"False Contact" has appeared for the first time in my hardcover short story collection JUDGMENT DAY AND OTHER DREAMS (Fantastic Books, 2009). It is one of 15 unpublished and previously published short stories in the collection. See Home page for details. This story is hard SF/First Contact. 

FALSE CONTACT


Jack Munroe stared in confusion as the Alien ship appeared from behind the large comet and approached the Uhuru, outbound from Charon Base on a survey of the larger Kuiper Belt comets.

They’d expected to find lots of kilometer-sized comets out here, well beyond Pluto and a third of the way around the solar system’s edge from Earth’s position. The Kuiper Belt was the source of the short period comets, like Halley’s, that now and then visited the inner solar system. But no one expected First Contact with Alien beings. Least of all Captain Monique d’Auberge, too long in command of the European Union survey ship Uhuru, and five other humans.

Humans. They’d have to get used to thinking that way.

Jack tasted metallic sourness as, free-floating like the rest of the crew, he watched the front screen. As ship’s Technologist, he should have picked up some kind of warning that others were out here, hiding in the solar system’s backyard where the leftovers from its formation circled endlessly around the dim yellow star that was more a direction than an illuminator of deep space. Now they weren’t just a French aristocrat too full of herself, a Belgian priest, a Polish drive engineer, two British lesfems, and an Asteroid Belter whose grandpa had emigrated from the Tennessee hill country. They were people about to face something no one had expected.

After all, interstellar travel was impossible, according to the Rules of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels—and Captain d’Auberge’s need for certainty in space. No reason, therefore, to call on Jack Munroe’s dual training as an anthropologist and student of archaic cultural practices. No need, really, for anything beyond the ordinary science business of Pluto’s Charon Base as the EU searched for planet-killer comets before they could head inward and disturb Earth’s social tranquility.

“Shit!”

Max Piakowski’s curse expressed Jack’s own feelings, but not those of Monique. She twisted in free-float and frowned at Max. “Engineer, cursing won’t remove this surprise.” Her nose lifted higher. “Can you, perhaps, tell us how that ship moves without a drive flare?”

“Whaat?” Max stuttered. His thick black eyebrows squeezed together as he peered at the screen. “Oh!”

The rest of the crew now noticed how the Alien globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead moved without visible plasma exhaust, unlike their own nuclear fusion Main Drive.

The six of them had gathered in the Pilot’s cabin as they approached Kuiper object QB1, a 280 kilometer-sized ball of reddish water ice. They’d expected to celebrate the half-way point of their trip by geo-surveying the first object discovered by Luu and Jewitt back in 1992, long before China colonized Mars, Brazil took over the Moon, and the European Union forced America into an economic armistice that led, eventually, to mining of the Asteroid Belt and outlying settlements on Europa, Titan and Charon. “Getting rich is glorious” had become more than the slogan of China’s long-dead Deng Xiao Peng—it had become the watchword of a world society that pretended war was extinct, commerce was always positive, and new wealth could pacify highly-taxed citizens.
Jack pushed down into his Tech station seat, snapped his restraint locks, and caught d’Auberge’s attention.

“Captain, do we match orbits with them—or do we turn tail and head for Earth?”

“Turn tail?” said Monique, lifting blond eyebrows.
 “Hardly. This is a momentous event in human history. We can’t—”

“Miss the chance to get rich?” Jack interrupted, unable to resist the sarcasm. He should be more of a team player like Gail and Hortense, the two Brits who functioned as Pilot/Doctor and ComChief/Ecological Biologist for the ship. But they’d spent six months in each other’s company and Monique had turned more and more rigid as time went on.

At Jack’s mention of the EU’s socially impolite raison d’étre, the Captain turned cold as a glacier. Gail and Hortense seemed embarrassed. Max looked thoughtful. And their Jesuit priest Hercule Arcy de Mamét, the Belgian comet expert who’d devoted his life to Kuiper Belt comets, frowned delicately. “Mister Munroe,” Hercule said, emphasizing for the hundredth time Jack’s lack of a doctorate, “your cynicism is out of place here. Aliens are on our doorstep. Aren’t you excited?”

Jack looked back at the screen, where the globe-and-spearhead had settled into a close equatorial orbit about QB1, just a few thousand klicks lower than their own incoming parabolic orbit. “Excited?” He shivered. “I’m afraid. Damned afraid. And the rest of you should be scared too!”

“Enough,” said Monique, her manner brittle as she twisted in mid-air to again face the screen. “Gail, can you put us into a transfer orbit that matches up with that ship?”

“Yes m’am, I can,” said the Uhuru’s Pilot. “Maneuvering thrusters will be enough to match orbits. Main Drive is still off-line, but it’s Hot and on standby if we need to leave quickly. Captain, do we—”

“Signal!” yelled Hortense from her duty post. “We’re getting a damned fucking signal from that ship!”

Jack’s gut backflipped on itself. “Radio or visual?”

“Radio,” answered Max from his Engineer’s post at the rear of the small cabin. “Damn! This is moving too fast for me. Captain, I—”

“Shut up!” screamed Monique.

The Captain’s loss of her eternally cool manner shocked everyone into silence. All but Hortense, who seemed ready to float out of her seat. “But, but—”

“You!” Monique pointed at Hortense. “It’s a radio signal? What kind? AM or FM? What power? What wavelength? And do we have enough computer power to decode the signal so we can—”

“It’s in the clear,” Hortense said, her interruption of the Captain a rare defiance of Monique’s command rigidity. “English language, on Charon’s standard comlink channel. No image. Yet.”

Stunned silence filled the cabin. To be found by an Alien ship was one thing. A wild card tossed into their lap. To have Aliens talk, immediately and in English, as if this were nothing more than a Hopper cruise in the Asteroid Belt, that was something else. These show-off Aliens had just played High Trump card, up front. Jack felt like getting out and physically pushing the Uhuru back to distant Sol. Get away! his instincts told him.

