Time Share

                                                                              by Gustavo Bondoni

    That’ll show ‘em.  I took a step back to make certain that the modifications were invisible to the naked eye.  They were.  The titanium plate looked as if it was securely bolted to the rest of the armor.  It would be impossible to tell the difference unless someone came in for a visual inspection, and I knew form the security reports that no one had been this deep for at least a couple of weeks.

    But that wouldn’t keep the blinkers from investigating.  They might not be as advanced as we were, but they certainly were methodical.  They would find the loose plate in no time, and work their way in.  I knew it was a risk, but I could monitor the whole thing from the command center, and if it looked like they were going to come at us in force, I could organize a welcome.  I wanted to tech the captain a lesson, not get us all killed.

    But I suspected they would send a small number of troops in ahead of any major incursion – that kind of action would be much more consistent with the way they’d been operating so far.

I was feeling great, whistling a little tune as I walked back towards the security center.

    I had finished throwing up, but my stomach was still unsettled.  Who could have known that the blinkers would attack in such force and with such brutality?  They’d torn through the whole squad that I’d sent over to check on the anomalous readings from the plate I’d loosened.  If I closed my eyes, I could see the wall on which they’d splattered the poor souls; the wall had been shiny metal when I left, and looked like some sort of wet organic papier-mâché when I returned.

    The image would live on in my nightmares for the rest of my life, along with their last transmission: a calm call for backup followed by an efficient voice saying that they were checking a loose plate and then the screams: terrified, high-pitched and cut off as suddenly as they’d begun.

    I’d gone down with the second unit in full battle armor and had managed to push back the blinkers’ strike force, twenty strong.  But even we’d suffered some casualties.  All told, my little trick with the plate had cost us six dead and another three badly injured.  After the adrenaline had worn off, I’d been lucky to keep the contents of my stomach under control long enough to get back inside my quarters before letting it all go.

    I knew just how hard I’d have to work to be able to look myself in the mirror in the future, but at least the captain couldn’t ignore the threat any longer. 

    A knock on the door brought me back up.

    “Just a minute,” I called and frantically wiped my mouth, rearranged my hair and tried to get my face into some semblance of cold efficiency.  Everyone knew I’d been in battle before, and looking so rattled after a skirmish might raise questions.  As soon as a semblance of normality had been restored, I ran to the door and pressed the activator.  Colonel Wang stood on the other side, her short black hair stuck to her scalp by helmet pressure and perspiration.  I saluted.

    “Jana, are you all right?” she asked.  Wang was the kind of soldier who wouldn’t stand on formality in front of a junior officer, as long as the respect was clear.

    “Yeah, I’m fine.  It was quite a fight, though.”

    The colonel’s eyes took on a sharp glint.  “Yes, I heard.  And I saw the aftermath of the fight.  Not pretty.” 

    My stomach heaved again.  Thankfully, I’d already emptied it completely. “No.”

    “Any idea what might have happened?”

    Was there suspicion behind the question?  I had no way of telling, but I knew my course had been charted already.  “Yes.  A single plate of door armor covering one of the out-of-the way escape tunnels had been removed.  My techs assure me that the studs had failed.”

    “On a titanium-alloy plate?”

    I shrugged.  “We have millions of those studs used in various places.  Having one crack under stress is possible, if unlikely.  Two on the same plate is very unlucky, but not unheard of.”

    “Two?”

    “If only one let go, the other three would be strong enough to bear the load against anything the blinkers have shown us so far.  But with two gone, they should have been able to get through easily enough.”

    Wang thought about it for a moment.  “Are we sure that was all that happened?”

    I actually felt my gut freeze.  “What do you mean?”

    She gave me a steady look.  “I have to look at this from every angle, and deal with the possible ramifications of each.  What if the blinkers are a little more advanced than they’ve shown so far?  What if they’ve developed something that allows them to cut through our titanium alloys?  They say war speeds technical development up to forty times its normal rate – and though we might not be shooting, this is definitely a war.”

