Marathon, The Future Starts Slow 2
The saga continues! See first chapter for content notes.
Previous chapter.
2. D. S. Rozinante
Mark opened his eyes, saw red, and closed them immediately. Whatever time it was, it was too early to look at Pfhor interior design. He just wanted to go back to sleep...
Too late. He was awake, sore, and in dire need of a piss.
He rolled off the shelf and onto his feet, accidentally kicking his helmet across the floor; he caught it before it hit the wall and checked the time on the readouts inside. He'd slept fourteen hours straight through, not too bad. He could get more later if he needed it; he had other things to take care of first, like finding out where the hell everything was. Especially the bathroom.
The first door he tried opened onto a tiny round room filled with small overlapping terraces, each one bearing colorful, bizarrely-shaped alien plants that looked like they had been recently trimmed and pruned. One set of terraces even had a clear greenish liquid trickling down it from the top through a winding channel carved into the soil. He had to squint at the room for a couple of seconds, then put two and two together and grinned. So the Pfhor's most fearsome admiral had been into gardening. Cute. Not exactly what he needed at the moment, though, so he moved on.
After a little more trial and error, he found a room that - well, it had a drain in the floor and water came out of a hole in the wall when he accidentally hit a switch with his elbow, so he took care of business and went back out to the main room.
He was contemplating the sorry state of his battle armor when something buzzed overhead and Durandal said, "You won't be needing that for a few days; the S'pht and I have cleared the ship of those few Pfhor that survived the initial purge."
"Poor bastards," Mark said, without much feeling. "You busy?"
"Not especially. What do you want?"
"Shower, change of clothes, and a five-course breakfast, but I'll settle for directions to a replicator I can mess with." His stomach was cramping with hunger, his clothes were pretty much fit to be incinerated, and if there was a shower in the possible bathroom he hadn't seen it; a replicator could fix about two-thirds of those problems, at least if he could figure out how to work one like the S'pht did.
"I've already reprogrammed the one in Tfear's actual bedroom for human use," Durandal said. "It's the room right behind you. For the record, you slept on a trophy shelf in his stateroom. Wishing you were in stasis yet?"
"No, thanks." He started hauling guns into the real bedroom, which he'd glanced at but not given a real look, and once they were stowed in a closet - except his pistols, those stayed with him regardless of Durandal's assurances - he started searching for the replicator.
A panel in the red wall next to a small keypad with Pfhor script slid open to reveal a plate of something he could only guess was a food-like substance. "There," Durandal said. "You can take your battle armor to the S'pht in engineering when you're done; there are some improvements I've been wanting to make to it."
"Yeah? And I get a say in this when?"
"Never," Durandal said with a terrifying cheeriness. "Eat up and leave me alone, I have sensors to upgrade."
Mark took the plate and silently thanked God he wasn't a picky eater; the stuff was edible, but a step below protein bars in terms of taste, and those ranked about even with pet food. Hell, pet food probably tasted better. He stripped off the rest of the battle armor between bites, hoping that the S'pht didn't have a sense of smell, and once the plate was clean he got the pieces together and set out to find engineering.
This was it, he thought as he wandered the halls in search of S'pht. This was going to be the rest of his life: shitty food - at least until he figured out how to work the replicator himself - hideous Pfhor design, running around antique heaps of junk getting shot at, and Durandal ordering him around. And he'd chosen it himself for some damn fool reason instead of - well, instead of dying in a nova, fine, that hadn't exactly been on his to-do list. Where there was life there was hope, though he didn't know what exactly he had to hope for at the moment besides figuring out where the fuck engineering was on this goddamn gigantic ship. After two hours of searching he hadn't seen a single S'pht or S'pht'Kr, let alone a group of them, or anything that looked like it might be an engineering section. Damned if he was going to ask Durandal for directions again, but he had to wonder where they had all gone. "Hey, Durandal? How many S'pht are actually on this ship?"
"You really don't understand the concept of 'I'm busy,' do you?" Durandal didn't sound all that annoyed about it this time, at least. "One hundred and twenty-four freed S'pht, mostly from Boomer's original crew along with a few of the survivors from Battle Group Seven and the garrison, and ninety-five S'pht'Kr. The usual complement for a ship of this class is much larger, of course, but the majority of the S'pht wanted to join the immediate fight against the Pfhor, and it's not as if I actually require more than a skeleton crew. And you, for entertainment."
"Ah, got it." He wondered just how many audiovisual sensors and speakers Durandal had at his disposal. Clearly enough to make life awkward.
"Is there any particular reason you're in the Juggernaut storage bays, or do you need directions again?"
Mark looked around the huge, barren gray room he was in and sighed. "No, I got to learn my way around this place somehow," he said. The mapping function in his helmet would have been useful, but who wanted to rely on a map to get around their own damn home? Better to figure out things by eye, especially if his battle armor was going to be stuck getting "improved" for a while. "I don't guess I'm anywhere near engineering yet, am I?"
"Not even close," Durandal said. "Try heading down and towards the rear of the ship - that would be your left. Just let me know when you're bored and ready for a stasis cell."
"Yeah, I'm getting a little tired of that joke."
"Suit yourself. I did warn you."
Mark gave the ceiling the finger and took a dark brown hallway to his left. It took him another hour, but he finally ran into a pair of S'pht he could follow the rest of the way to a set of rooms filled with moving parts, pink and green liquid flowing through rectangular channels, and plenty of S'pht, which spelled engineering to him. They mostly ignored him, except for one in an orange cloak that floated down from a high ledge and hovered in front of him with an expectant air. He held up the battle armor even as he realized he had no idea whether S'pht had hands, and when the S'pht's cloak opened he jumped back instinctively, waiting for the attack.
Instead of an energy bolt, a pair of slender mechanical arms with three delicate jointed fingers around an oval palm unfolded from the S'pht's briefly revealed exoskeleton. "Oh," Mark said, feeling like an idiot. "Sorry, I just - habit, you know?"
The S'pht murmured something in their language and took the armor, joining one of the small groups clustered around a Pfhor machine. Mark watched for a couple of minutes while the S'pht poked and pried at the armor, but he didn't have anything to contribute and having so many S'pht around - what looked like the whole hundred and twenty-odd that Durandal had said were on board - kind of made him nervous even if they were ignoring him, so he went back down the blue-gray metal corridor he'd come in through and started looking for the way back to Tfear's quarters.
On the way, he thought that maybe his life would be easier if he took up gardening.
---
The next few days Mark spent getting acclimated in various ways to the ship: what Pfhor furniture looked like, which teleporters still worked and where they led, the most useful landmarks for finding his quarters, when the plants in Tfear's closet garden needed watering, how to use the bathroom right - which was a big relief to his nose - and most importantly, how to make the replicator produce new shirts and real food. It wasn't like he had much else to do with no sign of Durandal's rogue star, no pursuit from or random encounters with the Pfhor, and his battle armor still off getting fixed by the S'pht. Exploration was the one that took up most of his time; no matter how big it was, Mark wanted to know his way around every inch of the Rozinante.
