Read Victory Conditions for Free Online

to some university language departments onplanet, but I don’t expect much. Cascadians are pretty much monolingual, and even on the other worlds of the Confederation, they don’t have much linguistic diversity.”
    Toby took the cube and printout and glanced at the latter. “That’s odd,” he said.
    “What?” Stella was already back at her own desk.
    “This word— prot —it’s kind of slang.”
    “Kid slang?” Stella said. “I don’t think the pirates would be using ordinary kid slang, and anyway others would recognize it.”
    “Zori said it meant—something rude.” He was not about to tell Stella exactly what. She had laid down her rules about anatomical humor long before.
    “Zori?” She turned to face him. “You learned that word from Zori?”
    “I don’t know if it’s the same word, exactly. It sounds like it, but there could be words in different languages that sound the same and mean something different. Vatta code uses some that Standard—”
    “I know that,” Stella said. “But do you see anything else you recognize?”
    He and Zori just talked slang; they never wrote it down. Toby worked his way along the page, sounding out the words; the transcriber had used phonetic symbols he wasn’t entirely familiar with. “What’s this thing with a hook under it?”
    “That’s a sk sound,” Stella said. “I think Ky’s com officer just ran this through a computer transliteration—it’s all in formal linguistic symbols. Let’s see—that one there, that’s another consonant cluster, kz. ” She looked up at him. “Do you recognize any of this?”
    “I’m trying—wait—this one is like the word for ‘far’ or ‘farther.’ This one is like ‘profit,’ with the suffix for ‘no.’ And this is like ‘out of here,’ and there’s a ‘now’…” Suddenly he felt chilled. “It’s…it can’t be…just coincidence. Not this many words. Can it?”
    Hope died with Stella’s expression. “You learned all these from Zori?”
    “It’s…it’s her family’s private slang. Like our Vatta trade-talk. That’s how I know the word for ‘profit.’”
    “That’s what she told you.”
    “Yes. She said she learned it from her father, her mother doesn’t use it so much. He told her not to use it in public, that it was rude to talk in a language others didn’t understand, but sometimes in trade, in business, it was necessary. She wasn’t supposed to teach me, but—” He looked at the page again. More words made sense now. “Ship” and “ships,” a few numbers—he had learned the numbers up to twenty. “I’ll have to ask Zori—”
    “No.” Stella’s tone brooked no argument. “You will not ask Zori. You will not tell Zori about this message. And you will find a way to separate yourself from Zori and her family, without fuss—”
    “I can’t do that!” He felt panic and outrage together. “We just—her family gave permission; you said—”
    “You must. Come on, Toby, you know what this means.”
    “I don’t.” But he did, and did not want to.
    “She speaks—her family speak—a language unknown to anyone else I’ve asked, which just happens to be the same language the pirates speak. That Gammis Turek speaks. What does that tell you?”
    “It doesn’t tell me Zori’s a pirate,” Toby said, past the lump in his throat. Not Zori. Never Zori. “Maybe they—maybe somewhere back, somewhere along the way, like Osman, maybe one of their relatives went bad. Any family can have bad people in it—”
    “Toby, I understand—”
    “You don’t understand!” Anger drove out grief; he pinned his mind firmly on Zori, unfairly accused. “Zori is not bad! She loves me, and I love her, and nothing you can say will change that.” He could feel the heat in his face, hear the tremor in his voice. He could not stand it; he flung himself out of her office, grabbed his books from the lab, and bolted for the door, his security clumping along after.

    Stella looked at