Orb Station Zero (Galactic Arena Series Book 1) Read online

  “Holy shit, great gifts of knowledge from an alien race?” Ram sighed. “What about the aliens, did the Artificial Persons meet them?”

  Diego shook his head. “The Orb was apparently unoccupied at that time. But we had made it there, that was the main thing.”

  “But why the hell, after we sent a manned mission beyond Neptune the aliens just told us to send someone else?”

  Diego grinned. “These were all tests, man. Every step, every stage. What’s thirty years to an all-powerful alien race? Maybe they live for thousands of years, I mean, they probably do, right? These tests the Orb was putting us through? It was to see if our civilization was capable of making the trip first of all. And when we could, I guess we triggered the start of the Arena System for humanity.”

  “Why thirty years?”

  “This is the cycle. It is not exactly thirty years. It’s ten thousand seven-hundred and fifty days. Our predecessors spent a long time translating what it was beaming at us through the ship’s systems. The language and the coding used by the Orb were far from perfect, okay, it was using our systems but finding common meaning in language is difficult even for the Orb Builders. So our guys back then in 2079, they had to decode what it was telling us. And of course, it was our own cultural assumptions that led to our first great error.”

  “Show him,” Milena said, sighing. “Just show him.”

  Diego pulled up video of a dignified young gentleman with neat gray hair, dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt and tie standing in a wood paneled room with Earth sunlight streaming in through huge windows on one side. He faced the camera and he addressing an unseen audience but there was no sound on the video. There were men and women behind him in military dress uniforms.

  “Okay, so, you can imagine the meetings,” Diego said, spreading his hands and settling back into his seat. “The Orb told us to return with our chosen representative and maybe get this great gift of knowledge. Almost certainly the most significant opportunity in our history, right? So who, out of all of humanity, should be chosen to represent us? You see, the Orb instructed that in ten thousand days we send the very best of us. Well, how do we decide on the criteria for selecting who is the best of us? What is it about humanity that we want to show off? Presumably, we needed someone strong, decisive and yet empathic and compassionate. Communication skills were absolutely top priority. The scientists in the early Project pushed real hard for it to be a scientist. Someone who would be able to converse fluently in the language of the universe. You know, mathematics.” Diego snorted. “They wanted someone who could talk about the molecular weights of elements as if they were ordering in a Chinese restaurant. But the scientists were drowned out by the corporate leaders who demanded they choose. After all, they paid for half of it, right? The politicians pulled rank on everyone as they had the tax dollars of billions of people plus the licenses to print money.”

  “For the love of God, leave off with your political nonsense,” Milena said. “Get on with it.”

  Diego laughed. “Alright, so, months of arguing, horse trading and everything but everyone could compromise on the fact that it was a diplomatic mission. So, pick a diplomat. But what world-bestriding ambassador or negotiator would be willing to, effectively, give up the rest of his life in return for this great honor? Well, lots of them were on the table but this was the one they chose.” Diego leaned forward and tapped the image of the man on it.

  “Who is he?” Ram asked.

  “Malcolm Diaz. American. Incredibly accomplished, started out a political scientist, came up with a revolutionary approach in Cooperation Theory pretty much right before he started employing it on the world stage. U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia during some rebellion, then at the U.N. negotiating a peace treaty in the Balkans. I don’t even know all that he did but the Project decided this is the guy we want representing humanity. I've seen footage of this guy destroying his opponents in debates, on all kinds of topics. He could work a crowd but he always made the argument about more than winning the debate. He would destroy the opponent, entertain the audience and also inform everyone listening, make you see the whole topic through fresh eyes. The guy was a legend by the time he was thirty. And, in a tragic but suspiciously handy turn of fate, his wife and daughter had died in a helicopter crash outside Geneva. Bit of a coincidence, right?”

  “They didn’t kill his family just so he would take the job,” Milena said.

