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I was trying to take a nap; I think I’d just started dreaming of blue alien women. Writhing, in a pile, on top of me. Drowning in an ocean of breasts.
It’s SciDiv, who I’m beginning to consider my nemesis, who wakes me with a call. “We’re getting weird readings,” he said. “I’m here with EngDiv. Apparently the, Abhijñā, their computer systems are talking to ours. It’s a use of the CommBox we haven’t seen before. Haley says the Argos’ logs don’t indicate seeing it, either. And it’s a type of digital interaction we’ve never encountered before, as a species. More intimate than an interface. And we’re totally okay with that. That seems weird- like I don’t think we should be okay with it. That sound okay to you?” “Aside from the part where you woke me from a blue booby dream, yeah.” “You’ve been having that dream, too? I’ve been trying to keep my eyes open, because they’re always there when I close them- not that I don’t appreciate alien jugs, they’re just distracting. I asked MedDiv about clearance for a little shore leave. So far the environment and the alien physiology seem survivable, if unpleasant, but he’s reluctant to sign off. PsychDiv more so. But that’s odd, right? We shouldn’t be okay with this. We’re being manipulated.” “But, apparently we’re being manipulated well enough that we don’t mind it. Hmm. I wonder.” I pulled a call to SecDiv into conference. “You’d better be wearing shorts. I don’t care if I’ve seen you naked before, that doesn’t inoculate me to the disturbing phenomenon that is flaccid male genitalia.” “So you naked dial her, too?” asked SciDiv, though I couldn’t be sure if he was joking or not. “Christ on a sandwich; you could have told me it was a conference call.” “Have you slept in the last few hours, or, perhaps more importantly, have you dreamed, including daydreaming?” “Uh.” “Okay, I’ll make it easier for you, have you dreamed of a blue alien orgy of some kind?” “Yeah. So I take that it isn’t just me. That’s good, actually. I thought I’d been watching too many Belgian cartoons lately.” “Nope. I’m going to conference in the rest of the Div heads.” It only took a moment to get the others on the line. PsychDiv seemed to have been woken up, because she had bed head, and must have been wearing a nightgown, though she was trying to carefully crop the vidfeed to obscure that fact. “All right. The Abhijñā are broadcasting sex-dreams at us. Could be a friendly, peaceful communication, could be a siren song yanking us towards the rocks. We might even be peeping on an entire planet’s sex life. What are our thoughts?” Suddenly HR blinked onto the call. “I really would have appreciated you calling me,” he complained. “Haley flagged the conversation once you’d notified the Div heads.” “Sorry. I only wanted to talk to the important people. You were scheduled for the less important people conference call after this one.” SecDiv stifled a laugh (badly). SciDiv started. “Well, given that it isn’t likely the species has developed a defense mechanism for wandering-by interstellar visitors, I’d have to assume that it’s a friendly thing. It’s probably meant for diplomatic missions amongst states or nations- one they were able to extend in our direction. Which implies pretty impressive broadcast range, not to mention some exceptional sensors to have detected us this far out.” SecDiv chimed in. “Of course, the extreme unlikelihood of it being a hostile response doesn’t mean my team can ignore that potential. So I’ll look through my division for people who are naturally less susceptible to the blue flu.” PsychDiv: “And you might have an easier go of it if your officers are being asked questions by PsychDiv personnel. I’ll start pinging conscious officers first, and we’ll try to keep them isolated to get the least tainted results. You want to come watch through the dual-mirror?” “Sure,” SecDiv said, and her picture disappeared out of the conference, but her name stayed on the contact list- telling me she was still listening, in case any further developments might impact her job. SciDiv started back up. “I’m honestly surprised that they’re able to talk to us at all. The likelihood that we’d have the right kinds of brains to receive these ‘visions’ is extraordinarily unlikely.” He paused a moment. “Although, it’s possible telepathy is a more common phenomenon than we’d assume. Like sight, or hearing, that are based around naturally occurring phenomena, light and vibration. Maybe we have the tech to hear telepathy even if we can’t speak it. I can’t wait to get to the planet to study the effects more closely.” I butted in. “NavDiv, I want you to get together with Haley. You’re going to have to let her monitor any changes to our flight path- particularly anything non-nominal without expected debris interference. If