Chapter 5
Philippe woke with a start at 4 a.m., instantly alert despite the early hour.
Today was the day.
A little morning hygiene, and he went to get a ration bar, deciding in advance not to have a social meal—he had too much to check up on. He spotted a couple of SFers as he grabbed and wolfed down the bar, but they all seemed distracted, too. He asked one of them, Bi Zui, where he could find Shanti, and the soldier took him to her. She introduced him to Sucre and Doug, both regular SFers, and the second medic, Gingko, who had accompanied Patch on his earlier visit to the station.
“Are you in the twenty?” Philippe asked Shanti.
“What do you mean?” she replied.
“Well, I’ve met the doctor, one of the two pilots, you, your second, and 18 soldiers, two of whom are medics. I had agreed to an entourage of 20 soldiers, and I guess they don’t count the pilots or George, but I was wondering if they count you and Patch and the medics, or if there’s more.”
“Are you sure you met eighteen?” Shanti asked.
Philippe counted on his fingers. “Baby, Bi Zui, Bubba, Cut, Doug, Feo, Five-Eighths, Gingko, Mo, Ofay, Paco, Raoul, Rojy, Sucre, Thorpe, T.R., Vijay, Vip. Eighteen.”
“Shit,” Shanti said. “What are the pilots’ names?”
“Cheep, who I’ve met, and Pinky, who I haven’t.”
She grinned. “No fucking way!”
“Is that everybody?” asked Philippe.
Shanti nodded. “Yeah, yeah, throw in George, me, Patch, and you, and that’s the whole unit.”
“Good,” said Philippe, thinking, I’m glad there aren’t more. “Do you mind if I address everyone before we go? I’d like to give them some pointers on diplomacy.”
“Sounds good,” said Shanti. “Hey, here’s your suits.”
Vip walked up with Philippe’s dress suits, which he had taken off to mike up the day before. “Do you need a tutorial?” he asked, brusquely.
“They just slap on and off, right?” replied Philippe.
“Sort of,” said Vip. “You hit it, you start talking, and it transmits to everyone. But if you want to talk to a specific person, then you hit it and say the name, like this.”
He hit his own mike and said “Trang. Got it?” The question echoed in Philippe’s earplant.
“Yes,” said Philippe.
Vip slapped his mike off. “You can also transmit to groups. ‘Medic’ will get you all the medical personnel, ‘outer guards’ will get you the perimeter guards, ‘soldiers’ will get you—well, it will get you everyone except you, so I guess you won’t need that one very often. There are some advanced features as well, but you probably won’t need to use them—if you do, Thorpe or I can show you how.”
“Thank you,” said Philippe, gently feeling the fabric for any unexpected stiffness that could indicate additional gear. “I’m not carrying surveillance equipment, am I? Diplomats aren’t allowed to.”
Vip shook his head. “Only the soldiers do—you and the doctor are camera-free.”
Eventually the unit, outfitted in space suits, gathered in a room near the docking area. Shanti instructed them to “shut the fuck up and listen good” because “the illustrious Philippe Trang is hoping to teach you assholes some manners.”
“Thank you,” said Philippe, walking up to the front of the room. “Of course, no one knows for certain what we should do when we get to the alien station, because with the exception of Patch and Gingko, we’ll be the first human beings to actually set foot there and deal with the aliens face-to-face. We’re pioneers, both from a security and a diplomatic standpoint, and we’re working without a blueprint. So we’re going to be winging it, at least to a degree, and it’s quite likely that we will make mistakes or have some kind of disagreement with the aliens at some point. I’m hoping we can minimize any conflicts, and I have some experience doing so on Earth—”
“Such as?” Shanti interrupted. She made an encouraging gesture with her hand.
Philippe took the opportunity to recite his resumé for any SFer who hadn’t bothered to look it up—which, to be honest, was probably most of them. “I’ve been involved in conflict-resolution negotiations in a number of Union and non-Union countries, including the Sudan, Kurdistan, Indonesia, Palestine, and Macedonia. In most of these cases, there were multiple parties involved who either had not engaged in negotiations previously or had a history of bad-faith agreements, so there was a strong atmosphere of suspicion.”
