A few seconds later, as if to show that it wasn’t an accident, the god-thing roared again and convulsed and another ship was destroyed, one of Rainwater’s lighters. This one must have had some kind of inflammable cargo because it went up like a giant magnesium flare, a ball of white fire burning away until nothing was left but floating embers.
This was too much, of course — proof of hostile intent — and a flight of wasps was scrambled from Rainwater Station and sent after the jellyfish ship. Maybe the aliens were surprised by how quickly we fought back, or maybe they were just done with their giant hologram: in either case, it disappeared as the wasp flight swept in. A moment later the wasps were in range and began to fire on the intruder, but their pulses only sputtered and flashed against the outside skin of the jellyfish ship. A moment later every one of the wasps abruptly turned into a handful of sparks flung out in all directions like spinning Catherine wheels — an entire flight gone.
After that, everybody fell back, as you can imagine. “Ran like hell” might be a better way to put it. The Confederation ships met up in orbit around the nearest planet, several units away from Rainwater, and the officers began burning up the com lines, as you can imagine. Nobody’d seen anything like the jellyfish before, or recognized whatever it was on that volumetric or how it was done. We accessed some of the Hub drones so we could keep a watch on Rainwater. The alien ship was still sitting there, although the Visser ring behind it had closed again. There were moments when the angry-god display flickered back into life, as if it was waking up to have a look around, and other moments when crackling lines of force like blue and orange lightning arced back and forth between the jellyfish and the ring, but none of this told anyone a thing about what was really going on.
Our first major clue came when one of the Hub’s own lighters got close enough to pick up some of the wreckage of the Malkin jumbo. The ship had not been blown apart in any normal sense — no shear and no heat, or at least no more than would be expected with sudden decompression. The carbon ceramic bones and skin of the ship had just suddenly fallen apart — “delatticed” was Doc Swainsea’s term. She didn’t sound happy when she said it, either.
“It’s not a technology I know,” she told Captain Watanabe the day after the attacks. “It’s not a technology I can even envision.”
The captain looked at her and they stood there for a moment, face to face — two very serious women, Doc tall and blonde, Captain W. a bit shorter and so dark haired and pale skinned that she looked like an ink drawing. “But is it a technology we can beat?” the captain finally asked.
I never heard the answer because they sent me out to get more coffee.
About two hours later, while I was bringing more whiskey glasses to the captain’s cabin — which meant, I assumed, that the doctor’s answer had been negative — I found Balcescu standing waiting for the lift to the bridge.
“I think I have it, Mr. Jatt,” he told me as I went by.
I was in a hurry — everyone on the ship was in a hurry, which was strange considering we obviously weren’t going anywhere soon — but something in his voice made me stop. He sounded exhausted, for one thing, and when I looked at him more closely I could see he didn’t look good, either: he was pale and trembling, like he hadn’t had anything but coffee or focusmeds for a while. Maybe he was sick.
“Have what, Mr. Balcescu? What are you talking about?”
“The language — the language of the things that attacked us. I think I’ve cracked it.”
Two minutes later we were standing in front of the captain, Chief Navigator Chinh-Herrera, Doc Swainsea, and an open com line going out to the other Confederation ships.
“I couldn’t have done this if it had been pure cryptography,” Balcescu explained, standing up after all the introductions had been handled. His hands were still shaking; he spilled a little of his coffee. He obviously needed some food, but I was damned if I was going to leave the room right then.
Sorry. We spacemen swear a lot. But I wasn’t going to rush out to the galley just when he was about to explain.
“What I mean to say is,” Balcescu went on, “if it is anything like the languages we already know — and I think it is — then they haven’t given us enough of a sample to do the standard reductions. For one thing, we couldn’t know that we were even hearing all of it…”
“What are you talking about?” asked Chinh-Herrera. “Not heard it all? It nearly blew our coms to bits!”
“We heard the part that was in our audio register. And there were other parts above and below human hearing range as well that we recorded. But who could say for certain that there weren’t parts of the language outside the range of our instruments? This is a first encounter. Never make assumptions, Chief Navigator.”
Chinh-Herrera turned away, hiding a scowl. He didn’t like our Mr. Balcescu much, it was easy to see. The chief navigator was a good man, and always nice to me, but he could be a bit old-fashioned sometimes. I actually understood what Balcescu was saying, because I’ve spent my life living with other people’s assumptions, too. That’s what happens when you’re my size.
“So you’re saying the sample wasn’t enough to form a basis for translation, Dr. Balcescu?” This was Doc Swainsea. “Then why are we here?”
“Because it is a language and I know what they’re saying,” said Balcescu wearily. By his expression, you’d have thought he was being forced to explain the alphabet to a room full of four year olds. “You see, we’ve enlarged the boundaries of human-contact space quite a bit in the last couple of hundred years — the Hub system has seen to that. Just a few weeks ago I was out in the Brightman system doing something that would have been unthinkable only generations ago — xenolinguistic fieldwork with untainted living cultures.” He gave Chinh-Herrera a bit of a sideways look. “In other words, speaking alien with aliens. Our linguistic database has also expanded hugely. So I figured it was worth a try to see if there were any similarities between what we heard at Rainwater Hub and any of the other cultures we’ve recorded on the outskirts of contact space. I spent hours and hours going through different samples, comparing points of apparent overlap…”
“And, Doctor Balcescu?” That was Captain Watanabe. She wasn’t big on being lectured, either.
“And there are similarities — distant and tenuous, but similarities nevertheless — between what we heard yesterday and some of the older speech systems we’ve found out toward the galactic rim. I can’t say exactly what the relationships are — that will take years of study and, to be honest, a great deal more information about this latest language — but there are enough common elements that I think I can safely translate what we heard, at least roughly.” He looked around expectantly, almost as if he was waiting for polite applause from the captain and the others. He didn’t get it. “I used what we already know about these particular rim dialects as a ratchet, combined with some guesswork…”
“Get to the point, Doctor,” said the captain. “Tell us what it said. A lot of good men and women are dead already, and the rest of us are stranded 46 parsecs from the nearest Confederation hub.”