by Timothy Zahn
Thrr-mezaz gazed at the monitor, trying to think himself into the aliens' footsteps. All right. If they were heading for either the village or the northern pyramid, they weren't doing a very good job of it. Could they have merely been part of the Human-Conquerors' feint, like the aircraft that had overflown the south pyramid? Something else to keep the Zhirrzh ground warriors occupied while those reinforcement warcraft tried to sneak in?
Or was that merely what they were hoping he would think? Could the aircraft - maybe even the fighter warcraft - have actually been the distraction for the ground mission? Were they even now making their way toward some important objective, something outside the village itself?
"They had two high-power Elderdeath weapons operating when we first arrived," Thrr-mezaz said, tapping the shoulder of the warrior at the monitor. "Show me where those were."
"Yes, Commander," the warrior said, fingers and tongue flicking across the keyboard. A beat later two flashing spots appeared superimposed on the view, one at the northern edge of the village, the other on a hill a few thoustrides west of it. "The heavy air-assault craft destroyed both of them at the beginning of the invasion," the warrior added.
"Yes, I know," Thrr-mezaz said. But the Human-Conquerors had already demonstrated that they had small, portable Elderdeath weapons on hand. If they had another of the high-power versions hidden out there somewhere...
"Do you want me to send the Stingbirds?" Klnn-vavgi prompted.
Thrr-mezaz flicked out his tongue. Time for a command decision... and a command gamble. "No," he said. "Let's let them go a little farther. See if we can figure out where they're going."
He sensed the flick of Klnn-vavgi's tail. "I'm not sure that would be a wise idea," the second commander said. "We've already seen that some of their explosive weapons don't rely on line of sight. If we let them get too close, they could do considerable damage."
"I realize that," Thrr-mezaz said. "I think it's worth the risk."
"Commander, if I may suggest - "
"Commander, the enemy warcraft are withdrawing," one of the warriors called.
Thrr-mezaz looked over at the Imperative's optical-viewer feed in time to see the last of the Human-Conqueror warcraft flicker away. It was over, at least for now. "See if you can find out how extensive the damage to our warships was," he instructed the warrior.
"Yes, Commander," the other acknowledged. "It'll probably take a while, though - they're going to be busy up there. Just a beat... Commander, the Imperative reports that there was a series of laser-communication signals to the surface just before the Human-Conquerors withdrew."
Final messages. Or final orders. "Understood," Thrr-mezaz said. "Keep a close watch; the Human-Conquerors may have a second wave on its way."
"I don't think so," Klnn-vavgi said. "The ground warriors seem to have given up."
Thrr-mezaz turned to find an Elder hovering beside Klnn-vavgi. "Are you sure?"
"They've moved back to this point, Commander," the Elder said, indicating a spot. He vanished, reappeared - "They're here now. Moving back the way they came."
And moving pretty quickly, if the Elder was marking their position correctly. "Check and see if they're carrying anything they didn't have before," he instructed the Elder. "Or whether they seem to have left anything behind."
"I obey," the Elder said, vanishing. A handful of beats later he was back. "No to both questions," he said. "At least nothing larger than hand-sized. Do you want us to try to make a closer examination?"
"No need," Thrr-mezaz said. The Elders wouldn't have had a detailed list of what the Human-Conquerors had carried in, anyway. "Looks like they've aborted their mission. Whatever it was."
"There's still plenty of time to hit them before they get to the mountains," Klnn-vavgi pointed out. "With the Stingbirds or either of the two teams of ground warriors we've got on their flanks. Shall I give the orders?"
Gently, Thrr-mezaz rubbed his tongue against the inside of his mouth. Tactically, of course, the Second Commander's suggestion was certainly the thing to do. Every enemy warrior destroyed was one less warrior to threaten their beachhead. Plus the intangible but inevitable damage it would inflict on Human-Conqueror morale.
