Damage Control - ARC (4 page)

Jade resisted the temptation to roll her eyes
at this attempt at acting. "Yeah, why the alien suit? You going to
a con?"

"No," he answered. "I wear the uniform of a
Chuzekk zeed. What's your name?"

"Oh sorry," she answered. "I'm Jade. Nice to
meet you." She offered her hand, and he shook it.

“Jade,” he repeated.

"I should check the fire again," said Jade.
It was probably too early to do anything with the fire, but she was
nervous and needed to keep moving.

He nodded and made room for her. She looked
at the fire and tasted the soup that simmered on top. After adding
a little black pepper and allspice, there was nothing more to do
than move it to the edge of the stove to keep warm.

"Is it ready?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Jade. "It's done." She didn't
want to offer him any. He wasn't a guest, after all.

He lifted the cover without a potholder and
smelled the soup. "I will eat with you," he said.

His arrogance annoyed her, but she thought it
would be petty to argue. "Soup mugs are on the beam," she shrugged,
pointing past him.

He grabbed two, and she got out spoons and a
ladle and dill weed. He ladled soup into the mugs and ate his. She
stirred dill into hers and waited. It was too hot. Besides, she was
too nervous to eat.

She should try to get him to talk. It would
be good to know if he was a fugitive and the alien-act was a way of
concealing his identity, or if he was just crazy. Either way, he
could turn dangerous. "So where you from?" she asked.

"Chuze," he answered.

"Choose what?"

"Chuze is the name of my planet. You have not
discovered it yet."

She shrugged again. "I hope this soup helps
your cold."

"The heat from your fire is recharging my
thermal garment," he answered, sounding as congested as ever in
spite of the steaming soup. "We are cold-blooded. We cannot create
our own heat as you do. So we wear special garments for this
purpose. After my vehicle was disabled, I did not have time to
finish repairs before recharging."

"So you came to my house to recharge your
garment?" Jade asked. Whatever else this guy was, he was
intelligent.

"Yes," he said.

Compassion finally got the better of her.
"You should take something for that cold. A decongestant. Let me
see what I have."

He followed her to the bathroom, soup in
hand. "I do dot require a decodgestat," he objected. "I ab dot
codgested."

"You can't even say the word 'congested,'"
she countered, "because you're too congested."

"There are some sounds of your language which
we cannot make," he explained. "It is a physiological difference,
not an illness."

"O-kay," she replied. He was really testing
her patience. "Are you sure you don't want to take one of these,
anyway? It'll help you feel better."

"Yes."

She poured out one pill and held it out to
him, in the bottle cap.

He ignored it. "You should eat. You require
fuel to create heat. You will come with me to my vehicle."

She put the pill away. "That's okay, you go
ahead. I'll stay here."

"No. I will not allow you to contact your
government."

They went back to the kitchen and he handed
her her soup.

She took a bite, then said, "Why not? Why
won't you let me contact the government? They can help you."

"They would consider me a threat, capture me,
probably kill me. They would attempt to reverse-engineer my
Personal Device, my thermal garment and my vehicle. When we contact
your government, we will do so with a show of force sufficient to
prove such actions unwise."

"I see." His logic may have been unrelated to
reality, but it certainly seemed consistent.

He was getting back into his sleeves, so she
put her coat on. The bright orange safety vest, a necessity during
hunting season, was already on it. She grabbed some gloves, a hat
and scarf, a flashlight and the Spanish novel she'd been reading
before she'd gone out for the mail.

He put his front-piece back on, picked up the
soup pot by its bail handle and took her arm again. She closed the
stove-drafts, and he pulled her out of the house.

"What is that thing for?" she asked as they
walked north into the forest. She pointed to the stiff thing he
wore on the front of his body.

"It is armor. It was originally for battle,
but since its protection is useful for many activities, we wear
them most of the day."

"And the design on the front? The gold
circles?"

"They indicate my rank and command: zeed,
Alien Command."