  “Oh no?” Diego said, raising his eyebrows. “You think we abandoned ethics after Diaz not before? Maybe you’re right. Either way, he had no family to leave behind so Diaz was perfect. And why was he perfect again? Well, there's no diplomatic situation he can't talk his way through. He's the greatest communicator on Earth, okay?”

  “You're building up to something,” Ram said. “I can tell.”

  Diego moved the footage on and it showed the diplomat Malcolm Diaz with a large group of uniformed men and women walking through a dark corridor, lit by the cameras and other bobbing torches the people carried.

  “That’s Diaz and the Mission One crew boarding the Orb,” Milena said.

  “He had a tough trip,” Ram said.

  “It took nineteen years back then,” Milena said. “Mission One left Earth orbit in 2090. They arrived at the Orb in 2109. It was rough on all of them.”

  “They’re walking normally,” Ram pointed out. “It’s not microgravity on the Orb.”

  “The gravity there is approximately 0.9G,” Diego said. “We spin our ships at two revs per minute or so to replicate that force but the Orb doesn't spin and we don't know how it creates the effect. Considering what else it’s capable of, that doesn’t seem like so much of a big deal.”

  The camera feed was cut from many on the heads of the crew members. The corridors were silvered but dark, like black glass. It was difficult to make out what was being shown on the screen. The lights from the crew illuminated the backs of the heads but not much beyond. They bobbed as they walked through the corridors inside the Orb. They appeared to enter a square chamber of some kind. One wall was semi-transparent.

  The heads stopped moving and the crew busied themselves setting up equipment, talking in hushed tones about what the aliens would be like and how they would communicate.

  The talking stopped as a single chime sounded on the Orb. The crew looked up.

  Ram held his breath.

  “Let’s just skip through this bit,” Diego said, clearing his throat and sighing, wafting a hand as he spoke. “The Orb chimes three times to let you know it’s time. That wall fades and turns into a door. There’s a Zeta Line test where the Orb stops anyone going through the smokescreen with a weapon. We’ll get to all that stuff later.”

  Even the Intel Officer seemed tense and he was watching events from ninety years ago that he had seen before. Diego clicked through the footage until the aged Malcolm Diaz stood alone a vast chamber.

  Above, the ceiling arched over in a dome shape. It was like a half a bowl. Other than Diaz, it was empty. The light came from everywhere, diffused and evenly lit.

  From the viewpoint of the camera, filming behind Diaz, Ram could only just make out the far side of that chamber.

  “Why’s it so blurry?” Ram whispered.

  “There’s a force field,” Diego said. “The section of wall between Diaz and the crew? It’s a plasma of some sort, we call it the smokescreen but we don’t know what it is really. A window that can’t be broken by anyone inside or out.”

  “It’s empty other than Diaz,” Ram said. “Where are the aliens? They didn’t say hello when the crew boarded the Orb?”

  Diego pointed at the screen and, in the replay, the crewmembers noticed something.

  A shape. A smear of color on the far side. It was hundreds of meters away from the camera but it was moving. Pale, yellow, on the dark background.

  “An alien,” Ram said.

  Milena nodded. “Our enemy.”

  CHAPTER FIVE – ANSWERS

  Ram decided that
he would find out everything that these people had to tell him, he would let it play out. If they were trolling him then it was the most involved, sophisticated scam he’d ever heard of. Either way, he wanted to see what happened to the ambassador on the screen. Then he would take action.

  “I suppose that is my cue,” Diaz said in the replay, half turning to the camera behind him. “Well, Captain Andrews, thank you and your crew for delivering me here. I only hope I can do my job as well as you all did yours.”

  The captain gave a little laugh over the comms. “It has been the greatest honor of my life bringing you here, sir. Tell them howdy from us.”

  The crew members laughed and Diaz squared his shoulders and strolled out farther into the vast space.