And if they hit the ground team now, before they got another half thoustride away, the Zhirrzh warriors would have the advantage of instant targeting and tactical information from the Elders anchored at the north pyramid. It would be a chance to prove to the skeptics, from Supreme Ship Commander Dkll-kumvit all the way up to Warrior Command, that using Elders as sentries this way was a sound and practical military tactic. A way finally to silence the rumblings of criticism and contempt that had been circling his head ever since the theft of Prr't-zevisti's fsss cutting.
Yes, he could easily destroy them. But if he did, they might never try this again. Whatever it was they were trying...
"No," he told Klnn-vavgi. "Let them go."
The low buzz of conversation around them vanished into silence. "Excuse me?" Klnn-vavgi asked carefully.
"We're letting them go," Thrr-mezaz repeated, turning away from the monitor. "We'll have the Elders watch them, of course, and I'll want both the ground warriors and the Stingbirds standing ready. But as long as they continue to head away from the village and the pyramids, we don't attack."
Klnn-vavgi cleared his throat. "With the Commander's permission - "
"They were up to something out there, Second," Thrr-mezaz said. "Something important. I want to make sure they feel secure enough to try it again."
"Understood," Klnn-vavgi said, his tone making it clear that he didn't understand at all. "What are you all sitting around for?" he added, throwing a quick glare around the room at the warriors watching them. "We have damage assessments to make, Stingbirds to service, and warriors to redeploy. And the Human-Conquerors might still decide to fight over the wreckage of those fighter warcraft. Get busy."
The warriors turned back to their monitors. Klnn-vavgi glared at them another couple of beats, then stepped to Thrr-mezaz's side. "This is risky, Thrr-mezaz," he said quietly. "And I don't mean just from a tactical standpoint. I hope you know what you're doing."
"So do I," Thrr-mezaz agreed. "History will have to pass the final judgment."
"That won't stop a thousand clan Speakers from writing their own versions of it."
"They'll be doing that whatever decisions I make at this point," Thrr-mezaz said. "The Thrr family is in political trouble, and there are going to be a lot of Zhirrzh scrambling to capitalize on that. That's the nature of politics."
"I suppose so," Klnn-vavgi said reluctantly. "It really shouldn't be allowed in wartime, though. I just hope Warrior Command has enough stiffening not to cave in to the whims of the Overclan Seating."
"I think they do," Thrr-mezaz said, sliding his tongue thoughtfully across the roof of his mouth. "There's been something different about Warrior Command these past few fullarcs. They've become more serious than I've ever heard them before."
"You know, I've been thinking the same thing," Klnn-vavgi said slowly. "The first few fullarcs after the survey ships were attacked, everything coming out of Warrior Command was all bright and brisk and businesslike. Cheerful, even, as if they were really looking forward to taking on this new challenge. And then suddenly it all changed."
Thrr-mezaz nodded. The messages and orders had suddenly become terse and grim, and Warrior Command had begun scrambling together new expeditionary forces to throw at the new enemy.
And so there they sat, underequipped, overvulnerable, trying to hold on to a barely tenable beachhead on a clearly minor Human-Conqueror world, while similarly underequipped and overvulnerable expeditionary forces did the same on other Human-Conqueror worlds.
Why?
"They know something, Klnn-vavgi," Thrr-mezaz said quietly. "Something they've learned about the Human-Conquerors that's got them scared. Something they can't or won't tell us."
"Could be." Klnn-vavgi snorted under his breath. "Then again, maybe so
me genius there has only just gotten around to counting and realized we're eighteen worlds against the Human-Conquerors' twenty-four."
"Maybe," Thrr-mezaz said. "If the data in that Human-Conqueror recorder can be believed, anyway. Personally, I'm not convinced the thing wasn't a deliberate deception. Planting a recorder loaded with disinformation would be just the sort of thing a devious conqueror race might do. Maybe this mission to the Mrachanis isn't so premature after all."
"The Mrach - ? Oh, right. Those new aliens. That mission's confirmed to fly, then?"
"That's what I hear," Thrr-mezaz said. "I want you to keep close track of the Stingbirds heading out to the warcraft wreckage. It's still possible the ground warriors were nothing but an attempt to distract us."
"Maybe." Klnn-vavgi looked back at the overview monitor. "What do you think they were really up to?"
