Fair trade, p.7
Fair Trade, page 7
The booth they met in had almost as much privacy as a separate room. If there were any security cameras, they were well hidden. The only vantage from which you could look into the booth was from the center of the bar, and the lone bartender was busy and absent from their view frequently.
Franz and he got burgers and fries, and a local beer that didn’t impress Jed. When John showed up, he got the same but a soda instead of beer.
“Nice to see you, Franz. I have to be back at the boat in about an hour. They are lifting some heavy gear off with a crane. I want to be standing there and have a man taking video from the catwalk in case anything goes wrong. I’ve seen too many optimistic idiots with cranes. I don’t want to be in another viral internet video of heavy equipment disasters.”
“I know you’re busy,” Franz said. “That’s why we picked a spot close to the water to meet so we didn’t waste your time. The owner here is also a friend and won’t remember seeing me or my friends. I was hoping you would do me a small favor. My friend here, John Doe, needs to get back to the lower forty-nine discreetly. I was hoping you could take him when you take your new vessel to the boatyard. He doesn’t have any experience but you are welcome to use him as unskilled labor along the way.”
John looked expectantly at Jed but that didn’t move him to say anything. He just looked back at him neither friendly nor particularly hopeful.
“Does Mr. Doe have the police actively looking for him?” John asked Franz, skeptically.
“If anybody is looking for him it’s not a public matter,” Franz said. “There shouldn’t be any warrants extant. You aren’t going to see his face in a post office or agency website. Besides asking a favor for old time’s sake we thought a small gift would be in order for your efforts.”
Franz set the gold Maple Jed gave him tight behind John’s soda where it couldn’t be seen looking into the booth. John was so slick his eyes slid over it without pausing to visibly stare at it.
“We have plenty of room. I’ll have two tiny officer’s cabins unoccupied. I suggest Mr. Doe spend his time in his assigned cabin or the wheelhouse with me during the day. There’s no need for him to mix with the crew. He can ask for me upon boarding and I’ll come to escort him. The ship is still marked the Abigail on the stern. That will get changed in Seattle too. I take lunch and sometimes supper on the bridge, and I’ll see he eats with me as well as something he can take to his cabin rather than eat with the crew. It might be smart to toss some snacks in your bag. If anyone asks, I’ll say he’s a potential investor and to leave it to me to talk with him.” John looked at Jed. “If you aren’t chatty with me and scowl a lot, that can’t help but cut off any interest.”
“Right, just be myself,” Jed said. “That sounds easy enough.”
That got a slight smile. “I think this might work out,” John agreed. He took a sip of his soda and when he sat it back down the coin was gone as slick as could be. Jed didn’t see him palm it.
“Stay close and the day after tomorrow I’ll call your cell,” John instructed Franz. “I won’t tell you directly to come board when I call, but that is the message to you in getting any call. You aren’t going to show up with a bunch of crap to bring aboard, are you?”
“One soft bag that it wouldn’t matter if anyone searched it,” Jed said. “I’ll toss a few protein bars in it in case I don’t get something from the galley. Anyway, I could fast that long if I had to.”
“That should take care of you,” Franz said looking at Jed. “You call me when you make contact in Seattle,” he instructed. “I’m not going to do anything here until then.”
Franz put four twenties on the table for lunch and set the salt shaker on them. When he nodded at Jed, he got up to let Franz out of the booth and followed him without looking back.
* * *
“Do they really think we don’t see them?” The early warning radar operator asked.
The watch commander didn’t answer right away, seeming to think on it.
“I know. I always expected if we saw aliens, they’d be so advanced they could suddenly materialize on the Whitehouse lawn and that would be our first clue they arrived. If they intended to provoke us to say something they would have progressively moved in closer or transmitted something themselves until we acknowledged them. Maybe even flash lights at us. The shuttle that landed in Alaska wasn’t terribly stealthy either. Besides that, the Russians, Australians, and the Indians have all asked us what the hell we think that thing is. Even the asteroid watch contacted us about it. I don’t think anybody wants to be the first to say alien, but what the hell else could it be? Certainly, none of us have lifted anything that big. Nobody even suggested it might be ours. They probably wouldn’t have inquired if that was a realistic possibility. The Chinese haven’t said boo, but then they wouldn’t mention it to us foreign devils if the Moon floated away.”
“One hopes nobody does anything stupid,” the radar man said.
“Including the aliens,” his superior agreed. This may be no different than Russia or China testing us. They may have formed false impressions of our abilities from our lack of reaction. The delay could be in trying to collect enough information to be able to talk to us.”
He was aware they’d already shot down an alien craft over the Indian Ocean. With a little luck that hadn’t been a manned aircraft but just a drone. There weren’t any organic remains recovered but there wasn’t all that much left to recover at all. He had no idea if that was shared with other nations. He certainly wasn’t free to share that with this subordinate. It was a worry how the aliens regarded the shootdown, but he found it personally heartening that they could down it.
