"Already." Robert whistled. "They aren"t wasting any time, are they?"
Michaela shook her head. "Kault"s folk have already contacted the Terragens Council to negotiate purchase of the fallow gorilla genetic base and to hire Earth experts as consul ":;."
! .,.::*: the Council holds out for a good price."
"Hcj;gars can"t be choosers," Gailet suggested. "According to some of the departing Galactic observers, Earth is in pretty desperate straits, as are the Tymbrimi. If this deal means we lose the Thennanin as enemies, and maybe win them as allies instead, it could be vital."
At the price of losing gorillas-our cousins-as clients of our own. Robert mulled. On the night of the ceremony he had only seen the hilarious irony of it all, sharing that Tymbrimi way of viewing things with Uthacalthing. Now, though, it was harder not to count the cost in serious terms.
They were never really ours in the first place, he reminded himself. At least we"ll have a say in how they"re raised. And Uthacalthing says some Thennanin aren"t as bad as many.
"What about the Gubru?" he asked. "They agreed to make peace with Earth in exchange for acceptance of the ceremony."
"Well, it wasn"t exactly the sort of ceremony they had in mind, was it?" Gailet answered. "What do you think, Amba.s.sador Uthacalthing?"
The Tymbrimi"s tendrils waved lazily. All of yesterday and this morning he had been Grafting little glyphs of puzzle-like intricacy, far beyond Robert"s limited ability to kenn, as if he were delighting in the rediscovery of something he had lost.
"They will act in what they see to be their own self-interest, of course," Uthacalthing said. "The question is whether they will have the sense to know what is good for them."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that the Gubru apparently began this expedition with confused goals. Their Triumvirate reflected conflicting factions back home. The initial intent of their expedition here was to use the hostage population of Garth to pry secrets out of the Terragens Council. But then they learned that Earth is as ignorant as everybody else about what that infamous dolphin-ship of yours discovered."
"Has there been any new word about the Streaker?" Robert interrupted.
Spiraling off a palanq glyph, Uthacalthing sighed. "The dolphins seem to have miraculously escaped a trap set for them by a dozen of the most fanatic patron lines-an astonishing feat by itself-and now the Streaker seems to be loose on the starlanes. The humiliated fanatics lost tremendous face, and so tensions have reached an even higher level than before. It is one more reason why the Gubru Roost Masters grow increasingly frightened."
"So when the invaders found they couldn"t use hostages to coerce secrets out of Earth, the Suzerains searched for other ways to make some profit out of this expensive expedition," Gailet surmised.
"Correct. But when the first Suzerain of Cost and Caution was killed it threw their leadership process out of balance. Instead of negotiating toward a consensus of policy, the three Suzerains engaged in unbridled compet.i.tion for the top position in their Molt. I"m not sure that even now I understand all of the schemes that might have been involved. But the final one-the one they settled on at last-will cost them very dearly. Blatantly interfering with the proper outcome of an Uplift Ceremony is a grave matter."
Robert saw Gailet wince in revulsion as she obviously recollected how she had been used. Without opening his eyes, Fiben reached out and took her hand. "Where does that leave us now?" Robert asked Uthacalthing.
"Both common sense and honor would demand the Gubru keep their bargain with Earth. It"s the only way out of a terrible bind."
"But you don"t expect them to see it that way."
"Would I remain confined here, on neutral ground, if I did? You and I, Robert, would be with Athaclena right now, dining on khoogra and other delicacies I"d cached away, and we would speak for hours of, oh, so many things. But that will not happen until the Gubru decide between logic and self-immolation."
Robert felt a chill. "How bad could it get?" he asked in a low voice. The chims, too, listened quietly.
Uthacalthing looked around. He inhaled the sweet, chill air as if it were of fine vintage. "This is a lovely world," he sighed. "And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect."
94 Galactics "After them!" cried the Suzerain of Beam and Talon. "Chase them! Pursue them!"
Talon Soldiers and their battle drones swooped down upon a small column of neo-chimpanzees, taking them by surprise. The hairy Earthlings turned to fight, firing their ill-sorted weapons upward at the stooping Gubru. Two small fireb.a.l.l.s did erupt, emitting sprays of singed feathers, but for the most part resistance was useless. Soon, the Suzerain was stepping delicately among the blasted remains of trees and mammals. It cursed as its officers reported only chim bodies.
