Catalyst

Today's post is by Bronwyn Cair:

“Today,” Admiral Roth somberly began her address, “we suffered a great blow. We lost hundreds. Some were our friends, some were our family. They were our mothers, our daughters, our wives. They were our fathers, husbands, sons, sisters and brothers. This is a day we will never forget. We will hold their memories in our hearts for all eternity.”

Photo: www.maxwell.af.mil

She paused, looked down at what had become her family away from home. They were all mourning. She thought about her son, her daughter and her partner, all fighters. All killed.

Photo: www.cargolaw.com

“And because of what they have done, it will be a day that Govern will never forget. Because of what they have done, we have an opportunity to strike back with a vengeance Govern has never seen.”

Photo: www.okefood.com

Admiral Roth’s podium shook with the volume of their cheers, the voices of every man and woman united in a fierce cry of agreement.



“We will not allow them to stomp out the light that burns within our hearts. We will not allow them to take away who we are. We will fight, in the names of those we have lost, and we will show them what a mighty nation we are. We are the Last Air Contingent, and we will not let our honor be forgotten!”

Rokassa Juice

One of the most fascinating (and time-consuming) parts of writing a Star Trek book is including lots of details that tie it together with the shows, movies and books that are already out there. I recently watched the DS9 episode "Cardassians" (2x05), in which the character Garak enjoyed a smelly beverage called rokassa juice, saying it calmed his nerves. As soon as he said that, I knew rokassa juice had to be in the novel.

Thanks to Paramount

One of the main characters in Cardassian Language is a military commander in wartime: a tough, proud leader in an already arrogant, macho culture. It would be all too easy to paint him as an irredeemable villain with no weaknesses, no doubts, no humanity. Of course, if I did that, he wouldn't feel real and I wouldn't be much of a writer, but I can't have him collapsing in a POW's arms and sobbing, either. That's where rokassa juice comes in.

In its introductory scene, it's not the rokassa juice that tells the reader he's having a bad day: we get a rare opportunity to use a battle injury to hint at his vulnerabilities. But the rokassa juice will, if I do my job right, establish itself over time as a clue or symbol, and be very useful in scenes where there are no convenient bodily signs.

Here's the passage, from Chapter 18, condensed it a bit for this post. We're on a Cardassian warship, and a human prisoner has been summoned for a chat with the Gul, or Captain:

The Gul put one hand on his chair and the other on the desk and pushed himself up on his arms. Slowly, he transferred his weight to his legs and turned stiffly to the replicator. "Coffee, cream and sugar," he ordered, and "coffee, black."

"You're hurt," I said.

He put the cups on his desk and lowered himself slowly back into his chair. "A present from Starfleet," he quipped, "a small token of friendship."

"What's it all about, anyway, this war?" I stood, picked up my cup in its holder and sat down again.

"There was a time when I would have answered, 'Expansionist aggression,' but now I'm afraid it's become little more than a political game."

"Dangerous game," I observed. "I wonder if there's anything I can do."

"I doubt there's anything you could do without revealing your presence here."

"Wouldn't it be worth it to let the secret out, though? I mean, if it stops the war..."

"If it could stop the war, perhaps revealing your presence would be worth the consequences, yes. But it's much more likely to prolong the war instead."

"I see. You haven't touched your coffee."

He picked up his coffee, took a small sip and put it back down.

"Is your leg going to be okay?" I asked.

"Yes, thank you, it's just a temporary inconvenience. But I understand your injury is not from the battle."

I stared into my coffee. "No, not exactly."

"And I hear your Bajoran assailants managed to teach you quite a bit of their language in just a few minutes."

"Only simple words," I replied. "And really, Iba only kicked me to keep me from hitting my head."

"I believe your head would never have been in danger if you had not disobeyed my Riyak."

I gripped my cup-frame tightly with both hands in an effort to prevent them from flying up to my face. "True," I admitted.

"I'm more interested in your accelerated lesson in Bajoran," he said.

I sat back, tried to relax against the back of the chair and looked him in the eyes. "What do you want to know?"

"I want to know how you learned so fast. This was your first encounter with the language, I presume?"

"Yes, it was. I'm a linguist. I guess that's why," I shrugged. "I don't know."

"Then you spent the rest of the day learning Cardassian. How did that go?"

"It went pretty well. We cleared the hallways. I tried to learn some Cardassian, but I'm afraid I must have said something offensive. I didn't mean to. I was just trying to say what I thought I heard them saying."

"And that was...?"

"I thought it was 'o-shah.'"

Gillek allowed himself an amused smile. "You were correct; they were saying 'o-shah.'" He paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling, then looked back to me. "The common tongue, what you call the Cardassian language, is in many ways an accurate reflection and expression of Cardassian social structure."

"Naturally."

"I'll simplify it for you: you should always address Cardassians as 'shada,' never as 'o-shah.'"

"Okay," I replied. "I'll try to remember that. Will I be working with them again today?"

"No. You'll begin your new assignment in a few days."

"I'd like to learn more about the Universal Translator, if I could."

"I'll consider it."

"Thank you." It had only been a comment; I hadn't thought I'd need his permission to study a translation program. "Earlier you said something about turning the heat down in my room. That would be fine with me, actually. To be honest, it's a little too warm for my taste, and I know you're worried about expenses."

"I don't remember mentioning that," said Gillek, "but you're welcome to adjust the environmental controls in your quarters to suit your comfort."

"I am? Thanks. But how do I do that? I didn't see a thermostat."

"The same way you control the lights: by voice command. Might you be referring to my remark that not all the rooms in this ship are warm?"

"Yes," I said, "that was it."

"The rooms in question are specialized storage bays, but I've found they also function effectively as quarters for uncooperative prisoners. I'm afraid they are in fact cold, rather than comfortably cool as you imagine. There is one standing empty at the moment that is..." He grabbed a tablet from his desk and typed. "...52 degrees by your 21st century North American scale. Oxygen saturation is limited, to slow oxidization of stored materials; it's breathable but very thin. There are no shower or toilet facilities."

"And you would actually put me in there if I refused to work?"

"Of course. I enjoy our little meetings, Vaine, but there's no more time for this one. I'll send for you again another day."

