Leaving the plate and mug on the bar for someone else to clean up—I had been reminded that presidents don’t do dishes—I pulled my coat out of the mini-Anti-Grav and took the winding hallway to what I used to call my office, the area my staff now referred to as the prez’s quarters, or HQ. The place in the crashed alien spaceship where Gomez was.
As I moved, I was joined by the queen cat, limping slightly, and the other five cats she had brought. All were young males, being given the grand tour. The males would be left with me to be placed in the medbay to be neutered. Even feeding the cats the bodies of my enemies, there wasn’t enough protein for Tuffs to allow unrestricted mating and unlimited litters.
I sealed us in to the command deck of the Bug alien spaceship / HQ / office, tossed the coat into the nook that served as a closet, peeled off the gloves, and wanded myself clean in my personal toilette compartment. More comfortable, I made a little milk from water and dry milk powder. I added a single drop ofDevil’s Milk to put the kits to sleep. As I worked, I said, “Gomez, Jolene said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. Shining Smith, I thank you for your attention and your time.” Today Gomez sounded like a snooty pre-war New Yorker. He was still trying on accents. I was waiting on him to try Texan. That would be perfect with Jolene’s Southern belle drawl.
“Okay,” I said. I opened a bottle of water and drank, waiting, watching the kittens drink and stagger. Devil’s Milk was addictive, but since they would never get another sip, Tuffs had deemed it safe. It was also kinder than her old method, where she ripped off their testicles and they either lived or died.
“This refers to the being previously known as Garrouling PopPop,” he said, as the air filters shot the scent of peppermint into the room. Bug aliens used scent as part of speech, and the speech part wasn’t anything a human mouth could make. Garrouling PopPop, no peppermint scent, was the best I could do.
“Okay,” I said again and put the glass bottle in the rack for cleaning and refilling.
“Garrouling PopPop is no longer in a state of maximum inactivity.”
“Uhhh. Okaaay.” I had no idea what that meant. I picked up the juvenile kittens, plopped them into the medbay, and set the procedure for cats, male, neuter, and closed the lid. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“Garrouling PopPop,” Gomez said, with a fresh spray of peppermint.
The scent was so strong, I started sneezing.
Between my sneezes Gomez finished, “—is no more.”
“He’s dead?” I asked. I grabbed a handkerchief and shoved it against my face.
“He is not a he and never was. Garrouling PopPop is not dead. I have told you repeatedly that Garrouling PopPop hasbeen in astate of maximum inactivity. Now, Garrouling PopPopis no more.”
“Which sounds like dead. Please stop saying his name. I’m dying here.”
“No. Your poor ability to scent emotions, your limited neural capacity, lack of neural computing capability, and deficient problem solving skills are insufficient to understand my captain’s biology.”
“I think you just called me stupid,” I said. “If he’s not dead, what is he?”
“The closest analogy in your nonspecific language is, ‘active, timorous, saturated, multilarval sponge state’.”
I pressed the spot on the command center that flushed the smells out of HQ. “So, he’s not dead.” I blew my nose vigorously.
Gomez sighed. The AI actually sighed. He had been around Jolene way too long. Tuffs, who had clearly been listening, jumped and slipped through the flap opening in the office, taking the slide to the lower levels of the bug ship. “They have no equivalent pronoun in your language. However—they are not dead.”
“Bloody hell,” I said. We knew the ship had sent out a signal of some kind recently, but since no human had decoded the language or mastered the Bug version of EntNu communication methods, we had no idea what had been sent or to whom or why.
“Lights on down there,” I said, “bright enough to see with. And don’t talk to me about my limited human senses.” I grabbed the edges of the opening and, holding on tightly, slid beneath the flap into the dark, knowing the queen cat was heading to PopPop’s carapace, where it had lain “since three earth days following its crash landing.” Per Gomez.
Slowly, the lights came on. When it was bright enough, I let go and gravity took me down. I figured the slide was a way to get to the lower levels with or without gravity. But it was just a guess.
The ship was built for free-floating, non-gravitational travel, constructed of what looked like interlocking gyroscopes; devices and equipment were overhead, upside down, in weird crannies, and the ship below the command deck—my office HQ—was dark and spooky, the lighting good for Bug eyes, not human ones.
The ship’s power source and engine were located two decks below the office and I had never tried to access them because I assumed they were protected by a self-destruct system and I didn’t want to die. Weapons were sandwiched in an outer layer and most of them had been buried in the junkyard on impact.
I stood over the dead alien. Its carapace wasn’t leaking, showed no signs of trauma—no cracks, no broken limbs, no signs of trauma from the crash that had half-buried the spaceship into the stone of the West Virginia desert. PopPop had survived the crash, which meant it—they?—had been strapped into the NBP compression seat / command chair on the upper level when it went down. PopPop had reached maximum inactivity three days after the crash.
Before, and several times since I reno’ed the upper deck of the ship into my office, I had crawled around in the lower decks looking for gear, weapons, things I could sell or repurpose without being caught and hanged for treason for hiding a Bug spaceship in Smith’s Junk and Scrap. I had always assumed the ship had crashed, like the USSS SunStar out back, killing its pilot. Its captain. Whatever. But what if the ship wasn’t damaged? And what if the Bug wasn’t dead?
I compared the Bug to the pics on my Hand Held. My device wasn’t as useful as a modern, updated Morphon, but it worked with the limited Berger chip receiver in my skull, and it worked underground, sowin. The pic showed my Bug, which looked a lot better than the only other specimen I had seen.
I swiped to the next set of pics, which displayed that other Bug, the one I’d encountered near Logan, West Virginia. The insectoid creature on the screen was smaller, mottled brown and gray, with shattered legs, broken antennae, and leaking greenish fluid. All its eyes were open, filmy, milky-looking opals with no discernable pupils. It looked freshly dead, after its crash landing near the old quarry.
I swiped and studied a more recent pic of the other alien, sent a month ago by Anse Hatfield, commander of the Logan Wildcats Militia, one of my allies in the area. Still mottled gray and brown, it was now covered with rock dust and windblown debris. Its eyes had withdrawn deep into the sockets, going grayish, its leakage dried up. But it didn’t seem to be rotting. Nothing had disturbed it. Probably nothing on Earth could eat it, not even bacteria.