There had been stories of others, humans and Tymbrimi and, yes, thrice-cursed Thennanin. Had not one of them suddenly appeared out of the wilderness? They had to all be in league together! It had to be a plot!
Now there were constant messages, entreaties, demands that the admiral return to Port Helenia. That it join with the other commanders for a conclave, a meeting, a new struggle for consensus.
Consensus! the Suzerain of Beam and Talon spat on the trunk of a shattered tree. Already it could feel the ebbing of hormones, the leaching away of color that had almost been its own!
Consensus? The admiral would show them consensus! It was determined to win back its position of leadership. And the only way to do that, after that catastrophe of an Uplift Ceremony, was to demonstrate the efficacy of the military option. When the Thennanin came to claim their "Garthling" prizes, they would be met with force! Let them engage in Uplift of their new clients from deeps.p.a.ce!
Of course, to keep them at bay-in order to return this world for the Roost Masters-there must be complete surety that there would be no attacks from behind, from the surface. The ground opposition had to be eliminated!
The Suzerain of Beam and Talon refused even to consider the possibility that anger and revenge might also have colored its decisions. To have admitted that would be to begin to fall under the sway of Propriety. Already, several good officers had deserted down that path, only to be ordered back to their posts by the sanctimonious high priest. That was particularly galling.
The admiral was determined to win their loyalty back in its own right, with victory!
"The new detectors work, are effective, are efficient!" It danced in satisfaction. "They let us hunt the Earthlings without needing to scent special materials. We trace them by their very blood!"
The Suzerain"s a.s.sistants shared its satisfaction. At this rate, the irregulars should soon all be dead.
A pall fell over the celebration when it was reported that one of the troop carriers that had brought them here had broken down. Another casualty of the plague of corrosion that had struck Gubru equipment all over the mountains and the Vale of Sind. The Suzerain had ordered an urgent investigation.
"No matter! We shall all ride the remaining carriers. Nothing, n.o.body, no event shall stop our hunt!"
The soldiers chanted.
"Zooon!"
95 Athaclena She watched as the hirsute human read the message for the fourth time, and could not help wondering whether she was doing the right thing. Rank-haired, bearded, and naked, Major Prathachulthorn looked the very essence of a wild, carnivorous wolfling ... a creature far too dangerous to trust.
He looked down at the message, and for a moment all she could read were the waves of tension that coursed up his "shoulders and down his arms to those powerful, tightly flexed hands.
"It appears that I am under orders to forgive you, and to follow your policies, miss." The last word ended in a hiss. "Does this mean that I"ll be set free if I promise to be good? How can I be sure this order is for real?"
Athaclena knew she had little choice. In the days ahead she would not be able to spare the chimpower to continue guarding Prathachulthorn. Those she could rely upon to ignore the human"s command-voice were very few, and he had already nearly escaped on four separate occasions. The alternative was to finish him off here and now. And for that she simply had not the will.
"I have no doubt you would kill me the instant you discovered the message wasn"t genuine," Athaclena replied.
His teeth seemed to flash. "You have my word on that," he a.s.sured her.
"And on what else?"
He closed and then reopened his eyes. "According to these orders from the Government in Exile, I have no choice but to act as if I was never kidnapped, to pretend there was no mutiny, and to conform my strategy to your advice. All right. I agree to this, as long as you remember that I"m going to appeal to my commanders on Earth, first chance I get. And they will take this to the TAASF. And once Coordinator Oneagle is overruled, I will find you, my young Tymbrimi. I will come to you."
The bald, open hatred in his mind simultaneously made her shiver and ako rea.s.sured her. The man held nothing back. Truth burned beneath his words. She nodded to Benjamin.
"Let him go."
Looking unhappy, and avoiding eye contact with the dark-haired human, the chims lowered the cage and cut open the door. Prathachulthorn emerged rubbing his arms. Then, quite suddenly, he whirled and leaped in a high kick landing in a stance one blow away from her. He laughed as Athaclena and the chims backed away.
"Where is my command?" he asked tersely.
"I do not know, precisely," Athaclena answered, as she tried to abort a gheer flux. "We"ve scattered into small parties and even had to abandon the caves when it was clear they were compromised."
