Chapter Four: The Itfa People
Trip, Jon, Malcolm, Travis, and Hoshi were in shuttlepod one, heading to Horienzi. Hoshi sat near Travis, in the front, while he piloted the shuttle. The other three men sat in the rear.
"Great going, Captain!" Trip exclaimed. "I was beginning to feel burnt out in engineering. It's been a while since we've gotten a little r and r."
"Please, Trip," Archer said. "You're the one who, conveniently, gets trapped on lonely planets with unknown aliens."
"Hey! That was just one time," Trip answered defensively.
"I can't believe I said that!"
Trip turned to Hoshi, sitting with a UT in her hand, a frown on her face. He smirked, thinking she looked cute with her hair down and not in that weird style she usually put her hair up in.
"What's going on there, Hoshi?" he asked.
She looked up and ran her hand through her hair to push it out of her face. "Oh, I've been running over the translations of the Horienzi, and I translated what I said to Captain Grunehf when we first hailed his ship." She frowned again. "I thought that if I could change the syntax of the captain's distress call, I would be able to communicate to him that we had come to help. And when I tried to communicate, the captain laughed. It seems their language is very complicated. They don't even have syntax order, so the meaning of a sentence is drastically changed when you switch the words around. So I had told the captain, 'We are the itfa people.'"
"Huh?" Trip asked.
"Well, after consulting with Captain Grunehf, I found that itfa is a type of fish on their planet."
"So, we're the fish people that came to rescue them," Trip said. "Sounds kind of fairy-talish to me."
Everyone in the shuttlepod laughed.
Trip winked at her and Hoshi looked away.