A brilliant red maple that still had most of
its leaves caught Jade’s eye. She let her head turn to enjoy the
view. He had her firmly by the arm, so she didn’t really need to
look where she was going. She didn’t know whether he would let her
fall if she tripped, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that
she was being dragged into the forest by some weirdo. For all she
knew, he could be a serial killer on the run. She was glad her
daughter was in school. What she needed to do was find a way to
convince her captor to go back, at least as far as the house, and
hopefully as far as the road. At least there someone might see
them. “Do you know what’s wrong with your vehicle?” she asked
him.

“Yes,” he said, and nothing more. He let go
of her arm.

“Would you mind telling me?” she prodded.

“No,” he said. Still nothing more.

“So, um…are you going to tell me?” she asked,
after a pause.

“If you want me to tell you, then I
will.”

Jade rolled her eyes. “Please tell me what’s
wrong with your vehicle,” she recited.

“The primary seal of the cooling fluid
container for the second combustion chamber contained cellulose and
fructose.”

Jade suppressed a laugh. Spaceship parts made
of cellulose and fructose, what a fantasy! “Is it supposed to?” she
asked.

“I do not understand,” her abductor replied,
serious as ever. He walked very close to her: even if he was one of
those guys whose size made them slow runners, he could still grab
her if she tried to make a run for it. She kept up her pace.

“Is—that thing—supposed to be made of
cellulose and fructose?” she asked, managing somehow to keep a
straight face.

He shook his head. “Cellulose and fructose
are combustible,” he explained patiently. “They burned and the seal
changed shape and caused a leak. The factory workers failed to
install the secondary seal.”

Jade didn’t pay a lot of attention to the
explanation. “Don’t you need to bring some tools?” she asked. “We
have lots of tools at my house. I keep a basic set in my car, and
then there are more in the shed. Shouldn’t we grab some?”

“Yes,” he replied, but he didn’t sound very
interested.

It had worked. Jade stopped and began to turn
back. “What tools do you need, exactly?” she asked, trying to sound
casual.

He grabbed her arm and forced her forward,
back in the direction they had been going—northeast, uphill, away
from the road. Her only hope of getting help out there would be if
they happened to meet a hunter.

“But you said you need to get tools from my
place,” she objected, looking up at him. She opened her eyes as
wide as she could. Maybe he’d feel sorry for her, and
reconsider.

“No,” he replied. “I said yes, I do not need
tools from your house. I need a tachzute combiner, and there is one
in my vehicle.”

A new thought suddenly occurred to Jade: if
'Zuke' was delusional—really believed his own story—then would he
become violent when he discovered there was no spaceship? She
walked for a minute, thinking, silent except for the rustling sound
her feet made in the leaves. Then she said, "Does your vehicle have
a self-destruct function?"

"I will not answer."

"Okay, that's fair. But if it does—and it's
in need of repair—then the self-destruct could theoretically go off
accidentally, right?"

"I don't know."

"And if that happened we could get to the
spot where you left your spaceship—I mean your vehicle—and find
nothing."

But when they got to the spot, it was Jade
who was surprised. Standing among the wispy
black-and-white-and-yellow birches and the thick green hemlocks was
something that looked vaguely like a rocket—or like one of the
space shuttles, only much smaller. It was white and shaped somewhat
like a cone, and had some round black parts on the bottom that she
took to be exhaust ports.

Just for an instant, she was tempted to
wonder if Zuke really was from outer space. How else could she
explain his vehicle, here in such a place? But then, a real alien
ship wouldn't look like anything she had ever seen or even
imagined.

"How did this get here?" she said aloud.

"I was recording this region when propulsion
failed, forcing me to land. I will finish repairs. You will stay
beside me."

"You were recording this region. You mean
mapping it?"

"Yes." He took the device from his hip and
punched in a code, and an opening appeared in the side of the
vehicle. Jade noticed that he typed with his claws and not his
fingers. He continued, "Mapping and recording sounds, images,
temperature, pressure, material composition and other things."

