City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,108
chairs are bolted to the floor, and there are actual sideboards. The walls show an unfamiliar skyscape, but that’s no painting. It’s a recorded image being shown on the screens that encase us.
A man stands at the head of the table. He’s surprisingly tall and broad shouldered, with dark hair that touches his collar. His eyes are blue, his features sharp.
He doesn’t have the thinness of someone raised in space. He’s muscular with strong bones, certainly not something I would have expected, even though the lieutenant doesn’t look space-raised either.
He bows slightly to me. “Welcome,” he says in Standard, mangling the word so badly that I almost don’t recognize it.
“Thank you,” I say in his language. I’m probably mangling that phrase as badly as he mangled “Welcome,” but I don’t mind. The phrase brings a smile to his face, one that softens his features.
He greets Al-Nasir personally, and Al-Nasir answers. Then the captain offers us refreshments from the sideboard. There are baked goods I do not recognize, carafes of something that looks like wine, and a variety of fruits and cold vegetables.
He lets one of his hands linger near a carafe. I nod. He picks up a glass, pours an amber liquid for me, another for Al-Nasir, and hands them to us. Then he pours two more, one for himself and one for the lieutenant.
Apparently the polite customs are the same in both of our cultures.
He indicates the chairs near the table. The lieutenant sits, then looks pointedly at Al-Nasir. He sits near her.
The captain stands near the head of the table. He says very slowly, “My name is Jonathon Cooper. I am captain of this ship. People call me Coop.”
His nickname. “Coop,” I say, careful to pronounce it the same way. “People call me Boss.”
He pulls out his chair and sits. I sit at the same time, taking the chair to his right.
“Boss,” he says as he sits. “Lieutenant—” And then he says that word I can’t quite understand, clearly her name. “—is not sure Boss is your name or your title.”
“Both,” I say.
He doesn’t understand that, but she does. She repeats it to him.
He replies in his own language and looks at me. I don’t understand a word, but she is able to translate.
“They call you by your title?”
“I prefer it,” I say.
The conversation is slow as the translations go back and forth, but it feels right, as if he and I are actually talking. I glance at Al-Nasir. He nods. He’s understanding us both so far.
The captain says through the lieutenant’s translation, “Surely you understand my position. As commander of this ship, I cannot call someone else Boss.”
I shrug. I expected this. “Then call me what you will.”
His lips twist into a slight smile, and the game is on. He now knows I’m only going to tell him what I want to tell him and nothing more.
“Fahd Al-Nasir will do his best to translate for me,” I say.
No one has said anything about my knife, which surprises me.
“I have a team of linguists monitoring the conversation,” the captain says. “They might be able to assist if we need it.”
“A team of linguists,” I say. “I am impressed. How large is your crew?”
“Five hundred strong,” he says.
Five hundred. The number staggers me.
“We guessed perhaps a hundred,” I say.
“You’ve never encountered one of our ships before?” he asks.
I’m going to be as honest as I can with him, unless I believe some of the information is not to our advantage. “Not a working vessel,” I say.
He frowns. That answer clearly disturbs him. “How many of our ships have you encountered that don’t work?”
“Five,” I say.
“Five,” he repeats, then holds out his open hand. “Five?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do they have any crew?” he asks.
I study him for a moment. He expects Dignity Vessels to have a crew. I expect them to be abandoned and ruined. Something is quite off here.
“No,” I say. “They have all been abandoned.”
The lieutenant touches her ear. She repeats my word again. Clearly the linguists are working on it.
“They’re empty,” I say to him. “The ones I find are derelicts.”
The lieutenant looks at me, her face a little slack, not from the linguists nattering in her ear, but from my words.
“Empty,” she repeats. “Destroyed?”
“A couple of them,” I say. “I don’t know if they were ruined by time or by some kind of battle.”
“You found them all in the same area of space?” she asks, her Standard fluid.