Storiesonline.net
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                               The Mission
                           by Gina Marie Wylie

Copyright© 2011 by Gina Marie Wylie


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Description: One of the triumphs of civilization is the ability for people in larger and larger groups to come together for the common good. Of course, people being people, some need convincing more than others and over the course of time forms of compulsion have been used when all else fails. When all parties can kill each other, compulsion has to come in more workable ways, where one can skip some of the usual baggage. Less common means, such as extortion, might find a place, no matter how unpalatable.

Codes: ScFi
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Chapter 1: Leaving on a Jet Plane


Thomas Christopher swam through the fog of sleep and eventually surfaced. The first two hours of sleep for him required the ground to shake to wake him up. The light knock on the door came again. Why weren't they using the bell?

Would a burglar be so persistent? A "no-knock" raid was just that -- they'd have come through like gangbusters. He threw on a robe and checked outside. Two men in suits stood outside, patiently knocking again. Still, while Bel Air was considered a "safe" suburb of LA, he left the chain on when he opened the door.

"Dr. Thomas Christopher?" the man in the lead asked.

That put Thomas back in a familiar neighborhood. "Yes, I'm Dr. Christopher."

"If you'd invite us in, we have a proposition to discuss with you." The man displayed what was clearly a badge labeled "Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"I'm not dressed."

"There is a certain degree of time pressure here. Invite us in if you're interested."

A robe was decent enough, so he unhooked the chain and let them in and if they were scandalized by his bare feet, what of it?

Thomas was a bit short of average height, although his arms were longer than average, reaching half way to his knees. He was trim and kept in shape by playing handball or tennis with his peers or students -- whoever was available. Sandy brown hair, cut like a businessman would have it, pale blue eyes that only seemed weak if you didn't look too hard.

"I will make this short, Dr. Christopher. If you're interested in a project that is of the utmost important to national security, involving one of the greatest discoveries of all time, please say you're interested. Otherwise, we won't take up any more of your sleep."

The two Federal agents might have been stamped out by a cookie cutter, dressed in single-breasted blue pinstripe suits, with white shirts, black ties and no visible jewelry. If you looked close, you could see they were armed. Big stocky men, half a foot taller didn't intimidate Tom, not even a tiny bit. Even armed, they didn't.

"What kind of discovery? What kind of project?"

"The classified sort of project. Where you promise the sun, moon and your first born as a security deposit. Where violations are treated with serious jail time -- not slaps on the wrist. Yes, or no, Dr. Christopher?"

"How long is this likely to take? I have finals to give next week."

"Yes or no, Dr. Christopher?"

Thomas deliberately turned away from the men and went into the kitchen. He pulled a Coke from the fridge and downed it in four gulps. "I'm never much good without coffee in the morning. This is a field expedient," he explained. He was watching carefully when he used the term; there were no change of expression on either man's face.

"The last time, Dr. Christopher. You aren't going to get more information unless or until you sign that national security agreement -- or we depart. This offer will never be made again."

"I'll sign. If this is crap, I'll crap on you."

The man held out his hand and the other placed a leather folio in it. Thomas was a careful man and though the words of the agreement were almost unchanged after ten years he still read them carefully. Only the penalties had changed, really. The crossed American flags, the red and blue ink and remarkable brevity and clear language for a government document was unchanged.

He signed it and waited curiously. "Dress," he was told. "Pack for two weeks, do not pack any electronics, not even a shaver. Arrangements will be made to proctor your exams for you."

Did they know he was going to do research instead of teach this summer? He expected they did.

They drove through the night to LAX, to a military hanger. He was escorted up the ramp of a C-130, and directed to a seat. The two agents vanished and an Air Force captain appeared. "You see nothing, you say nothing, and even if your wife appears, you don't know anyone here. Do crosswords." He handed Thomas a crossword puzzle magazine.

"I have my work," Thomas told him.

"Anything you write on this flight will be collected and will go into a burn bag. Attempt to evade the security and you'll spend a lot time with a fellow named 'Spike' -- you'll not find him very collegial ... but the odds are he'll take a shine to you."

Four men and a woman joined him over the next hour. Three of the men he didn't recognize -- but he knew the woman. The woman looked at him and he looked at her. They'd known each other for a couple years and loathed each other. He wondered what sort of a project needed a linguist and a tendentious anthropologist?

The last fellow he also recognized and he was recognized in turn. The two men traded bland stares and then ignored each other. Jack Grimes was an MD, and a good one. He was also about a half dozen other things.

They flew steadily east, until somewhere over the middle of the country. Then they started circling, and the sounds came signaling that they were undergoing midair refueling. That brought a frown to Thomas' face; they had used less than half of their fuel, not all of it. They hadn't needed to refuel. If they were going out of the country, it would have made more sense to refuel just before they left US airspace.

The answer left some of the other passengers airsick. After the refueling, they dropped like a rock. Then the plane leaned back at about a thirty degree angle of climb, and went up as not nearly as fast as it had descended, but fast enough. Then they starting making circles in the sky. The circles tightened until they were very small indeed. Thomas put his brain in neutral, trying not to be airsick as well. He's never been airsick before, but they certainly stretched the limits this time.

Then they straightened out and flew level for the better part of an hour and a half.

Before they turned onto the final portion of their course, the Air Force captain came to collect any remaining cell phones and GPS devices. The captain was blunt.

"Possession of an unauthorized cell phone, GPS or other electric-powered device will henceforth be the cause of immediate incarceration. Prison sentences will be indefinite -- the President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will have to certify that you can no longer harm the defense of the United States. That might be a while in coming. It's not worth the risk."

Except Tom had known which way he was traveling since before high school, without needing to have a GPS or even a compass.

He settled down to patiently wait some more.

Along about noon they landed and went directly to a hanger before they were allowed deplane. Then they were put in a bus without windows, traveled a half hour, and then unloaded in a large building where they were led to elevators and dropped a couple of hundred feet.

"Get some rest," they were told. "It's about 4 PM locally and there are a couple hours of downtime. We'll get you up in a few hours, feed you and do the initial briefing. You'll know more about your schedule in due course."

He didn't smile or let on. He'd been awoken at two in the morning; they had been on the way to the airport at a quarter of three. Take off about five, four hours in the air, an hour refueling and going in circles, then two hours to their destination. He was morally certain they were in the Central Time zone, so add two more hours. It was about two PM, not four.

On the other hand, the military don't like being told that they are wrong -- until it was announced what the real time was, it was four PM.

They fetched them for dinner as a loose civilian group. There was no interest in enforcing military discipline which Thomas considered a good sign. He was curious about what people would wear. They were all good Californians -- slacks and nice shirts and blouses, sensible shoes.

An oriental man stood in the front of the dining room and when everyone was seated he was quick. "I imagine you're all hungry and curious. Right now, get something to eat, we'll talk when everyone has had some sustenance."

It stood to reason that the government knew Thomas' checkered history. At one time he'd been fascinated by everything in the world and had wanted to try it all. It had been a freak; a one in a million accident. He'd ridden in a Humvee to a meeting with a tribal chief in Tikrit, Iraq. At one point he leaned down to accept a present from the chief's ten-year-old daughter, her shy six-year-old sister at her side.

One of those ugly yellow and black flowers opened six feet behind them, turned everyone around into gruel -- except Thomas who was shielded by the older daughter's body. How do you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning after a young woman dies in your place?

Thomas hadn't walked away from the blast. He had some burns; he'd needed new eardrums ... and a lot of counseling. He didn't shave and do anything else that required him to look into a mirror for more than a year.

Adventurism for adventure's sake died that morning. He still did things, exciting things -- but intellectually exciting. This was the first time he'd left LA in eight years.

He found he'd eaten a steak dinner flying entirely on autopilot. For dining room food, it had been surprisingly good.

Now, the oriental fellow, an ethnic Chinese if he was any judge -- and he was -- rapped a water glass with a knife and got everyone's attention.

"I'm Dr. Fred Tang and I'm a sort of half-baked expert at getting research teams on long assignments to work together -- and avoid killing each other. I'm half a project manager and half your ombudsman. Come to me if you're on my team and have an issue.

"What I'm going to cover is the basic discovery. I'm not going to bore you with any more but one additional warning. We're serious about security. This is currently the highest research priority in your nation and mine. Don't screw up. One last time -- if you're not prepared to give this your very best from the git-go, you're in the wrong place."

The phrase "in your country or mine" was downright fascinating. The US cooperated with Taiwan on a regular basis. Dr. Tang's accent was that of a native of Beijing. The US and Beijing cooperated on practically nothing, and certainly nothing of national security importance.

Dr. Tang launched right into his briefing.

"About six weeks ago an American exploration crew found something remarkable. Subsequent investigation has learned we had no idea what 'remarkable' was until just recently.

"The site is currently within the territorial waters of the United States. What the US was looking for and why they were looking where they were looking isn't germane. As of now we aren't planning on bringing any of you to the physical site. The environment is stable, but there are ongoing risks. However, people are working there even now."

"I'm going to take a moment here to digress into politics. What I'm going to say won't set well with most of you. I am Dr. Fred Tang, a professor of physics, but also Dr. Fred Tang, a colonel in the People's Republic of China's Liberation Army.

"I am not going to try to soft soap or minimize what's happened. My government has an active and effective intelligence service. Even so, it took a few weeks for the agents in place to convince the politicians of the importance of what the US had found.

"My government was facing what was certainly an existential threat. The best result that could be expected was to become a technological and economic backwater. After all the progress we've made in the last twenty years, that wasn't acceptable to the government.

"I and my associates are here for the simple reason that my government threatened to detonate a very large H-bomb on the site. And, it was decided, we'd drop more bombs on American cities, because it was unlikely the US wouldn't retaliate.

"Obviously this was an exceedingly unpleasant threat.

"China is not like the United States and the PLA is quite different from your military. Its structure is quite different from your military's. It is accurate to say that the PLA has tentacles all through Chinese society. The party, the government -- and business. In China it is redundant to refer to the 'military-industrial complex' and the PLA in the same sentence. The PLA controls a significant fraction of my nation's industrial output -- although it is true that since economic liberalism that has declined.

"Again I make no apologies for the actions of my superiors. The leadership of the PLA decided that the threat was too severe and argued that no such threat should be permitted; the party leadership panicked and refused to withdraw the threat out of fear of embarrassment.

"It was done very quietly, but the party no longer runs China. The PLA assumed control briefly, appointed a trio of non-party mayors of some of the major commercial and industrial cities to run things in the interim. We did withdraw the nuclear threats against your cities -- but kept the threat against the site. We simply asked to become equal partners in the research.

"There were a number of sidebars to the agreement, but I must say that all parties have been surprised at how well the agreement is working out. At the working level there have been no significant disagreements -- no more than two scientists with differing approaches who are running a project." He grinned, and there was nervous laughter from the audience.

"This is one of many reasons this project is secret. The leadership of the PLA is orchestrating a slow transition in the government, preparing the people slowly and carefully for the changes. There have been several retirements of senior party leaders announced; there will be more. Later, if any of you are curious, I will arrange a briefing detailing our new government structure.

"Your government didn't feel the need to inform its general populace of the threat to incinerate a number of your cities -- no matter how quickly the threat was withdrawn. Please ... even the dimmest bulb in this audience must understand the reasons our two governments will be dealing harshly with any security breaches -- real or imagined. For your own sakes, don't transgress. I assure you, you will have enough on your plate to make up for it."

"Now I will return to the topic of real interest.

"I'll make a series of brief declarative statements. US National technical means detected an anomaly. Subsequent research has confirmed that there is an object that appears to be a vehicle, not a base, about five hundred feet beneath the ocean. Which ocean you don't need to know. The top of the site is about three hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean, but extends vertically about a hundred and twenty feet deeper. The vehicle is buried under about a hundred feet of sediment, thus the base of the vehicle is about two hundred and fifty feet below the ocean bed and some five hundred and fifty feet below mean sea level.

"The vehicle is air tight, even after all this time. It is a serious understatement when I say that the vehicle has a very robust self-repair ability."

Tang looked around for a moment. "The vehicle is about the size of a football stadium. It has nine levels, and is arrow-shaped -- a blunt, rounded head that widens to about twice the width as the blunt end at what we are sure the rear of the vehicle. It ends in a section much narrower than the rest of the head -- like the section on an arrowhead that the arrow is tied to the head.

"We were lucky there, as the excavation of the vehicle is still in the early days. An educated guess was made based on early scans of the area, and we uncovered the approximate shape of the rear of the vehicle.

"A week ago the decision was made to open the vehicle, over the vociferous objections of many of us. However the rewards appeared to justify some risk. We prepared what amounts to a series of airlocks. People entering the vehicle would pass through a number of chambers where they would be thoroughly decontaminated, coming and going, several times. The air pressure is pumped to zero three times and the air at each stage is recycled. The last two stages we used the vehicle's own atmosphere. It is estimated that quantity of air exchanged between the two environments is less than a tenth of an ounce -- two or three grams. The air was zapped with hard radiation, ultra-violet, radio and microwaves -- across the spectrum radiation that was believed to have been sufficient to sterilize what little air was exchanged several times over.

"It is impossible to tell how long the vehicle has been there, but the upper limit is about five million years and the lower limit about three million -- depending on how fast the vehicle was buried.

"There were no signs of a crew -- although we've only explored a few percent of the vehicle yet. Of course, given the time span that has passed they could have dried up and vanished.

"Obviously this is a momentous discovery.

"Now if there are any minds out there that I haven't blown, I am going to do so now.

"The US Government isn't stupid. Trying to keep something like this to itself would cause rifts within even the most solid alliances -- and your traditional alliances would never survive being excluded with China included. Some nations however, aren't likely to be able to deal with the nature of the discovery. The US has fallen back on some of its more trusted, longer-term allies. Canada and Britain. Germany and Japan, and Australia for the most part. A great many former partners aren't being included, such as the Low Countries, France, and the southern tier of NATO members.

"Now, I'm going to speak a few dozen words of heresy."

"There are a number of obvious research priorities. But the top priority, far above all the rest is language translation. The technology ... I don't know how to explain this. Evidently we are further along than we thought. Still, there are many areas of sophistication that these aliens held over us.

"Consider for a moment, a modern integrated circuit. If we were to go back in time a mere century -- our simplest integrated circuits would be total mysteries to a researcher of the time. They didn't have the technology to detect devices on a nanoscale. They didn't have microscopes capable of 'seeing' a VLSI device and they didn't have the analytical tools and techniques to tell them the composition of the devices, much less how they were made.

"Modern plastics would have baffled them -- as would modern metallurgy. Our understanding of molecular biology, genomics ... a thousand areas would have left them in the dust.

"The aliens haven't left us in the dust. Our equipment can detect their microcircuits -- even ones that have unexpected biochemical components. There are frequent new approaches; there are frequently areas that they've greatly refined over ours. There are areas of knowledge that they are exploiting things we don't understand -- but we feel that if we apply ourselves, we will understand then.

"Our people originally said they were a million years ahead of us. That has slowly shrunk; the best guess these days is a few thousand years of refinements -- applications of technology -- not that many major fundamental breakthroughs. There undoubtedly are such, but they don't predominate. Refinements of technology for the most part.

"An example can be found in a simple thing as lighting. When I was an undergraduate at the university heat given off by an incandescent bulb in my dorm room was a desired feature. My PC was a veritable furnace. Spaceships that don't want to be glowing in the infrared need to be a little more proactive. Lights on the ship give off virtually no heat. The lighting controls in a compartment are simple enough for a person of normal intelligence to figure them out in a few minutes. How to exercise local control, how to override that from the room or from a remote location. It's simple -- a caveman who'd seen a 'clap-on/clap-off' TV commercial would understand how it works.

"Do we know how to make heat-less light? Well, we didn't -- we were close -- but we do now. At a guess every single light bulb on the planet is going to be changed in the next year or so, no matter how much of a feature it is for penurious college students." He smiled at his audience.

"Tomorrow there are a number of subgroups that will be formed to work on the various facets of the discovery. Language work will head the list. There are electronics of various types -- we'll work on identifying subsystems and breaking down further from there to guide future research. We understand some of what we see, and can puzzle out many other things.

"We are going to have a linguistics team working on translations, because that will be the key to understanding everything. The alien electronic systems are mostly recognizable for what they are and what functions they perform ... but they are not always understandable. They were further along towards a 'paperless' society than we are, but they still had something recognizable as books -- all isn't hopeless.

"I might add that the aliens do not appear to have suffered from hubris -- there are no photographs or other graphic representations of the aliens that we've discovered. I am told that many of their tools fit our hands -- and that some do not.

"There are a myriad tasks to do -- now we need to start knocking out those that we can!

"We ask that you not discuss this amongst yourselves just yet. We will assign you to working groups and that will be the place to begin discussions. A smooth and orderly flow of information!"

Thomas was amused. Colonel Dr. Tang had started off in his estimation as unrated, but tending towards the "Project Director" mentality. Tom had steadily upgraded him as he covered so much ground.

It probably wasn't a surprise that the linguists were named first; the surprise was seeing Sheldon Cosgrove appear and named as the team leader. The room had been too large for him to see everyone well, but the four other members of the team, three men and a woman, were all known to him. And all blanched seeing the man that had been put in charge.

Cosgrove was one of the least intelligent people on the planet -- and he'd never led anything in his life for longer than a day or two. He hastily wrote a note to Tang and when they were excused, dropped the note on the head table. It was amusing that two others of the team preceded him, with another bringing up the rear.

Sheldon led them to conference room and started to speak. Tom spoke out first. "Sheldon, sit down and be quiet. We are working to get your status adjusted."

"Status? I'm the assistant project lead for linguistics!"

"Sheldon," Keith Murdoch said, "I'll spend two years in the Colorado super-max prison before I let you manage any research of mine."

Juipei Suchang was more succinct. "If you get near me, I'll break both your legs. You are a trial imposed on us by the so-called dean of our field -- from the last generation that lived in the 19th Century. Let Dr. Christopher speak."

Cameron Healy spoke up. "I make it a point to never agree with Tom Christopher. I'll make an exception this time and agree with him. I told Tang that if you have anything to do with project, I am to misbehave."

Andy Phelps laughed. "What they said. I'm junior here, anyway."

"You'll be leading the way," Tom told him.

"Me?"

"Him?" the others echoed.

"Without a Rosetta Stone, we'd likely be stymied," Tom agreed. "But we have one, a very fine, a very large one."

"You haven't even seen their language!" Sheldon scolded.

