One of the Foitani from Odern gave Voskop W Wurd a headset. He screamed into it. Watching one of the radar tanks, Jennifer saw red sparks begin to move in unison with blue ones as both colors converged on a bigger white point of light.
Greenberg was watching the tank, too. He said, "The Rof Golani came here intending to smash up Gilver. They ought to be able to blow the tower into the middle of next week, no matter how big it is."
"Do we want them to?" Jennifer asked. "I know they say the old-time Foitani are evil and vicious, but as far as I can see, they're just acting the same way the modern ones do. And since when are aliens' sex lives any of our business?"
"I'd feel better about being neutral if we still had a way home in case the Great Ones wrecked the Harold Meeker," he answered. "As long as it's sitting outside this base, I'm for the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan."
"Something to that," Jennifer had to admit.
She and Greenberg did their best to stay out from underfoot as Foitani hurried this way and that. Jumping clear was all up to them, for the Foitani would not change directions for their sake. Jennifer wondered if that was because humans were too small for Foitani to bother noticing, or just because they were non-Foitani and therefore not worth dodging. Whichever way it was?she suspected the latter?she quickly learned to grow eyes in the back of her head to keep from getting trampled.
A Rof Golani ship abruptly vanished from the radar tank. Voskop W Wurd screamed something that the translator rendered as, "How extremely unfortunate." A good deal of juice seemed to have been squeezed out somewhere.
More ships started disappearing. No matter what sort of Foitani perverts crewed it, no matter that it had been grounded for twenty-eight thousand years, the ship that had been a tower was a formidable killing machine. Voskop W Wurd made noises suggesting a wild animal with a leg caught in a trap. Pawasar Pawasar Ras sounded calmer?that seemed the way on Odern?but no happier.
After a dismayingly short while, the course of the battle grew clear: the Great Ones were mopping up everything the modern Foitani could throw at them. Pawasar Pawasar Ras ordered one of his few surviving ships to break off and head back to Odern.
Voskop W Wurd yowled a phrase that sounded as if it would have made a pretty good operations order for the end of the world. "A cowardly act," the translator reported bloodlessly.
"By no means," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Suppose we are defeated and destroyed here. That will leave the kwopillot free to rampage through the Foitani sphere, with no one to know what they are until they come within smelling range. Our homeworlds must be warned. What I do is wisdom. Deny it if you may."
The Rof Golani warleader did not reply directly, but spoke into his headset. Before long, one of the red blips in the radar tank turned tail and boosted toward hyperdrive kick-in. Voskop W Wurd said no more about it. No Foitan Jennifer had ever seen was any good at admitting he was wrong.
"I just hope the Foitani sphere is all these revived Great Ones worry about for a while," Greenberg said. "If they have records of humans, they know where Earth is."
"They'd find out soon enough anyway, from dealing with the Foitani from Odern," Jennifer answered. It was not much consolation. One way or another, trouble was coming.
Trouble was, in fact, already here. The ship that had spent a geological epoch being a tower was still dreadfully efficient in its own role. Gallant to the end, the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan kept attacking long after they must have known they were doomed. Back on Earth, a long time ago, tribesmen had shown insane courage by charging straight at machine-gun nests. But for making them end up dead in gruesomely large numbers, their courage hadn't got them anything. Similar bravery served the Foitani no better now.
"Attack from space imminent," Pawasar Pawasar Ras called. "Prepare to resist to the end."
Jennifer was certain the Foitani would do just that. She was also certain the end had become quite imminent. She squeezed Bernard Greenberg's hand, hard. "I love you, too," she said. When the end comes, some words should not be left unspoken.
He hugged her. She hugged him, too. She did not care what the Foitani thought, not now. The only good thing she saw about being here was that the end would probably be quick. The Great Ones up there had overwhelming weapons and could hardly miss.
Voskop W Wurd said, "Get me a hand weapon, Oderna, that I may shoot at my slayers as they destroy me."
Jennifer watched the tower-ship in the radar tank. It hung overhead, an outsized sword of Damocles. Suddenly one of the communications screens lit up. A green-blue Foitani face peered out of it: a Great One. A technician spoke to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "Honored kin-group leader, the, ah, Foitan Solut Mek Kem would address you."
Jennifer's heart leaped. Surely one did not seek to address a person one was on the very point of destroying.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras saw things in a different light. He said, "So you have called to gloat, have you, kwopil?" Jennifer's hopes plunged as far and as fast as they had risen. Pawasar Pawasar Ras could not help knowing his own species, knowing what its members did and did not do.
The Great One called Solut Mek Kem said, "By your murderousness, I gather your kind still exists, vodran." Jennifer felt like screaming at the translator program for falling asleep on the words that really mattered. Meanwhile, Solut Mek Kem went on, "We all hoped earthgrip would have taken you by the time we returned to the sphere at large."
But for once, the problem was not the translator's fault. Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Vodran? I do not know this word, Solut Mek Kem."
Voskop W Wurd echoed him, less politely: "Trust the stinking kwopillot to come up with a foul-smelling name for proper people."
"You've grown old in depravity, to think it the proper state for Foitani," Solut Mek Kem said. "I see the race has had time to degenerate physically as well as morally, else our sphere would not be plagued with such hideous specimens as you."
Voskop W Wurd told the Great One what he?or was it she this time??could do to himself, in explicit anatomical detail. Jennifer did not think any of the suggestions sounded like much fun and did not think many were physically possible. Those limitations didn't bother humans in a temper, and they didn't bother Voskop W Wurd, either.
When the Rof Golani warleader ran down, Pawasar Pawasar Ras added, "You tax us with murderousness, yet outside this tower which is now a ship, you kwopillot wantonly slaughtered a great many Foitani, many of them unarmed and all of them mentally disabled by whatever means you employed to keep us from your precinct on Gilver."
"You are vodranet," Solut Mek Kem said. "You deserve no better. As I said, we had hoped our fellows would have exterminated you from the galaxy by the time we reawakened. Though I see it is not so, we shall join with the worlds of our kind and finish the job once and for all."
"What worlds of your own kind?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Kwopillot have no worlds. They merely plague true Foitani whenever a nest of them appears. This is so on every world where our kind survives, and has been so ever since the Suicide Wars cast our sphere down into barbarism."
"Lie all you like, vodran," the old-time Foitan said. "We could not have been destroyed in a few centuries."
Jennifer hurried over to Pawasar Pawasar Ras and tugged on the fur of his flank. "May I speak to the Great One?" she asked urgently.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras brushed her away, or tried to. She hung onto his massive arm. "Are you stricken mad?" he said. "Get away. This is not your concern."