Pretty sorry material to work with. But Captain Tolvern had asked him to try, so he intended to give it a go. And they’d given him a cool new toy to play with, so there was that.
He lifted his hand and rubbed it along the shaved spot just above his ear. It was about the size of a silver shilling, but the scar itself was no more than a pinprick. Amazing that they’d gone into his brain through that.
“So, what’s your name?” he asked. A glance at Ping. “Is that how it works?”
“Wait until he responds. Then it will come around.”
Wait? He didn’t have time for that. Svensen lifted the man’s chin. A hostile gaze answered.
“Joneson, right? That’s what they said. You look pretty miserable.”
He spoke now, a string of gibberish. It was the same dialect as used by the people they’d hauled off the surface of Castillo, and just as incomprehensible. Almost English—the same cadence and general sound—but not really.
“Yeah, it’s not working,” he told Ping. “I got nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Pretty sure he told me to go to hell.”
“What about nomah?” Ping said. “That sounds like ‘name,’ right? And that little bit in front of it was a negation.” Ping nodded. “He’s not going to tell you his name even though you’ve got it already.”
“In other words, go to hell.”
“Yes, but now you have some words.”
Svensen turned it over and was surprised to realize he could recall the entire string of nonsense syllables. And now that he’d identified “not telling you my name” more or less, it seemed to stand out from the other words, which he could suddenly pick out—at least, one word from another. But still nonsense.
He tried to repeat a bit, expecting his mouth to struggle, and discovered that it came out with exactly the same accent. Joneson, who’d heard this much already from Ping, seemed unimpressed.
“Tell me something else,” he said to the man. “How long were you on that ship?”
Gibberish, gibberish . . . too long . . . gibberish . . . don’t want to talk . . . gibberish.
The bits that Svensen understood emerged like bright lights among the darkness. And he was starting to pick up fragments of the grammar, too, the way the whole thing was constructed. They’d shifted words around relative to modern English. Or maybe the Albion dialect was the one that had changed.
“By the gods, that’s weird,” Svensen said.
Kelly must have heard the excitement in his voice. “You lucky bastard,” she said. “I told them I’d do it. Asked if they’d give me one, too.”
“So, just keep talking to him?” Svensen asked.
Ping gave a half smile. “If you can.”
He looked smug, like a wizard explaining magic to a young apprentice. It must seem commonplace to him, having already mastered modern English and this man’s more archaic version. Someone said the language implants could even master Hroom, and that was something Svensen was eager to try.
Well, master the understanding part, anyway. Nobody could reproduce all the Hroom whistles, chirps, hums, clicks, and gargles. Not even the Singaporean tech could unravel that mystery.
Svensen tried to concoct a sentence of his own. It sounded all wrong, except for the parts he’d already learned. Joneson seemed bored, almost irritated. He wouldn’t look at the others, or even at the activity buzzing through the engineering bay.
Marines drilled in mech suits to one side. Chief Engineer Barker worked with a pair of Scandians and a Hroom tech on a serpentine battery they were planning to install on Warthog. Three striker pilots argued with a mechanic about something to do with falcon engine tolerances. A forklift loaded chained shells coming up the belt from the armory.
He gave up in frustration. “If this idiot doesn’t want to cooperate, throw him back in stasis. Get the primitives in here. That one guy seemed pretty bright. Or the woman with the curly hair—she was brave enough to be the first onto the ship.”
“She also did some weird religious ritual when she came up,” Kelly said. “Praying and hand crosses and stuff. They have no idea what they’re getting into. No clue about science, tech, weapon systems, or even the basics of gravity. How an engine works, not even roughly. And on and on. It’s all magic and sorcery to her.”
“So she thinks a starship runs on demon farts. What does that matter if she follows instructions?”
“Joneson is our best bet. We teach him, he teaches the rest.”
Svensen threw up his arms. “Someone else, then. I’m no good at this people stuff. You,” he told Ping. “You did it once. Do it again.”
