So no shit, there I was, standing in the middle of the ocean with my commanding officer's severed head, and a dolphin had just speargunned a demigod in the back.
And now it was laughing at me.
Comm translation isn't perfect, but even though it struggles with stuff like with puns and music, it's still mostly reliable… between humans.
Comm translation works by artificially establishing a link between the speaker's intentions and the sound of the speech, bypassing normal processing. That's what causes the all weirdness with puns and music—you're still getting the actual sound, and the comm can only do so much to reconcile it with what you're expecting to hear.
A dolphin's primary sense is echolocation; they've got as much neural real estate devoted to it as we have to visual processing. Human audio processing just can't keep up. So comm-translated dolphin speech is like listening to a video on 2x speed, except the person's speaking voice is also high-pitched cackling. It sounds like they're laughing at you.
They probably are. Dolphins are assholes.
"You have three seconds to explain yourself before I shoot you," I told it.
A moment later, my comm received a contact request from an ID it didn’t recognize. Ever since the cloak incident, I’d had it set to automatically accept connections from my team. It wasn’t like there were a bunch of explanations for how a dolphin might end up with a head-mounted speargun, but the comm contact pretty much confirmed it: this was a Velean dolphin.
Just my luck. Of all the teams to survive, it was the most annoying one.
Steeling myself, I accepted the request.
“Hey hey, there we go!” laughed the dolphin. “Is that head for me, sexy?”
“You get one warning,” I said. “Hit on me again and I’ll fucking shoot you.”
“Friend,” Markus said diplomatically, “I know you don’t need the reminder to be more discerning when propositioning humans.”
“Save your ammo,” it chuckled, ignoring him. “Good to see some of the splitfins kicking around. You’re with Abby’s team, right? When we picked up the kill shot on the athletics god, Commander Blackfin figured she was still alive.”
“Uh,” I said, holding up her head. “Your timing’s not great.”
“When is it ever?” it laughed. “Left Flank, mating officer of the Face Sponge.”
“Markus, social officer of the Ragnar,” Markus said. “This is Lilith, our infiltration specialist.”
Val’s voice came through over the comms. “Operative, what’s the status of your ship?”
“Three courses currentward,” it giggled, the directions unfolding into intelligible coordinates as our comms negotiated an understanding. It was about a mile and a half to the northeast. “We just took out another one of those megafauna heading for this location. When we picked up the demigod heading for the same place, we figured it was for you, so I left to deal with him myself. Oracle’s giving you a chase, huh?”
“Mostly annoying surprises,” Markus said.
“Has your team experienced any divine interference?” Val asked.
“Nah.” The dolphin was swimming lazy circles around us, almost close enough to touch. “Same as always. None of the gods know what to do with us. We culled a couple proto-religions among the native dolphins, but it was all shallows stuff. Well, except for the fisher whales.”
“What’s a fisher whale?” Markus asked.
“History.” Left Flank flicked its head to the side and chirped mischievously. “Anyway, we’re almost ready to go home, but the commander wanted to offer support before we leave.”
“We have reason to believe our communications are compromised,” Val said. “The etheric shield around the planet has untested surveillance capabilities. At minimum, broadcasting from the ship gives the oracle metadata to work with.”
“So we’ll rub rostrums with you,” Left Flank tittered. “This planet was made for dolphins, let me tell you.”
I looked around the ocean, as if I could somehow understand what made it dolphin-friendly. “How so?”
“No sharks!” Left Flank gloated. “Paradise! Anyway, I hit my target, so I have to go back and report to the commander. We’ll rendezvous with you within the hour.”
“We need to resurrect the commander,” Val said. “It may be some time before she’s ready to make plans.”
“We’ll join your pod,” Left Flank laughed. “Take as long as you need. Longer, if you can. We’re on vacation here.”
“See you soon,” Markus said with a wave.
“Clap to, splitfins,” the dolphin giggled. It slapped the water with its tail and dove. Moments later, it was gone, leaving us standing on the black waves, alone with Abby’s decapitated body.
