And where, I belatedly remembered, Anglish was not always the language of choice. For a second she just gazed up at me, her face not seeming to register my question; and I was trying to figure out a Plan B when my words suddenly seemed to click. "Yes," she said. Her accent was soft and delicate and as exotic as the rest of her. "Can you help me?"
"I can try," I said, peering into the engine compartment. It was a Scroller, all right, though from the looks of it whoever had traded it to her had gotten the better end of the deal. I was just reaching in to check the motivor cables when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the pedestrian stream falter and looked up to see what was going on.
Rounding another corner, heading across the intersection, were a pair of Kailth warriors.
I'd seen pictures of Kailth warriors at the Convocation Complex, vids secretly taken by SkyForce Intelligence at the Chompre and TyTiernian pacifications near the edges of the Kailthaermil Empire. We hadn't tangled with them yet ourselves, but there was a widespread feeling in the Complex back rooms that it was just a
matter of time before we did. The Kailth controlled a lot of territory, with a
fair number of non-Kailth under their control, and that almost always spelled trouble.
Besides which—the more cynical argument went—the Pindorshi situation wouldn't last forever, and wars and conflicts were too politically useful for politicians to stay away from them for long.
Watching the SkyForce reports in the safety of a Zurich screening room, I had hoped those cynics were wrong. Standing there in the middle of a Quibsh street, I desperately hoped they were wrong. On telephoto vids, Kailth warriors were impressive; up close and personal, they were damn near terrifying. Armored up to their headcrests in full combat suits, walking in lockstep, they were straight out of a xenophobic newspage docu-diatribe. Or straight out of hell.
The two warriors spotted me at roughly the same time I spotted them, and in perfect unison they shifted direction toward us. Instinctively, I moved closer to the girl—some chivalric idea about sticking together, I suppose—and I threw her a quick glance to see how she was handling this.
And paused for a longer look. She was gazing at the warriors, but the look on her face wasn't the knee-shaking trepidation I was feeling. She was smiling, the tension lines in her face already starting to smooth out.
It was a look of relief. Maybe even adoration.
"You," one of the Kailth said in passable Anglish. "Human male. What are you doing?"
My tongue tangled momentarily over my teeth. "I—she's having trouble with her Scroller," I managed. "I stopped to help."
He held out his right hand. "Identify."
I fumbled out my ID folder and handed it over, wondering nervously whether a UnEthHu Convocation ID would be an asset or a liability here. My eyes drifted to the lumpy black weapon strapped to his left side, not much bigger than the 5mm slugkicker pistol I used to plink targets with when I was a kid. At its highest setting, this particular sidearm could allegedly drop a two-story brick building with a single shot.
The warrior studied the ID for what seemed like an inordinately long time.
Then, closing it, he handed it back and turned his insectine gaze on the woman.
"Does he bother you, Citizen-Three?" he demanded.
"Not at all, Warrior-Citizen-One," she said, bowing her head. "It is as he said: he paused to help me."
I stared at her, suddenly almost oblivious to the warriors. Citizen-Three?
"Do you wish our assistance?" the warrior continued.
The girl looked at me. "No," she said. "I will be fine. Thank you for your concern."
The warrior threw one more long look at me. Then, in lockstep once more, the two of them passed us by and disappeared down another street.
I looked at the girl, my stomach churning. "He called you Citizen-Three," I said. "Citizen-Three of what?"
"Of the Kailthaermil Empire," she said, as if it was obvious. "I and my people are third-citizens." She reached up and touched the tattoo line on her face.
"Your people," I said, dimly realizing I was starting to blither like an idiot.
But I couldn't help it. "But you're human. Aren't you?"
"Yes," she said. "My people were saved from invaders by the Kailthaermil many years ago. For that we will forever be grateful to them."
I frowned harder... and then, with a sudden jolt, I got it.
She and her people were verlorens.
"Would you be willing," I asked carefully, "to take me to your people?"
For the first time a shadow of uncertainty seemed to cross her face. But then the shadow passed, and she smiled. "Of course," she said.
"Thank you." I cleared my throat. "By the way, my name's Stane Markand."
"Stane Markand," she repeated, bowing her head as she had toward the Kailth warriors. "I am Tawnikakalina."
"Tawnikakalina," I said. It didn't sound nearly as melodious as when she said it. But with any luck, I figured I might just have a chance to practice. We spent the next half hour kluge-rigging the Scroller back to health, then nursing it over to the consulate. There I had it loaded aboard my half-wing, informing the pilotcomp and Consular Agent Verst that I'd be making one more stop on Quibsh and postponing my departure from the planet for a day or two.
The pilotcomp, programmed with flexibility in mind, took the change in plans in stride. Verst obviously couldn't have cared less.
It was about two hundred kilometers to where Tawni's people had been settled in a scattering of small villages beneath a line of squat volcanoes. We put down on a section of lava flow near Tawni's village, and by the time we had the Scroller rolled out, a small mob of her people had gathered around the half-wing to see what was going on. She explained the situation to them in a few musical sentences, and with a dozen enthusiastic young men pushing the Scroller ahead of them, we all went down to her village.
I don't know how widespread the term verloren ever became around the UnEthHu.
It was mostly an academic word, borrowed from the Old German word for lost, that was used to describe the phenomenon of Earth-born human beings or their relics discovered dozens or even hundreds of parsecs away from Earth with no apparent way for them to have gotten there. Genetic and linguistic studies were inconclusive, but they suggested that the original ancestors of the groups had left Earth some six to ten thousand years earlier. Whether the colonies had been deliberately planted by some unknown starfaring race, or whether the verlorens were the equivalent of white rats discarded after an experiment, no one knew.
There were thirty-one known archaeological digs that showed evidence of a long-past human presence, another dozen or so scatterings of primitive humans at Iron Age level or below, and three genuinely thriving verloren societies.
With Tawni's people, I'd apparently discovered a fourth.
"Our history on Sagtt'a goes back to the Great Rain of Fire," she explained as she showed me around her village. "Our ancestors sought refuge from the fire inside a strange mountain. When they came out, the land and the stars had changed."
I nodded. Two of the other verloren cultures also had a Rain of Fire in their histories. "That must be when you were taken from Earth."
"Yes, though it was many generations before we realized what had actually happened," Tawni said. "Not until after the first invasion."
"The Kailth?"
She shook her head, her hair shimmering in the sunlight with the movement.
"No, the invaders were called the Orraci Matai," she said. "Large creatures with many fish-like fins. They occupied Sagtt'a for four generations before they were overthrown by the Xa, who ruled us for thirty years before they were in turn overthrown by the Phashiskar. They stayed three generations before they were conquered by the Baal'ariai, in a terrible battle that killed a quarter of our people."