"Probably that alone indicates the state of your thinking," Tom told Sheldon. "If you had the lead we'd spend the next couple of years searching for a picture book for children.

"There's an easier way ... a better way."

"Even if you've yet to see the language?" Cameron asked. "I'm going to go back to being the contrarian."

"I've never had a problem with that, Cameron," he told her. "I've fought you tooth and nail, but I'm the better for it, I'm sure. I take more time to consider my positions these days -- it's embarrassing to be handed your clock after two minutes of ill-considered thinking.

"It probably won't be easy, but two intelligent species have at least one thing in common. There may not be any picture books, but if there are atomic or molecular diagrams, they aren't going to need a rocket scientist to figure out. Fundamental relationships are even simpler -- there is only one value for pi. Only one formula for the relationship between angles and length of sides of a triangle. There are literally thousands of data points we'll be able to make sense of -- and that will lead like a laser to our goal."

Cameron whistled. "There are a million things wrong with your assumptions -- but we're only going to need one or two to start unraveling things."

"And contemplate just how much we've learned about data mining, contextual clues to meaning -- and a hundred other areas in information science. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants -- I think we'll be able to understand whatever language awaits us," Tom explained.

Fred Tang came in and stood watching them for a minute. "What is your problem with Dr. Cosgrove?"

"Tom, you tell him the bad news," Cameron told Tom.

"Well, first off, Sheldon Cosgrove has an MA in modern languages, not a PhD. Do you know Emil Blucher?"

"I can't say that I do."

"He's the former dean of languages at Columbia, where all of us have matriculated at one time or another. Now he's the Dean Emeritus. This is a joke he plays on new people -- he convinces someone to appoint Sheldon as a project leader. Sheldon has had all these other appointments as a team leader -- for a day or so. One memorable dig they were stuck with him for three days, because of heavy rain. Those people tied Sheldon up and left him in a storeroom.

"He's easily the dimmest bulb in the box. If you look at his resume, there are no dates for the leadership positions that cross over a year. 'Appointed to head Giza expedition' leads the list. In 1941. Seriously ... what are the odds of an archeological expedition being in the field in 1941 in Giza -- when Rommel was running around Egypt? For sixty years Blucher's played on Sheldon's vanity -- it works every time. There's not anyone in the field who would work with Cosgrove. Ask him."

The question wasn't needed -- you could read the answer on Sheldon's face.

Tom went on, "This is a burden we've had to work with for sixty years, Dr. Tang. Emil Blucher thinks this is a rite of passage -- a form of 'paying your dues.' That and Blucher's been around forever ... he's nearly a century old."

"Pick a leader, get organized. Start thinking up some approaches, we'll get texts to you starting the first thing in the morning," Dr. Tang commanded.

Cameron laughed, "We picked Tom Christopher, we have approaches already, with a better than reasonable chance of success."

Tang repeated the criticism -- they hadn't even seen the language yet.

Keith Murdoch explained. "Simple, elegant, straightforward. As Cameron said some of the formulas aren't going to be as easy to decipher as others -- but it will only take a couple to break the logjam."

Tom spoke up. "We could really use someone like Martin Shaver -- he studies context based learning at Caltech."

"We can try. I'll make a note."

"In the meantime, can we borrow a physicist or mathematician?"

"Lily Chu," Fred Tang suggested quickly. "She likes to work alone. We hadn't decided what we wanted her to focus on yet."

"She would be fine," Tom said. His team was all Americans -- it wasn't a surprise to be assigned a Chinese member and he wasn't going to object.

Fred Tang led Sheldon Cosgrove away, assuring them that the physicist would be around in the morning.

"A raft of unanswered questions," Tom opined. "It's hard to know what's deliberate and what's an oversight because of limited time."

"Like for instance?" Cameron asked.

"If we left a ship sit outside for a few million years, we'd come back to find some rust stains and not much else -- if that. Yet we're told people are exploring it. Robust self-repair capabilities indeed!

"They tell us we're going to have books to examine starting tomorrow. A book doesn't last much more than a few hundred years, even with the best of care. Millions of years? There is more here than meets the eye."

Cameron did a formal bow, going low. "You are so right. You used to be such an easy mark because of your hasty conclusions. Now I'm doing it, and I find myself in the same spot as you used to be: regretting opening my mouth too soon too often."

"I'm keeping a stiff upper lip," Keith said. "It's stiff because of the hammer, nails, glue and industrial strength duct tape keeping it glued shut."

They all laughed. "Get some sleep. Toss ideas around in your head -- not your heads on your pillows. Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day. And Cameron and my own predilections aside, tomorrow it's going to be the hare-brain ideas that are going to get us there in the end. This isn't going to be the time for inside-the-box thinking."

Sleep was easier said than done. A strange bed, a strange room, strange shapes -- and the world was shaped different than before as well. It wasn't very restful sleep.

Breakfast was hasty meetings at tables in the dining room with everyone in a rush to get started. Tom deliberately didn't try to eavesdrop on any of the multitude of conversations around him; it would have added too much noise to the problem and not more information. There would be a time to meet later on, at their leisure with their peers.

Lily Chu was a hyperactive, tense, young woman of about twenty-four or twenty-five, thin as a rail, long black hair that reached the small of her back. She was brittle as a raw piece of spaghetti, verging on the neurotic. She also didn't speak very good English. Tom, Cameron and Juipei did speak decent Chinese and they explained what they were looking for.

"And you want me to what?" she said, her voice hostile.

"Look through the books. A recognizable vector diagram, a triangle with values for the sides, something recognizable as math tables or trig tables. A simple circle with a sentence that could be translated C = πD or A = πR2 or any other formula. It's my thesis that the language of science is pretty universal, and that the fastest way to finding a Rosetta Stone is math or some science. Anything."

Fred Tang came in, with a technician pushing a cartload of books. "This is the first tranche. Please be careful of them, they're priceless."

"Couldn't you have run copies?" Tom asked.

Dr. Tang laughed. "They're priceless. In our dreams we could make books like this."

"How is it we aren't investigating a heap of dust?" Cameron asked.

Dr. Tang looked pensive. "There are so many areas of the alien technology that we would love to have. One thing we're long aspired to do is create self-repairing systems. That has proved a very elusive goal. While it is possible to generate a system that repairs itself, it has to be simple, and not too much can go wrong at once or the basic raw materials go out of supply. Worse, if a critical system breaks. Few self-repairing systems have the redundancy required to correct any but the simplest, most problem.

"It is one thing to supply basic polymers and generate simple parts from them -- but eventually you run out of the raw materials and things stop.

"To be truly self-repairing a system has to be able to go out and hustle its own raw materials, assemble them or otherwise prepare them for deployment -- all without the benefit of an external supply chain. Over a very wide range of raw materials. We've created simple systems that can build a limited repair chain -- but eventually it runs out of the raw materials. The ship we discovered can absorb something like a circuit board, atom-by-atom, and spit out a new board. Or spit out another model -- and it doesn't take days to do so.

"It appears to be fully automatic, down to the most fundamental level of construction. We haven't done more than scratch the surface yet. The ship is the size of a large aircraft carrier -- we've explored less than five percent of the volume -- and understood about a millionth of what we've seen. Being able to read the language would be an enormous help -- I can't imagine how we're going to be able to do it..."

Lily Chu interrupted him. It took Tom a second to sort through the Chinese dialects he knew to find one that matched some of what she was saying.

Dr. Tang morphed into a Chinese colonel in about two seconds, the scowl on his face a dark warning she was treading in forbidden areas. Mostly Lily was flinging a torrent of obscenities at him that would peel the paint off the walls. Anyone who had someone speaking those sorts of things to him would be enraged -- but Lily was furious as well. From some of things said, it was clear that the two of them had some previous history -- and it had not been a happy history.

Tom spoke up. "Miss Chu, clearly you feel put upon. I thought I was fluent in Chinese -- but you've pushed the envelope. I'm a goal-directed individual myself, and it's obvious you think Colonel Tang is interfering with your goals. Please, slow down, speak more simply and explain your issue. This isn't the way to resolve disputes or misunderstandings, Miss Chu."

She'd stopped talking when Tom had started and stood now, her nose still flared with anger, her mouth twisted in a grimace of hate, breathing like a steam engine.

She pushed the book she'd been looking at hard, sending if flying off the table. Colonel Tang made a futile effort to catch it, then, for the nonce, he was more concerned about it that Chu. It was an eye-opener if you thought about it.

"We are told those are priceless," Tom said mildly.

"He lies. Everything out of his mouth is a lie! It always has been!"

"How do you figure?"

"The flexible pages -- that is an innovation class advance, not a breakthrough. There are many similar substances available now. There are links to additional material displayed on the pages. Trivial! This is something that the..." she descended into gutter Chinese again, "would do. Really, seriously. I'm not a linguist, I can't speak a foreign language -- not even Cantonese.

"What are the odds that I can learn to count to ten -- and what are the odds that the 'aliens' use decimal numbers in a minute? What are the odds that two minutes later I can count to one hundred and sixty-eight, and read the names of the elements? Not that I can pronounce them."

Tom took two steps, stripped the book out of Colonel Tang's hands, blocking him with his own body, and putting the book down in front of Lily.

"Show me," he said simply.

"The first page has this sign at the bottom. The second this one..." she went symbol by symbol for the next several pages. On the tenth page, the first symbol was repeated, with a new one added. She flipped rapidly forward, to the 20th page, where there was the symbol from the second page matched with the one that hadn't been in the first nine.

She flipped through more pages, showing the progression, until she reached the first page that had three digits. The first symbol, then what had to be the zero symbol twice.

"That is bad enough, lie enough! This is ... obscene! Another lie like all the rest of their lies! They excel at nothing better than telling lies!"

She flipped back to what Tom saw was page thirteen. There was what was obviously a chart split between the two pages. He was a polymath genius -- he recognized what he was looking at in a millisecond.

"The Periodic Chart of the Elements," he stated, tracing the table's title on the page. He touched the symbol at the cell on the top left. "I can translate that meaning, but not the words. Atomic number and atomic weight is one. Element Hydrogen." He ran through the first few elements, giving their group, their atomic number and pointing to the name for each.

"You are reading the alien language!" Colonel Tang exclaimed.

"Not reading, merely translating. Reading is going to be a bitch and a half!" He tapped the book. "Still, these two symbols are obviously the equivalent of our 'H' for hydrogen, these series of symbols are the word spelled out ... notice that the first two symbols of what appears to be the word are the abbreviation."

"This isn't a lie?" Lily asked.

Keith laughed. "No, it's not a lie. Dr. Christopher hypothesized that science could be used as a Rosetta Stone. If you're looking for a father for your babies, I volunteer!"

The comments were in badly accented Chinese.

Tom laughed. "Before you get too enthusiastic, consider where we would get the referents to translate this: 'Mom, please stop off at the AM-PM on the way home from work and pick me up some super-maxis.'"

Cameron laughed out loud, Keith blushed, and when Tom translated the remark into Chinese, Colonel Tang smiled thinly. Lily Chu went straight to the brass ring, repeating her earlier question, "This isn't a lie?"

"No, I'd say you have the translation pegged Miss Chu."

He turned to Colonel Tang. "I do believe I can work with Miss Chu. I will teach her patience and to be polite to her superiors."

"I am fascinated by the fact that you've had such early success; that so much progress has been made so much sooner than ever envisioned. Personal issues are secondary. They are of no account, when compared to the overall goal. I believe Dr. Healy described you as a 'diamond in the rough.' I'm not sure that I agree with that assessment ... but you are a valuable asset."

Cameron laughed. "Dr. Christopher has called me a 'rich spoiled brat' on occasion as well. All true, all heart-felt epithets that, on reflection, reflected our pique with each other more accurately than they reflected reality."



-------

Chapter 2: All My Bags Are Packed, I'm Ready to Go


By lunch they had expanded their "certainly translated" word list to about three hundred symbols, words or phrases.

Before lunch Tom pulled Lily to one side. "I went to bat for you once -- but only because you hadn't been briefed on what we were looking for. I won't do it again."

"He is my father. He ordered my mother, after I was born, to strangle me with the afterbirth. The penalties were -- dramatic -- against parents with more than one child. My mother refused and he used his party connections to get permission for a second child. Within two weeks of my mother showing pregnant the second time, he had the sex tested ... and when he found out I was going to have a sister, he divorced my mother. He has fathered nothing but girls."

"This isn't China. It won't happen here."

"My mother worked two jobs to get me the schooling I needed to qualify for the University. Then my sister was another trial for her to bear -- but my sister is smarter than I am -- she qualified for a scholarship. My father still wished my mother had strangled both of us."

"In the US we call this 'drama' -- personal issues that consume people and their energies to the detriment of their personal and professional lives. Please Lily, you are an asset that I want to keep. I'd been looking through a book, paying only partial attention to the colonel. Every one of us was doing that. You were the only one to notice the page numbers and their import. Although, those of us who specialize in ancient languages aren't used to page numbers."

"You aren't going to turn me over to him?"

"Not even close. If nothing else, I have a lot of dialect to learn."

Lily colored. "I thought I was going to die. That he was making up everything just to humiliate me. I wanted to get it over with."

"Lily, I'm me. I'm no simpler a person than you are. I've had high points and low points in my life. But as long as you are on my team, nothing will happen to you that doesn't happen to me first."

As Tom was eating lunch, Colonel Dr. Tang appeared and pulled him to one side. "I've tried to give Lily time to talk to you. Has that occurred?"

"Yes, sir."

The colonel laughed. "Ah! Americans! The greatest mistake that anyone takes away from meeting one of you is to think you are simple!

"Lily told you about me?"

"From her point of view."

"None of us, Dr. Christopher is simple! We don't live only now -- but in the past when things were different. Once upon a time your people exterminated the red Indians. Genocide!"

"It wasn't my people's finest hour," Tom agreed.

"It's still not. What Lily told you is true. I ordered her mother to kill her. When her mother refused, I had to use some serious markers to try for a second child. When she turned up pregnant with another daughter -- it was grounds for divorce. I was an up and coming officer; a son would have enhanced my status. I was focused on the gender of my progeny -- not my progeny. When my second wife turned up pregnant with a girl -- it was she who divorced me. She did kill our daughter. Everyone wanted sons -- no woman wanted to take a chance on a man who had fathered three girls in a row."

"I imagine that history will find that my own culture was just as screwed up -- just not in that particular fashion. We never discriminated by sex which babies were aborted."

"Then Lily started turning in stellar grades in school. I had burned all my bridges with her mother and Lily and her sister. I did what I could for all of them. I eased my daughters' way to places; I got them scholarships. Lily has always been a problem child. She has so much hate and anger -- she does poorly with authority figures."

His expression was pleading. "She is clearly a person to be reckoned with -- but she is on a collision course with the bosses. They are clearly delineated in China -- not so clearly here. Cosgrove and the two Bluchers ... they didn't realize that there are places you can't go even with a relatively soft government. Blucher senior should have heeded the warning to remain silent. He laughed at a Federal judge when he was told that he was in contempt of court. He's serving ten years for contempt, and twenty years -- consecutively -- for the violation of his security oath. His son objected, and he's just started a ten year sentence for contempt.

"Please, try to spare my daughter from any of this."

The five of them plowed through the books. They were a treasure trove, but Tom had been right too. A great deal of material existed as low-hanging fruit. The vast majority of the material was as opaque as ever.

Keith was a like a guard-yard dog, plugging away at the spoken language. Three weeks after they started he presented the rest of them with a complete phoneme library, the letter and aspirated equivalents. There were some commonalities with other languages, but never much and never for more than occasional instances.

Four weeks into the project they had gone from hundreds of phrases translated per day to maybe one or two on a good day.

Moreover, procedures were starting to get in the way of routine translations. A team would send in a query, it would be prioritized and routed to the linguistics team -- and they would respond. It would take two or three days to report back that a sensor was reading 75 degrees Fahrenheit when someone on site could have responded within a minute.

Tom was a little surprised when the delays brought the majority of the senior managers together.

Dr. Tang was blunt. "We've been concerned, as a priority, with the safety of the study teams. We are currently drawing from about 40% of the pool of qualified personnel. We have gone from a few percent of those we needed to double and triple that -- but it's still not enough.

"We have decided that the observed history is such that we can afford to take a few small risks. There have been only two injuries among the exploration teams. Both accidents are of the garden variety -- one individual allowed his attention to wander as he started down a ladder. He missed a step and caught his leg in a narrow place and broke his leg. He was transported and is doing well. Another individual tried to detect current in a high voltage socket with her fingers. She found it. Proving that God protects imbeciles, she survived.

"Both of these were preventable accidents, accidents caused by inattention or plain stupidity. Just to make the matter clear, both individuals have been assigned to lower priority activities here and not there.

"Now I'm going to entertain requests from individuals to transfer to the exploration teams. Some caveats: these are military-led teams from various nations. We will try to assign people to same-nation teams but I can't guarantee it. Assignments will not be on my whim -- there is a board that runs these assignments -- I'm just one vote there."

Tom had no idea where his request stood in the great scheme of things. He'd made a request a week before to be allowed to accompany the exploration teams. He'd heard nothing back. Now he had a request from Dr. Tang to see him after lunch.

He was Colonel Tang again, when Tom saw him. "A great many people of your nation examine my every move in exquisite detail. My government's instructions were crystal clear: 'Do not fuck this up!'

"My government is positive that if your government was trying to hide things from us, we'd now have a complete map of the sewage system. My government is clueless why it might be the greatest value to China that we could find.

"The thought of sending the world's top scientists hundreds of feet beneath sea level gives them all gas. Dr. Christopher, to be honest, your early success has put you in the 'If it's that easy, why do we need them?' class. So your whole team, having volunteered as a group, has been accepted as a group to work aboard the ship.

"Myself, I'm confident that you will be as safe as anyone, but there are those confident you will be dead in a matter of days. I tell you this to describe the variety of opinions that are held by your peers -- and mine." He smiled thinly.

"I'd have sent my daughter to safety if I thought she was in real danger. You can't read much of the alien language as yet -- but you are familiar with their sensor readings. Currently it takes us three days to clear a compartment as safe to enter. You'll reduce that to minutes, significantly extending our ability to explore." He grinned, "And if you are killed, the bosses are on record that you can easily replaced.

"I personally believe that you are the brightest of the lot, and the presence of you and your team will materially assist our efforts."

Tom mentally shook his head. Dr. Tang was anything but inscrutable -- but he was no closer to figuring the man out than he had been on the first day.

