The Blockade

by Jean Johnson

  Slovaskoff lifted his arm when she came close enough to speak, his eyes on her, his tanned fingers flattened and held at an angle at his brow. “Colonel MacKenzie. I have been given V’Dan, sir; you may converse with me in the local tongue.”

  Halting in front of him, Jackie returned the salute. “Major Slovaskoff. Good to know.” Lowering her arm in tandem with his, she gestured to her left, then to her right. “These are His Highness, Grand Captain V’Daania, and Grand General I’osha, who is the head of the V’Dan Imperial Army here on V’Ton-Bei. Your troops will be liaising directly with Leftenants Na’akarra and Shava, here, as both have been given Terranglo telepathically and have been appointed to work with you. The Grand General has been given a transfer as well, to facilitate matters in the case of a dispute.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Grand General, Leftenants. Full translation transfers will definitely smooth things over. My troops have been studying V’Dan the hard way from the training manuals our translators made,” Slovaskoff stated, nodding at the Grand General. “We’ve been focusing on basic nouns, verbs, directions, distances, and common military commands, based on what we’ve learned from each other over the last few months.” Turning, he gestured, raising his voice in a carrying shout. “Lieutenant Dagim! Front and center!”

  A young woman detached herself from the other troops. She wore camouflage clothes vaguely similar to what the V’Dan troops wore, but they hung a bit loosely on her short, slender frame. With her tight black curls cut close to her scalp, teeth white against her dark brown lips where she bit them nervously, she looked rather young.

  Li’eth shifted uncomfortably. (I know I’m supposed to view all Terrans as adults, but . . .)

  (Yes, she looks rather young to me as well,) Jackie reassured him.

  “Grand General, this is Lieutenant Junior Grade Mulunesh Dagim,” Slovaskoff introduced. “She is a telepath Rank 6, among other things, and will be performing language transfers for key personnel.”

  “I am not very strong, meioas,” the young woman stated, flicking her eyes briefly to Jackie before squaring her shoulders a little. “I am not the Ambassador. But I can do one transfer a day. It takes several hours, but it is an accurate transfer.”

  Grand General I’osha hesitated. She looked at the other Terrans before cautiously saying, “Forgive me for this, but . . . even for someone unmarked, you look very young. May I know your age, Lieutenant, so that I may reassure my troops you are indeed an adult?”

  Jackie relaxed subtly. That was exactly the right way to handle the subject. She nodded permission at the younger psi.

  Lieutenant Dagim grinned. “I always look young, Grand General. I am small and skinny and only nineteen in Terran years—even to our own people, I look fifteen or so, which I understand is about the same in your own years. My grandmother is in her seventies, and she still looks to be in her forties. I assure you, though, I am well trained; I graduated three years early at the age of fifteen, and have since earned a master’s degree in Cryptoanalytic Linguistics in a military academy. I also speak six languages without transfers. I don’t count the five that I learned telepathically.

  “I am just . . . I am overwhelmed by being here. On another world,” she finished, gesturing beyond them, dark eyes gleaming with wonder in the early-morning light and a returning touch of nervousness. “Breathing the air . . . worrying if any of the local bugs will be dangerous . . . It is one thing to whack one’s boots for scorpions in the morning, but what if you have things that won’t fall out when the boot is turned over and struck?”

  Her commanding officer shrugged. “Considering I feel the same way, as will many of our troops . . . we will be staring at a lot of things, looking and feeling a little lost inside until we get used to this place.” Major Slovaskoff lifted his chin briefly at the tent-strewn fields, then looked at Jackie and the Grand General. “With that said, permission to disembark, meioas? We have a lot of work to get done if we are to get used to this world well enough and fast enough to defend it.”

  I’osha gestured to Jackie, who lifted the two tablets in her hand, one V’Dan in style, one Terran. “I have all the paperwork right here, Major.”

  “How many troops did you bring?” I’osha asked him, curious.

  “Exactly eight thousand,” Slovaskoff stated, skimming through the Terran paperwork and pressing his thumb to the screen wherever indicated. “That includes me as the man in charge.”

