The first yellow-orange sun proved without habitable planets. So did the second and third. A lean region, Chang thought. He was on his way to the fourth when the detector picked up the alien squadron.
Excitement and alarm coursed through him. From the brilliance of the blips on the screen, those were sizable ships. They were making good speed, too, far better than most of the nonhuman craft he knew. He held his course and waited to be noticed.
In short order he was; the strangers had sensitive detectors. Three vessels peeled off from the main group toward him. He took no evasive action; he was looking for contact. "Fool that I am," he said to no one in particular.
The lead ship's drive field touched his; they were both thrown back into normal space. Gulping, Chang wondered whether the aliens were subject to nausea.
The two ships emerged on divergent vectors several thousand kilometers apart. That would have been enough to make it impossible for most of the aliens the scout pilot knew to find him in the vastness of space, but the stranger swiftly altered course and came after him.
"I'm picking up radar," the computer reported.
"Wonderful," Chang said morosely. As usual, B'kila had been right.
The other two ships must have slaved their engines to their detector screens, for they returned to normal space at the same instant as their comrade and Praise of Folly. Chang's radar soon found them. They closed rapidly.
"Radio traffic," the computer said. The whistles and growls that came out of the speaker sprang from no human throat.
"Let's give them something to think about." Chang recorded his name and the name of his ship. "Squirt that out on their frequency."
There were several seconds of absolute silence, then a burst of alien noise that sounded much more excited than the previous signals. Chang wondered if the non-humans had learned English or Low Mandarin from any of the earlier pilots. If so, they were not letting on. The incomprehensible babble continued.
Then alarms hooted and the computer was shouting, "Missile away!" A moment later it reported, "Contragrav job, fairly good velocity, but a clean miss—trajectory far ahead of us."
"Just the one launch?" the scout pilot asked tensely.
"So far." Praise of Folly was a confirmed pessimist.
"Might be a shot across our—" A new star bloomed in the forward screen, a supernova burst that went from white through yellow and orange to red and slowly guttered out.
"Fission explosion," the computer said matter-of-factly. "Thirty kilotonne range."
Chang held his head in his hands. Not just electronics, then: the aliens had a grasp of nuclear physics, too. He could not imagine anything worse.
"It lit up these," Praise of Folly said. Another screen came on, its images grainy with high magnification. The scout pilot did not recognize the craft displayed, but he knew warships when he saw them. They bristled with launchers and also sported two turrets each: quick-fire guns for close-in work, he guessed.
He weighted his options. Even winning a standup fight would not give him enough information to make B'kila happy. Meekly stopping, though, stuck in his craw. "They may as well be as worried as I am," he decided. "Give the lead ship a peewee at about the same distance they put theirs—but throttle down the missile so theirs seems to out-perform it." He did not intend to show all his cards.
Atomic fire blossomed again, unmistakably brilliant. The gabble of alien noise rose to a roar. Then abrupt silence fell; it must have occurred to one of the nonhumans that Chang might somehow know their language. Cat and mouse, he thought, with neither side sure which was which.
The three alien ships approached one another, though not so close that a single blast could take out more than one. Boats flitted back and forth: a meeting, no doubt. Glad he was a loner, Chang went to sleep. In case of serious attack, the computer would have to defend Praise of Folly anyway.
The computer woke him a couple of hours later to report that one of the aliens had gone into hyperdrive. "Which one?" he asked. The smallest of the three appeared onscreen for a moment.
A boat left one of the remaining aliens and moved slowly toward Praise of Folly. Unlike its parent craft, it blazed with lights: the equivalent of a flag of truce? Chang could not afford to be trusting. "If it comes inside 2000 kilometers, fire another warning shot," he said. "Chemical explosion this time, not nuclear."
But the boat stopped at more than twice that distance. It retreated to its own ship, leaving behind a small metal canister made conspicuous by a floodlight and radar beacon. "Playing it very cozy, aren't they?" Chang said.
"Probably booby-trapped."
"Probably," he agreed. "Shall we find out? Send the probe over for a look."
The little robot sped toward the canister. The scout pilot wondered what the nonhumans would make of it. It would tell them something of the technology he had, but he hoped to learn more about theirs.
The light on the canister was incandescent, not a plasma tube; the battery pack that powered it was larger than the Terran equivalent. The canister itself looked suspiciously like a wastebasket. A foil cover had been taped across the top; the paper tape was already beginning to come loose as its adhesive dried in vacuum.
At Chang's direction, the probe peeled back the foil. Nothing untoward happened. The camera pickup showed that inside the canister there were only two rectangular sheets of thick, parchment-like paper, one perfect, the other with a ragged edge, as if it had been torn from a book.
The book page had a line of incomprehensible script, but a black-and-white print took up most of the surface: an irregular pattern of lines and spaces. The scout pilot was used to seeing them in color, but he recognized it at once. "Spectrogram!" He had an inspiration. "Match it against the sun their fleet was heading for."
