Parallel Heat by Deidre Knight

Author:Deidre Knight [Knight, Deidre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0451219651
Published: 2009-04-04T21:48:46+00:00

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Chapter Seventeen

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The room in the underground holding facility where they'd placed Scott Dillon was only ten by ten feet, small enough that the alien could be wrestled into a corner if control became necessary, but large enough that they were giving him at least a little breathing room. Either way, Hope felt surprisingly sorry for the alien. He sat compliantly at the small desk in the center of the room, despite the fact that they'd worked him over good—she heard him groan and exhale whenever he shifted in his seat, indicating a high level of pain. He smelled of nervousness and something else that Hope couldn't quite place, a kind of musky smell.Seated across the table from him, she worked to make "eye contact": a skill that she knew made people less nervous about her eyesight problems. Part of her job as a translator was putting subjects at ease; it got them talking more freely. She never wanted to spook anybody by not quite looking them in the eye because that could render her less effective. And if there was anything Hope Harper wanted it was to be the best at what she did, not ordinary, and certainly not perceived as disabled. Still, despite her efforts to meet Dillon's gaze dead-on, all she could make out were a blur of black hair and the slash of black eyebrows against a fair face. If he had beard stubble, she couldn't see it. If he smiled, she only had a sense of it.

The lead investigator had described the room to her in detail while security officers had biometrically scanned her palm and retinas. After that, they'd performed a DNA test by swabbing the inside of her mouth. Within ten minutes they were able to verify her identity based on those tests, confirming that she was, in fact, Hope Harper. The door had been unbolted, a series of locks and codes releasing the latch, and she'd been briefed that they were working the subject hard—going the uncomfortable, less pleasant route with him since he hadn't been talking.

Apart from the small table, the only other accoutrements were a pull-down rack bed—currently unmade and against the wall—and a small toilet on the far side of the room. The alien had no privacy for his ablutions, even as it was becoming equally apparent to Hope that he had. no civil liberties. It went without saying that the Geneva Convention was meaningless for extraterrestrials, and now that she'd spent hours translating the interrogators' questions, she'd begun to feel even sorrier for Scott Dillon.

He seemed so weary—had they even fed him since his arrival? Another linguist had led out with him for the first day or so; they were rotating her and unknown others. They had split up the duty, which explained why they hadn't just relied on the language lab at headquarters. While she'd been working the intercepts all these months, other translators had been hammering out their own Refarian-English translations. None of them would ever be given the entire picture.

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