Trang (6 page)

“So—I’m sorry, I’m just having
trouble processing this—so when you were in Sudan, and Kurdistan, and—. Shit.
When you were in
Guantánamo
—?”

“They always
recommend
earplants, but this is the first assignment I’ve had where I’ve been
required
to get one,” Philippe explained. “I just carry a transponder on me.”

Shanti gave a brief, shocked laugh.
“You just
carry it on you?
So when they grab you, they can just
take
it off you?
”

“But so you know? The earplant is
just a communications device.” She slapped his shoulder as he walked through
the doorway. “The transponder goes someplace else.”

Chapter
4

The next day, Philippe sat, most uncomfortably, in one of the
Titan station’s briefing rooms. He was tired—the station was supposed to be on
Beijing time, but while the clocks on the station agreed with those in Beijing,
the truth was Titan was on its own time, or perhaps on no time at all. People
slept in staggered eight-hour shifts to maximize sleeping space and work time,
so whatever the hour, there was never any discernible change in the station’s
level of activity.

Because of the time it had taken
for Philippe’s earplant and transponder to be implanted, he hadn’t gone to
sleep until about midnight. At 4 a.m. his cubby had woken him up, turning on
lights and sounding an alarm because “his” sleep shift was over. He had sat
awake for a while after that, trying without success to figure out how to get
the machine to wake him up before noon and wondering if someone on the
4-to-noon sleep shift was going to try to get into the cubby.

Fortunately he had woken up
naturally at about 7 a.m. Breakfast had been a ration bar, which would be all
he’d be eating for the duration of his mission. While the bars provided the
necessary calories and nutrients, plus caffeine if you wanted it, it took a
while to get used to the reduced portion size.

Philippe’s stomach had been
grumbling when he entered the conference room, but the noise had been easily
drowned out by the roar of the SFers. There were more than a dozen of them in
the room, greeting each other with riotous enthusiasm, bellowing across the
room, and occasionally plowing into each other.

It was an excess of high spirits that
did not sit well with Philippe, who had quietly slipped into a chair. There was
the lack of sleep and real food, plus his ear was itching and felt swollen—
was
swollen, distended anyway, because of the earplant. And thanks to the
transponder—which had indeed been implanted “someplace else,” namely his left
buttock—he had to sit with his weight shifted far to the right, a position that
was already beginning to bother his back.

Philippe was the only person in the
room not in a camouflage uniform and the only person not sporting an angry
feline embroidered over the heart. He also, to put it bluntly, felt very small.
He was not a big man, and right now, he was surrounded by bruisers. Almost
everyone was at least a head taller than Philippe, and they were all easily
over 70 kilograms, maybe over 80—even the women.

There were only two of those,
Shanti and a shorter woman who was extraordinarily pale with white-blue eyes.
She had straight black hair that lay flat against her scalp despite her short
crop. With the exception of Philippe, Shanti, and the doctor, George, no one in
the room looked over 30, or even over 25.

Shanti was chatting in the back of
the room with a man who was fully two meters tall. She stopped, checked the
clock, looked around, and yelled, “Everybody here?” There was a murmur of
agreement, and she said, “So, sit!”

Those who were standing sat, while
she remained standing in the back. “OK, I want you all to meet our ambassador,
Philippe Trang. Philippe, stand up please.” He stood, smiled and waved,
wondering if he was expected to give a speech.

“He’s what we’re here to protect,”
she continued, so Philippe sat down. “Got it? Introduce yourselves after the
briefing. Patch here is back from the other side to tell us about our
situation. For those of you who just got here, Patch has been overseeing the
outfitting of our living quarters on the alien station. He’s my second, so do
what he says or we break your fucking legs.”

Everyone around Philippe seemed to
find the prospect of broken bones simply hilarious. Patch walked up to the
front of the room. His sleeves were rolled up, and his bare forearms
immediately resolved any questions as to why he had the same name as a popular
delivery system for recreational drugs: There was a large cannabis leaf tattooed
in bright green on each arm.

He began to speak. “OK, guys, so I
guess some of you just got here and don’t know this? But we’ve been outfitting
our little human area for a while now.” Patch waved his hand, and the wall
behind him sprang to life, showing the familiar station.

“So, you’ve all seen this. You see
how it’s shaped like a starburst or something, with this big cylinder in the
middle and these big, like, prong things sticking out of the cylinder.” Patch
pointed to the cylinder and “prong things” as he talked.

“So, this big cylinder, it’s, like,
the common area, where all the aliens can hang out together and talk and shit.
And these prongs, see? Those are, like, where each alien species lives.
There’s, like, a docking bay at the end of each prong, for ships.”

He waved his hand again, and one of
the prongs turned red.

“This is our prong,” he said. He
waved his hand again, and it detached from the cylinder, turned, and enlarged.
The outer layer stripped away, showing a cross-section of the prong.

“Everything in our prong is, like,
ours—atmosphere, power, defense, it was all built here or on Earth, you know,
by humans. We can seal our prong off from the common area, and pretty much do
whatever we want with it. The only rule the aliens have for our prong is that
we can’t have any weapons in it that will fire into the common area.”

That caused an immediate sensation,
with the soldiers gasping and gabbling to each other.
Now I know how to
shock an SFer,
thought Philippe.