“Your exit should be visible to the east,” Val said, as if nothing had happened. “I suggest you exfiltrate before the blood attracts predators.”
I exchanged a glance with Markus and rolled my eyes. Together, we trudged toward the tunnel of air that led down to the Ragnar’s deployment bay. As we descended toward the ship, I kept my pistol drawn, looking out for hungry sea life—or worse, more dolphins. When I was a kid, I’d read that sharks could smell a single drop of blood in the water from miles away, and despite the lack of sharks on this planet, I was still jumpy. Something had to have taken over their evolutionary niche, right?
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Or maybe not. I remembered there was something called the Autoconsistency Principle, but I forgot to do the readings for that unit. Val could probably explain it to me if I were willing to admit I didn’t know what it was. I should just look it up on the ship’s archives.
I nodded to myself and resolved to do that, knowing I was never going to follow through.
*
The commander was a dude this time. I knew intellectually that she didn’t care about the sex of her bodies, but she’d always been female as long as I’d known her. This was going to take some getting used to.
The three of us wheeled the body into the med bay. Normally, Abby seemed to pick bodies at random from the ship’s database, but this one had strong Estheni phenotypes—light brown skin, strong cheekbones, brunette. Brunette eyebrows, at least; the commander would be bald until Val translated her hair back. His hair, I mean. I vaguely recalled that she was one of the Veleans who used body-conformant pronouns.
Val triggered the neural cradle. It crackled with energy; the commander’s eyes snapped open and she—he, I guess—coughed and wheezed. A hand flopped limply toward his throat.
“Welcome back, commander!” Markus grinned.
“Judol was… right… decapitation,” the commander rasped, gagging. “Unexpected.”
Markus laughed. “If he was, it was only by accident.”
“I don’t know this guy,” I said.
Val smirked, not looking up from the diagnostics console. “You’ve lost nothing.”
“He’s this loudmouth who’s always hanging around Org spaces and telling war stories,” Markus said. “Smart money is that they’re not his stories. Never seen him actually deploy.”
“Wait, we’re supposed get to choose if we deploy?” I said. “That’s bullshit. I don’t get to choose.“
“We don’t,” Markus said. “Judol does.”
“Judol is a man of exceeding talent,” Val said, giving the word talent a Velean sort of inflection that meant nepotism.
“That’s just bullshit. Does anyone know who he’s connected to?”
“Don’t,” the commander rasped. “Better not to touch.”
“Have you picked a new name yet?” Markus said, slapping the side of the coffin. “You’re running out of au names.”
The commander pinged negative.
“Let him rest, Markus,” Val said. “Commander, we made contact with another ship.”
A ping for more information.
“The Face Sponge,” said Val. “Blackfin’s team. We’ll coordinate with them while you recover.”
The commander sighed, choked, and pinged in the affirmative. That seemed to be the end of the conversation. Moments later, the pod’s biofeedback readouts indicated either sleep or deep meditation. You could never tell with the commander.
We adjourned to the lounge, Val casually taking the armchair that Abby normally favored during strategy meetings. I shot him a look that he met blankly.
“Left Flank said they’d be here within the hour,” Markus said. “What’s our plan for Erid?”
“The commander bought us an opportunity,” Val said, nodding in my direction. “Now that she maneuvered Erid into saving Lilith’s life, we should consider embedding Lilith on the Fool’s Errand. We can exploit her cognitive dissonance to achieve a desirable outcome.”
“I thought I was done with deep cover for a while,” I said. “The commander said she wanted to do more training with me.”
“This wouldn’t be a deep cover assignment,” Val said. “We’ve been identified with Kives’s overwrought ‘Calamity’ theology. If you flare your eyes while Erid watches, nothing will substantially change.”
“You set this up,” I realized out loud. “Back at the temple.”
“Yes.” My comm didn’t pick up any smugness, but there’s no way it wasn’t there.
