Clear as mud
Summary: This is the last transmission of Alan Gerrard, the first diplomat of Earth to speak to a strange alien race in the only language they understand.
I am Lieutenant Alan Gerrard, and I am dying. I'm making this recording to fulfill my obligation as a witness to hostile action, which took place between Tuesday the 16th and Wednesday the 17th of October, 2085, between the orbits of Pam and Rot. My current status is adrift, about five hundred to a thousand miles from the scene of the incident. I'm in my environment suit only, and I have no means of propulsion. I've sustained injury to my left leg, which I've been forced to amputate and seal at the knee to prevent further venting of blood and gasses. According to my gauges, I have thirty seven minutes of air left. I have a location beacon active, but there doesn't appear to be any spacecraft nearby. I have enough power to transmit as far as the relay, but I think it was destroyed because it isn't responding to pings.
I had been serving on the Fuzz vessel Ronacondran as part of an alien exchange program for four months. However, since I'm dying I'll drop the pretenses, and tell the receiver of this message that I resigned my commission to be there for personal reasons, and the corps has spun a temporary story while they think about the idea of human officers marrying Fuzz. That means when the attack began there were no human vessels in the area except for an unmanned relay set up for my sake, leaving me as the only human witness.
At 14:07 universal time, the Ronacondran was impaled with a kinetic weapon and began venting. Moments afterward the Savanapple, a vessel in the same carrier group of six, was also struck. The four remaining vessels in the group came about to face the direction of the attack and reduce their exposed area, but the Rona and the Savan had trouble maneuvering and took several more hits each, although I don't remember how many. The Savanapple was a smaller craft than the Rona, and was disabled about half an hour into the attack. The Rona, meanwhile, was able to face the direction of attack before further perforation made it a slag.
Two hours later another hailstorm of concrete telephone poles began to arrive from a perpendicular vector and perforated the Tinselumpuck. The other three vessels had, as per protocol, all taken random attitudes in case of such a strategy and didn't suffer as much damage. They were, however, forced to rotate to the same attitude to minimize exposure to the second attack. Since it was clear now that the enemy's strategy was to fork them like pancakes with a triangulation of fire, they turned on their engines and headed in the direction of the first wave. I don't know what the outcome of their retaliation was, but we did see more kinetics approaching from the expected direction and veering off to try to poke them in the ass.
The Ronacondran wasn't able to follow them. Since we hadn't seen any sight of the enemy, who had probably fired their volleys from thousands of miles away, we went into salvage-and-repair operations immediately. Much of the Rona was spaced, and several pressurized sections were isolated behind corridors exposed to vacuum. It took about sixteen hours before enough tubes and corridors were patched and repressurized before we could get a count of the remaining crew. I, my beloved, and twenty seven were alive and ambulatory, four were incapacitated with wounds, which left forty three dead or unaccounted.
Later on Wednesday evening a group of three enemy vessel arrived in the area, and they were recognized by my comrades as Venn ships. These are supplied to several civilizations in the sector, so as I speak I still don't know who the enemy is among the known customers of the Venn. After inspecting the scene, the enemy ships finished off the Tinselumpuck and the Savanapple, then came for us.
The remaining crew of the Rona decided to make a last stand, and unlike the Savan or the Tinsel, we were carrying Class A munitions, including thirteen nuclear warheads. A pattern of three explosions would trap one or two enemy ships in a compression wave, so we prepared three sets of four warheads, all on independent rockets, with the hope that one from each batch would still explode even if the enemy tried to shoot them down. We launched the rockets and watched them spread like legs of a tripod. The enemy fired their anti-munitions and took out all but two of them, which exploded and caused significant damage to two enemy ships. The third reversed course, fell back about three hundred miles where it could be sure to evade any further retaliation, and launched a rocket.
What happened on the Rona happened very quickly, because rockets can cover distance fast, but I remember making my fiance get into a lifeboat, and then going down to the munitions bay for the last warhead, which I tethered to my suit and carried with me to the airlock where I kept the second of the two human environment suits I had.
I remember having trouble getting the suit on. I remember she came back and helped me. The Fuzz don't speak in sounds like humans because their cranial shape and mouth cavity isn't suited for articulation, but after she had secured the helmet, and I could hear only the sound of fans, she used that advanced sign language of theirs to tell me how to operate the airlock with no power. Then she gave me a handheld propulsion unit, hugged me, kissed the helmet glass, and helped me into the airlock.
