For Honor We Stand by Harvey G. Phillips, H. Paul Honsinger Page B

certain he understood only one word in twenty.  When Max had repeated the instructions back to Yarmouk four in equally impenetrable language and followed the fighter squadron through a change in course and altitude, he turned to his companion.  “Let me guess.  You didn’t get any of that.”
    “Scarcely a word.  You might as well have been speaking Pfelungian.  I can’t imagine why you would have to guess.  You conducted a conversation for minutes on end consisting of nothing but incomprehensible pilot argot, which I have long suspected pilots specifically evolved as a coded language so that members of your elite club of drive and rudder men can speak without being understood by the uninitiated and, further, as a kind of secret club handshake so that you can recognize one another.  It should entail no guesswork at all to conclude that I, an ignorant cretin who merely speaks a dozen and a half languages or so and who possesses a veritable plethora of university degrees in five or six different fields, would be unable to comprehend a word of the proceedings.” 
    “That’s ‘drive and thruster man.’  Thruster.”
    “See what I mean?  You people have your own language, constructed with incomprehensibility and exclusion as an objective and you have the undisguised temerity to wonder that you are not understood.  You might as well build a fire and marvel that it generates heat, light, and smoke.”
    Max knew better than to offer the rejoinder that Medicine was just as bad or even worse, because, while aerospace jargon had its basis in Standard, most medical terms are derived from Latin, the language of a long-dead civilization that is currently spoken only by the Romanovans, and Greek, a beautiful but now-obscure language spoken by only a few million of humanity’s hundreds of billions, because he knew from experience that Sahin would never admit the comparability of the two cases.  He decided just to go ahead and explain what was going on. 
    “So, in the plainest possible terms, here is what is happening.  It is believed that our original flight plan has become known to people who want to kill us.  Accordingly, our descent and flight path have been changed.  As much as possible it now takes place over the sea.  We will travel with this escort until the last two and a half minutes or so, or just before we cross the coast.  Then, the escort will peel off so that no one will see a microfreighter with a fighter escort, which would attract attention and, apparently, cue the people on the ground that something unusual is happening.  We will land at a different field than originally planned.  This one is technically not a spaceport, but the Rashidian authorities are waiving that and will let us set down there.  It’s a military airfield, well garrisoned.  Someone will meet us there and take us where we need to go.”
    “Why approach from the sea?”
    “It’s hard to hide a portable surface to air missile launcher or pulse cannon on the surface of the ocean.  You have to put it on a ship or a boat, and those have been cleared from our flight path.” As the two men were talking, Max had steered the ship through a series of turns and descents.  In a few minutes, just before they crossed the coast, the fighter escort peeled off, the leader wagging his wings as they departed, a fact reflected by a similar motion of the icon representing the fighter on Max’s proximity display.  Before Sahin knew it, with a gentle bump, the Clover was on the ground.
    After a few moments to equalize pressure, the hatch cycled and opened outward with a clunk and a hiss.  The doctor was standing at the hatch when the first glimpse of the outside became visible.  “But . . . it is dark,” he blurted indignantly.
    “I noticed.  The phenomenon is technically known to planetary scientists as ‘night.’  I hear that it happens on a regular basis around here.”
    “Do not be obtuse.”  He practically stomped his