Every newly contacted race is supposed to find a place in the Galactic Compact. Most of them end up dying.
Once the gate network opens up into some new inhabited system, an official contact team and it’s normal gaggle of hanger-ons jump through. The token Compact gunboats lurk menacingly, translation packets and threat profile’s are thrown together (my race warranted a brief “harmless, grounded” and a mere {two-gigabyte} morpheme map), and dozens of alien ships rush towards the newly contacted race, bringing with them the wonders of interstellar civilization.
One or two Rraey ships start trading for local delicacies in pursuit of their specie’s goal to eat a piece of everything (and everyone) in the galaxy. A budding Schlael ship discretely checks the various planetary bodies for new nursery worlds. Merchants and primitive-art specialists sample from the planet’s cultural achievements, while science vessels harvest whatever data they can find. There’s even the odd pleasure yacht on or schooner, home to some rich and well-connected sophont out on a pleasure cruise. All are safe in the knowledge that the might of the Compact Navy will protect them.
Then {a month} passes and the Compact’s initial ‘protective period’ ends. The Compact bureaucrats lament their failure to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, gather up their gunboats, and leave. All the various emissaries of civilization follow. Daan raiders arrive and ravage the system {a few days later}.
One ship always stays, though. A Nedji ship, its crew chosen from the best of the Remnant Flock, stands one last watch over the newly contacted race. When the Daan come, they fight back.
I’d been chosen for the honour of a crew position on board the RFS Unforgotten only a few {months} before the Sol gate came online. If my extensive study of linguistics and xenopsychology had given me an edge, a lengthy {year-long} posting aboard a Grx commerce freighter had all but guaranteed me the slot. Nobody else in the fleet was as well-suited to give our warning to a new race.
The Sol connection happened {years} earlier than anyone in Compact space had expected, catching the Remnant Flock unprepared for the first time in a century. The Unforgotten was still unfinished, equipped with only a handful of undersized graser projectors and no deployable defences. The crew hadn’t even begun to work up to full combat efficiency. We didn’t have a choice, though. We set off for Sol.
Our first sign of anything unusual came when we begged a contact package off of a sympathetic Walli merchant captain. (Not for us lowly client races is the full glory of the Compact navy. We make do with the scraps.) Instead of the brief, unimaginative descriptor the bored GCN paper pushers normally revelled in, Sol had warranted two full paragraphs:
contacted species appears capable of primitive manned spaceflight; acceleration of manned vessels limited to the durability of their bodies, but evidence of crude projectile weapons that can exceed these specifications have been observed
CAUTION: contacted species have spread across two planets. planetary body III appears to be the homeworld of contacted species: standard {carbon-based oxygen-nitrogen} atmosphere; beware of strong tidal forces, unpredictable geological activity, and dangerous weather patterns. planetary body IV appears to be a colony of the contacted species; beware of dangerous weather and minimal atmosphere.
On their own, all of those snippets weren’t surprising. Sol wasn’t the first system where live had evolved on violent and dangerous planets, and this newly contacted race was far from the first to reach primitive spaceflight by contact. But having a species to survive long enough on a broken planet to reach the stars was almost unheard of.
The translation protocols were unusual, too. Instead of the usual three or four dialects, it detailed more than fifty distinct languages. I’d only ever seen as many in studies of scattered tribal species, races of individuals doomed to die on the same rock they were born. It didn’t seem possible that a spacegoing race could manage with as many divisions as they had.
When I brought my concerns to the Flocklord, though, he only fluttered his wings in amusement. “The Compact team may just be trying to make this farce sound important. It wouldn’t be the first time one of those bastards forged information.”
“I don’t think they faked this, sir,” I replied. “Anyone smart enough to produce this much detail and consistency would never buy it. I’m almost certain its real.”
The Flocklord folded his wings down in concern. “Does this affect our calling?”
“No, sir. Despite evidence of a fragmented and diverse culture, they’ve formed some sort of unified front towards us and the Compact ships. Most of the flotilla’s calling it the Human Alliance.”
“Human?”
