by Bill Fawcett
"We've finally caught a few prisoners. A major breakthrough in Khalian biological research suggests that they are blind to certain colors and patterns. She indicated her sploshed flanks. "What I'm wearing should render me all but invisible to Khalia."
"Ah, come on, Ghra, I can't buy that!"
"Hear me out." She held her band up, her lustrous big eyes sparkling with an expression that could be amusement, but certainly resulted in my obedience. "We've also determined that, while Khalian night vision is excellent, dawn and dusk produce a twilight myopia. My present camouflage is blended for use on this planet. I can move with impunity at dawn and dusk, and quite possibly remain unseen during daylight hours, even by Khalia passing right by me. Provided I choose my ground cover correctly. That's part of early Hrruban training, anyhow. And we Hrrubans also know how to lie perfectly still for long hours." She grinned at my skeptical snort.
"Add to that inherent ability the fact that the Khalia have lost much of the olfactory acuteness they originally had as they've relied more and more on high tech, and I doubt they'll notice me." Her own nostrils dilated slightly and her whiskers twitched in distaste. "I can smell a Khalian more than five klicks away. And a Khalian wouldn't detect, much less recognize my spoor. Stupid creatures. Ignored or lost most of their valuable natural assets. They can't even move as quadrapeds anymore. We had the wisdom to retain, and improve, on our inherited advantages. It could be something as simple and nontech as primitive ability that's going to tip the scale in this war. We've already proved that ancient ways make us valuable as fighters."
"You Hrrubans have a bloody good reputation," I agreed generously. You've had combat experience?" I asked tactfully, for generally speaking, seasoned fighters don't spout off the way she was. As Ghra didn't seem to be a fully adult Hrruban, maybe she was indulging herself in a bit of psyching up for this mission.
"Frequent." The dry delivery of that single word assured me she was, indeed, a seasoned warrior. The "fingers" of her left hand clicked a rapid tattoo. "Khalia are indeed formidable opponents. Very." She spread her left hand, briefly exposing her lethal complement of claws. "Deadly in hand-to-hand with that stumpy size a strange advantage. A fully developed adult Khalian comes up to my chest: it's those short Khalian arms, incredibly powerful, that you've got to watch out for."
Some of the latest "short arm" jokes are grisly by any standards: real sick humor! And somehow, despite your disgust, you find yourself avidly repeating the newest one.
"The Khalia may prefer to use their technology against us in the air," Ghra continued, "but they're no slouches face to face. I've seen a Khalian grab a soldier by the knees, trip him up, and sever the hamstrings in three seconds. Sometimes they'll launch at the chest, compress the lungs in a fierce grip and bite through the jugular vein. However," Ghra added with understandable pride, "we've noticed a marked tendency in their troops to avoid Hrrubans. Fortunately we don't mind fighting in mixed companies."
I'd heard some incredible tales of the exploits of mixed companies and been rather proud that so many of the diverse species of the Alliance could forget minor differences for the main Objective. I'd also heard some horror tales of what the Khalia did to any prisoners of those mixed companies. (It had quickly become a general policy to dispatch any immobilized wounded.) Of course, such tales always permeate a fighting force. Sometimes, I think, not as much to encourage our own fighting men to fight that much more fiercely as to dull the edge of horror by the repetition of it.
"But it's not going to be brute force that'll overcome them: it'll be superior intelligence. We Hrrubans hope to be able to infiltrate their ground forces with our camouflages." She ran both hands down her lean and muscled thighs. "I'm going to prove we can."
"More power to you," I said, still skeptical if she was relying on body paint. While I was a space fighter pilot, I knew enough about warfare strategies to recognize that it was only battles that were won in space: wars are won when the planets involved are secured against the invader. "There's just one thing. You may be able to fool those Weasels' eyes, but what about the humans and such on Bethesda? You're going to be mighty visible to them, you know."
Ghra chuckled. "The Khalia enforce a strict dusk-to- dawn curfew on their captive planets. You'll be setting us down in an unpopulated area. None of the captured folk would venture there and all the Khalian air patrols would see is the camouflage net."