    Waves of relief replaced the ice.  “We’re already looking into it.  Is there anything else I can help you with, Colonel?” I asked, solicitous eagerness oozing from every pore – insincere, but convincing, I hoped.

    “Are you up for a meeting with the council?  I know you’ve been through a lot today, but it would be useful to have you there.”

    I nodded.  I’d been trying to find a way to get the council to listen to me for weeks and I’d spent the lives of six of my fellows to do it.  I sure as hell wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.  “Of course.  Let me change into a more suitable uniform.”

    Three minutes later we were walking down the main hall, a huge tunnel through the stone of the mountain, excavated by the plasma diggers two months before.  No one had bothered to smooth out the ripples that plasma digging invariably entailed.

    The council was waiting for us.  Captain Stewart, Colonel Pendalai and a few other officers I knew by sight.  And Emily.  Her presence was the one that hurt the most – of all the people who should have known better than to go along with the current policy, she was first on the list.  I’d explained the danger to her a thousand times, but she just didn’t want to hear it.

    Well, they could take responsibility for the five million people, frozen in an asteroid above us, who would die because of their policies.  I certainly wouldn’t.  But then again, In all likelihood, I’d be just as dead.

    “Lieutenant Carmel, thanks for coming,” the captain said, smiling warmly.

    I wanted to spit in his face, but it wouldn’t have been any use.  I saluted.

    His smile widened.  “No need for that formality here.  I hear you had quite a fight this afternoon.”

    “Yes, sir.  We lost six soldiers.”

    The smile vanished.

    “How did it happen?”

    “As far as we were able to ascertain, it was a material failure on a couple of the bolts in the armor.  A freak accident.”

    His piercing made me I wonder whether he suspected something.  Our beloved captain wasn’t an astrophysicist or even particularly smart, but that wasn’t why he’d been chosen.  He was a natural leader, and he could easily motivate large groups of people to rush over cliffs, on just his word.  On this particular expedition, he’d had to put that ability into practice more than once, first in the headlong rush towards shelter while the blinkers bombed us, and then in the fact that we weathered the siege without taking devastating action against the army blocking us in.

    His job was to know how people think, and what buttons to push.  And he knew that I was completely against waiting, that I wanted to take the war to the blinkers right now.  To establish our territory by conquest, as opposed to negotiation.  I believed that not only was the time we were losing precious to the colonists, but also that we couldn’t trust the natives to honor any agreements we did make.  It would be much harder to mount a counter-attack with five million civilians in the way.

    He knew that, too.  “Is it likely to happen again?”

    My only real option was to forge ahead and be as professional as possible.  “No.  We rechecked all the vulnerable areas in the armor, and there’s nothing anywhere that they should be able to get through with the technology we’ve seen so far.”

    “The technology we’ve seen so far?”

    “I’m assuming that their wish to get rid of us is strong enough that they’re working on new tech as we speak.  Who knows what they might bring against us next week.”

    “Well, it is their planet after all.”

    “And that gives them the right to wipe us out?”

    “I don’t know.  Since we haven’t been able to talk to them yet, there’s little I can contribute on the topic of their moral code.”

    “Well, my moral code is against getting killed.”

    The captain chuckled. “I’m well aware of that.  What do you suggest, then?”

    “We need to take the fight to the blinkers.”  I held up a hand.  I knew he was going to say that that was impossible.  “At the very least, we need to establish a perimeter they aren’t allowed to enter, and enforce it strongly.”

    “How far out would you recommend it extend?” Emily interjected.  I silently thanked her – she’d just moved the discussion from the advisability of my idea to the details.

    “About half a click from each of the entrances to the tunnels, including the ones with armored ends.”  We’d dug a pair of escape tunnels just in case, and armored them over – it had been one of these through which the attack had come.

    “And what are we supposed to do with the blinkers already inside the perimeter?” the captain inquired.

