by J. Boyett
“So you see,” said Farraday, wrapping up, “you were right to suspect that Beach was in contact with the Provisional envoy, since right before we docked at Bayawah. But he’d made contact with them on my orders. I figured that if there were any spies aboard, they would have passed along word of the alleged bad blood between myself and Lieutenant Beach. Which doesn’t exist, by the way. So it would seem natural to the Provisional that Beach should contact them.”
Miller was not actually blushing, but he was pretty close. “I have to admit, sir, I didn’t even suspect that Lieutenant Beach had sent any such messages.”
“Oh.” Farraday’s expression was both startled and worried. “I had assumed that your suspicions of him implied that you had.”
Lieutenant Beach said, “I’ll be happy to fill you in on the method I used to send that secret transmission, sir, so we can be on the lookout for anyone using a similar trick in the future.” There was a definite hint of pride in the helmsman’s voice.
“We did consult Ensign Dobbler on clever ways to mask the transmission,” added Farraday. Beach deflated a bit, now that it was out that he hadn’t done the whole thing himself.
Farraday turned to Blaine. “But you did catch the second transmission, at least. Right?”
“Aye, sir.”
Farraday nodded. He seemed to relax a bit at the news that this communiqué, at least, had not totally slipped past his officers, even though his plan had depended on its doing so. They were referring to the encoded pattern Beach had broadcast from the helm; that, it turned out, had been his signal to Commodore Chavez that he was sneaking aboard Bayawah. It was also the signal for Farraday to send for his trunk, which was how Beach had actually snuck off the ship. Meanwhile Ensign Dobbler, as the captain had secretly ordered him to do should the need arise, had disabled any alerts the AI’s might want to issue of Beach’s departure. Including the one Blaine had instructed her own AI to give.
“I had no idea Dobbler had that level of expertise,” murmured Blaine. Moreover, it didn’t sit well with her that the ensign had been in the loop, when she, the acting commander, had not.
Farraday noticed. “Sorry, Commander,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. “I felt it was important we let as few people as possible in on such a delicate, high-security operation.”
Blaine only nodded, and said, “Aye, sir.” Meanwhile she reflected that this practice of improvising unorthodox chains of communication was becoming worrisomely standard, on all sides.
Farraday was explaining how Shinjo and Yfir had been in on it, as well—it wouldn’t have been possible for the Galaxy to switch gates with the aksalions’ ship, without letting the Bayawah functionaries know. But they’d proven to be good sports after all, and not so scrupulously honest that they felt the need to spill the beans about Farraday’s plans to Chavez; the show of arguing with Farraday had even helped persuade Chavez that they weren’t on the captain’s side. Tradition had demanded that they require Farraday to at least try to solve the problem peacefully before asking a third party to constrain the Provisional men—that was why Farraday had had to make that futile plea to Chavez, in the two functionaries’ presence.
“I don’t understand,” frowned Miller. “Sir, you mean everything was planned all along? You intentionally lost at the Casino, as a feint? But you couldn’t have known days ago that we were going to meet the aksalions, and so be able to make an alliance with people who had no hyperdrive to lose, and so wouldn’t mind taking Chavez and his people prisoner.”
Farraday was shaking his head. “No. I wish I could say otherwise, but no—Chavez really did beat me there at the Casino. Of course, I could just as easily have won—but since I would have had no idea that a win would give me access to the dreadnaught, Chavez must have felt he wasn’t risking much. Once Chavez had actually gained access to the Galaxy, I changed the plan and played it by ear. The original idea was that Beach was going to pretend to defect to the Provisional. He was to become a double agent, a mole, sending us reports from within their government.”
Miller gave Beach a respectful look. “That’s a dangerous assignment.”
“That’s what I told him when I proposed it,” said Farraday. “I said he was free to decline the mission, but he stepped up.”
Beach met Miller’s eyes with no discernible expression. “It was what any good Christian would do, sir.”
“All right,” said Farraday, and stood up to signal the meeting was over. The other officers rose along with him. “Commander Blaine, I assume there’s no way that Provisional Dreadnaught could be on our tail, assuming our friend Captain Merg has released my old professor by now?”
“We’ve been in hyperspace an hour, sir. There’s no known scientific or thaumaturgical way anyone could be tracing us.”
“Right. Very good. Then if you’ll all excuse me, I feel like getting some dinner.”
They left the Conference Room. And once out in the hall, Farraday waited till his officers were a discreet distance away before calling Jennifer for a date.
After all, he thought, he’d earned it. Hadn’t he?
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EXCERPT FROM THE UNKILLABLES
Veela and Dak have escaped from the zombie apocalypse that destroyed the Earth by retreating into the past, only to find that they've brought the zombies back with them. Now Veela must enlist the help of Neanderthals and early Cro-Magnons if she wants to prevent civilization from being destroyed before it begins....
Chert advanced on Veela. “You must teach us something,” he warned, “or otherwise prove your worth. So far you’re dead weight. You don’t ever explain any of these mysteries, you just appear alongside them.”