I hoped so, not that I personally feared the Khalia in the air or on the ground. For one thing, an Ocelot is faster than any atmosphere planes they operate, or spacecraft. The Khalia prefer to fly small vehicles: as far as we know they don't have any longer than a cruiser. Which makes a certain amount of sense—with very short arms, and legs, they wouldn't have the reach to make effective use of a multiple function board. Their control rooms must be crowded. Unless the Khalia had prehensile use of their toes?
"Yeah, but you have to contact the o.t.s. and he lives in the human cantonment. How're you going to keep invisible there?"
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. "By being cautious. After all, no humans will be expecting an Hrruban on Bethesda, will they?" She dropped her jaw again, and this time I knew it was amusement that brought a sparkle to those great brown eyes. "People, especially captive people, tend to see only what they expect to see. And they don't want to see the unusual or the incredible. If they should spot me, they won't believe it nor are they likely to run off and tattle to the Khalia."
Then Ghra stretched, sinews and joints popping audibly. "How long before re-entry, Bil? Time enough for me to get a short nap?" Her jaw dropped in an Hrruban grin as she opened the lid of the deepsleep capsule.
"Depends on how long you want to sleep? One week, two?" Scoutships are fast but they also must obey the laws of FTL physics. I had to slow down just as the convoy had to, only I could waste my speed faster by braking a lot of it in the gravity well of Bethesda's sun.
"Get us into the system. We'll have plenty of time to swap jokes without boring each other," she said as she took two steps to the long cabinet that held the deepsleep tank.
She pulled it out and observed while I set the mechanism to time and calibrated the gas dose. Nodding her approval, she lay down on the couch, attached the life-support cups suitable for her species with the ease of long practice. With a final wink, she closed the canopy and then her eyes, her lean camouflaged frame relaxing instantly as the gas flooded the compartment.
Ghra was perceptive about the inevitable grating of two personalities cooped up in necessarily cramped conditions, for too long a time with too little activity. We brain ships are accustomed to being by ourselves, though I'm the first to tell new members of our Elite Corps that the first few months ain't easy. There are benefits. We are conditioned to the encapsulation long before we're placed in any kind of large, dangerous equipment. The good thing about being human is our adaptability. Or maybe it's sheer necessity. If you'd rather not be dead, there is an alternative: and if we, who have had bodies and have known that kind of lifestyle, are not as completely the ship we drive as shell people are, we have our uses. I have come to like this new life, too.
The Ocelot plunged on down toward the unseen planet and its mission. I set external alarms and went into recall trance.
As the Ocelot neared my target, a mild enough looking space marble, dark blues and greens with thin cloud cover, it roused both Ghra and me. She came alert right smart, just as a well-trained fighter should. Grabbing a container of the approved post-sleep fortified drink, she resumed her seat and we both read the Ocelot's auto-reports.
The detectors identified only the usual stuff—comsats, mining transfer gear, solar heater units, but nothing in orbit around Bethesda that could detect the convoy. The only way to be dead sure, or dead, was to check down below as well. Ghra agreed. Dawn was coming up over one of the water masses that punctuated the planet. The shoreline was marked by a series of half circles. They looked more like crater holes than natural subsidences, but there had once
been a lot of volcanic activity on Bethesda.
"How're we going to make it in, Bil? Even with what the settlers put up, the Khalians could spot us."
"No, I've lined the Ocelot up with the same trajectory as a convenient trail of meteoritic debris. You can see the planet is pocked with craters. Perfect for our purpose. Even if they have gear sensitive enough to track the Ocelot's faint trail, they'd more than likely figure it was just more of the debris that's already come in."
"I had a look at Het's data on the planet," Ghra said. "Bethesda's spaceport facility had been ample enough to take the big colonial transport jobs. Last recorded flights in before the Khalian capture were for commercial freight lighters, but the port could take the biggest Khalian cruisers and destroyers, not just those pursuit fighters."
