Damage Control - ARC Read Online Free Page A

that happened we could get to the
spot where you left your spaceship—I mean your vehicle—and find
nothing."
    But when they got to the spot, it was Jade
who was surprised. Standing among the wispy
black-and-white-and-yellow birches and the thick green hemlocks was
something that looked vaguely like a rocket—or like one of the
space shuttles, only much smaller. It was white and shaped somewhat
like a cone, and had some round black parts on the bottom that she
took to be exhaust ports.
    Just for an instant, she was tempted to
wonder if Zuke really was from outer space. How else could she
explain his vehicle, here in such a place? But then, a real alien
ship wouldn't look like anything she had ever seen or even
imagined.
    "How did this get here?" she said aloud.
    "I was recording this region when propulsion
failed, forcing me to land. I will finish repairs. You will stay
beside me."
    "You were recording this region. You mean
mapping it?"
    "Yes." He took the device from his hip and
punched in a code, and an opening appeared in the side of the
vehicle. Jade noticed that he typed with his claws and not his
fingers. He continued, "Mapping and recording sounds, images,
temperature, pressure, material composition and other things."
    "You're a spy." She hadn't meant to say it
aloud.
    "Yes." They were inside the vehicle now. Zuke
was typing with his claws and consulting various readouts. None of
the places where he typed looked like keypads, and none of the
places where the readouts showed looked like readout screens.
Everything looked like structural elements—walls or posts, for
example—until pictures and diagrams appeared on them.
    And then she saw the writing in the readouts
and forgot everything else. The characters were angular like
printed Hebrew, but had a little of the brushstroke quality of
Chinese. The language appeared to be either alphabetic or
syllabary. If she could just hear some of it...
    "What does that say?" she asked, pointing to
a short piece of text above her head.
    "Twenty-six-pod propulsion failure,” he
replied. “You will go outdoors with me." Then he took her arm and
half-dragged her back out into the familiar world and away from the
strange language that begged to be decoded. He had a tool in his
other hand, and began using it. It appeared to be some sort of
welding torch or laser.
    He kept working for hours, and she couldn't
convince him to let her back inside. He didn't want to talk,
either, and she grew bored and cold. She ate some soup—also
cold—and tried to run away but Zuke was too fast for her. She
finished the chapter in the Spanish novel.
    She wished she’d thought to bring her
computer. She should be working right now, after all, and her next
task was those four boring documents, two Spanish, one French and
one Italian, that were waiting on her hard drive to be turned into
English. She didn’t think for a moment that any of her clients
would understand if she told them, “Your documents aren’t ready yet
because I was kidnapped by a harmless man claiming to be an alien.”
She may as well tell them a dog ate it, or a dinosaur.
    The novel was much more interesting than
those dry documents. It was also much more risky. Nobody was paying
her to translate the novel, or not exactly, anyway. She was going
to get a percentage, after expenses, assuming enough copies were
sold to even cover the expenses.
    But as excited as she was about translating
the novel, even that was just another translation job. What she
really wanted was to tackle a new language and analyze it. She had
a feeling, and it wouldn’t go away. It was a feeling like there was
something there, buried in the languages—not just in the romance
languages she worked with every day. Not even in the Latin and
sprinkling of Greek that was always present in all of them. The
hints were there, but she wasn’t going to find the answer from just
those hints. She wanted to immerse herself, for starters, in
Russian, in Norwegian and