"What about this place?" Prathachulthorn motioned to the steaming slopes of Mount Fossey.
"We expect the enemy to stage an a.s.sault here at any moment," she replied honestly.
"Well," he said. "I didn"t believe half of what you told me, yesterday, about that "Uplift Ceremony" and its consequences. But I"ll give you this; you and your dad do seem to have stirred up the Gubru good."
He sniffed the air, as if already he were trying to pick up a spoor. "I a.s.sume you have a tactical situation map and a datawell for me?"
Benjamin brought one of the portable computer units forward, but Prathachulthorn held up a hand. "Not now. First, let"s get out of here. I want to get away from this place."
Athaclena nodded. She could well understand how the man felt.
He laughed when she declined his mock-chivalrous bow and insisted that he go first. "As you wish," he chuckled.
Soon they were swinging through the trees and running under the thick forest canopy. Not much later, they heard what sounded like thunder back where the refuge had been, even though there were no clouds in the sky.
96 Sylvie The night was lit by fiery beacons which burst forth actinically and cast stark shadows as they drifted slowly groundward. Their impact on the senses was sudden, dazzling, overwhelming even the noise of battle and the screams of the dying.
It was the defenders who sent the blazing torches into the sky, for their a.s.sailants needed no light to guide them. Streaking in by radar and infrared, they attacked with deadly accuracy until momentarily blinded by the brilliance of the flares.
Chims fled the evening"s fireless camp in all directions, naked, carrying only food and a few weapons on their backs. Mostly, they were refugees from mountain hamlets burned down in the recent surge of fighting. A few trained irregulars remained behind in a desperate rearguard action to cover the civilians" retreat.
They used what means they had to confuse the airborne enemy"s deadly, precise detectors. The flares were sophisticated, automatically adjusting their fulminations to best interfere with active and pa.s.sive sensors. They slowed the avians down, but only for a little while. And they were in short supply.
Besides, the enemy had something new, some secret system that was letting them track chims even under the heaviest growth, even naked, without the simplest trappings of civilization.
All the pursued could dp was split up into smaller and smaller groups. The prospect facing those who made it away from here was to live completely as animals, alone or at most in pairs, wild-eyed and cowering under skies that had once been theirs to roam at will.
Sylvie was helping an older chimmie and two children climb over a vine-covered tree trunk when suddenly upraised hackles told her of gravities drawing near. She quickly signed for the others to take cover, but something-perhaps it was the unsteady rhythm of those motors-made her stay behind, peering over the rim of a fallen log. In the blackness she barely caught the flash of a dim, whitish shape, plummeting through the starlit forest to crash noisily among the branches and then disappear into the jungle gloom.
Sylvie stared down the dark channel the plunging vessel had cut. She listened, chewing on her fingernails, as debris rained down in its wake.
"Donna!" she whispered. The elderly chimmie lifted her head from under a pile of leaves. "Can you make it with the children the rest of the way to the rendezvous?" Sylvie asked. "All you have to do is head downhill to a stream, then follow that stream to a small waterfall and cave. Can you do that?"
Donna paused for a long moment, concentrating, and at last nodded. "Good," Sylvie, said. "When you see Petri, tell him I saw an enemy scout come down, and I"m goin" to go and look it over."
Fear had widened the older chimmie"s eyes so that the whites shone around her irises. She blinked a couple of times, then held out her arms for the children. By the time they were gathered under her protection, Sylvie had already cautiously entered the tunnel of broken trees.
Why am I doing this? Sylvie wondered as she stepped over broken branches still oozing pungent sap. Tiny skittering motions told of native creatures seeking cover after the ruination of their homes. The smell of ozone put Sylvie"s hair on end. And then, as she drew nearer, there came another familiar odor, one of overripe bird.
Everything looked eerie in the dimness. There were absolutely no colors, only shades of Stygian gray. When the off-white bulk of the crashed aircraft loomed in front of her, Sylvie saw that it lay canted at a forty degree slope, its front end quite crumpled from the impact.
She heard a faint crackling as some piece of electronics shorted again and again. Other than that, there came no sound from within. The main hatch had been torn half off its hinges.
Touching the still warm hull for guidance, she approached cautiously. Her fingers traced the outlines of one of the gravitic impellers, and flakes of corrosion came off. Lousy maintenance, she thought, partly in order to keep her mind busy. I wonder if that"s why it crashed. Her mouth was dry and her heart felt in her throat as she reached the opening and bent to peer around the corner.
