“Which leaves us with a real problem,” the Rhino said. “Just what happened when the Heinlein Colony encountered the aliens?”
Charles nodded. If only the aliens could talk!
The Rhino’s communicator buzzed. He lifted it to his ear and pressed a switch. “Yes?”
He listened for a long moment. “I’ll be on my way,” he said, then returned the device to his belt. “Charles, there is a meeting I have to attend. Call me if the situation changes.”
Charles nodded, then returned his attention to the display. The dolphins were swimming over a large assortment of crab-like creatures, apparently corralled in a zoo… or a farm. Perhaps the aliens could farm after all. He watched, then flinched back as an alien face appeared in front of him. For a long moment, he had the distressing impression that the alien was looking right into the trailer, before remembering that the alien was looking at the dolphin. It was impossible to read any expressions on the alien’s face.
“Evade,” the intelligence officer ordered. “I think…”
The image blurred. Charles heard a woman’s voice scream from the front of the trailer.
“They killed the dolphin,” the intelligence officer said. “Shit.”
Charles nodded, then ran into the front compartment. One of the women was screaming in pain, despite two medics trying to hold her down. A medic pressed a sedative tab against her neck, but it was several very long moments before it took effect. The other women hastily snapped on their filters, then urged the dolphins to run. There was no longer any time to hesitate. The aliens knew they were being watched.
Shit, Charles thought, as he reached for his communicator. Bloody buggering shit!
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You’ve all seen the records,” Ted said, as soon as his subordinate commanders had assembled — via hologram — in the conference room. “The real question is simple. Just what the hell is actually going on?”
He looked — again — at the records from Primrose. “One possible answer is that we are actually dealing with at least two different alien factions,” he continued. “One of them wants to fight the war to the bitter end, the other is prepared to actually try to talk to us. But another possible answer is that the whole situation is a trap.”
“It seems odd,” Shallcross said, “to sacrifice one ship and risk another just to lure us into a trap.”
“I know,” Ted said. Captain Cook’s report had gone over the possibilities in exhaustive detail. “But these are aliens. We don’t have the slightest idea of just how they think.”
He looked down at the table, then moved his gaze from face to face. “Are there any clues, any at all, that the aliens might have internal divisions?”
“Nothing,” Commander Steenblik said. The Intelligence Corps officer sighed. “We went through the records from Target One carefully, but we didn’t see any telltale signs of divided loyalties or multiple different powers. I would have expected to see their orbital weapons pointed at their fellow aliens, or targeted at the ground…”
“It isn’t hard to use an orbital weapons platform to bombard the planet below,” the Rhino pointed out. “But they installed plenty of ground-based weapons. I don’t think we can assume there were multiple powers occupying the system.”
“Earth does have multiple powers,” Shallcross pointed out. “For all we know, we’ve overrun the alien counterpart of Washington or Britannia, not Earth. This clearly isn’t their homeworld.”
Ted had to admit he had a point. Humanity had Earth and Terra Nova, both ruled by multiple powers, but the other worlds had been shared out among the spacefaring nations. It was possible, he suspected, that the aliens were utterly unaware of humanity’s national divisions, all the more so as they’d clearly attacked several worlds belonging to different human nations. If they’d just gone after New Russia, it might have been harder to unite humanity against a common foe.
“Which leads to a simple question,” Ted said. “What — exactly — is going on?”
Commander Steenblik frowned. “The data package they sent us is quite definitely an extensive First Contact package,” he said. “I believe that part of the reason it is such a large package is because of the sheer volume of data they sent us. They didn’t attempt to compress anything, for example, or assume our system could automatically read it. I think they sent us both a contact package and the manual for reading it.”
He paused. “However, it might be some time before we understand it well enough to put together a common language,” he added. “The analysts are still working on it.”
“They came out of Tramline Four,” Captain Fitzwilliam said. “It’s possible that it leads towards a world controlled by Faction Two.”
“But Faction One was definitely determined to prevent Faction Two from making contact,” Shallcross pointed out. “We dare not assume that they have complete control over the links from their world to Target One.”
“Faction One might also be vastly more powerful than Faction Two,” Captain Atsuko offered, glumly. “Faction One blew up a starship without, as far as we know, any provocation. That would be an outright declaration of war in some cultures.”
Ted nodded. The attack on the alien starship hadn’t been an accident, but a cold-blooded attempt at intercepting and destroying the ship. There was no way a human diplomat could have smoothed matters enough to avoid war, unless one power was so vastly more powerful than the other that war would be nothing more than suicide. And that suggested that Faction One was still in control.
Assuming that we’re not misreading what we’re seeing, he reminded himself. We could be completely wrong — and pushing ourselves into a trap.
“Maybe there is a war going on,” Shallcross suggested. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less,” the Rhino quoted. “The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. I love that book.”
“I thought everyone who read it ended up in jail,” Captain Fitzwilliam said.
“I’m fifty,” the Rhino said. “Plenty of time for me to run afoul of the law somewhere.”
He cleared his throat, loudly. “I will not pretend to be a diplomat, Admiral, because the last time I tried to be diplomatic I ended up causing a mess. What I will suggest is that we should be very careful. Faction Two might have some reason to work with us, but they will almost certainly have an agenda of their own, an agenda that might not match with ours. We would be well-advised, I feel, to handle the situation with extreme care.”
Ted leaned forward. “An agenda that won’t match with ours?”
“We know nothing about how the aliens organise themselves,” the Rhino said. “Faction One might just be… the High King or something along those lines, with Faction Two intent on overthrowing them and becoming the High King themselves. Or Faction Two might want to stab Faction One in the back, despite them being embroiled in a war against us. Or Faction Two might actually be intent on keeping the war going as long as possible, then stabbing both us and Faction One in the back. Or there might be several different factions.”