Monique swallowed hard, a thin film of sweat beading her pale forehead. “English? They’re talking to us in English?”

“Yes m’am,” said Hortense in a mousy voice.

The Captain blinked, then her face stiffened as she caught Jack’s look. “Fine. Put the signal on the speaker so we can all hear. Switch on data recorders. No immediate reply. I’ll do that later. Well?”

Hortense dipped her head submissively. “Signal is piped to the ship’s intercom system.”

“—Human ship, we ask you to respond to our inquiry. Are you ready and willing to meet our team, at the dome on the ice body below, to discuss the Rules of Engagement? Human ship—” The signal repeated its brief message, as if on a loop.

“Engagement? Rules? Dome?” muttered Monique, scowling as if she’d bitten into a sour lemon. She motioned for Hortense to cut off the repeating signal that spoke in the voice of a man from the British Midlands. The Captain scanned them all, her manner once more that of an unmarried daughter of a French ducal family that traced its lineage back to Catherine de Médicis, a Captain who expected everyone to acknowledge her inherent superiority. With a light touch against the cabin wall D’Auberge free-floated over to the ship’s telescope station, pulled up the visor hood, and bent down to look at the CCD image picked up by the Schmidt refractor. “Gail, focus the telescope on QB1, then shift traverse control to my station. Now!”

“Yes, Captain.” Skinny, brown-haired Gail Winston did as she was ordered, then peered at him and Max with a look of sheer terror. Jack felt for her. Some Alien had listened to the vibechat of BBC-1 long enough to develop a Midlands accent. That was crazy and strange and . . . terrifying.

The Captain grasped the joystick control next to the visor, tilted it slightly, and the front screen filled with the vastly enlarged surface of comet QB1. In two minutes of traversing the lumpy surface of a comet too far from the Sun to develop a coma cloud, she covered a third of the comet’s reddish surface as the breathing in the small cabin grew louder, more labored and faster paced. Jack suspected more than just he and Gail were frightened by shocking events that moved too quickly for any of them to process, let alone understand fully.

“There!” whispered Monique in a triumphant tone. She pulled back from the scope hood, looked forward and frowned at an image of QB1’s north pole.

Jack looked too, like everyone else. He saw nitrogen and methane snows, scattered like dandruff atop the flatlands of water ice, all of it aged red-brown thanks to impacts from cosmic and ultraviolet rays, what Max called the Johnson-Lanzerotti Effect. The Alien dome where someone wanted to discuss the Rules of Engagement sparkled sugar-white against the shadowed landscape. The dome had a transparent roof and four small dots moved under the roof. Aliens? Jack cleared his throat, forcing Monique to acknowledge him with a backward glance.

“Captain, it’s time to leave,” he said, putting aside his fear and trying for cool logic. “I mean it. These Aliens, whoever they are, know too damned much about us. They know our commerce language, they know our comlink channel, they know—”

“Too damned much!” shouted Max, his space-darkened face sweaty as he gripped tightly his armrests. “We’ve got no weapons, no way to call home in less than five hours, no—”

“No sense of duty,” Monique said scathingly, looking from Max to Jack, then over to Gail, who sat strapped in to her Pilot’s seat, ready for thrust-gravity. “Pilot, fulfill my order. Put us into an orbit that parallels the Alien ship, but keeps us a hundred kilometers out. And tell the EVA computer to warm up the Lander. We’re going to meet our new neighbors.”

“Complying, Captain,” said Gail as she punched on the thrusters, moving them from freefall to thrust-gravity.

Jack wanted to hit Monique. He always wished that whenever she used her disdainful look and arrogant tone on him. He didn’t. Over the last six months, the woman’s behavior toward Jack had worsened, as if his Belter-style questioning of Brussel’s Rules upset her need for certainty, her need to believe the frozen unknown could be safe, routine and unsurprising. She’d even abandoned the official dogma of Cooperative Consensus of the Communitarian Unity and its long-dead founder, Amitai Etzioni. Around him, the others worked hurriedly at their stations or watched the front screen, acting as if the Captain’s decision wasn’t insane. He tried one more time.

“Monique.”

She whirled his way, blue eyes flaring with anger and surprise at his use of her first name. “What!”

“Think. Please think before you do this.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, then shivered as the cabin air-cooling kicked on. “We don’t know who they are, what they look like, where they come from, how long they’ve monitored Earth space communications, nor why they didn’t just come to Charon and visit us at the base.” He paused to let the last item sink in. “Monique, why didn’t they come to Charon?”

D’Auberge took a deep breath and eyed Jack as if he were a petulant little boy caught sneaking out of the girls’ bathroom. “Mister Munroe, why don’t you feel Hercule’s excitement?” She motioned to the ship’s priest, a man who’d devoted his life to the Jesuits, comets and self-denial, in that order. “Why so suspicious? That dome may be an Alien trading station, filled with wonders. And Brussels has always said that if true Aliens ever crossed the stars to visit us, they would be peaceful. No civilization develops interstellar travel without world union and an end to violence. Surely you don’t question Abbé Breed’s Fourth Principle of the Communitarian Unity?”

Jack did question it, but he’d not gotten his berth on Uhuru by being heretical. “That’s not the issue. The issue is, they act like they expected us. Doesn’t commerce negotiation require a common set of rules among traders? Doesn’t good faith in business require advance consultation, rather than this bolt out of the blue?” Monique’s certainty wavered a bit. “Don’t you think we should contact Charon or Earth for guidance on this situation?”

Monique smiled sourly. “Ah, the last refuge of a bureaucrat is an appeal to procedures. Anything to avoid a decision. I am better than that. Are you, Technologist?”

She was really, really going to do it. “No, I’m not. I’m scared. This doesn’t feel right.”

