Strider's Galaxy (34 page)

"Sorry about that." She looked downwards. "There's a very brightly lit area beneath me. I should be there very soon. Still no problems at all, except a touch of muscular fatigue. Send the fittest people down first. Yeah—send Polyaggle down first of all. Kids and fatties can follow later. I want to get the most possible people down here as soon as we can."

"Present company excepted," remarked O'Sondheim drily.

Despite her terror of what she was about to encounter, she managed a chuckle. "Never been able to work out whether you're a kid or a fatty, Danny," she said.

"Both," he replied. "But don't tell my girlfriend."

"I didn't know you
had
a girlfriend. This should have been reported to me.
You
should have reported it."

There was silence from the other end. Strider realized that O'Sondheim's remark hadn't been as flip as it had sounded, and wished she'd kept her mouth shut. After the first year out from Mars her First Officer had stopped making doe eyes at her, but he hadn't formed any kind of relationship with any of the other women on board, either. She'd seen the way that he'd tried to woo Strauss-Giolitto, and smiled; then had smiled with a bit less conviction once she'd deduced the kind of personal misery Strauss-Giolitto had taken on herself in order to be a part of the expedition. They were both very lonely people—lonelier than even she herself was. At least Strauss-Giolitto had Lan Yi's shoulder to weep on. As far as Strider could tell, O'Sondheim's mental maturity had never evolved beyond the idea that if you wept on a woman's shoulder you ended up screwing her and that if you wept on a man's you were betraying some obscure macho code.

She wasn't sure that her own solution—weeping on a bot's—was perfect, but it was obviously better than anything O'Sondheim had come up with.

She tongued off her suit lights. The yellowness beneath her was very close now. Glancing down yet again, she caught her first sight of the Preeae.

She took a sharp breath. The aliens were somewhat less aesthetically pleasing than the Images had described—not as bad as the Helgiolath but . . . no, maybe they were worse, because they had a vaguely humanoid form. They looked as if they had somehow evolved to wear their more vulnerable bodily organs and their blood vessels on the outside, rather than sealed away carefully beneath decorous folds of flesh. They were bipedal, and had two arms, although from this lofty angle she couldn't work out their physical proportions.

Like the Spindrifters, they wore no clothing. All of the ones staring up at her as she descended, her hands and feet moving more uncertainly now, were, however, wearing things that looked suspiciously similar to lazguns slung around their necks.

"I'm about to make contact with the Preeae," she said to O'Sondheim. "Anyway, I hope I am."

At least they had eyes that from this distance were fairly like human ones. It made the aliens a bit easier to contemplate. The trouble was, reflected Strider, that one gets so used to gauging people's reactions by their eyes that she could all too well completely misread what one of these Preeae was actually thinking.

She flipped off her suit radio.

"I'm going to need a lot of help here, Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said.

THEY ARE PREPARED TO TALK WITH YOU. THAT IS A GREAT ADVANCE ON THE SITUATION EARLIER. THE VERY WORST THEY WILL DO IS SEND YOU BACK UP TO THE SURFACE.

"Which is a long way away." She was sweating unpleasantly in her suit just from the descent. What would she be like if she had to climb all the way back up to the top? Like a stranded whale floundering on the sand of the desert until the Autarch's people came along to put an end to her misery, that was what.

WE WILL ASSIST YOU AS FAR AS WE ARE ABLE. WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN ARGUING VERY HARD ON YOUR BEHALF.

"I'm switching back to general frequency now," she said, tonguing the control as she did so. She wished her voice sounded less apprehensive.

IT SOUNDS FINE TO ME,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Yes,
thought Strider,
but you're not a rather vulnerable human being called O'Sondheim standing Umbel knows how many hundreds of meters above me wondering how long he's got to live. My voice might sound a bit grim to him, huh?

The Image waited until her right boot was on the final rung of the ladder before it commented.
WE WILL REMOVE ALL TRACE OF FEAR FROM YOUR VOICE AS WE INTERPRET BETWEEN YOURSELF AND THE PREEAE.

