by Pam Uphoff
Sniff. "We need recordings of their speech, so we can get a start on translation." Wpxa—Pause—sneered at the selections on the vendos. Or maybe the lack of instant data to analyze.
"That is going to be difficult." Ajha strode up to them. "Grab chairs and pull a couple of tables together. Let's see what we've got, to date."
Paer grabbed another drink—something with actual flavor, this time—and joined them.
Amsi frowned at her. "You're the Med Tech."
"She's a trained Exploration Teamer. We've worked with her before." Ajha tapped at his comp. "Now, the Disco people didn't have recorders with them, so we have no examples of their speech. Written language, yes. Dr. Quicksilver will be here tomorrow, and Xen is here as well, I think we'll see if we can get the two of them to converse in the Helios language. That will give us a starting point for your analyses of the radio intercepts."
"The what?"
"Radio intercepts. We set up a receiver on the far side and a laser relay through the gate." Ajha steepled his hands. "Then we'll compare your translation to Disco's. It'll keep you busy while we get some bugs into some more interesting spots."
Stiff backs.
Paer snorted. "They're the only people around who've heard the language. That makes them a valuable resource. Use them. They did teach the parts about using every resource in your school, didn't they?"
Hioz looked indignant. "Hey! I'm Directorate School too, you know! Well, Off and Tayc went to Daiki, but they've got a good rep."
Snob school, but yes, good rep on academics.
"Yeah, so why the attitude about Disco? Prejudice? I'd recommend you lose it. You're going to spend the rest of your life dealing with Non-Oners. Might as well start out right instead of obnoxious."
Offe gawped at her. "That's not how the game is played! You of all people should know that!"
Ajha cleared his throat. "This is not politics, and it is not a game. Our world is under threat, and we are all going to work our asses off, work together, and find out just how serious the threat is. Save the politics for the office assignments. You do it out here, I'll kick you out of here with a black mark."
Amsi bristled. "You are not our boss."
"I am the senior Intel man here, and you were ordered to report to me. Get over it." Ajha dropped his gaze to his comp. He tapped a couple of keys. "I've sent you half an hour of radio transmissions on six channels. Go have fun with them. And think."
Paer winced as the five analysts marched off. "Oh. Dear. How did you get them?"
"Greek speakers, with study time on the Helios books." Ajha sighed. "All the older experts are so busy playing games, they haven't been doing a lot of hands-on translations themselves. And may I say Paer, that until you have patients, I'm going to keep luring you into this side of things."
Paer beamed. "Excellent. But I have to admit I barely know any Greek at all."
"Study their numbers, those seem to have survived the split and . . . however much time has passed since then. And I sent you the recordings, too. Have fun!"
"Thanks!" Paer bounced off to the medical crawler. Peace and quiet. I'd better figure out where I'm sleeping before too long though. She grabbed her luggage and headed for the second crawler.
"Why are you sleeping here?" Tayc looked irritated.
"Because this is where I'll be once the doctors show up. Might as well stake a claim right from the first." Paer tried to stay cheerful.
"Yay! The girls outnumber the boys." Hioz pointed. "Girls on this side. The top bunk there is open."
"Right oh." Paer pulled out the minimum kit and slung her luggage into the rack at the head of the bunk. Or where it would be when the bunk was deployed. She glanced out the windows. "See you in a few hours. I'm going to go study too."
Tayc sighed. "Oh, don't mind me. I'm just out of sorts over this field assignment being so . . . out in the field. Bunking with a bunch of guys."
Paer snickered. "I know. What would the High Oner society mavens say? I expect though that as the camp grows we'll be able to grab a women-only crawler, or squishy."
Tayc nudged a chair her direction and Paer sat. Brought up the radio transmissions, donned headphones, and listened to incomprehensible gibberish.
Pulled up a list of Greek numbers and read through it. Played a file to hear the proper pronunciation. Then she restarted the recordings and tried to pick out numbers. Every conversation started with a few brief words, then a string of numbers. She wrote them down . . . yes, they were getting larger with time . . . "I'd guess they were naming themselves, naming the person or place they were calling and giving a time. Or at least saying numbers that are getting larger all the time."
