Free Connection by Ken Pence

coffee now. How do you feel about the fuel compatibility? Could you move near me – a short hop?”
     
    “Definitely Robert but I need a place to land away from government interference. Find an aerial map. Take a photo with your Dex and you can transmit it even over this system – might take a while but its doable. I will try to find Skip. I think he is going to trial or something. I will find him. He is alive.”
     
    “Stay buttoned up and safe. Come north about two hundred kilometers if you get in a pinch. Find a landing site that is possible. Oh. Teach me the phrases for ‘I need a tutor’ and ‘to learn your language’ or something similar.”
     
    “Okay. Here are those phrases,” Cassandra said and repeated them enough for Robert to memorize them. “I will continue to monitor you and try to decipher what is being said around you.”
     
    “Thank you Cassandra. I would be lost without you. Bye,” Robert celebrated having the tenuous thread of connection with Earth through Cassandra. He just hoped he could keep it. Robert went out in the corridor and there was a big guy sitting by his door – obviously a guard. Robert turned to him and the man’s eyes cut down the hall to a room. He stood up and said “Pa!” He put his hand against Robert’s chest. Obviously, these people had never heard of aikido. He grabbed the man’s wrist and flipped him face down then flipped him up and over. He finally smashed him unconscious on the corridor floor. Robert walked down to the room down the hall and knocked.
     
    LeSlur opened the door and LeSlur looked down the hall at the unconscious man on the floor. “Told them it wouldn’t work,” he said in the local language. “What is it you want so badly?”
     
    Robert said, “I need a tutor to learn your language.” He said it in the local dialect.
     
    LeSlur looked back at the unconscious man and decided he ought to get this fellow what he wanted.
     
                                                                          ****
Language Lessons
     
    LeSlur was pretty solicitous of my needs since I had tossed his goons.  We went to meals together regularly. I learned a bit about him – mainly listening to Cassandra say what was being said at the meals. I got a tutor assigned to me and she was tall and thin – I thought she was extremely pretty but LeSlur said she would be considered a 4 or 5 out of ten on his scale. He said she was too tall and thin with hips that were way too narrow. I thought she was sexy as hell and a full five foot six in the old standard. Her name was Twlise. We spent the first day learning “My name is Robert. Thank you. Where is X or Y. Same old Berlitz stuff – just in ‘LesMan’ or the local equivalent.
     
    My learning took off with Twlise. I was soon talking like a two-year old. Like a six year old at the end of five days of her training. I felt I was getting physically rusty so I started practicing my martial arts patterns in the afternoons. It was pleasant most afternoons with a gentle breeze. I collected an audience pretty soon. LeSlur came out later in the week and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing fighting and he laughed. He said that stuff wouldn’t work in a fight – at which point I laughed back at him.
     
    I suggested he get a couple of his best boys and I’d mess them around a little but not hurt them. He said we ought to bet but I didn’t have anything to bet. I told him I would kiss his bare ass in front of all his men if I lost – what would he put up. He said he’d bet one of those bags of coffee I had brought. I put my hand out to seal the deal and explained in my baby LesMan how to make a deal. He wanted me to kiss his ass so he got two of the meanest guys on the planet to face me. I wiped off my mouth because I thought I might be puckering up pretty soon but that isn’t how it worked out.
     
    These two goofballs had