10: Standoff

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“In a firefight, which ship is better?” the alien spokesperson asked.

Sil had been dreading that question. He didn’t want to kill the crew of the Oval Nine, and he wanted his own crew dead even less. If it came to a choice between them though, the facts were fortunately on his side.

“A battle would be dangerous for both ships,” he explained, “but ours would have the advantage. Moon class ships are designed primarily for orbital operations and planet work. They’re less manoeuvrable, and while they can carry heavy weaponry, it’s usually weaponry better specialised to firing through an atmosphere than ours, which is specialised for space combat. They also have lower fuel reserves and their sensory equipment is atmosphere-specialised. I don’t know what atmosphere that ship’s equipment is specialised for specifically, but we’re specialised for vacuum. A fight would be risky to both, though.” He hoped that the aliens wouldn’t make them fight.

The aliens had another discussion amongst themselves. This time, Sil mustered up the courage to butt in. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s not imp – ”

“My crew are putting our lives on the line for you,” he snapped. “We deserve to know what’s happening.”

After exchanging a couple more lines with the other aliens, the spokesperson acquiesced. “We’re need to figure out what they know about what we’re here for without getting attacked.”

“What are you here for?”

“You’ll know when we – ”

“Our comms people can’t get the information for you if they don’t know, can they?”

This prompted another round of arguing amongst the aliens. Sil turned to Skep on the comms. “How’d they respond to us?”

“Very vaguely,” Skep said. “Standard reply, said they were just passing through running a minor errand. They didn’t seem suspicious of our presence.”

So they didn’t know the patrol routes. Good. Now to convince these aliens to let him take the ship away until the Oval Nine was gone. Except…

“Any details on what their errand was?”

“No.”

Tryk came into the room. “We’re prepared for battle if need be, but if it can be avoided we’re not really in the best position to – wow! Is that one of the Ovals?”

“Oval Nine,” Sil said. “You know it?”

“Not really. I’ve seen the Oval Three briefly.”

“Then how did you recognise it from glancing at a screen? It looks like any other Moon class ship.”

“Oh, not if you know what to look for. Queen Tatik likes to put her most trusted, most valuable crews in the Ovals. For stuff a Lancer can’t do but that she wouldn’t want just any old crew handling. I learned to tell them apart years ago to avoid having to work with them. What’s it doing out here?”

“Wanting us to leave it alone, so far as I can make out,” Sil said.

“Great. Good plan. Let’s leave it alone.”

Sil glanced at the aliens. What were the chances that two secret important things were out here? No. the Oval Nine had to be out here looking for whatever the Red Four was looking for.

Unfortunately, the aliens weren’t distracted enough by their argument to miss Tryk’s words. After a bit more very intense discussion, the spokesperson turned back to Sil. “We have to make them talk.”

“People on top secret missions for the Queen don’t usually share secrets with random patrols,” Sil said. “I’m not sure what you want me to do here.”

“If we have to disable and board – ”

“No,” Sil said.

The spokesperson hesitated. It was a little difficult to be sure of the mood of an alien with a covered face, but they seemed unsure.

“No,” Sil repeated. “We won’t be attacking that ship. I’m not sending my crew to die for stupid reasons.”

More alien chatter. Hesitantly, the spokesperson backed away, and the biggest of the aliens moved forward, raising its arms up in what probably counted as a threatening pose. Head-on, without their tricks, the aliens weren’t all that imposing; it occurred to Sil that all three of them were right there in the room together, and while Sil wasn’t sure what weapons they carried exactly, he was sure that his crew had the overwhelming advantage of both physical strength and numbers. Tryk might very well be able to dispose of all three of them by herself, and if not, there were other tahl just an alarm trigger away. The easiest and safest thing to do might be to simply kill all three of them and return to his patrol route. Keep his crew safe. Keep the Oval Nine safe.

And never know what any of this was about.

“What do you plan to do, exactly?” he asked the threatening alien. “Kill me? My engineers and soldiers? Will that help you assault the Oval Nine more easily? Your trick with the Lancer ship was very clever, but have you fought in an actual ship-so-ship space battle before? Do you know how? Do you even know how to use any of the Red Four’s weapons?”

The alien, hesitantly, lowered its arms.

“We will not be attacking the Oval Nine,” Sil said. “We will not ask probing questions that make them suspicious of us. They want us out of their way, we want to be out of their way. You can’t make us fight them.”

Another discussion among the aliens. Very brief. Then the spokesperson said, “Learn what you can without making them suspicious,” and the three of them left the room.

Tryk didn’t need to be told what to do; she followed, making sure they weren’t going to try anything tricky. As soon as they were out of hearing range, Egil asked quietly, “Should I give the go-ahead for manual weapons deactivation?”

There were five manual deactivation switches throughout the ship, each set to cut off power to one-fifth of the ship’s external weaponry. It was a system intended to protect against someone trying to take remote control of the systems. Sil had never had cause to use it and had never expected to; the Red Four was a patrol ship tasked to watch trade highways, not a military vessel. But with these aliens, it was best not to take chances.

“Do it,” he said. Under Egil’s direction, atil rushed to flip the five switches scattered throughout the ship (putting all of them in one location would have been a massive vulnerability), and standby to reactivate them when ordered.

Sil was worried that the aliens might try to head for an escape shuttle and try to board the other ship themselves or something, but the camera feeds showed them heading for their own little chamber, so Tryk didn’t have to intervene.

“Captain?” Skep prompted him. “What should we say to the Oval Nine?”

“Uh, what are they saying?”

“Nothing.”

