The Nelson Touch

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“You know,” Charles remarked, “this is really very creepy.”

The Rhino snorted. “You wouldn’t be one of those people who think that dolphins are actually intelligent?”

Charles looked down at the dolphins as they were lowered into the water. They looked normal, apart from the handful of cybernetic linkages visible against their heads, but their behaviour was odd. Most dolphins were playful, even the ones that had been trained to work beside the Royal Marines or Special Boat Service. These… just seemed to hang in the water, waiting for the command to move. They didn’t even splash water towards the humans when they were lowered into the waves.

“They’re not human,” he said. “I find it… disturbing.”

He scowled. He’d seen humans who were more machine than men… and many other horrors, most of them perpetrated on one human by another. The Royal Marines were never dispatched to peaceful parts of the world; he’d seen looting, rape and mass slaughter, all horrible beyond imagination. Seeing dolphins turned into cyber-slaves shouldn’t have bothered him, but it did. And he honestly wasn’t sure why.

“Quite a few people do,” the Rhino said. “But, in the end, they’re not intelligent.”

Charles couldn’t disagree with that, he knew, even though it still bothered him. Human geneticists had been making proposals to uplift dolphins, chimpanzees and gorillas for the last hundred years, ever since genetic manipulation became a viable science. They’d argued that, if humanity was alone in the universe, there was no harm in creating other forms of intelligent life to stand beside their human creators. For once, the governments of Earth had acted with complete uniformity and flatly banned the process. Even Sin City and the rogue asteroid settlements upheld the ban.

But the ban didn’t preclude turning animals into cybernetic organisms.

The technology was simple enough, he knew. A human would see the world through the animal’s senses, feel what the animal felt… and be able to offer suggestions that were almost always taken as orders. There were even adventure parks where human children could ride along in an animal’s mind, despite lingering fears about what contact with non-human minds could do. Given the sheer power of modern VR technology, Charles suspected they had a point. If he ever had children, he promised himself, he was damned if they were being allowed to use VR until they were at least twenty-one.

But it still bothered him, not least because controlling animals was barely scratching the surface of the technology’s potential. Someone could plug themselves into another human’s body — there were places in Sin City where a man could be a woman for a few short hours or vice versa — or even control someone, directly, through cybernetic implants. There were even a handful of asteroid colonies where negative emotions, as defined by the founders, were carefully removed from the minds of the inhabitants. Where was the free will, Charles had asked himself more than once, if someone could be shocked every time they had a negative thought. Eventually, they would be brainwashed into compliance — or dead.

“I know,” he said. “But it only makes it worse.”

On an invisible signal, the dolphins came to life; they swam out, away from the shore, and plunged under the water. Unlike the drones, Charles knew, they wouldn’t really disturb the aliens so badly; indeed, they might mistake the dolphins for native creatures they hadn’t actually recorded yet. If humans were still recording forms of underwater life on Earth, why couldn’t the aliens have the same problem on a colony world? But it still felt wrong.

The Rhino elbowed him as they turned to walk back towards the Forward Operations Base, which had expanded rapidly in the days since their landing. “If they were human instead,” he said, “like the mermen, would it be better?”

Charles had no answer. The mermen had altered themselves to the point they could live and work underwater indefinitely, not unlike the aliens themselves. A few mermen might have been able to open communications, he suspected, but none of them had volunteered to accompany the task force. He had a private theory — and he knew that some of the researchers shared it, because it had been discussed during his training — that the genetic modifications had done something to their minds. They were no longer entirely human.

He looked over at a team of Americans setting up a plasma gun and smiled to himself. If the aliens returned to the planet before the humans were ready to leave, they’d be in for a warm reception. They now knew, thanks to the alien weapons, that they could engage targets in low orbit without problems… and, with so much space junk still up there, it would be harder for the aliens to move attack ships into orbit. But then, the aliens would probably do the same as their human foes and launch marines from a safe distance. It was a perfectly viable tactic, after all.

The Rhino grunted, then led the way into one of the trailers. Inside, twelve women sat at consoles, their heads linked to a mesh of cybernetic systems. Unlike the dolphins, they could disengage their minds at any time, although it might cost the program a dolphin if they did it at the wrong time. But then, Charles knew just what could happen if an animal died while a human mind was riding it, particularly if there were no filters in place. The human would go into neural shock and, perhaps, die.

He looked down at the women and shuddered, slightly. Their faces were hidden behind their helmets, but their bodies were twitching, as if they were swimming alongside the dolphins — and, in their minds, they were. He couldn’t help hearing faint sounds coming from below the helmets, some creepy enough to make him sweat uncomfortably. The women seemed to verge between being in pain to moaning in pleasure. Part of him felt as if he was intruding on their privacy just by listening to them.

