Chapter 1

Nils Michaelson was about as bored as it was possible to get. The locater on the mother ship, Freya, had indicated that there were Wasp pyramids in this neighborhood. Well, whatever the fancy sensors might say, Nils' Mark 1 eyeballs had not given him a glimmer of a sighting. Nils had been flying about in his spacetub for hours without any hint of a Wasp, and he was very happy that his shift was about over. He was a bit more confident of what he could see than what his sensors could indicate; his experience was that human eyes were just more reliable than any number of electronic instruments.

He knew as well as the next pilot that sensors had a greater range than his eyes, but sensors were not directly connected to his brain, so they weren't going to register that flash of light or stellar occlusion that his eye/brain combination would notice, because his body was tuned to detecting a flash of moving elk among the trees. Anyway, he was almost ready to speed up to near light speed and jump to the mother ship when his wingman shouted a headsup.

"What you got, Jesus?"

"I'm not real sure. My instruments are not registering a bogey, but I was sure I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye just a moment ago. Look left 80 (degrees) and down 10 (degrees). See if you can see anything over that way."

"I trust your eyes, compadre. Let's go take a closer look before we head back to the hacienda.

Jesus Ortiz laughed and said, "Come on, Nils, cut out that shit. I know you're no cowboy. You keep that up, and I'll find some Norwegian words to throw at you."

The two pilots sent an update on their plans back to the Freya by FTLR (Faster Than Light Radio) even though the automatic tracking capability built into their spacetubs would have kept the mother ship informed of their actions. But, sure as hell, if they had not reported the deviation from plan, they would have received a soul-searing scolding from their CFO (Chief of Flight Operations).

Sure now that they would remain in the good graces of the CFO, they turned their full attention to trying to identify what Jesus had noticed. Supposedly, there were no space ships flying through this segment of space at less than light speed, except for the Wasps' pyramids. Should there be another space traveling species, the humans sure wanted to know about it.

The Wasps were all over this arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, and nobody wanted to tangle with them without plenty of bug killing weapons of one sort or another. Ever since the ill-fated Wasp invasion of Earth, the humans were well equipped to defend themselves, and they were on a crusade to eliminate Wasps from the galaxy.

Unfortunately, many species were not able to fight the Wasps well enough to save themselves, so the humans had deputized themselves to police the galaxy. They jokingly called themselves the Orkin Brigade.

It was lucky for the rest of the galaxy that the Wasps did not have the right kind of mind set or society to develop their own equipment, though they were highly adept at stealing anything that they could use. That's how the humans had gotten a lot of their technology—by stealing from the Wasps what the Wasps had stolen from an octopus-like civilization. The pyramid-shaped spaceships that the Wasps used was one of those technical items that had been stolen. Fortunately, the builders of the pyramids had not yet developed FTL flight—the FTL flight used by the humans had been their own development.

When they got close enough, Nils whistled in surprise. They were not looking at a pyramid. This was a cylinder of monstrous proportions. It was rolling slowly along its long axis; Jesus postulated that the users of the vehicle might not have an artificial gravity generator, so they were using centrifugal force to simulate gravity. There was no sign of an obvious propulsion system, so there were more questions than answers about this strange craft.

Nils used his FTLR system to send a burst of video back to Freya so that they would know exactly what the two scouts were seeing. He also sent a request for a landing party, since this was obviously outside of the pilots' normal activities.

Nils and Jesus were asked to remain near the strange spaceship until the landing party could be dispatched, which should be about half an hour. Precisely 31 minutes later, two large vehicles appeared in space between the spacetubs and the huge cylinder. A voice came over the tactical radio, "Flight Officer Michaelson, this is Capt. Bridget Janson. I am in command of the landing party. Please remain in the vicinity until my flying cover arrives in 10 minutes. Then you may return to Freya."

Nils answered, "Roger that, Capt. Janson. We'll remain on watch until relief arrives."

"Thank you. Janson out."

The relief showed up on schedule and the two scouts returned to Freya for debriefing.

Capt. Janson was commanding two platoons of Marines. This was the first time that any humans had encountered something quite like this. All previous experience had been against Wasp pyramids, so there was no doctrine on this situation. Bridget was going to have to play this one by ear. She did not have any idea of the conditions inside the cylinder; she did not even know if they needed assistance. There were no ports, so there was no way to look inside. All in all, this was a potentially nasty situation.

The scouts reported what looked like a docking port about half way down the length of the hull, so she headed for that. Fortunately, the hull of the alien ship was magnetic enough for the human grapplers to hold on to the hull next to the port. She sent a sergeant and two troopers out to see if they could find a way in without blasting a hole in the hull.

The sergeant reported back that they had found what looked like a control box that might open the door. He said that he was going to give it a try. A few minutes later, the door started to move. It retracted a short distance and slid sideways into a slot in the wall. There was a light on inside, so the three men went in. These were seasoned warriors, so they were not afraid, just cautious.

The three Marines were not wearing space suits, instead they were equipped with a force field which protected them from space quite effectively, but conformed to their bodies so closely and so well that they were able to use their hands as if they had no protection at all. The only problem was that they did not have a sensitive sense of touch; otherwise, their hands were functionally bare. Of course, they carried their weapons on the outside of the field so that the bullets would not be deflected by the field.

The sergeant was about to report to the captain, when he heard a voice say, in English, "Strangers, why have you boarded our ship?" Talk about startled! All three men immediately assumed defensive positions and flipped the safeties off their weapons.

The sergeant said in a somewhat anxious voice, "Who are you, and why can you speak our language?"

"We are Arlosians, and we are not speaking your language. We have a device which can speak directly to the speech center in your brain, and the machine does the translation. Please answer my question, why are you here?"

"We are humans, and we thought that you might be in need of assistance, so we came aboard to see if we could be of help."

"Welcome, then. No, we do not need assistance, but thank you for offering to help us. Would you like to come into our ship?"

"Yes, we would like to visit with you. May I bring the rest of my people with me? There are 78 of us, so we will not all come if that is too many. I am part of a military unit, so I would like to bring my commanding officer, at least."

"There will be no problem with that many of you entering. I think that dock is large enough to take half of you at once, so I suggest that you come in half at a time."

"Fine, we'll be right there." The sergeant switched to his tactical radio and contacted Capt. Janson. "Did you hear that conversation I just had with the aliens?"

"No, Sergeant, I did not. How were you able to talk to aliens? I did not know that you were a linguist."

"I'm not, Captain. They have some sort of translating device that works directly to the brain. I thought that we might try to trade for it. I think that it is worth the antigravity technology, but I have not said anything to the aliens about it."

"Good, Sergeant. That's a policy decision way over our heads. What do they need from us?"