The rhotic consonant gave it away. The liquid sounds tend to be characteristic in a language; if I wanted to distinguish between Wentrese and Temarian, my best bet was to listen for the sound that, in the archaic alphabet, had been usually represented by the letter R. The R in this recording was an odd one; it sat sort of in the middle of the tongue and had the smooth shapeless sound of a door creaking open. It didn’t tap or growl or roll, like any of the rhotic variants more common in our modern languages.

The uncommon rhotic consonant, combined with the characteristic stress-unstress pattern, made the identity of the language unmistakable. I almost missed the desk with my glass; wine sloshed out over the edge and onto my finger.

“That’s Ameng,” I said. The person in the recording was speaking Ameng.

A thousand years ago, after the First Ministerial War, when the Ministers had taken control of the Sister Systems, they’d purged the old languages in favor of a standardized single language that both Sister Systems still spoke today as a lingua franca. The most common of these purged languages was Ameng. Only fragments of Ameng remained; a recording here and there, a library’s worth of old texts, root words and grammar buried in our modern languages.

But I’d never heard this recording before. I listened intently as the recording looped, carefully transcribing the syllables in my head. It was a simple message—an SOS, a ship without power, and something unintelligible about someone named Mara Zhu.

Quint tapped the screen, silencing the recording. “It takes a very long time by human standards for a dying star to actually reach supernova,” she said, tucking the handheld away despite my instinctive lean forward to follow it. “Our best estimates suggest that the salvage vessel has been in orbit for about a thousand years.”

Since before the First Ministerial War. Since before the language reform. That wasn’t just Ameng, it was native-speaker Ameng.

“My boss has heard of your special talent.” Quint fussed with the set of her jacket, tugging it down on her torso. “You run a small freelance translation business in and around the refugee camp outside the city, translating to and from at least four languages. The translations aren’t official, of course, because you aren’t certified, but the quality of your work is on par with the best AI translation software.”

On par with AI? Computers could go to Hell; you need a person to really understand implication and cultural context. I bet Quint was monolingual.

“It is said that one of your languages is Ameng,” Quint said.

There were only twenty or thirty people in the Republic who could speak Ameng with any kind of fluency. I was one of them. I pulled the disassembled clock into my lap, leaning comfortably back in my chair. “I don’t want to be modest about it,” I told her. “I’m really good.”

“Our sources said that message was an SOS.”