looked interested now. Tiona had the impression that the fact that humans were more advanced in one area had made him think about the possibility that the aliens might be more advanced in another. When he said, “What else do we know about them?” Tiona thought this confirmed her supposition.

Tiona considered. “The daughter-ship masses about 400 metric tons. They’re communicating by radio. The signals look digital.”

He appeared to be uninterested in the mass of the daughter-ship, but when she mentioned their communications Vaz looked excited. “Have we decoded their transmissions?!”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you get me copies of their signals? It’d be really fun to decode them!”

“How can you decode them when we don’t even know the language you’re decoding into?”

Her father appeared to be startled by the possibility. He tilted his head curiously, then said, “I guess I don’t know until I try. But, if some of the information being sent represents machine instructions rather than the conversations of biological beings, I think I’ll be able to understand the machine logic.”

Trust my father to think he’d understand the machines better than the people!
Tiona thought. “I’ll ask, but they’re trying to keep everything pretty hush-hush so they might not let us have them.”

Tiona wandered out to her car in a daze. She and her father had talked some more about the aliens, but she’d had a hard time getting him to talk about their technology. He was much more excited about how interesting it would be to try to puzzle out their communications.

She settled into her car, then wondered where she should go.
I should stop in and talk to Mom,
she decided, opening the door again. Her AI said, “You have a call from General James Cooper.”

“Put him through… General Cooper?”

“Hi, I’m answering your call, but I have a lot of pressing issues. Is it urgent?”

Tiona blinked, “I suspect I’m calling you about those selfsame pressing issues. Are you helping deal with the aliens?”

“Yeesss,” Cooper replied, dragging the word a little bit. Suspiciously, “How did
you
hear about them?”

“A General Stoddard is out at GSI commandeering saucers to go look at them. He’s a little… abrasive. Even though I believe we should help him, he’s getting less help than he could because he’s…” Tiona tried to think of a nice way to say it but then decided not to candy coat it, “such a jerk. I’m hoping you or someone on your staff can help us get a better liaison.”

“Ah… yes. I know what you mean about the general. He’s very capable but… lacking in social lubrication.” There was a little pause, then Cooper said, “I’ll see what I can do about that issue. For now, talk to me about any problems. Will you be able to provide saucers for reconnaissance?”

“Though Stoddard didn’t ask for it, I’ve called all of our saucers back on the remote chance that we need to fight. Unfortunately, even the first one won’t get back for four days. Since I talked to him, I realized we still have the original saucer that went out to the asteroid. It’s small, but could go out and have a look-see right away.”

“Oh! That’d be great. It’ll carry, what, seven people?”

“Five.”

“We’d need someone who’s familiar with the equipment. Could you or Nolan go?”

Startled by the suggestion of Nolan, there was a hiccup in Tiona’s thoughts.
Maybe it’d be good for him?
“Sure,” she said slowly, “one or the other of us could go.”

“Stoddard will probably want to go, but more importantly we’ve got to send a Major Vincent. Vincent’s the real hotshot on space warfare. If anyone can assess the alien’s technology it’d be him. I guess we should also send a couple of guys who are really comfortable in spacesuits in case we need to land somebody on the alien ship.”

Tiona said, “I think you should send a diplomat too. If you
only
prepare for war, that’s all you’ll be able to do.”

Cooper snorted, “That’s what the president said too. I pointed out that we won’t be able to communicate and she dropped the request.”

“If there
is
some way to communicate, being out there with no one but triggermen could be a problem.”

Cooper said nothing for a few seconds, then said, “There’s no point in me talking to the President Miles about that one. She’ll agree with
you
. I’ll ask her to assign us a diplomat. Any other issues I can help you with?”

“My dad would like a datastream of the radio transmissions we’ve picked up between the alien ships.”

“They’re digital! Not in any machine language we use!”

“I know. My dad thinks it would be
fun
to try to decode them.”

“We’ve got the NSA working on… Never mind,” the general said, sounding resigned, “I’m not going to make you point out the fact that your dad’s
way
better than the NSA. I’ll get him a feed.”

