Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “Oh, so now it’s a disease?”

  “Disease, poison, took the brown acid, whatever. I wanna know what they know. The one on the right—Tuan?—he seems to understand a little English. See what you can get outta him.”

  “Fine. Just don’t get used to ordering me around. I’m not one of your crew.”

  “Course you’re not. Girls can’t be pirates.” He winked. “But you would look great with an eye patch.”

  Her brow stayed wrinkled, but Lito thought he caught the hint of a smile before she turned away.

  She moved forward in the claustrophobic cockpit. The two Vietnamese boys watched her carefully. Amber knelt in front of them and introduced herself. “How long have you been here?”

  Tuan furrowed his brow.

  “Uh, how long?” She tapped her watch face. “Here?” She pointed at the floor.

  The young man’s face lit up. He held up a hand with all five fingers extended.

  “Five…hours?”

  He seemed to think about how to answer, then pointed at the pile of empty ration tins in the corner.

  Lito got it after a second. “Five days? You’ve been out here for five days?”

  “Days,” he repeated, nodding.

  “How’d you get here? Do you know why the people from these other ships are all messed up?”

  “Don’t confuse him,” Amber chided. She swept a finger at the other ships visible through the narrow viewport. “Do you know anything about those?”

  Tuan held his hands out, palms up.

  “What happened to you? How did you come here?”

  This time, he shot an uncomfortable glance at his compatriot. Due squinted his already narrow eyes as he tried to follow the conversation. Finally, Tuan shook his head.

  “You can’t tell me? You mean you don’t know?”

  Tuan grasped for words, then took his fingertips and made a show of clamping his lips shut.

  “I think he means he won’t tell you,” Lito said. “If they’re really Vietnamese military, then whatever they’re doin here could be classified.”

  “You think they had something to do with the derelicts then?”

  “Either that, or they’re just as stuck as we are.”

  “Maybe they’re terrorists.” Amber turned to Tuan and asked, “Is that it? Are you here to attack America?”

  “A-ttack…America?” the boy repeated. He looked genuinely puzzled. “No, no to…‘a-ttack.’ Friend. Asian Faction. Company C-12.” This last bit sounded more memorized than translated to Lito, a crucial bit of English they’d been taught in case someone wanted name, rank, and serial number.

  “You’re a friend?” Amber asked. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  Due interrupted in rapid Vietnamese, jabbing a finger at them. Tuan shook his head emphatically, negating whatever he’d been told, then grabbed the other soldier’s hand and pushed it down. Due jerked away from him and said something recognizable as a curse in any language, then threw a hand up and spun around in his chair. He flung his head down against the console and wrapped his arms over it, like a kid throwing a tantrum.

  Tuan ran a hand over his dark, bristly hair and gave them an embarrassed frown. Lito was getting the idea this levelheaded kid was the only reason they hadn’t been shot the minute they stepped foot on their vessel. These two were stressed to the breaking point, but the difference was, Tuan was willing to trust them if it meant a chance at help.

  “What are you doin here?” Lito repeated.

  The young soldier searched for words, then put his palms together and moved them apart, while making a sound like an explosion. Then he pantomimed firing a gun.

  “Fight?” Amber prompted. “Battle?”

  “War?” Lito offered.

  Tuan nodded eagerly. “War! Help war! America!”

  “What fuckin war is Vietnam helpin to fight in Caribbean waters?”

  The young soldier gaped at him, and Lito suspected it wasn’t because of a language gap this time. When he spoke, it was as though talking to a child. “War. War. Biiig war.”

  Amber looked up at Lito and shrugged helplessly. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  “Not a clue. Doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.”

  Lito was set to continue the line of questioning, but Jericho came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Lito…talk to you a sec?”

  Lito nodded and told Amber, “See what else you can get.”

  The two of them stepped out of earshot toward the back of the cockpit. “What’s up?”

  “I took a look at dere engine. What I t’ought was dere engine. Dis ship…I ain’t never seen anyt’ing like it.”

  “So they don’t have a fuel line?”

  “You kidding? I was prob’ly closer when I said nuclear fission.” Jericho leaned even closer to him and whispered, “We need to figure out who de hell dese guys are.”

  “They’re kinda tight-lipped, and I don’t know how much time we have for an interrogation, Jer.” Lito stood still for a moment. “Tell me this though: you think this thing could be worth somethin?”

  Jericho snorted. “I don’t know how Vietnam got dere hands on a ship like dis, but de technology ain’t common. De design alone has got to be worth millions to de right country.”

  Lito nodded. “Let’s keep this between us for the time being.”

  4

  Amber had participated in a study on non-verbal communication her junior year as part of a course requirement, where the participants had been forced to convey complex ideas without any vocalization. The experience was designed for situations exactly like this, where two individuals from radically different backgrounds had a language barrier between them. And, although she never expected to use it in a situation as odd as this one, she did find that the more she spoke with Tuan, the easier she found it to grasp his meanings. It also helped that he seemed to already have some English exposure. Their exchange became an intermingled soup of shared vocabulary and improvised sign language that she translated for the other two.

