A Sword Into Darkness

16: “PATRONS”

Date Unknown; USS Sword of Liberty (DA-1), location unknown; Mission Day ???

Nathan Kelley screamed.

Despite the anti-nausea meds, his stomach flopped about, churning with anxious bile, threatening to disgorge its bitter acid up his throat and into his helmet. Cocooned within his Charlie Station pod, he spun chaotically about with the forward half of the ship, but the sickness that prepared to overcome him was only partly due to the motion. There was instead something that concerned him far, far more.

He screamed again. “Kris!!”

She—and ten others—had been aft in the engineering spaces, spaces which were now cut free of the mission hull and whatever remained of the flayed apart radiator spine. He had no hope whatsoever that she could hear him on the general net, but it did not stop his anguished cries.

“Kris! Talk to me, Kris!”

Nathan’s helmet telltales flickered without any sense of order. The battle VR was filled with static, intermittent status bars, and multiple “blue screens of death” from systems cut off from their power source, their networks, and any semblance of connectivity. He could tell nothing about anything. For all he knew, he was the only one left alive aboard either half of the destroyer.

“Damn it, someone answer me! Kris!!”

A piercing whine shot through his ears. He winced and then froze as he heard an acerbic voice reply. “Jesus, Nathan. Would you just shut the fuck up for one minute?”

Nathan smiled desperately. It was Edwards. “COB! It’s damn good to hear your voice. Listen, have you got any data? I lost everything after that beam cut through the ship’s spine. Do you know what’s going on with Engineering?”

“No, Skipper, I don’t, but if you don’t mind me saying it, you need to chill the fuck out. When I got my comms back, all I could hear was your heart bleeding over the damn net, and while I understand it, it’s the last friggin’ thing any of us need right now.”

Nathan said nothing, chastened into silence.

Edwards continued. “I know you’re worried about Kris—and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re worried about the rest of us too—but she and the other engineers are like concern number twenty-seven on the list I’ve got running through my head. I need you to start with concern one and work your way down it, not the other way around. So, are you gonna captain, Captain, or do I need to cut your air off and let our happy-go-lucky XO take over?”

Nathan opened his mouth to bite back, but he closed it again with an audible snap and allowed himself to think instead of simply reacting. A few moments later, he keyed his mike again. “No, COB, you can keep me breathing. I’m sorry.”

“S’all right, Skipper. Next time we’re half a light-year from home and aliens chop my ship in half, with my sweetie in the wrong half, it’ll be my turn to freak out.”

Nathan chuffed a laugh, despite everything. “Can I at least hope that your little counseling session was on a private channel?”

Edwards’ voice was full of good humor. “Hey, who’s the Master Chief around here? Of course it was. Fact is, all the nets are down. I only heard you after I opened a pod-to-pod channel.

Nathan nodded to himself. “Okay. I don’t know what you had as concern one on that list, but my first proper concern is situational awareness. I’ve got nothing on my VR, and we need to know where we are and what’s going on before we can even start handling things.”

“Roger that, sir. I’m in the same boat.”

“Fine. If the nets are down and pod-to-pod comms are the only thing up, then we need to work through that. Kill the circuit with me and try to raise the XO, have him raise Damage Control Central, then CIC, then Weps, and so on. Work out a phone tree between the pair of you and see who’s still with us and if anything’s still working.”

“And what will you be doing, sir?”

“I’m going to crack my pod and see what’s up firsthand.”

“Whoa there, Cap’n Kirk. You need to let somebody else boldly go first. There’s no telling if we’re open to space, irradiated, or hip deep in nano-machines, not to mention this wicked spin we’ve got going on at the moment. All you can say right now is that your pod is safe, so that’s where you should stay.”

“Negative, COB. I wish this spin was gone too, but—”

whiteness pervaded

shining in incandescence

nathan moved his arms freely

no longer encumbered

no longer restrained

Nathan started and jerked, but now was held fast by the pod’s gel once more. The momentary bright glow was gone as well. After images filled his vision, negatives of whatever the source of light had been, as if he had looked into a bank of spotlights or the sun.

A mike clicked in his ears and Edwards’ voice spoke. “What … the hell … was that?”

