He focused on one who appeared to be a supervisor. It stood sideways to the telescope, watching builders at work, seeming to comment to a recorder of its own. The long head had upright ears, and overall it had reddish-brown fur. Prieto had said they looked like "centaurs from the Jurassic." He should have said Miocene, Morgan thought, or whatever period it was when Terran mammals were trying out bizarre body forms. He was pretty sure, though, that there'd been no six-limbed mammalian species in Terra's history.
It hadn't occurred to him to bring a vid. He didn't realize he could let Connie view the cube, and the prime minister's savant would see what she was seeing, via Robert.
So he described the alien in words, portraying the features of face and harness, the articulation of the limbs, and the four fingers and two thumbs on each hand. The feet were obscured by vegetation. From what he could see, the teeth were "cone-shaped and not particularly large," but the back teeth could be different.
Then the creature strolled to one of the buildings being assembled, and disappeared inside. Morgan shifted focus to another alien then, this one the color of wet sand. It stood on a gently sloping roof, using what appeared to be some sort of spot-welder. The feet had two splayed toes, suggesting a camel's but with heavy claws. Blunt claws, he thought, for traction instead of fighting.
He thought of measuring its height, but that required knowing its distance, and this was not the place to use his range finder. Use your map, and estimate, he decided. His computer made the worker's height twenty-eight inches at the withers. He couldn't get a figure for height to the top of the long skull; torso and neck were bent forward, eyes on its work.
"Not as big as I thought," he said, "and not horselike at all." Again reducing magnification for scanning, he found a dozer piling sections of fallen trees. As Morgan watched, the operator began flailing its arms, and jumped from the driver's platform with the dozer still running. Its legs gave as it hit, but it was back on its feet in an instant, arms still flailing, hind feet kicking.
Morgan stared. The machine, he realized, had disturbed a nest of Tagus's version of hornets. The operator's dance became extreme, then it fell, limbs thrashing. Quickly Morgan increased magnification till he could glimpse the hornets, big as his thumb joint, strafing the invader until its limbs went slack, and its head flopped sideways on the ground.
"Jesus!" Morgan murmured. He'd been stung a few times himself-twice just the day before; presumably he'd gotten too near a nest. It hurt like hell when they hit, but it hadn't laid him low like that. Of course, from what he could see, the alien had gotten stung a lot more than twice. But still…
He cut magnification, and scanned for reactions by other workers who might have seen it happen. Two had left their machines, each holding what might have been a spray can, but instead of running to help their comrade, they watched from a distance, moving nervously, apparently anxious, as if they wanted to move in, but were afraid. Morgan reported that, too.
He continued scanning and recording for another half hour, feeling increasingly edgy. Abruptly then he made a decision, and after disassembling the scope, packed it in its padded case. Then he loaded his gear on his back and picked his way carefully down the knob. At the bottom he stashed scope and case beneath the trunk of a large fallen tree, and set out for home.
If I hike till deep dusk, and get an early start in the morning, I can get back to Robert and Connie by noon, he thought. And debrief myself to the PM and the military.
It seemed very important.
Chapter 13
Language Lesson
David MacDonald heartily disliked the awkward commode they were expected to use. It was ill-suited for humans: a dry ceramic box perhaps sixteen inches high, and wide enough for two of the alien invaders to back up to at once. He sluiced it clean with the hose provided, then in lieu of paper, hosed his behind with a needle-spray setting. He wondered how the aliens managed to hose their rears. Probably they didn't, he decided. Their arms were too short. And horses got by without it, and dogs.
Fortunately, alien hygiene arrangements included soft soap in bowls, and he made use of it now. He didn't particularly like making a spectacle of himself for the multilens monitor that left no part of their cell unobserved. When they'd wakened on the shuttle that had brought them to this-station? ship?-they were naked. But of course their captors were naked too, except for equipment harness.
He looked at Yukiko, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room on a sort of futon. Annika lay still and pale, her head cradled on his wife's lap. Yukiko stroked the girl's short, blond, cap-cut hair, crooning softly to her. That the savant had been captured told him that even with no exposed structures, the Cave Bay station had been discovered. Probably from its electronics signature. And the Cousteau had obviously not gotten offworld, because Annika would have been on it.
Ju-Li would have fought a squad of hyenas to protect her, so the others must be dead, he thought. Yukiko agreed. Probably Dennis had sent the others out hunting for them, when they all should have been headed outsystem in warpdrive.
David shook his head. He and Yukiko were together, and when they'd been put aboard the shuttle, Annika had been given into their care. If any of the others had been taken alive, it seemed to him they'd all be together. The only apparent alternative was for each human to be held in solitary, and obviously they weren't.
"How's she doing?" he asked.
"Fine," Yukiko answered. Her attention remained on Annika. "Just fine. Annika knows we're with her, taking care of her. Don't you, darling?" she crooned, and continued to stroke. "She's just resting her eyes. She looked at me a minute ago."
David didn't take his wife's words at face value. She'd said what she had at least partly to sooth Annika, reassure her. It might take quite a bit of that before the child came out of whatever state she was in: a coma or stupor-whatever. The child. It occurred to him he didn't know how old Annika was. Eleven or twelve, he guessed, but mentally equivalent to four or five. If "equivalent" meant anything in cases like this.
A sound caught David's attention, and he turned. The door was sliding open, and two aliens looked in from the corridor, sidearms in hand, long reptilian jaws closed. The eyes were squarely in front, presumably providing binocular vision.
The weapons, David guessed, were stunners of some sort. But not the variety familiar from crime dramas; he and Yukiko had been stunned while being picked up on the islet, and there'd been no hangover. "Look who's here," David said. "The hyena twins, Ugly and Uglier." His eyes were intent on their faces, which he could not read. But he got an impression of wariness, as unlikely as it seemed. The two walked through the door, then stepped aside. A third one, larger, walked in between them, seemingly unarmed. The first two were reddish brown. This one had vivid blue sides; the upright torso and head were teal blue. The face was marked with red, and the seemingly clipped crest was scarlet. To David's eyes the colors seemed natural. Its own eyes intent on David, the latecomer spoke, the words recognizable despite very approximate pronunciations. "How do you feel?" it said. The eff sound was approximate.
It's got no lips, David realized. The alien's eyes were on him, and for a moment David thought the creature wanted to know. But then it answered its own question. "I felt vetter."
Before he got it all out, the creature's gaze had moved to Yukiko. "How do you suffose I feel?" it said, then answered its own question. "Cratty." It looked from one human to the other, then made what might have been a smile, and touched its upright torso where its heart might might have been but almost certainly wasn't. "Qonits," it added. "Qonits!"