“You mean, Commander, that that will affect any estimate of our travel time? But this is not a fresh team, unlike the one which brought you. The driver will have to rest and water them in an hour or two.”
“Oh.” Foord subsided.
Rituals. At least Thahl only did it privately, this gentle pisstaking; never in front of others, or when it genuinely mattered. Smithson did it publicly, privately, whenever and wherever he liked.
Foord commanded one of the nine deadliest warships in the Commonwealth, crewed by uniquely talented and dangerous individuals, yet they all had these rituals they enacted with him. Often they would change the rules at random, on the possibly anarchic basis that random rule changes were part of the rules. And Foord usually went along with it; anything to get the most from them. In any case, as well as being their Commander he was also one of them. He had done things as terrible as any of them. Except, of course, for Thahl. As far as Foord knew, Thahl had done nothing more terrible than any other Sakhran; he was not, by Sakhran standards, psychotic or maladjusted. He had simply completed all the necessary officer courses, usually with grades well into the top five percent, and had specifically asked to serve on an Outsider. He’d never wanted anything else.
The Department appreciates that you have a Sakhran First Officer; you know a lot about him, but maybe less about them. Your ship’s Codex, as usual, has more detail, but you may prefer this modest summary.
Sakhrans contain elements of mammal and reptile; and other elements, still unclassifiable. They reproduce asexually, but our cultural preconceptions still lead us to refer to them as males.
They have a slight build, but extraordinary physical abilities; the deadliest intelligent humanoids known to us. They evolved to compete with their planet’s other spectacular carnivores: Angels, Coils, Diamondfaces, and even the dreadful Walking Air. Sakhrans can outkill them all.
Their neural synapses and metabolism, their musculature and reflexes, are quite unique. Their bones and claws and teeth are like titanium. Thahl is smaller than you, but much faster and stronger. You have often been heard to say that you wouldn’t last ten seconds against him. Ten seconds is optimistic.
But they work best as individuals, not in teams. This could be connected with the next point.
You have had a long working relationship with one Sakhran, which may have obscured an important fact about Sakhrans generally. They were not always like they are now. Their society, their institutions, their Empire, even their everyday technology, declined rapidly—it was not a collapse, but a rapid decline—three hundred years ago, after the first visit of the unidentified ship and the writing of the Book of Srahr. We know no other culture which has declined in quite the same way. This may not impinge on your professional relationship with Thahl, which appears to have worked well; but with other Sakhrans, it may be significant.
The landchariot lurched on.
“Thahl,” Foord began, “I was sorry not to see your father before we set off this morning. Was he unwell?”
“Not unusually so, Commander. He’s old and diseased and will soon die, of course, but that wasn’t why he didn’t appear. I think he was concerned that if he saw you again he might delay you by restarting last night’s conversation.”
“I enjoyed last night’s conversation. He asks very good questions.”
“He’s very ignorant.”
A few miles later, as if there had not been a gap of distance and silence in their conversation, Thahl added: “My father asked me to give you a message, Commander. First, to thank you for coming up to visit him. Second, that whatever happens, he expects to invite you a second time.”
They were still in the Irsirrha, but they had left the higher slopes and the road didn’t double back on itself so much; it was straighter, plunging down between walls of dripping forest on either side. The view was smaller-scale, but didn’t seem so. Higher up, what would have been a much more impressive view had been obscured, by the mist and the sheer density of the trees. Here, the forest had thinned out enough to see how massive the trees really were; although the trees of the higher Irsirrha were even taller, these ones still towered four hundred feet over the road, often standing in groups of three or four as if talking privately together. Somehow, they made the air around them seem like the air in a cathedral.
They were set far enough apart to see the green-black shadows they cast on the ground, and the armoured secondary foliage bursting in frozen waves around their lower trunks, and the dark mouths of openings in the coils of their massive roots. Sakhra had many species of trees, but Sakhrans had a particular name for tall trees generally; they called them Shadanth, or Vertical Rivers.
The gradient softened. The road widened but was still mainly loose stones and mud, and still showed no signs or markers. The trees on either side were no less tall than before, but were set back further from the road, leaving a verge of mud and grass, dotted with tall clumps of silver-green bladeweed. As they turned a bend they encountered the first traffic they had seen all morning, another landchariot coming directly towards them at a speed almost matching theirs. They swerved to a halt and the two drivers had a brief and spiteful conversation—at least, to Foord it sounded spiteful—before the other driver lashed his team and clattered away towards the highlands.
They remained stationary.
The driver, without turning round, said something. Thahl leaned out of the window and a long, sibilant conversation ensued. When it finished they both sat silently, long enough for Foord to start hearing the noises of the forest; then the driver’s whip exploded over the six huge backs of his team, and they shot forward.
“What was that about?”
“It may be nothing, Commander. The driver has heard something…Can I suggest you check in again?”
“Thahl, what is this? Does it have any bearing on the ship?”
“Nothing like that, Commander. A rumour of a local evacuation. But it may affect our journey time and it would be prudent to check in more frequently from now on.”
Foord snapped open his wristcom.
“Yes?” Smithson said. “What do you want?”
“An update on the refit, please.”
“Scanners are done and tested. Minor systems await testing.”
“We may be delayed getting back.”
“You will be, Commander. Traffic’s got worse, it’s so tight you can’t…”
“No,” Foord said, not eager to hear Smithson complete the phrase, “it’s up here. There may be further delays in the highlands.”
“Why don’t we send one of the ship’s fliers for you? Or even better, get Swann to send a Blentport flier?”
“No. We’ve been through this before. I told you I wanted to make this journey by landchariot.”
The answering noise from Foord’s wristcom was moist and disgusting. In a gesture characteristic of his species Smithson had plunged his hand, and by symbolic extension Foord’s, into one of his lower abdominal orifices.
“Well, Commander, whenever and however you get here, we’ll have completed the refit, done the testing, got their people off and ours on, in four hours.”
“Four hours?” Foord and Thahl exchanged glances. Even Thahl looked surprised.
“Yes? Why not four hours? What’s wrong?”
“I expected eight at least.”
“Well. It’s four.”
Again, the ritual; Smithson left a gap into which Foord was supposed to put praise which Smithson could accept ungraciously. All the same, Foord couldn’t let it go unacknowledged.