“That’s right,” Geary said, pointing to General Charban. “We need you to sit down with the general and write a poem for the Dancers.”
Iger blinked before managing to respond. “Sir?”
“Sit down with General Charban and write a poem to the Dancers,” Geary repeated. “What are the types of poems that you’re skilled at? Haiku? One of those.”
“For the Dancers?” Iger flushed slightly. “Admiral, my… hobby… is just a pastime. I’m not any good at it.”
“Lieutenant Jamenson says you are.”
Iger jerked with surprise and glanced at Jamenson. “She did? I mean… yes, sir. I’ll try, sir. A poem for the Dancers?”
“General Charban and Lieutenant Jamenson will explain,” Geary said, waving Iger in their direction.
He and Desjani stood watching as Lieutenants Iger and Jamenson huddled with Charban. “Who would have guessed that Iger had an, um, poetic soul?” Desjani murmured to Geary.
“I have a feeling that Lieutenant Jamenson may have awakened that particular part of Lieutenant Iger’s soul,” Geary commented dryly.
“Well, yeah, that’s what women do. We take rough objects and polish them up a bit. What if this doesn’t work, Admiral?”
“Then we’re no worse off than we were before.”
Lieutenant Iger was sitting, looking distressed and running one hand through his hair, while Lieutenant Jamenson spoke to him in a low voice, her expression encouraging. General Charban had leaned back and was pretending not to be aware of what the lieutenants were doing.
Finally, Iger stood up. “Admiral, I think this will do to convey the message General Charban wants to send. Ummm…
“Dark is this winter,
“Come now our friends from far stars,
“What do they seek here?”
Lieutenant Jamenson beamed at Iger with what seemed to Geary to be possessive pride, General Charban nodded approvingly, and even Tanya Desjani smiled. “Why the reference to winter?” Geary asked.
“It’s traditional in haiku, sir,” Iger explained. “There’s often a seasonal reference, and I thought—”
“That’s fine. I just wondered. Send it,” Geary said.
Charban poked the haiku into the transmitter, then everyone waited. “If they want to respond,” Charban said, “they’ll usually answer very quickly, and by now those Dancer ships are only a couple of light-minutes from this ship, so there shouldn’t be any major comm delays caused by distance.”
An alert tone sounded. Charban slapped the control, reading intently. He smiled, then sighed, then lowered his head to the table as if immensely tired.
“What’s wrong?” Geary demanded.
“Do you have any idea how much sleep and how much hair I have lost trying to figure out how to communicate better with the Dancers?” Charban said, his voice partly muffled against the table’s surface. He sat up, sighed again, then read. “Here’s the reply from the Dancers—
“Now we speak clearly,
“As one to one, side by side,
“To mend the pattern.”
Charban shook his head, looking dejected. “I feel like such an idiot.”
“No one else thought of it until now,” Geary said. “Lieutenant Jamenson, I’m going to get you promoted if it kills me.”
“Here’s the next message,” Jamenson said, looking abashed, as another tone sounded.
Charban read it out loud at once this time.
“Cold minds must be stopped,
“This mistake is an old one,
“We fight beside you.”
“The meaning of that is very clear,” Iger said, sounding surprised.
“They’re here to help us fight the dark ships,” Geary said. “I can’t believe that all this time they were waiting for us to sing back at them.”
“It must be how they regard serious talk,” Charban said. “As long as we avoided using any sort of rhythmic patterns in our speech, we must have sounded to them as if we didn’t want to talk about anything important. We kept giving them baby speech, and they kept responding in kind.”
“Find out what they regard as fighting beside us,” Geary ordered. “Make the questions as poetical as you want, but I need to know if that means they’re taking orders from me, or if they’re planning on operating independently on the same battlefield. They need to know that we’re leaving in a few days for Unity Alternate. Also, see if you can find out whether they did jump here from somewhere in Dancer-controlled space.”
“I have a list a kilometer long of things we need to get answers to from the Dancers,” Charban said. “But I will give priority to those. What do you think of ‘this mistake is an old one’?”
“We’re not the first species to try to outsource responsibility for killing,” Desjani said. “Apparently that can produce results bad enough that the Dancers want to help us stop humanity’s efforts in that direction.”
“Did someone among the Dancers do it?” Geary wondered. “Put AIs in complete control of weapons?”
“They are natural engineers,” Charban noted. “And you know engineers. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build this? Let’s try! The awesomeness of building it fills their imaginations, and as a result, the question of whether or not building it would be a good idea doesn’t always get asked.”
“In that respect, they may be very much like us,” Geary agreed. “Lieutenant Iger, you are to work directly with General Charban and Lieutenant Jamenson to facilitate communications with the Dancers. That task takes priority over any other assignment.”
“Yes, sir.” Iger did not appear to be too put out at the prospect of working closely with Jamenson for an indefinite period. “My chiefs can run my intelligence section for a while and will let me know if they discover anything.”
Geary and Desjani left the other three, walking through the passageways of the battle cruiser, Desjani looking around in a way that conveyed concern. “They’re going to target Dauntless again,” she said to Geary.
“There’s no doubt of that. Our goal is to hit their base while most or all of the dark ships are away,” Geary reminded her. “We knock out their support structure, and, in time, they’ll run low enough on fuel cells and expendable munitions for us to be able to take them down.”
“And if a lot of the dark ships are there when we arrive?” Desjani asked. “Forty Dancer ships are welcome reinforcements, but they’re not enough to even the odds.”
“That’s an unusually cautious attitude for you,” he commented.
“I’ve got a bad feeling.” She frowned at the deck, causing some passing sailors to hastily check the deck for any signs of trash or other problems. “Like before we went to Prime with Bloch in command.”
“You think we’re running into an ambush?” Geary asked.
“I don’t know. But we have to try this, don’t we? There’s no telling where those dark ships might hit next. Time is not on our side.”
He had just reached his stateroom when Charban called, looking unusually triumphant. “The Dancers will come to Unity Alternate with us. They feel that they will be needed and that destroying the ‘cold minds’ is too important a task to risk an unsuccessful mission.”
“Will the Dancers operate under my command?” Geary asked.
“No. They want to be free to operate independently there.”
It was Geary’s turn to sigh. “I can’t make them follow my orders. Those forty Dancer ships could be enormously useful anyway if any dark ships are defending their base. And if they come with us, I won’t have to explain leaving an alien armada at Varandal while I take my fleet off somewhere else.”