They all looked at her list of numbers.
"Just the first track?" Offe turned back to his own comp, frowning.
"Yeah. Dang. I'd better note the recording times so I can compare the tracks. That'll settle my hash . . . Umm, we could each take a track?" Paer watched the competitive expressions, the thoughts, the final nods.
Whoa! Signs of teamwork!
It worked.
Then they compiled a list of the "call signs" Names, places, whatever.
Then they trooped over to Ajha's and asked nicely for more data.
"It sounds like eighteen—so far—people calling into four places or people." Offe showed him their notes.
"Very nice." Ajha approved. "We'll see tomorrow what Xen and Q think."
Paer blinked. "Xen didn't stay?"
"Nope. He's busier than all get out, trying to survey the most likely target and locate tribes that Disco will have to try to evacuate." Ajha grinned. "I have no idea when or if he's planning on sleeping. But here's the next three hours of recordings."
They all nodded, and departed. Paer trailing, picked up Fean's voice. "Did they actually cooperate? I'm going to wind up impressed if I'm not careful."
"Yeah. I was getting a little worried."
Paer let the door close and trotted off to listen to more incomprehensible chatter. I really hope those guys are picking up enough words to get the gist of these messages. Because I'm not much of a linguist.
In the end, they resorted to paper. Five parallel tracks, with time marks, call signs, and a scattering of recognized words.
They gave up at sundown, when Ajha suggested dinner. He glanced at their chart and smiled. "You lot are good. As advertised."
Paer tried hard to not taste the fabbed food, and washed it down with a commercial drink from the vendo.
"You guys are off to a good start. We'll get translations tomorrow, and start broadening our spoken vocabularies. Get a good night's sleep, Disco time is ahead of us by about five hours."
It was odd, sleeping with six other people, three masculine breathers who were all the wrong guy, two strange women . . . At least Fean is familiar, but somehow I don't think we're going to talk like we did when we had a crawler to ourselves.
But I'm across. And I hope Ebsa's new assignment goes smoothly. He's wasted behind a desk. Just thinking of Ebsa relaxed all her muscles and put a smile on her face. Love. Strangest thing in the Multiverse.
Chapter Four
30 Emre 1405 yp
Scrublands Base, World EH 2946
"Eep!"
Paer sidestepped as Tayc recoiled. Peeked in the door of Ajha's Electronics crawler.
The tall woman sitting at the comp hardly looked worth an "Eep!" In fact she looked a lot like Xen. Wearing a Disco uniform.
"Ah. I'll bet you're Q." Paer stepped in.
"Yep." A quick flash of a grin. "I hadn't realized I was so scary."
Paer snickered. "Your reputation is interesting. Not as bad as Xen's, mind you. So, you're doing translations?"
"Yep. And boring as hell, but useful. If you guys can automate the translations, it'll make picking out the important information a whole lot easier and faster." She waved at the computer. "These radio intercepts are patrol reports, supply trucks checking in after every delivery, and so forth. Let me send you th
e first three tracks . . . there you go. Good luck. I'll finish the fourth one in an hour and get the last two quickly. Hopefully by lunch."
"Excellent. Oh, I'm Paer, this is Tayc."
"Ah. Xen's buddy. Pleased to meet you."
Paer cocked her head. "You use a Oner accent when talking to us, too."
"Oh, it gets automatic, using the dialect of the people you're around." She glanced at the comp. "Whole new languages are much more fun."
Paer got bumped from behind . . . all the analysts were gathering.
"So . . . what's it like, merging?" Pause just had to go there.
"I don't actually know. It took, I think, about three days for the spell to maintain myself to catch up with the mess. Pity. As best I can tell I missed out on a huge orgy." She shrugged. "Anyhow, you've all got the first translations, and I'd better get back to the rest."
They all sort of edged away.
