Cardassian Interrogations

The premise of my Star Trek novel is that a Human from our time, who doesn't believe in extra-terrestrials, is transported to a 24th-Century Cardassian space station. Of course the Cardassians have to interrogate her; the story would be totally unbelievable if they didn't. And since Cardassian interrogations have already been written about, I already had a general pattern to follow in writing this one.

I took as my model Captain Picard's interrogation by a Cardassian named Madred, in TNG's "Chain of Command, Part II" (6x11). Here's a transcript of the relevant scene, courtesy of Chakoteya.net:

[Interrogation room]

(Picard is brought in blindfolded)

MADRED: Captain Picard.

PICARD: I demand to see a neutral representative as required by the Federation-Cardassian peace treaty.

(Madred removes the blindfold and the guards leave)

MADRED: We have already sent a message to Tohvun Three, the nearest neutral planet. They assure us they will dispatch someone immediately. Will you allow me to remove your restraints? 

(Picard holds up his hands.) 

I understand that you are a student of archaeology. Did you know that Cardassia boasts some of the most ancient and splendid ruins in the entire galaxy?

PICARD: I know that the burial vaults of the First Hebitian civilisation are said to be magnificent.

MADRED: Apparently when they were first unearthed two hundred years ago, they were. The burial vaults contained unimaginably beautiful artefacts made of jevonite, a rare, breathtaking stone. But most of those objects are gone.

PICARD: What happened to them?

MADRED: What happens to impoverished societies. The tombs were plundered, priceless treasures stolen, a few were preserved in museums but even those were eventually sold in order to pay for our war efforts.

PICARD: That war cost you hundreds of thousands of lives. It depleted your food supplies, left your population weakened and miserable and yet you risk another war.

MADRED: Let's not waste time arguing about issues we can't resolve. Would you care to tour the Hebitian burial vaults?

PICARD: What I would like is to be returned to my ship.

MADRED: My dear Captain, you are a criminal. You have been apprehended invading one of our secret facilities. The least that will happen is for you to stand trial and be punished. But I am offering you the opportunity for that experience to be civilised.

PICARD: What is the price of that opportunity?

MADRED: Cooperation. We need to know the Federation's defence strategy for Minos Korva.

PICARD: You've injected me with drugs. Surely you must realise that I've already answered truthfully every question you've put to me.

MADRED: Captain, we have gone to great lengths to lure you here because we know that in the event of an invasion, the Enterprise will be the command ship for the sector encompassing Minos Korva.

PICARD: Then it seems you have more knowledge of the situation than I.

(two guards come in and take hold of Picard. He struggles.)

MADRED: Wasted energy, Captain. You might come to wish you hadn't expended it in such a futile effort.

PICARD: Torture is expressly forbidden by the terms of the Seldonis Four convention governing treatment of prisoners of war.

(a metal piece is lowered from the ceiling, and Madred takes a knife from his desk)

MADRED: Are you in good health? Do you have any physical ailments I should know about? (the knife) Beautiful, isn't it? The stone is jevonite. And now you know why it is so highly prized. From this point on, you will enjoy no privilege of rank, no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as human. You have no other identity.

(Madred cuts Picard's clothes off and leaves them around his ankles. Naked, his hands are manacled and attacked to the metal piece above his head. Then the piece is raised so Picard is hanging just above the floor....)

And here's part of the interrogation in my novel:

Tahmid signaled the guards again, and the one on my right said quietly, "Hold still." The left guard held both my arms, above the elbows, and the right one reached up and took a hold of the neck of the top I was wearing. It took me a few seconds to realize that he had a knife, and was cutting it off me. Soon after, it fell to the floor, and for the second time that day I wished I had chosen a thicker, more modest bra. But I didn't have much time to dwell on that, because as soon as he was done with the top, the guard started cutting my slacks. He must have had a very sharp knife and a lot of practice, because all it took was two quick, neat cuts down the sides and the slacks had joined the top on the floor. I was left standing in my shoes and panties and bra and the strange handcuffs that held my wrists about shoulder-width apart.

Tahmid gestured to the guards again, and asked me, "Is Derek Dellinger a member of Starfleet?"

"As far as I know he's not," I answered, "but I'm not even sure if that's his real name."

"Is Derek Dellinger human?"

A flag went up in my mind. I'd heard of this technique but never seen it in practice. The idea was that they ask you several questions in quick succession, all of which are easy and innocent and take yes answers. Then in the same tone of voice they ask you to confess to a crime, hoping you'll answer yes without thinking and incriminate yourself. I took my time and repeated the question in my head before answering. "Yes."

"What's the last thing you remember before Terra Knorr?"

That wasn't a yes or no question, so he must have picked up on my hesitation, realized I was onto his game. That gave me a fleeting sense of victory, until I realized that he had just read me. Interrogators, of course, are supposed to be very perceptive, but I had been subconsciously hoping this one wasn't. I made a mental note to try not to lie. "I'd just gotten out of a cab in Chicago," I answered.

"What kind of cab?"

"A licensed yellow Crown Vic."

"Explain the term 'Crown Vic'," he said, seeming relaxed again. "I'm afraid there are many details of your culture I'm still not familiar with."

"You're not - " I began, then cut myself off. "I'm sorry," I said, "Crown Vic stands for Crown Victoria. It's a Ford model, and it's used, a lot of times, for police cruisers and taxis."

"A vehicle, then?"

"Yes."

"What were you going to say?" he asked. "I'm not what?"

"Oh," I answered, "I was just surprised to hear that you're not American. Your English is so good, I thought you were."

He laughed, a dry, cold laugh, and said, "Oh, you thought I was American. And now what makes you think that I may not be?"

"When you said," I paused, trying to recall his exact words, and gave up. "Something about not being familiar with my culture."

"How perceptive of you," he sneered. "I am not American." He signaled to the guards again, and almost immediately a strong hand smashed into my face. "In the future you will refrain from sarcasm in this room," Glin Tahmid ordered.

"Yes, Glin," I answered breathlessly, hoping to prevent any further blows. I wondered what I'd said that he'd taken as sarcasm, and decided to leave the subject of nationality alone as much as possible. Warm liquid trickled from my right nostril to my lip. It was blood.

Tahmid leaned back in his chair and looked up at me. “What’s your birthdate?” he asked cheerfully.

“September 13, 1985.” On a Friday. I’d never been superstitious about it, but now I was beginning to wonder.

“Explain,” he said.

Explain what? I wondered, but didn’t dare ask. “I was born on September 13, 1985,” I answered.

"Is that a date?"

Back to the obvious questions, again, or else he was just badgering me. “Yes.”

“By what calendar?”

“I think it’s called the Julian calendar,” I answered, getting sick of these obscure historical questions, “or possibly Gregorian? I’m sorry; I don’t know much about calendars.”

Tahmid had something on his desk that looked like a game controller, and he touched a button on it. A rod began to come down from the ceiling. It was nearly directly above me and pointing straight down like the rod the fan had been on in the restaurant. But there was no fan on this one. I tried to back up a step, in case it came down too low, but the guards held my arms. It kept coming, six inches in front of my face, and finally stopped when it was about at the level of my chin.

As soon as it stopped the guards grabbed my forearms and raised them, fitting the end of the rod into a small hole in the middle of the handcuffs. They locked together with a metallic click. Then the one on my left pulled my shoes and socks off and the one on my right made five quick cuts with his knife, and I was naked.

“I hope we’ve been able to come to an understanding,” he said in a friendly tone. “Think back to the last thing you remember before Terra Knorr. You got out of the cab, and then what?”

Short Story: Wearing the Enemy

Here's a short story about a prisoner of war:

The handcuffs that bound Jacoby Reese’s wrists were too tight. And the way the soldiers used his elbows for a steering wheel, grabbing them and yanking them to make him lose his balance and turn to catch it, only made them tighter.

Photo: trailzombie.com

There were two of them, and they both wore forest camouflage BDU’s. Chevron-shaped stripes indicated their rank--Private First Class--but otherwise their uniforms were plain. They bore no service ribbons, no nametags, nothing even to indicate which military their wearers were members of. The male on his left was almost stocky, with skin the color of bittersweet chocolate and eyes that looked Asian. The female on his right was tall, muscular and blonde. He wondered if she was Swedish.

The guards they’d passed on the tarmac, and at the entrance to this building, had been dressed in city-flage, and now other soldiers were passing them in the corridors, some in city-flage and some dressed for the desert. And from what Jacoby could observe in passing, they also had no markings except for rank. He wondered if their uniforms might provide a clue as to this prison’s location: likely it was in or near a desert. The forest camo of his escorts was probably nothing to go by: they’d been with him on the plane ride, and even before that. He’d first noticed them soon after his capture on the island.

The male Private suddenly pulled on Jacoby’s left elbow, causing him to reel leftward, lurch and catch his balance a split second before his forehead would have collided with a pane of glass. The glass was part of a door, framed in painted metal the color of mud, and reinforced with a wire grid. As Jacoby stepped back to give the soldiers room to open it, he couldn’t help feeling like a school child being dragged to the Principal’s office.