  “Forgive my ignorance of Terran ways,” the Grand General said next, “but you are a may-jore, which seems like it should be a Second Tier rank, yet you command eight thousand? That is not a small number.”

  “We’re a little short on officers at the moment,” Jackie filled in, since he was busy with thumb-signing for everything. “We’re still shuffling around everyone and everything so that the war effort has properly trained and experienced soldiers sent to your worlds, but it’s faster to train an enlisted soldier—”

  “—than to train a properly educated officer, yes. Learning tactics alone takes a great deal of time,” I’osha agreed.

  “We get it from day one, sir,” Lieutenant Dagim said. Then corrected herself. “Well, day four. The first three days are for orientation and evaluation. Day four onward, everyone gets daily drills in tactical assessment, deployment, and postcombat evaluation. Even the Psi Division, though it’s not our main focus. Obviously.”

  “. . . There, that should be everything,” Major Slovaskoff stated. He handed the tablet back to Jackie. “Double-check, sir?”

  Nodding, she scrolled down through the paperwork. I’osha moved closer, so she tilted the screen to show that everything had been signed. The older woman sighed. “Please don’t be offended when I say I’m having to trust you when you say you’re getting everything right. I’m not very good at reading your Terranglo symbols yet. I can read it, but I don’t know it just yet, so I’m not very fast at it.”

  “That will come with practice, Grand General, never fear. Grand Captain, please duplicate this so the General can review all of it at her leisure,” Jackie told Li’eth, handing him the tablet. Nodding, he fished a V’Dan-style data crystal out of his pocket and worked on that. “General, if you are satisfied with the paperwork as it stands, we request permission to begin disembarking and off-loading our troops and supplies.”

  General Ta-mal I’osha stared at the ten shuttles a long moment, then nodded. “Permission to touch down and unload is granted.”

  Major Slovaskoff touched the little wire wrapped around his ear, and said in Terranglo, “Ladies and Gentlemen of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Legions, 7th Battalion, 1st Brigade, 3rd Division . . . we are Green for Go. Disembark with discipline, gentlebeings.”

  A moment later, one figure on board each vessel moved up to the ramp and barked orders, facing the rest. A ragged mass of rote responses—the actual words were garbled by sheer numbers, effort, and timing—roared back. At the same time, a similar echo of five voices followed by mass responses came from the five shuttles on the other side. Once the echoes of that died down, the ten master sergeants in charge of disembarking blew their whistles shrilly and gestured outside.

  Dozens and scores and hundreds of boots clomped and shuffled across the deck plates, along with the scraping of boxes, the clicking of latches, the rattling of equipment. Men and women in the Terran equivalent of camouflage, their hues a bit too yellowish for the local foliage, marched down the ramps carrying kit bags and backpacks, and hauling supply boxes in pairs. They peered around with wide eyes when they weren’t watching their footing, but didn’t joke, didn’t run, didn’t break formation or discipline.

  At the barked orders of their own officers, individual soldiers from the V’Dan contingent detached themselves, trotted over to the cluster of V’Dan and Terrans, and called out somewhat mangled names of companies and platoons, requesting confirmation on berth assignments. At a murmured suggestion from th
e General, the two main teams of officers spread out as well. Li’eth, I’osha, and her two aides, Shava and Na’akarra, remained on the near side to handle some of the inquiries for those disembarking from those five shuttles, while Jackie, Johnston, and Buraq moved between ships to the other side of the track so they could handle the rest.

  V’Dan officers paired up with the Terranglo-speakers, some of them talking into communicators of their own, alerting the troops deeper into the maze of tents spread out all around them. With V’Dan troops manning the perimeter and waiting at strategic crossroads emplacements to help guide the off-loading teams, the shuttles were stripped bare in remarkably short order.

  Indeed, within ten minutes, ten supply sergeants hurried back on board, one per shuttle, and strapped into their jump seats even as the ramps hissed and rose back up into place before sealing their atmospheric clamps with hard clunks. Thrusters whined, warning everyone on the ground to back up protectively. Within very short order, the white-and-red bricks of the V’Dan Imperial Fleet kicked up dust and bits of turquoise leaf-debris, launching themselves one after the other into the air.

