Captivate (Alien Cadets Book 2) Read online

  “She's kind of a fleshy thing, isn't she? But I like the fur."

  Claire almost blinked, but stopped herself. Translation. This could be very useful. But fur? She couldn't tell if the Tergre was looking at her hair or her dress.

  The Tergre female replied and Claire's glasses continued to translate.

  “What is its anthropological origin? Does it have a heraldic tradition?”

  “Um.” Claire didn't know what those words meant in English, let alone Tergre.

  "I've heard very little. The Spo kept such a tight lid on the planet during their probation.”

  "Well, I think they're adorable. So soft and squishy."

  Claire choked.

  “Somewhat inarticulate, isn’t it?” the male said.

  “Be nice, they are new to the Council.” The female switched back to the Merith language and said loudly, “CAN. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME?”

  Claire nodded. “Yes, yes. I - speak Spo and some Merith. I didn’t realize you were speaking to me.”

  “VERY.GOOD. YOU SPEAK WELL," the female shouted at her.

  Claire laughed. “Thank you very much. What may I serve you tonight?”

  They made their selection from the limited menu, and Claire went to the kitchen to tell the chef. After she returned to her station she tried to be unobtrusive while the couple gossiped about the other guests in quiet voices, but now that she knew what they were saying, it was harder to keep a straight face.

  "Oh my dear - will you look at Enrithsco? No, don't turn your whole self, she'll see!"

  "Is that an extra pouch?"

  "It is! Another little one, at her age. Can you imagine how angry her daughter is?"

  "Shh."

  Claire was so busy following their conversation (a few lines behind) that she didn't immediately realize when they asked her something.

  “I’m sorry. What was that?” she asked.

  “Art," said the male Tergre. He spoke in Merith, but her glasses kept translating anyway, which was a darn good thing because he spoke with a strong accent. "I’m an art dealer, and I recently saw a most interesting catalog of human art. You’ve seen it?”

  “Um... no. I haven’t seen it. But if you have questions about human art...?” Claire stumbled over the words and a pronunciation guide appeared in her glasses, prompting her. These glasses were so incredibly awesome.

  “The auditory portions were my favorite," the Tergre said. "Would you give my mate an example?”

  “Auditory portion...?"

  Her glasses came to her rescue again.

  Reference log:

  Auditory portion of the Catalog of Human Culture, Section 42: Singing and dancing.

  “Oh, you mean singing?” Claire said.

  The Tergre lifted his long nose, somewhat like an anteater, and made a muted hooting sound. It hit a few vague tones – sort of familiar.

  Translation uncertain. Best match from catalog: Stille Nacht or Silent Night.

  “Oh, I do know that song!" Claire said. These glasses were amazing. "It’s called Silent Night. We sing it during Christmas – a holiday.” Finally something she understood.

  They waited.

  “Oh, you want me to sing it?” She glanced around. A little awkward, but doable. A week’s pay, she told herself, it’s worth a week’s pay.

  Claire sang the first line softly, so as not to interrupt the fragile buzz of conversation in the room.

  No such luck. Dead silence fell. Claire cleared her throat, feeling her cheeks warm. “All is calm, all is bright...”

  She only knew the first verse, the one she’d sung in school choirs since she was in preschool. How surreal to sing it for a room full of aliens.

  She finished quickly, but when she was done Diva held up a hand like a conductor. “If you sing it once more, we can accompany you.”

  “Oh, no, that’s –”

  “An excellent suggestion for our guests!” Francois said. “Once more, please Claire.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Continue!”

  Her face red, Claire sang it again, but better this time. She’d started too high last time, could barely squeak out the notes. She glanced at Diva, when she was done, who was waving her hand with an ecstatic smile on her face.

  “Yes, I have it now,” Diva said.

