"I have nothing to say right now about CIRCE," he told Cvv-panav. "Except that it's something that must be kept secret."
Cvv-panav smiled. "In other words, you still have hopes that your warriors will prevail out there and bring me down. Very well; I can wait. When word comes that my people have completed their mission and successfully vanished into the darkness of latearc, perhaps you'll recognize that your choices are between a private briefing or a public battle."
"Perhaps," the Prime said. "Or perhaps an entirely different word will come to you. Shall we wait here together and see?"
Cvv-panav eyed him, the first hint of uncertainty flicking across his face. "Certainly," he said. "Why not."
It was Thrr-aamr, all right, lying there in a crumpled heap at the base of the predator fence. Unconscious, a swelling lump already forming at the base of his skull where he'd been hit. Beside him was a neat cut in the mesh of the fence, just big enough for a Zhirrzh to crawl through, directly over the steepest part of the bluff.
Someone had penetrated the enclosure.
Thrr-tulkoj swore again, this time meaning it, as he dropped flat on the ground beside Thrr-aamr and swung his laser rifle around to firing position. He couldn't see anything moving or radiating near the shrine, but that didn't prove much. He—or they—could be around on the far side of the shrine right now, out of Thrr-tulkoj's sight. Besides, intruders clever enough to breach the fence at the one spot no protector would ever expect trouble would certainly be clever enough to be wearing darklight-suppressing combat suits while they did it.
They would also be clever enough to crawl across the ground, lest someone watching from the protectors' domes spotted them. Which would take time. Which meant that unless Thrr-aamr had happened to have the misfortune of catching them on their way out, the intruders were most likely still here.
Pressed against the ground, his tail spinning rapidly, Thrr-tulkoj peered across the open ground and wondered what in the eighteen worlds he was going to do. The simplest, most straightforward thing would be to shout as loud as he could and hope that at least some of the Elders on this side of the shrine would hear him. If he could get a warning into the Elder community, the whole planet could be aroused in a matter of hunbeats.
But there was no guarantee that his voice would carry well enough against the latearc breezes for anyone to hear him. Except maybe the intruders. And if they were armed—and they almost certainly were—then at the first sign of trouble from him they would do their best to raise him to Eldership.
Thrr-tulkoj wasn't afraid of Eldership. The threat of premature raising was supposed to come with this job. But if he was raised now, it would leave the Elders and the shrine completely defenseless.
Steady, he told himself firmly, pressing closer against Thrr-aamr. Think it through. You're a trained protector, and you're a long way from being helpless here. Think it through.
He should have used the loudspeaker right at the beginning, of course. In backsight that was painfully clear. But the procedures stated explicitly that the Elders were not to be alerted in cases of suspected intrusion, probably because every such incident for the past hundred cyclics had turned out to be a false alarm. Thrr-tulkoj had hit the direct-link emergency signal mounted to the side of the dome before heading over here; the fact that there hadn't yet been a response from Cliffside Dales implied that the intruders must have cut the cable somewhere before breaking in. Either that, or the system had simply fallen apart from disuse.
The best thing would be if he could get back to the dome. The loudspeaker would let him sound the alarm, not to mention the laser protection the one-way ceramic would afford him if it came down to a battle.
Unfortunately, nearly half a thoustride of open ground lay between him and the domes right now. Worse, he hadn't been particularly surreptitious on his way over to the fence. If the intruders had spotted him, they were undoubtedly watching and waiting for his next move. Probably with lasers already pointed his direction.
Which left him really only one option. He would have to slip through the hole the intruders had made in the fence, make his way down the bluff and over to the rail stop near the gate, and use the direct-link installed there to sound the alert. It would be a tricky climb, and it would mean leaving the shrine undefended, but there was nothing he could do about that. Keeping a close eye on the area around the shrine, he started to ease his way around Thrr-aamr—
And froze, listening. A new sound was drifting in to him over the latearc breezes. A transport, somewhere in the near distance.
The reinforcements from Cliffside Dales had arrived.
Moving his head as little as possible, Thrr-tulkoj searched the sky for the craft, a fresh surge of excitement rippling through him. Protector laser rifles were infinitely adjustable, in both intensity and spread angle, and there was a specified procedure for tuning the power and muzzle-coning down far enough to make the weapon into a safe flash-code signaler. A signaler, moreover, whose beam would be easily visible to the transport pilot and yet wouldn't sizzle the atmospheric water enough to produce emissions visible in any other direction. He could start with a simple three-two-three distress signal....
He frowned, his hands pausing midway through the necessary adjustments. The hum of the transport's engines had choked suddenly, dissolving into the sharp crackle characteristic of a misfiring transkilmer. Was the transport in trouble? He looked around the sky again, but he couldn't spot any running lights in the direction the sound was coming from. Odd. Had the transport's optronics failed, too? No; of course, the warriors would be trying to make an invisible approach. The hum returned, crackled again; returned, crackled again; returned, crackled again—
And then, in the middle of the last crackle, he abruptly understood. The noise wasn't coming from engine failure, at least not from unintentional engine failure. It had been deliberately created, designed for a very specific purpose.
To cover up the sound of a fsss-niche cover being opened.
For a beat Thrr-tulkoj's mind flashed back four fullarcs to that attempt by Thrr-gilag's mother to steal back her fsss. Thrr-pifix-a herself couldn't have climbed the bluff, certainly, but she might have found friends or relatives to do it for her.
He glanced down at Thrr-aamr's unconscious form. No. He knew Thrr-pifix-a and her family, and none of them would ever have condoned violence of this sort against one of her shrine's protectors.
But then who? And why?
The transport's engines had settled down again to their normal hum, and from the sound of it, the vehicle was veering off. Apparently its sole job had been to cover the noise of the intruders opening their target niche.
Thrr-tulkoj gripped his rifle harder, the brief flicker of hope giving way again to frustrated indecision. The intruders had one of the niches open now, with free access to the fsss organ inside. But surely the owner would have felt their touch by now and come back to investigate.
But no Elder had yet appeared. Were they dealing with the fsss of someone who was still a physical, then?
Again Thrr-tulkoj's thoughts flicked to Thrr-pifix-a. But again he rejected the idea that she could possibly be behind this. This was something vicious, like the bitter living-death feuds of nine hundred cyclics ago.
He winced at the thought. Living death: the deliberate destruction of an enemy physical's fsss. The exquisite torture of leaving him to live out his physical life with the knowledge that nothing but certain death awaited him at the end of it. Such feuds had once been widespread on Oaccanv, ultimately precipitating the Second Eldership War. If someone was trying to resurrect the abominations of that era...