Chapter 17

Theta Coronae Australis System
GNS Neil Armstrong
02/12/42 NR 1235 Hours

“Honey, you have to eat something.”

Luisa stepped into the sick bay, nodding to the sentry posted outside. Charlotte Evans, the ship’s sole medical technician, held a spoonful of applesauce in front of the young girl from the shuttle. She stared wide eyed at Charlotte, not even looking at the proffered food. “Has she tried to speak yet?”

“Not a word,” Charlotte sighed as she sat back on a small stool. “Derek and his people figured out the ‘popsicle box’, as they termed it, four hours ago. The fact that she’s awake and alert is astounding.”

Luisa nodded. She had just returned to Armstrong after one last flight to the alien shuttle, where a team of technicians was busily gathering every scrap of equipment they could move, and imaging everything else. Sadly, they had no way to move the craft, so the team had taken a demolition charge with them to destroy it when they were finished.

When the shuttle arrived in response to Luisa’s emergency call, April had simply disappeared. The team had quickly loaded the woman’s sarcophagus and a third of the containers Luisa had found, and returned it to orbit, while Luisa led the away team in search of April. They located the rover nearly ten kilometers away, wrecked at the bottom of a crater. In a macabre twist of fate, April had died when the vehicle’s nose impacted a sharply pointed rock spire. She had been crushed into her seat – and her helmet visor had shattered.

Luisa and her team salvaged everything they could, but they were unable to free April’s corpse from the smashed wreckage. After conferring with Boris Rouen, Armstrong’s captain, April and Jacques were left on the surface. A recovery effort would have both risked additional lives, and taken valuable time.

“The engineers are going to think it’s Christmas,” Luisa said with a smile as she crossed to the girl’s bedside. “Too bad we couldn’t get the shuttle up here, too.” She looked at the girl, who was staring at her with a mixture of confusion and fear. “Hello.” She placed her hand on her own chest, palm down. “Luisa.” She then extended her hand to the girl, palm up, and cocked her head slightly as she awaited a response.

The girl looked back and forth between the two women and tried to speak. Her voice came out as a croak, and Charlotte offered her a cup of water. After a moment’s hesitation, the girl took it, carefully examined the contents, and then drank it all in a single gulp. Charlotte held up a plastic pitcher, and the girl shyly extended the cup. After the third refill, the girl set the cup on the bedside table and regarded Luisa calmly. “Ku-aya,” she said in a soft soprano.

“Ku-aya,” Luisa repeated with a nod. She placed her hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. “Charlotte,” and, placing her hand on her own chest again, “Luisa.”

“Char-lot?” the girl tried, and Charlotte nodded. “Lu-issa?” Luisa nodded in turn. “Me-a ga?” Ku-aya paused and looked at each of them again. “Me-a dam-mul ga?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say.” Luisa shook her head.

Ku-aya nodded in apparent understanding. She laid her left hand on her lap, palm up. Then, she pressed her right index finger lightly against her palm and began to mimic writing, moving her finger in short strokes as if forming characters.

“Of course!” Luisa smiled and nodded. “Charlotte?”

The medical technician extracted a stylus from her pocket, and consulted her personal holo display. Ku-aya gasped in surprise as a white surface appeared just over her right hand. “Here you go,” Charlotte said as she held the stylus out to Ku-aya.

The girl hesitated for a moment, and then plucked the stylus from Charlotte’s hand. Gingerly, she touched the tablet, and inhaled sharply as the instrument’s point effortlessly penetrated the surface. After a few tries, Ku-aya began to slowly form characters on the tablet. She bent forward and worked more quickly, pressing the stylus into the surface in a curious pattern to form three dimensional characters. After writing two lines, she sat straight up and looked at the two women.

“Let’s see.” Charlotte’s eyes unfocused as she accessed her holo display. It was driven by the comm unit hooked over her right ear and extending just past her temple. She saved the document and sent a copy to Luisa. “Any idea what that means?”

“No, but...” Luisa eyed the strange characters. “I wonder – it sure looks like...” she cursed her loose tongue and shook her head. “Okay, Charlotte, I need to ask you to keep what I’m about to show you to yourself.” The redhead nodded in silent assent, and Luisa extracted the data stick with her copy of the star map from her pocket and linked it to the sick bay’s display. Ku-aya and Charlotte both inhaled sharply as the star map appeared over the bed. “Ku-aya, can you read this?” Luisa asked as she pointed at the characters on the map.

Ku-aya stared at the map, and finally pointed at one of the symbols. “Se-gu-nu,” she used the stylus to touch another symbol next to it, “tus.”

“She can read it,” Luisa breathed.

“You mind telling me what this is?” Charlotte said quietly.

“It’s our way out of here, and you never saw it, okay?”

“You got it,” the tech replied. She knew an order when she heard one, but her eyes were huge. “There’re more wormholes?”

“Yes, but only a few people know that, and now Ku-aya here might be in danger, so please keep this to yourself.” Luisa shut the display off, and Ku-aya started as the map vanished. “I’ll see if I can make sense of her writing.” Luisa reached out to Ku-aya. “I have to go, but I will see if someone here can figure out what you’re saying.” She rose from the side of the bed and walked out of the compartment.

Luisa lay back on her bunk and closed her eyes. The stress of the last few days had caught up with her, and she had slept for several hours, then she had awakened, and sat up to think about the situation at hand. She was no linguist, and none of Adam Thomas’ people were still alive to help her. She’d revealed the map’s existence to the medical technician, but no one else aboard knew about it. Ku-aya could read the map’s symbols, but Luisa couldn’t talk to her. However, Adam had deciphered a section of the map, leading her to Arwen and the shuttle. So, of course, that suggested a connection to ancient Earth languages, as the researcher had postulated.