The producer said something to Straight Tongue.
SHE’S ASKING HIM IF HE HAS ANY WORDS TO ADD TO THIS THAT THEY SHOULD RECORD. HE’S SAYING THAT HE IS SPEECHLESS, AND THEY CAN LET HIS SILENCE AS THE SHIPS WERE HUNTED BEHIND HIM SPEAK FOR HIM.
The three reporters didn’t say a thing as they gathered up their gear. Two smartly dressed and armed Marines waited at the door of the interview room and led them off to their return flight.
The camera operator eyed the Marines and their guns, and started his camera rolling again, capturing the way the Marines moved both gracefully and with purpose in zero gee.
“I think we have just given the Association of Associations, and flocks of other Alwans, a whole lot to think about,” Granny said.
“Now, Kris, Jack, you’ve shown me your setup. It’s only fair for me to show you mine. I should think with three more ships vanishing without a trace, any alien riffraff would take some time off to look at their hole cards, if they have any. From the look of all the data Nelly captured for the boffins, I’d guess they’re going to be busy for a day or twelve. Come, let me show you what my people have done.”
8
Kris checked with Captain Drago. He insisted he had everything under control and all but shooed Kris off his bridge. Besides, with the Wasp in microgravity, he needed to rotate his crew dirtside to avoid muscle loss. It would be best if Kris checked the lay of the land, assured there was a good supply of beer, and looked into the local attitude toward Sailors who might get a bit rowdy with the opposite sex. And it wouldn’t just be the local womenfolk who had to worry. The Wasp’s crew was forty-three percent women, who would be checking out the local menfolk.
Kris asked the skipper to duck into his in-space cabin for a brief consult. “Any suggestion about what we do if a hostile ship jumps into the system?” she asked when they were alone.
“If there’s just one of them, I’ll recall the crew, and we’ll fight it out, maybe put Alwa’s moon to good use. Two, I guess we could give it a try if you said so. Three or more, Your Highness, and I strongly suggest we run. Maybe they’ll chase us and leave the folks dirtside alone. This frigate is a dandy craft, Kris, but there’s a limit to what we can do.”
Kris sighed. “That was pretty much what I figured, but I wanted to hear it from you.”
“We’ve got buoys on the far side of both of the jumps into this system. We will not be surprised. Go ashore, Princess, and try, for once, to have fun.”
Thus Kris and Jack, Abby and Cara, and a platoon of Marines that just happened to include Sergeant Bruce, headed for the planet below. Penny asked to be included, along with a Musashi lieutenant who was working closely with her on intel. Amanda Kutter wanted to start working on her study of the Alwan economy and asked that Dr. Jacques la Duke join her. His area of study was anthropology, and she strongly suggested that their work would go hand in hand.
That the two of them were hand in hand drew a grin from Granny Rita. HAVE I TOLD YOU FOLKS I ALSO DO WEDDINGS?
GRANNY, BEHAVE YOURSELF.
I AM, DAUGHTER, YOU’RE THE ONE WITH A SHARP STICK UP YOUR BUTT.
Kris decided respect for Granny’s age required she let her have the last word. Several more boffins, mostly biologists but also sociologists and geologists, added themselves to the longboat.
Kris had met Granny Rita when she arrived on the Wasp. She’d looked much the worse for the ride up and Kris had rushed the old gal to sick bay. There the docs had fussed over her and started her on a cocktail of antiaging meds, all the Wasp had to offer. Granny looked better. Now Kris suggested she drop in a tank to ease the gees.
Granny refused. “I will not arrive back home in my birthday suit. I might get too many proposals for my old heart to survive.”
So Kris talked with the bosun in charge of the longboat, and the trip down took a bit longer but stayed lower on the gee meter. Even with that, Granny was sweating when they completed reentry and settled into normal flight.
“That was easier than the ride up, but you’re right. Space is a young person’s game,” Granny admitted, taking a swig from Sergeant Bruce’s offered canteen.
Then a monitor in the forward end of the cabin lit up. “Hey, that’s my planet,” Granny crowed.
“Most Alwans like the wooded areas,” she said in full lecture mode. “They no longer nest in the trees, but they like lots of trees around their houses and usually leave them open to the air, at least in the temperate zones. They plant crops, but you’d never recognize them as farms. Mostly they tend to hunt and graze, so they don’t have large population centers. I don’t know how they avoid overpopulation. That’s one of those questions we don’t ask, and they don’t tell.
“There, have the camera stay on that viaduct,” Granny ordered, and Nelly did. “That was the first project we worked on together with the Alwans. They’d never thought of bringing water to dry land. Our colony was growing, and we needed to put more land under the plow. We found a quarry and we all got together, cut the rocks, and used log rollers to get them where we needed. They’d never seen any of the engineering tricks we used to build the viaduct. We told them this was old stuff. Things we’d been doing for three, four thousand years.
“They didn’t believe we could know what had happened that long ago. That was when we showed them some books, personal tablets, and readers. That sent them into a tizzy and got me a visit from a delegation from the Association of Associations.
“We spent a good month explaining to them what we humans could do and explaining how we did it. Then the lead elder did a formal dance, feathers flying, and put the kibosh on us using most of our technology.
“Of course, the same time I was having my ears talked off by the delegation, we were also getting visits from the folks that I think, if they’d given them half a chance, would have been their engineers and scientists. While I palavered with the delegation of old farts, my first husband this side, the Enterprise’s chief engineering officer, learned a lot from the other folks and vice versa.
“That’s the way it’s been for eighty years. Some of their people attend our schools. We make sure our kids get the best education we can. It’s getting harder as more and more of the electronic devices give up the ghost, but we’ve invented paper and printing presses, and some of the Alwans have adopted our alphabet to their language and are reading their own books. All nonfiction, I might add.”
Granny might have gone on, talking their ears off, but the shuttle was coming up on the large lake that had been chosen for Haven, the first human town on Alwa.
“Ain’t she lovely,” Granny said. “We made it of adobe bricks and fired red tile for the roofs. Plenty of trees for shade. Wonderful in the cool of the evening. It’s home.”
The longboat settled onto the lake with spray and a wake that set the pulling boats and sailboats out on it to bobbing. “I bet there’s some cussing going on,” Granny said with a grin. “We haven’t had landers for a month of Sundays. Make that a century of ’em.”
Rather than accept the tow offered by a boat with twelve strong men at the oars, the bosun used the auxiliary motor to maneuver toward a long dock.
“Are there many water weeds?” the bosun called on the ship’s PA system. Right, Kris grinned, this was the poor fellow who had stranded her on Kaskatos when he sucked weeds into his reaction-tank intake. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.