my friend,” the grandfatherly warrant officer cautioned.
“See me tonight,” Sten ordered in a low voice.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Big X,” Sten said. What the clot. If he was blown, he was now thoroughly blown.
* * * *
He was not.
In case Hernandes was wired, Sten had him strip searched and then, finding he was clean, took him for a long and aimless walk down one of the wing’s corridors.
Rinaldi Hernandes was a building tradesman, a general contractor who had been a master plumber, carpenter, plas-man, ceramic specialist, and so forth, who had joined the service at the beginning of the conflict. He had been assigned to the Imperial construction units—for once the grinding bureaucracy that was the military had put a square peg into a square hole.
Hernandes desperately hated the Tahn. His only grandchild had been killed at the beginning of the war. Then Hernandes himself had been captured. He had survived and, during the years of his captivity, resisted—resisted in ways that would keep him alive until the time came when he had a weapon in his hands and could kill.
“Although, my friend,” he said sheepishly, “since I’ve never killed anyone in my life, I really don’t know what I would do.”
In the meantime, he had learned the Tahn worlds and sent shipments intended for garrisons to the front, and vice versa. He had stolen and then destroyed any protruding bits of military hardware that he could. He had surreptitiously tugged connections loose wherever he could when he was permitted aboard any Tahn ship.
Hernandes hated the Tahn so thoroughly that he was willing to sacrifice the opinion of his fellow prisoners. So they believed he was a quisling, a traitor, a double. Perhaps they might even kill him. That was the risk that Hernandes was willing to take. In the meantime, he was as trusted by the Tahn as any Imperial prisoner could be. He often wondered, he told Sten, how many—if any—Tahn he had killed. He had never seen any of them die.
Maybe he was not really accomplishing anything.
Sten thought that perhaps Mr. Rinaldi Hernandes had killed more Tahn than any Imperial battleship.
And now he had his jack-of-all-trades.
Big clottin’ deal, Sten thought. I’m assembling all these troopies. Giving them a mission.
But so far I haven’t come up with any mission.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
L’N THUMBED BACK on the joystick. There was a soft whirr as the feeder machine came to life and then two sharp clicks as the tubes dropped into the slots in front of her. She gave a quick double-check glance to make sure there was a pos and neg symbol on each of them, then toggled the joystick forward. The tubes slid slowly toward each other, then gave a quick jump as they mated.
She bent closer to look at the seal. It was so apparently perfect that she could barely see the nth of a hairline where the tubes joined.
All those movements were accomplished in nearly absolute darkness. In fact, it was so dark in the testing room that any other being would have started feeling like a claustrophobe after a few minutes. He would have felt completely cut off from the rest of the world, sensing only the form of his own body. To L’n it was a little bit better than twilight.
She toggled left to apply stress to the seal, pressing down to activate an electric field. Outwardly the seam was still apparently perfect, but L’n’s light-actinic eyes could see a dark red stain. The seam was badly flawed. L’n giggled and toggled right to drop the tubes into the discard bin. After only a few hours on shift, the bin was nearly full of rejects. So much for the Tahn’s boasts of superefficiency.
L’n liked to think that someday far in the future a really bright historian would trace the Tahn’s eventual defeat at the hands of the Emperor right back to the discard bin under her worktable. For the hundredth time L’n smiled at her little private joke, then toggled back to call for the next two pipes. Her small, delicately pointed left ear turned to catch the sound of the machine whirring into life. Instead, there was a loud shout just outside the room. Her ear curled back on itself in pain. What the clot? The shouting went on. It was Cloric, the Tahn work boss. She could not hear what was being said, but somebody was definitely getting it. If Cloric held to form—and she had no reason to believe that he would not—the shouts would eventually lapse into incoherence, followed by heavy blows.
Whoever it was, L’n felt very sorry for him. Still, what could she do about it? She turned back to her work, trying to push the sounds outside her mind. It was a process that seemed to be getting easier every day. That frightened L’n more than anything else—more than Cloric, or the other Tahn, or the war itself. Because until a few years before, violence had not even been a word in L’n’s vocabulary.
It was not that L’n came from a race of pacifists. On the contrary, on a scale of amoebic jelly to outright beasts, the Kerrs rated fairly high on the fierce side. They were a slender, soft-furred folk with large, limpid eyes; delicate, highly sensitive ears; and a long, agile balancing tail. The Kerrs’ original homeworld was mostly covered by dense forests. They inhabited the middle levels, where light was as scarce as the food supply on the top tier.
Like many forest beings, L’n’s forbearers were intensely jealous of their privacy. The only time a Kerr experienced a feeling even close to loneliness was during estrus. It was a trait that would stay with them through the ages, just like their passion for light.
An artist, L’n had been nearing the height of her powers when she decided to emigrate from her home system. It was a very bold—or foolish—thing for a Kerr to do. She was abandoning the warmth of personal privacy for what seemed to her friends and family a hostile and patently ugly life on the outside. But the artist side of L’n knew—as sure as she knew the conceptual beauty of polarized light—that the price of continued privacy was too high. To reach the next level in her art, she needed knowledge, a knowledge that could be found only in the great “outside.”
L’n thought she was just on the verge of finding her way, when the Tahn struck. She was in her biaxial period, and her strange light paintings were beginning to find a wider audience.
Audience. That was a strange word. There was no equivalent in the Kerr language. It made a being think of large, smelly crowds, pushing in, closer and closer… L’n learned to deal with audiences. In fact, she was even starting to like being the center of one.
She had also made her first “outside” friend. His name was Hansen. Lance Corporal Hansen, a very large and, at first, very frightening human. When she had met him and Hansen had grasped her small hands in his and grunted on in his ugly low-toned human voice about her light paintings, it was all she could do to keep herself from taking a shrieking leap for the studio’s rafters. But she had steeled herself, listened as politely as she could, and then ushered him out the door. L’n had spent hours that night trying to comb the smell of him out of her fur.
Months later, it was one of the things she liked about him the most. He was with her every minute he could spare, admiring her work, criticizing it in ways that turned out to be helpful, and hovering over her when she had a showing—keeping the crowds at a more comfortable distance.
When the Tahn had invaded, Hansen had fought his way to her studio, dragged her from it, and then fought his way back to his lines. They reached safety only moments before the battle-shocked Imperial Forces surrendered. Even then, the Tahn had kept their missiles thundering in.
Hansen and L’n were caught in one such explosion. Sometime later, L’n came to. How very odd. She was barely wounded—while Hansen was messily dead.
L’n had learned many things since she had left her home system. One of them was lying. The Tahn had mistaken her for a member of the Imperial Forces. L’n did not correct them. Out on the streets she could hear them killing the civilians.
The last thing she learned was after Hansen died. L’n learned what it was like to be lonely.
The