Far Side Two
Copyright© 2025 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 12
I
Erica Mirableu hated to do it, but she knocked on the door to Andie’s quarters soon after her boss had returned from DC. She was surprised when Andie answered it herself, while Linda was sitting in a rocking chair, her feet up on a hassock. Linda’s boots and socks were off, and Andie smelled of a lotion of some sort.
She handed the message to Andie, one that was appreciably longer than the ones before. Andie read the whole thing, then looked at Erica. Erica nodded. “I think I should be here for this discussion.”
“You think?” Andie said sarcastically.
She walked over to Linda and handed her the three pages, then sat down on another hassock, squirted something onto her hands, and started rubbing one of Linda’s feet.
Andie saw Erica’s expression and sighed. “My sweetie gets cramps in her feet, in both her toes and her feet. It’s pretty painful. She fakes it.”
Something Erica had read as she looked at the stripes that were clear marks on Linda’s feet. “Bastinado,” she said under her breath.
“There’s a reason why my name is inscribed on the LAPD building in letters ten feet tall,” said Andie thinly.
Linda cracked a joke. “My experience with cops is that they are very short-sighted.”
Linda waved the report when she was done. “Captain Friedrich wins my vote for the CMH.”
“This opens up humongous possibilities,” Andie said.
“Make sure to order Captain Friedrich to comply with the warning. A hundred twenty meters long; that’s twice his size,” Linda added.
“Authorize him to post a broomstick on his conning tower when he makes port; that’s the submarine service signal for a clean sweep. We know virtually nothing about the oceans here, and he’s added unimaginable detail to our knowledge,” Erica said.
“Emphasis on the unimaginable,” Linda said dryly.
Erica spoke again. “The captain added something in the clear that’s not in the report. ‘Show us Charlie Mike.’”
Linda Walsh laughed. “Tell him that he’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
“Gift is what is known as a false cognate between German and English. In German, it means poison. Geschenk is the German word for gift,” Erica told the others.
“The question is what we are going to tell everyone about the need to take certain precautions when crossing trenches, cracks, or whatever they are called? Especially since we now have just one located, and in just one spot.” Andie said. “We can’t tell people there is another sentient race on Arvala, whale-sized this time, and even better at telepathy than the dralha. At least I don’t think people back home are going to want to hear about it.”
“There are a limited number of people privy to the information to the knowledge of telepathic dralha,” Linda said. “You and me, Kris, Monica, Erica, Kurt, the German Commodore, and the German captains, and of course, Gregor. Back on Earth, the President and Jon Bullman, our Spec Ops commanders. In theory, it is tightly held,” Linda said. “Monica is a cryppie; I think we should talk to her before making any changes in the list ... but that list is going to experience great pressure to be expanded on.”
“Andie,” Erica started, stopped for a second, before she went on. “I think Gregor should be the next person we talk to. I think this is important enough to risk his contact with the dralha. We need him to ask some questions of his thrall.”
II
Gregor spent most of the next week simply listening to the daughter dralha as she went about her usual routine. Twice he checked if she was still enthralled, demanding scratching with one foot or another. And she did as bid, scratching being a common occupation of the dralha. The daughter had a number of male thralls, and one or another of them spent some time every day preening her.
He was contemplating the departure of U-37 in the early evening on her first voyage of exploration. He really missed his job aboard the boat, and he contemplated asking to be returned to his original job. Being an intelligence asset made for a highly circumscribed life, and what had sounded both dangerous and something he could do had sounded exotic at the time. After a week, it had begun to pall.
Two hours later, he was aware that everyone senior had a top-secret meeting, and he was frustrated as he’d never been before. Sure, officers were privy to secrets and top secrets. Being privy to such secrets was a heady drug, but it gave you a thirst for more.
The commodore went by the comm center, heading away from the meeting. It seemed like a few minutes later that he was hustling back, nearly at a run. Gregor figured it was the French woman who was bringing the messages to the meeting. Maybe, he could be trusted to deal with such messages? He knew all about the communications protocols of U-37; Gregor made a mental note to ask.
