The Guards were efficient. It wasn’t ten minutes before the Lancer’s transport was lifting off, this time with everyone in the main cabin. Lancer Tal stood at the front, holding on to an overhead grip while explaining the situation to both her Guards and, via the translator, to Ekatya’s own crew. Baldassar then stepped up next to her with specific orders for Candini, Kameha, and Xi.
“Dr. Rivers will be accompanying us to Blacksun Base to complete the translation chain,” he concluded. “Communications will be our weak link, so be certain of your orders before you act.”
As he took his seat in the row behind Ekatya, she leaned across the aisle and spoke quietly to Candini. “Above all, do not take the kill shot. Leave it to the Alseans, even if they’re getting blown out of the sky.”
“Are you serious?”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
Lhyn, who had discreetly chosen a place on the other side of Candini, added, “They’re an honor-driven culture, and there’s no honor in letting us do all the work.”
“Or take all the glory,” Ekatya said.
“What if I let their pilot do it? The one coming with me?”
Ekatya shook her head. “It can’t be our weapon or our fighter. It has to be them.”
“Don’t they know what they’re up against?” Candini’s voice had gotten too loud, and she cast a glance around before adding in a lower tone, “Captain, it’ll be like taking a slingshot to a gun fight!”
“I know, but it’s not our call. We have to respect their choice. Remember, we’re not even supposed to be here.”
“Neither is that ground pounder,” Candini pointed out.
Ekatya shared her feelings, but enough was enough. “Which part of ‘that’s an order’ did you not understand, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, Captain.” She slumped against her seat. “Well, Lhyn, you’re about to get a chance to study Alsean funeral practices.”
“Stop it,” Lhyn said. “If Captain Serrado couldn’t convince them to let us take care of it, nobody could. Be grateful they’re allowing us this much. You’re going to save lives.”
“Not enough of them,” Candini grumbled.
Ekatya thought about the dead bodies strewn all around that burning village. No, they hadn’t saved enough of them. But the Alseans deserved their vengeance.
The ride to her ship was shorter than she remembered from the morning, and the military transports that appeared on either side of their larger craft were certainly different.
“Escorts,” said Lancer Tal when she asked. “We’ve just crossed into controlled airspace. There’s a cordon on the ground as well.”
The windows were cut low enough that if she leaned over the empty seat next to her, she could see it: a seemingly endless line of vehicles and uniformed warriors, blocking fields and the few roads as far as her sight reached. On each of the roads, long lines of what she’d bet were civilian vehicles snaked off into the distance, and non-uniformed Alseans faced the warriors in large clusters.
She straightened and kept her face expressionless, but the Alseans were probably sensing her mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was good to know that her ship was being kept safe from unauthorized access. On the other, those people were much too close.
When Lancer Tal gave her a quizzical glance, she swallowed the lie that came too easily, remembering just in time that she couldn’t lie to this woman without being caught. Fortunately, her instincts were right: a simple head shake was enough to turn the Lancer away. The Alseans valued emotional privacy too much to press on when they knew it wasn’t wanted.
Before she was quite ready for it, she was once again looking through the transparent ceiling at her broken ship. Somehow it seemed shabbier now, a sad sight that was either her overactive imagination or the different angle of light.
The military escorts peeled away, and the Lancer’s pilot set them down on the port side of the Caphenon, near the bow. Candini, Kameha, and Xi were out the door shortly afterward, heading for the bow and the escape ladder. They’d need to climb back to the top of the skirt, run a hundred and fifty meters up it to get above the port-side fighter bay, then open an airlock and climb through brace shafts down to the bay.
All three of them were equipped with Alsean wristcoms now, as was Ekatya, and she felt much better with communication restored. She was also grateful to the four Guards who had unhesitatingly taken off their own wristcoms and handed them over at the Lancer’s request. The thin strip of transparent, flexible material had sealed itself around her wrist as if it were made for her, and she marked another point to the advanced level of Alsean technology.
As if called up by her thought, Lancer Tal returned from the front of the transport, where she had vanished to take a call. Carefully stepping over Ekatya’s encased leg, which stuck out into the access area, she leaned against the bulkhead and said something in Alsean.
Ekatya looked at Lhyn, who got up and stood next to the Lancer. “She said that since we’re waiting, perhaps you can answer one of the questions she and Colonel Micah have been puzzling over.”
“If I can,” Ekatya said.
Lhyn spoke, listened to the Lancer’s response, and said, “She wants to know about our hullskin. What it’s made of, how it forms a ladder, and how the ladder knows which way is down when there’s no down in space.”
“I thought she said one question.”
