Communication Failure Read online

  “I’m the civilian liaison. Every major military group has one who serves as the link between them and the Central Council of Thelicosa.”

  Great, Rogers thought. A bureaucrat. Funny—I didn’t hear any paper shuffling when she walked in.

  Rogers didn’t do well with political types. In fact, he wasn’t sure he did well with any types. In the back of his mind he made a note to, later, do some introspection about whom he did well with and why. He then immediately made another note to procrastinate as long as possible on the first note.

  “What does an ambassador want with me?” Rogers asked. “Maybe you can start by telling me what the hell I’m doing on a Thelicosan ship.”

  Rogers was pretty surprised at how not scared shitless he was feeling at the moment. Here he was, obviously some kind of political prisoner, if not a scapegoat, and he was giving attitude to a Thelicosan bureaucrat. Perhaps, he considered, he was already beyond the point of being completely screwed. A death sentence had strange effects on a man’s inhibitions.

  “I wish I knew,” Quinn said, her lips thinning. “I assume you understand what the gift of a jeweled protractor means in Thelicosan custom?”

  Rogers grimaced. “I know now. I can’t say that I understand it, though. And given that I said no very clearly, it also doesn’t explain why I’m here and not back on the Flagship.” He thought a moment. “Or dead.”

  Quinn looked at him for a moment, and Rogers could see the gears turning in her head. She was trying to say something sensitive but couldn’t find the words to do it.

  “Thelicosan marriage customs are . . . different,” she said. “They may seem foreign, or even barbaric, to someone not familiar with them.”

  “Well, I can’t remember the last time I kicked a date in the face.”

  Quinn shrugged, as though this was to be expected. “There is no shortage of people on this ship who have experienced similar fates. That she kicked you in a way to avoid permanent damage or facial scarring is exceptional.”

  Rogers was about to protest that he certainly didn’t feel as though she’d tried to avoid permanent damage, but he compared the experience with being hit in the face by the Viking. In reality, this hadn’t been that bad. He couldn’t see himself in a mirror, but he didn’t expect there to be much swelling at all. It had been the minimum effective force to knock him unconscious.

  “I see,” he said finally. “And what were you saying about marriage customs? Why am I here, Secretary Quinn?”

  Quinn adjusted the chair again but still refused to sit in it. For some reason, this made Rogers feel ill at ease. She took a deep breath, tucked a stray hair back into her bun, and folded her hands in front of her. She looked every bit the politician at a press conference, except that she appeared to be taking her own pulse and counting silently.

  “Thelicosa, at least as it pertains to marriage affairs, is a matriarchal society. Once a woman proposes to a man, it’s not expected that her proposal will be rejected. The woman carefully considers the match, the kind of children you’d give her, your potential as a mate, and so forth. When she offers you a protractor, it’s more a case of her saying that this is the way it should be. It’s not really up for debate.”

  “That seems a little, um, inconsiderate,” Rogers said. He shifted in his bed, subtly testing the rest of his body for injury. His left elbow felt like it was bruised, but otherwise he was starting to feel surprisingly good.

  “It’s not seen that way,” Quinn responded. “And in the rare cases when a proposal is refused, it is customary and acceptable to, ah, acquire the male.”

  “Acquire?” Rogers said. “You mean kidnap?”

  Quinn shrugged.

  “Wow,” Rogers said, looking back up at the sign above the door. He really was not on a Meridan ship.

  Pointing to the sign, he swung his feet over the side of the bed and stretched his legs. He wasn’t wearing his shoes, and he didn’t see them anywhere.

  “I know this is probably the least of my worries,” he said, “but what’s with the sign?”

  Quinn turned to read it, then looked back at him with something that might have been considered tightly controlled disgust.

  “Our understanding of Galactic . . . Meridan medical practices is that doctors generally do not have to go to medical school and that you frequently amputate the wrong body part.” She sniffed. “You also refuse to use anesthetics. The sign is there to reassure patients and remind them that they are in the care of a civilized federation.”

  Rogers barked a laugh, and Quinn jumped, startled. “I don’t see how that sort of barbarism is funny,” she said dryly.

