Translator’s Note: In the following many words and phrases, including names, are used that express human ideas somewhat similar to the ideas of the races tagged in human catalogs as Romeo-10s, whose home star is Catequin. Be warned that these are often about as comparable as Thor was to Jupiter; all that justified jovis dies becoming Thursday was that both gods were male and handled lightning bolts.
In particular, ordinary English time references (year, month, etc.) as usual refer to Earth periods but are approximate. The Romeo-10 “work cycle” is coincidentally very close to 12 Earth hours, and they contentedly work 1 cycle on, 1 cycle off.
According to another usual convention, the alien narrator is designated as Smith, in this case Capt. Smith, and other personal names follow the standard roster.
Smith refers to other alien races by nicknames not immediately matchable to human terminology. Since such matching is not essential to the narrative, the names of warlike races in Earth history are used here.
Historian’s Note: Captain bint Jaber failed to detect two ships mentioned by Smith. On the other hand, Smith finds her Ship D not worth mentioning.
Kali skin those Yankees alive and boil them for me to eat!
They knew the Danes had just upgraded Danish ECM, and the Yankees were checking to find out if we knew it too. We didn’t, so we didn’t sense the Danish ship, and ffft!!—one shot and we were toast. Fortunately, the Danes really had no interest in us; we’d just wandered too close for some junior marksman to resist. Nevertheless we were heavily damaged and, no surprise, the Yankees came back to loot us.
The small surprise was they pulled out of looting early when a Maori ship approached, even though it just sailed on by. That’s why I’m here to tell this story at all.
Our Captain and Executive Officer had been so shamed by the situation that when the Yankees boarded, they had opted for personal consultations with Thoth in the next life. I would have joined them, but I loathed our former XO, and the thought of having hours of tea ceremony in front of Thoth with her stayed my hand. So I was in charge of a ship that should have been dead, but wasn’t.
The repair crews worked wonders. In less than three work cycles—half a cycle before and two after the Yankee looting—they got some power restored. They were barely slowed by an incursion of lumbering Lurkers, that hopelessly rookie race, who tried to loot us after the Yankees. Within two more cycles, we could limp enough to get back to our interstellar module. Both repair crews celebrated with a contest for who could throw a Lurker furthest out from an airlock.
Now that we could leave the HX area and repair our short-distance capability, the question became where to do it. We were newly arrived, so our holds were still empty and just returning home would be embarrassing. The region is not a friendly one for us Romeo-10s, so our choice narrowed quickly to the closest M-class star system—a solitary, shown in our primary star system database as having, at most, non-threatening inhabitants on one planet. Being without a companion star, we could expect enough planetary debris to fix our ship with.
* * *
During the flight we made all further possible repairs, up to about 5% effectiveness. [Translator’s note: The Romeo-10s use an octal number system. Smith’s actual estimate is three sixty-fourths, = 4-11/16%. Subsequent approximations of numbers for readability are made silently.] Our bored comm officer, Lt. Cmdr. Jones, detected intermittent transmissions from the target star, and possibly two or three to it from the HX area. Apparently the primitives had begun approaching civilization in the last few centuries! Jones proposed we call our target star Orpheus because it sang. It is too far away from Catequin to be visible there, so that will probably stick as the popular name in our catalogs.
I requested closer study. The results were reassuring. The comm was barely interstellar-class, and the transmissions to it were apparently from our Lurkers in the HX area! Jones confirmed that the Lurkers’ origin from Orpheus had not only been published in some obscure astropolitical journal but had appeared in several of the 13-year supplements still waiting for merging with our primary database.
I ordered that the database be brought up to date immediately and issued a standing order to update it again within 7 months of each regular supplement’s appearance in the future. Mentally, I consigned our useless former Captain and XO to becoming Kali’s latrine cleaners.
Given that the Lurkers would presumably detect our approach and, despite their pitiful weaponry, might organize a reception, we decided to dress for the occasion. We created a decoy husk for them to meet, while we cloaked and came into the system from a somewhat different direction.
* * *
Just outside the Orpheus system proper, twenty or so of the Lurkers’ best warships converged on our decoy and blew it to pieces. We watched with delight, like vampires at a rugby match, [Translator’s Note: The parallel is reasonably accurate, and you don’t want to know more.] [Historian’s Note: It is, and you really don’t!] as the decoy took out two of their ships, using the little popguns that we’d added as mere props. Meanwhile we slid by undetected and aimed for the innermost planet. We had determined it was rich in the metals we needed, so we didn’t need to cruise around collecting debris after all.
