- Ava -

“So you didn't bring your sword?”

Ava sat down in the co-pilot's seat. She could fly a shuttle in a pinch, but she just never had the inclination to do it. She'd happily let Xark'ion do the flying. The Acerex usually weren't that good at flying, at least not according to Charlotte's high standards, but it wasn't like this was a gunship or that they'd have to evade enemy fire.

“I did not,” the huge warrior said heavily as he sat down. The seat creaked as the side bolsters had to widen to the max to accommodate him. “And my heart will bleed until I see it again. But the king was very clear: No blades on this mission.”

The turbines whined as they spun up to operating speed, and the shuttle lifted from the hangar floor of the Friendship.

Ava ran her eyes up and down the warrior. There certainly weren't many places he could hide a weapon with a bare torso like that. And his pants were already strained over his huge thighs. And that impressive bulge.

“Good. What else did he say?”

He gave her a very green glance. “My conversation with the king was in private. I doubt he'd want me to repeat it to anyone else. But he did stress the importance of the mission. And its non-violent nature.”

“And what do you think about that?”

He didn't look at her. “These are new times. Aliens now have the ear of the royal house. New ways of handling war are being tried. Something called 'peace' is to be attempted. Very well, if the king finds it necessary to try, then I suppose we should give it our best attempt.”

He didn't sound very enthusiastic, but it was probably the best she was going to get from an Acerex warrior.

Ava herself felt pretty good about the mission and what could happen if they succeeded, and this, finally being on the way, was making her happy.

“That's right. Xark'ion, this could be the solution to all the troubles Acerex has. We find the main enemy and make them understand that you're not a threat and that you will never attack them. You're just defending yourselves. That could be enough. It might make them back off completely.”

Xark'ion pulled back on the controls, and the shuttle shot into space. “Or attack with all their might.”

Ava shook her head. “See, that's the least probable thing that could happen. They are already attacking you with everything they have, including other aliens. No, I think we'll end up being friends with them. As well as getting the other aliens out of their own troubles. I mean, they are the ones that have really been suffering losses in the battles against the Acerex warriors. We'll just clear up any misunderstandings there might be, and the Kunuru might well stop with their attacks. They must be as exhausted as the Acerex from all the fighting.”

“And if they will not listen to reason?”

“Then we will be no worse off than we are now. And we will have established contact. Friendly contact. If they won't talk now, maybe they will later. Alien species can be tough to predict. They may need time to think.”

She expected him to protest, but instead he took his hands off the controls and glanced at her sideways. “Never a good idea to give your enemy time to think. I wonder, do we have a means of communication between us?”

“We have the interpreter devices. I don't think anything else is needed.”

“In combat, it can often be useful to communicate in other ways.”

Ava groaned inwardly. “I'm sure it can. But we're not going to have any combat. I really hoped that was made clear.”

He gave her another glance. “It was made clear. Repeatedly. Very well, do we have a destination for this adventure?”

Ava ignored his tone and consulted her pad. “I have one clue about where we might find the Kunuru. Apparently they're close to a species called the Solp, and I think I know where to find them.”

Xark'ion took the controls again and turned the shuttle to the left and up. “Woor Five.”

She stared at him. That information had taken her weeks of research to find. “How do you know that?”

He adjusted his course and checked the navigation chart on a little screen. “Everyone knows that. We've fought them many times, and we know where they always return to after we push them back. It's a little further than we want to send our armies, so I don't think we've ever attacked it.”

“So it's common knowledge that the Solp live on Woor Five? Why couldn't people just tell me that when I asked them?”

Xark'ion set the shuttle's systems for the multi-lightyear trip to the alien world. “They probably didn't want to tell you. It's military intelligence, after all. We have learned the wisdom of keeping our secrets. Especially from ... aliens.”

“But you have no problem telling me where they live.”

He shrugged. “I have some problem with it. But the king ordered me to consider you a friendly alien.”

Ava turned off her pad. They were about to travel very fast through space, and electronic devices would sometimes develop mysterious and unfixable faults if they were left running during those transits. “That's very kind of him.”

Xark'ion pushed a button, and the acceleration started. “He's a kind king. Too kind, some say.”

There was a hint of dissatisfaction in his neutral tone.