The Captain ignored intense looks from the rest of the crew and focused on Jack. “Feel? That’s base emotion talking. Whatever happened to your wonderful Anthropology? Isn’t this First Contact the event that will set off a Kuhnian paradigm shift in human culture?” He did not respond to her challenge. She sighed. “There is an easy way to solve this concern of yours. We will signal back. And we’ll ask for them to send us a visual image. Then, I’m certain, your fears will melt away.”

Signal them back? Jack blinked rapidly. “I wouldn’t do that, Captain.”

“But I am doing that, as Captain of this ship, as the adult in command.” Monique smiled pleasantly at Hortense. “Com Chief, we might as well vibechat with our new neighbors while Gail brings us into a matching orbit. Open a channel, please.”

“Yes, Captain,” murmured a nervous Hortense, her long fingers flying over her com panel. “Open, captain. Recorders are still running.”

“—Human ship, we ask you to—”

Monique braced herself against the maneuvering thrust-gee and faced the videye above the screen. “Alien ship, we are responding. I am Captain Monique Catherine d’Auberge, of the European Union, a member state of the Communitarian Unity, outbound from our science base on Charon in the ship Uhuru, on a mission to chart large cometary bodies. Please explain the invitation to visit your dome on the surface below, and please transmit a visual image of yourself. We humans prefer to see those with whom we talk.”

Silence filled the radio channel as the loop recording cut off abruptly. A signal whine sounded briefly, then eased away as the com panel automatically matched the incoming radio signal. “Welcome, Captain,” said a male voice that reeked of Midlands landed gentry tones. “I am Destanu, Link of the Pod Victorius, of the people called Rizen, who came not long ago to these small frozen bodies. We request you visit our dome so we may settle on the Rules of Engagement.” The casual voice paused. “You ask for visual images? Agreed. We had withheld such images until you requested them. We transmit on your Channel Three.”

The front screen wavered, lost the image of QB1, then solidified into a color image. They all stared.

The six-legged Alien in the image resembled a cross between a lion and a hippopotamus, but one with orange-and-black striped skin, sleek body muscles, and talon-toes. The platy hide looked tough as steel. The sextuped’s front leg pair showed manipulative fingers more flexible than a human’s, but stiffer than ropes. The front end supported a dome-skull, below which were two black eyes. The wide-set eyes peered at them without blinking. A tool belt of some kind hung from the Alien’s midbody, otherwise it wore no obvious clothes. To one side of Destanu stood another Rizen, though it stayed in the background. The room occupied by Destanu and the second Rizen resembled their own Pilot cabin, a place filled with metallic devices, blinking lights, and touch panels, with the low arch of a exit door off to the right. The Rizen commander opened wide the slash of its mouth, displaying dozens of razor-sharp teeth, teeth like a shark.

“Are you reassured, Captain Monique Catherine d’Aubege?” said a swarmy Midlands English voice that seemed totally incongruous coming from the lean, tightly-muscled alien.

Hortense squeaked her reaction. Gail’s mouth moved silently. Max cursed low, a guttering string of Polish that didn’t sound pleasant. Hercule the Jesuit crossed himself. And Captain d’Auberge straightened her posture, slim hands pulling at her dark blue jacket. She focused on the screen image.

“I’m reassured, Link Destanu of the Pod Victorius.” She paused, stood stiffly before the videye that returned her image to the alien ship, and bowed slightly. “Welcome to Sol system. Have you been here very long?”

“Long enough,” said Destanu, its body plates rippling in a sine wave that matched the movements of its shark-like mouth. “Our custom when meeting species new to the Great Dark is to learn your language of power, study your culture, then seek a meeting at a spot outside of the species’ home space.”

“So you’ve met other species!” exclaimed Monique.

“Many others. The Great Dark is filled with life, some of which travel star to star.” The alien glanced aside at some kind of monitor, then fixed its black-eyed gaze on Monique. “I see your ship is about to match our orbital footprint. Good. Our team awaits your team on the surface below. Do you accept our invitation to discuss Rules of Engagement?”

Jack thought the last question meant more than the obvious. The Alien acted far too relaxed. But Monique seemed unfazed by the incongruity of Brit-speech issuing from the shark-mouth of an orange-and-black skinned Alien who’d come to meet humans on a deep space mission out at the very edge of the solar system. Slick, too slick, he thought. The maneuvering thrusters shut off and freefall replaced thrust-gee—which clued him to the fact the Rizen aliens looked glued to their floor despite no ship movement. “Captain?” he said, floating up against his restraint belts.

“One moment,” Monique said to Destanu, then gestured to cut off the visual and sound feed to the Rizen ship. She grabbed a wall hand-hold, then glared at him. “What! Can’t you see this Alien is peaceful? Not violent like your Belter Rebellion ancestors? A species that crosses from one star to another is not an automatic threat, just a puzzle to be understood.”

“A species that has gravity control, while we still use spin-gee for our habitat torus?” Jack shook his head, feeling stubborn. “Captain, why assume the Communitarian creed applies to Aliens? Why do you assume that evolutionary biology and natural selection don’t apply to intelligent species?” Monique’s stubborn belief in the Unity creed baffled Jack. He pointed at Hortense, their Ecological Biologist. “Hortie, you tell her what we discussed on the way out here? Tell her what black-and-orange skin colors mean!”

The Captain glanced at Hortense. “Hortie? What’s he talking about?”

Hortense blushed at the personal question, though it would be hard for most people to notice thanks to her soot-black skin. The woman, who had seemed to enjoy their chats about biological and cultural determinism, dipped her head, collected herself, then looked directly at Monique. “Captain, it’s the aposematic coloration principle of evolutionary biology. In short, extreme color variations in a species are a danger signal. Like the brightly colored poison dart frog of the Amazon Basin, which advertises to predators it is not wise to eat frogs that don’t try to hide.”

