Lost In Translation

by Edward Willett

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Then, with no signal at all, the Hunters dropped from the trees.

  Black as night against the bright green, blue, and yellow of the tents, they swept in a hundred-strong flock across the camp and back, firelances lacing the ground below with blood-red beams. Tents blossomed into orange flame that brought aliens naked and screaming into the light, hair ablaze, skin blackened, only to be cut in two by the next wave of Hunters. A half-dozen aliens close to the ship made it inside, but others had time for only one startled look, time to open their mouths wide, before the beams found them and sliced them apart.

  In two passes, the Hunters utterly destroyed the camp and every alien in it; but with an ear-hurting whine, the sliver ship came to life, rising into the air, its lifters sending the smoke of the burning camp twisting and dancing across the carnage. One Hunter, more brave than wise, dove toward the ship, beam reaching out to caress the silvery skin, but the lance didn’t even mark it. Other Hunters followed the first, but suddenly the ship’s whine turned to fang-rattling thunder, white flame exploded underneath it and it rocketed into the sky, vanishing in a matter of seconds. In its fiery wake, the Hunter who had first attacked it fluttered to the ground like a burning leaf.

  We won, Jarrikk thought fiercely. It’s over!

  Two days later, when the first S’sinn warships arrived and the fortification of Kikks’sarr began, he knew he’d been wrong.

  It wasn’t over at all.

  It was just beginning.

  Copyright © 2005 by Edward Willett.

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in 2005 by Five Star Publishing.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1379

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-09859-2

  First Paperback Printing, October 2006

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  Prologue

  Jarrikk watched the humans crossing the polished black basalt floor of the Great Hall of the Flock as closely as if they were prey, hearing their strange footsteps echoing back from the distant walls. Spidery red columns, studded with perches and platforms, soared to the haze-hidden roof, S’sinn clinging to them in dozens and hundreds. Jarrikk could feel his people’s hatred of the humans beating down like desert sun, hot enough to turn the bitterness in his own hearts into bloodfury were he to allow it.

  His crippled left wing ached, ached as it had not since the day of his injury, the pain throbbing in the withered flight muscles in his shoulder and chest and into his left arm. Humans! The plague of his childhood, the cancer that had eaten away the best parts of his life, the poison that now threatened the Commonwealth itself. He had first seen the ugly, flightless, four-limbed creatures twenty years past. War had followed. He would gladly have gone another twenty without seeing them again, but the Translators’ Guild had called him to this duty.

  These negotiations had almost not happened at all. Without Full Translation, they would be impossible. S’sinn Translators were few and far-flung among the Seven Races; at this time and this place, he was the only one available, though he had never Translated with humans before.

  He wished that could have remained true, but his Oath bound him. He would do his duty.

  If war came this time, it would not be his doing.

  The giant hall whispered with the rustlings of the S’sinn, here stretching batlike wings, there yawning to display gleaming white fangs or grooming themselves with their ventral arms, but mostly just staring, staring with the blood-red eyes of a thousand nightmares.

  The damp chill and near-choking scent of musk pervading the Hall of the Flock might have come from those same dark dreams, Kathryn Bircher thought, shivering in her sleeveless Translator’s uniform. As might the sense of foreboding that gripped her. For a moment, she envied Ambassador Matthews and his aides, cut off from the seething sea of alien emotion she’d begun to feel the moment she stepped out of the shuttle. She knew the other five races of the Commonwealth considered humans and S’sinn primitive, almost barbaric, barely free of their animal pasts. Maybe that was why she could read the aliens so clearly, with very little effort, as clearly as she could read Matthews himself, his cold, passionless soul a spire of ice among the smoldering red fires of the aliens’ hatred.

  Or maybe it was because the last time she had been exposed to the raw emotions of the S’sinn, her world had shattered.

  She stared ahead at the waiting S’sinn leaders on the small, circular dais, still impossibly far away. The fires of rage in this room could shatter a great deal more than just her world; they could shatter a thousand.

  She wondered if anyone could stop them.

  Jarrikk focused on the human Translator, sharpening his gaze to hunting mode. He could see every strand of her blond hair, every tiny imperfection in her pale skin, could even count the stitches that held the triangle-within-a-circle-within-a-square symbol of the Translators’ Guild in place above the curve of her left breast. He raked his eyes over her figure from a distance of fifty spans, memorizing every claw’s-breadth of her within the space of five of her steps. Within that time he knew how she walked, how she breathed, which hand she favored, and where her uniform chafed her. Within minutes, he would know her interior landscape just as perfectly.

  He didn’t even notice his claws gouging splinters from the golden wood of the dais.

  Feeling that she carried not only her small metal Translator’s case but also the weight of a thousand S’sinn, and the lead ball and chain of her own nightmares, Kathryn stumbled as she mounted the platform. Ambassador Matthews steadied her with a strong hand. It was all she could do to keep from flinching; she could shut out much of the hatred beating down on her from the S’sinn, but touch strengthened empathy a hundredfold, and for that moment of contact, his little candle of hatred burned brighter than all the red eyes of the S’sinn—and he held the fate of negotiations in his hands as much as she did.