Two Gubru still lay strapped at their stations, their sharp-beaked heads lolling from slender, broken necks.
Sylvie tried to swallow. She made herself lift one foot and step gingerly onto the sloping deck. Her pulse threatened to stop when the plates groaned and one of the Talon Soldiers moved.
But it was only the broken vessel, creaking and settling slightly. "Goodall," Sylvie moaned as she brought her hand down from her breast. It was hard to concentrate with all of her instincts screaming just to get the h.e.l.l out of here.
As she had for many days, Sylvie tried to imagine what Gailet Jones would do under circ.u.mstances like this. She knew she would never be the chimmie Gailet was. That just wasn"t in the cards. But if she tried hard . . .
"Weapons," she whispered to herself, and forced her trembling hands to pull the soldiers" sidearms from their holsters. Seconds seemed like hours, but soon two racked saber rifles joined the pistols in a pile outside the hatch. Sylvie was about to lower herself to the ground when she hissed and slapped her forehead. "Idiot! Athaclena needs intelligence more than popguns!"
She returned to the c.o.c.kpit and peered about, wondering if she would recognize something significant even if it lay right in front of her.
Come on. You"re a Terragens citizen with most of a college education. And you spent months working for the Gubru.
Concentrating, she recognized the flight controls, and -- from symbols obviously pertaining to missiles-the weapons console. Another display, still lit by the craft"s draining batteries, showed a relief territory map, with multiple sigils and designations written in Galactic Three.
Could this be what they"re using to find us? she wondered.
A dial, just below the display, used words she knew in the enemy"s language. "Band Selector," the label said. Experimentally, she touched it.
A window opened in the lower left corner of the display. More arcane writing spilled forth, much too complex for her. But above the text there now whirled a complex design that an adult of any civilized society would recognize as a chemical diagram.
Sylvie was no chemist, but she had had a basic education, and something about the molecule depicted there looked oddly familiar to her. She concentrated and tried to sound out the indentifier, the word just below the diagram. The GalThree syllabary came back to her.
"Hee . . . Heem . . . Hee Moog . . ."
Sylvie felt her skin suddenly course with goose b.u.mps. She traced the line of her lips with her tongue and then whispered a single word.
"Hemoglobin."
97 Galatics "Biological warfare!" The Suzerain of Beam and Talon hopped about the bridge of the cruising battleship on which it held court and pointed at the Kwackoo technician who had brought the news. "This corrosion, this decay, this blight on armor and machinery, it was created by design?"
The technician bowed. "Yes. There are several agents -- bacteria, prions, molds. When we saw the pattern counter-measures were inst.i.tuted at once. It will take time to treat all affected surfaces with organisms engineered against theirs, but success will eventually reduce this to a mere nuisance."
Eventually, the admiral thought bitterly. "How were these agents delivered?"
The Kwackoo pulled from its pouch a filmy clump of clothlike material, bound by slender strands. "When these things began blowing in from the mountains, we consulted Library records and questioned the locals. Irritating infestations occur regularly on this continental coast with the onset of winter, so we ignored them.
"However, it now appears the mountain insurgents have found a way to infect these airborne spore carriers with biological ent.i.ties destructive to our equipment. By the time we were aware, the dispersal was nearly universal. The plot was most) ingenious."
The military commander paced. "How bad, how severe, how catastrophic is the damage?"
Again, a deep bow. "One third of our planet-side transport is affected. Two of the s.p.a.ceport defense batteries will be out of commission for ten planetary days."
"Ten days!"
"As you know, we are no longer receiving spares from the homeworld."
The admiral did not need to be reminded. Already most routes to Gimelhai had been interdicted by the approaching alien armadas, now patiently clearing mines away from the fringes of Garth system.
And if that weren"t enough, the two other Suzerains were now united in opposing the military. There was nothing they could do to prevent the coming battles if the admiral"s party chose to fight, but they could withhold both religious and bureaucratic support. The effects of that were already showing.
The pressures had built until a steady, throbbing pain seemed to pulse within the admiral"s head. "They will pay!" the Suzerain shrieked. Curse the limitations of priests and egg counters!