"Yes, Gul." In spite of my efforts, it came out in a growl. I stood up and hobbled to the door, and found Dolim Shal waiting.

"Rokassa juice," I heard the Gul say as the door swished shut behind me.

Where King-Size Beds Come From

Where did king-size beds come from? Here's a humorous answer from Luke Bellmason - a tribute to Rudyard Kipling, perhaps:

The King Who Liked To Sleep

Once upon a time, there was a King. And this King liked to sleep. And he had the softest, warmest bed in all of the seven lands. And a matress of the finest, softest eiderdown feathers, a pillow stuffed with soft fresh rose petals and huge thick warm duvets piled four and five high. And because this was a cold land and a cold castle he liked to stay in bed as long as possible, not doing anything.

And one day the King from the neighbouring kingdom sent a messenger. And the Clerk to the Court told the Messenger to come back tomorrow as the King was asleep right now. And in the meantime, would the messenger like to stay for the night? And so the Messenger said that he really was supposed to be getting back to his King with the reply to the message, but really he didn’t see the harm in staying one night. And so the Clerk showed the Messenger to a room with another bed just as big and soft and warm as the Kings. And the next day the Messenger awoke late and got up and found the Clerk to the Court, who was also not up yet, and asked him again if he could deliver his message to the King. And the Clerk to the Court said he would check but that he really didn’t think the King would be up yet as it was way too early.

And so the Messenger did spend another night in the enormous, soft, warm bed and slept in the next day even longer. And when he did get up he again found the Clerk to the Court and asked him if he could go to the King and deliver his message. And the Clerk to the Court said that even though it was a lot later than it had been the day before he still didn’t think the King would be up yet as it was barely half-past four in the afternoon.

And so the Messenger spent another fine, wonderful night in the huge bed, which was like sleeping in a cloud itself and being taken away from this world altogether with all its troubles and woes and carried aloft into heaven where it was so difficult to remember what message he had even come to deliver even was. And instead the Messenger dreamt that he was a King, a ruler of his own fine kingdom with servants and fine food and a view from the window of a fine green land with farms full of fruit and animals grazing.

And when he awoke late the next evening, just before bedtime, he did indeed see the King to whom he had come to deliver his message. And he delivered his message.

“King Great-Tog, it is my sworn duty to deliver to you this message from King Hard-Bed of Stoneshireland,” he recited, “and he demaands that you do immediately grant to him the lands to your Eastern borders comprising half of your total kingdom where the great reserves of oil and gold do dwell. And if you do not do this, you will instead consider yourself King Great-Tog and he King Hard-Bed, to be at WAR!” The Messenger solemnly stated. And he added, “I await your reply King, which I will deliver by the end of this day.”

And the King muttered a few words to himself and then beckoned to his Clerk to lean in closer whereupon he muttered something more. And then the King sloped off and went back to bed.
“He said he’ll sleep on it,” said the Clerk to the Messenger, and so, as it was close to bedtime, each of them returned to bed and slept like they had never done before, each knowing that this might well be their last night of peace before the War began.

And the next day everyone took the day off and stayed in bed a bit longer and it wasn’t until the day after that they got up to see if any decision had been made. And they saw that it was a Saturday and so they knew there was no point bothering the King as he liked a really good lie in on a weekend and Monday mornings were never good and so they would wait until Tuesday at the earliest and then maybe even leave it to Wednesday.

And so on Wednesday, late in the evening when the King was up, he whispered to his Clerk that he had come to a decision and, when they felt like it, as there was no rush, they should load up a train of wagons with eiderdown matresses, fresh rose petal pillows and plenty of big thick duvets and send these to King Hard-Bed with the message that he, King Great-Tog, would not be giving up and land and he would not be going to war either, as he would be going to bed and advised King Hard-Bed to do the same, but in one of these fine new beds.

And when the Messenger returned with the wagons to King Hard-Bed he saw that his King was furious at him for taking so long for getting back to him and the Messenger told him that he should just ‘chillax’ and try the new bed as King Great-Tog had suggested.

And his King was still furious at this, but then thought about his own bed made of hard wood, pillows made from stones and gravel and the thinnest, dampest blanket which always semmed to suck away the heat from his body rather than insulating it.

And so King Hard-Bed tried the new bed and discovered that he could find no other pleasure greater than staying in his bed all night and all day, warm and comfortable, dreaming of summer days and worlds of wonder. He forgot about his oil and gold and the two Kings didn’t go to war and instead both agreed to give beds to all their subjects, beds just as comfortable and warm as theirs. And they were called King Sized beds.

And so all the people in all the lands stayed in bed all day and all night, and were happy and comfortable and never got any work done, which of course meant they never did anything bad. There was no more crime, no more wars and, though the economy did die away to nothing, nobody really minded because they were all asleep.

And outside, nature blossomed. The oil and the gold went unmined, the ground lay undisturbed and the natural balance of the land returned to what it was, and everybody slept happily ever after.

THE END

Guest Post: Occam's Razor

Please help me welcome today's guest blogger, Terry Stenzelbarton:

Photo: ds9.trekcore.com

“Lt. Nog, we’re running out of time,” the young Ferengi heard from his combadge. It was Capt. Benjamin Sisko and Nog could tell the station’s commander was reaching the limit of his patience.

Slapping the badge, he said hurriedly, “Five more minutes, Captain. I know I’ll figure it out.”

“We may not have five minutes, Mister Nog. Chief O’Brien says heat sinks are at maximum on that spar. The secondary coolant has run out and the temperatures are rising quickly. If you can’t bring the coolant lines back online in three minutes, we’ll be forced to blow the spar, and you with it.”

Nog didn’t spare the time to answer. He felt he was close to the answer and the Captain, for all the respect he deserved, needed to just shut up and let him work.

The war was over, but there was still so much work to be done. The Founder had been transferred to Starfleet custody earlier that day, ships that had been taking part in the final Dominion War battle were in orbit around Deep Space 9 awaiting repairs, and soldiers were still being transferred through DS9 to other facilities for advanced medical care.