“Aposematic what!” Monique’s pale face slowly turned pink. “So we’re down to judging Aliens by skin color! Hortie, I’m surprised at you.”

Jack realized he had one more shot, if that, and sadly Hortie was not as tough-willed as her partner, Gail. “Captain, this is real stuff!” The glare in Monique’s eyes only motivated him further. “Hortie, tell her what the Alien shape means? The talon-toes, teeth and body form. Please!”

Monique glared again at Jack, breathed deep, then looked tiredly at Hortense Muggeridge-Mbasa. “Go on. Destanu will keep for another minute or two. What has Jack been doing to you girl?”

Hortie looked briefly incensed, glanced at a sympathetic Gail, then shrugged her slim shoulders. “It’s called Müllerian mimicry, Captain. A basic principle of predation and natural selection biology. In short, the Rizen’s shark-like teeth, lean-muscled body shape, and lion/hippo shape all reinforce the signal ‘don’t mess with me’. Like how the nomadidae bee resembles a yellowjacket, yet both species possess stingers. Or how the hunting cats resemble one another despite continental drift. Or—”

“Enough!” hissed Monique, angry disgust replacing the blush of moments ago. She twisted in space and shook a finger at Jack. “You would have us judge Aliens on the basis of appearance? Racist! Out there is the first non-Earth culture and people we’ve ever encountered. I’m not going to insult them by refusing to play along with this Engagement ritual of theirs.”

Jack gave up. It would do no good to debate ritual behavior, the role of tradition in culture, and sociobiology with his Captain. She seemed to be automatically fighting him, and defending the wishful thinking of her social dogma, rather than questioning the motivations of Aliens. But maybe he could convince her to be a little suspicious. “Captain, just what the hell are the Rules of Engagement?”

“Exactly!” Max said a bit too loudly “Monique my love, you’re no diplomat, nor are any of us. Let’s go home, tell the topsucks about this, and let them take the chances.”

Monique stiffened at the challenge to her authority and at Max’s allusion to their relationship. “No! The dome and the Rizen Aliens await us. There has been no assault on our ship, no threats, nothing to warrant an unfriendly response by us. We’re going.” She free-floated around to face the videye, gestured and Hortense restored the vid-com link. “Link Destanu, please pardon the interruption. We accept your invitation to meet your team in the dome. But if you don’t mind explaining, what do you mean by Rules of Engagement?”

Destanu peered at them, its unblinkling black stare fixing on each crew member one by one. The toothy mouth moved swiftly. “Why, just what I said. Rules of Engagement mean the rules for how we Rizen and you Humans behave toward each other. I think you call it etiquette, or diplomacy, or some such thing.”

Monique smiled triumphantly, but kept her attention on the Alien ship captain. “That’s what I thought. Since there are four of your people down below, four of us will also journey down. Is the dome atmosphere—”

“Oxygen-nitrogen?” interrupted Destanu. “Of course. We breath the same mix as you, at nearly the same pressures. And our home world and home star are near duplicates of yours. But come in your environment suits, if that reassures you and your team.”

Gail leaned over and whispered to Monique, who nodded distractedly, then faced the videye camera. “Good. Our landing craft will leave shortly. We look forward to meeting your people. D’Auberge off.” The Rizen image blanked out. The Captain twisted in mid-air, faced them, and put hands on slim hips.

“No arguments! We’re going down, the only question is who goes and who stays. Any volunteers?”

Everyone stayed frozen in their seats, except for Hercule, who raised a pudgy hand. “Me. I’ll go with you.”

Monique nodded, then eyed Jack and Max at the back of the cabin. “The ship’s Technologist and ship’s Engineer are excused from this trip, in view of their archaic reactions. Gail, Hortense, Hercule and myself will leave just as soon as our EVA suits are ready. Move, people!”

Everyone undid belt locks and free-floated out of the cabin. Jack was the last to leave, unable to resist a glance back at the screen. On it hung a globe-and-spearhead spaceship, its golden bronze color a striking contrast to the reddish ices and snows of QB1. His gut still jumped. His heart still raced. And fear nearly froze his joints. Would have frozen them, except for the idea that had occurred the moment he saw the Alien’s teeth, saw its body build, and decided not to believe what he heard from either Destanu or Monique. Maybe he could help the landing party, which would land unarmed, unwary, and at the mercy of the unknown. Maybe.


Jack watched as Max closed the hatch leading to the Lander, locked it down, then depressurized the launch bay. Their four crewmates waved at them through the thick glass porthole of the hatch, then entered the Lander, a box surrounded by an Eight-Pack of chemfuel rockets. The Lander had enough fuel to land five times on the Moon and over 50 times on the low-gee comet worlds they’d visited in the last six months. Their job had been to check on Kuiper Belt comets not locked into a 3:2 orbital resonance, to look for signs of outgassing, for any evidence they might deviate from their orbits and plunge inward as deadly Centaur groups. It was boring, simple work. But it kept them busy enough not to get on each other’s nerves. And it meant peace of mind for the Unity and a purpose for Charon station.

“You coming?” Max asked as he headed for the Spine corridor that connected the midship EVA module with the Pilot cabin up front.

“Yeah.” Jack floated away from his wall-hold, kicked gently, and floated after the ship’s Engineer. “Max, why didn’t you just tell Monique to kiss off, start the Main Drive, and vibejump us out of here?”

The dark-haired man chuckled. “Defy Monique? What an earthquake that would have precipitated!” The stocky Engineer twisted in air, grabbed the corridor handholds, and pulled himself along the Spine, heading for the Pilot cabin and its bank of instruments that would keep them in touch with the Lander—and with the Alien ship, if need be. “Anyway, Jack, maybe she’s right?”

“I hope so.”

