Now it was Sushi’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “You know, Do-wop, if I ever act as if I think you’re stupid, remind me of this. Of course there’s somebody in our company gathering intelligence on the Zenobians—there’s got to be! We’re the only Alliance military outfit on Zenobia. I mean, why would the government pass up a chance like this? The question is, who is it? It must be somebody who’s been with us a while—we haven’t had anybody new join the company since before we got the Zenobia assignment.”
Do-Wop shrugged. “Well, it ain’t us—unless this job for Rev is part of it. Hey, you don’t think …”
“Nothing would surprise me,” said Sushi. “But we’re not going to figure it out just standing around jawing. Why don’t you go over and get Rev to sign a chit for that translator—and see if you spot anything to make you think he’s the spy. I suppose it’s none of our business, but I must admit you’ve piqued my curiosity.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” said Do-Wop, showing what for him was an unusual degree of enthusiasm. He winked, and slipped out the door, and Sushi returned to his attempts to penetrate the Zenobians’ computer network. Maybe that weird oscillation in the 1000 kHz range was a carrier wave of some kind …
* * *
“Hey, we just got here,” protested Ernie, sprawling full length on the bed. There was no other place in the room to sit, unless he wanted to perch on a windowsill—which was currently occupied by Lola. “What’s the point of turning around and going right back out again?”
Lola shrugged. “Phule’s most likely to be at the Fat Chance, so that’s where we go.”
“Oh, sure,” groaned Ernie. “That’s halfway around the wheel. On a stinkin’ bus, no less.”
“If you have a problem with a bus, think about what happens if we don’t get the job done this time,” said Lola. “Or did you enjoy our last meeting with Mr. V?”
“Screw Mr. V,” said Ernie, but he looked nervously over his shoulder as he said it. Here on Lorelei, the mob was as likely as not to have ears even in the shabby rented room where he and Lola had landed after their unenthusiastic return to the space station where their previous attempt to kidnap Willard Phule had gone spectacularly awry.
Despite taking the cheapest liner they could find passage on, the two freelance kidnappers had arrived at Lorelei low on funds—low enough to make finding someplace to stay a real chore. After several hours of working the spaceport’s bank of pay phones, Lola had managed to find them a room in a small apartment building that normally catered not to off-station tourists but to the lowest-paid casino workers—a major comedown from the suite they’d occupied in the Fat Chance on their previous trip. The only workers who lived this far from the casinos were the least skilled and most easily replaced. The powers that ran Lorelei Station saw no reason to waste much effort making their living quarters attractive or convenient.
“There’s a bus stop about half a kilometer away,” said Lola, looking over the battered Public Transit handout their landlord had condescended to lend them. “Come on, get your tourist duds on. Now’s as good a time as any to scope the place out and make some plans. Besides, if we look and act like players, there’s free food in the casinos. Unless you’ve been holding out on me, we sure can’t afford to eat in any of the restaurants here.”
“Holding out?” Ernie protested. “After the way you searched my baggage on the ship, you think I’m holding out on you? What, do you think I keep my fortune in antique microchips built into my back teeth?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you to try,” said Lola. “Only reason you wouldn’t do it is you’re too impatient to keep your money where you couldn’t get right at it if you got the itch for something expensive. And too lazy to go to the dentist, come to think of it. Which is why I want to get started now. Come on, Ernie, let’s go see if we can finish this job before the big guys get upset at us again.”
Muttering darkly, Ernie pulled himself upright. At Lola’s insistence, he changed into a sportier-looking shirt and ran a comb through his thinning locks. A pair of out-sized sunglasses completed the costume. Then, with Lola similarly disguised as a tourist, together they made their way to the nearby bus stop, hopped the Clockwise Local, and soon found themselves at the entrance of the Fat Chance Hotel and Casino.
“All right, put on a big smile,” whispered Lola, as they got off the bus. “And remember, we only have fifty bucks apiece to gamble with. Better try to win—it’s the only way we’re going to eat anything better than the free lunch.”
“I always win,” said Ernie.
