"I was going to ask if you'd checked on that," Billingsgate said. "All right; but if the blood pressure doesn't respond properly, we're going to jack the dosage back up. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," Melinda agreed. "Now, what about the neurobinders?"
The discussion was short and civilized, and in the end he acquiesced with reasonably good grace. Like most surgeons Melinda had dealt with, Billingsgate had strong proprietary feelings toward his operation designs, but he was also experienced enough not to simply ignore the recommendations of a good consultant. With more and more routine operations being handled by semisentient computerized systems, the only ones that still required human surgeons were those that were as much art as they were science. Writing required editors; sculpture required texturers; surgery required design consultants. Or so the theory went.
"All right, then," Billingsgate said at last. "We cut the markinine by ten percent and shift the gamma-site neurobinder three millimeters right-lateral. Is that it?"
"That's it." Melinda closed down the plate. "Is everything else ready?"
"Just about. We just have to-"
He broke off as the door slid open and a nurse stepped in. "I'm sorry, Dr. Cavanagh, but this just came for you," she said, holding out a card. "It's marked urgent."
"Thank you," Melinda said, taking it and pulling out her own plate.
"Make it fast," Billingsgate said.
"I will," Melinda promised, frowning at the scrambled symbols. She'd expected it to be a job assignment or something equally official; but this was in one of her father's private codes. Keying for decoding, she watched as the lines reformed themselves....
And felt her heart seize up. "No," she whispered.
Halfway to the door, Billingsgate turned back around. "What is it?"
Wordlessly, she swiveled the plate around to face him. He stooped to read it. "Oh, my God," he murmured. "Who's Pheylan?"
"My brother," Melinda told him, her voice sounding distant in her ears. She'd had a chance to see Pheylan three weeks ago, when they'd both been on Nadezhda. But she'd been too busy....
Billingsgate was saying something. "I'm sorry," she said, forcing herself to focus on him. "What did you say?"
"I said you don't need to stay," he repeated. "The team can handle things without you. Get yourself a flight over to the spaceport and get out of here."
She looked back at the plate, the words dissolving into blurs before her. "No," she said, wiping at her eyes. "I'm the design consultant. I'm supposed to see the operation through."
"That's a recommendation," Billingsgate said. "Not a requirement."
"It's my requirement," Melinda said, standing up. Her mind was starting to function again, spreading out the possibilities and necessities in her usual surgically neat lines. "Give me a minute to get in touch with the CavTronics plant in Kai Ho and I'll be right there."
"All right," Billingsgate said, not sounding convinced. "If you're sure."
"I'm sure," she told him. "I can't bring Pheylan back. Maybe I can help prevent someone else from dying."
She didn't realize until the words were out of her mouth how easily they could be interpreted as a slight on Billingsgate's surgical skills. But the older man didn't even seem to notice. "All right," he said again. "Nurse, tell the team to get suited up. We'll be starting as soon as Dr. Cavanagh is ready."
4
The blue light flared through the honeycomb's viewports, jolting Pheylan out of a troubled sleep. The light faded, flared again, faded again, flared again, faded again-
"All right!" he shouted, slapping the pod wall. "Enough, already!"
The light flared one last time and went out. Pheylan swore under his breath, wincing at the rancid taste in his mouth as he checked his chrono. He felt as if he'd just barely closed his eyes, but he'd actually been asleep for four hours. That made it twenty-two hours since the alien ship had come up behind his pod and swallowed it like a big fish snaring its lunch. Roughly sixty-six light-years, assuming the aliens hadn't discovered a stardrive that ran on a different theory from the Commonwealth's. A long way from home.
The blue light flashed again, twice this time. Reflexively, Pheylan reached for the shutter control, stopped with another curse as his sleep-fogged mind remembered that none of the pod's equipment was functional. They'd done that to him early on, scuffling furtively around the base of the pod where he couldn't see them and knocking out his power supply. He'd been in silent darkness ever since except for the dim light and muffled sounds filtering in from the shuttle-bay-sized room around him.
Without power, of course, his dioxide/oxygen converter was also useless, and there'd been a couple of tense hours when he was debating with himself how close to suffocation he should get before he risked popping the hatch. But while the air inside the pod had slowly grown stale, it hadn't gotten any worse than that. Clearly, the aliens had arranged a supplementary air supply to him, probably funneling it in through the valve he'd weakened earlier when he dumped the pod's reserve oxygen.
For a couple of hours after that he'd worried about bacteria or viruses against which his immune system would have no defense, wondering if his captors had had the foresight to filter such things out. But there was nothing to be gained from such speculation, and eventually he'd abandoned it. Under the circumstances alien variations of influenza were probably going to be the least of his worries.
Outside, the blue light flashed twice more, and as it did so Pheylan noticed that his body was beginning to press into his seat again. Weight was returning; and unless the aliens had belatedly decided to spin the ship, that could mean only one thing.
Wherever they'd been heading, they had arrived.
It was fourteen minutes before the sudden rumbling vibration that indicated they'd made planetfall. The noise and motion died away, and for another fifteen minutes Pheylan sweated in the dim light, his survival-pack flechette pistol gripped in his hand, waiting for his captors' next move.
