Forsaken Skies (51 page)

These were not long in coming. Engineer Derrow leapt up onto the top of the tender, making it look easy. She could be recognized by the hexagons painted all over her suit and by a light just below her helmet that flashed when she spoke.

“I know this place is weird,” she said, and dozens of helmets turned toward her. “We don't have time for sightseeing. We need to get to work right away. We're going to climb up that slope,” she said, pointing at an impossibly steep pile of scree a few hundred meters away, “and then head down into the crater. What you see in there might freak some of you out. Try to cope, okay? We're all professionals here. If you weren't one of my employees back on Niraya, you are now.”

She jumped down from the tender and loped toward the jumbled boulders of the slope, then seemed to dance up them like a mountain goat, her feet barely touching the rocks. One by one the engineers followed. Elder McRae was very glad to see no one else had Derrow's effortless grace.

Of course, Derrow had been here before. She'd come here with the pilots, though the elder still knew few details of what they'd done on Aruna.

Up at the crest of the rim a couple of engineers bent to assemble a rover, a simple cage of pipes with four balloon wheels and a compact motor. A parabolic dish stuck up at the top of a pipe mounted behind the driver's seat. The rover was just big enough to seat Derrow. She took it over the edge of the crater and disappeared. The engineers and the volunteers like the elder had to walk.

Moving carefully, checking every foothold before leaping to the next, she followed a line of engineers up the slope. She was breathing heavily by the time they reached the top and they could look out over the massive crater. Despite Engineer Derrow's urgency regarding time, everyone up there was just standing and gaping at what they'd discovered.

Elder McRae couldn't blame them.

Below, inside the crater, the enemy had built a massive installation of towers and hangarlike structures and things like giant seed pods. None of it looked remotely like human architecture. The elder, who had trained in building when she was still an aspirant, who had built, in fact, her own office back at the Retreat, couldn't see how any of those structures were erected. The shapes were all wrong, round and sculptured where there should have been right angles, or minimally worked out of thin girders and tangles of pipes where a human designer would have put solid walls. Much of the crater's contents looked as if it had been smashed or burnt—she supposed that was the work of Commander Lanoe and Lieutenant Zhang—but everywhere that things were still intact metal glittered weakly in the orange light of the far sun. There was no color anywhere in that tangled mess of construction, nothing ornamented or decorated at all, not even any writing or signage to help the human eye make sense of it.

Derrow rolled past in her rover, pointing out details of the crater to an engineer who jogged along beside her. “Main problem is we have no power,” Derrow said, her voice broadcast to everyone's suits. “We'll pull it from the tender's reactor until we find a better solution. Plenty of scrap metal; get some teams on sorting through it to find the alloys we need, use anybody who doesn't have specific skills. Everyone needs a job and they need to keep doing that job until I say stop. And keep an eye on your sensors—any depleted uranium you find, tell me.”

One by one the engineers around the elder hurried to find tasks, to begin their labors. The elder looked around for M. Wallach, but the woman was gone, probably already hard at work.

“You,” someone said, an engineer with a blue stripe painted down the sleeve of his suit. “What are you standing around for, damn it? Oh. I'm sorry, Elder, I didn't recognize you.”

“That's all right,” she said. “Just tell me what to do.”

Lanoe and Thom had left Niraya but they were still hours away. Even patching Lanoe into the conversation meant waiting long minutes for Zhang's signal to reach him, then minutes more to hear his replies. She was used to communicating over such distances but that didn't mean it wasn't frustrating.

“We all heard that signal,” she said. “Every radio in the system picked it up. Somehow, though, Valk heard something different. I can't explain it, so don't ask me to. I've got Derrow on this call; maybe she has some ideas.”

“Don't get your hopes up,” Derrow said. “I don't exactly have a lot of free time down here, but I've dedicated some computing power to analyzing the signal. I didn't learn much.”

Lanoe's voice cut in, words from nearly a quarter of an hour ago, just catching up. “What did Valk hear? Just tell me what he heard.”

“Ignore that,” Zhang told Derrow. “We'll fill him in as best we can. Go ahead with your analysis.”

“It sounded like static at first. Just white noise. When I ran a basic Fourier analysis, though, it turned out that it wasn't random, it was compressed data. A lot of data, hundreds of megabytes squeezed down into a few seconds of high-bandwidth transmission. Data I can't translate, though. It's not in any kind of human language. It's not even in any kind of human protocol—every poly has their own proprietary way of talking to machines, but this doesn't look like any of them. It's all in base fifteen, just like the software onboard that lander I studied. So it's definitely from the enemy. Beyond that…I'm at sea here. The first fifteen digits are all zeroes. That looks like a handshake to me.”

“A handshake?”

Derrow sighed in frustration. “When a computer contacts another computer for the first time, it sends a short, recognizable signal. Something to say, ‘Hello, I am prepared to send you information.' A handshake can be as simple as that or it can contain information about how to process that information—the transmission rate, the protocols to use, things like that. Those fifteen zeroes look, to me, like a signal to another system, telling it to pay attention. Of course, that's just a guess. I have no idea how alien drones talk to each other.”

