The Trafalgar Gambit

Chapter Four

One of the curses of being born into the Royal Family, Prince Henry had decided long ago, was that one was expected to visit other countries and pretend to like them. It wasn’t so bad when visiting a modern country like America or France, but a less-developed or traditionalist country could be an uncomfortable place to visit. He still had nightmares about the water houses in Malaysia, where there had been no air conditioning, or the tents in Southern Arabia where his staff had been strictly segregated by sex. And complaining hadn’t been allowed, no matter how uncomfortable or unpleasant it became. It had been one of the many things he’d hated about his life.

But he had to admit it was also good practice for being an alien prisoner.

He lay naked on the uncomfortable bed, staring up at the transparent canopy. Outside, thousands of brightly-coloured fish swam through the water, showing no fear of the aliens or — for that matter — the human in the cell. And it was a cell, he knew, even if there were no locked doors or handcuffs. The only exit involved swimming through murky water and somehow getting up to the surface before he drowned. Henry knew he was a good swimmer, but he would never be as good as the aliens. They drew oxygen directly from the water through their gills.

The cell wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, although the aliens didn’t seem to understand what humans needed to survive and prosper. They hadn’t provided him with any clothes, either out of a misplaced paranoia over what he would do with them or through a simple lack of awareness that humans needed clothes. The aliens never wore clothes, as far as he could tell, at least outside combat situations. Given their biology, it was quite likely they had never developed any form of nudity taboo. Henry had rapidly grown used to being naked in front of his visitors. It helped that they were very definitely not human.

He sat up as water splashed around the entrance, then swung his legs over the side of the bed as an alien clambered up into the compartment. As always, the alien seemed largely uncomfortable in the cell, even though the atmosphere was warm and moist enough to pass for Malaysia. He couldn’t help comparing its movements to a strange mixture of wet dog and wetter seal, before it turned to peer at him with bulging, utterly inhuman eyes. Henry had the feeling that bright light would disorientate the alien — its eyes were designed to see underwater — but there was no way to be sure. He didn’t have anything, apart from his wits.

“Greetings,” the alien said.

Henry rose to his feet and affected a bow. “Greetings,” he replied. “Have we seen each other before?”

“Yes,” the alien said.

There were humans, Henry knew, who would have been offended by the suggestion that every member of a particular ethnic group looked alike. And it was stupid; it was quite easy to tell the difference between two different humans. The only exception to that rule, at least in Henry’s experience, was an asteroid where every single person was a clone of the asteroid’s founder or his wife. But the aliens didn’t seem to care. They all looked alike to him and, no matter what he did, he had never been able to even tell the difference between male and female aliens.

They might have the same problems with us, he told himself.

The alien seemed to flow into a sitting position. “Sit,” it ordered. “Please sit.”

Henry nodded, wondering just where the aliens had learned their English. His best guess was that they had recovered a tutoring console, perhaps from Vera Cruz or one of the other smaller colonies out along the rim of known space. They seemed to have a good grasp on the basic structure of the language, but they had real problems with understanding the differences between requests, commands and warnings. And that, he suspected, was just scratching the surface. It was possible that humans and aliens would never come to understand one another.

He sat cross-legged and faced the alien, wondering just what the alien saw when it looked at a human. A faceless monster, an animal… or another intelligent being? Humans saw monsters when they looked at aliens, Henry knew, although he wasn’t sure how much of that sensation had been dictated by experience. He was looking at a representative of a race that had devastated several worlds, occupied more and taken countless humans as prisoners.

“You will explain your government, please,” the alien said. “How do they come into power?”

Henry hesitated. It was hard enough explaining democracy, let alone the strange combination of meritocracy and aristocracy that made up the British Government. He rather doubted he could make it comprehensible to the aliens. But he had to try.

“When we want to select new leaders,” he said, “we ask people to support them. The person with the most votes wins the election and becomes the leader for the next few years.”

There was a long pause. He wondered, suddenly, how the aliens handled their government.

“Explain your government,” he ordered. It had taken him some time to realise that the aliens responded better to bluntness than politeness. He wasn’t sure if they didn’t need the social lubricant politeness provided for humanity or if words like ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ confused them. They’d certainly never punished him for asking questions or being rude. “How does it work?”

“All talk,” the alien said. “All decide. All do.”

Henry frowned, puzzled. Was the alien being deliberately evasive or was it unable to express its true meaning in English? Or was he simply not understanding what he was being told?

He took a breath. Weeks — he thought it was weeks, although it was hard to be sure — of captivity had left him uncertain of anything. It was growing harder to recall that there had ever been a world outside the cell, where he’d struggled to be a starfighter pilot and achieved his dream, only to be captured by the aliens. And the aliens didn’t have the slightest idea who they’d caught. He’d been careful not to say anything that might suggest his true identity to them.

