We all got drinks and finger food, in the end, for Anderson Marlow arrived while Van Veen was setting up the first round of drinks—no printer anywhere in sight—and declared he was hungry.
Marlow was a big man and filled any room he entered, but even he wasn’t large enough to overpower this one. He moved over to where Dalton was working on the desk, setting up a direct feed for Lyssa, and shook his hand. He introduced himself to Fiori, then came back to me and with a grin, hugged me hard enough to lift my feet off the ground.
Then he put me back on my feet and patted my cheek. “You’re cute when you blush.”
I growled at him, which just made him laugh louder.
Jai pushed a glass of something into Marlow’s hand. “They met aliens,” he said flatly.
Marlow’s smile was slow to fade. “Really?” He drank.
“Really,” I said flatly. “We’re about to show you.” I pointed toward the desk where Dalton was working.
“You don’t have a pad you can use?” Marlow asked, sounding merely curious.
“I have to get a new one,” I said.
“Another one?” Jai shook his head.
“Jai said you can emit a room-sized 3D tank in here,” I said to Marlow.
“We can. Is that what Dalton’s trying to do?” He put his drink on the table and went over to the desk. “I can help.”
The two of them sorted out the connection, with Lyssa weighing in from the other end. When the screen formed in the middle of the room, we gathered around it, while Lyssa appeared in the middle, at near life-size.
She waved enthusiastically at Marlow and Jai.
“You look lovelier than you ever have,” Jai told her.
“Why orange?” Marlow asked her, his tone serious. He leaned closer, examining her. “But I’m glad you kept the freckles,” he added.
Lyssa put her hands together and I thought she might scuff the ground with one toe, but she didn’t. “I have something to show you,” she said, her expression growing grave.
“So Danny said,” Jai replied. “Please go ahead.”
Lyssa nodded and disappeared. In her place, the rocky planet we’d left behind formed as a small ball in the middle of the tank.
“Where is this?” Jai asked.
“Unnamed planet on the very edge of the Carina arm,” I replied. “We’ll give you all the details later. Just watch for now.”
I had rewatched the footage more than a dozen times already and was more interested in seeing Jai’s and Marlow’s reactions. Dalton watched them, too.
Fiori kept her back to the tank and talked softly to Darb, while Coal and Vara sat next to their brother. Coal watched Fiori with his head tilted, the white eyes steady upon her face.
Lyssa had put together a full montage of our interactions with the aliens, including footage from the shuttle’s external cameras, which gave Jai and Marlow a full view of the creature inside the one man fighter.
“Hello…!” Marlow exclaimed softly when the fighter appeared. Then neither man spoke until the feed ended.
Jai rubbed his jaw. “Again, please.”
Lyssa ran the footage again.
Marlow moved over to the kitchen wall and prepared food, pulling containers out of cupboards and placing loaded plates in the center of the table.
Van Veen watched the footage four times in total. Then he glanced at us. “Come and eat.”
Fiori looked surprised, then concerned, but I knew how Van Veen liked to work. I shook my head and saw her tiny shrug in response. She came over to the table and settled on a chair beside Dalton.
Marlow placed a screen emitter on the table. “For the most important person in the room.” He switched it on.
Lyssa appeared on the flat screen and smiled sunnily. “You are very sweet, Anderson.”
He winked at her. “Don’t tell anyone else.”
The food was simple, but fresh, plentiful and good. I ate more than I thought I could, and in between mouthfuls, I glanced at Van Veen. I could see he was thinking hard.
Marlow was, too, but he didn’t one-track the way Van Veen did. He pulled the serving plates in front of everyone and encouraged them to try whatever it was. The plates were near to empty when Marlow said, suddenly, “Lyssa, did they hail you at any time? Try to communicate in any way?”
I was startled, for that was a question I had not thought to ask her.
Van Veen nodded as he watched Lyssa for her answer.
Lyssa scratched her cheek. “They came out of…of whatever they’re in when they use their drive. They just popped into real space out of nowhere.”
“Like crescent ships do?” Van Veen asked.
Lyssa grimaced. “Yes, I suppose just like that, only it was startling—”
“There was a flash?” Marlow asked.
Lyssa shook her head.
“Then it was startling only because you didn’t expect a ship to appear there,” Van Veen concluded.