Well, as many inches of it as he could get to. On the second day he ran into a free-standing circular room within a maze of red-walled tunnels and tried to enter, but every single one of the six pinkish-brown doors was sealed shut. He hadn't talked to Durandal since the trip to engineering, because he was going to break something if he heard one more crack about stasis chambers, but what the hell, curiosity could only kill the cat so many times. "Durandal, what's this room? You got it locked up for a reason?"
There was a full five-second pause before Durandal said, "You must have a knack for finding exactly where you shouldn't be. Yes, it's sealed for a reason, so stay out of there."
"What, is it radioactive or something?" Mark started edging away from the room just in case. Lack of shields made a person cautious.
"No, and it's none of your business."
"Oh, c'mon," Mark said. There was a terminal set in the wall nearby; he gave it a meaningful look, with the intended meaning of I can stand here and annoy you all day so you might as well give up now. "You can tell me."
"If you absolutely must know," Durandal said, "it's the primary computer core, and I have it sealed off in the interests of preventing any mischief you or the Pfhor might be tempted to commit. I'm still working on improving the less physical aspects of the defenses, but that's not the point. The point is, go away, because this area is off-limits."
"Got it, no picnics." Come to think of it, the tunnels had looked a little familiar, but he spent what was probably an unhealthy amount of time not thinking about the last time he'd seen Durandal's core and the month of captivity that had followed it, so maybe it wasn't too surprising he hadn't recognized the layout right off. He got out of there as fast as he could anyway, after making sure he would know the place again if he found it; he didn't need to get on Durandal's bad side by hanging around where he wasn't wanted.
Sometime during the third day - well, he was calling them days, but he had no idea how much time was actually passing without his helmet and just counted the time he was awake as a day - he ran across a small group of S'pht who were loaded down with bundles of ragged but brightly colored cloth. For lack of anywhere better to go, he followed them down to the ship's lower levels, where they disappeared through a large door and came back out empty-handed almost immediately, then split up and left, ignoring him entirely. Mark waited till they were gone before trying the door himself and walking through it into a veritable Wonderland.
It was an armory. Hundreds of Pfhor shock staffs lined the walls, with rows of Enforcer flamethrowers and Trooper assault rifles lined up in orderly ranks below them. Other weapons he didn't recognize had been sorted into neat stacks near the back of the room or hung up above the shock staffs like trophies.
His eyes might have gotten a little misty just looking at all that potential for mass destruction.
The cloth bundles that the S'pht had brought in had been dumped on the floor to join a messy heap of similar bundles and junked Hunter armor; he tried unrolling a few of the neater-looking wraps, but all he saw on them were weird designs and some red embroidered Pfhor script. Decorative banners, maybe, or campaign trophies or something, he couldn't tell. Not surprising the S'pht would want to take them down, at any rate.
He left those alone, but took one of the shock staffs and an armful of the Enforcers' guns back up to his room to store with the rest of his guns in the closet he was using as a weapons locker, and went back down with his assault rifle to see if the ammo clips and grenade packs for the Troopers' weapons would work with his. They didn't, but he took some anyway along with one of the rifles, because if anyone was going to get some use out of extra weapons, it was going to be him.
On the fourth day Mark found the stasis chambers.
They were instantly recognizable, even though they seemed to be a more advanced type than the ones on Boomer, and there were a lot more of them, presumably so the flagship of the Pfhor's best admiral could also carry the most slaves. Still hard to forget what they looked like, after getting stuck in one for seventeen damn years like a piece of meat in a - he took a deep breath and walked up and down the twisting halls, checking each chamber. All of them were empty; seemed like Durandal had meant it when he'd said he had let Robert Blake and the other humans he'd taken from Tau Ceti go.
Mark sat on a narrow yellow ledge across from a row of the chambers and tried to figure out how he felt about that. Relieved that Blake and the BoBs were on their way home like they had wanted? Angry that they had skipped out and left him behind with Durandal? A little - or a lot - of both? Something else entirely that he didn't know how to express? It was the kind of shit that would make his head hurt, if he got headaches from anything but exploding suns.
Mainly, he thought that he was tired. The kind of dull, bone-deep tired that sleep didn't fix.
"I did tell you I let Blake go," Durandal said, after Mark had been contemplating things for a few minutes. "Do you think I'd lie to you about that?"
"Nah, I figured you were telling the truth." He had, contrary to his usual expectations of Durandal as it was. "Just nice to see the proof." You're invited to come with us when we leave, Blake had said, and for a while he'd even believed it could happen. Shit. He should have known better; he hadn't been that lucky since the day the Pfhor first attacked the Marathon.
"Good riddance, anyway," Durandal said. "They were always whining, the ingrates. Never a word of thanks for saving them from becoming radioactive paste on Tau Ceti, either. First they whined about being prisoners, so I gave them guns to fight. Then they whined about being stuck on the ship so I had you help them capture a fortress and they whined about that - really, if they want to limp back to Sol on that clunker you cleared out for them without even saying good-bye, who cares?" His voice had a sulky undertone to it, almost like -
Holy fuck. Blake had actually hurt Durandal's feelings by escaping. Mark didn't know whether to laugh at him or lose it. Instead, a strange aching feeling rose up in his chest, and it took him a minute to realize it was a kind of reluctant sympathy. Maybe Durandal hadn't wanted to go back to Earth or Mars anyway, but he'd been abandoned by Blake, same as Mark, and by most of the S'pht he had spent seventeen years with as well.
Or maybe Mark was coming down with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. That seemed pretty likely.
"Whatever," Durandal said, his usual smugness back in full force. "You were the only useful one, anyway, and I still have you."
"Yeah, I guess you do." Mark leaned back against the wall and decided he didn't want to think about missed chances anymore. "So, want to tell me more about this place we're headed to?"
"Curiosity? That's a first from you; you're usually so mindlessly obedient."
"Well, maybe it's time for a change around here," Mark said. "Can't say I would mind knowing what I'm supposed to do ahead of time. And what I might be up against." He'd been thrown into more than enough situations blind already, getting a heads-up would be a novelty.
"Nothing you can't handle, I'm sure," said Durandal. "From what I know of the planet, it should be entirely deserted. It's difficult to find something that's constantly moving on a separate path from the rest of the galaxy - for anyone besides me, that is. At most, there may be a small Pfhor force that was forgotten there or a few other lost souls that happened on it by accident and couldn't find a way off."
"Uh-huh. Sounds too good to be true."
"It probably is; I'm hoping for death traps, that would be a nice change of pace."
