“I have jugger zygotes in the birthing chambers now, but have halted their gestation until we formulate our attack plans. They simply eat too much and can do no useful work other than in battle. It would be bad logistic practice to birth them too soon.”
At this the nife waved his claws briskly, signaling an emphatic negative. “I must differ with you and urge you to produce as many juggers as you can immediately. They take a longer time than most in the cocoon stage anyway, and we simply must have them for security purposes. For serious defense or offense, the killbeasts alone aren’t enough.”
The Parent ruminated on this a moment, mashing raw flesh with slow movements of her mandibles. “I bow to your greater genetic prowess in warfare. I am by nature conservative, perhaps too much so in an offensive campaign.”
“Secondly,” continued the nife. “There is the lack of arls to contend with.”
Again, the Parent shrugged. “We have no more need of pilots. There is no means of manufacturing imperial battlecraft on this planet, probably not for the duration of the campaign.”
The nife waved away her argument impatiently. “Of course not, but the enemy have such craft. We must be prepared to make use of their equipment, as we have no mass-transport technology of our own. For this reason maintaining a cadre of arls is essential.”
Again the Parent ruminated and assented to his judgment. Once the production goals were set, their attentions turned to the flesh they were consuming. Both found that they preferred the flesh of the humans slightly over that of the jaxes. Although it was more spare on the bone, it tended to have more flavor, probably due to greater variety in the diet. Both of them agreed after careful tasting of the limbs and abdomens of various specimens, that the female probably tasted the best. The flesh was soft and generally had a higher fat- content.
Rasping upon something hard in her mandibles, the Parent indelicately picked at her serrated grinding spikes with her tentacles and pulled loose a metal object. It was a spacer’s watch that had once belonged to Jimmy Herkart and to Bili Engstrom before him. Tossing it aside, she went back to chewing.
One of the Hests scuttled out of a gloomy tunnel and snatched up the gleaming piece of metal. To the creature’s vast disappointment, she found the watch to be inedible. She carried the ruined watch away and deposited it down one of the rubbish tunnels where most of the bones from the endless feast in the throne chamber were going.
Eleven
Captain Dorman returned to the spaceport aboard a rescue-lifter. He was set down on top of the parking garage and managed to walk unaided into the terminal building. His head was ringing and his left shoulder was sore from the ride down into the jungle canopy strapped unconscious to the ejector seat. He refused the medical team, however, and headed directly into the security center to meet the new governor. Jarmo met him at the door, and after a cursory inspection allowed him through. Another intimidating giant named Jun followed him wherever he went in the center.
“Hello Captain,” the Governor greeted him warmly, clasping his hand. “I hope you’re all right, quite a hairy mission as it turned out. Frankly, I’m amazed that a pirate spacecraft could do battle with two Stormbringers on equal footing. I’m anxious to hear your report on the matter.”
“That wasn’t just a smuggler, sir,” replied Dorman, marveling a bit at how easy it was to fall into the subordinate role with this man. It was clear he was used to giving orders and seeing them obeyed. “It was a combat ship, as good as anything the Nexus fleet has.”
The Governor nodded. Dorman believed that he had already reached these conclusions.
“Jun, could you bring up the current scene on the holo-plate?” asked the Governor.
Jun worked a keyboard with over-sized fingers, punching up an image on the holo-plate that dominated the conference table. The image was a fuzzy, military-spec holo of the jungle where the smuggler had first appeared. A line of trees was down where the ship had ditched its cargo. “This is where they dropped their load and ran for it,” said the Governor.
“What were they carrying? Did we recover the cargo?”
“No,” the Governor said, shaking his head and frowning. “There was nothing there but a tunnel leading into the mountain. The lifter we sent out to investigate put in a recon team, but they found that the tunnel dead-ended into solid rock half a mile into the Polar Range.”
“A tunnel?” said Dorman perplexedly, rubbing his sore temples.
The holo-plate image shimmered as the camera landed in the newly made clearing. Floating just above the heads of the recon team, it followed them to the mouth of a huge black hole in the fresh earth.
“A very large tunnel, big enough for men to stand upright in. The payload landed right in the middle of it.”
“It would take a week to dig such a thing,” marveled Dorman. “Seems amazing that they could land the payload that precisely under combat conditions.”
The image on the holo-plate dimmed then flickered out.
The Governor shrugged. “A mystery. I’m very new to my office, and was hoping you could shed some light on it.”
“I also wanted to speak to you about that, sir,” said Dorman, straightening in his chair. “About your new office, that is.”
“Proceed.”
“As a Nexus officer, I offer my support to you, sir, provided you can produce proof of your identity.”
Without a word the Governor ran his ID card through the terminal embedded in the conference table and waited as Dorman convinced himself that the data was genuine.
Dorman sighed at the end of it. “It seems that your claims are legitimate.”
“You disapprove?”
“This planet is my home sir, and I’m don’t relish the idea of a civil war.”
“In your view the Colonial Senate will oppose my inauguration, then.”
“Yes, most vehemently, Governor. I will assist you in gathering what forces we can that will stand loyal to the Nexus. We must mobilize before they do.”
The Governor nodded, and together they began to place a series of scrambled calls. Sergeant Manstein joined them, and soon they had a working defense strategy sketched out.
The culus emerged from the black treeline flying very low. The blue-green disk of Gopus had sunk beneath the horizon, leaving the cloudy night skies overhead pitch-black. Heading toward the sparkling streetlights the culus entered the city in the hilly residential section of Hofstetten. She glided silently among the houses, passing over fences and hedges, swooping down unlit streets and winding lanes.
The offspring flittered down into the center of town, where the tallest buildings on the planet stood. She passed the sixteen-story First Colonial Bank and she skirted the low, old-fashioned masonry walls that surrounded Fort Zimmerman, the militia headquarters. After that she entered the river district and ducked down between the moored barges that plied the river, hugging to the surface of the water like a seafloater skimming for jump-fish. Following the river down to where the spaceport edged up against it, the culus reached the cyclone fence around the compound and alighted atop a cement pipe.
The pipe was a sewer outlet that disgorged its steamy contents into the waterway. With a controlled vomiting action, the culus brought up the contents of her stomach, which consisted of the indigestible shrade. The long snake-like body of the shrade wriggled out of her mouth and slid immediately and stealthily up the pipe. The culus then rose up into the air, soaring back up the river on its leathery wings as silently as a giant hork-forest owl in search of prey.
A full six feet in length, the shrade was as thick around as a man’s arm. She slithered up the pipe encountering relatively few obstacles. Little more than a long narrow piece of muscle, the shrade compressed her body and wriggled through holes in grates smaller in diameter than a five-credit piece and slid underneath the
