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
