“Alright, To Vo, time to justify your existence,” Kamak said. Him being sarcastic again felt like a good sign to To Vo. “And also why you dragged a random alien corpse on to my ship. That thing-”
Kamak paused as he fully entered their makeshift medical room. It was just an empty bedroom they kept relatively clean and stored all their medical supplies in, but it was the closest thing they had to an actual medical bay, and Kamak did not appreciate the mess To Vo had made of it.
She froze in place, looking up from what appeared to be a full-scale dissection of the alien corpse she’d dragged aboard. There was purple-grey ichor everywhere, several organs had been scattered around the room, and To Vo was currently fiddling with a large chunk of caparace attached to some sort of wiry mass of ganglion neurons.
“I didn’t realize you were a surgeon.”
“Oh, I’m not,” To Vo said. “I, well, back on my homeworld, when we killed something we had to make sure we used all of it. So I’m very good at taking things to pieces.”
“Uh huh,” Kamak said. Looking at the massive amounts of “blood” all over the room, butcher did make more sense than surgeon. “You’re very lucky I know you’re going to clean all this up.”
“Absolutely, sir,” To Vo said. She saluted, and left a bloody imprint on her furry forehead.
“So, you find any important organs I should be shooting at?”
“No sir. As far as I can tell their nervous systems and sensory organs are mostly spread throughout their carapace, and they have a sort of hydraulic system that diffuses their blood and moves their limbs at the same time. The central body mostly contains their digestive system, which they don’t seem to need to survive. At least, not in the short term. They’d have plenty of time to rip you apart before they starved to death.”
“Not quite as hard to kill as Doprel, but still pretty fucking hard,” Kamak said. He didn’t like that one bit. “Any good news?”
“Yes! The whole reason I brought them on board in the first place,” To Vo said proudly. “One moment, I was just about to finish.”
To Vo took a pair of pliers and a scalpel and pried at the chunk of carapace she had been working on when Kamak walked in. With a little bit of effort, and a few careful cuts, she managed to remove the prize she had been seeking: a small, silvery computer chip, buried just beneath the carapace’s outer layer. Kamak recognized the construction. He’d bought one of these same devices for Corey not long ago.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“A translation chip?”
“Yes!”
“You went to all this trouble to get that?”
“Of course! If it is plugged into this alien’s nervous system, it means that it has their language loaded into it,” To Vo said. “Next time we meet, perhaps we can communicate.”
“I don’t know if you saw the part where they rip people into tiny little pieces, To Vo, but I’m not sure I want to talk to those things.”
“Every species has outliers,” To Vo said. “There’s a chance. Either way, it will at least let us gather more information.”
“Sure. I think Farsus knows how to work those things, let’s give it to him.”
----------------------------------------
Farus did know how to upload information to translation chips, just as he knew many other seemingly random bits of trivia and technical know-how. In a few moments, everyone felt a slight stinging sensation behind their ear—and heard a loud scream coming from Corey’s bedroom.
“Oh right, I forgot he’s sensitive to this shit,” Kamak said. “Sorry Corvash.”
Corey was too busy screaming to hear the apology, but he wouldn’t have cared for it anyway. He rubbed an aching head and stormed out of his bedroom.
“A little warning, please?”
“You know a new language now, you’re welcome,” Kamak said. Unfortunately, that knowledge was mostly passive. The translation chips did all the mental work for them. Farsus however, had made a copy of the linguistic information contained within, and was perusing it in document form on his computer.
“We have a name, at least,” Farsus said. “They call themselves Horuk.”
Their species name sounded a lot like someone throwing up, which Corey found appropriate.
“Any particular insights to be gleaned from their dictionary, Farsus?”
If anybody could pull some sort of in-depth cultural analysis from a list of basic vocabulary, Farsus could. He pored over the data, finding it to be often incoherent and scattered. The sample of the Horuk language they’d recovered from the translation chip wasn’t perfect, and the tongue was difficult to translate in the first place, due to the alien race’s unique biology. The differences in styles of communication created obstacles, but also opportunities: as the Horuk had entirely different phonetics, the translation also had to account for proper nouns.
“There are associations made for almost all of our technological and cultural mainstays,” Farsus said. “Bang Gates, Galactic Council, even phrases to refer to races like Gentanian and Sturit. They have a great deal of information on our society.”
“Got to do your research before you start a trade war,” Kamak said. “Surprising that the handsy bastards are so smart, considering they rushed us without guns. I figured these ones were some kind of attack dog.”
“You may be closer to the truth than you think,” Farsus said. “There is terminology for some kind of caste-based system present. What we’ve seen thus far might be the lowest caste of their society, the expendable shock troops sent to the front lines.”
“I really don’t want to think about bigger, tougher versions of these fucking things,” Kamak sighed. Farsus nodded in agreement. The last thing they needed was even bigger monsters trying to kill them.