“Yes,” Lyssa admitted.
“And did they communicate in any way?”
“Not in any way I would recognize,” Lyssa replied. “I recognize over three hundred forms of communication,” she added.
Van Veen rubbed his chin, the whiskers rasping. “The footage you just showed us was silent.”
“There was only the usual static of space,” Lyssa said. “And me screaming at Danny.” She gave a small grimace.
“And Danny shouting back, I’m sure,” Van Veen added dryly. “May we hear that?”
Lyssa glanced at me, startled.
I nodded.
“I…uh…sure. A moment…” She looked away. Then, “Here you go.”
The sounds that drifted over us at the table were the static-filled blips and pulses I’d come to recognize as the sounds of deep space. They were the sound wave symphony of distant and nearby stars.
Then, suddenly, the klaxon blared. Everyone around the table jumped, including me.
Lyssa’s voice shouted, “Incoming! Incoming! They appeared out of nowhere! No warning! They’re right on top of us!”
“Run!” I heard myself shout. My voice was thinner, filtered through communications conduits from the inside of the abandoned ship. Then, “Shut the alarm off!”
“I’m coming in!” Lyssa shouted back. “They’re fast! I’ve never seen anything like it!”
While everyone around the table concentrated upon the sounds coming from Lyssa’s screen, my attention was caught by the parawolves, who all sprawled on the floor by the windows, bathed in warm sunlight. They had all lifted their heads and were staring at the table.
Coal tilted his head and whined.
“Van Veen,” I breathed. “Look.”
Jai watched the wolves. “They hear more than humans can,” he said softly.
Vara jumped to her feet, quivering, as she stared at the table.
“More than a shipmind can?”
“Isn’t computer hearing directional?” Van Veen asked me. “They hear what they select to hear. Animal hearing is passive. We can’t help but hear what is on the frequencies we are designed to hear.” His gaze met mine.
“Lyssa, stop the playback,” I called.
My voice, shouting at Dalton to watch out, cut off mid-word.
“Colonel?” Lyssa said, doubt in her tone. She was addressing Van Veen, not me.
The parawolves had relaxed. Coal had gone back to sleep. Vara sat blinking in the sunlight.
Van Veen spread his hands on the table and studied them. “It is clear that the other ship had no intention of communicating peacefully. They approached at high speed, attempted to abduct Fiori, and when that failed, they opened fire. I think your guess that they took the crew of the Ige Ibas is correct. More, I think they remained in the area, with a passive watch on the Ige Ibas. They anticipated that someone would arrive to investigate the ship.” His gaze moved around the table. “They arrived not long after you did—not even an hour later. It isn’t a coincidence. They were waiting for you.”
Fiori shuddered.
“Everything they did was an act of aggression,” Van Veen added. “But why did they wait for someone to investigate the Ige Ibas? They had the crew. What else did they want?”
“Our data,” I said flatly. “They want to learn about us.”
“Given everything they’ve done so far, I think it’s more nuanced than that,” Marlow said. “I think they want to learn who we are, where we are and what our weaknesses are.”
Van Veen looked at Lyssa on the screen. “We need to know what is in that higher or lower frequency, which the wolves can hear, but we cannot. Can you isolate it, and convert it to something we can hear, Lyssa?”
“Why bother?” Dalton said. “These blue fuckers aren’t fooling around. They’re abducting humans, including my son. That’s all we need to know.”
Van Veen shook his head. “First axiom, Dalton.” He said it softly.
Dalton drew in a breath. Let it out. He nodded. “Intelligence is the sharpest tool.”
“First axiom of what?” Fiori demanded, her voice rising.
“First axiom of war,” I told her unhappily.
Fiori opened her mouth, then closed it. She sat back, her lips thinned with tension and, I thought, disapproval.
Van Veen touched my arm. “If we are in the prelude to a war, then we need a communications expert, someone who can speak all languages, to help us figure out what these creatures want.”
He wasn’t referring to human dialects, like Uqup, or unravelling code—although it might yet come to that. He was talking about someone who could straddle the disparate ways computers and humans exchange information and the differences in the way they thought. That kind of expert might be able to unravel how the aliens thought and communicated, too.
Know thy enemy.
“I’ll reach out to Lyth,” I told Van Veen, for Lyth Andela was the only person I knew who was a former computer, too.