“We knew that, we knew that,”
Shanti yelled, quieting the din. “We got extra concealables and uniforms that
hold them.”

“We’ve set up the first quarter of
the prong as a no man’s zone,” said Patch, launching into a lengthy explanation
of the various autofire weapons and explosives that lay in wait for the
unwelcome visitor. The presentation seemed to calm everyone in the room except
Philippe, who just tensed up more and more as Patch explained how the
explosives in the floor had detectors that enabled them to launch up to the
height of the mass moving overhead before blowing up, and how there were heavy
airtight doors on either side of the no man’s zone, and how the zone had packed
around it a ring of explosives that were powerful enough to blow their living
area away from the station entirely.

“We installed all that using
robots, so yesterday, Gingko and I were, like, the first humans to actually go
in and hang out. It all checked out; we turned the air on and were able to open
our suits and walk around without, you know, dying,” Patch concluded, nodding.

“Well, it kinda makes you fly,” he
said with a laugh. A few of the SFers laughed, too. “I mean, the oxygen’s a
little less than we’re used to, and the gravity’s a little less too—it’s kinda
weird. The lighting is flippy too because too much blue is, like, really bad
for some of the aliens’ eyes, so things are real orange and look strange. And,
of course, there are all the aliens. And I got something to tell you about that,
too.”

He waved his hands again, and a
picture appeared of two of the aliens usually referred to as the Builders or
the Founders—the species that first built the station. It was debatable whether
they looked more like giant insects or giant crustaceans: They had segmented
bodies, were about the size of a cow, and were covered in some sort of hard
shell that ranged in color from deep orange to bright red, with dark spots.

They also had six limbs that they
used both as arms and legs, each ending with seven long fingers. While they
usually walked on all six feet/hands, they had a good sense of balance:
Philippe had watched the many videos the Builders had made of themselves and
sent through the portal, and he remembered a shot of a Builder standing on only
one limb, using the other five to manipulate what he assumed was a piece of
machinery. The Builders lacked any visible head; instead, each segment ended in
a fringe of “fur.” Some people thought the fur was some sort of sense organ,
although others argued that their limbs contained whatever sense organs they
had.

“So you know these guys, right?
They’re smiling right there,” said Patch, indicating the picture. “They kinda
run things, and since I was trying out the translators, too, one of them asked
me if I would help out with something. The Union already gave them, you know,
all our words, our English, but they still needed the terms we use to describe
the different aliens.”

Philippe raised his hand, and Patch
nodded. “Couldn’t we use the names they use for themselves?”

“That’s what I told them, you know,
that we hadn’t really chosen names for the aliens because we thought it would
be, like, rude. But they said not to worry about it, that nobody aside from
that one guy can even, like, pronounce the words different aliens use for
themselves. They said to just come up with something that would be easy for us
to remember.” Patch looked slightly guilty. “They, like, really wanted to have
the names before we all got there. They looked really worried about it, so I
figured I’d better do it.”

He turned back to the video. “So,
here are the names. These guys, since they’re hosting us, I called them Hosts.
And these two in this picture? They’re, like, our guys—they’re assigned to us.
So I called them Max and Moritz—he’s Max and he’s Moritz.”

He waved his hand, and the video of
the two Builders—Hosts now, apparently—was replaced by one of a group of about
a dozen aliens of another species. They were about a meter long and half as
high, covered in spikes of various thickness, and they reminded Philippe of sea
urchins. Some of their spikes ended in multicolored blobs. They were sitting
close together, and Philippe could see that the aliens had all linked their
spikes together.

“OK, these guys I called
Pincushions,” said Patch. “Although I was thinking about calling them Cluster
Fuck, because that’s what they’re doing right there when I took that, just
right on out in the common area.”

“Awesome,” said a freckled man
sitting to Philippe’s right.

“Yeah, I asked Moritz, ‘What are
they all gathered together for, guy?’ And he said, ‘They’re exchanging genetic
material.’” Patch pointed to where the aliens were touching each other and
laughed. “And those blobs? Those are like clothes. They’re, like, doing it in
public with their clothes on.”

Everyone around Philippe expressed
their appreciation, while he massaged his temples with his forefingers.

Patch waved his hand, and the next
image appeared.
Oh, great,
thought Philippe.
He’s named these the
Vacuum Cleaners.

It was, after all, what they looked
like—small, round, flat, and brown, they whipped silently around on the walls
and floor in the background of any video.

In fact, Philippe, realized, that’s
what he had been told they were—simple maintenance drones.
Why is Patch—?

“OK, these guys are complicated,
because they’re basically machines,” Patch began. “But they’re not just
machines. They’re the eyes and ears of these other aliens, who like, live in
water and can’t leave their prong. They’re, like, connected remotely to their
machines. I called them the Swimmers.”

Everyone murmured, and Philippe
started in surprise. There had been nothing about any of that in his
briefings—no suspicion that the drones were anything but drones, and certainly
no mention of an aquatic species of alien.
God, if this idiot can make a
discovery like that in one day. . . .

“So I didn’t see them, but I’m told
that there are actually two Swimmer species that live on the same planet and
came to the station together. One’s big and one’s small, so I called them Big
Swimmers and Little Swimmers.”

The freckled man snorted with
laughter.

Patch waved his hand, revealing a
picture of an alien with an elongated body that stood on four legs and had four
arms. “These I called the Cyclopes.”