“Oh, God, Amaya, that doesn’t matter now,” I spit out, staring at smug, pompous Valaurgh-Alesh-23 with a growing temptation to tie it up into a giant knot with its own tentacles. I finally explain, “Old friend of mine. A physicist who never believed in the story of the Taraplins and their hyperengines.”
“Oh,” is all she says. Then, as the gravity of the situation dawns on her, she adds, as if still in doubt, “So there are no Taraplins, no hyperengines, just Qhigarian teleportation.” Her voice is trembling more than before. “And as soon as the last one leaves, we’ll be stuck here, unable… unable….” She can’t say it out loud.
“Unable to get home. Unable to travel faster than light,” I tonelessly complete the thought she couldn’t get herself to say. “Which practically means the end of the Human Sphere as we know it, and of the entire Galactic Community for that matter. Imagine! Poof, no more hyperjumps. Complete isolation between colonies, enclaves, and Earth. Same for every Alien race. Unless we manage to contact the extragalactics first, that is, and they have hyperengines that really work—and not mentally, if I had my choice. Assuming they want to sell them to us, naturally. That’s a lot of ‘ifs’ to work with, don’t you think? I’d say we’re good and screwed.”
“Fucking Qhigarians. We should blast them all out of the cosmos for conning the whole galaxy for so many millennia. They can’t leave now, just like that!” Amaya growls in pure rage at finally confronting our brute reality. But she instantly calms down, moves off holocamera to consult something, then returns to inform me mechanically, “There are now 20,112 worldships in this system. They’re still arriving.” She tightens her lips with determination. Something about the Catalan ability to put a good face on a bad hand and rise to meet the toughest challenges fascinates me. No wonder they’ve come so far. “Josué, if the octopus is telling the truth, there’s just 300 more to come. At the current rate, that gives us about… two hours. Listen up: if that sleazeball gives you the trajectory coordinates for the extragalactics in the next five minutes, we can still pull this off.”
Now, that’s what I call quick tactical thinking.
“We’ve got to do it,” I agree. Then, turning to slimy, purple Valaurgh-Alesh (I hope the other twenty-two from its brood or whatever are all dead), who continues fluidly waving its weightless tentacles, I insist: “Essential to have trajectory coordinates for extragalactic ship, here-now.”
The damn Qhigarian is so… Qhigarian, it waits a good three seconds before answering. And, it seems to me, it’s managing better than before with its newly acquired translation software. “Information available. Translator, no-sufficient price. Offer, what more?”
Oh, fuck Shangó, Orula, and La Virgen del Pilar. Clever bug, it was just messing with me. It fed me the key piece of information, enjoyed watching our faces as we figured out how they’d been swindling the whole galaxy for millions of years; and now it refuses to tell me what I need to know. What do I do now?
It’s like knowing you’re about to die and knowing what medicine you need to save your life, but not where to buy it.
“Assholes! Tell them, if they don’t let us know where those guys are right now, we’re going to tell the whole Galactic Community about their con game, and we’ll all get together and reduce them and every last ship of theirs to scrap!” Amaya explodes, her lovely dark eyes shooting fire.
“Chill out,” I try to calm her. It’s my turn to pretend to be cooler than I feel, while my neurons work feverishly. “Threatening them won’t do any good. Don’t you realize they literally have us by the balls? I wonder if any Alien species already suspected. They’ll owe their own Jaume Verdaguers a huge apology. For me, I’m planning to get a statue of him built while he’s still alive, if we get out of this.”
“I’ll help you,” Amaya offers, obviously in need of something concrete she can do. “I’ve got a friend who’s a sculptor.”
“Look. There’s nothing we can do to pressure them, and no threats that could work. Nobody can make a hyperjump without their help. So if we try to attack them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they teleport us to the other side of the galaxy. Likewise, if we try to leave now and warn the others about their con game, they’ll have no trouble stopping us. Anyway, as soon as they’re gone, the whole Galactic Community will figure out for themselves what they were up to; we won’t have to tell them. Except it’ll be too late by then to do anything about it.”
“And then what?” Amaya says impatiently, almost in tears from anger and frustration. “We give up, call off the search, forget about the rest of humanity, since losing our hyperengines is just about as fucked-over as we could possibly be, and stay for the rest of eternity in this system without any oxygen planets to colonize? The closest star to us from here is four lightyears away.”
“No.” I smile, in the sudden certainty that I’ve found the solution to our problem. “I’ll pay them more for the information we want. ‘Unworthy Pupils’—a perfect name for them! Even if their ‘Wise Creators’ never existed. What else do we have that might interest them?”
“Pay them more?” The sensor tech’s eyebrows almost disappear into her short but luxuriant dark mane. “But they already rejected enough tritium and deuterium to fuel a ship for a whole year, and we just gave them our translation software. I don’t see what else we have of value.”
“DNA,” I interrupt her, smiling mischievously. “The only other human possession that the Qhigarians have always been interested in obtaining.” Turning to the Contact Specialist star-octopus, I carefully articulate, “Human DNA, trade for trajectory coordinate extragalactic ship.”
The frenzy of activity running through Valaurgh-Alesh-23’s thousands of slippery, bifurcated, eye-encrusted tentacles is more than enough proof that it is seriously analyzing the proposal—with the help of all the other minds on all the Qhigarian worldships. Determined to convince it, I point out, “New galaxy, conditions unknown. Qhigarians need new race slave-clones.”
“Price sufficient,” my tentacular interlocutor replies at last, sounding almost sad. “Extragalactics trajectory, coordinates, transmit here-now.” And with that, it transmits a long string of numbers, which the computer in my suit and its big brother on board the Gaudí record flawlessly.
Then the Qhigarian adds, almost sarcastically, “Second transmission-coordinates extragalactics-trajectory.”
Shangó and Oggún! So we’re the second ones they told? The second to get a crack at finding those guys?
Time to run, then. With any other species, I’d dare ask who they gave the information to, Aliens or humans, and if humans, what enclave they’re from and which ship. But the Unworthy Pupils would make us pay for each crumb of information. And unfortunately, we have no bargaining chips left.
It gave away the fact that we’re not the first they told out of pure sadism, obviously.
“We did it!” Amaya laughs, excited, missing that last bit of bad news. I’m not planning to dampen her joy. Everybody will hear it when they replay the recording. “The computer is interpreting the coordinates and putting together a linear trajectory. What I can tell you now is that our visitors come from the Large Magellanic Cloud, they’re seeking out yellow dwarf stars, and their hyperjump system is long-range and very precise. I’ll have more to tell you later. For now, when you make Contact with that disgusting octopus, better hurry up and give it your DNA. I imagine that the fewer worldships there are remaining to join this conglomeration, the harder it will be for poor Gisela to find a feasible jump trajectory.”