Young Writers Society

Eager to leave behind the mess and the failure of the Intergalactic Sci-Tech Summit, Tejal and I headed for Sauron. We had put out messages before the ISTS, hoping to snag at least a few smaller investors, should the summit go wrong. Ellie had told us beforehand not to put all our cargo down one current, and her business savvy did, in fact, lead us to one group, however small and measly a group they were.

The Ink alighted at Savra Station to little fanfare. A few weeks had passed since the ISTS, and news of the shooting was in that middle-depth where the news was fresh, but had spread around long enough to both fade and take on life of its own. No one immediately recognized that the Ink, piloted by a pair of gato bounty hunters, carried anyone related to the incident with Independent Titan.

As Crane and Shell went about their usual landing hubbub—ushering Tejal safely to the ground, getting the bay door open, and checking on equipment to make sure no solar winds had caused damage—I meandered out to meet the saur representative of the group we were about to barter with.

By this point, Tejal and I still had not tested Mouthbot out on many saur, and though Ellie later became one of the first earthlings to coax her tongue through the clicks and trills of more than one saur language, she had not been around at the time to train the program to listen for all the nuances and dialects that existed on Savra.

I shook hands with a comparatively large, dark blue saur whose scales had grown speckled with age. Her claws dug a little into the webbing between my fingers, and she bopped my nose with a claw, which I think made my gills flare in alarm. Thankfully, she did not seem to understand my body language.

Tejal rolled up, tablet in his lap, and the conversation began.

“We are so very pleased to have you here,” the saur told us. “I understand that your goals rather line up with ours, though I only regret that we cannot do more for you.”

Ellie had mentioned something about that line there. We did not want a company that could back us entirely. For Tejal and I to truly beat Spec Corp in the fold generator game, we needed support from all over the universe.

“Oh, that’s fine,” Tejal replied, plastering on a smile. “At this point, any investment or cooperation is good, and should have a pretty high payout.”

The saur’s tail flicked at this; hopefully she was pleased. She hopped out into the hall and gestured for us to follow her. “A number of our board members have come up. We would like to see a demonstration before discussing any possibilities.”

I heard Tejal tap his fingers on his armrests, probably in apprehension, before we trailed after the saur down the tiled floor of the business sector.

Like every business sector in every station, Savra Station treated its high-class travellers with cushy furniture and abstracted art representative of the planet’s major industries. Friezes of saur mining operations lined the walls, and the jagged, painted cement walls felt like the cavernous interior of an underwater cave, though likely they were meant to invoke mining tunnels.

The saur led us through a black door with a single inset gemstone in the center, right at eye level for the average adult saur, and just high enough that I did not notice until Tejal pointed it out. She bounded inside, through a tiny anteroom, and then into a cramped meeting room with a small, circular table and two other saur resting on stools on the side opposite the door.

We had introductions, and they were short, and someone pulled up a couch so I could converse with everyone. Mouthbot had some troubles with the word ‘couch,’ which is mostly why I remember the seating arrangements. The saur had no real equivalent and had stolen a tyran word.

“So,” began one of the saur. He too was speckled with age, but the pronounced green scales over his eyes showed that he was still in good shape. “We are the representatives from Roid Mining Operations. You two are interested in working with us?”

I grinned. Ellie had told me that sirens should always grin while negotiating with non-sirens, because our teeth are threatening. I do not understand why; as far as I can tell, earthlings and day tubai have weirder anatomy for eating and digestion. “Yes,” I replied. “After all, in order to manufacture the generators, we must get materials from somewhere.”

“But you were hoping for investment, too, no?” asked the last saur. They were a bright, shocking yellow, and young enough to have only a few speckled scales.

Tejal rolled himself just a little closer to the table. “Yes. The initial funds for research and development were given privately by a single investor, but that investor was more interested in simply seeing if we could create the generator at all, and was less concerned about mass production.”

That was a lie, except for the single investor. But we needed an excuse of some kind to explain where the money had come from.

“Ah, some eccentric,” the blue saur chuckled. Or Mouthbot said she chuckled. I heard her make soft hissing noises.

“Well, how far did you get?” asked the yellow saur.

I grinned harder as Tejal placed the tablet on the table. He unlocked it and gestured around at the saur. “When we requested the meeting, we asked you all to arrange a teleconference time with someone outside of the system. This tablet has almost every communication app uploaded onto it, so you may go ahead and set up the call.”

The board members looked at each other for a moment, and then the green saur reached across the table and slid the tablet towards himself. “We sent two of the board members to Gant recently,” he announced, tapping the screen with a stylus. Saur always carried styluses, to keep from scratching screens. “They should be waiting for us.”

We all sat in the quiet for a moment, and then the pings of the app’s calling system echoed into the room. Shortly after, the call connected.

Saur do not have gills to flutter when they are amazed, but they do make incoherent chatter to the same effect. Mouthbot made a weak attempt to translate this noise, which resulted in something like “moon shirts where sky,” which prompted Tejal to quirk an eyebrow at me in confusion.

I remember little of the conversation that the saur had over the tablet. In all likeliness, they spoke too quickly for Mouthbot, who had lost some processing power to the teleconference, to translate. However, even after so many years, I still remember what happened right after the call ended, clear as algae-less waters.

For a moment, the room was silent, and the air seemed to expand, soaking up the tension of the saurs’ amazement and mine and Tejal’s anticipation. Then the room burst into chatter. The saur clicked and clacked and whistled at each other, all conversing over each other, too fast for Mouthbot to keep up or even differentiate between their voices. And then all at once, the saur turned to me and Tejal, half off their stools.

“It works!” the yellow saur trilled.

“That it does.” The green saur sat back, a little dazed, but not quite given over to excitement like his younger colleague. He leaned on the table and glanced between me and Tejal. “We would certainly be interested in helping you. But we can only promise help—both monetary and as a raw materials source—if you can manage to secure the rest of the operations.”

It is apparently unwise to break either a poker face or a well-set-up act, but I am sure Tejal and I broke ours then. Someone out there was willing to help us produce the pinpoint fold generator, someone who was not Ellie, and now that we had taken the first step, surely more people would rally around our project.

- A Rough Translation of Focci's Ballad