I asked the captain what I could bring her.
“Just sit down, Jatt,” she told me. “Shipman Ping’s handling your duties. You’re here as an observer.”
“Observer?” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but Observing what?” It was a mark of how sure she was of her command that I could ask my commanding officer a question that easily. A lot of ‘em want you to treat anything they say like it’s written on a stone tablet.
“This,” she said, and one of the engineers turned on the com screens.
The first thing I saw was a group of perhaps a half-dozen red circles moving across a star field, heading toward the immensity of the alien jellyfish ship. It took me a few more seconds until I figured out that the red circles were only on our screen, that they were markers outlining the position of several small Confederation ships which would otherwise have been almost too dark to see. The weird thing, though, was that I could see as I focused on their silhouettes when they crossed in front of the alien vessel that they weren’t Confederation cruisers or jumbos or even attack ships, but…
“Lifeboats,” said the captain as if she’d heard my thought. “One from each of the Confederation ships.”
“I’m sorry, Captain Watanabe, I’m still not getting any of this…” I looked around to see if anyone else was as puzzled as I was, but they were all watching the screens intently. I noticed that Balcescu, who lately had been at all these sort of meetings, was conspicuously absent. Had he given up? Or just pissed everyone off so much that they hadn’t invited him for this…whatever it was?
“Bear with us, Shipman Jatt,” the captain said. “You’re here by special request, but we’re in the middle of an actual mission here and we don’t have time to…” Her attention was distracted by a murmur from the first lieutenant.
“They’re not going for it,” he said.
“Maybe they’re just not in a hurry,” said Doc Swainsea. “Their approach is slow. Give it time…”
Even as she said it, one of the lifeboats suddenly flew apart. The others scattered away from their stricken comrade in all directions, but slowly – too slowly. The small ships dodged and dived, but within only a few minutes every one of them had been reduced to shattered flotsam. I blinked hard as my eyes filled with tears.
“There he is!” said Captain Watanabe. “See, Jatt?” When she turned to me she saw my face. “No, look, he got through!”
“He? What are you talking about? They’re all dead!” It was all I could do to keep from sobbing out loud at the waste, the murderous stupidity of it all.
“No! No, Jatt, the lifeboats were unmanned. They were cover, that’s all.” She pointed to the screen again, at what I had taken for another small, rounded chunk of debris. “See, that’s him! He’s almost reached them!”
“He doesn’t know, Captain,” said Chinh-Herrera suddenly. “Balcescu didn’t tell him.”
“For Christ’s sake, who is this he you keep talking about…?” Then suddenly it hit me. “Wait a minute…Balcescu? Are you telling me that’s Balcescu out there? What’s he doing? What’s going on?” I was almost crying again, and if you don’t think that’s embarrassing for a guy my age no matter how tall he is, you’re a damn idiot.
“He’s in one of our exterior repair pods,” said Chinh-Herrrera, pointing to the tiny, avocado-shaped object floating across the starfield toward the jellyfish, which loomed above it now like a frozen tidal wave. “The engineers modified it. Wait’ll you see what it can do.”
“If the ship lets it get close enough,” said Doc Swainsea. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were red, too.
I still didn’t really understand, but I sat in silence now with everyone else, holding my breath as I watched the tiny object float closer to the monstrous ship. At last it touched and stuck. Everyone cheered, even me, although I still wasn’t quite sure why. Slowly, the rounded shape of the repair pod flattened against the side of the jellyfish ship until had turned itself into a wide, shallow dome like a black blister.
“It’s slicing its way through,” said Chinh-Herrera. “Monofilament cutter.”
“Put on the helmet feed,” said the captain.
A moment later another picture jumped onto the screen – a close-up view of something falling away – a section of the alien ship’s skin that had been cut away now falling into the ship, I realized. The hole it left pulsed with blueish light.
“How’s the pod holding up?” the captain called to the engineers.
“The blister beams have gone rigid – no loss of pressure. We’re solid, ma’am!”