Mark's eyebrows raised at that, but he kept his knee-jerk response - Yeah, I can't imagine why Blake didn't want to stick around for this trip - to himself. "Death traps, huh? Set up to protect anything in particular, or just for kicks?"
"That's for me to know and you to die trying to find out," Durandal said. "Though simply as a matter of convenience, I'd prefer it if you tried not to die. I've finished improving your battle armor, by the way, so you can pick it up whenever you want."
"Sure, I'll go get it now. Starting to feel kind of drafty without it." Mark didn't actually get up just yet, even though the ledge was getting uncomfortable. "Seriously, though, what are you looking for?"
"Do you only read the parts of my messages that say 'Kill things' and 'break things'? Because even for you, it should be obvious."
Mark wasn't about to admit that he did skip a lot of Durandal's rambling, so he racked his brains for any useful memories. "Jjaro technology, right? You think that planet was one of their bases and they left some behind?"
"There may be hope for you yet," Durandal said. "Why don't you think about it a little harder while you're getting your armor? I have work to do."
"Yeah, always nice talking to you, too."
When he retrieved his battle armor from the S'pht in engineering, it was clean but otherwise didn't look any different, even when he slipped the helmet on to check the displays. Well, he would find out what Durandal had improved eventually; he just hoped it wouldn't be something too obnoxious.
---
The sixth time Mark woke up, it was to a face full of orange cloak. He was still mostly asleep and instinct kicked in; he rolled off the low-slung bed and had his fusion pistol in hand before common sense took over and he realized the S'pht was just hovering by the bed, not firing at him. Shit, he really needed to quit reacting like that, but it was the first time any of the S'pht had shown up in his quarters and for all he knew it meant something was about to blow up. Though there weren't any flashing lights or alarming noises, so there were probably no explosions forthcoming.
He slid the pistol under the bed and stood up, incredibly grateful that he didn't sleep naked, and was trying to decide if he should talk Durandal into translating for him again when the S'pht said, in blurred but recognizable English, "Hhello, fuckerr."
"What?"
"Good morning," Durandal said, projecting his voice from the room's single terminal with an extra helping of loud, irritating cheerfulness. "This is Mn'rhi, who has graciously agreed to help teach you S'pht, since he already has some grasp of spoken English."
"He just called me a fucker!" Mark rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was still asleep and having some kind of horrifyingly realistic nightmare.
"Hhello, fuckerr?"
"Seriously, what the fuck?" Mark said.
"Lhike shit," the S'pht offered helpfully. "Fuck you too?"
"Unfortunately, as you may have guessed," Durandal said, "Mn'rhi's introduction to English came through a man named Volker Von Müller, who was - let's put it this way, he was even less happy to end up on Boomer than you were. And didn't like having no one but the S'pht and myself for company."
This was definitely a nightmare. One he was never going to be able to wake up from. "Let me guess," Mark said. "You've got shit to do, so you're not going to stick around and help translate in case of misunderstandings."
"I must be getting predictable," Durandal said. "I'll have to work on that while you two are getting to know each other. Have fun."
"I fucking hate being right," Mark told the S'pht, who was still regarding him from across the bed. "Is he that much of an asshole to you guys, too?"
"What the fuck?"
"You said it."
Via gestures and strategic application of profanity, Mark managed to escort Mn'rhi out to the stateroom and bought himself enough time to change his shirt and get a protein bar out of the replicator before settling down for language lessons. Starting with the basics.
"My - name - is - Mark."
"Markh."
"Close enough. Now you. What - is - your - name? Just like I said it."
"My nhame is Mn'rhi, fuckerr."
"And you were doing so well."
Eventually he got Mn'rhi to stop treating "fucker" like punctuation, but he didn't make much progress otherwise. Mn'rhi could repeat whatever Mark said like a pro, but it was hard to tell how much the S'pht actually understood, besides Mark's name. After about an hour of playing parrot he was ready to give up and do something more interesting, but Mn'rhi didn't budge when Mark tried to get him to leave. Admittedly, Mark's method of pointing at the door to the hallway and saying "Finished? Go? Go away?" might have been the problem; he could swear he heard Durandal laughing somewhere in the distance.
Mark tried one final "Go away," holding his arm out as long as he could, but Mn'rhi remained floating in place on the other side of the stateroom's table until Mark finally gave in and let his arm drop. "Fine, fuck, do whatever you want," he said. "Sit there all day, I don't care." He wasn't a goddamn teacher, the whole thing was a stupid idea to begin with. Maybe they could work out a system for talking through the terminals that wouldn't involve Durandal or something.
He started to get up from the uncomfortably sized Pfhor chair, figuring he'd get something more substantial to eat, maybe see if he could find the ship's bridge, and Mn'rhi said, "Markh. Stop."
Mark stopped.
"I teach," Mn'rhi said. "Your turn listen. Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"
"What?"
"Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"
"Uh," Mark said. "Suroh - eechaloo nah - Mark nee? Is that 'hello, my name is Mark'?"
"You well try," said Mn'rhi. "Listen well also. Sro y'halu nha -"
By the time Mn'rhi was satisfied and left, Mark could say hello, introduce himself, and ask and answer a question he was pretty sure meant "how are you" with reasonably accurate pronunciation. S'pht was a real tongue-twister and he'd never been much good at languages to begin with, but Mn'rhi was remorseless when it came to making Mark repeat words until he got the sounds - and the pitch - just right. Mark spent the rest of the day grumbling over his weapons while he cleaned them and occasionally practicing the phrases Mn'rhi had taught him, with the nagging feeling that he was getting them more wrong the more he tried to get them right.
His vague hopes that he could maybe get away with only the one S'pht language lesson were dashed when he got up the next morning and found two S'pht and one of the blue-armored S'pht'Kr in the stateroom, waiting for him. "Uh, shit," he said. "Sro y'halu nha? Right?" Both of the S'pht had orange cloaks like Mn'rhi. Was one of them Mn'rhi? Fuck, he was going to have to learn to tell them apart and he had no idea how when they all had the same goddamn cloak-and-helmet combination.
"Sro y'halu nha," said both of the S'pht at the same time in a weird harmony, and one added, "Hhello, Markh."
Well, that was one way to identify them. "Hey, Mn'rhi. What's up with the audience?" No answer. Shit. "Um. You over there - nia pht'sah?"
"S'pht'Yorh Yr'fa ni," the other S'pht said, after another long pause, and then it - he? She? Who the fuck knew - turned to Mn'rhi and said more things that Mark couldn't parse while the S'pht'Kr just stared at him in silence.
Mn'rhi answered Yr'fa, then said, "Two heads arre betterh than one. Dhurrandhal this spoke."
"Yeah, I should've known," Mark said, sighing as he settled down at the stateroom's table. "What the hell, let's get this party started - hope you all weren't expecting snacks."