    I hesitated.  If it were up to me, I’d sanitize the whole area with one of the plasma cannons we use on the diggers, but I knew that would never fly.  “We’ve found some non-lethal alternatives we can use.  We know enough about their body chemistry to be able to knock them out temporarily and move them beyond the perimeter.  Of course it’s going to be rough going, especially in the tunnels, but if we do it sector by sector, we should be able to get it done in a few days.”  And, I didn’t say, once we have the perimeter established we can use the open ground to stage an “accidental” attack – and hopefully provoke them into doing something foolish – those plasma cannons of ours had extremely long range.

    The captain thought about it for a few moments, and I could see the weight of command settling on his shoulders, all jocularity disappearing from his face.  “All right.  Do it.  But I want the fewest number of native dead possible.  Zero would be the number I’d aim for.”

    “Yes sir.”

    Up close, the blinkers looked like shaggy gray dogs the size of Earth cows, with dog-like muzzles and ears, but walking upright and possessing six-fingered hands with two sets of three opposing digits.  The biggest difference with any mammal I’d ever heard of, though, were the organs that gave them their name: two bumps on their shoulders which emitted bright flashes of white light which our scientists believes was their main mode of communication.

    They also smelled… strange, like a mixture of wet fur with the sharp tang of citrus. 

    The one at my feet would be unconscious for another hour, so I gritted my teeth as I watched the front-loader crew pick it carefully off the floor.  All I wanted was to put a couple of chain-gun slugs into its head, but I held back.  The two good men I’d lost clearing the tunnel would be avenged later.  Right now, I was trying to follow the captain’s orders to the letter: no dead blinkers.

    It would buy me a little credibility when our little accidental war broke out.

    I climbed aboard the loader, and signaled the driver.  “Let’s take out the trash,” I told him – he wasn’t one of my regular troops, but I thought his name was Marq.

    He returned my smile and pushed the control stick forward.  “Yes, ma’am.  You’re the boss.  You want me to pile it up with the rest?”

    “Yeah, no point in putting it too far away.  We want to use them to send a message, to reinforce the limits of the perimeter we are going to enforce.”

    “And to show them how benevolent we are, in the face of extreme provocation?”

    I could get to like this guy.  “Exactly.  They can’t overlook the fact that we had them in our custody and didn’t kill a single individual.  But they’ll probably overlook a few bruises, so you don’t need to drive like my grandmother.”

    “Understood.”

    The terrain rolled by.  The mountain meadows, at least in motion and from a certain distance, looked so much like the terraformed places on Tau Ceti that I could almost feel the pang of homesickness in my stomach.  It was only when you got down on hands and knees and looked closely at the vegetation that the alien nature of the landscape became evident.  Each blade of grass was actually five individual strands, looped over each other and linked to a stalk on the bottom.  Only the green color and general layout made it look Earth-like.

    Soon enough, we reached the pile of unconscious natives.

    “Wasn’t there supposed to be a guard here?” I asked.

    He looked puzzled.  “He was here when I left.  Maybe he’s out on patrol or something.”

    I saw no sign of violence.  If the blinkers had been there, it was unlikely they’d have left their unconscious fellows lying on the plain in an unruly heap.

    “Put him down beside the others,” I told him.  I walked over to the pile of aliens.  When you saw a large group of them together, individual differences could be seen.  One might have a longer snout, another might have bushier fur.  There were thinner and fatter ones.

    The smell of blinker was nearly overpowering here, worse even than it had been inside the tunnel.  But something was wrong.  I looked around, but could see nothing amiss for miles on the plain.

    Then it hit me.  I was standing upwind of the pile of bodies.  The smell couldn’t be so strong.  I was reaching for my plasgun when the vegetation underneath me suddenly pushed up as if on springs.  I shot at least ten feet into the air, and, as I rotated slowly, before heading towards the ground, I thought I saw the hand of a blinker reach out from under the displaced sod.

    Then the hillside came up to meet me, and the world went dark.

    Darkness still reigned when I came to once again.  I lay on a hard floor in some lightless place trying to get some sense of what was happening.

