Babel-17 Part 2, Chapter 5: Emergency Exit and the End of Part 2

Chapter 5 is short. But it ends Part 2 with a bang, literally, and leaves us hanging in the worst possible way.

Back on the Ship

Rydra crashes through the door of the Rimbaud, running on hysterical exhaustion. She hits the intercom. Is everyone accounted for? Yes. All crew present. All three discorporate members safe aboard.

She switches channels and hears Babel-17 still transmitting. It’s been going the whole time, and her equipment recorded it automatically. Good. She has more data to study. But she also does something interesting. She starts broadcasting her own pre-recorded messages in Babel-17.

She doesn’t know the language well yet. She compares herself to someone at a Shakespeare performance shouting catcalls in pidgin English. But she’s trying. She’s throwing words back into the void, hoping someone hears. Hoping the response tells her something.

The Ship Gets Hijacked

Then things go sideways fast.

Albert Ver Dorco (the Baron’s brother-in-law) calls. There’s been a catastrophe at the Yards, total confusion. He says flight clearance tells him Rydra requested an immediate takeoff for hyperstasis jump.

Rydra says she did no such thing. She just wanted to get her crew safe.

But Albert says the request is going through. Top priority. He can’t override it.

Rydra calls the Slug. And the Slug says yes, he just received clearance from her. Emergency hyperstasis exit. Everything is in motion.

But Brass is standing right behind Rydra. He’s not at his pilot station. He’s not wired into the ship. If the ship jumps without a pilot connected, they’ll drift into the nearest massive object. That could be Bellatrix, the star. Or a nova. Anything with gravity will pull them in.

And someone on the ship just faked Rydra’s voice to issue takeoff orders.

The grinding starts. The surge hits. The generators are already screaming. Rydra shouts to cut the stasis generators. But it’s too late.

The ship jumps.

And that’s it. End of Part 2. End of chapter. A single dash on the page and then nothing.

Looking Back at Part 2

So let me step back and talk about what just happened across all five chapters of Part 2. Because a lot happened.

Rydra started Part 2 stuck in orbit with broken instruments. She used Babel-17 to solve the problem with marbles and physics. That was the first proof that this language isn’t just a code to crack. It’s a tool that makes you think differently. Better, in some ways.

Then they arrived at the War Yards and met Baron Ver Dorco, who showed Rydra his collection of weapons. Bombs, polarized matter weapons, poisons, and TW-55, a genetically engineered human spy. The Baron treated all of it with the same casual pride. Killing is just engineering to these people.

The Baroness was different. She saw what the war was doing to everyone around her. She valued Rydra’s crew because they still talked to each other like real people. That contrast between the Baron and the Baroness says a lot about what language means in this book. The Baron uses language to describe death with precision. The Baroness uses it to connect.

Ron’s conversation with Rydra on the balcony was about the same thing on a personal level. Three people who love each other but can’t communicate because of language barriers and emotional walls. The solution? Learn the words. Teach each other. Bridge the gap.

Then TW-55 was activated, killed the Baron and four key officials, and chaos broke out. Rydra identified the killer from a linguistic clue, a word about haptoglobins in marsupials that the Baron had mentioned was part of TW-55’s programming. Language as identification. Language as evidence.

And now, at the end of Part 2, the ship itself has been hijacked. Someone faked Rydra’s voice. Someone who knows the ship’s systems, who has access to communications, who can convince the crew they’re hearing the captain’s orders. The traitor is still on board. And now they’re jumping blindly into hyperstasis without a pilot.

The Babel-17 Pattern

Here’s what I notice. Every time there’s a sabotage event, Babel-17 transmits. The broken circuit plates at the start. The attack at the War Yards. And now this forced jump. Babel-17 appears each time.

Is someone using Babel-17 to coordinate attacks? Is the language itself doing something to people? Rydra is learning it. Is that dangerous? She compared herself to someone shouting in pidgin at a Shakespeare play. But what happens when she gets fluent?

And who is the traitor? Rydra hand-picked this crew. She felt proud of how they work together. Now she knows one of them is destroying everything from the inside. And she can’t figure out who, because whoever it is has a clean psychological profile. They’re not crazy. They’re deliberate.

Part 2 raised more questions than it answered. We know Babel-17 is powerful. We know someone is using it. We don’t know who, or why, or what happens next.

The ship just jumped into the unknown without a pilot. Part 3 is called “Jebel Tarik.” I have no idea what that means yet. But I’m guessing Rydra and crew are about to land somewhere they really didn’t plan to be.

This is post 10 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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