Free Ancient Birthright by Kendrick E. Knight Page B

found a butt load of pictures of his son in compromising situations with girls in his class. They tried to cover it up, but the housekeeper told her husband, and now it’s all over town. The kid’s reputation is shit, not to mention the parents of the girls in the pictures. I find any of that stuff on your system, and you’ve had it, kid. I’ll take that computer away so fast the bits will fall off the hard drive.”
    “I don’t go on dates, Dad. All my files are communications with space aliens. I just wanted to make sure no one messed with my files.”
    “You smart mouthing me, Bel?”
    Beldon stared at the floor not answering his father.
    “Ask him why he locks his door every night,” Sandy called from her bedroom doorway.
    “You lock your door?”
    “It’s the only way I can get my homework done. If I don’t, someone is always interrupting me.”
    “No more locked doors. That goes for all you kids. I find a locked door, and the lock is gone. Do I make myself clear?”
    “Yes Dad, no more locked doors,” mumbled Bel.
    Sandy is going to go into meltdown. She locks her door more than I do. Every night when she calls Brad for their phone sex session, she locks it for hours. That backfired on you didn’t it, Sandy? Now I’m going to have to get a memory stick and move everything to it.

Chapter-10
    Universe Explorer : Transjump plus 0 year, 210 days:
     
    Saigg was ecstatic with the progress he’d made on decoding the secrets of one of Treterra’s current written languages. Beldon called the language “English”. The exchanges with Beldon resulted in Saigg understanding a small dictionary of item names. He now knew how to change the binary data of many of the received files into the alphabet used by Beldon and his kind. The key was something called ASCII code.
    Team Leader Domm Feuua walked through the work area and announced an all team meeting would start in thirty truebeats. Saigg knew his efforts would be one of the primary topics, and the general expectation was that Team Leader Feuua would use it to get rid of him.
    Saigg arrived early and took a seat about halfway down the wall. The seats along the wall were reserved for low ranking support staff. They were rather hard and uncomfortable. The room filled quickly after Team Leader Feuua’s friends started the rumor of Saigg’s pending dismissal.
    The last soul to arrive was Team Leader Feuua. He took his position at the head of the table and sat looking expectantly at the door. Several moments passed before a late arrival walked in and took the only empty chair in the room, the one next to Feuua. Command Prime Jamz Garuu took the chair and turned to face the assembled team.
    “I’ve asked Command Prime Garuu to join us today so he can get a firsthand report on our efforts. Let’s begin. Section Lead Gambii, your report.”
    Section lead after section lead gave their reports. The reports were obvious vocal sketches of the written reports that Saigg had complained about a thirty-cycle ago.
    “Saigg Garuu, do you have a comment to make on the reports just given?” Feuua asked.
    Saigg stood. “Nothing additional to the observations I made a thirty-cycle ago.”
    A smile creased Domm Feuua’s face. “Please tell us what those observations were.”
    “I observed that the reports were exact copies of the ones from the two previous thirty-cycles. They held the same information and the same grammatical and syntactical errors I had corrected the previous thirty-cycle.”
    “What was the outcome of your learned observation?” Team Leader Feuua said as he squirmed and his facial colors bloomed with the bright-green of satisfaction and expectation waiting for Saigg to report on his work.
    “You assigned me the task of learning what I could from a pulsed signal beamed from within the star system we are approaching, an unknown signal that was essentially a series of pulses of unvarying duration, frequency or amplitude.”
    “What claim had you made