“True, Chert’s saying,” admitted Veela. She tried to think of some point that might qualify this admission, but nothing came to mind.
“Veela,” said the Jaw. He sounded both gentle and anxious, as if her safety depended on her producing something, and he was afraid she wouldn’t pull it off. “You must give my father something. If you can bring your own meat to the circle, my father and I will hunt alongside you. But you must bring something. Something besides questions and strange garb.”
Veela nodded. She didn’t think of anything to say, though.
The Jaw took a step towards her. Almost pleadingly, he said, “Veela. Just the first step. What is the first thing one must do, when making the magic of the strong tight fire?”
Veela hoped she was managing to keep her fear hidden. She had no clue how to go about making a laser gun, much less making one out of mud, wood, and stone....
Then a crazy inspiration hit her: All he’s asking for is the first step....
What was the first step of engineering, of physics, of everything?
With great solemnity, she said, “Teach you this magic, I can. From path’s first step. But path is long. Long, long, long. Want you it do?”
“Yes,” said the Jaw.
“Of course we want to do it,” said Chert.
“Long time. More long than hundred times the time for me to learn spear. More long than thousand times.”
When she said this, she had to use the words for “hundred” and “thousand” from her own native language. Not only did she not know those words in the People’s tongue, but, as she had anticipated, the People’s tongue did not even have such words. Chert and the Jaw both twisted up their faces in confusion. “What’s ‘hundred’?” asked the Jaw. “What’s ‘thousand’?”
“Ah!” said Veela. “That question, first step is. First step, of magic path.”
She sat down again. Chert and the Jaw followed suit, watching her uncertainly. She gestured out at the forest. “Trees,” she said. “How much
?”
“Very much,” replied Chert, in a tone that said he was still listening, but his patience would soon run out.
Fortunately, Veela had chanced upon a word meaning something like “exact” during an earlier session, so she was able to say, “No—how much, with exactness?” Even if she had known the language perfectly, she would not have been able to ask “how many,” because they had no word for “many.” While they did have the rough concept of numbers, it wasn’t developed enough for them to need much vocabulary related to counting or exact quantifications.
The Jaw frowned at the trees. “How can anyone say how much, exactly?”
“And what does it have to do with the strong tight fire?” pressed Chert.
“Do this,” said Veela, and held up two lightly closed fists. “Do this.”
The Jaw obeyed. So did Chert, reluctantly.
Veela poked up the index finger of her right hand. “What this, you call? Word for this, there is?”
The People did have words for counting up to ten, though the word list ran out along with their fingers. Even so, Veela’s question was confusing, because when they did count they started with their thumbs.
“Finger,” ventured Chert.
But the Jaw got it. “One?” he said.
Veela ran through all ten fingers. When she tried moving on to toes, they looked at her like she was crazy. So: they only counted up to ten.
She decided to go ahead and teach them her own words for the first ten numbers, figuring that things would ultimately be less confusing if she imported her own mathematical vocabulary wholesale.
Then she taught them the numbers eleven through twenty. That was harder. The way she did it was to have the Jaw hold up his two fists while she did the same. Once again she cycled through her ten fingers, then touched the Jaw’s fingers. For the first finger she touched on his hand, she said, “Eleven.”
“No,” he said. “One. You said that was one.” Veela shook her head and repeated the new word: “Eleven.” Quickly she counted to ten again on her fingers, then touched the Jaw’s finger and said, “Eleven.”
“The bitch can’t even count!” shouted Chert.
The Jaw ignored his father, face straining toward Veela, trying to understand. “That’s my one,” he insisted. “Why should my one be different from your one?”
Veela counted to twenty on their hands again, but this time she started with his hands, and designated her own fingers as eleven through twenty.
The Jaw tried to understand what she was doing but couldn’t. Unlike his impatient father, though, he sensed there was something she was trying to explain to him, something real and new.
“Sometimes your finger is ‘one,’” he said. “Sometimes my finger is ‘one.’ Why? What decides whose finger gets to be ‘one’? What changes? I can’t see any change. And I still don’t understand why sometimes it’s ‘one,’ and sometimes ‘eleven’. Why is ‘two’ sometimes ‘twelve’?”
“‘One,’ different from finger,” Veela said. “Even if no finger is, ‘one’ is existing.”
She got up and ran to a tree. She ran from one to another of them, touching each one and when she touched it counting from one to twenty. She scooped up a handful of pebbles and sat back down with the two men and counted out a little pile of twenty pebbles.
“This is stupid,” said Chert. “Let’s kill her.”
“Number is.” Veela slapped the pile of twenty pebbles. They clattered into the underbrush. “Before rock, number is. Before finger, number is. Before world, number is. In darkness, is number. Number is power. Number is only power.”
“What is she talking about?” demanded Chert.
“Shut up,” said the Jaw, without tearing his eyes from Veela. “Shut up.” He was concentrating so hard, beads of sweat popped from his forehead.
“Number is bones of the world. Number is the magic language.”
“But,” began the Jaw, then had so many questions he couldn’t find the sentence. Desperately, he said, “But how can you keep track of the numbers? If you don’t use your fingers? If there are more numbers than there are fingers?”