  Claire started for a third time, and this time not just Diva, but all the others joined in. Juliet and Old Twin followed Claire exactly, and Diva sang a low, throbbing harmony she’d apparently made up on the spot. Sage’s voice was a nice baritone, and Athlete had a surprisingly rich tenor. He followed Diva when they did it the second time, and it was beautiful.

  The guests applauded/honked/twizzled their appreciation, and Francois was so pleased, he couldn’t stop twirling a frying pan in the air above his head.

  Surreal doesn’t even begin to cover this, Claire thought, but what fun.

  ***

  That night, she lay in bed with her glasses still on. The glasses had saved her tonight. Translations, hints, pronunciation. She was never letting them go.

  Being adrift for so long, she'd learned to pidgin or mime her way through conversations that got out of her depth. But it was so exhausting to never know for sure what someone was saying. Just speaking to the Rik in English had been an enormous relief, but it paled in comparison to what her glasses could do.

  Even if something terrible happened and she ended up on her own in Lower Selta, still hunted by Faal and his zookeeper, at least she could communicate with the people around her. She could ask for help in ways people would understand.

  Perhaps it was illogical, but Claire felt that as long as she had these glasses she would never be alone and vulnerable again. At least not in the terrifying, gut-wrenching way she'd been before.

  The other Rik were still down in the kitchen, and during their absence, Claire experimented with the glasses.

  “Um... Glasses. I’d like to see a map,” Claire said, softly.

  Specify location please

  “Map of Selta?”

  A revolving planet appeared before her, light blue lines marking the spatial approaches to Selta’s main shipyard on the surface. The shipyard was shown on the top, like it was the North Pole. Just under it, spreading in layers like an onion was Upper Selta (neatly labeled). A thick blue tube extended from the upper sprawl straight into the planet. It connected to a similar layered onion of civilization in the middle. Lower Selta. That tube must be what Sage called the Chunnel, but Claire didn’t remember traveling through it.

  Claire squinted at Upper Selta, trying to see where the shipyard connected. The map zoomed in, exactly to where she’d been looking.

  “Wow.”

  She could see the individual elevator shafts leading down from the loading bays, and she thought she could roughly trace the path she’d taken when she’d gotten off that first day. It seemed so long ago- but really just two days.

  “Can you tell me what ships are docked?” she asked.

  There was a pause. Then neat labels showed up, hovering over and around the different ports. Claire didn’t recognize any of the ship names. Final Say was gone, and she was surprisingly sad about that.

  “Can you show me my current location?”

  Need more data

  Please enter address or sector

  Hmm. So she was right. The glasses had no GPS or positioning system. They didn’t know where she was. That was good.

  “User data,” Claire tried, wondering who these glasses rightfully belonged to.

  Nothing.

  “Previous user. Previous owner. Former settings.”

  Hmm, no luck.

  She tried a different subject. “News reports.”

  An image popped up in front of her, some kind of Seltan news channel. There was no sound though, just a picture.

  “Subtitle?”

  The subtitles appeared, in English no less! “This is so cool.”

  Claire would never have guessed that anybody on Earth had d
eveloped such a great natural language translator. Certainly there was nothing this good when she was around. These glasses had to be worth a fortune! Did they belong to Basher? They were clearly meant for human use. But if he had these, why had he come to Final Say without them, speaking in his less than stellar Spo accent? If these were his, why would he ever take them off?

  That gave her another thought. “Show Earth?” she asked.

  ***

  Akemi was having so much fun. Sure, it was limiting to pretend to be a dumb computer, but she was starting to get the hang of it. She was realizing that she could show Claire rather complex things, if she waited for Claire to ask the right questions. And by responding certain ways, Akemi could actually communicate with her!

  Now this one, “Show Earth,” was tricky. She didn’t have any recent videos of Earth. She could access a few videos from the ship’s computer, but they weren’t great. The only good one was the video catalog that she and Shara had put together to showcase Earth’s culture.