  She pulled free, took a deep breath, straightened, and looked around. The dais bore a black, glass-topped table and metal chairs for the humans and, for the S’sinn, the padded resting racks called shikks, which to Kathryn looked more like torture devices than comfortable body supports, even for creatures with two wings in addition to the normal complement of arms and legs, and bizarre musculature to match. Matthews and his aides sat at the table; a female S’sinn, already reclining
on one of the shikks, watched them in silence. Three others stood just behind her.

  Each S’sinn wore only a broad metal collar, marked with a sign. The female on the shikk, on whose red-gold collar a sapphire-studded lightning bolt slashed across a spiral of rubies, would be Akkanndikk, the Supreme Flight Leader. The other two, male and female, would be her Left Wing and Right Wing, her aides and bodyguards. On their copper collars, dull red stones picked out the spiral, minus the lightning bolt. As Matthews sat down, they spread their arms and their wings, revealing the insignia repeated in metallic red on the black, leathery membrane.

  The fourth S’sinn also unfolded his arms and wings in greeting, but though his arms moved normally, only his right wing extended fully; the left opened only halfway, and Kathryn glimpsed lurid purple scars zigzagging across it. On his silver collar and on his one good wing gleamed a triangle inside a circle inside a square.

  Translator.

  Kathryn felt him trying to read her empathically, and blocked frantically, instinctively, though the effort made her head throb. By Guild etiquette that was unforgivably rude, but she couldn’t help it. Facing the S’sinn Translator, all she could think of was the first time she’d seen a S’sinn this close, and the memory threatened to send her screaming from the room.

  Yet now she had to get even closer. Now, she had to Link.

  As the human blocked his polite probe, Jarrikk growled deep in his throat. How dare she! What it had cost him to make the effort, she could never know . . .

  Except she would know, in a moment. His anger dimmed slightly, damped by curiosity. Why block the initial contact when the deeper contact was heartbeats away? Did she fear it as much as he? Was fear the sharp smell that mingled with the humans’ strange salty stench?

  Fear or not, the Link could not be avoided. They were sworn to Translate, and that meant they must Link.

  It seemed the human recognized that fact as well as he; she stepped to the center of the dais, set her case on the floor, opened it, and took out the injector, a small glass cylinder with an absurdly tiny needle. Is human skin really so thin? Jarrikk wondered. He stepped forward with his own case, removed the much larger metal injector, and without giving himself time to think, drove it into his left arm.

  As the warm tingling of the Programming spread through his blood, he looked at the human. She still held her tiny syringe in trembling hands, staring at it as though it might explode, and the sharp scent was strong in the thin film of moisture that had suddenly covered her skin; but then her strange blue eyes came up to meet his gaze, and with a jerky, ungraceful motion, she stabbed the little needle into her arm. The syringe still shook in her hand as she returned it to her case.

  Jarrikk reached into his own case, took out the warm silvery cord of the Link, and touched it to the contact patch behind his right ear. He proffered the other end to the human, but she didn’t take it, staring instead at his polished black claws. Behind her the dominant male, the Ambassador, stirred and muttered something, but the human Translator didn’t respond. Jarrikk wondered if even now she would refuse the Link, and felt shame at his half-born hope that she would; or, more accurately, shame at his lack of shame at the thought.

  Confusion, he thought. Humans bring nothing but confusion. Confusion and pain.

  But he had sworn an Oath, and so he kept the Link extended: and, at last, the human took it, careful not to touch his clawed hand, careful to the last, though it seemed she, too, would uphold her Oath, and all her care would mean nothing momentarily.

  For the last time, the human hesitated, staring at her end of the Link. Then the Ambassador cleared his throat and said something, his voice deep and painfully harsh to Jarrikk’s ears.

  The human Translator snapped something even harsher and louder in return, and firmly touched the cord to the patch under her own ear.

  As human and S’sinn memories, terrors, and anger melded and fused, a great many things became clear.

  Chapter 1

  The wind caressed the leathery membrane of Jarrikk’s wings and tickled the soft hair of his belly like his brood mother used to, to soothe away a nightmare. For a thousand heartbeats he’d been holding his wings imperceptibly angled, spoiling the airflow ever so slightly. His chest and shoulder muscles ached with the effort, but he would have shrieked with excitement if it wouldn’t have ruined everything, because Kakkchiss and the others now flew thirty lengths ahead of him and had yet to realize that he lagged behind.

  With relief, he drove toward the clouds with powerful strokes. This time he had Kakkchiss. The youngflight leader would never know what hit him!

  High enough. Jarrikk focused prey-sight on the sleek black hairs rippling over the powerful muscles in Kakkchiss’ back, folded his wings, and dove.

