Chapter 5: The Beer

What? I haven’t talked about Webb Island yet? That’s the human enclave down on Beer, the island they gave us. See, the Beer were aware that there was something going on out in their night skies. The violence from our battles with the Sa’arm colony efforts had been impossible to hide.

Still, they had no space presence at all, and they had no good way to tell what was going on. Our Academy of Beerology kept us informed of how their broadcast media was discussing it. While there was a school of thought that such violent explosions could only mean danger, the typical Beer on the street seemed, according to the official news, to believe that there was no danger.

That changed, of course, when the biggest Sa’arm ship we had ever seen exploded while slowing down to land, raining high-speed fire all over that section of the planet. The dickhead tactics had been correct, from their point of view. The big colony ship was the only one that mattered. The colony ship’s escorts had, in fact, been able to keep us busy long enough for the Virtus to start slowing down to land before we finally got around to killing it.

The Beer had a couple of telescopes they used to look up at the sky. They assigned the users the task of finding out what was going on out there, and whether they understood what was happening or not they had certainly watched -and recorded for later analysis- every phase of that whole long running battle.

The debris from the Virtus devastated that section of the planet, and the loss of life and property among the native Beer was immense. Yes, of course, when compared to the entire planet it was minor, but to those involved it was huge. And it happened immediately after a series of those violent explosions out in space, each set closer than the one before, until the last one was just outside the planet’s atmosphere. The Beer immediately agreed that Something Must Be Done.

Further, the debris that made it to the surface was clearly artificial. There were steel girders, odd materials they couldn’t identify, parts of machines, etc. There were parts of bodies, too, of some creature they had never seen before. It was not a natural event like an asteroid falling.

However, what could they do? They had no space program whatsoever, not even weather or communication satellites. While they discussed their options and we listened in, we had our own discussions. We were prohibited from contacting the Beer until they came out into space to meet us.

Eventually I made a command decision. Nothing we could do here would count as “first contact”. “First Contact” was when one side or the other has no experience with aliens and doesn’t know what to expect. The Sa’arm would be credited with that claim, because of that Virtus. Anything we did in the future would certainly be filtered through their experience of that “first contact” with aliens. There was no way we could take the blame for ruining a first contact situation with those naive aborigines.

With that decision made, I directed Dr. Rasmussen to have the Academy put together a short radio message in their language, It said that yes, there were people out here, and we would like to converse but did not want to alarm them any more than necessary so we intended to leave them alone unless they asked us for a meeting. We were sorry about the damage done by the falling ship, but it was full of troublemakers -that was the closest we could come in their language- who wanted to destroy their planet.

Our message went on to say that it had taken us a very long time to kill them all and that ship almost made it. If they wanted to meet we would, but we accepted that they may not want to and would leave them alone unless they asked us to meet them. When they finally got around to one of their official broadcasts asking if anyone was out there, we sent that message back to them on that frequency.

Of course that sent them into a tizzy, too. Were we speaking truth? How could we? We were blatantly admitting that we were mass murderers. On the other hand, we said we were doing it to defend them, and we hadn’t come down and killed any of them, so maybe we were telling the truth.

We got to watch their television broadcasts and listen to their discussion about how to answer our message. That discussion took months, too, before they came to an agreement to hold talks with us.

Meanwhile, our own AIs were also in a tizzy because we had contacted these pre-space natives. Nope, you aren’t pinning that guilt on us. They ASKED if anyone was out here. They reached out to us on their own, using radio. All we did was answer their question, in the same medium. They ‘came out to us’ with their radio waves, and we ‘went in to them’ with our own radio waves.

The next step was to prepare other canned responses to give them, depending upon what they said, did, or asked. Actually, the Academy had been working on those for several years now. When it came time to prepare a couple of short videos that showed us in a family setting, eating dinner and playing with the children, I decided that my family would be the one immortalized here. We weren’t going to start with stock footage from Earth or use a random sailor’s family in the Womb.

If this happened on Earth, the videos would be shown over and over to everyone, and if those aliens were ever recognized on Earth, they would find themselves famous because they were the models for the alien’s video. Since I was already going to be famous as ‘the alien’s leader’, why cause trouble for someone else? So, when the Beer finally got around to asking what we were like and what we wanted, videos of me playing with my children were among our replies.

How we answered what we wanted was more straightforward. We wanted to leave them alone, to allow them to develop their own way. In fact, we had orders to do so. We wanted them to join us, someday, if that was what they wanted, too. We wanted to not get in trouble with our superiors for bothering them, but if they asked us questions then it was only honest to answer them. We were sorry about the destruction and loss of life, but the troublemakers had not wanted to die, only kill, and we had ourselves lost greatly trying to stop them before they reached the planet. We, too, were in mourning for all of our people who had died in those battles.