In accordance with SOP, when we finally docked among the Lurker ships on Orpheus I we sterilized the landing site settlement. When we had secured the area and made a good start on open-pit mining, Cmdr. Dr. Robinson, our science officer, pointed out, “We’re going to be in this system for maybe 5 months upgrading to about 38% effective, the highest we can hope for with no real repair yard. It will be twice that or more before our reception committee gets turned around and can reach us here. We should explore.”
He was right. We couldn’t really camouflage our presence on the inner planet, so if something big showed up, we were dead anyway. It made sense to have exploration crews find out what we were dealing with in this system. The question was where.
Some of the hobbyists among our repair crews had already begun exploring the nearby settlement, and would continue to do so, but they didn’t think it was worth professional investigation (or else they didn’t want to share their big new toy with more people), and the rest of Orpheus I even less so.
Orpheus II seemed to be a half-completed gas giant. It had the rocky core. It had the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen to make thick clouds. It was only lacking massive amounts of hydrogen and helium to puff up the atmosphere and planetary size.
Orpheus IV looked like a lightly inhabited world of a fairly standard sort: A barren surface with widely separated habitations huddling near one oasis or another.
Beyond was an asteroid belt and a gas-giant belt. We had not seen much activity among their moons and planetoids on the way in, and gas giants themselves are rarely worth the effort.
The arithmetically astute reader will have noticed that in the above list I skipped over Orpheus III. The narratively astute will realize that we chose it as our destination. You are correct. The third planet was distinctively different, over much of its surface being a primordial hotbed jungle planet teeming widely and thickly with life (forgive the echoes of bad popular entertainments). Of course in the real world, such planets, where much of the surface and atmospheric carbon is sucked up into organisms, are rare.
“We should go to Orpheus III,” said Dr. Robinson, and who was I to disagree?
However, I decided not to send him off on his own, because Doc has no commercial sense. To have any hope of redeeming ourselves on this voyage, we had to come back with something valuable. Moreover, Cmdr. Brown, my chief engineer, not only knew exactly what had to be done to fix the ship but had earned greater respect from the crew than had I. So rather than hover uselessly over her during the repair phase of our stay, I chose to lead the scouting party and leave Brown to do her engineering.
* * *
As we got close to Orpheus III, I became more and more impressed with the sheer thickness of its life, which had apparently made dozens and dozens of spectacular changes to the planetary surface. Much of that surface was covered with liquid H2O, water, with temperatures and pressures close enough to the compound’s triple point that there were significant areas of water-ice on the surface as well. That would have been strange enough. But even stranger, though H2O was the main constituent of the surface, water-vapor was not a main constituent of the atmosphere. It was present, in enough concentration to form water-clouds, but the two major atmospheric constituents were molecular nitrogen and, very oddly, oxygen. Dr. Robinson concluded that the life cycle’s carbon uptake was so massive that it had leeched most of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and replaced it with O2!
Doc Robinson first wanted to drop into one of the lush green areas on the equator and wallow in the thick life mat. I overruled that. “Way, way too many unknowns!” I protested. “If there’s going to be any looted HX tech on this world, or even interesting native tech, it’ll be in the areas of rectilinear grids. They may look like simply animal-made honeycombs [Translator’s Note: Romeo-10’s honey-analog producers never have discovered the efficiencies of the hexagon.] but plenty of sentient beings also produce such designs—including the cities of our early ancestors, before we developed burrowing technology.
“We’ll hit those areas first,” I said. Doc never holds a grudge, and he agreed.
We started our exploration with what I call the Horsefly Tactic, after an obnoxious blood-sucking insect on my home continent that attacks our horses, which have evolved long, swishy tails to swat those flies. [Translator’s Note: These “horses” are milk and meat animals rather than riding stock, and in most previous contexts have therefore been translated “cows”.] When a fly first approaches its target horse, it buzzes in fast and noisy, veering in random directions, until it determines which end of the horse is doing the swatting and how likely it is to do so. If the horse is reasonably placid, or it gets bored with swatting after several buzzing passes, the horsefly comes in quietly, lands lightly, and takes its meal.
On the way to Orpheus III with our five scout ships, we had to spend a boring work cycle to swat a few futile Lurker attacks ourselves, from ships, satellites, and surface-based missiles, before we could start the Tactic proper. After all that swatting, we were 91% sure what the results of the Tactic would be, but I had my heart [Translator’s Note: Literally, hind-brain.] set on trying it!
Our ships had five drones each, and we sent them over the Lurkers’ biggest rectilinear area, flying fast and random but buzzy—easy for the primitives to see though hard to hit. The response was spectacular! The primitives lit up the sky with their defenses, and smoked it up a lot, too, none of it very effectively. We determined that none of the Lurker defense systems could hit us.