After a few seconds, the computer said, "It checks." Chang fancied that he heard a note of puzzled respect in the electronic voice. He hid a smile. The computer was smarter than he was, but it did not make intuitive leaps.
The other sheet proved that the aliens were used to contacting other races. A series of skillful cartoons instructed Chang to go into hyperdrive between the two nonhuman ships and let them pace him to the star. They also warned that he would be attacked if he dropped into normal space on his own; he was to let one of the aliens bring him back by cutting across his drive field.
"Sensible enough precautions," he said. "They'll have scrambled every warship in that system to look out for me as I emerge, too. I would, in their shoes."
For Praise of Folly, the jump into hyperdrive was smooth. Chang's escorts hovered close, just far enough away to let their fields operate. To his regret, they kept up when he increased speed. Though the rest of their skills seemed a bit behind those of the Terrans, their hyperdrive systems were first-rate.
Shortly before he expected to return to normal space, the scout pilot gritted his teeth and injected himself with several cc's of memory-RNA. For the next ten days to two weeks he would have nearly total recall—and a raging headache.
Like Terrans, the aliens preferred to emerge well away from a system's ecliptic plane, to minimize the risk of encountering sky junk. Chang listened torpidly as radio traffic crackled back and forth between his escort and the ships that, as he had guessed, were standing by awaiting his arrival.
Several formed up in a globe around him. Another message canister showed him that he was to stay in the center of the formation as they approached the system's second planet. "If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk," he grumbled; reading Frost had gotten him interested in other ancient authors.
The lead ship in the escorting array slowed until it was only a couple of kilometers ahead of Praise of Folly and began flashing its lights on and off. After a minute or so, the scout pilot understood. "Folly, if you will."
"So it is," the computer said, but went after the alien in spite of his slip of the tongue.
Spaceports on civilized worlds have a depressing sameness; it is next to impossible to
make vast expanses of concrete interesting. The perimeter buildings, though, caught Chang's eye when Praise of Folly dipped below the last cloud back; they had the massive look of fortifications.
Atmospheric flyers screamed overhead as Praise of Folly touched down near the center of the field. Gun-carrying armored vehicles that reminded Chang of the ones he had seen in B'kila's ancient tape rumbled toward the ship.
There were also footsoldiers running across the concrete. Chang turned up the magnification on his vision screen. The aliens were fairly humanoid, taller and thinner than Terrans, with knees that bent in the opposite direction. They had narrow, foxlike faces, long jaws, and blunt carnivore teeth. Thick reddish-yellow hair covered most of their bodies; they went nude except for boots, belts with bulging pouches, and helmets.
Their hand-weapons gave the scout pilot a momentary start. The guns' curved magazines reminded him of the Kalashnikovs that were still ubiquitous in human space. He quickly saw, though, that it was only coincidence; the rest of the design was not similar at all.
He checked the atmosphere analysis. The air seemed good enough, barring some noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulfides that probably came for the noisy, smoke-belching iron monsters out there. He didn't worry about diseases. Few alien germs found humans tasty, and his broad-spectrum immunity shots left him doubly safe.
After instructing the computer, he strapped on a sidearm and cycled through the airlock. The pistol meant nothing as a weapon against the fire-power out there, but no race with an organized military could fail to grasp what it represented.
The worst moment came as the outer airlock door swung open. If one of the aliens panicked or got trigger-happy, B'kila would have five missing scouts to brief the next pilot about.
Some of the aliens yelled when Chang came into sight. "Officers, it would appear," the computer said into a receiver implanted behind his ear. "Notice the stripes on their helmets." Seeing one of them knock a soldier's gun aside, Chang tentatively identified his first phrase in the alien language: "Hold your fire!"
For a moment he thought his weight was shifting, then realized it was the opposite: like a seaman rolling on land, he had become so used to Praise of Folly's pulsing generator that steady gravity felt odd.
After the ship's mechanically pure air, the unidentifiable spicy smells of growing things hit him like wine. He did not even mind the diesel stink mixed with them, though it made him cough.
He paced off a circle of about ten meters around Praise of Folly, made pushing motions to show that the troopers should keep their distance. When a squad arrogantly strode inside his perimeter, Praise of Folly let go with an ear-splitting siren screech. Machine guns swiveled to bear on the aliens. They scrambled back.
Chang smiled to himself. It would not hurt to have the aliens think the ship still manned. In a way, it was.
One of the nonhumans stepped out of a small group and came forward, ostentatiously stopping at the boundary line Chang had set. The scout pilot caught his musky body odor; who could say what he smelled like to the other?
The alien—an officer of some rank, by the five stripes on his helmet—pointed to himself and said, "Zan." He pointed at one of the soldiers behind him. "Zan." Another. "Zan." A wave that encompassed a dozen or more. "Zanat."