The most notable thing on the day they were packing to leave was a visit by Lily Chu to his quarters. "I am not an easy person to get along with," she told him bluntly. "My father left me with a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to authority figures. My professors at the university were mostly time-serving party hacks who were still trying to wrap their heads around Mao's dialectic of 'The Great Leap Forward' and were unlikely to ever come to terms with economic liberalism.

"You've never bothered me, not even the first day when I made the worst mistake of my life. Not only weren't you angry with me, you patiently explained to me what you were looking for -- and that I had so cavalierly dismissed.

"You stood up to my father -- something new in my experience. You were no more impressed with his fury than you were with mine. More than once grown men have groveled in front of him; one of them wet himself. And it was nothing to you."

Tom laughed. "I'm goal oriented -- if we're not moving towards our goal we need to refocus, get our heads on straight and buckle down. Drama is in great surplus in my society. I avoid adding to it as much as possible."

"You stayed with me," she said simply. "Before it was always a fight to be allowed to stay; you've never asked me to leave."

"Hah! Chinese science must be very different from that in the US! When another researcher comes forward and confirms your thesis -- only a fool would ask them to leave! You keep them close to prove to everyone how clever your ideas were!"

She startled him by stepping close and hugging him. It was a long hug and her arms were exceptionally strong and she had a very tight grip on him. Abruptly, she let go. Under her breath he heard her say, "I am a stupid girl!" Lily spun and fled the room.

That night he practiced some slight of hand on two of the tiny bottles of wine they were permitted each day and put his feet up on a chair in his quarters. He hadn't bothered with the lights and sat slowing sipping some mediocre California Cabernet.

His topic was one of the rarest of the ones he choose when he was in a navel-studying mood -- himself.

The bomb in Tikrit had been a tragedy, no doubt. Still, a decade later, he was still wallowing in self-pity. Nothing in the universe was going to apply a "reset" to the events of that day. Nothing could change the deaths of the girls -- or anyone else killed that day.

He'd shut himself off from people, he knew. He'd done it in his own unique fashion and he doubted if anyone had noticed. He was enthusiastic, outgoing and above all gregarious and talkative -- not the traits you normally associated with someone profoundly depressed and cut off from his fellow man.

Lily had accidently touched upon it -- but like everyone else hadn't seen it. He hadn't reacted to her father's anger -- and hers -- for the simple reason that there was nothing that they could say or do that touched him.

He was a man who owed his life to the protection, to be honest, the sacrifice of the lives of two very young girls. What could an army colonel -- any army officer in fact -- do that could compare to that sacrifice? He talked too much -- at first it had been panic, trying to say anything that would distract himself. Cameron hadn't been aware of it, he was sure, but she had honed his techniques of disengagement. He still cared about winning and losing. He forced himself to focus on improving his arguments. He'd have been infinitely better off focusing on those rather than facing what had happened.

Shit happened. He knew that, really. His wasn't the most tragic story he's heard while he was in Iraq -- and he hadn't been there that long. He honestly thought he wasn't getting any worse -- although he was getting better at hiding his true feelings. How many people think you're BSing them when you're spilling your guts about how your first ever girlfriend tore your guts out -- when you actually had put it behind you years ago?

That incident could have -- should have -- taught him a lot about karma that sucked. Mary Alice hadn't left him for his best friend -- she'd left him for the asshole that had made his life miserable since second grade. That should have told him all he needed to know about what sort of a person Mary Alice had been. That was the first clue about human relations when he'd realized what had caused their breakup.

The guy, Dwayne, had gotten a job as a production assistant on the sequel to Blair Witch Project. He told Mary Alice that he could get her on as well. Seeing nothing but stars, she'd run off with him.

Tom supposed there were really people who memorized such trivia, but the movie was another crappy, low budget production and Blair Witch had worn out its welcome the first time. Mary Alice had been a cute redhead who smiled -- and later screwed -- one of the assistant directors. That got her a walk-on part on the sequel to Blair Witch Project where she said three words. You know you're bankrupt as an actress when your lines consist of "What the hell?"

When that project finished Dwayne scored a PA's job in another movie, this one with a real budget. Karma is a bitch; Tom was still trying to come up with some righteous payback -- when karma did a far better job that he ever could have. Dwayne and Mary Alice were sharing an unheated -- and uncooled -- apartment with two other couples in North Carolina. One of their roommates scored a few lines of coke -- Mary Alice stayed home to enjoy her share of the bounty and Dwayne had gone off to work. Mid-morning his craving overwhelmed his common sense and he snorted a line during a break on the set.

The movie business exists because the movers and shakers trust people to do the work. No one is going to put a drug head in a position where he can torpedo a fifty million dollar project because he's desperate for a toot. Dwayne was fired, paid and off the set in fifteen minutes. When he tried to come back the next day, swearing on a stack of bibles that he'd learned his listen, he was worked over expertly by a couple of the grips -- the men who moved equipment around.

Mary Alice contemplated her hole card and went home to Mommy and Daddy. Dwayne went down the sewer and vanished. Two years later Mary Alice OD'd while Tom had still been in college.

It was enough to leave you wondering if there really was a God.

He was still contemplating his navel when there was a knock on his door. He rose and answered it. One of the airmen spoke quickly. "Sir, your aircraft has received additional tasking for later in the day. Take off has been moved up three hours, sir. In ninety minutes."

"Thanks, I'll be ready."

He showered and did all that, grateful for having packed the evening before. As before, they were loaded into a C-130 in a hanger and buttoned up before the aircraft started moving. They flew due north for about a half hour before a man in an Air Force colonel's uniform rose and picked up a microphone.

"I'm Colonel Julian Baird, Colonel Tang's opposite number aboard the project vessel. I was returning after some meetings and it was decided that I could give your briefing as well as anyone. However, first we're going to disorient you again -- this isn't a comfortable experience for any of us and we'll try to settle your stomach for a bit afterwards."

Tom didn't see a signal, but there must have been one. The pilot dropped one wing and banked steeply. They went around five times clockwise very fast, then the plane rolled again, and they were going counter-clockwise "unwinding" so to speak. Then they returned to level flight.

Southeast, Tom was sure.

Colonel Baird was back up. "Aren't you glad you didn't have breakfast yet?"

Then he turned serious. "Things at the vehicle have been in a great deal of flux lately -- that's a lot of the reason you're here.

"I wish I could accurately characterize what you are about to see ... except there are so many contradictions, exceptions and downright impossibilities to make sense out of it. On a small scale, it makes perfect sense ... usually.

"Take a simple thing like the vehicle's atmosphere. Initially we were hyper-cautious about contamination issues. Then after four days of exploration, someone noticed something that had been obvious from the beginning -- the air pressure and composition inside the vehicle was 'consistent' -- that was the word used -- with the surface. The vehicle's hull integrity was intact and that was our first introduction to the contradictions that abound aboard the vehicle.

"The ship's atmosphere is not just consistent with the atmosphere at the surface, it's functionally identical. What's missing was a clue to what was going on, although we are no closer to understanding how it works than when we started. Particulates are missing -- not just some of them, but everything. Zero, zip, nada. No dust, no pollen, no bacteria, viruses, nothing. The ship's air is filtered external air. We tried to use radioactive tracers in an attempt to locate the inlet source but filtered means just that. There is no ozone, carbon monoxide, nothing but the harmless gasses.

"And yet the ship is resting under at least three hundred feet of water, with no portion of the vehicle that we can detect sticking out of the water.

"Humans have a habit of naming things like this ship. Initially everybody has their own suggestion and use narrows the number down rapidly until only a few are left. Then someone decides, 'We ought to come to a consensus' and then imposes their choice on everyone.

"Officially, the ship is called the Conundrum because it is one. Most people have shortened that to the Drum -- what we keep beating our heads against.

"Another example is the ship's self-repair abilities. We've not found a system that doesn't work. There are some that we don't understand or haven't tried, but there is no reason to believe that they won't work. We haven't tried the propulsion system yet, for example.

"The huge problem -- the ten-ton gorilla sitting in the room that we haven't got a clue how do deal with -- is if the ship isn't busted, why is it here? We believe the ship grew its own food and recycled everything. Where's the crew? What happened to the crew?

"You might as well start adjusting to life as you never knew it. The ship has been here millions of years. What did the crew look like? Look around you. The biologists are flummoxed. They look like anatomically correct modern humans. No one has a clue how that can be. Millions of years ago our putative ancestors were around -- and they looked nothing like us. Modern human skeletons have been found that are about fifty thousand years old. That makes sense -- there is an understandable progression of traits that would seem to lead to Genus Homo. Fifty thousand years ago -- not millions of years ago.

"Are there scenarios where these things could come to pass? Yes indeed! But they sound like bad science fiction plots and rely on a series of highly improbable events.

"Changing to the good news is always a welcome change. We entered the ship on the upper-most level. That appears to have been the command deck and held the bridge, subsections for sensors, communications, weapons and the like. Yep, that's right, it was an armed vessel. We have no benchmarks to judge -- we can't tell if it was a relatively few defensive weapons, a lightly armed ship -- or relatively armed to the teeth.

"Each of the ship levels, area-wise, is a large as a football stadium. Again, it's early days and we don't have accurate yardsticks to estimate things with. There are what appear to be senior officer quarters on the bridge level ... but evidently they travelled with their families in tow. Many of the quarters are similar to apartments, with one to four bedrooms, a bath or two, a living room, and a kitchen. They range in size from 125 square meters to a few with 300 square meters. The second deck has a large number of shared compartments, holding two or four residents ... those are a hundred to a hundred twenty-five square meters. That works out to about a 150 berthing compartments on the top deck, about 450 compartments on the second.

"For a lack of a better measure, we've been counting beds. There are roughly five hundred on the top level and thirteen hundred on the second level. The thorough exploration of the third level has just commenced -- it is almost totally berthing compartments. Just to prove that nothing is simple aboard the Drum the preliminary counts show about two thousand single individual compartments on the second and third levels.

"As a lark, we detailed Christine Thompson to set up a pool. She's one of the sharper people and good Lord! Does she like to bet! She'll bet on practically anything, if you let her set the odds. She's holding what amounts to auctions for best guesses."

"What is she using for money? I can't believe you're letting her use the real stuff," Cameron asked.

"She grants a each new staff member a thousand bucks of 'new' money. It's just accounting ticks on her computer. You can participate in an existing auction or open one of your own. You say, 'I think the odds of the ship is really a giant toadstool are a hundred to one against and I'll bet a dollar. I'll pay you a dollar if I'm right, and a hundred dollars if I'm wrong and it's really a giant toadstool.' Follow on bets are like 'I'll cover that' or an offer of different odds. The odds usually quickly settle. If the ship turns out to be a toadstool, someone is going to pick up a lot of 'new money.'

"The two biggest auctions are a bunch of academics who think this was a university ship, and they are willing to take three to two. The second largest auction is that the ship is like a starfish. It was damaged in a battle -- it was chopped into bits. This bit had no surviving crew, but had the wherewithal to fully repair itself. You can get two to one, depending on whether or not that's the answer.

"Until last week, we worked in environmental suits and there was a steady stream of people going in and out. It took a half hour to get in and a half hour to get out -- it wasn't very efficient. Ten days ago we got permission to bring in a pound of beach sand. We spread half of it on the floor of a berthing compartment. Inside a half an hour, we couldn't find any remaining sand ... it had been swept, vacuumed and cleaned up. We tried dropping the rest in quantities in parts per million. It was gone just as quickly.

"We've tried experiments with the self-repair functionality. It's undoubtedly using sophisticated A/I programming techniques. There are corridor-imaging cameras that can see in all the corridors. How often those cameras are sampled remains unknown ... but it's often. Repair robots are little float spheres that have finer cameras and again, seem to be sophisticatedly autonomous. We put one in a box in a faraday cage and it got out through the simple latching mechanism as fast as a person could have solved it.

"We've tried blocking doors. A robot arrives and removes the block. Get this though -- no door is permitted to remain obstructed. A lot of things get done within a half hour. Doors are freed within minutes. The most amazing thing of all is that the obstruction is flagged on the ship's computer and a query sent to the compartment with the blockage in it. That was the thing you identified about two weeks ago for us as an alert symbol, maybe an exclamation mark. The item is returned to a specific location ... always. If the object was in a common area, it is removed to an area like a 'lost and found.' There wasn't anything else there, but the lost and found quickly had other items.

"We are monitoring them. The heavy consensus favorite is that after some arbitrary time, the objects are recycled."

He grinned. "Yes, it's easy to digress. Back to good news. We currently have about fifty live-in researchers aboard the ship. There are currently about five hundred beds available on the top level. Ergo, people can, for now, have their choice of available quarters -- limited by your not being able to nip off a huge place for yourself. Team leaders can have the larger single person compartments and two people can share. Larger quarters will await the big bosses -- you know they will grab them for themselves -- why have to go to the trouble of having to move?"

Tom raised his hand. "You said something about their computers."

"The ship is bizarre. Any flat wall surface can be configured as a computer. As nearly as we can tell, any computer can be configured as any other computer. Want a weapons control console at your bedside? It can do that. Want to check the navigation while you're taking a sit down? You can do that."

"No one told us anything about computers."

"The way we work is we forward our reports to the central committee and they decide what gets forwarded to the other groups. I have no knowledge of what has or has not been made generally available.

"In truth, their computers are as much as mystery as everything else. We've had everyone take a stab at them; different people spot different applications. We've got two people who a few days ago got a basic calculator working. We have explored some of the functions, but not many.

"We found no photographs of their species in a book, but there are a lot of them, some quite anatomically detailed, stored in the computers. As a general statement there aren't many pictures in their books, but they are common in the computers."

Tom had been quietly translating for Lily and he saw this latest was about to set her off. He gently squeezed her shoulder and before turning back to the colonel.

"Sir, this is our bread and butter. We have isolated a dozen mathematical symbols. We're pretty sure there is a sign like a right arrow that means add, a left arrow means subtract. But there is some confusion even about something so simple. We think it has to do with adding and subtracting numbers of the opposite sign ... but we're not certain. Miss Chu has spent a lot of time trying to puzzle things out. She's a little upset that this is the first she is hearing of this.

"I have to admit to being disappointed in hearing about computers myself. There are so many contextual clues to the language that graphics could provide."

"We haven't a clue," the colonel admitted. "That's one reason I pushed to get you here. If one of your people is with a party, they could cut days off of exploration timelines."

Tom sighed. "I don't want to tell you your job, Colonel, but how many exploration parties would you like to field?"

The man looked over the group. "As many as I can; I realize that there aren't that many of you. We expect to ramp up the number of parties quickly now that we can work in shirtsleeves."

"Sir, we were tasked with learning the language. You clearly can field more exploration parties than we can help with. And if we are helping you? We won't be learning much. Colonel, you need a lot more people, just on the language problems. Maybe ten times as many."

"Someone would notice all the top level linguists were missing."

Tom sighed exasperatedly. "Think a moment, sir. The ones who are going to make the most progress are the professionals, spending as close to full time at it as possible. But what do your exploration parties need? Someone skilled enough to learn the basic vocabulary, they have to learn to recognize things of importance. We need a second call level, if you will, for them to query about something they don't understand clearly. Maybe a third level for something evaluated as important, who can decide if its something the top team needs to look at."

"Like I said, where would we get the people?"

"Colonel, a long time ago I worked on a revision to the Monterey Language School's language aptitude test. They created an artificial language, and the test was designed to show how well people could learn a language with no cognates, with arbitrary grammar rules that were consistent, but not like what most people are used to. Too many people were figuring out the grammar rules in the original and every year the average score increased. Now, the test scores have a normal distribution.

"Sir, whoever we bring on board is going to have to learn the language from scratch. We just grab fifty or a hundred language school students with top scores, who've already shown they can learn a second language. We run them through a quickie school -- most people who can learn languages easily are going to plow through the three hundred and fifty words we are sure of in a week."

Lily had settled down, so he explained the ideas to her. While he was talking to her, Cameron spoke up.

"I'm famous for giving Tom a hard time; I'm a natural contrarian. Since I've been involved in this, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not. Tom, like me, has worked with military linguists. I'm sure you understand who employs military linguists?"

"Yes."

"So, an added benefit: they will have their security clearances in advance. That will save another wad of time. You have the big picture, Colonel. We can't tell you how many bodies you need ... but Tom is right. You can pick up as many as a hundred in a week or two. For something like this, you aren't going to lack for volunteers."

"It's dangerous."

"Colonel, I'm shaking in my boots -- from eagerness to get on with it."

"I'll hit up project management. In truth, I've been getting a lot of flack about the glacially slow pace. But I'm not eager to preside over a lot of deaths. I'm not going to compromise safety over speed." He smiled slightly. "And they aren't anxious to take shortcuts on the security front."

"A man after my own heart, at least about the safety issues." Cameron said.

"Amen!" the rest of them chorused.

A chime sounded and the colonel laughed. "Times passes by fast when you're having fun. We are about to start our approach. As before, you're not going to see the outside.

"It used to take a half hour for each of the five chambers. Now it's five minutes. We'll take you to the bridge for a quick orientation. Then we'll deliver you to the dorms -- we have one for women and one for men. You can find untenanted quarters, and they are yours, if you haven't tried to be too greedy.

"I know Dr. Christopher will be angry, but one of the first things we learned about the computers was how to work the maps. We found a bridge position that allows us to enter what I assume are names to show that quarters are occupied. I don't imagine this will make any of you any happier, but we arbitrarily assigned letter equivalents to 26 of the letters of the alien alphabet.

"What we type in for a name appears in the alien language on the compartment door. If you know our transliteration, you can key in a name on the map and find the compartment and directions to it."

"Are there voice recordings?" Keith asked. "We never heard of any. We made up our own transliterations."

"Yes."

"Don't have anyone spend a lot of time on those transliterations," Tom told him. "They are surely wrong."

The colonel nodded. "I'm trying to do the best I can, serving a dozen masters. You will be assigned to dorms at first; you can find your own quarters as soon as you want. We will give you a general orientation, Guy Laskowski, who currently assigns members to the exploration parties will brief you on what he wants to learn. Exploration team leaders will brief members of the team about specific goals.

"I know I haven't sounded wildly enthusiastic, Dr. Christopher, but I have a lot of competing demands to balance. I take my time."

"Colonel, all I ask is to be heard."

"You were -- louder and clearer than most."

Tom cleared his throat. "One thing, Colonel, in the interests of honesty. I can sense we are about to land. Colonel, I know within a dozen miles of where we are."

"Is that a fact?"

"I didn't know the US owned any British Virgins."

The colonel gave him the evil eye.