They talked a few minutes longer about the reconnaissance mission then Cooper hung up. Tiona sat thinking in her car for a few more minutes, then got out and went into the garage. At her command the saucer tilted up so she could climb onto the back deck…

***

Once General Cooper had disconnected his call to Tiona, he turned to one of his aides. Lt. Mullins was the one he thought of as his Technical Aide because Mullins was so savvy with electronics and other science. “How’s the NSA coming with the Signals Intelligence on the aliens?”

Mullins slowly shook his head. “No context to use for decoding. There’s no way to figure coding schemes out when you don’t even have any idea what they
might
be saying.”

“I was afraid of that. I need you to get a feed of the raw data and forward it to Dr. Vaz Gettnor.”

The lieutenant frowned, “Who sir?”

“Vaz Gettnor. My AI will give you a connection to his daughter Tiona Gettnor. She’s the one that flew the saucer out to pick up the astronauts.”

Mullins glanced up, probably seeing the ping with the connection data on his HUD. “Do I send the alien transmissions to her, or her father?” Mullins looked a little uncomfortable, “And what are they going to
do
with the data?”

“
He
won’t answer your calls. So, contact her to figure out how to get the data through to him. He’s going to see if he can understand it.”

Mullins looked taken aback. “He thinks
he
can decode stuff that’s stumping the NSA?”

Cooper gave Mullins a little grin, “What’s the worst that could happen. Maybe that
he
won’t figure it out either?”

Mullins gave the general a dubious look, but said, “I’ll get right on it sir.”

***

Pasadena, California — The Near Earth Object Program at JPL today confirmed some rumors that have been on the amateur astronomy network. Apparently the object first seen in May after it rounded the sun has in fact split into two fragments. The smaller of those two fragments is going to pass quite close to Earth which will provide an excellent opportunity for closer observation…

Reven was at a skate park “generating buzz.” Tiona had told her that making a successful commercial product out of her sky-board would require that potential users had some time to get hyped up about it and encouraged her to fly it in public as much as possible.

Reven almost felt guilty about telling her parents that she was going out to advertise the sky-board when, in her mind, she was actually going out to ride for the fun of it. However, having zoomed around this particular skate park enough to have attracted a big crowd, she’d finally landed and started letting some of the kids take short rides themselves.

Some of them panicked when they got on because the board didn’t provide them the side-to-side resistance that wheeled boards did. Tilting the board hard enough to keep it from sliding out sideways took some getting used to. Some kids couldn’t stay on it for more than a few seconds and essentially wasted their turn. Others seem to get the knack of it fairly quickly, taking substantial rides around the park.

Fortunately, when they wanted to stretch their turn longer than they should, she could just tell her AI to ground the board. To their dismay it would slow and gently settle to the concrete. One of the kids had evidently thought she wouldn’t ground him if he stayed far away from her—presumably thinking that she wouldn’t want to walk over to get the board. However, once she’d grounded him he’d called out to her asking if she wanted him to ride it back over to her. To his frustration, when he stepped off the board, it rose to an HAAT of six inches and flew back to her under AI control, neatly dodging the intervening spectators on the way.

***

As the small saucer settled into place at the coordinates Tiona’d been given in Washington, she wondered once again whether she should’ve sent Nolan on this trip. She kept thinking that it would have been the good thing. It could have gotten him engaged in doing
something
again. Something to get him out of his dissipated new lifestyle. Tiona tried not to think about how she might be hoping that such a mission might get Nolan out of Carolyn’s orbit and into hers.

But, when it had come down to it, she’d realized that she couldn’t send him into danger that she wasn’t going into as well. If the purpose of this mission was to evaluate the aliens as a possible threat, sending her boyfriend out to evaluate it while she stayed at home felt… wrong. Perhaps she could have, if she’d been sending him on other missions. All space flights were inherently dangerous, after all, but sending him on the new undertaking that had as its
only
purpose the evaluation of the danger posed by the aliens felt morally inexcusable.