The Principal, in this case, was a Lieutenant in a shiny black pageboy, seated on a backless swivel stool with casters. To her right, or to the left of her from Jacoby’s perspective, was a grey metal desk that looked like a leftover from World War II, with a modern LCD monitor and a keyboard on it, and behind her stood a cheap-looking sheet-metal cabinet, its white powder-coat beginning to bubble with rust. To her left was a stuffed chair upholstered in vinyl the color of mustard. Its thick square arms and legs seemed to be made of oak and were bare except for the patches where the finish hadn’t quite worn off yet.

The Lieutenant looked at the three of them like she’d been expecting them, but she didn’t get up. And the Privates didn’t salute. They just shoved Jacoby’s elbows forward, and he stumbled into the room. The male closed the door and the female pushed him down into the yellow chair.
The Lieutenant turned to face him. She seemed to be about Jacoby’s own age—mid twenties—and might have had a chance to be pretty if it weren’t for all that arrogance. Her uniform was urban camo and, like the others, bore only the double-bar symbol of her rank. “What were you doing on Lessing Island?” she demanded. Her English was clear, but she had an accent. He would have been surprised if she hadn’t.

Jacoby just watched her and remained silent. The female private stood beside him with her weapon aimed at his stomach and her finger on the trigger, while her partner shackled his ankles to the legs of the chair.

“Why did you and your mates spend the whole night hidden on the island?” the Lieutenant asked him. ‘Mates,’ she’d said, not ‘friends.’ So maybe it was British English she’d learned, not American. Jacoby wondered if that little detail had any significance.

The Privates removed his handcuffs and locked his arms in place. His hands were numb; pretty soon they’d start to tingle and hurt. The male swabbed the inside of his right elbow with an alcohol pad. The Lieutenant opened the metal cabinet, got out a syringe in its packaging and a clear glass bottle nearly full of a colorless liquid, and put them on a tray on the desk. Then she got out a pair of purple nitrile gloves, closed the cabinet and put them on.

The Privates were standing near the door now, like sentries, and another soldier came into view, apparently having entered from somewhere behind Jacoby’s chair. He was a Corporal. Smallish guy, shaved head, urban camo, no markings. He had a piece of rubber, long and narrow like the ones in the medical labs, and he tied it around Jacoby’s right upper arm.

The Lieutenant tore the wrapper off the syringe and filled it from the bottle, pointed it toward the ceiling and got the air out of it, then spun around on her stool, slid the needle expertly into Jacoby’s vein and pushed the plunger.

It burned going in worse than meperidine, and made his head swim. “That wasn’t pentothal,” he observed, “What was it? What did you put in me?”

The Lieutenant smirked and stood right in front of him, her shiny black combat boots between his scuffed suede hikers. “What were you doing on Lessing Island?” she asked quietly. She nodded to the Corporal, who pulled off the rubber tourniquet.

A feeling washed over Jacoby. Like I’m drowning, he thought, even though he’d never even been close to drowning. The Lieutenant’s face went out of focus, and he wasn’t sure he could keep track of anything else in the room anymore.

And somebody needed to knock this Lieutenant down a peg or two. “I was fishing, alright?” he yelled up at her blurry face, “so let me go: I’m a civilian!” His words sounded slurred.

He thought he heard a snicker by the door. “Fishing for what?” someone mumbled. It was the female Private’s voice.

The blurry Lieutenant still stood over him. “Why did you and your mates spend last night hidden on Lessing Island?” she asked calmly.

“Smug!” he thought, and then realized he’d said it aloud. “We were camping, okay? You satisfied now, you nosy bitch? We were camping.”

She didn’t seem to mind the insults, but then he couldn’t be sure, since her face was still out of focus. “If you and your mates were only camping,” she countered, while the Corporal wrapped a measuring tape around Jacoby’s neck, took a measurement and pulled it off again, “then why did you choose one of the rare spots where there is no granite to block signals?”

Jacoby was surprised. “Didn’t know that,” he said honestly. “We left our phones at home because we didn’t think there was any signal anywhere on the lake.” His words were still coming out all slurred, like he was talking in his sleep or something. And his head was still swimming. “What did you give me?” he asked again, “Wasn’t sodium pentothal.”

“You don’t really think I’m stupid, do you?” she asked, almost sweetly. “We both know I’m not talking about cell phones, so why the charade?” She pronounced ‘charade’ the French way: ‘sha-RAHD’. “Where is your equipment?”

“At the campsite,” Jacoby answered. The Corporal measured his left ankle.

The Lieutenant shrugged and turned to face her desk, her back to Jacoby. The Corporal walked over and leaned down beside her and they formed a huddle. They stayed that way for minutes, conversing, apparently looking at the computer monitor. They weren’t speaking English of course, but that was no problem for Jacoby.

“Not too small, though,” said the Corporal. “Is that too small?”

“It’s bigger than the narrow part,” the Lieutenant replied. “Unless you doubt the figure?”

“No, the figure is correct,” said the Corporal, “but the size of the narrow part could change, no?”

“With the flow of life, yes,” she answered after a pause. “But not too big an adjustment, for fear of being lost.”

“I like this,” said the Corporal after another pause. “Do you approve?”

“Yes.” The Lieutenant turned back to Jacoby and the Corporal walked around his chair and disappeared behind it. They were still blurry.

“Can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Jacoby complained, mostly as a reminder to himself. He was a civilian, and he’d been out with his buddies camping and fishing. The mission didn’t exist, and he didn’t speak anything but English.

“Where at the campsite?” she asked, taking up right where she’d left off. “I’m afraid we didn’t find it.”

“What are we talking about again?” Jacoby honestly couldn’t remember, beyond the fact that she obviously wanted to know who he was and what he was doing, and he wasn’t going to tell her.

“Your equipment.”

“Oh, yeah, the equipment. All the equipment we had, we left at the campsite. Your lackeys didn’t let me take any of it with me when they brought me here.”

“Where is it?”

“Why do you keep asking?” Jacoby demanded, genuinely annoyed. The way his head was swimming, even ‘What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?’ would have felt like a trick question. “I told you, everything’s at the campsite.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t find any of it,” she replied, her voice dripping with a smug sweetness, “so I need you to be more specific. Which piece is where?”

Jacoby sighed. “Well, let’s see. The sleeping bags are in the tents, the stove is in—“ She slapped his face, and it stung. “Electronic equipment.”

“That,” he replied dramatically, trying and failing to add emphasis with a gesture of his bound right arm, “is not at the campsite.”

“Where is it?”

His thoughts, his mind, were so hard to control. “Those damn drugs!” He winced when he realized he’d said that thought aloud, too. At least it was about the drugs, though, and not the mission, so no harm done. “Where is what?” he mumbled, verbalizing on purpose this time, to drown out thoughts of the mission, but being careful to keep his volume down and speak in the direction of his left knee, so his interrogator wouldn’t think he was sassing her, and slap him again. “Oh, electronics.” Mosquito repellers—he’d had an electronic mosquito repeller on him. “I guess it’s in the plane, maybe,” he said. “They took it off me, maybe in the plane.”

The Corporal was back. He was carrying something, and put it on the desk. The Lieutenant turned around again, seemed to be examining the object. She nodded. “Do it,” she said, but not in English. She sat on the stool, facing Jacoby, and watched.

The Corporal knelt in front of the chair and clapped something around Jacoby’s left ankle, just below the shackle that bound him to the chair.

“What is that?” Jacoby asked, but no one answered.

The Corporal stood and got the object from the desk, went back to Jacoby, placed it carefully around his neck and snapped it shut.

And then he woke up. His head felt like it could split open at any instant, and part of him wished it would. He was sick to his stomach.

He forced himself to open his eyes and look around. He was alone in a concrete cell. No shackles or handcuffs, but the objects around his neck and ankle were still there. He tried to examine the ankle one, but had to stop to vomit. There was a drain in the concrete floor, and he got to it just in time.

Photo: mirandahomeservices.com

When he was done he looked at the thing on his ankle again, but he didn’t make much of it. Probably a tracking device, like they make people wear on house arrest. He brought his hands up to his neck and felt that one. It seemed to be like the thing on his ankle, only bigger, but other than that he learned nothing. He tugged on them, but of course he couldn’t get either one of them off. If they were tracking devices, he wondered why there were two of them.

The mission. The mission was paramount, essential: he had to find a way out. He decided to start with an examination of the ceiling, but he couldn’t even see the ceiling. That damn headache! He threw up in the drain again and decided the examination would have to start with the floor: at least he could use his hands for that. He hoped the way out wouldn’t turn out to be too close to the drain.

He got the floor done—even the drain, but it wouldn’t budge—and allowed himself a nap. When he woke up he still couldn’t see the ceiling very well. For the first second or two he could see it alright, but after that it would go all swirly and black. So he felt the walls, like he had felt the floor, and when he’d gotten all the way around as high as he could reach, he lay down on the concrete and had another nap.

“Wake up,” said a male voice quietly. “You awake yet?”

Jacoby jumped to his feet almost before his eyes were open. The cell door stood open and in the doorway stood another corporal in anonymous urban camouflage.

“Relax, dude, I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He unhooked a canteen from his belt and held it out to him. “Bet you’re thirsty.”