The Rhino, for once, had nothing to say as he led Charles into the deeper part of the trailer. A large holographic display hung in front of them, showing the live feed from the dolphins in a manner that looked faintly odd. Charles pushed his concerns aside as he watched the dolphins swimming deeper and deeper under the waves, probing towards the alien settlement in a casual, almost too casual, manner.

“Interesting,” one of the Americans said. Charles glanced at him and read the Army Intelligence patch on his shoulder. “Look at that.”

Charles frowned. For a moment, there was nothing there, but seabed. It wasn’t until he’d stared at it for a long moment that… something… began to take on shape and form. It looked like a crab… no, something much larger. He couldn’t help thinking of it as a strange cross between a crab, a slug and a lobster. But it was far too large to be natural.

“It looks to be mechanical,” the intelligence officer said. “But it’s just holding position there, as if it were watching for trouble.”

“A tank, perhaps,” the Rhino said.

Charles couldn’t disagree. The aliens seemed to have stationed a number of the strange vehicles below the waves, blocking access from the shore to the underwater settlements. Did they imagine that humans would send their tanks underwater to hunt them down? It might make sense, he told himself, to a race that lived under the waves. He wondered, absently, just what evolutionary path they’d followed. Humans had crawled out of the waters long before taking on their modern form; the aliens, it seemed, had chosen to establish their factories on the surface, but not to remain there permanently.

“We may never know, unless we manage to talk to them,” the Rhino commented. He’d listened to Charles’s commentary in silence. “Maybe they devised ways to use the land before they ever set foot on it, just as we did in space.”

“It would make sense,” Charles agreed. Humanity had spent years planning the use of space before ever establishing regular flights to orbit. “But how did they even consider the possibility.”

The Rhino smirked. “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space,” he quoted. “No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.”

He paused for effect. “And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”

“The War of the Worlds,” Charles said. “They made us read it in training.”

“Us too,” the Rhino said. “Although we found it a little disappointing. What does one do if confronted with a seemingly-unbeatable enemy? We used to come up with all sorts of alternate endings, ranging from eventually capturing and reverse-engineering their technology to simply carrying out an urban resistance against the bastards. The heat-rays are impressive, but they can only kill what they see, while the Black Smoke gas could be dispelled with water.”

“Sir,” the intelligence officer said, breaking into the discussion. “You need to see this.”

Charles looked back at the display and swore out loud. Aliens, hundreds of aliens, were swimming below the dolphins, never looking up towards the light. Below them, there were smaller aliens and some very strange creatures. Charles remembered one of the more pathetic explanations of the Birds and the Bees he’d had at school and had to fight down a laugh, then realised that they were looking at alien children. They were like tadpoles, he recalled, remembering the speculation he’d heard after their first return to Earth. The odd forms below the alien adults were children who had yet to grow into their full bodies.

“Tadpoles start out looking a little like sperm,” the Rhino said. Clearly, he’d been having similar thoughts. “They grow into frogs over several months. The aliens, it seems, follow the same basic idea.”

Charles shuddered, remembering some of the less pleasant speculation about how the alien society might have developed. Humanity’s ideal — one man, one woman, several children — was shaped by biological requirements. The man impregnated the woman, then fed her and defended her, while she had the children and then raised them. Human emotions were built around protecting one’s children first and foremost — and, less pleasantly, resisting cuckoos in the nest. So much about human society had been shaped by the mating urge — and the urge to keep children safe. But for the aliens it would be very different…

The alien men ejaculate millions of sperm, he thought, and the alien women launch countless eggs into the water. Their infant mortality rate must be terrifying — and I bet they don’t give a damn. Because they don’t have the emotional link between parents and children that we have…

He shuddered again, contemplating the possibilities. The aliens lived in a far from friendly environment, even though they were perfectly capable of living underwater indefinitely. It was easy to imagine creatures comparable to goldfish or even minnows snapping up alien sperm and eating it, perhaps even gobbling up fertilized eggs… he felt sick and swallowed hard, trying to think about something — anything — else. The whole concept was disgusting.

And what, he asked himself, would they make of us?

As a child, he’d firmly believed that girls were gross and sex, an act that involved parts of the body he associated with bodily wastes, disgusting beyond imagination. But, as a teenager, his opinions had changed radically, to the point where he’d spent most of his time plotting to commit the act he’d been so disgusted with, years earlier. And, even now, he knew he’d be tempted if someone offered him the chance to visit a brothel. Every damn deployment usually started with someone having to be rousted out of a whorehouse and then yelled at for several hours by the Sergeants for not having been ready to go on command. Or making a tearful farewell to his wife.

