City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,97

“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.”

* * * *

FIFTY-TWO

C

oop 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