Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  All the same, she was alone. And protectiveness was built into Gabriel.

  He left the room and went to find her. He would try the pod first.

  He was pleased to discover, at the head of the downward ramps, a switch on the wall that turned on lights all the way down, and he moved down the ramps with confidence. He remembered to turn the light off when he got to the bottom, thinking belatedly that it would be good if the people here were sound sleepers.

  • • •

  Nakeekt was not.

  She woke when she heard Gabriel knock on Hanna’s door, and she heard him call out words that obviously were not meant for her because they were in the not-Soldiers’ language. The creature must have disengaged or put aside his translating device, she thought. She heard him go into the female’s room. Kwek said the not-Soldiers mated frequently (but without issue, somehow) and did it most often in sleep periods, so perhaps that was why the male was abroad.

  Nakeekt was nearly asleep again when she heard him come out. He did not start back to his own room, but came past Nakeekt’s door.

  She got out of bed and peeked out.

  When the male was out of sight she stepped into the hall and looked toward the female’s room. The door was open and the light on, but when she went and looked into it, the female was not there.

  Farther down the hall, a wall lit up with reflected light. Nakeekt knew from long experience where it came from. Why was the male going downstairs?

  Her own room was directly above the main entrance. She went to the window and waited. Soon she saw the male go out and stand hesitating in the rain. Then he started walking slowly in the direction of the airfield. Were they going to fly away in the middle of the night without telling anyone?

  Kwek was her chief source—her only source—of information on not-Soldier behavior. Nakeekt went to wake her up.

  • • •

  Joseph: Translation’s starting . . .

  Oh . . . ?

  Arch: It might be history. Can’t be sure yet. Did you begin at the beginning of this archive?

  I don’t know where the beginning is . . .

  She pictured the wall of drawers, showed them where she had started. In the middle, approximately, and she had not attempted to reach the topmost rows. She showed them how she had proceeded, and how far she had gotten with recording images she had not been able to transmit.

  Bella: They write left to right, like us, and that’s how we tend to order objects. Go to the farthest left stack of drawers and start again there.

  All right. Is it informative?

  It might be.

  And you’ve learned . . . ?

  Nothing, yet. We’ll need to analyze. Get as much as you can. How much time do you think you have left?

  Hours yet if I stretch it . . .

  It would mean more tedium, but she might have found a prize.

  • • •

  Kwek, unlike Nakeekt, was deeply asleep. Her usual assignments, even as record-keeper, had one obvious disadvantage—she might cease to survive quite suddenly, possibly being chosen for that fate arbitrarily (she suspected that was the case)—but they did not involve any stooping or bending or the pulling up of tough plants. Her hands were sore, her back hurt, and she had seldom been this exhausted. The whispers about That Place had not included such details as how the inhabitants obtained food.

  She woke quickly enough when Nakeekt, without gentleness, shook her.

  “Is it an attack?” she mumbled, not remembering immediately where she was.

  “There is no attack, but the not-Soldiers have gone out into the night. They never said they were going to do that. Why did they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kwek, memory reviving.

  “Do they mate outdoors? Do they go out to do it?”

  “How would I know? I have not known them long enough to know their customs.” She remembered one of the interesting conversations. “Arkt said they do it on the spacecraft, though. They don’t have to be outside.”

  “I’m going to look for them. I want you to come along.”

  “All right,” Kwek said.

  She did not know it was raining until they got to the doorway to the outside. Kwek had not had to go out in the rain for some time, and she balked.

  “Why do we have to find them?” she said.

  “I want to know what they are doing. They might find out some things I don’t want them taking back to Rowtt or Wektt.”

  “They might find them out anyway,” Kwek said. “The male said some of them can see thoughts. He told me when I was on the spacecraft. He said it’s not like reading orders, but they can find out a lot that way.”

  “Oh, can they,” said Nakeekt.

  “Where are we going to look for them?”

  “The airfield, first. They might be going to communicate with the spacecraft.”

  “They don’t have to do that either. The devices they wear on their arms do that. Anyway, the female can talk to some of the not-Soldiers on the spacecraft with her thoughts. Gergtk told me.”

  “Is that so,” Nakeekt said, “tell me more,” so Kwek did, and they caught up with Gabriel just as he got to the pod, surprising him, because he hadn’t heard them behind him over the sound of the rain.

  • • •

  I’m getting sick of doing this, Hanna said.

  The telepaths consulted the true-humans.

  Captain says keep going. Signal’s back. Everything you’ve got is in. Captain says get more.

  I don’t care. I want to sit down and rest my eyes.

  Which she did. The room was peaceful. She ached; some of the muscles in her legs hurt from the long hours of walking. I am not getting enough exercise, she thought to herself; she had been focused on Battleground so long and so hard that she had strayed from her customary ways of staying strong. And she was tired in spite of a few hours of sleep, as she seemed to have been more of the time than not since her first tentative contact with the thoughts of a Soldier.

  She tried to let her mind rest, too, shutting down directed thought, drifting. She was not likely to fall asleep, seated on this hard bench. She drifted into—

  A howl—

  Tearing through the dark, tearing to the sky.