The SFers stared at him blankly—Philippe had no idea if they were impressed and simply being stoic, or if they were too nervous to care, or if the notion of minimizing conflict was so far out of their professional experience that they simply couldn’t process it.
He decided to return to his main thrust. “I’m glad to say that in the five years since our presence became known to the aliens, they have never behaved in a hostile or threatening manner—indeed, we would not be on this mission had they done so. But we are, nonetheless, a new and strange species for them—an unknown quantity, if you will. Likewise, we know very little about them. For example, I have been receiving briefings about the various alien species for the past six months, and I can assure you that until Patch made his visit two days ago, no one had the least idea that there was one aquatic species on that station, much less two. No one even knew that there were nine species on that station—everyone thought there were only seven.”
Patch grinned and pumped his fists in the air.
“I’d like us to do all we can to keep relations positive,” Philippe continued, smiling at the large soldier. “If there are problems, I want the aliens to feel like they can come to us and have a chance at a fair resolution. I want them to view us, if not as friends, at least as unthreatening.
“To that end, I’d like you to do a little more than make sure your weapons are concealed when you’re in the common areas—although I’d like you to do that, too.” They chuckled. “I’d like you to be aware of your language, be aware of how it sounds to someone who doesn’t understand the context and doesn’t know you. When you say, ‘I’m going to gouge your eyes out, dog-fucker,’ that’s something that will probably translate fairly accurately and could be easily misconstrued either as a sincere threat or a terrible insult.”
They were all looking a little uneasy now, in part, Philippe knew, because his example was a direct quote of something Shanti had said at dinner. It was a bit risky, but often the best way to change a culture was to take on the leader who set the tone.
“Another thing to bear in mind is that there are nine species here, and we don’t know how they relate to each other—they could all be very close allies, they could have already split into distinct alliances that compete with each other, they could all have a history of conflict. We have no idea. So please don’t talk about the aliens in front of the aliens. Any questions?”
Thorpe raised his hand. “What’s your position on surveillance?”
“As you know, all the relevant agencies agree that covert surveillance at this time is inappropriate,” Philippe replied. “We don’t know who to spy on; we don’t know what to look for. We also don’t know what they could detect. It’s entirely possible that some of the aliens can hear our broadcast frequencies, for example.
“Overt surveillance, on the other hand, is something I would strongly encourage—look around and ask questions; put what you find into your reports. So far, they’ve accepted our requests to take video, so keep your cameras on unless you are specifically asked to turn them off. We’ll be sending regular packages back to Union Intelligence, and everybody should be contributing footage and reporting anything they discover through conversation. Any other questions?”
No one had any, so Shanti gave the order and they loaded on to the ship. It was different from the one Philippe rode to Titan: The pilots weren’t walled off from the main cabin, and Philippe was seated directly behind Pinky, who true to his name had red hair and a pink complexion.
The only windows were those in front of the pilots. There were no overhead compartments to store baggage: Instead, the luggage was thrown, none too gently, into a cargo area in the back. The seats were considerably narrower and had a bare-bones quality to them—they had thin padding and didn’t recline. A quick inquiry revealed that they could fold into the floor so that the ship could be converted into a cargo hauler.
Philippe buckled in and looked forward out the window to see the orange Titan fog again. Shanti sat next to him. “That was a good presentation,” she said. “Food for thought.”
“Thank you,” he replied.
“OK!” Cheep said, his voice amplified by the ship’s speakers. “We’re ready to take off.”
“Strap the fuck in, dog-fuckers!” shouted Shanti, her voice requiring no amplification.
Half a minute later the ship slammed back—none of the gradual tilting that had so unnerved Philippe in Beijing. Half a minute after that, they had taken off. Things went almost too quickly for Philippe to get nervous, but he managed to hit his sick patch the minute the fog cleared out into the blackness of space.
