*
The next morning in the starship, Slirtmif was going over the reports from the night and the reports of the malfunctioning scanners. He read the report, in disbelief, of Niseyen up trees. He also read that the amphibian creatures that were proving so difficult to kill were also identified as Niseyen. Niseyen, in the water! You couldn’t get Niseyen to go into water! They hated it. You often couldn’t even get them into boats. They could fly anything or drive anything but boats generally were a no go. Those thick fur coats didn’t help! What was going wrong with the scanners? Had the Zeobani sabotaged them before they had acquired them or were these the ones from the Nashi? They all looked pretty much the same. He asked the Supply Officer, who replied, “All were stored together. I have no idea which ones came from the Zeobani.”
“Could they have been sabotaged before they were ‘acquired’?”
“Well, yes, it is possible. But they seem to be correct in all other identifiers. At least it matches with what we were told, doesn’t it?”
Slirtmif read over his notes. The mercenaries were instructed to take a note of which races were in the cities and make rough numbers of each. The pilots were to get a rough estimate of the numbers of bodies they dumped. Niseyen had been identified, a hundred or so in one city and a smattering in other cities. Very few in total. The scanner tallies roughly checked out with the eyeball accounts.
Were the Zeobani just doing a random sabotage or were they trying to hide something on Torroxell? No, that wasn’t possible. The Zeobani had no idea that Torroxell, or any other planet, was to be targeted. The Zeobani and Niseyen were not political allies but they got on. If anything, the Zeobani would be trying to hide their presence. No, he thought, this was just random glitches or sabotage, probably the latter. It wouldn’t be the first time. The problem with being a dominant race was that other races resented you and tried to pull you down. The main problem was, what other sabotage was done with the scanners? That was the really worrying problem.
In the crew lounge, this little glitch was one of the topics of conversation. Particularly the lounge that had several Niseyen pilots. Inevitably, they got teased and taunted. No one believed the scanner. All were perturbed about the inaccuracy or the malfunctioning of the scanners. Maybe sabotage.
The Niseyen pilots were even more unhappy. Most had liked the Zeobani and disliked the Nashi, who were aggressive and ruthless. Now they had discovered that they had killed their own. The eye-witness parts of the reports confirmed that.
Alien Alliance Page 23
