There was a slow, satisfied nodding of the blind white head. “So I surmised.” Atvar H’sial vibrated her wing cases, as though shaking off the dust of weeks of travel. “That is satisfactory. Did you establish communication?”
“Not from here. Too dangerous. We don’t call ’em, see, till we know we can get to ’em in person. That way nobody can talk them out of it.”
“No one will talk my J’merlia out of anything, once he knows that I am alive and present again in the spiral arm. But I accept that personal contact is preferable… if it can be accomplished. How do you propose that we proceed?”
“Well…” Louis Nenda reached into his pocket and pulled out a wafer-thin card. “That last jump pushed us down to the bottom of our credit. How far to Delbruck?”
“Two thousand four hundred kilometers, by direct flight.”
“We can’t afford that. What about overland?”
“How are the mighty fallen.” Atvar H’sial sat crouched for a moment in calculation. “Three thousand eight hundred kilometers over land, if we avoid crossing any water body.”
“Okay.” It was Nenda’s turn to calculate. “Three days by ground transport. Just enough for the trip, with nothing left at the end. Not even for food on the way. What do you think?”
“I do not think.” The pheromones were touched with resignation. “When there is no choice, I act.”
The great Cecropian untucked her six limbs. She stood erect to tower four feet above Louis Nenda. “Come. As we say in my species, Delay is the deadliest form of denial. To Delbruck.”
It was a transformed Louis Nenda who led Atvar H’sial off the bus in Delbruck three days later. He was clean-shaven and wearing a smart new outfit of royal blue.
“Well, that worked out real nice.” The pheromones grinned at Atvar H’sial while Nenda waved a serious good-bye to four gloomy passengers. He hailed a local cab sized to accommodate large aliens.
The Cecropian nodded. “It worked. But it will not work twice, Louis Nenda.”
“Sure it’ll work. ‘One born every minute’ needs updating. One born ever second is more like it. The arm’s full of ’em.”
“They were becoming suspicious.”
“Of what? They checked the shoe to make sure there was no way anyone could see into it.”
“At some point one of them would wonder if the shoe were equally opaque to sound.” Atvar H’sial sprawled luxuriantly across the back of the cab and opened her black wing cases to soak up the sun. The delicate vestigial wings within were marked by red and white elongated eyespots.
“What if they did? They made you sit over in the back, where you were out of sight of me.”
“Perhaps. But at some point one of them would have begun to wonder about pheromones, and nonverbal and nonvisual signals. I tell you, I will not repeat that exercise.”
“Hey, don’t start feeling sorry for them. They work for the Alliance government. They’ll chisel it back. All it means is another microcent on the taxes.”
“You misunderstand my motives.” The yellow horns quivered. “I am of a race destined to build worlds, to light new suns, to rule whole galaxies. I will not again sink to such trivia. It is beneath the dignity of a Cecropian.”
“Sure, At. Beneath mine, too. And you might get caught.” Nenda peered up to the top of the building where the cab had halted. He turned to the driver. “You real sure of this address?”
“Positive. Fortieth floor and up, air-breathing aliens only. Just like the bug here.” The cabbie stared down his nose at Atvar H’sial and drove off.
Nenda glared after the cab, shrugged, and led the way inside.
The air in the building was filled with a stench of rotting seaweed. It made Nenda’s nose wrinkle as they entered the thirty-foot cube of the elevator. “Air-breathers! Smells more like Karelian mud-divers to me.” But Atvar H’sial was nodding happily. “It is indeed the right place.” The antennas on top of her eyeless white head partially unfurled. “I can detect traces of J’merlia. He has been inside this structure within the past few hours. Let us proceed higher.”
Even with his augment, Nenda lacked the Cecropian’s infinitely refined sensitivity to odors. He took them up floor by floor in the elevator, until Atvar H’sial finally nodded.
“This one.” But now the pheromones carried a hint of concern.
“What’s wrong, At?”
“In addition to traces of my J’merlia, and to your Hymenopt, Kallik…” She was moving along a broad corridor, and at last paused before a door tall and wide enough to admit something twice her size. “I seem to detect — wait!”
It was too late. Nenda had pressed the side plate and the great door was already sliding open. The Cecropian and the Karelian human found themselves on the threshold of a domed and cavernous chamber, forty meters across.
Nenda peered in through the gloom. “You were wrong, At. There’s nobody in here.”
But the Cecropian had reared up to her full height and was pointing off to the side where two figures were bent over a low table. They looked up as the door opened. There was a gasp of mutual recognition. Instead of seeing the stick-thin figure of a Lo’tfian and the tubby round body of the Hymenopt, Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were facing the human forms of Alliance Councilor Graves and embodied computer, E.C. Tally.
“We were dumped off in the middle of nowhere…”
There had been half a minute of surprised and unproductive reaction — “What are you two doing here? You’re supposed to be off chasing Zardalu…” “More to the point, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be thirty thousand light-years away, out on Serenity and fighting each other…” After a little of that, Louis Nenda had been given the floor. His pheromonal aside to Atvar H’sial — Don’t worry. Trust me! — went unnoticed by the other two.
“… dumped with just the clothes we were wearing, and no warning that anything funny was going to happen. One minute we were standing in one of the main chambers, the same one where we rolled the Zardalu into the transition vortex—”
— and where we had the biggest pile of loot pulled together that you’d see in a dozen lifetimes. I know, At, I’m not going to say that. But it’s hard — fifty new bits of Builder technology, each one priceless and ready to grab. Two and a half months’ work, all down the tubes. Well, no good crying over what might have been —
And may yet be, Louis. Surrender wins no wars.
Mebbe. It’s still hard.
Graves and E.C. Tally were staring at Nenda, puzzled by his sudden silence. He returned to human speech: “Sorry. Started thinkin’ about it again. Anyway, all of a sudden Speaker-Between, that know-it-all Builder construct, popped up right behind us, quiet like, so we didn’t know he was there. He said, ‘This is not what was agreed to. It is unacceptable.’ And the next minute—”
“May I speak?” E.C. Tally’s voice was loud and off-putting.
Nenda turned to Julian Graves. “Couldn’t you stop him doing that when you gave him a new body copy? What’s wrong now, E.C.?”
“It was reported to me by Councilor Graves that you and Atvar H’sial were left behind on Serenity not to cooperate, but to engage in single combat. That is not at all the way that you are now describing matters.”
“Ah, well, that was somethin’ me and At worked out after your lot had left. Better to cooperate at first, see, until we understood the environment on Serenity, an’ after that we’d have plenty of time to fight it out between us—”
— as indeed we would have fought, Louis, once we were home in the spiral arm with substantial booty. For there are limits to cooperation, and the Builder treasures are vast. But pray continue…
If anyone will let me, I will. Shut up, At, so I can talk.