I frowned through the faceplate of my power armor at the man I had captured. He was just looking back at me, not making any attempt to break free- despite the collection of weapons lashed to his pack. He was dressed in furs and hides, and seemed not overly bothered by the lethal cold he was wandering around in. He had just crawled through my storm-wall the way one might scramble through the gap under a chain-link fence. “‘Bas, let him see my face. Maybe if he sees I’m not so much different than him, he can carry a message back to his people so I don’t have to kill anyone else.” The AI didn’t say anything, but a moment later, the eyes of the warrior focused directly onto mine. If I hadn’t been holding him half a meter off of the ground by the back of his furs, I might have taken a step back away from him when our eyes met. They were not the eyes of a human. Though he looked like a human- two eyes, two arms, two legs, generally symmetrical features- the eyes were something else. His eyes were canted, with an even more prominent epicanthic fold than someone of old Asian ancestry. I remembered a theory I had read, that those eyes had evolved to protect the vision of people living in cold, windy climates. It would certainly make sense here, though I still didn't understand how life could exist at negative one-hundred fifty Celsius degrees. His eyes had no whites- or at least his sclera wasn't white. Rather, they reminded me of the eyes of a polar bear, orbs of deep glacial blue framed in wild, feral brown. The polar bear impression was made even more striking by the fact that his skin and hair were both an utterly colorless white. He stared into my eyes with a ferocious intensity that was both worrying and intriguing. I felt something like electricity crackling back inside my brain, traveling down my spine-

"Try speaking to him." Barbas' voice was neutral. He wasn't paying attention to the alien hunter's eyes; he was reading all kinds of data from the suit, and from the enhanced sensors that we had mounted up high on the Terraforming Engine tower behind me. Something about the man made him nervous.

“He won’t be able to understand me,” I said, for the first time feeling somewhat foolish about speaking out loud to what was essentially my imaginary friend. For a moment I was glad that the alien couldn’t understand me. He probably thought I was talking to him.

"I know," Barbas replied, his tone clinical, emotionless. How could he be so… uninterested? We were talking about First Contact here! Well, technically, shooting the strange, ice-clad woman a few days ago had been First Contact, but still. Oblivious to my thoughts, or at least pretending to be, Barbas continued. “Even though he can’t understand you, he just reacted to the sound of your voice. If you keep talking, you can keep him reacting, and I can get more detailed information from the electromagnetic spectrum scans I’m running on his brain right now.”

"You can read his mind?" I had blurted the question before I realized how ridiculous that sounded. Barbas could read my mind, or at least I couldn’t come up with a compelling argument to prove that he couldn’t. Though he was riding on tech lacing the inside of my skull, he was essentially just reading the "computer language" of electrical impulses flickering across my gray matter. Chances were, even if he couldn't read the alien's actual thoughts, he could get the gist of what the warrior was thinking, the broad strokes of the picture he painted. I was pretty sure that Barbas was reading my thoughts because he deemed it unnecessary to answer my question. How else would he be able to talk to you- and more- in your dreams, stupid? I shook my head. This wasn’t the time. I needed to focus.

Gently, I set the warrior down onto his feet, and then took a step back away from him. If he went for a weapon, he would die, very quickly. Barbas and I had not been idle. The tower now sported a gauss rifle emplacement, a scaled-up version of the technology that made my revolver work. Regardless of the surrounding weather conditions, that gun could fire a tiny steel ball several times the speed of sound through anything inside my storm wall. It wouldn’t leave much more than a smear of a human- or a humanoid- skull behind it.

I raised my hands, palm out toward the warrior, hoping that the gesture meant the same thing to him that it did to me. Peace, I thought at him, willing my intention to reach him, language barrier or not. I hadn’t had the time to try to speak to the ice-woman earlier, killing her had been completely necessary. This- those eyes- this would be different. It wouldn’t be a tragedy. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The alien man seemed unconcerned by the language barrier, utterly unsurprised that I spoke a language he had never heard before. He mimicked my gesture, holding both hands out in front of him first and then slowly, carefully, slipped his pack off of his shoulders and lay it down on the ice. He took a step away from his weapons, towards me, and though I tried not to, I took an involuntary step backward. He cocked his head to the side, seeming confused by this. Shit. I can’t fuck this up. I pointed to myself with the broad metal thumb of my armored gauntlet. “My name is Joanna,” I said, slowly and with exaggerated diction.

He pointed at me with his index finger- I noticed that his hide gloves did not cover his fingertips, and black, glossy claws extended from each finger where his fingernails should have been. “Mie-nay-miss Joo-ah-nah,” he repeated, his mouth making clumsy piecemeal of the unfamiliar sounds.