Nathan shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue, but we don’t have time to keep arguing about it. Our visitors are still out there, doing whatever they want with us. Get started on contacting everyone. I’m leaving the pod to figure out what’s going on.”

“Aye aye, sir. Do you feel it, though?”

“Feel what?”

“The spin. It’s gone. The Deltans steadied us up somehow during that weird … moment. Right after you wished for it.”

Nathan grunted. “I doubt my wishes had anything to do with it. They probably steadied us up to examine us, if we’re lucky.”

Edwards finished his thought. “Or they steadied us up in order to flay us more precisely, if we’re unlucky.”

“Yep. I’m out.” Nathan cut off the circuit and reached methodically through the force-dampening gel to the pod’s emergency release. He pulled the lever and the whole pod vibrated. The gel cleared away, sucked back into its own reservoirs. The VR screen over his faceplate pulled away and the shell opened. His chair slid up and forward, returning to its usual position in the bridge. A thin layer of the alcohol-based gel that had clung to him boiled away in the near vacuum of the compartment.

Other than the lack of air, and the absence of the other acceleration couches, everything looked normal on the bridge. No aliens lay in wait for them. He reached over and drew his screens and control panels toward him. Unlike the ones they duplicated in the battle VR, these worked.

Every system was offline. Power was gone and both the screens and the space’s lights ran on battery back-ups only. Along with the aft half of the ship, the reactor and propulsion were cut off. The weapon system and auxiliary propulsion capacitor banks were fully charged, though. Without the reactor, they were the only sources of power the mission hull had once the battery back-ups ran out in a few hours. Nathan considered the situation. If he shut down the systems they usually powered and isolated the banks, they could conceivably keep life support and the auxiliary systems running for a few days.

Nathan shook his head in dismay. A few days. There was little point to stretching their survival time to a few days when it would take years for the alien formation to reach Earth, but perhaps in that time, they might learn something about the Deltans, something they could still transmit back home.

He shut down the missile sub-systems, the railgun, and diode laser banks, then did the same for the photonic reaction thruster pylons, conserving their precious energy, Finally, he tripped the breakers to the banks themselves. To re-route the power, they would have to cut out some main bus diodes and reverse some connections. It was a task Kris would relish.

Or one she would have relished.

Nathan stopped himself from thinking down that path, and refocused on the tasks at hand. All sensors and comms were down as well, but while the radar needed a level of power that he did not have, and could not have afforded to waste anyway, he did have backup power on the passive sensor systems. He reset the hull cameras and took a look around.

The tactical computer was still offline, so his view lacked the smooth, easy sweep of their combined picture, as well as the false color vector data that usually helped make sense of the vastness around them, but he could see a few things. They drifted over the drive-star, with the Control Ship just visible above the star’s horizon, pretty much where she had been during the final moments of the battle. Had they been just a bit fleeter, just slightly quicker, they could have escaped.

He shook his head and switched cameras. Many of the small, hull-mounted sensors were broken or still offline, but others were blocked. By what, he could not tell, but as he switched from camera to camera he finally found the engineering hull.

Tattered pieces of the radiator spine remained, fitfully spraying clouds of vapor and coolant from shorn lines and shafts. The reactor and the drive itself looked battle scarred but intact.

Nathan breathed a sigh of relief.

Kris’s broken half of the ship drifted steadily several miles from the mission hull, its spin also halted. Bracketing the aft hull was a silvery cage or framework that had presumably been put together by the Deltans, perhaps sent out from the Control Ship or even constructed in place by the nano-machines fired by the silvery beam Kris had overcome. He had no idea what its purpose was, but a similar cage was probably what blocked several of his own cameras.

He reached for a communications icon, to try and call the aft hull or the re-trans pod when—

bright flash again

all is lost in a haze of white

sense of motion

nathan flails

His arms swung wildly and he smacked his forearm painfully on one of his screens. “Damn it!” he complained, cradling his forearm in sharp self-reproach. He took a look at the camera view again. The aft hull was gone.

Nathan frantically searched through the cameras until he found it again. It had jumped, now directly behind them and close. In addition, the Control Ship lay immediately in front of them, big enough and near enough to fill the views of several cameras at once. Whether it had moved or they had moved in that brief moment of bright nothingness, he could not say.

