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“Babs, we will be back at the Portal in a little over a day. Is the moon base going to be ready to receive all these people in quarantine?” Oliver spoke as they were breaking orbit.
“Yes, Hector has an isolation area set up with a vacuum gap to the rest of the base. There are three doctors to do examinations and blood work. The crew of the Nautilus must also be quarantined.”
“We know. I have a feeling there will not be a problem. These people are in incredibly good health for slaves who have been crawling through rubble and eating gruel for a year. They all seem to be about our age. In a group this size, I would expect two or three to have problems or be older. Too uniform. All the refugees burned their clothes and are in mylar ponchos. Please ask the crew for donations of clothes.” Oliver continued, “Al, keep the barge gathering information a couple of more days or until the mothership is detected then leave it doggo on the small moon. I want to know who these fuckers are. Plan on leaving a barge in the system you are in now to act as a watchdog.”
‘Wilco’ Babs and Al said simultaneously.
“Thanks for leaving me here. I wouldn’t do well in a gunfight.”
“Each in the crew has their own abilities. See you in a bit,” Oliver disconnected.
Gabriela pushed the acceleration hard. She had been out of place during every action and felt kind of grubby now. And that Misha making eyes at Oliver left her more than a little anxious. They arrived at the Portal in less than a day.
The Nautilus now with a much smaller crew and the stripping out of almost all the missile canisters had left plenty of room to handle the swell of people. Cida was making headway in learning words in the new language. Communicating ideas was still a pantomime, song, and dance. Then she noticed a small symbol hanging from the neck of one of the refugees. She called Oliver down to the old missile bay which was functioning as a common area.
“You are right. Badly made, but definitely a Star of David.” Oliver paused for a few moments then motioned for the man and Cida to follow him. They went up to the conference room and called Ben Cohen.
“Oliver my friend. For once you call at a reasonable hour. And thank you for that heads up on the precious metals market. We barely had time to protect ourselves. Where are you, out zooming around Mars or some exotic place?”
“Hi Ben, we had short notice on that too. I have a person of interest for you. We are thirty light-years from earth in a red dwarf star system and we liberated sixty-three human slaves from aliens,” Oliver started his story.
“I am afraid to say bullshit with you,” Ben replied.
“It gets better. One of them wears a Star of David around his neck. I didn’t catch his name. Sorry.”
“Bullshit” Ben replied immediately.
“All true. This is the fellow next to me. Can you try a little Hebrew or maybe Yiddish? We cannot communicate with the group and we badly need a Rosetta Stone,” Oliver asked.
“Hello, I am Benjamin, who are you, and what are you doing there?” Ben questioned in Yiddish.
The man suddenly sat straight and replied, “I am Yacapo. My village was collecting scrap on a broken planet and these humans killed our Masters. They brought us to this spaceship, and we are going somewhere.”
Ben and the man had a good long talk then Ben said to Oliver, “My friend you may have solved one of Israel’s biggest mysteries. This man’s father was taken just before arriving at a Nazi death camp. His father is still alive and has an apparent age of thirty like all of them. This man is also my cousin.”
Oliver’s mouth gaped for a moment and then he said “Bullshit, no way he could be your cousin.”
Just then, Babs, Cida, and Ariel wandered in. “What’s up. I know that look,” Babs pushed.
“Hi girls. Oliver has just freed my long-lost cousin,” Ben said cheerily from the hologram. The girls spun around.
“Hi Ben, telling old Hebrew fables to Oliver again?” Babs said.
Ben repeated his findings as Yacapo waited patiently watching the strange people interact.
“Well Ollie, another fine mess you got us in,” Babs said, quoting Stan Laurel.
“Ben, we need to beg your secrecy again. I did not want our interstellar journey to be known so soon,” Oliver pleaded.
“We have another cousin who is an Israeli special operations officer. Why don’t you take this as an opportunity? Bring in Israeli. We can bring much to the table and eventually this fellow is going to talk to someone. Let us help. We can keep secrets as a country, unlike the US,” Ben proposed.
