My only consolation is that things couldn’t get any worse.
“Incoming transmission,” the sensor tech continues, and a hologram appears in our midst.
A day full of surprises for the Nu Barsa fleet, it seems. It isn’t Yotuel’s tan face, or Jürgen Schmodt’s clear blue eyes, or any of the unfamiliar officers and crew members of the Dalí. It’s an all-too-familiar face, with a jutting jaw and roundly muscular face, looking at us for a moment, grinding his teeth, and at last speaking with an ominous calm: “Last person you wanted to see, right? Perfect. Best if you and the Servet back away from the extragalactic ship right now, if you don’t want us to disintegrate you. Damned traitors!”
Turns out, things could get worse. We’re being insulted from the bridge of the Dalí by none other than Jordi Barceló.
“Hold up a sec, Josué, you’re almost half a klick ahead of them. You’re all three supposed to touch the extragalactic ship at the same time,” Captain Berenguer reminds me, his face looking worried in the small holoimage projected inside my helmet. This time he didn’t want to delegate the responsibility of being my remote Contact operator to anyone else. “We don’t want the crew of the Dalí to freak out and start the First Catalan Interstellar War right here, do we?”
“But what if that’s what we want?” Yotuel smiles venomously from another holographic window.
“Krieg if you mogeln,” comes the hoarse voice of Jürgen Schmodt, once again looking the part of the model gray-eyed Aryan in a third small holoimage next to that of his protégé.
What’s the point of having translation software with thousands of Alien languages programmed into it if he’s going to refuse to use it even to express himself in halfway passable Spanish?
My own German translator tells me that Krieg means “war” and mogeln is “cheat.” Clear enough. They trust me as much as I trust them. I never expected any different. No reason to.
This simultaneous triple hololink only proves how complicated the situation has become.
Could have been worse, though. If ours had been the only other Catalan ship in the system, then Jürgen, Yotuel, and especially Jordi Barceló (did the Qhigarians take the DNA sample from his pristine heterosexual rectum instead of his mouth, just to piss off the resentful prick even more?) would definitely have talked Captain Rubén Molinet of the Dalí into opening fire on us. Faced with the superior weaponry of the largest and most modern hyperjump cruiser in the Nu Barsa fleet, we wouldn’t have had any choice but to flee. Using our inertial engines, to make matters worse, because the hypergraph went dead only minutes after they arrived—meaning that Qhigarian-style hyperjumping has now stopped working throughout the galaxy.
We’ll never get out of this system if we don’t obtain a new form of faster-than-light transportation from the still unseen extragalactics in the cloud ship.
Luckily for us, Captain Saudat and his Servet were already here. Any hyperjump cruiser, no matter how outdated, is a factor to be taken into account in an armed conflict. Maybe the Dalí could have dealt with them and us both at the same time—but it would have sustained significant damage in the space battle. So the situation was basically a stalemate.
The three-ship problem, instead of the three-body problem.
Everybody frozen, watching the others.
Nobody making Contact, nobody letting the other guy make Contact.
Too awkward to last, right?
The Dalí trio started hurling insults and then threats our way. Jordi expanded on all the things he’d do to Amaya and me when he got his mitts on us. Yotuel told anyone who would listen about my more embarrassing childhood adventures in Rubble City. And Jürgen? I never imagined the German would have such a fertile yet rotten sexual imagination. Some of the things he said he’d do to Nerys when he had her at his mercy would make even the most experienced Contact Specialists, like my friend Narcís, blush.
But the bullying phase didn’t last long. Once they saw that they couldn’t intimidate Berenguer or Saudat into giving ground, they bit their tongues and let the grown-ups negotiate.
Discussions dragged on for three hours, constantly interrupted by “sincere” protests of innocence and marked by open mutual mistrust, but at last we more or less came to an agreement on a joint plan.
That’s why the three condomnauts still capable of making Contact are approaching the extragalactic ship at the same time, like good buddies. This way we’ll supposedly each get a fair chance. And may the best at Contacting win, right?
Lovely. Such fair play. Brings a tear to my eye.
If this had happened in Rubble City, my sarcastic mentor Diosdado would have said something like, “I want a clean fight—but everything goes.”
Two against one. The odds obviously are with the Dalí and their two Contact Specialists, first and fourth generation. Hard to say which of the pair is sneakier or hates me more.
I suppose one will try to knock me out of circulation while the other takes his own sweet time making Contact.
A good thing condomnaut suits are designed so you can’t carry any sophisticated weapons. Even having a laser telemeter on you is a bad idea: a particularly paranoid Alien might mistake it for some kind of gun, you know. I’d better keep my guard up anyway. They can always try strangling me or breaking my back between the two of them. And it’d be easy enough to hide a shiv in one of the pockets.
I had to accept the risk, of course. Time stands still for no one, and if the extragalactics decide to take off from this system and leave us behind here—I don’t even want to think about how embarrassing that would be. Or what consequences might result.
If Nerys had at least come out of shock it would have evened things up a little. Then I’d feel sure that Captain Saudat would support the Gaudí with all his ship’s arms, to protect his own condomnaut. Oh, well. If dogs had wheels, they’d be carriages. My mermaid still hasn’t shown any signs of consciousness. Quite a trauma….
But you can’t lose a battle before you fight it, and having the odds on your side doesn’t mean you’ve already won. Point is: sure, it’s two against one, but I’m still in the game, still playing.
Sure, I sound as trite as a college football coach or a drill sergeant. It’s a pile of clichés, but they work. Even when I use them on myself. It’s the magic of motivational speaking.
Now we can see each other. There’s no confusing us: Jürgen is wearing a red suit, Yotuel is in white (what a surprise, right?), and they’re approaching in close formation from the same direction. My suit is green, as always. I wish it was blue; then we’d be wearing the three colors of my country’s flag. So symbolic.
Blood and purity against green, which is the color of hope. And the old flag of Libya, with no other details. How lovely. How allegorical. How full of shit my thoughts get at a time like this. Like I care at all about Gaddafi. Or flags.
“Just five more klicks to the extragalactic ship,” Captain Berenguer tells me after checking his telemeter, like mine’s not working. “Synchronize your trajectories, though I doubt they’ll let you approach much closer. Captain Saudat thinks that at any moment they might telepor—”
Said and done. His voice cuts off, and the next instant we aren’t surrounded by the black of space but a softly luminous white. We’ve been teleported.