we correct course, we need to know why- so we don’t go squish on a moon we didn’t know was there.” “Captain,” Haley said, “I have to inform you that I may be compromised, as well. It seems I am undergoing a similar sensory experience, simulated though it may be. I may not be the neutral arbiter of fact I usually am.” “Crap. Okay. We’ll deal with that in a moment. Haley, you’re also going to have to proof whatever contracts or treaties HR okays in the field. It’s possible on-world we’ll end up completely under thrall. We don’t want him selling our ship and crew into slavery for a handful of beads- unless it’s sex-slavery, and we get dental. And since we can’t thoroughly trust the ship’s computers not to have been compromised, we need a plan. An automated one, with no room for deviation. MedDiv, what are the environmentals looking like on-planet? Specifically I need to know maximum exposure times without a suit.” “Well, actually the environment is mild, especially at the location SciDiv and I have marked as the likely capital. Some pollution, but no worse than a metropolitan area on a sunny day. Air is thin but breathable. No notable contaminants beyond what you’d find in a year’s worth of industrial labor; we’ve discovered several new species of microorganism, but you have to remember that our bodies will be as foreign to them as theirs are to us. They won’t be able to survive in our bodies. Given enough time, yes, there could be mutations, and in that scenario cross-species infection is practically a certainty. I’d say three days would be about as far as I’d be comfortable pushing it.” “Okay.” I started mapping out a course on a shared star chart of the system, and Haley made calculations as I went along, and corrected my squiggly course with an optimal path. “We’ll drop shuttles on our first pass. The Nexus will travel on a pre-programmed path around the sun, slingshot back toward Abhijñ and pick up the shuttles and head back out on a trajectory towards our next planet. Total time on world will be just shy of three days. And we can lock in the path so, at worst, we lose three shuttles but the ship gets out of the system.” “Presuming of course that we don’t lock in a course that puts us right into the rocks.” NavDiv said with a smile. “Exactly. It’s a crap plan, but it’s a crap circumstance. Telepathy’s a known unknown- but those kinds of risks are in the job description. We’ve got a week, so use it to prepare: prep your gear, prep your people. SecDiv and I will prep the plan and any necessary contingencies.” A couple days later NavDiv cornered me in the café. “I’ve been talking to Haley, and she had an idea. See, Haley isn’t strictly speaking the ship’s OS. She’s a program operating on top of the ship’s base functionality. She’s an interface. She thinks that by removing her program to a quarantined bit of memory we can keep her from interfering. It’s not a guarantee- because it’s possible that the Abhijñā tech is communicating directly with the OS, but it’s more likely that it’s going through Haley. It might make the ship safer- keep them from having undue influence.” “Do it.” “She thought you’d say that. Actually, we started testing a half hour ago. Otherwise she would have told you herself.” “Haley?” I asked reflexively. A memo popped up on my eyescreen. “I cannot communicate at the moment, Captain. However, please enjoy the cake I baked you before my sabbatical.” It was sweet that she’d left an out of office memo for me, but I was distracted. “There’s cake?” “Sorry, we ate it already.” “So the cake is a lie?” “Well, no, because it existed. Besides, I was lying just then: we saved you a piece.” “Don’t play with me. I can’t take the letdown again, so tell me honestly if there isn’t cake.” “It’s got a pink cream-cheese frosting. Your piece is in your cabin. Please unspas now.” “You shouldn’t mess with a man’s food.” “Says the man who’s doctored my food on at least three distinct occasions.” “’Doctored’ implies doing things to make you healthy; I had other priorities in mind.” “Given that your ‘doctoring’ usually involves pubic hair in my coffee, what priorities would those be?” “Man must know.” “What, how many pubic hairs you can trick someone into ingesting before they snap and kill you with whatever sharp and pointy doohickey he can swipe from EngDiv?” “For science.” “I don’t know why I talk to you.” “Because you have to,” I offered as he sulked away. I have an office, somewhere. I think I have one of those stress balls on the corner of the desk. I think I walked in there, the day I was chosen for the job. But I didn’t like the idea of sitting somewhere alone- or perhaps I didn’t like the idea of sitting someplace people could find me, and where decorum demanded I wear pants, unlike my cabin. Besides which, I could always be raised on the ship’s comm system. I