“Do you want me to translate that?”
“Go ahead.”
If there was one thing Ekatya had learned from a decade of diplomatic experience, it was that humor was the easiest bridge between cultures, so long as the humor was understood. And the Lancer clearly understood. She smiled as she listened, and her answer made Lhyn smile in turn.
“Damn it, I need a pad. I’m never going to remember things like that without being able to record them. She said—hang on, let me get this exactly—‘That’s the danger of letting a holcat get her nose under your hand. Before you know it, you’re petting the cat.’”
Ekatya was struck with the incongruity of the mental image, unable to imagine anyone petting the controlled woman in front of her.
“Starting with the last,” she said, “it doesn’t normally know direction. We program that in when we activate the ladder. There’s a control panel that allows us to select the end point, and it’s not limited to up and down. We can make the ladder diagonal or straight across, too. It’s much more convenient for hull walks than the old magnetic boots they used to use.”
“Not to mention that magnetic boots wouldn’t work on modern hull material,” Baldassar interjected.
“I didn’t know you programmed the ladder,” Lhyn said. “Guess it’s a good thing I never had to do a hull walk.”
“We usually program it,” Ekatya said. “But if an airlock is opened without any programming, and the sensors can detect a gravity field, then the ladder will automatically deploy toward that field.”
“Okay, stop. I need to explain this.”
They waited through Lhyn’s translation and its very short answer.
“And what exactly is the modern hull material? I’m curious about that, too. Funny, I’ve spent my whole life studying other cultures, and I don’t even know the basics about the ships I travel in.”
Ekatya nearly made a joke about how she should pay more attention in the captain’s bedroom, but remembered Baldassar’s presence in time. Turning as much as she could with her leg sticking out, she caught his eye and asked, “How do we make this as nontechnical as possible?”
He thought about it. “It’s a semi-organic, cybernetic, malleable skin designed primarily for radiation resistance. Its inherent memory of physical states was a secondary advantage that Fleet didn’t expect, but exploited when it was discovered.”
Lhyn rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure, that wasn’t technical at all.”
Ekatya saw the Lancer’s understanding as she listened. The Alseans might not have faster-than-light tech, but they were not scientifically illiterate by any means. If a warrior and political leader could easily understand the concept Lhyn had just repeated, what level were their scholars at? How far were they from developing FTL tech, anyway?
It occurred to her that the hundred-stellar-year wait for first contact that had originally been assessed was an old calculation. Lhyn hadn’t had a chance to file her report; the assessment didn’t take her findings into account. Maybe the Alseans weren’t that far off Protectorate contact, in which case the price she’d pay for breaking the Non-Interference Act wouldn’t be as high. Of course, there was the distinct possibility that she was indulging in wishful thinking.
“Now she wants to know how it resists radiation,” Lhyn said. “And I wish you could get Alsean language chips installed in your nodes, because we’ve probably hit the wall of what I’m capable of translating. At this point you need technical literacy. The translator database has that; my brain doesn’t.”
“I was thinking about that earlier,” Ekatya said. “Given the advanced level of Alsean medtech, is there any reason why their healers couldn’t do the installation? You know how to program them, right?”
“Of course. I programmed them for my entire staff.”
“Then maybe we should ask Commander Kameha and Trooper Xi to pick up some blank chips and a burner while they’re inside.”
“Better get a full medkit while they’re at it,” Baldassar said. “If I remember correctly, there are some special drivers they’d need to open our nodes.”
“Are you two seriously thinking about letting Alsean healers crack open your nodes?”
Ekatya rapped her knuckles on the leg case. “If I can walk when this thing comes off, then yes.”
“I saw what they did with our injured crew,” Baldassar added. “Torado is already on his feet, and Mauji Mauji and Hmongyon would both still be in critical if they were in a Protectorate medbay. We should be signing a treaty with these people for their medtech.”
“I’m already on it.” Ekatya enjoyed his surprise. “What, you think I can’t be a captain from a hospital bed?”
He raised his hands. “I never said anything of the sort.”
“Okay, stop for a minute and let me tell the Lancer what we’re talking about.”
Lhyn had just begun her explanation when a small transport appeared overhead, made a tight turn, and settled to the ground.
“That must be our pilot,” Baldassar said.
Lancer Tal said something to Lhyn and then strode down the transport ramp, Colonel Micah at her side. While they spoke with the new arrival, Ekatya contacted Kameha on her wristcom. “Chief, where are you?”
“We just got in. The bay looks to be in surprisingly good shape. All of the landing clamps held and the fighters don’t even look jostled. Xi and Candini are heading over to prep one right now. But there’s something very odd about the condition of our hullskin.”