"Sir, you need to check my army records -- which no one evidently bothered to do and then mention the results to you. Once the army tried a whole lot harder than you did to confuse me, and I told them within ten miles of where I was, fifteen thousand miles away from home, having spent six days to get there."

"Don't talk about it," Tom was told.



-------

Chapter 3: So Kiss Me and Smile For Me


They landed and were hangared and bussed as before. Later, it was clear that they spent a lot of time submerged in a sub. Tom thought it was a hoot -- most of the time they spent submerged was spent barely moving.

They went through a series of chambers, five in all, where there were plenty of seats to wait on, but there was no longer a wait. Tom was like everyone else -- a rubberneck once he was sure he was aboard the alien ship.

It was an underwhelming experience. They went down corridors that closely resembled a modern office building -- even though it lacked windows. Since any number of modern offices lacked windows, Tom wasn't impressed.

A Navy lieutenant was escorting them; the colonel had split off as soon as they were aboard the alien ship. They were led to a compartment and the lieutenant stayed outside with them. "This is the women's dorm. The women can put their things here for now -- empty lockers are next to beds that aren't made up. Put your things away, make up the bed and in an hour I'll be back to show you around."

The speech was identical when he gave it to Tom and the men. An hour later they were led to an empty residential compartment. "This is a typical residence. There's a sitting room and a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and a breakfast nook. The bedroom here has a single bed, about twin bed size. About a third of the one bedroom compartments are like this, two thirds have something like a king-size bed."

"Lieutenant," Tom asked, "the bathroom?"

He led them into the room. There was a shower stall and a prosaic piece of stainless steel remarkably similar in shape to a toilet. There was a stainless steel washbasin with paddle faucet handles. "As you can see, the fixtures are similar to ours. They have a button to push on the floor rather than a handle to flush the toilet -- there's no tank."

"We were told the aliens look human," Cameron said.

"That's true. The public bathrooms are very much like ours, except there are only toilets and no urinals. In public facilities there are multiple stalls, separate like we are familiar with. There is a simply remarkable correspondence between how they did things and how we do them.

"Now, a demonstration of the ship's computer."

He went to a bare section of the wall and pressed his hand flat against it for a second. A square about two feet on a side lit up centered on where his hand had been. About thirty icons cluttered the screen and there was tiny lettering under most of them. Along the left side of the screen, there was a flashing yellow bar, about an inch wide.

"We have no idea what the bar signifies," they were told. "Any place on the ship that has a bare wall will turn on like this. If you want to make the screen bigger, it's like a window on one of our computers -- you put your finger in the corner and 'drag' it. Ditto, to make it smaller.

"This bottom row of icons is terminal types. We're sure of some of them, others just have a lot of icons that we can't figure out. There is one set that clearly guides the ship -- which we haven't tried yet -- but the betting is that you have to be authorized to guide the ship. The same thing for what we think are offensive and defensive weapons. We've just turned on the various positions -- we're not far enough along to try to do anything.

"Here," he pointed to a line drawing, "is what we think the ship looks like from outside. The icon opens a map of the ship. A lot of the ship is simply available as a block diagram -- clearly there are user levels or authorities. Public areas have various icons, only some of which we've figured out. We know the one for 'eating place' for instance, another is an icon like a person running -- that's a gym. They have various exercise machines available. We've figured out how to work something like a treadmill, an exercise bike -- some of the equipment is more advanced and we leave those alone. Anything that isn't muscle powered we leave alone."

There was more and later, still more yet. After two days they spent most of their mornings in an alien version of a conference room, going over the alien language and possible word meanings. They had books and now the computer, even if they didn't have any way to access what was undoubtedly a vast store of data.

In the afternoons they went out with exploration teams. One group was tasked with checking out what were residential quarters. Their task was to see if there was anything interesting left behind in any of the rooms they explored. Since the rooms had a limited number of floor plans and a limited amount of basic furniture, it wasn't very exciting work, but they didn't want to leave any unexplored compartments that might come back to haunt someone later.

Tom and Lily worked together for the most part. There weren't that many Chinese working on quarters exploration, most of them were assigned to the technical teams trying to make sense of the electronics and that's where they were placed. An Air Force major led their party and from the first he had been blunt and often rude and condescending.

"I can't promise you a rose garden. We're exploring the two lower levels of the ship. Level 8 is mostly engineering and physical plant. We check radiation levels every few minutes, even though we've never found anything to speak of. But it stands to reason that the ship is nuclear powered. There is every evidence that the power plant is active.

"I've seen what we're sure is the power plant; several of us have. We look, but don't touch. We don't look real close either. Who wants to get up close and personal to a fusion reactor? Suffice to say we know that the ship takes in seawater -- like the atmosphere; we have no idea where the water comes from. The seawater has the deuterium removed and is expelled. Again, we have no idea of where. Honestly, the ship uses maybe a couple of thimbles of deuterium a day; it's not going to be noticeable. We have no intention of messing with that until we understand things a lot better.

"We have a better handle on the recycling system. Wastes are processed in three streams -- solid, liquid and gasses. Again, we've been cautious with how closely we look. We're familiar now with the flow chart -- but it's just a block diagram -- we have only a rudimentary understanding of the processes we're seeing.

"The ninth level is mostly storage. About a million gallons of deuterium, roughly a similar amount of water, with about five times that amount of water in circulation at any time. There are millions of liters of oxygen and a similar amount of nitrogen.

"There is something that is almost certainly a food production plant. There are a dozen food chains. New food is produced constantly, and there are robots that deliver it to food service areas. We're pretty sure that those robots deliver to residential compartments as well. The food seems to keep well for two weeks, and then the unconsumed portions are recycled. Right now that's virtually everything. A few brave souls have tried it ... some is clearly meant to be eaten cooked, some eaten cold. There are an amazing variety of sizes, shapes, textures and tastes, considering the relatively few number of basic materials.

"However, while the doctors tell us the food is nutritious, it has flavors that we aren't used to. They're not bad flavors -- just different. When you have your heart set on a burger and fries, you'll have to settle for starchy carrot-things that are blue with something that kind of looks like ground meat -- but tastes like chicken -- isn't the same thing at all.

"Let me recap: touch nothing! That's rule one. We are reluctant to bring the computer stations online in case we kick off something we don't understand. Yes, it hasn't happened yet -- we'd just as soon that we have an idea what's going to happen before we start meddling. Observe, report but don't touch."

The second day they'd been reading meters on an active computer in power engineering and Lily asked Tom to see if the major would explain what he knew about the power plant. Tom had to grimace when it was clear from the major's answers that he had no idea that Lily was really a physicist. He didn't translate that part of the questions, but he had a suspicion all along that Lily had a smattering of English -- she just wasn't confident of it.

The major finally did as requested; with Lily taking notes on her issue PDA. That evening, as they were walking back to the barracks, Lily was silent most of the way. Usually she was brimming with comments about what she'd seen -- it was unusual for her to be so quiet.

Finally before they parted she touched his arm. "Could we go to the conference room and talk? Privately?"

"Certainly," he told her.

She faced him as soon as they were inside, without bothering to sit down. "Tom, I have a couple of requests. Please, the first doesn't reflect on you. I am suffering from what you'd call 'beginner's luck.' I saw something I understood. It's a measure of how messed up my worldview is that I was a paranoid about it, thinking I was being tricked.

"Yes, in the days that followed we made great leaps -- but we quickly advanced past the point where my particular expertise wasn't of much value. I have no particular ability with language -- you know it and I do too. I want to be returned back to the physics department."

"I find your insight valuable," Tom told her honestly.

"And I am more than willing to help, when I can. But I think I will be of more use in physics. I swear, Tom, this isn't about you." She bit her lip and he realized there was something else.

"What is bothering you, Lily?"

"This afternoon, the major was so condescending. He treated me like a child. Either he's lying about how much he knows about the power plant, or he's stupid or ignorant."

"What do you mean, Lily?"

"The design is a variation of some of the research your government is pursuing in a small way -- and mine much more significantly, as it is showing significant early results. They use inertial confinement. I'm not sure how they can make their device so small, but I suspect they understand more about gravity that we do. I believe they can create artificial gravity fields, and that influences their ability to use confinement as a methodology."

"That would be a significant piece of information," Tom allowed. "If you're right about that, I suspect you won't have any trouble going back to physics."

She nodded. "There is a personal thing. It is harder to say. It isn't common in your country, virtually unknown in mine."

"And what's that?"

"You haven't found private quarters. I want to find suitable quarters we can share."

Tom blinked, but didn't answer at first. He was startled that Lily didn't say anything either.

"I'm a fraud, you know," he said sadly after a long pause. "A number of years ago something terrible happened to me. Ever since I fake how I feel about things -- I talk like I'm an open book -- but never coming close to anything that's truly important to me."

She made a dismissive gesture. "There's a saying among your people and a similar one among mine. 'A person's actions speak louder than words.' You didn't know me -- but you stood up for me against my father. In all my experience, no one stands up to my father except a very few high-ranking military officers and party officials. You didn't hesitate, you acted. That bespeaks of the fundamental person that you are. I realize that I'm being forward; I realize that there is no basis between us for a relationship. I am prepared to be patient, to come to know the real you, and go from there."

He sighed, "I've realized of late that it's no fun -- and less use -- to run away. I can't make any promises, Lily."

She laughed. "If we move in together, I can promise you trouble from my father."

Tom sighed. "Lily, in the spirit of honesty and candor, I've found that I work well with your father."

She blinked. "You are an American; I can believe that you established a superior position -- but to work well with him?"

"I treated him as a professional equal and he treated me the same way."

"There is something important about you that I don't know, then."

"I told you. Something terrible happened to me. I've never been able to talk about it."

"Everyone fancies themselves as a psychologist. It's a cheap emotion and invariably wrong. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom about such events is that talking about it helps," Lily told him.

"If thinking about it twists my guts, talking about it won't help."

"Yes or no: will be together?"

"Yes."

"Then there is no problem. One day you will tell me -- or it won't work."

Tom shrugged. "In truth, if you go back to physics it will be less of a problem than if we worked together every day."

Lily chucked. "Tom, dear friend -- I intend to work with you as much as possible, come what may. You are one of the few people who has ever understood me. You are the only person who has ever stood up for me."

"Then lets review the list of suitable compartments and pick one."

"Be shameless, Tom. Status is everything to a Chinese. It doesn't hurt among your people."

"And if my idea of our status doesn't match yours?"

"I am a young woman; I would be the first to admit that I lack experience in many things. On the other hand, I am not a typical Chinese woman: I have no intention of submitting quietly when I think you are making a mistake."

"We all make mistakes. Most of them, with a little thought, would have been avoidable. Please, come what may, give me the benefit of your thinking."

The billeting person was gone for the day, but they left a post-it note on the door of their prospective quarters. The next morning they were on the bridge early, and Tom went to speak to Colonel Baird while Lily went to talk to billeting.

One factor of the staff changes aboard the ship was fascinating. While there were lots of new people being added on the worker-bee level, they mostly were assigned into new teams and went over old compartments initially to get a feel for things.

That wasn't true among the senior staff -- more and more senior academics, in spite of the security, had learned of the "gold rush" and had streamed in to "help." Obviously this was a career-making discovery and there was almost a daily turnover in who the senior scientist was that you reported to. One constant, though, had been Colonel Baird.

"Colonel, I have a personal request for you, if you have a moment."

"As a matter of fact, I do have some time -- I scheduled you to be called in later today for a personnel meeting. We get a two-fer. What is it you want, Dr. Christopher?"

"Dr. Chu wants to return to her physics specialty and I concur. She's a major asset wherever she works -- but physics is what she knows best. She was saying last night that Major Reno says they have no clue how the fusion reactor works -- but she thinks she knows."

"That would be important," the colonel agreed. "I'll talk to Dr. Heileman this morning and let him know. I imagine he'll want to talk to her first."

Tom nodded. "And what is it you need, Colonel?"

"I was a little amazed at how fast the Pentagon leaped on your linguist idea. They've grabbed fifty linguists from Monterey, Texas and NSA headquarters and they'll be here within a few days. I'd like Dr. Healy to supervise them, with your concurrence. I had a choice between one of your existing people and someone new ... I didn't think someone with zero experience would work and Dr. Healy is the best choice, I believe."

"I definitely concur."

"Good, have her see me at her convenience this morning and I'll give her the good news. They are couriering in the records this afternoon."

"I'll tell her."

A little later he was back in their conference room. Colonel Baird had taken Lily to see the head of the physics department, so Tom made the announcement about them moving in together.

Cameron was the person Tom was concerned about the most, but she was ebullient. "About time you loosened up!"

"Funny you should say that, Cameron. Remember the first story about Blucher that you told me? About his wanting to bring you up to speed quickly on how to be a PhD?"

"Him giving me two grad students to advise, and two PhD candidates for me to mentor? All at once? Yes, I'm not likely to forget that! Too bad he didn't read my records. Four wasn't as much of a challenge as the twenty linguists I supervised in my section for NSA."

"Well, I broached the idea about a quick source of linguists with security clearances to Colonel Baird. To prove that maybe the military does think this is important, they are sending us a bunch. Baird and I agree, you have experience in this area, and you're the natural choice to supervise."

"And how many did they find on such short notice? Ten or fifteen?"

"Fifty."

Cameron sputtered while Tom continued. "Colonel Baird is going to get with you this afternoon and go over how scheduling will be handled. They'll deal with the orientation and all of that. You'll just handle the scheduling and the occasional question. You'll probably have lots of time to continue your own research."

"Undoubtedly gobs of time," she said wryly. "How soon?"

"This was put together rather quickly. Two or three days, I imagine." He turned serious for that.

They turned to their books, taking copious notes and doing like they had so many other days.

About ten in the morning, Major Reno came in. "We need a couple of volunteers; maybe a little dangerous, but certainly exciting."

Cameron spoke up. "Since I'm about to go into durance vile, let me come along. I know you're going to hog it, Tom."

"Sure. Lead the way, Major."

They had hardly gotten out to the corridor when the major looked around. "Where's the mouthy bitch?"

Cameron put her hand on Tom's arm expecting a violent reaction. He reacted violently, but not in the way she expected.

"Your degree is in what, Major?"

"It's not pertinent to my duties," he said, suddenly defensive.

"You said dangerous, Major. No offense, sir, but I prefer to be led by someone whose degree is pertinent. What sort of site are we going to be inspecting?"

"Something on the engineering level. The initial party wasn't positive enough to characterize if accurately."

"Come then, lets go see Dr. Heileman and pick up a physicist or engineer. Better: both."

"I've been checking locations like this for weeks. I know what I'm doing."

"Major, anyone who can characterize Dr. Chu as a 'mouthy bitch' I have no faith in. Zero. A man who won't tell me what his degree is in -- I have no faith in. Zero. I have no intention of taking my people into an unknown, possibly dangerous compartment led by a man I have no confidence in. I will seek Dr. Heileman 's guidance."

"You have no right!"

"I'm responsible for the people under me. I'm not going anywhere under your command."

He turned and headed for the bridge. Cameron promptly fell in behind him. The truly crushing blow was the half dozen others who traded glances and trailed after Tom.

He saw Lily talking to a tall, lean man with a handlebar mustache; it was quite a 'stache! He walked up to them, aware that everyone was staring at the procession.

"Dr. Heileman, I presume," Tom said lightly.

"Dr. Christopher! Good to meet you! What do I owe this unexpected -- pleasure -- to?" The hitch on the word "pleasure" unexpectedly pleased Tom.

"I was asked to help explore a new compartment; it was described as dangerous. Alas, Dr. Heileman, I have no confidence in the officer assigned to lead the team. Major Reno."

"And why do you lack confidence in Major Reno, Dr. Christopher?"

"His characterization of Dr. Chu as a 'mouthy bitch' and his reluctance to state what his degree is in. I'm sorry, sir, Dr. Chu, but those were his words."

Dr. Heileman stroked one side of his mustache. Then he did it again. "Those exact words?"

"Yes, sir."

Dr. Heileman turned to Major Reno. "Those words, sir?"

"She saw the power plant and began to spout all sorts of gobbledygook! She wouldn't shut up!"

"Gobbledygook? Words of more than one syllable?"

"She's a linguist! What does she know?"

Dr. Heileman turned to Lily. "My abject apologies, Dr. Chu. I never thought you were understating things." With that he placed fingers from each hand in the corners of his mouth.

The whistle was piercing, and got anyone's attention that wasn't already focused on them. "Colonel Baird! Here! Now!" Tom smiled slightly. The good Doctor Heileman reminded him of a British Sergeant Major from the Black Watch he'd met in Iraq. His voice sounded just like his as well.

"This is unnecessary," Major Reno said weakly.

"Young man, when I want your input, you will be so informed. Belt up!"

Colonel Baird appeared, followed by two corporals. Armed corporals.

"Hamish? My high range of hearing is already badly abused. It didn't need another dose."

"Major Reno thinks Dr. Chu spouts 'Gobbledygook.' He described her as a 'mouthy bitch' in my hearing, in the hearing of others. Dr. Christopher says he has no further confidence in Reno's leadership abilities."

Colonel Baird turned to Major Reno. "And you have what to say for yourself, Major?"

"She's a linguist! She has no business mouthing off about the power plant."

"And what, Major, leads you to think Dr. Chu is a linguist?"

"She works with them."

Colonel Baird sighed. "Major, you are relieved. You will report to the surface for immediate transportation back to the Pentagon. If you have the brains God gave a gnat, you'll keep your mouth until you are safely ensconced deep in the building.

"Your are culpably ignorant, Major. You had access to the records jackets of all those on your team."

"A linguist!"

The colonel sighed even louder. "Be advised that Dr. Chu is one of China's leading physicists, forwarded to Dr. Christopher to help the linguists. Dr. Chu spent ten minutes looking at the first alien book presented to her, and figured out their numbering system. Ten minutes later, she translated two entire pages with a 90% plus accuracy rating."

"And had figured out how to work the alien hyperlinks in books," Tom interjected.

He earned a nasty glare from Colonel Baird.

The colonel went on. "She has important insights into the alien power plant, is spite of your bleating."

"One final word before you head north, Major. If you expect to be alive when you reach Washington, do not let my counterpart, Colonel Tang, know of your opinion of his daughter."

The major paled. He walked unsteadily away, helped by one of the corporals.

Dr. Heileman turned to Tom. "I assume Dr. Chu has your confidence?"

"Yes, sir."

They all turned to look, and saw that Lily was about two hundred feet away, staring intently at a position on the bridge.

