Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  He’s Guild. Not a Translator, but still part of the Guild. And the Guild has already sacrificed me once—or at least set me up so I would sacrifice myself. She smoothed wrinkles out of her uniform. Well, only one way to find out. “Summoned to the bridge,” she told Jarrikk. “I’ll be back.” She felt his concern and curiosity follow her as she went out.

  Having already decided she knew why she was being summoned, she was totally unprepared when the door to the bridge slid aside to reveal Jim Ornawka.

  He sat in one of the swinging crewchairs at an unmanned station, and looked like he’d crawled through a hundred miles of mud and barbed wire to get there. Brown water tinged with red dripped from the tattered black cloak he wore, dirt smudged his face, and one cheek bore a red, blistered streak. But he managed a smile when he saw her. “Hello, Katy.”

  She didn’t smile back. There’d been only one thing she’d wanted to say to Jim Ornawka for days; she said it now. “You lied to Jarrikk. You told him I didn’t want to see him. He almost died because of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jim said, but empathically he was as blank to her as ever. “I only did it to protect you—and honor Jarrikk. I knew he wouldn’t thank you for interfering with his Sacrifice. You think too much like a human for your own good, Katy. The S’sinn may be a lot like us, at least compared to races like the Swampworlders, but they’re not human.”

  Kathryn said nothing. The captain, who had come up behind Jim while they were talking (and while the other half-dozen crew on the bridge very carefully didn’t look at them), cleared his throat. “Translator Ornawka made it through the blockade around the Spaceport. He says he can take you out the same way.”

  “Take us out?” Kathryn stared at him. “Why would we want to leave the ship?”

  “It’s not safe,” Jim said. “It’s only a matter of time before they move in and take it. And with all due respect to the captain and crew of the Unity, they’re not what Kitillikk really wants. She wants Translators. She’s announced that it was a Translator who tried to kill the Supreme Flight Leader.”

  It was so much like the fears she had read from Jarrikk while he held her hand that it startled Kathryn. “Then what about Annette Ursu? She’s in the Great Hall with Matthews—”

  Jim didn’t say anything, but the captain cleared his throat and, sensing his grimness, she knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Translator Ursu and Ambassador Matthews are dead. We presume the others in the diplomatic mission are dead, too, although some may have escaped to other Commonwealth embassies.”

  “Matthews and Annette were torn apart by a so-called ‘mob,’ ” Jim said. “Kitillikk’s doing, of course. I’m sorry, Katy.”

  Katy hadn’t had much use for Matthews, but the news of his death still shocked her deeply. And though she’d never met Annette Ursu, the violent death of any Translator should have been unthinkable. “But if the people are against us . . . where would we go?” she whispered. “It’s not our world.”

  “They’re not all against us. They’re fighting each other in the streets. There must be Commonwealth sympathizers who could help us—and maybe Jarrikk knows who they are.” Jim got to his feet slowly. “Shall we go see him? I think it’s about time I went to sickbay anyway.”

  Kathryn tried to read him one more time—and one more time, she failed. Maybe Jarrikk would have better luck. “Let’s go.”

  Shortly after Kathryn left Jarrikk’s room in response to the call from the bridge, Ukkaddikk came in. He greeted Jarrikk solemnly. “Grim news,” he said, his words underscored empathically by deep concern. “Kitillikk is tightening her hold. There is no word of Akkanndikk’s whereabouts, and Kitillikk has said it was a human Translator who tried to kill her.”

  “In other words, Kathryn,” Jarrikk said.

  “Translator Ursu is dead. With Ambassador Matthews and others. No doubt I would be, too, had I not been on the Unity. But this is only a temporary refuge, Jarrikk. This ship cannot be held against the Hunters.”

  “We don’t seem to have much choice.” Inwardly Jarrikk seethed with anger at Kitillikk. May the Hunter gag on that female’s soul! he thought. How many lives will she spend in her ambition?

  “No,” Ukkaddikk agreed gloomily. “If we were anywhere but the Spaceport, I might be able to find us refuge, but the Spaceport is designed to be easily defensible—which means it’s just as easily besieged.” He gave Jarrikk a curious look. “I don’t suppose this new link of yours with Translator Bircher could help us?”