  “It’s only funny because it’s wrong,” Rogers said. “Where did you even hear that?”

  Quinn shrugged. “It’s common knowledge.”

  Rogers shook his head. He wondered what other vast chasms of misunderstanding separated the Thelicosans and Meridans. Even during the Two Hundred Years (And Counting) Peace, the two systems hadn’t played very nice, and communications had been cool at best. Relations with the New Neptune System had been better, but they were very hard to not get along with, since they didn’t have a collective personality at all. In general, the four active systems tended to simply pretend the others didn’t exist.

  “So I’ve been kidnapped,” Rogers said. “What’s next?”

  “You marry the Grand Marshal,” Quinn said.

  Rogers blinked. “That’s not the kind of advice I was looking for.”

  Quinn shrugged. He wished she’d stop doing that—it was very aloof for a bureaucrat. “As I said, it’s very unconventional for a proposal to be refused. You are expected to come around.”

  How was he supposed to come around? He was the commander of a major Meridan military unit, kidnapped by the enemy, and expected to simply go along with it all? His head was starting to hurt again just thinking about it. Maybe he could put that IV back in and just go to sleep for a while.

  As if answering his mental summons, another doctor came bustling in, looking very hurried. He wore a large pair of spectacles with thick round rims, and he kept his head angled slightly downward and his shoulders hunched. The man looked like a neurotic badger with self-esteem issues. His white coat, which covered his uniform, was much too long, and his hair was arrayed in such a way that it suggested a recent interaction with a high-voltage current. Both of his cheeks looked swollen, like a hamster hiding his lunch.

  “Ah,” the doctor said. “Ah. You are awake. It is time for your medicine.”

  “Medicine?” Rogers said.

  “Medicine,” the doctor replied. Quinn had taken a step back, though she kept her eyes on Rogers.

  “I don’t really feel that bad,” Rogers said.

  “It’s on the schedule,” the doctor said. “We must stick to the schedule.” His voice had a cracked quality to it, like someone had rubbed his vocal cords with sandpaper and then kicked him in the privates. Just listening to it made Rogers feel like he should have been moving faster, or at least chewing on something nervously.

  “Really,” Rogers said, waving the doctor away, “it’s not necessary.”

  The doctor produced a syringe from his pocket—which seemed to Rogers to be a strange place to keep one’s syringes—and flicked the end of it.

  “I must stick to the schedule!” the doctor said.

  “I’m going to stick that syringe in your schedule if you don’t put it down,” Rogers said. Quinn sighed, rolled her eyes, and said something about him being a baby.

  “Here we go!” the doctor said.

  “Stop!” Rogers said, swinging his feet up and jumping off the other side of the bed, putting the fixture between him and the doctor. “Put that damn thing away!”

  Rogers didn’t like needles. Worse, he didn’t like needles wielded by someone who reminded him of a mad scientist. Needles and mad scientists from the enemy fleet took his aversion to a completely new level.

  “I must stick to the schedule!” the doctor cried. “T
his will only take a moment.”

  “Just a moment!” Another voice came from the hallway.

  “Oh god,” Rogers said, rubbing his face with his hands. “Where are all these people coming from?”

  The small room became more crowded as another doctor—Rogers was presuming, of course, because of the white coat that said DOCTOR on it—rushed into the room. This one was short, with a thick, almost fake-looking mustache.

  “I don’t have a moment,” Dr. Spectacles said.

  “You must!” Dr. Mustache said. His voice was much more accented than those of the other Thelicosans in the room, to the point where Rogers could finally understand Tunger’s obsession with the dialect. It was difficult to make out what Dr. Mustache was saying.

  “Quinn,” Rogers said, “can you make this stop? Who are these people? Clearly I’m fine.” Rogers gestured to himself as though to indicate as much, but his nervous enthusiasm only resulted in his arm’s sweeping a glass vase off the counter, scattering fake flower bits all over the floor as the vase shattered.

  “You see?” Dr. Spectacles said, trying to get around Dr. Mustache. “It has been too many moments! Too many!”