Eyed each other . . . somewhere between appalled and boggled.
Pause finally shook himself. "Well . . . it would take a very drunken orgy for me to want to have anything to do with her."
Hioz snorted. "I'm not the gender to notice, but they do say she's got a anti-sexual-desire aura."
Tayc nodded. "Must be nice."
Paer managed to keep her face straight. Nope. I like the way Ebsa lights up when he sees me. But I am glad this bunch doesn't.
"Well. Shall we see what we've got?" Paer led the way to the pavilion and sat down to read.
A phonetic transcription, followed by a translation. Word for word, then when it wasn't clear, a restatement.
Patrol reports. Supply runs checking in at departure and delivery.
"Boring routine stuff." Paer sighed. Anything really interesting will come later . . . and I'll probably be handing out band-aids by then.
Offe nodded. "This at least gets us a large working vocabulary."
The translations of other channels popped up on the comps all through the morning.
Paer stuck her head in the electronics crawler, but Q was already gone. Do they have their own gates? Or do they use ours?
She blinked and looked around. No sign of Ajha, Fean, Hob . . . the Action Teams . . .
"Are they all across, already?"
Offe raised his head and frowned around the abandoned site. "Well, it is sensible to get the bugs in place as quickly as possible. But that gate was pretty far from anything we'd want to listen in on. I suppose they could be scouting out the nearest military camp."
Paer nodded. Then slipped down to the gate to Helios. There was a second gate now. A hundred meters from the first. She walked over and looked through. More melty ruins, of course. Temptation won. She stepped through. She was in a small room, or what was left of one. Three walls and half a roof. A cautious peek out the ruined wall . . . at a soaring tower of rough concrete, no effort wasted on appearance. Beyond it, a large windowless square. Four floors tall, to judge by the tower. One of the Magnetics centers, perhaps?
I wish I was out there with them. Out on the sharp point of the action. Damn. We also serve, those of us who stick on band-aids.
She retreated to the scrubby desert World. And practiced warping light.
Xen returned, and sat on the ground as gates formed up in front of him.
He stretched and stood up, glanced around at his audience and grinned.
"Voila! A featureless boring hill, looking down on a busy road, a kilometer from the military base with the tanks. Another hidden in ruins three kilometers from the government buildings."
"What was that one, this morning? A magnetics center?"
His quick grin flashed. "Peeked, did you? The tower is their research center. As far as I can tell, there's nothing going on in the magnetics center . . . yet. Ajha's trying to get some bugs into the research center offices, on the theory that they'll discuss the worlds they might hit. And hopefully they'll know which one."
"How do you get them all over the place like that? Do you have vehicles over there?" Offe eyed the man. "How do you hide them?"
"We just throw corridors. I can throw them, oh, a hundred kilometers or so. Q twice that. She's over there with the Teams, setting up some corridors now, so they can travel about easily and quickly."
Paer hesitated. "So . . . you really only needed one gate?"
"Eh. Never hurts to have an escape route. A couple of hidden ones, one to check the military and another closer to the government offices, and one you can get vehicles through." He nodded at the open hill. "And one more for redundancy. Q has a theory that gates can affect the relationship between worlds. I think she's put a hundred gates between Helios and another world, just in the off chance it would work."
Paer bit her lip. "That sounds . . . ominous, considering how many gates the One World has."
"Yes, but reaching out in all directions. Q is paying attention, and nothing bad is happening yet. If her hundred gates can pull a world off course, we'll have to be alert for problems." He glanced around. "I need to get back to Disco. Remember, if you get into trouble call for the God of Spies. Might work, might not." He disappeared.
Offe cleared his throat. "Those people might be weirder than I'd realized."
Paer frowned at the gates . . . and headed back to the crawler. A search through her gear turned up her old compass. Totally mechanical. Her dad had taken her camping, taught her all sorts of primitive skills. Back before he was president and I was lucky to see him at breakfast.
At the gate, the compass started pointing at the gate within twenty meters.
