A Learning Experience

Chapter Three

Fnfian Horde Warcruiser Shadow 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 Reading between the lines, Steve had a suspicion that the entire ship was outdated as far as the aliens who had built it were concerned, although the neural interface was a little vague on such matters.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.”

Steve nodded. The teleporter had dropped the aliens into open space and Earth’s gravity had done the rest, once the bodies were outside the craft’s as-yet unexplained drive field. By now, the remains of the alien crew had burned up in Earth’s atmosphere and vanished. Part of him regretted slaughtering so many without a second thought, the rest of him knew there had been no alternative. The aliens wouldn’t have hesitated to kill their former captives, now they’d seen just what they could do.

If all the aliens are like them, he thought, humanity will rule the galaxy in years.

But he knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

They made their way back to the bridge and entered the dining hall. Every time he saw it, Steve was reminded of the depictions of Norsemen partying hard after a successful campaign of looting, raping and burning. They’d cleared away most of the mess — it seemed the aliens liked living in squalor — but it still disgusted him. He’d checked with the neural interface, only to discover that the cleaning robots had been removed, along with several automated maintenance systems. The sellers had clearly anticipated getting rich by selling spare parts and basic maintenance to the Hordesmen.

He activated the neural link as he stopped in front of the food professor, a slot in the bulkhead that remained sealed until the food was ready. “Please produce something suitable for human consumption.”

There was a long pause as the device hummed to itself. “You’d think they could produce matter directly from energy,” Kevin commented. “If they have teleporters, surely they could produce food and drink…”

“Or duplicate a living person,” Charles muttered. “I saw a Star Trek episode where someone was duplicated accidentally…”

Kevin snickered. “You’re a secret Star Trek fan?”

“We ran out of Doctor Who episodes to watch,” Charles confessed. “And we had a lot of fun pointing out the problems…”

“A likely story,” Kevin said.

Steve ignored them, concentrating on the neural interface. Most of the technobabble it produced was way above his head — it was suddenly harder to blame the aliens for being unaware of the potentials of their technology — but it seemed to be impossible to actually duplicate a person through teleport malfunctions. Furthermore, direct energy-to-matter conversion, while quite possible, was actually extremely uneconomical. It was far simpler to reprocess biomass to produce something humans could eat safely.

“There won’t be any more of you running around,” he said, finally. “It doesn’t seem to be possible.”

“What a relief,” Kevin said, dryly.

There was a ding from the food processor. The hatch opened, revealing a plate of steaming… something. It looked rather like grey porridge. Steve eyed it doubtfully, then removed it from the processor and placed it on the table. There were no knives or forks, so he had to use his hands. It tasted of nothing, as far as he could tell. Just… nothing at all.

“We will have to bring some proper food up here,” Kevin said, as he tasted the glop. “And a small horde of cleaners.”

Steve nodded. “I’ll get you an interface,” he said. “And you can start asking questions.”

He finished his share of the glop, then ordered the machine to make another portion and something suitable for one of the aliens. Mongo would be growing hungry too, as would their alien captive. Steve wished that he dared trust the alien enough to ask questions, but a long interrogation session would have to wait. Maybe Kevin — a trained interrogator, among other things — would be able to get more answers out of the computer network.

Shaking his head, he walked back onto the bridge, found the second interface and took it back to Kevin. “There’s a stab of pain as it configures itself, then you’ll be fine,” he assured his brother. “And good luck.”

Kevin nodded and placed the silver band on his head. “No pain,” he said, after a moment. “I guess you were the unlucky bastard who got the brunt of the reconfiguration.”

“So it would seem,” Steve said. He picked up the food and headed for the hatch. “Charles, keep an eye on him.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said.

Mongo was, as Steve had expected, glad to be fed. “When are we going to get some more people up here?”

“Good question,” Steve said. Their wives and families, naturally, but who else? And what could they do, in the long term, with such a starship? “As soon as possible, I think.”

“Just teleport them up,” Mongo suggested. “Mariko would love it.”

“Go do it to Jayne first,” Steve countered. His partner wouldn’t love being taken by surprise. “I dare you.”

Mongo shrugged, then conceded the point.

Kevin was in heaven.

None of his family had been dumb. They’d been homeschooled by their parents and found, when they were finally tested against children from the state-run schools, that they were far in advance of their peers. Their mother had been a stern taskmistress, watching her children like hawks while they were studying and enforcing quiet where necessary. But Kevin had always been more intellectual than his siblings, even though the very word was a swear word in the mouth of their father. He’d wanted to know and know and know…

The neural interface was brilliant. From what Steve had said, he’d accessed only the very basic level. Kevin was swimming in data. It flowed into his mind, each file opening itself in front of his eyes and entering his mind. He couldn’t help comparing it to surfing the internet, only the data was far more complete than anything he’d seen online. And even a random thought was enough to activate search algorithms that assisted him in his search for raw information.