    The first input was pain.  My wrist must have been broken – or at least badly sprained – in the impact with the ground, because I could feel it throbbing.  I Tried to move it into a more comfortable position, but first succeeded in giving it a sharp knock against a wall of some sort.  Rough, damp and cool, it didn’t seem high-tech, but it also wasn’t natural – not stone, but certainly not titanium armor.

    “Hello?” I said.  My voice sounded insignificant in the darkness, but its echo came back to me quickly, perhaps too quickly.  Wherever I was was a tiny enclosure.  But where was it?

    The next thing I noticed seemed to answer the question.  A sharp, citrus aroma suddenly wafted in, and my stomach sank.  I’d never smelled the blinker’s scent so strongly.  Even piles of ten captured individuals had less odor – although the fact that they were unconscious might mean that the smell was less powerful. 

    There were only two possible explanations: either there were a large number of the creatures nearby, or there were few but they were active.  Neither alternative was particularly attractive.

    I needed to figure out my status.  Was I a prisoner or had I fallen through a crack of some kind and gone unnoticed?  The fact that I was unbound seemed to indicate the latter, but my plasgun was nowhere to be found, so it might be the former.

    There was only one way to be completely certain.  I got gingerly to my knees – the oppressive darkness had convinced me that the space I was in had to have an extremely low ceiling – and began to feel the wall with my uninjured hand, from the floor upward, first.

    A good thing, too.  I would have added another blow to the head to my recent collection as the roof, of the same rough, hard material was about a meter and a half.  Now that I knew where my upper limit was, I quickly traced the contour of my surroundings once, and then again and again.

    It didn’t take very long to do this.  I was very effectively enclosed in a room that seemed to be about two meters long by one wide.  There were no openings whatsoever in the walls: no door, no joints between stones and no vents of any type.

It was this last discovery that kept me searching, since I could distinctly feel a current of air passing through the niche.  But there were no gaps.  None.  The only explanation I could think of was simply a porous wall.

    I was essentially entombed inside a coffin-like structure.  Maybe this is what the blinkers did to their prisoners of war.  Or maybe they particularly didn’t like me.  At least I didn’t have time to dwell on my situation very long.  The room began to vibrate, softly at first and then in a more pronounced manner.

    It felt like a road vehicle going over a rutted surface; perhaps they were moving me. 

    Or maybe it was part of their torture.  I would have to wait and see.

    Air.  Despite the draft flowing through my prison, there was simply nothing like finally getting a rush of fresh air and, even better, daylight.  I would have like to push against thee opening and spring out at whoever – or, more likely, whatever – was on the other side, but my body felt sluggish, unresponsive.  I must have been inside the coffin for two days, at least, without food or the desire to move.  Water had dripped in through the permeable walls, and I’d lapped it up like a dog.

I moved slowly to the crack and let my eyes get accustomed to the glare as my muscles unkinked.  I stretched, hoping the blinkers had made a mistake and would give me a target and an opportunity.

    The lid must have been a serious piece of precision engineering, because I certainly hadn’t felt a seam despite searching for hours, and as I knelt there, it opened all the way, leaving me face to face with a pair of white-furred blinkers.

    No mammal should have faceted eyes, and yet these two did, the eyes reflected nearly everything, and still managed to give the impression of blackness. 

    I had no illusions about my chances.  Despite their rather bovine appearance, these aliens were not a gentle race.  They’d been bombing the hell out of each other before we arrived, and had only stopped to concentrate their efforts on us.       They would not be gentle with a captured invader.

    Anger welled up inside me.  If these things were going to torture me and then kill me, I certainly wasn’t going to make it easy for them.  I jumped as quickly as I could out of the box and went after this one’s most sensitive organs – those obscene faceted eyes, which they used not only to see where they were going, but also to interpret the flashes that its race used as language.

    I would leave it blind and incommunicado in one stroke.  One final defiant gesture before they tore me to shreds.