“I understand,” he said. If the alien was feeling talkative, he could at least try to learn something from it. “Why did you decide on war?”

The alien moved, oddly. Henry wished, not for the first time, that he knew how to read their body language. A human might have been laughing at him or preparing to throw a punch, but the aliens were completely inscrutable. He braced himself and pressed onwards.

“Your people attacked us,” he said. “Why?”

“Attacked. Us,” the alien said. As always, the computer-generated voice was completely atonal. “You. Attacked. Us. Faction for war won.”

Henry felt his eyes narrow. There was certainly evidence the aliens had more than one faction; he’d been at Target One when the aliens had fired on one of their own ships. But what had the War Faction won? And why did they think humanity had attacked them first?

“We didn’t even know you existed until you attacked us,” he said. “Why didn’t you talk to us?”

“Faction for war won,” the alien repeated.

It — or he — spoke as though it explained everything. And perhaps it did, Henry realised. It was far from uncommon for humans to be rushed into war against another group of humans without sober reflection. If the aliens had some reason to think that humanity had started the war, it might explain their reluctance to actually talk to human representatives. They’d see the human race as aggressive, as needing to be pruned back before opening discussions. But how had the aliens come to that conclusion in the first place?

“We don’t have to fight,” Henry pointed out. “We could have the land; you could have the sea. There’d be nothing to fight over.”

“Faction for peace… uncertain,” the alien stated. “Aliens. Started. War.”

Aliens, Henry thought. They must mean us.

“But what happened?” He asked. “And why?”

The alien said nothing. It rose to its feet, inched back towards the entrance and dropped into the hole. There was a splash as it hit the water and then vanished, somewhere within the murky depths. Henry stared after it, wondering just what had happened, then stood and walked back to the bed. There was little else to do, but sleep and dream of Janelle. He couldn’t help wondering just what had happened to her…

And Ark Royal, he thought, numbly. Did she make it back to Earth or did the aliens kill her?

His thoughts were interrupted by splashing from the entrance. One alien — a new one, if he were any judge — clambered into the room, then knelt down and held out a leathery hand. It was so odd that Henry stared in disbelief. He’d never seen the aliens needing assistance to climb out of the water and into the room. But, as the next person came out of the water and removed the mask covering her face, he understood. The newcomer was human. And female.

He looked at her, then flushed and looked away as he realised she was naked. She was probably a handful of years younger than him, he decided, probably just pushing eighteen rather than twenty-two. Her long brown hair clung to her body as she wiped her skin, trying to get the water off her flesh. Henry understood the feeling all too well. The faint smell from the ocean water suggested it was far from clean.

“There’s a shower over there,” he said, pointing to the corner of the room. “It’s clean water.”

“They never supply towels,” the girl said. She sounded rather amused. “I should complain to the management.”

Henry snorted, then looked back at the alien. It looked back at him, then stepped into the water and vanished from sight. Henry shook his head in disbelief, then tried not to look at the girl as she washed the ocean water from her body and hair. His body was insisting on reminding him just how long it had been since he’d slept with anyone.

And are you going to betray Janelle so quickly? His thoughts mocked him. Or are you going to try to excuse your behaviour?

Shut up, he thought. He knew his father and grandfather had both had their affairs — being in the Royal Family made it impossible to keep anything quiet for long — but he was damned if he were going the same way. Honour wasn’t just the name of a famous American movie heroine, after all. I’m not going to cheat on her.

“My name is Jill, Jill Pearlman,” the girl said. Her accent was definitely American, Henry decided, although it was thicker than the last American accent he’d heard. Was she from one of the colonies? The Americans had been enthusiastic colonisers after the discovery that Terra Nova wasn’t the only Earth-like world out there. “Who are you?”

Henry hesitated. Everyone knew him as Charles Augustus. It might not have been the brightest name to pick for himself, but it had worked. And yet, here and now, he didn’t really want to hide behind a mask. It wasn’t as if Henry was an uncommon name.

“Henry,” he said, simply. He studied her, trying hard to keep his eyes on her face. It was possible she was an American starfighter pilot, but he rather doubted it. She just looked too young. “Where did you come from?”

“Heinlein,” the girl said, bitterly. “I started the war.”

Henry stared at her. There had been a flurry of interest in the Heinlein Colony on the datanets after the discovery of artefacts from the colony on Alien-1, but he’d been struggling to get through the Academy and he hadn’t been paying much attention. From what he recalled, the colonists had wanted to set up a homeworld far from the United States and its colonies, claiming they were tainted with a political disease. They’d boarded a ship, jumped through the tramlines and vanished. No one had seen anything of them until Alien-1.

