Chapter 2: All My Bags Are Packed, I'm Ready to Go

By lunch they had expanded their "certainly translated" word list to about three hundred symbols, words or phrases.

Before lunch Tom pulled Lily to one side. "I went to bat for you once -- but only because you hadn't been briefed on what we were looking for. I won't do it again."

"He is my father. He ordered my mother, after I was born, to strangle me with the afterbirth. The penalties were -- dramatic -- against parents with more than one child. My mother refused and he used his party connections to get permission for a second child. Within two weeks of my mother showing pregnant the second time, he had the sex tested ... and when he found out I was going to have a sister, he divorced my mother. He has fathered nothing but girls."

"This isn't China. It won't happen here."

"My mother worked two jobs to get me the schooling I needed to qualify for the University. Then my sister was another trial for her to bear -- but my sister is smarter than I am -- she qualified for a scholarship. My father still wished my mother had strangled both of us."

"In the US we call this 'drama' -- personal issues that consume people and their energies to the detriment of their personal and professional lives. Please Lily, you are an asset that I want to keep. I'd been looking through a book, paying only partial attention to the colonel. Every one of us was doing that. You were the only one to notice the page numbers and their import. Although, those of us who specialize in ancient languages aren't used to page numbers."

"You aren't going to turn me over to him?"

"Not even close. If nothing else, I have a lot of dialect to learn."

Lily colored. "I thought I was going to die. That he was making up everything just to humiliate me. I wanted to get it over with."

"Lily, I'm me. I'm no simpler a person than you are. I've had high points and low points in my life. But as long as you are on my team, nothing will happen to you that doesn't happen to me first."

As Tom was eating lunch, Colonel Dr. Tang appeared and pulled him to one side. "I've tried to give Lily time to talk to you. Has that occurred?"

"Yes, sir."

The colonel laughed. "Ah! Americans! The greatest mistake that anyone takes away from meeting one of you is to think you are simple!

"Lily told you about me?"

"From her point of view."

"None of us, Dr. Christopher is simple! We don't live only now -- but in the past when things were different. Once upon a time your people exterminated the red Indians. Genocide!"

"It wasn't my people's finest hour," Tom agreed.

"It's still not. What Lily told you is true. I ordered her mother to kill her. When her mother refused, I had to use some serious markers to try for a second child. When she turned up pregnant with another daughter -- it was grounds for divorce. I was an up and coming officer; a son would have enhanced my status. I was focused on the gender of my progeny -- not my progeny. When my second wife turned up pregnant with a girl -- it was she who divorced me. She did kill our daughter. Everyone wanted sons -- no woman wanted to take a chance on a man who had fathered three girls in a row."

"I imagine that history will find that my own culture was just as screwed up -- just not in that particular fashion. We never discriminated by sex which babies were aborted."

"Then Lily started turning in stellar grades in school. I had burned all my bridges with her mother and Lily and her sister. I did what I could for all of them. I eased my daughters' way to places; I got them scholarships. Lily has always been a problem child. She has so much hate and anger -- she does poorly with authority figures."

His expression was pleading. "She is clearly a person to be reckoned with -- but she is on a collision course with the bosses. They are clearly delineated in China -- not so clearly here. Cosgrove and the two Bluchers ... they didn't realize that there are places you can't go even with a relatively soft government. Blucher senior should have heeded the warning to remain silent. He laughed at a Federal judge when he was told that he was in contempt of court. He's serving ten years for contempt, and twenty years -- consecutively -- for the violation of his security oath. His son objected, and he's just started a ten year sentence for contempt.

"Please, try to spare my daughter from any of this."

The five of them plowed through the books. They were a treasure trove, but Tom had been right too. A great deal of material existed as low-hanging fruit. The vast majority of the material was as opaque as ever.

Keith was a like a guard-yard dog, plugging away at the spoken language. Three weeks after they started he presented the rest of them with a complete phoneme library, the letter and aspirated equivalents. There were some commonalities with other languages, but never much and never for more than occasional instances.

Four weeks into the project they had gone from hundreds of phrases translated per day to maybe one or two on a good day.

Moreover, procedures were starting to get in the way of routine translations. A team would send in a query, it would be prioritized and routed to the linguistics team -- and they would respond. It would take two or three days to report back that a sensor was reading 75 degrees Fahrenheit when someone on site could have responded within a minute.

Tom was a little surprised when the delays brought the majority of the senior managers together.

