Christopher Nuttall: A Learning Experience

“If you cooperate, you will be treated decently,” one of the humans said, finally. “If you try to escape, you will be killed.”

“I understand,” Cn!lss said, quickly. It was better than his treatment in the Horde. “I will cooperate.”

“Good,” the human said. “But for the moment, we will put you in a small cabin and hold you there.”

Steve looked around the bridge and knew that he’d been right, even before the neural interface had confirmed it. The aliens hadn’t designed the ship themselves; hell, their consoles were clearly designed for a humanoid race, rather than a six-legged crab-like race from Hell. They must have found it more than a little uncomfortable, he decided, as he strode over to the central chair and looked down at it. That, at least, had been designed for the aliens. It looked absurdly like a throne suitable for a crab.

He sniffed the air, experimentally. There was a faint stench of rotting meat in the air, but nothing else. As far as he could tell, the atmosphere was breathable, although he made a mental note to check that as soon as possible. And to explore the rest of the ship… his ship. He found himself grinning as he realised what they’d done. They’d captured an interstellar starship and the way to the stars lay open, right in front of them.

“Well,” Mongo said. “What do we do now?”

Steve sighed. There was work to be done. “We research,” he said. They’d have to find several more neural interfaces, although he suspected they needed a rule that barred more than one or two people from using them at the same time. “And then we make plans.”

Fnfian Horde WarcruiserShadow Warrior

Earth Orbit

“You know, my mother used to believe that aliens would come one day and show us a whole new way to live,” Charles commented. “I never believed she was right.”

Steve smiled as they made their way through one of the alien sleeping compartments. He’d been in barracks inhabited by ill-disciplined soldiers, American and foreign, but this was far worse. Great piles of meat and drink lay everywhere, creating a stench that would have to be dealt with sooner or later, while tiny creatures ran across the deck. They seemed to be crosses between crabs and cockroaches, Steve had decided, and they were as hard to kill as the latter. The entire ship would have to be fumigated before they did anything else. It was probably a breeding ground for disease.

The ship itself, according to the neural interface, was four hundred metres long and designed to serve as a Warcruiser. Reading between the lines, Steve had a suspicion that the entire ship was outdated as far as the aliens who had built it were concerned, although the neural interface was a little vague on such matters. He hadn’t been able to determine if he was asking the wrong questions or if the system was designed not to provide exact answers to such questions. If he’d been designing a system for primitive aliens, he would have been careful what he programmed it to do too.

But it was clear that the aliens — the Hordesmen, the interface had called them — hadn’t even had a vague idea of just what their ship could do. They reminded him of training missions to Arab countries, where no one dared admit ignorance, even if it was manifestly obvious they didn’t have the slightest idea of what they were doing. Their weapons were clearly modified from weapons designed for other races, the advanced technology was partnered with a technology more primitive than any available on Earth and… and they’d kidnapped a group of humans without even bothering to secure them. Such carelessness made little sense.

They don’t have any real conception of technology , he decided, as he peered into another alien cabin. It was oddly barren, in some ways; there were no books, no electronic readers, no computers… not even anything that resembled porn. The thought made him smile — did the aliens even have a concept of pornography? — but the cabins testified to an odd bleakness in their lives. Or a complete lack of concern from their superiors. He’d seen both in human societies around the globe.

He pushed the thought to one side as he accessed the neural interface again. The aliens had placed their ship in high orbit, using a masking field to hide their presence from Earth’s defenders. Not that they’d had much reason to worry about Earth’s defenders, Steve had already concluded. They could simply have thrown rocks from a safe distance until humanity rolled over and surrendered. Their point defence could have shot down every ICBM on Earth without breaking a sweat. No, the whole alien operation simply made no sense. It was almost as if they’d wanted the humans to capture their ship.

“We should probably talk to our new friend,” Kevin said, when Steve commented on his suspicions. “Do you think he’ll be open with us?”

Steve shrugged, expressively. Humans showed a wide range of behaviours when taken prisoner, from defiance to outright collaboration. The alien — his name was a series of clicks and hisses that was beyond humanity’s ability to pronounce — seemed to tend towards the latter, but there was no way to be sure. All they could do was keep a sharp eye on him, then find somewhere to stick him well away from unknown technology. For all they knew, he had his own way of accessing the computer nodes even without a visible neural interface.

“You can put together a list of questions for him,” he said, finally. “And we can corroborate what he says with what we pull out of the computer systems.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “About that… are you sure the connection is safe ?”

“It saved our asses,” Steve reminded him. The neural interface had insisted the process was safe, but — once again — it hadn’t gone into details. “Does that mean you don’t want one for yourself?”

“At least one of us shouldn’t use one,” Kevin said, firmly. “Mongo has enough common sense to tell us when we’ve pushed it too far, I think.”

Steve didn’t bother to disagree as they worked their way into the next set of compartments, which were crammed with all sorts of pieces of technology. Almost all of them were completely unrecognisable, save for a handful of devices that looked like the silver box the unarmed alien had carried down on Earth. Two of them might be the alien versions of laptops, he decided, others might have been weapons or sex toys. Short of asking the interface, there was no way to know. The next compartment held a line of vehicles that looked like small, almost toy-like tanks. They looked too small for the aliens to use comfortably.

“Maybe designed for another race,” Steve speculated. He linked into the neural interface and asked. “Yep, built for another race and stolen.”

“Scavengers,” Charles said. “It might explain why they were so fucking careless.”

Kevin paused, then rubbed his stomach. “Is there anywhere to get something to eat here?”

“The alien food is classed as incompatible,” Steve discovered, querying the neural interface. “But the food processors can produce something suitable for human consumption.”

“We’d better get back up there and find something,” Kevin said. “And then I think we need to start asking more questions.”

“There’s a spare neural link up on the bridge,” Steve said. From what little the voice had said about itself, handing two or even several hundred users at once was well within its capabilities. “You might as well put it to use.”

“Just be careful what you do,” Charles warned. “You don’t want to accidentally beam yourself out into space.”