"Come on," he urged his mentor.
"I am not coming, youngster," Thunderstorm said, with a shake of his great head.
"Why not?"
The older Thelerie reared back onto his muscular haunches and touched Sunset with a foreclaw. "My reiving days are over, lad. Go with good grace. Come back with honor."
Chapter Three
"In ten, everybody. Ten, nine, eight…"
When Carialle's tailfins touched the ground, the passengers and Keff felt hardly a bump.
"… Two, one. Welcome to Cridi. And thank you for flying Air Carialle. Please wait until the captain has turned off the 'fasten seatbelts' sign before debarking."
Keff, who had been worried about her mental state when the Cridi took control of their flight path, was relieved at her flippancy. He took off his crash straps and stretched.
"Completely painless," Keff said to Tall Eyebrow, who timidly followed his host's lead. "No wonder your people have such a successful space program. No chance of breakup on reentry."
"No chance of missing the launch pad, either," Carialle said, activating one of her exterior cameras and tilting it downward. She had landed exactly in the middle of a round pavement surrounded by a pattern of lights laid out on the ground like a snowflake, illumination marching inward from the points.
Tall Eyebrow saluted Carialle for the safe landing.
"None of my doing, TE," she said. She noticed that his thin hands were still shaking, and made her frog image appear on the wall opposite him.
"Don't worry," she signed to him. "They'll be glad to see you."
"If only I can be certain," the Frog Prince signed back. He shook his head, a gesture of uncertainty that his people shared with humans.
"Here comes security," Keff said. "The party's beginning."
The first sight Keff had of the inhabitants of Tall Eyebrow's homeworld was the tops of helmeted and visored heads sticking out of an open vehicle that was plainly meant as field security. The flattened, molded, bulbous shape of the craft would force any missile, from thrown rocks to laser beams, to bounce upward or outward away from it. If there was anything aloft that looked more like the ancient myth of the flying saucer, Keff had yet to see it. How appropriate when the inhabitants were, verily, little green men. The thin pipes protruding from sockets in the vehicle's upper shell had to be weapons. He couldn't focus quickly enough on the moving craft to estimate whether the pipes shot solid projectiles or some other deterrent.
"I wish we could tell them we're unarmed," Keff said worriedly.
"They know," Carialle said, feeling the light sensation fluttering over all her sensors once more, this time lingering at the ends of her neural synapses. "We're being scanned again. Whew! That was thorough. Good thing I'm not ticklish. They probably also know your age, your shoe size, and how much you weigh."
"If they can do that, then why the heavy armament?" Keff wondered.
Through her audio monitors Carialle also received the frequency signatures of half a dozen frog devices, plus the quasi-telepathic communications that the system both required and made possible. Since the messages were in high-pitched cheeps and arpeggios, she couldn't understand until the IT got more data on the language of Cridi science, but at least she understood the drill. It was carried out on every planet, spaceport and asteroid in the civilized galaxy.
"Trust, but verify," Carialle replied.
Another burst of high-pitched music issued from the speakers, a mathematical sequence that Tall Eyebrow quickly translated for them.
"Sigma is greater than zero. X equals zero. Y equals zero. XY equals infinity."
"Very interesting," Carialle said. "To the rest of us folks, it means, 'Come to a stop; don't move; don't attempt to lift off. Any efforts will result in disintegration into uncountable particles. Not that I can move. They've got me held as tightly as a fly in amber."
The frustration in her voice was not lost on Keff. "Give them a moment to get to know us, Cari. We haven't sent out a herald yet."
Carialle's Lady Fair image appeared on the wall beside him and made a face. Keff grinned.
The security vehicle made one more sweep, zooming close to Carialle's dorsal hull, then there was a hash of static as several controller-based broadcasts collided in mid-frequency. Tall Eyebrow looked at Keff and shook his head. He couldn't translate any of that, either. IT's vocabulary base gathered dozens of new syllables and put them on a hold in the datastream.
From the buildings at the field's edge, a party of frogs emerged and began to make their way across the field. Instead of walking, they glided a few centimeters over most of the beautiful, green sward. Suspicious, Carialle did a scan of her own.
"Do you realize that these landing pads are almost the only dry land in sight?" she said, showing them a map of her soundings. "That bright verdure covers either mud or marsh, depending on where you step."
"I bet only the poor folks on this planet live on dry land," Keff said. "Water is riches around here."
"Then everyone's rich," Carialle said.
The welcoming committee came within half a kilometer and stopped. Keff counted eight frogs he would classify as dignitaries, and twice that many who were hangers-on, aides, and, to judge by the number of devices hovering in the air near them, reporters. Around them and the ship, the hovering security vehicles described slow circles. The three Ozranians stared at the images of their long-lost cousins, hands flying as they speculated on relationships.
"They are just like us," Long Hand said, with great interest.
"That's as far as they're going to come to meet us. You three had better make an appearance," Keff said.
"If…" Long Hand said, hands twitching nervously. She held onto her usual composure. "If they do not disapprove our coming."
"You won't know until you try," Carialle said, trying to lighten the situation. "But I know that our government would be thrilled beyond words to rediscover a long-lost colony. Go on."
At once, all three started to make a hasty toilette. Tall Eyebrow divested himself of his beret, sword belt, and cape. Small Spot checked his immaculate hide for dust or smudges. Long Hand dashed for the sonic shower and cleaned herself all over. They resumed their controller units on elastic belts around their chests. Tall Eyebrow already had his on from the game. Keff thought that they did it more for moral support than for use. Once out of the range of Carialle's engines, the ancient amulets would be of little use, even for keeping the skin of water around their bodies. The leader must have sensed Keff's thoughts, for even as he was fitting his long fingers into the five depressions on the bronzed surface of what once had been a lady's belt buckle, he gave a nervous smile.
"For luck only," he signed, crossing his two first fingers, "since they cannot work here. We must go without globes as well as the protective slip of water. I will return to our people's birthplace standing tall and with dignity, ignoring inconvenience and discomfort."
Small Spot looked unhappy about his leader's last statement, but he too stood tall, and strode with what dignity he had toward the airlock.
"If we can do it without losing our pride," Long Hand said, more practically, "I will ask our cousins how to adapt the amulets to their system."
Carialle opened a tiny panel in her outer hull. A balloon pump took a fifteen cubic centimeter sample of the oxygen, which she ran through a barrage of tests for gas density, humidity, and chemical impurities. It confirmed what she had already guessed.