“It's a place to start. Lanoe, we think the orbiter was put here just to send this message. It slagged itself in the process. The message means nothing to me or any of us—but somehow it got through to Valk. Engineer, any thoughts there?”

“M. Valk was the closest person to the orbiter when it transmitted. Maybe it sent a second message, one in clear text, but with a weaker signal. One that didn't propagate far enough for anyone else to pick it up.”

“It's not that,” Valk said. “I checked my comms logs—”

“Damn it,” Lanoe said. Fifteen minutes in the past. “Zhang, you're going to have to figure this out before I arrive. Have some kind of conclusions ready for me when I get there, will you?”

“Everyone, please ignore that,” Zhang said. “Valk—you were saying?”

“I checked my comms logs,” Valk repeated. He sounded nervous. Like he was on trial here. “They didn't record anything except the same gobbledygook you two caught. There was no second message. Just the one—except to me it sounded like a voice speaking. Not a human voice. It sounded synthesized—you know, like a drone voice. Flat. Weird inflections, no rhythm to it. Just words.”

“That should be impossible,” Derrow pointed out.

“I heard what I heard!” Valk shot back.

“Okay, okay, let's all calm down. Valk,” Zhang said. “For Lanoe's benefit—tell me what you heard.”

Valk cleared his throat. He repeated the message word for word, raising or lowering his voice to match the inflections. “IF
(conditional; signify compliance)
would
(subjunctive)
speak
. THEN (allow? deny?)
speak: this system, false-mind.”

Zhang had heard it before. It still spooked her out to hear him repeat it. For a while no one spoke, as they digested the words. Then Lanoe cut in again, still well behind everyone else.

“Thom, it was some kind of signal from the enemy. The first time they've tried to communicate at all. I know. I know! Kid, I'm working on it—Zhang's trying to decode it now. Clear this channel until I say otherwise. Zhang—what the hell is going on?”

“I wish I knew,” she said, catching herself too late before she said it out loud.

“I think it's kind of obvious,” Derrow said. “I mean, okay, it's confusingly worded. But it sounds like they want to negotiate.”

“I didn't hear anything like that,” Zhang said.

“Yeah, it sounds like a computer having a stroke. But to me that's exactly how a device just short of artificial intelligence would ask if we wanted to talk to it. ‘IF you want to speak, THEN speak.' It's like a line of computer code for a system that wants to negotiate. Maybe to stop this war.”

“Lanoe won't see it that way,” Zhang said.

“Let's have some perspective here,” Derrow said. She was still talking. “I know we're all scared. But this is one of the biggest moments in human history, isn't it? I mean, isn't it? First contact with an alien species?”

“First contact,” Valk said, “was when they started killing farmers on Niraya.”

Derrow growled in frustration. “We don't even know—maybe they didn't understand, maybe they didn't know we were sentient, maybe they were just…exploring, who knows? I don't know! But neither of you do, either. We have to take this opportunity. We have to try to talk to them.”

“Elder McRae said—back in the very first briefing we did, back at the Retreat—that they'd been trying for weeks to contact the enemy, long before Lanoe even started recruiting us. There's never been any response.”

“Maybe they just didn't know how we communicated, maybe—”

“Enough,” Zhang said.

“Please just listen,” Derrow said.

But Zhang was done. “No. Hold that thought. This is too big a decision for us to make. We need to wait until Lanoe gets here. Engineer, thank you for your assistance. When we're ready to discuss this again, I'll let you know.”

She cut Derrow out of the call before she could say anything else.

“Zhang,” Valk said, when it was just the two of them, still circling Aruna in their BR.9s, still within shooting distance of the slagged orbiter. “Zhang, she could be right.”

“Don't start.”

“No, look,” Valk said. “She could be right. But I don't trust these bastards. And that ‘false-mind' bit, that doesn't exactly sound friendly to me.”

“Nor me,” Zhang admitted. “Even if I had any idea what it meant. I'd be a lot happier if I knew why they sent this message to you. Just to you.”

“There's one possibility,” he said. “Maybe I'm the only one who heard it because I've gone crazy. Maybe the voice was just in my head.”

Zhang laughed, though she knew he hadn't been joking. At least not entirely. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

Mostly, the elder found herself gathering things and carrying them from one place to another. Pieces of debris and junk, parts of broken drones. She carried them to the smelters, where the engineers were busy casting long, perfectly straight iron rails. They fussed and argued over their calipers and their geodesic lasers, always trying to get the rails that much closer to some hypothetical ideal of straightness. The elder didn't understand any of what they were doing. So she just kept carrying things, walking them over to the glowing mouth of the smelter. Casting them in.

In the low gravity she could lift objects that, on Niraya, would have been ludicrously too heavy for her. Boulders so big she could hardly get her arms around them. Whole legs of destroyed landers. It was almost comical how much she could carry. There was a problem, though—their weight might be different than what she expected, but they still had mass. Just because everything felt like it was made of packing foam, she couldn't beat inertia. If she moved too fast, so did the thing she was carrying. If it massed more than she did, when she tried to stop it would keep moving, and carry her with it.

It would be easy here to break an arm, or a leg. The cheap suit she wore had no safety measures built in to protect her or keep her working if she was injured.