“I would be most happy to discuss such things with you,” he said.
“That’s all that I ask. It might possibly happen that we could have some mutually profitable business dealings with each other.”
“When such things occur, I would be interested in hearing about them.”
“We shall see,” Bronki said.
At this point, a group of twelve entered the car, and Bronki ended the conversation by feigning sleep.
Her mind, though, was churning over, examining the various permutations of this situation. With a devoted dependant who was both a warrior and a vampire, there were so many pleasant possibilities.
Academic superiors who were in her way at the university, plugging a hole that would otherwise allow for her advancement, could be eliminated. From being a senior professor, she could see herself becoming a department head, a director of a college, and eventually even the chancellor!
Of course, that sort of thing would have to be done cautiously, with much preplanning, and with great discretion. She would have to be sure that when some ancient academic went to his just reward, she would be the obvious successor to his chair.
Business dealings, on the other hand, often allow one a great deal more latitude. She could imagine certain of her competitors selling out their holdings to her at very reasonable prices and then simply leaving town, never to be seen again.
And Kren, of course, would be happy to eat the evidence.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
First Blood
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d.
We found ourselves suddenly back in the meeting hall. General Sobieski was at the podium.
“So, now that we are finally back together, let’s get on with this,” he said. “A month ago, General Abdul Hussein was exercising his troops in the Cometary Belt of New Syria.”
I put my face in my hands. I’d had to work with Hussein during the taking of Earth’s Solar Station, and he was a murderous, suicidal lunatic. If there was anybody to not choose to represent humanity in our first contact with an alien race, it was Abdul.
A large wall screen appeared behind Sobieski, showing the action.
My boss continued, “They picked up a fairly small, spherical ship coming at them at almost light speed. In the few seconds available to them, they sent recognition signals to it, which were not answered. Then, Abdul’s forces were hit with some sort of energy field that took out thirty-one of their tanks. These tanks were not exactly destroyed. They simply ceased to exist. General Hussein took this to be an unfriendly act, and the rest of his forces, some four thousand tanks, opened fire on the intruder.”
Well, at least they fired on us first. That’s something, I thought.
Sobieski continued, “As you will see shortly, the rail gun needles simply bounced off, but the X-ray lasers, which deposit their energy deep into their targets, were more successful. The alien ship showed considerable warming.
“Then, in two hundred and fifty-two milliseconds, it ceased traveling in the direction of our forces. From moving at nearly light speed, it simply stopped, made an eighty-nine degree turn, and then proceeded sideways at three hundred and ten thousand kilometers per hour!”
Actions like these are simply physically impossible, and the crowd broke into gasps of shock.
“Right,” the general continued. “Now, look at this close-up. You can clearly see that the rail gun needles are stopping ten meters from the alien craft. Or rather, they are suddenly moving at the same speed that it is. They wander around a bit, but when they get more than twenty meters from the ship, they suddenly take off, continuing in the direction that they were going before they encountered the alien!”
I was as confused as everyone else in the room.
“Abdul sent six squads of tanks after the intruder, since his fuel stores on his home planet weren’t big enough to send his entire force. Those thirty-six tanks eventually caught up with the alien. They found it completely dormant. It was warm, but cooling off, and was generating no energy of its own. It appeared to be completely dead. They didn’t feel up to opening the ship themselves, so they simply pushed it home, putting it in a three-day orbit around New Syria.
“Since then, experts from all over the system have been studying the alien craft. What we have learned so far is very preliminary, but we can state the following:
“First. Their materials technology is vastly superior to our own. That ship was constructed of ordinary elements well known to us, but in combinations such that many of them had tensile strengths up to fourteen times better than anything that we have ever produced.
“Second. Their computer technology is inferior to ours. There was not a single integrated circuit on that ship! Every single transistor was a discrete component! There is no possibility that they had an artificial intelligence on that ship. On the other hand, from what little we have been able to deduce, the programming of these simple computers is extremely sophisticated.
“Third. There were a number of charts and books on board. While we are nowhere near being able to decipher their language, we are pretty sure that we understand their numbering system. We deduced the age of their civilization from what we are fairly certain is a history book. Then again, it could be a cook book, I suppose. We are more definite about the star charts we found. Incidentally, the characters in the books and charts are so small that a human can not read them unless they are expanded by at least a factor of sixteen. Their eyesight is apparently much better than ours.
“Fourth. There were absolutely no microorganisms of any kind on that ship, not even dead ones. This level of sterilization would be beyond our technology. What it means is beyond us.”
“Last. There was only a single pilot on that ship, a strange creature who looks vaguely reptilian.”
The screen showed him. An ugly sucker!
“There were also twenty-two and a half other, smaller creatures on board, all of whom had been alive until our X-ray lasers cooked the place. We haven’t been able to analyze their version of DNA yet, but it appears certain that they were chemically identical to the pilot. There can be no other explanation for this than to assume that they were juveniles of the pilot’s own race. And since there were no other food supplies on board, the presumption is that he was eating them. This supposition is backed up by the fact that he was eating one of these children at the time of the attack. It had not been slaughtered first. He’d been eating it alive.”
The screen showed a small, green, partially eaten body, with obvious tooth marks in it.
“So. That’s all we know right now. As we learn more, you will be informed. Get your preliminary suggestions together, submit them, and then go home and think about this. Keep in touch with each other. I’ll call you all back together later on. Dismissed.”
After we shipped our preliminary suggestions to HQ, Kasia wanted to spend a week visiting her parents on New Kashubia, Quincy and Zuzanna wanted to see their grandchildren, and Conan and Maria did some sightseeing.
I stayed bottled up in the CCC and thought about our new problem a lot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Kren Knocks One out of the Park
Duke Kren took off the recording helmet, got up, visited the toilet and the drinking fountain, and lay back down on the cot.
His head was throbbing. Damn, but resurrection was a painful process. Being eaten alive was actually the easy part!
He put the recording helmet back on, and remembered. . . .
* * *
It was dark when they arrived at the university, but Kren wasn’t aware of it. They left the lighted, underground tube station, and walked a half mile through a pleasant underground tunnel that was lined on both sides with many gross of shops and other establishments for which Kren could not imagine any possible use. Finally, they went through a locked doorway and up a winding staircase that led to Bronki’s huge town house.
The building had three floors below ground and a dozen and five above it. Passenger elevators were as illegal as private transportation among the Mitchegai, for the same reasons of physical fitness. This caused the highest levels of buildings to be the least desirable, and here they were used for undergraduate housing. Graduate students lived below them, and junior faculty members below that. Bronki kept the entire second floor for her own, personal use.
The glassed-in first floor was taken up by a large lobby, six public meeting rooms, and some office space. It was here that they stopped first, at the registration desk.
“Zon, this is Kren,” Bronki said to her subordinate behind the counter. “He will be registering as an undergraduate soon, and he will need a room.”