The language lesson went from there. Chang soon decided that the Zanat officer was a trained contact specialist. He went about his business with a calm competence that implied he had undertaken such tasks many times before. Skillfully he gave Chang both vocabulary and grammatical structure. The latter made the scout pilot want to groan, for the Zanat language was highly synthetic. Chang wished for the simpler analytic structure of low Mandarin or English, but he had been on enough worlds that spoke Russian-based tongues to cope. And what he learned, he did not forget.
The contact officer's name was Liosh; that, at least, was as close as Chang could come to it. His own name sounded like "Razmuzjang" in the other's mouth. Liosh undid his belt, tugged off his boots, put his helmet on the tarmac. When completely naked, he pointed to himself, then to Praise of Folly's entry ladder. His mobile ears twitched in what Chang had already come to recognize as the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. "Go there?"
"No." The scout pilot could not make his refusal polite.
Liosh gave a very human shrug. He pointed to one of the blocky structures several hundred meters away. "Go there, then?"
The scout pilot decided to risk it. He had several days' worth of food concentrates in the knapsack on his back, as well as vitamins to supplement alien food and reagents to test for the more common sorts of indigestible proteins and lipids. If the Zanat intended killing him, they had easier ways than poisoning.
He spoke into his handset, telling Praise of Folly what he was about and adding, "If I'm lost, get the data home if you can: override command. And another override: destroy yourself to avoid capture."
"Acknowledged," the computer said sulkily, speaking, as Chang had ordered, through both the receiver behind his ear and the handset. He wanted to make sure Liosh understood what that was; the Zanat model was a back-carried unit bigger than his knapsack, and looked to be much heavier.
Liosh, he suspected, was smart enough to draw his own conclusions from that.
After several tries, he conveyed to the Zanat that hell would break loose if he was not allowed to communicate with his ship regularly, or if they tried to seize it while he was gone. Liosh agreed so promptly that Chang was sure the aliens would take their chances when the time came. He shrugged; he had known that already.
Troopers fell in around him and Liosh as they walked toward the port building. When they were nearly there, Chang heard a spatter of small-arms fire: single shots, followed by the harsh tac-tac-tac of automatic weapons.
He whirled, but the gunshots had nothing to do with Praise of Folly. In fact, several of the armored vehicles were rumbling away from his ship toward the far edge of the spaceport. "What's going on there?" he asked the computer.
"Fighting." Sophisticated as it was, Praise of Folly could be annoyingly literal, especially just after an override command. A moment later, though, it added some worthwhile information: "The attackers stay well hidden, but do not seem to be Zanat."
"Interesting," Chang said. He turned to Liosh, used the only interrogative he had. "What?"
The contact officer spread his four-fingered hands in a gesture many races used. "Slayor," he said. "People of the world." He approached that several ways, until he saw that Chang understood. He did not have a high opinion of the Slayor. Pointing at a starship: "Slayor—no." At a fighting vehicle: "Slayor—no."
Local barbarians, the scout pilot translated mentally. Which meant that this is not the Zanat homeworld. He had not really thought it was, but the implications jarred him all the same. The Zanat were plainly here as conquerors, not traders—which argued for an expansive, unified imperialism such as the dead Confederacy had known.
And if they found fragmented humanity unprepared . . . Their technology was not up to the best Terran standards, but not much in human space was either, any more. Chang wanted to run and hide.
Instead he followed Liosh into the port building. The door closed behind them with a thud that told of metal reinforcement. Liosh led him up a couple of flights of stairs and through a tangled set of corridors to a suite of rooms from which troopers were hauling desks, cabinets, and other office furniture. Others were standing by with gear that looked as though it had come from their barracks: a big metal footlocker, a table, a cot amazingly like Loki standard issue, and several peculiar free-standing contraptions that puzzled Chang until he realized they had to be what a race with back-acting knees used for chairs.
Liosh pointed at the gear and the rooms. "Yours," he said. Chang nodded, a gesture with which the Zan was already familiar. The scout pilot noted that, as befit a fortress, the windows were mere firing slits. Nor was he surprised to discover a guard-squad outside his door. He had been a prisoner ever since his ship emerged
in this system.
He gained fluency in the Zanat language with a speed that won Liosh's respect. The alien contact officer pushed hard; he did not have the advantage of an artificially unfailing memory, but he owned a good one, and the Zanat seemed to need only about half as much sleep as Terrans. He found Chang's dormancy amusing.
The scout pilot came to like him, not least because he did not take himself too seriously. For all that, the Zan was a clever interrogator, adept at sliding smoothly from one subject to the next. One secret, though, he did not penetrate: the scout pilot was careful always to speak of the Confederacy in the present tense. He was so perfectly consistent that Liosh never thought to doubt him.
Still, it was not an easy time. Liosh extracted a good deal of information, and yielded little in return. Chang started seeing those probing golden eyes, started hearing that guttural voice in his sleep.
He dreamed they were trying to talk during a storm. Thunder boomed; lightning seared the sky. When he woke, for a long moment he was unsure he had. The night was pitch-black, but lurid flashes of light came stabbing into his chamber. The crashes that tore the air were louder and more continuous than those from any tempest.
Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War Page 26