He was thirsty alright! Felt like he could have downed a gallon of water. But this could be a trick. He turned the canteen away from both of them and opened it slowly.

The Corporal laughed. “It’s just water,” he said. “Feel free to drink it all.” He was one of those guys who probably had no trouble getting dates.

It was just water. Jacoby drank it dry and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem. The things on your neck and ankle are a tracking device and a communications device. We can hear everything you say—that’s why it’s so close to your voicebox—and we can use it to shock you. Just a little shock, like this…” He reached into his pocket and an electrical charge surged through Jacoby’s body. It wasn’t strong--it felt like more like a near miss than a real shock--but it was certainly strong enough to get his attention. “…means you need to report to your reporting point immediately. I’ll show you where your reporting point is, when we go out.”

They were going out, then. That made the devices a little more understandable.

“If you disobey orders,” the Corporal continued, “we can turn up the voltage, so be warned. And you can’t leave the prison, of course. There’s a signal at the perimeter that will knock you unconscious the moment it hits you. I recommend staying away from the fence, to avoid accidents. You don’t want to trip, and fall into it.”

Jacoby still had to find a way out: the mission had to be completed, and he was the one to complete it. “Look,” he said to the Corporal, “there’s been some kind of mistake. I’m a civilian: I’m not even supposed to be here. Is there a review process? How do I get out?”

The Corporal shook his head. “I wouldn’t waste your energy. There’s really no review process, except that they keep records. But I wouldn’t worry. It’s true that we never ratified the Geneva Accords and that we don’t follow them, but we do voluntarily collect name, rank and serial number and forward those to your government. If there’s a mistake, they’ll figure it out.”

“One more thing,” said Jacoby. “Any idea what they injected me with? It wasn’t pentothal.”

“That depends. Who’d you have?”

Jacoby shrugged. “Nobody seems to wear nametags here.”

“Do you remember what he looked like? Old bald guy?”

Jacoby laughed. “Female. Straight black hair.”

The Corporal nodded. “I know the one. Diluted vodka.” 

Note: I answered a call from Chainbooks.com to write just the first chapters for several novels, and Wearing the Enemy is one of them. If you'd like to contribute a chapter to Wearing the Enemy, or check out the other novels-in-progress at Chainbooks, click here. 

Science Fiction Story: Reluctant Asylum

Another science fiction story, one of my favorites. I got some of the place names by scrambling names of beverages.

Amy Perrodin’s real name was Amelia, and she had the misfortune to have been born Human. It wasn’t that being Human was actually a bad thing, but it did tend to bring with it certain disadvantages.

Photo: echotwosevencorpsmen.com

Like being at war with the Jdekkans.

Amy hadn’t asked for this war, and had never actually been able to figure out why it existed at all. There was the dispute over who owned the Anasid System, which was uninhabitable anyway and didn’t even have much in the way of natural resources. There had been the incident at Dlopna when a Human woman had falsely accused a Jdekkan platoon of attacking her without provocation. But that matter had been resolved years ago. Amy suspected the only real reason there was still a war was because neither side wanted to be the first to stop fighting.

And just for that, she and millions of other Humans lived in fear of the Stunt Monkeys.

It was the Stunt Squirrels that had the real firepower, and the huge ships proved a fearsome enemy in open space with their virtually impenetrable armor and immensely powerful weapons. But on a planet - or a moon, which was where Amy was now - one had to watch out for Stunt Monkeys. Like their namesakes, the smallish craft had amazing maneuvering capability. Unlike any monkeys Amy had ever seen, they could also kill you with mind-boggling accuracy in zero visibility over immense distances. If there was a Stunt Monkey in the area, it was best not to let its crew see you in the first place.

Which was why at this particular moment Amy was diving behind a dumpster. A Jdekkan Stunt Monkey had just appeared out of nowhere and was now coming down to land on the smooth surface of a dry lakebed only a hundred yards or so from where Amy had been standing.

Her hiding place wasn’t very good, because it was much too close to the Stunt Monkey; there was a very good chance that when the Jdekkans exited the craft, they’d happen across her. What they’d do after that, whether they’d capture her, torture her, kill her or all three, she didn’t feel like finding out.

She had ducked behind the dumpster as soon as she’d seen the Stunt Monkey, and now she crept away as quietly as she could manage, using a cargo van for cover first, and then stooping behind a hedge, and finally putting a large block building between herself and the Stunt Monkey. It was a college building, but she didn’t care about that.

Photo: koshercasual.com

Once she was far enough, she started running, and she figured she’d run until her lungs gave out. But that was before she ran into the Sbrade.

Luckily, she didn’t really, literally run into him. He’d been standing there, staring at the dust cloud raised by the Stunt Monkey and reaching his right hand into his leather bag, when Amy came out from behind a Ferdorian banana bush and saw him.

There was nothing unusual about this Sbrade’s appearance. He was about the size of the average Human man or slightly larger, and the long, matted hair on his head and the backs of his hands was mostly brown with patches of bright orange and smears of the sort of green that sometimes appears in mud puddles.

“The colors come from fungus and algae” her friend Luke had told her. Luke was a doctor, a physician like the Luke in the Bible, and he’d treated a few Sbrade before. He’d also gotten curious and swabbed their hair, studied it after they’d been gone.

The Sbrade saw her, looked right at her, and Amy stopped dead in her tracks. There were a few worse things in life than being spotted by the crew of a Stunt Monkey, and getting too close to a Sbrade could be one of them.

The real trouble with the Sbrade was the guilds. There were a gold guild and a medicine guild, a power cell guild and a titanium guild and a liquor guild and a fuel guild. There were at least eight guilds, Amy had read somewhere, but she didn’t know what the other two were. It was each guild’s mission to gain a monopoly on its product, and any action that helped the guild accomplish that goal was, to the Sbrade mind, good ethics. Conversely, anything that interfered with a guild’s mission was worthy of whatever punishment the insulted guild members might have in mind. And if you did something that didn’t affect the guild one way or the other, then in the Sbrade moral code it didn’t register at all. If it didn’t affect business, then it was nobody’s business.

And you could be pretty sure that any Sbrade you met was in a guild, since rumor had it that Sbrade who refused to join were generally hunted down and killed.

When the Sbrade saw her, his grimy face erupted in a leering smile, two rows of large slimy yellow teeth suddenly appearing beneath a food-encrusted mustache.

She turned and ran back to the Stunt Monkey.

Photo: airliners.net

When she got there, three or four Jdekkans had come out and seemed to be doing some sort of security check before clearing the rest of the crew to disembark. She put her hands up when she saw them, in a quick gesture to show that she didn’t want to cause trouble, and kept running. There was a stairway leading up to the Stunt Monkey, like the stairways they’d been using on Earth ever since the age of the primitive aero-planes, and at the top, of course, was a Jdekkan guard. She ran to the base of the stairs and stopped.

She had intended to make a convincing, very logical appeal for asylum, or at least for temporary shelter, but when she tried to speak she found that she’d lost the ability. She was so out of breath that all she could do was pant.

The guard laughed, dashed down the stairs and helped her up them. She didn’t need help; she was tired from running but she could manage the stairs just fine. The guard, though, had his hands all over her. She realized with satisfaction that he was searching her for weapons in the most time-saving way possible, getting her into the relative safety of the Stunt Monkey without delay.

They came to the top of the stairs and he led her to a room and shut the door. It almost looked like a sort of alien living room, with some low chairs and couches and small tables. And beyond them, in the end of the room opposite the door, there was some sort of equipment Amy didn’t recognize.

“Feel free to sit down when you’re ready,” said the Jdekkan, “but I think you should walk back and forth until your heartbeat slows down.”

Amy had heard this before, that your heart could explode if you stopped moving just after a hard enough run. She figured the walk up the stairs had been enough to remove her from that danger, but even so she paced among the furniture.

The Jdekkan crossed the room, opened a sort of mini-bar and after a few moments came back with two tall glasses, one full of blue liquid and one full of brown. He handed her the brown one. “I believe you call it cola,” he said, “but I don’t know how authentic it is. The Human-food line is new, and I hope it’s a sign that this war is losing momentum.”

They both sat down, him in a chair and her on a couch, with something like a coffee table between them.

“Meet a Sbrade, did you?” he asked.

She sipped her drink. It tasted good. She nodded.

“How do you know we’re going to treat you any better?”

She looked at him. Beneath those flawless good manners the Jdekkans were famous for, he was staring at her just like the Sbrade had been, like a cat who’s just cornered a mouse. She sighed. “At least you appear to bathe,” she said.

The Jdekkan sipped his drink. “I do have the official obligation to ask you for your story.”

“Of course,” Amy replied. So this was an interrogation, then. She tried not to think about the equipment in the end of the room. “My name is Amelia Perrodin, and I’m originally from Earth,” she began. After a moment she shrugged and admitted, “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“What’s your business on Okce?”

Photo: whathelpswithanxiety.org

Okce, the moon with the difficult name, where she’d been for only the past four hours. “I hitched a ride,” she told him. “Somebody was delivering a shipment of rice and let me ride along.”

He just looked at her and didn’t speak, but his face told her that the answer wasn’t satisfactory.