We waited a work cycle, during which I produced charts for my report on the Tactic, and then with a more extensive pass determined that we could also counter all their weaponry. Our drones came and went, went and came, over the five largest rectilinear areas, which I may as well call “cities” as our ancestors might have, though these are giants by comparison to theirs. Then we left. We would let things settle down for a while before we slipped in.
In the middle of the fifth work cycle afterward, a scout landed in each of the three largest cities. Two were at the western edge of the largest ocean, one occupying a large bay on an island, the other on the mainland to its south. My ship’s city sprawled on the western edge of the second largest ocean. The pilot settled on a small island in a large river that contained a concentration of the tallest aboveground structures.
Given the results of the Tactic, we didn’t bother with sterilization.
The first surprising thing our sensors showed was how very shallow all three cities were; most of what there was to an area was visible from the surface and virtually everything else much less than a kilometer under it. “These are decoy areas to be seen from space,” I thought. The other two scouts had stayed off-planet as ready reserve, and for many work cycles I had their crews run ground-penetrating radar to locate the real centers of population.
The results finally forced me to concede that the Lurkers were even stranger than we had expected. It’s as if their builders are half-afraid to dig, or addicted to seeing the sky.
The second immediate surprise was that our standard anti-surveillance shield interacted strongly with the atmosphere. The Engineer for my scout complained, “This atmosphere is such an oddball mix! Dense, cool, and always with some water-vapor as a trace chemical. When the shield ionizes that atmosphere, it creates a god-awful acoustic disturbance, continuous visible light, and a lot of ozone.”
“Are the shields working?” I asked Lt. Cmdr. Black.
“Other than using up a lot of energy, and advertising to the Lurkers where we are in general, yes,” he answered. “They’re blocking all means of surveillance, as designed.”
“Have we got the energy to spare?”
“We aren’t flying or maneuvering, so yes.”
“Then keep them up,” I ordered.
The ships being relatively secure, we went exploring. Over the work cycles our more adventurous members discovered a few interesting sights and sounds in the open, but most of what was commercially valuable, and of what was vid- or even virty-worthy, appeared inside Lurker halls and corridors that were much like the interiors of HX and our own ships, familiar substitutes for our home burrows.
However, the shields, sprouting lightning bolts on their surfaces and shedding waves of ugly brown ozone gas, were not only obnoxious to us but the inhabitants didn’t seem to be faring too well, either. We found corpses from extremely tiny on up to a few Lurker size, much bigger than our people, which (as later observation confirmed) were in fact Lurkers. The plants we found were also dead.
The many kinds of animal bodies and their diversity reminded us that this was a jungle planet. We found a number of bodies wholly or partly covered by a thick stringy growth that the xenobiologists call “hair”—sometimes short and stiff; sometimes long, either wavy or straight, but always flexible; and occasionally thick and coiled. Brought back into ship’s atmosphere, all of these proved extremely pleasing to the ungloved touch, but especially the last.
On our second expedition, Doc Robinson found a quadruped corpse with beautiful black hair of the thick, coiled variety. He ordered it skinned for a throw rug in his quarters, where it proved just as delightful to the unshod touch. He made a virty and distributed it among the crew.
Interestingly, the Lurkers were exceptional in having only sparse or no hair on most of their bodies, but about half had hair growing thickly on their heads in distinctive patterns of all types, luxuriant, close-cropped, and in between.
Almost as soon as we began exploring each city, we encountered bands of Lurkers armed with primitive projectile and energy weapons. The ensuing combat-and-evasion [Translator’s Note: A single ancient word in the original. Romeo-10s have never considered retreat, etc., dishonorable.] soon grew game-like for most of us, given our overwhelming superiority in speed, weaponry, and detection tech. (The Lurkers’ only known combat-and-evasion advantage is their astounding acuity in the visible light range.) Nevertheless the Lurkers remained persistently curious and combat-and-evasion was often necessary throughout our stay. The whole time we were on the planet, I sobbed [Translator’s Note: Literally, and with more anatomical accuracy, “bled”] over the moronic loss of their futile lives until my second spleen began to dry! … Right.
Several members of each crew, those who perversely enjoy clamping down on the fear-urge to evacuate their body-plumbing that is induced by being alone in wide-open spaces, took advantage of their chance to indulge on Orpheus III. Their adventures demonstrated that the Lurkers’ long-distance weapons can damage armor, even ripping off a limb or two before you can scuttle to safety in an access tunnel. That annoyance did not deter anyone from repeating the experience, of course.
But in one case the practice nearly led to a fatality. Specialist White somehow failed to immediately return to safety when attacked, remaining in the open until the Lurkers had applied enough primitive firepower to blow her suit apart. Before exposure to the alien atmosphere put her beyond repair, her comrades managed to retrieve a big piece of her, but she’s going to be a very long time in a regen tank. The Lurkers opposing her retrieval were of course neutralized.
