Suarez looked meaningfully at Cortez. “Five… four… three…”
The picked men with Cortez dropped their rifles and raised their hands at the count of “Four.” Cortez, himself, looked from side to side. Seeing he was alone and without support, Cortez lifted his left hand, palm out in supplication, while his right pulled his pistol slowly and gently from its holster. Using only his thumb and forefinger he withdrew it and stooped to place the firearm gently on the ground. The right hand then joined the left in the hands-up posture of surrender.
Suarez jerked his head in the direction of the dropped firearms. Two sergeants, a lieutenant and a captain sprang to retrieve them from the ground.
“You know, Manuel,” Suarez said, not ungently, as he walked toward the overthrown general, “I can almost forgive you for bugging out when the Posleen had us surrounded. And I can even, almost, understand the desire to obey the orders of your uncle, the president. But the thing that really gripes, the thing I’ll never be able to forgive you for, is abandoning your company and mine when the gringos attacked in 1991.”
Suarez’s arm drew back in a blur and then lashed forward, his fist catching Cortez squarely on the nose. Blood burst forth even as the victim flew back. The body made an audible thump despite the fairly soft dirt flooring the tent. Cortez was quite senseless, though, and never heard Suarez give the order to arrest him. He also never heard, not that it would have done anyone on his side any good, the order Suarez gave to certain officers to assemble their commands and prepare for a long vehicular road march to Panama City and beyond.
Interlude
It was not the alcohol, curiously enough, that intoxicated the Posleen, but an impurity within it that was usually only found in any quantity in the cheapest, rawest rotgut human beings were capable of manufacturing. Since the bottle Ziramoth split with Guanamarioch was searing, cheap, rotgut…
The two Posleen, arms over each other half for comradeship and the other half for steadiness, staggered through the night up the dirt road that roughly paralleled the fishing stream. They sang as they staggered, their bodies swaying from side to side with the tune and the drunkenness.
Perhaps there was in all the universe a more vile form of singing than that practiced by the Posleen. Perhaps. Then again, snakes slithered fast to escape from the snarling bellows of the pair. Insects shivered and scuttled away as fast as legs and wings would carry. Fish dove down into the deepest pools they could find and a few tried to bury themselves in the mud. Somewhere, off in the distance, a pair of wolves howled in their cave before giving the canto up as a bad job.
What was the song about? That was a story. It seems that, sometime in the lost millennia past, there had been a God King whose very name had disappeared and whose song was now known only as “The tale of he who farted in the enemy’s general direction.”
Properly translated, the Irish would have loved it, being, as it was (and they were), full of defiance and rage and untimely but glorious and violent death. The Russians may have loved it even more. The Germans? Nah.
In any case, with or without the Irish or Russians or Germans to accompany, the Kessentai and Kenstain loved the bloody song. Staggering and swaying, muzzles lifted to snarl out the tune or to, alternately, take big gulps from Ziramoth’s bottle of hooch, and working their way through the verses from one to one hundred and forty-seven.
The verses were long and, though the evening was late and the bottle near empty, they had only worked their way through to number fifty-two:
“Are you sure it isn’t ‘bining bloma shades,’ Zira?”
“Mmmm… maybe?”
Chapter 25
Pacing did Daisy no good. She was everywhere within the ship, and everywhere near about it. Whatever joy or distraction humans found in changing location while muttering and worrying were not for her. She simply wasn’t capable of it physically and had found no way to duplicate it electronically. She’d tried.
Perhaps when my new body is decanted I will understand better what it means to “pace the deck.” If it is ever decanted. If I have my captain back to share it with. If, if, if…
Daisy Mae, the AID, couldn’t pace, exactly. Daisy Mae, the ship, could still patrol back and forth, south and southeast of Panama City. That would have to do. And there was more than patrolling endlessly back and forth to occupy her. Somewhere, inbound soon, was a Himmit scout ship, stealthier than anything ever devised by Man, Darhel or Indowy. She didn’t even have an estimated time of arrival to go on. It could be anytime. It could even be no time; it was at least possible that the prisoners would be taken out some other way.
Just as it had in her long, insanity-producing confinement, Daisy’s speed of thought only added to her problem. What would have been a long, boring patrol to a human was approximately four-hundred times longer and more boring to her. She filled the time and killed the boredom by “reading” one military or naval tome after another, assimilating and casting them off at a rate of approximately one hundred per hour.
Damned Himmit. Invisible to the naked eye. Invisible to cameras that rely on any kind of light. Invisible to radar, invisible to sonar, invisible to lidar and the bastards don’t even give off the kind of energy shift that allow the Posleen to see human aircraft under power.
Daisy’s avatar stood next to a small plotting table on the bridge, facing aft. The fingers of her holographic right hand drummed noiselessly on the map laid out there under Plexiglas. To her rear, visible to the men on the bridge facing forward, the three guns of number two turret likewise moved up and down as if they were drumming fingers.
Pace… tap… patrol… tap… read… tap… assimilate… tap… worry… tap… worry… tap… worry. And then…
“Acoustic survey!”
“What was that, Miss Daisy?” Chief Davis asked of the avatar that appeared in CIC a fraction of a second after the words emanated from the walls.
“Acoustic survey, Chief. Ever hear of it?”
Davis half blew out his cheeks and shook his head in a puzzled negative.
“I found it in an old book on fortress warfare. Sometimes — rarely — you humans used to fire artillery, in peacetime, from different positions around fortresses you wished to defend in war. Your ancestors would do it under varying meteorological conditions, all the likely conditions, actually. Then, when the fortress was under siege — hidden batteries pounding on it — you had a fair chance, even before the invention of counter-battery radar, of finding those batteries by the sound they made and blasting back at them.”
The chief shrugged. “I really don’t see…”