Because he doesn't know what that means, the content of the message cannot make him any more alarmed than he already was, but that's pretty alarmed. Why is he lighter. Can he fly - no, apparently this isn't a Fly variant. He looks in both directions along the corridor in hopes of seeing clues to which way he should go.

Well, from one end of the corridor, two armored Martian marines are approaching him. They aren’t wearing helmets, and they don’t have the good armor, so they are still recognizable as men in armor. They aren’t recognizably armed, though Blai may still understand that their heavy machine guns are pointed at him in a threatening manner.

“Freeze! Hands up!” shouts one. Really what one does with intruders on a warship is shoot them but his bosses are going to want to know how the fuck this guy did manage to intrude on their warship in the first place. He is, perhaps, not yet processing how incredibly primitive Blai’s armor is, and he actually doesn’t recognize his mace as a weapon at all.

Blai doesn't know what that means! However, he will regardless hold his hands - not up, exactly, away from the mace and the holy symbol.

They do not shoot him. One of them will come and take the mace—which they still do not recognize as an intentional weapon but could definitely be an improvised one. They don’t take the holy symbol, having no concept that it’s more than decorative. The other will grab Blai’s wrists and cuff them behind his back.

“Look at this shit the skinnies call armor,” says one.

     “He looks like an Earther.”

“So does Fred Johnson.”

     “How the fuck did he get on the ship, then?” He might have believed that Earth had developed invisibility or teleportation or some shit.

The marines gesture for Blai to follow them and head back down the corridor.

Well, he doesn't like anything about this but he is not commanded to like it. He follows.

They lead him down the corridor and down a flight of metal stairs. At one point they pass a section of wall covered in living plants and artificially lit to almost the brightness of a sunny day, but there are no windows, or drafts, or really any indication that there’s an outside world at all.

Eventually they come to an area that’s recognizably a prison, although everything continues to be made of unfamiliar materials. The doors to the cells are some kind of transparent not-glass.

There are people in some of the other cells!

One of them appears to say something when Blai enters the hallway, although no sound is audible from Blai’s position.

The marines push Blai into one of the open cells and shut the door. (This is done by pressing a button, causing the door to slide out from its concealed position inside the wall with a whoosh.) They take his backpack first, but not his holy symbol.

Once the door is closed, the handcuffs automatically unlatch and fall from his wrists.

There’s a cot in one corner, with a thin mattress that is nonetheless much more comfortable than anything available at the Worldwound, possibly more comfortable than anything available in Golarion if you aren’t rich. In the opposite corner is a toilet. Otherwise the cell is bare.

Maybe this is underground. They look like humans, if strange humans - well, the woman might not be a human? But she could be one, she'd just be an exceptionally spindly one or something. And they have some way to Permanency Daylight so they can grow plants down here. The gravity thing he has no explanation for but stranger things have happened.

He nudges the cuffs into the corner of the cell. He starts taking off his armor, he doesn't need it in a cell. "Do any of you speak Chelish, common Taldane, or Infernal?" he asks the hallway, in case they can hear him, though probably they can't, he couldn't hear the one guy.

No one bothered to turn on the noise canceling on Blai’s cell but they did for all of the other prisoners, and it works in both directions. No one can hear him at all except the marines, who are already leaving. (Babysitting prisoners isn’t their job; the cells are in fact really hard to break out of, and the automated security system will fill the entire brig with knockout gas if it detects any serious attempt at escape.)

Naomi does see his mouth moving and taps her ear twice, which is the Belter sign language gesture for “I can’t hear you”.

He neither understands nor Comprehends Belter sign language but it's easy enough to figure out from context; he nods. Once he's got the armor off he - can't read the Acts, they took his bag. He gives Iomedae a brief sitrep in case She needs that and then Prestidigitates himself a chess set.

Oh.