just felt better talking and walking. I knew Elle felt the same, which is why we never spoke in her office, either. “If anything happens to me, you should take temporary command.” “Martial law? That won’t go over well. Also, HR would object.” “I suggest you sedate him. And then secure things long enough for NavDiv to take command. He has the most operational knowledge besides the three of us, and the temperament to make it stick. Presuming I’m not the one kyboshed, I should be able to temporarily oversee any Divs that lose their heads, with help from any seconds.” “But the most important thing, really, is the quarantine,” I continued. “If MedDiv has in any way screwed up, we’ll want to keep the third shuttle open for anyone exposed- to whatever. And do what you can to get your crew not to screw the natives.” “We could always tell them to go out and get laid the night before.” “I suspect that won’t go over well. But we could give them R & R and just tell them no drinking. It’ll mean substantively the same thing, only without HR popping a brow-vein because we’re pimping out SecDiv. And I’ll get word to the other Div segments of the landing team. With any luck we won’t bring back any alien STDs that make people tear off their genitals and beat their neighbors to death with them.” There was a moment, a pause in the conversation, where suddenly I thought I could hear what Elle was thinking, like the blue orgy in our shared unconscious was acting as a membrane, or perhaps it was just the obvious extension from where the conversation had stopped to the next thought. She was going to ask if I had anyone to relieve the “tension” with, and whether or not I’d be interesting in helping her with hers. And at that moment Private Dickbite barreled around a corner and smacked me in the nose with his elbow. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, nearly shitting himself. I imagine he did pee his pants just a little when he realized it was SecDiv with me. She could tell from his expression that the collision had been an accident (which is why she didn’t break his nose in reprisal). “Holy shit, sir. I’m so sorry. I was- I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.” He helped me off the floor. “Well,” I said, holding my nose to keep blood from spattering on my shirt, “that’s irrelevant, because now you’re escorting me to MedDiv.” “Yes,” he hesitated, “sir.” “There isn’t something more important you need to do, is there?” “No sir,” he said, and shook his head to confirm it. “We’ll continue another time, Elle,” I said, and pretended not to notice the combination disappointed and relieved look on her face as she turned to walk away. “What the hell’s with the rushing?” Confused, Dickbite glanced back at an engineer we’d passed. “Tomas? I think he’s Ukrainian. And he’s still mad because last week I kind of puked on his bunk. I swear it was an honest mistake- I thought I was in the can.” “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said; “and EngDiv would have gotten it clean in no time.” “Well, he was in the bunk at the time.” “Ah. But I meant the running. Snake in your boot, or lump in your pants?” “Oh, um. There’s a girl.” “So the lump, then. And you’re playing nice with this one, right?” “Yeah. McCain’s been a godsend. She’s the first woman who ever really… listened to me, I guess.” “You’re not falling in love with your headshrinker, are you?” “No, no. But she listens. And she’s helped. A lot. She thinks I might be ready to interact more intimately with a woman. In a healthy way, I mean.” “And you just talked to then girl, then?” “Yeah. We made plans to get some dinner tomorrow, and watch a video in my room.” “All right. But watch where you’re going, and no more violently skipping through the halls. I might be willing to take a broken nose for love, but others on the crew are more cynical than I am. SecDiv, for one. That would have gotten ugly, and I doubt MedDiv would have been able to put your face back in order in time for your date.” “I’ll be careful, sir.” He saluted and walked off as I entered MedDiv. The admitting nurse was a mousy little woman who looked like she’d blow away if exhaled too deeply on. She took one look at my nose and let out the laugh of a woman four times her size. “You should see the other guy,” I said. “I did. He was entirely unscathed, and went skipping away.” “Damnit.” I’d come up through SecDiv, so I’d broken my nose more times than I could count. And the frequency seemed to afford me a certain amount of fluidity. She smashed it back into place with one quick shove. Then she grabbed an injection gun and shot me up on either side of the bridge. “Local anesthetic and anti-inflammatories. I can also give you a local anti-coagulant if you’re worried about getting raccoon eyes.” I squinted, thinking, and realized my face