    I managed to land a fist on one of the eyes, and it surprised me.  It was much stronger than a human eye, as if it were covered with hard acryliplast.  I don’t think I even managed to dent it at all before the creature reacted and jumped back.  Its companion stepped into the breach and soon had me under control – it must have weighed two hundred kilos at least; nearly four times my weight.  There was nothing whatsoever I could do about it.

    Oh well, at least I could say that I died while trying to do something to hurt the bastards.  I relaxed and waited for the inevitable.  Would they shoot me?  Tear out my throat?  Or simply sit on me until I suffocated?

    The answer surprised me.  Working together, the two blinkers gently but firmly placed me back in the box and closed the lid, suppressing my most frantic efforts to get back out.

    It didn’t make sense.  This was a race that had shot at every single attempt we’d made to speak to them.  They’d even shot at us when we were in orbit about their planet.

    And yet, unless I was sorely mistaken, they were now trying to speak to me.  Over the next couple of days after I attempted to attack the blinker, they pulled me out of my box every few hours, never mistreating me, always waiting to see what I would do.  I attacked the nearest one each time, hoping that this time they would either make a mistake and let me escape or end it all.

    No such luck.  Each time, they used their superior mass and numbers to put me away as if they were manipulating a valuable piece of glassware, the lights on their skin blinking urgently all the time, as if speaking at an enormous rate.  I didn’t even have any bruises to show for my attempts at xenocide. 

    After a few rounds of this, I decided to come quietly and see what would happen, and that’s when they started trying to talk.

    Well, not right away.  First they just stood there and winked little lights on and off at me.  I suppose they were either talking among themselves or trying to see if I had any understanding whatsoever of the basics of their language.  I must have been a disappointment to them, because all their winking was nothing more than pretty lights to me.

    It should have come as no surprise. Our best people had been studying their blinking and attempting to decipher it for nearly two months.  As far as they’d been able to tell, there was no pattern to the blinking – the distribution of light intensity and blink length was close to random.

    In fact, the only thing I could see now that they were facing me was that the color in the center of their blinkers – the two large glassy, irising bumps on their shoulders that emitted the light, were changing colors as they winked.  Yellow, red, blue.  And although the white light flashed randomly in all directions, it was clear that the shift in the color patterns was deliberate and slow.  And suddenly I understood.

    The flashing lights we’d been seeing from our vantage point – very bright and very obvious – wasn’t the language that the blinkers used to communicate.  I didn’t know what it was; perhaps a waste product created by the communication organs as they changed colors.  But it certainly wasn’t their language.

    They spoke by changing the colors of the blinkers, and they needed those huge, faceted eyes to be able to make sure they could ‘hear’ one another.

    I assumed that this is what they were trying to tell me, and I signaled that I understood, but I don’t think it came across too well.  In the end, their flashing became very agitated once again, and they put me back in my box.

    This time I had a lot to think about.

    This exercise was repeated every few hours until they finally let me go.  Either they’d decided that I understood them or they’d decided I was too dense and that they would have to capture a smarter human.  Either way, it was quite evident that they were in a big hurry.  They simply dropped me down in front of their forces surrounding the mountain we called home and pointed their weapons at me until I began walking up the slope.

    At that point, they seemed to lose interest in me and faced each other.  No.  They hadn’t lost interest.  They were discussing me amongst themselves – they could only talk while facing each other.

    I staggered towards the nearest unsealed tunnel.  After nearly four days without food or any meaningful exercise, the gentle rise covered with the local pseudo-grass seemed like climbing a sheer cliff. 

    I wondered what my security people would make of me.  They’d wonder how I managed to escape.  I wasn’t too clean, but fortunately the walls of my prison had been advanced enough to not only let in air and water, but also to remove excess waste.  They’d definitely want an explanation.

    And I wasn’t exactly certain what I would tell them.  It was quite clear that the blinkers were trying to find a way to sue for peace.  Their instruments had probably detected the incoming asteroid, and they’d decided that they needed our help in dealing with it.  They probably didn’t know that it was ours, or that it was filled with colonists.  All they could see was a world-killer coming towards them.  And here we were, an advanced race that might be able to tell them what to do about it.

