I laid out our sleeping bags over the reed mats and Remy activated our heat-n-eats. Lizzy grumbled at being dragged inside. She ate half her meal before nodding off. Schaef carried her to bed.
I wasn’t so easily lulled, still flying too high from this discovery. Remy joined me on the terrace, letting his legs dangle over the edge, watching the LR end their day. No matter who I was, this was a once in a lifetime experience. Missing a single minute was criminal.
Below, the LR glanced up at us, but went about their business. “I’m not one of your xeno-guys, but I’d think with the size of their eyes they’re more adapted to night vision than we are.” Remy leaned back to stare up into the sky, at the first sparkle of stars.
I followed his gaze. The trees around the cliffs were sparse and one of the moons was already cresting the mountain edge. “Two moons should be out tonight, but yeah, won’t see much without the goggles. Are you game for watching?”
“I’m game as long as you are, though it’s been a long day.” He wrapped his arm around me. We’ll be here for a few days, I assume.”
“Try to drag me back to camp.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Morning came with Lizzy shaking us out of our nest, excited and buzzing a mile a minute. “Wake up already. Geez, I’d think you’d have been up with the sun.” She dragged off our blankets, limping a bit yet as she dodged Remy.
I glanced at my watch, seeing it was well past dawn. “I guess I was more tired than I thought. You look much better.”
Lizzy flaunted her heels. “Miracle cure, though I think I’ll skip the boots for another day or two.” Typical civilian, she’d packed flip-flops. She bounced out the doorway. “Hurry up. The LR delivered breakfast.”
“Glad she’s better. Hate to leave her on the sidelines. We’d never hear the end of it.” Remy climbed off the ledge, grabbing up the blanket she’d pulled off. “Man, slept like a rock, which is surprising. You?”
I had to jump down from the bed. “It was a hell of a lot better than I thought, and certainly better than bags on the ground.” I straightened our area up, not wanting the LR to think we were slobs. Lizzy and Schaef waited on the terrace, breakfast laid out. Below the LR were up and about. From our vantage point we could see the organization of the village. We studied it over berries and some sort of melon.
Lizzy pointed out a group of youngsters, clustered together with several older LR. “I’m taking that as school. I’d love to sit in, see if I can sort it out. You know, kids are my specialty.”
“Let’s meet with Yinet and see what she has in mind for us. If there’s no objections, it’s fine with me.” I looked around, watching the flow of LR up and down the cliffs. Like in the forests, they easily leapt from one level to the next, except for a few of the citizens who used the terraces as we had. “This is so odd, so primitive, though they created this?”
“So did many of our own cultures.” Schaef gave me a ‘you should know’ glance.
I rolled my eyes at him. “It’s the first thing on my agenda, figuring this part of it out. I’m going to assume you’ll be working on the mountain itself?”
“It’s what brought us here.” He’d been more interested in it than the LR, running his hands over the rocky surfaces. “If we can reach some sort of deal…” He shook his head at my raised eyebrow. “Yeah, a deal. I concede. They’re fully sentient.” He let his eyes be pulled back up the cliffs. “Everything we know will change with this information.”
Remy shook his head too. “Only yesterday I thought we were limited to our little bitty solar system and today I’m here.” He waved his hand out over the village. “People would kill for this opportunity alone.”
“Which is a scary thought.”
Remy looked at me, confused.
“It was one thing when we had hopes of no sentient life forms here. Extraction would proceed by policy. Now we face a whole other set of rules. Greed can outweigh rules.”
“True… but I don’t think it’ll be an immediate concern.” Remy looked perplexed, as he was trying to sound confident. “From what I picked up, you only have two functioning ships, which means a controlled extraction, if an agreement can be reached. It’ll still take years before new ships come off the line. By then the Corps should have the process secure.”
“Yeah, but look at history, at every major ‘gold rush’ scenario. Eventually the bad guys always show up.” I was not so sure about the Alliance’s ability to control the future. “By now our report on sentience has been transmitted, so they’ll be shifting the plan.”
Deep down I cringed. We needed the ore, but that hinged on communications. That was my game, Kazan’s.
Despite conditioning, my Batista side was the one who’d come out enough to equate them with Zebra, enough to throw my brain into some mental short-out, maybe starting long before I returned home. At least that was the suspicion growing in my head as both sides found common ground. I tried not to resist them.
We finished our breakfast in silence, then climbed down from our vantage point. Lizzy’s shoes plop-plopped behind us as we went in search of Yinet.
It took a while, but we found her up another cliff, in a circle of other females. They were chittering intensely and I got the distinct impression it was about us, from the frequent glances at us. Yinet came off strong, determined, definitely a leader. Figuring out the politics would be an important step too, so we didn’t step on the wrong toes.
We waited quietly, observing without staring, letting our lapel cameras record the proceedings. Eventually the other females quietly dropped