  He had a long way to walk into the middle. Ram wanted to know how far it was but he did not want to break the spell by speaking. Even though the footage was a hundred years’ old, he felt almost as though he was there. Why had the people in charge of these events hidden such a profoundly important moment in human history? It was outrageous. Telling humanity what was out there in the galaxy, at the edges of their own system, in fact, might have stimulated millions or billions of people to be more engaged in the world. So many people had taken refuge in the shared dreamspace of Avar where you could live out any fantasy you wanted but if they knew what was out there, they might be doing great things in the real world instead. Ram might have become an engineer, like his father, if he’d known he could be building giant spaceships for meeting with aliens.

  The crewmembers mounted larger cameras while Diaz walked toward the alien and the edited feed jumped up in quality. The cameras were trained on the growing yellow shape and they zoomed in.

  “That's incredible,” the Mission One crew said to each other as the image resolved on screen.

  “There it is,” an awed voice muttered.

  “What is it?” another voice said before someone else hushed them into silence.

  Zooming in past Diaz to the far side, an image resolved itself.

  It was a circle. A wheel, rather. The shape of the alien was that of a thick, squat wheel with six spokes. Two long arms stuck out from the hub at the center perpendicular to the legs. A three-clawed hand flexed at the end of each arm.

  It rolled toward Diaz. Lumbering.

  “Six legs, you see?” Diego said, his voice tightly controlled. “Each leg ends in a large, flat, prehensile pad. The pads fit together almost without a gap between them to form the rim of the wheel shape.”

  Diaz got closer, smaller and smaller and the alien got larger. The perspective seemed wrong.

  “How,” Ram started. “How big is it?”

  “Two point eight meters in diameter,” Diego said.

  “It must be twice as tall as Diaz,” Ram said. He knew that 2.8 meters was over 9 feet.

  Milena nodded.

  Diego said nothing.

  Out in the middle of that vast alien dome, Diaz drew to a stop.

  The alien kept coming.

  The two arms rolled over and over, sticking out from the central hub. Huge, long, knobbled arms ending in three-pronged hands. They stuck out to both sides, rolling over and over, with the legs and central hub closing in on Diaz.

  “Greetings,” Diaz intoned, his powerful voice picked up clearly on his internal microphone. “I am Ambassador Malcolm Diaz and I am here representing humanity, which is my species and for my planet, which is called Earth, and all the lifeforms that we share it with.”

  The alien did not stop.

  Ram found that he was chewing the nails of his new hands and he yanked his finger out of his mouth. He literally did not know where that finger had been.

  On the screen, the alien did not slow down. Diaz’ mic picked up the soft thump-thump-thump of the alien’s feet on the black tiles getting louder as it cartwheeled toward him. The side of the thing was undeniable, now, bearing down on Earth’s ambassador, a monster twice his height, many times his weights, with the long arms twirling and the hub seemingly without eyes, without a mouth or any features at all other than lumpen sockets where the limbs met the hub.

  Diaz tensed. Took a step back, then another.

  “What is it-” Ram started.

  The alien accelerated the final few meters, charging Diaz. Faster than seemed possible.

  Diaz seemed fit for an old guy but the ambassador barely had time to flinch and turn half back to the way he’d come before the yellow alien was on him. It leaned to one side, pivoting just as it reached the human.

  One of the long arms slammed into Diaz, smashing straight down into his head and chest with incredible force.

  The blow was fast, powerful and it happened so fast it was hard to make out. Diaz snapped in half at the spine even before his legs buckled. The man's chest exploded with the impact. Bright blood sprayed through the air in an arcing mist of red. His head was just gone.

  The alien spun, turned, rolled back and smacked into the body again. It leaned over and slammed and slapped Diaz's remains against the floor a little while longer, gathering smashed parts to break further into pieces. Diaz' body was obliterated further with every blow. Shredded strips of Diaz’ clothes hung sodden with chunks of flesh as the blood-splattered creature flailed into the gore, flinging it everywhere.

  After a few moments, the blood spattered alien turned and rolled back the way it had come. Its footpads slapping wetly into the tiles as it went. Ram could just about see it left a trail of blood, a chain of oval footprints of shining red.

  The crew members were screaming, in shock, in terror, in rage. The captain shouted at them to be quiet and gave the order to arm themselves with weapons from the armory.