That response led them to analyze their recordings from their telescopes, and they realized that, yes, there had been a series of battles with at least two sides, and one side was approaching their planet while the other side was not. Indeed, the final phase of the most recent battle had involved one set of ships that were actually leaving the vicinity of their planet, heading outward to participate in the battle. One side of that battle had already had ships near the planet, and they had done nothing to harm the Beer before, during, or after the battle. Both sides had lost ships, with the approaching side only losing their last and biggest ship when it was close enough to the planet that the wreckage caused all that destruction.

After a bit of discussion, we started to see a change in the way we were referred to. They started using forms of address that a village elder, responsible for the well-being of maybe 200 families, would use to speak of a district elder who oversaw the well-being of a huge land mass with hundreds of cities and millions of people. We had seen it, in their day-to-day affairs, but we hadn’t really understood it before. They were treating us as people that they owed a non-material debt to.

Respect? Fear? We weren’t really sure. Probably some of both, with other stuff mixed in. Frankly, as long as they didn’t throw any worship in there I didn’t much care. I had Tina and Joannie to look at me that way if I wanted to feel important, and I didn’t need anyone else. Honestly, I sometimes saw Hannah’s real job as standing by to stick a pin in me whenever I started to act too important.

We let the Academy continue their research, with oversight from the Governor’s Council as needed. That meant that as long as the Academy was only replying to questions we had anticipated with answers we had agreed on, we stayed out of their hair. Any time the Beer came up with something we didn’t have a canned answer to, they asked for guidance and the Council hammered our answer out, with the AIs providing advice from both their own knowledge bases and communications with the ‘real Confederacy’, the elder races who had brought us in for this war.

Other than answering questions and providing information, we took no action with respect to the Beer. Oh, we discussed a bunch of actions, but we didn’t DO anything. The AIs will back me up on that.

Eventually though, the Beer asked for a face-to-face meeting. They wanted to be sure that we really did look like the videos we had sent them. Of course, by then we had sent them videos of us walking around, goofing off, working, in our shipsuits, in CMC powered armor, videos of our shuttles, our ships, what was left of the dickhead wrecks we had investigated.

We’d even sent them pictures of the dead dickheads we’d found in those wrecks, and they had matched them to the wreckage from the Virtus, which had apparently held several hundred thousand dickheads in suspended animation. So, they wanted to meet these people who claimed to have saved them from being eaten. Yes, there was an overtone of wanting to see for themselves if we really were different.

Of course the AIs were against it, but it was pointed out that if we refused, the Beer would take it as a sign that we were hiding something, like maybe we made up those videos of humans and we were all just two factions of dickheads. No, we had to let them see real live humans.

On the other hand, we had to go to them. It wasn’t like they could come to us. So, we had been thinking about how to do that for some time. The treehuggers thought that we should walk out of the shuttle naked. I, um, thought that this might perhaps be unwise. Maybe in the future, we could let a team of their doctors examine us, but not as an introduction.

In fact, that was the way we set our medical exams up when we got around to it. For the interspecies show and tell, we sent a team of four doctors, two male and two female, and we basically said “we’ll show you ours if you show us yours”. That got our doctors permission to examine them, too, avoiding any issues of privacy or propriety.

Another camp thought that we should start with a squad of Marines in powered armor and carrying every weapon they could hold, just for safety. That faction didn’t get much buy-in, either. The Beer weren’t warlike, and there was no good reason to do that. We asked who would be greeting us, and if the person in charge normally had any assistants with him, to help him and protect him from accidental harm.

They agreed that occasionally a leader angered others with his decisions, and it was common for a leader to be accompanied by a couple of assistants who had it as their task to protect the leader if necessary. We said that this was so of our people as well, and in fact it was much worse these days since many people suffered from our war with the Sa’arm.

What we finally came up with, with the Beer’s full knowledge and agreement, was a mix of all the options. We decided to put Krait in orbit above the planet where they could get a good look at it and we could use it as a base. We pulled a Panther from the Marines’ spare parts bin and set it up as a mobile command center with a transporter pad linked to Krait in case things went wrong.

The first two people out of the shuttle would be fully armed -and armored- Marines from Thor’s Heavy Weapons squad. They would take up a guard position on either side of the back ramp. The Beer didn’t need to know that all powered weapons would be disabled; if the Marines were attacked they could best use their grenade launchers as clubs.

After sixty seconds, assuming that no one had done anything bad to them, two more humans would come out wearing nothing but our shipsuits with a holstered pistol, and they would help the two Marines remove their armor. It was heavy enough to benefit from being powered, but it was still light enough to put on or take off if someone else helped. When they were done we’d have two guys in shipsuits and two guys in their underwear, all milling about smartly around a big pile of armor pieces.