"You're a spy." She hadn't meant to say it
aloud.

"Yes." They were inside the vehicle now. Zuke
was typing with his claws and consulting various readouts. None of
the places where he typed looked like keypads, and none of the
places where the readouts showed looked like readout screens.
Everything looked like structural elements—walls or posts, for
example—until pictures and diagrams appeared on them.

And then she saw the writing in the readouts
and forgot everything else. The characters were angular like
printed Hebrew, but had a little of the brushstroke quality of
Chinese. The language appeared to be either alphabetic or
syllabary. If she could just hear some of it...

"What does that say?" she asked, pointing to
a short piece of text above her head.

"Twenty-six-pod propulsion failure,” he
replied. “You will go outdoors with me." Then he took her arm and
half-dragged her back out into the familiar world and away from the
strange language that begged to be decoded. He had a tool in his
other hand, and began using it. It appeared to be some sort of
welding torch or laser.

He kept working for hours, and she couldn't
convince him to let her back inside. He didn't want to talk,
either, and she grew bored and cold. She ate some soup—also
cold—and tried to run away but Zuke was too fast for her. She
finished the chapter in the Spanish novel.

She wished she’d thought to bring her
computer. She should be working right now, after all, and her next
task was those four boring documents, two Spanish, one French and
one Italian, that were waiting on her hard drive to be turned into
English. She didn’t think for a moment that any of her clients
would understand if she told them, “Your documents aren’t ready yet
because I was kidnapped by a harmless man claiming to be an alien.”
She may as well tell them a dog ate it, or a dinosaur.

The novel was much more interesting than
those dry documents. It was also much more risky. Nobody was paying
her to translate the novel, or not exactly, anyway. She was going
to get a percentage, after expenses, assuming enough copies were
sold to even cover the expenses.

But as excited as she was about translating
the novel, even that was just another translation job. What she
really wanted was to tackle a new language and analyze it. She had
a feeling, and it wouldn’t go away. It was a feeling like there was
something there, buried in the languages—not just in the romance
languages she worked with every day. Not even in the Latin and
sprinkling of Greek that was always present in all of them. The
hints were there, but she wasn’t going to find the answer from just
those hints. She wanted to immerse herself, for starters, in
Russian, in Norwegian and Swedish, in old and new Turkish, in
ancient and modern Hebrew. She didn’t need to actually learn the
languages, she just needed to analyze them. Look for patterns. What
patterns, she couldn’t tell. She only knew there was something.

But she was being silly. It was ridiculous to
think that she, Jade Massilon, could find something the world’s
expert linguists hadn’t found. She had only a GED with a couple of
college courses tacked on. And she read a lot, for whatever that
was worth.

And anyway it didn’t matter. She didn’t have
time to chase language-ghosts; she had a living to make. She wished
she’d at least thought to bring a paper and pencil. She could start
working on translating the novel, that way. At least she’d be doing
something, and she could get her mind off the tantalizing readouts
locked inside this vehicle. She looked at Zuke working on it and
wondered if it was ever going to fly. She wondered if he could
really be an alien. She wondered if there was any way to know for
sure.

Then suddenly he was done. He stood up and
spoke a command, and the engine—or whatever it was—started with a
babbling hum. Then the hum stopped and the vehicle disappeared.

"Cloaked," Jade heard herself say.

Zuke spoke another command and the vehicle
reappeared, silent this time. He turned to her and offered his
hand. This time, she shook it willingly. "I will leave now: you are
free," he said. "I believe that since you have seen me, my people
will expedite the Earth project. I expect ships from Chuze to
arrive soon." He let go of her hand and started toward his vehicle,
then stopped and turned. “Our meeting was due to an error, but I am
glad of it. You have a greeting.” He paused a moment to think, then
said with his congested sound, “Pleased to beet you, Jade.”

Then he stepped into his vehicle, and the
opening closed behind him. The vehicle made its babbling hum for a
few seconds, then went silent and disappeared.