Tomorrow there would be parties and goodbyes. Chief Miles O’Brien had announced his acceptance of a teaching position at Starfleet Academy. Commander Worf was headed to Qo'noS to fill his position as Ambassador. Odo was going home with Col. Kira. Sisko would be away to Earth with his son Jake for two weeks of debriefings. Nog himself had scars and an artificial leg, but he had survived when hundreds of millions had not. He and Bashir and Ezri would remain on Deep Space 9, cleaning up the mess the war had wrought and continuing the medical support for the ships still limping to the station.

But the war was behind him and he’d have the rest of his life to deal with it - if he could get the coolant lines to the heat sinks flowing. The heat sinks on the spars of the six pylons of Deep Space 9 were instrumental in keeping the station’s attitude and location stable in the area of the wormhole. They were part of the station’s stabilization network and bled off heat from the reactors which powered everything from the artificial gravity to the environmental equipment onboard, to the station-keeping thrusters and six rudimentary impulse drive engines.

The coolant that was supposed to flow through the sinks was in the pipes, but not cooling anything.

In all the excitement with the end of the war and the signing of the peace treaty, beta shift hadn’t noticed the increased pressure in the coolant tubes running up the pylon to the docking clamp spar. The automatic equipment hadn’t shut down the sinks or re-route the super-heated plasma from the reactors to one of the working spars or pylons.

Only when Nog had signed on duty and began handing out assignments did he see there was an issue, and by then it was quickly becoming a problem. He sent the rest of gamma shift on to their assignments, and pulled one of the multi-tool cases and another diagnostic case from the rack. It was his first night as gamma shift supervisor.

Just before leaving the engineering offices he'd reported to Lt. Ayava, the Bajoran Gamma Shift bridge officer, that he’d noticed a problem in Pylon 3 and was on his way to effect repairs. She'd acknowledged and logged the communication, flagging it for Captain Sisko and Chief O’Brien’s attention.

That’d been 42 minutes ago.

Things had not gone well. What should have been a simple matter of shutting down the heat sinks and shunting a few valves had turned into a battle to save Pylon 3 and, in the last ten minutes, his own life.

There didn't appear to be any damage to the control circuitry for the machinery that should have been shunting the plasma. Nog opened his diagnostics case and began running the troubleshooting routine. It took less than a minute to complete, but the computer was only able to tell him something was wrong, not what was causing it.

Still confident he could keep the heat sinks from going critical, Nog began removing panels along the corridor. The piping looked right at first glance, so he concentrated on the circuitry.

Twenty-two minutes into the circuit tests, the first alarm sounded. The temperature in the heat sinks had reached maximum and the emergency coolant tanks were pumping 500 liters of Ever-Kool across the heat sink baffles. Deep Space 9’s Ferengi engineer had about 10 minutes to shunt the plasma flow to another group of heat sinks, get the primary coolant flowing to the sinks again, or blow 25 meters worth of spar off the end of Pylon 3. The station would be unbalanced and the other engineers would have to manually compensate to keep the station from tearing itself apart, but it would survive.

Nog, however, would not. He knew his time was running out when the pumps for the secondary coolant wheezed silent. The backups were now empty and the sinks would begin heating again.

The corridor he was working in was in the 25 meters that would be blown free of the station. It wasn’t just a few explosive bolts. The blast doors had slammed down with the first alarm. It was a cruel fact, but one engineers understood. Sometimes you had to sacrifice a few to save the whole. The corridor he was in would be blasted free of the pylon and, hopefully, clear of the station. There would be no place for Nog to take refuge. He’d be blown into space.

There had been some hope for a transporter lock, but 15 minutes after the emergency bulkheads had slammed shut, Ensign Polk in Ops started explaining why he couldn’t get a lock.

“Just keep trying, Mister Polk. If I don’t give up trying, you can’t either,” Nog told the young Ensign.

“Excellent advice, Mr. Nog,” Sisko added. “Is there anything we can try beaming in to you?”

“No, sir. I can fix this. I know I can. I just need to concentrate.”

Photo: wallpoper.com

“Have it your, way, Lieutenant. The Defiant has cleared moorings and is maneuvering into position to tractor the spar clear of the station. You now have three minutes,” Sisko told him.

“My way, your way, any way I can make it work,” Nog muttered to himself, looking at the piping and wiring in the corridor wall. “My way is the right way. What is the right way for this work?” he slammed the computer diagnostic tool against the main coolant pipe. The sound was wrong. It should have been filled with cooling fluid, but to Nog’s hyper-sensitive ears, he could tell the pipe was only mostly full, and not moving. He looked to the far end of the corridor and realized the valves had been worked on recently. They seemed to be installed correctly except for the arrow on the main valve. It was pointed to the left, but it should have been pointing to the right.

“The right way is right!” he shouted, grabbing the tools in the work box.

It took 20 seconds and Nog suffered freezing burns to his hands and face, but with the valve re-installed correctly, the fluid started moving through the pipes and up to the heat sinks.

He was sitting on the deck plates, hands stuffed inside his uniform, when the emergency bulkhead opened and alarms ceased. Dr. Bashir got to him first, followed closely by O’Brien and Sisko. Three other Gamma Shift engineers started work on cleaning up and putting the spar corridor back together.

“Well done, engineer,” Sisko told him. “Well done.”

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.

Encounter Intelligence

Another science fiction story from The Claw and the Eye:

The alien planet resembled an artificial garden, a fantasy, a play-place for children. Gize Kwejj stepped out of his pod onto the moist, dark-brown earth that sprouted a succulent, soft, green vegetable resembling human hair. He strode up the stone path, stepped over the little step and stood on the wooden platform that formed the front of the house. He tapped on the thin metal doorframe with the backs of his claws. The door itself was made of a sort of mesh: it was nearly transparent.

Photo: weirdcrime.net

Another, more solid door fit into the same doorway, but it stood open. A human arrived in answer to his tapping. This was Becky’s house, but this wasn’t Becky. This human was as pale as Becky but younger, taller, thinner and male. His hair was so short that Gize could see the skin of his head. “Hello,” he said, with understandable suspicion.

“I require information,” Gize explained.

“Did you take my sister?” the human demanded. This was probably Jade’s brother, then.

“No,” he answered, truthfully enough.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Yes,” Gize replied. The human was holding the door closed, so he told him, “I will enter.”