But there were very definite limits to what he could access, he discovered. The data files were brimming with information on what the starship — it was called Shadow Warrior — could do, but they weren’t very specific on how it actually worked. There was an FTL drive that seemed to bend local space around it, as far as he could determine, yet the theory was completely isolated from the technology that made it work. It might as well be black boxes, he realised, as he made another mental note. The designers had sealed the technology to prevent it being duplicated.

The thought discharged another torrent of data into his mind. Steve had been right, he realised; the Hordesmen were nothing more than scavengers. They’d barely entered the Bronze Age, if that, when they’d been discovered by older, more advanced races, and introduced to the surrounding galaxy. Some of them had been taken as slaves, others had been serving as mercenaries… none of them had built a significant galactic power base of their own. As far as the Galactics were concerned, the Hordesmen weren’t even a minor headache. They were just gnats to be swatted aside when they got too irritating to tolerate for a moment longer.

But what did they want from Earth?

There were no answers in the databanks, he realised slowly. The Hordesmen had never bothered to keep logs, either because they were too primitive to care or because they’d worried about the security of their systems. There was nothing to show why they’d come to Earth or why they’d adopted such an absurd strategy for abducting humans. Hell, maybe they had been interested in anal probing after all. Given how little data there was in the computers, it was as good a theory as any.

Not that it matters, he told himself. If they decided they wanted to invade Earth, they could.

Images flowed through his mind from the databanks, triggered by his thoughts. There was no Prime Directive, no law preventing advanced races from overwhelming primitive races… just as the Hordesmen themselves had been overwhelmed. Hundreds of worlds had been invaded by their more advanced neighbours, then enslaved… or merely forced to pay tax. Earth had been lucky. The handful of aliens who had visited the solar system hadn’t been particularly interested in the human race or anything in their star system. But there had been other visits…

He poked the databanks, but details were scarce. Or perhaps he was simply asking the wrong questions, no matter how closely he scrutinised the data. There was no way to know.

Instead, he started to ask about the technology on the ship. The sheer size of the response sent his mind reeling in disbelief, as if the data was too much to handle. He felt a dull pain at the back of his head as he tried to process what he was being shown, then tried to distract himself by asking more questions. The Hordesmen hadn’t even bothered to scratch the surface of the ship’s full capabilities.

He felt a sudden burst of awe, mixed with terror. If Shadow Warrior was something the Galactics felt comfortable about selling to a tiny scavenger race, what did they have at their disposal? Was the starship, for all its wonders, merely the counterpart of an AK-47? Were the odd gaps in the datanet’s explanations intended to prevent the Hordesmen from developing their own starships? Or were they merely placing some limits on exported tech to prevent it from being turned against them?

The sheer potential of the technology stunned him. It would be easy, almost as easy as breathing, to reach out and download the entire human internet into one of the starship’s memory cores, even the millions of pornographic sites. The 30TB portable hard drive his friend had been so proud of producing was a laughing stock compared to the alien ship. And no security protocols could keep him out of a human system. He could download the secrets of the Pentagon, the Kremlin… every top secret base on Earth.

It terrified him. As an intelligence officer, a system like the one in front of him would be a dream come true, but it was also a nightmare. The most advanced human surveillance system in the world wasn’t capable of tracking everything, no matter what the designers claimed. This could… and it could do more. Complete and total monitoring of millions of people, at all times, was well within its capabilities. Kevin shuddered at the thought. Privacy would become a joke.

Or worse, he thought. He’d retired from intelligence work after the field had become increasingly politicised. He had never admired Edward Snowden for defecting from the United States, but he’d understood the impossibility of blowing a whistle when the most senior men and women in the nation were involved. I don’t think we dare hand this over to the government.

The question brought another stream of data into his mind. He welcomed it, even as he fired more questions back into the databanks. How were the aliens governed? Who were the major interstellar powers? What might they do to Earth if they discovered humanity?

They already know about us, he corrected himself. It was humbling, but unsurprising. From the point of view of the Galactics, Earth wasn’t even a microstate. They just didn’t care enough to try to take us into their system, even as slaves. We had nothing to offer them.

Something clicked. As an intelligence officer, he knew how to put pieces together to form a coherent picture. Now, looking at the data, he understand why some aliens had been interested in Earth… and why the Horde had followed in their wake. Humanity might be significant after all… and that thought, too, was terrifying. Frantically, half-convinced he had to be looking at a false Earth-centric picture, he fired off yet more questions. The datanet struggled to respond.

There was a sudden surge of data, followed by a stab of pain so intense he couldn’t help screaming. He dimly heard Charles calling his name, felt someone shaking his body… and then he fell down into darkness.