  “How?” Jarrikk asked, instantly wary. Even now, Ukkaddikk was fishing for information. Ever the true Guild loyalist. Anything for the good of the Guild.

  Well, he still wasn’t prepared to tell the Guild exactly what he and Kathryn had achieved. Not yet.

  “Obviously I don’t know, since I know very little about what you’re able to do. I do know Translator Bircher is a projective, at least a little bit. Could the two of you, working together, plant a suggestion in a third person’s mind?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jarrikk said. “No. We couldn’t.” But inside, he wondered, and a part of him began worrying at the problem, trying to remember how that link with Kathryn felt and what could be done from it. But he didn’t get far before the door opened and Kathryn came in—with Jim Ornawka.

  Jim’s face glistened with synthiskin bandages, beneath which Jarrikk could still dimly see a variety of nasty cuts and bruises. “Translator Jarrikk,” Jim said. “Translator Ukkaddikk.”

  Jarrikk glared at him. Jim Ornawka had lied to him about Kathryn. She had wanted to see him before he took the knife. He felt he had ample reason to dislike and distrust the man.

  So why is he here?

  Kathryn’s own emotions felt similarly tangled—yet she had entered with Ornawka. Somehow, Jarrikk sensed, Ornawka had convinced her to trust him, at least a little.

  “Jim got through the blockade,” she said tensely. “He thinks he can get all of us out—if we want to go.”

  Ukkaddikk glanced at Jarrikk. “We were just discussing the matter. We did not think it possible.”

  “It might not be,” Ornawka said. “They may find the route I used at any time and plug the hole. But it’s the only hope I see. They’ve got major military hardware piling up outside. They can take this ship any time they want.”

  “Then what are they waiting for?” asked Kathryn.

  Jarrikk knew the answer to that. “The right moment,” he said. “Kitillikk is using everything to strengthen her position as interim Supreme Flight Leader—a position she will make permanent when she is certain that she can. She is keeping us in reserve. When she feels she needs to boost popular support, or distract the public’s attention from something, then she will take us. We’re just being used.” Again.

  “But if we escape, it backfires,” Ornawka said. “If we escape, and she is not aware of it, and strikes at this ship anyway—”

  “No,” Jarrikk said emphatically. “If we leave, we must let Captain Hall tell Kitillikk we have escaped as soon as the Hunters move in. They will search the ship, of course, but they will not need to take it by force. We cannot ask the crew to die to cover our escape.”

  “They serve the Guild. They should be prepared to die.”

  “I agree with Jarrikk,” Kathryn put in hurriedly. “We must do what we can to protect them.”

  Ornawka shrugged, but Jarrikk felt his irritation: the first emotion Ornawka had let leak through his shield.

  “Whatever we do, we must do quickly,” Ukkaddikk said. He gave his wings a nervous shake. “There is another question. Jarrikk, are you well enough to travel?”

  “Yes,” he said, hoping it was true.

  “We should ask Doctor Chung,” Kathryn said. “I’ll go.” She slipped out.

  Jarrikk looked at Ornawka. “There’s no point in running if we have nowhere safe to run to.”

  “I hoped you could help there,” Ornawka said.

  “He can’t, but I can,” said Ukkaddikk. “A p
owerful family with strong pro-Commonwealth sentiments has a jarrbukk ranch not far from here. We will go there, away from prying eyes. They will also have news of what’s really happening, news that isn’t filtered through Kitillikk.”

  “Excellent,” Ornawka said. “We’re agreed, then.”

  “Agreed,” said Ukkaddikk.

  “Agreed,” Jarrikk said, but he kept his eyes on Ornawka, the Translator who hid behind an impenetrable empathic block, the Translator who had lied to a fellow Translator, the Translator who would willingly have sacrificed the crew of the Unity to make Kitillikk’s grab for power just a little more difficult.

  Dr. Chung, after considerable argument, finally admitted that Jarrikk could probably travel without risking permanent damage. But she was adamant about one thing: “I must come with you.”

  “No. Doctor, I put you at risk once, dragging you off to the Place of Flightless Sacrifice. I can’t—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you, with all due respect, Translator Bircher. In Translator business I am at your command, but this is medical business. My business. And Jarrikk is my patient. I’m coming.” She picked up her medical bag and brushed past Kathryn without looking at her.

