"Yes, I remember hearing that Earth is a water planet. I've never seen an accurate map of it, though. They all went into the fire along with the star charts." Her dark brown eyes took on a faraway look, then blinked back into the here and now. "Another interesting thing about the Danuans . . ."
"No, it goes beyond interesting," Sarnac interjected. "You
like
them."
"Yes, I do. It's not just for our own sakes that we Raehaniv hope our fleet gets here soon. The thought of the Danuans being subjected to a Korvaash occupation . . . troubles us."
"You keep saying 'we Raehaniv,' but you're partly of Terran ancestry. And you speak English like you were born to it."
"Strictly speaking, I'm
entirely
of Terran ancestry," she said with a slight smile. "But I know what you mean. There's one planet, called Terranova, where descendants of the Terran exiles make up most of the population, for reasons that go back to the war against the Unity. But elsewhere, including Raehan, where I was born, we're a tiny minority—though one that's overrepresented in the military." Another ironic little smile. "Varien went to the Solar System looking for military expertise, and we've tended to follow that calling over the generations. And we've tried to retain as much of our heritage as possible, including English as a second language. Some people on Terranova have tried to preserve Russian as well. But English was the common language of the Mars Project, so all the Russians could speak it. For their descendants as well, it's become the link with lost Earth."
"Not lost any longer," Sarnac smiled. "After your fleet gets here and wipes out the Korvaasha, our peoples will be reunited. Sol is just a medium-length displacement chain away—remember, it has a couple of displacement points now. Once we join forces, the war'll be over in no time; the Realm of Tarzhgul won't stand a dog's chance in hell!" Tiraena blinked, but caught the sense. "You'll be able to see Earth for yourself!"
"Yes, I'd like that." Her face broke into a rare, dazzling smile. "It's become almost a place of legend for us. I remember, as a child, being told the old hero tales—like Francis Drake sinking the Japanese Armada, and Davy Crockett defending Masada against the Mexicans!"
"Er, they may have gotten a few of the details mixed up."
Tiraena waved the point aside. "But what's Earth like today? Tell me about it."
"Well . . . where to begin?"
He began talking, and the time flowed past like the shore.
The attack came as they were nearing their landfall.
They had entered the shallows, and the Danuans were preparing to pole the raft in closer, when Natalya pointed to the north and cried out, "Look there!"
Sarnac squinted in the indicated direction. A flash of reflected sunlight. And he could hear a humming sound that didn't belong in this scene.
Tiraena already had her compact electronic binoculars out. "Yes. They're approaching rapidly. Two air-cushion vehicles—quaint but serviceable."
"The quaintness doesn't exactly help us much," Sarnac snapped. Now was
not
the time! The Korvaash ACVs were drawing closer, and he saw the smoke trail from some kind of missile arch out from one of them. "Abandon ship!" he yelled. "Everybody try for the shore. Tiraena, tell the Danuans they've got to . . ."
Then the missile exploded in midair, not with a roar and flash, but with a popping sound, and a spreading cloud of mist. Sarnac snapped his jaws shut, for if that was what he thought it was, the water was the last place they wanted to be.
With frantic haste, Tiraena started stripping off her coverall. After an instant's incomprehension, Sarnac understood. She, too, had a good idea of what the mist was, and she wanted to throw her telltale technology overboard, weighted down, while she was still capable of doing so.
But then the unmistakable odor of capture gas entered Sarnac's nostrils, and he remembered to fall flat, so he at least wouldn't topple over when the paralysis took him. The Danuans didn't know what they were in for. One of them, keening in bewilderment like the others, was too near the edge of the raft. He fell off and sank like a stone.
Sarnac, lying on his side, conscious, but with muscles paralyzed, found he could, with great slowness and difficulty, move his eyes. He did so, and brought Tiraena into his field of vision. She had only gotten the coverall half peeled off, and looked peculiarly undignified in underwear from the waist up. He couldn't think why he found that so worrisome at this of all moments. Beyond her, the first of the hovercraft pulled alongside. And the Korvaasha came for them.
Some of them were beginning to move, tentatively and with an unpleasant tingling numbness in the limbs, when the drop shuttle arrived.
It appeared in the sky at dusk, falling rapidly from orbit until it reached a low enough altitude for grav repulsion to take hold. Then it swept around and settled down on the beach amid a flurry of disturbed sand. One Korvaasha—apparently the boss of their captors—emerged from its hatch and was greeted with unmistakable signs of respect, bordering on obsequiousness.
After a short colloquy, the new arrival stalked toward the beachside clearing where the captives huddled under the guns of the silent guards. He was obviously an upper-caste Korvaasha, for he had none of the crudely obvious bionic enhancements that made the lower classes seem an obscene hybrid of organics and machinery. And he wore a pendant which, with a small mechanism attached by suction to the side of his head, performed the same functions as Tiraena's translation device.
He ran his eye over the four humans who sat together amid the larger group of Danuans. The latter had been strangely quiet as they emerged from the effects of the capture gas, fatalistic in the face of the incomprehensible and the irresistible.
Tiraena, whose translator had been taken along with the rest of her gear, and who now sat hugging her underwear-clad body against the growing chill, would have been unable to talk to them even if they had not withdrawn into a place of their own philosophy, beyond communication with the Strange Ones.
The Korvaasha held up Tiraena's coverall and examined it for a moment. Then he spoke, and all at once he seemed even more machinelike than his blatantly cyborgian guards, for the translator pendant emitted a computer-generated Standard International English that was flat, tinny, and devoid of inflection.
"I am the Interrogator. The voder would only produce a meaningless sound in your aural range to represent my personal name, which, in any event, is not to be revealed to inferior beings." Nor, Sarnac knew, to his subordinates in the Korvaash caste structure; it was a characteristic of the culture of the Realm of Tarzhgul.
He addressed Tiraena. "This coverall, and the rest of your equipment, is different from the standard issue of the Solar Union, and far more advanced. How do you account for this?"
Tiraena hugged her knees more tightly and launched into her prepared cover story. "I am from a human-settled world, independent of the Solar Union but allied to it, which has made a specialty of highly refined technology. I am here with this expedition as an observer . . ."
The Interrogator gestured to one of the guards, who extended an artificial forearm. With a whirring hum, a device extruded itself and touched Tiraena's bare upper arm. Instantly she shrieked in agony, her back arching. The Interrogator immediately made another gesture, and the guard withdrew the device. Tiraena collapsed, shuddering convulsively. Sarnac grasped her hand, unable to do more and despising himself for his inability.
"You lie," said the mechanical voice. "There is no such world. We know from prisoner interrogations that the Solar Union holds jurisdiction over all worlds Sol has colonized." And after a pause, "But not necessarily over all
human
worlds. Just prior to the Great Realignment of the displacement network that caused the downfall of the old Unity, we received reports in our sector of the conquest of a race of inferior beings called the Raehaniv, identical with yours. The report was followed by loss of contact with the Unity's forces in that race's system. I believe that there is a connection—just as there is a connection between you and the loss of two of our fighter craft that were assigned to prevent the departure of the exploration team that were landed on this world."
Tiraena raised herself, panting with effort. "You are wrong. I swear that my ancestors came from Sol. Use truth drugs, or whatever methods you employ, to confirm this."
It was impossible to read expressions from the Korvaash eye, but the Interrogator looked long and hard at her. "It is true that evolution cannot repeat itself on two different worlds. And yet we know that the humans of the Solar Union did not attain interstellar travel until some time after the Great Realignment. This contradiction must be explored further.
"I have other business in this region, in connection with the inferior beings native to this planet, that we will begin to incorporate now that we have annihilated your pathetic forces." Sarnac heard a shuddery intake of breath from Natalya and a low growl from Frank. "Afterwards, you will be taken to an orbiting ship where facilities are available to properly interrogate you. I am aware of your implanted communications devices. They will be surgically removed. The effectiveness of the anesthesia will be in direct proportion to your cooperativeness."
Tiraena spoke haltingly. "Let these Danuans . . . these natives go. They are primitives, and know nothing."
"I see, then, that their welfare concerns you." The Interrogator's translator-voder continued to emit ghastly mechanical English as its owner addressed one of the guards. "Kill this one"—he indicated Cheel'kathu—"so that the female inferior being will take me seriously when I say that I will make her watch me kill them all if she does not speak the truth."