"I don't know," Thrr-mezaz said. "But I can't help noticing that that's the same general area they were in when they took Prr't-zevisti's cutting."
"Interesting point," Klnn-vavgi said slowly. "I'd assumed they were there that time to get a look at the pyramid. You think there's something hidden out there that they want?"
"Or else they're trying to plant some non-line-of-sight weapon in position," Thrr-mezaz said. "Or trying to gain access to an underground supply or tunnel system. All we know for sure is that it's important to them." He flicked his tongue. "And I don't want them waiting until they've gathered so much strength that we won't have a hope of stopping them."
Klnn-vavgi snorted. "Under the circumstances, I hardly think that's likely."
"Unfortunately, circumstances seldom stay constant for long," Thrr-mezaz countered dryly.
"Point," Klnn-vavgi conceded. "All right, I'll go watch the Stingbirds. What about you?"
Thrr-mezaz looked back at the monitor. "First, I want to make sure those ground warriors really do leave. After that... I think I'm going to get the Elders started on a thorough search of that area. See if we can get to whatever the enemy's looking for before they do."
5
It was quiet in the big metal room. Amazingly quiet, distressingly boring, and very, very lonely. An ideal sort of place, Prr't-zevisti had long since decided, for meditative remembrance and reflective thought. And such thoroughly positive pastimes as berating himself for having done such a mallet-headed thing in the first place.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, or at least no worse than everything that had gone before it. The first mistake had been a group one, with enough blame for everyone to get his fair share: no one had noticed that group of Human ground warriors until they were practically on top of the northern pyramid. The Zhirrzh warriors had done their best, but without a timely warning from the Elders their response had been unfocused and far too late. The Humans had reached the pyramid; but instead of destroying it, they'd simply poked around, broken into Prr't-zevisti's niche and taken his fsss cutting, and moved on.
His cutting. Hovering at the edge of the lightworld, Prr't-zevisti gazed down at the thin slice of tissue sitting there in its tiny sealed box. It had been taken from his fsss organ a little over seventeen cyclics ago, but he still remembered that event as vividly as if it had just been last fullarc. The procedure had been brand-new at the time, only a couple of cyclics old, and most of Prr't-zevisti's friends had sworn up and down that they'd never let a technic take a blade to their fsss organs. But Prr't-zevisti had always had a reckless streak to him, and the prospect of getting to flit between two different areas instead of being stuck in just one had been highly intriguing. A little thought, a little boredom - a little goading from his friends - and he'd had his name put on the list.
Letting the Human warriors get to the pyramid had been their first mistake. The second had merely compounded it. Instead of redoubling their efforts to destroy or defeat the enemy, the Zhirrzh warriors had shifted their focus to merely driving the attackers back into the mountains.
At the time, of course, no one had thought of it as a mistake. With Prr't-zevisti's fsss cutting bouncing ignominiously around in some Human's combat bag, an ill-placed shot by the Zhirrzh warriors could have vaporized the cutting and sent him snapping unceremoniously back to his main fsss anchorpoint at the Prr-family shrine. The Elders would certainly have pressured Commander Thrr-mezaz not to take such a risk, a point of view Prr't-zevisti himself would definitely have supported if he hadn't been so quickly taken out of direct range of the discussion. Besides which, considering why Commander Thrr-mezaz had put the communicators' pyramids outside the village in the first place, he'd probably had some crazy notion of Prr't-zevisti serving as a spy at the enemy mountain stronghold.
He'd kept a low profile during the first couple of tentharcs of his captivity, staying deep in the grayworld where he couldn't see and could hear only through his fsss cutting. Stoically enduring the Humans' discomforting and occasionally painful manipulation of the cutting.