Dr. Tang was blunt. "We've been concerned, as a priority, with the safety of the study teams. We are currently drawing from about 40% of the pool of qualified personnel. We have gone from a few percent of those we needed to double and triple that -- but it's still not enough.

"We have decided that the observed history is such that we can afford to take a few small risks. There have been only two injuries among the exploration teams. Both accidents are of the garden variety -- one individual allowed his attention to wander as he started down a ladder. He missed a step and caught his leg in a narrow place and broke his leg. He was transported and is doing well. Another individual tried to detect current in a high voltage socket with her fingers. She found it. Proving that God protects imbeciles, she survived.

"Both of these were preventable accidents, accidents caused by inattention or plain stupidity. Just to make the matter clear, both individuals have been assigned to lower priority activities here and not there.

"Now I'm going to entertain requests from individuals to transfer to the exploration teams. Some caveats: these are military-led teams from various nations. We will try to assign people to same-nation teams but I can't guarantee it. Assignments will not be on my whim -- there is a board that runs these assignments -- I'm just one vote there."

Tom had no idea where his request stood in the great scheme of things. He'd made a request a week before to be allowed to accompany the exploration teams. He'd heard nothing back. Now he had a request from Dr. Tang to see him after lunch.

He was Colonel Tang again, when Tom saw him. "A great many people of your nation examine my every move in exquisite detail. My government's instructions were crystal clear: 'Do not fuck this up!'

"My government is positive that if your government was trying to hide things from us, we'd now have a complete map of the sewage system. My government is clueless why it might be the greatest value to China that we could find.

"The thought of sending the world's top scientists hundreds of feet beneath sea level gives them all gas. Dr. Christopher, to be honest, your early success has put you in the 'If it's that easy, why do we need them?' class. So your whole team, having volunteered as a group, has been accepted as a group to work aboard the ship.

"Myself, I'm confident that you will be as safe as anyone, but there are those confident you will be dead in a matter of days. I tell you this to describe the variety of opinions that are held by your peers -- and mine." He smiled thinly.

"I'd have sent my daughter to safety if I thought she was in real danger. You can't read much of the alien language as yet -- but you are familiar with their sensor readings. Currently it takes us three days to clear a compartment as safe to enter. You'll reduce that to minutes, significantly extending our ability to explore." He grinned, "And if you are killed, the bosses are on record that you can easily replaced.

"I personally believe that you are the brightest of the lot, and the presence of you and your team will materially assist our efforts."

Tom mentally shook his head. Dr. Tang was anything but inscrutable -- but he was no closer to figuring the man out than he had been on the first day.

The most notable thing on the day they were packing to leave was a visit by Lily Chu to his quarters. "I am not an easy person to get along with," she told him bluntly. "My father left me with a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to authority figures. My professors at the university were mostly time-serving party hacks who were still trying to wrap their heads around Mao's dialectic of 'The Great Leap Forward' and were unlikely to ever come to terms with economic liberalism.

"You've never bothered me, not even the first day when I made the worst mistake of my life. Not only weren't you angry with me, you patiently explained to me what you were looking for -- and that I had so cavalierly dismissed.

"You stood up to my father -- something new in my experience. You were no more impressed with his fury than you were with mine. More than once grown men have groveled in front of him; one of them wet himself. And it was nothing to you."

Tom laughed. "I'm goal oriented -- if we're not moving towards our goal we need to refocus, get our heads on straight and buckle down. Drama is in great surplus in my society. I avoid adding to it as much as possible."

"You stayed with me," she said simply. "Before it was always a fight to be allowed to stay; you've never asked me to leave."

"Hah! Chinese science must be very different from that in the US! When another researcher comes forward and confirms your thesis -- only a fool would ask them to leave! You keep them close to prove to everyone how clever your ideas were!"

She startled him by stepping close and hugging him. It was a long hug and her arms were exceptionally strong and she had a very tight grip on him. Abruptly, she let go. Under her breath he heard her say, "I am a stupid girl!" Lily spun and fled the room.

That night he practiced some slight of hand on two of the tiny bottles of wine they were permitted each day and put his feet up on a chair in his quarters. He hadn't bothered with the lights and sat slowing sipping some mediocre California Cabernet.

His topic was one of the rarest of the ones he choose when he was in a navel-studying mood -- himself.

The bomb in Tikrit had been a tragedy, no doubt. Still, a decade later, he was still wallowing in self-pity. Nothing in the universe was going to apply a "reset" to the events of that day. Nothing could change the deaths of the girls -- or anyone else killed that day.

