Kristine Rusch - City of Ruins

She repeats his name. Then she says very clearly, “Boss,” and I jump.

“Yes,” I say.

She looks at me sharply. She seems to understand yes.

“Yes?” she repeats, but her emphasis is odd.

“Yes,” I say.

“Good,” Al-Nasir says, but he says it oddly, almost unrecognizably. “You speak Standard.”

His inflection is weird.

She frowns at him and says something in return.

“Yes,” he says.

“You’ll have to translate for me,” I say.

“I think she said, You’re speaking Standard?”

“You think?” I ask.

“I think,” he says, looking at me.

She’s watching closely.

Al-Nasir taps himself again. “I am Fahd Al-Nasir.” Then he puts his hand on my arm. “And she is my boss.”

The woman’s eyes light up. “Boss,” she says just as clearly. “Title?”

At least, I think that’s what she says. Al-Nasir seems to understand it that way, too.

“Yes,” he says, and gives me a sideways glance. He’s not going to explain that it’s also what everyone calls me. Probably too confusing anyway.

He looks at her, then at the ship. “Are you the boss?”

“No,” she says.

Even I understand that. So there’s someone else in charge.

“May we speak to your boss?” Al-Nasir asks.

She says something in response. Al-Nasir repeats the question. She slows down what she says. At least, I think it’s the same thing she said. I don’t have a facility with language. Clearly, Al-Nasir does.

He repeats the question a third time, and this time she says, simply, “No.”

My heart sinks. “Do they want us to leave?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says testily. “I can barely understand her as it is.”

“Try this,” I say. “Tell her we’re recording the conversation. Tell her that we’ll find someone to translate her message if she just repeats it a few times.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, “with my magical ability to speak a variation of Standard I’ve never heard before.”

She’s looking at us.

I sigh. I hold up my hands and say, “We would like to figure out a way to communicate. Does anyone on your ship speak Standard?”

She answers me. Al-Nasir says softly, “She says she is speaking Standard.”

“Let me try again,” I say to her, ignoring Al-Nasir. “Does anyone on the ship speak the version of Standard that I know?”

“No,” she says. I swear she’s understanding more and more as the conversation goes on.

“We would like to have some kind of dialogue. Is there a way we can do that?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. Then she says something else rapidly. I don’t understand any of it. Al-Nasir doesn’t seem to, either.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small device. It looks official. I watch as she clicks it on and off. My heart soars for a moment.

She’s recording us, too. She’ll work on our language, just like we’ll work on hers.

She puts the device back in her pocket. Then she reaches toward me, slowly, and carefully takes my hand. On my arm is my wrist guide. She taps it, and says one word slowly.

Al-Nasir repeats it. It sounds almost familiar.

She smiles at him. Her smile is lovely. “Yes,” she says.

“Yes,” he says, and they nod at each other.

Then she looks at her team, says something in a different tone, and they file back up those stairs into the ship, leaving us standing outside. As the last woman goes inside, the stairs disappear.

“What was that?” I ask Al-Nasir.

“I think she wants us back tomorrow at the same time.”

“You think?” I ask.

“You saw her,” he snaps. “What do you think?”

I smile at him. I’m suddenly giddy. We just met people from a Dignity Vessel. In uniform. And they seem official.

It’s like a dream.

“What do I think?” I say, grinning like an idiot, glad no one can see it under the mask. “I hope to hell you’re right.”

Coop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happened, but he knew better. He waited on the bridge and watched the outsiders.

The woman gazed wistfully at the Ivoire ’s door. Then she nodded to her people. She put a hand on the arm of the man who had done much of the speaking and talked to him for a moment.

The three who had their pistols out holstered them. And then the group headed to the door.

The woman looked at the consoles, stopped, and held up a hand. She stared at the far console again, the one showing that space station. Coop frowned. She knew something about that, or it disturbed her in some way. Coop couldn’t tell which it was, and he wasn’t going to know, not for a while.

The others looked at her; she tilted her head slightly, as if she were saying something self-deprecating, and then they left the repair room.

He wondered if he would have stayed. Would he have investigated those consoles as the woman was clearly tempted to do? Or would he leave, worried about what the people on the ship were thinking?

He didn’t know, partly because he didn’t know what their mission was. If the outsiders hadn’t known what the room was, or what the ship was, they might have stayed. Or maybe not. Maybe they were worried about a greater force, the clear military bent of the people on the ship.

“Captain?” Perkins spoke from behind him. “Do you want me to brief the entire bridge crew?”

Coop turned. A few nanobits glistened in her hair. A few more rested on her sleeves and shoulders.

“Just me,” he said, and led her into the conference room. He kept the screens off. He pulled out a chair for her, so that she would be comfortable as they spoke, but she didn’t sit down.

Instead, she paced, filled with an energy he hadn’t seen in her before.

He didn’t sit, either.

“I captured a lot of their speech patterns,” she said. “They spoke to each other quite a bit, and I captured that, which is good.”

Coop had forgotten this about her. Perkins never gave a report in a linear manner.

“They don’t speak Standard, then,” he said.

She paused and looked at him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. You weren’t listening in. I’m not sure what they speak. It sounded familiar when the woman started talking to us, but I couldn’t understand her. I thought at first that she was speaking Standard, but pronouncing it differently, so differently that I had trouble processing it. Then I realized that the words sounded familiar but weren’t familiar.”

“Which means what?” Coop asked.

“Which means they might be speaking a mangled form of Standard or some kind of pidgin language. It might also be a related language with similar sounds. I already have the computer working on it, and I expect to have results before our next meeting with them, which I’m hoping will be tomorrow.”

“Did you set that up with them?”

She shrugged. “As best I could. They seemed pretty startled by us. They seemed even more shocked that we had trouble communicating.”

He wasn’t surprised. He had encountered many different languages on his travels, some of which were so different that it took months to get as far as Perkins had gotten today. Basic introductions were difficult, and from what he saw, she had gotten through those.

“Did you understand anything they said?” he asked.

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

Coop frowned. She had never given him that response before. “What do you mean?”

“It’s that soundlike thing I mentioned,” Perkins said. “I gave the woman my name. The woman did the same thing, but I think she gave me her rank.’