  “A very smooth innie-out,” I’osha murmured, rejoining Jackie and the prince.

  Jackie blushed and cleared her throat, unsure she had heard her counterpart right. “Ah . . . what was that?”

  “An innie-out,” the Grand General repeated. “Off-loading and disembarking is called an innie-out.”

  “We would prefer to call it an ‘insertion’ for a landing and a ‘dust-off’ for a departure . . . because the equivalent in Terranglo, the ‘innie-outie,’ has a distinctly sexual connotation. It’s very crude, in fact, and anyone above the Fifth Tier equivalent in our society would blush to use it.”

  I’osha arched one of her graying-blond brows. “Does it?”

  “Yes, sir, it does.”

  I’osha looked over at Li’eth. “I’m given to understand Your Highness can sense subthoughts . . . ?”

  That was as far as she could delicately press. Li’eth cleared his throat. “They are indeed very crude associations. It hasn’t really come up until now, but . . . Ambassador, I suspect we are going to be using the term a lot around your Terran soldiers, both here and elsewhere in the Alliance. Perhaps you should explain it to the troops in a broadcast? Like the way you told me that joke about the old cultural differences between ‘bastard’ and ‘bloody bastard’ . . . ?” he offered, using the Terranglo words.

  “May I be let in on the joke?” the Grand General asked, seeing Jackie’s lips twitch upward. “I presume this is a joke, yes?”

  “Only if you promise not to be offended, sir,” Jackie replied politely, eyeing the older woman.

  “Call me Ta-mal for the moment, and I won’t,” I’osha countered. “As one soldier to another.”

  “Call me Jackie, then, Ta-mal. The joke is about two cultures that spoke the same language—a variation on Terranglo—who sprang from similar origins, but whose cultures had evolved differently over a couple centuries because one was a colony of the other that had settled on pretty much the far side of our world from its parent. The two cultures were having a sporting event, something called rugby if I remember right. It’s not too dissimilar to your guanjiball,” Jackie explained in a brief aside, “when one of the captains of the British team got very upset when one of the members of the Australian team called him a ‘bastard.’”

  I’osha blinked. “And this leads to a joke? Illegitimacy can be a serious issue, particularly among the higher Tiers.”

  “Well, the captain of the British team went to the captain of the Australian team to complain, and there was some confusion over what, exactly, was meant by one of his men calling the British captain a bastard. When he finally understood what the cultural difference was—the casualness versus the seriousness of it—he marched the British captain into the locker room and yelled at his teammates, ‘Alright, you bastards, every time you call this bastard a bastard, in his culture, it means bloody bastard! So which one of you bloody bastards needs to apologize to the bastard?’”

  I’osha blinked a few times, then puzzled it through. “So . . . the Os-tral-yans called the Brish . . . wait . . . I’m confused . . .”

  “Australians in that era called each other bastards right and left with no offense, compared to the British culture,” Jackie explained. “But adding the adjective ‘bloody’ made it very offensive to the Australians, so he—the Australian team captain—was explaining to his teammates that their casual use of ‘bastard’ was taken by the British to mean the version with the adjective attached. So essentially what His Highness suggests I do is that I explain that our version of ‘innie-outie’ is like saying ‘bloody bastard,’ and that your version, ‘innie-out,’ is no more serious to you than to an Aussie of a couple hundred years ago calling someone a ‘bastard’ without any adjectives added to it.”

  “Ah. That makes sense. I suppose it’ll be more funny next time around, now that I know the cultural connotations,” I’osha offered dryly. She added a slight smile. “I’ll be especially careful not to call anyone a bloody anything, just in case.”

