As the pair passed de Tomas, who had remained silent during the entire scene, de Tomas stood and bowed deeply at them, a lopsided sneer on his face. Sturgeon ignored him, but Spears could not suppress a grimace of disgust.
In the evening, secure in the fortress that was his headquarters, de Tomas played the recording he’d made of what Sturgeon and Spears had been saying, from the time they got into their car to the time they got out, back at Sturgeon’s command post. “‘Christ’s bleeding piles’.” De Tomas laughed. That was a new one on him. He was beginning to like this Brigadier Sturgeon. They apparently thought alike when it came to the uselessness of religion in running a government. Then he smiled at the brigadier’s threat to “squash” him. “No fear of that, my dear Marine commander,” he said aloud. “I’ll not get in your way. No, sir, my dear Confederation friends! You do your work and then I will do mine. My day is coming.” He laughed with real pleasure, and with a flourish as if proposing a formal toast, finished the glass of Katzenwasser ’36 he had been drinking.
Back in his billets, the young soldier who had driven Brigadier Sturgeon and Ambassador Spears to the Convocation earlier in the day reflected on the things the brigadier had said in the car along the way. “. . . these religious leaders are some of the worst of the lot,” the Marine commander had said. The worst fools, is what he meant. He had never, ever heard anyone speak that way about the Convocation of Ecumenical Leaders! And he took the Lord’s name in vain and was not struck by a bolt of lightning! Extraordinary! And he’d said the Collegium, the one institution everyone on Kingdom feared and respected, was “worse than any secret police organization.” That’s what the brigadier had said! And he’d called them all “whining pulpit thumpers.” Those words had literally taken the young soldier’s breath away.
These Marines were not like anyone else he’d ever met. They talked freely to everyone, showed no fear of being overheard, and made the most outrageous statements without the slightest fear of correction. And more than that, men only slightly higher in rank than himself were given the most important responsibilities and evidently left alone—trusted—by their leadership to carry them out. Such initiative was totally alien to his army, and he marveled that mere enlisted men in the Confederation Marine Corps could be trusted so explicitly. Taking responsibility seemed natural to them! And he had never received such good instruction as the Marines were giving the Kingdomite soldiers. Amazingly, it was evident his Marine teachers really wanted him and his fellow soldiers to act as they themselves did.
Deep down inside, beneath a lifetime’s religious indoctrination and stringent orthodoxy, a small flicker of doubt burned within that young soldier’s soul. He was beginning to like the Marines.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
The days following the attack on the Skink supply depot were filled with activity on all sides, but there was little contact between the Marines and the invaders. Most of the activity on the Confederation side wasn’t conducted by the Marines, but by the scientists and technicians of Interstellar City and on board the Grandar Bay. The raiding party had brought back forty packages from the supply depot. Eleven of them were duplicates, which left twenty-nine different items to identify. The civilian and navy scientists and technicians on the ground and in orbit worked furiously to analyze them. The navy assembled a special engineering team to work on the spare barrel, or whatever it was, that Lieutenant Eggers had captured.
The Confederation forces were excited. The Skinks were decidedly not.
The Over Masters and more senior of the Senior Masters again assembled before the Great Master. No small tables were set between them. No diminutive females moved silently and gracefully among them to serve a steaming beverage. They carried no weapons, not even ceremonial swords. Facing the assembly, the Over Master responsible for defense of the entrances to the underground complex sat cross-legged in front of the Great Master. He was naked except for a loincloth, and a long knife lay on the bare floor in front of his ankles. His face bore no expression. A Large One faced him from a pace to his left and rear. The Large One held a sword, its blade gleaming sharply. The unsheathed sword that lay across the Great Master’s crossed legs was a true weapon, not an emblem.
The Great Master glared at the Over Masters and more senior of the Senior Masters; he did not look at the loinclothed Over Master before him. When he spoke, his raspy voice rumbled and crashed like an avalanche.
“The Earthman Marines attacked us underground!” he roared with the sound of a city toppling earthquake. “The Earthman Marines are not supposed to be able to reach us in our caves and tunnels. Our defenses are supposed to stop them if they attempt to enter our home. They found an entrance we did not know about and destroyed a logistics depot. This should not have happened! This is unacceptable! This will not happen again!”
He cast his glare upon the Over Master responsible for defense. Had his eyes been a weapon, they would have reduced that Over Master to his constituent atoms.
“Die,” he rumbled, an earthquake’s aftershock.
Still expressionless, the Over Master responsible for defense leaned forward, picked up the knife, held its point to the side of his belly, and drew it through the flesh, eviscerating himself.
The Large One a pace to his left and rear brought his sword up and swept it down, severing the Over Master’s head from his shoulders. The head bounced off the chest of an Over Master in the front rank and thudded to the floor. Bright blood spurted from the Over Master’s neck and splashed onto the nearest Over Masters. None of them flinched, none showed any expression.
“There are entrances to the caves we do not know about,” the Great Master said, ignoring the corpse in front of him. “They will be found. They will be defended.”