Of course they were. So far as that poor naive ship was concerned, the interaction was over. The patrol ship had questioned them, they’d brushed the patrol ship off, presumably the patrol ship had recognised that they were outranked and backed off. The Oval Nine was probably scanning the area, looking for whatever they’d come looking for. The Oval Nine had probably discounted their presence entirely.

———————————–

“Fuck,” I said, pacing back and forth in the bridge (which in zero gravity just meant pushing myself back and forth across the room using the safety rails, but I made do). “Fuck. Shit. Is the Red Four still there?”

“Still there, Captain.”

“Saying anything?”

“No, Captain.”

Waiting on more information from us, then. Of course they were going to want information. That was their job. They were on a patrol route and we’d suddenly shown up, definitely not on their schedule. Shit.

“If it comes to battle, which ship will win?”

“A battle would be very dangerous to both ships,” Glath explained, “but moreso to us. This ship’s not designed for fighting and dodging in open space.”

“Well, shit.”

“We would win in a battle,” Lln said confidently. “Because we have a secret weapon that they don’t have.”

Hope sparked in my chest. “What weapon?”

“We have a human!”

Hope died again in my chest.

She probably wasn’t wrong, though. These things could usually be resolved by me doing something unbelievably dangerous and nearly dying and coming back horribly injured instead. But I was running out of bits to injure.

“It’s hard to be certain from this angle,” Glath said, “but their centre and rear doesn’t look right. Look at the hull plating, there.”

“Those look like scratches and scorching around the main gun, too,” Kit said. “Hard to be certain without getting closer and putting a light on it, but…”

“We shouldn’t get closer,” I said. “You’re saying their ship is damaged?”

“Repaired, certainly,” Glath said. He was “squinting” at the camera feeds, which for him meant pouring spiders over some of the screens as if proximity would give him a better view. I wondered if he was getting anything more useful than ‘this screen sure is made of glass’. “They’ve been in a conflict on their patrol; a pretty serious one, it looks like.”

“So they’re probably extra jumpy,” I said.

“So they probably don’t want trouble,” Glath said.

“How does this affect our chances so far as running away goes?”

“Impossible to say without knowing what’s damaged and how badly. Maybe their engines are damaged and they won’t be able to follow us. Maybe they aren’t. Actually, that would explain why they’re just sitting out here in the middle of nowhere; if their engines are damaged, they might not be able to get home.”

“Unlikely,” Kit said. “If they’re just out here because they need help, they would’ve asked us for help.”

“Can we make any jump preparations without them knowing?” I asked. “can we start secretly warming up the engines or whatever?”

“No,” Lln said. “They can see the heat on our engines just like we can see the lack of it on theirs.”

“We can back off and see if they give chase,” Glath said. “If they can’t follow us, they won’t. They also might just not bother. If they do, well, we can say we misunderstood and thought thaqt we were free to go.”

“Yes, good,” I said. “Do that.” Maybe, for once, we could actually get out of a situation without a massive fight breaking out.

—————————————-

Sil had made one horrible, horrible misjudgement, and by the time he noticed what it was, it was far too late.

He had never had to deal with aliens. He’d memorised the codes of interactions, the rules that the Empire had developed through trial and error, to trade resources for resources or for services. He’d been warned that commanding a patrol ship meant dealing with aliens, meant inspecting trade ships for contraband, and that a lot of the aliens he’d have to deal with didn’t truly understand how to be part of an empire and were too stupid to bond with and serve a Queen so he should just take them on the level that they could actually communicate. He’d thought, given the circumstances, that he’d been doing really, really well with these aliens. At first, they’d seemed like shyr, but really they were more like tahl who had been set on a complicated mission without guidance. It wasn’t until he’d stood up to them and they’d acquiesced that it had all fallen into place, but now it had, and he finally had a handle on the situation. He had space to think, and figure out how to leave without provoking a violent reaction from the aliens. He was sure that he could do it, now that he understood. Tahl were so very much easier to reason with than shyr. The weapons were locked down, the aliens off in their own room away from anything important… he could relax.

It was too late, when he realised that there were in fact two ways to initiate a fight with someone in order to disable or board their ship for interrogation. You could attack them, which he’d handily made it impossible for the aliens to do. Or you could provoke them to attack you.

The aliens didn’t have any means of controlling the ship’s weapons, no matter what tricky secret gadgets they might have that he didn’t know about; nothing could override the physical deactivation switches. But they did have equipment that could, at the very least, monitor the ship’s communications.

It only occurred to him that of course they’d be able to interfere with said communications when he heard their spokesperson on the comms.

—————————————————-

“Starting the engines,” Kit said. “They’ll heat up fast, so if they intend to stop us – ”

“Message coming through,” Lln said.

“ – it’d be about now, yeah.”

Well, at least they were calling to ask us what the hell, instead of just shooting. I’d long tuned out the audio comms messages; I could just about glean some aljik words that the crew used with each other when I could see them and they were words that were used a lot, but the modified comm speech without the accompanying body language, spoken by strangers? Forget it.

But this voice was different. Slower, more monotonous, unable to produce some of the clicks and trills that the aljik used. Comprehensible to them, judging by their reactions to the voice and, well, to me, but not aljik. It was a human voice.

It was a human voice that I recognised.

No fucking way. How? What? But there was no way in all the universe that I could be wrong about that voice.

I threw myself at the comms, nearly knocking right into Lln and having to wildly grab at the edge of the console to stop myself bouncing off it and back away.

“Derek? Sweetheart? Is that you?”

A long pause, during which my heart stopped; a response that got it beating so fast I thought it might explode.

“Mum?”

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