“The patterns of air traffic have changed subtly,” the radar tech said. “I think we are quietly dispersing assets to safety.”
“I’d be shocked if they didn’t,” his commander agreed. “I’m not in the loop on that, but I’d expect the same of ground forces and for vital people to be removed from the cities and disaster bunkers to be activated. I don’t think you are going to see any joint sessions of Congress televised or big meetings of foreign leaders either. It will get difficult to maintain that status indefinitely.”
“If they want to talk to us, I guess it will depend on how different they are and how complicated the message they need to send,” the radar man said.
“If they need to speak us in full diplomatic obfuscation it may take a decade of study,” his supervisor said. “A simple surrender demand should be much easier.”
* * *
“I thought this would make things clearer,” Xilo said. His voice had an edge of desperation.
“We do have a lot more words,” his assistant, Beelus, pointed out. “Now it’s true, the captioning lags from the events on the screen. Sometimes the last phrase shown stays on well into the next presentation. Just figuring that out helped us a great deal. My personal opinion is that it also simply isn’t very accurate. I showed you those instances where something was spelled out and then retracted and a new word or expression typed in. The fact that it has the cadence of somebody keying it in live says it is a person instead of a computer generating it. Then there is the occasional person who is doing complex gestures while another person speaks. The workers who go EV in vacuum suits assure me it looks very much like what they do to communicate with gestures rather than everyone babbling over each other on the same channel.”
“There are far too many feeds of video for us to monitor,” Xilo said.
“If one may be so bold, I’d make a suggestion,” Beelus said.
“Suggest anything you please,” Xilo said. “I’m overwhelmed. I stand aside from protocol.”
“We don’t have anyone who primarily deals with language. Even the communications specialist who can speak basic Tiger has another primary job. I mean, we don’t get a lot of prisoners to have it as a full-time specialty. And nobody can speak with the Bugs. Just about anybody aboard has as much ability with alien languages as another. Ask for volunteers. Half to watch the videos when not on duty, and report what they think are word associations, and a half to validate what the others report. Let them do it singly or in groups, the less we structure it the more likely something will work. Just ignore the feeds for things like athletic competitions and selling things.”
“You realize that is insane and totally against all my training?” Xilo asked. “You don’t put intellectual puzzles to the common crew, as if these things can be decided by consensus.”
Beelus looked a little crazed himself.
“This world is more than a little insane and never had the benefit of your training! Try it. If it doesn’t work lay the blame on me. What can they do to me? We’re never going home anyway. I have no hope of a nice retirement with decent social credits.”
That rattled Xilo. He still was thinking he’d have a comfortable retirement in the not-too-distant future. He had even less chance of seeing that than this pup now.
“Get permission from the commander and have him instruct the leaders not to interfere with it,” Xilo instructed. “If it isn’t by his direct order, you’ll get far too much resistance. It’s too radical for a lot of the leaders to accept easily.”
“You don’t want to present it?” Beelus asked surprised.
“It’s your idea. You can best defend it if he wants to argue. I’ll go along and stand beside you so he knows it has my blessing. I suggest if he doesn’t like it, you ask for an alternative plan. I really doubt he can articulate one any more than I can.”
* * *
When John called, Franz drove Jed to the docks and dropped him off. He left his rifle, camera, and most of his gear with Franz. Franz had his cell phone with instructions on how he’d like it used. Franz also checked his rented mailbox periodically and delivered it when he had online orders. Jed told him to stop checking it. If it got too full, they could put it in will-call. The authorities might start watching it and see Franz check it. His satellite phone he kept as a prop, but didn’t intend to use it. Even though it worked fairly well for text using a VPN he didn’t trust it being secure. When Franz returned home, he’d find another Maple like he gave John Burns on his kitchen table.
Jed reported to the ship and told the watchman who came to the gangway that the owner was expecting him. When he asked for a name, Jed informed him he’d had lunch with the owner, and he’d be recognized. He could tell that put the man off but that was too bad. It wasn’t any of his business.
The tiny cabin was in the superstructure behind the bridge. It was as lacking in personality as he expected. This wasn’t a cruise ship after all, but it smelled fine and the bed when he checked it seemed decent. Jed checked for bed bugs like he would at any hotel, even a fancy one. There was a locker with shelves but he was going to live straight out of his bag for the short time the trip to Seattle would take. The head pointed out to him was behind the bridge and separate from a shower room at the opposite end of the hall.
Jed stretched out on the bed and tried to relax, but laid there thinking. When he got to Seattle, he needed to buy a computer and a phone. Nothing fancy, a pawn shop laptop, and a big box phone would suffice. Transportation was going to be a more difficult issue and he gave it some thought.
* * *
“Your idea of dividing the crew into those examining video and those filtering their interpretations has worked fairly well to reduce the wild unsupported speculations of some. I’m going to refine that system somewhat,” Xilo told Beelus. “I’m going to pick four of those who have demonstrated the best use of logic in refuting false assumptions and make them a separate filter over the larger group. I’m also slowly marking certain crew members who get unduly excited about certain images as less useful and segregating their responses to be examined by the most critical of our second-tier judges.