“I see,” he said. “What happened?”

Jill looked down at the floor, then sat next to him on the bed. “We were swimming,” she said, slowly. “Ira and I… we went to have some fun away from the adults. Ira spent all of his free time exploring, so he knew where we could go. There was this lagoon.”

She broke off, bitterly. “We went skinny-dipping,” she admitted. “It was Ira’s idea.”

“I’m sure it was,” Henry said. “And then?”

“We saw this creature rise out of the water,” Jill said. “It was one of them” — she waved a hand to indicate the aliens — “but we didn’t know it at the time. We thought it might be a dangerous creature. I ran to get the gun and shot it. It fell back into the water and vanished.”

She rubbed her eyes with her bare hands. “They didn’t believe us in the colony,” she said. “There hadn’t been any traces of higher life forms on Heinlein, none at all. They didn’t believe us until the aliens arrived and attacked in force.”

Henry cursed under his breath. The aliens settled the seabed first and then moved onto the surface, if all the projections and observations were correct. Humans, meanwhile, settled the land and rarely paid any attention to what was lurking under the waves. It was quite possible, he decided, for two separate colony missions to occupy the same world, without ever realising the other one was there. If they’d both checked for other life forms and found nothing, would they even bother to check again?

“And it started there,” he mused. “They must have been as astonished as you.”

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “I hid when they attacked; my father fought desperately to protect the colony. But they overwhelmed the defences and took the survivors prisoner. They just… took me away from the other captives one day and sent me here. I haven’t seen any other humans since then.”

Henry considered it. “What do they want from you?”

“They just ask questions and try to master English,” Jill said. She made a face. “I was not a very good teacher.”

“I don’t think English is an easy language for them to learn,” Henry said. How many of humanity’s words were bound up in unspoken assumptions that simply didn’t apply to the aliens? “But you did very well.”

He looked down at his hands, thinking hard. The war was an accident. The whole war, which had killed hundreds of thousands of people and presumably aliens, was an accident, the result of a disastrous First Contact. And yet… how could he get back to Earth to report to his superiors? And even if he did…

They could have talked with us at any moment, he thought, bitterly. God knows Earth would have happily disowned the colonists if it would have prevented a war. Instead, they started to plan for a war that would have crushed us within months, if the Old Lady hadn’t remained intact. They took a minor incident and turned it into a pretext for all-out war.

“The war hasn’t been going well,” he said, slowly. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “I used to count my… well, you know — but the aliens accidentally destroyed my markers and I lost count. Several months, at least.”

Years, Henry thought. They would have needed time to prepare their weapons and tactics to launch the invasion.

He looked up at the greenish light filtering down from the ceiling. It was the same as it was yesterday and the day before yesterday. The food was the same, the water was always bland and completely tasteless, there was next to nothing to do… it was easy to lose track of just how long he’d stayed in the cell. His hair might not have grown out long enough to suggest he’d been imprisoned for months, but it was still longer than it had been.

Jill caught his arm. “There’s a war on?”

“They attacked Vera Cruz nearly a year ago,” Henry said. he wasn’t sure of the precise timing. “Then they stabbed inwards and advanced on Earth, taking New Russia and several smaller colonies at the same time. We stopped them, then launched a deep-strike raid on the alien colonies. I was on that raid…”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what happened next,” he said, “but I do know some aliens tried to communicate with the fleet.”

Jill stared. “They did?”

Henry nodded, sourly. Humanity’s First Contact protocols had obviously failed, although if the aliens were in a warlike mood they might not have paid attention. But building up a common language was obviously going to take time, time they didn’t have.

“it failed,” he said. “Other aliens stopped them.”

He looked up at her. “Did they try asking you questions about Earth? Anything tactical?”

“Of course not,” Jill said. “I don’t know anything about Earth.”

“But it suggests they want to learn from you, rather than just suck you dry,” Henry said. The aliens had kept Jill for at least a year, perhaps longer. They could have killed her by now if they’d not thought they had a use for her. “And we have to try to convince them to talk to the rest of humanity. Get some proper diplomats and language experts here, talking to them. We might be able to come to an agreement.”

Jill frowned. “And what if they don’t want to come to an agreement?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said. He thought, briefly, about how the aliens had treated occupied worlds. New Russia had been occupied, but the aliens had largely left the human population alone. But it could have just been a tactical decision to avoid starting the genocide until after the humans were thoroughly defeated. “I just don’t know.”