felt delightfully fuzzy. But the break had been low enough I didn’t think my eyes would blacken. “That’s all right.” Besides which, I’d had excellent luck finding sympathy with women, and furries (female ones, anyway), with raccoon eyes. The rest of the week passed swiftly. I’d playfully avoided SecDiv, or maybe fearfully avoided her. PsychDiv had disapproved of the idea of having her subordinates blow off steam, and even wondered aloud if the exercise mightn’t ‘prime the pump’ and make an alien excursion more likely rather than less. But I wasn’t surprised when SecDiv called me late into the night before we hit Abhijñ; it was a booty call. It was the first time on ship I’d seen her wear enough makeup that I could tell she actually had any on. And she’d programmed her uniform to tighten around her lady bits- accentuating what god gave her. But the deadest giveaway was that she was, for the first time this entire trip, uncertain. It read in her eyes, and if I were a better man I’d have rescued her from it by articulating, simply, what she was struggling to say. “Look, we’re friends, right. But we’ve been more. And right now, I don’t have anyone who I’m seeing, and you don’t have anyone,” and I knew that her checking up on me, for her, was mostly sweet and not creepy. “What I’m trying to get at, and what you’re enjoying watching me stumble around, is that we could arrange for a different aspect to our relationship that could have benefits for the both of us.” It was really hard not to laugh at how awkward it was. And then there was a message flashing at the bottom of her screen. “Shit. There’s a bar fight. Involving my team for tomorrow.” “I’m totally in.” I paused, just a moment, letting the ambiguity hang in the air to be cruel; “I’ll meet you outside the bar. Bring me an extra whomping stick.” And so we whomped together. It was like old times. And like old times, she dropped her guard, and got hit in the face. And when I tried to get her to head straight off to MedDiv, she refused, until the last of the partiers had been subdued. Then I took her there myself. While we were waiting for a free nurse, I couldn’t stop staring at her in profile. Even ruffled, it was hard not to notice the effort she’d put in. “You looked nice tonight.” “I bet you say that to all the girls who’ve been hit in the face.” “Admittedly, you looked better before the punch in the face. But I’d still hit it.” “You have; unless you meant my nose, but I guess you’ve hit that, too.” She smiled, then grimaced. Then hit me in the arm. “Ah. Don’t make me smile. It hurts.” “You do know you punching me also hurts.” “Yeah, but you deserve it.” “I probably do, at that.” “Ah, SecDiv, my arch nemesis.” “Oh, shit,” she said. It was MedDiv, and he was dramatically snapping a pair of exam gloves as he walked over to us. “You’ve owed me an exam for months now. And every time you come in, you snake oil my physicians into giving you a pass on the physical and just treating whatever new contusion you’ve brought to them- despite repeated notations I’ve made in your records. But when I heard there was another fight in the crew deck I knew you’d end up here. Because you always do. She’s going to be a while, captain.” “Oh, I’m happy to stick around,” I said, getting up. “Not in the exam room, you won’t,” she said, glaring. “You’re no fun,” I replied. Though I honestly had no interest; medical nudity isn’t nearly as much fun as recreational nudity. I half expected to get another booty call from Elle; I wonder if things would have gone differently if I had. But the next time I saw her was during the mission brief. HR was running it, because he enjoyed that kind of thing. The rest of us already knew our roles, and our background information, but something about going through those motions soothed his savage beast- or at least made him a bit less of a prick on the trip down. He was pleasant enough I hardly realized we’d touched down until the door on our shuttle unlocked. Abhijñ was arid. Like Arizona. Only saltier. “You’re supposed to be wearing a mask,” the MedOff who had traveled in our shuttle scolded. I gave her a raspberry, and took in a gigantic lungful of air. The Nexus had the best filtration system man had ever devised- and it still had that canned locker-room heaviness to it (though only occasionally the smell). This was air. Clean air. Dry air. You could have told me there was anthrax in that air and I still wouldn’t have put on a mask. “Stop, wait, don’t,” SecDiv said in a disinterested monotone as I ran off the shuttle. The SecOff team was having trouble doing their work. The telepathic mellow that had affected us on the ship was much stronger here. They were wandering around in a malaise, like sheep in a pen. “This is the crappiest LZ I’ve ever seen,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “Tighten