'I know. He wants to stay and listen to those underground 'voices' of his.' Toshio rubbed his eyes, wondering why Dennie was keeping him awake with all this. He already had listened to Sah'ot's importunities.
'Don't shrug them off like that, Tosh. He says Creideiki listened to them, too, and that he had to cut the channel to break the captain out of a listening trance, the sounds were so fascinating.'
'The captain is a brain-damaged cripple.' The words were bitter. 'And Sah'ot is an egocentric, unstable…'
'I used to think so too,' Dennie interrupted. 'He used to scare me until I learned he was really quite sweet and harmless. But even if we could suppose the two fen were having hallucinations, there's the stuff I've been finding out about the metal-mounds.'
'Mmmph,' Toshio commented sleepily. 'What is it? More about the metal-mounds being alive?'
Dennie winced a little at his mild disparagement. 'Yes, and the weird eco-niche of the drill-trees. Toshio, I did an analysis on my pocketcomp, and there's only one possible solution! The drill-tree shafts are part of the life cycle of one organism — an organism that lives part of its life cycle above the surface as a superficially simple coral colony, and later falls into the pit prepared for it…'
'All that clever adaptation and energy expended to dig a grave for itself?' Toshio cut in.
'No! Not a grave! A channel! The metal-mound is only the beginning of this creature's life cycle… the larval stage. Its destiny as an adult form lies below, below the shallow crust of the planet, where convective veins of magma can provide all the energy a metallo-organic life form might ever need!'
Toshio tried earnestly to pay attention, but his thoughts kept drifting — to bombs, to traitors, to worry over Akki, his missing comrade, and to a man somewhere far to the north, who deserved to have someone waiting for him if — when he finally returned to his island launching point.
'… only thing wrong is there's no way I see that such a life form could have evolved! There's no sign of intermediate forms, no mention of any possible precursors in the old Library records on Kithrup… and this is certainly unique enough a life form to merit mention!'
'Mmm-hmmm.'
Dennie looked over at Toshio. His arm was over his eyes and he breathed slowly as if drifting off into slumber. But she saw a fine vein on his temple pulse rapidly, and his other fist clenched at even intervals.
She lay there watching him in the dimness. She wanted to shake him and make him listen to her!
Why am I pestering him like this. She suddenly asked herself. Sure, the stuff's important, but it's all intellectual, and Toshio's got our corner of the world on his shoulders. He's so young, yet he's carrying a fighting man's load now.
How do I feel about that?
A queasy stomach told her. I'm pestering him because I want attention.
I want his attention she corrected. In my clumsy way I've been trying to give him opportunities to…
Nervously, she faced her own foolishness.
If I, the older one, can get my signals this crossed, I can hardly expect him to figure out the cues, she realized at last.
Her hand reached out. It stopped just short of the glossy black hair that lay in long, wet strands over his temples. Trembling, she looked again at her feelings, and saw only fear of rejection holding her back.
As if on a will of its own, her hand moved to touch the soft stubble on Toshio's cheek. The youth started and turned to look at her, wide-eyed.
'Toshio,' she swallowed. 'I'm cold.'
78 ::: Tom Orley
When there came a moment of relative calm, Tom made a mental note. Remind me next time, he told himself, not to go around kicking hornets' nests.
He sucked on one end of the makeshift breathing tube. The other end protruded from the surface of a tiny opening in the weedscape. Fortunately, he didn't have to pull in quite so much air this time, to supplement what his mask provided. There was more dissolved oxygen in this area.
Battle beams sizzled overhead again, and weak cries carried to him from the miniature war going on above. Twice, the water trembled from nearby explosions.
At least this time I don't have to worry about being baked by the near misses, he consoled himself. All these stragglers have are hand weapons.
Tom smiled at that irony. All they had were hand weapons.
He had picked off two of the Tandu in that first ambush, before they could snap up their particle guns to fire back.
More importantly, he managed to wing the shaggy Episiarch before diving head-first into a hole in the weeds.
He had cut it close. One near-miss had left second degree burns on the sole of his bare left foot. In that last instant he glimpsed the Episiarch rearing in outrage, a nimbus of unreality coruscating like a fiery halo around its head. Tom thought he momentarily saw stars through that wavering brilliance.
The Tandu flailed to stay upon their wildly bucking causeway. That probably was what spoiled their much vaunted aim, and accounted for his still being alive.
As he had expected, the Tandu's vengeance hunt had led them westward. He popped up, from time to time, to keep their interest keen with brief enfilades of needles.
Then, as he swam between openings in the weedscape, the battle seemed to take off without him. He heard sounds of combat and knew his pursuers had come into contact with another party of ET stragglers.
Tom had left then, underwater, in search of other mischief to do.
The battle noise drifted away from his present position. From his brief glimpse an hour ago, this particular skirmish seemed to involve a half-dozen Gubru and three battered, balloon-tired rover machines of some type. Tom hadn't been able to tell if they were robots or crewed, but they had seemed unable to adapt to the tricky surface, for all of their firepower.
He listened for a minute, then coiled his tube and put it away in his waistband. He rose quietly to the surface of the tiny pool and risked lifting his eyes to the level of the interwoven loops of weed.
In his mosquito raids, he had moved toward the eggshell wreck. Now he saw that it was only a few hundred meters away. Two smoking ruins told of the fate of the wheeled machines. As he watched, first one, then the other slowly sank out of sight. Three slime-covered Gubru, apparently the last of their party, struggled over the morass toward the floating ship. Their feathers were plastered against their slender, hawk-beaked bodies. They looked desperately unhappy.
Tom rose up and saw flashes of more fighting to the south.
Three hours before, a small Soro scoutship had come diving in, strafing all in sight, until a delta-winged Tandu atmospheric fighter swooped out of the clouds to intercept it. They blasted away at each other, harassed by small arms fire from below, until they finally collided in a fiery explosion, falling to the sea in a tangled heap.
About an hour later the story repeated itself. This time the participants were a lumbering Pthaca rescue-tender and a battered spearship of the Brothers of the Night. Their wreckage joined the smoky ruins which slowly subsided in every direction.
No food, no place to hide, and the only race of fanatics I really want to see is the one not represented out here in this dribble-dribble charnel house.
The message bomb pressed under his waistband. Again, he wished he knew whether or not to use it.
Gillian has to be worried by now, he thought. Thank God, at least she's safe.
And the battle's still going on. That means there's still time. We've still got a chance.
Yes. And dolphins like to go for long walks along the beach.
Ah, well. Let's see if there's some more trouble I can cause.
79 ::: Galactics
The Soro, Krat, cursed at the strategy schematic. Her clients took the precaution of backing away while she vented her anger by tearing great rips out of the vletoor cushion.
Four ships lost! To only one by the Tandu! The recent battle had been a disaster!
And meanwhile, the sideshow down at the planet's surface was bleeding away her small support craft in ones and twos!
It seemed that tiny remnants of all of the defeated fleets, stragglers that had hidden out on moons or planetoids, must have decided the Earthlings were hiding near that volcano down in Kithrup's mid-northern latitudes. Why did they think that?
Because surely nobody would be fighting over nothing at all, would they? The skirmish had a momentum all its own by now. Who would have thought that the defeated alliances would have hidden away so much firepower for one last desperate attempt at the prize?
Krat's mating claw flexed in wrath. She couldn't afford to ignore the possibility that they were right. What if the distress call had, indeed, emanated from the Earthlings' ship? No doubt this was some sort of fiendish human distraction, but she could not risk the chance that the fugitives actually were there.
'Have the Thennanin called yet?' she snapped.
A Pil from the communications section bowed quickly and answered. 'Not yet, Fleet-Mother, though they have pulled away from their Tandu allies. We expect to hear from Buoult soon:'
Krat nodded curtly. 'Let me know the very instant!' The Pil assented hurriedly and backed away.
Krat went back to considering her options. Finally, it came down to deciding which damaged and nearly useless vessel she could spare from the coming battle for one more foray to the planet's surface.
Briefly, she toyed with the idea of sending a Thennanin ship once the upcoming alliance against the now-pre-eminent Tandu was consummated. But then she decided that would be unwise. Best to keep the priggish, sanctimonious Thennanin up here where she could keep her eyes on them. She would choose one of her own
