Damage Control - ARC by Mary Jeddore Blakney

the good part of
being here: Chuzekk showers were fabulous.
    A large hand sealed her mouth and nose and
pulled her head back against something solid behind her—her
attacker's chest. She decided he was probably male, and tall. She
raised her arms to struggle but found them restrained as well. She
could see nothing except two of the shower walls and the water
shooting out of twenty or so little jets.
    "I won't hurt you," the stranger whispered.
He relaxed his fingers so she could breathe. "But we do need to
keep this quiet."
    Jade executed her surprise-twist technique
that had always gotten her out any hold her brother and sister
could devise, but it didn't work.
    "Sorry I had to scare you like this," said
the stranger, "but they monitor your uniform, so I had to catch you
without it. I'm Fletcher. I don't know if you remember I contacted
you about a job back on Earth."
    Jade said nothing, but nodded her head. Yes,
she remembered.
    "Well, I still need you to do it."

11
the jailer

    C olonel Elwood Rocco
stood stiffly in the small conference room of the keev-ship's
prison. Laitt had never seen him stand any other way but stiffly,
and she was used to it by now.
    He greeted her with the arm grasp, stepped up
to the desk and consulted what he called his "notes"—hand-drawn
markings made in blue dye on delicate white tablets as thin as the
fabric of Laitt's uniform.
    "Your prisoners tried to overpower my guards
yesterday," Laitt said.
    The Human replied with his usual
unintelligible speech, and Laitt's Personal Device translated,
"Unorganized workers. We've already dealt with them. I don't think
you'll have any more trouble from them."
    The first time they'd met, Laitt hadn't
bothered setting her Personal Device to translate. She had gone to
language school, after all. Besides, the practice was good for
her.
    But whatever had come out of the Aberikekk
leader's mouth was no language she had ever heard. She'd quickly
turned on the translator and asked him about it.
    "Oh," he'd said, "that's because I speak
Alabama."
    "What is Alababa?" she had asked.
    According to Elwood, it was a form of
Aberikekk. But her Personal Device had had a different answer.
    "Define 'Alababa,'" Laitt had ordered when
the meeting was over and she'd had a moment alone.
    "A legendary Human leader of a band of
thieves numbering three dozen plus four."
    But as far as Laitt knew, the Human colonel
who stood across the desk from her was a leader of spies, not
thieves. On the sleeve of his mottled green uniform, he wore what
Aberikekks called the 'MI patch,' which was roughly equivalent to
the Chuzekk open-eye symbol and meant he belonged to an
intelligence command.
    "I hate to keep beating on a dead four-footed
mammal traditionally used for transportation," Laitt's Personal
Device translated, "but there's still the issue of the lack of
toilets."
    "There are three toilets for every twelve
prisoners," Laitt replied. "Are some of them broken?"
    Elwood shook his head and spoke again, and
the translation cut in a few seconds later. "I'm not talking about
toilets, here. I'm talking about toilets. My people can't relax.
You may not believe this, but it makes security a lot harder to
enforce when they can't even shit. They want to watch the
entertainment and education screens, but they have no toilets. They
want to have a cup of coffee with a friend, but again, there are no
toilets. All I'm asking you, Zeed, is that you work with me here.
Can I have your word that you'll at least think about allowing some
toilets in the common areas?"
    "There are several toilets accessible from
the common areas," Laitt said. "Is there a problem with them?"
    The Human put his right palm up to his
forehead for a moment, then looked Laitt in the eyes. "I think
we're having a translation problem. I'm talking about toilets, and
every time, you come back to me with something about toilets. It's
two different things."
    Laitt nodded. "My translator does not
distinguish between the two words,"