Black and White by Mark Wandrey

Author:Mark Wandrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: alien invasion exploration survival, contact fleet starship colonization, troop armor marine soldier, action and adventure, empire republic exploration, four horsemen young adult, military war mech mecha mechs
Publisher: Seventh Seal Press
Published: 2020-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Teddy Roosevelt, Hyperspace

December 11th, 2037

As it had in Karma, life fell into a routine in hyperspace. The spin provided by Second Octal made some aspects better. The Humans didn’t have to spend as much time in the gym exercising and taking special medications to avoid losing bone density. Care for the drugged orcas was handled by the trained medical staff. However, the strange orientation of the ship made many routine tasks twice as difficult. This included a slew of water circulation and filtration pump failures on Teddy Roosevelt.

The malfunctions became enough of a problem that the biologists considered moving the cetaceans to one of the other ships. As a last-ditch effort, a small engineering team was hired from Second Octal to look at the problem.

Six Maki showed up one morning, all with tool kits and various diagnostic instruments. They examined the Human-made ship’s systems for an hour. Much yipping and chittering followed. Terry watched and was curious as his translator didn’t want to render what they were saying into English. After a time, they began making modifications.

The engineer on Teddy was alarmed when one of the aliens simply cut a power circuit and all three pumps went down. However, a second later, a new controller they’d built on the spot was installed, and the pumps came back online.

“The charge is 300 credits,” the leader said, the translator understanding it.

“What if there are problems later?” the engineer asked.

The alien smiled. “There will not be.”

Terry’s mom paid the bill, and true to their word, no more malfunctions occurred.

“I wonder why we couldn’t understand them,” Terry asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He did some of his own research. The only thing he found was about the Maki merchant clans. An entry in the GalNet mentioned clans appeared to have individual languages which didn’t fit any of the translation matrixes. To further complicate matters, the Maki could produce varying tonal modulations in their vocal cords, which in turn meant they were able to alter the frequency of their speech.

They have built in scramblers, Terry thought. Handy.

In what time he could find between lessons, taking care of Pōkole, and helping out wherever he could, Terry worked on his pet project. He quickly realized in order to do what he wanted to do, he needed to learn some programming in the Galactic Union’s standard computer language. Luckily it didn’t require learning their spoken language. All programming was done in numbers, or some special symbol variants.

Within a day, he was writing simple programs that could respond to inputs. In two days, he was writing fairly complex decision tree routines. After three days he was learning how to integrate Human standard image files to Union programs so they could display and encode them in Union formats. On the fourth day, he finally got the program he’d downloaded to do what he wanted it to do, and quickly created his masterpiece.

“Hey, Mom,” he said on the evening of their last day in hyperspace.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Can you come with me aboard Second Octal? I have something to show you.

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