Federations

“Adriassi, who is this?” I continued. “Why does he dress this way, and cut his hair so? I found him near the body of a terminated seditionist.” I turned the corpse’s head down to give Adriassi a good look at the pattern on his skull.

Adriassi stroked his earlobes as he spoke. “He’s a priest,” Adriassi said, “Conducting rituals for the deceased.”

I watched his lips move and there was a lag before his voice came through the com, meaning our translation device was struggling to find cognates between our languages. “Adriassi, what kind of rituals?”

“It’s complicated,” he answered. “As we have discussed, the seditionists have strict beliefs. They think the soul can be trapped in the body after death and left to rot if not properly freed. They believe souls leave through the mouth, so the priest conducts a mouth-opening ceremony freeing the souls to rise to heaven.”

The lag between his moving mouth and the translation was severe enough to be disorienting, so I shut down the visuals as he spoke. I relayed the information to the rest of the team.

Rauder snorted, then patched into the conversation. “Is that so? Check this out,” she said. Adriassi’s face soured, insulted either by her intrusion or her failure to address him properly. She opened her own visual pathway with Adriassi as she lifted the priest’s body and ripped off the wide hood of his robe.

“Rauder,” Marsten said, sounding tired. “Knock it off.”

“Just doing a little soul catching for Fireteam Bravo,” she said as she dragged the corpse of the armored seditionist away from the group a few paces, then thrust the hood inside its helmet and made as if she were capturing the dead seditionist’s soul inside. Then she twisted the hood shut like it was a sack and held it over her head, waving it at the grassland.

• • •

“She did this how many times?” Adriassi asked, his glassy eyes veering away from mine to scan the front room of the eatery where we sat. He had difficulty relaxing in public, even in his armor. Like him, I’d removed my helmet as a gesture of fostering openness in our conversations; like him, it made me uneasy. Confed armor could repel most of what the seditionists could throw at us, but diagnostics showed that their plasma rifles were strong enough to penetrate our armor’s weak points—the flexjoints at the wrists, elbows, the thinner material under our arms, behind our knees. The armor’s weapons detection sensors would give me enough time to slap on my helmet before an attack, but Adriassi had no WDS in his armor so he would far more vulnerable. I had no doubt that some seditionists were gunning for him specifically because he had chosen to cooperate with us, but regulations prevented me from offering to upgrade a native’s armor or conducting meetings in a Confed-secured zone. At each of our cultural exchange meetings, he was taking a significant risk. He knew it, and so did I.

Of course, such conditions make the work of filing accurate daily reports difficult, sometimes impossible, and antagonistic behavior like Rauder’s only compounded the problem.

I let out a sigh. “She did it fourteen times, once for each dead seditionist. Do you think her gesture will mean anything to someone watching?”

“Oh, yes,” Adriassi said, shrugging his shoulders, his people’s equivalent of a nod. “It most certainly will. But why would she do such a thing? It certainly cannot help?”

“I can’t explain. Maybe she thinks it will demoralize them, or that they’ll become more reckless in their attacks if they’re angry.” I left out that Rauder’s actions seemed tame compared to some of the atrocities I’d heard about on other planets. The Confed investigates allegations of improper conduct, but with an infinite set of diverse planets and cultures, the circumstances are always extenuating apart from cases of indiscriminate slaughter. Besides, the prosecution would rely heavily on the attendant Xenologist’s reports and I had no desire to stir up a bureaucratic mess that would ultimately lead nowhere. Attempting to explain this to Adriassi would be next to impossible, so I made the best excuses I could.

I waited for the explanation to filter through, as the translator had gotten hung up on the words demoralize and perhaps reckless. The translator parses about eight million known languages in order for us to communicate with the alien species we encounter, cross-referencing grammar, syntax, and phonology, uploading and downloading lexicons even as we spoke. It handles the structure of languages incredibly well, but it was dicier when it came to semantics, the actual meaning of what we want to say. The more specific a word or phrase, the more difficult it was for the translator to get it right.