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The two sailors shared a look. “I guess so,” Peters agreed cautiously.

“Good.” Dreelig gestured. “Shall we go to see Znereda?”

Peters shrugged. “Sure. Lead on.”

At the door of the mess room Donollo nodded and gave them the left-handed Grallt salute. “Hear later,” he said, then exchanged a few words with Dreelig and corrected it to, “See you later, ke?”

“Yeah, see you later, Donollo,” Peters said, returning the salute. The other inclined his head and left, and the two sailors accompanied Dreelig down the corridor toward the language teacher’s office.

“You have plenty of nouns,” Znereda began the lesson. “It is time for you to learn verbs.” Todd was pleased to learn that Grallt was less complex than Spanish, and didn’t have much in the way of rules of agreement for nouns, verbs, and modifiers. There were irregular verbs, but they fit the nouns in fairly simple patterns, and there were no male/female distinctions.

Talking about male and female led to a surprise. “Dee’s male, and you’re female?” Peters asked incredulously. “You could’a fooled me. You did, in fact.”

Znereda chuckled, Grallt style. “Actually, it isn’t that simple,” he said to their stares. “If you saw us unclothed you would be very confused.”

“Wait a minute,” Todd demanded. “How do you know all this?”

“It’s part of my job,” Znereda told them with lifted eyebrows. “Sex interaction is very important to language. I’ve studied materials brought back from your planet, including popular magazines with pictures, and a medical text.”

“I bet I know what kind of magazines,” Peters said with a chuckle.

“You’re probably correct. I believe they are not thought very cultured. We have similar ones, and they are not respected. The ones I received offer a great deal of information to a person like myself.”

“I’ll bet,” said Todd darkly; Peters waved him to silence, and Znereda went on to explain. Grallt of Znereda’s sex were biologically female, in that they produced ova; Dee’s sex produced sperm. “Males” had an ovipositor, similar in structure and function to a penis, but nothing resembling testicles. A “Male” deposited an egg in the body of a “female,” where it was fertilized and grew to maturity. Grallt sperm, like the human version, needed to be kept cooler than body temperature, so “females” had testicles similar to a human male’s, but their sex organs were otherwise similar to those of human females, including provisions for suckling. Znereda produced a magazine that could have been sold in a Jacksonville stop-and-rob, behind a screen to keep the kiddies curious, to illustrate.

The teacher waved them out, still confused, a few tle before the fourth ande, and they headed for the mess hall, where they regarded the other diners with new interest. One “female” had patterned “her” kathir suit to emphasize “her” frontal development, which was considerable. “She” undulated by, eyeing them sidelong, and Todd sighed. “It’s too much for me,” he confessed. “I’m just gonna think of them as men and women, like back home.”

“What’re you gonna do if a lady asks you out?” Peters asked slyly.

“I don’t know the answer to that yet,” Todd confessed. “I guess I’ll burn that bridge if I get to it, you know?”

“Yeah, I reckon I’ll reserve judgement myself,” Peters said. “Not that it’s likely to come up ‘til we know more of the language. Dee ain’t interested, an’ who else could we ask?”

Chapter Six

“Tell you what, let’s do poke around a little,” Todd suggested. “I’d like to get a look at what’s below the main deck.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

They rode the elevator down to the docking bay and walked forward, as Peters had decided to call it, to the big door midships. Set in it was a smaller, people-sized hatch; through that was a thwartships passage, easily wide enough to accommodate a dli or a Navy fighter, going all the way across to another big door that presumably led to the other docking bay. The passage was as long as the bay was wide, maybe longer.

“So the midships section’s the same width as the docking bay,” Todd noted. “Fifty meters wide, eighty high, and seven hundred long. That’s a lot of fucking space, even with the hangars taken out of it.”

“Well, Dee said most folks lived here,” Peters pointed out. “An’ it makes sense structurewise, I guess.”

Fore and aft off the passage were enormous empty spaces that were probably meant as hangars, grimy, dusty, and full of the same collection of crap that littered the ops bay. All of the hangar doors were open except the forwardmost one, and all but every eighth overhead lamp was either off or burned out. In the aftmost hangar they could see three dli and a scattering of junk. The midships spaces were empty, but when they hiked forward and found a mandoor leading to the forward hangar they discovered a single ungainly object.

“Reminds me of a truck,” Peters commented.

“Or maybe a garbage compactor,” Todd suggested.

Peters was taller; by jumping up he was able to glimpse a pair of chairs and a set of controls. He reported this to Todd, summing up with, “Freight hauler. Has to be.”

“Yeah.” Todd scowled. “They’ve been hauling food up, and God knows what all else. The dli didn’t seem like enough for all of that.”

“You’ve heard tell of somethin’ flyin’ like a brick?” Peters asked in amusement. “Well, there’s the brick they were talkin’ about. Except I bet it flies good enough to get the job done.”

The hangars were flanked by six tiers of balconies with welded-pipe rails. Doors led to rooms of varying sizes. “Shops,” Todd diagnosed. If so, they weren’t needed much. Even the ones in the dli hangar were empty, except for one that had a couple of sleeping pads and some small cabinets in it. All they visited, including the one with the sleeping pads, were coated in a thin film of dust. By the time they’d worked their way back aft, so were they. They paused to brush off; dust didn’t stick to the kathir suit worth a damn.

“You seen anything that looks like a ladder leadin’ down?” Peters asked, running his hand over a hatch coaming.

“Nope, all the ladders I’ve seen lead up. Not many of those, either. Whoever built this thing wanted the sections kept separate.”

“Yeah.” Peters eyed the other sidelong. “You said ‘whoever.’ You sayin’ our good friends here didn’t?”

“Shit,” Todd dismissed. “Can’t you just see Dreelig running a welder? We don’t know them all, but if the ones we know are any sample, hand ‘em a screwdriver and they’d cut themselves. How does it work? ‘I have never troubled myself to ask.’” He slapped the wall, getting back a dull thud. “No, they bought this thing.”

“Wha’d'ya reckon, surplus aircraft carrier?”

“You got it. This ship—” he slapped the bulkhead again, “—and the dli were built by somebody about like us, give or take. The folks at Newport News, or Ingalls down in Mississippi, could have put this ship together, and likely done a better job.”

“Yeah, and the ones as built the dli was better, for all of me. It don’t look too different from the birds our guys fly around back home.”

“Right, but it’s a different style, you know? Our guys could have built the dli, sure—”

“If they had whatever makes it go,” Peters pointed out.

“Yeah, I’m coming to that. Our guys could have built it, but it’d look different, you see? It’d probably work just as well, but a different style.”