“Do we use an alpha drive?” he asked Shanti.
She shook her head as Pinky, who had obviously overheard the question, snorted with laughter. “We no got no alpha drive. Is no big enough for,” he said.
“We’re not going that far,” Shanti said. “Plus, we gotta get through the mines and hit the portal, and you can’t be going fast and do that.”
“Mines?” Philippe asked.
“Yeah, you know, the portal defenses,” she said.
“Hey, did you hear?” said Cheep. “Some of those university types who just showed up were asking if the SF would clear out all the mines so that they could do a study.”
“Oh, you shit me,” said Pinky.
“No shit, no shit whatsoever,” Cheep replied, warming to the topic. “Like, sure, we’ll just clear out all those pesky mines for you, so you can be right there when the invasion comes.”
“University fuckers. Supposed to be smart. They no got no brains,” said Pinky.
Chip was grinning “Sure, sure, we’ll just drop all our defenses, so you can get your studying done. No problem!”
“They can look, say, ‘We still no know what that!’”
The pilots had a good laugh, while Philippe squirmed, thinking of Yoli. He was about to say something in defense of the researchers when a beeping began.
“Here we go!” said Cheep.
The two pilots’ fingers began flying, and they began uttering codes into their coms. As near as Philippe could tell from their chattering, they were asking someone on Titan station to send clearance codes to the mines, while also transmitting codes themselves—and, Philippe assumed, not flying too close to any of them.
He leaned forward to look out the window and see the mines—a sprawl of small satellites, their lights glinting in the darkness. The ship was soon surrounded by them.
“Are those nuclear?” he asked Shanti.
“Yup,” she replied, also leaning forward to look at the satellites, filled with the terror of a bygone age. She suddenly snapped up. “How did you know about that?”
“Oh, it was a huge headache for the DiploCorps, changing all those non-proliferation agreements. I mean, that technology’s been completely banned for over 20 years,” Philippe replied.
“Yeah,” Pinky chipped in, his fingers moving without interruption. “I remember, when they went up, they no was legal.”
Philippe blinked, and then decided that he must have misheard what Pinky said—the man’s English was hardly Union standard, after all. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.
“That’s right—32 clear, 32 clear. It was a big relief when those laws got changed, thanks for that.” Cheep, still looking ahead, waved back in Philippe’s general direction.
“Could you two focus on flying, please?” said Shanti, her voice suddenly strained. She turned to Philippe, who was trying to digest what had just been said. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
A pfft escaped from Pinky, while Cheep let out a brief bark of laughter.
“I didn’t,” she said, more forcefully. “OK, it was kind of hard to miss when it was happening, but it’s not like it was my decision or anything.”
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Philippe. “I-I-I mean, I know the defenses went up right after the treaties were modified, and there were rumors that the warheads had perhaps been manufactured a little early. But I didn’t, I had no idea—there were riots in Japan over those mines!”
“And, they all still alive to riot again,” said Pinky. “We through!”
Philippe peered at the satellite-studded space before them. “How can you tell?”
Pinky tapped a monitor. “Saturn, Titan, is gone,” he said.
Philippe looked through the window again. They weren’t facing Saturn and its moons, so the difference in scenery was subtle—far fewer stars, but equally as many satellites.
But shouldn’t he have noticed? There were no weird feelings, or bizarre lights. Indeed, there were no lights at all, except those flashing on the satellites.
“Didn’t there used to be a ring of lights around the portal?” he asked.
“The aliens put lights there to mark it when it first opened up,” Shanti replied. “But we had them take them away—there was a concern that it kind of made for an inviting target. Plus, it was alien technology, and we didn’t want any of that near our portal,” said Shanti.
“So we just have our banned, illegal, deadly nuclear technology?”
“It’s not illegal now,” said Shanti. “Besides, we’ve got no mines on this side, they don’t like that. From a security standpoint—and this may be useful to you as well, I don’t know—they’ve really got this idea that there’s your space, and then there’s our space. And by our space I don’t mean ours like theirs, but ours like everybody’s.
