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.
—15—
The residents of the Uqup Pedrottle system were not shy about claiming that their two settled worlds and three star cities were the oldest established human enclaves in the galaxy. They had a thing about it. They fought to maintain their peculiar dialect to preserve their culture. There were ruins of a human city on the second world, Pedro, which had been more or less reliably dated to well before the establishment of the second empire.
Wynchester, on the other hand, was the oldest non-planetary human structure in the galaxy and had their original charter of