“And what does Captain Xark'ion say?”

“I say he's the king. Is there a need to say anything else?”

- - -

The planet was gray and dull from space, and the small oceans it had would be considered little more than lakes on Earth. Most of all they resembled dirty brown puddles, but some of them had to be a hundred miles across. It didn't look at all like any inhabited planet Ava had ever seen.

She leaned forward. “What happened here?”

They had been underway for six hours, and the close proximity to the huge Acerex warrior was both exhilarating and worrisome. Because he took up so much of her mind and her attention, she wondered how she would be able to concentrate on the mission.

Xark'ion maneuvered to enter the atmosphere. “It's not known exactly. It could have been some kind of mass extinction event that devastated the planet entirely. There are ruins in many places, and it seems the alien civilization that lived here was highly advanced and had large cities. Now they're all gone, and the Solp have made it theirs.”

“So this isn't the Solp homeworld?”

“It is now. But they obviously weren't the first sentients here. They didn't build any of it. When you meet the Solp you'll understand why.”

The surface of Woor Five filled the viewscreen. Here and there Ava could spot networks that looked like roads, radiating out from large nodes that could well be the ruins of ancient cities. “What are they like?”

The shuttle hit the atmosphere and started to shake, first mildly, then violently. “I've only fought them twice. They're not the best fighters, but they attack in swarms. Sometimes they have the aid of sophisticated weapons, although we've never seen them use the same kind of weapon twice. It worried us that they seemed to be very inventive. Some squads were sent here to find out more, and they reported that the Solp are only scavengers. They don't invent, they just find things left behind by the original inhabitants here. And sometimes they figure out how to use them.”

“Uh-huh. Do you know anything about their connection with the Kunuru? Or maybe you know where to find the Kunuru? Perhaps it's one of your military secrets?”

“I'd never heard of the Kunuru until you told me about them.”

The shuttle shook hard, and Ava closed her eyes and grabbed a hand-hold with both hands. “Okay. Do you know anything else that may be helpful for our investigation?”

Xark'ion didn't reply, and Ava didn't press the point. She was pretty much used to traveling on interplanetary shuttles, but she didn't like entering an atmosphere. It was too uncontrolled. But Xark'ion was obviously a better pilot than most Acerex warriors, and the experience wasn't as unpleasant as it could be.

The trembling subsided, and now they were flying through the air like an airplane.

Ava opened her eyes. Outside, everything was gray and brown and seemed unspeakably dirty. There was no vegetation anywhere, just mud and rocks and ruins.

“This is the ugliest planet I've ever seen.”

Xark'ion pulled back on the engine power. “The event that killed the original inhabitants must have been somewhat intense. Here we are, diplomat Ava.”

She looked out the windows. Nothing called for her attention. Where to start on a ruined planet? “I guess we can go anywhere there's a Solp to talk to. Maybe they all know where the Kunuru can be found.”

Xark'ion brought the shuttle lower, until they were skimming the surface, going slow enough to spot any movement. Still there were no plants or even weeds.

“It's completely destroyed,” Ava marveled. “There's just nothing left alive. Imagine that a civilization could to this to itself.”

“It's not an easy thing to imagine,” Xark'ion said and slowed down further, then banked left, circling a large ruin that looked like a huge heap of shattered concrete. “And yet, here it is.”

Ava stretched her neck to look out. “We landing here?”

“It is my understanding that the diplomat wanted to see the Solp aliens.”

Then she saw them, and at first she wondered why she hadn't spotted them before. They were milling all over that ruin, so it looked like the concrete was alive with movement. But the creatures were just as gray as their surroundings.

At first they reminded Ava of coyotes, with dirty, grayish fur splotched with brown streaks and spots. But there was nothing dog-like about them. They had six stiff, short legs each, and they moved awkwardly without any knee joint. The head was small and round and had fur in tufts, making them look as if they had scabies. They had long snouts with three nostril-like holes and six small, black eyes on stalks, making them look a little like a cross between a rat and a spider.

As they became aware of the approaching shuttle, they all scurried out of sight in a split second.

Xark'ion put the shuttle down on its skids and set the engines to idle, but didn't turn them off.

