The room Joshua and Rynstadt had been assigned to had been dark and quiet for nearly half an hour by the time Justin finally unhooked himself from the direct feed apparatus and rolled stiffly to a sitting position on his couch. The
Dewdrop's lounge, too, was quiet, its only other occupant a dozing Pyre. Justin moved carefully, working the kinks out of his muscles as he walked toward the door.
"There's food by the corner terminal if you're hungry."
Justin looked back to see Pyre stretch his arms out with a sigh and straighten up in his chair. "Didn't mean to wake you," he apologized, changing direction toward the tray the other had mentioned.
"S'okay. I'm not actually on duty, anyway-I just wanted to wait till you were up, make sure you were doing okay."
"I'm fine." Justin sat down beside the other Cobra, balancing the tray on his knees as he attacked the food. "So... what do you think?"
"Oh, hell, I don't know," Pyre sighed. "I'm not sure we can take anything they say or do at face value. That mayor, for instance. Is he really some throwback to the old despot tradition, or was all of that set up to confuse us? Or is that really the way they conduct business here?"
"Oh, come on," Justin growled around a mouthful of fried balis. "Who could concentrate in a din like that?"
"It was only a din because you're not used to it," Pyre said. "The music could actually have a calming effect on the brain's emotional activity, allowing the people in there to think more logically."
Justin replayed the scene in his mind. Possible, he decided-those hunched over the low tables had been doing something. And the smoke-? "Supplemented by tranquilizing drugs, maybe?"
"Could be. I wish we'd had some sampling equipment in there to run a quick analysis on the air." He snorted. "Though a lot of good it would have done."
Justin grimaced. Every bit of the contact team's recording and analysis equipment had been politely but firmly confiscated during their hospital examination. The best Cerenkov's protests had done was to elicit Moff's promise that the gear would be returned when they left. "I was locked into Joshua's sensors at the time, but I have the impression Governor Telek was pretty mad about that."
"That's putting it mildly. She was on the edge of a full-fledged tantrum." Pyre shook his head slowly. "But I think maybe she was right, that this is looking less and less like it's going to work. Yuri can't find out anything the Qasamans want to keep hidden, not with Moff steering them around like tame porongs and his equipment buried in some back room somewhere. And we sure can't do anything ourselves stuck out here."
Justin eyed him suspiciously. "Are you leading up to the suggestion that someone take a little midnight stroll in a day or two?"
"I don't know how else to find out their true threat potential," Pyre shrugged.
"And if we're caught at it?"
"Trouble, of course. Which is why the operation would have to be handled by someone who knew what he was doing."
"In other words, one of the Cobras or Decker. And since we're in plain view and
Decker is both watched and unarmed, not getting caught starts sounding a bit unlikely."
Pyre shrugged. "At the moment, you're right. But maybe something will change."
He gave Justin a long look. "And in that event... you weren't supposed to know this, but Decker isn't unarmed. He's carrying a breakapart palm-mate dart gun with him."
"He's what? Almo, they said no weapons. If they catch him with that-"
"He'll be in serious trouble," Pyre finished for him. "I know. But Decker didn't want the party completely helpless, and the gun did make it through the big inspection okay."
"As far as you know."
"He's still got it."
Justin sighed. "Great. I hope the Marines taught him patience as well as marksmanship."
"I'm sure they did," Pyre grunted, pushing himself to his feet with an ease that was probably due solely to his implanted servos. "I'm going to crash for a few hours-if you're smart you'll do likewise after your exercises."
"Yeah," Justin said with a yawn. "Before you do, though, has the governor said when she's going to call Joshua back in for our switch?"
Pyre paused halfway to the door, a look of chagrin flicking across his face.
"Actually... her current plan is to go ahead and leave Joshua out there for the foreseeable future."
"What?" Justin stared at him. "That's not what we planned."
"I know," Pyre shrugged helplessly. "I pointed that out to her-rather strongly, in fact. But the situation seems pretty stable at the moment and...."
"And she likes having Joshua's visual transmission too much to give it up. Is that it?"
Pyre sighed. "You can hardly blame her. She'd wanted the whole contact team implanted with those optical sensors, I understand, and been turned down on grounds of cost-split-frequency transmitters that small are expensive to make.
And now with all our other eyes taken away, Joshua's all we've got left if we want to see what's going on." He held up a hand soothingly. "Look, I know how you feel, but try not to worry about him. The Qasamans are hardly going to attack them now without a good reason."
"I suppose you're right." Justin thought for a moment, but there didn't seem anything else to be said. "Well... good night."
" 'Night."
Pyre left, and Justin flexed his arms experimentally. Thirteen hours in the couch had indeed left the muscles stiff, but he hardly noticed the twinges as his thoughts latched onto Pyre's last comment. Without a good reason... but what would constitute such a reason in the Qasamans' minds? An aggressive act or comment on Cerenkov's part? Discovery that the ostensibly voice-only radio link to the ship also had a split-freq channel that was carrying the visual images they'd obviously tried to suppress? Violent use of York's illegal gun? Or perhaps even the outside reconnaissance Pyre had clearly already decided on?
Eyes on the darkened display, Justin settled into his exercises, pushing his body harder than he'd originally intended to.
Chapter 9
With less need for immediate debarkation-and more comfort and room aboard ship in which to wait-the Menssana's passengers didn't bother with filter helmets, but simply stayed inside until the atmospheric analyzers confirmed the air of
Planet Chata was indeed safe for human use.
Long tradition gave Jonny, as senior official aboard, the honor of being the first human being to step out on the new world's surface; but Jonny had long since learned to put discretion before pomp, and the honor was claimed by one of the six Cobras who went out to set up a sensor/defense perimeter about the ship.
Once again the passengers waited; but when an hour of Cobra work failed to entice any predators out of the nearby woods-or to flush out anything obviously dangerous within the perimeter itself-Team Leader Rey Banyon declared the
Menssana's immediate area to be safe enough for the civilians.
Jonny and Chrys were near the end of the general exodus of scientists through the Menssana's main hatch. For Jonny it was a step into his own distant past.
Chata looked nothing at all like Aventine, really; certainly not after even a cursory examination of plant life and landscape. Yet the simple fact of Chata's strangeness relative to Aventine's by-now familiarity gave the two experiences an identity. A new world, untouched by man-
"Brings back memories, doesn't it?" Chrys murmured at his side.
Jonny took a deep breath, savoring the almost spicy aromas wafting in along the light breeze. "Like Aventine when I first arrived," he said, shaking his head slowly. "A kid of twenty-five, just about overwhelmed by the sheer scope of what we were trying to do there. I'd forgotten how it all felt... forgotten what all of us have really accomplished in the past forty years."
"It'll be harder to do it again," Chrys said. Dropping to one knee, she gently fingered the mat of interlaced vine-like plants that seemed to be the local version of grass. "Chata may only be thirty light-years from Aventine, but we don't have anything like the Dominion's transport capability. It hardly makes sense to spend our resources this direction with so much of Aventine and