I just about banged my head against the console when linguistics threw a flag in the translation, indicating a
cultural insult in my grammar.
“Maybe you should program it to stop those from happening. You’ve got the delay to do it and already have your lovely voice recorded, Samantha, darling,” said Lona.
I ground my teeth. “Different languages require different sound bites, but thank you, Captain, for the suggestion.”
She patted me in a well-familiar gesture of understanding. I’d be better in a day-cycle or thirty. After the drop and pickup went well. After things settled down. After medical cleared us, giving us leave once more to travel to the other ships in the tribe. It was a bane to my existence that we all remained quarantined here in the point-ship with its heightened alien-bacteria guard and its overly-familiar isolation chambers after every single blasted planetary contact no matter how distant some of us were to the drop.
Thankfully, the alien contacts had lessened over the years. The hydroponic and protein farms were finally producing enough food that we had introduced luxury trading, and our asteroid mining ships were upgraded to allow for more harvesting. Synthetic fibers were still a difficulty given they required heavy planetary mining, and planets were, by and large, a bit taken, but that was a problem our tribe was working on.
Medicine, though, had proved to be the most convoluted. Drugs were easy enough to fabricate from our own basic supplies in the lab, or via hydroponics, and we were often able to make more than enough anti-inflammatories, fever-suppressors, and antibiotics to serve both the tribe and be used as surplus in a trade. Yet, despite all that, there were still a lot of diseases out there, and vaccinating the entire fifty-three-ship fleet against every awful disease in the galaxy was not only cost-prohibitive, but was entirely unfeasible. The program Dante wrote had estimated something like a million years for everyone in the tribe to be vaccinated against enough diseases to be considered “safe” by a developed planet’s government.
“Sammie, you got our coordinates?” Dante called over the comm. “We’re suited up and ready to take the bird out.”
“Sending now.”
The bird—hidden now inside the drop-pod—was a planetary plane with vertical landing capabilities. It was made for simple cargo drops, not high-speed maneuverability.
“Locked in?” asked Lona.
“Ready when you are, Captain.”
“Dropping pod, in three, two, one, away.”
I watched the viewscreen as the pod fell through the gray-cloud atmosphere of the planet. Lona monitored its progress with a critical eye. I turned back to my terminal right as bits of alien speech began crackling in the comms, the sound bites translated by the computer in real time, the out-of-date program quickly discarding poor translations the same way our mining team sifted out worthless rock.
I typed a message for my planetary liaison: “Our team’s away. We won’t have eyes on the landing site until the drop pod opens.” A few moments later, I added: “No, it’s about forty kilometers above planet surface, but still within the landing zone you indicated.”
Lona leaned back and sighed the same way she always did when things went well. “Pod’s clear and stable, and they’ve just initiated the open. Dante should be contacting you soon.”
I put in a message to the bird and then began the hurry-up-and-wait for Dante to respond. On screen, another translation from the native governing body popped up. An unintelligible voice in the lower registers of my hearing softly murmured in my headphones while the computer filtered the sounds into words. Two different ninety-seven percent acceptable translations popped up simultaneously.
Neither of the translations were acceptable to me. Nor to the crew of my ship. Nor to the inhabitants of the other fifty-two ships in my tribe.
With a sense of foreboding, I responded, “Please repeat. Confirm your situation.”
Dante’s voice came through a different channel, garbled from distance and time: “Pod landing and crew are good. Bird’s revved up, and we’re on our way to the drop zone. No problems. Six minutes to coordinates. Drop crew, out.”
I forwarded his message to Lona with a flick on the terminal, and then scrubbed at my hair. The waiting game was taking its toll. Lona sat quietly next to me while I dragged my hands back and forth across my chair’s armrests. A visual transmission request from Dante appeared on my main terminal and I accepted, sending it over to one of the lower screens so we could watch his recent progress.
That’s when the planetary representative contacted me again. This time, their message waxed long and intricate, causing my database to struggle with the more complicated structure for an achingly long minute, but the end result was explicit: they had a virus outbreak.
My first reaction was to demand explanation. Why wait to tell us now, after it was already too late? Why hadn’t they let us know the moment we’d made contact? When we’d first initialized a trade of…That’s when I remembered the manifest. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask why they’d wanted the medical supplies since the request was common for smaller planetary civilizations like this one, especially if the planet had run into supply chain problems and hadn’t developed their own laboratories. But I’d thought it was just a normal resupply for them.
I turned to tell Lona, and then froze.
We’d have to put a zinger in their data. A warning for other spacefarers, other nomads. Standard procedure. But then where would these people get the meds they needed?
“Everything good?” asked Lona.
Words evaded me, their sounds catching in my throat when I tried to answer.
Dante had just about reached the drop zone, the figures standing at a distance visible on the screen as blurs of vibrant color. There was still time before Dante initialized the drop from the bird. Just enough time. All I had to do was tell Lona, and she’d cancel the whole mission. Call Dante and crew back. Our medical supplies with them. The planet’s request gone unanswered, and these people left to die. Alone. In pain.
I leaned back in my seat and folded my hands over my churning stomach. It wasn’t my choice to make, but still, I sat and waited, saying nothing as Dante initialized the drop. I watched as the supplies hit planetary soil, as the hovering bird lifted up and away. Then Dante requested permission to head to the pick-up zone where our people might be exposed to any virus or contaminant on the supplies.
Only then, did I rush to say, “You need to take a look at this, Captain. Translation’s just come through.”