She was our worst casualty on either planet in the Orpheus system.
* * *
About 64 work cycles after our arrival on Orpheus III—almost exactly an observational month for the planet’s single moon, as Doc Robinson pointed out—a fleet of five Lurker ships took up orbit around that moon, with another three on trajectory to arrive 64 cycles or so after that.
Cmdr. Green, with support from most of the other officers and enlisted crew, argued for a preemptive strike, citing the impressive quantity of primitive weaponry on the moon and the likelihood she saw of the Lurkers launching from the moon at the cities we were exploring, now that they were reinforced by mobile ships.
This was unadulterated horseshit, of course. Part of the real reason was that shooting Lurker ships would simulate being top of the loot-chain at an HX Sphere, where we all dreamed dearly of being.
However, it was not just our being trigger-happy. Practicing ship combat-and-evasion was impossible near the HX area; it would inevitably have led to the real thing, sooner rather than later, with our ship usually at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the Captain before me had repeatedly denied requests to leave station and take shooting practice in an area safe for it. Consequently I was happy for the opportunity to allow maneuvers against live targets, pitiful as they might be, using the weapons Cmdr. Green was charged to maintain and to train personnel on.
So we pulled up stakes and headed for the Lurkers’ moon. After comprehensively kicking butt in orbit, in an engagement prolonged by some spectacular evasive action by all five of their ships, we took target practice against the installations on the moon, rotating gunners until several eights of crew had qualified for marksmanship badges. (Cmdr. Brown’s reports indicated mining Orpheus I had yielded a surplus of ammunition materials.)
I also seized the chance to rotate the reserve ships down to continue the exploration in two of the cities we had chosen, replacing two of the original landers. There was some argument among the science officers for choosing additional sites when we settled back, but the winner of a board game tournament held to decide the issue opted for depth rather than breadth.
When the second fleet of three Lurker ships arrived on schedule, it was very cautious, hovering at the L-5 point rather than the moon. It didn’t bother us; we didn’t bother it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s much more to tell about our exploration.
* * *
In all our searching, we found only the barest smatterings of HX technology, and even less of interest in Lurker developments from it. On the tech front, Orpheus III was a bust.
But when tech fails, exotic materials and art never do. We collected actual pieces of the few charming and the many astonishingly grotesque art pieces, all small (prices never increase in a favorable ratio to volume, and we wanted to use our cargo space efficiently), and we made high-def threedies, vids, and virties of many more in all sizes.
In the end the most valuable stuff available in reasonable quantities was the hair we had found early on. Apparently the Lurkers felt so, too. In the art collection process, a Sgt. Mustard came across an animated diorama and made a vid of it that quickly became popular across our fleet. It showed one Lurker cutting the skin and attached hair off the head of another, then holding up the result in triumph as the victim screamed.
For the terminally bored among the crew, that was enough to set off a fashion of hunting the locals, taking “scalps” (another xenobiologists’ word) as trophies and for sale when we get home.
* * *
Doc Robinson still wanted to visit one of the lush areas, but my objections still held. So he proposed visiting a comparatively remote island on the far side of the world with very little rectilinear organization. With several work-cycles left before departure, I approved his sortie.
And there Doc got to be Doc—the crazy scientist. He found that he could disguise himself as a Lurker and walk among them without violence. And to his total astonishment, he discovered an animal completely covered with thick, coiled hair, like that of his wondrous rug. He brought it back, and when we saw that it was better textured than a Lurker scalp with sixty-four times the area, the hunt was on! Doc was convincing that the island was not the place to look for more. It took a week of searching through smaller and smaller cities, but we finally found wide open areas on the surface with thousands of these animals all closely huddled in the same places. Score! We finally now had at least something in our holds.
* * *
All through this, the repairs on Orpheus I were proceeding on schedule or a little ahead. Cmdr. Brown sent word it was time to head back, and in spite of all the hunting and combat-and-evasion fun we were having, we were really happy to do so, arriving four or five work cycles before the big ship was ready to go.
Some of the crew wanted to depart through the Orpheus system defense fleet, which was still headed toward Orpheus III and Orpheus IV, to “teach it a lesson”. I vetoed that idea, although our return course did take us close by their incoming fleet, without incident. We’d already taught this Lurkers’ backwater world as much of a lesson as it needed, and we had more important things to do: First, getting back to the HX hulk in hope of adding some substantial value to the hold—not a lot of hope, but … Then it was on to Catequin and a real repair yard to spend our profits on. And after that the hulk would still be waiting for our full loving attention.