and formal looking offering of the head, Oakley had no choice but to reach out and take skull from me, holding it at arm's length to keep the dangling neck bits from leaking onto his polished boots. I snapped to attention and Oakley smiled weakly for the whirring cameras, then immediately motioned for one of the BlackShirts to take the skull away.
"First Lieutenant Forrest, I accept this trophy and commend your actions," he boomed to the cameras more than me as he handed the bloody mess off. "You and your Infinity Squad embody all that humans are trying to accomplish on this planet."
Still smiling widely, he leaned in close to my ear and growled, "Next time you WILL be dropped off and retrieved by helicopter so that your squad does not look like a band of goddamned homeless butchers when you return! And clean up the fucking skulls before you present them! Laugh and salute me you sorry excuse for an officer."
I broke into deep belly chuckles and then snapped to, smiling at Oakley like he was my hero. "Yes sir! You are an inspiration, sir!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," he said, smiling at me like a wolf. "I look forward to the next five skulls you will get to me by the end of the week. Dismissed." He saluted, then turned stiffly away.
He tried to direct the crowd away from the squad and most followed, until the two Benefactor robots started rolling towards us. And then every camera was jostling for position, eager to capture what the aliens who had given humans access to the stars might say to us.
Humans had never seen a Benefactor in the flesh, but had been assured that they looked somewhat like their tele-operated encounter bots, tall bipeds with spindly, fragile limbs and a thin, oval head. They also assured us that they were not the same tall, spindly biped aliens that humans had reported being abducted by for decades.
The first Benefactor bot rolled to a stop right in front of me, its camera eyes panning over the squad, the gate, the spider skull, my sidearm, and finally my face. It looked right at my eyes, paused like it was going to say something, then just nodded and started rolling away.
The second bot was looking closely over each member of my exhausted squad, then turned its emotionless face to me as well. "It was a difficult mission?" it said in its slow, perfectly unaccented English.
I gulped, looking at Oakley and the other frozen diplomats who were as shocked as I. A First Lieutenant should not be talking to a representative of the species that controlled the wormgates. One wrong word, one gesture taken a bad way, we'd be trapped here forever, cut off from Earth, hundreds of people slowly starving. What did it want to hear? The truth? The official line? A gung-ho sound bite?
Now the silence was getting awkward. The bot was still looking at me, perfectly still, waiting. But there were huge implications here, political, economic... I tried to remember everything I had ever heard or read about the Benefactors, every nuance of their culture, real or theorized.
"Answer him," Ann-Marie hissed into her mike, the voice barely registering in my implants.
The bot stood motionless, head tilted, still waiting for my answer.
"Yep."
Fuck. Did I just say 'yep' to the most powerful aliens in the uni-
"You will have to tell us more about it sometime."
Double fuck. The inflection could have been annoyance. Or sarcasm. Or mirth. There was no way to tell. You don't really miss emoticons until you're trying to communicate with the robotically operated representative of an alien race you've never seen with your life hanging in the balance.
I slowly, very slowly, pulled my completely fake, full of lies, folded up mission report from my back pocket and extended one copy towards him. Metal fingers accepted the papers from my hand, brought them up to its camera face and flipped through them faster than my eye could follow, like an industrial machine. Then he handed them back to me as slowly as I had to him.
"Thank you," it
"First Lieutenant Forrest, I accept this trophy and commend your actions," he boomed to the cameras more than me as he handed the bloody mess off. "You and your Infinity Squad embody all that humans are trying to accomplish on this planet."
Still smiling widely, he leaned in close to my ear and growled, "Next time you WILL be dropped off and retrieved by helicopter so that your squad does not look like a band of goddamned homeless butchers when you return! And clean up the fucking skulls before you present them! Laugh and salute me you sorry excuse for an officer."
I broke into deep belly chuckles and then snapped to, smiling at Oakley like he was my hero. "Yes sir! You are an inspiration, sir!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," he said, smiling at me like a wolf. "I look forward to the next five skulls you will get to me by the end of the week. Dismissed." He saluted, then turned stiffly away.
He tried to direct the crowd away from the squad and most followed, until the two Benefactor robots started rolling towards us. And then every camera was jostling for position, eager to capture what the aliens who had given humans access to the stars might say to us.
Humans had never seen a Benefactor in the flesh, but had been assured that they looked somewhat like their tele-operated encounter bots, tall bipeds with spindly, fragile limbs and a thin, oval head. They also assured us that they were not the same tall, spindly biped aliens that humans had reported being abducted by for decades.
The first Benefactor bot rolled to a stop right in front of me, its camera eyes panning over the squad, the gate, the spider skull, my sidearm, and finally my face. It looked right at my eyes, paused like it was going to say something, then just nodded and started rolling away.
The second bot was looking closely over each member of my exhausted squad, then turned its emotionless face to me as well. "It was a difficult mission?" it said in its slow, perfectly unaccented English.
I gulped, looking at Oakley and the other frozen diplomats who were as shocked as I. A First Lieutenant should not be talking to a representative of the species that controlled the wormgates. One wrong word, one gesture taken a bad way, we'd be trapped here forever, cut off from Earth, hundreds of people slowly starving. What did it want to hear? The truth? The official line? A gung-ho sound bite?
Now the silence was getting awkward. The bot was still looking at me, perfectly still, waiting. But there were huge implications here, political, economic... I tried to remember everything I had ever heard or read about the Benefactors, every nuance of their culture, real or theorized.
"Answer him," Ann-Marie hissed into her mike, the voice barely registering in my implants.
The bot stood motionless, head tilted, still waiting for my answer.
"Yep."
Fuck. Did I just say 'yep' to the most powerful aliens in the uni-
"You will have to tell us more about it sometime."
Double fuck. The inflection could have been annoyance. Or sarcasm. Or mirth. There was no way to tell. You don't really miss emoticons until you're trying to communicate with the robotically operated representative of an alien race you've never seen with your life hanging in the balance.
I slowly, very slowly, pulled my completely fake, full of lies, folded up mission report from my back pocket and extended one copy towards him. Metal fingers accepted the papers from my hand, brought them up to its camera face and flipped through them faster than my eye could follow, like an industrial machine. Then he handed them back to me as slowly as I had to him.
"Thank you," it
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