  Kakkchiss flapped on, his attention apparently entirely on the forest below. “You wait,” he said to Llindarr, on his right. “Flight Leader Kitillikk will threaten to rip our wings off when we get back, but she’ll be glad to hear a clear-eyed report of what these aliens are doing, just the same. She’ll probably make us full-fanged Hunters on the spot, isn’t that right, Jarrikk? ” And at the last possible instant, Kakkchiss sideslipped smoothly out of Jarrikk’s way. As Jarrikk hurtled through empty air, Kakkchiss’ laughter followed him down.

  Claw-rot! Jarrikk snapped his wings open, grabbing air so suddenly he almost tumbled out of control. He righted himself but stayed put a good fifty lengths below Kakkchiss and the other four members of the youngflight, their good-natured abuse raining down on him. “Give it up, Jarrikk! Kakkchiss is Leader to stay!” “Noisiest dive I ever heard!” “Hey, even those aliens could fly better than that!”

  That stung, because the strange aliens who had just landed on their planet of Kikks’sarr—their planet, Jarrikk thought, with a familiar sense of outrage that the aliens had dared—flew only with noisy motors and stiff artificial wings. “There’s one now!” Jarrikk shouted suddenly, pointing down, and had the satisfaction of seeing all but Kakkchiss spill air, proving pretty conclusively, Jarrikk thought, that they weren’t nearly as unconcerned as they claimed to be about this flouting of Flight Leader Kitillikk’s command to roost until she decided how and when to contact the aliens.

  Not that they planned to contact them, Jarrikk hastily reminded himself; just spy on them.

  Kakkchiss hadn’t put a wingtip out of place. He really is good, Jarrikk admitted to himself. An excellent leader. But I could be better.

  Still, Kakkchiss caught his eye and clawed the air with his arms in a gesture of respect, and Jarrikk felt a little better. One thing about Kakkchiss, he never begrudged Jarrikk’s attempts to dethrone him, and Jarrikk thought if—no, when—he finally succeeded in catching Kakkchiss off-guard, Kakkchiss would accept it—and then, of course, immediately set about getting the leadership back.

  Well, it was no good sulking down here all day. They must still be at least two thousand beats from the aliens’ landing place. Jarrikk strengthened his wing-strokes and started to climb.

  Something flashed, blindingly white. Jarrikk blinked. Lightning? Out of a clear sky? “Kakkchiss, did you—” he started, then stopped, gaping.

  Kakkchiss’ wings, those smoothly powerful tools that never stumbled in even the roughest air, fluttered uselessly, spasming like they had suddenly developed minds of their own; and then they stopped altogether, and Kakkchiss dropped from the sky.

  He plummeted down toward Jarrikk, and for a moment Jarrikk thought he’d been wrong and Kakkchiss intended to take revenge; but as Jarrikk spilled air and swung out of the way, he glimpsed the gaping, blackened hole in Kakkchiss’s chest. Trailing a thin stream of smoke and blood and the smell of burned meat, the youngflight leader hurtled a thousand lengths into the forest below, striking the treetops with a terrible breaking sound that carried clearly to Jarrikk’s horrified ears.

  Jarrikk’s own wings suddenly didn’t want to work anymore. He circled down toward the scar in the forest canopy, while above him the other youngl
ings whirled, shouting in confusion. “Jarrikk, what—” Yvenndrill called, then the strange bright flash came again and the call became a choking shriek that dop plered toward Jarrikk.

  Jarrikk tore his eyes from the place where Kakkchiss had fallen just in time to see Yvenndrill spinning helplessly down, blood streaming behind him, his agonized shrilling ending abruptly as the sharp splintering branches of the trees broke his fall and his back. His severed wing, still twitching, fluttered down seconds later.

  Stunned, almost numb, Jarrikk spiraled down to the trees and clung to a high branch, staring back up at the sky, where Llindarr and little Illissikk, the youngest, still circled in terror and confusion. The light flashed again, and this time Jarrikk saw an energy beam split the air between the two bewildered younglings and realized at last someone was shooting at them. “Dive!” Jarrikk screamed at them, just as they reached the same conclusion and headed for the trees.

  Llindarr had only descended a few lengths when the beam flashed again. For a moment Jarrikk thought it had missed, because Llindarr’s dive still seemed in control—but he never pulled up, and the upthrust tip of a forest giant impaled him.

  Illissikk almost made it: might have made it, if he hadn’t tried, at the last minute, to pull up low over the forest and join Jarrikk. The beam flashed one last time, and Illissikk’s headless body slammed into the clearing below Jarrikk’s perch so hard it shook the tree he clung to. A thin pattern of deep scarlet drops spattered the dark brown fur of his chest.

  Jarrikk wanted to shriek himself, then, wanted to throw himself in blind panic into the sky, but fought down the instinctive urge to flee with reason—and rage. If he left cover, he would die, too, cut in two by the beam, and the Flight Leader might never know what had happened. But if he stayed, he would see the hunters who had used this horrible weapon come collect their “trophies.” And then he could tell the Flight Leader with absolute conviction what he already knew in his hearts: that the strange aliens who had landed on their planet were bloody-handed murderers. And then it will be the S’sinn’s turn to Hunt!