He considered putting the weapons back online, but the alien ship was so massive relative to their remaining firepower that it would do little good. However, as he watched in mounting horror, the overlapping plates of the lobster-like Control Ship began to slide apart and open up, revealing a dark interior, an interior into which they were undoubtedly about to be drawn.

Nathan reached for the lasers—

bright white again

nathan’s fingers blindly grope

skitter across the panel

nothing happens

The Bridge returned to dim normality. Nathan struggled to understand. The glow that filled his vision during those terrifying moments of nothingness was not source-less. The glow’s brightest spots were analogous to the actual recessed lights on the bridge. It was as if all their light became thousands of times more powerful, as if the photons had become physical things themselves, drifting around him like a fog of light.

That was significant somehow, but he had no idea what it meant. Nathan shook his head, and scrolled through the cameras. The scene had changed again. The aft hull was nowhere to be seen, and the mission hull was surrounded on all sides, locked into place by brackets, spars, and webs of material.

They were inside the Control Ship.

Nathan shifted panels and frantically closed the breakers to the laser capacitor banks, trying to bring the lasers back online. Where they had been operational but useless before, though, now all he saw were red status icons. During the moment of discontinuity, not only had the ship been captured and secured, but the lasers had been either physically disabled or removed.

Nathan checked the railgun, and found much the same story. He shook his head and secured their capacitor banks once more.

Following that, he reset the internal comms system and called Edwards’ pod. “COB, Captain. I’ve got us stable for the moment, but we’ve got some work to do if we’re going to last beyond a few hours. And the situation up here is … unsettling.”

Edwards’ voice crackled back into his ear. “Roger that, Skipper. Hey, I had a couple more of those whiteout moments. Any idea what’s going on with them?”

Nathan frowned. “Yeah, I’ve got an idea, but I don’t like it. It plays into our situation up here. How many of the crew do we have?”

“The XO’s still touching base with his half, but pod-to-pod works for everyone I called, and the general net came online right before you called me.”

“Right,” Nathan said. “I reset the comm system from my regular panel. Those are still working. In fact, why don’t you have everyone crack their pods, and we’ll go back to standard ops. Or as standard as it’s going to get with the current situation.”

“Aye aye. I’ll see you in a second.”

Nathan continued checking out the status of the ship, and scrolling through the cameras out to the interior of the alien vessel. No Deltans presented themselves, at least not in any sort of recognizable form. The amber-glowing interior of the Control Ship was made up of silvery braces, gossamer webs of fine wire, articulated cables, black humps, and strangely shaped protrusions of multicolored, glossy material, blinking lights, and a thousand other things of unknown function, purpose, or design. He shook his head in wonder, still fascinated with the idea of their first contact, even though the reality of it had proved less than ideal.

Pods began to open, returning everyone’s acceleration couches to their usual positions. Nathan released his straps and pulled himself up and over to Christopher Wright, whose suit and helmet steamed with evaporating gel. He reached out and clasped hands with his XO.

Wright smiled tightly at him, his eyes full of concern. “Captain, any sign of the engineering hull?”

“Yes, I saw it. It looked intact, but where it is now, I have no idea. We seem to be inside the Control Ship, so I imagine Kris and the others are inside here somewhere as well.”

“Inside? Have the aliens made any attempt at communicating with us?”

“No, not that I’ve been aware of. They put some sort of framework around the two halves of the ship, and then they moved us in during those weird breaks in reality, but I haven’t seen or heard from anyone or anything.”

Wright grimaced. “Yes, I’d noticed those, but I didn’t know what to make of them.”

Nathan was about to respond when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Edwards floated at his side, having returned from checking on the other Bridge watchstanders. Nathan smiled and shook his Master Chief’s hand.

He turned back to Wright and then went on. “I think the Deltans can manipulate our sense of time somehow. When each of those discontinuities occurs, things change up or shift all of a sudden. I have no idea how it’s done, but I think they’re putting us into some sort of stasis, freezing us in place while they move us around. Maybe the light gets brighter because even though we’re moving at a much slower rate, the light is still being emitted normally, so it looks brighter to us.”

