Damage Control - ARC

by Mary Jeddore Blakney

  “Yes,” he said, and nothing more. He let go of her arm.

  “Would you mind telling me?” she prodded.

  “No,” he said. Still nothing more.

  “So, um…are you going to tell me?” she asked, after a pause.

  “If you want me to tell you, then I will.”

  Jade rolled her eyes. “Please tell me what’s wrong with your vehicle,” she recited.

  “The primary seal of the cooling fluid container for the second combustion chamber contained cellulose and fructose.”

  Jade suppressed a laugh. Spaceship parts made of cellulose and fructose, what a fantasy! “Is it supposed to?” she asked.

  “I do not understand,” her abductor replied, serious as ever. He walked very close to her: even if he was one of those guys whose size made them slow runners, he could still grab her if she tried to make a run for it. She kept up her pace.

  “Is—that thing—supposed to be made of cellulose and fructose?” she asked, managing somehow to keep a straight face.

  He shook his head. “Cellulose and fructose are combustible,” he explained patiently. “They burned and the seal changed shape and caused a leak. The factory workers failed to install the secondary seal.”

  Jade didn’t pay a lot of attention to the explanation. “Don’t you need to bring some tools?” she asked. “We have lots of tools at my house. I keep a basic set in my car, and then there are more in the shed. Shouldn’t we grab some?”

  “Yes,” he replied, but he didn’t sound very interested.

  It had worked. Jade stopped and began to turn back. “What tools do you need, exactly?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  He grabbed her arm and forced her forward, back in the direction they had been going—northeast, uphill, away from the road. Her only hope of getting help out there would be if they happened to meet a hunter.

  “But you said you need to get tools from my place,” she objected, looking up at him. She opened her eyes as wide as she could. Maybe he’d feel sorry for her, and reconsider.

  “No,” he replied. “I said yes, I do not need tools from your house. I need a tachzute combiner, and there is one in my vehicle.”

  A new thought suddenly occurred to Jade: if 'Zuke' was delusional—really believed his own story—then would he become violent when he discovered there was no spaceship? She walked for a minute, thinking, silent except for the rustling sound her feet made in the leaves. Then she said, "Does your vehicle have a self-destruct function?"

  "I will not answer."

  "Okay, that's fair. But if it does—and it's in need of repair—then the self-destruct could theoretically go off accidentally, right?"

  "I don't know."

  "And if that happened we could get to the spot where you left your spaceship—I mean your vehicle—and find nothing."

  But when they got to the spot, it was Jade who was surprised. Standing among the wispy black-and-white-and-yellow birches and the thick green hemlocks was something that looked vaguely like a rocket—or like one of the space shuttles, only much smaller. It was white and shaped somewhat like a cone, and had some round black parts on the bottom that she took to be exhaust ports.

  Just for an instant, she was tempted to wonder if Zuke really was from outer space. How else could she explain his vehicle, here in such a place? But then, a real alien ship wouldn't look like anything she had ever seen or even imagined.

  "How did this get here?" she said aloud.

  "I was recording this region when propulsion failed, forcing me to land. I will finish repairs. You will stay beside me."

  "You were recording this region. You mean mapping it?"

  "Yes." He took the device from his hip and punched in a code, and an opening appeared in the side of the vehicle. Jade noticed that he typed with his claws and not his fingers. He continued, "Mapping and recording sounds, images, temperature, pressure, material composition and other things."

  "You're a spy." She hadn't meant to say it aloud.

  "Yes." They were inside the vehicle now. Zuke was typing with his claws and consulting various readouts. None of the places where he typed looked like keypads, and none of the places where the readouts showed looked like readout screens. Everything looked like structural elements—walls or posts, for example—until pictures and diagrams appeared on them.

  And then she saw the writing in the readouts and forgot everything else. The characters were angular like printed Hebrew, but had a little of the brushstroke quality of Chinese. The language appeared to be either alphabetic or syllabary. If she could just hear some of it...

  "What does that say?" she asked, pointing to a short piece of text above her head.

  "Twenty-six-pod propulsion failure,” he replied. “You will go outdoors with me." Then he took her arm and half-dragged her back out into the familiar world and away from the strange language that begged to be decoded. He had a tool in his other hand, and began using it. It appeared to be some sort of welding torch or laser.

  He kept working for hours, and she couldn't convince him to let her back inside. He didn't want to talk, either, and she grew bored and cold. She ate some soup—also cold—and tried to run away but Zuke was too fast for her. She finished the chapter in the Spanish novel.

  She wished she’d thought to bring her computer. She should be working right now, after all, and her next task was those four boring documents, two Spanish, one French and one Italian, that were waiting on her hard drive to be turned into English. She didn’t think for a moment that any of her clients would understand if she told them, “Your documents aren’t ready yet because I was kidnapped by a harmless man claiming to be an alien.” She may as well tell them a dog ate it, or a dinosaur.

  The novel was much more interesting than those dry documents. It was also much more risky. Nobody was paying her to translate the novel, or not exactly, anyway. She was going to get a percentage, after expenses, assuming enough copies were sold to even cover the expenses.

  But as excited as she was about translating the novel, even that was just another translation job. What she really wanted was to tackle a new language and analyze it. She had a feeling, and it wouldn’t go away. It was a feeling like there was something there, buried in the languages—not just in the romance languages she worked with every day. Not even in the Latin and sprinkling of Greek that was always present in all of them. The hints were there, but she wasn’t going to find the answer from just those hints. She wanted to immerse herself, for starters, in Russian, in Norwegian and Swedish, in old and new Turkish, in ancient and modern Hebrew. She didn’t need to actually learn the languages, she just needed to analyze them. Look for patterns. What patterns, she couldn’t tell. She only knew there was something.

  But she was being silly. It was ridiculous to think that she, Jade Massilon, could find something the world’s expert linguists hadn’t found. She had only a GED with a couple of college courses tacked on. And she read a lot, for whatever that was worth.

  And anyway it didn’t matter. She didn’t have time to chase language-ghosts; she had a living to make. She wished she’d at least thought to bring a paper and pencil. She could start working on translating the novel, that way. At least she’d be doing something, and she could get her mind off the tantalizing readouts locked inside this vehicle. She looked at Zuke working on it and wondered if it was ever going to fly. She wondered if he could really be an alien. She wondered if there was any way to know for sure.

  Then suddenly he was done. He stood up and spoke a command, and the engine—or whatever it was—started with a babbling hum. Then the hum stopped and the vehicle disappeared.

  "Cloaked," Jade heard herself say.

  Zuke spoke another command and the vehicle reappeared, silent this time. He turned to her and offered his hand. This time, she shook it willingly. "I will leave now: you are free," he said. "I believe that since you have seen me, my people will expedite the Earth project. I expect ships from Chuze to arrive soon." He let go of
her hand and started toward his vehicle, then stopped and turned. “Our meeting was due to an error, but I am glad of it. You have a greeting.” He paused a moment to think, then said with his congested sound, “Pleased to beet you, Jade.”

  Then he stepped into his vehicle, and the opening closed behind him. The vehicle made its babbling hum for a few seconds, then went silent and disappeared.

  3

  little green men

  The dying stopped as spontaneously as it had begun.

  In the last week of October, five hospitals in New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts admitted 32 patients diagnosed with antibiotic-resistant strep throat. By the second week of November, the number of admissions had swelled to 105. 50 of them eventually recovered, while the remaining 55 died suddenly of brain aneurism or stroke within a week of their hospitalization.

  During the same two weeks, seven New Hampshire residents died unexpectedly in their homes or workplaces of brain aneurism or stroke. Only one had a history of heart disease.

  By the second week of November, hospitals all over New England were on high alert and ready to deal with the outbreak. Quarantined patient rooms were set aside. Centers for Disease Control trainers refreshed staff on containment procedures. Bacteriologists, epidemiologists and immunologists abandoned their other projects to focus on what they'd started to call streptococcoid syndrome.

  But only 12 more patients were ever diagnosed with the new infection, and eight of those diagnoses turned out to be incorrect. Lab tests confirmed those infections to be regular old strep throat, and they were all cured with a standard course of erythromycin. And the remaining four patients recovered.

  On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Elliot Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire, received its last streptococcoid case. And no healthcare facility ever saw it again.

  The first time they told Chegg what Humans were like, he put on his best curious face and pretended he hadn't already been dealing with them for years.

  It was an ordinary water-city conference room, with lots of blank, white wall space for presentations and a central oval enclosed by a waist-high railing. Chegg swam through the round doorway and over the railing and chose a spot near the back. About half the people had arrived so far, and he wondered how many of them realized they'd been set up to fail.

  Deet was there, and he caught her eye. He and the Intelligence keev had worked together on several missions over the years and become close friends. He had no doubt that she knew the situation. She had probably even made a few very accurate guesses about what Chegg was doing to correct the problem. But he wasn't concerned about her. She had the good sense to see why these measures were necessary, and he could count on her to keep her mouth shut. It was some of the others who worried him.

  The last five keevs swam in together, and everyone but the Kirove stood in a semi-circle near the railing. There were 11 other keevs there; that was to be expected. Deet's surveillance zirode stood four spots to Chegg's left. He must have been there to make a report.

  The appointed time for the meeting arrived, and everyone stopped talking and faced the Kirove, who stood just outside the railing at the front of the oval.

  "I understand two of you have staff recently returned from Earth," he said, acknowledging Deet's zirode with a nod, then looking at Chegg with raised eyebrows.

  "Mine has not returned yet," Chegg said.

  "Find out if he can come directly here and give his report to all of us."

  Chegg pulled out his Personal Device.

  "Earth," said the Kirove, as a spinning blue and green planet appeared on the wall behind him. "It's where sandfruit comes from, but up until now, that's just about all we've known about it."

  The Medical keev, Chegg thought. She'll assume someone else from the Medical Command took standard outbreak-control measures as soon as that kid exposed Earth to our microbes. I'd better alter the records to match that assumption.