“Your space is totally yours—you can arm it like you want, and no one can enter it without your permission, and if they do, you can blow them away, no problem. Our space is share-and-share-alike—it’s open, people can do as they please, you don’t have big weapons sitting around because that makes people feel unwelcome. As far as I can tell, the living areas on the station and what’s on the other side of each portal is, like, private space, your space. Everything else is our space.”
“Interesting,” said Philippe, looking at the blinking devices around them. “What are these satellites, then?”
“Surveillance,” Shanti replied. “They send probes back through the portal every few minutes. If you look, you might see one shoot.”
Philippe watched, but nothing shot while he was looking. It was funny to think that with all the advances in communications technology, the military and the Space Authority had to rely on sending physical messages, just like the old postal systems or the Pony Express. But that was the portal—nothing from one side went through to the other, except for people, ships, satellites. . . . It was so bizarre.
The Titan portal, you could work your whole life on that alone.
Philippe wondered how Yoli was doing. He fervently hoped that no one had called her a university fucker to her face.
“You see there?” asked Pinky, interrupting his musings.
“Oh, wow!” said Philippe. “The station’s just right in front of us, isn’t it?”
The station—the massive, alien station—was looming up before them, and Philippe had hardly noticed it. It wasn’t lit well from the outside, and he stared at it, trying to connect the lights sprinkled across his field of view into the sunburst shape made familiar from videos and diagrams.
“It’s not that easy to see, is it?” Philippe said.
“It’s fucking dark,” said Shanti.
“Yeah,” said Cheep. “Surprisingly so, right? But we’re really far from any natural light source—they built this place in the middle of fucking nowhere. What you’re used to seeing is footage from satellites, and those came
ras are made to work in low light, and then the images get enhanced. It’s a hell of a lot harder with the naked eye, even if you’re augmented.”
The pilot’s fingers went to work again, and the ship eased up next to one of the docking bays—Philippe hoped it was the right one, otherwise some alien was going to have a few unexpected guests. The ship shuddered as they docked.
“Welcome home!” trilled Patch from the back.
“Time to see if Patch did his job right,” Shanti yelled back. She reached up and touched Pinky’s shoulder. “Don’t you guys leave until we say so.”
“Got it,” Pinky replied.
Philippe was ready to go, but Shanti stopped him—apparently the SFers had to go in first with their biggest guns in hand. He heard them shout “Clear!” at each other for what seemed like an hour. While he was waiting, Philippe went into the cargo area and found his bag. Eventually Patch stepped back into the ship and told him that, yes, things were clear, would Philippe like a quick tour of the place? Philippe enthusiastically agreed, quickly slinging his bag over his shoulder and following Patch out into the space station.
Stepping through the doorway, Philippe looked around excitedly, and then rolled his eyes. The living area was Union-built all right—here he was, nowhere near the Earth’s solar system, out of his own galaxy, even, and the hallway he stepped into looked clean and white, exactly like the hallways of Titan, exactly like the hallways of Beijing.
And it felt exactly like Beijing too....
“Hey Patch,” Philippe asked, interrupting Patch as he pointed out an armory. “Why is there gravity?”
“Uh, yeah,” Patch said, looking slightly guilty. “The gravity. OK. You know how this area is all supposed to be outfitted on Earth, with Earth technology, right? So the aliens would say, like, ‘Do you want to do the atmosphere, or do you want us to do the atmosphere?’ And we’d say, ‘We’re doing the atmosphere.’”
“Uh-huh,” said Philippe.
“Well, then one day they said, ‘Do you want to do the gravity, or do you want us to do the gravity?’ And we asked Titan, and they asked Beijing, and the SA was like, ‘What do you mean, do the gravity? We can’t fucking make gravity.’ And the SF was like, ‘Well, we can’t fucking fight without it,’ right, ’cuz you train mostly in gravity. And they were arguing about it, because you know, maybe the gravity could be some kind of weapon or a trap or something.