  But she could hear the repressed shiver in Claire’s voice when she asked for Earth, and Akemi wanted to give her something better than that. Something to remind Claire that she was human and not Rik. Searching around through her various subsystems, Akemi came across several video files on Basher’s computer.

  Ah. This was perfect, it seemed to be some kind of vacation video.

  She heard Claire sigh when it started. It was a hand held video, a little shaky, of a campus in Boston.

  “I still don’t know why you wanted to visit Dartmouth,” Basher was saying. “You lured me up here with promises of a hike.” He was in the foreground of the video, talking to whoever was holding the camera.

  “Don’t you feel smarter already?” It was a woman’s voice, teasing and fun. “Anyway, we’ll go for that hike, but I’ve never been here before. The camera moved around, taking in stately, tree-lined pathways and ornate, brick buildings.

  “Hey, look at this squirrel,” Basher said. He crouched down and pointed to a big, gray squirrel that was inching towards him. “It’s as big as a cat.”

  He put out his hand and chirped and the squirrel crept a few steps closer.

  “Well, give him something,” the woman said.

  Basher reached slowly in his pocket and pulled out a stick of gum.

  “Not that, you’ll make it sick!”

  “Not that sick – haven’t you ever given gum to a squirrel?”

  The camera went sideways as the woman behind the camera handed him half a muffin.

  "That cost four bucks," Basher protested.

  "My video. Feed the squirrel."

  Basher rolled his eyes, but obligingly pinched off a piece and gave it to the squirrel.

  "Your turn, Karen," he said. They traded places (with more camera shaking) and now she fed the squirrel. She wore a beautiful engagement ring on her left hand.

  "Hey, please don't feed the squirrels." A campus security guy came into view and the video cut off abruptly with the sound of their embarrassed laughter.

  The video jumped to another scene. It was a view of a harbor, though Akemi didn’t know exactly where – perhaps they were still on vacation. The sky was cloudy and gray, and a strong wind was whipping up the waves. The woman, Karen, was in the video again. She held her arms out and the wind blew her straight blond hair wildly around her head. “This is so great!” she shouted over the wind. “I think there’ll be a storm. I already feel the drops.”

  “We should go in,” Basher said. “I don’t think I have any more clean pants in my suitcase.”

  She made a face and the video panned the length of the coast, showing dark rain clouds massing above the rocky shore, broken by an unexpected shaft of sunlight that momentarily formed a rainbow prism.

  "Did you get that?" Karen asked. "It was beautiful."

  "I did," Basher said. "But we really are getting wet now!"

  The rain was coming down faster, and Karen's hair was stuck to her back.

  Akemi was absorbed with the short video. She could almost smell the rain and the ocean. In the silence after it stopped, she realized Claire was crying.

  Akemi felt the heaviness of tears as well, but had no way to let them out.

  Claire folded up the glasses and put them under her pillow, effectively blinding them both.

  CHAPTER 22

  Basher watched the video recording of Claire receiving her injection in the medical room... again. There he was in the doorway while his partner led her into the room. Basher watched his digital self hang back in the doorway, visibly reluctant to enter.

  She answered questions, getting angry at him and going off about the foods she remembered from her childhood.

  He watched it carefully. The angle of the feed wasn’t great for getting her facial expression, but he was wondering if she'd known then about the escape plan. He watched her hands flutter for a second when he asked about her family. He watched her eyes dart back and forth between him and his partner while the syringe was slowly filled.

  Nothing.

  He switched to the video of the cell she’d been in. It had no audio, because the Rik never said anything worthwhile so the Spo didn’t bother. They just didn’t see the value in continual surveillance the way humans did. Basher had already pointed out that it was just such a situation as this that a continuous recording would be useful for, but there was no point in berating his partner again. In their defense, this was the first escape they’d had.

  After the lights went off in the cell the recording was no good. He could barely see anything, and of course, he couldn’t hear anything either. He went back to the moment when she’d been brought into the cell. The other Rik had been doing yoga or meditation or something and she’d sat uncertainly on the empty bed watching them.