  After ten more minutes, she was able to piece together their story: there were originally four soldiers manning this craft, which had taken damage in whatever fight they’d been involved in. Dead in the water, they’d floated into the midst of the derelicts while waiting for extraction. Here the story got fuzzy, but as she understood it, the sky had flashed blue to the west, and ‘day had turned to night.’ She had to ask him about this part twice, thinking at first he meant it the other way around, that the flash was so bright it had seemed like daylight, but he was absolutely adamant that the sun was out before the flash, and afterward, it was moonlight and stars. His only explanation was that they had lost consciousness, except none of them could recall waking up, or any sort of gap in their thought stream. That had been five days ago.

  “What about their superiors?” Lito asked. “They must have a radio on this thing. They heard from anyone?”

  Tuan cringed at this question and mumbled something in Vietnamese. Beside him, Due lifted his head from his arms and looked up fearfully.

  “What? What’d I say?”

  Tuan reached out to his control console, flicked a switch beside a built-in microphone jutting up from the plastic, and the entire cabin was filled with the Voice of the Deep, spouting its gibberish through speakers hidden somewhere around them. Tuan shivered.

  “Damn. Forgot about that,” Lito said.

  “Yes,” Amber told Tuan. “We know, we heard it, too. We don’t know what it’s saying.”

  As the current transmission stopped, lapsing into one of the thirty second gaps of radio silence, the Vietnamese soldier leaned to the microphone and held down a button.

  Amber realized too late that he was about to attempt broadcasting.

  “No, don’t!” Jericho shouted behind her. The terror in his voice sent a tingle of fear across her scalp.

  Tuan spoke a quick, simple sentence in Vietnamese into the microphone, sending his voic
e over the airwaves. Amber imagined it floating up and away, to be intercepted by whoever was broadcasting that other cryptic, monotonous spiel. She held her breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  When Tuan let go of the button and relinquished control of the channel, there was a metallic click, followed by a low tone. The broadcast started up again, but this time it was one single, repeated syllable. And, even though she still didn’t understand what it was saying, Amber could at least identify the language now.

  It was deadpan, perfectly unaccented Vietnamese.

  From the other chair, Due pressed palms over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, forcing tears down the sides of his nose.

  The word played a few times before Amber whispered, “What did you say, Tuan?”

  Anticipating her question, he struggled to find the words. “Ask name.”

  Amber opened her mouth, let out a rasp, and had to swallow before she could try again. That one word repeating over and over again—in a recognizable language now, but so cold and emotionless—was somehow worse than the other. She realized she was terrified to speak too loud, lest it somehow hear her over the speakers. “And what is it saying back?”

  “‘Leave,’” he translated. “Say…‘Leave. Leave.’”

  They listened to it for a full minute, then the tone came again, and the original broadcast resumed. Tuan turned off the speakers, and everyone seemed to deflate as the tension left them.

  Amber twisted around to look at Lito and Jericho. “What does it mean?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Lito said. “That voice…it didn’t just sound like a recording that time, it sounded like a damn robot.”

  “And it spoke dere language.” Jericho gestured at the soldiers. “Does dat mean it has somet’in to do wit dese two?”

  “Not necessarily.” Amber rubbed at her temples. “It only spoke Vietnamese in response to him. If whatever is broadcasting this is truly automated, then maybe it just took in what he said, decoded it, then spoke back to him.”

  “Is there some computer program that’ll do that?” Lito asked. “Understand any language and use it to answer you?”

  “Not any language. There are spoken translators you can buy that understand the big ones—English, Spanish, French—but they’re far from reliable. Plus, it would take massive computational storage space to be able to house every language on the planet.” She held up a hand. “But we need to be very clear here. That thing didn’t answer him at all. Chances are, it probably didn’t understand what he said, just what language he said it in. Then it sent out a preprogrammed response that matched the verbal patterns. That would account for the simplicity; it probably has a very limited vocabulary, just enough to get across its message.”

  Lito looked over her head at Tuan, who was desperately trying to follow their conversation. “Kid, that’s obviously not the first time you’ve tried that. Has it ever said anything else?”

  Amber had to work to translate the question enough for him to understand, but the young soldier eventually shook his head.

  “It’s a warning,” Amber said.

  “Or a threat,” Jericho added.

  Lito’s jaw clenched. “Or it could be somebody with somethin to hide, so they’re tryin to scare people off by flashin lights in the sky and makin spooky voices on the radio, like a goddamn Scooby Doo villain.”

  “We have to try it ourselves,” Amber said. “In English. See if it answers us.”

  “No, can’t let you do that. Anyone else within range could pick up the broadcast. The less radio presence we have, the better.”

  Amber felt her fingernails biting into her palms as she said, “Enough with your goddamn anti-authority bullshit. We are way beyond the fact that you guys are pirates. This is our best chance at finding out what the hell is going on around here.”

  The two of them locked eyes, like matador and bull.

  The tension was broken when Ray’s voice spoke from Lito’s pocket. “You guys copy? Everything okay in there?”

  Lito glared at her a moment longer, then pulled the radio out. He left the device in its protective bags while he spoke. “We’re fine.”