Tiraena staggered to her feet as the guard's weapon swung around and the red dot of a laser designator appeared over Cheel'kathu's uncomprehending eyes. "No! I'll tell you everything. There's no need—"
"Good. But since there is an ample supply of them with which to assure your continued obedience, there is also no need to countermand my order." He gestured, the guard's railgun emitted a single sharp crack on single-shot mode, and Cheel'kathu's head exploded in a wet, pink and grey shower.
As the echoes died away, the Danuans broke into a low moaning—all but two males, of the two different sorts, who edged forward to touch what had been their mate. And Tiraena—all reason gone from her eyes—began to step forward. Sarnac half-rose and caught her around the waist, holding her motionless, until sanity returned.
The Interrogator's face was as unreadable as the dead tones of his voder. But his massive frame stiffened in a way that Sarnac would have sworn revealed some powerful emotion under tight control. "It is as our founder, Tarzhgul, who organized the Realm after the Great Realignment, said. This concept of pity for others is one of the hallmarks of inferior beings, who ape the true sentience of which only our species is capable. He explained it to us clearly. Even if the Great Realignment had never occurred, the Unity would eventually have fallen anyway because of its own rigidity and inner weakness. Our ancestors sought to treat inferior beings in a way that they could never comprehend or appreciate, allowing them a place—subordinate to our race, of course—in the great scheme of the Unity, and resorting to extermination only when recalcitrance left them no alternative."
"Yeah," Sarnac drawled. "Ingrates everywhere you look! Ain't life a bitch?"
The Interrogator gestured abruptly, and the guard with the artificial forearm thrust it forward and jabbed Sarnac in the neck. Instantly, his nervous system became nothing more than a carrier of pain—more pain than he would have believed the cosmos could hold. He didn't even hear his own screams, for he was in a universe where sound did not exist, where nothing existed but agony.
Then the neurolash was withdrawn, and it was like going into free fall, for the sudden absence of pain was disorienting. He lay shuddering spasmodically, growing aware that Tiraena was holding him and that Frank and Natalya were by his side.
"You will find," the Interrogator continued as though there had been no interruption, "that we of the Realm of Tarzhgul have outgrown this folly. Tarzhgul taught us that the Unity's fair-mindedness was futile and self-defeating when applied to inferior beings, who are inherently incapable of responding appropriately to it. The interests and convenience of our own race are the only relevant considerations in dealing with vermin like yourselves.
"Keep them under close guard tonight," he continued to the chief guard. "I will deal with them further in the morning."
He turned and walked toward his drop shuttle as the guards began to herd them toward an enclosure, and Sarnac recalled Tiraena's earlier remark that the Korvaasha that had survived to the present must be the truly dangerous ones.
Dawn had not yet broken when Sarnac was awakened from a fitful sleep by the low whine of gravs. A second drop shuttle descended in a blaze of running lights and settled down on the beach alongside the Interrogator's. The activity that followed was carried on in Korvaash silence, and he drifted off again.
A vicious jab from a guard's weapon was the next thing of which he was conscious. As the Korvaasha moved on, rousing the others, he got slowly to his feet and looked around. The sun had risen and the new drop shuttle was still where he dimly remembered it landing in the night. The camp was alive with activity, and Sarnac thought he detected a difference from the leaden stolidity with which the Korvaasha seemed to do everything. They actually looked mildly agitated to human eyes, and he wondered what that implied.
The other humans and the listless-seeming Danuans were up and moving about, carefully avoiding the wire enclosure—one of the Danuans had brushed against it and discovered that it carried a mild neurolash effect. The Interrogator approached with a brace of guards in tow, and spoke with the emotionlessness of his voder.
"Plans have been changed. I must depart immediately. You will travel into orbit aboard the second shuttle." His eye rested on Tiraena. "We will take the local inferior beings along to assure your cooperation. Also, they will add variety to our personnel's rations. We discovered this in the course of extracting, from their community in the north, the secret of your presence on their raft." Without further explanation he turned and strode off, and disappeared into his shuttle.