“I’d wanted to get out of where I was,” she explained, “and there was room for me on the rice transport, so I grabbed the opportunity.”

“Why didn’t you remain on the rice transport?”

“I wasn’t welcome. The pilot told me she could take me only as far as this stop, because after that she was meeting her boss, and she’s not really supposed to carry passengers.” Amy hoped she wasn’t getting the pilot in trouble, but she supposed not. The pilot wasn’t Jdekkan, after all.

“Where did you board the rice transport, and why did you want to get out of there?”

“Respion Station,” she answered, “because I heard there was a Human patrol on the way.”

The Jdekkan’s eyebrows went up.

“I’m wanted by my government,” Amy continued. She wondered if that would make him like her or make him want to turn her in.

“For…?”

“They’re abusing their own people and I’d be a traitor if I didn’t try to stop it.”

The Jdekkan nodded, like he understood, and like he wasn’t drawing any conclusions yet. “Why did you hide behind the dumpster, and then run?” he asked.

She smiled, a little embarrassed. “I guess I wasn’t really hiding, after all, was I? Well, to tell you the truth, until I saw the Sbrade, I didn’t want you to see me. I was about to go into that college building, see if they had a Student Union or something where I could maybe get some lunch, maybe if I was lucky even make a friend. And then I saw your Stunt Monkey and it was already almost - “

“Miss Perrodin,” the Jdekkan interrupted.

“Yes?”

“You will please refrain from using derogatory terms on this ship,” he demanded.

“Um,” Amy responded, stupidly, “sure. Did I?”

The Jdekkan sighed. “This ship is not a Stunt Monkey.”

“Oh,” said Amy, “I’m sorry. I really thought that was its name.”

He shook his head. “It is called a Stahn Temekka. Translated, it is Planet Machine.”

“Oh, you’re kidding, I had no idea. So, I would hate to make the same mistake again…”

He allowed himself an amused smile. “If you are attempting to refer to the Stunt Squirrel, it does not exist, either. It is called the Stahn Seco-il, which is the Jdekkan way to say Star Machine.”

“It might take me a while to learn these names,” said Amy diplomatically. What she was really thinking was, these Jdekkan ship names were worse than the name of the moon she was on, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get her Human mouth to say them.

He shrugged. “You will learn them in time, or you will not,” he replied. “In the meantime you will please either try to use their names, or else use the translations, Planet Machine and Star Machine.”

“Of course,” Amy agreed. She wondered what the consequences would be if she forgot and used the offending terms. She wondered if she should ask, and then decided against it.

“I’ll need to take a blood sample,” he said, getting up and walking to the equipment in the end of the room. “No need for you to move, unless you want to. I just need a few things.” He came back with a small bag, set it on the coffee table, and settled down in a sort of squatting crouch with his right knee on the front of the couch beside her and his left foot on the floor in front of her.

She looked up at him and realized this whole situation would be slightly less scary if she had something to call him. “I don’t even know your name,” she said.

“Kraja,” he replied. “I will take the sample from a vein on the inside of one of your elbows, unless you object.”

“Kraja?” she asked, not sure if she’d heard him right.

“Yes, Kraja. I am responsible for ship security.”

“So, I have the right to object?”

“You have the right to request that I use a different vein, if you wish. I will take the sample, in any case.”

“Oh,” Amy said, trying to sound disappointed. The truth was, she’d never really gotten her hopes up. She’d figured that ever since she’d arrived at the bottom of the stairway - ever since she’d been seen by that Sbrade, actually - she’d stopped having any say in what happened to her. She pulled her left sleeve up and gave him her arm.

He took the sample skillfully, and it didn’t hurt, not really. More importantly, he was meticulous about his sanitary procedures. But then, he was Jdekkan: he probably brushed his teeth the same way.

“We won’t be here long,” he told her, injecting the blood sample into a port in a large black machine in the end of the room. “Our cook wanted to make a small purchase of human foods, including rice. We’ll be lifting off in a few minutes.”

Amy nodded. “Do I get to ask where we’re headed?”

“Jdekka,” he answered, “by a circuitous route. We’d rather avoid the Human patrols, too.”

Photo: anxietyhelpforme.com

Amy was surprised. “I didn’t think you’d have to worry about that, in a Stunt Monk--“ Now she’d said it, and she could see by the look in his face that he wasn’t going to let it slide. She’d been warned, and now it was time to face the music.

“Stahn Temekka,” he corrected.

She nodded, and tried to repeat it, but her mouth wouldn’t obey her and her voice remained silent.

“I’ll have to punish you now,” he said solemnly, coming back from the black machine, his task done. “Stay here. I’ll tell the guards to prepare the tub of dry ice.”

Amy swallowed. For some reason, she wanted him to see her remain dignified. She didn’t want to throw up on the couch.

He laughed and touched her arm reassuringly. “You shouldn’t believe all your government’s propaganda,” he said. “But if you persist in forgetting, you may find that I begin to forget my own manners as well. Do not be surprised if I - accidentally of course - introduce you to the crew as a Terran Hairworm.”

Note: I answered a call from Chainbooks.com to write just the first chapters for several novels, and Reluctant Asylum is one of them. If you'd like to contribute a chapter to Reluctant Asylum, or check out the other novels-in-progress at Chainbooks, click here.

Interrogatory Sentence

One of the science fiction stories from The Claw and the Eye:

The cafeteria was huge and crowded. There must have been thousands of Chuzekks there. Most were in uniform but some, both male and female, wore dresses or shirts and pants. Jade saw two or three pair of blue jeans. The guards took her to the door but didn't follow her inside. The food-dispensing pillars were easy to spot and she began to make her way through the crowd and over the uneven floor to the nearest one.

One of the uniformed Chuzekks grabbed her bicep. “Gashh,” he hissed, glaring at her tauntingly, and let go. Several times she felt hands stroking her head or claws playing with her curls, and she didn't object. She was, after all, apparently the only one there with hair.
When she got to the food dispenser, a uniformed soldier was just leaving it with his tray of food. When he saw her, he balanced his tray on one hand and grabbed his Personal Device. He spoke to it and the Device responded, “Do you know that it serves Earth food?”
His companion, who was female and also wore a uniform, spoke into her own Personal Device, and it said, “He's talking to you, Human.” The Chuzekks themselves always sounded congested when they spoke English, because they couldn't say their M's or their N's. But the Personal Devices had no impediment: they spoke with a perfect Cleveland accent.
“Thank you,” Jade answered politely, and both Personal Devices translated in unison.
“I'm Lidd and this is Vaikk,” said the female through her Personal Device, and extended her hand.
Jade shook it.
“That's not how you should greet,” Lidd responded, and Vaikk said, “We'll show you how to greet, at the table, if you will eat with us. Will you eat with us?”
“Thanks,” said Jade. “But how do I order food? Do I just talk to the thing?”
“Yes,” Vaikk answered, then said to the pillar, “Show me the earth food selection.”
The dispenser responded before the translation came. On the side of the pillar appeared a series of pictures of dishes, labeled in Chuzekk and in English.

“New England clam chowder!” Jade exclaimed, very surprised to see such a regional dish on the menu. The Chuzekks didn't really have a presence in New England, as far as she knew.
The chowder came out of an opening that looked something like a small oven. It was on a tray with coffee and juice, a set of ordinary silverware and an ordinary napkin. It smelled good.
There were no chairs around the table, only hard metal contraptions for kneeling in. She set her tray on the small orange table and knelt, ready for her knees to hurt. But the uniform-boots they'd made her wear were thickly padded in the front, and shaped just for this purpose, and she found the position very comfortable. She adjusted the back of the contraption and settled back on it.
“How to greet,” said Lidd through her Personal Device. She and Vaikk were both still standing, and after checking to be sure Jade was looking, each grasped the other's right upper arm with the right hand.

So that was why people kept feeling her right bicep: they were trying to shake hands. Jade stood and grasped Lidd's arm, and Lidd grasped hers.
She turned to Vaikk to do the same with him, but Lidd gently took Jade's wrist and said, “First, tell us your name.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “It's Jade.”
“Jade,” Lidd repeated. “You have a Chuzekk nickname, then.”
“No, that's really my name.”
“We're lucky then,” said Vaikk, kneeling. “Most human names are hard to say. Yours sounds just like a Chuzekk name.”
“When we greet,” said Lidd, “we are not silent. We say each other's names. Or if the person you are greeting outranks you, you should say his or her rank.”
“But only if you mean it,” said Vaikk. “Never say it if you don't mean it.”
Jade settled onto her knees and realized eating would be awkward since the table was so high. “I don't understand,” she said. “Only if I mean what?” The chowder tasted like it had come straight from a Boston diner.
“When you say a person's rank in this way,” Vaikk answered, “you recognize his or her authority over you.”
“So it's a gesture of respect,” said Jade, to confirm that she understood.
“It's more than that,” Lidd answered. “It's a promise to obey.”
“How do I know what rank someone is?”
“You can ask,” said Vaikk. “The most common rank is Chijj, and the insignia looks like this.” He pointed to his own chest. It bore the claw-and-eye symbol and another symbol that reminded Jade of a necklace. She looked at Lidd's uniform and it matched Vaikk's.
“So when I greet you two, I should say, 'Chijj'?”
“Yes.”
They had all been kneeling, eating, and Jade stood again and extended her hand to Lidd. Lidd stood and they practiced the greeting.