Ava put on her most advanced translation device, which looked like a headset with a thin microphone boom along her cheekbone. It was probably one of mankind's most impressive inventions, and it could learn and translate a completely new and alien language in just a few minutes. Provided that language was based on sound.

“Do you know if they can talk?”

He shrugged. “They make sounds, certainly. But I don't know if that can be considered talking.”

The ground looked wet and muddy, and Ava suddenly wished she wouldn't have to go out there. But the atmospheric readout on the display told her that the air was fully breathable. And this was the first time Xark'ion would see her do her thing. She wanted to give him a good impression of her methods.

She closed the mechanism on her knee-length planetfall/alien encounter boots. “I think I should try to talk to them alone first. If the Acerex have fought them like you say, then they may not appreciate seeing you here.”

“My orders are to protect you.” The tone was flat, and it didn't invite to any discussion.

“And you'll protect me by staying out of sight until I ask you to join me. Let's not try to provoke trouble the first time we contact these guys. You've fought them, you say. They may be well aware of that.”

Xark'ion got to his feet and opened the shuttle hatch. Immediately the shuttle got colder, and a stale smell of decay spread in the cabin. “Perhaps. And perhaps we want them to focus their anger on me, and not on the exalted diplomat.”

Ava got up and looked out of the hatch opening. It was as desolate a place as she had ever seen, and those Solp gave her the creeps. “Perhaps. We'll have to play it by ear. Just stay out of sight.”

He looked past her out onto the alien landscape. “Don't make my task unnecessarily challenging by walking too far from the shuttle.”

“I have to get close enough for the translator to pick up what they're saying.”

He pointed at the device she was wearing. “Will that alien device understand these beings?”

“Eventually,” Ava said. “It has to hear enough of their language to understand it.”

That was the problem with the device – it needed data, and it could sometimes be hard to get. More than once Ava had been wanting to talk to an alien species for the first time, and they just wouldn't utter a sound. Sign language usually didn't work with non-humanoid aliens, and it had sometimes taken her hours of her chattering away about random things before the aliens would say enough to the translator to start helping her.

“Possibly we can accelerate it.” Xark'ion turned to the control panel and pressed some buttons.

Suddenly the cabin resonated with a screechy noise like that of a hundred bricks being rubbed together, hard.

Ava clamped her hands over her ears. “Ouch! That's loud. What is that?”

Xark'ion turned down the volume. “This craft has a sound sensor. I directed it towards the ruin. That noise is what I remember from fighting the Solp. It's the sound they make.”

Ava frowned. It was nothing like any speech she'd ever heard from any alien. “That's the way they talk? This might be harder than I thought.”

She checked the translator. A small LED light was flashing in orange, the way it did when it was adapting to a new language, but couldn't yet translate it. “But it does seem to be working.”

She looked out the hatch opening again. The sky was a dirty yellow, as if stained with some unhealthy smoke. Yeah, the less time she spent out there, the better. Despite the sound from the speakers in the shuttle, she couldn't see any trace of the Solp.

She glanced over at Xark'ion, who was leaning casually into the back of his seat. He was so tall and wide he seemed to fill up the whole shuttle. The sickly light from the planet outside made his fire tattoo stand out more, and it looked so vivid she longed to touch it and trace it with her finger.

He noticed her staring and inclined his head quizzically.

“Did you have tough Trials?” she asked.

“Everyone does. That's the point of them, diplomat.”

“How many survived?”

“Two.”

“Of how many?” She already knew the answer, but for some reason she wanted to hear it from him, too. She liked the way his deep voice sounded in her ears, and sometimes it would set her chest vibrating with its bass tone. What was that deepest voice called in choir music? Basso profundo, wasn't it? But Xark'ion's voice had a power to it that she hadn't heard from any choir.

“Of nine.”

She knew this could be a sensitive topic for many Acerex warriors, but it was also of extreme importance to them. And if they didn't want to be asked about it, maybe they shouldn't carry those huge tattoos as mementos. Or maybe they could at least cover them up.

“Did the others burn?”

“Some burned. Some were taken by firebirds. Some taken by hergs. Some died from just accumulating too many injuries.”

She let her eyes wander over his bare torso with its immense muscles and many scars. “Were you injured?”