The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Ezra’s voice was sleepy. “So, you’re a spectacular fuck up! How can I help you slit your own throat? Oh, wait! I can’t possibly improve on your method!”

  “Would you just listen?” Charles told him. “I listened to Kris Boyle when she lectured. I heard every single word that she said. She said that when it hits the fan that you don’t have time to think -- you have to act and you’d damn well better use your best judgment.”

  “That sounds like her. But I do believe you’ve done something different, Cadet.”

  “The captain of this ship took Melea’s chains off first. Only later did she take mine off.”

  “So? She? Are you thinking with your gonads?”

  “I’ve never met Colonel Levi, but this woman could be her daughter!”

  “Hush your mouth, Cadet,” Colonel Levi told him. “I am not old enough to have adult children.”

  Charles coughed. “Look, what I need is to get in touch with that former Tengri slave up in Arvala. I never met her, but she was pointed out to me. She speaks Tengri and Arvalan now. I’m pretty sure the captain of this ship speaks Tengri. She’s turned back east. I don’t think we should pass up this chance.”

  There was a moment’s pause and then Ezra laughed. “I passed that on to Andie. She told me to get my head out of my ass and do whatever you want to make this work. She’s having them call Chaba. This is going to be exciting, Cadet Evans. That woman will speak to Chaba, then Chaba talks to me and I’ll translate to you. Then backwards. This is a prescription for disaster.”

  “And if we’re careful, who knows what could happen?” Charles told him.

  “That’s what Andie said. She’s screwed -- she’s a day out of Arvala, headed back here. It’s going to be difficult to keep her in the loop. She is, however, very insistent that we do.”

  “I can wait -- but not long.”

  “You do that. Convey to them that they need to be patient for a few days. We see the pirate ship burning and you heading east. That’s upwind, you understand? On that course, Colonel Levi tells me that we have five or six days, tops, before we’ll have to divert the UAV because you’ll be out of radio range.”

  “Right now they’re making tracks away from that mountain. I told them there are enemies there.”

  “Well, that’s good enough. Of course, the pirates could launch a fleet and that ship could blow the whole fleet into kindling in a day.”

  A man came back and spoke apologetically to his captain. The woman looked hard at Charles.

  He spoke into the radio. “I’m going to have to see if I can get the message across. I’ll be gone for a few minutes.”

  He put the radio into his fatigue pocket, leaving the ear bug in place. “You can’t hear, right?” he asked. He made the “hearing” sign and shook his head.

  The woman nodded. Charles had had basic electronics in the Boy Scouts. This was something he knew. There was no way he could know the frequency they were broadcasting on. Sure, he could find out from Denise’s friends what frequency humans thought they were broadcasting on, but the time units were bound to be totally different.

  He made broad waves with his hands. Then not so broad waves. Then smaller waves. He stepped down, showing waves of smaller and smaller wavelength. One of the men nodded, when the woman asked him a question.

  Charles then made tiny waves, very quick. He made them in tens, making sure the others knew how many he meant. Then he made a wave motion and signed that it was really ten tens of waves. The one who’d answered the question told the woman something and she looked at Charles intently.

  Charles held up his fingers in an “X” showing ten. He made ten “Xs” and made a “C” with his finger. The other technician was staring at him very intently.

  Charles did ten “Cs” and since he didn’t think “M” was good, used a V for a thousand. The other was puzzled, but still curious. For his finale, Charles did ten “Xs” again and a “C” then ten “Cs” and a “V” and then changed it, hoping to convey “V” “Vs.” At first they didn’t understand, but Charles didn’t want to do a couple of more iterations. They finally realized he meant a thousand thousand -- a megacycle. He used a thumb for a megacycle, and then made signs for “V” a hundred megacycles.

  That didn’t fly well, but the woman barked a question that the man shook his head to, and then the captain barked a second question that also got a negative response.

  Charles pulled the radio out again and spoke to whoever was currently on the other end. “How are we doing?”