“So we didn’t get back to the aliens with an answer, and I was here—I mean on the shuttle, overseeing stuff, you know—and they asked again. So I, um, I sort of said to them, ‘Why don’t you do the gravity?’ Like we were doing them a favor.”
“As though it were goodwill gesture,” said Philippe.
“Yeah,” said Patch. “And I still haven’t heard back from Beijing about it, so I guess it must be OK. Except for that, and you know, the station itself, there’s no alien technology in our living area. At least not that we know about.”
Patch resumed the tour: Armory, enough sleeping cubicles to house a much larger group of soldiers, armory, entertainment area, training area, armory, armory, gym, communications center, cafeteria, armory, infirmary, armory.
“And this is your area,” Patch said, opening a door and revealing a surprisingly large office. He walked through the office and opened another door, which led to an honest-to-God bedroom.
“I get all this space?” Philippe asked, walking into the bedroom and dropping his bag on the floor. There was a door in the bedroom as well; he opened it to see a small but complete bathroom.
“Yeah,” said Patch, going back out into the hallway and opening another door. “This conference room is for you, too.”
Philippe looked in at the conference room; it was larger even than his office.
“You know, I’m not complaining, but I feel weird about getting three rooms and my own bathroom when everyone else just gets a sleep cubicle and a gang shower.”
Patch gave him a genuinely perplexed look, and then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a diplomatic mission, you know. Besides, by SF standards, those cubicles are fucking nice—you can fit two people in one of those, easy—and we don’t always have showers. This door is—oh, sorry, that’s another armory—this door is another office, which I think the MC wants to use for now, but she could always give it up if you wind up, like, needing a real staff. Is that all right with you?”
“Not a problem,” said Philippe. “Even if I need an assistant, my office looks big enough for two.”
“Well, it’s up to you,” said Patch. “More weapons stations, and then this—” he slapped his hand onto the blast doors that sealed off the end of the corridor “—leads to the no man’s zone, and through that is where the aliens are. Which is kind of a flight.”
“And we’re going to visit them today, right?” Philippe asked.
“Yeah, if that’s what you want. I think the MC wants to get everyone situated, and then we can go say hi. I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks,” said Philippe. “I’m going to get situated myself, OK?”
He walked into his room and began to unpack his bag. There wasn’t much. The SA wouldn’t even let him bring a razor or clippers, so he’d been forced to get his head, hands, and feet flashed in Ottawa—the hair follicles on his face and scalp would be inactive for a full year, and his nails would not grow. Of course, God only knew what flashing your head did to the brain, and if he caught his finger in something or stubbed his toe, he’d have to wear a bandage for months and months. This, it seemed, was progress.
Philippe put away his gear, walked into his office to make sure everything there was in working order, and went back into the bedroom. He pulled off his casual clothes and put on his suit.
Looking into the mirror he saw a reasonably dapper man with dark hair and eyes—he had his father’s coloring, although his eyes were round like his mothers. He looked more tired than either of them, though. He had looked tired for the past year, and by this point, he was beginning to wonder if it just meant he was old.
He was also nervous. As always before a big meeting, he began to obsess over his grooming, brushing his hair, smoothing his eyebrows, straightening his suit again and again. He folded down the turtleneck of the lonjons so that it didn’t stick out over the suit jacket’s band collar.
He kept smiling in the mirror—We are friendly. We are not your enemy. Trust us.
He felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The banging on his bedroom door came as a relief. Shanti opened it without waiting for a response and charged into the room. “Hey, Trang—holy shit! You look nice! Damn, I wish the SFers got uniforms like that!”
Philippe couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, the DiploCorps is famed for its tailoring. And this is just a traveling suit—you should see what they wear in Ottawa.”
“Well, hey, I got some accessories for you,” said Shanti, shoving some pieces of cool fabric into Philippe’s hands. “We’ve cleared our area—looks like they didn’t fuck with anything—and we’ve unloaded, so as soon as you’re ready, we can go meet the freaks.”