Wright frowned. “Or it’s being slowed down as well, but we’re seeing all the wavelengths at once, even the ones outside our normal visual spectrum. Blue shifting thermal radiation into our visible range?”

Edwards shook his head. “Hey, yeah, or maybe we’re seeing all the dust sprinkled by the Sandman. Listen, those sorts of details aren’t really our primary concern at the moment, sirs. What matters is, if what you’re saying is right, the Deltans can freeze us and do whatever they want at their leisure. How do we defend against that?”

Nathan shrugged. “I haven’t a clue, but I know the Deltans are mindful of our defenses.” He told them about the disabled weapon systems, and what he planned to do with their capacitor banks in order to keep the ship running for a while.

Wright nodded. “All right, Captain. That could work. But, if we’re going to have to rewire the power system and re-air the ship, we need to begin immediately, before our suit air runs out.”

“And patch up any breaches from the battle,” Edwards added. “Not only do we not want our atmo venting out, we don’t want any of whatever the Deltan’s breathe getting in.”

Nathan frowned. “This would be a lot easier if we had the engineers with us.” There was more to what he meant, but he did not bother saying it.

Neither of the other men needed to hear him say it. Edwards clasped him on the shoulder again. “I’m sure she and the others are okay, sir. They were just as protected as we were, and if the aft half survived like you said, then they’re going to be fine.”

Wright nodded. “Yes, sir. And they’re going to need air just like we are. The Deltans have yet to show up after bringing us aboard, but keeping us alive is the best sign we’ve had so far. My guess is they’re probably giving us a chance to stabilize ourselves, perhaps so they can bring the crew from the other half of the ship up here.”

Nathan looked doubtful. “I have yet to see anything from these aliens that would lead me to believe they have such a benevolent intent.”

Edwards grinned. “Well, they haven’t broken out the anal probes yet. That’s benevolent enough for the moment.”

Nathan put Edwards in charge of rewiring the power system and Wright on buttoning up the hull. They divided up the four Bridge crew between them and then branched out into the ship, gathering up crewmembers and handing out tasks. Nathan set out by himself, assessing individual systems and battle damage, balancing what they had against the situation they found themselves in.

In terms of balance, there was none. One crewman had died during the battle, at the location of the Deltan laser burn-through. Another five had died after the ship had been cut in half, three due to malfunctioning air systems, and one due to a broken neck. The final death had been hard to explain, until he noticed the empty IV drug reservoirs in her pod. It had malfunctioned, overdosing her on a lethal cocktail of the normally balanced flows of stimulants and depressants used to keep her alive during the extended high acceleration.

Two hours after commencing repairs, the remaining thirteen crewmembers of the Sword of Liberty gathered in the ship’s single mess. Nathan looked around at the assembled spacers. In a space built to hold a crew of 35, and which had supported 30 for a year and a half, thirteen was a depressingly spare assembly. He hoped against forlorn hope that Kris and her engineers were alive, and would soon be with them all here again.

Nathan glanced back at Edwards, who manned the environmental control panel on the aft/dorsal bulkhead of the mess. Those areas of the mission hull that could be properly patched had been. Anyplace too far gone—from either the laser attack or the nanobeam—had been sealed off forever. Now they each felt the air pressure rise in the room, and with it came a rising sense of safety and hope, even though they all knew that the air and power were both depressingly finite.

Edwards finally looked over and nodded to his Captain. Nathan reached up and unsealed his helmet. He removed it and took a deep breath for all to see. Exhaling, he nodded to them all and they each removed their helmets. Edwards did as well, and then wrinkled up his nose. “Damn, you guys smell like shit.”

Everyone laughed, just as he had intended. Nathan turned to regard them all. “Good work, everyone. And I mean that—both in the battle and now, with our repairs. You’ve achieved something very real and important here. Together, we have faced a superior, unknown, and completely alien force—and have shown not only that humankind can survive against such a force, but that we can persevere and win. The Sword of Liberty and each of you are a force to be reckoned with. I want each of you to know that what we’ve done, and what we’ve shown can be done to the folks back home, has assured Earth its survival.”

