Elsie shrugged. She made a quick set of hand gestures. Several chims darted out of the spine-stones and down into the forest. After a moment there came an all-clear whistle. The rest of the party crossed the gap at a brisk run.
“They are very good,” Lydia McCue told him softly after they were back under the trees again.
Robert nodded, recognizing that she had not qualified her remark by adding, “for amateurs,” as Prathachulthorn would have done. He was grateful for that, and wished she wasn’t being so nice.
Soon they were picking their way toward tumbled ruins, carefully searching for signs that anyone else had been there since the battle, months ago. There did not seem to be any, but that did not diminish the intense vigilance of the chims.
Robert tried to kenn, to use the Net to probe for intruders, but his own jumbled feelings kept getting in the way. He wished Athaclena were here.
The wreckage of the Howletts Center was even more comp\ete ttvan \\ad been apparent from the hillside. The fire-blackened buildings had collapsed further under wild jungle vegetation now growing rampant over former lawns. The Gubru vehicles, long ago stripped of anything useful, lay in tangles of thick grass as tall as his waist.
No, clearly nobody’s been here, he thought. Robert kicked through the wreckage. Nothing remained of interest. Why did I insist on coming? he wondered. He knew his hunch — whether it panned out or not — had actually been little more than an excuse to escape from the caves — to get away from Prathachulthorn.
To get away from uncomfortable glimpses of himself.
Perhaps one reason he had chosen to come to this place was because it was here that he had had his own brief moment of hand-to-hand contact with the enemy.
Or maybe he had hoped to recreate the feelings of only a few days ago, traveling unfettered and unjudged. He had hoped to come here with different female company than the woman who now followed him, eyes darting left and right, putting everything under professional scrutiny.
Robert turned away from his brooding thoughts and walked toward the ruined alien hover tanks. He sank to one knee, brushing aside the tall, rank grass.
Gubru machinery, the exposed guts of the armored vehicles, gears, impellers, gravities…
A fine yellow patina overlay many of the parts. In some places the shining plastimesh had discolored, thinned, and even broken through. Robert pulled on a small chunk which came off, crumbling, in his hands.
Well I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher. I was right. My hunch was right.
“What is it?” Lieutenant McCue asked over his shoulder.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure, yet. But something seems to be eating through a lot of these parts.”
“May I see?”
Robert handed her the piece of corroded ceramet.
“This is why you wanted to come here? You suspected this?”
He saw no point in telling her all the complex reasons, the personal ones. “That was a large part of it. I thought, maybe, there might be a weapon in it. They burned all the records and facilities when they evacuated the center. But they couldn’t eradicate all the microbes developed in Dr. Schultz’s lab.”
He didn’t add that he had a vial of gorilla saliva in his pack. If he had not found the Gubru armor in this state, on arriving here, he had planned to perform his own experiments.
“Hm.” Lydia McCue crumbled the material in her hand. She got down and crawled under the machine to examine which parts had been affected. Finally she emerged and sat next to Robert.
“It could prove useful. But there would still be the problem of a delivery system. We don’t dare venture out of the mountains to spray the tittle bugs over Gubru equipment in Port Helenia.
“Also, bio-sabotage weapons are very short term in their effectiveness. They have to be used all at once and by surprise, since countermeasures are usually swift and effective. After a few weeks, the bugs would be neutralized — chemically, with coatings, or by cloning another beastie to eat ours.
“Still,” she turned another piece over and looked up to smile at Robert. “This is great. What you did here before, and now this… These are the right ways to fight guerrilla war! I like it. We’ll find a way to use it.”
Her smile was so open and friendly that Robert couldn’t help responding. And in that shared moment he felt a stirring that he had been trying to suppress all day.
Damn, she’s attractive, he realized, miserably. His body was sending him signals more powerful than it ever had in the company of Athaclena. And he barely knew this woman! He didn’t love her. He wasn’t bound up with her, as he was with his Tymbrimi consort.
And yet his mouth was dry and his heart beat faster as she looked at him, this narrow-eyed, thin-nosed, tall-browed, female human…
“We’d better be heading home,” he said quickly. “Go ahead and take some samples, lieutenant. We’ll test them back at base.”
He ignored her long look as he stood up and signaled to Elsie. Soon, with specimens stowed away in their packs, they were climbing once more toward the spine-stones. The watchful guards showed obvious relief as they shouldered their rifles and leaped back into the trees.
Robert followed his escort with little attention to the path. He was trying not to think of the other member of his own race walking beside him, so he frowned and kept himself banked in behind a brumous cloud of his own thoughts.
59
Fiben
Fiben and Gailet sat near each other under the unblinking regard of masked Gubru technicians, who focused their instruments on the two chims with dispassionate, clinical precision. Multi-lensed globes and flat-plate phrased arrays floated on all sides, peering down at them. The testing chamber was a jungle of glistening tubes and shiny-faced machinery, all antiseptic and sterile.
Still, the place reeked of alien bird. Fiben’s nose wrinkled, and once again he disciplined himself to avoid thinking unfriendly thoughts about the Gubru. Certainly several of the imposing machines must be psi detectors. And while it was doubtful they could actually “read his mind,” the Galactics certainly would be able to trace his surface attitudes.
Fiben reached for something else to think about. He leaned to his left and spoke to Gailet.
“Um, I talked to Sylvie before they came for us this morning. She told me she hasn’t been back to the Ape’s Grape since that night I first came to Port Helenia.”
Gailet turned to look at Fiben. Her expression was tense, disapproving.
“So? Games like that striptease of hers may be obsolete now, but I’m sure the Gubru are finding other ways to use her unique talents.”
“She’s refused to do anything like that since then, Gailet. Honestly. I can’t see why you’re so hostile toward her.”
“And I find it hard to understand how you can be so friendly with one of our jailers!” Gailet snapped. “She’s a probationer and a collaborator!”
Fiben shook his head. “Actually, Sylvie’s not really a probie at all, nor even a gray or yellow. She has a green repro-card. She joined them because—”
*’l don’t give a damn what her reasons were! Oh, I can imagine what sort of sob story she’s told you, you big dope, while she batted her eyelashes and softened you up for—”
From one of the nearby machines came a low, atonal voice. “Young neo-chimpanzee sophonts… be still. Be still, young clients…” it soothed.
Gailet swiveled to face forward, her jaw set.
Fiben blinked. I wish I understood her better, he thought. Half the time he had no idea what would set Gailet off.
It was Gailet’s moodiness that had started him talking with Sylvie in the first place, simply for company. He wanted to explain that to Gailet, but decided it would do no good. Better to wait. She would come out of this funk. She always did.