The Gubru are mighty warriors, he reminded himself. But they are excitable…
The blue beam edged closer. Fiben’s nostrils flared. The only way he could take his gaze away from the deadly sightwas by closing his eyes.
If I’m right then this is just another damned Tymbrimi…
He opened them. The beam was approaching his right foot from the side. His toes curled from a deep will to leap away. Fiben tasted bile as the searing knife of light tore through a pebble two inches away and proceeded on to …
To hit and cross his foot!
Fiben choked and suppressed an urge to howl. Something was wrong! His head spun as he watched the beam cross his foot and then commence leaving a narrow trail of smoky ruin directly under his spread-legged stance.
He stared in disbelief at his foot. He had bet the beam would stop short at the last instant. It hadn’t.
Still… there his foot was, unharmed.
The beam ignited a dry twig then moved on to climb up his left foot.
There was a faint tickling he knew to be psychosomatic. While touching him, the beam was only a spot of light.
An inch beyond his foot, the burning resumed.
His heart still pounding, Fiben looked up at the blue globe and cursed with a mouth too dry to speak.
“Very funny,” he whispered.
There must have been a small psi-caster in the cairn, for Fiben actually felt something like a smile spread in the air before him … a small, wry, alien smirk, as if the joke had really been a minor thing, after all, not even worth a chuckle.
“Real cute, Uthacalthing,” Fiben grimaced as he forced his shaking legs to obey him, carrying him on a wobbling path toward the cairn. “Real cute. I’d hate to see what gives you a belly laugh.” It was hard to believe Athaclena came from the same stock as the author of this little bit of whoopee cushion humor.
At the same time, though, Fiben wished he could have been present when the first Gubru approached the Diplomacy Cache to check it out.
The blue globe still pulsed, but it stopped sending forth pencil beams of irritation. Fiben walked close to the cairn and looked it over. He paced the perimeter. Halfway around, where the cliff overlooked the sea only twenty meters away, there was a hatch. Fiben blinked when he saw the array of locks, hasps, bolts, combination slots, and keyholes.
Well, he told himself, it is a cache for diplomatic secrets and such.
But all those locks meant that he had no chance of getting in and finding a message from Uthacalthing. Athaclena had given him a few possible code words to try, if he got the chance, but this was another story altogether!
By now the fire brigade had arrived. Through the smoke Fiben could see chims from the city watch stumbling over stick-figure aliens and stretching out hoses. It wouldn’t be long before someone imposed order on this chaos. If his mission here really was futile, he ought to be getting out while the getting was still easy. He could probably take the trail along the bluff, where it overlooked the Sea of Cilmar. That would skirt most of the enemy and bring him out near a bus route.
Fiben bent forward and looked at the hatchway again. Pfeh! There were easily two dozen locks on the armored door! A small ribbon of red silk would be as useful in keeping out an invader. Either the conventions were being respected or they weren’t! What the hell good were all these padlocks and things?
Fiben grunted, realizing. It was another Tymbrimi joke, of course. One the Gubru would fail to get, no matter how intelligent they were. There were times when personality counted for more than intelligence.
Maybe that means…
On a hunch, Fiben ran around to the other side of the cairn. His eyes were watering from the smoke, and he wiped his nose on his handkerchief as he searched the wall opposite the hatch.
“Stupid bloody guesswork,” he grumbled as he clambered among the smooth stones. “It’d take a Tymbrimi to think up a stunt like this … or a stupid, lame-brained, half-evolved chim client like m—”
A loose stone slipped slightly under his right hand. Fiben pried at the facing, wishing he had a Tymbrimi’s slender, supple fingers. He cursed as he tore a fingernail.
At last the stone came free. He blinked.
He had been right, there was a secret hiding place here in back. Only the damn hole was empty!
This time, Fiben couldn’t help himself. He shrieked in frustration. It was too much. The covering stone went sailing into the brush, and he stood there on the steep, sloping face of the cairn, cursing in the fine, expressive, indignant tones his ancestors had used before Uplift when inveighing against the parentage and personal habits of baboons.
The red rage only lasted a few moments, but when it cleared Fiben felt better. He was hoarse and raw, and his palms hurt from slapping the hard stone, but at least some of his frustration had been vented.
Clearly it was time to get out of here. Just beyond a thick wisp of drifting smoke, Fiben saw a large floater set down. A ramp descended and a troop of armored Gubru soldiery hurried onto the singed lawn, each accompanied by a pair of tiny, floating globes. Yep, time to scoot.
Fiben was about to climb down when he glanced one more time into the little niche in the Tymbrimi cairn. At that moment the diffusing smoke dispersed briefly under the stiffening breeze. Sunlight burst onto the cliffside.
A tiny flash of silvery light caught his eye. He reached into the niche and pulled on a slender thread, thin and delicate as gossamer, that had lined a crack at the back of the little crevice.
At that moment there came an amplified squawk. Fiben swiveled and saw a squad of Gubru Talon Soldiers coming his way. An officer fumbled with the vodor at its throat, dialing among the auto-translation options.
“…Cathtoo-psh’v’chim’ph…
“…Kah-koo-kee, k’keee! EeeEeEE! K… “…Hisss-s-ss pop crackle!…
“…Puna bliv’t mannennering…”
“…what you are doing there! Good clients do not play with what they cannot understand!”
Then the officer caught sight of the opened niche — and Fiben’s hand stuffing something into a coverall pocket.
“Stop! Show us what…”
Fiben did not wait for the soldier to finish the command. He scrambled up the cairn. The blue globe throbbed as he passed, and in his mind terror was briefly pushed aside by a powerful, dry laughter as he dove over the top and slid down the other side. Laser bolts sizzled over his head, chipping fragments from the stone structure as he landed on the ground with a thump Damn Tymbrimi sense of humor, was his only thought as he scrambled to his feet and dashed in the only possible direction, down the protective shadow of the cairn, straight toward the sheer cliff.
39
Gailet
Max dumped a load of disabled Gubru guard disks onto the rooftop near Gailet Jones. “We yanked out their receivers,” he reported. “Still, we’ll have to be damn careful with’em.”
Nearby, Professor Oakes clicked his stopwatch. The elderly chen grunted in satisfaction. “Their air cover has been withdrawn, again. Apparently they’ve decided it was an accident after all.”
Reports kept coming in. Gailet paced nervously, occasionally looking out over the roof parapet at the conflagration and confusion in Sea Bluff Park. We didn’t plan anything like this! she thought. It could be great luck. We’ve learned so much.
Or it could be a disaster. Hard to tell yet.
If only the enemy doesn’t trace it to us.
A young chen, no more than twelve years old, put down his binoculars and turned to Gailet. “Semaphore reports all but one of our forward observers has come back in, ma’am. No word from that one, though.”
“Who is it?” Gailet asked.
“Uh, it’s that militia officer from th’ mountains. Fiben Bolger, ma’am.”