Retread Shop 1: First Contact Read online

  FIRST CONTACT

  Book One of the Retread Shop Series

  T. Jackson King

  Other King Novels

  Fight The Aliens (forthcoming), Mother Warm (forthcoming), Escape From Aliens (2015), Aliens Vs. Humans (2015), Freedom Vs. Aliens (2015), Humans Vs. Aliens (2015), Earth Vs. Aliens (2014), Genecode Illegal (2014), The Memory Singer (2014), Alien Assassin (2014), Anarchate Vigilante (2014), Galactic Vigilante (2013), Nebula Vigilante (2013), Speaker To Aliens (2013), Galactic Avatar (2013), Stellar Assassin (2013), Retread Shop (2012, 1988), Star Vigilante (2012), The Gaean Enchantment (2012), Little Brother’s World (2010), Judgment Day And Other Dreams (2009), Ancestor’s World (1996)

  Dedication

  To my wife Susan

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks go to scholar John Alcock and his book Animal Behavior, An Evolutionary Approach (1979). Second thanks go to the scholar Edward O. Wilson, whose book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis has guided me in my efforts to explore a future where humanity encounters life from other stars.

  FIRST CONTACT

  © 2015 T. Jackson King

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

  Cover design by T. Jackson King; cover image by Luca Oleastri via Dreamstime license; back image of Carina Nebula, courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope

  First Edition

  Published by T. Jackson King, Santa Fe, NM 87507

  http://www.tjacksonking.com/

  ISBN 10: 1-63384-374-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-63384-374-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Title Page

  DETECTION CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OBSERVATION CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CONTACT CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  COOPERATION CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DEPARTURE CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX ONE

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Jack Harrigan—Senior International Correspondent for CNN. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America. He does vid-interviews and investigative reporting, assisted by his sat-vid producer Colleen McIntyre. First human to interview the werewolf-like alien Sargon for Earth media. Later he becomes the Liaison between humanity and the aliens of starship Hekar.

  Arix Sargon Arax—Watch Commander of Hekar. He is a brown-furred member of the Horem species. Makes decision to turn ship toward Sol star and First Contact with humanity. That decision creates controversy and conflict among the eight alien species living in habitats on Hekar. Sargon favors peaceful Trade negotiations while the Arrik leader favors attacking Earth to force Humans into submission.

  T’Klick T’Klose—Ruler-by-Right-of-Challenge-and-Defeat of all Arrik, who resemble giant bats. He is a flying raptor who wants to kill any Contact with humanity, then later becomes the ship’s Conflict Commander. He aims to keep his Arrik people and all Compact members safe from the non-rational Humans, even if that requires an attack on Earth.

  Life-Who-Is-Song—Executive Aide to Sargon. He is a rainbow-colored centipede-like alien who has no eyes but uses a sensorium strip to perceive all forms of EMF radiation. He and his Strelka people are firm allies of Sargon and the Horem.

  Looseen—Maker-Of-Eggs and Brood-leader of the crab-like Zik species onboard Hekar. She gives birth to genetically engineered cohorts of Zik and aims to plant a colony of Zik on a water world of Barnard’s Star, with the help of Humans.

  Algonesus—Pod Leader and Prime Trickster of the Thix-Thet species, who are silicon balls that breath methane and live inside supercold tracglobes. The Thix-Thet want to make contact with similar lifeforms living on Titan and Ganymede. They view life as a joke played on unsuspecting organic chemicals.

  Lady Essene—Leader-Designate of the Gosay Assembly, a group of six-legged, sausage-shaped carnivores who are intensely individualistic. They hate crowds but love raw meat meals.

  Mother Esay—Leader of the ocean-dwelling octopoid Sliss species, all of whom are female and go by the term Daughter. Her people yearn to swim in Earth’s oceans and make contact with the sea-life of Earth.

  Arkady Sergeyevich Bochtov—President of Russia who is intensely focused on gaining more influence with the Compact aliens than the Western powers, whom he hates.

  Hiroto Arioshi—Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan who approves a scheme for an in-person meeting with the Compact aliens using his nation’s Shikazu Moon shuttle.

  Heather McDonnell—President of the United States at Contact, who makes the choice to accept the alien visit, then forge a mutual defense pact with the Compact aliens. Her choice sets America on course to travel among the stars.

  Eeess—Science Contemplator for Sargon. Eeess is a crystalline being and member of the Thoranian Group MIND, whose species wants to plant a colony on Mercury.

  DETECTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  The star died violently.

  Shell after globular shell of glowing incandescent gases shot through with hard x-rays, synchrotron emissions and gamma rays spread outward over the black light years. The shells expanded slowly, ever so slowly. Like a rippling blight upon the universe’s immense vastness, or a pebble dropped into a pond, the supernova shed more energy in a few short months than an entire galaxy emitted in a year.

  Sargon realized the star’s death had happened more than a million years ago. Its death throes filled two light years of solitary vastness. He felt small. Was small, when compared to such as this.