Nearly all the details of Blai's report are, on closer examination of the situation, inaccurate or misleading, but it doesn't matter, because she wouldn't have been able to see this place at all if Her cleric hadn't called her attention to it. She still cannot see it well—it is very far outside her normal sphere of influence, and prophecy is clouded around the arrival of Her cleric out of Golarion, which is the part of this world that she would ordinarily be able to see most easily. It doesn't matter, because a human civilization that has begun to grow the kind of strength they would need to challenge the Lower Planes on their own territory is the kind of thing that shines in Her vision like a blazing sun.

Also Her lone representative to this civilization is completely out of his depth and doesn't even speak the local language. Her capacity for extraordinary action on the Material has been spent all but utterly, but fixing that last one is, at least, a fairly ordinary action.

One convenient thing about Her cleric being trapped in deep space millions of miles from the nearest planet is that the treaties governing when, exactly, clerics should receive their spells do not fully apply, because a number of their referents do not exist. She still has to grant spells on a fixed cycle with a length within a certain margin of 14,400 standard time units, but Blai has traveled in a manner permitting the cycle to be reset, and since there are—she quickly checks—no other clerics of any god in this star system, there is nothing preventing the new spell-granting time from being 'right now'.

Blai feels the familiar prod that would have told him it was 'dawn' during those months at the Worldwound when the sun doesn't rise or set at all, even though there's no way it's been 24 hours since the sun last rose in Cheliax. Here, have a Comprehend Languages or several. You're going to need them.

- oh, okay, it's dawn Right Now, he will abort the prestidigitation and fall to his knees and get right on that. He will in fact go for a lot of Comp Lang without any prodding as long as he has the opportunity. Three of those plus an Air Bubble for Oh Shit situations. Drop the Spark and pick up a Stabilize, nobody in the cells looks likely to have a medical emergency but they don't seem to be being closely supervised and you never know. Two of Share Language in case anyone'll shake hands later when they're less busy or something, and an Owl's. He'll keep the Create Food, he doesn't know if they feed prisoners here.

Elsewhere, and meanwhile, Blai’s backpack and the books in it have ended up on a table between four deeply confounded MCRN officers plus one of the two marines who initially arrested him, who is only less confounded because that isn’t his job.

“It’s got to be from Earth,” says Captain Yao, examining the pack. “The quality of the fabric is bizarrely terrible but Belter gear looks like it’s made of sixteen different recycled tarps, not like this. Maybe a test subject—no, actually, I’ve got nothing. Did we get anywhere on the books?”

     “The computer says it’s a real language unrelated to any other it knows of,” says Lieutenant Lopez. “And that’s ridiculous, right—but maybe someone actually did make up their own language, it would be almost as hard to break as any encryption, and way harder to steal the key…”

          “He did say something as I was leaving the brig, sir,” says the marine. “I didn’t catch it but that might have been because it was a language I didn’t speak.”

     “People sometimes pretend not to speak a normal language. Because the law requires us to obtain an interpreter for prisoners who don’t. It doesn’t stop me from knowing they’re lying, though.”

“Any progress on translation of the books?”

     “No, sir. Well, this one looks like it’s about chess, it’s got the diagrams, and this one is probably poetry if I had to guess. But if it is a conlang invented for obfuscation then that’s probably misleading, right.”

“Go talk to him and see what he has to say for himself.”

     “Yes, sir.”

Sometime after Blai is done preparing spells, a man—an officer, from the look of his uniform—enters the brig and opens Blai’s cell door.

“Come with me.”

"Some time" is enough time to have a chess set halfway to created on the floor of the cell. "Comprehend Languages," says Blai, but he can kinda guess and he gets up and waits for informative gestures.

Where’d he get the chess set? Probably not the priority right now.

He leads Blai to the interrogation room they set up for the Canterbury people. He takes a small round capsule from a container on the table and swallows it, and his pupils widen briefly and then narrow again.

“Who are you, who do you work for, and how did you get on this ship?”

"Select Blai Artigas. Iomedae." Handshake?

He doesn’t recognize any of those words. Why is the subject trying to shake hands? It’s weird but he’ll accept the handshake in the interest of building rapport, which is less important to his interrogation style than it is to some people’s, but is still generally valuable.

"Share Language."