  "This planet is home to seven or eight billion people," the Kirove continued. "They are extremely disorganized and without interstellar travel. Contact will almost certainly lead to war. Your job, if the Committee chooses, will be to make contact with a culture group that calls itself Aberica. Zirode Goke Dak of the Intelligence Command will brief us."

  Zirode Goke tapped his Personal Device, and a Supply Command messenger swam in, towing a string of drink cylinders. She passed the string to Goke and left.

  "This is coffee." Goke held up one of the cylinders, leaving the rest to wave in the gentle currents of the room. "I brought enough for all of us." He pulled the cylinder free of the string and handed it to Keev Bekk, who stood beside him. Then he swam around the semicircle, passing out the cylinders.

  When Chegg got his, he tried it right away. Drinking underwater was inconvenient, to say the least, but it was considered a luxury among water people, since it was completely unnecessary. This way of opening the briefing—the gift of an exotic drink—was obviously a calculated effort to ingratiate the boss.

  Chegg put his mouth on the cylinder's built-in straw and gave it a hard drag to activate the one-way valve. He liked the flavor immediately, but thought he would have liked it better if it had been stronger.

  He finished his coffee and tethered the empty cylinder to the railing while Goke talked about Aberikekk satellites and nuclear weapons. His Personal Device vibrated, and he checked it and nodded to the Kirove: his own surveillance zirode would be briefing them today, too.

  Goke finished his report, and the Kirove asked for strategy ideas for defeating the Aberikekks if war broke out. This was essentially a discussion for the War Command, and Chegg just stood there and listened, trying not to count all the wrong assumptions the keevs were making about Human physiology and culture. They were good at their jobs and would find these details out in time.

  Luak, Chegg's surveillance zirode, slipped in, took a spot at the rail beside Goke, and turned to watch the war plans.

  They had a map on the wall, showing some place in Arkansas. "We can lure the rest of the Aberikekks here, here and here," said one of the keevs, and tapped a few keys on his Personal Device to move the map before continuing. "Then you can see how, despite their numbers, they will not be able to break through to access their weapons stronghold."

  About half the people present shook their heads, and the Kirove said, "We can't keep an accurate fix on the locations of the Aberikekks after the map moves. There are just too many."

  There was a rumble of agreement from the group, and Luak grabbed a net bag he had tethered to the railing and swam to the speaker. "These may help," he said. "They are toys for Aberikekk children: models of Aberikekk warriors in fighting poses."

  The speaker gave a warrior to each person in the room before attaching several to the wall. When Chegg got his, he saw that it was a little plastic army man with a suction cup tied to its feet. Chegg stuck his to the railing and wished he hadn't finished his coffee.

  Beside him, the Medical keev was still drinking hers. "These Earth people are a very pleasant color," she remarked. "I'm eager to meet them in person."

  "So am I," said Deet. "Nuclear weapons...impressive communications and targeting technologies...I like a good challenge."

  Luak's turn was next. He tapped his Personal Device, replacing the map with a picture of a Human holding a bulky projectile weapon. The army men were still stuck to the wall, and Luak waited until Goke had pulled them all off before announcing, “These are some of the portable weapons currently popular on Earth.” The picture slid to the left and was followed by several more in succession, each showing a Human posing with a different weapon. Chegg wondered if the Medical keev had noticed that not one of the warriors was green.

  "I have with me a translation of the personal testimony of an Aberikekk warrior,” Luak continued, “telling about his experiences during a recent war. Preliminary investigation has turned up an overwhelming amount of corroboration; so far, his testimony appears to be accurate.

  “He says that hi
s own troops, and many others, were sent to war without their standard supply of weapons and armor, and with communications devices that didn’t have enough range to function on the battlefield. This was not due to a lack of resources to procure these items, nor a lack of time to transport them. Here is a selected passage."

  He tapped his Personal Device again, and a block of text appeared. To the left and right of the text were two columns of pictures. Each picture showed an Earth weapon and had a faint line running from it to the first mention of that weapon in the text. It read:

  They sent us out to secure the city without arming us for the task. The enemy had light machine guns, AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and even a few heavy machine guns, while we had nothing but nine-millimeter pistols.

  Fortunately, there were more than enough confiscated AK-47s to go around, so we were able to get something to defend ourselves with.

  It was the perfect solution—until the Army found out. They ordered us to put the AKs back in the locker. The war was to be fought, they said, with Army-issued equipment or none at all. That was what the regulations said, and the regulations, apparently, were more important than either protecting our lives or winning the war.

  They wouldn’t send us our standard weapons because they said the war was basically over now. So we tried to fight with whatever we could find, until the Army found out and took it away and we had to look for something else.

  And so the war dragged on.

  At first, no one spoke. People grabbed tethers from the railing and ran them through their fingers, or pretended to suck the last drops of coffee from empty cylinders. Then the Zirode said, "If they're that disorganized and incompetent, how did they manage to develop satellites?"

  "Or nuclear weapons?" said the keev who had proposed engaging the Aberikekks in Arkansas.

  Deet looked at her empty drink cylinder. "Or coffee?