"If you do that, you risk starting the war with the Great Ones again," Jennifer pointed out. "Not only that, you might antagonize the Foitani from Odern. Besides, we're just humans, remember? Do you expect any self-respecting Foitani to take seriously anything we say?"
"Probably not," Yulvot L Reat admitted, "nor do you deserve serious regard."
"Thank you so much, Yulvot L Reat," Jennifer said. "Out."
"You're getting to be able to handle them pretty well," Greenberg said.
"Bernard, I don't think that's necessarily a compliment. I just want to get into space again."
"Me, too. Stuck on the surface of Gilver like this, I've felt like a bug with a shoe poised over it. Once I'm flying on my own power, at least I'll have the illusion of being a free agent again, even if I'll still be under the guns of Vengeance."
The Harold Meeker lifted off a few minutes later. Jennifer watched the Foitani research base fall away. The screen's view expanded to pick up the Great Unknown. The precinct looked strange and incomplete without the central tower, as if all roads led, not to Rome, but to nowhere.
The sky quickly darkened toward black. Stars came out. Jennifer looked at the radar pickup. On the way in to Gilver, it had shown a hideously jumbled swarm of ships and missiles, their tracks and signals jammed to provide them the greatest possible protection. Now only one artificial object swung in space near Gilver: the Vengeance. On radar, it was only the palest of flickering ghosts.
"I'm just glad to see it at all," Greenberg said when Jennifer remarked on that. "If we couldn't pick it up, that would be bad news for human space."
A Great One sent a peremptory signal. "Approach slowly and directly, or you will be destroyed without further warning."
Jennifer acknowledged, then shut down the communicator and sighed. "They're such a charming race. I don't know what those CroMagnon people will do once we get them back, but we have to do it. The more I think, the more it looks like I couldn't live with myself if I just left them there in that Foitani database."
"I know what you mean," Greenberg answered. "At first, I didn't worry too much about it?they were in storage and weren't aware of anything that happened around them. But if the Foitani can call them up again and again, do what they want with them every time?test them to destruction if they've a mind to, which they probably do?I think we have to get a live copy back, and get the Great Ones to wipe the files so they can't make any more."
"Sounds good to me," Jennifer agreed. She didn't know what sort of deal they would have to make with the Great Ones to accomplish that. Whatever it was, that price needed paying. Sometimes profit didn't count for everything.
The Vengeance might have been more or less invisible to radar, but before long it showed up visually in the Harold Meeker's forward screen. It looked even bigger alone in space than attached to a planet… and no wonder. It wasn't the size of a spacecraft. It was the size of a baby asteroid?maybe even a toddler asteroid. It also bristled with weapons emplacements that hadn't been visible while it slept away the centuries on Gilver.
What worried Jennifer most was that the Vengeance was an artifact from the side that had lost the Suicide Wars. What sort of craft had the winners used? Whatever the answer, those ships were gone now, either destroyed in the war or turned on one another afterward. The Vengeance remained, huge and deadly and all alone, as if a last Tyrannosaurus rex had somehow been raised from the grave and turned loose in the jungle parks of modern Earth.
The abrupt voice came out of the speaker again. "Berth your vessel at the lock with the flashing amber light, non-Foitani."
Jennifer looked in the screen. The flashing amber light seemed bright enough to be visible down on Gilver, let alone from just a couple of kilometers away. She said, "They aren't crediting us with a whole lot of brains."
"We aren't Foitani. How could we have brains?" Greenberg answered. "They're giving us more credit than they think we deserve just by talking with us. For that matter, how smart are we? Here we are, going to dicker for specimens from our own race and for a way to keep the Suicide Wars from starting over, and what can we offer? What do we have that the Great Ones might want?"
It was a good question. As with a good many others lately, Jennifer would have admired it more had she had a good answer for it. She rocked back and forth in her seat, not so much concentrating as trying to relax and let her subconscious come up with one. In SF novels, inspiration was usually enough to let the hero make the story come out right.
Inspiration did not come. In any case, inspiration looked puny when set in the balance against the kilometers of deadliness of the Vengeance. A mammal in the jungle park might be more inspired than any Tyrannosaurus rex ever hatched, but that wouldn't keep it from getting eaten if the dinosaur decided to open his mouth and gulp.
A human in the jungle park, of course, would think about a weapon to use against a monster dinosaur. Put a character from a Don A. Stuart novel in that park and he would think of a weapon one day, build it the next, and eat Tyrannosaurus steak the day after that. The spacegoing Tyrannosaurus engulfing the Harold Meeker, unfortunately, had already thought of more weapons than any Don A. Stuart character ever born. The Foitani, whether ancient or modern, put a lot of effort into destructive capacity. If only they'd expended even a little more on learning how to get along with one another, they would have been much nicer people… and Jennifer wouldn't be coming aboard a spacecraft called Vengeance.
"If only…" Jennifer sighed. That was one of the ways old-time SF writers had gone about building a story. She wished it had more bearing in the real world.
The communicator spoke. "You may now exit your ship. You will find atmospheric pressure and temperature maintained at a level suitable for your species; at least, the specimens of your kind in our data store take no harm of it."
Jennifer's hands curled into fists. Those poor cave people were getting the guinea-pig treatment again, and then being?what? Killed? Just erased? She thought of the explorer in Rogue Moon, who died again and again as he worked his way through the alien artifact on the moon. She wondered if, like him, the CroMagnons in the Foitani data banks remembered each brief incarnation, each death. She hoped not.
"Atmospheric analysis," Greenberg told the Harold Meeker's computer. It, too, reported that the air was good. Greenberg said, "I don't trust the Foitani any further than I have to." He cocked a wry eyebrow. "If they do want to kill us, I guess they could manage it a lot more directly than lying about the air outside."
"I don't blame you for not trusting them," Jennifer said. "I don't, either. And they have something we want, too. I only wish we had something they needed."
"A way for them to live in peace no matter whom they go to bed with would be nice. You don't happen to have one anywhere concealed about your person, do you?"
"Let me look." Jennifer checked a pocket in her coveralls, then mournfully shook her head. Greenberg snorted. Jennifer said, "Shall we go see if we can get our own remote ancestors out of their clutches?and maybe even ourselves, too?"
"That would be nice," Greenberg said. He and Jennifer went through the air lock one after the other. They peered around. The Vengeance was so big that Jennifer didn't feel as if she were on a spacecraft; it was more as if the Harold Meeker had inadvertently landed in the middle of a good-sized town.