“Sure,” said Lola, straightening her hat. “So tell me again—why are you taking contract jobs from the likes of Mr. V?” Fixed smiles in place, they strolled arm in arm through the main entrance of the Fat Chance. The black-uniformed guards, actually actors impersonating legionnaires, didn’t give them even a first glance.
Inside, they swept through the entrance lobby, ignoring the hotel registration desk, and headed straight for the gambling floors. During the working day, Phule was most likely to be within easy view of the floor, watching his investment growing before his eyes. Assuming, of course, that Phule was in the casino at all. Lola and Ernie had found out on their previous trip just how risky that supposition was …
“Do you see him anywhere?” asked Lola, as they sauntered through the bar area.
Ernie peered around the glaringly lit bar area. “Not a sign of the guy … Hey! Check it out! I always wondered where she’d gone—didn’t know she was into gambling!”
“Who?” said Lola, looking at the woman Ernie had indicated, a small woman leafing through a racing magazine and sipping on some tall clear drink. “I see who you mean, but I don’t recognize the face. Is she a vid star or something?”
“Nah,” said Ernie, scoffing. “That’s Maria Delia Fanatico—hottest race driver on the Formula-Ultra circuit, in her time. Broke all the course records for the Tour di Zappi when she first came up. Shocked the hell out of everybody when she retired all of a sudden, maybe fifteen years ago. People figured she got a rich boyfriend who didn’t want her to keep racing, or something like that. I thought she was the hottest thing in the world, when I was a kid. Never expected to see her someplace like here, though.”
“Well, if she’s got a rich boyfriend, that explains how she can afford Lorelei,” said Lola. “Which we can’t unless we hit a jackpot or two. Come on, let’s check out the free lunch in the game rooms. Maybe our boy will be there, and we can finish what we came here to do.”
“Sure, sure,” muttered Ernie. “More likely it’ll be that damn robot again.” He glanced again at Delia Fanatico, then followed Lola into the next room.
* * *
“All right, Tusk-anini, it’s time for your break,” said Lieutenant Armstrong, who was OD tonight. “Get up and get out of here—I don’t want to see you for half an hour.”
Tusk-anini put down his book—Black’s Dictionary of Interspecies Law, Twenty-first Edition—and looked at the clock. Oh-three-hundred hours, the middle of the night, and of his shift in the comm center. He stood and placed the book on the seat of the chair he’d been occupying. “I be back,” he said gruffly, and headed out the door, ducking his head on the way through. He didn’t understand why the Legion insisted on having him get up and leave the comm center, when he could relax even more effectively just by continuing to read. But Armstrong, in particular, was a stickler for regulations, and Tusk-anini had learned that arguing with the lieutenant was a waste of time. It was easier to get up, take a little while to enjoy the clear night air of the desert, and come back when it was time to resume his shift.
Being of a nocturnal species had in fact worked to his advantage in the Legion, once he got a commanding officer who didn’t try to make pegs of different shapes fit into identical holes. Humans seemed to think it was a hardship to stay up all night. Sergeants in particular were in awe of any sophont who actually enjoyed being awake during the wee hours of the morning, at least unless there was a party
going on. Captain Jester had almost immediately rearranged Tusk-anini’s schedule so that he could work during his preferred hours. And, since most humans were sound asleep during the night, there was little reason for the Volton to waste his duty hours doing anything more strenuous than catching up with his wide-ranging reading of human literature. As long as he was there, and awake, in case something did happen, that was enough for them. It was just one of the curious facts he had gathered about this strange race.
The comm center was a short distance from an exit onto the parade ground. Phule had required that the modular unit he had purchased for Omega Company’s base on Zenobia should have easy access to the outside from every point, in case of an attack or other emergency. That was smart planning, Tusk-anini thought. In a real emergency it could save not only time but lives.
He came out into the base’s central area and looked up at the Zenobian sky. Out here in the desert it was clear at night, with a panoply of unfamiliar constellations visible above the campsite. Tusk-anini’s home star was below the horizon at this time of night, but he knew that it was located in a small constellation the Zenobians called the Gryff’s Tail. Tusk-anini could see no resemblance between the group of stars and any kind of tail, but never having seen a gryff, he was willing to reserve judgment for the time being.