“I’ve trusted you for a long time Ben. Call your cousin. We will pick him up in Israel along with three doctors to supervise our quarantine. Tell them to bring all the medical materials and machines as though they will be on the moon. Which they will be. We will pick them up in about a week. As a heads up, we may have sensitive material from the Sumerian-Aramaic period. Find some scholars who can keep their mouths shut.”
“I will never get tired of our conversations. You won’t be disappointed, but how much can I tell him to be taken seriously? This will seem a bad joke.”
“No way around it but the basic truth. First, have him promised to secrecy, that will help him understand you are not joking. Keep the secrecy chain going up only high enough to the person that can get things done. If he is an intelligence agent, he will recognize the need to keep this tightly held. One thing you must also recognize, and I intend this to sound ominous, we may be monitored by forces in the Galaxy that do not wish us well. Someone used violence here in our solar system in the past and we were violent in this liberation, but I will leave that tale for another time. This information I have just given you must not be leaked to the population.” Oliver delivered the last in a somber tone.
“There is more but I don’t want to spoil a good surprise. Courage my friend. We will talk some about this in few days. By the way, this is a heads up, but the refugees acted like a pile of scrap tin, copper and aluminum was like a pile of gold. We have been cut off from the Galactic economy for a long time so our perceptions on value are going to be different,” Oliver finished and disconnected.
“I have an assignment for you Cida. Work with Al and Yacapo to learn to speak Galactic as you develop a translator of Galactic-English. I know that going through Yiddish will distort it, but my God what a present we have been given. We will be going out into Galactic society. I need a translator and partner I trust without question. Are you up for an adventure like that?”
“Yes Oliver, I will go with you anywhere.” She replied with steel in her voice. The warnings Oliver just gave to Ben made her stomach go cold. She motioned Yacapo to go with her.
“Think we ought to call the General?” he asked the girls. They nodded. “Where is Marco? He needs to know all this.”
“Know all what?” Marco asked as he walked in. It took Oliver several minutes to get Marco up to speed to which he replied, “Let’s get the translator working before we dig up any more bones. It’s bad enough telling Gen. Frank we may have started a war. That translator will answer a lot of questions.”
“Let’s do it. Al, call the General.”
Gen. Frank answered on the first chime and just grunted a ‘Hello’.
“We travel to a new star system with a human habitable planet and all you got for us is a grunt?” Oliver tried to sound cheerful.
“Good morning. Well done. Over the top good news but that means there is some very bad news to go with it,” he replied.
“Uhm, we may be intergalactic fugitives for armed robbery and mass murder.”
“There it is. I am sure there are a lot more ‘Ands’ so start your story,” Frank replied both aggravated and amused at the same time.
“I will leave the beginning up to Marco since technically it was a battle, and he was in command for that part.”
“Holy shit you weren’t kidding.”
Marco told most of it as though an after-action report, something the General was more comfortable with. Since he was on a roll, he related the rest about Yacapo and the Israelis. After Marco finished the General sat a long time digesting the information before answering.
“Well, we were expecting something big since seeing Ceres with its base wrecked. I am just ashamed there was an interstellar shootout with alien slavers, and I wasn’t there. But on the bright side, this business with the Jews being kidnapped will give me another chance. The Israelis will want to mount another Raid on Entebbe and I will have to go ride herd on them.”
“That’s the spirit, and Gabriela may finally get her fighters,” Oliver replied relieved of Gen. Frank’s reaction.
“I thought y’all had a party going in here and now I’m getting my fighters? Icing on the cake,” Gabriela gushed.
“We will fill you in a little later,” Marco cut her short.
Frank carried on, “before we start the hardware, we need more information. Maybe these refugees can help but we are going to have to do some exploration, then some spy work. It’s good you pasted their work area. Harder to find clues. Analyzing the tech, we recovered will help us understand what we are up against. I suppose you want to do everything on the moon base?”