“I didn’t exactly get through to him,” Ping said. “Other than a few minutes learning the language, I don’t have any advantage.”
“Come on, Svensen,” Kelly said. “You had something you wanted to show him, right? A plan for getting through?”
“Seems dumb, now.”
Svensen looked down at his left hand. It was a mech attachment, not military grade, but from naval engineering, for manipulating heavy objects in vacuum. Felt strange to be wearing it without a full suit to go along with it.
A conveyor rack of mech suits hung on the wall behind them, all civilian gear like this one, and he’d detached part of one suit and connected the leads to his wrist. Without modifications to account for his disability, he wouldn’t be able to use it for more than a demonstration. But that was sufficient for now.
“Teach me the dialect,” he told Ping. “Give me more vocabulary, and I’ll see if I can get through.”
“I only spoke to him once.”
“But you were talking to those people we brought back, right? You must have picked up the rest of it.”
“Their dialect is more . . . rustic. But sure. Let’s start with this.”
Ping said something, told him to repeat it. With surprise, Svensen realized that part about repeating had been said in the dialect itself.
“No, your”—more gibberish from Ping—“is wrong.”
Some more babbling, a few times where Ping translated directly. The strange thing about this wasn’t that Svensen was learning, but that it only took once to pick it up. He could feel something working about in his head, inferring language rules, storing away new vocabulary like objects arranged neatly on a shelf. It even bent his tongue and moved his lips and mouth into strange positions to reproduce the accent.
They spoke for a few minutes, with Svensen quickly growing more fluent, until he was eager to try it out. Joneson, if he was paying attention, gave no sign.
“Give me words for ships and stuff,” he told Ping. “Engines, weapons, forts, all that. Come on, I’m ready to go.”
A minute later, he had it, and was trying out the new vocabulary. It felt smoother and smoother in his mouth.
“So you speak English,” Joneson interrupted. “Or something like it. You picked up a lot of weird words. Did you find old video of ours or something?”
Svensen had understood about eighty percent of that, and his mind effortlessly filled in the rest. It really was miraculous.
“I don’t think it’s English,” he said. “Otherwise Albion speaks English, too.”
“That babbling I hear around these parts? No, not really.” Joneson gave a disinterested shrug. “It’s a nice little trick, however you do it. Don’t know why you’d bother, though.”
“I don’t know why I’d bother, either. You’re a sad, broken man.”
That generated some heat. Joneson spat something, the majority of which was new.
Svensen chuckled. “Thanks for that. Ping is a little too proper. Doesn’t know the curse words. What’s that last one, a rude term for female anatomy?”
“Something like that, you smelly, ugly—” Another new word.
Svensen shrugged. “I’ll get the literal meaning later. I can use it figuratively until then. Here’s the thing, you jackass—yeah, I figured that one out. Modern English has the same word. There are four hundred men and women on their way t
o Fort Mathilde. Your people, from Castillo. That’s what you called Novosibirsk, right?”
“My people are gone. The planet reduced. That’s what Tolvern said.”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Svensen said. “It’s grim down there. We sent our Singaporean ship for a better scan, and there are maybe a million people left on the whole planet. Maybe. Nobody under the age of fifty remembers what it was like before, and the younger ones are all . . . well, kind of primitive, to be honest.” He ran into trouble with vocabulary and had to ask Ping for some words before starting again. “They didn’t leave behind the scientists and military leaders when they hauled off the population. They left farmers and septic workers and sheep herders, and we’ve got their . . . what is it? Their children.”
Svensen collected more vocabulary from Ping. His mind kept filling in, guessing, extrapolating based on sound and word shifts the language implant had already identified, until he could make accurate guesses at words he’d never heard or pronounced.