As he stood looking at the stars, a voice nearby whispered, “Tusk-anini! Come here quickly.”
He looked to see Rube, one of the three Gambolts assigned to Omega Company. Catlike aliens with excellent night vision, the Gambolts were also valuable for nocturnal work. Captain Jester liked to have at least one of them on guard duty during the dark hours. Of course, with no hostile forces on this planet, the value of the Gambolts was mostly in helping to train legionnaires of other species to move and work in conditions of low visibility. Still, conditions could change, and the captain liked to be prepared for all possibilities.
“What going on?” said Tusk-anini, keeping his voice low as he moved next to Rube, who crouched along the side of a heavy personnel carrier.
“We don’t know, Tusk,” said another voice—the human legionnaire Slayer. “Weird stuff out in the desert …”
“Why you not reporting it?” asked Tusk-anini. Having just come from Comm Central, he knew that no reports of suspicious activity had come in. Nor had the base’s sophisticated detection systems detected anything suspicious while he had been on duty. He knew that for a fact, because Lieutenant Armstrong was especially meticulous about recording even the faintest blip on his screens.
“We aren’t sure it’s dangerous,” said Rube, whose auto-translator made his speech seem much more idiomatic than the Volton’s. But Tusk-anini had made it a point to learn English directly so as to improve his understanding of humans—which had been his main reason for joining the Legion to begin with.
“Perimeter electronics no detect nothing yet,” said Tusk-anini, peering out in the direction Slayer had gestured in. “What kind of weird stuff you mean? Lights, noises, smells?”
“Faint lights, moving,” said Rube. “Slayer can’t even see them, most of the time.”
“I seen some of ’em,” said Slayer, who was wearing Legion-issue night-vision goggles. “They’re sorta yellow-green, and they move real slow.”
“Any chance Nanoids doing this?” said Tusk-anini, thinking of the microscopic silicon-based beings the captain and Beeker had discovered out in the Zenobian desert.
“It could be,” said Rube. “But don’t the Nanoids show up on the electronics? That’s how they were detected in the first place, I think.”
“Usually they do,” admitted Tusk-anini. “Don’t know much about them, though. Maybe some new form of them. Or maybe some Zenobian life we don’t know yet—flying bugs with taillights, maybe, like the books say on Old Earth.”
“Ah, that’s just a story for kids,” said Slayer. “The guys that write those stupid books must take a lot of drugs to think up all that weird stuff. I bet most of ’em never been anywhere near Old Earth.”
“There’s another one,” said Rube, pointing toward the desert. Sure enough, there was a faint but plainly visible light there—plain to Tusk-anini’s night-adapted eyes, in any case. It moved slowly left to right, staying a more or less constant distance above the desert floor, then suddenly winked out.
“Well, Tusk, now you seen it. You think we ought to go out and look where it was?” asked Slayer, deferring to Tusk-anini as the most experienced legionnaire present.
“I don’t know,” said Tusk-anini. “Looks undangerous, but who knowing? I go back to Comm Central soon and see if sensors pick up anything. Armstrong is OD tonight—is the one who ought to decide whether to look closer or not.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Slayer, clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to be sent out in the desert to investigate—at least not yet.
Tusk-anini thought a moment more, then said, “Whatever Armstrong say, tomorrow I ask Qual if any animal on Zenobia acts like that. He going to know, if anybody do.”
“Good idea,” said Rube, nodding. “You want me to come along when you tell Armstrong?”
“Sure, nobody attacking camp,” said Tusk-anini. “I go back on duty—you come now.”
But when the two legionnaires described what they had seen to Lieutenant Armstrong, he emphatically denied that the Comm Center’s instruments had detected any activity in the desert. “I’m glad you spotted this,” the lieutenant said. “I’m not sure what to make of it. I’ll twiddle with the instruments and see if there’s any signal on some energy band I haven’t been monitoring. You keep an eye on those lights, Rube, and if you see anything that looks like a threat to the camp, sound the alarm right away. But for now, my gut instinct is to watch it and wait. If anything changes, let me know right away, and I’ll decide whether or not to wake up the captain. Until then, keep a sharp lookout and be ready to respond.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rube, and he returned to guard duty. But whatever the lights were, they turned out to be undetectable on the base’s electronic sensors—and after an hour or so, even the Gambolt reported that they had gone away.
