was a different Pat Adcock, and I couldn’t sort that out.
Then the moment passed. The pilot was already on the horn again. “Okay, people, they say we can come in to land now. Make sure your seat belts are fastened, will you?” And Patrice straightened up and did as ordered. So did I, and that particular conundrum had to be set aside again.
The blimp-copter pilot had eased his big ship down another meter or two, until the cables that held his load went slack. Workmen on the ground had quickly released them, and the blimp-copter lifted and went sailing away into the sunrise. I lost sight of it as our own pilot was setting us down on the pad a few dozen meters away.
While we were waiting for somebody to bring up a forklift to get Hilda’s box to the ground, I could see that the handlers had already hooked a little tractor to the cradle the sub was on. They weren’t wasting any time. The machine was pulling the whole thing, sub and all, into a cavernous loading dock the size of a hotel ballroom.
As soon as we were off the chopper a couple of Bureau guards were waving us inside. Next to me Patrice stumbled and frowned; she was looking curiously toward the perimeter of Camp Smolley. Some sort of argument was going on there, Bureau guards and a couple of soldiers in unfamiliar blue berets yelling at each other. But what the squabble was about, I could not see.
The Bureau people weren’t just beckoning us inside, they were rushing us inside. As soon as the sub and we were in the loading dock, its big steel door folded itself down to shut us off from the outside world, and the workmen began pulling the tarps off the submarine.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Even in that moment I noticed something funny. The workmen weren’t the usual uniformed grunts the Bureau used for heavy lifting. They were high-ranking officers. I recognized some of them as upper brass from the Arlington headquarters, and they didn’t seem to like being used as manual labor.
I didn’t spend much time thinking about that; there was something more important. It was the first time I’d seen the whole Scarecrow submarine exposed. It didn’t look a bit like any vessel I’d seen before.
When the tarps came off at one end of the sub they revealed a squared-off stern with three great openings, making a triangle, looking like exhaust nozzles on a huge rocket. There was neither propeller nor rudder. At the bow end was a group of tightly nested jointed rods, for what purpose, I could not say. A whitely gleaming squarish thing was between them; it looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The rest of the hull was featureless metal, marked only by the hatch on the upper deck.
I heard my name called and turned around. It was Deputy Director Marcus Pell, looking recently slept and freshly bathed. From behind me Hilda’s voice said, “He wants you at the sub. Go!”
I went. The brigadiers and department subheads were rolling a wheeled ladder up to the sub’s side and Pell was standing impatiently beside it. “Up you go, Dannerman,” he snapped. “See if you can keep those freaks of yours from making any more trouble.”
I did as ordered, somewhat confused because I had no idea what kind of trouble Pell was talking about. Then the people on the desk opened the hatch and it got a lot more confusing than that.
The first thing that came out of the sub was the stink, worse than ever and with some unpleasant new | ingredients added. The second thing was a uniformed police lieutenant, looking as if he’d had a hard ride. He glowered at me. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, and didn’t wait for an answer. He turned to the deputy director, who had followed me up. “Is there somebody who can talk to those freaks? They wouldn’t let us touch the machinery at all. Then kept getting in Dr. Evergood’s way when she was trying to take care of the Doc with the burned arm and ... and Sergeant Coughlan was airsick all the way here,” he finished bitterly.
That explained the new aroma. It didn’t explain the fact that the second person out of the sub was a portly black woman in a stained white smock, whom I’d never seen before. The deputy director didn’t give me a chance to ask questions. “You heard what the lieutenant said, Dannerman,” he snapped. “Get in there and straighten the freaks out!”
As soon as I lowered myself inside, Beert and Pirraghiz came clamoring around me for news and explanations. “Give me a minute,” I begged-in Horch, of course-while I looked around. Part of the stink came from three Bureau- issue body bags stacked one on top of the other-four body bags, actually; two bags had been put together to hold a larger carcass. That would be the dead Doc; the other bags would be holding the bodies of the two dead Scarecrow warriors. Another component of the stench was a couple of drying puddles of vomit on the floor, just under the perch where the ship’s Dopey was fastidiously shielding his face with his fan and squawking his own raucous complaints at me-in English, this time. The sergeant who had been airsick gave me an aggrieved look and said faintly, “He’s been going on like that the whole time. They all have.”
They all still were. The surviving Doc was holding up his ruined arm, now neatly bandaged and a lot shorter than it had been, and mewing earnestly to Pirraghiz. The only things capable of speech or action that weren’t demanding attention at once were the two machines, Beert’s Christmas tree and the surviving robot fighter. They stood totally silent and unmoving in a corner of the sub’s cabin. I appreciated that.
I raised a hand and said loudly, in English: “Shut up.” Then in Horch, “I’m sorry if you had a rough trip, but it’s over now. Pirraghiz? What happened to your friend?”
She was standing next to him, with one big hand on his shoulder for comforting. “At the other nest-the first place they took us to, I don’t know where it was-the human female amputated most of his stump,” she told me. “She did an excellent job, I think.”
I blinked at that. “You let her operate on him?”
“I had no choice, Dannerman. It was clear that she knew what she was doing, and the medical attention was urgently needed. Then she came with us to care for him on the trip.”
“But I thought you were the medical one-“
“Only for dealing with your species, Dannerman. I have been given no skills for my own.”
Beert had been standing behind me, listening. Now his neck snaked over my shoulder and his little head twisted to peer side-wise into mine. “May I speak now, Dan?” he asked, sounding sorrowful but resigned. “I do not complain, but can you tell me what place we have arrived at? And for what purpose?”
It was a tall order, but I did my best to pass on to him-adding apologies every few sentences-what Hilda and Patrice had explained to me: We were at a research facility devoted to analyzing the technology of the Others, where he and the Docs would be-I took a moment over the choice of words-would be cared for, I said. I didn’t want