Tom walked over to her. "Lily, feel up to a little exploration?"

She put her hand down on an icon on the position. "We think this means "To communicate" or something very much like it."

"That's our best guess," he assured her. He looked around and frowned. "I thought the communications positions were over there," he waved towards the center of the bridge. The next position over was the billeting computer.

"Slippery things, words," he observed.

"And this?" she asked, putting her finger on a smaller icon.

"We've decided that's the 'open/close' icon, like we see of disc players."

Dr. Heileman and Colonel Baird were now a few feet away, watching curiously.

Lily pressed down on the button, and a drawer opened. There was a bin of what looked like ornamental pins. Lily reached down and picked one up. After a second, she pinned it on her blouse and said, "Dr. Lily Chu."

A voice came from the device. Lily looked at Tom. "Did you catch that?" the voice repeated the same words at the sound of her voice. She plucked the device off her blouse and examined it again. "I bet you a dollar that we learn those words mean 'Invalid input' or something close to that."

Tom laughed. "I like to win bets, not lose them. I'll cover anyone who bets against you, up to a grand."

She extended her finger and laid it along a ridge at the top of the badge and spoke her name again. The badge said something much shorter. "I bet that's, 'input accepted' she told him. Again he shook his head.

She dipped down and tossed Tom another badge. "Touch the bar and say your name."

He did so.

"Tom, can you hear me?" she said aloud. He heard her twice -- once in his mind and once as she spoke.

"I heard you twice -- in my head and your voice."

"Tom, can you hear me now?" She hadn't said anything aloud.

"Doctor Chu, I can hear you." He heard his own words in his head. He spoke, "If you could hear me, I suspect anyone with 'Doctor' as part of their name would have heard me as well."

"What have you found, Dr. Chu?" Colonel Baird asked.

"Our Star Trek communicators," Tom said before she could speak. He was curious; she had a piece of paper she was writing on. A couple of times she scratched things out, and added others. "What do you think, boss?" she asked Tom.

He recognized that she hadn't wanted to activate the communicator. He took the paper and read what she'd written. "Everyone. Physics. Linguistics. Lily Chu."

He handed it back. "At the front, add 'anybody.'"

She nodded and put her finger on the bar and said the phrase. Tom did the same thing, leaving out "physics."

"Anyone, can you hear me?" he thought.

"Everyone, read you fine," Lily's voice said in his head.

"That worked," Tom said aloud.

"Is that what I think it is?" Dr. Heileman asked.

"You bet, sir. How many devices are in that drawer, Lily?"

"I heard that, Tom. You get the entire message even if the addressee is the last word and only part of a name."

She turned to Colonel Baird. "These are communications devices. They are going to take a little getting used to. We need to experiment some; there has to be some additional controls. You don't want to speak to every Tom, Dick and Harry if you mention one of those names."

She scooped up a handful of the communicators. "Say your name, your title, and the words 'everybody' and 'anybody.' I suspect the word order doesn't matter. Say that while your finger is on the crossbar. I suspect you erase the original ID every time you do so." There was a rush of people taking communicators from Lily. At first there was cacophony as people tried them out.

Colonel Baird held up his hand. "We did this once before. We asked people to work with compartment lighting, and report what they found worked to control it. I don't want to hear from on the crew each time they say, 'Colonel' 'anybody' or 'everyone.' There is undoubtedly ways to send messages to individuals and to suppress accidental transmissions to unwanted addresses."

He laughed, and turned to one of the corporals. "Take a message for Colonel Tang. Tell him that I've relieved Major Reno and will take it as a personal favor that he not be upset at the major's characterization Dr. Chu as a 'mouthy bitch' who spouts 'physics gobbledygook.'

"On the ship exploration front, I'm happy to report that a few minutes ago Dr. Chu discovered a drawer of at least several hundred individual communications devices from the ship." He stopped as one of this ship's robots pulled to a stop next to the bin and a cascade of several hundred additional devices flowed into the original drawer. "I'm confident," Colonel Baird went on, "that there will be enough for everyone."

A little later, they met with the colonel again. "Dr. Chu, before we were so rudely interrupted, I was going to send you off to a new compartment. We thought it was a tank, although we couldn't decipher the icon..."

"Colonel, can you print up the icons?" Tom asked.

"Yes, of course."

"Give them to us to see what we can figure out -- we've never seen any of them. Dr. Chu figured out the icon on this position meant 'communication.' Obviously a different context than the other communications."

Lily spoke up, "The main icon has an extra swirl on the right. We're sure their words run left to right, I think it's the plural. Communication, meaning between individuals, and communications, between groups."

"Once again, we're distracted," the colonel told them. "We sent a party to check what was being tanked. It's not a tank; it's a very large compartment. I received the following video transmission."

The transmission was first from an Air Force captain. "Colonel, you're going to want to send the first team down here. I'm extracting my party carefully, touching nothing. This is either the shuttle bay or the hanger deck."

The view swept around, showing easily twenty or thirty small craft.

"Why do they have the wind up?" Kevin asked.

"Dr. Christopher, I imagine you have a guess."

"Kevin, if those are shuttles or other separate craft, someplace in that compartment there are controls to get them outside. Opening the compartment wouldn't be good for us. There are probably safety protocols that we haven't tripped -- but do we really want to research their fail-safe systems just now?"

"Urk! I take everything back! And we're too deep for SCUBA here, aren't we?"

"In spite of what you might have heard, the bridge has about a hundred feet of overburden covering it, and the sea bed is about three hundred feet below mean sea level. That level is another hundred and twenty feet deeper. Survival would be problematic at best, even if you were prepared."

"Lets go see what we've got," Lily said cheerfully.

The compartment was fairly crowded, with smaller vessels racked in ranks in various places. Lily had people count the vessels and the number was twenty-eight.

They ended up in a side compartment off the main one that had a good view of the larger compartment. "I'm not directing this at anyone in particular," Lily told Tom as he followed her in. "But keep your hands in your pockets, and resist the impulse to touch anything."

He had no desire to touch anything anyway, so it was no trouble. Cameron poked her head in. "Lily, I'm going to remind you that I'm trying to specialize in biological readouts."

Lily nodded absently. "I don't think you'll see anything here, but you never know. Which is why I want you to look around."

Cameron spoke up a few seconds later. "We counted the twenty-eight craft. This one bank has sixty indicators, there are a couple of other banks, and those other banks total twenty-eight. I'm thinking we're not seeing another sixty vehicles."

"It's something to think about," Lily said. "I checked -- they aren't hanging from the rafters."

Tom couldn't help looking up, but he didn't see anything that looked like sixty additional vessels.

Afterwards he listened to Lily's debrief with interest. "Obviously this is a compartment we must defer further exploration of, until we have a better handle on the language and ship's controls."

"Like the power and propulsion compartments," Colonel Baird agreed.

"Unless they have something, what to us seems magic, a membrane that keeps vacuum out and atmosphere in, we have to treat that compartment with enormous respect."

"There are others like that," Colonel Baird admitted. "So far, knock on wood, none of our people appear to be suicidal and if they've pushed any buttons, they didn't kill us all. That or their safety systems are made to deal button-pushing idiots."

"You said it, Colonel," Lily told him. "But at the same time we have engineers among ourselves who say 'People can't be that stupid!' when they demonstrably are."

One of the Air Force captains approached them. "Sir, take a look at this." He activated a computer, causing the colonel, Tom and Lily to chuckle. Mystified, but intent, he tapped the map icon. "I saw these," he indicated something that looked like decorations around the rim of the level they were in. "I was curious..."

"Irk!" Tom choked.

The captain looked at him in askance. "I was working from the map icon, Dr. Christopher. If I can open the ship to the local environment from a map, they were bigger idiots than you think I am."

He tapped the corner of the screen. The view zoomed in. Tom blinked. "I didn't know you could do that!"

Colonel Baird said darkly, "Neither did I."

Lily asked what they were saying and Tom told her. "There was a young man in the Beijing University physics department. He got there as a freshman, because one of his science teachers in secondary school was curious about some math that he'd included with a celestial dynamics solution.

"He had no idea that general relativity had an effect on orbit calculations. He had independently derived GR, and included it in the calculations he'd made, having figured it out on his own.

"Tell the colonel that the young man shouldn't be punished, but asked what else he knows that isn't general knowledge. The colonel should ask himself how many others know short cuts they've worked out that aren't general knowledge."

Tom translated, watching the young captain's defiant gaze.

"Are you done? Can I finish up now?" the captain asked angrily. He jabbed a finger from his left hand and a finger from his right hand. The picture zoomed, the view panned. Colonel Baird muttered something angry.

"By my count, sir," the captain reported. "There are sixty of these; the missing number of ships. The view shows what clearly look to be separate vehicles. From their configuration, they are designed to be launched quickly, up to the total available. I suppose they could be missiles of some sort, but I think they are fighters.

"There is a gallery that provides access to them; it's wide enough to move one of these smaller vehicles through -- but only one at a time, and only in one direction. There are no passing lanes or pullouts. I suppose you could load missiles through the gallery -- but you'd have to stage the reloads to the cells furthest away first."

There was an extended discussion, but the consensus stayed firmly on "These are fighters or some other form of defensive craft." The vehicles themselves were about sixty feet long and about thirty feet wide -- they did have wings, but the wings were awfully short. The cells were forty-five feet wide and about seventy feet long.

Tom pulled the captain aside. "Captain, what is your name?"

"Captain Thomas Hartman, US Air Force.

"Are the map icon shortcuts something you noticed, or someone else noticed?"

"I found them out. They are so simple, I thought someone had forgotten to tell me about them."

Tom waved at Lily. "Dr. Chu was assigned to my linguistics team. Ten minutes after she was given her first book to examine -- she was rude, accusing me -- us -- of trying to hoax her. That's how long it took her to learn their numbering system and to read the periodic table.

"Can you blame a brilliant physicist for thinking she was being spoofed, having such an easy time with such an important subject?"

"I guess not," he replied.

Tom laughed. "I'll you a big institutional secret, Captain. Such stupid, sophomoric humor isn't unknown in linguistics. I'm pretty sure from Dr. Chu's reaction -- and obvious expectations -- such things aren't uncommon in physics.

"Now, I'm going to tell you another important thing about science in general. What is your college degree in?"

"History of the early industrial revolution in Europe -- 1600 to 1850."

"That's good -- what I'm going to tell you will make more sense.

"You've undoubtedly heard about the scientific method -- developing testable hypothesizes and then actually testing them."

"Yes, sir."

"That's only part of it. There is another part, another recognized part of science and the scientific method that laid the foundation for everything that came after.

"That's observation, Captain. Even if you didn't understand something, you measured it as best as you could. You observed, noted your observations and published them in the hopes that someone had something else that could help you understand things.

"If you ever want to read some interesting history of science, read the history of the early studies about vacuum. Do you know that the Catholic Church once considered the concept of a vacuum heresy, and people were burned alive for believing a vacuum could exist?"

"Good grief!"

"It's true. The debate finally reached its peak in the last half of the 18th century -- that's when science finally accepted that such a thing was possible. Why? Because a lot of people had, over the years, made thousands of observations of all sorts of phenomena regarding vacuums.

"Observation, Captain, is a vital component of science. Yes, these days there isn't much that hasn't been observed to a fare thee well -- except aboard this ship. Yes, it's not unreasonable to expect someone else already knows something and that it's common knowledge. Five professional linguists were looking at books just like Dr. Chu. She was the only one to notice that every book page is numbered. Dead easy! A true slam dunk! But she was first!

"Science is niggardly with praise, Captain. There is no second place in science. You either finish first or you didn't place. When you see something that might be important, speak up! Maybe you'll get shot down -- and eventually that'll happen more often than not. But right now, you'll gain a lot of kudos -- and other rewards -- if you're first."

"Thank you, sir."

"Over there," Tom pointed to Cameron, "is my number two, who is going to be heading up the language teams that will be going out with you in a few days. Get with her. Go over what you know -- about this and anything else you know."

Later, they were back on the bridge and Colonel Baird pulled Tom to one side. "That was a fine thing you did for Captain Hartman. I would have screwed it up."

Tom laughed. "Being a doctoral candidate isn't an easy row to hoe. Some jackass professor has your future in his hands and often as not, he doesn't have a clue about the finer points of your work. There is a mountain of self doubt that most of them face. Speak a discouraging word and they can get the wind up and quit the next day -- you may never have any idea what set them off.

"A couple of years ago, one of my female grad students made some mods -- at my request -- to my budget spreadsheets. I tried them and they seemed fine. I save my work any time I get up or am disturbed for any reason. I've lost too much to the blue screens of death over time. I came back after lunch and found that saving the spreadsheet destroyed the data. It was still looking at the old data instead of the new.

"I thought nothing of it. She'd gone home for the day and I sent her an email saying there was a problem with her spreadsheet, and I'd gone back to using my old one until it could be fixed.

"The next morning I was hauled in front of the Dean on a sexual harassment charge -- I'd created a hostile work environment. She saw my email -- and it was the first day of her period and she was -- very uncomfortable. She'd blown her stack, sent an accusation to the Dean and head of HR -- and went home for the day.

"There are some who would have covered up their mistake by pressing ahead with the charges, regardless. She was back two days later, and when she found out that I was up to lose my tenure and my job, she spoke up and admitted what she'd done.

"The Dean expected that I'd dump on her, but I'd never do anything like that. He transferred her to another advisor who really was a sexist bastard. She demanded that she be allowed to continue with me.

"Or, to put it succinctly, I've learned to leaven my words with honey and sugar, and I'm very patient."

"And a good reminder that is, Dr. Christopher!"

-------

As was no surprise, Cameron hit the ground running with the language teams. They hated her -- for the first two weeks they worked ten hour days, starting two hours earlier than everyone else. She drilled them mercilessly about vocabulary and what grammar they had learned.

It seemed like every day that there were a lot of new faces aboard. Nearly every compartment had had someone look at it by then, now parties were going back to examine possible important sites in more depth.

They kept the translation team -- even as augmented as they'd been -- very busy.

People are people. There are some who make quick work of any task, over any obstacle. There are others who just can't figure it out.

Cameron sent four people back to Colonel Baird for general assignments, and took the two brightest of those left and set them to teaching simple vocabulary classes to anyone who was interested. That quickly resulted in more rough translation and fewer requests for linguists -- who would be translating nothing important.

Things were settling down and a remarkable amount of progress was being made.



-------

Chapter 4: Oh Babe, I Hate to Go...


Gail Taylor woke about three thirty in the morning. For some reason her throat seemed like it was filled with cobwebs, and she was a little hyper, not something she was used to.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of ice water and sipped it slowly. The security guard on duty nodded to her. "Good morning, Dr. Taylor."

"It's too early to decide if it's good or bad. Have a nice day." With that she retired again. She was a tall dark-haired woman; medium built and wore a tracksuit to sleep in. Guards were a fact of life of late; she lived with it.

Back in bed, she blessedly went right back to sleep and was grateful.

It happened slowly.

She dreamed. She thought she was in a vast building, something like a football stadium or basketball arena. She let impressions trickle in, savoring them in a way where curiosity was restrained, but not absent.

Awareness grew slowly, but steadily. She realized what she was sensing wasn't the vast, empty void she'd first thought. There were levels and partitions. As she slowly grew accustomed to the complexity, she realized that there were people around her, going about unknowable tasks.

The top level, she gradually realized, was where the activity seemed to be centered or focused. It was all fuzzy, though, like looking through a shimmering waterfall with a heavy fog on the other side.

She looked around the center of the activity. It was a large chamber, with a lot of people doing those unknowable things, as everyone else she saw were doing elsewhere in that ship. That's what it was, she'd realized, a ship.

Something tickled her thoughts, demanding her attention. It was a computer console, one of the majority in this compartment that was untenanted.

She sat down in her dream and regarded it. Her mind seemed to flow effortlessly, highlighting ideas and concepts. There was a part of the console that had a solid green dot, surrounded by four rings of varying colors, ranging from light blue, to bright red.

She grinned. She was aboard the starship Enterprise, sitting at Spock's position. These were the Enterprise's shields. She laughed at her cleverness. She studied the four controls that clearly controlled the four layers.

She couldn't understand why she could knew these things -- but then this was a dream. Why shouldn't she understand and know things when it was just a dream?

Three of the layers were dead; she understood that she couldn't activate them. The blue ring, the closest one, she could activate. She raised it to the first level.

She was unprepared for the consternation of the people around her. They were clearly upset, looking around, trying to figure out what had happened.

The shields were half the console. She turned her attention to the other half. Weapons, the word whispered inside her head. There were six of them. Looking at them, two she understood. The first was for internal security. Like stun guns, only she could direct them from the console.

She looked around, still able to see anywhere on the vessel she wanted. Walls didn't seem to be more than hazy lines in her head. A man was lying in bed, reading a book. Why not? He was going to think he just fell asleep! She tested the weapon; indeed he slumped. Gail could see he was just asleep. She had no idea how she could read his vital signs. Was this like a ship-wide tricorder?

The next weapon she understood as well. The first icon was something she thought was a cloud. Cloud 9? The second had a lightning bolt for an icon. That, she decided was 'stunners set on lethal' not stun. She knew it wouldn't hurt the ship. She watched as she activated the weapon and saw the flash; she could see that charring of the deck where it had hit ... a spot a considerable distance from anyone.

Gail sensed a stir at the console. She saw an oriental woman waving her hands through Gail's body as if she was trying to touch Gail. She thinks I'm a ghost, Gail deduced.

The oriental woman called and a man joined her. He said something, clearly trying to talk to Gail. She heard nothing, no matter how hard she tried. The woman said something and scribbled on a piece of paper and held it up.

Gail grimaced. Chinese or Japanese; the woman would have had more luck with Greek -- at least Gail could recognize the symbols, even if she couldn't understand them.

The man wrote four characters on a piece of paper as well. She mentally scratched her head. They weren't English; they weren't like the letters the woman had written. They were Arabic, Cyrillic or maybe even Hebrew. She knew she looked Semitic, even though her family hailed from Wales.

The woman laughed and said something to the man and he laughed as well. He wrote again and this time she understood. "Please stop! Don't do anything else!"

That did it! She jerked awake and sat up. Her body was trembling; she was hungry enough to eat a moose. She was drenched with sweat; her breathing was fast and deep, like she'd run a couple of miles. She hated exercise!

There were too many biological imperatives. She had to eat, drink, and work off the nervous tension ... the urge to pee won. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand and blinked. It was four thirty. It was still dark outside, so it wasn't the afternoon. She laughed and shook her head. This wasn't the first time she'd noticed that her dreams had their own clocks.