“But those people have got fight in them,” he continued. “When we landed, they attacked us and gave us a good battle. Came out of the ruins where they’d been hiding like rats and tried to bring us down. Thought we were the aliens, and they were going to kill a few of us if they could. I shot them up, sorry to say. I’d take it back if I could, but I don’t have the luxury to feel bad about it. I’ve got to go forward.”
“If you were in my situation you’d understand.”
“Doubtful. I’m not a—” He tried out a curse word, deliberately using it wrong in an attempt to bring a smile to the man’s face. No reaction.
“Everyone I know is gone,” Joneson said. “Don’t tell me they’re not. Most of them died when we lost Sevastopol. A handful made it to Novosibirsk. What’s left down there? Three percent of what it was, and most of them born after the attack.”
“I’ve seen people die, too,” Svensen said. “My father died in front of my eyes.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have this.” Joneson gestured at his missing legs, then held up his hands with the missing fingertips. “Wake up after fifty years to find your people gone and half your body, too. That something you’ve faced before?”
“Not exactly.”
He pressed a seal on his wrist, and the mech hand popped off. He dropped it onto Joneson’s lap. The man looked at it, but didn’t pick it up.
“The same man who killed my father cut off my hand with a knife and took me as a slave,” Svensen said. “I was seven years old. I ended up on a strange planet, living in bondage.”
“What did you say?” Kelly asked. She’d been listening, straining at every word, her expression ever more perplexed. “Ping, translate that for me.” When the Singaporean had done so, she nodded. “I thought I caught some of that. Is that why you speak with a Mercian accent?”
Svensen didn’t answer her, but continued addressing Joneson. “She’s asking about my accent. I don’t talk about it much, but it’s native to Mercia. The language of my slave master. Spent fifteen years there before I escaped. I eventually made it home. You can, too.”
“As a cripple.”
“If that’s how you see yourself. Don’t know if I’d call it that.”
Joneson glanced over to the marines, who worked with their battle gear near where others were hauling in damaged tyrillium plate with forklifts, as Blackbeard’s repairs continued at a frantic pace. For the first time, Svensen saw a flicker of light in the man’s expression.
“From what they say, you were a civilian mining foreman,” Svensen said, “which means you understand excavation. I’ve got more mech suits than crew, and it’s all Albion stuff. I was using it myself, and it’s not battle tech, but it’s good. The engineers can rig one up for a man with no legs—not a problem. And a few missing fingertips is nothing at all.”
“You want me to work?”
“I need to train you, first. Then you train these rustics we brought up. Then together you train the fresh meat that’s currently on cold storage shipping out from Castillo. You help us harden this base against attack. We’ve got a couple of weeks, that’s all.”
“You can’t beat the Adjudicators. Once you’ve been judged, it’s only a question of time.”
“Let me teach you a Scandian word. It’s only fair.” Svensen gave one of moderate crudity that translated roughly as “rubbish.” “There, now we’ve had us a proper cultural exchange.”
“We’re not one civilization,” Ping said. “We’re several. War brought us together. Our strength is in numbers, in shared power, in shared technology.”
“You don’t know what you’re facing,” Joneson said.
“And neither do they,” Ping said. There was a cold edge to his voice that Svensen admired. “We’re going to take their judgment and shove it straight down their throat.”
“We’re going to shove it somewhere,” Svensen said. “Don’t know if I’d say it was their throat. But let’s talk about you, Joneson. Are you going to curl into a ball while we fight for our lives or are you going to help?”
“What can I do?” Joneson practically spat the question. “Do you people really need the labor of a worthless old cripple?”
“What we need is your leadership,” Svensen said. He switched to English. “Bring over that mech suit.”
Kelly hit a button on the wall and the rack of mech suits popped loose. She swung the whole rack out from the wall and ran the belt until a battered gray civilian unit came around the end, the main parts loosely held together with clips.
Svensen picked up his artificial hand from Joneson’s lap, fit it over his stump, and fastened the seals. It wasn’t properly customized, and he could only flex and unflex, but that was enough to detach the legs from the mech suit, which he held out for the man in the chair.