  I am ending I leave behind nothing nothing nothing

  Then it stopped.

  She leaped to her feet, shuddering, breaking out in sweat. Her hands shook. What was—

  It had not been audible, it had been the anguished cry of a sentient mind. Not human, though: a Soldier. She reached out, still shaking, seeking.

  And sensed Gabriel, broadcasting confusion and alarm, plain to any telepath in the neighborhood. But Hanna was the only one listening.

  She called to the telepaths, I thought you were monitoring Gabriel!

  Why would we? He was asleep!

  Gabriel first—she grabbed the sheets that lay on the table and put them back in the drawer where they belonged, trying to stack them just as she had found them, trying to still the tremor in her hands, trying at the same time to see what Gabriel saw. Nakeekt and Kwek were with him, and it was apparent that Gabriel did not have his translator, because Nakeekt was talking and he did not understand her.

  But where—?

  He was wet, soaked, in fact, and in the dark. Outdoors, then, in the rain.

  Gabriel! Where the hell—?

  He barely perceived the question, but she got an answer anyway, a fleeting impression of the pod at his back. She shoved the drawer shut, left the room, and headed into the rain at a run.

  • • •

  She circled around, moving as fast as she could without light, to make it appear she had come from anywhere except the vault of documents. Mud and grass squelched underfoot, but the ground was level, and she did not fall. She heard Nakeekt’s voice
and turned on the light, and for an instant saw Nakeekt leaning toward Gabriel, her face almost in his, both their faces shining with rain, Nakeekt shouting as if that would force the not-Soldier to understand her. Nakeekt whirled as Hanna ran toward them and called out, “Are you going to pretend you do not comprehend either?”

  “I understand. Do you not see he is not wearing the translation device?”

  “Why not? Where have you been? You have been spying!”

  If Gabriel could not talk to them she did not have to worry about matching his lies—or about, knowing Gabriel, any inconvenient truth he might offer.

  “We lost contact with our spacecraft,” Hanna said, improvising. “I came outside to see if that would help. I suppose my fellow-Soldier did the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nakeekt said. “Kwek says you can do that with your, your, head?”—she was uncertain, but she had the fundamental fact right.

  Who had been so unwise as to tell Kwek about that?

  “The ability is not reliable,” Hanna said, thinking fast, suddenly detesting all the lies she had told, such a non-D’neeran thing to do. She had told more of them on Battleground than she could remember telling anywhere.

  She swung around at something—

  All for nothing nothing—

  —an echo, a fainter mental howl, from the shadow that was that cottage, but she could not see it through the rain, and no one else could hear it, and Nakeekt could not be ignored.

  “Is that what you have been doing? You did not say much while we walked yesterday. Is that what you did all day, look at what was in my head? Did you do it all night? I should not let you go! Do you think we could not kill you here? We have weapons!” Nakeekt had reverted to active duty rapidly. “I will not let you go!”

  Now she had Hanna’s full attention.

  We have done you no harm and wish you no harm, she said, straight to Nakeekt’s mind, in words that did not register but with sense and conviction that did—finally, pure truth. And Nakeekt knew it was.

  Nakeekt’s breathing organs swelled and shrunk, swelled and shrunk. Hanna had seen Kwoort’s do it too, the rapid breathing that accompanied strong emotion, as in humans.

  “You may not wish to do harm, but others would, if they knew more! Are you going back to Rowtt? What are you going to report there?”

  “We will not go back to Rowtt,” Hanna said. “I think we will be ordered to Wektt, although we have not been told that certainly. But we will not report anything we have seen here that is not already known. You sustain yourselves, and you do not fight. That is known, is it not? So that is all we will say. I know nothing more except that there is much you have not told us. And I will not say that.”

  She was not connecting with Nakeekt’s thoughts now; you could not be evasive in thought without its being perceived, and she was evading the whole truth. She expected to learn more—if not here, in This Place, then from the texts she had transmitted to Endeavor. Whatever they were, their nature was different from those that had made it into the datastream Communications had tapped at the start. The telepaths on Endeavor had told her that, not in the primary content of their thought, but in how they perceived what they saw of the first translated passages.

  Slowly, Nakeekt’s respiration began to ease. She was silent for a time. Gabriel had the sense to be quiet and Kwek did not say anything either. Finally Nakeekt said, “Go, then. I will let you go but I want you to go now.”

  This suited Hanna. She did not want to be around if anyone connected a missing coverlet with an extra one found near the vault.

  “Very well,” she said. “Kwek, are you coming with us?”

  “I would like to go back for a while,” Kwek said. “I would like to talk with Arkt again—”

  “No,” Nakeekt said. “You can’t go. You have made your decision by coming here with these not-Soldiers. If you go with them and do not come back, if you go to Wektt with them, they might not say ‘There are things in That Place nobody knows,’ and soon they will go away, but you will not go away and one day you might say that—no, you cannot be allowed to do that. You will stay. And you,” she told Hanna, “will not come back. If you do I will think not-Soldiers want to war with us, and I will make sure you do not survive.”