Though none of it had been nearly as discomforting as the cutting process itself had been, seventeen cyclics ago. There was no way to apply an anesthetic, of course, and even though they'd used a cold-knife, a fair amount of pain had necessarily made it through to him. Far more sickening, at least to him, had been what the whole procedure had looked like. He'd seen other preserved fsss organs when he was a physical and had known that the preservation technique had left a thin, hard shell around the exterior of the small, finger-shaped organ. What he hadn't realized until the cutting operation was that either time, or those same preservatives, had turned the interior of the fsss into a fluid, jellylike substance. It oozed slowly around the knife as the healers cut, trickling down the side of the fsss like some sort of extra-thick kavra-fruit juice. Like something dead and decaying, even though he knew intellectually that it was fully alive and vibrant. He'd watched in morbid fascination, a combination of shocked disgust and stubborn pride preventing him from looking away, as they finished their cut and turned the parts right side up to minimize and contain the leakage. They'd applied a new treatment of more modern preservatives, sending an odd sort of double tingling sensation through him. Both sections had skinned over; the healers had announced the cutting a success; and as the disgust and pain had faded into disinterest and fatigue, Prr't-zevisti had wandered off.
The Humans had eventually lost interest in his cutting, too. And as darkness fell and the aliens settled down for the latearc, Prr't-zevisti had come up to the edge of the lightworld again and begun to poke around.
But he'd underestimated the enemy's cunning. The area where his cutting had been taken was absolutely crammed full of metal: metal weapons, metal tools, even what appeared to be metal packaging. Like every Elder, he knew that refined metal could not be breached; what he hadn't properly appreciated until then was that the effect went far beyond the actual physical space occupied by that metal. Each piece seemed to throw the grayworld equivalent of a shadow, a sharply defined area shaped exactly like the shadow that would have been created by a light source at his fsss cutting. A shadow as impenetrable as the metal itself. Obviously having to do with his anchorline, though he was rather surprised he'd never heard of this effect before.
And as he was picking his way carefully through the area, his full attention on the metal and the shadows, the Humans had sprung their trap.
He was standing there in the darkness - he or she; Prr't-zevisti still didn't know which. Standing there waiting for him to make his appearance... and even as Prr't-zevisti had belatedly noticed him, the Human had let out a shriek of discovery and triumph that had echoed through his mind a half-dozen beats after he'd dropped frantically back into the grayworld.
For a while he'd stayed there in the haze, unwilling to come up and risk being seen again. Silly, of course - irrational, even; trying to hide himself in the grayworld while his fsss cutting sat open and unprotected in Human hands. Presently, he'd heard voices and felt movement and, bracing himself, had come back up.
To find a Human carrying his fsss cutting toward a ro
om-sized box rising above the shorter stacks around it. A thick-walled box, with an equally thick door, furnished with lights and a long table and shelves stacked high with equipment.
A room made entirely of metal.
There'd been a room very much like it back on the Dhaa'rr homeworld of Dharanv, he remembered. Once the cutting had been pronounced viable, the healers and technics had offered to take his fsss into that room and take a second cutting from it. The metal, they'd pointed out, would force him to anchor to the just-completed cutting, blocking all pain and discomfort from the fsss itself away from him. They'd been rather enthusiastic about the whole idea, a fact that had struck him as rather suspicious. He'd satisfied the requirements of pride and curiosity, and had no intention of being someone's experimental animal, and had politely declined.
But the Humans hadn't asked his permission to put him in their metal box. Nor were they likely to do so. And once his cutting was inside it, he'd be well and truly trapped there.
He'd been gone in an instant, stretching out and upward to the full length of his anchorline, sweeping across the foreshortened hemisphere that was all the surrounding piles of metal had left him, searching frantically for the anchorpoint-sense that would have shown he had a clear path back to safety at the Prr-family shrine. But nothing. He'd scanned the stars, wondering what the chances might be that Dorcas's rotation would bring the Dhaa'rr ancestral world of Dharanv into range in the handful of beats it would take the Humans to reach the box. But the stars were difficult to see from even the closest edge of the lightworld, and the constellations there were too different from those of home. He'd flicked back to the cutting - nearly to the metal box now - back to his anchorline limit; back to the cutting - just inside the door now, instantly shrinking his available angular range to practically zero - one last time along the anchorline -
And even as he'd shot back to the cutting, the door had swung shut with a deep and hollow boom.