“The natives have a rich catalog of video every bit as fanciful as the cover of the recovered codex. That wouldn’t be as great a problem if the images were as obviously drawn as the folio cover, but it seems the natives are better than us at creating realistic false images. Not just altering them, but making them up from scratch. They create entire fake worlds, and just to confuse things, they create realities just slightly altered of things that really exist.
“Quite a few of our people got excited over what have to be entertainments of starships visiting other planets, dealing with species that don’t exist, and waging war with impossible weapons in defiance of known science. They show ships doing swooping maneuvers in defiance of orbital mechanics and weapons with explosive powers beyond what you could stuff in an entire freighter. They show invisible shields that defy every known law of physics. I’m embarrassed that some of these fictions fooled any of our crew. But examining a still frame of those videos it’s impossible to tell it from a recording.”
Beelus looked dismayed. “Then video is useless for them as evidence in a court of justice. If we send them a video, they will look at it with the same critical eye. They may not believe we are actually aliens, and not the sort of fake aliens created by some jokester of their own species.”
“Your point is well taken,” Xilo admitted. “I’ll have to advise the commander that we can’t make contact from a shuttle or any other way of cloaking our real presence near their moon. They’ll have to see our location to affirm the veracity of our transmission.”
“I just hope they don’t regard that as targeting data,” Beelus said.
* * *
“Even if we don’t publish it, we need a policy and to act on it consistently,” the head of NASA, Durkin said. “Others will observe what we do. It’s not like you can hide civilian launches from well-known sites. The Chinese and the Russians both brought their space station crews back to earth about the same time we became aware of the alien ship. That’s a pretty good indication they have about the same quality of sensors and radar as us. So far, we’ve delayed the launch of three commercial satellites. The Space Force has delayed a training launch and an unmanned shuttle launch that were announced, but they don’t care to tell civilians why.”
He looked a question at John Gott, the head of Space Forces, and got a poker face back. So much for getting any cooperation from him.
“India stopped and defueled a launch vehicle already on the pad. The Chinese haven’t sent up anything since recovering their crew and there has been nothing launched by France, Israel, Pakistan, Australia, Canada, Japan, Persia, or Argentina.
“If we don’t send a supply mission to the Freedom Station pretty soon, we’re going to need to have the crew start shutting down systems and getting ready to moth-ball the station. They’ll use their remaining fuel to loft it into as high an orbit as they can. That will give us about a two-year extension of its orbital life before we have to refuel and man it again or lose it.”
“You send up supply rockets without a crew, don’t you?” President Garvin asked.
“Yes, more often unmanned,” Durkin said. “The crewed versions can’t carry near as much.”
“Send one then,” Garvin said. “If they interfere with it that will tell us a great deal about them. Just don’t risk a crew or put anything aboard the mission that would be a tragedy to lose.”
“We’ll do that,” Durkin agreed. “We’ll also send the station crew a written explanation of what is going on. We have no idea how secure our encryption is now with the aliens. Most of our encryption seems to last only a few years before it is cracked, and we have no idea how many years ahead of us they are.
“The astronauts onboard are not stupid people. Commander Perez has already said they see something is going down and asked what it was. He wasn’t happy to be told it wasn’t to be discussed. The crew has responded to that by refusing all calls and text messages from their families.
“They are fulfilling every official and professional communication but we never anticipated the effects of them cutting off personal calls. When told their family would like to hear from them commander Perez said that parched souls in hell would like a shipment of snow cones too. It’s becoming difficult to keep their families from going to the press and raising an alarm that something is wrong.”
“Give them the option to come home if they wish,” President Garvin ordered.
Chapter 6
“We have several hundred words,” Xilo said. “Some are closely related. For example, we have descending and down as well and ascending and up, hold and go, from aircraft instructions and confirmed in video. Oh, and go to. To was an important combination. A lot of common phrases could be deduced by repeated use and then observing what happened. For example, we are certain of the words or phrases coming up and lastly or finally from news programs.
“We’ve seen maps and know some words for water such as pond, lake, ocean, and sea. A lot of words are related to images. They have several words for cyclonic storms shown both at ground level and in overhead views from satellites. They have hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. We were already having difficulty understanding the reasons for naming them but just to make it even more confusing they name them individually as if they were people.”
“That sounds religious,” Three Fingers suggested. “Maybe they are animists and regard the forces of nature like aboriginals, addressing the sun and wind like people. Our language persists in doing that for poetic expression. It seems odd for people who can launch satellites.”
“Perhaps they are doing it on the same basis,” Xilo said. “A linguistic holdover, not a literal belief. We also have the words for rain and clouds, hail, and snow from weather reporting and graphics. We rather wondered why they have such an obsession with the weather, but it became apparent they have a great deal of trouble operating ground cars if the roadways are made slick from ice or sometimes just wet. They have storms of such severity they do heavy damage. No wonder they are interested.