  “I need another moment to conduct an exam,” Dr. Mustache said. “It’s on the schedule!” At least, that was what Rogers assumed he’d said. His accent made it sound more like “Eats urn the schmurgle.”

  “The what?” Dr. Spectacles said. “I can’t understand you.”

  Rogers had to admit, Dr. Mustache’s accent was quite thick, but he’d have figured at least other Thelicosans would be able to understand.

  “The schmurgle!” Dr. Mustache said. He reached out to gesture to something—ostensibly a schedule posted somewhere that Rogers couldn’t see—but misstepped and stumbled forward. He crashed into Dr. Spectacles, whose spectacles fell to the floor along with the syringe he’d been holding. The glasses only bounced, but the syringe shattered, spilling a thin, greenish liquid onto the floor. A rotten smell, like eggs and feet, began to fill the room.

  For a moment, Dr. Formerly-Spectacles-But-Now-Just-a-Beady-Eyed-Guy-with-Big-Eyebrows didn’t say anything. He stared at the spot on the floor, his mouth open, as though Dr. Mustache had just slaughtered his puppy in front of him. Finally, he curled both his hands into fists and screamed at Dr. Mustache.

  “You idiot!” he said, the timbre of his voice coming down a little from his frantic falsetto. Then, without another word about the schedule or the medicine, he stormed out of the room. Dr. Mustache followed, bellowing in his thick accent.

  “The schmurgle! The schmuuuurrrgle!”

  The silence they left behind in the room was both comforting and unsettling. Quinn, who hadn’t batted an eye during the entire exchange, stepped out of the corner and stood next to the chair in which she was apparently absolutely not going to sit.

  “You can see the need for reassurances that we are at least better than Merida,” Quinn said, pointing back at the sign above the door.

  Rogers shook his head. “You people are crazy. And I need to get the hell out of this infirmary before someone else tries to stick me with something or kicks me in the face or asks me to marry them.” He threw up his hands before bending down to search underneath the infirmary bed. “And where the hell are my shoes?”

  Quinn let out a gasp, which Rogers took to be not at all in response to the question he had just asked, unless he so misunderstood Thelicosan custom that asking where one’s shoes were was considered a great offense. It was a gasp that told him he had yet another visitor, one he had absolutely no desire to see.

  “I regret to admit that I was only able to collect one of them after our exchange,” Grand Marshal Keffoule said. “The other flew off quite a distance.”

  Intergalactic Relations

  Slowly extending his head above the mattress, Rogers locked eyes once again with the dark, smoldering woman who commanded the enemy fleet. Grand Marshal Alandra Keffoule stood in the doorway, filling it in a way that was at once similar to and completely different from the way the Viking did the same thing, staring at him with a predatory, hungry gaze. She was holding one of his shoes.

  Not knowing what else to say, Rogers looked up and said, inexplicably, “Well, then, what am I supposed to do about walking around your ship, Grand Marshal? Unless I am to stay in this room forever?”

  It really was the least of his worries. It wasn’t like there was broken glass everywhere or anything—it was a modern, solidly build spaceship with smooth, metallic floors—but there was a part of him that felt that if he could get his missing shoe back he could reclaim some part of himself. What part he wasn’t sure; he had a guess it was his pride.

  “You are a guest on my ship, Captain Rogers,” Keffoule said. Was she deliberately adding a sultry, husky quality to her voice, or was Rogers hearing things? “You can go about it any way you’d like.”

  Why did it sound like “naked” was an unspoken word there? Rogers stared at her, his mouth a little drier than normal. He spent a moment sorting through all the thoughts in his head, through the litany of things he wanted to ask the leader of the enemy fleet.

  “Why do you want to marry me?” he blurted finally. He thought that perhaps this was the least important of his concerns. In some way, however, he felt that it was also the most critical.

  The Grand Marshal shrugged—what was it with Thelicosan women and shrugging?—and stepped fully into the room. “It is a natural thing,” she said, as though that explained everything.

  “The secretary here tells me you’ve kidnapped me as part of some sort of Thelicosan custom that says I’m eventually going to agree,” Rogers said, jerking a thumb at Ms. Hair Bun.

