Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  The S’sinn’s eyes narrowed: it said something in its own harsh language. It wore a gold collar embossed with an intricate design, and the jeweled hilt of a dagger protruded from its leather belt. When Kathryn started forward again, it snapped open its wings and growled something indecipherable but unquestionably hostile. Kathryn stopped. “My friend’s hurt! You’ve got to—”

  The S’sinn’s left arm swept down across its body to its belt and came back up holding the dagger. Kathryn’s breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t talk to the alien, couldn’t even feel it empathically. Had they broken some religious taboo by coming here?

  If they had, and this guardian or whatever it was felt so strongly about keeping Kathryn from approaching the platform, what would it do when it realized Dr. Chung was already on it, helping Jarrikk?

  Kathryn hoped help wasn’t far away.

  The communicator in the car beeped. The S’sinn didn’t move, but its eyes, glowing faintly red in the light from the car’s interior, tracked Kathryn as she backed up to the vehicle, reached into it, and touched the controls. “Guildship Unity,” said the voice of the comm operator. “Translator Bircher, are you there?”

  “Bircher here,” Kathryn said. “I hope you have good news.”

  “There’s a fully equipped human medical team en route from the Unity—but we’ve had a problem getting help from the S’sinn.”

  “A problem? What kind of problem? There’s a Translator dying out here!”

  “Maybe they didn’t understand Guildtalk very well, I don’t know but . . .” The comm operator hesitated. “They refused to come. Translator, they said Jarrikk has been dead for years.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what they said,” Kathryn said bitterly. “And I’ve got my own little problem here. There’s some kind of warrior-priest standing between me and Jarrikk, and she doesn’t look friendly. Warn the medical team, and then forget trying to get a S’sinn doctor here—get that S’sinn Translator who’s taken over the treaty negotiations. I don’t think this whatever-she-is is going to let us anywhere near Jarrikk.”

  “Yes, Translator.”

  As Kathryn eased back out of the car, another S’sinn swept overhead so close the wind from its passage ruffled her hair. A third followed close behind. They wore dagger-belts and gold collars like the first, and looked no friendlier. Six red eyes watched Kathryn as she straightened up and faced them. “That’s right,” she said softly. “You just keep watching me. I’m the one you’re interested in.”

  A short eternity passed, or maybe just a century or two, then lights swept over the scene as the medical van from the Unity pulled up. Without looking away from the S’sinn, Kathryn raised her hand in warning, and the personnel in the van took the hint and stayed put, though they kept their lights on, which suited Kathryn. The S’sinn were slightly—very slightly—less intimidating when she could see all of them and not just those glowing red eyes.

  The standoff, long though it seemed, ended far too soon: Dr. Chung appeared on the platform, her face a pale blotch against the black sky behind the S’sinn, and called, “Kathryn!”

  The S’sinn whirled as one: then two of them launched themselves at the platform, the blast of air from their wings driving Kathryn back against the cold, dew-misted metal of the car. “Doctor Chung, get down!” she screamed, as the third S’sinn, the one that had landed first, turned on her, dagger flashing in the headlights of the medical van.

  Kathryn heard the van’s doors open, heard the medical team rushing toward her, but she knew they couldn’t reach her before the S’sinn did, and she crossed her arms over her face as the S’sinn lunged forward—

  —and stopped, wings spread, dagger scant centimeters from Kathryn’s throat, as an angry screech split the sky like fingernails dragged across metal amplified a thousandfold. The S’sinn’s head jerked back and she stared up as two more S’sinn passed overhead, then she spun to face them, her right wing slapping into Kathryn’s side, knocking her half-breathless to the ground. She scrambled up, helped by a frightened-looking young man from the medical van, then shoved him aside and dodged around the priest to see the new arrivals.

  One S’sinn wore the collar of a Translator, the other—she almost sobbed with relief—a collar bearing the green circle of a Commonwealth medic. Behind them, she saw the two S’sinn who had flown at Dr. Chung returning to the ground, and on top of the platform, Chung reappeared. “Kathryn! What’s happening?”

  “I’m not sure. How’s Jarrikk?”

