An object was tossed into the room: a dull silver orb the size of my fist, sailing in a lazy arc upward, then down toward the floor. The object had WEAPON written all over it… not literally (as far as I could see) but I knew something unpleasant would happen when it struck the ground. I squinched quickly behind the crate of ingots, putting all that heavy platinum between me and the silver ball. However, because I was still trying to keep silent, I did not move quite speedily enough — my right arm and shoulder were still exposed when the ball hit the floor with a clink.
I did not see or hear any spectacular result — no flash, no explosive boom. My unprotected arm simply went numb from shoulder to fingertips. I could see the arm was still there, but it had no sensation at all. Even worse, it had no strength; and that was the hand which had been holding the platinum ingot. Before I realized the danger, the ingot slipped from my limp fingers and dropped to the ground.
Clunk!
So much for lurking in secret. Without hesitation, I let forth a gasp of Poignant Distress and slumped into an aesthetically pleasing sprawl on the floor. Since I had accidentally revealed my presence to the Shaddill, I would let them believe they had bested me with their numbness device; that way they might not embark upon more drastic action to overpower me or my comrades. When they came to collect my unconscious body, I could still take them by surprise and rain punches on their villainous noses.
I lay where I was, cleverly opening my eyes in tiny slits to observe what was going on. At first, I saw nothing; but I heard heavy footsteps walk cautiously out of the airlock and advance in my direction.
None of my hidden comrades attacked. I did not know if they had fallen victim to numbness themselves or if they had been sufficiently shielded behind crates and were simply biding their time, waiting for the Shaddill to advance farther into the room. It was also possible there were multiple Shaddills to consider — if a single one ventured into the receiving bay while others remained in the airlock to provide covering fire, the situation required delicate handling. As for me, all I could do was lie still and wait… until I saw a pair of feet step around a box some four paces away.
They appeared to be human feet. More precisely, they were feet wearing human-style boots — very much like the boots both Festina and Aarhus wore.
Sturdy navy-issue boots.
A Ghastly Realization
The boots took a step toward me. My head lay at an angle that prevented me from seeing more than the person’s legs… but they looked very much like human legs enclosed in human trousers. Gray trousers. Gray trousers exactly like Festina’s — the color that denotes an admiral in the human fleet.
I suspected this was not just an Eerie Coincidence.
The person in gray made rustling noises: I could not see what this person was doing, but it sounded as if he or she was rooting inside a jacket pocket. Then a man’s voice said in conversational tones, "It’s Oar. We’ve got her."
No doubt he was speaking to someone else via a communication device. This in itself was enough to give me chills — confirmation that these people were looking for me in particular. But even more terrifying was how he spoke: not in English, but in my own language. The tongue I had learned from infancy, the language of my mother and my sister and all the teaching machines on Melaquin.
Suddenly, I had a terrible thought. Those teaching machines had been built by the Shaddill… and I knew our current language was not what my ancestors spoke when they first arrived from Earth.
What if all this time — from my very birth and from the births of untold generations of my glass predecessors — we had been speaking the Shaddill’s own tongue? What if they had created the teaching machines to make us over in their own image? Our flesh-and-blood ancestors could not have prevented it; they were mortals who died in their natural time, and after that, our only instructors were the machines. Perhaps somewhere on Melaquin, in some well-lit Ancestral Tower, members of the first glass generation still remembered words from ancient human tongues… but those ancestors had not made sufficient effort to pass on the words to subsequent generations, and now we were thoroughly immersed in the language of our enemy.
In a horrid way, I was a Shaddill.
I hoped that beneath the gray pants, the man in front of me did not have glass legs.
I Make First Contact With The Shaddill
The man stepped closer. Indeed, he came near enough to nudge me with his foot. I let him do so; he gave a satisfied grunt, then turned away. That was the moment I swept my right leg in front of his ankles, while kicking at the back of his knees with my other foot. His knees buckled most satisfactorily — he fell backward on top of me, his head striking my stomach with a satisfying thump.
It was an Earthling head with genuine hair. Not my lovely glass species at all.
My right arm was still entirely numb. However, I threw my left around the man’s throat in an arm-bar and squeezed tight. He tried to yell, but could draw no air. Desperately, he grabbed my arm with both hands and tried to pull it away. If I had possessed a functional right hand to reinforce the armbar, he never would have pried me loose. As it was, he still had to work hard for it — after five seconds, he was just able to inhale, readying himself for a shout, when a large orange hand clamped down hard on his mouth.
Lajoolie. I had not heard the tiniest whisper of her approach.
She was not quite so silent in finishing the man off — one cannot throw eight successive palm-heels into a man’s solar plexus without making noticeable thumps, not to mention the "Whuf!" sounds that emerge from a man’s mouth no matter how thoroughly you have him muffled — but the noises were scuffly and vague, rather than clear-cut evidence of a fight. If other persons were listening, I hoped they would think the man was merely struggling to drag my unconscious body out into the open… and indeed, a moment later, a woman’s voice called, "Do you need a hand with her?"
Lajoolie looked at me helplessly. The words had been spoken in my own language; Lajoolie did not know what had been said, and no doubt feared it was something like, "I know you have pummeled my partner, and now I will shoot you like dogs."
I gave Lajoolie a reassuring smile and called back in a throaty whisper, "Yes, come help." One would never pretend it sounded exactly like the man, but my performance was good enough to fool the unseen woman — her footsteps came slowly out of the airlock, moving in our direction.
As she approached, there was time to inspect the man Lajoolie and I had just bludgeoned. His hair was jet black, cut close to the skull, and he sported a fussily trimmed goatee; his skin was golden, about halfway between Aarhus’s light pinkness and Festina’s deep tan. As for his clothes, they were indeed a Technocracy admiral’s uniform — something that raised important questions, but I had no time to ponder such issues. The man’s female colleague would soon be upon us and…
And…
The man was not breathing. In fact, he had gone quite limp; I could not remember him moving so much as an eyelid since Lajoolie finished hitting him.
Oh dear, I thought, the League of Peoples is not going to like this.
I Make Second Contact With The Shaddill
The man’s female partner was almost upon us. Silently, Lajoolie slipped out of sight behind the crate of platinum. As for me, I was left as I had been while trying to choke the foe: lying on my back with the man slumped on top of me.