Jack noticed the man’s cloth boots were dirty, the grip-threads half-filled with food fragments, plastic debris, carpet fiber balls, and the shiny gleam of body fluids that adhere to everything after six months in space. They enjoyed thrust-gee only when leaving one comet and vectoring toward a new one, a choice mandated by the need to stretch out their deuterium-helium 3 fuel. The spin-gee of the ship’s habitat torus helped some, but not enough. This last month they’d all let personal hygiene slip a bit. Had their judgment also slipped as badly?

“Jack,” called down Max to him. “What were you doing with the EVA suit backpacks? They’re totally fail-safed, like the rest of this ship.”

Tell him? Not tell him? Jack felt his neck muscles tense up. “Just something I thought of at the last minute. I don’t like our people heading down there with no backup and no way to defend themselves.”

Max halted his upward drift and looked back over his shoulder. “Jack, this scene has us all vibed out. But Monique is competent. She’ll do fine.” He smiled reassuringly, then twisted around and resumed his weightless climb up the Spine handholds.

“Sure.” Jack was less sanguine about the team’s chances. No one from Brussels had loaded any First Contact software into the ship’s computer. No one had fitted the ship with gas lasers or kinetic kill vehicles or any of the stuff that had been used in the Asteroid Belt’s rebellion against the Unity, back in 2072. No personal weapons had come on board. They had nothing, except for the scientific instruments needed on a deep space mission. He prayed and hoped they would not need to resort to violence. While skeptical of the Unity’s “We’re All One Happy Family” social dogma, he had no desire to revisit war, or violence, or dead bodies. But the voice of his old cultural anthropology professor at Vanderbilt still spoke in his mind, still said—“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and expect a mess.”

“Here we are,” Max said as they reached the Pilot module.

Jack watched Max take his seat at the Main Drive station in back while he floated forward to Gail’s Pilot seat. He strapped in, touched on the front screen, and observed the image of a golden globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead, now a hundred kilometers away and ahead of them in equatorial orbit, as it floated above the reddish disk of QB1. Jack keyed the external maser tube into search mode for the Lander’s beacon, waited for acquisition, then punched in the vidlink. “Monique, how soon to touchdown?”

The screen flared white, then the Captain’s space-suited figure filled it. Her clear glass helmet hadn’t yet polarized—no bright Sun to make it do so. Her pale lips thinned at his informality. “Technologist Munroe, please observe ship procedures. This is not the time for informality.” She looked aside, then back to face him. “Our polar orbital track is nominal. In fifteen minutes we land a half kilometer away from the dome. Until then—”

“Will you leave on the Lander videye?” he interrupted before she could switch off. “So we can watch your landing?”

Captain d’Auberge nodded stiffly. “Of course. I’ll keep my suit vidcam active as we traverse to the dome. Satisfied?”

Tell them now? But surely Destanu the Alien was monitoring their com chatter. “Satisfied. But please, keep your suits on and pressurized even after you enter the dome.”

“Why?” Monique said, her tone suspicious.

“Rules.” Behind him, Max shifted in his seat as the Engineer leaned forward. “EU rules for EVA on airless bodies mandate it. A precaution, Captain.”

“Agreed.” On screen, Monique d’Auberge turned away from the videye, moved to her Lander seat, and strapped in.

Jack exhaled loudly. “Thank god!”

“What was that all about?” asked Max.

“Nothing.” That was a lie, but a needful one. “Max, I’ll tell you all about me and my stupid idea when they return. Fair?”

“Fair enough, I guess,“ Max grunted. “Look, they’ve gone into landing mode. The Navtrack radar’s got them in a nice glide.”

Jack watched as the Lander repeated what it, and some of the crew, had done 23 times over the last six months. Set down on the water-ice surface of a Kuiper Belt comet, autocycle to emergency departure mode, power down to maintenance mode, then exhaust air from the EVA airlock preparatory to the geological survey work they did each time they landed. The routine had been ... put down sonophones, embed small explosive charges, move two hundred meters away, put down a radioisotope powered transmitter that would send back to Charon the dozen or so geophysical readings their sensors looked for, take a sample of surface ices, return to the Lander, lock up stuff, leave the comet before setting off the charges, confirm transmission of the sonophone readings that built a subsurface image of the comet, and hightail it down the line to the next big iceball. This time, the routine stopped with the depressurizing of the Lander airlock.

He and Max watched as their four crewmates entered the lock, cycled through, climbed down the ladder attached to one landing leg, then bounce-glided toward the clear dome that gleamed in the silvery starlight. From this distance, they could see the orange-and-black striped bodies of Destanu’s ‘team’ inside the dome. And also the airlock set into the side of the dome. Minutes passed as their friends coped with the comet’s extremely low gravity. Then they stopped before the dome, looked around, observed the distant shape of an Alien lander, and stepped into the large airlock. It was big enough to accommodate all four of them.

“We’re entering the dome,” Monique said a bit breathlessly over the channel that fed through the Lander’s com panel. “Air pressure checks out. So does air composition. I think—wait, the Rizen aliens are lining up against the far wall. Must be some kind of greeting ceremony.”

“Hey!” Max yelled from behind Jack. “You be careful Monique! You too, Hercule, you smart-assed Jesuit!”

The suited priest smiled good-naturedly at Monique’s vidcam, waved briefly, and then focused on the four unsuited, orange-and-black skinned Aliens who had risen up on their hind legs, leaving two feet-pair suspended in the air. “Hey,” Hercule murmured, “no booze, no chairs, no table, nothing for our vibechat. Captain?”

“I noticed,” said Monique, her tone tense. “Jack, set up a piggy-back comlink to Destanu. I’d like to speak with him.”

Jack reached over to Hortense’s com panel, tapped in a preset function, then watched as the screen image split into two, one showing the team via Monique’s vidcam, one showing the Rizen ship in low orbit. “Done, Captain.”

“Link Destanu?” Monique called. “Would you please reply? We are in the dome with your people.”