I watched the missile's exhaust light approach with only a few tens of miles to go. I squeezed the trigger of the propulsion unit all the way and jetted out of the airlock and away from the Rona. A minute later it was vaporized, and to my misery, before I saw any lifeboats leave. Although the missile had a low yield, I was still relatively close and the shockwave hit me painfully. I blacked out for several minutes, and came to when I was about a hundred miles away from where the Rona had been. The enemy missile's detonation had knocked me back in the direction of the enemy itself, a few degrees off course, though, which I corrected with the propulsion unit.
I must have looked like debris from the Rona to the enemy, and the radiation of the last three explosions must have masked the trace from my tethered warhead from their sensors. It took something like two hours to reach the enemy, which had clustered the two crippled ships and was performing repairs on them. I jetted on a collision vector towards them for several minutes. Then I untethered the warhead, set the timer on it, and let go of it. I used the last remaining fuel in the propulsion unit to change my arc by a few degrees, and about half an hour later I saw the enemy destroyed by a close-proximity explosion.
I'm about out of air now. I would have had more, but fragments of an enemy ship penetrated my suit and lodged in my leg. The area was numbed by automatic medications, but I was forced to use a cutting tool to amputate at the knee, cauterize the wound and seal the breach. I don't think I did a very good job of it, though. I've been getting foggier from blood loss.
This is the last recording of Lieutenant Alan Gerrard. I hope somebody gets this message.
News of Lt. Alan Gerrard's death and the incident reached Earth weeks later, as news traveled slow through space. The body hadn't been found yet, his message not received yet. All that was heard, a month later, was a cryptic and short message from the Fuzz.
BODY OF LT. ALAN GERRARD RECOVERED. CREMATED AND DISBURSED ON ROT. CURRENTLY DETERMINING SENTIENCE OF HUMANS.
The press went apoplectic. Currently determining the sentience of humans?? Opinions were divided over whether this was the greatest insult inflicted on the human race, or proof of a depraved and insensitive alien species. Gerrard's family raised hell over the fact that they had apparently saw fit to cremate him and scatter his remains on some strange alien planet. An official protest was filed. Diplomatic relations soured. Message lasers were pointed in the direction of the Fuzz's star and used to beam gigabytes of vitriol and rage.
The Fuzz's ambassador to the New United Nations had difficulty explaining the meaning of the message. Indeed, he had difficulty explaining anything at all. About 99% of the Fuzz “language” was really body language and facial expression with a scattering of hand gestures. Without the physical ability to speak any terrestrial language, he simply stood in front of the podium and painfully tried to mime concepts. Another major limiting factor was that the Fuzz had no concept of lecturing or speechmaking, since their method of communication was inherently cooperative: the listener had to guess at and propose hypothesis, which the speaker would confirm, reject or modify (and with the subtlest of signals).
Their writing skills, while obviously good enough to build a civilization on, were woefully short in the expressive department as well. The alien message, and some brave attempts by their ambassador, came across to human readers as terribly nieve, unnuanced, rather directly phrased chunks, assembled by someone who wasn't awfully familiar with the full human vocabulary yet.
But just as the turmoil was dying down, another apparent taunt was picked up in the flickering of a message laser from the Fuzz.
WE HAVE DETERMINED THAT HUMANS ARE SENTIENT.
This unspeakable pile of condescending crap was made the lead headline merely seconds after it was received and verified. Humans are sentient? Oh gee, thanks. Like, glad you never doubted us, you bastards. And more official denouncement were made and transmitted, but even after the NUN had passed its resolutions and moved on to earthy matters, the press and popular culture took up the banner of indignation and transmitted their hate with their message lasers turned up to eleven. When no reply came back, the ambassador tried to assure humans that they were being received and translated, but they were having awful difficulty “putting it into motions”.
It was Tuesday February 17th, 2128, and the human colony at Centauri-A had been under siege for thirteen years to the day. The planet was protected by a man-made grid of booby-trapped satellites, composed of rocky fragments tugged into position from an exploded moon. The inside of the shell was patrolled by improvised human warships, the outside was patrolled by the Venn, who had long been in an imperial phase following a collapse in the market for interstellar vessels. Every couple of years they'd accelerate an asteroid fast enough to break through the grid of fragments and penetrate the atmosphere before it got burned up or shot down. Whenever one hit the terraformed planet below it would cause earthquakes and tidal waves.