  So there were three humans and two S’sinn in the party that gathered in one of the auxiliary airlocks twenty minutes later. Jarrikk leaned heavily on Kathryn, but though she could feel his mind, she didn’t try to link telepathically. They both needed all their energy—especially Jarrikk. Chung hovered near him, playing the flickering blue beam of a medical scanner over his chest, watching its readouts with lips pressed and eyes narrowed.

  The humans all wore packs—there had been nothing that would fit S’sinn and Jarrikk was in no condition to carry extra weight anyway—and all of them except Dr. Chung wore Commonwealth-issue beamers holstered at their waists. The unfamiliar weight at her hip bothered Kathryn. She couldn’t imagine actually firing the thing, but the captain had insisted and Ukkaddikk had thought it a good idea as well. Certainly Jim had taken his with no qualms. Chung had refused as a matter of ethics.

  “I hope your ethics don’t come with too high a price,” Jim said to her.

  “No price could be too high,” Chung replied quietly.

  Jim and Ukkaddikk were already in the airlock when the others arrived. The open outer door revealed, not the landing field, as Kathryn had expected, but a strange, tubular corridor. Dim blue lights every metre or so glistened off walls of black plastic. “This is how I got to the ship without being seen,” Jim said. “It’s a maintenance tube; provides easy access for Spaceport crews and a handy source of compatible power for their tools.”

  “Where does it go?” Kathryn asked.

  “All the way back to the maintenance shop in the main terminal. And the maintenance shop has a loading dock opening onto a lev-line outside the Spaceport’s perimeter fencing.”

  “Kitillikk wouldn’t miss something that obvious,” Ukkaddikk growled. “Surely it’s guarded.”

  “It’s guarded—but it’s also crowded with boxes and barrels and half-a-dozen lev-cars. Lots of shadows. We can slip through it without being seen. I proved it.”

  “I hope you weren’t just lucky,” Kathryn said.

  They moved through the eerie black tube in silence, its padded floor, designed to provide traction to clawed S’sinn feet, muffling their footsteps. Periodically they passed joints between sections of tubing, but every section looked just like every other. Kathryn had no idea how far they had come or how far they still had to go when, suddenly, they arrived at an open hatch.

  Jim drew his beamer, motioned the others to keep silent, then edged forward to look through the hatch. He turned his head this way and that, looking, listening, and, Kathryn realized, reaching out with his empathic sense. After a moment he gestured for them to follow him.

  Work platforms hung from metal beams at apparently haphazard heights above them in the circular, high-ceilinged shop. Metal shutters secured several large windows or doors right under the ceiling, and closed hatches like the one they’d just come through circled the room at floor-level, presumably linking the shop to other ships on the landing field. A sharp, metallic scent hung in the chill air, and odd-shaped, inscrutable pieces of large machinery stood around like silent sentinels, the light from the three floodlights spaced equidistantly around the shop throwing some areas into high relief and others into pitch-black shadow.

  “Spooky,” Kathryn whispered, hugging herself against the chill, glad she’d thought to wear the jacket.

  “But empty,” Jim said briskly. “Unless you can sense something I can’t.”

  Kathryn closed her eyes for a minute and concentrated, focusing her empathic sense, and quite unexpectedly found herself in momentary linkage with Jarrikk and at the same time suddenly aware of a much larger area than she’d ever been able to scan before—and aware of a single S’sinn presence, not in the room, but somewhere nearby.

  She opened her eyes again. “I thought I felt someone,” she said, glancing at Jarrikk, then back at Jim. “Outside the room.”

  “Outside . . . ?” Jim frowned at her. “Since when have you been able to sense . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Kathryn snapped. “I’m just telling you what I felt. Or thought I felt. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “No,” Ukkaddikk said. “I feel him, too. But I don’t believe I would have if you hadn’t told me he was there.”

  “Probably just someone cleaning up,” Jim said. He sounded unreasonably irritable. “Shouldn’t even know we’re here. Let’s go.”

  He led them through the maze of machinery toward a hatch on the far side of the room, larger than any of the others, large enough to admit a transport.

