Damage Control - ARC (12 page)

Jade didn't recognize it, but she didn't
bother answering verbally. She saw that the document bore her name,
and read to learn more.

“You took a test for the American Army,” said
Chegg, “called DLAB—Defense Language Aptitude Battery. This is your
score.”

Jade's heart pounded, and the body-outline
and bar graph showed the rapid change. “Yes, I did,” she admitted,
“but I didn't really go. I mean, I enlisted, but I never went to
Basic.”

“You were discharged before training because
a doctor misdiagnosed you with arthritis. My concern is your
score.”

Jade smiled, part relieved, part proud, part
embarrassed, part apprehensive, and the bar graph changed. She
could still remember the look on that sergeant's face when she had
brought back the message that, yes, this really was her DLAB
score—the proctor hadn't accidentally given her some other slip of
paper.

“He made a mistake,” the sergeant had said.
“That's not a DLAB score. Go back and ask him for your score
again.”

And when she had gone back to the proctor, he
had said, “I've never seen a score that high, either, but that's
your score.”

“With the proper training,” said Chegg, “you
could probably crack Chuzekk code. I ordered your capture as a
preventive measure, but of course we want to know if we acted too
late and you have already compromised our code.”

“Wow,” said Jade. “But why are you doing the
interrogation? I mean, I got the impression that normally you have
someone else do that.”

Chegg knelt in his station. “There are twelve
zeeds who do most of the interrogations on this ship. I was once
one of those interrogators, and one of the reasons for my promotion
was because of my interrogation skill. I want to keep that skill
sharp, so I occasionally perform an interrogation myself. I find
your case interesting, and I want to explore your mind.”

Jade didn't like the idea of having her mind
explored, but it was still a lot better than being tortured. “I
tried to contact my family,” she said, “but they keep telling me I
have to get permission from my interrogator. Can you give your
permission so I can let them know I'm okay?”

“No,” Chegg answered without any hint of
apology. “I will not risk your having contact with Earth until the
planet is secure.”

He started the pictures again, and they
included a lot of her family and neighbors. Even her daughter
Geonily was there. She had been careful not to mention Geonily,
just in case the Chuzekks might want to capture her as well and use
her as a hostage.

The pictures stopped sliding in from the left
and began maximizing from the lower left corner. It was a review of
the pictures that had been saved, and the sorting process occurred
again, with most of the pictures Jade didn't recognize sliding off
to the right. Chegg often asked questions or made comments about
the individuals in the pictures, usually with his hand on her back.
“Does she still live in New Hampshire?” he would say, or “You find
him attractive.” His touch felt like an intimate gesture,
especially when coupled with some of his comments, and she found it
hard to tolerate.

“Why do you keep putting your hand on my
back?” she asked, trying to keep the aggravation out of her
voice.

“I feel with my hand some of the information
you see on the left: your breathing, your heartbeat, your
temperature, the tension of many of your muscles, whether your legs
are still or moving. I can see all this information and more on the
wall, or on my Personal Device, but I don't want to become too
dependent on the technology. I want to keep my skills sharp by not
relying entirely on the telemetry from your uniform.”

“My uniform? So all this data is coming from
my uniform?”

“No, the top section of horizontal lines is
from the disk on your cheek.”

“This symbol,” she said, pointing to the claw
and eye on her uniform. “What does it mean?”

“It is the symbol of the Counter-Intelligence
Command. Counter-Intelligence is the job of this ship.”

“And you're its Commanding Officer,
right?”

“Yes.”

A few more photos sorted themselves before
Jade spoke again. “You've given me two orders:” she said, “not to
remove my knees from this station without your permission, and not
to ask you not to touch me. I'm not going to disobey you, of
course. But I'm curious. Can you tell me what would happen if I
did?”

“Yes,” he replied. He placed the claws of his
left hand on the back of her neck as though ready to tear her. She
could feel all five sharp points and had to remain perfectly still
so they didn't penetrate her skin. Then he said quietly, “You would
feel my claws.”

Jade adjusted the water temperature, pulled
off her uniform, took a deep breath and stepped in. Water jets
massaged her legs, her trunk and even her face as she moved into
position so she could breathe again. This was the good part of
being here: Chuzekk showers were fabulous.

A large hand sealed her mouth and nose and
pulled her head back against something solid behind her—her
attacker's chest. She decided he was probably male, and tall. She
raised her arms to struggle but found them restrained as well. She
could see nothing except two of the shower walls and the water
shooting out of twenty or so little jets.

"I won't hurt you," the stranger whispered.
He relaxed his fingers so she could breathe. "But we do need to
keep this quiet."

Jade executed her surprise-twist technique
that had always gotten her out any hold her brother and sister
could devise, but it didn't work.

"Sorry I had to scare you like this," said
the stranger, "but they monitor your uniform, so I had to catch you
without it. I'm Fletcher. I don't know if you remember I contacted
you about a job back on Earth."

Jade said nothing, but nodded her head. Yes,
she remembered.

"Well, I still need you to do it."

C
olonel Elwood Rocco
stood stiffly in the small conference room of the keev-ship's
prison. Laitt had never seen him stand any other way but stiffly,
and she was used to it by now.

He greeted her with the arm grasp, stepped up
to the desk and consulted what he called his "notes"—hand-drawn
markings made in blue dye on delicate white tablets as thin as the
fabric of Laitt's uniform.

"Your prisoners tried to overpower my guards
yesterday," Laitt said.