“Seems to be what they call themselves as a group, sir, although they’ve got a whole host of other names. No idea why they’d need a dozen different ways to label a flockmate, but they’ve got them.”
“It won’t matter for much longer. Find their leaders and make contact with them.”
I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t expected to do anything more than advise on this than advise on language.
“It looks like their leaders are nested in the large, rotating space station just outside the limits of the gate. Most of the flotilla’s concentrating their efforts there.”
“You’d better join them. Establish a connection and get started with the warning process while I get the rest of our crew into fighting shape.”
Continued in comments.
{Two hours} later I was awkwardly perched across from a human, fighting the urge to bolt.
Humans are unmistakably predators — even the way the man across from me sized me up made my feathers itch. On a Nedji ship I would have scurried up the walls to safety, but on this cramped vessel the {six-foot} monstrosity could easily reach me wherever I fled.
While Nedji are definitely striking, there isn’t a race in Compact space that finds us imposing. We measure {four feet} from our rear climbing-arms to our head, though our wings span a good {six feet} when unfurled, and make do with our thick coat of downy feathers and a bandolier in lieu of clothing. Our wings boast enough colour to make up for it, though, and four deep scarlet orbs add a dash of majesty to our beaked face. We’re a species born to ride the thermals of our homeworld and nest amongst its tall trees. We fended off the predators of our past through sheer numbers and tools, and we fled to the skies when we could not.
We never walked into an enclosed space with a predator, sat down across from it, and “shook hands.” Millions of years of evolution cried out in horror when I realized that the voice in my ear, delivered courtesy of my small translation unit, wanted me to let the human pin one of my grasping-arms and wrench it up and down..
I had to tamp down a strong urge to urinate and flee when I felt the carefully restrained strength of the muscles in his grasping-hand. Another surge of panic arose when he bared a rather nasty set of teeth in my direction. Only the soft, insistent voice in my ear averted a disastrous first Human-Nedji contact.
That being said, it still took me a good {thirty seconds} to realize he was waiting for a response. I blinked apologetically.
“Sorry, but I’m afraid that I… ah… missed that last bit.”
I felt a jolt of surprise as the human bared his teeth and let out a warbling sound vaguely reminiscent of our own joysong. The voice in my ear called it laughter.
“That’s a first. Most everyone I’ve entertained today hasn’t cared a whit about what I said. I’m John Gaulle, junior ambassador of the United Humanity Alliance, and would like to formally request the reason for your meeting.”
“In a little less than one of your months, almost everyone who came through that gate today is going to leave. Then the Daan were going to come. Then you’ll die.”
Much to my surprise, this drew another laugh. “So you’re saying that all the good aliens are going to leave, and then the bad aliens are going to come and kill us all?”
“They did to the Nedji.”
The human quieted. “The Nedji?”
“My people. The Flock. When the gate connection formed, we were excited. We’d long dreamt of the stars–what flying species doesn’t?–but we never expected to have someone someone give us the key for free.
In a way, they didn’t. Some Compact bureaucrat deemed us a dead-end, more useful as a commodity than a people, and the Compact stepped aside to let their Daan privateers visit our system.
They slaughtered us. Warships filled our skies and rained fire down on our cities and forests. The luckiest among us were captured and taken as slaves. Others were rounded up and butchered, sold as an exotic delicacy to species like the Rraey or simply killed for sport.”
“Wait, the Rraey?” interrupted the human. “Those Ewoks that were trading for nothing but food?”
“That sounds like the Rraey. They’ve got some sort of religious fascination with eating sentients. One of the nastier races out there — they do a lot of trade with the Daan occupying our homeworld.”
“Ugh. So how’d you guys end up here?”
The question came out of nowhere. “Sorry?”
“If your race became a bunch of livestock, how’d you manage to bring a ship alongside the galaxy’s finest?”
“Oh. The remnant of the Great Flock that managed to survive the Daan occupation stole one of their ships. They didn’t see us as a threat — most of us were either penned up in breeding camps or gracing buffet tables galaxy-wide by then. We weren’t advanced enough to overpower the guards on one ship, much less three, but we managed it. We call it The Escape.”
