Rev walked away in a daze. Things were even worse than he'd feared. He made his way to Rembrandt, saying not a word. The lieutenant looked up from her desktop, an anxious expression on her face. "Well, Rev, how'd it go?"
Rev shook his head. "I hate to say it, ma'am, but it ain't good at all. Not one bit." He paused and turned his eyes to the ground, then looked back at her. "If you're expectin' help from the captain, I'm afraid you got a long wait 'fore it gets here."
Rev's report convinced Rembrandt that it was imperative to follow up on Sushi's plan to find out what had happened to Phule's hoverjeep-and to Beeker. With the plan jumped up to top priority, she began recruiting a search party.
Almost the entire company would have gone, if she'd asked them. In the end, she chose six, with a particular eye to scouting skills and wilderness survival experience. Several legionnaires that her criteria kept off the team besieged her with complaints that their other skills more than compensated for these lacks. Remembering what had happened when she'd deferred to the troops in making up a similar "rescue party" on Landoor, Rembrandt stuck to her guns.
Flight Leftenant Qual was an obvious choice for the team. His local knowledge was orders of magnitude beyond anyone else's, of course, even when you remembered that he'd grown up in a swampy region rather than these semidesert conditions. Even then, she harbored some doubt whether the Zenobians were entirely trustworthy. After all, in one of his last messages, the captain had hinted that the local military was eavesdropping on him in between negotiating sessions. Also, considering how few members of his race were in camp, Qual's absence would be more easily noticed than that of any other possible participant. In the end, she decided that his local knowledge trumped all the objections.
Tempted as she was to include all three Gambolts, she reluctantly decided that she couldn't in good conscience leave the camp without any of the catlike aliens and their uncanny scouting abilities. So Dukes and Rube stayed behind, while Garbo-who, of the three, seemed best adjusted to working with humans-went with the team. So did Garbo's partner, Brick. Not just because the two were inseparable companions; as it turned Brick came from a back-country region of her home world, an arid region known as Nueva Arrakis. She had the kind of instinctive knowledge of desert scouting that only comes to someone who'd spent their growing-up years in dry country.
Mahatma and Double-X had the skills she needed, while neither would be missed if they were away from base for a week or more. Except for the latter factor, Brandy and Escrima would have been her first choices for the assignment, but neither could just walk off without being missed. Well, she had the best team she could put together, and she'd have to trust it to do the job that had to be done.
She'd had the most difficulty deciding who was going to command the team. All three of the company's sergeants had wanted to do it, but none of them could just disappear from the base without being missed fairly quickly. Finally, Rembrandt took the bit in her teeth. "The major isn't any part of this mission, and the captain's not himself right now," she told them. "I'm next in rank, so it's my job to make the decisions."
That was before Sushi had stormed into her office, demanding to be put on the team. Her original instinct had been to leave him off the team, despite the fact that it was his idea to send the expedition out to begin with.
"Look, I can't bring you along," she told him. "You're a city boy. You'd slow us down way too much in the kind of country we'll be traveling in. Besides, we need you to monitor the alien signals so you can tell us about any changes in them. That means you have to stay behind and stay in touch via communicator."
Sushi wasn't budging. "Have you forgotten that the communicator's on the fritz?" he pointed out. "We can't pick up signals from more than a couple of miles beyond the perimeter, let alone where we're going to be. Now that I've figured out what frequency the aliens are using, I can monitor it with a handheld unit, which is what I've been working on the last couple of days. I've got it down to three kilos in weight, and it's no bigger than a shoebox."
After he showed her the new unit, Rembrandt was convinced, and she added him to the team. But this meant she'd have to cut somebody else to keep the team to a manageable size. That was going to be tricky; all the members had useful skills, although only Qual seemed really indispensable. Cutting either Garbo or Brick probably meant she'd have to drop the other, and she couldn't afford to lose both. So that left Mahatma and Double-X as the possible choices.
She agonized over it for a whole afternoon before a peremptory communicator message ordered the officers to the command center. Rushing to the meeting, she rounded a corner and nearly collided with Louie, speeding silently down the cross-corridor on his glide-board. The Synthian swerved just in time to avoid hitting Rembrandt; but in her abrupt stop, she wrenched her lower back. By the time she got to Botchup's office, it was starting to stiffen up. By the time the meeting was over, she couldn't stand. The autodoc scanned her, displayed a diagnosis of muscle spasm, and dispensed a bottle of pills that stopped the pain well enough for her to sit at a desk and work; but it was obvious she was in no shape to head a team into rough country.
That made Flight Leftenant Qual the de facto team leader. Now Rembrandt was glad she'd given in to Sushi's demands to be included; of all the remaining team members, he had the most leadership potential and the clearest sense of their mission. And, perhaps most importantly, he seemed to have the best idea what Qual was talking about; the translator's mangled renditions of the Zenobian Language were sometimes more impenetrable than the Alliance tax code.
She hobbled out to see the team meet at the perimeter for their departure. They slipped out of camp after midnight, with only the light of the gibbous Zenobian moon to guide them. (According to the books, the local moon-Vono, the Zenobians called it-was a bit smaller than old Earth's famous Luna, but it was bright and impressive enough to these legionnaires, most of whom came from small-mooned or even moonless worlds).
Actually, the team could probably have made its move in broad daylight, since everybody in Omega Company except for Botchup and Snipe knew what was about to happen. Of course, if the major caught them and tried to make a big deal of it, they might have to break a few more regulations than they'd planned on breaking. Even the success of their decidedly nonregulation mission wouldn't necessarily excuse the violations if the major decided to get vindictive, which struck everybody as exactly how he'd play it. Just to avoid unnecessary complications, they'd decided to go at night.
After a final check of equipment and supplies, Qual led them off into the dark. With luck, they'd reach their destination without being detected by the aliens or missed by the major. Standing there watching them fade into the darkness, Rembrandt had a twinge of regret at not being able to join them. But another twinge from her back told her in no uncertain terms that she'd made the right decision. She turned and walked slowly back to her bunk, hoping all her other decisions had been right. She'd know the answer soon enough.
Chapter 13
The Zenobian desert, like those on most other planets, was a far more diverse and fertile environment than most city-dwellers would have realized. Especially to the Zenobians, who were most at home in a swamplike setting, any large dry area seemed much like any other. But as the team sent out to search for the source of the alien signals quickly saw, this was no simple unbroken expanse of dry sand. There was life aplenty here, some of it very lively and very dangerous to the unwary.