She turned on the sink in her bathroom and took handful sip of the tap water. The chlorine smell was overpowering as usual and the water tasted like crap. No one in Las Vegas drank tap water unless there was no choice.

Still, it assuaged her thirst long enough to get into the shower and get rid of the night sweats. Her legs had firmed up and her breathing had returned to normal.

The only problem was that if she closed her eyes for more than a few seconds, she could see the console again. It was unsettling.

She finished her shower keeping her thoughts far away from the console. That woman had sensed or seen her. So had the man. She wanted to get dressed first. Had she appeared dressed in her dream? She normally wore a plain cotton tracksuit, Las Vegas or not. This time of the year, it was thin cotton was all.

About a quarter of five she was in the kitchen, rustling bacon and eggs. The guard grinned. "You're up early, Dr. Taylor."

"Bad dreams," she told him. "Nothing but bad dreams."

"Dr. Taylor, be glad for small favors. I spent almost two years in Afghanistan. The docs said I'm likely to have nightmares for the rest of my life. Meaning no disrespect, ma'am."

She shook her head. "This was confusing more than nasty. I can't explain it."

She turned over the bacon and remembered the console. This time she felt more like a wraith than a ghost as she watched it. The man and woman were gone; everyone else ignored her. Oddly, there was a woman a few feet away from the console, leaning forward to get a better look. She was speaking to a man a few feet away. The woman stood out because she held her hands behind her back, and stayed a distance away from the console.

Gail thought she was hallucinating. The woman had nothing to worry about. The controls were cold and dead; when Gail thought about them, she knew she could activate them, but she didn't.

She sat at the dining room table, long after she finished breakfast, thinking. Her cousin Steve appeared a little after eight. He grinned. "Up early, cuz?"

"Yes," she said evenly.

"Still hoping for that Nobel?"

That was a bright spot; in spite of the fact she knew her sixteen-year-old cousin was jerking her chain.

"Not this time. I thought I was dreaming that I was on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I just realized it was the bridge of an Ancient spaceship from Stargate."

He chuckled. "I don't suppose I could convince you to fix me bacon and eggs?"

"Call the twins; I'm not going to spend the morning doing this."

He went out of the room and was back in a couple of minutes. "Judy says waffles! She was quite emphatic about the exclamation point after waffles. Bacon, yes. Honestly Gail, I think I rather have waffles than eggs."

"Ask and you shall receive!" she told him. Bacon and waffles were better than bacon and eggs -- she cooked the eggs in the left over bacon fat and everyone said that wasn't healthy.

The guard came out and watched her work. "There are times, Dr. Taylor, when I hate our instructions. We are never to eat what you eat. Ever. Why couldn't you have been a lousy cook like the twins?"

She laughed and kept working.

She used the mood to carry her through the morning. Then she went to her own computer and buried herself in her work, avoiding the dreams of earlier.

Three weeks ago she'd gone to Pasadena and delivered a paper to an astronomy symposium. To say she'd had a mixed reception was to understate it. She was an unemployed astronomer. She was also a billionaire, and she was determined to get a job in her major field based on her own merit, no matter how impossible it was.

Right after last Thanksgiving she'd suffered two major shocks. Her girlfriend of six plus years had stormed out; revealing that the only reason she'd slept with Gail was all those trust funds in Gail's name. A few days later, she'd gone to Seattle and heard from her grandfather. He had early Alzheimer's and was planning on 'checking out' as he described it, in December, when the estate tax laws for the very rich would never be better.

He was the patriarch head of the family fortune -- and he'd picked her from the current crop of CEO wannabes. She explained that she wasn't a CEO wannabe past, present or future -- and he'd laughed. "Which is why you've got the job!"

She'd come home, intent on erasing both events from her mind. Her one hope to get a job as an astronomer was to make an important discovery.

She had -- sort of. Maybe every hundred thousand years a star was ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a velocity that violated most speed limits. These were called 'hyper-velocity' stars. Gail had known of such, but her main interest was the dynamics of extra-galactic globular clusters.

Not long after she started trying to find the mother lode -- a globular cluster that had originated in another galaxy -- she noticed a blue star not far from her favorite globular -- the cluster she'd done her doctoral dissertation on. Blue giants are young; she, like everyone else, had assumed it was a foreground star and not given it a second thought. Theory said if would go supernova before it was twenty million years old. Star ages were a function of the spectral color and size of the star. Theory said that star was fifteen million years old. Not hardly worth waiting for it to supernova!

Except it was there, and since it was close to cluster she was measuring, she measured it too, and found that it belonged to the class of speeders and it was outside the galaxy.

But hey, she'd discovered it! Number sixteen on the list of hyper-velocity stars. Astronomy was big on being first. Being sixteenth hardly counted. She got an "atta-girl" from the dean of hyper-velocity stars (he'd discovered eight of the sixteen known) and nothing else.

A few days later she was looking at a spectrographic plate of another globular. A lot of individual stars had been resolved, showing their spectra. There had been one that stood out; she was sensitive to the red shifts involved with hyper-velocity stars -- this looked like one. But it was one star just off center in globular cluster. There were a quarter million stars in that cluster and while blue giants weren't that common, they were rare enough to deserve a look.

One of her hallmarks was careful measurements. She never ever gotten one she'd published wrong. Astronomical measurements are unbelievably sensitive to bad data. An extra-galactic globular cluster was thirty or forty thousand light years away at the very least. The impact of missing a star's real location on a plate by a millimeter would have put the star moving faster than light.

So, she checked her work very, very carefully.

She was her grandfather's niece. No big. Not even the family had guessed ahead of time who was going to receive the hand-off of the baton. The family reaction to her sudden "good fortune" was stunned surprise, followed by massive anger that they'd been passed over. Outside the family it was noted by people who were concerned about such things, but didn't make the news.

The bottom line though was that she could easily be able to afford to buy telescope time, even before her grandfather died and afterwards observatories lined up to sell time to her. Not, mind you, any of them would offer her a position.

The next set of data was fourteen months younger than the first. She was presented with a quandary. The star she was interested in, was, according to the new data, moving seven kilometers per second faster than the first set of data had shown. It was just barely out of the error bar of the possible error in her first data.

She debated trying for a third data point, unsure what was right. Sometime that night she realized what she was sure was the truth. What if the numbers were right? What if the star was a cosmic jaywalker -- not just a star that had wandered onto a deserted country road in the middle of the night -- but one who was dashing across a freeway at rush hour, a freeway clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic?

If the one star was showing that large of velocity increase, there was another nearby likely showing a velocity increase that was even greater.

She couldn't find it in any of the plates she had. Still sure, she resorted to brute force: she began to assemble a model of the local area of the cluster, star by painful star. Finally, in a plate nearly twenty years old, she found the little pimple on the jaywalker's ass. In an plate taken in 1990 she found the spectrum she needed: the jaywalker was headed for a star that it was currently obscuring.

She ran the numbers; eventually she was sure. At first, the thought of being the first one to watch a pair of stars merge had been heady wine. Except, she was just one person, and she wasn't going to command much in the universe of resources to watch the event. It wasn't her area of interest, and she would have to struggle to learn the science in the few months before the stars merged. The awful truth: if she tried to hog this, she was going to do immeasurable damage to science. And no one in the astronomy community would ever forgive her.

Instead, she prepared a paper, with nothing but the bare fact that the two stars were about to merge. She already had figured out that everyone was going to laugh at her. It just wasn't possible not to. "The fireworks are due to reach their peak about 11 PM, EST on July 4th." She wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't made the calculations.

She had been gifted with the house she lived in when she was eighteen, but she'd already lived there for six years by then. It had been her grandfather's golf retreat, situated in the middle of a subdivision on a golf course near downtown Las Vegas and wasn't far from UNLV.

Over the years, before her grandfather died, she had three family members move in. Judith and Katherine Montgomery, twins from her mother's side of the family, were sophomores at UNLV when her grandfather died. And then there was her cousin, Steve Taylor, from her father's side of the family. He was sixteen when he started at UNLV, a math major, starting a few months before her grandfather had died.

She'd learned the hard way about the lies that universities told. No one had mentioned to her, until just weeks before she presented her thesis, that she had no future in astronomy. There were thirty or forty applicants for every job, and most of the successful applicants had built up friendships to grease the way. She had none. She told Steve about the lies. He hadn't believed her, until he did his own research. The rage you feel when you find out the people you thought were helping you achieve your dreams -- but who were there merely to part you with your money -- is terrible. And it didn't matter if you were wealthy or not. The thought of people stealing dreams makes you furious no matter how deep your pockets are.

Steve, as she said, was a genius. He'd helped her prepare her paper. She had a web site were everything was posted. Her code, her plates, her calculations, her data. Sure enough the listeners had been 80% believing it was a hoax, and 20% who told the rest she'd never gotten a measurement wrong, to their knowledge.

It turned out to be a topic that too many people had a vested interests in not to be sure. The data was there; everything was there. There was three weeks to go now before the two stars would merge. People with much larger computers than she had available had made better measurements than she could ever hope to. The two stars were going to merge. The jury was still out on how spectacular an event it was going to be. At forty thousand light years, you can't just plot the groove the stars were going to follow.

The best guess was that the jaywalker was going to hit the victim, going at vectors that totaled 85% degrees -- a sideways swipe -- from each other. The stars were already measurably elongated. Since the interloper was four times the mass of the smaller victim, the longer streamers were from the victim.

When she'd given her presentation they had been about two months from merging ... the jaywalker had not been quite as far as Jupiter was from the sun. Four weeks later they were advancing on each other at about a million kilometers per hour and the merge was less than a month away.

She had made a decision that she was going to be satisfied with an honorable mention. As the day got closer, fewer and fewer researchers mentioned her contribution, concentrating on what part their own research was going to play. It was a little frustrating, but she told herself she had expected it.

She did her latest series of measurements, finding nothing new.

At a little after four in the afternoon the guard spoke on the intercom. "PB and J sandwiches in the pantry!"

That was a warning that their security had been breached. "PB" was code that security had pushed the panic button alerting the local authorities -- and the lawyers -- while "pantry" was code for "go to the panic room."

The panic room was a secure room in the middle of the house, with no windows and only one door. It was armored and no one could get inside unless someone inside let them inside -- or you had to expend hours with a cutting torch or detonated some serious explosives.

Still, she walked to the living room, not the panic room.

The guard was aghast. "Dr. Taylor ... you need to get secure!"

She peeped out the window. There were two HumVees and a large army truck outside. Soldiers were pouring out of the truck, heading in either direction around the house. The group of three people headed for the front door were ones she recognized from her earlier dream.

"I think they've come to talk to me," she said with aplomb. "We will want to be careful. Tell Steve to take care of the twins. Tell him this time there are a lot more than two who've come calling.

"Oh, and tell the PD to be careful they don't start shooting until they know for sure who they are shooting at."

She went to the front door and opened it before the trio arrived.

The man who looked for all the world like a college professor regarded her steadily. "I'm Dr. Thomas Christopher, representing the government of the United States," he said. The oriental woman next to him said something and he nodded.

"We'd like a word with you in private."

The guard was right there. "Over my dead body."

The rather severe man in a military uniform growled, "That can arranged."

The guard grinned. "You, sir, aren't a credible source. You're wearing the uniform of a colonel in the Red Chinese army."

The professor laughed easily. "Colonel, I've told you often of the American propensity for drama. Please, sir, don't feed the animals."

He turned to Gail. "This is in regards to a national security matter. Please, listen to me before you do anything rash. May I inquire as to your name?"

"I'm listening," she replied, keeping the door on the chain. "I'm Dr. Gail Taylor." If he could play the rank card, so could she.

"Dr. Taylor, please be careful right now. This a matter of significant national security importance to a number of governments. You did something this morning. Please, for all of our stakes, as a gesture of good faith, please undo it. Then, please, invite us in. This is not a discussion I'm comfortable with holding outside."

"Again," the security guard said, "you're not coming in."

Dr. Christopher eyed him and the security guard moved just so, revealing his weapon. The older man in a military uniform spoke. "Dr. Christopher the FBI reports that this address has alerted the local police. They are trying to get the local authorities to stand down. So far they aren't having much success." He paused. Gail got the impression he was listening to something, but she couldn't see a radio.

"Dr. Taylor appears to be extraordinarily wealthy. There are several armed guards on the premises. The local police have been told to respond, regardless of any attempts to get them to stop."

Dr. Christopher sighed. "Dr. Taylor, you did things this morning."

"I thought I was dreaming."

"Dr. Taylor, you turned on something. Turn if off. Please."

"If I could turn it on, you should be able to turn it off."

He laughed. "We've been trying for weeks to learn what is was we'd be turning on ... but we didn't learn and probably wouldn't have dared if we did. To be honest turning it off will be just a sign of good faith. What you did afterwards has got the wind up among a great many politicians. You know what I mean."

"And if I chose not to cooperate?"

"You, I, and everyone within several hundred yards of this house would have just moments more to live. Please, you know what you did. Undo the simplest thing. Let us in and we'll discuss this in a non-adversarial manner."

She shrugged. She visualized the console one more time and turned off the one level of shield she'd activated. "I thought I was dreaming of the Starship Enterprise, activating her shields."

"Dr. Taylor if you keep discussing this in front of people not cleared for the information, our fate will be taken from our hands. Say anything further in public and a wing of B-2 bombers up there at 12 miles altitude will obliterate us. I am not being dramatic ... you know what else you did this morning. That has terrified a great many politicians. They believe you could be an existential risk to this country -- they will apologize to all and sundry about the regrettable deaths: ours. After the fact."

"You were the one talking earlier about drama."

"Dr. Taylor, you've bought us a slight reprieve when you reversed what you did first this morning. I have gotten an intelligence report on you. You're an astronomer; you made a remarkable find not so long ago that by the nature of your field is not highly valued. You wish a job in your professional field.

"I'll be truthful: I can't give you that. I can, however, hire you as a consultant -- at the site you visited earlier. You might find that position of significantly greater personal value in the long term than a position as just another astronomer."

Gail made up her mind. She nodded to Dr. Christopher. "I'm taking the chain off, you understand?"

"I understand."

"I can't recommend this, Dr. Taylor," the guard said.

She ignored him, pushing the door nearly closed, unhooking the chain and opening the door wide. The three outside came in. She heard a stir behind her and turned, seeing Steve and another of the guards. "They tell me you've gone nuts, cuz," Steve told her.

"You have no idea, cousin. Go back to the twins. Tell them to get a solid grip on their socks. I am going to extort these people to our hearts' desire. Yours too. It is going to blow everyone's socks off."

"Extort, Dr. Taylor?" Dr. Christopher asked.

"You bet!" she said cheerfully. "I have dreams, my cousins have dreams. I was screwed when I was a good little girl and followed all the rules to get my doctorate. It's not going to let it happen again -- not to me and not to my family.

"You're here. You haven't really got around to mentioning the real reason why you're here, nor why you're risking death. Combine that with what I thought was a dream, and just as obviously was something neither you nor I completely understand, I'm sure I can gain a few modest concessions from you -- concessions that would not have been offered if I didn't insist."

"You are rolling dice with a lot on the line, Dr. Taylor."

"I'll give you a freebie, Dr. Christopher. I activated two other devices. You seem to be aware of that?"

"Indeed," he said. "This is very dangerous ground, Dr. Taylor. We need to speak in a secure location."

"A freebie, Dr. Christopher. Those devices have no reach beyond the local area."

"Please, is there a place we can talk, without spectators?"

"Exempting my cousins?"

"You're risking their lives."

"Need I repeat my request? It's not negotiable."

"A secure location, Dr. Taylor."

Gail turned to Steve. "Tell the guards to leave the panic room. Tell the twins to get comfortable."

"This is a bad idea, Dr. Taylor," the head of the security detail said.

"Either you have no imagination or you're incompetent. Clean out your things and be gone by the close of business today."

"Dr. Taylor..."

"It's very simple. I'm going to take our guests into the panic room and lock the door. Either the panic room is secure or you're fired. The only way out of the panic room is -- was -- controlled by you with us providing an override. Your instructions are not to allow hostages to be taken from this house. Period. Again, you can either follow your instructions competently or you're fired."

She turned to her three guests. "Follow me."

She led them to the panic room, with two of the guards standing by the door. She went inside, and waved the three to one side of the conference table that occupied the room. Her three cousins were already seated at the table, and Gail locked the door from the inside.

"I hope this meets your definition of secure," she told Dr. Christopher levelly.

"It does. You seem to be adjusting to -- things -- rapidly, Dr. Taylor."

"Maybe you've never dreamed of being aboard the Enterprise, but I have. Although this is more like the Stargate Universe's ancients -- were genes were important."

The three visitors regarded her steadily. "I think you're talking," Gail told them. "But I don't hear you. I controlled the console this morning with my mind. Not far from where I'm sitting now. Maybe I'm closer with the Stargate analogy than I first thought."

"Honestly, Dr. Taylor, we never suspected a genetic component until a short time ago. We thought it was based on IQ alone." He waved at the Chinese woman. "Dr. Chu is very intelligent and she understands better than most. Of course, she's Chinese and understands about a third of what we are saying."

"And this gentleman?" Gail said, waving at the older Chinese officer.

"It will be explained in due time, but the US has combined with China and a number of our more traditional allies to research this find."

"I can understand the 'more traditional allies, '" Gail replied. "But China?"

"Extortion is not your sole province Dr. Taylor," the Chinese officer said bluntly. He turned his gaze on her cousins.

"We've not said anything of significant importance as yet. There isn't much left that is relatively unimportant. When we start discussing the important elements, you will be subject to security oaths."

"I haven't made any oaths," Steve said. "Neither have my cousins. I'd be surprised if you have a signed agreement from Gail."

The Chinese officer spoke again, "You have been informed that such oaths exist. You can no longer even plead innocence of that knowledge. We no longer need your agreement. I'm a PhD as are Dr. Chu and Dr. Christopher as well, so is Dr. Taylor. That is your reported aspiration. We'd much rather be collegial and reasonable than authoritarian. Unless we have no choice."

"The papers," Gail said bluntly to the Chinese officer.

He dug into a folio and produced them. Gail got her copy and signed hers before the others all had theirs.

"You're not going to read it, Gail?" Steve asked.

"I was there. There is nothing I wouldn't sign away to be a part of this. Sign it or I never want to see your chicken ass again."