  “Chaba is on the line,” Ezra told him. “Just speak, and I’ll translate for you. You realize you’re draining half the radio batteries on the peninsula? Do try to be quick!”

  “Tell her that I want her to introduce herself in Tengri to a woman who speaks Tengri, but is an enemy of the Tengri -- I think.”

  “Right,” Ezra told him.

  Charles listened for a moment, and then gave the woman the ear bug, motioning her to put it in her ear, then he handed her the transmitter, showing her the push to talk button.

  She pushed it and said something, and then listened. It took a few times through before she got the hang of it, but there was about two minutes of conversation.

  Then she handed the transmitter and ear bug back to Charles. He took it and asked, “What?”

  Ezra was blunt. “Those people on that ship are transmitting to beat the storm. We asked her if she knew what the Tengri send and she refused to answer. If they’re talking about you and the Tengri understand them as well as we understand them, they -- and you and us -- are thoroughly screwed.”

  Charles looked at the woman, trying to think of a way to tell her that his people were very good at reading other people’s mail.

  He spoke to Ezra. “Have Chaba ask her if she speaks Tengri. Obviously, she does. Ask her if the Tengri speak her language. Read her one of the recent Tengri messages.”

  Ezra laughed. “We can do that.”

  Charles handed the ear bug back and the woman listened. At first her answers were monosyllabic, and then there was a long pause. She spoke a few words at the end, and then somberly held the transmitter out to Charles.

  “How did that go?” he asked.

  Ezra responded, “She didn’t like the answers we gave her. Tell her, if she likes, we can play back one of her transmissions. I grant you, it would mean more if we knew her language and were sure what she said. But their codes are a thousand years old here from our point of view.”

  “Let’s move past that,” Charles told him. “We need to get them to show up at the rookery and talk, face to face.”

  Colonel Levi agreed at once. There was more palaver between the captain of the ship and the other end of the radio. Finally she handed it back and turned to her crew, shouting orders.

  “Charles,” he said once again into the radio.

  Ezra was there. “She’s agreed to bring you home. Chaba convinced her that you were a soldier kidnapped for military information. Andie will be here, and Kris is also on the way. King Collum is sending Melek. Try to get across to her that she’ll be facing the first team.”

  The return, as it wasn’t directly against the wind wasn’t either slow or fast -- just boring. Charles didn’t dwell on the possibility that his captor had survived -- he spent more time trying to reassure Melea that no one meant to hurt her. Not even the captain could sooth the woman’s fears.

  The captain was Danei Koryei of the B’Lugi. Chaba only knew of the B’Lugi as enemies of the Tengri. When asked, Kris’ ward, Diyala, said that she also spoke B’Lugi and that they were the least of the Tengri’s enemies.

  They learned to keep the conversations focused, because when the topics wandered, frequently no one knew what the topic was because it became too convoluted.

  Chapter 36 :: A Final Rescue

  Danei was startled when Charles gave her a very exact heading to follow to reach the mainland. Her navigation was about like that of the early fifteenth century -- accurate to with
in ten degrees or so. She didn’t know how to compute the force diagram for the effect of the wind; she used seat-of-the-pants dead reckoning.

  Charles found himself giving geometry lessons, and then describing how to calculate trig tables. The B’Lugi were fascinated, hungry to learn what he had to say. He did, however, caution them that it was clear that the Tengri understood their radio transmissions. She’d been out of contact with her home base for weeks and had been transmitting blind, hoping they could hear her, even if she couldn’t hear them. She didn’t want to believe that the Tengri understood her transmissions, because they were in special, supposedly unbreakable code.

  Danei was unhappy to hear that all she was doing was providing the Tengri with information about her plans, but since Charles told her the content of some of her “secret” messages that the Tengri had intercepted and rebroadcast, she was forced to accept that the code wasn’t perfect.

  Andie Schulz’s spooks reported that there were now a dozen Tengri ships headed in the direction of the B’Lugi ship, intent on capturing or destroying it.

