Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune … But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity …
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“Yes. Soil Starship Nichols.”
I followed the being in the suit.
Took me well over a minute to realize “low frequency right angle shape” was Red Cross.
This whole thing is brilliant with translation stuff.
There was a blonde who found herself sitting next to a Lawyer on an airplane. The lawyer just kept bugging the blonde wanting her to play a game of intelligence. Finally, the lawyer offered her 10 to 1 odds, and said every time the blonde could not answer one of his questions, she owed him $5, but every time he could not answer hers, he’d give her $50.00. The lawyer figured he could not lose, and the blonde reluctantly accepted.
The lawyer first asked, “What is the distance between the Earth and the nearest star?”
Without saying a word the blonde handed him $5. then the blonde asked, “What goes up a hill with 3 legs and comes back down the hill with 4 legs?”
Well, the lawyer looked puzzled. He took several hours, looking up everything he could on his laptop and even placing numerous air-to-ground phone calls trying to find the answer. Finally, angry and frustrated, he gave up and paid the blonde $50.00
The blonde put the $50 into her purse without comment, but the lawyer insisted, “What is the answer to your question?”
So my friend’s kid has celiac and dyslexia and reading labels is difficult for them (also they’re like 7) so he’s teaching their pigeon, Grey Boy, to read the labels and identify ingredients with gluten. It’s going well, other than Nick thought it would be a good idea to make the behavior when the pigeon does find a bad ingredient to just fucking…wing slap the box. Just beat the shit out of it like, “no! BAD gluten! BAD!”
@tinysaurus-rex I drew an artist’s interpretation of Grey Boy the pigeon pummeling a box of cheesy snacks into dust for Gluten Crimes. Pigeons have buff arms and big fists, right? Yeah, that sounds correct. Totally.
This is beautiful.
Hold on a sec… Pigeons can READ!!!?!??!?!!
From what I read on this thread, they don’t so much read as much as recognize patterns.
Have any of you heard of the Harvard MIT Pigeon Prank?
An MIT student dressed in a
black-and-white striped shirt went to the Harvard football stadium every
day of one summer, blowing a whistle while scattering breadcrumbs or
birdseed to coax neighborhood pigeons down onto the field. At
Harvard’s opening game of the season, upon the referee’s first whistle,
it’s said that hundreds of pigeons descended onto the field, causing a
half-hour delay.
So my mom worked as an educational consultant for HP (AKA translating Engineer into Normal Human) and part of her job was working with the overseas translators to make sure everything said approximately the same thing and that all the languages fit on the documentation. And that said documentation looked pretty enough for marketing. marketing would always get real pissy if there was leftover margin space at the end of the instructions, which is to say, One Guy Named Carl would get real pissy over ‘wasted space’ and because they happened to work in the same building, he’d always come bitch to my mother.
For like, an hour.
Eventually, Mom realized that while English, French and nearly all the other languages took up the same amount of space, German always took up 20% more space and Japanese about 20% less. If she included both languages at the end of any documentation, they’d fill up the margin space *perfectly*. So she just started including both languages, regardless of whether or not that documentation would be distributed to Germany or Japan, just so she could fill up the margin space and also Mrs. Yamada at the Kyoto office needed the extra hours.
Carl, who only sort of paid attention to his work, told her he was very pleased that there was no more “wasted paper” despite the fact that most of the documentation was about 20% longer now.
Eventually, all the other documentation coordination people noticed mom’s practice and started including German and Japanese, and started doing it too. Then the inclusion of both languages became Official Documentation. Then it became Standard Practice for HP and any firms it worked with. Then it became the Industry Standard across Silicon Valley. If you open up the user manual on a new computer these days, you’ll often find German and Japanese, right at the end, because it’s a semi-official practice now.
…some 20 years after my mom started this, my fiance got a high school German assignment to translate a piece of formal writing, and he chose the documentation for his new HP laptop. He had fun with that assignment, and it encouraged him to stay in German, eventually travel overseas, and when he met me, we had a lovely conversation in German and I decided he was worth going out with.
Thank you Mom, for finding a way around Carl’s bullshit, and me my husband.