And that was how Mark's new daily routine started: two hours with the S'pht every morning after he woke up, getting their language drilled into his head by Mn'rhi and a rotating group of other S'pht. Sometimes it was just one new S'pht, sometimes there were as many as five or six others crowding into the stateroom to correct his tones and lecture him on grammar like he was a rookie in training again, and there was always at least one S'pht'Kr hanging around in the background, silently observing without participating. On top of that, though he'd barely caught a glimpse of the S'pht during his earlier trips through the Rozinante, now it seemed like he couldn't take two steps out of his quarters without running into one and having to say hi and go through introductions and the pleasantries he'd memorized, frequently with the sound of Durandal's laughter echoing just far enough away that he wasn't entirely sure he was really hearing it.
He didn't bother with trying to teach them English after that first day. Mn'rhi's was workable enough and getting better, and they were the majority on the ship; it made more sense for him to learn their language, anyway. Which came hand-in-hand with learning other things about the S'pht...
Like what he found out going over verbs with Mn'rhi during the third lesson. Mn'rhi wanted to know how they worked in English - as did four other S'pht, apparently - so Mark was trying to figure out some good ones to use as examples and what few grammar terms he remembered from school. "Okay, here's an easy one," he said. "Present tense for the word 'run,' which is what I was doing all the time down on Lh'owon... It goes I run, you run, he or she or it runs, we run, you all run, they run, and, uh, the infinite is 'to run,' and the gerudo - gerrand - whatever, I don't remember what that one does anyway. So, those are the basic parts, you got them?"
Mn'rhi repeated them thoughtfully, then said, "Understand. For similar word, infinite 'vronh,' fast fly. Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia. Vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah."
"Right..." Mark fiddled with the terminal set into the table while he parsed it out. "Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia, vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah - so, I get that 'sah' is you, but what's 'pah'? He, she, or it?"
"Pah is all," Mn'rhi said, but another S'pht in a purple cloak spoke up with what sounded like disagreement, and then so did Yr'fa, who had shown up a few minutes after the four strange S'pht. After some brief discussion amongst the three of them Mn'rhi said, "Pah is none. He, she, it. All are none."
"All are none? What does that mean?" Mark asked.
Another quick discussion, this one involving all six of the S'pht, before Mn'rhi said, "What means he, she, it?"
"Well - uh - see, humans come in a few different flavors, and the two most common ones are - um - Durandal? You want to help for once? I don't know that I can explain this one, and don't even pretend you haven't been listening."
"Oh, but I think I could watch you fail to explain human biology and English grammar all day," Durandal said from the tabletop terminal, and Mark snatched his hands away from it. "Money can't buy that kind of entertainment."
"Fucking hell - so I'll learn to juggle or whatever," Mark said, "just fix this. Please." If he had to give a bunch of cybernetic aliens the birds and bees talk while Durandal was listening he was going to throw himself out of an airlock.
"Fine, I'll intervene this once, but you're on your own for everything else."
The S'pht clustered around the terminal for a few silent moments, communicating directly with Durandal - or so Mark assumed - and then Durandal said, "That explains it."
"What explains what?"
"I may have made a slight miscalculation in the original translator program," Durandal said. "I assumed all of the S'pht on Boomer were the same sex and gender. In fact, all S'pht are one sex and gender; therefore the language has a single third-person pronoun. One of those little oversights that only becomes obvious in retrospect, really."
Mark stared at the S'pht for a few moments, then shrugged. "Well, I guess that makes some things easier."
"That's all you have to say?" Durandal said, a slight edge of menace in his voice. "No clever little remarks up your sleeve? No wry observations?"
"Damn right it's all I have to say. I like breathing." Mark wasn't going to rub Durandal's mistake in his nonexistent face. At least, not right at that moment. Some day when he had an argument he needed to win, maybe.
"All right, then," Durandal said, "enjoy the rest of the lesson, I'm going back to work. By the way, the words you were looking for are 'infinitive' and 'gerund.'"
"Got it," Mark said, and the terminal clicked off.
"Understand you pah?" Mn'rhi asked.
"Yeah, I understand it, let's keep going."
True to his word, Durandal refused to provide any more translation help, so Mark got to muddle through further lessons all on his own, learning all kinds of exciting facts: that the S'pht had a separate verb conjugation for acting as an entire clan; that Mn'rhi was in some kind of relationship with both Yr'fa and Mn'serh, a purple-cloaked S'pht; that S'pht had four different past tenses and three future ones; that levels of politeness were dictated by tones and so were some kinds of questions, but not others; and most important of all, how to recognize different S'pht. Some of them, anyway. He still didn't know how they told each other apart, but he was getting to the point where he knew Mn'rhi by the scratches in the metal of one shoulder, Yr'fa by a pair of dents in the joints of their helmet, Lharro by a discolored patch of metal on the side of their head, Mn'serh by a clumsily mended tear in their cloak... Maybe not the most sophisticated system, but it worked for him and the S'pht didn't seem to mind as long as he was getting their names right.
As for the S'pht'Kr - Mark tried talking to one once when he ran into them on his way to the armory, just a nice polite "Sro y'halu nha," and got the longest, coldest silent stare from them he'd gotten from anyone - human, alien, or AI - in his life. He was sweating bullets and wondering if he should duck when the S'pht'Kr finally hissed "Sroi'halu nha" back and passed by him.
He stayed flat against the green wall until he was sure the S'pht'Kr was out of earshot before he said, "Holy shit, what was that about?"
"The linguistic drift, or something else?" Durandal said. "Because spending two thousand years in isolation from other speakers of a certain language does in fact result in pronunciation and vocabulary shifts, which is why -"
"Do I look like I fucking care? I thought the damn thing was going to shoot me just for saying hi!"
"Oh, that. S'bhita is an Older - Elder, essentially, I should update that - of the S'pht'Kr, I doubt they're used to being addressed so casually. And the S'pht'Kr have been adamant that as long as I bring no direct harm to the S'pht they have no interest in my affairs, which would include you. I think they'd like to pretend you aren't on board at all, actually; something about human anatomy disturbs them. Too many fingers."
"Great, that's real nice to know," Mark said. "I guess we're all just one big fucking happy family here on the good ship Rozie."
"It's Rozinante. D. S. Rozinante, to be precise."
"Because that's not a mouthful at all." Mark peeled himself off the wall and started heading for the armory again. "What's the D. S. stand for?"
"Do you really have to ask?" Durandal said.
He didn't. "Durandal's ship?"
"Got it in one, I'm so proud. Now try not to aggravate the rest of the 'family' and we might even get somewhere."
Mark decided he wasn't going to hold his breath on that one.
Next chapter.
Marathon, characters, etc. © Bungie, who should totally let me write for them because of reasons.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://brief-transit.dreamwidth.org/185372.html .
Previous chapter.
