![]() ![]() There were shouted orders in the next room, a tinkle of glass as a window was broken out, and a rattle of rifle fire. The sentries were alert, and the species as a whole was not so sunk in sleep of nights as Terrans would have been. The Zanat inside the spaceport buildings had not been taken entirely by surprise. He had been a prisoner ever since his ship emerged in this system. Nor was he surprised to discover a guard-squad outside his door. The scout pilot noted that, as befit a fortress, the windows were mere firing slits. Chang nodded, a gesture with which the Zan was already familiar. Others were standing by with gear that looked as though it had come from their barracks: a big metal footlocker, a table, a cot amazingly like Loki standard issue, and several peculiar free-standing contraptions that puzzled Clang until he realized they had to be what a race with back-acting knees used for chairs. Liosh led him up a couple of flights of stairs and through a tangled set of corridors to a suite of rooms from which troopers were hauling desks, cabinets, and other office furniture. The door closed behind them with a thud that told of metal reinforcement. Instead he followed Liosh into the port building. Their technology was not up to the best Terran standards, but not much in human space was either, any more. "Go there?"Īnd if they found fragmented humanity unprepared. His mobile ears twitched in what Chang had already come to recognize as the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. When completely naked, he pointed to himself, then to Praise of Folly's entry ladder. Liosh undid his belt, tugged off his boots, put his helmet on the tarmac. His own name sounded like "Razmuzjang" in the other's mouth. ![]() The contact officer's name was Liosh that, at least, was as close as Chang could come to it. but he had been on enough worlds that spoke Russian-based tongues to cope. Chang wished for the simpler analytic structure of Low Mandarin or English. The latter made the scout pilot want to groan, for the Zanat language was highly synthetic. ![]() Skillfully he gave Chang both vocabulary and grammatical structure. He went about his business with a calm competence that implied he had undertaken such tasks many times before. Chang soon decided that the Zanat officer was a trained contact specialist. "Chemical explosion this time, not nuclear." "If it comes inside 2000 kilometers, fire another warning shot," he said. Unlike its parent craft, it blazed with lights: the equivalent of a flag of truce? Chang could not afford to be trusting. A boat left one of the remaining aliens and moved slowly toward Praise of Folly. The smallest of the three appeared onscreen for a moment. The computer woke him a couple of hours later to report that one of the aliens had gone into hyperdrive. In case of serious attack, the computer would have to defend Praise of Folly anyway. The three alien ships approached one another, though not so close that a single blast could take out more than one. Cat and mouse, he thought, with neither side sure which was which. Then abrupt silence fell it must have occurred to one of the nonhumans that Chang might somehow know their language. The gabble of alien noise rose to a roar. Atomic fire blossomed again, unmistakably brilliant. "Give the lead ship a peewee at about the same distance they put theirs-but throttle down the missile so theirs seems to outperform it." He did not intend to show all his cards. "They may as well be as worried as I am," he decided. Meekly stopping, though, stuck in his craw. ![]() Even winning a standup fight would not give him enough information to make B'kila happy. ![]()
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