Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

Our first major clue came when one of the Hub’s own lighters got close enough to pick up some of the wreckage of the Malkin jumbo. The ship had not been blown apart in any normal sense — no shear and no heat, or at least no more than would be expected with sudden decompression. The carbon ceramic bones and skin of the ship had just suddenly fallen apart — “delatticed” was Doc Swainsea’s term. She didn’t sound happy when she said it, either.

“It’s not a technology I know,” she told Captain Watanabe the day after the attacks. “It’s not a technology I can even envision.”

The captain looked at her and they stood there for a moment, face to face — two very serious women, Doc tall and blonde, Captain W. a bit shorter and so dark haired and pale skinned that she looked like an ink drawing. “But is it a technology we can beat?” the captain finally asked.

I never heard the answer because they sent me out to get more coffee.

About two hours later, while I was bringing more whiskey glasses to the captain’s cabin — which meant, I assumed, that the doctor’s answer had been negative — I found Balcescu standing waiting for the lift to the bridge.

“I think I have it, Mr. Jatt,” he told me as I went by.

I was in a hurry — everyone on the ship was in a hurry, which was strange considering we obviously weren’t going anywhere soon — but something in his voice made me stop. He sounded exhausted, for one thing, and when I looked at him more closely I could see he didn’t look good, either: he was pale and trembling, like he hadn’t had anything but coffee or focusmeds for a while. Maybe he was sick.

“Have what, Mr. Balcescu? What are you talking about?”

“The language — the language of the things that attacked us. I think I’ve cracked it.”

Two minutes later we were standing in front of the captain, Chief Navigator Chinh-Herrera, Doc Swainsea, and an open com line going out to the other Confederation ships.

“I couldn’t have done this if it had been pure cryptography,” Balcescu explained, standing up after all the introductions had been handled. His hands were still shaking; he spilled a little of his coffee. He obviously needed some food, but I was damned if I was going to leave the room right then.

Sorry. We spacemen swear a lot. But I wasn’t going to rush out to the galley just when he was about to explain.

“What I mean to say is,” Balcescu went on, “if it is anything like the languages we already know — and I think it is — then they haven’t given us enough of a sample to do the standard reductions. For one thing, we couldn’t know that we were even hearing all of it…”

“What are you talking about?” asked Chinh-Herrera. “Not heard it all? It nearly blew our coms to bits!”

“We heard the part that was in our audio register. And there were other parts above and below human hearing range as well that we recorded. But who could say for certain that there weren’t parts of the language outside the range of our instruments? This is a first encounter. Never make assumptions, Chief Navigator.”

Chinh-Herrera turned away, hiding a scowl. He didn’t like our Mr. Balcescu much, it was easy to see. The chief navigator was a good man, and always nice to me, but he could be a bit old-fashioned sometimes. I actually understood what Balcescu was saying, because I’ve spent my life living with other people’s assumptions, too. That’s what happens when you’re my size.

“So you’re saying the sample wasn’t enough to form a basis for translation, Dr. Balcescu?” This was Doc Swainsea. “Then why are we here?”

“Because it is a language and I know what they’re saying,” said Balcescu wearily. By his expression, you’d have thought he was being forced to explain the alphabet to a room full of four year olds. “You see, we’ve enlarged the boundaries of human-contact space quite a bit in the last couple of hundred years — the Hub system has seen to that. Just a few weeks ago I was out in the Brightman system doing something that would have been unthinkable only generations ago — xenolinguistic fieldwork with untainted living cultures.” He gave Chinh-Herrera a bit of a sideways look. “In other words, speaking alien with aliens. Our linguistic database has also expanded hugely. So I figured it was worth a try to see if there were any similarities between what we heard at Rainwater Hub and any of the other cultures we’ve recorded on the outskirts of contact space. I spent hours and hours going through different samples, comparing points of apparent overlap…”

“And, Doctor Balcescu?” That was Captain Watanabe. She wasn’t big on being lectured, either.

“And there are similarities — distant and tenuous, but similarities nevertheless — between what we heard yesterday and some of the older speech systems we’ve found out toward the galactic rim. I can’t say exactly what the relationships are — that will take years of study and, to be honest, a great deal more information about this latest language — but there are enough common elements that I think I can safely translate what we heard, at least roughly.” He looked around expectantly, almost as if he was waiting for polite applause from the captain and the others. He didn’t get it. “I used what we already know about these particular rim dialects as a ratchet, combined with some guesswork…”

“Get to the point, Doctor,” said the captain. “Tell us what it said. A lot of good men and women are dead already, and the rest of us are stranded 46 parsecs from the nearest Confederation hub.”

“Sorry, of course.” He pointed to the com screen and the picture of the monstrous apparition jumped back onto it. I’d seen it before, of course — everyone had been watching it over and over, trying to understand what had happened — but it still scared the brass marbles off me. It was like something out of an old ghost story, the kind they tell down in the engine bay on a slow shift, with the lights down. The thing was like some wailing spirit, a banshee heralding death — and not just the death of a few, but of the whole human race. How could we beat something like that?

As the image billowed and stretched in achingly slow motion, like living flame, Balcescu spoke.

“What it seems to be saying, as far as I can tell, is unfortunately just as bellicose as its actions suggest. It boils down to this.” He said it like a man reciting a memorized speech, all emotion squeezed out of his voice. “ ‘Your death is upon you. Only black ash will show that you ever lived. The Outward-reaching Murder Army’ — that’s the best I can do, that’s pretty much what they’re saying — ‘ will spit upon the stars that give you life, extinguishing them all. The cold will suck the life from you. All memory of you will be obliterated.’ ” Balcescu shook his head. “Not exactly Shakespeare. In fact, a rather crude translation, but it makes the main points.”

The monstrous shape still rippled slowly on the com screen, its face glowing like a dying sun.

“Well,” said Captain Watanabe after a long silence. “Now that we know what it said, I’m sure we all feel a lot better.”

Everybody on board the Lakshmi continued to hurry around as the days went past, but with what seemed like an increasing hopelessness. Rainwater was one of the longest and most important holes — without it, it would take us years, maybe decades, to make our way back. There was no other shortcut from this part of the rim.

Under emergency regs most of the passengers had been put into cryo, except for those like Balcescu who had a job to do. I didn’t have much to keep me occupied so I spent a lot of time with the people who had time to spend with me. Chinh-Herrera the navigator didn’t have much to do either, once he’d plotted the various ways back home that bypassed Rainwater, but when he was done he didn’t really want to talk. I’d bring him wine and stay a while, but it wasn’t much fun.