Ajha walked over and raised a questioning eyebrow.
"I was wondering if we could get far enough away from the gate, and close enough to the magnetics center to pick up any activity."
Ajha blinked at the compass. "That's . . . interesting. We were waffling about whether we dared use instruments that close. Powered gates are detectable from a couple of kilometers away . . Let's just take a look."
A cautious bit of climbing over rubble got them within a hundred meters or so of the magnetics center.
Her compass pointed to what she thought was north. Just a bit to the side of the nearest corner of the building.
"Too bad." Ajha shrugged. "Either we're still too far away, they've got excellent shielding, or they aren't doing anything."
"Hopefully because they can't." Paer reached for the compass, sitting on a slab on concrete in front of them.
The needle twitched, then drifted to the left, five degrees away from the building.
Ajha hissed. "Don't touch it." He pulled out a pen and drew lines on the slab. Where it had been pointing and where it was pointing now.
Noise on the street. Paer peered past wreckage. A group of men were leaving. To far to catch any words, but the voice tones positive. Two men tapped fist to chest and turned back to the building. The other three men walked out of sight.
"A test? A successful test of their merge machine?"
Ajha bit his lip. "I have a nasty suspicion that's right. Oh Damn. They're getting ready to force a merge."
"How close are they to which worlds? Maybe, maybe they need years of tests . . . "
Ajha nodded. "I hope to Hell they do. So . . . I need corridors to the other magnetics centers and a bunch of compasses and watchers."
Paer nodded. "Can the Action Teams do that? I know they're trained to blow things up."
Ajha's worry disappeared behind a grin. "Enjoyed that part of equipment training, did you?"
"Too loud for me. Ebsa and Ra'd loved it. Ra'd scared the heck out of the instructor with all his suggestions for improvements."
Ajha sighed. "Is his personal information still classified? I'm hideously curious."
"Yes. Sorry." Paer picked up her compass and followed him back to the gate.
And found herself stuck studying the Helaos semi-greekish language while everyone else got down to what sounded like really boring duty.
Three more magnetics centers showed activity over the next week.
&n
bsp; The sound of motors interrupted their studies. Military vehicles, mostly trucks. Four tanks, no doubt sized to fit through the gates.
Getting ready for an attack on the magnetics centers?
Paer ran a quick head count, and headed for the medical crawler. I'd better check where everything is. Because it looks like I'm now the medic for around a hundred people.
***
Intel Leader Icti showed up to confer with Ajha and Action Leaders Ubno and Ace. Ajha immediately called in Camp Manager Wxxo, and Colonel Ypxe.
Paer and the analysts were not invited. Which didn't stop them from hovering at the far side of the pavilion.
" . . . guard all the gates, and train for a strike on the four working magnetics centers."
Paer—much to the horror of the analysts—quickly joined Fean in fetching coffee and drinks from the vendos and delivering them to the men sitting around the tables shoved together in the center of the pavilion.
And listening.
Colonel Ypxe was the head of the army . . . people. Not a proper company, let alone a regiment. Some sort of special units, and something about training for various scenarios. There were four tanks, all sitting where they were not quite in the way of the four gates to Helios, but their big guns were aimed at the gates, through the gates, and Paer had no doubt that they would be deadly to anything coming through.
But more likely the riflemen deployed around it can deal with any of the Helaos soldiers. Their tanks could only get to one of the gates anyway. The rest of them are two floors up in the ruins.
"Well, we've got your water and power hooked up. I've got requests in for hygiene facilities." Wxxo shot a grin at Ajha. "And a cook and kitchen."
Intel Leader Icti snorted. "Getting soft Ajha? I thought you liked roughing it."
"I do. Vendos and fabs don't qualify." Ajha grinned. "We have to survive long enough to sabotage the Mag centers, after all."
Laughs all around.
Paer retreated to sit where she could watch them, ready for an excuse to get closer. Fean grinned as she swooped past with a pot of coffee. Apparently someone had a stash of the real thing . . .
