They came to within three strides of the armored leader before stopping. "Sk-(cough)-ssst-tssmss-(cough)-mts-os-mss," one of the newcomers said, gesturing toward the Zhirrzh with the slender tentacles edging his mouth. "Sk-pss-mtss-hrss'mss-(cough)-kss."
The leader of the war party answered in kind. One of the other newcomers spoke and was answered. "What are they saying?" Thrr-gilag whispered.
"I'm not entirely sure," Klnn-dawan-a answered. "They're talking much faster than I'm used to. But it sounds like the warriors want the grazing party to join them. The grazing party is refusing."
Thrr-gilag looked at the three Chig, an odd feeling of warmth rippling through him. "They're on our side?"
"Hardly," Klnn-dawan-a said shortly. "They just don't want to risk bringing reprisals down on themselves."
The warm feeling evaporated. "Oh."
"Don't take it personally," Klnn-dawan-a advised. "There aren't any Chig anywhere who really like us."
Typical bad losers, in other words. All the more contemptible given that they were the ones who'd started the war in the first place. "So why are they still talking?"
Klnn-dawan-a shrugged. "The war-party leader is still trying to talk the others into coming along. The others just want to get their whelp back and go home."
The conversation droned on. Thrr-gilag found himself studying the two different crossbow styles: the multishot repeaters carried by the war party, the much simpler two-shot models of the mountain Chig. If it came to a fight...
But it wouldn't. As Klnn-dawan-a said, none of the Chig liked the Zhirrzh. All they were talking here was varying degrees of hatred. "I wish they'd give it up," he muttered. "Let the grazing party go and get on with it."
"I know," Klnn-dawan-a agreed, her voice frowning. "It's almost as if they were stalling."
Abruptly, she stiffened. "Of course they're stalling," she said. "They're worried about the warships."
Thrr-gilag felt his midlight pupils narrow. Of course—the Zhirrzh encirclement forces. Five warships filled with the best high-power monitoring telescopes in existence. Orbiting slowly over the Gree landscape, watching everything that happened there. "Are any of them overhead right now?"
"I don't know," Klnn-dawan-a said. "I don't know the orbit pattern."
"I'll bet the war party does," Thrr-gilag said, thinking furiously. That must have been what the three Chig were discussing just before the grazing party showed up: whether or not they were in view. The last thing they would want at this point would be for the orbiting warriors to see them kidnap a pair of Zhirrzh. Or, worse, to see them raise those same Zhirrzh to Eldership.
And the fact that they were still talking would imply the group was under at least one of those distant telescopes right now....
Klnn-dawan-a must have sensed something from his posture. "What is it?" she asked, half turning to frown at him.
"Just thinking," Thrr-gilag muttered, glancing up at the occasional fish-scale clouds scattered across the otherwise clear sky. The Chig eye, if he remembered correctly, was supposed to be incapable of seeing the darklight laser frequencies that Zhirrzh stingers operated at. If he eased his stinger to point straight up and fired it...
"What are you thinking?" Klnn-dawan-a asked.
"About trying to call for help," Thrr-gilag told her. All right. The laser, he knew, would sizzle the water in the air as the beam passed through it, producing secondary radiations within the Chigin vision range as well as a certain amount of sound. But in bright sunlight, and with the wind blowing strongly off the mountains and across the stream toward them, there was a fair chance that both the light and the sound would go unnoticed. Particularly with the bulk of the Chig attention on the grazing party.
"Thrr-gilag, are you crazy?" Klnn-dawan-a hissed. "You want to make Elders out of both of us?"
"Quiet," he hissed back, not daring to look at the three Chig still guarding them. All right. He didn't remember very much of the flash-code he and Thrr-mezaz had memorized back when they were children, but every Zhirrzh knew the old three-two-three emergency signal. Carefully, trying not to let the movement show, he turned the stinger to point straight up between him and Klnn-dawan-a. Taking a deep breath, he keyed for full power and adjusted his thumbs on the triggers—
And with a crack of a supersonic shock wave, a Zhirrzh transport shot over the hilltops and blazed past overhead.
One of the Chig screeched, a high-pitched howl that dug like knives into Thrr-gilag's ear slits. An instant later he found himself sprawled on the ground, his legs having collapsed ignominiously beneath him. With one hand he was gripping Klnn-dawan-a's jumpsuit, dragging her bodily down beside him; with the other hand he still clutched his stinger. All around him the air was alive with the thunder of the transport, the sizzling of laser shots, the sharp multiple snap of crossbow threads. The Chig and their whelps were howling madly; and over all of it he could hear Klnn-dawan-a screaming something. Pulling her tightly against him, he fired his stinger, sweeping it blindly around them. There was a crack of stressed ceramic as the beam caught the side of the floater—a sudden stab of pain slashing across the side of his head—the stinger swinging randomly toward the ground as he flinched away from the pain—
And then a new roaring sound abruptly joined the pandemonium around them. A sizzling roar, followed instantly by a violent, blinding rush of dense steam.
Unexpectedly, certainly without planning on his part, the beam from his stinger had found the creek. Bracing himself, squeezing his eyes shut against the scalding cloud, Thrr-gilag kept firing.
The Chig were still howling, but the howl had taken on a note of desperation. Buffeted and burned by the wind-driven steam, their enemies effectively shrouded from view, they must have known they had lost. But still they fought, until all the howls had been silenced.
And Klnn-dawan-a's desperate, pleading scream was all that was left.
The battlefield, once Thrr-gilag was finally able to get a good look at it, was horrifying.
Dead Chig and whelps littered the ground, some with their limbs twisted at bizarre angles, all crisscrossed with the blackened lines of laser burns. A group of Zhirrzh moved back and forth across the carnage, going silently about the grim task of collecting the dead.
And at one edge of it stood Klnn-dawan-a. Her face as dead as those of the Chig.
She didn't look up as Thrr-gilag stepped over to her. "Hey," he said softly, touching her shoulder. "You all right?"
"They killed them all," she said, her voice as dead as her expression. "All of them. Even the grazing party."
Thrr-gilag nodded. "I know."
"The grazing party wasn't even doing anything," she said. "They weren't bothering anyone."
"I know," Thrr-gilag said again with a sigh. That wasn't how the transport's pilot and Director Prr-eddsi were going to report it, of course. That much he'd been able to figure out from the snatches of conversation he'd heard while the healer had patched up his head wound. Prr-eddsi was going to report it as a coordinated Chig attack, with a violent but necessary Zhirrzh response.
Thrr-gilag and Klnn-dawan-a knew better. Not that anyone was likely to listen. Or was likely to care.
"We're finished here," Klnn-dawan-a said, looking slowly across the bodies. "Our chrysalis studies, our whelp examinations—all of it. Gone, just like that. The Chig up here will never trust us or cooperate with us again."
"Maybe," Thrr-gilag agreed. "But if the warship hadn't spotted us when it did and sent the transport over, we'd be Elders by now. You think that would have left your relationship with the Chig in any better shape?"
"No," Klnn-dawan-a conceded. "Certainly not after the reprisals were finished with." She turned and looked at him, wincing as her gaze came to rest on his bandage. "I'm sorry, Thrr-gilag. I didn't even think to ask about your wound."