Lost Change

Chapter 100

"Right." Ivy's tone went back to one of seriousness and worry. "I passed that on to Trenil. He's trying to find something; I'll let you know if he does."

The mindlink went quiet.

I watched as Minna continued studying the controls. The entire shuttle was quiet. I could tell the other Kymari were all nervous by the posture of their bodies - well, except for Minna's father - but none of them said anything. I was quiet too, even as I kept gnawing on the net. Nobody wanted to distract Minna.

She reached towards one of the controls and hovered over it. I heard her mumbling and tried to perk my ear tufts to make out her words. "This would... no, wait, it would be over here, wouldn't it?" She hesitated, then reached to the other side of the console and tapped a similar button.

The lights inside the shuttle went dark.

"Oops. That wasn't right." Minna flinched and immediately tapped the control again. The lights came back on, and she stared at the controls again.

One of the younger guards closed his eyes and brought his hand up to rub at his head. He mumbled to himself, and I thought I caught something about 'bring your children to work day'. The other guards all looked at him with frowns of varying degrees of disapproval. The look from Minna's father was the most severe. "She will get it. She's good at this."

I noticed Minna flinch ever so slightly and frowned. She was worried - something about the controls was confusing her, and she wasn't sure what they meant.

"Anything?" I reached back out to Ivy.

"Maybe. Trenil can't find an exact match for those controls; he thinks the aliens must have modified it away from the standard designs. Probably stuff to help them with smuggling. He thinks he found the base layout though; see if this helps."

Ivy sent me an image of a Kymari laptop screen. The black-and-white sketch on it looked vaguely like the controls at the front of the ship, but there were a few things on the drawing that this shuttle didn't have, and there were a lot of extra controls that didn't show up on the picture.

Strange symbols covered the image, with lines drawn to the various controls. I had no idea what they meant, and hoped I wouldn't garble them. It was simple enough to send an image of something I was seeing through the mindlink, even if I didn't know what it meant, or even a picture of a few symbols like the ones Ivy had relayed to me months back. But sending a memory of so many words I couldn't understand, especially of words I had never seen myself... that could get iffy.

Like a horrible game of telephone, where a message was passed from person to person and had become something completely different by the time it got to the end.

I tried to burn the complicated image into my head for a few more seconds, doing my best to make sure the strange symbols would look the same as they had when I had received them, then I sent the image to Minna.

Minna stopped moving in the middle of reaching for a control. Her face was pointed away from me so I couldn't make out her expression, but she had stiffened slightly in the chair.

That at least meant the image had reached her. Whether or not it helped...

She stayed still like that for a few more seconds, then she began moving. "This shuttle has a lot of modifications. I think it has a cloaking field, and it may even have weapons." She reached towards the center of the console and began tapping at the controls with sudden confidence.

The sound of an engine powering up began to hum through the shuttle. The guard that had muttered earlier seemed surprised, and Minna's father gained a hint of pride in his expression, but all of the Kymari relaxed.