“Good news about the fighter bay. What’s wrong with our hullskin besides the obvious?”
“It’s severely damaged, everywhere. Candini said the escape ladder wasn’t normal last night, but at least there weren’t any missing rungs.”
“No, they were all there.” She would definitely have noticed if she’d had to hop a distance of two rungs with a broken leg. “But there were bits and pieces missing along the entire ladder.”
“It’s more than that now. Some of the rungs are gone, some cracked under our feet, and occasionally the side rails cracked, too. When we were walking up the skirt, hullskin pieces were coming off on our boots. It’s losing cohesion. And the entire hullskin, as far as we could see, looks like…well, it looks like something’s been eating it.”
She gazed up at her ship, realizing now that its shabbiness wasn’t her imagination. “You don’t think that could have been caused by recent events?”
“I’ve seen a lot of weapons damage in my day, and this isn’t it. And the only way it could be crash damage is if Lieutenant Candini rolled the Caphenon on the landing. I think we’d all remember if that happened. There’s something going on here that I don’t understand.”
“All right. Take a sample and analyze it after you’ve safely launched Lieutenant Candini. Tell her that her copilot just arrived, so we’re ready to go as soon as she gets out here. Oh, and add a full medkit, a chip burner, and three chips to your list of things to collect. We need to deal with the language issue.”
“You’re going to have Alsean healers install chips?”
Was everyone going to ask that? “Yes, I think so.”
“Then may I request one for myself and Xi as well? We would love to be able to talk to these people.”
“Are you certain? We won’t be here for more than a few days.”
“It’s worth the headache to be able to communicate.”
Ekatya looked at Baldassar. “Maybe we should offer it for everyone. I didn’t think the crew would want to go through the procedure for just a few days of benefit, but perhaps I’ve underestimated their curiosity levels.”
He nodded. “I’d say bring back fifteen chips. Enough for everyone, plus spares. Let them choose.”
Kameha was happy to receive the new orders, and Ekatya closed the channel just as Lancer Tal returned with Colonel Micah and the new pilot, who was introduced as Lead Guard Tesseron. He was a slender young Alsean with dark skin and a bright smile, which he directed at everyone. He had quite a few questions about the ship he’d be flying in, since his pre-mission briefing had been rather lacking in details. Lhyn was kept busy translating in both directions, and Ekatya realized too late that she should have kept the translator here instead of sending it up with Candini. She hadn’t known that the Alsean copilot would be here so quickly.
The ease Lhyn displayed with this musical language was marvelous. Ekatya could hardly wait to get an Alsean chip for herself; without it she couldn’t even discern the word breaks. But Lhyn flowed along, seemingly as comfortable as a native, and Ekatya felt a sudden swelling of pride. Lhyn was at the top of her field, courted by not just academies and universities but also the Assembly itself, which had more than once tried to recruit her into the Diplomacy Corps—a lost cause if there ever was one, Lhyn had said.
Lancer Tal flicked a glance her way, a small smile edging onto her face. Ekatya guessed it wasn’t the details on their fighter causing that smile. The Lancer had felt her pride.
Her wristcom vibrated, and she turned away to hear better. “Serrado.”
“Captain, this is Xi. Everything’s a go and we’re opening the bay door now.”
“Understood. We’ll be watching.” She gave the news to Lhyn, who said a few words that had all of the Alseans craning their necks to look at the ship looming above. For their benefit, Ekatya pointed out where the door would be opening, and a few seconds later they saw the hull section sliding open to reveal a dark space behind it.
Ekatya frowned. The bay door wasn’t opening properly. It seemed to move in fits and starts, rather than the normal smooth slide, and stopped before it was halfway open. She tapped Kameha’s code into her wristcom. “Chief, what’s happening with the bay door?”
“It’s the hullskin, Captain. It’s flaking off and warped, and it’s jamming up the door slides. This is as far as we can get the door open. But it’s far enough. Here comes Candini.”
Even as he spoke, a fighter emerged from the darkness and floated gracefully toward the ground, firing its thrusters to hover next to the transport’s windows. Candini, visible through the cockpit bubble, waved at them and raised her wristcom to her mouth. Ekatya activated hers as it buzzed. “I see you haven’t forgotten how to fly the small ones, Lieutenant.”
“Not a chance, Captain. I’m officially reporting for duty. Let’s go help these people kick some ground pounder butt.”
Lhyn translated to the Lancer, who made a loud announcement to her Guards. When they sent up an enormous cheer, Ekatya grinned at her pilot.
“Candini, I think you just spoke their language.”