eyes. They were-sleepy? No, maybe not sleepy, but definitely strange.
The large one that had entered the Med-Center first turned to the others and snarled something that sounded like a group of gravel-throated cats having a fight. The others made hissing and spitting cat sounds back and damned if they somehow didn’t make them come out sounding deferential as they surrounded the autodoc. Tom was pressed against the side of the ‘doc, trembling.
The second creature, whose face had distinctive asymmetric stripes and dark markings around his eyes, looked down at me and then did the one thing I would have never expected. He spoke, in hard to understand and heavily accented Standard.
“This one knows how? Yesss? He must work.”
I almost passed out from the shock. Here we were between the stars, twenty-plus ship-years from the Belt, and aliens from who-knows-where Just waltz into the Med-Center. And they speak Standard. No one ever told me that our first contact with outsiders would be like this.
Then I looked closer at the biggest outsider-the one who was eyeing me closely. And I saw them. Hanging from his belt. At least a half dozen, maybe more. Strung together on some kind of cord.
Ears.
Human ears.
That’s when I passed out.
When I woke up again I wasn’t in the autodoc, but lying on a waterbed in an empty room. From its size, about as large as a small walk-in closet back on Earth, I guessed it was the Captain’s quarters. I wondered what had happened to Jennifer, but I remembered those ears hanging from that outsider’s belt and decided I didn’t really want to know.
The image of a hungry tiger that walked like a gorilla made me want to fade back into black oblivion, but my fear of what might happen to me while unconscious kept me awake. I tried to sit up, but the room turned gray and started spinning around. Lying down seemed like a better idea. On the wall next to the bed the ready light of the intercom softly glowed green.
“Hey! What’s going on? Where is everybody?” I wasn’t sure who (or what) was going to answer.
Tom’s voice crackled over the intercom, “Relax. I’ll be right there.”
A few minutes later the door of the cabin slid open and Tom limped in carrying a medkit. “Take it easy You’re weak and you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Tom ignored my question as he rustled through his medkit and removed drinking bags, drug hypos and bottles of medicine. “Here, drink this and don’t interrupt.”
I swallowed the chalky pink juice from the drinking bag. It tasted worse than it looked. The burning sensation from a hypo pressed against my arm distracted me from further thoughts about Tom’s bartending skills. He tapped a touchpad near the bed and a memory plastic chair extruded itself from the adjacent wall. Tom sat down, composed his thoughts and began talking.
“Those aliens call themselves ‘kzinti,’ though I don’t know if they’re talking about their race or some sociopolitical subgrouping.”
“But what are they?” I asked. “Explorers? Scientists? What?”
Tom blinked at my question. “Not quite. They’re warriors.”
“That’s impossible! Who are they fighting?”
“Us,” Tom replied. “As near as I can tell, we’re at war with them.”
War.
There hadn’t been a war on Earth in dozens of generations. The last historically verifiable intergovernmental conflict had been before the time of Galileo. There were stories about misunderstandings and UN police actions, like the apocryphal stories about a global conflict involving genocide and nuclear weapons during the twentieth century But even children knew that those were just fictions used to teach moral philosophy. Every child in the ARM sponsored school system learned that war was impossible for any advanced culture. Any civilization that lasted long enough to develop interstellar flight must have lasted long enough to outgrow their aggressive behavior. If they hadn’t, they would have killed themselves with their technology
“I don’t believe you,” I said as I tried to think of some other explanation.
“You can believe me or not, but that doesn’t change the way the kzinti act.”
Silence filled the room until Tom continued. “Look, Ib, maybe we’re at war, maybe we’re not. Maybe these creatures are psychopaths escaped from a mental institute and they’re living out their delusional fantasies using stolen technology.”
Now that, I thought, made sense.
“But what matters is what’s happening here and now. They act like we’re at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”
I just stared. My mind didn’t want to accept star-traveling warriors. “But what do they want with us?”
Tom looked away as if in shame. “To them we’re just potential slaves.” Silence filled the room until Tom continued with his story.
“It happened a couple of weeks ago. We were six months out of Vega when we detected the approach of an unknown vessel at outrageous speeds and accelerations. We shut down the ramscoop so its magnetic field wouldn’t be a danger to the alien ship’s crew. Then we waited. The kzinti ship rendezvoused with us and just hung a few hundred kilometers off our nose, doing nothing at all.”
I interrupted, “How did they come across us? Random chance?”
“No,” Tom replied, “they were reconnoitering Vega when they detected our approach and came out to intercept us.”
I interrupted him again. “You’re telling me they were able to accelerate out to our position, come to a dead stop and then match our velocity for a rendezvous. Man, what kind of technology do they have?”
“I don’t know anything about their technology Jennifer thought it might be some kind of field drive, something where the drive forces operate on the entire ship and its contents equally. That way they could accelerate at hundreds of gravities and not feel anything.”
I was still having trouble believing this. First, hostile outsiders. No, make that hostile slave-taking outsiders. And now I find out that they have technologies that made our best ramships look like cloth and wood biplanes in an era of hypersonic jets. This really wasn’t the way that first contact was supposed to happen. Tom continued his story.
“The crew tried every communication scheme you could imagine. The kzinti never responded to any of them. Maybe they misunderstood us, but it sure seemed like they were just ignoring us. I wish that’s all they had done.”
Tom paused, remembering. I tried to imagine the hopes and anticipations of the crew. Lightyears from Earth, lightdays from a new star, and then they make first contact with the outsiders-the often imagined, more often imaginary, intelligent creatures from another world. Everyone knew this would be an epochal moment in human history. The fulfillment of many lifetimes of dreaming and imagining. Tom’s voice threatened to break as he told me the rest of the story.
“Then the kzinti sent over a couple of small craft and forced their way onto our ship. There was a fight, but we were outmatched. Most of the crew were killed in a matter of minutes. I was in the Med-Center and didn’t even have time to get to anyone who needed me.”
Tom’s eyes took on a distant, haunted, look. I didn’t want to think about the things he must have seen.
“Jennifer tried to restart the drive. I guess she hoped its magnetic field would kill the kzinti who were still on their ship. Maybe she wanted to use the drive’s exhaust as a weapon. Who knows? The kzinti broke into the control deck and killed her and the remainder of the crew. In the fighting our drive got damaged and it executed an auto-shutdown. But not before its magnetic field had destroyed the drive and most of the electronics on the kzinti warship as well as killing all its occupants.”
Warship. A word from our past. In school they had taught us that the last human warships were boats that plied the oceans with sails. The idea of a warship that could sail between the stars was almost unimaginable.
“Our ramscoop destroyed the drive on the kzinti ship?” I couldn’t bring myself to call it a warship. “How’s that possible?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not an engineer.”