  Nothing! someone howled.

  Hanna did not answer. She would not promise not to come back. Nakeekt had not shown or told her anything that could tell her who it was that screamed Nothing! in the night or why it happened, and she wanted very badly to know.

  Chapter IV

  “CAPTAIN METRA TOLD ME in confidence, before the conference, that Lady Hanna has a personal agenda.”

  “Hanna? An agenda?”

  “That she’s angry. With you, the captain said, for breaking with her.”

  “She’s the one breaking with me, but nobody seems to believe that . . . well, I suppose it might follow that she’s angry anyway, about something—but what agenda does Metra think she has?”

  “Failure of the mission, was the implication. In the captain’s defense, Hanna has made no secret of her dislike of Battleground.”

  “That is a concern, but for a different reason. Hanna has impeccable instincts. She was convinced Zeig-Daru knew of our existence and was implacably hostile long before we knew anything about Species X. I wonder what unconscious awareness she might have about Battleground that she hasn’t yet been able to articulate. But she wouldn’t sabotage the mission for any reason. Hidden agendas and Hanna don’t go together. She would simply refuse to go on.”

  “She’s not in a position to overtly refuse. Or am I wrong?”

  “Well—admitted. She isn’t. Given that, the protests we’ve already seen were predictable, but she will continue to comply. I would not take anything Metra tells you ‘in confidence’ very seriously. How did it go, otherwise?”

  “It wasn’t pleasant. I might have exerted more control than I did, but I wanted to get a sense of how these people are with each other. It was not like overseeing traders in F’thalian luxury goods . . .”

  • • •

  It had been a wrangle, the air thick with accusations, but blessedly short.

  Metra to Hanna: “You had no business spying. What do you think this is? An Intelligence and Security operation? Did I authorize you to do what you did? Did anyone?”

  Hanna to Metra: “You were eager enough for the results!” And then, gouging where she knew it would hurt (and drive Metra wild with fury): “I thought Endeavor was a first-class operation. First-class operations do not lose communications capability!”

  Get out of my sight, Metra thought, and Gabriel said, “It was my fault. I should have trusted Hanna and stayed where I was.”

  “It was not your fault,” said Hanna, and put her hand on his.

  “You’re right about that,” Metra said. “It was your responsibility to inform him of what you were going to do and what he ought to do—but you didn’t tell anybody. If you were one of my crew I’d confine you to quarters for the duration.” She looked at all she could see of Evanomen, his head and shoulders, floating in the air. “I assume we’re going to Wektt. I recommend assigning real humans to the contact.”

  She did not even bother to use the conventional term, “true-humans.”

  Evanomen finally said something. “It might have been a mistake to hide the nature of the telepaths.”

  “That was Bassanio’s idea. A serious misjudgment on her part.”

  “I do not recall anyone disagreeing,” Hanna said. She briefly considered pointing out that it had in fact been Jameson’s idea, decided her own mistakes could do without examination, and went on. “Kwoort was determined to the end to enlist us in his war. Nakeekt has things she wants to conceal, and if she had known what I was when we landed she wouldn’t have shown us anything. Downplaying it’s still my recommendation, when we go to Wektt.”

/>   “It won’t matter,” Metra said, “because there won’t be any telepaths in the picture. I don’t want any of them involved.”

  “I’ll take it under consideration,” Evanomen said, meaning, intentionally, nothing.

  “Captain Metra is speaking from prejudice,” Hanna said. “Leaving my people out of it would be idiotic.”

  “You are confined to quarters,” Metra told Hanna.

  “I can’t agree to that,” Evanomen said with more authority. “I want Hanna working on the new data with Arch Harm.”

  “Is that what Starr wants?” Hanna said, just to goad Metra, responding to Metra’s fury in spite of herself. Damned if she was going to say “Commissioner Jameson;” she felt like throwing the affair in Metra’s face, over or not.

  “Try not to make a disaster of it,” Metra said. “The equipment you left behind was valuable. So far your accomplishments are confined to running away from Kwoort every time you saw him, and getting thrown out of That Place.”

  And the best Hanna could say to that was, “Well, not every time.”

  Chapter V

  KIT MORTAN HAD ORDERED the telepaths out of Communications as soon as Hanna left the surface. He said he would let them access the new documents from the auditorium if that would make them go away, and that was where Hanna found them. Gabriel trailed after her, radiating guilt.

  “Look at this,” Bella said, depressed. Kit had supplied raw material, not the ongoing translation, and the masses of text were incomprehensible.

  Hanna looked at the moping Bella, sighed, and called Kit to ask for the translation. He hesitated, but only a little; whatever Evanomen (or Jameson, or Zanté) had said to Metra about keeping Hanna informed had not lost its power, and the translations appeared quickly. She flipped through pages, muttering “next” and “next” and “next,” watching them flash past.

  “Metra said you should have sampled randomly,” Joseph told her.

  “It’s a shame she didn’t say that at the start. We’ll have to settle for randomly sampling the samples, I guess.”

  She paused—at random—and read: