“Sheet!” Yohin exclaimed, barely audible. The heavy snow was swallowing everything. “Where are the bird men?”
“Do Tor, Go Ton? Come in,” Mary shouted. There was no answer. “If they’ve been hit, they’re nearby. Stendt didn’t come far so soon carrying this.”
“I understand,” Drin roared back against the wind. Pollution! Drin’s Monitor com was down in the crevasse. Mary had lost hers in her fall. “Borragil’ib,” he shouted in Do’utian, using a range of frequencies evolved to cut through polar storms, “can you call and get a fix on the aircraft?”
“Commander?”
“Emergency channel, and give the operator code five, seven, two, D, nine.”
“Nine, seven, two, B, nine?”
Drin tried to shout as clearly as possible. “Five—Seven—Two—Delta— Niner”
“Got it.” There was an interminable wait. Then Borragil’ib said, “The Kleth monitors are over the ridge, eight-squared charter units. Commander, they are down, but they managed a safe landing.”
“Mary, Do Tor, and Go Ton are safe.” Drin shouted. He looked up and saw a star on the west horizon just south of the flat ruddy dome of Ember. It was Aurum III, where these makers of harpoons and rocket tubes should have gone. The storm was lifting, but clouds of question remained.
Stendt had not been aiming his weapon at Drin, but at Gonikli’ibida.
Check the obvious. Especially the obvious.
“We didn’t,” Do Tor admitted, “recognize the rocket launcher for what it was until much too late.”
Drin gingerly adjusted his position on his pad so that he could see the holoscreen on the wall opposite Mary’s pool in his estate room. Do Tor shuddered in the wind shadow of their damaged aircraft, already dusted with blowing snow—Kleth needed to keep active at low temperature.
The Kleth monitor panned the damage with his comset’s tri-ocular video pickup. The digital holographic reconstruction was clear and sharp, probably a little bit better than the raw data, Drin reminded himself—like the untrained eye, cybernetic pattern recognition and reconstruction programs sometimes filled in detail that wasn’t there. But this one seemed straightforward enough. One of the blades of the port fan of their delta-shaped aircraft had been bent straight up, rim and all. The two adjacent blades were bent away like the skin of a steelfish filet.
“It must have taken great skill to land the aircraft on its nose and starboard fans alone. So you saw the launcher?”
“Oh, yes,” Go Ton said. “Looked like a telescope, or something optical. Then whoosh and bang! Do Tor bailed out and held the port wing up while I eased us down. Saved evidence.”
“Well done, but you look very cold,” Drin observed. “You could finish your report when you get in.” A splash and a light laugh reminded him that the other half of his team was now very warm. Mary had invited Richard Moon for a swim and some gentle fact finding.
The harem-instinctive part of Drin’s brain was putting out discomfort hormones at the sign of Mary being physical with someone else. Realizing this, with beak closed, Drin told himself more again and again that Mary was not in the “harem/mate” category, but more like “family/sister.” Getting a sister into someone else’s harem before her biology forgot that she was a sister was a major theme in Do’utian literature. Do’utians were less susceptible to mutations than humans, but exogamy still offered more possibilities. And for more of their history, obligations to the bridal family had been what tied beaches together into loose trading confederations, despite combat between their beachmasters. A sister in the harem was a traditional sign of weakness, but even in the best of families—Drin shuddered.
Bodil, with her ravenous intellect and passionate will, had attached herself to the long discredited idea that harem imprinting was really a cultural, not biological, thing which intelligent beings could choose to disregard. Curiosity had burned in her, and she had begged him for the experience. She’d seen nothing disgusting in doing what nature had evolved them for, had no fear of the minor pain involved, and no qualms about discarding any eggs.
Drin had been curious, too, but had been unwilling to shorten his tail to satisfy it. But Bodil and Gonikli had caught him alone, outdoors, in season, one day and teased him into “just acting it out.” They could always stop. But the hormones they triggered had washed through him and his mind had been a semiconscious observer to the tragedy.
He exhaled as if to discharge the memories—there was work to do now. He stared at the damaged aircraft on the wall screen, picking out details—there were dark things in the white composite hull here and there—-he forced it to take back his attention.
“It looks like pieces of the rocket are embedded in the hull.”
“Oh, yes,” Go Ton agreed. “Think the fan cut off guidance head and threw it into hull—see hole just above wing—before explosion.”
“Best get data to you now,” Do Tor suggested. “That rocket launcher is a puff in an updraft. It appears that Lord Thet has guided weapons now. Cybernetics and A.I. maybe.”
“Good enough,” Go Ton added, “to force us to kill many of them if we attempt to remove them.”
Drin nodded. So it had come to that, Drin thought. When this had started, Thet had a farcical primitivist city-state dictatorship run with sharp steel sticks and the kind of nihilistic charisma ancient humans often fell for. In some respects, they were a herd animal, and untrained minds were prone to follow those who spout pretty mist. Primitivists generally came from romantic young people who, knowing little and hostile to learning, fell back on their instincts. In this case; follow the alpha male.
Evolution had prepared Do’utians to be more self-assertive. But there were, Drin reminded himself, difficulties to indulging that mode of behavior as well.
“The Council will not be amused. But what is the connection to this case?” Drin asked.
“Drin,” Mary yelled from the pool. “The connection is that Stendt had one!”
“Oh, yes.” Go Ton agreed.
Drin thought, or tried to think. He was swimming in a whirlpool of data. “Very well. He needed a weapon like that, so he got it from them. And, because it was of Thet City manufacture it doesn’t show up in the Trimus permit files. This makes sense for Stendt, but...”
“Councilor Drinnil’ib,” Richard Moon spoke up. “Gonikli’ibida and Bi Tan had been working on a report about primitivist weapons manufacture—and Zo Kim’s criticism was scaring off any potential editors.”
I must be swimming through a swamp of pollution, Drin thought. “So Gonikli’ibda told you and Stendt that Bi Tan was dead in order to kill Zo Kim? Having the information come at him from two sources like that would probably convince him. But she knew that would kill Bi Tan, too.” Drin touched his beak to the carpet. The Gonikli he knew was incapable of such callousness.
“Big puzzle,” Do Tor agreed. “Who told Bi Tan that Zo Kim was dead? If no one could have done this, one terrible answer is that no one did. Must test at the hearing.”
The sound of the aircraft approaching cut through the gusts of polar wind picked up by Do Tor’s comset. “The replacement fan is finally here! We need to sign off now and help dismount it. We’ll have evidence of smart weapons back to you in an hour or so.”
Drin sent them off with a “smooth air” and turned an eye toward Mary. She was sitting in the shallow end of the warm pool with Richard Moon, whose yellow mane now lay wet and flat on his skull, making him seem thinner and more athletic. Now that he was firmly off the suspect list, Mary had, in effect, recruited him to help with the cybernetic tendrils of discovery that this case had grown. Their data trail now ran to Lord Thet’s city state. But not continuously.