Nadja was still working the cobwebs from her head. The potent Lonn Drive that powered their star liner was a godsend, one that enabled humanity's spacefaring way of life, but it was not her favorite mode of travel. Even at the unimaginable speeds at which the vessel hurtled through the void, voyages the distance of the one which she'd just endured were taxing on passengers, crews, and ship's resources. She'd passed most of the four-month journey in Hibernation, an induced state of neurological and physical quiescence, awaking only three days prior to her debarkation to revive her body gradually and to begin her last-minute preparations.

The leviathan vessel on which she travelled, christened the Mathilde, was something of a great interstellar bus, shuffling people about that remote corner of the cosmos, picking up and discharging passengers and cargo along the way in smaller drop-ships, seldom falling from faster-than-light travel for more than the time necessary to make the exchange. Throughout the journey, both crew and passengers passed most of their time in Hibernation and were roused only as they were needed.

On the far side of a sterile partition, the purser who served her now, a sleepy-eyed woman who went about her duties as if half in a fog, was not the same who had manned the vessel when Nadja had embarked four-months before. It likely would be another crewmember or two on a different leg of the journey, depending on how many passengers and how much cargo came and went.

Their stop was miniscule. A single small vessel would drop on Skiathos with Nadja and her two assistants, a small marine detachment, and a negligible bit of cargo. No passengers were scheduled to embark before the great bus jumped back to FTL and resumed its course.

She looked around the airlocked bay after the purser had passed Ken and Janet their sealed containers of coffee and departed. It seemed like everyone was there who needed to be. Her married assistants, both postgrad researchers in linguistics at Heather Institute, were sitting patiently on a nearby canvass-strap bench and, she thought, waiting nervously for their chalk to form—it was not shaking out to be the adventure honeymoon of which they'd dreamed. She counted fifteen marines, all of whom were formed up patiently on the ground, leaning back on their rucks. Nadja had done her military service many years before, back when it was still mandatory, and the phrase 'rucksack flop' came to mind. She wondered if that name was still used to describe such a waiting game.

Before she could ponder further, the intercom screeched the Skiathos drop and, as a body, the marines came to their feet and fell in. Nadja was veteran of a dozen or more drops over the years. Loading the chalks usually was a careful procedure, except when numbers were small. In such instances, the process was more informal, and passengers just gaggled aboard. As long as everyone was onboard and in harness in time for release, no one on the crew fussed. But this time there were marines involved.

The situation soon resolved itself and, as if by an unspoken compromise, the marines faced left and merely filed in a familiar route-step to the secondary airlock. Nadja and her team followed, their personal gear and carry-ons in hand. It took all of five minutes for the debarkation team to scan and admit them all, and another twenty minutes found their bags stowed and their persons strapped into seats. They need only await the drop.

Despite their reputation, drops generally were uneventful affairs, little different than the shuttle rides to which most travelers were accustomed on settled worlds. But this was past the edge of settled space, the frontier. The nearest emergency services units were a hundred or more lightyears distant, and Mathilde would make her jump to FTL the moment the drop-ship was free. The real danger was that every planet was different, and one could never completely predict atmospheric conditions on a world only a few humans had visited.

Nadja sat back and hummed quietly.

"First drop?"

She looked three seats over and saw a young marine private, or a marine private who appeared young—it had become harder and harder to tell. She smiled back.

"Nah, I'm past a dozen. Just trying to relax."

The young man laughed. "Oh, well, you've got me beat, ma'am. This is three for me ... hold my hand?"

Nadja suppressed a laugh but heard a feminine voice from several rows back. "Leave the nice woman alone, Christian." The voice was stern but patient.

"Aye-aye, ma'am." The young marine was resigned but cheerful.

Nadja forewent her usual ritual for the moment and flipped open her tablet. Release was still some minutes off, and she thought to torment herself further.

She had another two years to figure out this problem—by necessity, stays on un-terraformed worlds were long due to the enormous strain placed on the human body by CAP, the Clemence Acclimatization Process—but it already had been seven years that she had worked this problem and was no closer to its solution than she had been on the day she started.

The lacertians didn't appear to have a language, or they had a language that a veritable army of linguists, including Nadja, had yet to decipher. That was the problem.

Language was a constant throughout the civilizations humanity had encountered. It was a lodestar, a keystone, a firm bedrock without which cooperation within a species was impossible. But every such system was unique; some were downright arcane. Transfer of neurons, manipulation of appendages, the shifting of inanimate objects, changes of colors all played parts in the various languages they'd encountered over the centuries. All were different, and though some few races even relied on atmospheric vibrations to transmit information, none of humanity's intergalactic interlocutors actually 'talked.'

The lacertians talked.

It was that fact that had left Nadja pulling out her hair and rending her clothes most of the last seven years. Since grad school, she had been on four teams tasked with learning to communicate with new civilizations. After obtaining her doctorate, she had led one of those teams—the Forcor of Pangea IV relied on a complex system of taps and whistles of their own design to communicate with non-Forcor. It had taken her team eighteen months to master that system and another six months fully to grasp the Forcor internal language, a series of protein markers that conveyed information via the exchange of aspirated gases. Exo-linguistics was a subtle, complex, and highly developed science, one that often relied far more on biochemistry than on conjugation of verbs.

The lacertians talked, actually moved their mouths and talked. For they indeed did have mouths—and eyes, and ears, and arms, legs, fingers, toes, and ... yes, a single humanoid head on top. They looked more like humans than any exo-biologist ever could have imagined, and they survived on a world the characteristics of which were not terribly different than those of old Earth.

On average, Skiathos was a great deal warmer and more arid than Earth, but the atmosphere was a familiar mix of oxygen and nitrogen, and the gravity, despite the planet's greater surface, was about fifteen percent below Earth normal. More, a strong but peculiar electro-magnetic field protected against the worst interstellar radiation. Of course, the planet had its own slew of particles, microbes, and bacteria—against which Nadja's arduous CAP treatments should be proof—but every survey, report, and story about the planet suggested it was nearly as suitable for human habitation as any terraformed world. That fact alone was astounding.

But not so astounding as the fact that lacertians talked and that after seven years study Nadja couldn't understand a single word they were saying.