They all nodded back to him, solemnly accepting his praise. Nathan saw in each pair of eyes, though, the truth of what he left unsaid—that whatever happened back home when the aliens reached it in a few years, they had at most a few days, even assuming the Deltans left them alone, and they had no guarantee of that. They had been brought aboard for some purpose, and whatever it turned out to be, it was likely to be counter to their continued survival.

Nathan turned to Wright. “XO, what’s next on the schedule?”

Wright smiled. “Well, Captain—”

unbearable brightness

fluttering, jostling motion

shadows flitting about madly

insane shapes among them all

Stasis ended, and there were suddenly five more suited figures among them, still wearing helmets. They each floated above the deck, clawing at their sealing rings. Nathan spun around and searched the new faces. Seeing Kris, he dove forward, catching her up. He unsealed her helmet and pulled it free, tossing it behind him to bounce off the bulkhead.

She gasped and coughed, pulling in heaving gulps of air. Nathan smiled and hugged her close, squeezing her fiercely, his heart pounding in his ears. He whirled around and saw that the other engineers were also free of their helmets and being cared for. He turned back and refocused on Kris.

She had her breath again and looked around the mess, wide-eyed. He kissed her, but it took a moment for her to regain her bearings and kiss him back. They kissed again, and then she pushed him back, confused and slightly afraid. “Nathan,” she said, her voice raspy, “what the hell is going on?”

He smiled. “You’re back and you’re alive, that’s what’s going on.” He squeezed her again, breathing in the smell of her hair, covered by the unfortunate scent of hours spent in a vacuum suit, but still there.

Kris returned his embrace, also thankful to be alive and to see him again. Eventually she pulled away again. This time he allowed it, and neither of them said anything about the tears welled in their eyes, or about the contented smiles on both their faces. Kris asked again, “Nathan, what is going on?”

He shook his head. “Nope, you first. After the ship broke apart, what happened in Engineering?”

She shrugged. “Well, everything went offline, but not before the drive crashed us into the forward hull like a couple of billiard balls. We went spinning away, unbalanced, with no coolant for the reactor, and no energized helium for the drive, and no way to see where we were going, much less control our path. I tried to jury-rig some way to tap into the camera feed or use the auxiliary antennas, to see what was going on with you guys, when, somehow, we lost our spin. Once it was safe to move around, me and the others broke out of our pods and got to work on our repairs.

“That’s when I found out it was just me, Viera, Maxwell, Tambourge, and Blake.” Her eyes welled with tears again, such that she had to wipe them away as they would not fall. “The others were all dead. There were electrical fires, and the reactor was scrammed, and, damn it, nothing worked. The air was compromised—we were on suit reserves only and there was so much damage, we thought we’d never be able to re-air the hull. And we kept having these blackouts, or whiteouts, I guess, brought on by a lack of oxygen. We kept working though, up until we started choking out.”

She looked back at him and smiled wanly. “Then we had another whiteout episode and I woke up here. With you.”

He smiled back and kissed her. “That’s pretty much what we experienced, except for two things. First, we seem to be somewhere inside the Control Ship, and second, those weren’t whiteouts from a lack of oxygen. It appears to be a sort of stasis or suspended animation.” Nathan went on to explain everything that had happened to them in the forward half of the hull.

Kris’s eyes grew wider and wider as he went on. When he finished, she just stared. A smile began to tick up one corner of her mouth. “That … is … awesome!”

Nathan arched an eyebrow. “Not exactly the word I would use to describe being captured by hostile aliens, but sure, ‘awesome’ works, I guess.”

“No, no, no!” She pushed off from him and turned around to capture the attention of everyone in the mess. “Don’t you see? This explains so much.”

Edwards regarded her from where he was talking with one of the other engineers. “What does what explain so much, CHENG?”

“The Deltan’s stasis field—it’s why they don’t mind taking 80 some odd years to get from one star to another. To them it’s not 80 years, or whatever it would be with relativity thrown in. To them, it’s in the blink of an eye!”

Wright moved to the front of the crowd. “They’re putting themselves in stasis? But they seem to move around with impunity when we’re under the field.”