When it happened, it happened all at once. The pod's exit hatch at his left was abruptly rimmed with light, and with a crackle of superheated metal and a cloud of brilliant sparks the hatch cover blew outward, landing with a muffled clang on the deck below. A cool breeze flowed in through the opening, carrying with it the stink of burned metal. Setting his teeth, Pheylan pointed his gun into the air flow and waited.
No one tried to come in. But then, no one had to. Sooner or later he would have to come out on his own, and waiting until he ran out of ration bars would gain him nothing. Sliding his pistol into the inner pocket of his jacket, he unstrapped from his chair and worked his way through the cramped space of the pod over to the blackened opening. The edges were still warm, but not too hot to touch. Getting a grip on the handholds, he looked cautiously out.
The light outside was too dim to see very well, but he could make out a row of indistinct silhouettes facing him from three or four meters away. Worming through the opening, he dropped to the deck beside what was left of the hatch cover. "I'm Commander Pheylan Cavanagh," he called, hoping the quaver in his voice wasn't as noticeable to them as it was to him. "Captain of the Commonwealth Peacekeeper starshipKinshasa. Who are you?"
There was no reply, but one of the shadowy figures left the line and stepped toward him. He stopped a meter away, and Pheylan had the impression that even in the dim light he was having no trouble looking the prisoner over."Brracha," he said in a deep voice; and as he did so, the lights in the room came up.
And Pheylan finally got a clear look at the creatures who'd destroyed his ship.
They were roughly human in height, with slender torsos and a pair each of arms and legs in more or less human arrangement. Their heads were hairless, the faces roughly triangular in shape as large brow ridges over the deep-set eyes narrowed to hawklike beaks. They were dressed in tight-fitting footed jumpsuits of a dark shimmery material, with no insignia or other ornamentation that Pheylan could see.
Nor were there any obvious side arms in sight. Pheylan eyed them,
wondering if it was possible that the basic concept of hand weapons could somehow have passed them by. If so-if that meant they might miss the flechette pistol in his jacket pocket-
There was a movement to his right, and he turned to see another of the aliens step through an archway into the bay, a long folded towel of what looked like their jumpsuit material draped around the back of his neck. He came up to the alien facing Pheylan, who turned and took the material. Their heads, Pheylan saw now, extended farther back than he'd realized, curving back and under to the neck and to a low spinal ridge that jutted out from their jumpsuits. The ridge terminated just above the legs in a flat, eellike tail that seemed to twirl continually in a tight corkscrewing spiral.
The alien spokesman turned back to Pheylan and held out the material."Tarr'ketarr brracha," he said in the same deep voice.
Pheylan focused on it and saw that what he'd taken to be a long towel was in fact another of their jumpsuits. "No, thank you," he said, shaking his head and tapping his chest. "I prefer to wear my own uniform."
The alien opened his mouth slightly, and a long dark-red tongue jabbed outward at the jumpsuit in his hands."Tarr'ketarr brracha," he repeated.
Pheylan grimaced, but it was obvious that they had their minds made up. It was also obvious that unless he wanted to haul out his gun and start shooting, there weren't a lot of options open to him. Stripping off his uniform, he put on the jumpsuit.
It was a perfect fit-amazingly perfect, in fact, right down to the slight but annoying bulge around his waist he'd been promising himself to get rid of for the past two years. Clearly, it had been custom-cut for him; and while that eliminated any potential problems of movement or breathing, it also left him no loose nooks or folds where he might be able to conceal his pistol.
The point turned out to be moot. He was still figuring out how the fastening strip worked when the second alien stooped and collected his uniform and equipment, then turned and disappeared back the way he had come.
The spokesman took a step to the side."Brracha," he said. Again the tongue snaked out, stiffened to point briefly to the alien's right, then retracted again into his mouth.
Pheylan looked in that direction. There was the outline of a large hexagonal-shaped hatchway on the bulkhead, probably the door his pod had come in through. The request was obvious, and as with the jumpsuit there wasn't anything to do but obey. He headed toward it, the alien spokesman stepping to his side as the rest of the line formed up behind them. As they approached the hatchway, it folded outward, letting in a burst of cool, spicy-pungent air.
The sky outside was blue with a scattering of white clouds. As the hatchway continued to open and Pheylan got closer to it, he saw first the tops of tall gray-green objects-the local equivalent of trees, he decided-and then, between him and the trees, a complex of low, flat buildings. From his angle it was difficult to be sure, but they looked as if they were the same linked-hexagon design as the aliens' ships.
A dozen more of the aliens were waiting for him on the ground, standing in a line facing a flat ramp that had been run up to the edge of the hatchway. Pheylan started down toward them, trying to get a look at everything without being too obvious about it. The building complex seemed to be backed up against the gray-green forest, with a wide-open space between it and the landing area. Here and there a few plants still grew, but most of the ground around the complex was a uniform reddish dirt. An indication that it had been only recently finished, he decided, a hunch supported by the second complex clearly still under construction just off the landing area to his right. At the edge of the forest, midway between the two building complexes, was a small geodesic shape with the ominous look of a weapons dome about it.