The local stars around the Alien ship blurred, the ship changed orbit from equatorial to a polar track, and Jack suddenly realized the Rizen possessed a gravity-pull drive able to move at right angles to its apparent inertia. Before he could comment, Destanu’s sleek bulk filled the screen. The Alien looked the same as before, but the assistant was not present. “Replying, Captain Monique Catherine d’Auberge. Please be patient. The discussion of the Rules of Engagement will commence shortly. Tell me, you are inside the dome? You are ready to begin?”

“We are,” said Monique, sounding impatient. “If you would just tell your people to—”

“Watch out!” screamed Gail.

Orange and black bodies flashed in sudden movement on one the split-screen. They raced toward Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, shark-mouths opening wide.

“No!” cried Max.

Jack froze. Unable to move, he watched as a Rizen alien jumped on one of his crewmates, slashed through the suit fabric, then sank white shark-teeth into human flesh.

“Get it off!” screamed Hortense, whirling into the center of the dome as she beat at the Alien that had locked its mouth onto her midbody.

“Noooo!” whispered Monique, then she turned and reached for the airlock controls—just as the final Rizen hit her from behind. Red blood fountained into view as severed neck arteries gushed redly. Her shoulder vidcam twisted with her dying convulsions.

On the screen, the vidcam arced past the still, wine-red bodies of Gail, Hortense and Hercule, each the victim of buzzsaw teeth and a blood-spattered Alien. The side split-screen that carried Destanu’s image showed him unmoving, unreactive. As if he—

“Bastard!” Jack screamed over the ship-to-ship link. “Why! Why attack us? Why kill—”

“Shut up,” Destanu said coldly, turning to face Jack and Max even though the Uhuru sent no Pilot cabin image.

“Jack?” moaned Max. “Is she, is she dead?”

“They all are.” His mouth soured and Jack felt like vomiting. But maybe, maybe, his last minute fix would work. If the air pressure sensor worked, if—

Destanu opened its toothy mouth. “The Engagement is—”

“Blammm!”

The dome interior erupted in yellow flames and white gases. On the tilted vidcam image, orange-and-black striped Aliens puffed up at the sudden loss of pressure. Orange fluid erupted from eyes, mouth and hindquarters. The blood-spattered Rizen tottered, looked up as the dome roof crashed down in slow motion, then all disappeared as the vidcam melted from the thermal heat put out by the suit fuel cells.

Max slapped his back. “You killed them! How?” The Engineer now floated immediately behind Jack’s seat.

“Dead Man Switch,” he muttered, sick at heart, sick to his stomach with the after-image of dead human and Alien bodies. “Set the fuel cells to spark and blow the hydrogen they usually use during electrolysis—whenever the suit lost pressure. Being near the airlock, the blasts from four suits were enough to crack the dome.”

On the front screen, the orange-and-black striped body of Destanu looked aside at some device, trembled suddenly, then it faced them. “So. The Engagement is not yet complete.”

“Engagement!” Jack yelled, wishing he held a laser, a knife, a mortar launcher, anything with which to strike back for the deaths of his crewmates, his . . . his friends. “You said you were diplomats. You said—”

“We lied.”

Max sputtered more Polish curses. Coldness flooded over Jack’s skin. “Lied? Then, but—”

“Enough.” Destanu waved a taloned foot-hand at them. “The Rules of Engagement have been observed. The new species has had the chance to assert its right of survival through personal combat. Your team failed, though I honor your treachery. What kind of explosives did you use in the suits? We detected no chemical charges.”

Jack’s coldness seeped down to his feet. He barely felt Max’s hand on his shoulder. “So this was all a setup? You intended to kill us?”

“Of course.” Destanu sighed. “You are so naive,” he said, his tone that of a Midlands country baron trying to explain the Hunt to red foxes. “The Rules of the Great Dark, the rules adhered to by all space-going cultures, are that we leave juvenile species alone, so long as they do not travel beyond their outermost planet. To waste Engagement challenge on immature ones is to stain the Rules. But you have now traveled beyond your outermost planet. So we invited Engagement. Tell me, will your species now surrender to Pod Victorius, of the Rizen? ”

“Surrender?” howled Max. “Not on your fucking life!”

Destanu nodded once. “Stupid. But expected. You need to understand the proper role of predator to prey. After we Rizen cull out a few hundred million, your species will be healthier—and your home planet less crowded.”

“Why? Why!” Jack yelled. “Why treat new species this way?”

Destanu paused. On screen, its orange-and-black skin plates rippled like a snake moving toward its prey. “Why? In our language, the Rule says—Shna tok torn, shna opp sem!” Destanu looked aside as a second Rizen entered the room. “In your terms, only wolves travel star to star, never the sheep. Did you think the Rules of natural selection do not prevail in the Great Dark? That predators do not roam the Dark, hunting prey? They do. We do.” The image blanked.

“Son of a bitch!” growled Max.

“Think!” Jack shouted. “Think! Weapons? Anything we can use for weapons? Max!”

The free-floating Engineer wiped tears from his eyes, glanced once at the screen image of a golden spearhead-through-a-globe, then sighed. “No weapons. No real ones. Too far to toss survey charges at them. Too far to do anything—”

“The maser!” He leaned over to Hortense’s com panel, touched in new parameters, overrode a software caution, then slapped the transmit pad. “Belt in, Max! We’re gonna fry them with microwaves!”

Max floated back and belted in at his Engineer seat. “Good idea, bad physics. Remember inverse square law? Even a coherent beam of microwaves loses power as the inverse square of the distance traveled. In short, you’re down to one fourth the beam power at double the initial distance. Ship’s reactor can’t power a maser beam across a hundred klicks and still cook ‘em.” He touched an armrest control. “Plus they’re diverging from us on a polar orbital track.”

Jack cursed their very, very limited options. “Then we reduce the distance and change orbit. Engineer, I need full power on the Main Drive. How soon?”