2. D. S. Rozinante
Mark opened his eyes, saw red, and closed them immediately. Whatever time it was, it was too early to look at Pfhor interior design. He just wanted to go back to sleep...
Too late. He was awake, sore, and in dire need of a piss.
He rolled off the shelf and onto his feet, accidentally kicking his helmet across the floor; he caught it before it hit the wall and checked the time on the readouts inside. He'd slept fourteen hours straight through, not too bad. He could get more later if he needed it; he had other things to take care of first, like finding out where the hell everything was. Especially the bathroom.
The first door he tried opened onto a tiny round room filled with small overlapping terraces, each one bearing colorful, bizarrely-shaped alien plants that looked like they had been recently trimmed and pruned. One set of terraces even had a clear greenish liquid trickling down it from the top through a winding channel carved into the soil. He had to squint at the room for a couple of seconds, then put two and two together and grinned. So the Pfhor's most fearsome admiral had been into gardening. Cute. Not exactly what he needed at the moment, though, so he moved on.
After a little more trial and error, he found a room that - well, it had a drain in the floor and water came out of a hole in the wall when he accidentally hit a switch with his elbow, so he took care of business and went back out to the main room.
He was contemplating the sorry state of his battle armor when something buzzed overhead and Durandal said, "You won't be needing that for a few days; the S'pht and I have cleared the ship of those few Pfhor that survived the initial purge."
"Poor bastards," Mark said, without much feeling. "You busy?"
"Not especially. What do you want?"
"Shower, change of clothes, and a five-course breakfast, but I'll settle for directions to a replicator I can mess with." His stomach was cramping with hunger, his clothes were pretty much fit to be incinerated, and if there was a shower in the possible bathroom he hadn't seen it; a replicator could fix about two-thirds of those problems, at least if he could figure out how to work one like the S'pht did.
"I've already reprogrammed the one in Tfear's actual bedroom for human use," Durandal said. "It's the room right behind you. For the record, you slept on a trophy shelf in his stateroom. Wishing you were in stasis yet?"
"No, thanks." He started hauling guns into the real bedroom, which he'd glanced at but not given a real look, and once they were stowed in a closet - except his pistols, those stayed with him regardless of Durandal's assurances - he started searching for the replicator.
A panel in the red wall next to a small keypad with Pfhor script slid open to reveal a plate of something he could only guess was a food-like substance. "There," Durandal said. "You can take your battle armor to the S'pht in engineering when you're done; there are some improvements I've been wanting to make to it."
"Yeah? And I get a say in this when?"
"Never," Durandal said with a terrifying cheeriness. "Eat up and leave me alone, I have sensors to upgrade."
Mark took the plate and silently thanked God he wasn't a picky eater; the stuff was edible, but a step below protein bars in terms of taste, and those ranked about even with pet food. Hell, pet food probably tasted better. He stripped off the rest of the battle armor between bites, hoping that the S'pht didn't have a sense of smell, and once the plate was clean he got the pieces together and set out to find engineering.
This was it, he thought as he wandered the halls in search of S'pht. This was going to be the rest of his life: shitty food - at least until he figured out how to work the replicator himself - hideous Pfhor design, running around antique heaps of junk getting shot at, and Durandal ordering him around. And he'd chosen it himself for some damn fool reason instead of - well, instead of dying in a nova, fine, that hadn't exactly been on his to-do list. Where there was life there was hope, though he didn't know what exactly he had to hope for at the moment besides figuring out where the fuck engineering was on this goddamn gigantic ship. After two hours of searching he hadn't seen a single S'pht or S'pht'Kr, let alone a group of them, or anything that looked like it might be an engineering section. Damned if he was going to ask Durandal for directions again, but he had to wonder where they had all gone. "Hey, Durandal? How many S'pht are actually on this ship?"
"You really don't understand the concept of 'I'm busy,' do you?" Durandal didn't sound all that annoyed about it this time, at least. "One hundred and twenty-four freed S'pht, mostly from Boomer's original crew along with a few of the survivors from Battle Group Seven and the garrison, and ninety-five S'pht'Kr. The usual complement for a ship of this class is much larger, of course, but the majority of the S'pht wanted to join the immediate fight against the Pfhor, and it's not as if I actually require more than a skeleton crew. And you, for entertainment."
"Ah, got it." He wondered just how many audiovisual sensors and speakers Durandal had at his disposal. Clearly enough to make life awkward.
"Is there any particular reason you're in the Juggernaut storage bays, or do you need directions again?"
Mark looked around the huge, barren gray room he was in and sighed. "No, I got to learn my way around this place somehow," he said. The mapping function in his helmet would have been useful, but who wanted to rely on a map to get around their own damn home? Better to figure out things by eye, especially if his battle armor was going to be stuck getting "improved" for a while. "I don't guess I'm anywhere near engineering yet, am I?"
"Not even close," Durandal said. "Try heading down and towards the rear of the ship - that would be your left. Just let me know when you're bored and ready for a stasis cell."
"Yeah, I'm getting a little tired of that joke."
"Suit yourself. I did warn you."
Mark gave the ceiling the finger and took a dark brown hallway to his left. It took him another hour, but he finally ran into a pair of S'pht he could follow the rest of the way to a set of rooms filled with moving parts, pink and green liquid flowing through rectangular channels, and plenty of S'pht, which spelled engineering to him. They mostly ignored him, except for one in an orange cloak that floated down from a high ledge and hovered in front of him with an expectant air. He held up the battle armor even as he realized he had no idea whether S'pht had hands, and when the S'pht's cloak opened he jumped back instinctively, waiting for the attack.
Instead of an energy bolt, a pair of slender mechanical arms with three delicate jointed fingers around an oval palm unfolded from the S'pht's briefly revealed exoskeleton. "Oh," Mark said, feeling like an idiot. "Sorry, I just - habit, you know?"
The S'pht murmured something in their language and took the armor, joining one of the small groups clustered around a Pfhor machine. Mark watched for a couple of minutes while the S'pht poked and pried at the armor, but he didn't have anything to contribute and having so many S'pht around - what looked like the whole hundred and twenty-odd that Durandal had said were on board - kind of made him nervous even if they were ignoring him, so he went back down the blue-gray metal corridor he'd come in through and started looking for the way back to Tfear's quarters.
On the way, he thought that maybe his life would be easier if he took up gardening.
---
The next few days Mark spent getting acclimated in various ways to the ship: what Pfhor furniture looked like, which teleporters still worked and where they led, the most useful landmarks for finding his quarters, when the plants in Tfear's closet garden needed watering, how to use the bathroom right - which was a big relief to his nose - and most importantly, how to make the replicator produce new shirts and real food. It wasn't like he had much else to do with no sign of Durandal's rogue star, no pursuit from or random encounters with the Pfhor, and his battle armor still off getting fixed by the S'pht. Exploration was the one that took up most of his time; no matter how big it was, Mark wanted to know his way around every inch of the Rozinante.