Then came the unexpected. The French woman poked her head in his office. “Miss Schultz wants to see you in Conference A right now.”
Ah! He was going to find out what was up!
Andie Schultz was brisk. “Linda and I think that Captain Friedrich is the gift that keeps on giving. I will instruct the commodore to brief you on the early parts of U-37’s first trip into the great unknown. Even I’m impressed by how much he’s learned in just a few hours.”
“Miss Schultz, the commodore is to brief me? That isn’t how things are done in the Deutsche Marine. Commodores brief captains, captains brief their officers, and one of them briefs crewmen like myself. It just isn’t done, Miss Schultz.”
“Well, you are going to brief him on something similar to the secrets you are aware of. I expect you will also brief Captain Hermann on your activities to date, then the new material. However, first, I am going to assign you a task that will be possibly unpleasant -- it might risk your thrall.”
“Miss Schultz, when my thrall relaxes, she dreams of how many heads of humans she can pile up. Her waking thoughts are about ten percent about how to bring that about.”
Andie told Gregor about the race of large creatures in the abyssal deeps and their warning, and how it was delivered. “The big question is, do the dralha have any contact with even larger creatures?” Andie asked.
“Let me organize my thoughts,” Gregor started. “The dralha celebrate a moonset ritual, which Erica first assumed was a sunrise festival. It’s really the last day of the Big Moon’s orbit where it is not in the sky at sunrise. There is a litany, and both Monica and I are convinced it is very old, kind of like the Jews reading from the Torah, concentrating on Genesis. There is a lot of what we believe to be metaphor. ‘In the beginning was darkness, then came the light, and with the light, it brought life to our world.’ There follows a lot of what I expect is semi-mystical stuff that makes only sense to a true believer. Nowhere do they ever ascribe events to a mystical power -- until about halfway through. ‘The sky was changed as was promised. But it was arrogance and went awry. The world was promised that it would be set right in the end, but that end isn’t yet.’ And it goes on for a while about promises not kept. All metaphorical allusion that could be used to describe nearly anything.”
“What I want you to do is interrogate your thrall. Ask her if she knows about elder races and what she knows about them.”
“Right now, she just finished a grooming session with her lead male. It was her intent to flirt and leave him frustrated. It is too soon for sleep, but she can go someplace private. Miss Schultz, dralha masturbate.”
“Whatever. Ask the questions.”
An hour later, Gregor was wrung out and breathing hard. “Talk about a snake pit! ‘Elder Races’ is indeed how they refer to them. The dralha have been very badly handled by the elder races, and that’s a definite plural. It’s why they were only on one continent ... they were kicked off the others. And, there are places in the Big Moon liturgy when there are definite plurals when referring to the ‘races of this world.’ Erica thought that the references were hyperbole, but evidently not. The ‘Elder Race’ they face the most often have terrible weapons.
“The dralha’s worst imaginable catastrophe is burning a nest. Twice in memory of the dralha that Elder Race burned all of the nests on a continent with ‘terrible weapons of fire.’ Most of the current crop of dralha is intent on staying within the limits set for them, which is far from any human-occupied continent. They wanted to wipe the Arvalans out before the Elders learned of them. That second line of Tengri ships? They would have had to cross one of the forbidden boundaries in order to reach them. The boundary between the islands and the continent hasn’t existed for a long time. Evidently the crack is very recent, as in the last couple of thousand years. Daughter was gibbering in terror that they had crossed an impermissible barrier to attack the Tengri.”
Gregor was silent for a few minutes. “The nest has gone crazy. They have lost contact with the daughter who was on the island with the Tengri; none of the dralka who were there appear to be alive as well. There was no warning, but the event was similar to what happened before. My thrall is telling them that the Elder Race is awake again. I made up a story about a male dralka landing in the channel for some fish and his mind making contact with the Elders.” He was silent for another several moments, then he laughed.
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