Jack Campbell - Guardian

But the grand council lacked any desire to keep talking about the hypernet.

“Well,” Navarro said, “there is some good news. We need to talk about that. We have a vast amount of, um, Kick technology in that captured warship. We should be able to learn a lot about them.”

“We would have learned much more if we could talk to living individuals of that race,” Senator Suva muttered loudly.

Rione forestalled Geary’s reflexive response with a hand gesture. “We tried,” she told Suva and the others. “We tried in every way we could.”

“The specialists you had with you,” Suva said pointedly, “are saying you failed to try several methods that might have worked.”

“Some of them may be saying that now, but they certainly didn’t propose any such methods at the time,” Rione said. “I personally asked more than once. If some of our academic experts now claim to have known of other methods to communicate with the Kicks, they must have deliberately withheld their suggestions. You might ask them why they did that.”

Navarro grimaced, tapping his hand lightly against the table. “I suspect those experts had no more ideas than you did. I can’t think of anything you didn’t try. Maybe we’ll figure out how to wake up the two living Kicks we do have.”

“I strongly advise against that,” Geary said. “They’ll suicide.”

“The decision may not be ours, Admiral. What’s this I heard about ghosts on that captured ship?”

“There’s something strange on Invincible ,” Geary said. “It manifests as if Kick ghosts were crowding around you. I don’t recommend going anywhere on that ship alone. The sensation gets overwhelming very fast.”

“They had a device,” Unruh said softly, “that would protect planets from space bombardment. Is there anything aboard that ship that will show us how to do the same?”

Geary could feel the wave of hope that radiated from the entire grand council. How many billions had died in orbital bombardments since humanity had learned how to go into space and use that ability to drop rocks on the surface of worlds? He shook his head, hating to crush the hopes of the senators. “I don’t know. Their technology, the way they build equipment, is very different from ours in many ways. I do know even the largest Kick ships, like Invincible , did not have that defense against kinetic projectiles. The fleet’s engineers speculate that the defense may require an immense amount of power, or a very large mass like a planet or minor planet. But the bottom line is that we just don’t know. For obvious reasons, we didn’t want to fiddle with the Kick equipment on Invincible to see what it could do.”

“Do we have to use the insulting name ‘Kicks’?” asked Senator Suva. “And why do you keep referring to the ship we took from them using a fleet name?”

“I can call them bear-cows if that’s more acceptable,” Geary said, not wanting to get into useless debate over that issue. “We don’t know what they call themselves. As for why I call the ship Invincible , it’s because it was as Invincible that she came through the voyage back here, and more than one Marine died defending her as Invincible .”

“Learning more about the technology used aboard the ship will surely be a priority for the Alliance,” Senator Unruh noted in a pleasant voice that still drove her point home. “And for the enigmas, you believe there may be hope for peace?”

“I believe that Emissary Charban is right in his guess that such a privacy-obsessed species regards a curiosity-driven species such as ourselves as a major threat. Promising not to seek any further knowledge of them, or enter space controlled by them again, might serve as a basis for halting hostilities. But,” Geary conceded, “so far the enigmas have not responded to our proposals in that direction.”

“And lastly,” Unruh continued, “the Dancers.” She smiled. “I have seen their ships move. It is an apt name.”

“They saved a human-occupied planet,” Senator Suva said eagerly. “Can they show us how to do that?”

“Again,” Geary said, “I don’t know. They are talking to us, they seem helpful and friendly, but they also have an instinctive grasp of maneuvering in space that exceeds the capabilities of human senses or human equipment.”

“But can we trust something that looks like… that?” Wilkes said distastefully.

Rione smiled as she replied. “We can be certain that we aren’t being mesmerized by their beauty.”

“Negotiations are going well?” Navarro asked.

“We’re still learning to communicate. We’re not at a formal negotiation stage, yet.” Rione’s smile went away, replaced by an expression that was impossible to read. “They have communicated something to us since we arrived at Varandal that was unexpected. Emissary Charban and I just managed to work all of this out definitively late last night, so this is the first report of it. I wanted the grand council to be the first to hear.” Even the senators hostile to Rione puffed up slightly at her implied acknowledgment of their importance. “The Dancers have told us they need to go somewhere. They will not open further negotiations until they go there. That’s not being presented as an ultimatum, rather as sort of an if-then set of conditions. If we take them there, then they will talk about other things.”

“They told us?” Costa asked skeptically. “How? I thought our communications with the Dancers were still very basic.”

“They said there was a place they had to go. They used the pictograms for must and travel , so there’s no other interpretation possible,” Rione said. “They did the same, repeatedly, regarding the if-then condition for further negotiations.”

She held out her data pad, tapped a control, and an image of angular characters appeared in the air over the table. “And then they showed us this. It’s a word formed from letters from one of the ancient common languages of humanity, so our systems were easily able to translate it. Even one of us can almost make out the word from its ancestry of our current language.”

“What does it say?” Senator Navarro asked in amazement.

“Kansas.”

“What?”

“The ancient word is Kansas,” Rione explained. “We asked in every way we could, and the Dancers insisted in every way that they could that they must go to Kansas.”

“Where the hell is that?” Costa demanded. “I’ve never heard of a star named Kansas.”

“We located Kansas,” Rione said. “It’s not a star, or a planet. It’s a place on a planet, an old name for a province or region on that planet.”

“What planet and what star?” Senator Navarro said.

“Old Earth,” Rione replied. “Sol Star System.”

The resulting silence was so deep and complete that a falling pin would have resounded like an explosion.

When Navarro broke the silence, he almost whispered, but his voice still sounded unnaturally loud. “Old Earth? They want to go to Old Earth?”

“They are insistent upon that,” Rione replied.

“Why?”

“They cannot, or will not, explain. Not until we take them there.”

“Impossible,” Senator Costa declared. “Take aliens to Sol Star System? To Old Earth itself, the Home of our ancestors? We can’t do that.”

Instantly, Senator Suva turned on her ideological foe Costa. “These are representatives of the first nonhuman intelligent species that has ever sought to communicate with us. It is critically important that we do not offend them!”

“It is critically important that we don’t let a bunch of alien warships drop a stellar destabilizer into Sol itself!”