Generation Warriors (33 page)

"They for us water pour but one time daily," the Ryxi twittered, dropping the empty bowl. Dupaynil picked it up with less graciousness than he'd filled it. He had never been the nurturing type. Still, it was communication. The Ryxi went on. "Food at that time, only enough for life. Waste removal."

"Did they tell you where we're headed?"

An ear-spitting screech made him wince. The Ryxi began bouncing off the walls, crashing into one after another of them, shrieking something in Ryxi. The Bronthin huddled down in a large lump, leaving Dupaynil in the Ryxi's path. He tried to tackle it but a knobbed foot got him in the ribs. The Ryxi flipped its crest up and down, keening, and drew back for another kick, but Dupaynil rolled behind the Ssli tank.

"Take it easy," he said, knowing it would do no good. Ryxi never took it easy. This one calmed slightly, sides heaving, crest only halfway up.

"They told," came the sorrowful low groan of the Bronthin. Dupaynil had never heard one speak Standard before. "Wickedly dangerous meat-eaters. We told Theks what would come of it. Those who sweep tails across the sand of reason, where proofs of wisdom abound." The Bronthin had accomplished advanced mathematics without paper or computers, using smooth stretches of sand or clay to scribe their equations. Although their three stubby fingers could not manipulate fine tools, they had developed an elegant mathematical calligraphy. And a very formal courtesy involving the use of the "sands of reason." A colt (the human term) who used its whisk of a tail on someone else's calculations would be severely punished. Bronthin were also strict vegetarians—browsers on their world which had small and witless carnivores. They were pacifists.

Dupaynil eyed the calming Ryxi warily. His ribs hurt. He didn't need another kick. "Do you have any plan?" he asked the Bronthin.

"The probability of escape from this ship, in a nonviable state, is less than 0.1 percent. The probability of escape from this ship in a viable state is less than 0.0001 percent. The factors used to arrive at this include the..."

"Never mind," said Dupaynil, softening it with an apology. "My mathematical skill is insufficient to appreciate the beauty of your calculations."

"How kind to save me the trouble of converting to Standard that which can only be properly expressed in the language of eternal law." The Bronthin heaved a sigh, which Dupaynil took to mean the conversation was over.

The Ryxi, however, was eager to talk, once it had calmed enough to remember its Standard.

"Unspeakable reptiles," it twittered. "Unworthy to be egglayers!" Not again, thought Dupaynil, not anticipating the Ryxi side of that argument. "Thick-shelled, they are. You can't even
see
a Seti in its shell. Not that it makes any difference, because even if something's wrong, they won't do anything. Just let the hatchlings die if they can't make it on their own. Some of them don't even tend their nests. Not even to warn away predators. They say that's giving Holy Luck the choice. I'd call it criminal negligence."

"Despicable," said Dupaynil, edging farther away from the dance of those powerful feet. Then a bell-like voice rang out, its source unidentifiable.

Dupaynil tried to control his start of surprise, and glanced around. The Bronthin looked half-asleep which is the way Bronthins usually looked and the Ryxi had begun grooming its feathers with jerky strokes of its beak. The two Lethi were still stuck to each other and the slab of sulfur.

He managed to stare at the blank space above the Bronthin, while the voice continued and his own mind shivered away from it. He had never liked descriptions of telepathy and he liked the reality less.

Of course. Ssli. So Ssli larvae could communicate! He could not "feel" anything in his mind when the voice fell silent, but that didn't mean it, or they, were not reading him.

They were reading his surface thoughts, at least, to have picked up that distaste for internal snooping. He recognized the irony of that, someone whose profession was snooping on others, now being turned inside out by aliens. He tried to organize his thoughts, make a clear message.

"You stare at wall for a reason?" the Ryxi asked, its feathers now sleeked down.

Dupaynil could have strangled the Ryxi for breaking his concentration, and then he
did
feel a featherlight touch, soothing, and a bubble of amusement.

"I'm very tired," he said honestly. "I need to rest."

With that, he found a clear space of floor, between the wall and the Ssli tank, and curled up, helmet cradled in his arms. The Ryxi sniffed, then tucked its head back over its shoulders into the back feathers. Dupaynil closed his eyes and projected against the screen of his eyelids.

Again the mental gurgle of amusement.

The voice said nothing more and Dupaynil thought about it. If they were reading his thoughts, they were welcome. Not both Ssli? Another alien marine race? Suddenly he realized what it had to be and almost laughed aloud.

It seemed an odd question from beings who could force mental intimacy, and already had, but Dupaynil was in the mood to accept any courtesy offered.

He tensed, bracing himself for some unimaginable sensation, and felt nothing. Only information began to knit itself into his existing cognitive matrix, as if he were learning it so fast that it was safely in long-term memory before it passed his eyes. The Bronthin, he learned, had been hired by the Seti to provide them with mathematical expertise. On the basis of its calculations and models, they had defined the best time to attempt the coup.

And the Bronthin had had no way to warn the Federation. Bronthins could not manipulate Seti communications equipment, were not telepathic, and suffered severe depression when kept isolated from their social herds. As for the Ssli, it had been delivered, in its tank, after it had been stolen from a Fleet recruit depot. The Weft, a Fleet guard at the depot, had been shot in the burglary and survived only by shapechanging into the Ssli tank in a larval form. The thieves had not known the difference between Weft and Ssli larvae and had apparently supposed that two or more larvae were in each tank, in case one died.

do
?
>
Dupaynil asked.

Cheering up the Bronthin took all of Dupaynil's considerable charm. It turned away at first, muttering number series, but the offer of another bowl of water helped. He watered the Ryxi, too, automatically, and this time the feathered alien handed the bowl back rather than dropping it. But it took many bowls of water, and a couple of sessions of picking the burrs from the dry grass the Seti tossed in for its feed, before the alien showed much response.