  The Watch Commander of the starship Hekar slouched moodily in his Command Dais seat, hands gripping tightly the seat’s control-studded armrests, on edge and anxious. He looked past the scaled or chiten-armored or leathery-winged forms of his busy crew at the viewscreen filling the front of the high-domed Command Deck. A new image filled it with rainbow-colored stars and white globular clusters from a small, nearby part of home galaxy as the ship’s primary computer displayed a different, real-time image, leaving the supernova for study by the specialists. A smaller holo version of the exploding star winked out just below his knees, unveiling the gray titanium-steel of the deck’s floor.

  The diversion had been useless.

  He felt deeply restless. Still no signal. Still no Contact with a new alien species! His fur rose as he ground his canines and flared his claw-nails outward. They were typical Horem body actions that signaled high emotion.

  Once again his emotions had gotten the better of him.

  Other Horem called him a “hopeful romantic,” someone not cool and cerebral enough to be one of the three Watch Commanders who ruled aboard their giant asteroid starship as it followed a sublight course down the spiral arm, searching for new Trade partners, seeking sapient life, all sensors alert. He was not the “proper” choice for a Watch Commander—unlike his father. Sargon sighed, hi
s claw-nails lightly scratching the armrests, but not loud enough to draw attention from his quietly busy Command Deck crew. At least he wasn’t impulsively violent like their newest Trade partners, the leathery-winged Arrik. Those black-winged flyers would eat him alive, his detractors had said. Not yet. He was too pragmatic—in the Horem way—to allow himself to be manipulated by the Compact’s newest members. Balance was the key. That much he’d learned from Horem history, from the holo vidprograms sent outward by tachyonic signals from the Horem home world. Always maintain the balance among the 33,000 members of eight different alien species, each with their own habitat dome affixed to the outside of Hekar—like blisters stuck to a throwing rock. Each species had its own history, culture, language, social practices and, of course, deadly politics. Balance had ruled during the 300 years of the ship’s slow voyaging from star to star.

  But the Arrik flyers worried him. They were still adjusting to the discovery that they weren’t the crown of creation. Or alone in home galaxy. Arrik society had undergone great convulsions during Contact. Now, they belonged to the Compact of Traders begun by the Horem and the blind, chittering, empathic centipedes who called themselves the Strelka. The centipedes were part of an empathic group identity quite different from the Group Mind of the barium titanate crystal beings called Thoranians, who treasured cold logic and mathspeech above all else. For now, the Arrik flyers acquiesced in all Compact rules. They contributed crew to Hekar. They integrated their fighter ships with those of other species in the various rock-cut hangars of the giant asteroid. They even played in the spacious interior Bubble habitats where off-duty Crew and Citizens from each of the ship’s member species went to recreate, communicate, observe, and politic. But they weren’t assimilated into the Compact. Not at all. Their hierarchy told them what to do, and they did it. Period. No arguments. What did they really think of the Compact? Would an Arrik Challenge him to ritual combat? Or did their ruler T’Klick T’Klose have a different agenda—one that called for the appearance of cooperation?

  Sargon had not yet experienced Arrik memories firsthand, through use of the Memorynet machine. Perhaps it was time for this Watch Commander to become more active, more probing, more invasive into the tribal culture of the Arrik flyers?

  What would his father Salex do in his place?

  He could of course simply ask him at the next Clan Arax gathering. Or he could visit with his beloved mate-wife Bethrin, she of the soft brown fur, feathery headcrest, lively eyes, deadly claws, and understanding of computer Core programming that far exceeded his own abilities in ship ballistics, fusion drive engineering, sociobiology, and interspecies politics. Bethrin understood him. As only a wife who’d born him two children, aged 40 years with him, and gone into and out of Suspense hibernation with him year after year could understand him. For her, he gave thanks to the God of Trade. For his father Salex . . . Sargon could only hope the second-guessing, the questioning, the furrowed brow of incipient disapproval would ease over time. He’d been Watch Commander for nine years now. When would his father finally approve of him? When would Salex accept that being “different” didn’t mean he was deficient as a Horem?

  And when would they detect a new species?

  The raging impatience overwhelmed his self-doubts, his worries about his father, his concerns over the Arrik.

  His surge-tides of emotion, of expectation, of excitement at the prospect of a new sapient species with which the Horem and other Compact species could barter-trade were his undoing. In his father’s estimation. Even the Clan Herald, uncle Maran, only partly understood Sargon’s intense feelings of yearning. Those feelings weren’t the unschooled emotions of a juvenile prey-hunter, still new to the rigors of life and struggle. They were fully based in intellectual delight at the wonderful diversity of life, the universe, and the peculiar combinations which thinking chemicals assumed in the short space-time during which the Horem had traversed a small part of the galaxy. But they made him different from most other Horem. Calmness, interior reflection, pragmatism, faultless professionalism, and a kind of monastic dedication to the principles of the multispecies Compact distinguished his fellow Horem, both on Hekar and back home on Horem itself—as best as their faster-than-lightspeed tachyonic communications Pylons could tell them. But Sargon was different. Too different, some said.