I shook my head and then pointed to myself again. "Me," I said. "Joanna." I pointed at him and said, "You…" then paused. He didn't say anything this time, he simply cocked his head slightly to the side again, the gesture reminding me uncomfortably of the curious movements made by a feral dog I had seen when I was a little girl. It could have been pure curiosity, or it could have been him wondering if I was good to eat. I repeated the little sequence, pointing at myself, and saying, "Me, Joanna," then pointing at him and saying, "You…" and pausing. Pattern recognition. It was one of the basic foundations of human cognition, our greatest strength, and our most exploitable weakness. If he recognized this one, maybe…

The warrior straightened his neck slowly, and then pointed one dark claw at me, pointing directly at my eyes. I blinked. He had figured out that the face he saw behind the quartz faceplate was me, and that the metal body was just a suit. Interesting. His lips moved, this time producing a sound that was utterly unlike my mother tongue of Pan-American Standard. “Joo-ah-nah atzvaka,” he said, his clumsy pronunciation of my name contrasting sharply with the harsher, more guttural sound of his language. He pointed his thumb at himself. “Volistad mitzerkim.” He waited a moment, then repeated the sequence, the same way I had repeated mine to him.

I grinned, suddenly excited. This was working! I tried to make the same sounds he had made, sure that my attempt at his speech sounded just as inelegant as his attempt at mine. I pointed at myself. “Joanna mitt-zeer-kim.” I pointed at him, still smiling. “Voh-list-tad at-vak-kah.” I was sure that I had put the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and I hoped that I hadn't just issued a deadly insult or something. I noticed then that he had taken a few quick steps back from me, his eyes narrowed slightly, and his chin tucked low, presenting me with his broad brow. Shit, what had I just done? Did I just threaten him or something?

Barbas muttered diffidently in my ear. “Stop smiling.”

“What?” I hissed back. “I’m trying to be friendly.”

“You didn’t see when he was talking?” Barbas sounded amused. “He’s a carnivore. What does it mean when you bare your teeth at a wild dog?”

I didn't miss the connotation in his choice of words, but I chose to ignore it for the moment. "Oh. Shit." I quickly wiped any lingering traces of the smile from my face, and then held my hands palm-out to the warrior. Volistad watched me for a moment warily, and then, with no warning, he barked out a short, rattling, coughing sound. It sounded unsettlingly like the beginnings of Mesoamerican jaguar's roar. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. "God," I commented to no one in particular. "Am I as terrifying to him as he and his people are to me?"

Barbas snorted. “In the armor? Probably.”

Regaining control of his evident mirth, Volistad took a step towards me, and pointed at me, reversing the pattern as I had with his language. "Yoo Joh-ah-nah." I suppressed my smile as I realized he had made the correct ‘oh' sound at the beginning of my name this time. He pointed his thumb back at himself and said, "Mee, Volistad." Then, in a moment of surprising intuition, he smiled, as I had, and I saw what Barbas meant. Volistad's mouth was that of a carnivore's. His face looked human, but as I looked more closely, I realized that there were some subtle differences. The muscles around his neck were thicker, and his jaws were prominent and wide in a manner that seemed more suited for biting than an ordinary human mouth did. Most obvious were the fangs that curled up from the row of sharp, dangerous looking teeth, literal canine teeth. Or, I supposed, taking in the other polar-bear seeming traits of the alien, ursine teeth. Nonetheless, he smiled, mimicking me, and then, when he saw that I understood, he closed his mouth quickly and narrowed his eyes again, this time in an expression utterly different than the one he had made when I had startled him. It was the same kind of expression that a cat made when you scratched him behind the ears. Caught completely off guard, I laughed, and Volistad joined me, making his own, half-growling guffaws.

We just stood there, laughing for a good five minutes, tickled by how different we were, and at the same time, just as amused by how much we were alike. When we finally stopped laughing, I felt tears on my face. This was amazing This was the way First Contact was supposed to go. I was really doing it! I was communicating with an alien! It was funny, since the prospect of meeting extraterrestrial life had deemed so unlikely as to merit a single hour of instruction during the entirety of my training as a Former. "Barbas," I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. "I want you to record everything he says. You're going to analyze it all, and when I dream, you're going to help me learn. I want to speak that language, and I want to speak it soon. If we do this right, I won't have to shoot anyone else."

Barbas’ whispered, his tone more mechanical than human now, as if the analytical processes he was running behind the scenes was beginning to eat up the computing power he usually reserved for his personality. “Joanna, you’re probably going to have to kill again, regardless.”

“What? Why?”

"Because I doubt the first one, the one who brought the storm with her, was alone." A little more humanity crept back into his voice, and his tone changed, sounding… apologetic. "You need to be careful with this… Volistad. You're right; he's probably friendly. But he might also have been sent by the same power that sent the woman I killed. When the hammer fails, you try the knife in the dark." Despite the temperature control in my suit, I felt a chill pass through my body. Was Barbas right? Could this hunter be here to hunt… me? Could those amused eyes be hiding malice? He had put down his weapons, but what did that mean really? I would sleep eventually, and when I did…

“I’ll be careful, ‘Bas. And besides, I have you watching over me. I know you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” I tried to picture the image of myself smiling, tried to send him reassurance through my thoughts.

My efforts seemed to work, because I could hear the smile in the AI's voice as he said, "Of course I will, Jo. I would never let anything bad happen to you. And you know I can never leave you." He paused for a moment and then continued, his tone businesslike. "If you want to learn this language, you're going to have to find a way to get him talking, and I'm going to be unable to speak to you for a while. There's a lot of for me to do to keep working on the tower, and between those tasks and analyzing an alien language, I'm going to be very busy. You've got this. I'll be here if you need me. Otherwise, I'll talk to you tonight."

Our missions clear, we got to work.