Chapter 4

As soon as the first uninfected slugs were found, an effort was made to contact them. No matter what was tried, the slugs seemed to be totally nonreactive. Finally, somebody had a brilliant idea: the sensors that the AI had used were brought into play. There was definite activity with their brains in the range the AI considered to represent sentience, but no sensible contact could be made. Then there was another brilliant idea: maybe the cognitive rate for the slugs was too slow for humans or Arlosians to follow. It was suggested that the AI try to find a sampling rate that would allow it to converse with the slugs. The AI could then relay the information to the organic beings. Likewise, maybe the AI could talk slowly enough for the slugs to understand.

Anyway, this was tried for a period of roughly six weeks. At the end of this time, the AI announced that it had, indeed, been able to converse with the slugs. Their time moved so slowly that they had no idea what was going on with the Wasps. None of their bodily sensors could register the presence of the Wasps, they just knew that their people were dying so fast that it was a real calamity that they had no way to control. The AI was able to determine that, to the slugs, a human year was like a few days. The rotation of their planet was so fast that they could not perceive a difference between night and day, their world outside the mines was a kind of gray half light.

The slugs thanked the people for rescuing them from the Wasps, but they had no interest in joining any kind of alliance. Come back in 5,000 years and they might be interested!

The other planet, the one devoid of life, was something of a conundrum. There was no question that it had once been occupied by living sentient creatures, but now it was just a dark and dreary wasteland. This planet was 13 light-years from Oryx, so it was not likely to have been a recent victim of the Wasps, but it looked like it might once have been visited by them.

Scientists were sent down from Freya to see what they could find in a place that might have once been a major city. After three days of mucking around in the city, an urgent call was sent out for assistance from Jill and Jim Anderson. The scientists had found what looked like a library, and the books looked like one of the type found on the captured pyramids. The language was not the same, but the alphabet was very close. This was a strong indication that one of the conquered people had been related to this group.

Jill and Jim showed up and began to work on translating the books. For some uncanny reason, Jill was much more adept than the AI in spotting relationships and trends in these unknown languages, but the AI was able to string together Jill's discoveries into something that could be interpreted by Jim. Thus, the three of them made the best translating team among the humans/Arlosians/AI. In four weeks, they had read enough of the books in the library to enable the scientists to puzzle out what the other books had to say.

From what they had seen in the library, the team had worked out a hypothetical scenario for the fate of the locals. It appeared that they were one of two groups of people living on the planet the locals called Aaran. There were two major continents on the planet and this group occupied the one that had been settled the longer. The other continent had been settled in the far past by explorers from the first continent, but contact had been lost, so the two groups of people developed independently for many years. They had diverged in many ways, socially and in language, but they had kept the same alphabet.

Eventually they had contacted each other and had actually fought several wars before a permanent peace was worked out. The other continent had been more physically minded and this continent had been more philosophically minded. This soon ceased to matter as each of the two people began to depend more and more on the strengths of the other group. They were even working toward a common language when the disaster of the Wasps struck. All written records stopped very soon after the strange spaceships landed on the other continent.

The native creatures were never very numerous and had a low reproduction rate, so the Wasps must have quickly used up the available bodies and pushed on to other, greener pastures. Apparently it never occurred to the Wasps that there was a difference in the books stolen from the two continents, so they never took a set of books from this culture. The Wasps probably would never have understood the differences, in any case.

The scientists had learned enough to know that there was nothing of immediate value on this planet to use in fighting the Wasps, so they returned to Freya to continue the battle against the Wasps. Other scientists from Earth and Arlosia traveled to Aaran to take up the study of the vanished people. There was considerable interest in the philosophical ideas developed by these people, but only marginal interest it their physical accomplishments.

A vector had been calculated for the path of that last batch of Wasp pyramids, so Freya backtracked to see what could be learned from the previous launch point. Jesus and Ac'sus were scouting ahead of the main party when they were attacked by a swarm of missiles. The missiles were all traveling at about one-tenth of light speed, so they had no trouble evading the attack, but they wondered why the attack had been launched.

In the interest of cutting down on the amount of gadgets carried by the spacetubs, a multiplexer had been designed which let the spacetubs communicate with AI through Freya's FTLR. Most of the pilots called the AI by the name Freya, since they found that less confusing. The AI had started answering in a female sounding voice, which reinforced the connection.

Jesus asked, "Freya, do you know of any reason why we would be attacked out here in the middle of nowhere? There is no sign of Wasp pyramids, so that surely cannot be the reason."

"Jesus, I have no data which could explain the attack. However, I can offer a scenario that could explain it: the missiles were not aimed at you. Suppose a battle was fought many years ago, and these missiles were fired back then, but missed their target, for any number of possible reasons. Anyway, there is nothing in this volume of space which would cause the missiles to deviate off course, so they would simply keep traveling on their original vector until they found a suitable target. My guess is that you just happened to be that suitable target. If I were a betting being, I would wager that the missiles are now out of fuel and will just continue on their current vectors until they accidentally hit something."

"Can you determine their launch point from the vector they were following before attacking us?"

"Yes, I can. There is a planetary system about six light-years away which could have been their launch point. From the speed of the missiles, I estimate that the battle took place approximately 60 years ago, assuming that system was the source of the missiles."

"Very well, please report the encounter to Freya and that we are heading for that system. By the way, do you have a name for it?"

"OK, Freya has the report. The only name I have for the system is an Arlosian catalog designation for the star, 357W093. Would you care to name it?"

"How about Loki for a name? If that's not taken, let's use that."

"Duly recorded."

The pair of scouts turned toward Loki and accelerated to FTL flight. Twenty minutes later, they were orbiting Loki V. Ac'sus said, "That looks like a likely planet. It has a breathable atmosphere, land, and water. Let's go in for a closer look."

"Looks good to me, Fur Ball. Hang on my wing." Jesus moved in to just skim the atmosphere while they did a sensor run on the planet. They made 10 orbits and scooted out to hide behind one of the moons while Freya processed the data.

"I did not detect any radio energy emitting from Loki V, but there appeared to be a gravitic surge whenever you orbited over a particular point. Otherwise, I found nothing of interest."

"Thank you, Freya. Hey, Fur Ball, what do you say we take a closer look at the gravitic surge?