The Over Master newly appointed to command the defenses of the caves and tunnels was given as many Leaders and Fighters as he requested to prowl the land and find previously undetected entrances to the underground complex.
The cartons and sacks the raiding party brought back were broken open and inventoried. Samples of each item, along with samples of the packaging, were put in a drone and dispatched to Earth. The remainder were divided between the xenobiology team on the Grandar Bay and the scientists and techs of Interstellar City.
One carton held shirts, the right size for a young adolescent, but another held some that would have been too big even for the most overweight member of the Interstellar City staff. These were immediately identified. The xenobiologists used the measurements they’d taken of the recovered Skink lower body and determined that the large Skinks stood approximately 2.2 meters tall and massed close to two hundred kilos. Strips of fabric about thirty centimeters wide by two meters long puzzled everybody until an Interstellar City accountant who had once worked as a theatrical costumer wrapped it around his hips and discovered that they were the loincloths the Skinks were sometimes seen wearing. The hats were also obvious. The material closely resembled linen in weave, texture, and feel, but it was not from any plant the xenobiologists could identify.
A small case held ten objects about twenty-five centimeters in length and eight at their widest. At one end was an evident handle. The other was a more or less triangular, shallow-bowled blade. Molecular analysis determined that the components were exactly what they appeared to be; the handle was a flexible polymer of hitherto unknown composition, and the blade was a low grade steel. They decided the object was most likely a trowel for working dirt.
A senior medical corpsman on the Grandar Bay, whose hobby was the history of medicine, tentatively identified a carton of metal implements with finely serrated blades as surgical saws—they looked almost exactly like surgical saws he’d examined in a medical museum on Earth. He was more positive in his identification of a small carton of sealed gauze pads with straps extending from each end; he said they were field dressings, the kind of bandages soldiers had carried during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Containers of two different k
inds of tablets required further analysis, as did a bottle of a fluid that gave off an astringent aroma.
“Four fingers and an opposable thumb,” observed an engineer who examined the contents of a package that contained twenty pairs of gloves made from an unidentified but tough fabric. “That must explain why everything is packaged in units of ten.”
Another small carton held forty packets that contained rolls of thread and steel slivers with an eyehole at one end. It caused some puzzlement until a seaman who embroidered for a hobby identified them as implements used to repair torn garments—he called them “sewing kits.”
The engineers were excited by a small carton of steel boxes, each of which held twenty short metal sticks with one end enlarged and rough-surfaced. They determined that the sticks were magnesium matches. The construction of the boxes was ingenious; to use them, one flipped up a guard plate on one side and pressed the lever protected by the guard plate. That expelled a match in such a manner that the roughened end scraped against a strike surface and ignited it. The match then continued out of the box and could travel more than a meter before its trajectory began to rapidly deteriorate.
“This must be how they ignite their dead,” the Interstellar City chief engineer said. From a safe distance, he’d observed Skinks who were withdrawing from an assault on the Haven defenses setting their dead on fire. He’d wondered how they did it, as well as why. The magnesium matches brought him the how, not the why.
The xenobiology teams were ecstatic. Sixteen of the twenty-nine different items brought back by the raiders were clearly organic, all probably foodstuffs. They got the first clue from the fact that every one of the sixteen types of packages—whether of a clear polymer wrapping that was curiously both brittle and tough, or a metal canister—bore a label made of some paperlike material, each with a picture of something—presumably the contents—in a bowl. This picture label seemed redundant on the items packaged in the transparent polymer. The xenobiologists went to work with a will.
The dry, coppery-colored things sealed in clear polymer looked very much like fish. The different teams, in Interstellar City and aboard the Grandar Bay, each rehydrated one and dissected it. Fish analogs, they both determined, though their libraries held no match; the fish-things, they concluded, must be native to a planet outside the Confederation of Human Worlds.
A block of gritty white stuff easily gave up its identity. “Sodium chloride,” a Grandar Bay tech reported.
“Yes?” Lieutenant Commander Fenischel gestured for him to go on.
“That’s it, sir,” the tech said. “Common table salt.”
“Nothing else in it? No impurities?”
The tech shook his head. “Nope. Very well-refined.”
Fenischel blinked. Animal life everywhere needed salt of some sort, but while sodium chloride was used by native life on some human-occupied worlds, it was not all that common. He dredged his memory and only came up with half a dozen other worlds where nearly pure sodium chloride was the salt essential to indigenous life.
“Get me a list of every planet where the animals use pure sodium chloride,” he ordered. “Mass, diameter, orbit, mean temperature, solar type.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The tech headed for a library terminal to dig up the information.
Three different varieties of dried leaf, two green and one yellow, were sealed in polymer. They were tentatively classified as analogs of seaweed and leafy vegetables. The same wrapping was used on long, whitish strings that were multiply folded. The strings readily soaked up water and became soft and flexible. They resembled very long noodles.
