Lemurian friends have had to, and been able to rely on mental adaptability to survive. Hand to hand, no human or Lemurian is a match for any of the… hmm… perhaps semireptilian?” He scratched his balding head.
“Courtney.”
“Excuse me, indeed. As I’ve long maintained, we’re no match for them physically, but we appear to have an advantage when it comes to our capacity for imagination. The enemy in the west has developed a competitive technology only with the aid of humans, past and present. Here, these ‘lying Grik,’ these ‘dragons,’ are the tools of our human enemy. They’re a disconcerting weapon, but that’s all they are. Our enemy here remains the humans that control them.”
“Okay,” agreed Matt, “so how does that work?”
Courtney nodded at Jenks. “The dragons have a similar brain capacity to other Grik. Perhaps slightly less, but not significantly. Still, greater than we’ve ever seen them demonstrate-with the exception of our own dear Lawrence and the rest of his people, no doubt. This is likely due to cultural imperatives and… well, their very physical perfection. Their lethality as predators has perhaps subdued requirements for imaginative thought. In other words, they’re so good at what they do, they don’t need to think about ways to improve!”
“Well… what makes Lawrence different?”
“I can only presume, as an island race, his people have had to imagine more efficient methods of survival than chasing prey and eating it. Their resources were limited, and they had to imagine and learn skills such as boatbuilding, fishing, even agriculture. The same may even be true of the ‘jungle’ Grik Mr. Silva discovered. It’s possible Lawrence’s people might have ultimately evolved along lines similar to those in the swamps of Chill-Chaap and become famous swimmers, but I believe they’d already crossed the figurative ‘Rubicon.’ ”
“That’s amazing,” Matt said, truly impressed, “but that still leaves us with how do the Doms control their lizard birds?”
Courtney frowned, and his eyes suddenly reflected a horrible sight. “There’s some training involved, certainly, but upon opening the specimen, I discovered… human remains.” He stared hard at Matt, then at Jenks. “They feed them people.”
There were gasps in the pilothouse. Courtney Bradford tried at times, but he really didn’t know how to whisper. Invariably, his various dissertations were overheard and spread throughout the ship. It didn’t really matter. Matt wanted his crew as well-informed as possible. “Scuttlebutt” often distorted things and made them worse. In this case, uninformed speculation would’ve probably sugarcoated the truth.
“It’s known that the ‘un-Holy’ Dominion engages in blood sacrifice at the drop of a hat,” Courtney continued, “as part of their ‘native’-inspired perversion of the already rather… insistent.. . early-eighteenth-century version of the Catholic faith they brought to this world, but using people to feed those monsters…!”
“Makes perfect sense from their evil perspective,” Jenks spit, his words slightly slurred. “Feed them the infirm, the sick, the wounded. .. perhaps the laborers they brought with them. Regardless, only able bellies are filled, and the priests probably manufacture ‘divine’ justifications!” He looked at Matt. “Do you think they’ll be kinder to conquered peoples?”
“Relax, Harvey,” Matt said. “We’ll stop them somehow. We would have already, if not for their pets.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, we have to assume they know that too. We can’t count on their being idiots. What’ll they do now that we’ve learned about their ‘secret weapon,’ but they know about Walker?”
CHAPTER 13
Kaufman Field Baalkpan
“T en- Hut!” cried a shrill, Lemuran voice. The sound didn’t echo in the hangar made of canvas and the oversize Baalkpan bamboo, but at least the building was tight enough to make it loud.
“Oh, ah, ‘as you were,’ by all means,” replied Adar’s voice in his carefully cultivated English.
“Thanks, Your Excellency,” Colonel Ben Mallory replied, and his voice did echo-from within the wheel-well he’d somehow managed to cram an unlikely percentage of himself into. “Just a minute… and I oughta… Eeee! There! Now, if I can just get me outta here!” A pair of wrenches dropped to the hard-packed, concretelike crushed limestone floor, and Ben grunted and squirmed until he extricated himself. “Ahh,” he said, wincing, as he stepped forward and straightened from his crouch. “Gimme a rag, Soupy,” he demanded, his eyes clenched shut over hydraulic fluid and burning sweat. He held his greasy hands out, blindly.
