Birdie Kelly had never thought of himself as a hero. Quite the opposite. When other men went looking for trouble, Birdie was already looking for cover.
But this time it was different. He was the target, and there was no cover. He had to do something.
Birdie’s minor shift toward bravery began as a horrified inspection of the Zardalu, particularly their hungry young. They seemed to be forever peeking out from under the protective umbrellas of tentacles, begging for food. They light-orange beaks were small, only half an inch across, but there was no doubt about their sharpness. They cut easily through any food fragment, even the hardest shells or rinds, and they made the adult Zardalu jump when the infants, dissatisfied with what was offered to them, nicked the tough flesh at the base of their parents’ bodies.
After the first morbid fascination of that sight wore off, Birdie shuffled quietly over to Julius Graves. “Councilor, what are we going to do? You heard Kallik — another hour and we’re done for. Me first, then all of us.”
Graves was nodding, the great bald head furrowed with worry. “I know, I know. We won’t let them take you, Commissioner. They’ll have to fight all of us before that happens. But what can we do? They refuse to listen to me, or allow me to act as an intermediary with the others. If only they would sit down, and talk…”
Talk was not what Birdie had in mind. In his experience, people who wanted to sit down and talk were the ones who were going to lose the argument. What he would have preferred was more along the lines of a nice 88-gauge automatic cannon.
He nodded and crawled back to his place. Julius Graves was full of talk, but he was not going to do one damned thing. Certainly he would not be able to stop the Zardalu from using Birdie as baby-chow any time they felt like it.
Birdie stared again at their captors. His inspection moved from a horrified stare at the young ones to a general survey of all the land-cephalopods.
They certainly had that look of invulnerability. But he knew it was an illusion. Eleven thousand years earlier, species who had been trained from birth to believe in Zardalu superiority had risen to fight their tyrant masters — and won. They had exterminated the Zardalu, except for these last few remaining specimens.
There had to be some chink in the armor, some flaw that had been exploited at the time of the Great Rising…
It was certainly not easy to see one. Birdie had watched earlier, when two of the Zardalu picked up empty food containers and squeezed them to form rough clubs. Now he wandered over to a food container himself, and put all his weight on it. It did not budge a millimeter. Birdie sat down again with a new respect for the power of those three-meter ropy tentacles. They could pulverize him without putting one of their nonexistent hairs out of place.
So. They were as strong as they looked.
How well did they see and hear? None of the Zardalu was turned his way at the moment. Birdie drummed lightly on the side of the empty food box with his fingertips, producing a light pa-pa-pa-pam. No result. A few harder blows with the flat of his hand produced no reaction from the Zardalu.
Birdie stood up, slowly and quietly, went across to the side of the chamber, and began to edge his way around it. The Zardalu were close to the single exit, but on one side there was space for a human to slide along the wall without coming within tentacle range of any of them.
Birdie sidled along until he was no more than a few paces from the nearest Zardalu. He soon reached a point where he could see out of the chamber. The exit led to an open corridor. One mad dash would take him out there and on his way through the unknown interior. He rose onto the balls of his feet. At that very moment the biggest one, the one identified as Holder, fluted a few liquid sounds to where Graves, Kallik, and J’merlia were lying.
“With respect, Commissioner Kelly,” Kallik called. “The Zardalu do not want you in your present location. You are commanded to return at once to join the rest of us. And when you do so, the Zardalu order you to refrain from hammering on the food containers. The noise creates unrest in the young.”
Birdie nodded. The scariest thing of all was that the Zardalu did not bother to threaten him with consequences if he did not obey. They knew he knew. He was turning to inch his way back along the same smooth gray wall when he caught sight of movement in the outside corridor. He forced himself to keep turning, resisting the urge to stop and stare. His split-second glance had not been enough to identify the individual person. But it was a person, and not a Zardalu, Cecropian, or other alien. Someone human was out there, crouched low in the angle of the corridor, peeping out now and again to observe what was going on inside the chamber. And far behind, almost indistinguishable from the darker shadows, Birdie thought he had caught a glimpse of another, less familiar form.
Birdie slid steadily back along the wall and returned to sit by Julius Graves. A few minutes earlier he had been convinced that the Zardalu were hard of hearing; now he was not so sure. For all he knew they could hear the slightest whisper. And even if they could not, certainly Kallik could, and the traitorous Hymenopt would tell the Zardalu anything that she heard.
He leaned forward to put his mouth right next to Graves’s ear. “Don’t say anything or do anything,” he breathed. “But help may be on the way.”
“What?” Graves said, loud enough to be heard twenty yards off. “You’ll have to speak up, Commissioner. My hearing isn’t too good.”
“Nothing,” Birdie said hurriedly. “I didn’t say a thing.”
Several of the Zardalu turned to stare at them with those huge, heavy-lidded eyes of cerulean blue. Before Birdie had time to feel guilty at rousing them to attention, another land-cephalopod, closer to the door, started up onto his powerful splayed tentacles. There was a pipe-organ whistle from the ingestion organ, and the Zardalu headed out of the chamber.
Birdie had never seen anything that big move so fast and so silently. The Zardalu flashed out of the room like a silent specter of midnight blue, one moment there, the next vanished. Birdie heard the sound of rapid movement outside and a startled cry. He knew that the sound had not come from the vanished Zardalu. Those were human vocal cords, the same ones that now produced a hoarse roar of pain.
“What was that?” Graves asked. “What happened?”
Birdie did not need to answer. The vanished Zardalu was coming back into the room. It was not alone. Dangling two meters from the ground, suspended by one brawny tentacle wrapped around his neck to carry his weight and cut off his breathing, hung the kicking, purple-faced figure of Louis Nenda.
“Not to spy.” Louis Nenda rubbed at his bruised throat. Released from the killing grip of the tentacle but with another sinewy extensor wrapped snugly about his chest and arms, he was reluctant to meet the gaze of either humans or aliens. He kept his eyes downcast, and he spoke in a low voice.
“Not to spy,” he said again. “Or to turn against my fellow humans. I came here to — to try to — negotiate.”
Kallik was crouched in front of him, half her ring of eyes fixed on his expression, the others attentive to her masters. The leader of the Zardalu whistled and fluted, and its companion’s grip on Nenda tightened.
“You were told in the last meeting that you were not to take the initiative,” Kallik translated. “You were told to stay and arrange with the being called Speaker-Between for the Zardalu’s immediate departure from this place. Are humans too stupid to understand direct command?”
“No.” Nenda was struggling for breath. The ropy arm around his chest was gradually tightening. “We held that meeting, just like we said we would. But it was no good! Speaker-Between wouldn’t agree they could leave. We can’t control him!”