“Chijj,” said Jade, grasping Lidd’s right bicep, or at least as much of it as she could manage.
“Jade,” said Lidd returning the gesture.
Vaikk stood and they grasped arms.

“Chijj,” said Jade.
“Jade,” said Vaikk.
They knelt again.
“So where are we?” Jade asked. “I mean what is this? Is it a ship? Are we going somewhere?”
“We're going in circles,” answered Vaikk, between bites of something that looked remotely like a thick spaghetti sauce. “This is a Kivv-ship and we are in Earth orbit.”
Jade wasn't sure whether that was a joke or not. “What's a Kivv-ship?” she asked.
Neither Chuzekk responded to this immediately. The two consulted each other and their Personal Devices for a minute before Vaikk's said, “mothership.”
“Buthership,” Lidd repeated, then she continued through her Personal Device, “It's like a city in space. Everyone on this ship reports to the Kivv, so it's called a Kivv-ship.”
“How many people are there on this ship?” asked Jade.
“The actual number varies,” Vaikk answered, “because not all the Kivv's staff is on the ship. Sometimes our jobs take us to the surface, or to other ships. But a Kivv is responsible for 22,620.”
“Wow,” said Jade. “That’s a lot of people for one ship.”
“Maybe,” Lidd suggested, “you’re thinking of the smaller ships, the ships that travel.”
“This ship doesn’t travel?” Jade asked. She wanted to say, ‘then how did it get here? It couldn’t have been built here,’ but she didn’t want to sound disrespectful—not yet, at least. She needed to get her bearings first, and come up with a plan.
“Of course it travels,” Lidd replied, “but it doesn’t travel much. It’s like a city, not a vehicle. The Kivv takes it to the place it needs to be, and then it stays there until the mission is over.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” She was glad she’d kept her mouth shut: she would have sounded stupid, or worse. “The symbol on my uniform,” she said. “Sorry to change the subject, but I don't see anyone else with this. Lots of Chijjes, though.”
“It means that you're a prisoner,” said Lidd, still speaking Chuzekk and letting her Personal Device translate. “In Chuzekk, the word is 'prisoner.'” When she heard the translation, she slapped the device as though it were a naughty child. “Gashh,” she said, slowly and clearly, and her Personal Device said, slowly and clearly, “Pris-on-er.”
When she had said goodbye to Lidd and Vaikk and made her way out of the cafeteria, the guards met her at the door. She reached for Koll's bicep and Koll returned the gesture.
“Chijj,” she said solemnly.
Koll’s response was polite and easy. “Jade.”
She repeated the process with the other guard, and they all began to walk through the hallways with their strange floors, back to Jade's room. It wasn’t quite like they had installed extra features in the floor—features like mounds and dips, ramps and steps. It was more like the floor had never been flat, had never been intended to be flat. Walking in the Kivv-ship felt a little like walking on Earth, outdoors in a wild place. Jade would have expected to trip at least occasionally, but she didn’t. It must have helped that the floor’s color varied along with the terrain, so it was easy to see its contours.
“I have a question,” said Jade after a minute, “that I don't know if you can answer.” Koll said nothing but appeared to be listening, so Jade continued, gaining confidence, “Why am I here? Why was I captured? What's going to happen to me?”
Koll grabbed her Personal Device. “Repeat, please,” she said.
Jade said it again, and Koll's Personal Device translated.
“Three questions,” Koll said. “Why was you captured? I don't know. Probably somebody ordered. Usually Zidds do order the captures. Usually a prisoner knows--”
“What are Zidds?” Jade interrupted.
“Zidd is a rank.” Koll explained. “Zidds are few. You must give much respect to Zidd.” Then she continued, “Usually a prisoner knows the reason for the capture. Often, prisoners lie to say 'I don't know,' but only very few prisoners truly don't know why. I cannot know which is you. But if really you don't know, then probably is an error and you will go home soon.”
“I met a Chuzekk before the war,” suggested Jade nervously. “It could have something to do with that.” Koll stopped walking and looked intently at Jade. “Zukk Gevv?” she asked.
“He said his name was Zukk,” Jade answered apprehensively. “I think he was a Zidd.”
Koll said something in Chuzekk to the other guard, and he reacted with obvious interest. He took out his Personal Device and set it to translate.
“I just tell him that you is the human who sees Zukk Gevv on Earth. Everybody knows the story. Nobody knows is you. But I don't know if this why you was captured.”
“I'm concerned,” said Jade, even though 'petrified' would have been a more accurate word, “that they may think I have some kind of secret. But I'm not in the military. I don't know anything, except what I see on TV.”
“I think you should not worry,” Koll reassured her. “Zukk's pod failed because...” She consulted her Personal Device for the correct word. “...fabrication error. He fixed the pod because he is very smart. He used resources he had. He had you. He used you. This not makes you look like a spy, see? If you really don't know why you is here, probably is an error and you go home soon.”
“Thanks,” said Jade, relieved.
“Thanks for what?”
“I feel much better now.”
“I say what I think only.”
“Well, thanks for saying what you think, then.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence, and when they got to the painted shape that was Jade's door, Koll grabbed her Personal Device and said, “I will report that you is here now.” She held it to her face like a human with a cellphone, and had a conversation in Chuzekk. Jade thought she looked surprised.

She put the Device back on her hip and looked at Jade intently. A sly, sneering smile spread over her face. “You did lie, Jade Massilon,” she stated, her voice a mix of amusement and triumph.
“About what?” Jade asked, confused.
“Chegg Jeigg did order you captured.”
“Who's that?”
“Chegg Jeigg is our Kivv. He is commander. Very big. He was very expert interrogator. Still now, very expert interrogator.”
“The CO of this ship ordered me captured?”
“C-O” Koll said to her Personal Device. The translation was long, and she shut it off. Then she looked back at Jade and demanded, “What is CO?”
“Commanding Officer. The highest-ranking officer, basically.”
“Yes,” Koll answered simply, then repeated, “You did lie.”
Jade’s heart was pounding. “Lied about what?” she asked.
“You did say you not know why you is here.”
“I don’t.”
Koll’s smile freshened. Her face said, “You don’t fool me.”
Jade switched tactics. “So what happens now?” she asked.
Koll just looked at her. The other soldier shifted impatiently and looked at Jade’s door.
“What will happen?” Jade corrected. “The Kid gave the order for me to be captured; you think I’m—“
“Kivv,” Koll interrupted.
“Kivv, sorry. The Kivv gave the order to capture me, you think I’m lying. What happens next?”
“Next, you sleep,” the soldier answered, “and tomorrow you go to Kivv for he interrogate you.”
Jade couldn’t help feeling that she had just been handed a horrific sentence without being allowed a trial, without even being allowed to know what the charges were. “The Kivv…is going to be my interrogator?” she asked weakly. She swallowed hard, trying to calm her stomach.
“Yes.” Koll wore a broad, sneering, cold grin that spoke of victory. Jade looked at the other soldier and he wore it, too.
“Why?” said Jade. It was almost a whisper.
“Because you is big spy.”

Spy High

Another science fiction story from The Claw and the Eye:

Becky kissed Jade on the cheek. “Wade was a little terror today. Wouldn't listen, wouldn't--” She stopped speaking, looked up and glanced around. “I thought I saw something.” They were standing in Becky’s yard, between their cars on the gravel space that couldn’t quite be called a driveway, that locals call a dooryard.

“We're all on edge now, I think,” Jade answered. She really didn’t have time for this. She was here to drop off a birthday present, and then she had to get home. It was getting late, and she still hadn’t even started working yet. “It was probably—“she started, then stopped and pointed to the overcast sky--“there!” For an instant, she had seen it too, then it was gone again.
“Shh.” said Becky, searching the dull greyness overhead.
“All I hear is the wind,” whispered Jade, glancing around vaguely, “and the brook.”
“Right,” Becky whispered back. “We don't have a brook.”
The sound grew steadily louder. It was like the rustling swish of a storm-breeze on a summer afternoon, the buzzing hum of a bumblebee, and the babbling laughter of a shallow, rocky brook.
“Chuzekks!” Jade yelled, even though Becky was right next to her, and both women started running across the wet lawn toward the house. That babbling hum was the engine-sound of a small Chuzekk spy-ship or landing module.
But running was futile. The alien craft burst through the clouds and settled onto the lawn between them and the house. They stood on the wet grass and watched it land, along with two others that touched down in the dooryard beyond the cars. Together the three ships formed a triangle with Jade and Becky inside it. They walked back in the direction they had come, stood back-to-back in the center of the triangle, and waited.
All three of the little spaceships opened, and the two women were soon surrounded by Chuzekk soldiers: scaly-skinned, bigger than humans and hideously fierce-looking.

