Damage Control - ARC (10 page)

“No,” Laitt answered. “Without alterations,
there is no air that is not mixed with water. As a mammal, you
would drown.”

“You're not mammals?”

“Yes, we are amphibians. When we shower, we
breathe the spray. It feels refreshing. If you have no more
questions, then I will leave for a short time, then return.”

“Oh, sure. I think I'll try out the
shower.”

“Yes. Give a shower. That is incorrect. Take
a shower.”

“Take a shower, yes. I'm going to take a
shower.”

When Jade stepped out after showering, her
clothes were gone, replaced by a folded slate gray outfit. As much
as she hadn't been looking forward to putting her dirty clothes
back on, she now felt a disproportionate sense of loss. Aside from
her body and thoughts, her clothes were all she'd had left from
home. Now even they were gone. She took a deep breath and told
herself to be reasonable. Probably they were just out for washing
and she would be back inside them soon.

She picked up the gray clothing and found
that it was all one piece. A pair of tall boots stood on the floor,
and leaning against the wall was one of those things Zuke had
called armor. She didn't see any undergarments anywhere.

It took her a while to figure out the alien
garment, but she got it on, eventually. The boots were easier, and
strangely comfortable. The armor was too confusing, and superfluous
anyway, so she left it in the corner.

She heard footsteps, and Laitt came in
without knocking. “I was delayed. I will show you how to wear the
faltoopp.” She picked up the armor and handed it to Jade.

“So this is called a faltoopp,” said
Jade.

“Yes. Hold it here and put your head
here...fasten this...pull this.”

Now Jade was dressed in a Chuzekk soldier's
uniform. She wore a catsuit, knee-high boots and the faltoopp.
Besides size, the only difference between her outfit and Laitt's
was the markings on the faltoopp. Zuke had said they indicated
“rank and command.” Embossed on her own faltoopp was a sort of
rounded rectangle. Laitt's, like Zuke's, was more intricate,
bearing a pattern made of many circles. Both Laitt's and Jade's
bore identical symbols that Jade didn't like the look of: a claw or
talon appeared to be in the act of putting out an eye.

But the markings were not important right
now. She turned to Laitt. “What am I doing here, anyway?”

“Dressing.”

“No, I mean why am I here? Why was I
captured?”

“I don't know. Were you captured with others,
or was only you captured?”

“Only me, I think. I was at my aunt's house.
A lot of pods landed. They had us surrounded.”

“I think someone ordered your capture. But I
don't know who or why,” said Laitt. “You should eat. The door
guards will take you to the cafeteria. You can order food from the
round pillars. They understand English. My workday is ending. I
will go home now and return tomorrow. My husband's workday is
ending, also.” She smiled confidentially. “He is an interrogator.”
She watched Jade's face for a reaction, and when she saw none, she
explained, “Interrogators are the best lovers.”

For a moment, Jade said nothing. A lover who
made a living torturing people wasn't Jade's cup of tea. She
wondered if Laitt's husband would be her own interrogator. She
wondered if she would survive the interrogation or if he would
realize too late that she had no information that could be useful
to the Chuzekk side.

"Listen," she said, "I've tried to be very
reasonable. I know it's not your fault and all. You just work here,
you don't make the decisions and all that. I get it. I really do.
But there's a lot more at stake here than just some stupid job,
alright?" She was yelling now. "I'm not just another day at the
office. I'm not some case of hairspray that got shipped to the
death chamber instead of the beauty pageant. I am a Human being and
I need to get home. NOW! TONIGHT! So do whatever you have to. Crack
a few heads together, I don't care. But I need to be on a flight
home TONIGHT!"

Laitt listened to Jade's whole speech with a
look of professional courtesy, then nodded and walked to the door.
"You will stay in your room now," she said. "The guards will take
you to the cafeteria later, if you are calm." Then she stepped into
the hallway and closed the door behind her.

T
he cafeteria was
huge and crowded. There must have been thousands of Chuzekks there.
Most were in uniform, but some, both male and female, wore dresses
or shirts and pants. Jade saw two or three pairs of blue jeans. The
guards took her to the door but didn't follow her inside. The
food-dispensing pillars were easy to spot and she began to make her
way through the crowd and over the uneven floor to the nearest
one.