He reached the foot of the ramp and stopped. "I'm Commander Pheylan Cavanagh of the NorCoord Union," he identified himself again. "Captain of the Peacekeeper starshipKinshasa. "
The middle three aliens in the line stepped forward; and now that he was closer, Pheylan could see that their jumpsuits were a different design from those his shipboard escort were wearing. The two flanking aliens stopped a meter away, while the one in the center took another step toward Pheylan."Mirras kryrrea sor zhirrzh har'proov," he said. His long tongue extended, curved back beneath the lower beak almost to his neck."Svv-selic: Too'rr," he said. The tongue swung around to his right to point toward the alien there."Nzz-oonaz: Flii'rr." The tongue swung around to his left-"Thrr-gilag: Kee'rr."
"Cavanagh," Pheylan repeated, sticking out his own tongue and trying to point to himself. Not surprisingly, it didn't work very well. "Earth," he added, hoping he was guessing right about what had been said.
"Cavv-ana,"the alien repeated."Urr't."
"Close enough," Pheylan said. "Now let me try. Siv-seleck: Too-err-"
"Svv-selic: Too'rr,"the alien corrected him sharply.
"Right," Pheylan said. "Siv-selick-"
"Svv-selic: Too'rr,"the alien insisted.
"Yes, I get it," Pheylan said. He could hear the differences; he just couldn't get his mouth to make the proper sounds. "Sorry, but 'Siv-selick' is as close as I can get. You're not exactly on target with 'Cavv-ana' either, you know."
For a moment Svv-selic gazed at him, as if trying to guess what his prisoner might have said. Pheylan found himself looking at the alien's wide eyes, noticing for the first time that each had what looked like three separate pupils. The two on either end were vertical, catlike slits, while the center pupil of each eye was noticeably wider. It struck him as an odd and rather redundant arrangement.
Though so did the aliens' hands, for that matter, composed of three fingers plus two oppositely placed thumbs. Was the second one a spare? Or did their particular grasping movement require an extra thumb to get a proper grip? Or was the appendage something else entirely?
Long ago, in his second year at the Peacekeeper academy, there'd been a unit on nonhuman physiognomy. He was beginning to wish he'd paid more attention in that class.
The alien stirred, cutting off his musings."Brracha," he said.
From the chorus line of aliens two approached, each with a small round greenish-yellow ball clutched in one hand. One of them stopped beside the alien on Svv-selic's left-Thrr-gilag, if Pheylan was right about these jawbreaker consonant sounds being names-and handed him the ball. Thrr-gilag took a step forward and, in turn, handed the ball to Svv-selic. At the same time, the other alien handed his ball to Nzz-oonaz, who stepped forward and handed it to Pheylan.
"Thank you," Pheylan said, frowning at it. It was hard but not too heavy, with a bumpy texture and a strange but not unpleasant aroma. A piece of fruit? He looked back up at Svv-selic, wondering if they intended for him to eat it. Svv-selic, watching him, held up his own piece of fruit-
And suddenly his tongue snapped stiffly out, its edge slashing like a knife blade as it ripped through one side of the fruit.
Pheylan jumped, startled. The tongue retracted and slashed out again, cutting a second deep groove in the other side of the fruit. A thick, clear liquid pooled slowly across the top of Svv-selic's fingers and dripped over them onto the ground."Brra'avv rrv nee," he said.
Pheylan swallowed hard. As an object lesson, it could hardly have been improved on. It probably also explained why they weren't bothering with hand weapons. "Very impressive," he managed. "Now what?"
"Brracha,"Svv-selic said. His tongue slid out, supple and nonknifelike again, and pointed at the fruit in Pheylan's hand.
Pheylan shook his head. "I'm sorry, but I can't," he said, sticking out his tongue again for their inspection. "My tongue doesn't work that way."
For a long, uncomfortable moment Svv-selic just looked at him. Then he turned and handed the lacerated fruit back to Thrr-gilag. As he did so, Nzz-oonaz stepped forward again and took the fruit from Pheylan's hand."Brra sev kel't mrrt," Svv-selic said.
He turned, the others standing with him following suit, and started toward the building complex. One of the shipboard escort stepped up to Pheylan's side and gestured toward t
he complex with his tongue. "Right," Pheylan said, and started walking.
They led him to a heavy-looking door in one of the smaller hexagons at the near edge of the complex. Svv-selic swung it open and gestured with his tongue. "Right," Pheylan said again, and stepped inside.
It was a large room, taking up most if not all of the hexagon. Three of the six walls were lined with waist-high consoles, some of them with displays that showed shifting ghosts of hazy luminescence or more sharp-edged patterns of white and gray. A dozen pieces of alien furniture were scattered loosely around two of the other three walls. The sixth wall held the door they'd entered by, itself flanked by another pair of consoles.
And in the center, arranged inside a floor-to-ceiling glass cylinder, was a bed, a chair and fold-down table, a toilet, an open-top shower, and a washbasin.
His cell.
"Nice and cozy," he commented sourly. Actually, it wasn't nearly as bad as he'd expected. Small but adequately appointed, a little short on privacy... and, somehow, oddly familiar. He took a step toward it, studying the layout-