  “That word has been replaced by variations on boots and booting, General,” Major Slovaskoff reassured her. “We’ve done our best to eliminate a lot of the swearing that tends to accumulate in a military environment,” he added. “When I signed up as a raw recruit in the Army—enlisted—my drill instructor caught me swearing and made me stand at Attention and recite one hundred words’ worth of absolute absurdities instead of actual swearwords . . . and he made me do that every single morning for a week, at the top of my lungs, before I could go off to get breakfast.”

  “For a week?” Leftenant Shava asked.

  “Their week is seven days long, just like ours,” Li’eth explained.

  Shava nodded, but arched a dark brow, making the golden-yellow dots dusting his hairline shift a little. “May I ask what some of these absurdities were? Or would that be offensive?”

  “It wouldn’t be offensive, but it was a long time ago. I remember shouting . . . ‘blue-cheese sniffing’ . . . and ‘klingon beard-mangling’ and . . . umm . . . hm. I believe something about ‘dolphin blowholes’ getting me an extra day’s recitation—dolphins are among what we call the nine-tenths species, almost as sentient as a Human,” Slovaskoff added. “Dolphins and whales, the gorillas, chimpanzees . . . so it was stupidly offensive of me to mention them in such a manner.”

  (Dolphins, like your dalphskin things?) Li’eth asked Jackie.

  (Dalphskin suits were inspired by dolphins, yes. I’ll share some pictures of the suits later,) she promised. Out loud, Jackie offered, “Even in the best of possibilities, it will take more than half an hour for those shuttles to load on the next round of supplies and soldiers and come back down. We should probably go tour the camp and make sure there aren’t too many problems.”

  “Yes. Especially as I can see some of the students from the Lesser Academy have come out of their classrooms and are peering past the perimeter fence,” Na’avarra agreed, shading her Prussian-striped eyes from the rising sunlight with both tanned hands. “Should we split up further and cover more of the camp, Grand General?”

  “An excellent idea, Leftenant. Let’s split up. Ambassador, I’m certain you’ll be able to handle things with the help of His Highness. Major Slovaskoff, may I walk and talk with you?” I’osha offered. “The rest of you, pair up V’Dan and Terran.”

  “Grand General, that’s an excellent idea, sir. If anyone comes running to find either side in this mess, they’ll be presented with a united front,” Slovaskoff agreed.

  Jackie agreed as well. “Hopefully, that will cut down on complaining and all the headaches attached to such.”

  Nodding politely at each other, the group split up.

  Somewhere around hour seven of the ten or so it would take to bring everyone down from the troop transport, Jackie found
her attention drawn to a clutch of soldiers chatting amiably with some local college students. The V’Dan, a clutch of five young women and two young men, were eyeing the Terran men and women working to stow yet more crates into a storage shed. They did so through the gridded metal fence—more like hexagonal chicken wire than the simpler diamonds of wrapped chain link—separating the rest of the college grounds from the gardens and athletic fields set aside for the newcomers’ use.

  Most of those roughly dozen Terrans were in their early to late twenties, experienced soldiers with the muscles to match. The students seemed to be in their late teens to early twenties at most. Both groups looked relaxed, joking back and forth over the distance between the two troops, a good five or six meters from that fence.

  Metaphysically, things seemed to be going fairly well; her ability to see and read auras had gotten stronger, and it looked like both groups were in good humor. Flirtatious humor, even. There were rules about fraternizing with the locals, however, and since she was there in her role as Ambassador, Jackie made sure to stroll a little closer to observe. They weren’t speaking too loudly, which meant her ability at reading auras was still more useful than her ears, though the latter picked up sense as she drew near.

  They look like they’re just having fun. Except that tall fellow . . . Master Sergeant? No, he has only two rockers . . . he’s looking a bit more flirtatious than before—

  The pinks of the sergeant were counterpointed by a streak of what looked like scornful brown from the young lady he flirted with. She flicked her dark brown hand dismissively, showing off the light blue stripes curling around onto her palm. “. . . Come back when you have some real stripes!”

  Her girlfriends laughed with her. The sergeant stood up and pointed to the rank patch on his sleeve, his V’Dan heavily accented but still intelligible enough to understand and be understood. “Hey, I have stripes! I’m a First Sergeant; I have three!”