    Oh, yes, they were suing for peace.  The question was, did I want to let my superiors know it?  Did I want humanity to establish communication with a race that had killed a good number of my people, or should I keep my information to myself?  When the colonists landed, we’d have no choice but to take more aggressive measures against the blinkers, beating them into some sort of submission.  It would be satisfying as hell.

    “Stop right there.  Show me your hands.”

    The guard had his plasgun pointed right between my eyes.

    “Hi there Joaquín,” I said.

    “Jana?” Shock flashed across his features.  “What happened?  Are you all right?”

    “I’m all right, I guess.  A bit tired, though.  Can you help me up the hill?”

    He fell all over himself holstering his weapon and giving me an arm to hold on to.  Now that I was back, I was his superior officer again.  He radioed in his report and we trudged upward once more, with Joaquín bearing most of the weight.

    We soon reached the tunnel mouth. A cart was ready to whisk me to my quarters, where I found the captain and Emily waiting by the door.  They smiled at me.  “Welcome back,” the captain said.

    I wasn’t in the mood for his politicking.  “What about the rest of them?” I blurted.  I knew that at least two members of my team had been involved in the attack in one way or another.

    It was Emily who replied.  “Marq didn’t make it.  He reacted in time and resisted the assault, and was taken down.  Not much left of the load-truck either.”

    I nodded.  Another readon to wipe the bastards off the face of the planet. “And the guard?  Sergi?”

    “We don’t know.  When both of you went missing after the shootout, we thought they’d killed you too.”  She gave me a searching look.  “How did you manage to escape, anyway?”

    “They got careless.  Turned away for a second and I ran.  When I got to the perimeter, it seemed like they refused to go any further, and they just stopped and let me go.”

    They’d never buy it.  I would be arrested and interrogated by my own people.  But the captain surprised me.  “That sounds about right.  There’s an imaginary line now, which they haven’t come across for any reason for a couple of days now.  Something is going on, but I don’t know what and it’s driving me nuts.  Do you have any idea what it might be?”

    I gave him a steady look.  “I’m sorry sir.  I was locked in a box.”

    I woke in a cold sweat.  I had no idea how long I’d been under, but the dream had left me completely unable to get back to sleep.  It had been one of those dreams with obvious meaning.  We’d conquered the planet and established a human hegemony, using the blinkers as menials when suddenly huge grey spacecraft disgorged advanced machines which attempted to conquer us.  We fought them to a standstill but suddenly the blinkers changed sides and we were overrun.  All of that passed in a flash, and the dream-image I would always remember was that of the lid closing as the blinkers put me back in my box.  I knew that this time, they wouldn’t be opening it ever again.

    It was one of those nightmares that any child could interpret.  My conscience was obviously worried about the fact that I had the power to bring peace to this planet, and was choosing to wipe out a sentient race.  But then again, it was obvious that, had they been able to, they would have done the same to us.

    All I had to do was to tell the tech division that the blinkers’ flashing lights meant nothing, and that their true communication was done by simple color change patterns.  That was it, they would do the rest.  Their pattern-recognition software along with a couple of long-range observation devices would allow them to crack the language in no time flat.

    Screw it.  I would let them decide their own fate.  They still had one of our guards.  If they thought I had the information they needed to deliver, they didn’t need him, so they would probably dispose of the poor guy.

    But if they let him go, I would give the captain their message.

    Decision made, I tried to get back into a comfortable position.

    Two days later, I watched in silence from the mouth of a tunnel as one of the perimeter patrols helped an emaciated man in a soiled guard uniform climb the hill.  His eyes were sunken, and I could tell that he was very weak, probably from hunger.  Two patrolmen dragged him up the hill as his legs only sometimes managed to support his weight.

    But he was alive.

    I felt a weight lift off my shoulders as I turned back towards the interior of our mountain to go search for the captain.  I had some news he’d want to hear.