"Gosh, Gail, you sure have a way with words!" Steve said, but signed. The twins read the oaths, looked over the papers, and traded nods, and then signed.

"I will speak first," the Chinese officer said. "I am the deputy project leader for the investigation of an anomaly.

"The specific object involved was discovered by US National Technical Means -- it has been subsequently investigated in much greater detail. It proved to be an artificial object about four hundred meters long, three hundred meters wide and about forty meters tall, lying not only below the surface of the sea, but completely buried and then some.

"We quickly determined it was a vehicle, and since it had been in place for three to five million years, it was assumed the object was a space vehicle.

"We will go into detail at a later time, but the vehicle has robust self-repair systems. So robust, in fact, that we have found nothing no longer functioning, even after this long. However, a great many systems, while familiar in concept, the implementation isn't something we understand.

"When you are some distance beneath the surface of sea, you are a little careful which doors you open, shields you activate or weapons you employ."

Gail nodded. Oh yeah!

"Further, when you are buried under a hundred feet of rock, the propulsion systems aren't something we've looked at closely yet either.

"We have made considerable progress in other areas. The maxi-light that has made so much news of late is a sample. It gives off no heat, and directly converts electricity, no matter what the source, directly to light. Those devices are going to revolutionize the lighting market. It is just one of the applications we've discovered.

"Recently we discovered the vehicle has personal communicators that can be keyed to individuals. We cannot detect their transmissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, but it was highly indicative that we can hear messages to us in our heads, nor do we need to vocalize messages we wish to send. Messages are routed to the named individual or individuals that we want to speak to. Further, you can verbalize groups, ranks, and other criteria to send the messages to multiple addressees.

"Thus it wasn't as much of a surprise to find that the vehicle can be operated by mind alone -- although the distance was a surprise.

"We have been taking a slow and steady approach to the investigation of the vehicle. There are books, computers and audio records from which we are learning their language; that was Dr. Christopher's initial primary duty. He had done so well that he now heads the civilian science effort in general."

He nodded to Gail. "You caused a great deal of concern today, Dr. Taylor."

"How was that, Gail?" Judy asked.

"I thought I was dreaming." She looked at Dr. Christopher. "It is easy, Doctor, to make great leaps of deduction when you think you are dreaming and that nothing is real."

"Indeed," he intoned, deadpan.

"Are you mocking me, Dr. Christopher?"

"Indeed," he intoned again. "And I apologize.

"You were noticed when you turned on the first layer of shields. Dr. Chu saw something at the console, and again I apologize, she described you as a 'wraith.' Granted, she was speaking Chinese, but that was my first translation of the word.

"I mocked you; please understand, when you are far beneath the surface of the Earth, beneath the surface of the sea, when you see someone activating systems that you've never dared to touch because of the risk to the lives of what, Dr. Tang, now about three thousand people?"

"Roughly that, Dr. Christopher."

"You become vexed. All we learned about you that was that you had control of a number of critical systems, that you were considered 'authorized' by the ship's computer and that you were located at these GPS coordinates."

"What did you do, Gail?" Steve repeated.

"I dreamed I was on the Enterprise, at Spock's position. I tried to activate the shields and weapons."

"So?"

Dr. Christopher laughed. "You need to expand your horizons, young man. Would you want the ship you were buried in to fire its phasors or photon torpedoes while you were buried under a hundred feet of rock and further than that underneath the surface of the ocean?" He turned to Gail. "What did you activate?"

"Local defense weapons. Something like phasors set to 'stun' and something like the other phasor setting."

"We held a roll call, no one was missing," Dr. Tang told her.

"I used the stun setting on a man reading in bed; I figured he'd just think he'd fallen asleep. I fried a piece of deck on the lowest level that had no one with two hundred meters on that level."

"We always assumed that things were controlled by either your IQ or your knowledge of their systems. It is -- stunning that it might be genetic," Dr. Christopher said.

The Chinese woman spoke at length. When Dr. Christopher turned to Gail, she spoke first. "You said you can use your minds to transmit messages."

"Dr. Lily Chu is probably the smartest person we have working for us -- and the politest. She doesn't want to talk behind your back."

"Remind her that I don't speak Chinese."

"She reminds me that we have no idea what the ship can do at this point. Obviously you have opened up new possibilities. She is asking what else you learned."

"I could only activate one shield level on the first layer of shields. I couldn't even sense what the other shields did, and it wasn't possible to activate any of them. And for that first level? All I could sense was some kind of shell around the vehicle.

"I could sense what the weapons I activated would do. I could only activate two of six of them. I have no concept of what the others do."

"And you thought you were just dreaming?" Steve asked.

Gail was helpless to the evil impulses in her brain.

"Indeed."

The Chinese woman said only a sentence or two.

Dr. Christopher laughed and waved at her. "You were lied to about the possibility of becoming an astronomer. She was lied to, pretty much the same way, about her chances of becoming a physicist." He went on to describe Lily's first ten minutes as a linguist.

Dr. Christopher stopped, and then started again. "Dr. Taylor, I'm a science layman. That said, predicting the collision of two stars is, as far as I'm concerned, a considerable achievement, even if it's clear your peers intend to sideline you.

"We have no jobs for an astronomer with our project," he said baldly.

Gail felt her heart go into freefall.

He saw her expression and sighed. "You should have let me finish my thought.

"You are an extraordinary individual and honestly, we can't just let you walk around with the keys to the shields and weapons systems. We'll hire you as a consultant, at a pay scale with an extra zero at the end of what you could have expected to earn as an astronomer. I can't guarantee you work as an astronomer, but I can guarantee you work for the foreseeable future. Work that I'm sure you'll find interesting."

"Do you know why I included my cousins, Dr. Christopher?"

"Nepotism aside? No."

"I can feel it in my head. I can change something in their heads. And when I do, Steve will be able to control the ship's propulsion. Judy can do what I can. Kathy ... I don't know what she can do, but she'll be able to do something. Fly the ship, I think, but it's murky.

"The rest of you -- the rest of the people aboard the vehicle? I can't feel any switches in my head."

Dr. Christopher laughed and held up two fingers in a mock crucifix. "This is above my pay grade. It's above Colonel Tang's. Obviously I can't stop you, but please have a care."

"Ever since this morning, Dr. Christopher, I have done little beyond being more cautious than I've ever been in my life. It started out dreamlike; when you held up the message, 'Please, do nothing else!' I began to consider the possibility that I wasn't dreaming. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, given that possibility, to take all due care."

"For which not only are the three of us grateful personally, but our governments are as well."

"Dr. Tang had a hand in it, in the last few minutes. When he said 'extortion isn't my sole province.'"

"I don't understand, Gail," Steve said.

She lifted her eyes to Colonel Tang and he gave the barest of nods.

"I suspect China has had to deal with a new broom."

Dr. Tang barked a laugh. "Dr. Taylor -- you are going to be an inestimable addition to our number. That was very well put."

"Now what?" Gail asked.

"Now we will get the various and sundry security forces to take their fingers off the triggers and return to base. While that is happening, you and your cousins will be free to start packing. Plan on a stay of indefinite duration. Room and board will be provided -- no outside communication will be permitted however. Cell phones, Blackberries, and that sort of thing won't be allowed and any attempt to use them from this point forward would result in sanctions. You can bring personal data on a memory sticks, but no computers ... we'll supply you with one. You will not have Internet access.

"Each of you may prepare written instructions to attorneys and written goodbyes to members of your families. Expect them to be read and paraphrased."

"I run a multi-billion dollar company," Gail told him. "I can't be out of touch for a protracted period."

"You will tell them to prepare for just that. In an emergency they will be able to send you written messages and perhaps receive a written reply; if the emergency is serious enough, you might be permitted to visit. The visit would be escorted and heavily monitored. In fact, the three of us have been escorted and are heavily monitored in order to be here today."



-------

Chapter 5: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again


Three days later Gail sat with Steve and the twins in the wardroom of the ship. It was odd, she thought. In theory, no one had to talk -- yet the room was filled with hum of conversation. "Have any of you seen the least thing that doesn't seem on the up and up?" she asked silently.

"Outside of the constraints, no," Steve replied. "And there are surprisingly few of them. The guys who have been studying the engineering aboard are delighted that I can make sense of what they are seeing."

Judy mentally laughed. "This ship is very large, and has taken a lot of manpower to explore. Everyone's so busy trying to find things of particular interest to them, not many have tried to put things together. Thus they missed the room with a dozen flight simulators and the mock bridge."

"I'm surprised they missed the bridge," Kathy said. "Practically everyone has seen it. The consensus was that it was 'bridge alternate' and not currently activated."

"I too have found everything to be on the up and up. I'm unhappy that there are only four of us with deeper access to the controls. I propose expanding the project's knowledge base with what I've learned."

"I don't see as how it will hurt. They might be angry that you've been withholding information from them."

"I expect they are withholding some information from us as well. Or at least trying to," she told the others.

Steve jerked his head and Gail turned and saw Dr. Christopher. "I missed breakfast," he told Gail. "Can we hold our meeting here?"

"Not worried about secrets being spilled?" she asked.

"We'll conduct the meeting via communicator," he replied.

"As you wish," she told him, this time communicating. "Where do you wish me to start?"

"Several days ago you said you wanted to do some independent research for a few days; you told me last night you'd be ready with a report this morning."

"That's right. Back to the question -- where do you wish me to start?"

"Start at the start," he told her.

She laughed. "I tried that. Did you know the ship's computer contains a ship's log?"

"We thought there had to be one, but we could never find it."

"You probably did like I did at first. The reason you couldn't find it? It consists of one sentence. 'Departure countdown interrupted with five minutes and thirty seconds left.'" Where they were departing to, who made the entry, why they interrupted the countdown isn't stated."

"There has to be more than that!"

"It was a woman's voice that made the entry. Her voice was dry and terse, and quite devoid of emotion. It was like you reporting on dinner last night."

"And that's it? There isn't more?"

"As you've discovered, the ship's computer controls all aspects of the ship. It has safety overrides to make it, I believe, impossible for even the biggest boob to do something lethal to the ship. Since you've had two accidents, the ship does allow accidents. Oh, I didn't fib about the 'only one log entry' but it wasn't completely accurate. There are log entries starting some time ago as the ship detected scans of its location. There are more extensive records of when the first party arrived, and quite detailed records of events since then. The two injuries were the first I learned of other things of interest."

"And what are those?"

"It was the first time I heard two important words. 't'landa' and just plain 'landa.'" Tom's spoonful of pancakes stopped halfway to his mouth.

"I was remiss. After three days you shouldn't be able to understand the language. How did you read the entries?"

"The computer can translate on the fly. For concepts that aren't shared -- I can access a dictionary and have it translated into English. I suspect that it can translate into Chinese and most other important languages."

"The computer can translate? There are alien to English and English to Alien dictionaries?"

"You don't understand the computer; you've been accessing it through icons. Those were created for people who were very busy, I think, whose hands were free and their thoughts otherwise occupied.

"The word you need to know is 'diku.' True, it has an unfortunate resonance in English, but the aliens never knew that. Say the word in your mind, instruct the computer to 'translate this to that' and it happens. Ask 'what does 'landa' mean and it will explain."

"You're telling me I wasted six months of my life -- my whole team wasted six months of our lives -- because we didn't know how to work the computers?"

"That's about it Dr. Christopher."

"And you just walk in here and know everything?"

"Not hardly. I've learned a few words of their language, but not many. There is quite a bit more data available if you know how the machines work."

She was aware of the frantic call that went out to a number of people. Colonel Baird, Dr. Chu, Dr. Healy...

Steve and the twins stayed next to her as the brass assembled. Dr. Christopher briefed them in. Dr. Chu, Gail found, had a really nasty temper.

Dr. Christopher was more sanguine. "Cameron, Colonel Baird -- did you see the Star Trek movie 'The Voyage Home?' Lily, did you?" The three Americans had, the Chinese physicist hadn't.

"Lily, in the story, people from the future travel back to our day. One of the engineers from the future sits down at a computer terminal and he picks up a mouse and talks to it."

"Oh God!" Cameron said. "That hurts!"

"I don't understand," Lily said belligerently.

"They were from the future; they'd had voice interfaces with their computers for hundreds of years. The engineer couldn't, in fact, imagine a computer without it. This is the gg of mistakes people routinely make. When faced with something outside our experience, we extrapolate from data we know, guessing at how things work. In this case, we were wildly wrong.

"Right now, I'm curious about the words Dr. Taylor gave me. Landa appears to mean crew or ship's complement. The computer is fuzzy about which. T'landa adds the word 'provisional' and doesn't refer to ship's complement. I'm trying to find related words. Alas, they use prefixes, which messes up alpha sorts."

"Think 'grep' Doctor Christopher. This is a computer, after all. A very, very, very fast computer," Gail told him. "Ask it to pattern match."

She turned to the others, but still spoke privately. "I think 'landa' is best translated as 'those who belong to the ship's complement.' T'landa is one who has a provisional higher status. If you think my name, you'll find the word the word 'k'landa' next to it. That means something like a 'ship operator.' I'm authorized to make things work aboard the ship. Some particular things. Steve, Judy and Kathy hold that title as well."

"I'm only paying half attention, Dr. Taylor -- and saying half is being generous. I'm busy catching up correcting months of half-assed assumptions."

"I hesitate to offer direction to such august company," Gail told them. "I hope at least Colonel Baird is paying attention."

"I'm hanging on your every word, Dr. Taylor."

"Sir, the computer has access to brain scans of every living person on the planet. I limited my search to the five main members of this project -- the US, the UK, Australia, Japan and China. The computer has tried, unsuccessfully, to integrate a number of people into its network. Forty-five of them are in those four nations. Fourteen more Americans, six from the UK, three Aussies, a dozen from Japan and just nine from China. Education has some component in this, as well as genetics. Think of the bars at some amusement park rides -- if you can walk under the bar without hitting your head, you're too young. If you don't have sufficient education, all the genes in the world don't help.

"It worked with me because evidently I was dreaming of being on the bridge of the Enterprise, at the science officer's console. It inserted the actual for the imaginary and sat back to see what I'd do. I surprised it, I think. I surprised everyone.

"Turning back to those scans -- I can give you names and instantaneous GPS locations on each of those people. If you want to take in 41 more random people off the street who can control various ship functions."

"It won't be up to me. I'm just a flunky," the colonel said without bitterness.

"Assure the powers that be. I thought about targeting the phasors on the lethal setting on someone. Just targeting -- I had no intention of shooting, but I'm not authorized to kill people without permission.

"Another word Dr. Christopher has come across now is 'a'landa.' That's an officer with command authority. I don't have it, no one aboard does, and without it, I can scorch the decks well away from anyone, but I can't get close with the targeting. I was logged for 'unauthorized non-lethal weapons access' when I fired my first shot. The log entry adds 'awaiting review by a'landa or higher.' H'landa is something like the ship's executive officer. The word 'p'landa is the one for captain -- the ultimate authority aboard. As I said, I'm an operator; my cousins are operators. No one aboard merits higher; no one on Earth merits higher."

Colonel Baird made a rude noise. "It's so easy to sit on the sidelines, Dr. Taylor. I want your recommendation -- do you think we should expend the effort to find these people?"

"Sir, I know people won't like this -- but the computer can read minds. A person with -- hostile intent -- won't even be allowed computer access, much less access to ship systems. None of these people can hurt the ship or crew. I get the distinct impression that while they aren't brainwashed, the concept of hurting another crewmember was inconceivable to the original crew. There are a dozen and a half people who will understand the engineering. Two who can fly this ship, a half dozen that can operate the fighters carried below us. And that's what they are -- not everyone in the universe is friendly, and those ships down there are able to deliver the message 'Stop! Do nothing further!'"

"There are people who can navigate this ship, communicate with others, people who can work the sensors. There aren't many of any group, Colonel. But enough to train up to understand their departments."

Gail paused. "The ship was designed for four thousand five hundred crew, five thousand students, faculty and staff for what I think was a 'space navy academy.' It's not entirely configured to teach war -- but that was certainly a large part of the curriculum. The opposite of 'landa' is 'hotha.' Staff -- and there were various degrees of them. Still, the computer was blunt -- they were just along for the ride."

"Three days is all this took?" Colonel Baird asked.

"A day and a half. I know that everyone thinks I'm a cowboy; that I fire from the hip. I think Dr. Christopher understands now. Dr. Chu understands what it means that I've never messed up a measurement I've published."

Dr. Chu spoke up. "Talk to my father. Measurements are tough. There are millions of sources for systemic errors. Fail to account for even one and your peers will leap on you and attempt to rend you from limb to limb. No one will care if their arrow misses -- but, oh how they care when a shaft strikes home!"

"It's that way in astronomy," Gail told them. "It's why I'm very careful with my measurements and why I posted everything before I presented my paper."

Lily Chu laughed. "Few would have the courage to let it all hang out, Dr. Taylor! You are our weapons tech?"

"I understand the offensive and defensive control systems; I don't understand the weapons or the shields."

"You opened the gates of hell, Dr. Taylor. I am authorized now to look at most things. You are authorized to study how those systems work. Study hard, Dr. Taylor! That's what this project is about! Learning how these things work."

Gail had been reading, the instant she knew she could. She looked up at Dr. Chu, and spoke to just her. "You're comfortable with me knowing how a beam weapon that affects the solar constant works? You're comfortable that I could build a weapon that would convert all the molecular hydrogen on the sun into helium in a few seconds? The fireball reaching nearly to Jupiter's orbit?"

"I believe the assurance of the computer that not only can't you imagine using that technology without a good and sufficient reasons -- but that it wouldn't let you if you did."

"We're human -- and I think that the people who made it are enough like us that we shouldn't rule out human mistakes -- even if they've tried very hard to eliminate them."

Dr. Chu walked over to Gail and kissed her forehead. "Like I said, Dr. Taylor."

The next few days were heady; when anyone aboard could understand anything that they asked, then the science leaped ahead; giant leaps.

Starting three days later the first of the "draftees" began to arrive. They'd been told nothing about what they were going to see. Gail had suggested asking questions about their dreams -- and prioritizing those who had dreams like hers.

That was a dozen people. She met attitudes that varied from rank incredulity to instant acceptance -- and a thirst for more knowledge. Judy took over the first group, while Gail stayed with the latter group, with Steve helping her.

-------

A month passed. Most of the "draftees" had settled down, understanding the importance of what they were about. Three had been trussed up and shipped back to the mainland.

It was Steve, Gail thought later, who triggered catastrophe. How it worked or why they never figured out.

"How's it coming with the second rank?" Gail asked.