A moment later we could see feet in an excursion suit fill the screen as Balcescu looked down while he stepped through the hole cut in the alien hull. It seemed crazy – the aliens must know he was there. How many seconds could he have until they were on him? And what the hell was he supposed to do in that little time – plant a bomb? Why would they send Balcescu to do that instead of one of the marines?
But all I asked was, “Why isn’t he talking to us?”
“Radio silence,” Chinh-Herrera whispered. “To make sure we give him as long as possible before he’s detected.”
“He likes it better that way, anyway,” said Doc Swainsea.
As Balcescu moved inside it was as though he had been swallowed into some giant living thing – the blue-lit corridor was mostly smooth except for low bumps in strange formations, and as shiny-wet as internal organs. I half expected him to be swept up like a corpuscle in a blood stream, but instead he turned into the main passage, which seemed to be about half a hundred feet tall and nearly that wide, and began to move down it. He was walking, I realized, which meant that the ship had to have some kind of artificial gravity.
“What’s he looking for?” I whispered, but nobody answered me.
Suddenly a trio of inhuman shapes emerged from a side-corridor into the main passageway. I heard several of the observers swear bitterly – I must confess Captain Watanabe was one of them – as the horrors turned toward Balcescu. I couldn’t make a sound, I was so frightened. They were at least twice human height, rippling like ash in a fire, but undeniably real, even seen only on com screen. Whatever complicated arrangement was at the bottom of their bodies didn’t touch the floor, but they did not give the impression of being light or airy or ghostly. And their faces – if those were their faces…! Well, I’ll just say I think I know now what was under the Commendatore’s mask.
Balcescu stopped and stood waiting for them. We could tell he’d stopped because the walls around him stopped moving. I guess he thought there was no point in running away, although if it had been me I sure as hell would have given it a try. The entire bridge was silent. You know that expressions about hearing a pin drop? If someone had dropped one just then we all would have jumped right out of our skins.
The terrible things approached Balcescu until they were right in front of him – and then they glided right past him.
“What the hell…?” I said, louder than I meant to, but nobody seemed to care. They were too busy cheering. For a second I thought they’d lost their minds. “Has he got some kind of cloaking device…? I asked.
Balcescu had turned around for some reason and was following the floating aliens. To my horror, he actually hurried after them until he caught them, then reached out and shoved the nearest one in the back. The creature stumbled slightly, or at least bobbed off balance, but then righted itself and went on as if it hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Neither of them even looked back.
I felt like crying again, even as everyone else was celebrating. I just didn’t get it. I almost thought I’d lost my mind.
“I hope you all saw that,” Balcescu said. I realized it was the first time I’d heard his voice in days. Who would have guessed I’d be hearing it over a comlink from the alien ship? “I humbly submit that I have won the argument.”
“You sure did, you arrogant sonuvabitch!” shouted Chinh-Herrera, but I think the comlink was only
working one way.
“What happened?” I asked Doc Swainsea. She seemed more restrained than the others, as if she didn’t quite believe this was the victory everyone else seemed to think it was.
“They’re not real,” she said. “He was right, Rahul.” The doctor is the only person who calls me by my true name.
“Not real? But they blew up our ships! And just now…he pushed one of them!”
“Oh, they’re real enough – they have weight and mass. But they’re constructs. They’re not real people, any more than a child’s toy soldiers are real.” She frowned. She looked very tired, like it was taking all her energy just to keep talking to me. “No, that’s a bad analogy. They’re not that kind of toys, they’re puppets. This was all a show.”
“A show? They killed people! Hundreds of shipmen! What kind of show is that?”
But before she could answer me I heard Balcescu’s voice and turned back.