Well, as many inches of it as he could get to. On the second day he ran into a free-standing circular room within a maze of red-walled tunnels and tried to enter, but every single one of the six pinkish-brown doors was sealed shut. He hadn't talked to Durandal since the trip to engineering, because he was going to break something if he heard one more crack about stasis chambers, but what the hell, curiosity could only kill the cat so many times. "Durandal, what's this room? You got it locked up for a reason?"
There was a full five-second pause before Durandal said, "You must have a knack for finding exactly where you shouldn't be. Yes, it's sealed for a reason, so stay out of there."
"What, is it radioactive or something?" Mark started edging away from the room just in case. Lack of shields made a person cautious.
"No, and it's none of your business."
"Oh, c'mon," Mark said. There was a terminal set in the wall nearby; he gave it a meaningful look, with the intended meaning of I can stand here and annoy you all day so you might as well give up now. "You can tell me."
"If you absolutely must know," Durandal said, "it's the primary computer core, and I have it sealed off in the interests of preventing any mischief you or the Pfhor might be tempted to commit. I'm still working on improving the less physical aspects of the defenses, but that's not the point. The point is, go away, because this area is off-limits."
"Got it, no picnics." Come to think of it, the tunnels had looked a little familiar, but he spent what was probably an unhealthy amount of time not thinking about the last time he'd seen Durandal's core and the month of captivity that had followed it, so maybe it wasn't too surprising he hadn't recognized the layout right off. He got out of there as fast as he could anyway, after making sure he would know the place again if he found it; he didn't need to get on Durandal's bad side by hanging around where he wasn't wanted.
Sometime during the third day - well, he was calling them days, but he had no idea how much time was actually passing without his helmet and just counted the time he was awake as a day - he ran across a small group of S'pht who were loaded down with bundles of ragged but brightly colored cloth. For lack of anywhere better to go, he followed them down to the ship's lower levels, where they disappeared through a large door and came back out empty-handed almost immediately, then split up and left, ignoring him entirely. Mark waited till they were gone before trying the door himself and walking through it into a veritable Wonderland.
It was an armory. Hundreds of Pfhor shock staffs lined the walls, with rows of Enforcer flamethrowers and Trooper assault rifles lined up in orderly ranks below them. Other weapons he didn't recognize had been sorted into neat stacks near the back of the room or hung up above the shock staffs like trophies.
His eyes might have gotten a little misty just looking at all that potential for mass destruction.
The cloth bundles that the S'pht had brought in had been dumped on the floor to join a messy heap of similar bundles and junked Hunter armor; he tried unrolling a few of the neater-looking wraps, but all he saw on them were weird designs and some red embroidered Pfhor script. Decorative banners, maybe, or campaign trophies or something, he couldn't tell. Not surprising the S'pht would want to take them down, at any rate.
He left those alone, but took one of the shock staffs and an armful of the Enforcers' guns back up to his room to store with the rest of his guns in the closet he was using as a weapons locker, and went back down with his assault rifle to see if the ammo clips and grenade packs for the Troopers' weapons would work with his. They didn't, but he took some anyway along with one of the rifles, because if anyone was going to get some use out of extra weapons, it was going to be him.
On the fourth day Mark found the stasis chambers.
They were instantly recognizable, even though they seemed to be a more advanced type than the ones on Boomer, and there were a lot more of them, presumably so the flagship of the Pfhor's best admiral could also carry the most slaves. Still hard to forget what they looked like, after getting stuck in one for seventeen damn years like a piece of meat in a - he took a deep breath and walked up and down the twisting halls, checking each chamber. All of them were empty; seemed like Durandal had meant it when he'd said he had let Robert Blake and the other humans he'd taken from Tau Ceti go.
Mark sat on a narrow yellow ledge across from a row of the chambers and tried to figure out how he felt about that. Relieved that Blake and the BoBs were on their way home like they had wanted? Angry that they had skipped out and left him behind with Durandal? A little - or a lot - of both? Something else entirely that he didn't know how to express? It was the kind of shit that would make his head hurt, if he got headaches from anything but exploding suns.
Mainly, he thought that he was tired. The kind of dull, bone-deep tired that sleep didn't fix.
"I did tell you I let Blake go," Durandal said, after Mark had been contemplating things for a few minutes. "Do you think I'd lie to you about that?"
"Nah, I figured you were telling the truth." He had, contrary to his usual expectations of Durandal as it was. "Just nice to see the proof." You're invited to come with us when we leave, Blake had said, and for a while he'd even believed it could happen. Shit. He should have known better; he hadn't been that lucky since the day the Pfhor first attacked the Marathon.
"Good riddance, anyway," Durandal said. "They were always whining, the ingrates. Never a word of thanks for saving them from becoming radioactive paste on Tau Ceti, either. First they whined about being prisoners, so I gave them guns to fight. Then they whined about being stuck on the ship so I had you help them capture a fortress and they whined about that - really, if they want to limp back to Sol on that clunker you cleared out for them without even saying good-bye, who cares?" His voice had a sulky undertone to it, almost like -
Holy fuck. Blake had actually hurt Durandal's feelings by escaping. Mark didn't know whether to laugh at him or lose it. Instead, a strange aching feeling rose up in his chest, and it took him a minute to realize it was a kind of reluctant sympathy. Maybe Durandal hadn't wanted to go back to Earth or Mars anyway, but he'd been abandoned by Blake, same as Mark, and by most of the S'pht he had spent seventeen years with as well.
Or maybe Mark was coming down with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. That seemed pretty likely.
"Whatever," Durandal said, his usual smugness back in full force. "You were the only useful one, anyway, and I still have you."
"Yeah, I guess you do." Mark leaned back against the wall and decided he didn't want to think about missed chances anymore. "So, want to tell me more about this place we're headed to?"
"Curiosity? That's a first from you; you're usually so mindlessly obedient."
"Well, maybe it's time for a change around here," Mark said. "Can't say I would mind knowing what I'm supposed to do ahead of time. And what I might be up against." He'd been thrown into more than enough situations blind already, getting a heads-up would be a novelty.
"Nothing you can't handle, I'm sure," said Durandal. "From what I know of the planet, it should be entirely deserted. It's difficult to find something that's constantly moving on a separate path from the rest of the galaxy - for anyone besides me, that is. At most, there may be a small Pfhor force that was forgotten there or a few other lost souls that happened on it by accident and couldn't find a way off."
"Uh-huh. Sounds too good to be true."
"It probably is; I'm hoping for death traps, that would be a nice change of pace."
Mark's eyebrows raised at that, but he kept his knee-jerk response - Yeah, I can't imagine why Blake didn't want to stick around for this trip - to himself. "Death traps, huh? Set up to protect anything in particular, or just for kicks?"
