Steel flashed. MorlaKa roared with rage, broke the grip that encircled his neck, took hold of an arm, and jerked the warrior up over his shoulder. The long sinuous neck was an obvious point of vulnerability. The Hudathan got a grip on it, twisted, and heard something pop. The body went limp. He let the warrior go.
Though filled with the rage of battle, his body pumping chemicals into his blood, MoriaKa’s mind had stayed in control. He saw the net fall over Hebo’s torso and considered his options. He could let the bug die, a rather reasonable course of action given the manner in which the Ramanthian government hoped to annex Hudathan-controlled worlds, or—and this possibility went against all of the officer’s instincts—MorlaKa could wade out, pull his sidearm, and shoot the frogs in the head. The sound of his own gunfire served to alert the War Commander that thought had been translated to action. The bodies fell away, splashed into the water, and floated with arms extended. Silence descended over the lagoon. Those frogs that were still alive had escaped.
Booly saw some mottled fabric, swam over, grabbed
Mondulo’s battle harness, and towed the body to shore. The others salvaged what gear they could, recovered most of the logs, and pulled them up onto the mud. Once that was accomplished, Booty took control. “We’ll bury the sergeant, make camp, and spend the night up in the trees. Seebo, MorlaKa needs some first aid. See what you can do. The raft can wait till morning.”
“We will use wire to lash the binders on next time,” Hebo said reflectively. “That should stop them.”
“Yes,” Booly replied wearily, “I think it wilt.”
Dinner was a somber affair, the night passed slowly, and dawn brought rain. Not a downpour, but a steady drumbeat, that peppered the surface of the lagoon.
Each member of the team paused by the mound of newly turned earth and said goodbye in their own special way. But it was Seebo who quoted a long-dead poet—a legionnaire named Alan Seeger: When Spring comes back with rustling shade,
And apple blossoms fill the air,
I have a rendezvous with Death,
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
Booly nodded solemnly and followed the rest of the team down to the muddy beach. The work went quickly, and the heavily reinforced raft was ready less than three hours later. No one bothered to name this one, no one questioned the grenades that blew holes in the water, and no one looked back. The Clan Mother awoke to an overwhelming sense of loss. The eggs? No, they were safely contained within her abdomen.
Then it came, the sudden realization that the thin tenuous thread that connected her to the leader of the war party had been severed. Drik was dead.
The Clan Mother cried out in sorrow, attendants rushed to her side, and the entire village began to mourn. For the warriors, yes; but for themselves as well, since each death weakened the social organism. For there were crops to be harvested, fish to catch, and repairs to be made. And ultimately, should the village be unable to defend itself, another clan would force the group to surrender its identity and accept outside rule.
Clouds hid the sun, darkness settled into her heart, and the Clan Mother started to cry. The pickup zone consisted of a flat scrub-covered island. The clearing, which had been enlarged with machetes, was barely large enough to accommodate the flyform already on its way. Outside of their weapons, which looked as clean as the morning they had left, the team was dirty, ragged, and tired. Still, they lay in a circle, facing outwards, ready for anything, a disposition that was indicative of the mutual dependency, respect, and trust developed during the last few days. Booly considered saying as much, heard the approaching aircraft, and decided to let it go. Words have their place ... but blood binds all. The officer turned his face upwards, gloried in the way the raindrops struck it, and was grateful to be alive.
Chapter 10
The key to opening new markets is to establish two-way communication. Failing to do so will often lead to disaster.
Prithian Handbook for Merchant Apprentices
Standard year 2842
Somewhere Along the Rim, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings
The Prithian freighter bore a vague resemblance to the beings who had designed it, in that the ship possessed wings for use within planetary atmospheres, which were folded white traveling through space, a strategy that allowed the birdlike beings not only to indulge their love of atmospheric flight but to avoid the delays so often associated with orbital parking slots. It was all part of doing what the Prithians did well, which was to carry small, highly valuable cargoes over relatively short distances leaving the high-volume long-haul business to the big conglomerates.
It was a niche market, which was perfect for a numerically small race having a low birthrate and rather insular ways. So insular—and some said self-serving—that the Prithians had ignored repeated invitations to join the Confederacy, while continuing to profit from the markets the organization had created and the stability it fostered. A policy that saved the merchant race a significant amount of money. All of which explained why the Dawn Song was jumping from one system to the next, delivering freight to a series of undistinguished planets, when it surfaced in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having arranged for the soft body to delete its other self, the Hoon had lingered for a bit, taking the time necessary to review the fleet’s operating system and root out those instructions authored by its recently deceased twin. A tedious process, but one that would ensure that the Hoon’s orders would be followed by every unit in the fleet, regardless of which entity had controlled it during the recent past. That’s why its forces were waiting there, with very little to do, when the Dawn Song dropped hyper, appeared on the detector screens as a spark of light, and attempted to run. The Hoon noted the event, dispatched two fighters to deal with it, and returned to what it had been doing: Reviewing each and every line of code that comprised the operating system for the fleet’s maintenance units. After all, the artificial intelligence thought to itself, I’m clever, which means my twin was clever, which means traps could have been laid. And where better than deep within some aspect of my own body? Which was how the computer regarded the thousands upon thousands of machines that comprised the reconstituted fleet Time passed, the Al searched, and the Dawn Song ran for her life. Whereas the control rooms on Hudathan ships resembled those on human vessels, and vice versa, the Prithians took an entirely different approach. There was no single place from which to pilot the Dawn Song anymore than there was a special place to sleep or eat. After all the birdlike beings reasoned, why limit oneself when there was no reason to do so?
The entire concept of a humanstyle control room stemmed from the days of sailing ships, steam locomotives, and early ground vehicles—times when the need to see where one was going, plus analogstyle controls, forced the helmsman, engineer, or driver to stay in one place. But now, more than a thousand years later, there was no need for such limitations beyond that required for their own psychological comfort.
All of which explained why Prithians like Per Pok preferred to con their vessels via audio interface and simply “sang” their instructions to the ship’s central computer.