  He watched the whole thing at high speed, only slowing whenever someone spoke. He’d watched this before, but now he watched their lips, doing his best to try lip reading.

  It was no good. Half the time they were turned away from the lens, and the other time... he just couldn’t tell what they were saying. He slapped his palms on the table.

  “I just can’t believe it has been a week, and we still can’t get a location on them. A week!” Basher said to Akemi.

  He knew she could hear and see him through his computer. He’d given her access to it, and at first he'd been self-conscious that she kept the tiny video recorder going non-stop, but he’d gotten used to it. He felt bad for her, trapped in a computer with only a few visual outlets. It was still hard for him to grasp that she was only a computer. Having never met her before, he kept picturing a real girl, stuck in her room, bored out of her mind, texting everybody she knew.

  He’d gotten used to her presence, and even started to enjoy bouncing ideas off of her. He had not gotten used to her reorganization of all his files and programs, but she insisted her way was better and he learned it was easier to let her have her own way.

  Sorry. Akemi printed in a small text box on his screen.

  She really hasn’t given me much to work with.

  “I would go stir-crazy stuck in a tiny little apartment above a tiny little restaurant for so many days,” Basher said. “Why doesn’t she leave?”

  She’s used to confinement. And she’s happy, mostly.

  “Don’t even get me started on that,” Basher said. “They’re Rik.”

  But they look human. It’s more than she’s had in a while.

  “So you don’t think she’s going to leave any time soon?”

  I can’t be sure. She COULD take a walk tomorrow, but I doubt it. :-(

  “Hmm.”

  Nothing new from the videos?

  Basher rolled his eyes. "No. And don't say 'I told you so,' because I'm not in the mood."

  He should have known that if Akemi got nothing useful from analyzing the video of their escape, he wouldn't either, but it hadn't stopped him from trying. Akemi seemed like a nice girl and all, but he wasn't about to let a sixteen year old girl (com
puter or not) take over his investigation. In fact, Basher had planned to independently confirm Akemi's diagnosis of Claire's fever at the time she'd left the embassy. He hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so he might as well do the work now. It made Basher feel marginally better to have something concrete to do.

  The cells were climate controlled, of course. All of Selta was climate controlled, because if there was a breach to the exterior of the planet and cold vacuum started pouring in, people wanted systems in place to notice and lock down before all their air escaped. Conversely, the mining processes in the center of Selta generated an incredible amount of heat. All of the habitable portions of Selta were heated from this excess, and a good bit of geothermal energy was gleaned from it. But if those systems of heat distribution broke down, the heat could build catastrophically in small pockets, and destroy whole sections of Selta.

  Which was all to say, the temperature of every dwelling, business, and bathroom on Selta was rigorously monitored.

  With a little digging, and a call to his partner for an access code, Basher got the heating logs for the cells of the Spo embassy. The data was raw, a confusing mess of a Spo spreadsheet, and it took him close to half an hour to make certain he’d found the right cell information for the right time. Then he used a simple program to figure out the average heat output to maintain that cell. He did the other cells while he was at it, just to make sure he was getting good numbers. Then he counterchecked the figures to determine how much the heating/cooling changed when an occupant was added to a cell. That took a while, the numbers being so slight... but he had months worth of data on the cells, and all he had to do was cross reference his own records that showed how many people had been in each cell on any given night.

  Eventually he had it, with a statistical reliability of .89... Each additional human in a cell caused the heating output to go down .015%. Give or take .003%.

  So, if Claire had a fever that took her from 98 degrees, to say, 103, would that make a difference? The math took him a while, and he even broke down and ran it by his partner (although that was kind of embarrassing).

  But the equations worked out. The output in their cell had gone down more than it should have for one additional person. He ran the equation the other way and pursed his lips in a silent whistle. If he’d done this right, she was running a fever of 106 or 107 by midnight when they’d escaped.