“Yes,” Penny said. “We will not lose. We can’t.”
“Did any of you notice something about that lineup?” Masao said.
They waited for him to make his point. “They all represent one species. None of them have two standing together. What do you think they’d make of us and the Alwans on one planet?”
“They’d either take the Alwans for animals,” Penny said, “or go looking for where we came from. And if they’ve got any ability to read DNA, they’ll know that we don’t fit on Alwa.”
“Yeah,” Kris said. “Good old Grampa Ray goofed it big this time. No matter how big an industrial base we build on Alwa, we can’t fake our DNA fingerprint. When we killed that first base ship, we started a war, and no amount of us dying on Alwa will shake the raiders from hunting for the first race that managed to kill them in what, over a hundred thousand years?”
“We don’t know that all of the other races failed to put up a decent fight,” Jack said.
“The bastards sure don’t fight as if they’ve had a tough, space-based enemy for some time,” Kris pointed out.
“I will concede that,” Jack said.
“So, what do we do now?” Penny ask. “Do we know enough to head home and dig in for the next fight?”
Kris chewed on that thought for a long moment, then shook her head. “I still want to talk to one of them. I want to know if what we’re assuming is the way it is. I want to know what makes their minds tick.”
“That’s assuming you can find someone running around with a flint-tipped spear on this planet who knows anything about what happened a hundred thousand years ago,” Penny quipped.
“That’s the problem,” Jack said. “I doubt if any of the natives here have any written records. Handing knowledge down by word of mouth has its limits.”
“Carefully constructed sagas can last a long time,” Masao pointed out.
“What about the locals that were recently landed?” Kris said. “The ones that are still wearing rags? They have to know the official story from their ship. Maybe they’ll tell us what’s happening on the ships and why that pyramid of horrors is down there?”
“But they were tossed off the ships,” Jack said. “Won’t that impact their perspective?”
“And even if we ignore that minor issue,” Penny said, smiling enigmatically at her understatement, “that’s just one ship’s version.”
“All good points,” Kris admitted, “but I want to talk to someone. I want to hear something, right or wrong. Those that are stuck down there living from hand to mouth look like a better prospect than those that blow their ships up rather than talk. Somehow, there has to be some way for us to make contact with them before they manage to kill themselves.”
“Or us,” Jack pointed out.
“They don’t get to kill us,” Kris said, voice cold as steel.
“So, how do we get one of them in a mood to talk?” Penny asked.
“Let’s talk to Jacques,” Kris said. “He’s the anthropologist. If he can’t figure out a way to get a word in edgewise with people struggling to survive on what they can hunt, scavenge, or dig up, no one can.”
So Jacques and Amanda were recalled from the surface, and Kris found out she’d bitten off a whole lot more than she thought though not more than she was willing to chew.
After listening to Kris, Jacques shook his head. “I would not suggest that we just sleepy dart one of them and haul them up here. People can kill themselves by running into a wall over and over again. I suspect if these dudes got the shock of finding themselves on a strange ship, that is exactly what they would do.”
“We look just like them. Can’t we pass for them?” Kris asked.
“Bare-ass naked, I might,” Jacques said. “But dressed here, on this ship?” He shook his head. “Even the smell of the ship might give us away. No doubt our language would, and definitely our questions would. No, we’ve got to come at this using a totally neutral approach.”
“Does that mean you have one?” Kris asked.
The anthropologist settled into a chair and rubbed his chin. It had been a while since he had shaved. “We’ve got surveillance bugs following several of the gens around. I can’t actually call them clans or tribes. They’re much too small. What we’ve found is that they speak similar languages, but different enough that they would have trouble talking to each other.”
Kris made a puzzled look. Jacques took mercy on her.
“Most of us speak Standard. It’s a cross between Old Earth’s English and Spanish, which themselves were a cross between several languages that preceded them like German, French, and before them, Latin and Greek. Then you have to throw in borrowed words from all over Earth: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Swahili. Don’t get me started, or I will bore you to death.
“Anyway, back on Old Earth, the French, the Italians, and the Spanish spoke languages that branched off from Latin. They shared a lot of similar words, but put two of them in a bar and they couldn’t order a drink.
“However, we have a lot of scout bots following different gens around, collecting sessions of their speech and the context for it. With any luck, we should have a good idea of what they’re saying in a week, two at the most.”
“The markings in the pyramid,” Kris said. “Will we be reading them as quickly?”
“Not likely. We have only the most minimum of context for them. For example, we know that there is a kind of star location given for each of the specimens. It’s the opening line etched into the wall behind every one of them. We think it’s giving us numbers, but we can’t even be sure of that. It’s a lot easier to crack a living language than a dead one, and the written markings on the pyramid are, for all practical matters, dead to us.”
“Can we do anything to help you crack the living languages? I’m including in that the languages of the natives in the dominant culture,” Kris said. “I wonder if their language is anywhere close to the star raiders’ language?”
“Possibly, but quite likely not,” Jacques said. “In a hundred thousand years, languages can change a lot. And remember, these are the ones that stayed behind when the others took up wandering the stars and slaughtering everything they meet. There’s bound to be some basis for that difference.”
“And these people on the ground have been attacked by the star raiders,” Nelly put in. “We’ve dated three of the more recent depredations. We’re sure the most recent was lased from space in the last ten thousand years.”
“But why?” Amanda asked.
Kris took a shot at an answer. “They may be flesh of their flesh, but they chose to stay behind, to separate off from those who are carrying the torch. They can live, but they can’t ever threaten the star rovers. If they look to be developing a science-based, industrial culture, they burn it.”
“You may be right,” Amanda said. “Dear God, I hate this. And I hate them.”
“We can’t afford to hate them,” Kris said. “If necessary, I will destroy them, but I will not hate them. Hate like that is what turned them into whatever it is they are.”
Jack and Jacques nodded agreement.
“There is one thing that might help us correlate the data we’re collecting,” Jacques said, changing the topic to something they controlled.
“Name it, and it’s yours,” Kris said.
“The use of the ships’ main computers to grind the data.”
“Oops,” Kris said, “On that, you will have to speak to my flag captain. No one messes with the ships’ computers without his say-so.”
Which brought Captain Drago into the conversation. He looked more than negative to the idea, even when Nelly offered to coordinate the data processing.
“Thank you, Nelly, but I like having my ships ready to run at the first sign they need to. If you and yours are messing with our nav computers, we might find ourselves still sitting here, counting zeros and ones by hand, and running short of ones, when the big uglies show up.”