* * *
Several parsecs distant, at the Legion’s Hickman Training Center on Mussina’s World, four dozen raw recruits waited anxiously in their bunkhouse. Just as some of them had begun to gripe that the threatened inspection was another ploy to cheat them out of a night’s sleep, the barracks room door burst open.
“TENN-HUT!” bellowed Sergeant Pitbull. “GENERAL BLITZKRIEG WILL NOW INSPECT THE BARRACKS!” he added, unnecessarily, as General Blitzkrieg blustered into the bunkroom. He was followed by a female human major bearing a clipboard and a bored expression. The recruits, forewarned, were all lined up at the foot of their bunks, wearing their best uniforms and trying (for the most part without success) to conceal their nervousness. Nothing resembling a senior officer had ever deigned to appear on the post during their brief time as legionnaires. Even the colonel who nominally commanded Hickman Training Center might as well have been on another planet entirely—the recruits weren’t even sure whether their post commandant was male, female, or even human.
On the other hand, there was no doubt at all that General Blitzkrieg was human. Thumper had sniffed him out even before he’d entered the barracks. Thumper had grown up on a planet with a high enough human population that he knew the race well, and was even fond of a fair number of the sophonts from Earth. But he also came from a race with a highly developed sense of smell, and he knew the odor of humans well. Especially human males who ate red meat, smoked tobacco, drank distilled alcohol, and sloshed their faces and armpits with aromatic concoctions as part of their morning ablutions. No question at all, General Blitzkrieg was one of those humans. He entered with a scowl that had been known to make strong legionnaires quake in their boots. That, in fact, was its main purpose, and on most of the recruits it worked quite well.
But as much as Thumper thought he knew about humans, he had learned very little about human psycho
logy, and so the little Lepoid had no clue that the general might want to scare him. I’ve done my job right, so he can’t find fault with me, thought Thumper. He stood at perfect attention, his uniform immaculate, his bunk made with exacting care to every detail. In fact, Thumper’s bunk was even more perfectly made than the sample illustration of a correctly made bunk in the Legion Drill Instructor’s Manual His trunk was equally a paragon of exactness. Whatever else the general might find wrong with this recruit company—and Sergeant Pitbull had made it clear that he didn’t expect much to be right—there wasn’t going to be anything for him to criticize about Thumper.
Sergeant Pitbull had his mouth open, ready to issue another order, when someone hissed, “Now!” and all hell broke loose. As Thumper tried to turn his head to see who had spoken, the lights went out, and he heard the sound of several pairs of running feet. There was an incoherent roar from the front of the room, about where General Blitzkrieg stood, then someone rushed up to Thumper and put something into his hand. “Hold this!” they whispered, and before he could say a word, he found himself holding something. Even as he realized it was some kind of bucket, and that the outside of the bucket was dripping something wet on his uniform pants, the lights came back on.
Even then Thumper didn’t quite realize what kind of trouble he was in. Granted, the sight of General Blitzkrieg splattered head to toe with some sort of brownish sludge—foul-smelling brownish sludge, Thumper immediately realized—was the first thing that drew his attention. The next thing was the row of wet footprints and drips leading away from the general—toward where Thumper stood.
Only then did he recognize that the same foul smell that emanated from the general was also coming from the bucket he was holding. And, most curious of all, the sludge-covered footprints stopped right at his feet.
“WHAT THE FARKING HELL IS GOING ON HERE?” roared Sergeant Pitbull, instead of whatever else he had been about to roar when the lights went out. Then he saw the general, and his eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. “Oh, golly,” he said, in a voice the recruits had to strain to hear—the first time in Thumper’s memory that one of Pitbull’s statements hadn’t threatened to shatter his highly sensitive eardrums.
The Complete Phule’s Company Boxed Set Page 119