Finally it scrubbed its heavy head up and down his arm, took his hands in its muscular lips, and said, "I....ill try to speak Standard... in thanks for your kindness..."

"Inaccurate as Standard is, and unsuited to your genius, would it be possible to recall how many ships this size the Seti have with them?"

The Bronthin flopped a long upper lip, and sighed.

"The ratio of such ships to those next smaller to those next smaller to the smallest is 1.2:3.4:5.6:5:4. An interesting ratio, chosen by the Seti for its ragged harmony, if I understood them." It shook its long head. "Alas... never again to roll in the green sweet fields of home or be granted the tail's whisk across the sands in the company of my peers."

"Such courage in loneliness," Dupaynil murmured. In his experience, praising the timid for courage sometimes produced a momentary flare of it. "And the total to which such a ratio applies?"

With something akin to a snort, the Bronthin's lovely periwinkle eyes opened completely.

"Ah! You understand that the ratio is theoretical. The fleet itself made up of actual ships, of which at any time some fraction is out of service for maintenance and the like. Of those actually
here
, in the sense that here has any meaning... are you at all familiar with Sere-kleth-vladin's transformational series and its application to hyperspace flux variations?"

"Alas, no," said Dupaynil, who didn't know such things existed—whatever they were.

"Unhhh... one hundred four. Eight similar to this, which would of course make you expect 22.6,37.3, 35.9 ships of the other classes, but fractional ships are nonfunctional. Twenty-three of the next class, then thirty-seven, then thirty-six. And since it would be the logical next question," the Bronthin went on, its eyes beginning to sparkle, "I will explain that the passive defenses of the Federation Central System, if not tampered with, could be expected to destroy at least 82% of the total. Those remaining would be unlikely to succeed at reducing the planets or disrupting the Grand Council. But the Seti count on tampering, which will reduce the efficiency of the distant passive scans by 41%, and on specific aid whose nature I do not know, to disable additional defenses. This incursion is timed to coincide with the meeting of the Grand Council and the Winter Assizes, at which the presence of many ships could well cause confusion."

"They expect no resistance from Fleet?"

The Bronthin opened its mouth wide, revealing the square grinding teeth of a herbivore, and gave a long sound somewhat between a moo and a bray. "My apologies," it said then. "Our long misunderstanding of the nature of humans; our votes have long gone to reducing appropriations for what we saw as a means of territorial aggrandizement. These Seti expect that any Fleet vessels in Federation Central Systems space will be neutralized. And once again, we aided this, voting to require that all Fleet vessels disarm lest they overpower the Grand Council."

"A most natural error for any lover of peace," Dupaynil murmured soothingly.

Sassinak would be there with the
Zaid-Dayan.
Would she have disarmed completely, trusting in the disarmament of others to keep her ship safe? Somehow he doubted it. But with surveillance by the FSP local government, she wouldn't be able to have all the ship's scans on... and without warning... he realized he had no idea how fast the
Zaid-Dayan
could get into action.

If mental speech could have tones, that would be dry wit, Dupaynil thought. He sent a mental flick of the fingers to the Ssli and Weft, still swimming with apparent unconcern in the tank. Easy for them, he thought sourly, and then realized it wasn't. He would be even more miserable if he'd been stuck in a tank like that.

* * *

Despite the rising tension, he had actually fallen asleep when a screech from the Ryxi brought him upright, blinking. The viewscreen snowed what he presumed to be the real outer view, although he had no way of knowing which of the ship's outer sensors had produced the image. Darkness, points of light, some visibly moving. A Seti voice from the wallspeaker interrupted the Ryxi's tantrum.

"Captives, observe," it began, with typical Seti tact. "See your feeble hopes destroyed."

The view shown shifted from one angle to another. The outside of the
Grand Luck,
with a long pointed snout oozing from a recess to slide past, aimed at some distant enemy. A zooming view of nearby ships, lifting them from points of light to toylike shapes against a dark background. Then another view, of the star around which the Federation Central Zone planets swung, a star which now looked scarcely bigger than any of the others.

Dupaynil tried to relax. He had already passed on all he'd learned from the Bronthin. Now he watched the screen, listened to the Seti boastful commentary and hoped the Ssli/Weft pair could contact another Ssli. Time passed. The view shifted every few minutes, from one sensor to another.

Dupaynil wasn't sure if the triumphant tone came from the Ssli or his own reaction. He expected to hear more, but the Ssli did not include him in whatever link it and the Weft had formed with that distant Ssli. The Ryxi clattered its beak, shifted from one great knobby foot to another, fluffed and sleeked its feathers, staring wide-eyed at the viewscreen. The Bronthin refused to look. Its closed eyes and monotonous hum could be either sleep or despair. And the Lethi, as before, simply stuck to each other and the sulfur.

Dupaynil had the feeling that he should do something more to prepare for the coming battle. Now that the Ssli had warned its fellow. Now surely that alarm was being passed on. He felt free to consider more immediate problems. Could they possibly break free of this compartment? Could they steal weapons? Find some kind of escape vehicle? Or, failing escape, do something disastrous to this ship and destroy it? He and the Ryxi were the only two who might actually
do
something, for no one had ever heard of a Bronthin being violent. He edged over to the hatch, and prodded its complicated-looking lock.

A roar of Seti profanity from outside made it clear that wouldn't work. He was looking around for something else to investigate, when the viewscreen blurred, cleared, blurred, and cleared again after a couple of short FTL skips. Then it grayed to a pearly haze and the ship trembled.