"Crops look healthy, but there's very little heavy cover," she said. The Cridi were wide-eyed. She manifested her frog image near Big Eyes.
"Enjoying yourself?" she asked.
"Yes!" the Cridi squeaked, grinning in the human fashion. Clutching Tall Eyebrow with one arm, she signed with the other hand. "A new landscape, the first! Videos of original landings and colonies do not compare to own eyes!"
In the other ship Carialle could see the entire crew glued to the 3-D tanks. She was glad they felt the way she and Keff did about exploration. The Cridi would be a wonderful addition to Central Worlds. When M-C finally allowed the documents to be signed, that was.
"Look, that's a spaceport," Keff said, picking out a distant feature on the horizon after they cleared the next mountain ridge. He peered at the spiky growths poking up from the flat plain on the terrain map. "That is a spaceport, isn't it? Yes! Look, you can fit right in! Just land there."
"I intended to," Carialle said, impatiently, as she was already dumping velocity. She extended visuals to extreme magnification, trying to discern the landing pads, and find herself an empty slot to set down.
"What a collection of derelicts!" she exclaimed in dismay. "I'm never going to pass for one of those. I refuse to try. I do have my pride."
Keff leaned up to peer at the screen and signalled for more magnification. Carialle flung up the image she was viewing. The tiny irregular shapes on the cabin screen suddenly took focus.
"Great stars, you're right," Keff exclaimed, looking as if he didn't know whether to laugh or not. "Those look like they've been cobbled together by committees of people who'd once heard a rumor of a story about a spaceship."
"I have no idea how one of those would fly," Carialle said, "but hit me with a hammer if I ever let their ground crew do maintenance on me."
The field reminded them of the scatter of ship remains on the airless asteroid at the edge of the Cridi system. The three craft that stood on the landing pads had been put together with no practical knowledge of the working details. Exhaust vents were ducted to the outside where they would cause the craft to spin in frictionless space. Fuel tanks were exposed, and in one case, the single hatch hung open to show a control room unprotected by anything so pedestrian as an airlock. And yet two of the ships showed clear signs of having launched and returned safely at least once.
"My internal scans show no shielding in half the bulkheads." Carialle said. "The crew must be suffering from fierce radiation poisoning. If they lived."
"These people are suicidal," Keff said flatly. "Or perhaps they're kamikaze pilots, who refuse to be captured alive."
Carialle was silent a long time while she studied the ships. "I think it's buck ignorance," she said at last. "All the pieces necessary are there, but the instructions for assembling them were in a non-native language, so they did the best that they could."
"Like the pedalcycle I had as a boy," Keff said. "No safety backups at all, but it ran."
"Yes, and that's curious, because the ships that were chasing us had full shields."
Someone must have passed the word that Carialle was on her way. By the time she had tipped up and was beginning her descent, the field and the sky above it was full of griffins. Some of them fluttered gracefully to the ground at a respectful distance, but Carialle counted over a hundred in the air alone, with more in sight in the distance. Their followers were catching them up.
"Are they armed, Cari?" Keff asked, surveying the scene with a wary eye.
"Not with anything that carries a heat signature," she said. "Good heavens, but they're big beasts."
"Those teeth!" Tall Eyebrow signed, a-goggle at the screen.
Carialle stepped down magnification to her more immediate location, and settled neatly toward the landing pad between the taller of the two jalopy spaceships. Measuring her thrust to the minim, Carialle brought her tail to the ground just as her engines shut off.
"Swank," Keff said, grinning. "You look like a candle on a minefield, lady love."
"I intend to outclass the competition right from the start," she said. "All psychological advantage we can gain will be to our benefit, if we ever get to a point where we can negotiate."
"I'm ready," Keff said. "Listen: 'Freihur, co nafri da an colaro, yaro.'" The IT unit on his chest recited in Standard, "Greetings, leader you me take go, please."
"That's fine, if that's what those words mean," Carialle said, skeptically. "Trying to guess from context, it still could mean, 'Greetings, your sister sells rugs in a zoo.'"
Keff didn't bother to defend the honor of his translation program.
"We'll find out," he said, pointing at the short-range screen. "Here come the authorities."
On the field, a white-sided gurney like a medieval siege tower, rolled toward Carialle. The half dozen griffins operating it moved in jerking haste, showing their excitement. An enclosed tunnel with soft bumpers extended and clamped against Carialle's side.
"Ah, so that was their design on the remote base," Carialle said. "I'm glad to see they don't steal everything."
"Easy, Cari. It's showtime," Keff said.
He stood up and sealed his suit, waiting for the faint hiss as each edge met. With the same care, he put on his helmet, then fastened his gloves. A secure seal. He breathed deeply of the slightly plasticky-tasting air, setting the air-recirculators going. There would be no more sudden breaths of ammonia. He felt excitement warring with nerves in his belly, and told both emotions to quiet down. Another life form, another world on which he would be the first human to step! What an opportunity! It was another notch in his belt, although, technically, Carialle had set foot on the planet first. He pretended to grimace, but he couldn't concentrate on being upset. What would happen to him when he stepped outside the airlock? He wasn't afraid to go, but by the stars, he was wary. On the external screen he could see the crowd of griffins gathered on the landing field. As he was checking his heads-up display, he felt something bump into the back of his legs. He jumped half a meter and spun around in midair.
"What are you doing?" he asked. In the few moments he had his back turned, the four Cridi had climbed into their travel globes, and they were clustered around his feet.
"We are coming with you," Tall Eyebrow signed, rolling back a foot or two so he could look up at Keff's face.
"Oh, no, you're not," Keff said, accompanying his words with firm gestures. "This could be dangerous. Please stay in here and cover me with your amulets. I'm counting on you."
"We would share your peril," Tall Eyebrow said earnestly.
"They tried to kill all of us on that base," Keff pointed out, signalling in exasperation. "Me, they just allowed one of their number to stalk. They went blind mad when they saw you."
"They know something of Cridi," Long Hand signed, "having killed three ships with Cridi defenses. It cannot have been easy."
"I do not know why they hate us, since we never did them harm," Big Eyes gestured, her wide mouth pressed into a thin line. "Never in our history have we seen these creatures. We should resent them, but we do not. We only wish to ask why. It is the honor of all Cridi." She added mischieviously, "Big Voice would have said so."
"Big Voice wouldn't be diving straight out into their midst! Give me a chance to get this on a friendly footing, then we'll ask them," Keff said, pleadingly. The Cridi conferred for a moment, exchanging signals with the screen on the wall on which Narrow Leg's face appeared.
"Very well," Tall Eyebrow said, turning back to Keff. "We wait."
"Thank you," Keff said formally, with a low bow. He strode into the airlock, and heard the door slide shut and felt the slight drag on his shoulders as Carialle pressurized the cabin around him. His suit inflated slightly around his knees, crotch, elbows, and chest. He braced himself, legs well apart.