I couldn’t help but bring my attention back to their faces, reassessing. If they used the armor to protect them in deep space—which they must do, for they had flooded the tunnel behind them with air we could breathe, so they could therefore not survive in space without air—then the face I found so hideous was merely a helmet and not their true features. Were they an approximation, though? The overly large eyes might be twin windows that functioned as the clear dome on our average suit did.
They moved closer, the weapons trained on us, and halted.
I swallowed, my heart slamming against my chest. Would they even understand what the raised hands meant? Perhaps it might be a sign of aggression in their culture. But they weren’t firing at us. So maybe putting ones’ hands up was a universal gesture.
Ten of them, all told. A range of heights, all close to human average.
One of the shorter ones stepped forward and spoke in a rasping, broken language.
They had language, then. They didn’t communicate via telepathy or something esoteric like that.
Clearly, they were telling us something.
“Lyth, do you have any idea what they’re saying? At all?”
“Not a clue,” Lyth whispered back. “I’d need to listen to them speaking for hours before I could start to guess at the meaning of individual words. If they even use words.”
“My guess is ‘you’re our prisoners, don’t move or we fire’,” Marlow said.
“Sounds about right to me,” Dalton said, his voice low.
Another of the things stepped out from the line of them, which had fanned out around us, enclosing us in a pincer movement that made me want to break out in hives. It was tough to just stand there and let them surround us like that. Sweat prickled in my armpits and my heart would not quit banging. Coppery spit flooded my mouth.
The second one to break rank swung its repulsive helmet, clearly examining us. “You.” The weapon it carried swiveled to aim at Marlow. “Lead?”
“Fuck, they speak Common?” Sauli said.
“They think you’re the leader because you’re the tallest,” Jai murmured to Marlow.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Marlow told the speaker, smiling and showing all his teeth.
The speaker scanned us all again. “Who? Lead?”
Jai patted my shoulder. “This is essentially a military operation. Knock yourself out, Colonel.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. I stepped forward a half step. “Me. I’m the leader.”
The speaker moved closer and I had to fight to not lean away from it and keep my feet planted where they were. As soon as it stopped before me, I said, “How do you know our language?”
It didn’t answer for a long moment. Probably putting together what Common it did know, building a coherent answer. Either that or deciding whether to cut off the head of our group and leave us leaderless. But if they really thought that shooting the leader would demoralize us or leave us flailing, they had a lot to learn about humans. These humans, at least.
“Others. Teach. Learn. Speak.” The speaker said the words slowly, and the pronunciation sucked, but I got it.
The humans they’d already abducted had taught them enough Common to communicate.
I nodded. “Dam wall now, Lyssa,” I said in a conversational tone. “Everyone, flat, roll, envelope.” I said it as fast as I could, then dropped and rolled myself, moving swiftly away from the blue guys.
The two open hatches slammed shut and hissed, as Lyssa sucked the air out of the middle of them, creating a vacuum seal that was unbreakable, and activated the Faraday cage that covered the entire ship, a second skin coated with matt black so the Lythion was difficult to see in deep space, leaving only a negative area where it blocked the stars behind it.
The blue ones shouted at each other, as we all rolled out of the way of their line of fire. I heard Dalton shouting instructions at Fiori. Sauli hauling Yoan out of the way.
Nanobots flooded the floor and instantly built up into a high wall surrounding the aliens. They fired rapidly, but the construction nanobots held against the charged particles their weapons fired. Where they broke apart, new nanobots swarmed to repair the damage.
“Cage in place,” Lyssa said calmly, as the aliens continued to fire at the wall surrounding them. “Their communications with the mother ships have been cut.”
“Wait,” I said, listening to the crackle of fire and violence.
We waited, all of us breathing hard, our heads bent as we listened to the noise on the other side of the wall.
When it ended, I said, “Window, Lyssa.”
A rectangular section of the wall melted away in front of me. I brought my shriver up, aiming through the window. “Are the mother ships firing on us, Lyssa?”
“No.”
Hostages were enough to hold their fire. Good to know.
The tall speaker came over to the window. “We kill ship. Free us.”
“We negotiate first,” I told it.
“Neg…” It paused. “No. Not.”
“It means it doesn’t know that word,” Lyth breathed next to me. “It isn’t refusing.”
Know, not.
“Deal. I want. You want. Agree. Get it?” I said.
The creature turned back to the others. Their rasping chatter ran fast for a few seconds, then it turned back.
“You want?” it said.
We were negotiating, then.
Jai, out of sight of the window, gave a gusty sigh. “They can be reasoned with.” He bowed his head in relief.
“The humans you took from the ship. We want them back,” I said.
“Humans…ship. Back.” It repeated me quietly, sorting out meanings. Putting concepts together. Then it lifted its ugly snout, pointed it at me. “Ship?” Its tone inflected upwards. It was clearly a question.
Which ship?
“They’re not going to grasp the name of ships,” Lyth muttered.
“Lyssa, emit a screen over this window and display an image of the Ige Ibas.”
The window misted over and Lyssa put up an image of the ship, then shifted through various views of the ship taken from the footage we’d captured.
The speaker’s snout stayed aimed at the screen. It was watching.
