“What is the nature of your weapons?” Kond asked. “If you don’t mind.”
“Chemically propelled rockets with powerful warheads,” Spectre said.
“Those will be of little use,” Kond replied. “Their antimissile defenses are strong. They will easily detect them and shoot them down.”
“Do they have any sort of shield?” Weaver asked.
“Squee shields,” Kond said. “That is effective against squee. It is tight to the hull. Their ships normally mount squee and squee for both defense and offense and fire squee for medium-range attack. They also carry squee for longer-range attacks.”
“We lost almost all of that,” Spectre said tightly. “Squee shields. How do those work?”
“Electricity is generated and forms a squee shield. It stops squee.”
“We’re still not getting that squee,” Weaver interjected. “What is the last thing? What it stops?”
“Matter that the squee have been stripped from by energy. This creates a high energy material that is the fourth state of matter.”
“Plasma,” Weaver said, wincing. “That’s what we got fired at by. Very high velocity plasma, too. Nearly light speed. Ouch. Those are going to be nasty. And they have shields that… Oh, hey, something I understand!”
“You’re ahead of me, then,” Spectre said. “What is a squee shield?”
“We’ve actually got that technology, but much lower power,” Bill said. “The physics of it is the same as that in a plasma ball that you see in novelty stores. The little purple glow around the interior of the ball protects it the same way. It is called a Debye shield after the scientist who first described it mathematically. DARPA and AFRL and even NASA have been researching uses for it for decades. Certain types of armor-piercing weapons use a jet of plasma to penetrate armor. Notably, RPGs. The Brits developed a sort of static electric charge that could be formed over their armor that disrupts the plasma. For that matter, now that I think about it, Boeing was working on something similar for the space plane. When you do a high-speed reentry, the air forms plasma around you. That’s what the space shuttle tiles deflect. We might actually be able to copy their shield technology, if we get the power systems to duplicate it.”
“Good to know,” Spectre said. “Kond, those longer-range attack, those are what we call fighters? Manned ships? Or missiles?”
“They are creatures that have reactionless drive and medium ranges,” Kond said. “They fire squee.”
“Lasers are what we pulsed you with to determine the size of the wing,” Weaver said. “They are light, a medium level electromagnetic spectrum light that is coherent. Does that help?”
“Lasers,” Kond said. “They fire lasers of squee range electromagnetic spectrum. Very high frequency, beyond that of your signal. Also squee. These fire… squee at high velocity. What a ship is made of.”
“Metal slugs,” Weaver said. “A slug driver. Heavy metal? Very dense? How large?”
“Depends on the gun,” Kond said. “Very small to quite large.”
“Well, let’s go do a flyby,” Spectre said. “We’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Probably nothing, but we’ll keep trying until we figure something out. Kond, good luck. We’ll see if we can delay them.”
“Perhaps they will choose to pursue you,” Kond said. “Good luck as well.”
“If they’re continuing on the same course and acceleration, they’re going to be about three AU in, towards our last position, sir,” Weaver said. “Want a bearing?”
“Please,” Spectre said. “XO, stand down for the transit, then back to Condition One.”
“Aye, aye,” the XO replied.
“Pilot, set course. Warp Three. Let’s go see what the Dreen are up to.”
“Having fun, Miss Moon?” the CO asked as they headed towards the rendezvous.
“Quite a bit,” Miriam admitted, looking over her notes.
“Thank you for cracking the communications barrier so fast,” Spectre added. “I was surprised how well it all worked.”
“Oh, that was mostly their systems, sir,” Miriam replied. “I didn’t do much.”
“Unless I’m much mistaken, they were stuck until you figured out how to rewrite our systems to convert sonar to video,” the CO said definitely. “That, right there, was an amazing feat. But I was wondering about the, ahem, nature of the translation.”
“Oh, that,” Miriam said, dimpling. “Well, when we were leaving I dumped a mass of audio to their communications officer so he could use it to improve the language. Unfortunately, most of it was audio tracks from… entertainment programs.”
“Oh, God,” Spectre groaned. “You sent them a hundred hours of MTV, didn’t you?”
“No, sir,” Miriam said, wincing. “There was some MTV in there, but not that much. But… it was all popular entertainment programming. So their translators are now a bit… biased to nonformal speech. We’re working on it. But ‘dude’ seems to be a bit hard to write out. In part because it’s an accurate translation.”
“They call their CO ‘dude’?” Spectre asked, grinning.
“More or less,” Miriam replied. “The Hexosehr seem to be a highly cooperative species with an almost total lack of formality. In many ways they seem somewhat Japanese; they seem to prize agreement over argument at least within a sub-group. Americans are very different; we are a very contentious society. But they lack the severe formality of the Japanese, which is an artifact of constraining humans to the degree that they do. I could get their communications officer to substitute another term, but the choice is difficult. They have no terms relevant to ‘sir’ or ‘madame.’ So calling their captain ‘Dude’ is a fairly good translation. That’s why it’s hard to filter out.”
“The… Hexo… ?” the CO asked.
“It’s really a made up term, sir,” Miriam said, shrugging. “Their name for themselves translates as ‘us.’ So does ‘human’ to them. And it’s entirely in the inaudible range. Even compressed to where we can hear it it sounds like: Hecsssosssrre. Hexosehr not only refers to their six limbs but is pronounceable by the majority of major linguistic groups. I figure even a TV reporter can’t mess it up too badly. I explained the change to their communications officer and he understood. They’re having a hard time with both human and Terran. They don’t do the hard u or soft e well and t comes out as a click. So they pronounce Terran as !Tran!.” The latter sounded like something in Bushman. “They’d probably be better off with Chinese, to tell you the truth.”
“Ooookay,” Spectre said, his eyes wide. “Hexosehr it is. I didn’t realize that you were having so much conversation with their communications officer.”
“I was using subvocal most of the time,” Miriam admitted. “I realized I can get into inaudible range that way. Low inaudible. Their range is huge, higher and lower than ours. I can’t do even mid-range low for them, but I can go high. I was trying to speak their language direct, but it still didn’t work,” she finished with a sigh.
“It’s still an impressive achievement,” Spectre said. “I’m putting a commendation in your file. I’m glad you’re along.”
“I’m glad I finally have a job to do,” Miriam said. “Although I miss the painting.”
“There’s always the trip back to look forward to,” Spectre replied.
“Conn, Tactical. We’re picking up signatures consistent with Sierra One.”