He laughed. "We're good to go. These people all have a huge sense of wonder..." the last word trailed off as a chime sounded.

"Departure countdown resumed. Five minutes thirty seconds to departure." The words were alien, the units were alien -- the meaning was clear.

"Kathy! Judy! To the bridge!"

"Kathy is there already," Kathy told her. "I'm still shut off from everything!"

"Not a twitch!" Judy confirmed.

"Steve! Shut it down!"

"Can't! The twins aren't the only ones shut down! Nothing I can do touches the launch sequence!"

"Taylor for command. Recommend that people brace for acceleration. Isn't there a sub coming?"

Colonel Baird spoke. "General Sinclair is aboard, he's overridden the mission abort. They will try to board."

"Tell everyone they have two minutes to be in a chair. Or they are dead or crippled!" Gail told him. "Tell that general that the ship is about to fire a weapon the will lift a couple of hundred feet of overburden over the ship. If I was him, I'd be high-tailing it as fast as I could! If he continues to attempt to come aboard, he'll be toast!"

"Roger that. Engine shut down isn't an option?"

"Not an option, Colonel. Get comfy; it appears that we'll lift at three gravities."

"And our overburden?"

"That doesn't factor into the numbers. There is a countdown to firing our third level weapon -- it's going to make a lot of solid rock into something smaller than pea-size."

"Or no problem at all," Judy spoke into the command circuit. "The useless-as-tits-on-a-boar-hog pilot reports."

"Equally useless engineering reporting," Steve said next. "Nothing I can do is going to affect this!"

Gail saw it; it was so fast as to be hardly visible -- although the instruments recorded it clearly enough. "Colonel Baird, our first level shield just went to maximum and our third level weapon just fired a single shot at its lowest setting. Where is that sub?"

"What did they do?" Colonel Baird asked.

"What overburden? We don't have any at the moment. I can't detect much in the water -- the weapons stirred up a lot of debris. I can't detect the sub."

"Jin Dao, b'landa Taylor. We are lifting at once gravity through the debris -- most of it is pea-sized. We are maneuvering to avoid the sub. They never got close enough to try to board. They've stopped trying to close and have sheered off."

Norman Thomas, one of the forty-five spoke up. "The course has been laid in, Gail. It's ... pretty amazing. Our destination is fourteen thousand light years distant, with two stops en route. One is listed as a fueling stop; the other is listed as 'liaison' -- whatever that means. The first stop is 8216 light years from Earth."

Steve spoke up. "I heard that, Gail. We've been studying the propulsion systems systematically. That's the euphemism for 'glacially slowly.' Now that we're moving, I can 'see' the systems. We are currently moving using what I guess we could call the 'sublight propulsion.' It's limited under normal usage to three gravities. Command can override that up to five gravities.

"There is a 'star drive' that cranks our velocity up to about a light-year a day ... that might sound speedy, but our destination would be more than 38 years away at that velocity. The third level is what is called 'burst' engines. They can crank a light year an hour, but only for short periods and with only extremely poor precision.

"For what it's worth, I can't reroute us, but I'll be able, after the initial the maneuvers, to moderate, to an extent, the burst timing, and perhaps distances involved."

"Dr. Taylor," another voice intruded. "It's Hypatia -- I navigate." Gail knew of the woman, but she had never met her. The name was ... odd.

"Before I was studying the starship records of the local stars. I was very frustrated. I translated our stellar coordinates into theirs, and most commonly I was told there was no star there even if I could see it. The rest of the time I was told the closest star to the star I wanted evaluated wasn't a spectral match.

"Moving, however has concentrated my focus. I have learned a number of interesting things."

"For instance?" Gail asked.

"This ship is older than first supposed. I'm not sure of the causative event, but it appears to have been cloned from another ship, 64 million years ago, more or less. Probably less, but not much. Cloned isn't the right word -- the info I have is that the 'bud' was set to impact Earth about 63.4 million years ago. Dr. Taylor, I believe this vessel was deliberately sent to wipe out the dinosaurs."

"A bud? The entire ship wouldn't have been able to do that."

"Yes, Dr. Taylor -- at normal velocities. The bud was, as near as I can translate the dimensions, about ten meters in diameter. However kinetic energy -- kinetic energy being what does the damage is mass times velocity. Objects in the solar system typically travel twenty to forty kilometers per second. From the data, the ship encountered Earth a velocity a thousand times higher than normal."

"And this is there, in the records?"

"Yes, Dr. Taylor. I heard your lecture on tape a few days ago -- about thinking outside the box. I asked the ship to recompute the stars, assuming positions sixty-five million years ago. The computer says that such orbits are beyond calculation. Then I asked how it was going to navigate to our destinations. The reply was that while the exact stellar locations couldn't be computed, approximations could. The ship was going to slow and search; stellar signatures will not have changed that much in such a 'short' time frame."

Gail had read the appropriate header information from Hypatia's mind. "You left out the part where they created the human race."

"They seeded mammalian life with retroviruses that affected DNA, directing evolution, yes. The ship has stayed at roughly the same distance below sea level -- deep enough to be safe from casual detection, but easy enough to find and reach when technology reached that point."

Gail swallowed when she read the 'mission' of the ship. "They routinely shanghaied crews?"

"Only young cultures have the sorts of risk takers that they needed. Sixty-four million years ago, the builder's original culture was moribund; no one was interested in space or exploration. They seeded a lot of ships like this. When the requisite number of people genetically able to operate it were on board, it heads to one of their regional centers. Crews are expected to learn their jobs. I'm not comfortable with the comment that those that don't are 'pruned.'"

"Who would be? I need to talk to the colonel."

Colonel Baird blanched when it was explained to him. "What was the SOP?"

"Sir, the spacers weren't especially inbred -- there were hundreds of millions of them, but as a general thing, their over-all culture was hidebound and moribund. The spacers knew they kept things running and they weren't happy with the lack of support they got from everyone who was dependent on them. So, when they would need new blood they'd raid a relatively backward planet and shanghai a couple of thousand 'volunteers.' Then they would let the nature of the job 'prune' the new blood.

"Space is a hostile environment, and most of the spacers lived for the job -- not families. They'd have died out in a generation or two without the desperate measures they undertook. The problem with desperate measures, sir, is that eventually you look on them as 'business as usual' and stop caring about the harm they inflict.

"It wasn't exactly what I'd call a mutiny, but the ancestors of this ship's crew headed out as far away from temptation as they could get. And still the old school spacers had the last laugh when they created this ship -- and set the Earth on a trajectory to create the human race."

"And now it's our turn to have been shanghaied."

"That's right, sir. Hypatia, myself and a few others are going through the old records. They were buried where we couldn't find them until we launched."

"We are still in contact with Earth. What should I say?"

Gail sighed. "So long and thanks for all the fish." She saw Dr. Christopher standing not far away. "I suppose I shouldn't be flip, talking about the lives of this many people."

"Your flippancy pales before the chutzpah of people who kidnap thousands at a time," Dr. Christopher said with resignation.

"Sir, we will need to talk fast. In about forty minutes we'll go faster than light. It will be a long time, I'm afraid, before we have contact with home again." She left out the very real possibility that she could end the sentence with the words "if ever."

"In a second. The ship lifted to the northeast; everyone in Europe saw us. The secret is out. What they are going to do about secrecy now I have no idea. Doctors Christopher and Taylor -- talk to me. What is the long term prognosis?"

Gail answered that. "We're about a half year from our first lengthy stop; people need to learn their jobs. I don't imagine they give crews to be 'pruned' any more leeway than those they plan to kidnap. They never had a ship out of contact for this long before -- the time that has passed is about twice as long as their history prior to this and it was a very long history. What we will find out when we arrive at our destination is unknowable -- anything from full recovery to total collapse. And by collapse, I have no idea. The decay of civilization -- the decay of species -- we're talking long enough for lemur-like animals to develop into sapients on Earth. To total erasure. Ships like this one might have survived, but I doubt if everything in their civilization was maintained like a ship. In fact, I'm pretty sure the spacers reserved the best for themselves.

"Think of all of the possibilities we've seen in science fiction films -- and a million that that no one could have dreamt of. Star Trek: to boldly go where no one has gone before. Stargate: to explore the universe. Star Wars: in a galaxy, far, far, away. All of that and more."

"Let me say goodbye to people; let the crew know they have only a short time to say goodbye to their loved ones. The calls will go through..." Colonel Baird grinned wanly. "I don't think they could stop us, even if they were foolish enough to try."

"One last thing. There is no way to assume control of the ship's systems?"

"There may be, but I have no idea how to go about it. One would assume that they have a means to control the ship those 'pressed into service' can't affect. If it was easy to do, they'd do something else.

"Sir, I promise I will spend every waking moment that I can, trying to find a way to control this ship and get us home. But right now, it's not looking good. Sir, my cousins have family and so do I. I have a business that I was already neglecting. I have to speak to them."

It was a brisk time, little more than a half hour People talked to home, said their goodbyes and spilled an awful amount of tears. People were still at it when the ship slipped into the FTL drive and Earth was out of touch.

The ship showed external views of the universe around them. The systems were fairly clear that they were seeing a "representation" of what they could see if the ship was actually able to "see" at the velocity they were traveling.

It was a much quieter group of people who met in the largest of the staterooms. Gail and her three cousins were there, Hypatia, Colonel Baird, Tom Christopher, Cameron Healy, Lily Chu and a few others.

"We are committed now?" the colonel asked.

"Yes. There are a number of things we're looking at," Tom said. "Dr. Fisher and I are exploring the computer structure and operating system." He chuckled. "We are reading the regulations ... there has never been a ship where the entire crew was shanghaied at once and where there is no official command authority.

"We are hoping we can somehow convince it to appoint someone to that command authority. Colonel, I'm sorry to say it won't be you or I, as we don't have the right genes. The leading contender at the moment is Dr. Fisher. It is our thought that someone with command authority might be able to unlock more files, and if nothing else, be able to change the itinerary.

"We are exploring the command links to see if there is anything else we can exploit, but obviously they didn't want a mutiny to be able to assume command of the ship."

"But you said such a mutiny had occurred," Colonel Baird reminded Tom.

"Evidently it wasn't complete, and just on the parent ship. We think that the burst drive was turned on for a longer period of time than intended and damaged as a result. In spite of the self-repair abilities, the ship wasn't immediately able to effect repairs.

"The 'bud' was created as a way to pass time by the original authority of the ship, and launched on its way. The parent ship was repaired and headed home again -- but this was nearly 64 million years ago. In that time the sun has completed about a third of its orbit around the center of the galaxy.

"While the ship has massive quantities of data on stars, it had less of it this far from home. Their 'association' of stars was about six thousand light years across."

Tom grimaced. "There is no information about 'alien' races in the records. The impression I get from the historical data I've read is that there were a lot of new worlds settled on the periphery, and those required the most support and provided the most 'raw material' for ships' crews. Planets that had been settled for more than a few centuries -- less than a thousand years, so far as I can determine -- were supplied by fully automated, self-repairing systems like the ship has, and that there was limited need for interplanetary or interstellar transportation.

"The contempt for the space travelers had for the inhabitants of such worlds is hard for me to understand. I can't tell if what I'm reading is rhetoric, hyperbole, propaganda or what, but the space travelers believed the inhabitants of such worlds incapable doing anything for themselves -- they were used to everything done for them.

"Over and above that, there are statistics that point to a very bleak picture. The number of new planets being settled was declining, while the volume of the periphery was expanding.

"If I can think to ask the computer to extrapolate from the data, it's hard to imagine that they didn't do so. They were no longer able to find qualified crews, no matter how they recruited them and the lack of crews reduced exploration and new settlement, which reduced the number of crews. Back on Earth we call that a 'Death Spiral.'

"They were probably less than a thousand years from the point where the math shows that no new growth would be occurring.

"The people of the settled worlds didn't care -- nothing the space travelers did was important to them any more. In theory, the settled worlds could still be around, but I have trouble imagining what that society would be like after this long spent in total stagnation."

"So, we have no way to return home immediately," the colonel mused, "But we may find a way by becoming barracks lawyers or by jury rigging the computers."

"Yes, sir," Tom replied.

"Dr. Fisher, you are trying to gain full authority over the ship?"

"Yes, sir."

"If you got that control, I'd be out of the loop."

"No, sir. The ship to the contrary, I have no aspirations to be the ship's captain. I'm doing what I feel I must to be able to return home, and to return the rest of those along on this involuntary journey."

"But if you wished to supplant me, there wouldn't be much I could do about it?"

"That presupposes that I want the headaches involved with telling this many people what to do. I am not stupid -- we are likely -- in fact absolutely certain -- to lose people. Not everyone is taking this as well as those in this room.

"I understand it, even if I have little sympathy for more than initial burst of anger. This is like running into a tree on a ski run. You're going to get busted up. You can cuss, you can blame the tree for jumping in front of you -- but in the end you either get back up and go again or you quit. I'm not a quitter. Yes, it's a shitty deal and I'm not going to dispute that with anyone.

"However, like with that tree, we've landed. Nothing we can do now can change past decisions. We have to play the hand we're dealt.

"Our first priority is a survey of the ship to make sure there are no surprises. Then a further survey to inventory life support and fuel stores. Then we need to hit the books -- evidently our lives are going to depend on how well we learn our jobs. I'll do my level best to stop the 'pruning.'" He grinned. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law after all. If we can gain control of the weapons and shields we may be to convince someone that we know what we're doing."

He looked around those at the conference table. "Does anyone have anything else to add?"

Hypatia cleared her throat. "Colonel, I know it isn't my place to comment on these things, but I feel I must.

"I have been studying hard, sir. My top priority has been to learn as much about the navigation and ship control systems as I could. In doing so, I've learned a fair amount about related areas.

"Currently we are in hyperspace, or something very much like that, at least conceptually. Our destination is about twenty light years distant, about two and a half weeks travel time.

"There we will find the terminus of a 'burst' chute. The math is far beyond me; all I know is that if this ship enters the 'chute' we start going very fast indeed. These chutes travel a number of light years, twisting and turning around obstacles in real space -- not that we'll be able to sense anything ourselves.

"The ship has a big red flag on this chute. It is near the terminus of the chute that brought the mother ship this far so very long ago -- but that was a long time ago and this one is certainly not that one.

"When the ship is closer it will be able to determine where the chute goes and the 'gradient' -- how fast we will travel it. All the ship knows at this point is that it appears to lead in the direction that was correct tens of millions of years ago.

"I set the ship's sensors to a priority tasking in the sky survey. I am handicapped -- or rather the ship is -- because the best markers would be the blue giants -- except those that existed when this ship was constructed are gone now as supernovas. In fact probably three generations of blue giants have come and gone." She nodded at Gail. "Dr. Fisher can confirm the life spans of such stars ... ten to twenty million years at most.

"At this distance from the original association -- the ship has not been able to identify a single star. The ones bright enough to be seen at this distance are too short-lived, and the longer lasting stars aren't going to be visible at the distance we are at.

"We are going to be flying blind. All the survey data the ship has is obsolete; the ship couldn't identify even one star within a hundred light years that matches its original survey.

"In short, the ship is lost and is flying blind. There are protocols and procedures for exploration, and as such things go, not that much more dangerous than space flight itself. But not to be confused with as 'safe as a church.'

"Again, I know it's not my place, sir, but I think Dr. Christopher should speak to the crew. Only about a third of the crew is military, and even then, half of them are researchers and not soldiers. I think such a gesture would go a long way towards reducing some of the natural anxiety that people are feeling."

Tom shook his head. "I'd like to make people feel better, but right now symbolism is everything. This is something Colonel Baird is going to have to do, whether he is military or not. We need to work together as a team and we need to make sure the lines of authority aren't blurred any more than this damn ship is going to make them. Teams have captains, ships have captains and genes or not, we need a clearly defined captain. And if the ship appoints Dr. Fisher -- or someone else to be in command, Colonel Baird gets a promotion to flag rank. He's going to be the one who tells the captain what to do and where to go to do it."

Colonel Baird turned to Hypatia. "I believe Dr. Christopher is correct, Hypatia. This isn't a reflection on your youth or gender or anything else, but I think it would be better if I gave the speech."

Hypatia nodded. "Dr. Chu is noted as having trouble with authority figures, although I've never heard of her losing her temper with you, sir.

"I actually have a worse temper, but I've had more time to learn to control it. I know I look like a perky cheerleader in her twenties. Colonel, my records have my actual age which you may have missed."

"Evidently I did. You do look to be in your mid-twenties."

"Sir, when I was a young woman my parents fled my native country to escape persecution and probable murder. Ever since, I've cultivated this disguise. I wear a blonde wig, I work out an obscene amount of time every day and I've had plastic surgery to fix my face to make me look much younger. I'm thirty-eight, sir."

"Good grief!" Cameron said softly. "I'd like to meet that surgeon! Too late now, I suppose."

"Yes, Dr. Healy.

"Please, you must understand that they hunted us even after we left. Five years ago they killed my father, wounded my mother and nearly got me as well. The reason I'm here is that the British government told me this was the price for all that protection. I nearly killed the man who told me that; I was sedated and transported here quite involuntarily.

"That said, once I was here and saw what was underway I've cooperated in every way. I am an astronomer and astrophysicist. I wish they weren't security happy and would have told me what was ahead of me -- it would have saved one of their people a stint in a hospital burn unit."

"All of this is more of that drama I'm not fond of," Tom said. "Colonel, work on that speech; try not to crib too much from other such works."

There were a lot of laughs, and they filed out.

-------

Much later Tom said that he thought it was a good speech, filled with hope and at the same time promising a lot of blood, sweat, toil and tears. Colonel Baird hadn't mind reusing that bit of rhetoric!

Gail, her cousins, Dr. Chu, Dr. Healy and Hypatia stood in the main conference room off the bridge, the stars crawling by on one wall.

Cameron Healy wasn't much of a romantic, Gail thought. "We're further from home than any of us ever imagined we'd be, going a distance that's a bad dream for most of us and uncomfortable one for the most optimistic. We suddenly are the forefront of the human exploration of space, with only a few crummy skiffy stories to give us a clue what to expect. The thing that I'm most uncomfortable about that? Those crummy stories are as likely to be right as our most learned scientific opinions."

Steve laughed. "Look on the bright side, Dr. Healy! From here on we're going to be able to say, 'Been there and done that!'"

Everyone laughed, and then turned to watching the slow crawl of the stars.


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The End
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Posted:  2011-07-24
Last Modified: 2011-08-21 / 09:25:38 pm
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