The Human replied with his usual
unintelligible speech, and Laitt's Personal Device translated,
"Unorganized workers. We've already dealt with them. I don't think
you'll have any more trouble from them."

The first time they'd met, Laitt hadn't
bothered setting her Personal Device to translate. She had gone to
language school, after all. Besides, the practice was good for
her.

But whatever had come out of the Aberikekk
leader's mouth was no language she had ever heard. She'd quickly
turned on the translator and asked him about it.

"Oh," he'd said, "that's because I speak
Alabama."

"What is Alababa?" she had asked.

According to Elwood, it was a form of
Aberikekk. But her Personal Device had had a different answer.

"Define 'Alababa,'" Laitt had ordered when
the meeting was over and she'd had a moment alone.

"A legendary Human leader of a band of
thieves numbering three dozen plus four."

But as far as Laitt knew, the Human colonel
who stood across the desk from her was a leader of spies, not
thieves. On the sleeve of his mottled green uniform, he wore what
Aberikekks called the 'MI patch,' which was roughly equivalent to
the Chuzekk open-eye symbol and meant he belonged to an
intelligence command.

"I hate to keep beating on a dead four-footed
mammal traditionally used for transportation," Laitt's Personal
Device translated, "but there's still the issue of the lack of
toilets."

"There are three toilets for every twelve
prisoners," Laitt replied. "Are some of them broken?"

Elwood shook his head and spoke again, and
the translation cut in a few seconds later. "I'm not talking about
toilets, here. I'm talking about toilets. My people can't relax.
You may not believe this, but it makes security a lot harder to
enforce when they can't even shit. They want to watch the
entertainment and education screens, but they have no toilets. They
want to have a cup of coffee with a friend, but again, there are no
toilets. All I'm asking you, Zeed, is that you work with me here.
Can I have your word that you'll at least think about allowing some
toilets in the common areas?"

"There are several toilets accessible from
the common areas," Laitt said. "Is there a problem with them?"

The Human put his right palm up to his
forehead for a moment, then looked Laitt in the eyes. "I think
we're having a translation problem. I'm talking about toilets, and
every time, you come back to me with something about toilets. It's
two different things."

Laitt nodded. "My translator does not
distinguish between the two words," she agreed. "You should choose
a Human translator from among the prisoners who can speak to me in
standard Aberikekk. I will return in two segments so that you can
explain your need."

"Raht," Elwood began, and the Personal Device
took over: "Correct. I'll do that. I'll see you then, Zeed."

They shook hands, Human style, and Laitt
waited until the door had locked behind Elwood before taking
another door into the hallway.

This issue with toilets is probably just a
translation glitch
, Laitt thought.
But I'll continue to
watch it closely.
She'd been warned in countless training
sessions about odd prisoner requests that turned out to be part of
a sabotage or escape plan. Perhaps the Humans were hoping to access
the sewage recycling system. More likely, the incessant requests
for more toilets were designed to be a distraction.

But it wasn't the toilet issue that made
Laitt's abdomen feel as tense and twisted as it had after that time
she'd let her friend convince her to try ice cream. What worried
her was the persistent thought—now very close to becoming a
conviction—that her prison was no different from any other POW
facility. There was nothing special about this one. It was no
better than any other prison on any other keev-ship in any other
war. In other words, Laitt was a professional failure. Maybe there
was still a chance, still some way she could stand out from the
crowd. Even this toilet problem could turn out to be her
opportunity.

At the moment, though, she had a more
immediate responsibility: the solitary prisoner.

As if she didn't have enough to worry about
with a whole prison full of Aberikekk spies, the keev had
considered it necessary to order that this one prisoner have no
contact with others of her kind. Laitt wondered if he had
considered the fact that she and her staff were now required to
fulfill all the prisoner's needs themselves. Probably not. It
probably had never even occurred to Chegg that Humans had any needs
at all, besides food, air and hygiene facilities (an abundance of
hygiene facilities, apparently).

Chegg was an interrogator, and while
interrogators were experts at zenopsychology, they studied a
different side of it than Laitt did. Interrogators learned the
out-going side of psychology. They knew how to figure out the state
of a prisoner's mind by reading what came out of it. Laitt had
learned the in-going side. She and her staff were experts at
keeping a prisoner's mind from spiraling into insanity by
controlling what went into it. And that, Laitt knew, required a lot
more work than most people realized.

At least Chegg stands out from the
crowd
, Laitt thought as she opened the door to the solitary
prisoner's quarters.
He may be making a lot of work for me, but
at least he's not doing what all the other keevs are doing.

She found the prisoner kneeling at her desk,
leaning closely over a tablet and writing on it with an Aberikekk
eating utensil.

Laitt resisted the temptation, this time, to
pet her soft animal head. She had always had a weakness for
fuzzy-headed animals, ever since she'd met her first hippotruncatis
on a school trip to an air city.

The Human rose and grasped Laitt's arm.
"Zeed."

"Jade."

"I, um... Would you like some coffee?"

"No, thank you," said Laitt, trying as always
to imitate the gentle near-monotone of native Aberikekk speech.
"Why are you writing with a fork?"

"I didn't know what else to use. I wanted to
use a pen that the ink had run out of, but nobody had one."

"What is ink?"

"Ink?" the human replied, the hair where her
eyebrows should have been rising in unison with her voice. "It's,
um, a colored liquid that comes out of the end of a pen, so you can
write on paper. Our paper isn't like your tablets. It only has one
layer and it's not as thick. So if you try to scratch it, it will
probably just rip. We write by putting ink on the paper."