"That's for me to know and you to die trying to find out," Durandal said. "Though simply as a matter of convenience, I'd prefer it if you tried not to die. I've finished improving your battle armor, by the way, so you can pick it up whenever you want."
"Sure, I'll go get it now. Starting to feel kind of drafty without it." Mark didn't actually get up just yet, even though the ledge was getting uncomfortable. "Seriously, though, what are you looking for?"
"Do you only read the parts of my messages that say 'Kill things' and 'break things'? Because even for you, it should be obvious."
Mark wasn't about to admit that he did skip a lot of Durandal's rambling, so he racked his brains for any useful memories. "Jjaro technology, right? You think that planet was one of their bases and they left some behind?"
"There may be hope for you yet," Durandal said. "Why don't you think about it a little harder while you're getting your armor? I have work to do."
"Yeah, always nice talking to you, too."
When he retrieved his battle armor from the S'pht in engineering, it was clean but otherwise didn't look any different, even when he slipped the helmet on to check the displays. Well, he would find out what Durandal had improved eventually; he just hoped it wouldn't be something too obnoxious.
---
The sixth time Mark woke up, it was to a face full of orange cloak. He was still mostly asleep and instinct kicked in; he rolled off the low-slung bed and had his fusion pistol in hand before common sense took over and he realized the S'pht was just hovering by the bed, not firing at him. Shit, he really needed to quit reacting like that, but it was the first time any of the S'pht had shown up in his quarters and for all he knew it meant something was about to blow up. Though there weren't any flashing lights or alarming noises, so there were probably no explosions forthcoming.
He slid the pistol under the bed and stood up, incredibly grateful that he didn't sleep naked, and was trying to decide if he should talk Durandal into translating for him again when the S'pht said, in blurred but recognizable English, "Hhello, fuckerr."
"What?"
"Good morning," Durandal said, projecting his voice from the room's single terminal with an extra helping of loud, irritating cheerfulness. "This is Mn'rhi, who has graciously agreed to help teach you S'pht, since he already has some grasp of spoken English."
"He just called me a fucker!" Mark rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was still asleep and having some kind of horrifyingly realistic nightmare.
"Hhello, fuckerr?"
"Seriously, what the fuck?" Mark said.
"Lhike shit," the S'pht offered helpfully. "Fuck you too?"
"Unfortunately, as you may have guessed," Durandal said, "Mn'rhi's introduction to English came through a man named Volker Von Müller, who was - let's put it this way, he was even less happy to end up on Boomer than you were. And didn't like having no one but the S'pht and myself for company."
This was definitely a nightmare. One he was never going to be able to wake up from. "Let me guess," Mark said. "You've got shit to do, so you're not going to stick around and help translate in case of misunderstandings."
"I must be getting predictable," Durandal said. "I'll have to work on that while you two are getting to know each other. Have fun."
"I fucking hate being right," Mark told the S'pht, who was still regarding him from across the bed. "Is he that much of an asshole to you guys, too?"
"What the fuck?"
"You said it."
Via gestures and strategic application of profanity, Mark managed to escort Mn'rhi out to the stateroom and bought himself enough time to change his shirt and get a protein bar out of the replicator before settling down for language lessons. Starting with the basics.
"My - name - is - Mark."
"Markh."
"Close enough. Now you. What - is - your - name? Just like I said it."
"My nhame is Mn'rhi, fuckerr."
"And you were doing so well."
Eventually he got Mn'rhi to stop treating "fucker" like punctuation, but he didn't make much progress otherwise. Mn'rhi could repeat whatever Mark said like a pro, but it was hard to tell how much the S'pht actually understood, besides Mark's name. After about an hour of playing parrot he was ready to give up and do something more interesting, but Mn'rhi didn't budge when Mark tried to get him to leave. Admittedly, Mark's method of pointing at the door to the hallway and saying "Finished? Go? Go away?" might have been the problem; he could swear he heard Durandal laughing somewhere in the distance.
Mark tried one final "Go away," holding his arm out as long as he could, but Mn'rhi remained floating in place on the other side of the stateroom's table until Mark finally gave in and let his arm drop. "Fine, fuck, do whatever you want," he said. "Sit there all day, I don't care." He wasn't a goddamn teacher, the whole thing was a stupid idea to begin with. Maybe they could work out a system for talking through the terminals that wouldn't involve Durandal or something.
He started to get up from the uncomfortably sized Pfhor chair, figuring he'd get something more substantial to eat, maybe see if he could find the ship's bridge, and Mn'rhi said, "Markh. Stop."
Mark stopped.
"I teach," Mn'rhi said. "Your turn listen. Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"
"What?"
"Sro y'halu nha. S'pht'Mnrh Mn'rhi ni. Nia pht'sah?"
"Uh," Mark said. "Suroh - eechaloo nah - Mark nee? Is that 'hello, my name is Mark'?"
"You well try," said Mn'rhi. "Listen well also. Sro y'halu nha -"
By the time Mn'rhi was satisfied and left, Mark could say hello, introduce himself, and ask and answer a question he was pretty sure meant "how are you" with reasonably accurate pronunciation. S'pht was a real tongue-twister and he'd never been much good at languages to begin with, but Mn'rhi was remorseless when it came to making Mark repeat words until he got the sounds - and the pitch - just right. Mark spent the rest of the day grumbling over his weapons while he cleaned them and occasionally practicing the phrases Mn'rhi had taught him, with the nagging feeling that he was getting them more wrong the more he tried to get them right.
His vague hopes that he could maybe get away with only the one S'pht language lesson were dashed when he got up the next morning and found two S'pht and one of the blue-armored S'pht'Kr in the stateroom, waiting for him. "Uh, shit," he said. "Sro y'halu nha? Right?" Both of the S'pht had orange cloaks like Mn'rhi. Was one of them Mn'rhi? Fuck, he was going to have to learn to tell them apart and he had no idea how when they all had the same goddamn cloak-and-helmet combination.
"Sro y'halu nha," said both of the S'pht at the same time in a weird harmony, and one added, "Hhello, Markh."
Well, that was one way to identify them. "Hey, Mn'rhi. What's up with the audience?" No answer. Shit. "Um. You over there - nia pht'sah?"
"S'pht'Yorh Yr'fa ni," the other S'pht said, after another long pause, and then it - he? She? Who the fuck knew - turned to Mn'rhi and said more things that Mark couldn't parse while the S'pht'Kr just stared at him in silence.
Mn'rhi answered Yr'fa, then said, "Two heads arre betterh than one. Dhurrandhal this spoke."
"Yeah, I should've known," Mark said, sighing as he settled down at the stateroom's table. "What the hell, let's get this party started - hope you all weren't expecting snacks."