The translation the small box squawked out left me feeling a tad cheated. In our tongue, The Escape’s a beautiful, harsh, and hopeful string of musical notes that are hard to sing without feeling a little bit awed. In the human tongue, it’s three syllables.
“So all three got out?”
“No, just one. Two sacrifice themselves to save the last surviving Flocklord’s vessel. We built up from there.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“Where else would we be? Before, we were artists and poets and sculptors and singers. We never learned to hate until the Daan came, but we learned that lesson well. It’s the highest of honours to be chosen to resist them. The Nedji have stood alongside a hundred races through their final days.”
“So you send ships to die” The human’s surprisingly mobile face contorted into a frown.
“You expect us to stop the Daan? The Compact sees to it that they get powerful ships and fearsome weapons; they like their status quo too much to let any but the most select of races reach membership. Those Compact bureaucrats negotiating with your senior ambassadors are stalling. The deadline they’ve given you for admittance is going to pass, everyone but us is going to leave, and then the Daan are going to come a-raiding. They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again.”
“We might be able to change that last bit,” the human said as his face split into a savage grin. “We’ve been preparing.”
I was ushered into some sort of holding area. The table of foodstuffs set up in the corner immediately caught my eyes and, after a surreptitiously scan with my datapad (there’s roughly even odds that two species can eat the same food), I reached out and snagged a small, soft bundle I couldn’t identify. It’s smell reminded me of a local grass we’d managed to salvage from Nediji, but it’s hard shell and spongy innards didn’t quite fit with my image of the small tufts of seeds.
I’d pecked off about half of it, my eyes closed in pleasure as the rich, vaguely tart flavour swept through me, when someone spoke.
“Like the sourdough?”
My self-control finally broke. Before the speaker had finished I’d scurried up into the corner of the roof, my climbing-arms latched onto the grille of a small air duct. The human, only halfway into the room, looked at me in surprise.
“Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you, just wanted to see if you like the cooking. Wasn’t sure if we’d get it right — only had a couple of hours to put it all together, y’know.”
My translator was speaking into my ear again — it identified the pale-skinned human as female, and (belatedly) drew my attention to the humour in the newcomer’s voice. I gingerly descended back to the floor, fully intending to smooth things over. My curiosity got the better of me, though.
“Sourdough?”
“Yeah, bread. Like the roll you were eating. You seemed to be enjoying it.”
“It’s… good. Although I’ve been raised on mealworm and grass seeds, so that’s not too surprising. Never had a chance to try a planet’s cooking before.”
“Enjoy it while you can, then. I’m Faith O’Neal, by the way. Senior United Earth Alliance ambassador. Figured this would make a better meeting room than one of the cells we had you in before.”
I cast my eyes up to the tall ceiling. “It is a bit more roomy.”
She smiled, and for once I didn’t get the urge to dash for a high branch. Maybe there was something in the bread.
“So,” she said after a moment. “What’s your name.”
I’d been ready for this question since we stepped on board, and it almost surprised me that it hadn’t been brought up.
“Nedji don’t really have names,” I said. “I’m known by description, or by scent, or song, but rarely by name. If you have to call me anything, mottled-crest-broken-tailfeather will do, but it’s not necessary. We hadn’t even named our homeworld, Nediji, when the Daan came.”
“Really? Why Nedji and Nediji?”
“They’re the first parts of the dirge the Flocklord sang as we fled. Loosely translated to English, they mean Those Who Shall Remember and The Place of Those who Shall Remember.”
“Ah. Makes sense.” She went still for another moment, and then she spoke again, this time quieter. “We believe you.”
“Just like that? Most other races take a little bit more convincing. You’ve only had the data we provided for a few of your hours, and I doubt you started analyzing it right away.”
“I’ve been in talks with these so-called Compact specialists since the moment that gate spun up. Humans spend enough time arguing to know when somebody’s stalling, and these guys are textbook examples.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
I probably shouldn’t have been as blunt as I was, but Nedji aren’t politicians. Besides, she didn’t seem to take offence.