“Three minutes,” Max muttered, reaching up for the nuclear fusion Drive controls as they lowered from the ceiling. “You really gonna flash-boil them with the maser?”

“Nope.” Jack recalled something from the Belt Rebellion, a ploy used by his Grandpa Ephraim against a Unity freighter. “Something better. Judging by the gravitational lensing of the starfield that just happened when they changed orbit, they have a gravity-pull drive, maybe even an FTL stardrive. I want it!”

“You’re crazy.”

“That I am.” Jack paused to mourn the memory of Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, decent crewmates even if blinded by wishful thinking and a social dogma out of tune with reality. “But I’m not stupid. Destanu said other Aliens traveled the Great Dark. The Rizen are just the first to knock on our front door. If we don’t take them out, others will come. Either we defeat this ship, take its drive, and then go on the offensive, or humans will shortly be indentured slaves.”

“I don’t believe it,” Max said, then the heavy rumble of the Main Drive vibed the ship. They moved downward and into an elliptical curve, chasing after the golden bronze ship as both headed for the north pole of QB1.

“Believe it,” Jack said. “I don’t know what the trophic structure of intersteller space is, as in who eats whom, but we’re facing a classic case of Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle.”

“Gause’s what?” Max growled as he built thrust up to one gee.

“Something Hortie told me about when I talked with her.” Now that they chased, cold logic and the details of someone else’s discipline flooded into Jack’s mind. “In 1934, G. F. Cause concluded that two species so similar that they compete for the same limiting resources cannot coexist in the same place.” He paused, remembering something else. “You know, the Rizen may be what the ecologists call a keystone predator.”

“And that means what?” Max said distractedly as he monitored the feed rates of gaseous deuterium and helium-3 into the Drive module.

A chill ran down Jack’s neck. “It means they think they’re top dog around here.”

“Do they have ship-to-ship weapons?” Max said worriedly.

“We’ll soon find out.” Jack relaxed into the weight of thrust gravity. “If we can get close enough, I’ve got one trick that may take them out.”

In the half-darkness of the Pilot cabin, Max chuckled. “If your trick is anything like the exploding fuel cells, I’m looking forward to it.”

“So am I,” Jack whispered. “So am I.”



Destanu, Link of the Pod Victorious, appeared on Jack’s screen at 70 kilometers out. “We outmaneuver you, human. See?”

On the screen, the starfield around the Rizen ship blurred slightly. The ship went vertical, then curved out thirty degrees, keeping the same distance, but making Jack’s vector match an impossibility. Leastwise, at one gee thrust it was impossible to match something that bounced around like a bumble-bee. “You scared?” he said over the open channel. “The Engagement is still active, so long as we live. Isn’t that the full Rule?”

Destanu’s hide plates rippled. “So you’re not stupid. Just foolish. Yes, the Engagement is open until one side or the other surrenders, or all its members are eaten.” The Rizen nodded once. “I prefer to eat you and your dark-skinned ally.”

“But if we defeat you?” Jack said. “What do we win?”

Destanu’s shark teeth chattered like ivory cymbals.
 “That will not happen. But if it did, your win means you survive—until another Hunter of the Great Dark visits you. We are predators. You are meat, or you are our servants. Choose!”

“Fuck you.” Jack switched off and looked back at Max. “I need something to keep Destanu from blip-jumping away just when we get close enough for my trick.” He recalled Hortie’s doctoral research subject. “Hey, Max, think you can fiddle Hortie’s com station broadcast so the visual part of the signal transmits far-red light at 730 nanometers?”

Max looked at him as if he was crazy. “Yeah. I guess. Why far-red and why that wavelength?”

Jack watched as the Rizen ship widened its arc separation. “To make Destanu suddenly sleepy. By entraining, or resetting, his biological clock. The bastard said they evolved on a planet and under a sun just like Earth and Sol. The expert software on the recorder says their internal ship-light is a close match for our spectrum and wavelengths. So maybe his circadian clock is photoperiodically controlled—like the internal clock of humans, animals and plants.”

“What!” Max snorted with disbelief. “You’re really reaching, but I can overlay the far-red onto the vid signal. Hey—doesn’t it take a lot of time to reset biological clocks?”

“It varies. Some plants bloom after a single exposure to the photoperiod required for flowering.” On screen, the Rizen ship kept just out of reach. “Hell, I’m betting their metabolism has enough phytochrome Pfr to respond to the far-red signal. And I’m betting that light is the reset cue, or zeitgeiber, for this animal predator. It usually is, on Earth.”

“And if it isn’t?” Max said as he got up, walked heavily under thrust-gee over to Hortense’s com panel, and began modifying the AV signal.

“Then we’re no worse off than now. It’s all a matter of timing.” He nearly choked at the bad pun he’d just committed. “Next time we vibechat with them, piggyback the far-red light spectrum onto the carrier wave and leave me to do the talking.” Jack looked back at his ally. “The fusion drive—can you narrow the exhaust flare’s cross-section? Make it hotter and longer?”

Max nodded, sweat dripping from his forehead. “Yes. Using the exhaust magfields, but the modulation software will need new parameters.” He left the com station and headed back for his Drive seat. “It’ll take a few minutes, but it will give us a higher ISP impulse. We’ll speed up. Hey—maybe we can ram them?”

“Not likely.” Jack ran over his Grandpa Ephraim’s trick in his mind, wondering if it would work against this ship, at this place. Then he realized Destanu was playing with them, like a matador with a bull. “Max, can you flip us tail to nose when I say so?”

“Yeah, but we’ll continue spinning like a pinwheel.”

“Fine by me.” Jack fed in new Navtrack numbers, forcing the Uhuru into a three gee turn toward the Rizen ship. “We’re 50 klicks out now. The drive flare—how rad-hot is it?”

Max looked startled. “Crisp them? With the drive exhaust?”

“Yeah.”

