Prathachulthorn might hate Galactic Civilization with a passion that bordered on fanaticism, but he knew how essential it was that Terrans not break their solemn pacts with the great Institutes. Right now, Earth’s only hope lay in the ancient codes of the Progenitors. To keep the protection of those codes, weak clans had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.
Lydia McCue listened attentively. She had high cheekbones and eyes that were sultry in their darkness. It pained Robert to look at them, though. Those eyes seemed somehow to be set too close together, too immobile. He kept his attention on the crooked path ahead of him.
And yet, with a soft voice the young Marine officer drew him out. Robert found himself talking about Fiben Bolger, about their narrow escape together from the gas-bombing of the Mendoza Freehold, and of his friend’s first journey down into the Sind.
And the second, from which he never returned.
They crested a ridge topped with eerie spine-stones and came to an opening overlooking a narrow vale, just west of Lome Pass. He gestured to the tumbled outlines of several burned structures. “The Howletts Center,” he said, flatly.
“This is where you forced the Gubru to acknowledge chim combatants, isn’t it? And made them give parole?” Lydia McCue asked. Robert realized he was hearing respect in her voice, and turned briefly to stare at her. She returned his look with a smile. Robert felt his face grow warm.
He swung back quickly, pointing to the hillside nearest the center and rapidly describing how the trap had been laid and sprung, skipping only his own trapeze leap to take out the Gubru sentry. His part had been unimportant, anyway. The chims were the crucial ones that morning. He wanted the Earthling soldiers to know that.
He was finishing his story when Elsie approached. The chimmie saluted him, something that had never seemed necessary before the Marines arrived.
“I don t know about actually goin’ down there, ser,” she said, earnestly. “The enemy’s already shown an interest in those ruins. They may have come back.”
Robert shook his head. “When Benjamin paroled the enemy survivors, one condition they accepted was to stay out of this valley, and not even keep its approaches under surveillance, from then on. Has there been any sign of them breaking their word?”
Elsie shook her head. “No, but — ” Her lips pressed together, as if she felt she ought to forbear comment on the wisdom of trusting the pledges of Eatees.
Robert smiled. “Well, then. Come on. If we hurry we can be in and back out by nightfall.”
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.