One of the uniformed Chuzekks grabbed her
bicep. “Gashh,” he hissed, glared at her and then let go. Several
times she felt hands stroking her head or claws playing with her
curls, but she didn't object. She was, after all, apparently the
only one there with hair.

When she got to the food dispenser, a
uniformed soldier was just leaving it with his tray of food. When
he saw her, he balanced his tray on one hand and grabbed his
Personal Device. He spoke to it and the Device responded, “Do you
know that it serves Earth food?”

His companion, who was female and also wore a
uniform, spoke into her own Personal Device, and it said, “He's
talking to you, Human.” The Chuzekks themselves always sounded
congested when they spoke English, because they couldn't say their
Ms or their Ns. But the Personal Devices had no impediment: they
spoke with a perfect Cleveland accent.

“Thank you,” Jade answered politely, and both
Personal Devices translated in unison.

“I'm Leed and this is Vyke,” said the female
through her Personal Device, and extended her hand. Jade shook
it.

“That's not how you should greet,” Leed
responded, and Vyke said, “We'll show you how to greet, at the
table, if you will eat with us. Will you eat with us?”

“Thanks,” said Jade. “But how do I order
food? Do I just talk to the thing?”

“Yes,” Vyke answered, then said to the
pillar, “Show me the Earth food selection.”

The dispenser responded before the
translation came. On the side of the pillar appeared a series of
pictures of dishes, labeled in Chuzekk and in English.

“New England clam chowder!” Jade exclaimed,
very surprised to see such a regional dish on the menu. The
Chuzekks didn't really have a presence in New England, as far as
she knew.

The chowder came out of an opening that
looked something like a small oven. It was on a tray with coffee
and juice, a set of ordinary silverware and an ordinary napkin. It
smelled good.

There were no chairs around the table, only
hard metal devices for kneeling in. She set her tray on the small
orange table and knelt, ready for her knees to hurt. But the
uniform-boots they'd made her wear were thickly padded in front,
and shaped just for this purpose, so she found the position very
comfortable. She adjusted the back of the contraption and settled
back on it.

“How to greet,” said Leed through her
Personal Device. She and Vyke were both still standing, and after
checking to be sure Jade was looking, each grasped the other's
right upper arm with the right hand.

So that was why people kept feeling her right
bicep: they were trying to shake hands. Jade stood and grasped
Leed's arm, and Leed grasped hers.

She turned to Vyke to do the same with him,
but Leed gently took Jade's wrist and said, “First, tell us your
name.”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “It's Jade.”

“Jade,” Leed repeated. “You have a Chuzekk
nickname, then.”

“No, that's really my name.”

“We're lucky, then,” said Vyke, kneeling.
“Most Human names are hard to say. Yours sounds just like a Chuzekk
name.”

“When we greet,” said Leed, “we are not
silent. We say each other's names. Or if the person you are
greeting outranks you, you should say his or her rank.”

“But only if you mean it,” said Vyke. “Never
say it if you don't mean it.”

Jade settled onto her knees and realized
eating would be awkward, since the table was so high. “I don't
understand,” she said. “Only if I mean what?” She dipped the edge
of her spoon into the chowder, braced herself, and tried it. To her
relief, it tasted like it had come straight from a Boston
diner.

“When you say a person's rank in this way,”
Vyke answered, “you recognize his or her authority over you.”

“So it's a gesture of respect,” said Jade, to
confirm that she understood.

“It's more than that,” Leed answered. “It's a
promise to obey.”

“How do I know what rank someone is?”

“You can ask,” said Vyke. “The most common
rank is cheej, and the insignia looks like this.” He pointed to his
own chest. It bore the claw-and-eye symbol and another symbol that
reminded Jade of a necklace. She looked at Leed's uniform, and it
matched Vyke's.

“So when I greet you two, I should say,
'Cheej'?”

“Yes.”

Jade stood and extended her hand to Leed.
Leed also stood up and they practiced the greeting.

“Cheej,” said Jade, grasping Leed’s right
bicep, or at least as much of it as she could manage.

“Jade,” said Leed, returning the gesture.

Vyke stood and they grasped arms.

“Cheej.”