Kris nodded. “Sure. If you’ve got stasis, why not anti-stasis? That’s probably what those frameworks they put around us do—those generate the stasis field, and if they have to move around while we’re frozen, they wear an anti-stasis doohickey on their belts, or whatever.”

Nathan smiled at her. “All right, I grant you it’s pretty neat, but I’m not as excited as you are about it. To me, that means we can’t oppose them effectively unless we can get one of the anti-stasis devices for ourselves, and the chances of that are piss-poor.”

She nodded. “Sure, if you wanted anti-stasis, but that’s the last thing we need right now. We only have a few days of life support, right?”

Wright answered, “Seventy-two hours at the outside, unless you can improve our setup.”

Kris grinned. “Seventy-two hours running continuously, but what about if they put us in stasis? There’s no reason we can’t survive for years on what we have left—long enough to get back home. We still have a chance of reaching Earth!”

The crew all looked at her now, with expressions ranging from joy, to shock, to worry. Nathan carried one of the worried looks. “Assuming they do put us in stasis to bring us back to Earth, why? Why have they captured us instead of letting us die out there? What do they need from us? I’m excited about the prospect of seeing Earth again, too, but not as the pawn or tool in some alien attack on our home planet.”

She smiled at him, and this time her smile had a slightly evil cast to it, much as she had back when she first described the Excalibur missile to him. “We’re only pawns if we allow ourselves to be pawns. Just because they took our weapons away doesn’t mean we aren’t armed. Were the auxiliary drives still intact when you isolated their capacitor banks?”

“Yes, but why … .” Nathan’s eyes grew wide. He pushed off from where he was and caught her up in an embrace. He leaned in and whispered to her. “Can I be in love with you and completely scared of you at the same time?”

She smiled and kissed his cheek. “It’s not very healthy emotionally, but sure, why not?”

Edwards and Wright exchanged a look and a shrug, but that was all. The XO moved over to Nathan and Kris, who turned arm-in-arm to regard him. “Captain,” he asked, “what are your orders?”

Nathan sobered. “We need to take stock on what we have thus far. Divide up the crew into maintenance teams—some for checking air integrity and supplies, the engineers and some of the twidget-types for getting whatever systems we can online, comms especially, another team to check out the SSTOS. We may need to use it as a final redoubt once the systems in the rest of the ship fail due to lack of power. The shuttle has its own reactor. We could potentially survive there for several weeks. And, lastly, we need to arm ourselves from the weapons locker—”

an infinity of white

crew reaching out blindly

something else

something among them

Stasis fell away and Nathan whirled around. He caught sight of it just as several of the crew gasped and cried out. Bodies surged back from the mess’s open hatchway, crowding up against the furthest bulkhead. It took a moment for them to clear away and give him an unobstructed view, but soon he, Wright, Edwards, and Kris were at the forefront of the assembled crew.

An alien held its position steady in the hatch’s frame. The creature they had long referred to as a Deltan was nothing that could be encapsulated by such a pedestrian, human name. This thing was the product of a different biology, a different environment, a different science. It was alien in all senses of the word.

Nathan’s mind, recoiling from the sight of something so strange, struggled to classify it, to break it down into parts which would make sense to him. In the broadest sense, it looked like the impossible crossing of a wasp and a squid.

Its upper body was hard and segmented, though its segments were not differentiated as cleanly into head, thorax, and abdomen as a terrestrial insect would be. Instead, the glossy gray segments grew narrower and longer at the top, with the last segment covered in a mix of a dozen simple multicolored eyes and four black compound eyes, with slits of unknown purpose alongside upper and lower pairs of mouths, ringed in cilia.

The segments lower on the body grew wider and shorter, eventually breaking up into overlapping plates, between each of which emerged scaled, ringed tentacles. Nathan saw at least a dozen tentacles of varying thickness supporting the creature in its position at the hatchway. The tentacles themselves appeared quite complex, branching again and again into smaller limbs and cilia, such that each one would have been capable of either delicate work or heavy lifting.

The Deltan was wrapped in a dull blue, translucent shift, and either ornamentation or instrumentation of unknown purpose. The entire alien and its garment also appeared to be covered in a uniform layer of plastic, to which a square-ish pack was attached at its back. Nathan wondered whether it was an environment suit of some sort, or if it was part of the creature’s anti-stasis generator, allowing it to move when they were frozen in place. Perhaps both?