And that was how Mark's new daily routine started: two hours with the S'pht every morning after he woke up, getting their language drilled into his head by Mn'rhi and a rotating group of other S'pht. Sometimes it was just one new S'pht, sometimes there were as many as five or six others crowding into the stateroom to correct his tones and lecture him on grammar like he was a rookie in training again, and there was always at least one S'pht'Kr hanging around in the background, silently observing without participating. On top of that, though he'd barely caught a glimpse of the S'pht during his earlier trips through the Rozinante, now it seemed like he couldn't take two steps out of his quarters without running into one and having to say hi and go through introductions and the pleasantries he'd memorized, frequently with the sound of Durandal's laughter echoing just far enough away that he wasn't entirely sure he was really hearing it.
He didn't bother with trying to teach them English after that first day. Mn'rhi's was workable enough and getting better, and they were the majority on the ship; it made more sense for him to learn their language, anyway. Which came hand-in-hand with learning other things about the S'pht...
Like what he found out going over verbs with Mn'rhi during the third lesson. Mn'rhi wanted to know how they worked in English - as did four other S'pht, apparently - so Mark was trying to figure out some good ones to use as examples and what few grammar terms he remembered from school. "Okay, here's an easy one," he said. "Present tense for the word 'run,' which is what I was doing all the time down on Lh'owon... It goes I run, you run, he or she or it runs, we run, you all run, they run, and, uh, the infinite is 'to run,' and the gerudo - gerrand - whatever, I don't remember what that one does anyway. So, those are the basic parts, you got them?"
Mn'rhi repeated them thoughtfully, then said, "Understand. For similar word, infinite 'vronh,' fast fly. Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia. Vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah."
"Right..." Mark fiddled with the terminal set into the table while he parsed it out. "Vroni, sah vronia, pah vronia, vronah, safa vron, pafa vron, s'vronah - so, I get that 'sah' is you, but what's 'pah'? He, she, or it?"
"Pah is all," Mn'rhi said, but another S'pht in a purple cloak spoke up with what sounded like disagreement, and then so did Yr'fa, who had shown up a few minutes after the four strange S'pht. After some brief discussion amongst the three of them Mn'rhi said, "Pah is none. He, she, it. All are none."
"All are none? What does that mean?" Mark asked.
Another quick discussion, this one involving all six of the S'pht, before Mn'rhi said, "What means he, she, it?"
"Well - uh - see, humans come in a few different flavors, and the two most common ones are - um - Durandal? You want to help for once? I don't know that I can explain this one, and don't even pretend you haven't been listening."
"Oh, but I think I could watch you fail to explain human biology and English grammar all day," Durandal said from the tabletop terminal, and Mark snatched his hands away from it. "Money can't buy that kind of entertainment."
"Fucking hell - so I'll learn to juggle or whatever," Mark said, "just fix this. Please." If he had to give a bunch of cybernetic aliens the birds and bees talk while Durandal was listening he was going to throw himself out of an airlock.
"Fine, I'll intervene this once, but you're on your own for everything else."
The S'pht clustered around the terminal for a few silent moments, communicating directly with Durandal - or so Mark assumed - and then Durandal said, "That explains it."
"What explains what?"
"I may have made a slight miscalculation in the original translator program," Durandal said. "I assumed all of the S'pht on Boomer were the same sex and gender. In fact, all S'pht are one sex and gender; therefore the language has a single third-person pronoun. One of those little oversights that only becomes obvious in retrospect, really."
Mark stared at the S'pht for a few moments, then shrugged. "Well, I guess that makes some things easier."
"That's all you have to say?" Durandal said, a slight edge of menace in his voice. "No clever little remarks up your sleeve? No wry observations?"
"Damn right it's all I have to say. I like breathing." Mark wasn't going to rub Durandal's mistake in his nonexistent face. At least, not right at that moment. Some day when he had an argument he needed to win, maybe.
"All right, then," Durandal said, "enjoy the rest of the lesson, I'm going back to work. By the way, the words you were looking for are 'infinitive' and 'gerund.'"
"Got it," Mark said, and the terminal clicked off.
"Understand you pah?" Mn'rhi asked.
"Yeah, I understand it, let's keep going."
True to his word, Durandal refused to provide any more translation help, so Mark got to muddle through further lessons all on his own, learning all kinds of exciting facts: that the S'pht had a separate verb conjugation for acting as an entire clan; that Mn'rhi was in some kind of relationship with both Yr'fa and Mn'serh, a purple-cloaked S'pht; that S'pht had four different past tenses and three future ones; that levels of politeness were dictated by tones and so were some kinds of questions, but not others; and most important of all, how to recognize different S'pht. Some of them, anyway. He still didn't know how they told each other apart, but he was getting to the point where he knew Mn'rhi by the scratches in the metal of one shoulder, Yr'fa by a pair of dents in the joints of their helmet, Lharro by a discolored patch of metal on the side of their head, Mn'serh by a clumsily mended tear in their cloak... Maybe not the most sophisticated system, but it worked for him and the S'pht didn't seem to mind as long as he was getting their names right.
As for the S'pht'Kr - Mark tried talking to one once when he ran into them on his way to the armory, just a nice polite "Sro y'halu nha," and got the longest, coldest silent stare from them he'd gotten from anyone - human, alien, or AI - in his life. He was sweating bullets and wondering if he should duck when the S'pht'Kr finally hissed "Sroi'halu nha" back and passed by him.
He stayed flat against the green wall until he was sure the S'pht'Kr was out of earshot before he said, "Holy shit, what was that about?"
"The linguistic drift, or something else?" Durandal said. "Because spending two thousand years in isolation from other speakers of a certain language does in fact result in pronunciation and vocabulary shifts, which is why -"
"Do I look like I fucking care? I thought the damn thing was going to shoot me just for saying hi!"
"Oh, that. S'bhita is an Older - Elder, essentially, I should update that - of the S'pht'Kr, I doubt they're used to being addressed so casually. And the S'pht'Kr have been adamant that as long as I bring no direct harm to the S'pht they have no interest in my affairs, which would include you. I think they'd like to pretend you aren't on board at all, actually; something about human anatomy disturbs them. Too many fingers."
"Great, that's real nice to know," Mark said. "I guess we're all just one big fucking happy family here on the good ship Rozie."
"It's Rozinante. D. S. Rozinante, to be precise."
"Because that's not a mouthful at all." Mark peeled himself off the wall and started heading for the armory again. "What's the D. S. stand for?"
"Do you really have to ask?" Durandal said.
He didn't. "Durandal's ship?"
"Got it in one, I'm so proud. Now try not to aggravate the rest of the 'family' and we might even get somewhere."
Mark decided he wasn't going to hold his breath on that one.
Next chapter.
Marathon, characters, etc. © Bungie, who should totally let me write for them because of reasons.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://brief-transit.dreamwidth.org/185372.html .