  Charles finally offered up a suggestion. “Lie,” Charles told her.

  “Lie? I am a woman of honor -- I don’t lie.”

  “Would you prefer the Tengri to catch you? Simply send in your code that you are headed southeast, intending to return home at your best possible speed.”

  “But, we’re heading almost due north.”

  “So? You know that; I know that... and the Tengri, if you tell them that you’re headed southeast, will concentrate to the southeast because they know you don’t lie.”

  He watched her contemplate that, and then she gave the order to send the message.

  Now Charles was learning two separate and very different languages. Chaba and Melea were no help with B’Lugi, and while he could send a question to Diyala, there was no doubt that Diyala didn’t want to do anything to help the B’Lugi.

  Finally the day arrived when they made landfall. Charles hadn’t realized how good it was to see something so unfamiliar, but that so much represented home, freedom and safety. Freedom was something he was never, ever, going to take for granted again. The B’Lugi had given him a small canvas bag and he’d put both the collar he’d worn into it, along with Melea’s, and one of the lengths of chain.

  Like most people his age, his political opinions were a reflection of his parents. He been one of many who’d been appalled at what the President had attempted, more appalled still when he learned the details. That had been a shock; this had been well beyond a shock. This was in-your-face reality.

  Politics was something he was going to avoid for the foreseeable future, because it was clear that there was too large a variance between what people said and what they actually did.

  They passed a mile offshore, and Danei handed him a telescope, and waved towards the shore. Two dozen people were lined up there, all saluting the ship. Off to one side was a small group of a half dozen, all but one of them men. A tall, hawk-nosed woman stood next to what was undoubtedly a UAV -- the machine that had saved his life. He tried to explain it to Danei, but he wasn’t very successful.

  They passed the people on the headland and continued up the coast. It was Charles who saw them first.

  There were a cloud of dots on the northern horizon, over the ocean and he blinked when he recognized what they were. “Captain!” he called out to Danei. She looked at him, and he pointed. She shrugged, not understanding.

  Then it struck Charles. The Arvalans hadn’t known about dralka and the other predators that were found on this continent before they arrived. Danei had no idea what she was seeing. And there wasn’t time for involved translations... he pointed and said, “Tengri!”

  Danei looked at him like he was insane. “Tengri! Enemy!” Charles repeated.

  He pointed to one of the men who never got far from his captain, who was carrying a musket. “Shoot! Bang!” he said, making shooting gestures at the approaching predators.

  Danei looked upwards, trying to understand. “Eat!” Charles said, getting frantic as they got closer. “Eat!” he gestured. “Eat me... eat you... eat all!”

  Finally she understood and yelled, and there was a loud clanging of a bell. Men rushed up on deck, armed with muskets. The targets were quickly pointed out and the men stood, jaws gaping.

  Charles remembered what Kris had said. The Tengri muskets couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. And that was probably when the barn was stationary, too. Diving predators, intent on eating you, were going to be a problem.

  He pulled the radio out. “Evans.”

  “Levi,” the woman’s voice came right back.

  “We have dralka.”

  “We see them. Ezra says that you should go below decks until further notice.”

  “The B’Lugi are going to fight. I can’t do that.”

  “The B’Lugi will all be killed; son, Ezra is screaming for more guards for us here -- there are hundreds and hundreds of these dralka. We have a start on an OP but -- it’s roofless. Do what you can to stay alive, son. That’s what we’re going to be doing.”

  The dralka swooped in, wary of bows. The B’Lugi would have done better with bows, Charles thought sadly, as almost all of the initial volley of musket shots missed.

  Worse, the dralka seemed to understand that it took a while to draw another arrow and get ready to shoot again -- so they dropped like rocks, arriving long before the clumsy muskets could be reloaded.

  Men screamed, fought and died.

  Danei fired a pistol and killed one, but another killed her guard. Charles tackled her just as another dralka lunged for the B’Lugi captain. He pushed her to one side, grabbed an empty musket and shoved it between the closing teeth of a dralka.