  Diego cut the footage.

  “What happened then?” Ram said, letting out the breath he'd been holding. His new hands had been grasping the edge of the seat beneath him as if his life depended on it. “Did they attack the alien?”

  “It was pointless,” Diego said. “They would never have made it through the smokescreen with weapons, the Orb don’t allow that, only organic material plus a little bit of tech, the extent of which we call the Zeta Line. Anyway, after the alien rolled away, the Orb did that three pips thing again, the three chimes? The smokescreen opened, the crew went in, some of the crazy ones looking for a fight. But the alien was gone, the arena was empty. They scooped up as much as they could of poor old Malcolm Diaz and then the Orb directed them back to their shuttle. It opened up the shuttle bay, they went back to their vessel and the ship was free to leave.”

  “What the fuck,” Ram said, remembering to breathe. “What was that? The aliens just let them go? What the hell was the point of all that?”

  Diego nodded, pursing his lips. “The Orb seemed satisfied with how everything had played out. Like you, our guys thought they’d been attacked, ambushed, that they’d been tricked and that war had been declared on us. But the Orb didn’t seem concerned. It said to come back in thirty years and try again. It said that the other alien had won its gifts and next time we could win some of our own. I'm paraphrasing. The communication between our people and the Orb has always required varying amounts of computation before we could get close to what it was actually telling us. Although we're all learning. It and us, so that our AIs can translate almost right away with what we think is over ninety percent accurate. But back then, as the ship headed home, the Orb began broadcasting more detail than we ever had before. Spilling the beans about the galactic civilization that it represents.”

  “An intelligent alien civilization?” Rama said, head reeling. “Those yellow cartwheel monsters?”

  Diego shook his head. “No. Here’s the thing you have to understand. The Orb was not built by the Wheelhunters.”

  “There’s two alien civilizations?”

  “What we didn’t show you just now was telescopic images of the Wheelhunter starship arriving at the Orb two days or so after Mission One went into orbit around it. There was some kind of electromagnetic and gravitational disturbanc
e tens of thousands of kilometers from the Orb, and then they picked up radiation emissions and the Mission One ship telescopes picked it up.”

  The screen flicked on, showing a dot that grew, in time-accelerated footage, to show a large ship in space.

  The design was not one he’d seen before but it was recognizably a spaceship. Longer than it was wide, with engines at the rear but flatter than a human ship. It was more like some monstrous, chunky airplane design. It looked awesome, Ram thought.

  “The creature that killed Diaz was the representative of an alien species that the Orb had invited, just as it had invited us. Only, the Wheelhunters come from another star system and the Orb brought them to ours.”

  “It was a competition,” Ram said. “Right? Us and them, the yellow guys.” He paused. “What does it mean? Wheelhunters? What do they hunt?”

  “Us,” Diego said. “In the arena. But it’s not an official designation. First off, they called it XB-001, which is kind of cool but pretty boring. And the UNOP biologists argued about the name, what taxonomy they should use for it. Some people said it could be included in a new domain or kingdom but others went insane over the suggestion. You think Marines and martial artists are crazy, you should see biologists fighting. Anyway, why they were screaming at each other that it was xenopoda rotaeflava or Orb Station Zero Xenobiological Species 001, someone in the Project started calling them Wheelhunters, or just Wheelers and the name seems to have stuck.”

  “So the Orb Station is not built by the yellow aliens, the Wheelhunters,” Ram said. “So, why are they there? Did they take it over? Or is it some sort of symbiotic relationship between the two of them?”

  “Not bad guesses. But it’s not just two species we’re ultimately dealing with here, Rama. There are many intelligent species in our galaxy creating a vast interconnected network of civilizations. A true galactic civilization. They are all in contact with each other through the Orbs. And we were being invited to join that galactic network. The strange thing was that they had this specific method of interaction. We didn't understand it at first. It made no sense to us, a hundred years ago, our global culture back then had become obsessed with deemphasizing warfare as a means for resolving disagreements.”