“I can’t let you in,” said the human. “It’s not my house and I don’t have…” He stopped speaking once Gize was inside, and just stood there looking up at him.

Gize opened his Personal Device and accessed infrared detection. There were two other humans in the house, plus two smaller heat-sources. One was probably a coffeemaker. The other, Gize could not identify. He would continue monitoring.

“What kind of information are you looking for?” asked the human, still very afraid and trying not to show it.

They were in a small room with two open doorways, besides the door Gize had just come through. Before answering, he ducked through the doorway on the left, which led to a room with two perpendicular exterior walls. Then he asked, “Is Jade Massilon’s daughter in this house?”

“No,” the human lied, following cautiously, “she’s not here.”

The infrared signals of the other two humans had moved a little, so apparently they were awake.

They seemed to be together in the same room. The smaller signals hadn’t moved at all. “Does she live here?” Gize asked.

“No,” he lied again, then said. “Becky Sagamore lives here.”

“Is she well?”

“Becky?” said the human, pretending to misunderstand. “Yeah, she’s doing okay, I guess.”

“Is Geonily well?” Gize asked patiently.

“Yeah, well, she lost her mother,” the human answered honestly. “What can I say? I mean physically she’s not sick, but…”

“You are her uncle?”

“Yeah…” he said. “Yeah, I am.” He struggled to control his emotions.

“I did not order Jade’s capture,” Gize explained. “I cannot order her release.”

“Then who can?” asked the human, trying to hide his anger.

“My Kivv,” Gize replied, shaking his head.

The human did not understand this.

“The commander of my ship ordered Jade’s capture,” Gize tried again. “He will not release her until the planet is secure.”

“My sister can help you with security on your planet?” he asked, again pretending to misunderstand. There was something else showing in his face, too. Physical pain.

“Your sister will not be released soon,” Gize told him. “I cannot change that. My concern is the welfare of Geonily.”

“Me, too,” said the human earnestly. He was fidgeting, from the pain.

“I am Gize,”

“I’m Brooks,” the human answered, reaching toward Gize with his open right hand, in the traditional greeting gesture of his culture. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Gize,” Gaizz repeated slowly, grasping the small, pale, fragile hand in his own right hand and participating in a repetitive vertical movement.

“Gize,” Brooks repeated. “I hope I can remember that.”

“You will not offend me if you do not,” Gize assured him, “and I will not stay here long. Does Geonily attend the Town school?”

Photo: coffeemakerx.com

“We’d—I’d rather not say,” said Brooks. Apparently, the answer was yes. “I need to get some food,” he announced, and without taking his eyes off Gize, started slowly toward a doorway on the other side of the room. Gize followed him, but not too closely. They were moving away from the two other humans, and toward one of the smaller heat-sources. Gize had guessed right: it was a coffeemaker.

There were many other things in that room as well. There was furniture that looked like desks, only lower, but had no stations. There were boxes of varying sizes. Two of the boxes had no tops and seemed to be made of metal, and had a pipe built over them: probably a water-source. There were shelves stacked with eating vessels similar to the ones in the cafeteria back on the ship.

Brooks walked stiffly to the largest box, opened a door and retrieved a bag from inside it. Steam escaped from the box, and according to Gize’ Personal Device, its interior was very cold. “So how’s Jade?” Brooks asked, setting the bag down on one of the desks. It crinkled.

“She is healthy,” Gize answered.

The human had one fist on either side of the bag, and was trying to pull it open.

“But she is anxious about her separation from Geonily,” Gize continued.

Brooks repositioned his fists on the bag and tried again. “I, um…” he began, then hesitated before continuing, “I need a knife. Can you tell me how she’s being treated?” Slowly, he turned and retrieved a small knife from a rack on one of the desks.

Gize grabbed the bag and clawed it open. “Yes.”

Brooks shrugged and put the knife back. “Thanks,” he said.

“We give her food, air, water and the opportunity for sleep, exercise and hygiene. She--”

“Sorry, exercise and what?” Brooks took a vessel from a shelf behind a small thudding door, and emptied the contents of the crinkling bag into it. It seemed to be a vegetable: lumpy and green.

“Hygiene,” Gize repeated. “Her room contains a modified shower.”

“Oh, hygiene,” said the human, pronouncing the word correctly as only a human can. “A modified shower, what does that mean?” He got a piece of shiny, transparent film from a box in the side of one of the desks, and covered the vessel with it.

“We modified it for air-breathers, so that she will not drown.”

“Oh!” said Brooks. He grabbed a fork from the side of a different desk and stabbed the film.

“Yeah, that’s important, I guess. What else? How’s the food? Do you know if she’s been able to find any Chuzekk food she likes? Can we send her any?” He put the fork back.

Photo: realcheapfood.com

“It is unlikely,” Gize answered, “that she has found Chuzekk food that she likes. Our nutritional needs differ. She eats human food.”

“Human food, like what?” Brooks asked, opening yet another box and putting the vessel of cold green lumps in it. He closed the box and pushed on the front of it with one fragile finger. The box beeped once, paused, then began to whir.

Like bland white paste, thought Gize. “Like goatherd’s…” he began aloud, trying to remember the names of the dishes Jade chose, “cake? No, the word is ‘pie’. Goatherd’s pie.”

“Goatherd’s…” Brooks repeated thoughtfully. “Shepherd’s pie, maybe?”

“Yes,” Gize replied. “Shepherd’s pie…clam chowder.”

“Yum,” said Brooks. “So she’s healthy, then? She gets plenty of sleep? She’s warm enough? Does she have medical care?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” said Brooks, looking confused. “Yes to all of it? Yes to health? Yes to sleep? Yes to warmth? Yes to medical care?”

“Yes,” Gize answered again.

“Okay,” said the human, as though Gize were being difficult. “So, um, if you don’t mind my asking, who are you?”

The other non-human heat source had begun to move, and now it was coming toward them. It was slightly hotter than a human, but much smaller.

Brooks continued, “I mean, I know you’re Gize, but…is that your name? How do you know Jade? What’s your job, if that applies?”

