"Me, too." Greenberg reached out to take her hand. She squeezed back. The contact was reassuring. She knew?she thought she knew?it was real.
A Great One stuck his head through the hole. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders to go through, but he managed to squeeze out. Jennifer wished Pawasar Pawasar Ras hadn't listened to her or to Aissur Aissur Rus. Here were the warriors of a long-forgotten day, free on Gilver once more.
One of the Great Ones pointed his weapon at Jennifer and Greenberg. He urged them toward the hole they'd made. They went. Greenberg scrambled out first. Jennifer came after him a moment later.
The Great One goosed her with his weapon to make her go faster. She squawked and almost fell as she popped out of the hole. Greenberg helped steady her, then moved her away from the opening before the next Foitan came through and stepped on her.
Imperial Foitani kept emerging. Jennifer wondered if the alarm had rung all through the tower, and how many Great Ones had been in suspended animation or whatever they used. She thought again of Pawasar Pawasar Ras's worries and how she'd pooh-poohed them. If she ever got the chance, she'd apologize to the kin-group leader.
No Foitani from Rof Golan had been within a couple of hundred meters of where the Great Ones were coming out. The gray-blue soldiers, caught in the spell of the Great Unknown, gaped as their green-blue forebears came out of what might have looked to them like solid rock.
Jennifer waited for the Rof Golani to fell to their knees and worship the returned Great Ones, or to perform some equivalent ritual. The Rof Golani pointed at the newcomers, shouting among themselves. One of them yelled something toward the revived imperial Foitani. A Great One answered. Without hesitation, the Foitani from Rof Golan began running toward the Foitani who had come out of the tower.
And, without hesitation, the Great Ones methodically began shooting them down. Most of the Foitani from Rof Golan were too befuddled to use their own weapons, but their bared teeth, outstretched claws, and bellows of fury said what they thought of the Great Ones. But that wholehearted hatred availed them not at all, for the imperial Foitani calmly continued their massacre.
One Rof Golani somehow kept enough presence of mind to remember he carried a weapon more lethal than those with which he'd been born. Bullets ricocheted from the wall just above the Great Ones' heads. Jennifer and Greenberg threw themselves flat. A moment later, an imperial Foitan killed the only gray-blue soldier who'd seriously tried to fight back.
Slowly, Jennifer got to her feet. The precinct that contained the Great Unknown seemed to sway around her. Her view of the Foitani was rocking, too. Far from reverencing the Great Ones, the Foitani from Rof Golan had tried to kill them on sight. The Great Ones hadn't wasted any time returning the favor, either, and by all indications so far, they were a lot deadlier than the Rof Golani.
An old-time Foitan walked over to the nearest Rof Golani corpse and stared down at it. Jennifer wished she were better at reading Foitani facial expressions. Then the Foitan removed all doubt about what he was thinking. As Enfram Enfram Marf had with Jennifer, he drew back his leg for a kick. Unlike Enfram Enfram Marf, he didn't stop himself. He kicked the dead Rof Golani as hard as he could. The body had to weigh something close to two hundred kilos. The kick rolled it over, twice.
Several other Great Ones abused the bodies of the Foitani from Rof Golan. One picked up the weapon the Rof Golani had managed to fire. He examined it for more than a minute, then threw it aside with unmistakable scorn. His own hand weapon emitted a beam of some sort; but for being dead, the Rof Golani looked fine.
Off in the western distance, the explosions round the research base of the Foitani from Odern kept rumbling. Fliers clashed above it: Rof Golani attacking, Foitani from Odern defending. A Great One pointed his weapon at one of those fliers. It was more than a dozen kilometers away, but it twisted in midair and crashed to the ground with a flash of purple light.
The rest of the old-time Foitani began swatting fliers out of the air as easily as if they'd been flies. Jennifer watched in appalled perplexity as the machines tumbled. "What's going on?" she demanded of Bernard Greenberg, who had no more answers than she did. "The Foitani from Odern practically worshiped the ground the Great Ones used to live on. No matter what they said about the Rof Golani, they never said the Rof Golani hated the Great Ones, either. But they do." She looked at the sprawled corpses, shuddered, and looked away. "And the Great Ones hate them, too. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing?this." She spread her hands in an all-encompassing gesture.
"Tell me about it," he said. He looked away from the carnage, too. "From what we've seen of the way Foitani treat other races, I'm glad they didn't just shoot us down without asking questions first."
One of the Great Ones swung his head around to glare at the two humans. By the way he hefted his weapon, he wasn't far from doing what Greenberg had feared. He wrapped a hand around his muzzle so it closed his mouth, pointed first at Jennifer, then at Greenberg. Shut up, she figured out, and obeyed. Greenberg didn't say anything more, either.
The old-time Foitani?by now a couple of dozen of them might have been outside the tower?spread out into what looked like a skirmish line. One of them pointed west, toward the sound of fighting… and toward the research base of the Foitani from Odern. The whole band started moving in that direction.
By the way they set out, fifteen kilometers was a stroll in the park for them. Jennifer looked longingly toward her sledge. The Foitan who'd warned her to be quiet gestured with his weapon?that way. She sighed and went that way after the Great Ones.
The old-time Foitani strode along at a pace that suited them fine, which meant it was uncomfortably quick for Jennifer. She kept up anyhow, and so did Greenberg. The Great One who was covering them looked as if he'd happily get rid of them if they slowed him down.
She looked around behind her, wondering if more imperial Foitani were issuing from the central tower. They were, but by ones and twos rather than by hundreds and thousands as she'd feared. They were quite bad enough by ones and twos.
By the time the leading Great Ones neared the edge of the radius of insanity, both their human captives were panting and footsore. Another few kilometers like that, Jennifer thought, and she'd look forward to being shot. Her coveralls were soaked with sweat; it ran stinging into her eyes and dripped from her chin.
Unlike the Foitani from Rof Golan, the Great Ones seemed immune to sweat. They tramped down the processionway as if on parade. Jennifer's uneasy vision of old-time Foitani leading defeated aliens in triumph came back to her. All that made this seem different from a small-scale version of it was that they were walking away from the tower, not toward it.
Even after the processionway ended, the imperial Foitani strode grandly along. A gnarled shrub grew by their line of march. Jennifer thought nothing of that at first. Then she realized it meant they were out of the precinct of the Great Unknown, for no plants lived within it.
Ahead, the firelight between the Rof Golani and the Foitani from Odern continued. Both sides had to be going crazy, wondering what had happened to their fliers. Jennifer thought the Great Ones were crazy too. She turned her head toward Greenberg and muttered, "Do they think they're bulletproof, or what?"
"I don't know," Greenberg muttered back, soft enough so as not to earn the wrath of their watchdog. "I know I'm not, though."
Just then, the communicator in his pocket spoke up in loud, clear, translated Spanglish. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Thegun Thegun Nug. You will tell me immediately who those strange Foitani with you are. You will also tell me whether they are in any way responsible for the difficulties our aircraft have encountered over the last few minutes."