Veela grabbed a twig and jumped up, gesturing for them to follow her out to the ash. They did.
They sat together. Veela held out her hands and again cycled from one through ten. Then, in a column in the ash, she wrote the Arabic numerals for one through ten, saying each number as she went.
Then she held up both hands, leaving the fists closed, and said, “Zero. Zero.” She kept doing it until the Jaw, still confused, mimicked her. Chert refused to.
Then she took her stick again and wrote a zero in the ash atop her column of numerals. “Zero,” she said again. She faced the two men and held up her closed fists again and again said, “Zero.”
The Jaw noticed that the circle she’d drawn to represent a zero was also half of the two-part mark she’d made to represent “ten.” Then he noticed that the other half of the mark was that which represented “one.”
“Zero, hidden number is,” she said. “But most powerful number is.”
“Powerful things have no need to hide,” said Chert.
“Is strange,” she said. “But is true.”
She wrote down the numbers for eleven through twenty, saying them aloud as she went. Having noticed that the “ten” was made of a “one” fronting a “zero,” it was not lost on the Jaw that this new set was just the old set fronted by a “one” each time. He was expecting the same thing to happen when she wrote “twenty,” so that the mark would be “one, one, zero,” and was surprised when instead it was a “two, zero.” His eyes ran up the column again. He noted, with only a groping idea of its significance, that this appearance of a “two, zero” for twenty after the “one, zero” for ten seemed to mirror the sequence of the one and the two in the original column.
Veela looked at the Jaw’s face to see if he understood. She couldn’t tell whether he was close to it or not, but he was clearly trying.
She continued writing the sequence, saying the numbers aloud as she went. “Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.” She had to move along the ash field to find room to write. Chert and the Jaw followed her.
Chert was so annoyed that he wanted to stop her by force. But it seemed that the Jaw was seeing something in all this nonsense, and Chert felt uncharacteristically unsure of himself.
Shortly after Veela got to the the thirties the Jaw realized with a gasp that this new string of marks, fronted by the mark for “three,” also mirrored the sequence of the original string. “Next is four!” he shouted, voice breaking. Veela looked at him. He’d spoken too excitedly for her to make out the words. The Jaw started to hurry back to the original string, then realized he didn’t have to go that far and stopped at the place where she’d written “twenty-four.” He pointed down at the second half of the mark, the “four,” and shouted, “Next is four!” He looked at Veela in appeal, waiting to hear if he’d gotten it right.
“Yes!” she shouted. “Yes!” She wrote more quickly, hurrying to get through the thirties’ subset of the sequence so that she could get to the forties, to reward the Jaw.
He walked beside her as she wrote. When she got to the forties, and he saw he’d been right, that he’d predicted the pattern, his body shook with emotion. He put his hand over his eyes. Voice hoarse, he said, “Next is five. Next is five.”
Veela kept writing on into the fifties. Her voice was getting hoarse too, as she continued to name each number. She was exultantly shouting them now.
Chert stared in astonishment at his son, who for some reason was actually crying over these scratchings in the dirt. “How long will you go on?” he demanded of Veela. “Where do these scratchings end?”
She straightened and turned to face him. She said, “They end at the strong tight fire.”
As she was about to finish the sixties, the Jaw took the stick from her and took over the sequence. Having never written before—having never conceived of the notion of writin
g until today—his scratchings were barely legible. But it was plain that he had grasped the principle of the sequence—he made his way into the seventies with no problem, then the eighties. Veela walked alongside him, saying the name of each number as he wrote it.
Once he’d written “ninety-nine,” he looked up at her uncertainly. She took the stick from him and wrote a one and two zeros. “One hundred,” she said.
“Is that the end?” he asked.
“No end. Never end.”
The Jaw breathed out softly. He gazed up at the dimming sky and seemed to no longer even notice the nearby wall.
While there was still light Veela sat the Jaw down with her in a fresh patch of ash. Chert hung back—Veela wasn’t going to waste time begging him to pay attention when the Jaw was so enthusiastic.
In the ash she wrote a ten, and below it she wrote an “x” beside a two. Under them both she drew a line, and below it she wrote a twenty. The Jaw stared, face scrunched in concentration.
She held her two closed fists up, and flashed her ten fingers open twice in quick succession, saying, “Ten. Twenty.” She repeated the action, this time saying, “One. Two.” She repeated the whole thing several times, using both pairs.
Then she pointed down at the newly written symbols. One the Jaw’s attention was there, she held her two closed fists beside the symbols. She opened her fingers. “Ten,” she said. Then she flashed her fingers closed and open twice. “One, two,” she said. “Two.” Then she pointed at the symbols written in ash, pointing at each relevant marking in turn. “Ten. Two times. Is twenty.”
She repeated this many times. The Jaw, scowling in concentration, followed along with the symbols, watching her flashing fingers, muttered along after her. He would look up at her face, looking for help. She continued repeating the lesson, patiently.
At last he gave that gasp of comprehension. He leaned far forward, supporting himself with his hands and bringing his face close to the markings.