The small heat source continued to approach. A wall still hid it from view, but at its current speed and direction, it would soon be in the same room where Gize stood. Quickly, he pulled a hand weapon from his waist and aimed it at the spot, low in one of the doorways, where the appearance of the heat source seemed most likely. “Gize is my name,” he explained as he did so. “My job title is…” The heat source appeared—a fuzzy quadruped of some sort--and when Gize saw it through the site of his weapon, he was tempted to put the weapon away, kneel on the floor and attempt to attract the creature. But his training told him to remain as he was, except for slight movements to keep the creature centered in the weapon’s firing line. Meanwhile, he continued his reply to Brooks without interruption. “…Telemetry Interpreter Support. I assist with interrogations.”

“You’ve never seen a cat before, have you?” asked Brooks.

Photo: rozeboomerang.com

“Yes,” Gize confirmed. The creature stopped walking and contemplated Gize with an expression he interpreted as surprise and curiosity. Then it continued to a small vessel on the floor and began to drink, using a complex movement of the tongue. The creature fascinated Gize. Despite its very different appearance, it had a grace, a poise, a fluidity of movement that almost mirrored the bearing of a water woman. It stopped drinking and glanced at Gize again, then at Brooks. The expression it bore as it did so, Gize would not soon forget. On a Chuzekk or even a human, that look would have meant tolerance and benevolent condescension. It was the look of one who was in the presence of lesser beings.

“Ellison,” said Brooks, stooping with difficulty, putting his hand near the floor and signaling the creature in what appeared to be a gesture-language. “Come on.”

The cat looked intently at Brooks’ hand, blinked, and turned away.

Brooks repeated the motion, at the same time making a short sucking noise with his mouth.

The smaller creature looked again, feinted toward the human, and turned away once more.

Gize put his weapon down on the desk in front of him, and kept his hand on top of it.

Brooks tried a third time to attract the cat. This time it went to him, stopped just out of reach, and sniffed the outstretched hand. After a pause, it rubbed the hand with its face, neck and shoulder, and began to make a soft vibrating sound, a sort of throaty, thrumming buzz. It allowed Brooks to pick it up, and lay in his arms, rubbing Brooks’ arm and making the sound. Brooks rubbed the cat in return.

Gize holstered his weapon. “What is the meaning of the vibrating sound?”

“Oh, that’s purring,” Brooks answered. “They do it when they’re happy, and sometimes maybe for other reasons.”

“May I touch?” asked Gize. This was not the correct phrasing in Aberikekk, but he didn’t know how to form the question properly. A direct object was required. A personal pronoun. But Gize didn’t know the sex of the creature, and he had read that in this culture it was an insult to call a male ‘she’ or a female ‘he’, and equally insulting to use the convenient neuter ‘it’ for a conscious being.

“Well,” Brooks replied, taking his time and apparently trying to think fast, “I guess that’s up to her.” He turned to give Gize and the cat better access to each other. “Gize, meet Ellison,” he said with a polite formality. “Ellison, meet Gize.”

Slowly and smoothly, Gize reached his right hand toward the two Earth creatures. The cat, still purring, reached out to him with her nose and sniffed his knuckle. She hesitated, apparently thinking. Her purring didn’t stop, but its pattern faltered. Then it continued at a faster tempo than before, and she rubbed her face against the knuckle she had sniffed. Gize rubbed her head.

Brooks smiled for the first time. It looked like Jade’s smile. “She likes you,” he said. He looked surprised and relieved. Apparently he valued the creature’s opinion.

The infrared signal of one of the humans in the other room had not moved for a few minutes now. Perhaps the human who emitted it had fallen asleep. The other signal now began to move toward the spot where Gize stood with Brooks and Ellison. Gize waited, rubbing Ellison and watching the human’s signal-indicator move on the screen of his Personal Device.

It was Becky: he recognized her from the intelligence pictures as soon as she appeared in the doorway. That meant that the other human—the one who seemed to be sleeping—must have been Geonily. Before arriving, he had planned to find the child and look at her himself. Now he had come to realize that this plan was both unrealistic and unwise. He hadn’t sufficiently appreciated the fear and suspicion his mere presence would arouse in the humans. He should have. Centuries of oppression had of course caused them to be confused about their liberation. And given the lies their oppressors were telling them even now about Chuzekk intentions, Gize should have expected this reaction.

Becky’s arrival startled Brooks. Ellison seemed to have been expecting her, but seemed to find Brooks’ reaction annoying.

Gize spoke without delay, to try to ease the tension. “I am Gize,” he said to Becky. He continued to rub Ellison, who quickly became calm again.

“My aunt, Becky,” said Brooks.

Becky gave Brooks a questioning look, but with minimal movement of her face and body. Perhaps she was hoping Gize wouldn’t notice it. Brooks shrugged slightly, and Becky approached.

“Hello, Becky,” said Gize. “Brooks asked who I am, what is my job and why I am here. If you wish, I will answer now.”

“That would be good,” Becky answered tensely. She was standing with them now, across one of the desks from Gize.

“My title is Telemetry Interpreter Support,” he repeated. “I assist with interrogations. The commander of my ship ordered Jade’s capture. He will not release her soon: I cannot change that. Jade is well, physically. But she worries about her daughter. I came here to learn whether Geonily is well, and whether I can help.”

“Well, to be honest with you, she’s having a hard time,” said Becky. “It’s her imagination, more than anything. She doesn’t know what’s going on with her mother, so she makes things up. She’s got all sorts of visions in her head. We do our best to help her, but we don’t know, either. We don’t have facts, we just have speculation. And even if we had facts, I’m not sure if she’d believe us or not. She really needs to hear from her mother.”

Gize shook his head. “My commander will not allow Jade to communicate with Earth. She has requested many times that he change this order. He refuses.”

Photo: sausociology.wordpress.com

No one spoke after that. The humans were deeply disappointed. Ellison continued her purring. Brooks turned his back to Gize and opened a door in the wall. There were shelves behind it, full of Earth-style drinking vessels, stacked up so precariously that some of them seemed in danger of falling. Brooks extricated an opaque blue one with a pattern on it, set it on the desk in front of himself and filled it with coffee. He turned to Gize. “Coffee, Gize?” he said, looking at his eyes. Pain, fear and calculation still showed in his face.

“Yes, please.”