  When was being different good, and when bad? Or was that the wrong question?

  Horem logic said it could be years before a new Detection. Past experience had recorded passages of over 20 years before a new electromagnetic signal was detected, and responded to by Hekar. And the science of statistics related in mind-numbing detail how fortunate they’d been to find so many sapient species co-existing in the same timeframe in a portion of space measuring only l80 by 60 by 40 light years across. They’d explored only a small, small part of one of the five spiral arms of home galaxy. Now, with their new, improved fusion pulse Drive capability of ninety percent of lightspeed, they covered more territory than at their old velocity of one-half lightspeed. But still, they moved slowly. In a galaxy measuring at least 50,000 light years from its outer Rim to its black hole center and another 50,000 light years out again to the opposite Rim, they’d just scratched the surface of that immense disk of gases, stars, nebulas, dark matter and gravity tides.

  Among the Horem, only he felt a romantic attachment to the great exploration of nearby stars and new peoples. Other Horem professed a mercantile attitude toward the interstellar barter-trading that was the focus of the Compact. Greed, not curiosity, had prompted the Trade Clans of his home world to support this one-way exploring venture in partnership with their nearby stellar neighbors, the scale-covered Strelka. Hekar’s job was simple: Detect new sapient species, Observe them during approach, Contact them to establish Trade relations, Cooperate in barter-trading, then Depart, to begin the process all over again. After, of course, sending all their new technology, biology and cultural discoveries back to their home planets via the instantaneous wonder of the tachyon Pylon. While they could communicate at FTL speeds, the Compact traveled the starry seas at sublight speeds, refueling every few stops with native deuterium and lithium-six barter-traded from sapients in some distant star system. It wasn’t a particularly efficient Contact methodology, but it worked.

  And he was at the forefront.

  A hopeful romantic in command of an asteroid starship inhabited by 33,000 aliens from eight different species, with only greed in common, worried what his father would think of him. Sargon knew he was too emotional, too adventurous, too alone, too different—and momentarily bored.

  He smiled broadly.

  The only thing guaranteed in life was that boredom rarely persisted.

  Whistling softly, Sargon turned to his Executive Aide, Life-Who-Is-Song. Idly he wondered what the empathic Strelka centipede had made of his emotions during the last few moments.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The void between the stars grew larger and more oppressive to Torik of the Ziks as he floated far out from his ship nest. He hung suspended in a sensor pod attached to his nesthome—Hekar—by a thin, supremely strong cable. The pod trailed long filamentary sensor cables behind it. The cables were designed to detect the slightest electromagnetic whisper, like one of those airborne seedpods with long fibers that caught the wind. The cable allowed his pod to float several kilometers out from the rocky, pockmarked surface of Hekar, well beyond the ship’s nimbus of charged particles. Those particles, generated by the impact of their sublight passage through sparse interstellar gas molecules, flowed around the ship’s rounded nose like water around the oval carapace of a Zik.

  But the sensor pod was dry. Unfortunately.

  Electronics and photonics do not mix well with the warm waters his species had evolved in under the pale light of a red dwarf star far, far from Hekar. Nor with the salt content his metabolism demanded periodically. Which was why only dryland or amphibious Crew could occupy the sensor pods. That left the water-breathing Sliss octopoids to do other C
rew duties. Torik liked being a sensor tech. But the pod’s tight confines hindered free movement of his carapace and his ten chitin-armored legs. Only his mouth palps and his four perceptor stalks could move freely, interacting with the data input devices that showed him the dry, cold lifelessness of space.

  Together with Hekar, Torik and his small pod moved slowly down the Orion arm of home galaxy in a corkscrew search pattern that had begun before he was hatched and would continue long after he provided nutrients to the next birth-cohort. Mismatched in size—like a grain of sand beside a boulder—Torik’s pod and Hekar flew onward together. So far, there had been nothing to report.

  But life, he knew, is endless change.

  Outside, stars shone. Gases billowed lazily across the light years. Neutrinos surged through everything. Gravity waves echoed across the galaxy. And boredom threatened.

  Torik’s primary mouth palps felt something.

  He shifted his position. There! His palps detected erratic modulations from the sensor cables trailing out into space. Torik turned his perceptor stalks to the red visualizing screen before him to see what his sensitive palps had found.

  The taste signal felt by the palps was distinctive, as were the irregular wave patterns flickering by him in the infrared light by which he saw his environment. Could it be?

  A secondary palp depressed the All-Hailer key, connecting him with the Command Deck and Watch Commander Arix Sargon Arax.

  “By your leave Eminence, this one reports an apparent source of irregularly pulsed electromagnetic waveforms emanating from the dorsal side of us and slightly below our current path.” He paused, multiple hearts thudding with excitement. “The waveforms appear to come from a G2V yellow star located in a group of other G, K and M single and double stars. By the Maker-of-Eggs, the waveforms may be artificial!”