“You mean, fulfill our delicate and historic mission?” asked Philippe, holding up what looked like two arm-length gloves and a hood with a transparent face panel.
“Yeah, that,” said Shanti. “You know how to use those?”
Philippe shrugged his shoulders. “No idea,” he replied.
She took the gloves and hood out of his hand. “Take off your jacket,” she said.
He did, and watched as Shanti folded up the sleeves of his lonjons. Philippe pulled on the gloves, which practically went up to his armpits, and Shanti folded the left sleeve down over the top of the glove and pressed her hands around his arms. “Bango, motherfucker’s airtight,” she said.
Philippe did the same on the right side. The process was quite straightforward, so his mind wandered to the trip they had just taken.
“I was surprised by Pinky,” he said. “I mean, I guess it’s not that important cons
idering what you do, but I didn’t think anybody that young still spoke English like that, given how long they’ve been pushing Union English in the educational system.”
“If your earplant tells you to put your hood on? Do it. Just pull it up over the top of your head, down across your face, and seal it to the front of your neck,” said Shanti, as she unfolded his turtleneck and attached said hood where his neck met his shoulders. “My understanding is Pinky didn’t speak any English when he joined the SF.”
“Really!” said Philippe. “I thought you had to speak Union English fluently to take any Union job.”
Shanti pulled her own hood down over her face to show Philippe how it was done. As with the gloves, it was quite straightforward, and he nodded at her.
She pulled her hood up. “Normally, you do, but with Pinky, I think it was one of those amnesty deals because he was in some militia that got pacified. He’s a hell of an extractor, anyway. I wish he was still here.”
“The ship left?” asked Philippe, surprised.
“Oh, yeah,” Shanti said, blandly. “They’re coming back, of course, but Beijing wants them to spend as little time as possible on this side of the portal. I don’t see how that makes a difference, but they’re paranoid.”
“And we’re expendable,” Philippe said.
“Nice to know where you stand, isn’t it?” she replied with a smile.
Philippe pulled on his suit jacket, checking the back to see if the empty hood left a lump. There was a slight one, but it didn’t ruin the lines of the suit. Not, that the aliens would know, he thought, as he tucked the neck of his lonjons into his jacket collar again.
“Oh, you can’t do that,” Shanti said. She reached into the neck of his jacket and pulled the lonjons’ neck back up.
“It looks weird up,” Philippe protested.
“No, it doesn’t, it coordinates—blue suit, gray shirt. You look fabulous,” she said, giving his hair a quick brush and turning him so that he faced the mirror. “And your gloves show anyway. Besides, you have to wear it up. It protects your neck.”
“You know,” Philippe said, “technically speaking, I don’t think I have to take orders from you.”
“Hey, easy there,” said Shanti, as she steered him to the door. “Technically speaking, I’m bigger than you are, and I have the guns.”
They stepped out of his office into the corridor, where a dozen soldiers were waiting. Apprehension gripped Philippe as he smiled. “Now’s the time,” he said.
Vip and Shanti walked down the line, making sure everyone’s com, cameras, and translator mikes were on and functioning, and that everyone had their gloves on and hood attached. Everyone except Philippe also went through a lengthy check of their concealed weaponry. The soldiers were to go through first, with Philippe at the rear, so he stood at the end of the line as the doors to the no man’s zone slowly opened.
They went into the zone and had to wait for the inner doors to close before the doors to the rest of the station would open. Philippe was not normally claustrophobic, but he was standing with a dozen bruisers in what was essentially a narrow tunnel, waiting to meet aliens. The knowledge that he was surrounded on all sides by powerful explosives did nothing to reduce his anxiety.
They stood for what seemed like an eternity, but what must have been only a few moments. Philippe could feel his heart suddenly going thump thump thump, pulsing throughout his whole body and filling his ears. Then, despite the mass of soldiers in front of him, he noticed a change in the light. They began to move forward, and so did he.
First came the smell, and then came the noise.