  “Alive. Stable, I think. But I can’t be sure. I don’t know enough—”

  The S’sinn wearing the medic’s collar slipped past Kathryn’s attacker, who gave him one smoldering glance before returning to her argument with the Translator. “The injured one is on the platform?” the medic asked Kathryn in passable Guildtalk.

  “Yes,” she replied. “A human doctor is with him.”

  The doctor launched himself toward the platform, ignoring the outraged shrieks of the two S’sinn he flew over to get there. Kathryn saw Dr. Chung raise her arms reflexively, then relax when she saw the medical insignia—and plunge at once into animated conversation. The two medics bent over Jarrikk, disappearing from sight.

  Kathryn turned her attention back to the argument between the Translator and the S’sinn who had attacked her, which seemed to be reaching a climax. Her attacker growled something, snapped an angry gesture at her underlings, whirled and gave Kathryn one more hate-filled glare, then disappeared in a blast of musk-scented air.

  The S’sinn Translator approached Kathryn. “Greet ings, Translator Bircher,” he said. “I am Translator Ukkaddikk. I came at once when I received word, and fortunately the medic who accompanied me was nearby. We are old friends—as are Jarrikk and I.” He spoke Guildtalk far more fluidly than even Jarrikk.

  “You know Jarrikk?” Kathryn said, then felt foolish. Of course the S’sinn Translators would know each other, just like all the human Translators knew each other.

  But Ukkaddikk didn’t seem to find her question odd. “Search those memories you retain from your Link with Jarrikk. I think you will find me there.”

  Most shared memories faded quickly after the Link ended, but some of the strongest lingered. Kathryn closed her eyes, called up those images that had flashed through her mind when she and Jarrikk first Linked—and her eyes flew open again. “Of course, Ukkaddikk! You brought Jarrikk into the Guild.”

  “I stopped him then from taking the Dagger of the Hunter. I hoped he had learned that in this new age there are new possibilities. But he has always had a thick skull.”

  Kathryn smiled ruefully. “I know,” she said. “But so do I. We are . . .” She stopped. “We were a good team.”

  “Perhaps you will be again. Let us see what the medic has to say.”

  What the medic had to say was grim. Jarrikk had plunged the dagger into one of his two hearts. The other still beat, raggedly, keeping him alive, but blood loss and shock threatened to drive it into fibrillation at any moment, and it alone could not provide the necessary blood flow to his brain. If they did not get him connected to artificial life support within a matter of minutes, he would suffer irreparable brain damage. Yet moving him could kill him.

  “We have no choice,” Ukkaddikk said, and Kathryn agreed. “We must move him.” He turned to Kathryn. “Have your personal empathic powers returned?”

  “No.”

  “No? But I sense . . .” So quickly Kathryn flinched, he reached out one hand and touched her left temple. He closed his eyes and cocked his head to one side momentarily—and suddenly Kathryn could sense him, warm and concerned, and the cool professionalism of the Commonwealth medics, and Dr. Chung’s slightly flustered excitement, and the welter of emotions from the humans gathered by the medical van, and she gasped, feeling as if she’d been encased in a thick, deadening gel that had suddenly been flushed away.

  “Thank you,” she breathed. “I was afraid it was gone forever!”

  “Now
you can help.”

  “How?”

  “Hold Jarrikk’s head. Will him to live.”

  “But I’m—” not a projective empath, she wanted to say, but Ukkaddikk had already leaped from the platform, gliding down to the ambulance to prepare them to receive Jarrikk.

  Kathryn crawled across the rain- and blood-slicked stones and lifted Jarrikk’s head. It felt light, fragile, and frighteningly cold, and the fur behind his wolf-like ears was sticky with blood from a cut he must have suffered when he fell. Kathryn closed her eyes and tried to sense the tiny spark of life still flickering inside her friend, deep within, past the layers of darkness and pain. Somewhere . . .

  There. She could feel him, faint, oh-so-faint, like a candle at the bottom of a mineshaft guttering in an icy downdraft. She concentrated, pushed harder. She no longer felt the cold night air, no longer felt the stones of the platform bruising her knees, no longer felt anything but that faint presence, that last flicker of life. She folded her mind around it, cupped it, tried to shield it from the deadly wind howling through his damaged body.