Humans couldn’t separate themselves from sex, not completely. There might be heterosexuals and homosexuals — and perversions that were banned even in Sin City — but they all involved sex. But, for the aliens, there would be no time being wasted on sexual matters. Nor would they have any of humanity’s complex and often useless regulations barring sexual contact. They simply never had sexual contact. It struck him, suddenly, that an alien king could have a child with a beggar girl and neither of them would ever know about it.

He snickered, suddenly. “They’re all bastards,” he said. “Quite literally. They’re all bastards.”

He watched as the dolphins swam past the alien children and down towards the alien city. It was a weird structure, reminding him more of coral reefs than anything else, surrounded by countless brightly-coloured fish. There were few signs of high technology of any sort, apart from a number of sealed boxes of uncertain origin. One building had an open roof; inside;, several dozen aliens drifted together, either asleep or stunned. Other aliens seemed to be sleeping wherever they chose, clinging to the reefs or hanging just inside rocky caves. It was hard to pick out anything that might be shops, government buildings or anything else that would be common in any human city.

“They don’t seem to have any shops,” he observed. “Or anything we would consider useful.”

“They might not have them,” the intelligence officer pointed out. “They eat fish, I assume, and there’s just too much fish around for them to try to have dedicated fishmongers. I think they’re actually more flexible than we are when it comes to eating — trying to sell food and drink here would be like trying to charge for oxygen or fresh water.”

“They do, on asteroid settlements,” Charles recalled. One of his earlier deployments had been to an asteroid where the ruling power had tried to do just that, only to have their settlers rise up in revolt. “And there were people who wanted to try it on Earth.”

“There’s a limited supply of oxygen or water on an asteroid,” the intelligence officer explained, “and they need scrubbers and recycling plants to keep the system operational, even with the best genetically-engineered grass carpets we can produce. It’s viable there to charge for oxygen. On Earth, there’s no point in even trying.”

He looked back at the latest set of images. “I’d bet good money that the first alien governments were actually communistic in nature,” he added. “Why not? There wouldn’t be any real advantages to either tribal or monarchical governments. Even capitalism would be of limited value in a world where everyone could get food and drink whenever they wanted.”

“If that is true,” the Rhino mused, “how did they ever develop intelligence?”

“They’re probably not naturally top of the food chain,” the intelligence officer said, after a moment. “Like us, they probably have problems fighting… well, a sabre-toothed shark one-on-one. So they develop basic weapons and tactics… and, somewhere along the line, those tactics become outright intelligence. And then they discovered they could climb out of the water and go on dry land. I’d bet good money that their intelligence was just sufficient at that point to allow them to take advantage without actually abandoning their roots.”

“But they have to know we wouldn’t be interested in the deep waters,” Charles said. “Why would they react so badly to us?”

“Maybe they fought a war with another alien race, one based on the land,” the intelligence officer said. “Or maybe they just suspected the worst when they first encountered humanity. Our history with other forms of life isn’t that good.”

Charles nodded, slowly. Humanity had saved the whales and dolphins after an extensive cloning program, as well as moving samples from Earth to several other worlds, but countless species had been wiped out entirely. No one had seen a dodo for hundreds of years and no one ever would, not outside VR productions or movies. But how would the aliens know what had happened? It wasn’t as if humanity had seen fit to advertise its crimes.

“Which leaves us with a real problem,” the Rhino said. “Just what happened when the Heinlein Colony encountered the aliens?”

Charles nodded. If only the aliens could talk!

The Rhino’s communicator buzzed. He lifted it to his ear and pressed a switch. “Yes?”

He listened for a long moment. “I’ll be on my way,” he said, then returned the device to his belt. “Charles, there is a meeting I have to attend. Call me if the situation changes.”

Charles nodded, then returned his attention to the display. The dolphins were swimming over a large assortment of crab-like creatures, apparently corralled in a zoo… or a farm. Perhaps the aliens could farm after all. He watched, then flinched back as an alien face appeared in front of him. For a long moment, he had the distressing impression that the alien was looking right into the trailer, before remembering that the alien was looking at the dolphin. It was impossible to read any expressions on the alien’s face.

“Evade,” the intelligence officer ordered. “I think…”

The image blurred. Charles heard a woman’s voice scream from the front of the trailer.

“They killed the dolphin,” the intelligence officer said. “Shit.”

Charles nodded, then ran into the front compartment. One of the women was screaming in pain, despite two medics trying to hold her down. A medic pressed a sedative tab against her neck, but it was several very long moments before it took effect. The other women hastily snapped on their filters, then urged the dolphins to run. There was no longer any time to hesitate. The aliens knew they were being watched.

Shit, Charles thought, as he reached for his communicator. Bloody buggering shit!