He shook himself. Here was their first contact, the first chance they would have to perhaps avert the war over Earth that seemed inevitable now. Nathan pushed off from the crowd to approach the alien who had captured them.

He was grabbed at the last moment by the XO. Wright pulled him back to the rest of the crew and placed a hand on his chest. “No, sir. You’re not going to be the first one to talk to that thing.”

Nathan looked incredulous. “Pardon me, XO?”

Wright’s features were firmly resolved. “Not a chance, sir. You’re our captain, our leader. We live or die on your word, and you are first and foremost in charge, but you also planned this to happen a certain way.”

Nathan frowned. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed over the past year and a half, but our plans have had a depressing tendency to go by the wayside.”

“Not this one, sir. True, originally we were supposed to have a US ambassador and a couple of xenologists along for this purpose, but stealing the ship made that a moot point. And though our roles have changed to better fit the actual mission, I was originally supposed to be their liaison to the crew. With my background and training, I’m the closest thing you have to an ambassador and a linguist.”

“You’re stretching things a bit, XO. The situation has changed.”

“No, sir. Just as I led the first communiqués aboard ship, I need to lead these negotiations. You’re the captain, Nathan, but first contact has been—and is going to remain—my game. Right, Master Chief?”

Nathan turned toward Edwards. “COB?”

Edwards looked at them both, then gave the Deltan by the hatchway a critical appraisal. He faced Nathan again. “I’m with the XO on this one, Skipper.”

Nathan turned red at the seeming betrayal. “Damn it, Master Chief—”

Edwards interrupted him. “Need I remind you that last time you spoke directly to these guys, they started shooting?”

Nathan’s jaw dropped. “That is a complete mis-representation of what happened out there.”

Edwards shrugged. “It is what it is. Now, sir, please give your authorization for our XO and ambassadorial liaison to proceed with his damn job.”

Nathan fumed, but—with a final glance at the Deltan waiting at the hatchway—nodded curtly to Wright after a few moments. Wright nodded back and then pushed off from the crew to close half the distance to the alien. He stopped his flight with a quick grasp at one of the overhead’s handholds and then re-oriented himself to a more dignified standing position.

He inclined his head respectfully to the alien and smiled. “Hello. I am Lieutenant Commander Christopher Wright of the United States Aerospace Navy, and Executive Officer of the USS Sword of Liberty. In the interests of peace, and in order to settle the conflict that has arisen between our two species, I am authorized to communicate with you on behalf of the people of Earth.”

He paused. The alien did nothing but stand there. “Do you understand me? Is there another language you are more familiar with?” He turned his head to look back at Edwards. “COB, can we get the linguistic program running on the computer here in the mess?”

Before Edwards could respond, the Deltan moved. It held forth a device in one tentacle, which scintillated in a rainbow of colors. Between it and the XO, a flat image appeared in mid-air. Wright turned back to look at the image and the alien, giving both his full attention.

He smiled. The images were a series of clips, replayed snippets of television programs caught up by the Deltans from the Earth’s distant broadcasts, and now shown back to them as a form of communication, though none of them knew what the message might be.

City skylines and architecture were mixed in with sculptures, paintings, and plays. Soundless visions of singers, concerts, and comedians were cut in between biographies of famous artists and writers at work. Trailers from movies and news clips of ballet and opera openings were shown now and again. It went on for several minutes, widely varying and never repeating. It was possible the Deltans had hours upon hours of stored clips.

Wright nodded and laughed slightly. “This is art! Is that what this is all about? Have you seen our art and culture and that’s why you’re coming? What is so important about our works, that you would make such a long journey? Why haven’t you simply contacted us and asked for some sort of exchange? Why the attacks and the hostility? Please make me understand what it is you want from us.”

The alien’s head analog tilted slightly, regarding the XO. The images vanished and it lowered the device in its tentacle. Another tentacle rose up, carrying a different instrument.

