The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(55)

“On it,” Hanton said.

“It’s not random or regular,” Seve said after a minute. “You got long blinks and short blinks going on. It’s code.”

Hanton looked at it for a moment, then pulled out his tablet and opened up a search function. “I know what this is,” he said. “The Imperial Navy has a code system for ships in distress that it can use if their communications are otherwise down.”

“Using ship lights?” Roynold said, incredulously. “Given the average distance between ships, that’s optimistic.”

“I didn’t say it made sense,” Hanton said, annoyed. “I just said we had it. And anyway it’s not meant just for spaceships. You can use it for land and sea vessels.”

“And this messaging system has been the same for eight hundred years,” Marce said.

“Of course not,” Hanton said. He flipped the tablet around to show Marce. “But as part of the mission informational database I have the key for the code from eight hundred years ago.”

“Well played,” Marce said.

“It was just part of a larger download on ships generally, but I’ll go ahead and take the credit,” Hanton said. “Now give me a minute so I can pay attention to this.”

“There are three individual messages,” he said, a couple of minutes later. “The first is ‘communications inoperable.’”

“We knew that,” Roynold said.

Hanton held up his hand. “The second is ‘systems critical.’”

“What’s the third?” Marce asked.

“‘Help.’”

*

The Dalasyslans were simultaneously short and elongated, a result, Marce imagined, of poor nutrition and low gravity. Marce could see Dr. Ells next to him clearly wishing she could get one into her medical bay for examination. He couldn’t blame her; in her position, he would probably want to do the same thing.

For the moment, however, what Marce really wanted to do was understand them.

Captain Laure had balked at Marce’s request to be sent over without security, and didn’t want to risk a full crew of scientists. In the end Marce, Ells, Seve and PFC Lyton put on their suits, took a shuttle and waited by an airlock while one of the Dalasyslans manually cranked it open for them. The Dalasyslan was wearing an ill-fitting suit that looked ancient and patched, because it was both of these things.

When the four of them were in, the Dalasyslan cranked the airlock shut again and waited as air flooded back in. Then it cranked the inner door open, shed its suit and left it by the airlock. The Dalasyslan was mostly naked, of indeterminate sex, and appeared to wait for the crew from the Bransid to shuck their suits as well. When they did not, the Dalasyslan did what looked like a suit yourself shrug, kicked off in the microgravity and waved the four of them along to follow. They did, clomping along with their magnetized feet on the deck.

The interior of the ship was falling apart, or it looked great for an at least eight-hundred-year-old ship, take your pick. Marce noted how every part of it was cobbled together and jury-rigged. It was a Frankenstein monster of a ship, clearly refurbished with bits and pieces of other ships and habitats. The citizens of the ship were scavengers, as well they would have to be to survive as long as they had.

The crew from the Bransid were taken to what appeared to be a mess hall, or would have been a mess hall if the ship had been anything approaching a normal ship. Inside were several dozen other Dalasyslans, each looking not dissimilar from the one that had led them in.

They were human, but of a sort of human that Marce had never seen before. They were creatures of space and of spaceships in a way that no other member of the Interdependency was. Billions of Interdependency citizens lived in space, of course. But they lived in habitats with full gravity and full atmosphere and all the essentials and most of the luxuries. They lived in space. They weren’t of space, like these Dalasyslans now were.

This is what our future is, Marce thought, and hoped the involuntary shudder that went across his body was not visible outside of his suit.

The Dalasyslan who had escorted them into the room maneuvered over to a group of its compatriots, and another unfurled, oriented itself to Marce’s team, and began to speak. Marce couldn’t understand a single thing it was saying.

“Jill?” Marce said, to his linguist, after the Dalasyslan had stopped speaking.

“It’s Interdependency Standard,” Seve said. “Or was. There’s some sort of vowel shift going on.”

“Can you understand it?”

“Sort of.” Seve stepped forward to the standing Dalasyslan, and pointed to herself. “Human.” She pointed to Marce. “Human.” She did the same with Ells and Seve.

The Dalasyslan caught on easily enough and said a word that might have been “human” if someone had recorded the word, run it backward through a recording device, said that resulting word, reversed that, said that and then repeated the process a couple dozen times. Seve did the word game several more times with different objects in the room, getting the Dalasyslan version of it. Then she said something to the Dalasyslan in something that sounded, to Marce’s ears, like nothing resembling language.

The Dalasyslan nodded and waited.

“Wait, what did you just say?” Marce asked.

“I think I said, ‘Speak slow, your words are hard for us,’” Seve said. “I guess we’ll find out.”