But what interested us Belters wasn’t that moon, but the extensive family of rocks circling Vega. Analysis of the ramrobot’s data showed that they were a rich combination of ice, rock, metal and carbon compounds. The stuff of life. Let the Flatlanders have what was at the bottom of that moon’s well; we Belters would have no problem carving out a civilization from the rich rocks surrounding Vega.
Well, at least that was the plan. But something seemed wrong and I didn’t think it was just the imaginings of my coldsleep-addled brain. If we had really arrived at Vega IVb, then the Med-Center should have been filled with glassine coffins being thawed out by the ship’s autodocs. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could tell that my coffin was the only one in the room.
With a click the restraints that had been holding my arms and legs in place retracted and I held my hands in front of my face. Their nails were long and clean. The pale pinkness of my skin surprised me, but then coldsleep wasn’t meant to be like dozing under a tropical sun. My face and scalp were itching and I touched my hand to my face to scratch but pulled it away in shock. Hair. On my face. On the side of my head. I had always worn my Belter’s crest trimmed short, but now it was lost in the confusion of fresh hair covering my head. How could this be? Hair doesn’t grow when your body is a corpsicle held at liquid nitrogen temperatures. When did my head have the time to become covered by a ragged stubble of hair?
“Still in coldsleep. There’s been a problem.” Tom tried to continue but a sound at the door stopped him and focused all of my attention on the other side of the room. The source of the sweaty grass and ginger scent was now obvious. Coming through the door was a creature that walked upright but looked like a cross between a tiger and a gorilla. (I remembered seeing both at the holozoo at Confinement Asteroid when I took my sister there in ‘57.) It must have been close to eight feet tall with long arms that ended in hands with four digits and a naked rat-tail twitching behind it. The creature was wearing rough-hewn clothing that looked like leather. Metal shapes with handles, ugly but vaguely familiar and sized for overly large hands, hung from a belt at its waist. As it looked at me I had the distinct impression that I knew what a frozen meal felt like when it got popped out of a microwave cooker.
A second creature came through the door and then a third. This last one was different. Smaller and unkempt. The others walked, no, make that strode, with an upright posture that bespoke an unquestioned belief in their authority. But this one? He (she? it?) walked slowly, hesitatingly, and with a slumped posture that screamed fear. The others had long orange-brown fur with variegated patterns of stripes that showed the obvious effects of frequent grooming. This one, his fur looked as unkempt as the unwelcome hair that covered my head. And his eyes. They were—sleepy? No, maybe not sleepy, but definitely strange.
The large one that had entered the Med-Center first turned to the others and snarled something that sounded like a group of gravel-throated cats having a fight. The others made hissing and spitting cat sounds back and damned if they somehow didn’t make them come out sounding deferential as they surrounded the autodoc. Tom was pressed against the side of the ‘doc, trembling.
The second creature, whose face had distinctive asymmetric stripes and dark markings around his eyes, looked down at me and then did the one thing I would have never expected. He spoke, in hard to understand and heavily accented Standard.
“This one knows how? Yesss? He must work.”
I almost passed out from the shock. Here we were between the stars, twenty-plus ship-years from the Belt, and aliens from who-knows-where just waltz into the Med-Center. And they speak Standard. No one ever told me that our first contact with outsiders would be like this.
Then I looked closer at the biggest outsider—the one who was eyeing me closely. And I saw them. Hanging from his belt. At least a half dozen, maybe more. Strung together on some kind of cord.
Ears.
Human ears.
That’s when I passed out.
When I woke up again I wasn’t in the autodoc, but lying on a waterbed in an empty room. From its size, about as large as a small walk-in closet back on Earth, I guessed it was the Captain’s quarters. I wondered what had happened to Jennifer, but I remembered those ears hanging from that outsider’s belt and decided I didn’t really want to know.
The image of a hungry tiger that walked like a gorilla made me want to fade back into black oblivion, but my fear of what might happen to me while unconscious kept me awake. I tried to sit up, but the room turned gray and started spinning around. Lying down seemed like a better idea. On the wall next to the bed the ready light of the intercom softly glowed green.
“Hey! What’s going on? Where is everybody?” I wasn’t sure who (or what) was going to answer.
Tom’s voice crackled over the intercom, “Relax. I’ll be right there.”
A few minutes later the door of the cabin slid open and Tom limped in carrying a medkit. “Take it easy. You’re weak and you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Tom ignored my question as he rustled through his medkit and removed drinking bags, drug hypos and bottles of medicine. “Here, drink this and don’t interrupt.”
I swallowed the chalky pink juice from the drinking bag. It tasted worse than it looked. The burning sensation from a hypo pressed against my arm distracted me from further thoughts about Tom’s bartending skills. He tapped a touchpad near the bed and a memory plastic chair extruded itself from the adjacent wall. Tom sat down, composed his thoughts and began talking.
“Those aliens call themselves ‘kzinti,’ though I don’t know if they’re talking about their race or some sociopolitical subgrouping.”
“But what are they?” I asked. “Explorers? Scientists? What?”
Tom blinked at my question. “Not quite. They’re warriors.”
“That’s impossible! Who are they fighting?”
“Us,” Tom replied. “As near as I can tell, we’re at war with them.”
War.
There hadn’t been a war on Earth in dozens of generations. The last historically verifiable intergovernmental conflict had been before the time of Galileo. There were stories about misunderstandings and UN police actions, like the apocryphal stories about a global conflict involving genocide and nuclear weapons during the twentieth century. But even children knew that those were just fictions used to teach moral philosophy. Every child in the ARM sponsored school system learned that war was impossible for any advanced culture. Any civilization that lasted long enough to develop interstellar flight must have lasted long enough to outgrow their aggressive behavior. If they hadn’t, they would have killed themselves with their technology.
“I don’t believe you,” I said as I tried to think of some other explanation.
“You can believe me or not, but that doesn’t change the way the kzinti act.”
Silence filled the room until Tom continued. “Look, Ib, maybe we’re at war, maybe we’re not. Maybe these creatures are psychopaths escaped from a mental institute and they’re living out their delusional fantasies using stolen technology.”
Now that, I thought, made sense.
“But what matters is what’s happening here and now. They act like we’re at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”
I just stared. My mind didn’t want to accept star-traveling warriors. “But what do they want with us?”
Tom looked away as if in shame. “To them we’re just potential slaves.” Silence filled the room until Tom continued with his story.
“It happened a couple of weeks ago. We were six months out of Vega when we detected the approach of an unknown vessel at outrageous speeds and accelerations. We shut down the ramscoop so its magnetic field wouldn’t be a danger to the alien ship’s crew. Then we waited. The kzinti ship rendezvoused with us and just hung a few hundred kilometers off our nose, doing nothing at all.”