Now I’m sitting in the orc prison, the dim light of a distant red giant seeping through the tiny cell window. I’m glad to have finished my patrol before dark; I much prefer being indoors over being outside, where a swamp the size of an ocean is interrupted only by patches of blood-red grass and black, prickly trees and islands of bushes that look nightmarish under the reddish light of the sun and worse under the bloodlight of the double moons.
We sit silently at a metal table, Orc #176 cuffed to a chair, watching me as I wait for my neuralnet translation program to load. As usual, the speaker that plays our translations sits between us. Once the program sends a signal from my implant to my cerebral cortex, the light on the speaker turns green and I clear my throat. Fourteen other translators have managed to squeeze out at least a name from their orcs, though nothing else of importance. Yet.
“Your name?” I say.
A pause, and from the speaker comes a voice that isn’t my own: “Yan mayun.”
I think the orc is young. Though it sits, I can tell it stands about six foot five—a bit smaller than the others—and there are no greys threaded through its long, braided hair, but its shoulders are impressively broad; the whites of its red eyes shine a brilliant blue-white instead of yellow, and its grey, folded skin is smooth and supple. A hint of moisture—its viscosity somewhere between snail slime and nutri-gel—shines from a few of its folds. Seeing the aliens off-screen and, like now, in person . . . there’s something a little less orc-ish about them. Something about their eyes.
Disconcertingly human.
I ask it another standard question, arguably the most important: “Where are the others?” Wayun go zi?
Every orc in our custody was captured on Earth and brought with us to this creepy place, and if we’ve learned anything, it’s that their favorite—and usually only—reply is silence. I’ve always had a feeling it knows we’re being watched, studied: it’s observing me, I’m observing it, and the interrogator, via the grain-sized camera on the ceiling, observes the both of us from another room.
“What is your specialization? . . . Have you or any others worked covertly with any Earth government in the past?”
It won’t answer and I want to throw my boot into its chest. Instead, I swallow. Take a breath. Gotta stay calm, despite my brain conjuring the image of Uncle June lying dead in the street. “How large is your fleet?”
Back on Earth, we captured a few of their ships, and it didn’t take long for our engineers to figure out their systems. According to all the alien vessels, their origin was this here planet, six hundred light-years away. Now we’re the ones who’ve dropped in on them, but . . .
“Where are the others?”
I run through the list of questions the brass wants us to ask, but question after question, the orc gives me nothing. I continue down the list even as my body shakes and I resist the urge to cry. I feel my chance to save Uncle June slipping through my fingers.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I set down my tray and take a seat beside Santos.
Santos and I joined the United Defense League—the international military created in response to the alien crisis—when we were sixteen, but our paths didn’t cross until a year later, when we signed up for Mission Savior. Nearly a third of the soldiers that make up the UDL are teens like us. Child soldiers. No one could decide whether or not that was a good thing. But the way I saw it, tailgates and prom and grad caps in the air weren’t going to be part of my generation’s future anyway.
Not that Santos ever had any of that in her future; she’s one of those super-smart girls who skipped high school and went straight to MIT.
I haven’t seen her for a couple of days and she’s got dark circles under her soft, hazel-flecked eyes. Her canned peaches and peanut butter crackers are untouched, but there are about ten Fruitbomb wrappers littering her tray. She’s been hoarding Fruitbombs since the week the orcs touched down on Earth, and up to now has maintained a one-every-few-days rule.
“OK,” I say, “what’s up?”
Santos unwraps a pink Fruitbomb and bites into it with all the joy of hurling in a space suit. She whispers, “I don’t want to torture people.”
“You mean the orcs.”
“They have nothing in common with the orcs in those ridiculous movies.”
“First,” I say, “flawed though they may be, those films are classic—”
“You never even read the books.”
“That’s beside the point.”
Santos huffs and looks away, and I try to figure out what’s wrong. It could be the predicament we’re in: communication with Earth unexpectedly ceased the millisecond we went through the wormhole. Twenty-six days later, no one on Earth knows what’s happening here, and no one this side of the hole knows what’s going on there.
But then Santos yawns and I guess her problem’s something closer to home.
“I told you you shouldn’t have taken that prison detail,” I say, digging into my bowl of UDL Protein Medley 2.
Between patrol duty and translating and prison detail, she can’t be sleeping much. Plus, she’s always volunteering to help the technicians and coders with the Earth transmissions, which is how I know about the comms problem in the first place. Santos is doing all she can to increase her chances of getting her mom, sister, and baby cousin into Sanctum.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “your orc will start talking soon.”
Santos tosses a furtive glance about the mess hall. “I’ve spoken to a few of them, actually. During prison detail.”
“One of those things just struck up a conversation?”
“No. I— The point is, they’re not what you think. They have a rich history, and—”
“Are you serious?”
Santos sighs exaggeratedly and slides a slice of peach into her mouth. She’s got full lips and that smooth, dark-brown skin that can make a girl forget herself. A teasin’ sip, what my uncle would call it. Back on Earth when he’d see a woman in a park, one who got no time for nobody, sashayin’ through the city heat like a mirage to a man dyin’ o’ thirst.
There’d be only the slightest hint of sadness in Uncle June’s voice.
Thirst is right, I’d say to him before rolling my eyes, because Thirsty June is what my dad used to call him, and my uncle would chuckle and say, Girl, please, and knock his knuckles against my head while continuing to watch the lady walk down the street.
That was before, when there were NYC streets to walk on.
“Santos,” I say, “if they felt for us half as much as you do for them, we wouldn’t have needed to cross the galaxy in the first place. Let’s just stick to our objective. The interrogators torture. We translate.”