"Thanks," she said, reeling in her belt-rope.

"For what?" said O'Sondheim anxiously.

"I was speaking to Ten Per Cent Extra Free," she said. "Now, Danny, keep listening in, but leave me alone to do one of the things I do best: act like a diplomat."

He laughed.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said.

Several of the Preeae had drawn their weapons from their neck holsters—the aliens' arms were triple-jointed, Strider saw, so that it was as easy if not easier for them to reach to their necks as to their waists—and were directing them at her. She found the prospect of the weaponry less worrying than the physical appearance of the Preeae. She hoped that none of the personnel who with luck would be allowed down here to join her would do anything stupid—the children especially.

One of the Preeae took a step forwards. Presumably he was the leader of the contingent. Strider decided to address herself directly to him and leave the rest out of consideration.

"Look, dammit, let's get this straight: all we want to do is wipe out those bastards who very nearly fucking annihilated your entire species," she said, hoping that she was hitting the right diplomatic note. "That means we're on the same fucking side, so could you piss off with this super-defensiveness?"

The room around them was an empty box with various dark exits leading in various directions—some off to the side, a couple upwards, and quite a few downwards. Strider found it almost offensive that there were no technological artifacts on view—not even so much as a chair. This room was just a way-station into what she assumed was the system of tunnels Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her about.

"We haven't got very long. There's going to be a few hundred Autarchy warships hitting the fucking desert above us pretty goddam soon."

"We are aware of that," said the Preeae. His voice sounded as though it tasted of metal. "But we did not bring this antagonism down upon ourselves: it was you
things
that lured the Interlopers to this place. If you had left them alone they would have continued in ignorance of our existence."

I SHOULD WARN YOU THAT WE ARE MAKING AMENDMENTS TO SOME OF YOUR REMARKS, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"So your species could spend the rest of eternity living in hiding?" she said to the Preeae spokesperson.

"Living." The single word made the point.

"Can I tell my people it's safe for them to come down here?" Much longer standing around like this and it'd be too late to get everyone in through the trapdoor. "The Spindrifters thought it would be all right for them to carry on just living in quiet, but the Autarchy killed all of them except a friend of ours, who is here with us. You yourselves kept your heads down, but the Autarchy attempted to annihilate you. We human beings aren't any kind of saints, but we want to help stop these things happening."

"And the Helgiolath?" said the Preeae.

"I'm not sure what their agenda is, but at this moment I think they're the best chance this part of The Wondervale has."

"You will all need to be decontaminated," said the Preeae.

Strider's heart leapt as she heard the translated word "will."

"You mean you'll allow my personnel to escape down here?" she said.

"For a short time only. Your Images have been very persuasive."

"Start it off, Danny," said Strider. "We're provisionally welcome."

"I was listening," said the First Officer. "Polyaggle's already on her way down, followed by a bundle of others. Still no signs of enemy action."

"Good."

Strider didn't know if Ten Per Cent Extra Free had interpreted any or all of this for the benefit of the Preeae. It seemed not, because the individual was still speaking.

"We will escort you to our nearest escape-way and release you back to the surface of Preeat. More than that we will not do. After that you will be on your own. We will be glad to be rid of you as soon as is possible. You have already seriously risked our security."

"Nice to meet you as well."

BE CAREFUL, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER,
urged Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Aw, fu—"

DO BE CAREFUL. YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF A SPECIES THAT HAS BEEN ALMOST ENTIRELY EXPUNGED. IF YOU DO NOT CHANGE YOUR TUNE IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO LET POLYAGGLE DO THE REST OF THE TALKING. SHE AT LEAST WILL BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THE PREEAE.

Strider took the point.

"Thank you very much for the assistance," she said formally to the Preeae representative. "We'll get ourselves out from under your noses just as soon as we can."

"'Noses'?" said the Preeae.