"What did Het say about Khalian update on the invasion?"
Ghra shrugged. "That is unknown. We'll find out." She grinned when I made one of those disgruntled noises I'm rather good at. "Well, they could be busy elsewhere. You know how the Khalia are, mad keen on one thing one moment, and then forget about it for a decade."
"Let's hope the decade doesn't end while we're in this sector. Well, we've got a day or so before we go in, did you hear the one about . . ."
Ghra knew some even I hadn't heard by the time I was ready to activate the trajectory I'd plotted. I matched speed with a group of pebbles while Ghra did a geology game with me. I thought I'd never see the last of the fregmekking marbles, or win the game, even though we were getting down at a fair clip. Ghra was betting the pebbles would hit the northern wasteland before we flattened out for the last segment of our run. Whose side was she on?
Ducking under the light cloud cover, I made a low altitude run over the night side toward the spaceport and the small town that serviced it. The Khalia had enslaved the planet's small resident human population in their inimitable fashion, but there might just be some sort of a night patrol.
"Here's our objective, Ghra," I told her as we closed in on our landing site, and screened the picture.
She narrowed her eyes, mumbling or purring as she memorized landscape. The town had been built along the coastline and there looked to be wharfs and piers but no sign of sea traffic or boats. Just beyond the town, on a plateau that had been badly resculptured to accommodate large craft landings, was the respectably sized spaceport, with towers, com-disks, quarters and what looked like repair hangars. Infra scan showed two cooling earthern circles but that didn't tell us enough. I got a quick glimpse of the snouts and fins of a few ships, none of them warm enough to have been flown in the past twenty-four hours, but I didn't have time to verify type and number before we were behind the coastal hill. I dropped the meteor ruse just in time to switch on the gravity drive and keep us from planting a new crater.
"And there," I put an arrow on the screen, "is where I make like a rock. You'll be only about five klicks from town."
"Good," and she managed to make the g into a growl, narrowing her eyes as she regarded the picture. Her tail gave three sharp swings. "May I have a replay of the spaceport facility?" I complied, screening the footage at a slower rate.
"Nothing fast enough to catch me, Ghra, either in the atmosphere or in space," I replied nonchalantly. I made the usual copies of the tapes of our inbound trip for the Mayday capsule. Commander Het collects updates like water rations. "Strap in, Ghra, I'm cutting the engines. Het found me a straight run through that gorge and I'm using it.
That's another thing about the Ocelot, she'll glide. Mind you, I was ready to cut in the repellers at any moment but Het had done me proud in choosing the site. We glided in, with due regard for the Ocelot's skin for we'd be slotted in among a lot of volcanic debris. Some of that was, as Ghra had promised, as large as the scout. No sooner had we landed than Ghra retrieved her bundle and hefted it to the airlock, which I opened for her. Locked in my sealed chamber, I couldn't be of any assistance in spreading the camouflage net but she was quick, deft and strong.
"Have you got a com button, Bil?" she asked when she had returned, her breath only a little faster than normal. She walked past the console into the little galley and drew a ration of water. "Good, then you'll get the gen one way or another." She took a deep draught of the water. "Good stuff. Import it?"
"Yeah, neither Het nor the Admiral likes it recycled," and I chuckled. "Rank has some privileges, you know."
Shamelessly, she took a second cupful. "I need to stock up if I have to lie still all day. It's summer here." She ran a claw tip down the selection dial of the supply cupboard and finally pressed a button, wrinkling her nose. "I hate field rations but they do stay with you." She had ordered up several bars of compressed high protein/high carbohydrate mix. I watched as she stored them in what I had thought to be muscle but were carefully camouflaged inner forearm pockets.
"What else are you hiding?" Surprise overwhelmed tact.
She gave that inimitable chuckle of hers. "A few useful weapons." She picked up the button I had placed on the console. "Neat! What's the range?"
"Fifteen klicks."
"I can easy stay in that range, Bil." She fastened the little nodule to the skull side of her left ear, its metallic surface invisible in the tufty fur. "Thanks. How long till dawn?"
