The Long War

Maggie, who gave him a peppermint.
    The mayor watched this in blank astonishment.
    That was the start of a couple more days at this township, days devoted to seducing hearts and minds, with younger kids being given rides in the Franklin to see their homes from the air for the first time in their lives, and older kids – heavily supervised – playing with the trolls.
    But on the second day the crew went on the alert, when a second twain showed up in the sky above New Melfield.
    The ship was a merchant vessel. That evening the captain himself, with an aide, crossed to the Franklin and met Maggie in her sea cabin. And they came bearing a package.
    Maggie glanced quickly at Nathan Boss, who’d accompanied them aboard. ‘We scanned the parcel,’ Boss said. ‘It’s clean.’
    The merchant’s captain, young, overweight, grinned at Maggie. ‘You must be very important, Captain Kauffman, we were detoured a hell of a way to bring you this. You have the assurance of Douglas Black himself—’
    ‘Douglas Black? Of the Black Corporation? The . . .’ Wow, she thought. Sally Linsay has contacts.
    ‘Yes, Captain. The Mr. Black assures you that nothing in this package is to the detriment of either you or the Benjamin Franklin . Instructions can be found inside. I know nothing more . . .’
    Maggie felt ridiculously like a kid at Christmas, eager to unwrap the gift.
    As soon as the guy was gone, at Nathan’s cautious suggestion she took the package outside the ship to open it, just for extra security. And inside she found, carefully wrapped, a curious instrument faintly resembling an ocarina. A troll-call – Sally Linsay had come through. She toyed with the controls; it looked more complex than the gadget Sally had shown her, maybe some kind of upgrade. And there was a brief page of instructions, signed by hand: ‘G. Abrahams’. The name wasn’t familiar.
    She couldn’t wait to try it on the trolls.
    She dismissed Nathan, who went off grinning and shaking his head. Then, alone, she made for the observation deck, where the trolls preferred to sleep, perhaps because of its cooler temperature. The trolls were huddled together, grooming gently, half-asleep, communicating in their usual soft, barely audible tones.
    Maggie quietly switched on the ocarina, pointed it at Jake, and listened carefully.
    And was surprised when from the direction of Jake a clear voice said, ‘I am fed / satisfied; this is fun; I yearn to return to /meaning not understood/ . . .’ It emerged as a human male voice, firm, reasonably pleasant, if rather synthetic.
    So the troll-call worked, even if it did seem to be more like an exchange of concepts than a true translation. Those nerds at the Black Corporation – or whoever ‘G. Abrahams’ was – must have loved working on the development of this thing.
    Now she pointed the troll-call at Marjorie.
    ‘Female here / watching / no mate female / meaning not understood: tentative translation, a female choosing for her own purposes not to have a mate . . .’
    They meant her! ‘Everybody’s a relationship counsellor,’ Maggie grumbled to herself. Plucking up her courage, she raised the troll-call and said clearly into its mouthpiece, ‘My name is Maggie Kauffman. Welcome aboard the Benjamin Franklin .’ A liquid warble accompanied her words.
    The trolls seemed to snap to attention. They stared at her, mouths open, eyes wide.
    She pointed to herself. ‘Maggie. Maggie . . .’
    Marjorie gabbled back, apparently attempting to find a label for her. ‘Friend / grandmother / interesting stranger . . .’
    It was ‘grandmother’ that flabbergasted Maggie. Grandmother! How human was that? And was that how they saw her relationship to her crew, that she was the old woman looking after all the little children? Well, they were mostly a lot younger than her . . .
    She boldly walked up to the trolls, where they sat huddled in a corner of the cabin, and sat on the carpet with them. ‘I’m Maggie. Maggie . . . Well, you’re right. I have no husband. No mate. The ship is my home . . .’
    It seemed to her that Marjorie, the female, was looking at her sorrowfully, with soulful brown eyes. With extreme care, a hand like a leather shovel gently touched Maggie’s. Maggie felt she had no choice but to move closer, and she felt huge arms close around her.
    Carl, meanwhile, got hold of the ocarina and experimented until he found a way to say, ‘Peppermint.’
    That was how Maggie was