“This looks like it, don’t you think?” he asked, as if having a conversation with an old friend. “Time to make a little trouble for the local repertory company, I think.” George Sanders, maybe even Cary Grant – I have to admit, the superior bastard did have style. He seemed to be standing in a large chamber, one that was even more intestinal than the passageway, if such a thing was possible. At the center of it floated a huge, shifting transparency, a moving gob of glass-clear gelatin as big as a jumbo jet. Balcescu walked toward it, then stopped and held up his com wand, thumbed it. A deep rasp of sound echoed through the room and the jelly rippled. Then a vast pseudopod abruptly reached out toward Balcescu and engulfed him. I must have cried out, because Chinh-Herrera turned to me and said, “Nah, don’t worry. He was right again, damn him. Look, it understood!”
The pseudopod was lifting him as gently as a mother with her child. Balcescu’s point of view rose up, up, up until he was at the top of the gently swirling jelly, up near the roof of the intestinal, cathedral sized room. He stepped onto a platform that emerged from the bumps and swirls of the wall, then held up his com wand again. A single sound, loud and rough as a tree pulling up its roots as it fell, then Balcescu and the rest of us waited.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe I’m being too polite,” he said. Balcescu still sounded like he was on a day-hike in the hills. Even I had to admire him — me, who’d seen him drunk and feeling sorry for himself. I can’t tell you how annoying that was.
He lifted the com wand and thumbed it again and another wash of sound rolled out, this one harsher and more abrupt. We waited.
The jelly thing abruptly shrank away beneath him like water down a drain. Then the lights faded all though the vast room. Everything was black. A moment later, Balcescu’s helmet light flicked on, but the view now was almost all shadows, the chamber’s far walls a distant, ghostly backdrop.
“Mission accomplished, Captain Watanabe,” he said. “It’s turned off.”
The bridge erupted in cheers, some of them almost hysterical. I still didn’t really understand what I’d just seen, or why I was even there, but when Ping appeared a few moments later with something that looked as near as damnit to champagne, I took a glass. God knows everyone else was having some, even the captain.
I was taking my second sip when I noticed someone standing over me.
“I’ve got something for you, Rahul,” said Doc Swainsea. She showed me her ring with its glowing spot. I let her touch mine so the data could transfer. “He asked me to make sure you got it.”
“He?” I asked, but I knew who she meant. It was just something to say as I watched her walk away and out of the conference room. She was the only one beside me who didn’t seem happy, and I wasn’t sure I understood my own reasons.
I stayed on the bridge a little while, but I wanted to see what he’d left for me. Anyway, I never liked champagne much. Any alcohol, in fact. Too many people over the years have thought it was funny to try to get the little guy drunk, and I used to be stubborn and stupid enough to try to prove them wrong.
* * *
“Hello, Mr. Jatt. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye properly, but the last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, getting ready for this thing we’re trying. But I did want to say goodbye. I’m glad I got a chance to know you, even a little bit. I intend no joke, by the way.”
Balcescu was wearing an exosuit. The message looked like it had been recorded just before he left, which explained why he was talking like he wasn’t coming back.
“But I owed you of all people an explanation, because you were the one that gave me the idea. I guess you must know by now whether I was right or not.”
Like you ever really doubted it, you arrogant s.o.b., I thought. But then I wondered, hang on, if he was so sure of himself, why did he leave me this message?
“I should have suspected something right away – or at least as soon as I translated the message,” he went on. The Balcescu of half a day ago was putting on his exosuit gloves. “I mean, really – ‘The Outward-Reaching Murder Army will spit upon the stars that give you life’? ‘Only black ash will show that you ever lived.’ A bit over the top, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it. I took it at face value.
“Then you asked what else I could figure out about the aliens. I began to wonder. As you said, we knew what they’d said – but not why. Were they just roving the universe like Mongol horsemen, conquering and slaughtering? But why? What was the plan? Why leave a ship with immensely superior firepower to defend a Visser ring when they could have wiped out every ship in the vicinity in minutes? But it was the way they talked that really puzzled me. Bloody melodrama, that’s what it was. It was like something out of one of those ancient movies you told me you like so much… ”
“Those aren’t the kind of movies I like,” I told the recording. “Not that John Wayne crap – well, except for ‘Stagecoach’…and maybe ‘The Quiet Man’. I like characters.”
