“Did that go well?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think I’ll have to ask for your Marines to move the boffins back aboard at the tip of their bayonets.”
Jack grinned at the thought.
Breakfast finished, Kris called a meeting of her core team in her day quarters. Penny and Masao arrived first, still showing the black humor of two who had been taken into the love of a child only to lose it. Amanda and Jacques were the last to arrive, and kept their distance. They settled their foul moods at opposite ends of the conference table.
Before Kris could open her mouth, Nelly butted in. DON’T ASK THEM WHAT’S WRONG. THE DOCS THINK JACQUES SHOULD NOT BE INTIMATE AFTER ALL HIS CATTING AROUND ON THE SURFACE.
BUT I THOUGHT THERE WAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.
OFFICIALLY, THERE ISN’T, KRIS, BUT THE DOCS THINK HE AND AMANDA SHOULD KEEP SOME EXTRA DISTANCE UNTIL THEY’VE HAD A BIT MORE TIME TO ANALYZE ANYTHING NEW IN HIS BLOOD.
“CATTING AROUND,” NELLY?
NOT MY WORD. AMANDA’S. I GOT IT FROM MY KID WHO WORKS WITH JACQUES. WE LOOKED IT UP. CATS ARE VERY PROLIFIC.
Kris started the meeting with no preamble. “We’re leaving here in three days. Do you have a problem with that?” she said, looking at Jacques.
The anthropologist shook his head. “I’m done down there. I’ll spend years going over my research, but I think we’ve already written the executive summary.”
“Then I have a question,” Kris said. “What do we do with that pyramid?”
“We don’t lase it from space,” Jacques quickly said.
“Not even a little bit?” Amanda asked.
“How much do you have in mind?”
“I was kidding, Jacques. That trip down has made you thin-skinned.”
“It is growing thicker by the second, my dear.”
“Then kidding aside,” Kris said, “what kind of calling card do we leave the next visitor?”
“Hmm, that is not an easy question, Admiral,” Jacques said. “My wife just might have the right answer. I can’t tell from my talk with the others for sure, but I think they were just dropped off near the pyramid. It is possible that the Black Hats quickly shoved them out the door, did three quick bows to the pyramid, then took off back for space. It might only be opened when there are heads to put on display.”
“And, if Professor Labao’s report is right,” Kris said, “it might be twenty or thirty years before they actually open the damn place up.”
“Lase it a little bit from space,” Amanda said through a tiny smile.
“I’d rather not do something so violent,” Kris said.
“And so ambiguous,” Penny added.
“How much of the alien printed language have we managed to translate?” Jack asked.
“Not a lot,” the anthropologist admitted. “We think we have something from the boasts they write on the walls behind each of the figures in glass. By the way, the figures are in a strange kind of silicate substance. It’s like glass, but slow and cold. We can’t figure out the process they follow to make it happen. Now that we know it’s possible, we’ve got folks working on it.”
“Do we need this new tech?” Kris asked.
“I can make walls of clear Smart Metal,” Nelly pointed out.
“Folks, I think we’re a bit off topic,” Jack put in. “As I see it, the question before us is how to let the bug-eyed monsters know we know where they live without throwing down the gauntlet and laying on a war.”
Kris gave Jack a look.
“Laying on more of a war than we already have,” he amended.
“Better. We’ve got the jump buoys out, so they’ll know on approach that things are different,” Kris said.
“But we’re not flashing any high tech,” Penny added.
“We’ll need to retrieve all our high-tech gear from the pyramid,” Amanda said.
“Including the Smart Metal ramp over the pit. We should also retrieve the probe from the bottom of the pit,” Masao said.
“And fill it in,” Jacques said. “We could get dirt and gravel from outside the glass plain.”
Kris shook her head. “No, not the closest dirt. They brought the rocks from the next star system over. Let’s do this right.”
“You aren’t going to get rocks from the next system?” Jack asked.
“No, I don’t want to stay here that long. But we can do the next best thing. Nelly, that place that got lased from space. The latest one. Isn’t there’s a river through it?”
“Yes, Kris.”
“Does it have rocks and gravel?”
“Of all sizes.”
“Good. Captain Drago.”
“You holler, Admiral?”
“Could you drop in here for a moment?”
“What do you want?” he answered, already standing in the doorway to his bridge.
“I need to move a couple of longboat loads of rock and gravel from a point on West Continent to the pyramid on East Continent.”
“Rocks and gravel, you say, Your Princessship?”
“It’s a message to our bug-eyed-monster friends,” Jack supplied.
“Well, in that case, I’ll get some Sailors right on it.”
“Ask Gunny if he’s got any Marines who need some hard duty,” Jack said. “He was complaining that the troops were getting slack, what with nothing tough to give the slackers.”
“I’ll call him,” Captain Drago said. “Anything else, Admiral?”
“Yes, I want one big rock that will fill up a big part of the opening into the pyramid.”
“One big one it will be. If that’s all, I’ll get right on this. I heard that you’re moving all the boffins up from dirtside.”
“Right after we draw straws or roll dice to determine the order. There are too many of them to flip coins.”
“Cutting cards is best for the really big ones,” Drago said. “I’ll have Cookie bring you a deck.”
“Cookie has a deck of cards?” Kris said.
“He uses it for card tricks, or so he says. Me, I think he and the chiefs have one huge floating poker game going on somewhere aboard ship. My chief master-at-arms hasn’t busted it, though. I have no idea why.”
“Smart man,” Jack said.
The captain left, no doubt to tell a few chiefs and Gunny to make a lot of rocks move from one side of the planet to the other.
Kris turned back to look at her team. “I want to carve something on the big rock. I’m open to suggestions on what to say. I don’t think we can afford to call the mother ship a bean like I did the first time I talked to the Alwans.”
“Are you ever going to let me live that one down?” Nelly said.
“Nope. I doubt it. Your mistakes are so few, Nelly, I have to treasure each one.”
“Humans,” Nelly spat, if a computer could spit.
“What do you want to say, Kris?” Penny said, getting them back on track.
“Something along the lines of ‘I came. I saw. I don’t like what I saw. If you go to war with me, I will pile your heads up inside this pyramid.’ Any chance we could say that, Jacques? Nelly?”
Jacques was shaking his head. No doubt Nelly was, too, but the human got to talk first. “We have found no word that looks like ‘if.’ Apparently, if you are an Enlightened One, if you will it, it happens, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Kris said, dryly. “So, tell me what I can say.”
“The ‘I came, I saw,’ is not a problem. How about ‘What I saw of your false enlightenment disgusts me.’ We are pretty sure we have that ‘enlightenment’ word down. Now that I’ve talked with one, and understand how basic it is to their worldview, we’re real sure on that one. The word for ‘disgust’ has their root word for vermin in it, so it’s a real slap in the face.”
“I like that,” Kris said. “How do we say if you go to war with us, we will whip your butt?”
“That won’t be easy. It’s easy to say, ‘We will bury this place with your heads.’ They talk a lot about burying you and taking a lot of heads. It’s the idea of having an alternative to the course of action that they don’t do so well.”