  For the first time, Keffoule seemed to notice Quinn’s presence in the room. The Grand Marshal looked over at the place where Quinn was standing and made a face that gave away all the information Rogers ever wanted to know about civilian-military relations aboard the Limiter.

  “What are you doing here?” Keffoule said.

  “I’m speaking to our . . . guest,” Quinn said, not making any effort at all to hide what she really thought of Rogers’ status aboard the ship. “I’m trying to bridge the communication gap between Thelicosan and Galactic . . . Meridan expectations, since you seem content to just kick him in the face and expect him to want to marry you. Had you considered that perhaps Meridans don’t work that way, or was your ego too big to see over?”

  In his head, Rogers heard that stereotypical “rawr” noise that chauvinists thought of when two women were in an argument. A catfight, they’d called it in older days, and for the first time in his life, Rogers could understand why. They looked like two tigers—or bears, but “bear-fight” wasn’t as catchy—about to leap at each other and vie for dominance. But Rogers didn’t really consider himself a chauvinist, so he was mostly just terrified.

  “Get out,” Keffoule said with the kind of finality that only the narcissistic commander of a highly advanced fleet, hell-bent on getting someone to marry her, could muster.I

  Quinn hesitated for a moment, as though considering making a big deal out of the situation, but complied, walking out of the room with such a slow, measured pace that it could only have been intended to tell Keffoule exactly what she thought of her command. The Grand Marshal moved aside only just far enough to let the woman pass.

  Rogers and Keffoule stared at each other for a length of time until the click of Quinn’s heels vanished into the distance.

  “I’m unfamiliar with a lot of Thelicosan customs,” Rogers said, “but I am nearly positive that it is unacceptable for high-ranking officers to limp around a capital ship wearing only one shoe. I will require another.”

  What the hell was he talking about? He would “require” another? What kind of crazy pills had he taken? Maybe it had something to do with the IV he’d gotten in the infirmary bed, or maybe he really had needed whatever medicine Dr. Spectacles had been ready to stick into him via the now-broken syringe.

  To his surprise, t
his cocky, self-assured remark didn’t earn him another kick to the face. Keffoule actually smiled at him.

  “I will of course supply you with ample footwear,” she said. She tossed his shoe aside and, without looking, sank it into a waste receptacle. Rogers frowned. It might have been missing its partner, but it was still his damn shoe. If anyone was going to blindly throw it into a trash bin with superhuman accuracy, it should have been him.

  “Xan!” Keffoule barked suddenly, causing Rogers to duck, which made him feel a little silly. She was all the way on the other side of the room.

  The pale-faced man with the swinging cheeks came into the room. Well, he more appeared in the room; he made no noise or showed any sign of physical effort to move his body. The only indication that some sort of inertia was present was the subtle swinging of the things hanging off his face. What the hell were those?

  “Yes, Grand Marshal?”

  “The shoes, Xan.”

  Xan disappeared—was there a poofing noise?—and emerged from the hallway a moment later holding a pair of black shoes, nondescript except for a bit of brogue design at the toe. They looked suitable for a high-ranking officer or a bellhop. Rather than handing them to Keffoule or to Rogers, Xan bowed low and placed them gently on the floor, then backed away.

  “As I promised,” Keffoule said, gesturing grandly at the shoes. Her eyes sparkled like she’d just performed some kind of magic trick. Was there some other significance to this gift? Where was Tunger when Rogers needed him?

  They spent a moment staring at each other, Rogers’ feelings of impending doom slowly bleeding away. He wasn’t exactly in the best situation, but he was feeling less like he was about to die. Keffoule had said she’d wanted to marry him, after all. Unless Thelicosans were really strange, marrying a dead man wouldn’t yield a very exciting honeymoon.

  “So,” Rogers said, coming back around the bed so he was on the same side of it as Keffoule, who was still blocking the door. It took all his courage not to make a break for it—courage and the knowledge that he really didn’t have anywhere to run. And that even if he did have somewhere to run, he wasn’t a very fast runner. “What’s next?”