“…but I still couldn’t figure out what was making me itch. Then Diane…Dr. Swainsea…came in with her wide-spectrum audio analysis of the sounds that we hadn’t noticed at first, the ones that were largely out of our hearing range. Think about it. Behind those overly dramatic words they were pumping out a huge range of sounds – higher, lower, faster, slower – not exactly synchronized to the words, but emphasizing them, heightening the effect. What does that sound like?”
It hit me like a blow. “A soundtrack,” I whispered. “Like a movie.”
“Right,” the recording said. “A score – as in an opera. As in Don Giovanni.” The recorded Balcescu had closed all his seals and sat calmly, as if we were in the same room at the same time, having an ordinary conversation. “So I kept thinking, Mr. Jatt – why would someone go to such lengths, write an entire space opera, so to speak, just to kill innocent people? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t know they were killing anyone? But how could that be?” He smiled that infuriating smile of his. “Because maybe they didn’t think there was anyone left to kill. Remember, this thing came to us through the Rainwater Hub, the most compromised wormhole in known space. Who’s to say they even came from our galaxy? Remember, I only found traces of their languages in some of the very oldest civilizations we know out near the galactic rim. Maybe the originals that spoke those languages are long gone – at least in physical form.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I was about to run the recording back when he picked his helmet up off the clean pad where it had been sitting. The mirrored visor made a brief infinity loop with the recording wall screen – a million helmets strobed. “Look, if you saw this by itself, up close, you would assume someone was in it, right?” He slid the visor up to show the empty interior. “My guess is, these people – let’s call them the Company, like an opera company — have left their physical forms behind long ago. They might even be dead and gone, but that’s another libretto.” Again, that irritating grin. “But what they haven’t done is given up art. Just as our operas often im
itate the past in which they were written, the Company’s art mimics the time when they had bodies. Entire constructs that perform acts of aggression and destruction and who knows what else? Programmed, operating in empty space at the edge of a distant galaxy, for the nostalgic pleasure of bodiless alien intelligences. Of course they would violently destroy what they come into contact with – because they’re pretending to be the kind of ancient savages that would do that. But that’s why I’m guessing that the Company are no longer wearing bodies — they assumed that anything they came in contact with would be more of their own lifeless constructs, part of this art form of theirs that we can’t hope to understand…yet.
“So that’s my idea, and in an hour or so we’ll find out if it’s true. I’ve convinced the captain it’s worth a try, and she’s brought in the other Confederation ships, so at the very least I will be the center of a fairly expensive little drama of my own.” Balcescu stood then, his helmet under his arm as though he were some kind of antique cavalier. “Sorry I couldn’t explain this to you in person, but as I said, it’s been a busy last 48 hours or so, putting together my hypothesis and then getting ready to test it.” He turned toward the door. “But I did want to thank you, Mr. Jatt. You opened my eyes in a couple of ways, and that doesn’t happen very often.”
I’ll bet it doesn’t, I thought, but suddenly I wished I’d told him my first name.
“And now one of two things are going to happen,” the recorded Balcescu said. “Either I’m wrong somehow – about the purpose of that ship, or about how realistic and thorough its defenses are, in which case by the time you see this I’ll have been delatticed, as Diane puts it. Or, I’ll be right, and I’ll be able to use the little bit of Company language I’ve put together, along with some useful algorithms from Dr. Swainsea, to override the programming and cancel the show, as it were.” He moved to the door of his cabin, so that he stood just at edge of the recorded picture. “And if I succeed with that, then I’m going to start looking for some kind of emergency return pod. You see, the Confederation are welcome to the ship itself. I don’t give a damn about how it works or how far it came to get here or anything of the things they want to know. I just want to go where the show is happening – where the opera, or religious passion play, or children’s game, or whatever this thing represents, is really going on. I’m hoping that the Company has some kind of recoverable module – like a ship’s black box – and that it will return to their space, wherever that might be. I intend to be on it.