Becky was behind Gize, standing next to the biggest box in the room—the cold box that had been the source of Brooks’ green lumps. The box had two doors, an upper and a lower one. Brooks had used the upper one to get his green lumps. Becky now opened the lower one. “What would you like to put in it?” she asked. “I have half-and-half, milk, non-dairy French vaniller…sugah rin the cubbad.”

Gize concentrated to understand her. ‘French’ he understood. ‘Vaniller’ he had never heard of. The last phrase, he realized after a moment, was “sugar in the cupboard.”
“No,” he replied, “Just coffee, thank you.”

“You like it black, then,” said Becky.

Brooks put the mug on the desk near Gize—not right in front of him, Gize noticed, only somewhat close. The human was afraid to risk touching him, then—or perhaps to risk offending him. He waited respectfully until Brooks had pulled his hand back, then picked up the vessel. The coffee inside wasn’t black: it was dark brown, like the coffee on the Kivv-ship.

Brooks removed an orange vessel from the crowded shelf and filled it with the hot liquid. He added two little shovelfuls of sugar and poured in some half-and-half. It was almost the way Jade prepared her coffee, only slightly less sugary.

“Cup,” said Gize, looking at the vessel and recalling its Aberikekk name. Some of its markings vaguely resembled the hair-like vegetable that covered the soil in front of the house. “What is this?” he asked, holding up the cup and indicating the markings with his claw.

“Grass,” Becky answered, but Brooks said, “firing glaze.”

In the pod on the way back to the Kivv-ship, Gize monitored his instruments carefully. He was a competent pilot and a better gunner, but he knew there was no substitute for preparation and alert observation. And the humans had found a way to detect even pods now, although their equipment needed to be aimed just right to be effective.

He reached an altitude of nearly 1728 units without incident, then the pod’s sensors detected a flare on the surface, probably a weapon launch. A moment later the weapon itself showed up on the sensors. He got it in the targeting sites, but the angle was wrong. If he shot it now, he’d hit whatever was below it on the planet, too. Somehow, he had to get the thing to come up beside him, and that wouldn’t be easy since it probably had him targeted, too.

Photo: dalje.com

He did his best to fly in a complex pattern. That was a challenge because his expertise was in guessing emotions from unconscious physiologic signs, and not in flying pods. His first task was to stay away from the weapon--chances were slim that it wouldn’t kill him if it hit. Pods were built to withstand attack to some extent, but by now the humans knew what kind of weapon was needed to penetrate their armor, and even they weren’t  so disorganized as to waste resources on ineffective projectiles. His second task was to lure the weapon to fly higher, then take his own pod into a dip that would put it and the weapon at roughly the same altitude.

Heart pounding, senses and reflexes quickened by the instinct to survive, his hands flew over the interior surfaces of the craft. Immediate course changes, frequent and sudden, bought him precious moments of life. Meanwhile, he also mapped out a route that should put the weapon where he needed it, assuming it cooperated.

Finally the thing was at nearly his own altitude, chasing him as he flew in a sub-orbital arc. This was his chance, but he needed to seize it quickly--it was gaining on him, fast.

With one clawstroke, he released the two waiting torpedoes and hoped.

Shooting Pains

Another short story from the science fiction story collection The Claw and the Eye:

Brooks Massilon braced himself on the edge of the shower with his left arm, wincing. He inched his way down to the lever that worked the tub stopper, and with his right hand yanked it up and turned on the hot-water faucet. Another day of work missed. Two o’clock and just now able to walk, barely. Walking was good, but thinking was even better. His head was starting to clear now. That was nice.

Photo: orrplumbing.com

Through the constant pain that felt like it held his head in a vice, and the frequent pains that felt like jolts of electricity darting at random through his body, he limped out of the bathroom with the faucet running, grabbed a pad of paper from the kitchen counter and returned. The pen was already behind his ear, carpenter-style. It wasn’t easy, but he got his body into the tub. His skin turned nearly scarlet, but he was used to that. It wouldn’t burn him. And it wouldn’t feel like it was burning if he believed that. He sighed as the intense heat began to soften the painful tension in his muscles.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” The apartment door slammed and every sound assaulted Brooks’ head with pain “Daddy, I got the part! I get to be Lily A-nnnnunnnn-zio!” she announced, dragging out the N’s like she was trying to imitate the sound of a motorcycle engine. “Where are you?”
“I’m in here,” Brooks managed, when there was finally a bit of silence.
But she didn’t keep quiet long enough to hear him. “Daddy?” She was still yelling, and it still hurt.

“I’m in here,” he said again, but not loudly enough, apparently.
After more slamming and thumping, she yelled, “Oh, are you in the bathroom?” Then she laughed.
“I guess you are. The door is closed. Guess what?” she called, loudly as ever, “I got the part.”
“Guin,” he said, “you’re yelling.”
“What?” She was even louder now. “I can’t hear you.”
“You’re yelling.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, then asked, “Oh, do you have a headache?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said again. “I got the part.”
Brooks smiled in the tub. “So I heard. Congratulations. Proud of you.”
The bath helped. He released the drain, got out of the tub, dried himself, put on his basketball shorts and came out.
“How are you feeling?” Guin asked him.
“Better,” he answered. “Definitely better.” He gave her a hug. “Welcome home, Honey. Congratulations on getting the part.”
“Thanks. You’re still hurting, though, huh?”
“Yeah. What are we gonna eat? Are you hungry?” He got to the fridge with an odd gait that wasn’t quite a limp but wasn’t normal, either, and opened it.

“Starving,” said Guin. “I don’t know, roast beef?”
“You used up the roast beef last night, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Chop suey?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Brooks. “No hamburg. Won’t be very good chop suey.” “I meant the other kind of chop suey.”
“Chinese food?”
“Yeah, remember when Monica took me to lunch?”
“Oh. I think that was sukiyaki. I threw it out: it was moldy.”
“I can go shopping,” said Guin.
“I would really appreciate that,” Brooks replied sincerely.
“So would I,” she retorted. “You can barely even walk to the fridge, and I still like to eat.”
Brooks smiled. “Can you check if there’s still a pound of elbows in the cupboard, please?”
There wasn’t still a pound of elbow macaroni in the cupboard, but only about a half-pound left in the bottom of the big economy box. Behind it was a forgotten cellophane bag of corkscrew-pasta, though. It had been part of a Christmas present. “Fusilli,” it said on the front. Brooks had no idea how you were supposed to pronounce ‘fusilli’ and neither did he care. He bet Jade would know, and care, too.