For thirteen years Earth had been manufacturing a metal cavalry big enough to end the siege, dispatching ships in small groups as soon as they were completed so there'd be a convoy four-and-a-half light-years long, made up of battleships, supply ships, hospital ships and so-on, traveling at a third of light speed to the rescue of a few hundred million human pioneers.
Alan Gerrard's nephew, Captain Peter Gerrard led the first carrier group to arrive thirteen years after the siege began. On the leading edge of the charge, but the trailing edge of technology, he'd flown almost blind behind the narrow band of space that could be seen by radar. So pointed astern were his message lasers, aimed at space debris, asteroids, moons, anything that would reflect and scatter the beams so the enemy couldn't infer the location of the other convoy groups listening in. They continuously transmitted in realtime every radar reading, camera image, gravitic sensing, and even the bridge chatter in case the lead group was destroyed quickly, they could still impart some crucial intelligence.
When they arrived in the system of Alpha Centauri A, a G2 star just over 1 solar mass, it took several hours of searching before they came across the hull of the first enemy ship. Peter had robot probes launched to canvas the system while an away team propelled itself to the dead Venn ship. The team came back with two corpses in tow that symbolized what they'd later learn from the probes; a dead Venn, and a dead Fuzz.
Peter Gerrard established communications with the colony later that day and learned about the telescope observations they'd made over the past month. Flashes of light seen here and there through the gaps in the protective shell, each with the spectral signature of an atomic explosion. The system was now littered with a ring of fragments and corpses from wrecked spaceships of two alien civilizations, traded in absurd ratios few commanders on either side should have been willing to tolerate. Every melted Venn ship would have a perforated Fuzz vessel nearby with a moebius strip of debris and bodies floating in the weak gravitational interactions between them, like arms locked in a mutual death grip.
A Fuzz group arrived in the system about a week later. It had been burning its engines for six years, and was spread out and tilted for fighting until it identified the markings of the human ships and the evidence of a party that was over. When they docked and the doors opened, Peter Gerrard reached across the bulkhead and shook the paw of his Fuzz counterpart. The alien had a new contraption hanging around his neck, a small flat screen that read his body language and converted it into written English.
“WE NEED TO START CREMATING OUR DEAD,” was the first thing the alien said, “WE SHOULD DISBURSE THEM ON THE CENTAURI-A COLONY.”
Peter was taken aback with how blunt and to the point the Fuzz captain was. There were no pleasantries, and he didn't seem to grasp what Peter was saying when he thanked them for the sacrifice his people had just made for the human colony, although a Fuzz translator was busy communicating it with posture and movement. The Fuzz captain just looked awkward and sad, and the screen translated it to “DISBURSING ON ANOTHER PLANET WOULD BE BETTER.”
It dawned on Peter that the alien was making a hypothesis, so he shook his head, “Uh, no, you can scatter the ashes on Centauri-A. I'm positive they'd—that we'd be honored.”
This made the Fuzz visibly happy, and he hugged Peter. Then turned to go straight back to his ship and leave. Peter started, “woah, woah! Wait a minute! You haven't told me why you even did this for us?”
The translator posed, and the alien replied. “HUMANS ARE SENTIENT.”
Peter furrowed his brow and tilted his head. He opened his mouth to say something, but to the Fuzz's eyes he already had, so he continued. “ALAN GERRARD TOLD US,” then he crossed back over the bulkhead to his own ship, with the door closing behind him.
Later that day, Peter ordered the long range message laser pointed toward Earth, and filed his report. Along with it, he had something to say about the Fuzz's style of communication.
“My experience with the Fuzz captain was the shortest diplomatic meeting I've ever participated in. While it appears that they understand what we say to them, in the sense that it can be translated into their language, I come away with the impression that it doesn't register as meaningful unless it describes something that has happened, or that can be done. It's not just that actions speak louder to the Fuzz, I'd go as far to say that actions are the only thing that speak at all.”
It took four years and four months for the modulated light to eventually reach Earth. Shortly afterward, the stream of displeasure aimed at the Fuzz homeworld shut off with an embarrassed silence. Fuzz would still be bathed in the queue of upset photons for a few more years to come, but fortunately for the human diplomats preparing to reopen relationships with the alien civilization, none of it would be taken seriously.