  Far away, like a distant shout, she felt messages from her own body, that both she and Jarrikk were being lifted, carried, that her hands still cradled his head. But she shut that out of her mind, concentrating on Jarrikk, on keeping him alive.

  She drew closer and closer to the heart of his dim presence, and as she did so she began to feel new sensations—the messages of his body: no agony, only a terrifying numbness radiating from the wound in his chest, and the frantic, uneven spasming of his remaining heart. She turned to that sensation fiercely, trying to strengthen the beats, to smooth the rhythm—and slowly, slowly, she felt it working, felt his body respond, felt the frightening cold gripping him lessen somewhat. The flicker of life strengthened, steadied: and then, just for a moment, she felt Jarrikk’s consciousness, dazed, lost, wondering, but definitely there. She sent him a wave of reassurance—then, suddenly, it all vanished, darkness crashing down on her.

  She screamed, certain Jarrikk had died. Her eyes snapped open and she tried to jump up. Something stopped her, and she struggled against it for a moment before realizing Dr. Chung stood over her, gentle hands restraining her. “It’s all right,” Dr. Chung said soothingly. “It’s all right. They’ve taken Jarrikk into surgery. He’s on life support.”

  “He’s alive?” Kathryn gasped. Her own heartbeat felt none too steady at that moment.

  “He’s alive.”

  Kathryn looked around. She sat on the edge of her old bed in Unity’s sickbay. “How did I get here?” she asked, amazed.

  “Once you took hold of Jarrikk’s head, you slipped into a kind of trance—you were practically catatonic. I wanted to try to bring you out of it, but Ukkaddikk touched both of you and said to leave you. We brought the two of you back here in the medvan, and just pulled your hands free of Jarrikk as the S’sinn medic took him into surgery.”

  Kathryn looked at her hands. Jarrikk’s blood had stained them with dark brown patches that flaked off as she clenched her fists, dusting the blue cloth of her Translator’s uniform with rusty brown. “I don’t even know what happened. I’ve never made a connection like that before . . . not even with the symbiote.”

  “Ukkaddikk was certainly excited about it. He wants to talk to you as soon as you’re able.”

  “No,” Kathryn said instantly. “Not until we know about Jarrikk.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way, because . . .” Dr. Chung held up the medical gown Kathryn had flung off earlier. “. . . as your doctor, I’m ordering you back to bed—the perfect place for you to wait.”

  Kathryn started to protest, then thought better of it as the protest turned into a cough. When she’d mastered it, she said meekly, “You’re the doctor, Doctor.”

  “I am indeed,” Dr. Chung said briskly. “First, let’s get you cleaned up . . .”

  Kathryn waited until she’d washed and changed and Dr. Chung had taken her temperature and reconnected the monitors and pumped her arm full of drugs before asking the question foremost on her mind. “Doctor Chung, all of this effort tonight was pointless if we can’t get regeneration therapy for Jarrikk. He’ll just try to kill himself again.”

  “I’m aware of that. I’ve sent my own recommendation to Doctor Kapusianyk as a follow-up to your message to him. I don’t expect a problem. In fact, I wager they’ll jump at the chance to try regeneration therapy on a non-human. Now get some sleep.” Dr. Chung went out, dimming the lights on her way.

  Sleep? Kathryn thought. How could she sleep when not a dozen meters away the medics fought to save Jarrikk’s life? She closed her eyes, trying to remember her own part in that fight. What exactly had she done? It had been almost like Linking with the symbiote’s help—almost, but different. Deeper. Had Jarrikk been conscious, she felt she might almost have been able to understand his thoughts, not just feel his feelings. But that shouldn’t be possible without Link, and symbiote, and Programming.

  Ukkaddikk had seemed to know something about it. She’d have to ask him.

  Tomorrow. When Jarrikk was out of danger.

  Her eyes still closed, she tried to reach out to him on the operating table . . . but all she accomplished was putting herself to sleep.