#

After Kaantalech had finished eating one of her aides she wondered yet again if she should holo the Autarch to tell him the truth about the Humans having disappeared for the second time, and yet again she decided to procrastinate. All Nalla would do was get angry, then angrier. If he discovered that the Humans were in the middle of a Helgiolath fleet he would become incandescent—which would be fun to watch but would probably be personally dangerous to her. If she just left it alone he would assume that the Humans had been vaporized along with the entire ecology of Spindrift above viral level—damned few viruses would be left, come to think of it, except those that were able to live in total vacuum. Big deal. Perhaps in a few billion years a bunch of them might drift panspermically across a few hundred parsecs and seed life on a virgin planet, and some new technological species would come screaming up into The Wondervale with a view to getting revenge. Kaantalech wasn't going to waste too much time worrying about the possibility: she would have been dead herself for almost all of those billions of years—so why should she care?—and anyway she was pretty certain that viruses had lousy memories.

Not only had the aide been heinously inefficient, he had been made of meat that was so stringy that most of her teeth were now singing out in protest because of the bits of flesh still jammed between them. He hadn't even tasted anything more than passable. It was so difficult getting the right quality of staff these days.

Spitting out a ball-and-socket joint, she turned to look at her surviving aides. Most of them had continued to work away at the puters they were wired into, guiding the remnants of the fleet back across The Wondervale towards Qitanefermeartha orbit, but a few had watched the butchery of the aide. They didn't realize it as yet, but they had thereby volunteered themselves to be next. If there was anything that Kaantalech particularly disliked it was disloyalty.

"I want a position on the Humans," she said angrily. The aide really had tasted pretty poor: she hoped he hadn't been suffering from any infectious disease.

"We're doing our best, leader," said one of the aides, not looking up from his puter, "but they seem to have vanished from spacetime."

"Keep looking."

"Yes," said several voices.

She waded splodgily through the thick coating of faeces and other ordure that carpeted the floor of the
Blunt Instrument
's command deck. Hers was not a tidy species—never had been. It always amused Kaantalech and her kind to see the way that other species were so prim about the products of their bodies' metabolism. Every now and then the
Blunt Instrument
was cleared out and the valuable nitrates extracted.

"I want a fast result," she said, "but I don't want it broadcast. The first person to track them down is to contact me and me only, understood? Of course, the rest of you will know what's going on, but I don't want a word spoken." She snorted up what had once been a kneebone. "Do I make myself clear?"

There was not a word of dissent.

#

Lan Yi spent not one moment regretting that they had lost the
Santa Maria
: it had been a spaceship, nothing more and nothing less. What was really upsetting him was that he had had to leave his musibot behind. He himself played only half a dozen musical instruments, and as far as he could work out he was by far the most technically talented of the few musicians who had been aboard the
Santa Maria
. Human music was one of the comparatively few things that the species could profitably have brought to The Wondervale. Music was a peacemaker, unlike all the other things that people called "peacemakers." It was very difficult to get two people to start fighting each other while they were listening to the divine cantatas of Pastredii or the songs of L5 or the mating music of hump-backed whales. If there was any sign of aggression afterwards you could always just recycle the chip. He supposed it was all a primitive form of brainwashing, but it was not one to which he objected.

He looked upwards, and his lights illuminated Strauss-Giolitto's suited bottom descending towards him.

Once upon a time . . .
he thought, before a stirring of interest told him that he was lying to himself.
Yes, I'm being guilty of the most acute form of dishonesty: dishonesty of the self.
He smiled wearily at the way fate had treated him. First a wife who had strangled herself rather than continue the existence she shared with him. Now a woman who he was virtually certain was not interested in him for the most fundamental reason of all. After Geena's death he had assumed there would be occasional—hell, after a while, frequent—sexual liaisons. The idea that bloody, nuisanceful, pestilential love might hit him was something that had never occurred to him. Now he found himself not only fonder of Strauss-Giolitto than he had been of anyone since Geena but also wanting to build a partnership with her. He had a couple of times lightly, as if joking, broached the notion to her, and each time she had taken it as the joke it wasn't.