Markus shifted, drawing our attention to him. “The Calamity was one of my research topics during the culture acquisition phase. There’s some information that just became more relevant. Just to set the baseline: apocalyptic event, war between the gods, armies of doom burning the world, ‘as two women stand together, one shall stand and one shall fall,’ all the usual.“
I threw a double thumbs-up; Val nodded.
“There’s a mixed lens on it,” Markus said. “Every religion has its own prediction about how their god is going to survive, so we can draw on those if we really need them. Varas in particular has a term of art, ‘Trustworthy Warriors,’ that people always say with a particular cadence.”
“Olou elliloi,” I translated. “Damn, that really rolls off the tongue. Your translation needs to be more alliterative, like ‘Legions of the Loyal.’”
“Switch your comm back to Velean,” Markus said, jerking his head to the side in that Velean got-one-past-you gesture. His eyes were twinkling.
Something felt off about that. Keeping my comm output in English was a violation of Eifni protocol, not a prank on Markus’s part. I filed it away for later.
“So we can play to the Trustworthy Warriors narrative,” Markus continued, oblivious to my inner musing. “The potential problem with that plan is that the Calamity narratives heavily feature Alcebios, in her persona as the Adversary. She’s supposedly the one who kicks off the party, but it’s hard to pick out when that’s meant literally and when it’s a metaphor for everything catching fire. Either way, that association is probably why people like Erid might be wary of assisting us in our capacity as the Calamity.”
“Is Alcebios involved? She kind of, uh.” I shuddered and didn’t finish.
“She should be no more involved than any other god, except insofar as she will be drawn to conflict and betrayal,” Val said. “Granted, you did betray Erid. But everyone on that ship will be involved in the conflict, so Alcebios won’t be specifically interested in you. The real strategic obstacle will be the optics of being a Calamity.”
“Nice going, Val,” I said.
“Kives assigned that label to us during the pilgrimage operation,” he said calmly. “We are cooperating. If the label exceeds the bounds of cooperation, then we can simply leave and burn the Empress’s palace down. So by all means, play it up. Erid will have to resolve her cognitive dissonance one way or another, and her weakness for you should tilt the balance in our favor. If not, better to learn now.”
“Your chances of swinging on ship rigging are much higher with Val’s plan,” Markus added.
“Fuck it, I’m in,” I said immediately. “I’ll swim over right now.”
Markus laughed.
“Excellent.” Val evinced the hint of a smile. “Once you’re onboard, your objective will be to suborn Erid for this operation. The important thing is to make this campaign into a narrative about Varas’s conquest of the unruly dissidents, or some equivalent sentiment. We’ll work with you to shape it into something appropriate to Varasite philosophy. The first step should be convincing Erid to enlist aid from the Trade Fleet. The operation should practically run itself at that point—Varas’s institutional complex is more than capable of producing the requisite propaganda. The only hurdle should be hiding your intent from Erid.”
“Should be easy,” I said. “I left her with the impression I’m not taking any of this seriously.”
“How unexpected.”
I flipped him off.
Markus clapped me on the shoulder. “We’re right behind you, Lilith. The commander too, when he gets back on his feet.”
“Great,” I said. “Then we’re doing a pirate movie night.”
Val looked disdainfully at me. “I am not ‘doing a pirate movie night.'”
“I need to prepare not to take things seriously,” I said. “Therefore: pirate movies.”
“I’m in,” Markus said, grinning at Val. “It’s for the good of the mission, after all.”
“Morale is important,” I said with a straight face. “You wouldn’t sabotage our combat effectiveness, would you?”
“I need to stay in the med bay so I can monitor the commander,” Val said.
“Good point,” Markus said. “He can watch too. We’ll project it on the med bay screen.”
I watched Val blink as he realized we’d cornered him.
“There is a cost to every victory,” he quoted ominously.
But fighting us any harder would have been even worse for his dignity, so he gave up. And that is the story of how I got Val to watch the Muppets version of Treasure Island.