  Kitillikk commiserated with the priest who brought her the news. Yes, it was a terrible thing when a Flightless One was prevented from dying an honorable death. Yes, she was appalled that the Commonwealth could interfere even in the worship of the Hunter of Worlds. No doubt He would rise up and take vengeance. “No doubt at all,” Kitillikk said as the priest took flight. She watched the Hunter’s servant soar into the graying sky of morning, then dive toward the black bulk of the Temple, where no doubt the discussion of the night’s events would rage for days.

  That was the trouble with priests, and why she’d never been able to make much use of them, Kitillikk reflected as she stepped back through the arched windows into her quarters in a minor tower of the Hall of the Flock. They talked and talked and talked some more; they rarely acted. And when they did, they were quite unpredictable. One could never tell how they would interpret the Hunter’s will.

  She preferred to rely on her own will. Her goals required no interpretation, and she couldn’t see how Jarrikk’s continued survival would affect them, much though she would have enjoyed killing him herself that day in the Hall when peace had suddenly broken out, against all odds. With the odd symbiote technology of the Guild precluding any electronic recordings of exactly what had been said on that dais, she couldn’t prove it, but she was convinced the Translators had somehow cheated, no doubt with the connivance of their spineless, limp-winged excuse for a Supreme Flight Leader.

  No matter. There would soon be a new Supreme Flight Leader, and war between Earth and S’sinn, an end to the meddling of the Commonwealth and their thrice-cursed Guild of Translators, and well-deserved glory for the S’sinn—and herself. She grinned a savage grin and swept aside the beaded curtain that had hidden her other guest from the priest. He came out warily, and she grimaced as she caught a whiff of his scent. She’d have to sleep elsewhere; no doubt her sleeping chamber now reeked of him.

  “So, human,” she said in Guildtalk, though the Commonwealth’s pidgin always left a bad taste in her mouth. “You heard?”

  “I do not understand your tongue.”

  Of course not. “Translator Jarrikk still lives. Your Translator Bircher saved him after he attempted to give himself to the Hunter—though I do not think he will thank her for it.”

  The human’s eyes narrowed and his mouth grew tight. “I am sorry Jarrikk did not die.”

  “So am I. But there is time enough for that. We have a more important matter to discuss.” She settled herself on a shikk, fully aware he could not sit comfortably on anything in the room, and showed her teeth again. “A human and S’sinn working together have temporarily staved off this war. Ironic that a human and S’sinn will now work together to ensure that it comes about as originally intended.”
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  “For the destruction of the Commonwealth, I would work with the devil himself.”

  “Appropriate, since I understand your human devil is supposed to look a lot like a S’sinn.” Kitillikk picked up a scarlet-hilted dagger from the table by the shikk and toyed with it idly, admiring the watery play of light on its silver blade. “Have you chosen your method?”

  “Method, and time, and place.” The human showed his broad, flat teeth. “None of which I will tell you, of course.”

  “Of course. Mutual distrust can only carry a relationship so far.” She held up the dagger and squinted down its length at the human’s hideous hairless face. “But you realize your secrecy means I won’t be able to help you escape.”

  “I can look after myself.” More teeth. “I could kill you, now, after all, and no one would be the wiser.”

  “Could you?” Kitillikk purred. A flick of her wrist, and the knife in her hand suddenly sprouted in the bloodwood floor a centimeter from the human’s booted foot. The human didn’t even flinch. “I am no coddled palace quisling, human. I am a S’sinn Hunter, and Flight Leader. You would do well to respect me.”

  The human bowed slightly. “Oh, I do, Flight Leader, I do. As I respect those who guard the Supreme Flight Leader. But you must also give me my due. Akkanndikk will still die, and I will escape—and there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that a human assassinated her. Kathryn Bircher is no longer a Translator. Nor is Jarrikk, even if he still lives. The peace plan they have Translated will vanish like a dream, like smoke in a hurricane. War will come . . .”

  “And I will lead the Hunters as Supreme Flight Leader!” Kitillikk breathed, wanting to shout it but not quite daring to: not yet.

  “I must go.” The human went to the arch that led into the corridor where Ukkarr stood watch. “I will not see you again. But the deed will be done soon; I promise you that.” He pulled the hood of his black cloak over his black-furred head, and slipped out.