"I'll handle the drones, Bernard," Koniev said, seeing her confusion. "I've had experience with them."
"I know you have. That's why I'm giving them to Jennifer," Greenberg said. "She has to get some herself."
Koniev nodded. So did Jennifer; Greenberg had a way of making sense. Then she saw a sparkle of irony in Marya's dark eyes. She flushed all over again. Another reason Greenberg might want her back aboard the Flying Festoon was to keep her out of trouble. It didn't occur to her to wonder whether that meant trouble with the M'Sak or trouble with him.
Just then, K'Sed came over to the four humans. The prince of T'Kai had gone martial to the extent of carrying a ceremonial shortspear that did not look sharp enough to menace anything much more armored than a balloon. "Let us see what we can do," he said. For a moment, only Jennifer's translator picked up his words. Then the other traders switched theirs back on. The machines' flat tones did not make him sound martial.
Greenberg said, "Your Highness, we admire your courage in going forth to confront your enemies. Many princes might stay within the walls and try to withstand a siege."
"If I thought I could, Soft One, I would. But V'Zek, may his clasper's prongs fall out, would swallow my cities one by one, saving T'Kai for the last. Maybe the town can hold against him, maybe not. But the confederacy would surely die. Sometimes a bad gamble is all there is."
"Yes," Greenberg said.
"I thank you for making it better than it might be. Now I join my troops." K'Sed gestured jerkily with the shortspear and headed for the way down. That was neither stairs nor ramp, merely a double row of posts driven into the wall. With ten limbs, the G'Bur needed nothing more complex. Humans could use the posts, too, though less confidently.
"More to him than I thought," Koniev said as he watched the prince descend.
"He's brave enough, and bright enough to see what needs doing," Greenberg agreed. "Whether he has the skill and the wherewithal to do it is something else again. Maybe we can help a little there."
"Maybe." Marya sounded about as convinced as K'Sed but, like the prince of T'Kai, was ready to get on with it. "Shall we go down? Otherwise they'll leave without us, which won't make them like us any better." She lowered herself off the edge of the wall, grunted when her feet found purchase, and then rapidly climbed down.
Jennifer stuck her reader in a pocket and followed Marya's lead. She didn't think about what she was doing until her boots kicked up gravel in the courtyard below. Then she started to put her reader back on.
Greenberg came down beside her. He wiped his hands on the sides of his coverall and shook his head. "I don't like that. Hell of a thing for a spacer, isn't it?a bad head for heights?"
"It would be a nuisance, wouldn't it?" Jennifer said. "I just don't notice them."
"Nothing seems to get to you, does it?" Greenberg said. She shrugged and started to walk with the rest of the humans toward the T'Kai army. The warriors milled about under their standards: bronze-colored pennons bearing the emblem of the confederacy T'Kai ruled?a golden grasping-claw, its two pincers open. Greenberg coughed. "You won't be marching with us," he reminded her." You're going back aboard the Flying Festoon, remember?"
"Oh, that's right," she said, embarrassed. She'd forgotten all about it. The ship sat a few hundred meters away, its smooth silver curves contrasting oddly with the vertical dark stone curtain of the walls of T'Kai. Willingly enough, Jennifer hurried toward it.
Bernard Greenberg watched Jennifer head back to the Flying Festoon. Her curves contrasted oddly with the jointed, armored G'Bur all around her. He sighed. Try as he might, he could not stay annoyed with her. He walked on over to where K'Sed was haranguing his army.
The prince was less optimistic than most human leaders would have been, were they facing his predicament. Even his peroration sounded downbeat. "Warriors of T'Kai, we are fighting for our freedom and our lives. Fighting is our best chance to keep them; if we do not fight, we will surely lose them. So when the time comes, let us fight with all our strength."
He got no cheers, but the soldiers began tramping north, the humans with them. Heavy wagons drawn by t'dit?large, squat, enormously strong quasi-crustaceans?rumbled in a long column between troops of warriors. Choking clouds of dust rose into the sky.
"I wish I had a set of nose-filters," Koniev said, coughing.
"Get used to it," Greenberg waved his hand at the ground over which they were walking?bare dirt, sparsely sprinkled with small bushes here and there. Most of them, now, were sadly bedraggled. "No grasses, or anything like them," the master merchant went on.
"So?" Koniev said indifferently.
Greenberg stared at him. "So?" he echoed. "Next trip in, we'll have a load of grain genetically engineered to take advantage of the gap in the ecosystem?grain is just grass with big seeds, after all. I've had people working on that for a long time, but always on a shoestring, so it's taken a while. T'Kai would pay plenty for a new food crop like that… if there's any T'Kai left to sell it to in a couple of years. The M'Sak won't give a damn about it?what forest nomads would?"
Marya knew about the grain project. "We're not just trying to save T'Kai out of altruism, Pavel," she said.
"Well, I was hoping not," he said. "Where's the profit in that?"
Greenberg clapped him on the back. He had the proper merchant's attitude. Now if only Jennifer could find a fraction of it in herself…
Quiet and smooth, the Flying Festoon rose into the air. The ground screen showed G'Bur with eyestalks that seemed more than fully extended, G'Bur pointing grasping-claws at the trade-ship, a few G'Bur running like hell even though starships had been visiting L'Rau every few years for a couple of generations now.
Jennifer noticed the excited locals only peripherally. The novel she was reading interested her much more than they did. Only when the Flying Festoon reached the five thousand meters she had preset did she reluctantly lower the reader and get around to the job she had been assigned.
Three drones dropped away from the ship and slowly flew off: northeast, due north, and northwest. One of them, Jennifer thought, ought to pick up the advancing M'Sak army. When it did, she would have more to handle. Until then, she could take it easy. She got out the reader and put it back on. The novel engrossed her again.
Prestarflight writers, she reflected, had one thing wrong about trading runs. Nobody in a novel ever complained about how boring they were. But then, she supposed, nobody set out to write a deliberately boring book.
Not for the first time, she wished she'd never gotten involved with real traders. But it had seemed such a good idea at the time. A whole little academic community specialized in comparing the imagined worlds of Middle English science fiction with the way things had actually happened. She'd always intended to join that community and, at the end of her sophomore year, she'd had a notion original enough to guarantee her tenure before she turned thirty?no mean trick, if she could pull it off.
She had reasoned that her competition?ivory-tower types, one and all?hardly knew more about how things really worked outside the university than the old SF writers had. If she spent a couple of years on real fieldwork and coupled that unique perspective with a high-powered degree, what doors would not open for her?
And so she'd taken a lot of xenanth courses her last two years. Some of them, to her surprise, were even interesting. When the crew of the Flying Festoon decided to carry an apprentice, there she was, ready and eager.