He'd shut himself off from people, he knew. He'd done it in his own unique fashion and he doubted if anyone had noticed. He was enthusiastic, outgoing and above all gregarious and talkative -- not the traits you normally associated with someone profoundly depressed and cut off from his fellow man.

Lily had accidently touched upon it -- but like everyone else hadn't seen it. He hadn't reacted to her father's anger -- and hers -- for the simple reason that there was nothing that they could say or do that touched him.

He was a man who owed his life to the protection, to be honest, the sacrifice of the lives of two very young girls. What could an army colonel -- any army officer in fact -- do that could compare to that sacrifice? He talked too much -- at first it had been panic, trying to say anything that would distract himself. Cameron hadn't been aware of it, he was sure, but she had honed his techniques of disengagement. He still cared about winning and losing. He forced himself to focus on improving his arguments. He'd have been infinitely better off focusing on those rather than facing what had happened.

Shit happened. He knew that, really. His wasn't the most tragic story he's heard while he was in Iraq -- and he hadn't been there that long. He honestly thought he wasn't getting any worse -- although he was getting better at hiding his true feelings. How many people think you're BSing them when you're spilling your guts about how your first ever girlfriend tore your guts out -- when you actually had put it behind you years ago?

That incident could have -- should have -- taught him a lot about karma that sucked. Mary Alice hadn't left him for his best friend -- she'd left him for the asshole that had made his life miserable since second grade. That should have told him all he needed to know about what sort of a person Mary Alice had been. That was the first clue about human relations when he'd realized what had caused their breakup.

The guy, Dwayne, had gotten a job as a production assistant on the sequel to Blair Witch Project. He told Mary Alice that he could get her on as well. Seeing nothing but stars, she'd run off with him.

Tom supposed there were really people who memorized such trivia, but the movie was another crappy, low budget production and Blair Witch had worn out its welcome the first time. Mary Alice had been a cute redhead who smiled -- and later screwed -- one of the assistant directors. That got her a walk-on part on the sequel to Blair Witch Project where she said three words. You know you're bankrupt as an actress when your lines consist of "What the hell?"

When that project finished Dwayne scored a PA's job in another movie, this one with a real budget. Karma is a bitch; Tom was still trying to come up with some righteous payback -- when karma did a far better job that he ever could have. Dwayne and Mary Alice were sharing an unheated -- and uncooled -- apartment with two other couples in North Carolina. One of their roommates scored a few lines of coke -- Mary Alice stayed home to enjoy her share of the bounty and Dwayne had gone off to work. Mid-morning his craving overwhelmed his common sense and he snorted a line during a break on the set.

The movie business exists because the movers and shakers trust people to do the work. No one is going to put a drug head in a position where he can torpedo a fifty million dollar project because he's desperate for a toot. Dwayne was fired, paid and off the set in fifteen minutes. When he tried to come back the next day, swearing on a stack of bibles that he'd learned his listen, he was worked over expertly by a couple of the grips -- the men who moved equipment around.

Mary Alice contemplated her hole card and went home to Mommy and Daddy. Dwayne went down the sewer and vanished. Two years later Mary Alice OD'd while Tom had still been in college.

It was enough to leave you wondering if there really was a God.

He was still contemplating his navel when there was a knock on his door. He rose and answered it. One of the airmen spoke quickly. "Sir, your aircraft has received additional tasking for later in the day. Take off has been moved up three hours, sir. In ninety minutes."

"Thanks, I'll be ready."

He showered and did all that, grateful for having packed the evening before. As before, they were loaded into a C-130 in a hanger and buttoned up before the aircraft started moving. They flew due north for about a half hour before a man in an Air Force colonel's uniform rose and picked up a microphone.

"I'm Colonel Julian Baird, Colonel Tang's opposite number aboard the project vessel. I was returning after some meetings and it was decided that I could give your briefing as well as anyone. However, first we're going to disorient you again -- this isn't a comfortable experience for any of us and we'll try to settle your stomach for a bit afterwards."

Tom didn't see a signal, but there must have been one. The pilot dropped one wing and banked steeply. They went around five times clockwise very fast, then the plane rolled again, and they were going counter-clockwise "unwinding" so to speak. Then they returned to level flight.

Southeast, Tom was sure.

Colonel Baird was back up. "Aren't you glad you didn't have breakfast yet?"

Then he turned serious. "Things at the vehicle have been in a great deal of flux lately -- that's a lot of the reason you're here.