Lieutenant (jg) Suaak-Pas-Ra, acting exec of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron, was similarly buried in the cockpit of the P-40E, with only his legs and tail visible. “Can’t, sur,” came the muffled reply, but somebody hit Ben in the chest with a clean cloth, and he wiped his face. He blinked.
“Wow,” he said when he could see. “What brings the whole back row of the chessboard to my modest little abode?” Not only was Adar standing in the wide opening of the hangar, but quite a few others including Steve Riggs, Perry Brister, “Ronson” Rodriguez, and Bernie Sandison were with him. Those he understood. He was surprised to see Isak Rueben and several “high-up” Lemurians he recognized, but didn’t really know, however. He didn’t understand why Pam Cross and Sister Audry were there at all. Wait, Pam’s a nurse. She’s probably here to check the new arrivals, and make sure the men they sent out to me are really fit to be here.
Adar walked slowly around the big, muscular-looking plane that seemed to crouch menacingly in the still, sultry shade of the big building. As always, he wore what all the humans referred to as his “Sky Priest suit,” despite his lofty status, but the star-spangled, purple hood was thrown back, revealing his gray fur and bright, silver eyes. He’d been there when Santa Catalina limped into Baalkpan Bay, and he’d watched the heavy crates removed from the dry-docked ship. He’d even been out to the infant airfield while it was still under construction and the fighters were being uncrated and positioned for assembly. But this was the first time he’d ever seen one of the “hot ships” in one piece. Even though he had no real grasp of what it was capable of, beyond what he’d been told, he could tell just by looking at it; by the sleek, animalistic, hungry lines, that it certainly appeared capable of more than he’d ever truly believed.
“It is magnificent!” he gushed. “Oh, it is!” He took a breath. “And how many have you managed to save, to assemble?”
“We have twenty, Mr. Chairman, that’ll fly once we finish getting everything hooked up,” Ben said as though he’d failed his task. “Plus one more we can fly with the landing gear fixed.” He shrugged. “I mean to use that one as a trainer, if Bernie doesn’t swipe it and stick those Jap floats salvaged out of Amagi ’s hangar on it. Nuttiest thing I ever heard! A P-40 seaplane!” There were chuckles, and he looked wistfully at the fighter. “We might even cobble one more together, but no promises. It’s not so much a matter of spare parts; we’re actually pretty good there. As I said, we have engines, radiators, gauges, tires… you name it. But some of the airframes were damaged in fundamental ways we didn’t expect just by looking at thm. The crates must’ve taken a real beating, particularly those in the holds, and the crate bracings themselves actually torqued things around.” He smirked. “The good news is, we’ll have plenty of replacement tail assemblies, windscreens, control surfaces, and,” he grunted, “rudder pedals. We’re also using two pretty corroded fuselage assemblies for simulated flight trainers. Got ’em rigged in the trees to respond to stick controls!”
He looked at Riggs, then Ronson. “That was one little thing I was going to see if your guys could do: juice the instruments so we can do some night-flying training-without using one of our batteries… or busting a plane!”
Ronson grinned. “Sure thing, Ben.” He looked at Riggs. “It’ll be good training for the EM flight engineers, and you can use batteries! Homegrown ones! I don’t know when we’ll have anything like Bakelite, but we’re doing good stuff with glass and ceramic, and we finally have batteries that don’t weigh a ton.”
Bernie looked at Ronson. “Just so long as you don’t give us any more of those wood and brass ‘box bombs’!”
Ronson cringed and cut his eyes back at Riggs. “So? I forgot there was zinc in brass! I’m an electrician’s mate, not a metallurgist! Nobody got hurt!”
Ben laughed. “That’d be swell, so long as I don’t have to use any of my batteries for the job!”
“So,” Pam Cross suddenly asked in her heavy Brooklyn accent, “when’re ya gonna fly one?”
“Well, it’s been taking a while to get all the bugs ironed out,” Ben defended, a little self-consciously. “I got almost two hundred ’Cats workin’ on these crates and trying to learn how to fly ’em-without letting anybody fly one! Only guys with flight experience are even allowed into the training program, but”-he took a breath-“nobody but me,
