That was Thegun Thegun Nug all the way, Jennifer thought: whatever he wanted, he ordered the humans to deliver immediately. He also had a gift for opening his mouth at just the wrong time.
The Great One who'd kept Jennifer and Greenberg from talking with each other snarled at them and held out his hand for the communicator. Greenberg gave it to him. He held it close to his face for a moment, as if figuring out how it worked. Then he spoke into it in sharp, abrupt tones.
Silence stretched. Jennifer wondered how a Foitani translator system that was geared to handling Spanglish would deal with suddenly getting its own tongue back. After a moment, she also wondered how close the language the Foitani from Odern used really was to the speech of the Great Ones.
Evidently it was close enough, for Thegun Thegun Nug seemed to understand it. The first part of his reply came back in Spanglish. "We greet you, Great Ones, returned to the world at last after so long. We shall serve you to the best of our ability and obey you in all regards, for we?"
The translator program suddenly went out of the circuit. Thegun Thegun Nug's own voice came over the communicator. Even speaking for themselves, Foitani from Odern seldom sounded excited. Thegun Thegun Nug was no exception. "If I witnessed the Second Coming, I think I'd show a little more feeling than that," Jennifer complained to Greenberg.
"The Foitani have been waiting ten times as long as Christians," he answered. "Maybe after twenty-eight thousand years, some of the rush has gone out of it."
"Maybe," Jennifer said. But her own reference to the Second Coming rang a bell in the scholarly part of her mind. What rough beasts were these old-time Foitani, slouching out of the Great Unknown to be reborn? She looked up to the sky, which still had no fliers in it. She shivered. The old-time Foitani might be very rough indeed.
Somewhere much too close, a Rof Golani hand weapon barked. Bullets shouted past. Jennifer went flat and tried to claw holes in the ground with her nails. She couldn't call this combat, because she had nothing with which to shoot back. But by now she knew what to do when somebody started shooting at her. So did Greenberg, who might have hit the dirt a split second before she did.
One of the Great Ones was down, too, down and shrieking. His blood was even redder than Jennifer's. His comrades cried out. A couple of them stooped beside him to give what help they could. It wasn't much. His screams went on and on.
The rest of the imperial Foitani did as Jennifer and Greenberg had?they dove to the ground. But they were armed, and armed with weapons more terrible than any mere firearms. With dreadful thoroughness, they turned those weapons on one possible spot of cover after another, as far as the eye could see.
A few more bullets came their way, but only a few. They stopped all at once. The silence that settled round the Great Ones was punctuated only by the cries of their wounded comrade.
Jennifer didn't yet dare to raise her head, but she did turn to face Bernard Greenberg. "Looks like it's going to be the old-time Foitani and the ones from Odern against the Rof Golani," she said.
"I'd say the Rof Golani are in big trouble," he answered. He lowered his voice. "I'd say we are, too. I don't mean just you and me, I mean everybody."
"I know what you mean," she answered as quietly. "I've already decided I'm going to tell Pawasar Pawasar Ras that I'm sorry." But she suspected that by then, Pawasar Pawasar Ras would be happy to see the Great Ones out and loose, not afraid of them any more. Thegun Thegun Nug had all but groveled to them on the communicator, at least in the brief part of that conversation that had been in Spanglish.
The wounded Great One's shrieks shrank to gurgles. He had an amazing amount of blood in his body; the spreading puddle was a couple of meters wide. One of the other imperial Foitani spoke to him. He gasped out an answer. The second Great One touched his weapon to the wounded one's head. The wounded one jerked and lay still.
"What are they doing?" Jennifer said, more than a little sickened. "He just killed him. The old-time Foitani have to have the medical technology to save him. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here after so long in cold sleep, if they use cold sleep. So why did he kill him instead of helping him or getting him back to the tower where he could be worked on properly?"
"Maybe he only stunned him," Greenberg said. "We don't know what all their weapons can do."
"That's true, we don't." Jennifer mentally kicked herself for jumping to a conclusion. Just because the Great Ones had done their level best to exterminate every Rof Golani Foitan within range of their weapons, that didn't have to mean they were as callous among themselves.
But everything she'd learned about the imperial Foitani argued that they might well be. Races with gentle, tender dispositions didn't make a habit?maybe even a sport?of genocide. They didn't fight Suicide Wars, either, for that matter. And the way the Great Ones tramped on and left behind the one who'd been shot argued that they had no further use for him. They were, as Jennifer had long since concluded, not nice people.
The communicator spoke up again. Jennifer caught Pawasar Pawasar Ras's name in the middle of a lot of unintelligible Foitani chatter. Her spirits rose slightly. Maybe the administrator's good sense would warn him not to trust the Great Ones too completely.
"Maybe," Greenberg said when she spoke that thought aloud; their keeper seemed more willing now to let the two humans talk. He didn't sound as if he believed it, though. He kept looking back toward where the one old-time Foitan had been shot. He obviously didn't believe the Foitan was just stunned any more either.
The sun set when the imperial Foitani were still a couple of kilometers from the research base. By the way they glared at the western horizon, they looked about ready to order it to come back up and keep lighting their way. Jennifer knew a moment's fear it might obey them, too.
But however great they were, the Great Ones had no Joshua among them. They did the next best thing: they surrounded themselves with glowing globes that filled their camp with a light about as bright as daylight.
"That's all very well if they don't have any enemies left out there," Greenberg observed, "but if they do, the only way I can think of to make themselves more conspicuous would be to paint 'shoot me' on their backs in big fluorescent letters."
In spite of everything that had happened through a long, exhausting, terrifying day, Jennifer found herself giggling. She dug out a plastic pouch of Foitani kibbles and crunched a handful between her teeth. "These things had better have all the nutrients humans need in them," she said, "because I've used up just about everything that used to be in me."
"You and me both." Greenberg pulled off his shoes and stared at his feet. "I keep waiting for them to swell up right before my eyes."
"Me, too," Jennifer said. She shed her shoes, too, and sighed in exquisite relief as she wiggled her toes. "I didn't come out here set up to hike." She swigged from her canteen. She would have killed for a cold glass of beer; warm, rather stale water was at the moment a more than adequate substitute.
Greenberg also ate some Foitani people chow. He washed it down with his own water. "Better?a little better," he said. "If they're going to the research base tomorrow, at least they won't walk our legs off, Jennifer… Jennifer?"
Jennifer didn't answer him. She hadn't heard him. She lay sprawled on her side in the dirt, fast asleep.
The old imperial Foitani must have eliminated or at least intimidated the Rof Golani on the ground, for Jennifer woke up the next morning. At first, she wasn't sure she liked the idea; she felt almost as bad as she had after Thegun Thegun Nug stunned her.