A silvered beam of suspended nanomachines lanced out from it, slicing into Wright at the abdomen. Nathan cried out in shock, along with a number of the crew, Kris included, who shrieked. They were all drowned out, though, by the screams of mindless agony from the XO himself.

The beam scanned up and down his body, spreading the nanomachines all over him. The particles flowed around his body like a silvered mist, flaying him apart microscopic layer by microscopic layer, fast enough to watch him vanish, but too slowly to be merciful. His vacuum suit and skin vanished, and then the flesh beneath, but not one drop of blood was cast off, converted instead into ashen dust and silvered particles.

After too long a time, the screams cut off and they could only watch as their XO was rendered and skeletonized. The crew had surged back and lined the opposite bulkhead, some crying, some comforting, and all afraid of what sort of hell they had fallen into. Nathan, Kris, and David Edwards alone stood apart, the pair of them holding their Captain in place from his instinctual attempt to go to his murdered compatriot’s aid.

The beam stopped and the alien brought the device down. The cloud of nanoparticles kept up their work, though, and soon the XO’s bones started showing holes, thinned out, and vanished into dust. Of Wright, there was nothing then but a dense, swirling cloud of particulates.

After a moment, purposeful motion could be seen within the cloud. Similar to a time-reversed strip of film showing a decaying body growing backwards toward life, gray and silver dust coalesced, building up a body from the bones outward. Flesh, skin, hair and features appeared, laid down layer by layer, like a line-by-line printout of a human being, differentiated by what had been there before only by coloring. A body was made up of reds and whites, and a dozen other subtle hues between them, but this pallet had only gray and silver.

At its end, the cloud was gone, its entirety now comprising a statue of Christopher Wright, nude and flawless, inexplicably standing on the deck in disregard to the absence of gravity. As they watched, the gray and silver coloring of the body faded and gained inhuman detail. Finally, the statue took on the cast of white marble, shot through with random veins of pink and amber.

As a piece of art, a memorial to Wright, it had worth, but not any worth that justified his murder. Nathan no longer struggled against Kris and Edwards. He simply glared at the statue and the alien with unmasked hatred.

That hatred shifted to shock and confusion, though, as the marble statue of Wright turned toward him fluidly and smiled. The statue glanced back at the alien blocking the hatchway and then walked—again in contravention of microgravity—to Nathan, Kris, and Edwards.

The thing that had been their XO, and which mirrored his appearance in exacting detail, nodded to them all and spoke, its voice similar enough to Wright’s to be unsettling, but stripped of all emotion and inflection, words without conscious thought or feeling. “Greetings. I am prepared to communicate with you in regards to our purpose and design. Will you speak with me?”

Nathan shuddered, listening to the thing speak, unable to reconcile its toneless copy of Wright’s voice with the passionate, disciplined man who used to own that face. “What the hell are you?”

The statue gestured to itself, waving a hand over its body. “The man Wright was your ambassador. I, too, am an ambassador. This is our emissary, capable of communication in human terms, an avatar of the beings you know as the Deltans, though that designation is incorrect in every way worth considering.”

Nathan shook his head, horrified and confused beyond all measure. In the back of his mind, he realized that it could have just as easily been himself who was converted into this entity, a thought that both shamed him and relieved him at the same time. He struggled to get his mind back on track. “What do you mean, the ‘designation is incorrect’?”

“The beings en route to your planet are not from Delta Pavonis, nor any nearby star system. Their home and their place is quite distant from any place you would know, at least in any sense that you will understand. That star system was merely the sight of their last acquisition, a priceless treasure which you destroyed during your futile attack.”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back and forth between the alien and the statue of Wright through which it communicated. “Acquisition? Treasure? What are you talking about? Why are you coming to Earth?”

The avatar smiled. It might not have any emotion in its voice, but its expression demonstrated its condescension quite well. “Your people have openly displayed their magnificent cultural wealth for all within a hundred light-years to see, with selfless disregard for protecting its unique and singular worth. And we have taken notice. We are appreciative. We adore the works of Earth and we are devoted to its safety and guardianship. We do not seek enslavement. No, no. We only want to preserve and enshrine the greatness your species has wrought.

“We are your Patrons, and we bring you the galaxy, to the betterment of all.”