CHAPTER 54
ANGELIQUE
NEGOTIATION
Angelique studied the body language of Nukchuk. It was hard for her to get a reading on the alien.
All the learnings that Icarus had shared about this alien world were about the Penquins. There was nothing tangible she would be able to take from it. The Atua inhabited the Penquin bodies and controlled them from the inside. Angelique had no idea how much of their personality leaked through. She didn’t even know if the Penquin fear responses were the same when the Atua was inside of them.
Even though Rose stepped forward, Nukchuk didn’t acknowledge her with a look. The alien kept its eyes on Angelique, Peter, and Atlas—the original explorers whom these aliens knew quite well.
“My name is Rose. I’m the designated speaker in this group. We’ve come here to negotiate a peace treaty between our two species.”
Nukchuk continued not making eye contact with Rose. The alien continued to scan the faces of the rest of the group. Angelique wondered whether this was a ploy to put their designated negotiator on the back foot or whether Nukchuk was looking for something.
“Peace,” Nukchuk said, looking at Atlas as it spoke. “You came all the way here to ask for something we already have?”
The lack of eye contact was working. Rose began losing her veneer of confidence. She glanced at Peter before she spoke. “We would like assurances that you will not attack us again.”
Angelique watched as the Atua made a clicking sound when it noticed Rose’s eyes deferring to Peter. She assumed it was a sign he’d found what he was after. He wanted to know if she was the real leader of the group.
“What about that threat you broadcast to our world?” Nukchuk was staring daggers at Peter as it spoke.
“That was simply to show that we mean business,” Rose replied, noticing the Atua’s disrespect and trying to capture the alien’s eye contact.
Angelique realized the Atua had successfully changed the dynamic of the negotiation. Rose was now trying to gain approval from Nukchuk—she wanted the alien to look at her.
Nukchuk did not respond. It kept looking around the group, studying everyone.
Some of their members averted their eyes when Nukchuk looked at them. Not Angelique, though. Her eyes bore daggers into the alien. Her eyes said, “You should not have messed with us.”
Nukchuk maintained eye contact with Angelique for a good long while. Then suddenly it turned around.
“I’m authorized to give you nothing and to tell you to leave,” Nukchuk said, almost spitting the words out. “What are you hoping to achieve? Threaten us and hope we capitulate? We won’t accept a dirty bug in our system doing that. If you leave now, we can accept this transgression. Let bygones be … forgiven but not forgotten.”
“If you don’t agree to a peace treaty with us, I will utterly destroy your planet.” Rose spoke with force, as if she meant every word. “You’ve got to understand that all we want is peace. If you can’t agree to that, then we will gain it by ensuring you’re not around any longer.”
“You don’t know much about our true history, do you?” Nukchuk asked, finally making eye contact with Rose. “Even if I wanted to negotiate, I’m not in a position of power.” The alien made eye contact with the six of them in the group that had been captured by them the last time the two species had met. “You lost your opportunity to talk when you escaped. Right now, my people are arguing over whether to blow you up. Destroy every one of your ships. I suggest you leave now before they decide it’s not worth having you in our system.”
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“I don’t believe you can hurt us,” Peter said. “Otherwise, I think you would have already.”
Nukchuk turned around to face the other way, as if to say it was done with the conversation. “Go now or we will destroy your ships.”
“No,” Peter replied forcefully. “Bring someone here who is in a position of power, someone who will negotiate with us, or we will destroy your planet.”
“Your weapons can’t hurt us; we have a defense network capable of deflecting them. Leave now or we will destroy you. Then we will go on a rampage and destroy every one of your planets.” The alien looked at Angelique. “Even the hidden ones you think we don’t know about.
“Let me tell you a story about our species. We don’t age. We don’t die. And more recently we have struggled to reproduce. We’ve pieced together much of what Icarus learned in his time here and don’t believe any of those facts should be new to you.” Nukchuk looked at the faces of everyone, hoping to gain a hint of knowledge about what Icarus had told them. When it didn’t gain anything from everyone’s eyes, the alien continued: “We didn’t become intelligent first. What you call the Penquins did. We, however, evolved to take knowledge from them. And as they got smarter, we got smarter, too. “As you know, the Penquin require us in order to breed.”
The alien looked down at its body as if it was a suit it was wearing. “Over time, we selected for smarter and smarter Penquins, and in turn, our knowledge grew exponentially faster. As they grew in intelligence, we grew faster.”
Angelique was fascinated by everything Nukchuk was saying. It built on a lot of the things that Icarus had said. She couldn’t help but wonder why this alien was sharing so much information.
“We used to use the Penquins as breeding grounds. But to us, breeding also means dying. Which, as we got smarter, we no longer wanted to do. One unintentional consequence of not selecting Penquins as places to breed is that both of us evolved that capability away.” Nukchuk stopped talking for a moment, as if it was receiving a message from somewhere else. It looked like it had just shared too much information and was being told to change the subject. “I tell you all this to say our two species already have an end date. Every few thousand years, one of us dies, and that becomes one fewer of us that is replaced. If you choose to attack us, then you’re simply bringing forward our end date. We are not giving you anything; that would be beneath us.”
Angelique studied the body language of Nukchuk. She was trying to understand whether it had just admitted that it had been lying before. If she was reading the subtext properly, this Atua had just said that they couldn’t actually stop them from attacking. The message was clear, however; the Atua would rather die than to have a negotiation with humans as equals. Their culture wouldn’t let them do that.
“What have you got to lose in agreeing to peace?” Angelique asked, not believing that the Atua was too stubborn to come to an agreement.
“Would you rather we lie to you? The one you call PBD was happy to partake in that strategy, but it didn’t work out well for him. Your culture is fractured. Humans are scattered around the universe. Even if we come to an arrangement with you, there could be others who come back and disagree, ask for updated terms. We don’t want terms. We want you to leave.”
Everyone looked shell-shocked. This negotiation wasn’t going the way it was meant to. Angelique couldn’t quite figure out whether this had always been the plan. On some level, she’d assumed that they had a deep understanding of human behavior, so manipulating humans was going to be easy. But still, she didn’t think it would be that easy. Based on what the Nukchuk had just said, Angelique was inclined to leave. But from what she knew of the Atua, she suspected this was all a carefully planned ruse to get rid of them.
“You’re trying to hack into our systems,” Ship interrupted everyone and pointed to the docking station they’d arrived on. “I’ve just had a reading we’re now infected with billions of nanobots currently trying to make their way into our systems.”
“You better leave before they get in. I know you as a culture love knowledge. Think of that knowledge I just shared as our form of trade. Now leave and maybe in the future we can trade again.”
“You’re not getting in that easily,” Ship said. “Pick up the phone on the dial-up router.”
A fraction of a second later, the rockets began to rise off the ground, taking all the hapticgraphic projections of everyone with them. Then Ship and Atlas disappeared.
The secret message Ship had just said aloud was for everyone to destroy the entangled particles connecting everyone’s spacecraft to this particular docking station. Angelique guessed they were on the verge of being compromised.