They had the elbows and spirals mixed together, with a little leftover chicken, the rest of the cheese ends and the leftover stir-fry. Along with salt and pepper and a little thickened half-and-half, it made a good supper. While they ate, they made a shopping list and talked about Lily Anunzio and the war.
“Mr. O says they don’t make them like that anymore,” said Guin.
“Make what like what?” Brooks asked.
“Sugar.”
“Don’t make them like sugar?”
“No, Lily.”
“What about Lily?”
“We need sugar. Write down ‘sugar’.”
Brooks wrote down ‘sugar’. “What does Mr. O say?”
“He says they don’t make girls like Lily anymore. I asked him what she’s like and that’s what he said. He said, ‘They don’t make girls like her anymore.’ What does that mean?”
“Brooks rolled his eyes.” It could mean a lot of things.” He was about to put his mind to it, make some guesses about what Mr. O might have meant by that comment, but Guin seemed to have moved on, so he didn’t bother.
“Guess what?” she said.
“The cat jumped onto the stove and knocked the teakettle out the window, where it hit the rooster, causing the rooster to crow and wake the owl, who decided to put the kettle on for tea?” he guessed.
“No,” Guin laughed. “You’re supposed to just say, ‘What?’”
“Good thing I don’t do what I’m supposed to, then,”
It was Guin’s turn to roll her eyes. “I heard on the radio on the way home, a bomb went off and when it cooled they went into the crater, and they found—“
“Wait, a minute, wait a minute, slow down,” Brooks interrupted. “A bomb went off where?” “I don’t know, Iraq, Afghanistan, one of those places. And when it cooled they went into the crater and they found some kind of ancient writing.”
“So the bomb unearthed an artifact?”
“Yeah, I guess. They don’t know if it’s real, though. They said it could be a hoax.”
“Who found it?”
“Some soldiers.”
“American soldiers?”
“Yeah, I think. They don’t know what it says yet. One soldier took pictures, though.”
“Your aunt should look at those pictures,” Brooks said. “I wonder if she knows about this. We should tell her. Are the pictures public on the internet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out. Jade would want to see them.”
“Okay,” Guin responded, “but why Jade, specifically?”
“Because, I bet she could translate them.” Brooks wrote down ‘bacon, potatoes, eggs’ and ‘cream cheese’.
“Does she know that one?” asked Guin, looking doubtful.
Brooks looked up from the shopping list. “Know that one what?”
“That language. What language is that?”
“How would I know? You’re telling me about this, remember?”
“Okay, I’m confused,” said Guin. “Why do you think Jade could translate the writing they found in the bomb crater, if you don’t even know what language it is?”
Brooks shrugged. “Because she translates a lot of stuff that’s written in languages she doesn’t 'know’.” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.
“Really? Like what?”
“Like Italian,” he suggested, off the top of his head.
“But she knows Spanish and French,” said Guin. “Isn’t Italian related?”
“It is,” Brooks admitted. “That was a poor example. She’s done Arabic, though, and modern Greek. Not really a hundred percent accurate, I guess, but enough to get the idea of what it was saying.”
“I don’t get it,” Guin balked. “How can you translate something, if you can’t even read it? I mean, don’t you have to learn a language, before you can read it?”
“I don’t really get it either, to tell you the truth,” he admitted. “She says it has something to do with looking for patterns, though. I don’t know. Maybe she can read the instructions on the new air filter.”
“You need the instructions? I thought you knew how to fix cars.”
Brooks smiled. “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “I’m pretty sure I can replace the air filter.” He slid his chair back and half-stood, only to realize he couldn’t walk. He’d been in the chair too long, and grown stiff.
“I don’t know,” Guin teased. “You’d have to learn to walk first.” She went to the fridge and got out the orange juice and refilled his glass for him. “Is that what you wanted?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks,” Brooks replied, and began to stretch, working his way toward walking again.
When Guin came back from shopping, Brooks was feeling a lot better, and they were both hungry again. They put the groceries away together but left out some fish sticks and French fries, and heated them in the microwave, and Brooks cooked mushrooms and peppers in a fry pan to eat with lots of sour cream. For Guin there was store-bought tartar sauce, and for Brooks the kind he made himself, because his didn’t have onions in it.
“Want to eat on the roof?” Guin suggested. It wasn’t the roof, exactly. The roof was made of slick dark-red metal, the color of drying blood, and had what builders call a twelve-inch pitch, or a 45-degree angle. But someone had built a nice deck up there, that you could get to by climbing through the window near the table and going up some steps.
They took their plates up to the roof-deck and ate there, sitting on fold-up canvas chairs with cupholders in the armrests. It was a beautiful clear night, and hard to believe that tomorrow it was supposed to be overcast and drizzly. Guin would need to take an umbrella with her, just in case, when she went to meet her friends.
“Some girl at the auditions today thought you were a drug addict,” Guin laughed. “Did you bring up the salt?”
He handed her the shaker. “Why’d she think that?“
“’Cause I told her I couldn’t wake you this morning. I said I hoped you were okay, because I couldn’t wake you and I had to get to the school. And she sort of freaked and I said it happens sometimes. So she asked what else and I said sometimes you get up but you’re sort of not really there, and—“
“Not really there?” Brooks repeated, interrupting because sometimes that was the only way to have a two-way conversation with her.
“Yeah, like, you can’t think, sometimes. And you can’t walk sometimes, and you’re in a lot of pain, a lot, and you take stuff for the pain but it doesn’t really work.”
Brooks shook his head. “Naproxen Sodium,” he said.
“Yeah,” Guin agreed. “I didn’t even think of that. I mean, when I said ‘take stuff for the pain’ I didn’t mean drugs.”
“Naproxen sodium is a drug. I take drugs.”
“Yeah, and so is ibuprofen. But…” For once, she seemed to struggle to express her thoughts. “But they’re not addictive,” he supplied. “A lot of times when you say ‘something for the pain’ people assume you mean narcotics—especially since I’m ‘not really there’, as you say, sometimes.”