  “Water’s gettin pretty choppy out here. This storm’s gonna be on us any second, and it’s lookin more and more like a doozy.”

  Amber had been so engrossed in her conversation with Tuan, she hadn’t realized how much the vessel was now rolling from side to side, a slow, gentle pendulum motion, like being inside a giant bassinet.

  “We’ll be out in a sec.” Lito put the radio back up and turned to her. “We can play detective on our own scanner when we get back. Finish this up. I wanna know what happened to their other crewmen, and if they know anything about those blue flashes.”

  “Blue!” Tuan came alive all of a sudden, swiveling in his chair to sift through piles of paper print-outs on the desk. He started handing several of these to Amber, documents packed densely with Vietnamese writing and complicated graphs, then pointed out the viewport to the west and waved the strange handheld device they’d used earlier. “Blue, blue!”

  “I don’t understand.” She held up the sheaf of papers. “What does this have to do with the blue flashes?”

  Tuan thought for a second, then grabbed another piece of paper and bent over it with a pen. He scribbled for a few seconds and then handed this new slip over to her.

  It was a quick drawing of three flat-topped cones arranged in a triangle, all pointing inward to a circle in the middle. She recognized the crude pictogram immediately.

  The international symbol for radiation.

  5

  The end of their story came quickly to Amber, although it made such little sense, she preferred to believe the meaning had been lost in translation.

  The flash that turned day to night (big, Tuan insisted about this one, much brighter than what Amber and the others had been seeing) had also set off alarms all over their ship. One of their crewmates had been outside when it happened, standing on the hull to keep an eye on the derelicts, and became violently ill over the next day. Fearing that their enemy had used a new weapon in whatever battle they were fighting, they’d locked themselves inside their ship for two days, eating their food stores and trying to restore power to their craft while their crewmate went downhill fast.

  “It was radiation poisoning, wasn’t it?” Lito asked quietly.

  Tuan nodded.

  “Oh shit,” Jericho moaned.

  “What?” Amber demanded. “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t you get it? The sickness, the mutations…one of dese ships is carryin radioactive cargo, and it’s fryin everything dat comes t’rough here!”

  “I don’t know if that’s it at all,” Lito said.

  “Course it is, mon! Goddamn it, the little soldier boys have been protected on dis ship, but who knows how much exposure we’ve had!”

  Tuan jabbered at them and held up the PDA device with the short, silver wand attached.

  Lito said, “We’re okay, Jer. I think that thing must be some kinda Geiger counter. They were testin us earlier, seein if we’d been exposed. Since they let us on board, I guess that means we haven’t.”

  “So the blue flashes we’ve seen, like the one that just went off a little bit ago…they’re not radioactive?” Amber asked.

  Tuan shook his head emphatically.

  “Maybe it was a nuclear bomb den,” Jericho said. “Someone coulda set one off miles from here, and we’re gettin de fallout.”

  “No new-clee-are,” Tuan said, sounding very sure even as he pronounced the last word in heavily-accented imitation. He reached out and tapped the packet of graphs he’d given Amber. “Computer…no say new-clee-are. Other. No name.”

  “Finish your story,” Lito told him. “What happened to the other soldiers?”

  While they awaited rescue, they’d heard screeches and moans from the other boats that drifted by, and something big had slithered around beneath their vessel, bashing at the unde
rside of their hull before finally giving up and going away. During each of these incidents, the radiation detectors had gone off. Then, as their crewmate got sicker, he began to set off the detectors. He had a fever, screamed and thrashed violently, and they’d been forced to quarantine him to his bunk as best they could. From the way Tuan described him, it seemed to Amber they were scared of the man. When the others became convinced they’d been abandoned by their superiors, one of the crewmen commandeered a small sailboat that floated close enough to lasso. He took the sick one and left to find help. That had been three days ago, and they’d never returned. Since that time, the sky had flashed brightly three other times, with the smaller bursts in between. Tuan held his stomach and stuck out his tongue as he attempted to convey this, miming a bellyache.

  “So the small flashes make you queasy, like what we felt before, but it’s only the bright ones that are dangerous,” Lito said. “Tuan, how often do these things happen?”

  The response was translated through Amber after some effort: the time period between the bright flashes were completely random—the shortest about eight hours, the longest close to two days—but they were always separated by four of the lesser bursts.

  “Dat’s not so bad. We’ve only seen two of dem so far.”

  “Three,” Lito corrected. “I saw one from a distance, before we ever found the first derelicts. Is that right, Tuan, there have been three so far in this set?” The soldier nodded. “Which means we’re pretty damn deep into this thing.”

  Amber cleared her throat of the spit that had suddenly flooded it. “Can…can radiation poisoning be passed on though? Through a scratch?”

  “No. It also doesn’t turn you into a burnt-up psychopath that doesn’t age. It makes you sick and kills you, or, if the dosage is low enough, it turns your unborn kids into freaks. Period.”

  Jericho shook his head. “But Lito, what you’re talking about is nuclear radiation. And he said dat’s not what dis is.”