things up.” They couldn’t tell if they wanted to listen to me, until SecDiv stepped out of the shuttle. Apparently whatever mood altering was going on, the fear she instilled was stronger. They trotted out into an octagon perimeter, and watched their zones. “Got locals at eight o’clock.” Caulerpa’s king had been all pomp and circumstance, but this was different. A column of the Abhijñā were flooding down the street towards us. And as I played over the cautionary morals of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles I wondered if that was the moment we should have run. The blue wave wasn’t just marching at us from one direction, but from everywhere. They were flooding out of gently curving spires and towers that were beautiful but violent slashes across the sky. Then they stopped. HR stood in the center of our cordon, clinging to our commbox. I stepped forward, even with the edge of our perimeter. A female, a little taller than the rest, spoke, but it reverberated with the sound of a thousand voices. “We are of one mind.” I heard it in my head; I couldn’t tell if she was speaking with her lipless mouth as well, or if I imagined that as I tried to make sense of it. It felt like my brain having a runny shit all over itself- in a pleasant sort of way. “Groovy,” I said. There was a pause, her skin flashed blue, then purple. Scanning the crowd I saw many different colors flash across their faces, like a chameleon’s camouflage, only with a light glow. Then the procession turned towards the tallest and most impressive building in the city; it looked like one of the more intricate musical notes, but drawn in a puffy yet slippery Cyrillic script. Walking along the procession I noticed the Abhijñā kept looking at us with large, dewey eyes. I wondered how much moisture they lost from them in this heated clime. The building that looked like a clef was farther than I’d realized, and the walk there took over an hour. The base was a stadium, and we were funneled through tunnels onto the floor. There were tens of thousands in the arena around us. Apparently they’d been nosy. They’d gleaned what our purpose was. Hell, they’d even picked up our minimum and maximum offers, so they knew our parameters. They agreed to a third of the way between the min and max, which they said was being generous. After that, their translator “spoke” to HR alone. I gathered from the crowd they could hear the exchange, but we couldn’t. He nodded, and said aloud, “we have an accord.” Then he turned and whispered in my ear. “As it’s been explained to me, they don’t have signatures. Written documents don’t have any legal standing here. They have something called imprinting- putting the meaning of the agreement directly onto someone’s mind. And luckily for my virgin brain, they want you. Specifically, she wants you. Requested, was the word I think they were reaching for, but it came across as she ‘craves’ you.” “You did explain I’m not a turkey sandwich.” “Not in so many words; we’re trying to avoid a diplomatic incident, here. But after the imprinting, you’ll have the legal authority, as her vassal, to sign the contracts on her and her planet’s behalf.” I hesitated. “What? The big bad war hero captain afraid of a supple blue girl?” “She’s easily eighteen by human equivalence; girl makes it sound sordid- so did supple.” “I know, that’s why I chose it. Now stop being such a sissy.” She leaned over the table; there was lots of blue cleavage. “I can take it from here, negotiator.” Then it was like the room was dark, and everyone except her was in the shadows, and there was light, a soft glow, framing her in a halo. “Do I have permission to imprint you?” There was a light tremble to her voice, and I wondered then what the cultural significance of this was; was she asking me to dance or was it something more intimate. Then there was a sharp sensation at the back of my head, no, in my head, near the back. But not a pain, exactly, just intensity, to the point of it being uncomfortable. I picked up a pen, but it was more like we picked up the pen together, like the way a man uses teaching a woman to golf as a pretense to getting his arms around her. And we pushed it around, and I realized I was writing an alien name I’d never seen in a script I didn’t recognize. Then I set the pen down, and it was over, and she was staring at me, blushing. Like the first time somebody sticks a finger in you, it was awkward. Hurt a little, and tickled, and afterwards I was left a little frisky. I don’t recall exactly what all happened afterwards, with the ceremony, with the woman, but I woke up sticky, with a smile on my face. I had no idea how much time had passed, and found it difficult to care- even if it meant I was going to be stuck on this planet. |
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