“Jade.”

They knelt again.

“So where are we?” Jade asked. “I mean, what
is this? Is it a ship? Are we going somewhere?”

“We're going in circles,” answered Vyke,
between bites of something that looked remotely like a thick
spaghetti sauce. “This is a keev-ship and we are in Earth
orbit.”

Jade wasn't sure whether that was a joke or
not. “What's a keev-ship?” she asked.

Neither Chuzekk responded to this
immediately. The two consulted each other and their Personal
Devices for a minute before Vyke's said, “mothership.”

“Buthership,” Leed repeated, then she
continued through her Personal Device, “It's like a city in space.
Everyone on the ship reports to the keev, so it's called a
keev-ship.”

“How many people are there on this ship?”
asked Jade.

“The actual number varies,” Vyke answered,
“because not all the staff is on the ship. Sometimes our jobs take
us to the surface, or to other ships. But a keev is responsible for
twenty-two thousand, six hundred twenty people.”

“Wow,” said Jade. “That’s a lot of people for
one ship.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of the smaller ships,”
Leed suggested, “the ships that travel.”

“This ship doesn’t travel?” Jade asked. She
wanted to say, ‘then how did it get here? It couldn’t have been
built here,’ but she didn’t want to sound disrespectful—not yet, at
least. She needed to get her bearings first, and come up with a
plan.

“Of course it travels,” Leed replied, “but it
doesn’t travel much. It’s like a city, not a vehicle. It goes to
the place it needs to be, and then it stays there until the mission
is over.”

“Oh, that makes sense.” She was glad she’d
kept her mouth shut: she would have sounded stupid, or worse. “The
symbol on my uniform,” she said. “Sorry to change the subject, but
I don't see anyone else with this. Lots of cheejes, though.”

“It means that you're a prisoner,” said Leed,
still speaking Chuzekk and letting her Personal Device translate.
“In Chuzekk, the word is 'prisoner.'” When she heard the
translation, she slapped the device as though it were a naughty
child. “Gashh,” she said, slowly and clearly, and her Personal
Device said, slowly and clearly, “Pris-on-er.”

When she had said goodbye to Leed and Vyke
and made her way out of the cafeteria, the guards met her at the
door. She reached for Koll's bicep and Koll returned the
gesture.

“Cheej,” she said solemnly.

Koll’s response was polite and easy.
“Jade.”

She repeated the process with the other
guard, and they all began to walk through the hallways with their
strange uneven floors, back to Jade's room. It wasn’t quite like
they had installed extra features in the floor—features like mounds
and dips, ramps and steps. It was more like the floor had never
been flat, had never been intended to be flat. Walking in the
keev-ship felt a little like walking on Earth, outdoors in a wild
place. The floor’s color varied along with the terrain, so it was
easy to see its contours.

“I have a question,” said Jade after a
minute, “that I don't know if you can answer.” Koll said nothing
but appeared to be listening, so Jade continued, gaining
confidence, “Why am I here? Why was I captured? What's going to
happen to me?”

Koll grabbed her Personal Device. “Repeat,
please,” she said.

Jade said it again, and Koll's Personal
Device translated.

“That is three questions,” Koll said. “Why
was you captured? I don't know. Probably somebody ordered. Usually
zeeds do order the captures. Usually a prisoner knows—”

“What are zeeds?” Jade interrupted.

“Zeed is a rank.” Koll explained. “Zeeds are
few. You must give much respect to zeed. Usually a prisoner knows
the reason for the capture. Often, prisoners lie to say 'I don't
know,' but only very few prisoners truly don't know why. I cannot
know which is you. But if really you don't know, then probably is
an error and you will go home soon.”

“I met a Chuzekk before the war,” suggested
Jade nervously. “It could have something to do with that.”

Koll stopped walking and looked intently at
Jade. “Zuke Gevv?” she asked.

“He said his name was Zuke,” Jade answered
apprehensively. “I think he was a zeed.”

Koll said something in Chuzekk to the other
guard, and his eyes widened. He took out his Personal Device and
set it to translate.

“I just tell him that you is the Human who
sees Zuke Gevv on Earth. Everybody knows the story. Nobody knows is
you. But I don't know if this why you was captured.”