Canisters in four sizes and two shapes caused a fair amount of controversy. Some xenobiologists and other scientists insisted they were clearly a mechanism for preserving food. Others insisted that, unlike the brittle but tough polymer wrappings, the canisters couldn’t be opened by hand or even tooth, and therefore couldn’t be used for food preservation because the average person couldn’t open them to get at the contents. Their pictured labels, therefore, had to have a different meaning. A petty officer second class on the Grandar Bay settled matters when he did a search of the ship’s library and found that for a few centuries very similar canisters were used on Earth for food preservation and storage. He even located illustrations of the once-common instruments that were used to open the canisters.
However, that did not explain why the smallest size canister had a lid that was held on by friction. The lid could be twisted off by anyone with a grip of even modest strength. Adding to the perplexity of this canister was the contents—dried leaf—sealed in the ubiquitous polymer.
One of the largest canisters contained what analysis insisted was animal protein packed in gravy.
“If I didn’t know any better,” Lieutenant Commander Fenischel muttered to himself, “I’d swear this was a cross between a chicken and something else.”
Another of the largest canisters revealed tubular animals resembling the eels of Earth. They were packed in some sort of gelatin.
The middle-size canisters held five different types of what had to be animal products. These were impossible to identify except that they were all cut up, sliced or diced, and presumably skinned.
So, the items identified with a fair degree of certainty were foodstuffs. It still remained to identify the leaves in the small canisters with friction lids. Those were thought to be far too fibrous to be digestible. Certainly, humans would have had a problem with them.
One other presumed foodstuff created great excitement, though nobody had a clue to its meaning other than convergent evolution. A white sack, sewn closed, lined with a less brittle polymer, contained what appeared to be grain that looked exactly like rice. Every analytic test run on it led to the same conclusion: but the grain was a variant of rice unknown to the libraries of Intersteller City or the Grandar Bay.
“This goes way beyond convergent evolution,” Lieutenant Commander Fenischel said in awed tones.
The xenobiology team’s senior chief petty officer grinned. “Well, sir, I’ll tell ya. There’s been speculation for centuries that some Johnny Appleseed went through the universe a few billion years back, planting likely planets with the seeds of life. Then a few million years ago, that Johnny Appleseed or a different one came through again and planted sentient beings on some planets. Stands to reason if that’s true, he had to bring the right kind of food for the sentient beings.” The Chief Petty Officer beamed. He called the Johnny Appleseed theory “speculation,” but he’d believed it since he was an adolescent. As far as he was concerned, this “rice” was proof positive. He’d read all the analyses. These foodstuffs were close enough to Earth norm, right down to the handedness of the amino acids, which he thought not only could a human eat with no ill effect, but thrive on. And he intended to prove that as soon as he could do some pilfering.
“So what does this prove?” Brigadier Sturgeon demanded when he was given the results concerning the items brought back from the raid. “We know the Skinks wear clothes, we’ve seen them. We already knew they have four fingers and opposable thumbs and that the big Skinks are a lot bigger than we are. We already know they eat food—they’re animate, they have to.”
“But, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Fenischel, who gave the Grandar Bay’s report, said in a pained voice, “don’t you find it meaningful that their packaging is centuries behind ours, or that they use primitive—” He searched for the term. “—sewing kits to repair their clothing, or primitive bandages to cover wounds?”
Sturgeon snorted. “At their height, the ancient Meso-Americans were among the most technologically advanced people on Earth, but they never used the wheel or developed metalworking beyond gold ornaments. These creatures have weapons we haven’t thought of, and a version of the Beam drive that makes ours look like an internal combustion engine. I need information that will help me keep my Marines alive and let them kill Skinks. What has engineering found out about that spare barrel that was brought back? That might help.”
Fenischel looked crestfallen. “Engineering’s still working on it, sir.”
“When they find out something, I want to know immediately.”
Scientists! Sturgeon could barely contain his irritation. Knowing what the enemy ate for dinner wouldn’t help him keep his Marines alive or save Kingdom from the invaders.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Jayben Spears was composing a message, perhaps the most important of his long career as a diplomat. He sat deep in thought, his head wreathed in the aromatic fumes of an Anniversario, a gift from Colonel Ramadan’s private supply that the 34th FIST’s acting commander had brought with him from Thorsfinni’s World.
He drew deeply on the fine cigar, held the smoke deep inside his lungs, then let it out slowly. He sighed and closed his eyes in pleasure. The simple things in life are the best, he reflected. Not that savoring Anniversarios was something everyone could afford, but the cost of one was a small price to pay for the delight it gave to a smoker, which lingered long after the cigar had turned to ash.
The cigar was a reward of a kind, a sort of symbol that cemented the relationship between Jayben and the Marines. He had just returned from a briefing at Brigadier Sturgeon’s command post, and the brigadier had taken the ambassador completely into his confidence by revealing to him his plan for lifting the siege of Haven. Sturgeon had done this because he knew he could trust Spears. They had been through a very hairy situation on Wanderjahr, and on that occasion Spears had proved to the Marine that he was a man who could be relied upon. Their relationship in the present crisis had only grown closer.
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