  That hurt it! It screamed as its teeth broke on the cold steel, and it flapped frantically backwards. Charles dragged Danei a few feet to a hatch that led below and pushed her ahead of him. He managed to get the hatch partly closed before two dralka were at it, battering at it.

  “Down!” he screamed, pointing at another hatchway that led further into the ship.

  She drew herself up, shook her head and started reloading her pistol.

  If Charles let loose of the door for an instant, the dralka would be through it. As it was, there were two battering at it, and it was all he could do to keep them out.

  It seemed like forever, but Danei appeared at his side and held two fingers four inches apart, and gestured at the door.

  Charles doubted if he could get the door closed again, but went with the next thud a bit and let the door open a few inches. Danei fired once and there was a loud scream outside.

  She touched him on his shoulder, and waved at the open hatch he’d pointed her towards earlier. He jerked his chin towards it and she held his eyes for a second, and then nodded.

  She hastily went down the steps, and there was another savage slam against the door and instead of waiting for the next one, Charles was after her in a flash. Between them they managed to get the hatch sealed before the first dralka hit it.

  Danei pointed and led the way. Charles followed, unfamiliar with most of the ship. A few moments later they emerged into a long deck that held the cannon. Men stood around, muskets in hand, looking terrified. Danei called to them and spoke for several minutes.

  A few minutes later she was at a hatchway that led upwards. She pulled it open, and a dozen men fired at once into the mass of dralka on deck. At ten feet, unlike before, most of the musket shots hit, and the dralka were bowled over, even the ones not shot. Charles helped Danei force the hatch shut, while another group of men formed up, ready to shoot.

  When they were ready, she and Charles hauled the hatch open again and there was another volley. The dralka screamed in rage, but the survivors, those that could, took wing.

  Still, they swung the hatch shut again, and Danei called a command to the next rank of musket men, even as they formed up. This time there were only a few dralka still alive when the hatch opened, and the m
en took their time aiming their shots.

  Another wave of men moved closer, warily watching. A few shots killed other wounded dralka, but when someone fired at one aloft, there were harsh words spoken and the man retired, abashed.

  It took a bit to reestablish control of the ship. Men moved cautiously, seeing to the occasional wounded survivor, most having lost limbs. The dralka were winging their way north, reduced in number by at least half.

  Charles put the ear bug in and spoke. “Evans, here.”

  “Charles!” it was the ubiquitous Israeli colonel. “You made it!”

  “So did you.”

  “We had machine guns, Cadet. We’ve taught them to respect machine guns.”

  “The dralka have seriously hurt the B’Lugi crew. They are in the process of taking stock, but I’d say half or three quarters were killed. Danei got to the gun deck, rallied the survivors and drove them off in the end.”

  “It has been touch and go here. Ezra says there were a thousand plus dralka. He and the others are gravely concerned: more than a dozen men are dead and twice that many wounded. We here... my radioman is dead, and my second in command lost his arm below the elbow. It was a terrible thing, Charles. We fired every weapon we had and it didn’t make a bit of difference to them. Then it was like someone passed an order and they all lifted away at once and fled.”

  “I need to see what happened to Melea. I haven’t seen her since the attack. I’ll get back to you in a bit. There are just a few more miles and we’ll anchor.”

  “Roger that, Charles. Take care of yourselves first, don’t worry about anything else.”

  Melea was in her cabin; she hadn’t moved from her quarters, and was loath to do so afterwards. He got enough out of her to learn that the pirates used dralka as bogeymen to the slaves. No one had seen a dralka in a hundred or more years, but they remembered them.

  Danei had her ship back in control again; men saw to taking care of the wounded, and then the dead. Dralka went over the side as rapidly as possible. Charles helped with tossing dralka over the side. More than once he got a sharp nod of appreciation from someone he helped. He would shrug -- he hadn’t been armed and hadn’t fired a weapon at their enemies. Sure, he’d hurt one, but really? One with broken teeth?