“This is it, friend,” Svensen said. “The one they outfitted for your use. Just hanging on the rack with the others—it’s nothing special, really—but there’s an ID right back here so you can find it again.”
He set them in front of the man, a pair of mech legs standing upright in front of a man missing his real ones. Joneson stared at them thoughtfully.
“I’ll need help,” he said at last.
Svensen shook his head. “No, you won’t.”
“My hands . . .”
“Ping, where are those guys who just came in off the shuttle? The ones you were telling me about.”
The ensign gestured down the bay. “Third door on the right. They’re training on the new particle drill.”
“Get your legs on,” Svensen told Joneson. “Hands, too, if you need them. Then get down to that training. Ping will translate until they give you one of these.” He touched the shaved part of his skull above the ear. “I’ve got to get off this overpriced gunship and back to my ship. I’ll give you access to my com, once they’ve got you online, in case you have questions about the rustics. Don’t expect you’ll need to call, though. You’ll be a god to those people. A survivor from the old days—they’ll do whatever you say.”
Svensen nodded at Kelly and gestured in the opposite direction, up toward the away pods. She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t object when he started to walk away. After about twenty paces, she glanced back at Joneson.
Svensen didn’t follow her gaze to see if the man was suiting up. Didn’t need to. The smile on Kelly’s face confirmed what he’d already known.
Joneson was all in.
Chapter Nineteen
Tolvern was in the gunnery when an urgent message came from Smythe on the bridge. Barker had been running down the list of ordnance shared out with the other ships and how that would impact them in battle. But suddenly she was no longer paying attention. Ships had been detected entering the system.
Already? Tolvern suppressed a curse. Only six days had passed since receiving Wang’s message.
Her stomach was churning anxiously by the time she entered the bridge. They weren’t ready. Not even close to it. They couldn’t face the alien flee
t yet.
“Wang promised us sixteen days,” she said. “At a minimum.”
But Smythe and Lomelí were grinning, and Nyb Pim made a happy sound in the back of his throat. Capp leaned back in her chair with her hands behind her head, looking smug.
“We got us some help, Cap’n. Show her, Smythe.”
A video recording appeared on the viewscreen. A slender female Hroom appeared. She wore a cape of office around her shoulders and a thin woven silver band around her smooth forehead. A person of some importance, and Tolvern felt that she should recognize her, but didn’t.
And curiously, the Hroom had the pale pink skin of a sugar eater. Tolvern thought General Mose Dryz would have compelled all Hroom officers and crew to take the antidote by now, and maybe he had, and this one was slow in returning to her natural hue. That was a possibility, too.
“Greetings, Admiral James Drake and Captain Jess Tolvern,” began the recording. “It is an honor to see the glorious Blackbeard and know that I will be serving beneath two illustrious officers such as yourselves. My name is Colonel Bailyna Tyn. I believe you know my sister-cousin, Lenol Tyn, who served with distinction in the war. I am also part of the empress’s honor guard, and belonged to her personal fleet before the recent emergency.”
She paused, nodding solemnly in a practiced human gesture before continuing.
“I command three sloops of war and one Albion warship, HMS Apollo. It is a fraction of the combined force that was sent to relieve the Castillo System, but we were attacked passing through Viborg, participated in a brief, but savage battle to relieve the Alliance fortifications, and then continued with those few ships capable of jumping.”
Bailyna Tyn whistle-hummed, low and then two high, short chirps. Tolvern didn’t recognize the sequence, and paused the video to ask Nyb Pim.
“Regret and embarrassment,” he explained. “Yet a firm belief that one has done one’s best, given the circumstances.”
“All that in a few sounds?” Tolvern said.
“It also indicates a plea to one’s ancestors not to judge one’s failures too harshly,” Nyb Pim said, “but that seemed less germane to the conversation.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 19