  They were only halfway across the floor when the hatch started to rise.

  Chapter 17

  The party from the Unity scattered like quail into the shadows of the shop. Peering cautiously around the base of the lathelike machine behind which she hid, Kathryn saw a S’sinn, carrying a firelance, duck under the still-rising hatch into the room—and at the same time sensed him empathically, this time without Jarrikk’s help. Jarrikk hid behind her, not quite touching her; but then he did touch her, placing his hand lightly on her calf, and suddenly she could sense the strange S’sinn with shocking strength, as though he were standing right next to her: and knew at once that, as long as they didn’t show themselves, they had nothing to fear. She sensed nothing from him but boredom, not a hint of suspicion, and was certain that after he completed his desultory inspection of the room from the hatchway he’d go back out again—a certainty heightened as he paused to stretch, wings rustling as he spread them wide, and yawned hugely, revealing alarmingly sharp white teeth.

  Kathryn could also sense Ukkaddikk’s anxiety, Dr. Chung’s fear, and even—for the first time she could remember—a hint of something from Jim, though the emotions roiling beneath his thick shield remained too complex to read clearly. Most of all, of course, she could sense Jarrikk, strong and surprisingly calm. But then, she supposed, if you had the courage to stick a knife in your own heart, a little thing like a firelance wouldn’t bother you.

  Jim judged the location of the Hunter, then crawled quickly across open space to join Kathryn and Jarrikk. “Only one,” he mouthed. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “No,” Kathryn whispered back. “Can’t you sense him? He’s not suspicious. There’s no need—”

  But Jim was already scooting away on his belly, wriggling out of sight behind a long bench that stretched almost to the big hatch.

  Kathryn looked at Jarrikk and Ukkaddikk and Chung, but none of them said anything. There was really nothing they could do.

  With great relief, Kathryn saw the Hunter turn back to the still-open hatch. He’s going, she thought pointlessly at Jim, wishing she could contact him telepathically. He’s going. Let him go . . .

  But Jim didn’t. He rose silently from behind the bench, and without a sound, without a warning, he raised his be
amer and fired a single pulse.

  The white beam slashed across the S’sinn Hunter’s back, severing his spine and cutting his wings in half. Kathryn cried out as the Hunter’s agony exploded in her own mind, then he vanished from her awareness and collapsed in a smoldering heap.

  The severed tip of one wing burned with sharp popping sounds, a thin tendril of smoke curling up from it, for several more seconds.

  And Kathryn, to her horror, felt one undisguised, unblocked emotion from Jim: pleasure.

  Jarrikk also felt Ornawka’s sick satisfaction, so forcefully he almost vomited. Nauseated and enraged, he staggered to his feet, his mind filled with unwanted images from years past of his youngflight brothers, shot from the sky by humans. He lunged at Ornawka as the human Translator walked nonchalantly back, but Ornawka raised the beamer again.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Murderer!” Jarrikk snarled in Guildtalk. “There was no need—”

  “There was every need,” Ornawka replied, his own voice calm and controlled. “It would be much harder to slip past him outside than in here.”

  “You didn’t have to kill him!” Kathryn cried. She, too, Jarrikk knew, must have taken the full empathic force of the Hunter’s death.

  “What would you have suggested? Unarmed combat? He’d have taken me apart.”

  “As I yet may!” Jarrikk growled.

  “You? You can hardly walk.”

  Jarrikk’s claws dug hard into the padded floor, but Ukkaddikk stepped between him and Ornawka with spread arms and half-spread wings. “This gets us nowhere,” Ukkaddikk snapped. “I would have preferred to avoid bloodshed, but it is Kitillikk who chose the path of war. The next blood to be shed may be our own if we do not escape the Spaceport!”

  “My point exactly.” Ornawka holstered his beamer and turned away. “So let’s go.”

  Promising himself there would yet be a reckoning, Jarrikk accompanied the others to the hatch, passing within a span of the dead S’sinn’s charred corpse and the slowly spreading dark red pool around it. Jarrikk saw Kathryn look away, but he stared long and hard. I will remember you, brother, he thought fiercely. You may have stood against me, but I do not call you enemy. May the Hunter avenge your death—with my help!