“Right?” she half-squealed. “Duhhhh… But it’s not from drugs. I can just imagine the shape you’d be in, if you did do drugs.”
“Yeah,” said Brooks drily. “My head would be attached to my kneecaps, maybe.”
“Dad!” she scolded, “you know what I mean. Oh, but I did straighten her out. I mean, I told her you get these headaches, like migraines or something, and your back is messed up. I told her you should be taller than you are but your neck-bone is like out-of-joint or something, so you’re not.”
“That’s right, I’m not taller than I am. It’s not really out of joint, though. I guess if it were, I’d be dead. I don’t think anyone could survive that. Maybe…maybe I’d just be paralyzed, though.”
“Oh, what is it, then?”
“I guess they call it ‘out of alignment’.”
“Oh. That sounds like a car.”
“Yeah. That’s what’s wrong with me. My tread is wearing thin, and I need to get re-tired.”
“Or retard,” Guin teased. “Oh, did I tell you Shannon joined the Army? Or the Air Force, I guess. Yeah, the Air Force.”
“You did tell me. She was going to be a cook but there was a bonus for some kind of weapons job, so she took that instead.”
“Oh, guess I did. She goes to Basic next week. She’s excited.”
“I bet she is. Wow, did you see that?” asked Brooks in amazement, staring, literally, into space.
“No,” he said, after a pause, “you didn’t see it: you’re facing north. Move your chair,” he suggested, “it might happen again.”
“What might happen?” Guin asked, looking for a good place to put her plate down so she could turn her chair around. She didn’t notice her dad, sitting there holding his hand out for it.
“Let me hold your plate,” he said, “before you put it on the floor and walk in it.”
“Oh, so I have to put on the floor and walk on it, after you hold it, then?” She grinned. Usually he was the one to make cracks like that: she was giving him a taste of his own medicine. She handed it to him and moved her chair, slowly, so the store-brand cola wouldn’t slosh. “What am I looking for, again?”
“They used to call them shooting stars,” Brooks responded bitterly, carefully holding both plates level and wishing he had a hand free to take a swig of his water. The fries were deliciously salty.
“Oh, cool,” she said, oblivious to his tone. “I like shooting stars. You should have made a wish.”
“I did.”
“Really?” she asked, settling back into her chair and taking her plate back. “Brooks Massilon actually wished upon a star? I can’t believe it!”
“You shouldn’t believe it,” he answered. “I didn’t wish upon a star. I was just wishing, and then it happened.” He took a long draught of the cold water.
“What were you wishing for?” she asked him, “Or was it private?”
“I was thinking about your brothers, actually.”
“Oh.” She was silent for a moment, then she said, “No wonder you sounded sad.” Maybe she hadn’t been so oblivious, after all, then, even if she still didn’t get it. “When do you go to court again?”
“Don’t know yet. There’s no date set yet. I have to put in a request for a hearing, or whatever they call it, and then I guess the Clerk of Court’s office will set a date.”
“Is that Venus?” she asked, pointing.
“No, Venus we can see in the morning. It’s called the Morning Star.”
“Then what planet is it, then? It’s a planet, right, and not a star?”
“It’s not a planet or a star,” he answered soberly.
“Oh, it’s—that’s a satellite, isn’t it?” Even Guin looked chagrined now.
“Yeah.”
“Can you put in the request tomorrow?” she asked.
“The…request for a court hearing?” he replied, trying to keep up with her zigzagging train of
thought.
“The—whatever it was you said—put in a request for the boys, so you can go back to court.”
“No, I have to prepare it first, and I have to make sure it’s all right according to procedure. Jade knows about that stuff, or at least she’s really good at looking it up. I’m going to send her an email tonight. She practically begged me to let her help, so I’m going to let her.”
“Awesome.” She sounded like she meant it. “So maybe you can do the request tomorrow.”
Brooks shook his head. “She’s in bed already, for one thing.”
“Oh, right,” Guin teased. “It’s after six o’clock.”
Brooks smirked. She was exaggerating, but not that much. “And tomorrow she’s going to drive
Mrs. McGillicuddy to her doctor’s appointment, podiatrist or something—“
“You’re kidding me,” Guin interrupted. “Her name is really Mrs. McGillicuddy?”
“No,” Brooks admitted, his lips threatening to break into a sheepish smile, “but I can never remember her name. Jade must have told me half a dozen times, but I always forget, so now I just call her Mrs. McGillicuddy, or Mrs. What’s-Her-Face.”
“Ohh...” Guin breathed, screwing up her face and looking nostalgic at the same time. As though a sixteen-year-old could be nostalgic—but she was a natural actress. “Is it Griffin something? Griffin-Wendell?”
“I have no idea,” said her father. “It could be.”
“You don’t recognize it?”
“I don’t remember her name,” he said. “I just don’t remember it. I wouldn’t know it if I heard it, and maybe I just did.”
“Okay,” she conceded. “So she has to take the old lady to the foot doctor tomorrow. And then what?”
“Then she’s going to drop off a birthday present for Wade at Becky’s house, and after that she can go home and start working for the day. She’ll probably see my email when she gets home from Becky’s, but when she can start—” Brooks cut himself off suddenly and just gasped and then forgot to breathe.
“Oh my god!” Guin half-screamed. “That was a big one. You said shooting stars but I didn’t expect shooting stars like that.”
“Yeah,” Brooks exhaled sadly. “It was a big one.”
“If I was superstitious,” said Guin energetically, “I’d say it was a sign.”
“It was a sign,” said Brooks.

Photo:thesilentroom.com

“Okay, now you’re weirding me out,” she objected. “Since when did you get so hocus-pocusy?”
More white streaks of light, smaller ones, sparkled in the black sky. Brooks said nothing, and just stared at them. He wondered if it was a good sign or a bad one. It didn’t feel good.
“Ooh,” said Guin in a subdued voice, “those aren’t meteors, are they?”
“No, Honey,” Brooks confirmed gently. He sat there and gazed at his daughter, his Guinevere Sylvanbrooke, his little girl who was nearly a woman now. It was painful to watch the reality sink in. He felt like it was robbing her of her innocence, stealing the last shreds her childhood before their time.