“Ol’ Geeky understands,” Pete confirmed. “And evidnti, he’ll even tell you the truth, if he knows it. Sometimes he doesn’t, and he’s been known to make up stuff he thought Rolak wanted to hear, but that’s over now… ain’t it, Geeky?”
“O’er,” Geerki agreed solemnly. Quickly he wrote on the tablet: “No more make up. Not know, say so. New masters not like old. Want honest only. Better honest not know than lie, make masters glad.”
“Huh.” Alan looked at Rolak. “You trust him?”
Rolak blinked affirmative. “I suppose I do,” he said. “As best we can tell, he either tells us the truth or-now-tells us he doesn’t know. He’s given us a good picture of Grik population and industrial centers, as well as warrior concentrations-as they were when last he was on Saa-lon.”
“Why?” Alan wondered aloud.
Pete shrugged. “He’s figured out we’re not ‘prey’; can’t be, since we kicked hell out of the warriors he ‘belonged to.’ That makes us ‘hunters’ like any other that might’ve done the same thing. Turns out the devils fight one another all the time when there’s not somebody like us to pick on. Anyway, the ‘civvies,’ like him, belong to whoever wins, and at Rangoon, that was us.” He shrugged again. “Weird.”
“And perhaps useful… or problematic,” Keje said.
“In any event, if he knows the answer to what you ask about the horns, he will tell you,” Rolak assured him.
Hij Geerki knew quite a lot about Grik horns, as it turned out. Like many other things, he’d been responsible for their procurement. Through a series of questions, alternately written and spoken, Geerki described how they were made, used, and what the three tones they were capable of making meant. It had long been a mystery how the sounds were made. Grik were even less suited to blowing horns than Lemurians were; yet as the Allied armies had discovered, sound commands on the battlefield were essential. The allies had resorted to drums and simple whistles even ’Cats could blow. Various tattoos or sequences of whistle blasts meant different things. The same was true for the Grik, but they’d contrived instruments blown by a bellowslike device to create the bloodcurdling, rumbling roars they used. The horn itself had two holes in it, and a different sound resulted from the simple expedient of depressing the bellows with a wooden plug stuck in either or none of the holes. One sound was a warning. Another was blown to assemble all warriors within earshot. The last was a signal to attack.
“I’ll be damned,” Pete confessed. “Hell, we’ve captured some of the gizmos. Didn’t know what they were.”
“Are any aboard here?” Alan asked.
“I don’t know. Could be. I’ll find out. If we kept any, they might be back on Andaman.”
“We’re still close enough for a plane to bring one out, as long as it refuels for the return,” Keje suggested. He looked at Alan. “Why?”
“Well, think about it. I’m no infantryman, but just imagine the confusion we could cause if we had some of those horns to toot on at the right time.”
“Wow,” Pete said. “That’s a swell idea.” He paused. “And one that doesn’t leave this compartment,” he warned. “We might make use of it at some point, but it’ll take more than a couple of horns to pull it off. It’ll probably only work once on a large scale, and that’s the only way it makes sense to use it.” He looked at Letts and scratched his beard. “You know, we nd to keep this in our back pocket, but maybe start up a ‘dirty tricks division’-start getting some guys to work making more ‘Grik horns,’ and cooking up other angles on stuff the Grik do that we can use against them.” He grinned. “This is the sort of stunt you plan a battle around, and I want more of ’em to choose from!”
“Ha!” barked Rolak. “A ‘dirty tricks division’! That is just what we need to put some ‘fun’ in this dreadful war, and maybe it will help us win it!” He looked around. “Obviously, Mr. Letts should be in charge…”
“As if I didn’t have enough stuff to do already,” Alan interrupted, but he was grinning too.
“Indeed,” Rolak agreed. “I suspect you and Hij Geerki will be spending a great deal of time together!”
CHAPTER 7
Adar’s Great Hall Baalkpan December 25, 1943
A dar, High Chief and Sky Priest of Baalkpan and Chairman of the Grand Alliance (COTGA), sat stiffly on a heap of cushions in the “War Room” section of the Great Hall. Ironically, it was one of the few places he could find “peace” anymore, since only those invited, or had a “need to know” what was discussed inside, were ever allowed. He took refuge there more and more often during the days when office seekers, deputations from other Allied powers, and representatives of the Home and Allied Councils sought him out to berate or cajole him concerning what he saw as trivial matters. Some were trivial and others weren’t, but Adar wasn’t a High Chief by temperament, at least in the jovial fashion of his predecessor, the Great Nakja-Mur. Once a simple Sky Priest, a celestial observer who’d charted Salissa Home’s nautical wanderings by plotting her position on the Sacred Scrolls of the prophet Siska-Ta, he’d become a “War Leader”; a position, even a concept, unimaginable to most Lemurians just a few years before. He hated it.
He longed to be just a simple warrior; to personally fight the hated Grik, but he had neither the training for, nor the “luxury” of engaging in such a personal craving. Perhaps because he was a Sky Priest, able to grasp the evidently progressively more flawed, but still pertinent “big picture” of life, he was possibly uniquely qualified to lead the Grand Alliance through the ever-expanding panorama of an increasingly global war. Right now, he wasn’t leading anything, even the conversation flowing around him. He merely sat listening intently, his silver eyes fastening on each speaker in turn.
“Some of Ben’s toys are washouts, if you’ll pardon the term,” said Walker ’s former comm officer, and Adar’s acting chief of staff, Steve Riggs. He was also “Minister of Communications and Electrical Contrivances.” “But we might save some of the radios. There were even a few spare sets aboard Santa Catalina. Might help Pete with his mashed-up comm. They’re short-range sets, of course, but still plenty useful, tactically. We can have the operators speak ’Cat in case the Japs still have, or have developed, a new means of listening in.”
“Good idea,” said Rolando “Ronson” Rodriguez, the former EM who’d taken over most of Steve’s day-to-day responsibilities, particularly where it came to electrical power and comm development. “I’ll pry what I can from Colonel Mallory. We’ll be able to build similar sets soon, now that we’re blowing glass and we’ve got a vacuum chamber to assemble tubes in.” He shrugged. “It’s just a little thing now, nalproof of concept,’ but it works, and we’ve made some rectifier tubes already.” He grinned. “They’re pretty big and look like a squash, but at the rate we’re going, we’d have voice comm with Walker in a month-if she were closer.”
“How will we get the sets to General Alden?” Karen Theimer-Letts, Acting Minister of Medicine, asked. She’d quickly fastened onto the radios as something else they could send to First Fleet-anything to assist the mission her husband Alan was on.
“We can send one of the ‘Buzzards,’ ” said the dark-haired Commander Perry Brister. He’d been Mahan ’s engineering officer and was now Minister of Defensive and Industrial Works.
“Have to ask Ben,” Riggs said. “We’ve got only four of the things, and we’re working their asses off. One’s a dedicated trainer.”
“We should have built more,” Karen murmured.
“Ben argued, and I agree, that they’re underpowered,” said Riggs. He held out his hands. “We need bigger engines-or bigger planes to handle four of the ones we have. We’re working on both. We’ve taken the basic ‘Nancy’ design about as far as it can go. We might build more ‘Buzzards’ as light bombers-Ben really wants bombers!-but what we really need is a bigger, more powerful plane to carry more bombs, freight, or passengers.” He looked at Sister Audry, seated next to Adar. “Speaking of passengers…”