One of the soldiers approached them. He looked at Jade. “Jade Massilon?” It sounded like “Jade Bassilod?”
She wanted to say no, she wasn't Jade Bassilod. She didn't know any Jade Bassilod. But if she said that, maybe these cold-blooded brutes would turn this whole area into one big crater, just like they had the Pentagon in the first minutes of the war-and all those deaths would be her fault. “Yes,” she said. Or at least she tried to, but her voice wouldn't work.
The soldier got the message. He took her arm in one clawed hand and with the other pointed to one of the ships. “You will enter that pod,” he said. She walked in without resisting. Another soldier followed them inside, carrying Jade's purse. He must have grabbed it from her car. She tried to catch a glimpse of Becky's face, but by the time she was allowed to turn around, the door was closed.
She thought of the time she’d been in Zukk’s vehicle, just like this one. Then, he had practically dragged her out of it, and she would have given almost anything to get back inside. But that was before the war. Now, she'd give anything to get out.
“You will kneel here,” said the soldier who had Jade's arm.

Jade didn't see any place to kneel, but still the soldier propelled her forward. In front of her seemed to be nothing but a sort of sculpture made of tangled, shiny pipes. Had Zukk’s vehicle had something like that? She couldn’t remember. The soldier kept pushing her until her thighs touched the sculpture. Then he adjusted the pipes so they touched her shins instead, just below the knees. There were pads on the pipes where they touched her, and the soldier pushed her a little more so that her knees bent and half her weight was on the pads. Then he secured another set of pipes around her torso and she was locked in. There were vertical pipes on both sides of her, attached to the floor and ceiling, supporting all the other pipes. Otherwise, she had a good view of half the interior of the craft. And her arms were free-though she couldn't reach anything but the vertical pipes.
The second soldier started typing with his claws on a gray metal support-post, and the walls began to light up with readouts. A short text readout appeared near the ceiling. She had seen one like that the last time.
“What does that say?” she asked, pointing.
“26-pod optimal status,” answered the soldier who was typing. Last time, the translation had been,
“26-pod propulsion failure.”
“26-pod,” Jade repeated. “Is that what kind of ship this is?”
“Yes. Any small, ultra-maneuverable, surface-capable spacecraft is called a pod. Or our word translates into English as 'pod'. It was originally used only for the protective shell of certain seeds.
This pod is version 26. 25 is still used, but I don't think that any 24's are still used.”
“Probably not,” agreed the soldier who had locked her in the sculpture-cage. He was studying one of the readouts, which showed a line drawing of a body with many colored lines and symbols superimposed on it. Jade shifted her weight to her right knee, just for a change, and some of the lines changed color. Curious, she leaned on her left knee and they changed again. She stayed on her left knee for ten seconds and the readout stayed basically the same, but when she put her weight back on both knees evenly, it changed again. Meanwhile, the soldier kept looking at the readout, then at Jade, then back at the readout again.

He had a short conversation with his colleague in their language, the second soldier typed something on the post again, and Jade felt the pod lift off.

“Where are you taking me to?” she asked.
“We don't know,” the first soldier answered.
“You don't know where this pod is going?” If there was one thing that got under Jade's skin, it was being lied to. But she really should have kept her mouth shut. She wasn't exactly in a position to be mouthy.
But her alien captors didn't seem to mind. Instead, they both laughed, and Jade jumped in her restraints. She had never thought of Chuzekks as capable of laughter.
“I know where this pod is going,” said the second soldier, still smiling. “I'm the pilot.”
“We are taking you to a larger ship,” the first one explained. “We do not know your destination after that.”
Or more likely, they didn't want Jade to know her destination after that. But there was no point in pursuing the subject with them: they were trained soldiers and she wasn't going to get anything out of them that they didn't want to tell her.
So she'd been captured by the Chuzekks. Why? It wasn't that she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say. The Chuzekks had actually sent quite a lot of pods and soldiers, specifically for her, Jade Massilon. But why? It must have had something to do with Zukk. She hadn't been intended even to know he was there. “Our meeting was due to an error,” he had said. And now, they probably thought she possessed some sort of secret. Well, she didn't.
But how could she convince them that she didn't? She felt herself start to panic and pushed the thought away, forcing herself to concentrate on the Chuzekk script overhead. “26-pod status optimal,” was the translation they had given her. Or was it “optimal status”? Her eyes lost their focus on the readout. Her head began to swim and her stomach churned. Her face and ears felt hot. Or was it cold?
Suddenly the first soldier turned from his readout and gave her a backhand slap on the cheekbone.
She gasped.
“Breathe,” he ordered.
By the time the pod had landed and she was released from her restraints, Jade was stiff and found it hard to walk. While the first soldier--the one who had slapped her--helped her out of the pod, the second one stroked the top of her head with his hand. He seemed to be petting her, as though she were a dog.
The pod was sitting in a very large, windowless room along with about a dozen other pods and one bigger craft.

Another soldier approached, a female. Jade had seen female Chuzekks on television ever since they had taken over the satellites, but this was the first time she'd met one. Most of them were smaller than the males, and this one was no exception, but still she was six feet of sculpted muscle. She grabbed Jade's right bicep, as though testing its strength. “I am Koll,” she said. “I will take you to your room.”

“Jade Massilon,” answered Jade. “But I guess you already knew that. Can I contact my family now? I need to let them know I'm alright.”
“No,” answered Koll. “Orders. No contact to Earth, no contact from Earth.”
“Is there any way I can appeal that?”
“Perhaps, but not today.”
Koll exchanged a few words with the two other soldiers, in their own language. Then she took Jade's arm in what now seemed to be the standard prisoner-escort method, and pointed her between two rows of pods to an opening in the far end of the huge room.
They came to a shallow ramp, and Jade stumbled.
“You is stiff because of the garoshh,” said Koll, steadying her. “I will help you.”
“Garoshh?”
“The rig placed around your ribcage to immobilize you.”
“I just learned a new Chuzekk word,” said Jade wryly. “Garoshh.” The ramp had been going up, and now it started going down again. Looking ahead, Jade realized the floor was full of ramps and steps, rises and hollows.
Koll laughed. “That is bad first word. Try 'shass'. It is the sea.”
“The sea?” said Jade. “The ocean? Or see with the eyes?”
“I don't know 'ocean',” Koll answered. She quickly pulled a small object from her left hip and spoke into it. “Oshad,” she said to it, because she couldn't say 'ocean', and the object replied, “Shass.” Then she said, “Sea,” and this time the object gave a long reply. Jade theorized that it was giving the definitions of the words 'sea' and 'see', and maybe also the letter 'C'.
“That's a nice dictionary you've got there,” said Jade, hoping to continue the friendly tone as long as possible.
“Yes,” the soldier agreed, putting the object back on her hip. “But perhaps we rely them too much. Is called a Personal Device.” Now that her left hand was free, she reached for Jade's hair. “You will get Personal Device, too,” she continued as she ran her claws through the ends of the pumpkin-colored curls. “But yours does less than ours, for security.”
Jade's stiffness soon wore off, and she walked with Koll through corridor after corridor, stepping up and down on the uneven floor. Sometimes they passed other soldiers. Finally Koll stopped where another soldier waited near an open door. “This is your room,” she said.
Jade had been expecting a cell, and hoping for a cot or at least a shelf for sleeping, and a toilet. What she saw was a spacious room furnished with many large and small items. Some of them she could identify: pillows, a couple of high counters or low walls, an American-brand coffeemaker, a pool of water. Most of them, she could not. The floor, of course, was on many different levels. A soldier waited behind one of the counters.
“You may come in,” said the soldier. Actually, what she said was, “You bay cub id,” and for half a second Jade heard it as “You make a bid.”
Jade entered and someone closed the door behind her. She was alone with the new soldier, whose head-ridges were blue. Jade wondered whether she belonged to a blue-ridged ethnic group or whether she had painted them. Whatever their source, the blue ridges matched what appeared to be eye shadow, and the effect was striking. Chuzekks, in Jade's opinion, were ugly, but this one was somehow beautiful.
The blue-ridged soldier came out from behind the counter. “Since you are perhaps not familiar with our accommodations, I will tell you what is here and teach you how to use things. I am late.” She extended her hand. Her claws were blue, too.
“If you're late,” said Jade, shaking her hand, “we can skip the tour. I'm sure I'll figure things out.”
The soldier laughed. “I have time. Leitt is by dabe,” she said. Leitt is my name. She stroked Jade's head. “Here is your bed,” she said, indicating a flat disk about three feet high and ten feet in diameter. “Here is the temperature control for the bed. Or you can use a voice command. It understands English.”
“The bed is heated?” Jade asked, and regretted it.
“Yes. Here is the pool. Here is the temperature control for the pool.”
Jade didn't comment on the heated pool. “When can I call my family?” she asked instead.
“I don't know. I recommend you ask your interrogator.”
“My interrogator?”
“Yes.”
“Who's my interrogator?”
“I don't know.”
“But you know that I have one?”
“No. Rarely prisoners are captured by error and returned without interrogation. But that is rare.”
“How do I find out who my interrogator is, then?”
“Perhaps you will not discover who it is before your interrogation starts. If I discover, I will tell you, if I am allowed.”
“Thank you,” Jade replied hollowly.
“Here is your desk,” Leitt continued, gesturing toward the counter she had been sitting behind when Jade first saw her.
It didn't look like a desk. And it had some strange-looking metal devices on one side. Jade didn’t like them: they looked vaguely similar to that horrible prisoner-restraint in the pod, the garoshh.
“How do you use the desk?” Jade asked.
In one quick, graceful movement, Leitt knelt in one of the metal devices, facing the counter. She looked like a patron sitting at a bar. Then she stood again. “I put my knees here,” she said, touching a spot on the device, “and here. You can adjust it to the desired height, like this. If I will stay in this station long I will place this piece behind me for support when I lean back.”
Jade tried it. The metal wasn't padded, and it hurt her knees. She stood and glanced around the room. “I don't see any chairs,” she said.
“There is one,” said Leitt, putting her emphasis on the word ‘is’ as though only one chair was to be expected. She led Jade to a spot near the corner of the big room where there was a shape painted in red on the white wall. Leitt pushed on the painted shape with her hand, and it swung open on hidden hinges. They entered a smaller room, Leitt opened another painted-shape door and they crowded into an even smaller room. In one corner was a triangular sink with an overhanging lip that Jade assumed must contain the faucet. A package of 12 rolls of toilet paper sat unopened on a shelf. Jade recognized the brand. The only other item in the room was a round thing that looked like a cross between a toilet and a wide-mouthed jar. It stood only about a foot high.
“The toilet,” said Jade, “is the only chair?”
Leitt hesitated. “Our translator is not perfect. What is the difference between 'toilet' and 'chair'?”
“This is a toilet,” Jade answered, “and a chair is something you sit in.”
“Something I shit in,” Leitt said. “I know only one thing. Do you require something else as well?”
“No, that's okay. I can sit on the bed.”
“No,” Leitt answered with authority. “That is not acceptable.”
“Sitting on the bed is not acceptable?”
“Yes, it is not. Describe what you need and I will get it. But you must not shit on the bed.”
Jade decided not to try to explain the difference between 'shit' and 'sit'. There were more important things that needed explanation. She tried to keep a straight face. “I'll just use the toilet,” she said with difficulty. “I don't need anything else.”
“Be sure that you do not,” Leitt replied sternly, then continued in a lighter tone, “I will show you the shower. It has been altered so that you can breathe. I will show you how to use the alteration.”
“So that I can breathe?”
“Yes.” By this time, they had left the little toilet room and entered the shower room. The shower was recognizable, though not familiar. It had a pocket-door and what looked like water jets in the door, walls, floor and ceiling. “The water sources have been disabled in this corner,” Leitt explained. “When you breathe, your face should be in this corner. Otherwise, you should--” She paused and spoke to her Personal Device in her own language and the rest of the sentence came from the Device in a perky American accent: “to hold one's breath.” She put it away and said, “Do you require more information about the shower?”
“I'm just curious about the alterations, I guess. Is it a height thing? Maybe I'm not tall enough to use a shower without alterations?”
“No,” Leitt answered. “Without alterations, there is no air that is not mixed with water. As a mammal, you would drown.”
“You're not mammals?”
“Yes, we are amphibians. When we shower, we breathe the spray. It feels refreshing. If you have no more questions, then I will leave for a short time, then return.”
“Oh sure. I think I'll try out the shower.”
“Yes. Give a shower. That is incorrect. Take a shower.”
“Take a shower, yes. I'm going to take a shower.”
When she stepped out after showering, her clothes were gone, replaced by what appeared to be a folded outfit of slate gray. As much as she hadn't been looking forward to putting her dirty clothes back on, she felt a disproportionate sense of loss, bordering on anger. Her clothes were all she'd had from home besides her body and her thoughts, and now even they were gone. She took a deep breath and told herself to be reasonable. Probably they were just out for washing, and she would be back inside them soon.
She picked up the gray clothing and found that it was all one piece. A pair of tall boots stood on the floor, and leaning against the wall was one of those things Zukk had called armor. She didn't see any undergarments anywhere.