“Like John said, we’ve been preparing.” She pulled a small screen out of a pocket and tapped a control. I took the opportunity to scurry over to the buffet table and snag another piece of bread.
By the time I was back over to my seat, a the centre of the room had become a holotank. A small three-dimensional image of the gate was projected in the centre of the room, along with scaled image of the station.
There were also a lot of ships that I couldn’t remember seeing from the deck of the Unforgotten. On screen, they looked dangerous, even if the human’s tech level made them easy to dismiss.
“We picked up the gate about half a century ago. Some lucky bastard had his telescope aimed at a star when it passed in front of it. He drew a straight line from where it was to one of Venus’s Lagrange points, reset his scope, and caught it passing in front of another star. Damn thing was moving at a decent fraction of the speed of light, and it was slowing down. Asteroids don’t do that.
We’ve dreamed of first contact for a while, but having it right on our doorstep still came as a bit of a shock. It took about a decade of war to settle down.”
“War with who?” I interrupted. Who’d these humans fight if all the aliens were on the other side of the gate?
“Ourselves,” she said dismissively. I filed that away as a disturbing yet interesting revelation as she continued.
“We almost destroyed ourselves trying to come to an agreement about what to do with this. My side won out eventually. What had once been called the United Nations became the United Human Alliance, and we started building.
In case the object was peaceful, we made this ship. Spared no expense, really, and tried to make it accommodating to as many forms of life as we could think of. Almost managed a home run, too,” she added with a smile. “Didn’t have quite the right setup for those plants.”
I broke in when my translator finished explaining their concept of a plant. “The Schlael? They wouldn’t come on board even if you could accommodate them. They do everything through those tame bugs of theirs — I’m not even sure if they can talk.”
“Weird. I’ll pass that on to our xenos, they’ll have a field day. Anyways, we built up this spaceship in case the contact was peaceful. We also put together an alternative if not.
There’s two lines of defence. First up are these really fucking big solar-powered laser arrays. There’s about a dozen of them that we use for asteroid mining, but we always kinda planned on melting ships with it. Judging by what our techs are saying about your ship alloys, we should be able to burn through them in short order.”
“Most of the ships will have screens to deal with that,” I said. “Something to do with cancelling a good part of the wave while its within the field of effect. If its powerful enough it’ll break through, but it’ll take time and juice.”
“Figures. What’re these ‘grasers’ the geeks have been babbling, then?”
“Something like focused gravity waves, although that’s all I know.” I fluttered my wings apologetically as I spoke. “I’m not very technical. My specialties are xenobiology and linguistics.”
“They’re short range, though, right? Our best guesses puts their envelope at around ten thousand kilometres.”
There was another lag while my translator figured out what a kilometre was. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“Perfect. One more quick question: what do you ships use for point defence?”
I was puzzled again. “Point defence?”
“Y’know, for stopping missiles and ballistic weapons.”
“We’ve got some guns for breaking apart small rocks and meteors, if that’s what you mean, but they’re not used much. Why’d we worry about that? And what do you mean by ‘missile'”
I’d seen the word on the original Compact briefing for the Sol system, but I hadn’t bothered to figure out what it meant. My translator was proving rather unhelpful now, too.
The human didn’t seem to notice. Her face split into a feral grin as she stabbed at a button on her small screen, and her next words sent chills through me spine.
“Perfect,” she said again. Her eyes were fixed on the holotank as the ordered scene devolved into chaos.
A flotilla of Daan ships, larger than anything I expected to see in Sol, burst through the scale-model gate. The cruisers were eerily accurate; whatever these humans were, they were damn good at putting together information.
The lasers Faith had boasted of tried to cut into the ships, but the screens I’d described a moment before made them almost useless. The Daan ships bore down on the human fleet unopposed.
Unopposed, that is, until tens of thousands of small projectiles exploded out from the space around the gathered human ships. I could only stare mutely as the missiles chased down the Daan raiders, slamming into their sides and igniting like so many small, vicious stars. Within moments the only ships left on the holotank belonged to the humans; the simulated Daan raiders were little more than slag.
“They’ll never see it coming,” said Faith, still smiling. “We’ll get the bastards.”