The Engineer grinned. “Nice idea. But we’re low on neutrons and high on plasma gas that cools down to 30 Kelvin at 70 klicks. If we can get close enough, though . . . ”

Jack nodded. “I’m trying.” On the screen, the local starfield blurred and the Rizen ship blip-jumped again, increasing the arc separation once more.

“So am I,” called Max, sounding breathless from the increased thrust. “I’m tightening the exhaust magfields. Whoa! This is gonna be one hot afterburner!”

“Great.” Jack reset the Navtrack again, then smiled to himself. The fusion drive of the Uhuru mixed deuterium and helium-3 gas inside a torus where the magfield created a ‘pinch’ with a narrow enough cross-section to fuse at 900 million degrees Fahrenheit. Feed in some more gas and the whole mess fused into lithium-5, which instantly degraded to lithium-4, one proton, and a banshee flare that kicked out enough ISP for them to reach 20 percent lightspeed. It was a flare hot enough to melt any metal, with secondary rad-showers as the metal vaporized.

“Jack!” called Max anxiously. “We’ve got to swerve sideways at the same time we flip over. Otherwise—”

“Otherwise we miss them, since they’re to our side.” Jack smelled the sweat-stink of his armpits. “Remember to cut fuel feed as soon as the flare hits the Rizen ship, otherwise we’ll pinwheel into our own exhaust.”

“Damn! I’ll set that up now.”

Jack’s hair stood on end at that close call. “Looks like the Rizen have no ship-to-ship weapons.”

“Or they consider it beneath their Rules to beam us.” Max’s own sweat odor filled the cabin.

“You ready to overlay the far-red wavelength?” he called over his shoulder.

“Ready.”

“Good. Watch for my thumbs-up.” Jack locked in the scope’s image of the Rizen ship, then touched on the AV carrier signal. “Destanu, why don’t you stand still so my microwaves can fry your brains? Assuming you have any?”

The Rizen appeared split-screen, with the ship on one side and Destanu on the other. “We have brains. Enough to avoid any effort to ram us.” Destanu motioned for its assistant to move back. The other Rizen did so, but its mouth hung open, flashing shark teeth at its intended prey. “And your maser is too weak to harm us, even close up. Last . . . chance. Feed us or . . . serve uuus.”

Jack gave Max the hand signal for the nose-to-tail flip. “Feed you?” he said, noticing how Destanu had slurred his words. “We might give you indigestion.”

On the front screen, Destanu and his sharky aide stood stock still, black eyes open, their hide plates rippling autonomically, but acting disoriented. As if their minds were elsewhere.

Jack watched as the golden spearhead-in-globe drew closer. The Navtrack showed they would miss the Rizen ship by 40 kilometers, the earlier vector changes far too sharp for the Uhuru to match. But spinning head for tail was apparently not something done by the Rizen, or done recently. The ship did not blip-jump even when Uhuru’s nose whirled sideways toward them, then dipped as the flip gained thruster speed. Nor did Destanu and his aide move.

“Yeah!” yelled Max.

On screen, the yellow wash of the Drive flare enveloped the ship’s nose, then the CCD scope sensors reached overload and the screen went black. Uhuru’s Main Drive shut off, putting them in freefall.
Had they hit the occupied part of the ship? Had the plasma of the drive flare punched through alien metal? Had the secondary shower of radiation that happened every time plasma hit metal added enough neutrons to the flare to make a lethal rad dosage for the Rizen crew-members on-board? Jack would know once the tail-to-nose flip brought the Pilot cabin back into line of sight of the Rizen ship . . . assuming the Alien hadn’t blimp-jumped, or launched a torp, or fired a gas laser or—

“Slagged!” yelled Max in a hoarse voice. “They’re slagged! All the way back to the globe midbody! We did it!”

“Yeah. We did.” Jack’s heart beat wildly. “Now all we have to do is wait for it to cool down.” The simplicity of his words did not match the churning of his empty gut.

The front screen flared with a vid signal. A signal from the Rizen! What? Weren’t they dead?

Destanu appeared in the static-blurred image, its body already red-welted from too much radiation. Behind it, the body of its aide lay half in and half out of the archway. Three of Destanu’s eyes showed the white of new cataracts. “The Rizen are meat. You, you—” The Alien collapsed from view, the screen image blanked out, and all that floated against the reddish disk of QB1 was a scorched ship whose front end had melted under the drive flare of the Uhuru.

Max’s wild whooping peaked, then stopped suddenly. “Hey, you wanna go salvage that ship?”

Jack bent over and dry-heaved. When he was done, he grasped the rough hand of his friend, and fellow survivor. “Yeah, we salvage. After all, we humans started out as scavengers, graduated to two-legged hyenas, and then forgot there might be a reason for all the wars we ever fought.”

The Engineer stared at the ship on the screen, then nodded slowly. “I don’t think we’ll forget again.”

“We better not,” Jack said, then altered the Navtrack for a rendezvous with the Rizen ship on the far side of QB1, where its orbit would intersect with their own ellipsis. “Wishful thinking has killed too many people, here and in the Belt.”

“Amen,” muttered Max, then returned to his Drive controls, working to stop their tailspin.

Jack wasn’t religious, not like Hercule Arcy de Mamét the Jesuit, nor even like gruff and honest Max, who kept his copy of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa stuck on the wall above his bed. But he was a descendant of the Belter Rebellion, the kind of man who did not forget when friends and shipmates died on his behalf. They would recover the bodies of Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, then head home to Charon.

Later they would move back out into the Kuiper Belt, even into the distant Oort Cloud, hunting the Hunters of the Great Dark. Today had been a skirmish. Tomorrow would be War, human-style.

Jack shivered, his regret over the passing of innocence a true thing. Still, humans were predators, not servants, never meat.

So his Grandpa had told him. So the Rizen had taught him.

He grinned hungrily. “Max, you want a steak?”