It took her a while to figure out the alien garment, but she got it on eventually. The boots were easier, and strangely comfortable. The armor was too confusing, and superfluous anyway, so she left it in the corner.
She heard footsteps, and Leitt came in without knocking. “I was delayed,” she said. “I will show you how to wear the faltupp.” She picked up the armor and handed it to Jade.
“So this is called 'faltupp',” said Jade.
“Yes. Hold it here, and put your head here...fasten this...pull this.”
Now Jade was dressed in a Chuzekk soldier's uniform, complete with catsuit or jumpsuit, knee-high boots and the faltupp: a stiff protective piece worn in front like a baseball catcher's gear. Besides size, the only difference between her outfit and Leitt's was the markings on the faltupp. Zukk had said they indicated “rank and command”. Embossed on her own faltupp was a sort of rounded rectangle. Leitt's had two concentric circles. Zukk's had been more intricate, bearing a pattern made of many circles. Both Leitt's and Jade's bore identical symbols that Jade didn't like the look of: a claw or talon appeared to be in the act of putting out an eye. But the markings were not important right now. “What am I doing here, anyway?” Jade asked Leitt.
“Dressing.”
“No, I mean why am I here? Why was I captured?”
“I don't know. Were you captured with others, or was only you captured?”
“Only me, I think. I was at my aunt's house. A lot of pods landed. They had us surrounded.”
“I think someone ordered your capture. But I don't know who or why,” said Leitt. “You should eat. The door guards will take you to the cafeteria. You can order food from the round pillars. They understand English. My workday is ending. I will go home now and return tomorrow. My husband's workday is ending also.” She smiled confidentially. “He is an interrogator.” She watched Jade's face for a reaction, and when she saw none, she explained, “Interrogators are the best lovers.”
Jade said nothing. A lover who made a living torturing people wasn't Jade's cup of tea. She wondered if Leitt's husband would be her own interrogator. She wondered if she would survive the interrogation or if he would realize too late that she had no information that could be useful to the Chuzekk side.

The Enforcement Claws

Another science fiction story, one of the eight short stories in The Claw and the Eye:

The Keev's office was at the end of a high, broad hallway. The door was square, about ten feet by ten feet, made of some kind of metal and inlaid with stones and a horizontal line of tiles bearing Chuzekk characters. Above it, in gleaming gold, was a giant emblem on Jade's own POW uniform, depicting a long claw or talon in the act of piercing an open eye.

Jade had been brought there by two low-ranking Chuzekk soldiers, or Cheejes. One of them pushed open the huge door and the other walked through the open doorway, still holding Jade by the arm, and stopped as soon as they were past the end of the door.

Standing about 15 feet in front of them was a male Chuzekk that Jade took to be the Keev, since his rank insignia was one she hadn't seen before. He walked slowly toward her, looking at her intently with piercing green eyes. He smiled a sneering, almost hungry smile, and didn't stop walking until he was only about a foot in front of her. He nodded to the Cheej, who let go of Jade's arm.

Jade had to tilt her head back and look up to see his face. She almost didn't dare move, but she didn't dare not to. She forced herself to reach for his right upper-arm as she had been taught and say, “Keev.” To her surprise, her voice worked this time, though it did sound shaky.

He grasped her arm and said, “Jade.” Then he released his grip and said something to the Cheej in Chuzekk. The Cheej turned and left, closing the door behind her. Jade was left alone with the Keev, who continued to stand and look at her intently.

Afraid of appearing defiant, Jade lowered her gaze, but he lifted her chin with his leathery left hand until she was looking at his face again.

His reptilian-looking skin was browner and less gray than the average Chuzekk's Jade had seen so far, and his face was wider. From straight on, his head ridges looked like points - almost like a crown. A hairless unibrow that vaguely resembled crocodile-skin extended to both sides of his head.
The same crocodile effect occurred across his flared nostrils, and in two lines that extended from his cheeks to his throat and jutted out half an inch or so from his chin.

Finally, he stepped back and slowly walked in a circle around her, still staring at her in that piercing almost-hungry way.

“I am Keev...Chegg...Jaig,” he said when he had completed his circle, speaking slowly and enunciating the names with extreme clarity. “Keev is my rank. It means that I support more than 22,000 people. Chegg is my personal name. Jaig is my family name.”

There was a desk in the room, much like the desk in Jade's own room, and the Keev walked around it and stood on the other side. “You will kneel in this station,” he said.

Jade complied. There were half a dozen kneeling-chairs, or stations, at that desk, and the Keev had indicated the second one from the left-hand end. Jade was now facing a large blank white wall to the left of the door. To the right of the desk, and nearest the door, was a counter holding a coffeemaker, half a dozen mugs and some other things.

The Keev stood to her right and placed a small round object on her cheek. It must have had an adhesive backing, because it stuck there. Then he took out his Personal Device, opened it and typed. He set it on the desk and tapped it one more time with his claw, and a projection appeared on the wall in front of her: an outline of a body with colored lines and symbols. There was a series of lines to the left of the body-outline as well, vaguely resembling a bar graph.

“You did not sleep last night,” he observed, “nor eat today.” He walked to the coffee counter. “Do you want coffee?” he asked her.

Last night, she had made up her mind not to answer any questions in this office, no matter how trivial. She stared straight ahead and said nothing.

He poured two cups of coffee. “Sugar?” he asked.

Again she said nothing. Data in the projection flickered and changed.

“More sugar?” he asked, seeming not to notice her silence.

