| Post a comment |
|
Title: Untitled
Fandom: Star Trek: Reboot
Pairings: None
Warnings: Linguistics nerdery ahead
Status: Incomplete
Uhura set down her padd, frowning. She still had six more pages of data to go through, and she was chasing the thread of a promising pattern that might explain the strange vowel assimilation that was taking place in southern Makhtian... but she couldn't concentrate, because her comb was malfunctioning. It still seemed to be smoothing her hair straight, but it was producing an irritating whine and making her scalp tingle.
A couple of minutes' examination and partial disassembly of the comb produced no clues as to how to fix it. Uhura had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with curls in the foreseeable future, and no more time to look at it herself; she made a note to get an engineer to look at it later, and headed for her duty shift on the bridge.
--
"Who enters the space of the Breewee?"
"I'm Captain James Kirk of the Federation Starship Enterprise. We -"
"Bree, bree, Captain James, welcome of trade is farflung ice."
Uhura's breath caught and she turned to her screens, hands racing over keys. The universal translator's status bar was glowing green, and the detailed report had page after page of results that made no sense - phonetic symbols charting irrational patterns, a morphology of suspiciously perfect regularity, and a lexicon that treated too many concepts as untranslatable.
"I'm sorry, we appear to be having some difficulty -" Kirk began, but the alien interrupted.
"Difficulty we some appear, ancestral farfarrar prophesying yellow!" The link went dead.
Kirk rose from his chair. "Uhura, what the f-"
"I'm on it, captain," she answered tersely. The translator had detected a high frequency of mappable cognates with several ancient Klingon dialects, which made no sense - there was no reason to think the Klingons had ever come to this part of the galaxy. Uhura quickly set up a subroutine to break down the comparisons and continued to look through the data.
"Captain, they're powering weapons," Chekov said urgently.
"Shields, evasive manoeuvres, back us off. Don't return fire if they shoot," Kirk ordered. "Spock, assist Lieutenant Uhura. I want to know what the hell is going on here."
"Yes, sir." Uhura kept working as Spock took the station next to her, but sent the results of her first tests to his screen. In her peripheral vision she saw his approving nod, and felt a faint glow of pride, despite her frustration that the translator kept returning irrational results.
Another hail came in around the same time four more ships dropped out of warp around them. Uhura shunted basic comms to Chekov and let him deal with it.
"There is another signal, captain," the young man said nervously.
"Let me hear it." Kirk was still standing, glaring at the viewscreen as if it could give him answers and just didn't want to.
"Enterprise Captain James! Movement muhnrar negative! We will destroy! Enterprise Captain James! Movement muhnrar neg-" Chekov cut it off.
"It's just looping now, sir," he explained.
"I see. Well, that one seems fairly clear. If we move, they'll destroy us." Kirk paused. "I think. Uhura, Spock, get me some translation please." He dropped into his chair. "Until then... someone get me some coffee."Current Music: Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
|
|
|
| Top of Page |
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios |
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}