“Yes. We will have to be in quarantine until the doctors get a chance to prove we are disease free. Can you get some analysts for the alien articles? Those rifles are exceptionally potent. We can handle the tablets and electronics. Before you ask, we did not dissect any of them although Jerry exploded one with one of those rifles. A story he can tell.
These refugees speak the same language and have had a very long-term relationship that sounds feudal. I expect them to know more than they realize. An anthropologist will be the best to unravel the details of humanity’s place in the Galactic civilization. Returning to 18 Scorpii should be a major expedition. Long term, its value to humanity cannot be exaggerated. I am not sure how to keep that under wraps or when the expedition can be mounted. I expect the return of the mothership will give us our direction, especially if our translator is running by then,” Oliver said.
“The Mars Colony Conference will make good cover when we take these extra people. The movement of people with certain profiles will create a pattern for the intelligence agencies to sink their teeth in. You are aware that all the spies in the world are shifting through your figurative garbage?”
“Doesn’t surprise me. Spies do what they do, and politicians wring their hands about whether to believe them. Nothing new. You think everyone is going to be pissed about going to Mars then another Earth becomes available?” Oliver sounded anxious.
“You haven’t conquered Scorpii yet. The difficulties of Mars society will be a good filter about who to go farther with. By the way, I have convinced the President to give back the Roswell Boneyard. He is still embarrassed. Maybe you can throw him a bone for the public. Can someone pick me up in White Sands in about a week? I will have the experts and equipment gathered by then,” Frank said.
“Ok a week, see you then.”
Babs had been filling in Gabriela during the comm. She looked excited about the developments.
“Oliver, I have some rough designs for a fighter. I know the General thinks we should wait but look at them with me. I made allowances for different weapon systems and a fusion reactor. You are an aeronautical engineer so I’m sure you will see how easy we can build one,” Gabriela pleaded.
“I’ve put you off too long. Let’s go take a look.”
“I want to see too,” Babs chimed in. The three of them headed off to Gabriela’s quarters.
“These girls are going to be the death of me,” Oliver muttered a few hours later as he extracted himself from the dog pile with Babs and Gabriela. A shower would do the trick.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
Oliver looked over his shoulder to see three brown eyes and one blue eye daring him to leave. With a sigh, he returned to the dog pile.
∞
Al, Cida, and Yacapo had a basic translator ready before reaching Earth. The hardware was easy, just a smartphone with an earpiece. Oliver had decided the extensive interviews could wait until they were settled on the moon base quarantine. A simple survey had given them the basic profile of the group. With a few exceptions, most of the refugees were sent to that work camp because their masters owed money and immediate payment was required. Slaves were the most liquid of assets.
The exceptions were notable. Zan had been a weapons tech on a gunboat that used humans as cannon fodder. Although not an officer he had a good basic understanding of the military abilities of local system warships. At least in his sector of the Centaur Empire. He got sent to pull scrap for mouthing off a few too many times to the snot snouted Tull Petty Officer. The hatchling was as dull as the bag of hammers he carried around to fix problems with. Literally. A collection of various weight hammers to hit things with that didn’t work or did work and he didn’t realize it. Zan stood between him and the laser cannon one too many times. A dead laser cannon could mean a dead ship of his mates.
Then there was Ralic. He was an actual physician and Freeman, highly paid to keep the humans able to work. Pulling scrap caused multiple injuries. He was a simple cost of doing business. The nanites would fix many things but trauma injury needed help, or the slave could die.
Misha was considered a criminal for the many times she was denounced by other slaves for advocating liberation ideas. If her full active participation had been known in fomenting slave revolt she would have been executed after public torture. The Masters were very good at sowing fear and any sign of rebellion was treated in the harshest most public way possible.
Tilaura committed a series of minor offenses, but primarily extracting hormones from pregnant humans’ urine. It acted as a mild intoxicant to male Tulls and a strong aphrodisiac to females. To the third sex needed to consummate the sexual act in their species, it was toxic. It was the third sex of shriveled pseudo males that complained loud and long until Tilaura was transported to a penal village. She always thought of herself as a nice person. It just didn’t seem fair since the Tull males had sought her out.