She looked at him and saw that he wasn't even looking at her. He seemed to be looking at the data on the wall. He turned and put sugar in one of the mugs. “More sugar?” he asked again, looking at the wall. Some of the bars in the graph seemed to move in response, and he put in another spoonful. “More sugar?” He put the sugar down. “Cream?” he said. The bars responded again and he poured cream into her mug. “More cream?” Apparently the wall said no, because he put the cream away.

He came back to the desk with both mugs of coffee and set hers in front of her. There was nothing alien about these solid-color ceramic mugs. She figured the Chuzekks must have gotten them from Earth. She picked up the maroon mug and sipped, and couldn't help noticing that the coffee tasted just like she had prepared it herself. The Keev's own coffee was black, and his mug a sort of dusty blue. She wondered if any of this information was significant, and tried to observe and put to memory as many details as possible. But she should focus on the room, too, not just the coffee and the mugs.

“Chuzekks discovered coffee just recently, when we came to Earth,” the Keev observed. “But already many like it. I also like it.”

He typed on his Personal Device and the body-outline and bar graph moved to the left, leaving a large area of blank wall between them and the door. Then a picture seemed to slide out from under the body-outline until it occupied the majority of the blank space. It was a face-shot of a man, and it looked like the kind of photo you'd find on an ID. It stayed there for a second or two, then seemed to slide off to the right and disappear. Another picture slid in from the left, stayed for a moment, then disappeared to the right. The process kept repeating, until Jade began to wonder if the Keev was trying to hypnotize her.

Then she saw something that made her jump: staring back at her from the wall was the face of her neighbor, Bill. This time the photo didn't slide off to the right. It minimized into the lower-left corner of the photo area before disappearing. The next photo was of Bill's wife, and it, too, disappeared into the corner and not to the right side.

Very uncomfortable with this development, Jade stood up.

Silently, the Keev stopped the flow of pictures with one clawstroke, put a big hand on her back and firmly pushed her into the station, so that her weight shifted onto her knees and forearms. Then he placed his hands on the desk, one on either side of her, leaned close and spoke quietly into her right ear, emphasizing the first two words with a chilling severity, “Do...not...remove your knees from this station without my permission.” Then he stood to his full height and Jade straightened her back, kneeling solidly in the station. The Keev started the pictures again, knelt in the station beside her and sipped his coffee.

She saw a lot of faces she recognized, and a lot she didn't. Most of the ones she recognized minimized into the corner: most of the ones she didn't slid off to the right side. Clearly the Personal Device, or some other computer, was sorting the pictures based on Jade's autonomous responses. But sorting for what purpose? Was she unwillingly betraying her friends and neighbors? She put her head down on the counter so she wouldn't see the pictures.

Still without speaking, the Keev put down his mug, stood behind her and picked her head up with both his hands.

She closed her eyes, but he opened them with his fingers and held them open. His claws didn't scratch her, but she could feel them against her eyelids, her cheeks and the back of her head, and they felt sharp.

After a few seconds he let go and returned to his station. Her eyes burned and she blinked hard, but she was careful not to leave them closed.

The pictures continued sorting themselves. Clearly, refusing to answer questions was useless since somehow the computer could read her responses whether she spoke them or not. Refusing to look at the projection was useless since she was forced to see it whether she looked or not. There no longer seemed to be anything to lose by talking.

“Keev,” she said, “is it okay if I say something?”

“Yes.” He stopped the pictures.

“There must be some mistake. I'm not in the military. I don't know any military secrets.”

“What is the mistake?” he asked her.

“Well, here I am, I've been captured, I'm about to be interrogated, but I don't have any information I could possibly imagine would be useful to you.”

“Then we will find that out.”

The cold, ominous sound of his response started her heart pounding.

“A sudden increase in fear, I believe,” he observed like a scientist analyzing a test. “Why?”

Jade paused to compose her reply. Stating the obvious without sounding disrespectful was always a challenge. “I think fear is normal for any human waiting to be tortured.”

He scoffed. “We do not torture,” he spat. “It's ineffective.”

He started the pictures again, and she watched them sort themselves.

“Keev,” she said a few minutes later, “Is it okay if I ask questions?”

He stopped the pictures. “You should say, 'Chegg' not 'Keev'. Chegg is my name, Keev is my rank. You should not address us by rank, as you will dilute the significance of the statement of submission if you use our ranks also to ask for attention.”

Jade didn't understand, and he seemed to realize that.

“When we met today,” he said with the patient tone of a teacher, “you called me 'Keev'. Why?”

“I was told that when someone outranks you, you should say their rank and not their name,” Jade answered, hoping she wasn't getting anyone in trouble.

“You were told correctly. Do you know why you should say the rank and not the name?”

“They said it's a promise to obey.”

“Yes, it's a statement of submission, a recognition of my authority over you. You should not use it simply to address me. If you want my attention, you should use my name. Yes, you may ask questions.”

“Chegg, then. Why was I captured?”

He put his left hand on her back. It wasn't a sexual touch, but it did seem inappropriately familiar. With his right hand he typed something into his Personal Device, and the image of a US military document showed on the wall.

“Can you please not touch me?” she asked.

“Request denied,” he answered. “Do not ask again.” He remained standing, touching her back. “Do you recognize this document?”

Jade didn't recognize it, but she didn't bother answering verbally. She saw that the document bore her name, and read to learn more.

“You took a test for the American Army,” said Chegg, “called DLAB - Defense Language Aptitude Battery. This is your score.”

Jade's heart pounded and the body-outline and bar graph showed the rapid change. “Yes, I did,” she admitted, “but I didn't really go. I mean, I enlisted, but I never went to Basic.”

“You were discharged before training because a doctor misdiagnosed you with arthritis. My concern is your score.”

Jade smiled, part relieved, part proud, part embarrassed, part apprehensive, and the bar graph changed. She could still remember the look on that sergeant's face when she had brought back the message that, yes, this really was her DLAB score - the proctor hadn't accidentally given her some other slip of paper. “He made a mistake,” the sergeant had said. “That's not a DLAB score. Go back and ask him for your score again.” And when she had gone back to the proctor, he had said, “I've never seen a score that high, either, but that's your score.”

“With the proper training,” said Chegg, “you could probably crack Chuzekk code. I ordered your capture as a preventive measure, but of course we want to know if we acted late and you have already compromised our code.”

“Oh my gosh!” said Jade. “But why are you doing the interrogation? I mean, I got the impression that normally you have someone else do that.”

“My gashh,” her interrogator corrected. “You are my gashh.”

She felt her face grow hot, and the data on the wall adjusted to match it. “It’s just…an expression we use…” she struggled. “It expresses surprise.”

Chegg laughed. “I am familiar with the expression,” he said, going back to his station. “There are twelve Zeeds who do most of the interrogations on this ship. I was once one of those interrogators, and one of the reasons for my promotion was because of my interrogation skill. I want to keep that skill sharp, so I occasionally perform an interrogation myself. I find your case interesting and I want to explore your mind.”

Jade didn't like the idea of having her mind explored, but it was still a lot better than being tortured. “I tried to contact my family,” she said, “but they keep telling me I have to get permission from my interrogator. Can you give permission so I can let them know I'm okay?”

“No,” Chegg answered without any hint of apology. “I will not risk your having contact with Earth until the planet is secure.”

He started the pictures again, and they included a lot of her family and neighbors. Even her daughter Geonily was there. She had been careful not to mention Geonily, just in case the Chuzekks might want to capture her as well and use her as a hostage.

The pictures stopped sliding in from the left and began maximizing from the lower-left corner. It was a review of the pictures that had been saved, and the sorting process occurred again, with most of the pictures Jade didn't recognize sliding off to the right. Chegg often asked questions or made comments about the individuals in the pictures, usually with his hand on her back. “Does she still live in New Hampshire?” he would say, or “You find him attractive.” His touch felt like an intimate gesture, especially when coupled with some of his comments, and she found it hard to tolerate.

“Why do you keep putting your hand on my back?” she asked, trying to keep the aggravation out of her voice.

“I feel with my hand some of the information you see on the left: your breathing, your heartbeat, your temperature, the tension of many of your muscles, whether your legs are still or moving. I can see all this information and more on the wall, or on my Personal Device, but I don't want to become too dependent on the technology. I want to keep my skills sharp by not relying entirely on the telemetry from your uniform.”

“My uniform? So all this data is coming from my uniform?”

“No, the top section of horizontal lines is from the disk on your cheek.”

“This symbol,” she said, pointing to the claw-and-eye on her uniform. “What does it mean?”

“It is the symbol of the Counter-Intelligence command. Counter-Intelligence is the job of this ship.”

“And you're its Commanding Officer, right?”

“Yes.”

A few more photos sorted themselves before Jade spoke again. “You've given me two orders:” she said, “not to remove my knees from this station without your permission, and not to ask you not to touch me. I'm not going to disobey you of course. But I'm curious. Can you tell me what would happen if I did?”

“Yes,” he replied. He placed the claws of his left hand on the back of her neck as though ready to tear her. She could feel all five sharp points and had to remain perfectly still so they didn't penetrate her skin. Then he said quietly, “You would feel my claws.”