I gave her the times for false and real dawn. With a cheery salute she left the Ocelot. I listened to the soft slip of her feet as long as the exterior sensors could pick up the noise before I closed the airlock. She had been moving on all fours. Remembering old teaching clips about ancient Earth felines, I could see her lithe body bounding across the uneven terrain. For a brief moment, I envied her. Then I began worrying instead.
I had known Ghra longer than I knew most of my random passengers, and we hadn't bored each other after I roused her. In her quiet, wryly humorous way, her company had been quite a treat for me. If she a been more humanoid, and I'd been more like my former self . . . ah well! That's one of the drawbacks for a gig like me; we do see the very best, but generally all too briefly.
Ghra had sounded real confident about this camouflage scheme of hers. Not talk-herself-into-believing-it confident, but sure-there d-be-no-problem confident. Me, I'd prefer something more substantial than paint as protection. But then, I'm definitely the product of a high tech civilization, while Ghra had faith in natural advantages and instinctive talents. Well, it was going to take every asset the Alliance had to counter the Khalian pirates!
Shortly before Bethesda's primary rose in the east, Ghra reported.
"I'm in place, Bil. I'll keep the com button on so you'll know all I do. Our contact's asleep. I'm stretched out on the branch of a fairly substantial kind of a broad-leafed tree outside his window. He's not awake yet. I'll hope he isn't the nervous type."
An hour and a half later, we both discovered that he was not the believing type either. But then, who would have expected to be contacted by what at first appeared to be a disembodied smile among the broad leaves shading your side window. It certainly wasn't what Fildin Escobat had anticipated when his implant had given him the warning zing of impending visitation.
"What are you?" he demanded after Ghra had pronounced the meeting code words.
"An Hrruban," Ghra replied in a well-projected whisper. I could hear a rustle as she moved briefly.
"Arghle!"
There was a silence, broken by a few more throaty garglings.
"What's Hrruban?"
"Alliance felinoids."
"Cat people?" Fildin had some basic civic's education.
"I'm camouflaged."
"Damned sure."
"So I'm patently not Khalian . . ."
"Anyone can say they're Alliance. You could be Khalian, disguised."
Have you ever seen a Khalian going about on all fours? The size of me? With a face and teeth like mine? Or a tail?"
"No . . ." This was a reluctant admission.
"Speaking Galactic?"
"That's true enough," Fildin replied sourly, for all captive species were forced
to learn the spitting, hissing, Khalian language. Khalian nerve prods and acid whips effectively encouraged both understanding and vocabulary. "So now what?"
"You tell me what I need to know."
"I don't know anything. They keep it that way." There was an unmistakable anger in the man's voice, which he lowered as he realized that he might be overheard.
"What were you before the invasion?"
"A mining engineer." I could almost see the man draw himself up with remembered pride.
"Now?
"Effing road sweeper. And I'm lucky to have that, so I don't see what good I can do you or the Alliance."
"Probably more than you think," was Ghra's soothing response. "You have eyes and ears."
"I intend keeping 'em."
"You will. Can you move freely about the town?" "The town, yes."
"Near the spaceport, too?"
"Yeah." Now Fildin's tone became suspicious and anxious.
"So you'd know if there had been any scrambles of their fighter craft."
"Haven't been any."
"None?"
"I tol' you. Though I did hear there's supposed to be s'more landing soon."
"How soon?"
"I dunno. Didn't want to know." Fildin was resigned.
"Do you work today?"
"We work everyday, all day, for those fregmekking rodents."
"Can you get near the spaceport? And do a count of what kind of space vehicle and how many of each are presently on the ground?"
"I could, but what good does that do you if more are coming in?"
"Do you know that for sure?"
"Nobody knows anything for sure. Why? Are we going to be under attack? Is that what you need to know all this for?" Fildin was clearly dubious about the merits of helping a counterattack.
"The Alliance has no immediate plans for your planet."
"No?" Fildin now sounded affronted. "What's wrong? Aren't we important enough?"