I signaled Goodall and his Consu. Goodall grinned and danced out, holding his knives low with both hands, blades behind him. His Consu bellowed and charged, head first, slashing arms extended. Goodall returned the charge and then at the last second slid like a base runner on a close play. The Consu slashed down as Goodall slid under it, shaving the skin and ear from the left side of Goodall's head. Goodall lopped off one of the Consu's chitinous legs with a fast upward thrust; it cracked like a lobster claw and skitted off perpendicular to the direction of Goodall's movement. The Consu listed and toppled.
Goodall rotated on his ass, flipped his knives up, did a backward somersault and landed on his feet in time to catch his knives before they came down. The left side of his head was one big gray clot, but Goodall was still smiling as he lunged at his Consu, which was desperately trying to right itself. It flailed at Goodall with its arms too slow as Goodall pirouetted and drove the first knife like a spike into its dorsal carapace with a backward thrust, then reached around and with another backward thrust did the same to the Consu's thoracic carapace. Goodall spun 180 degrees so that he faced toward the Consu, gripped both blade handles and then violently cranked them in a rotating motion. The Consu jerked as the sliced contents of its body fell out in front and behind and then collapsed for a final time. Goodall grinned all the way back to his side, dancing a jig as he went. He'd clearly had fun.
Private Aquinas didn't dance, and she didn't look as if she was having any fun. She and her Consu circled each other warily for a good twenty seconds before the Consu finally lunged, bringing its slashing arm up, as if to hook Aquinas through her gut. Aquinas fell back and lost her balance, fumbling over backward. The Consu jumped her, pinned her left arm by spearing it in the soft gap between the radius and the ulna with its left slashing arm, and brought its other slashing arm up to her neck. The Consu moved its hind legs, positioning itself to provide leverage for a decapitating slash, then moved its right slashing arm slightly to the left, to give itself some momentum.
As the Consu slashed to remove her head, Aquinas grunted mightily and heaved her body in the direction of the cut; her left arm and hand shredded as soft tissues and sinews gave way to the force of her push, and then the Consu rolled as she added her momentum to its. Inside the grip of the Consu, Aquinas rotated and proceeded to stab hard through the Consu's carapace with her right hand and blade. The Consu tried to push her away; Aquinas wrapped her legs around the creature's midsection and hung in. The Consu got in a few stabs at Aquinas' back before it died, but the slashing arms weren't very effective close in to the Consu's own body. Aquinas dragged herself off the Consu's body and made it halfway toward the other soldiers before she collapsed and had to be carried away.
I now understood why I had been exempted from fighting. It wasn't just a matter of speed and strength, although clearly the Special Forces soldiers outpaced me in both. They employed strategies that came from a different understanding of what was an acceptable loss. A normal soldier would not sacrifice a limb like Aquinas just had; seven decades of the knowledge that limbs were irreplaceable, and that the loss of one could lead to death, worked against it. This wasn't a problem with Special Forces soldiers, who never could not have a limb grown back, and who knew their body's tolerance for damage was so much higher than a normal soldier could appreciate. It's not as if Special Forces soldiers didn't have fear. It just kicked in at a far later time.
I signaled Sergeant Hawking and his Consu to begin. For once, a Consu did not open its slashing arms; this one merely walked forward to the center of the dome and awaited its opponent. Hawking, meanwhile, hunched low and moved forward carefully, a foot at a time, judging the right moment to strike: forward, stop, sidestep, stop, forward, stop and forward again. It was one of those cautious, well-considered tiny forward steps that the Consu lashed out like an exploding bug and impaled Hawking with both slashing arms, hefting him and hurling him into the air. On the downside of his arc, the Consu slashed viciously into him, severing his head and cutting him through the midsection. The torso and legs went in separate directions; the head dropped directly in front of the Consu. The Consu considered it for a moment, then spiked it at the tip of its slashing arm and flung it hard in the direction of the humans. It bounced wetly as it struck the ground and then twirled over their heads, spraying brains and SmartBlood as it went.
During the previous four bouts, Jane had been standing impatiently at the line, flipping her knives in a sort of nervous twitch. Now she stepped forward, ready to begin, as did her opponent, the final Consu. I signaled for the two to start. The Consu took an aggressive step forward, flung its slashing arms wide, and screamed a battle cry that seemed loud enough to shatter the dome and suck us all into space, opening its mandibles extra-wide to do so. Thirty meters away, Jane blinked and then flung one of her knives full force into the open jaw, putting enough force into the throw that the blade went all the way through the back of the Consu's head, the hilt jamming into the far side of the skull carapace. Its dome-shattering battle cry was suddenly and unexpectedly replaced by the sound of a big fat bug choking on blood and a skewer of metal. The thing reached in to dislodge the knife but died before it finished the motion, toppling forward and expiring with a final, wet swallow.
I walked over to Jane. "I don't think you were supposed to use the knives that way," I said.
She shrugged and flipped her remaining knife in her hands. "No one ever said I couldn't," she said.
The Consu ambassador glided forward to me, sidestepping the fallen Consu. "You have won the right to four questions," it said. "You may ask them now."
Four questions were more than we had expected. We had hoped for three, and planned for two; we had expected the Consu to be more of a challenge. Not that one dead soldier and several lopped-off body parts constituted a total victory by any means. Still, you take what you can get. Four questions would be just fine.
"Did the Consu provide the Rraey with the technology to detect skip drives?" I asked.
"Yes," the ambassador said, without elaborating further. Which was fine; we didn't expect the Consu to tell us any more than they had obligated themselves to. But the ambassador's answer gave us information on a number of other questions. Since the Rraey received the technology from the Consu, it was highly unlikely that they knew how it worked on a fundamental level; we didn't have to worry about them expanding their use of it or trading the technology to other races.
"How many skip drive detection units do the Rraey have?" We had originally thought to ask how many of these the Consu provided the Rraey, but on the off chance they made more, we figured it'd be best to be general.
"One," said the ambassador.
"How many other races that humans know of have the ability to detect skip drives?" Our third major question. We assumed that the Consu knew of more races than we did, so asking a more general question of how many races had the technology would be of no use to us; likewise asking them who else they had given the technology to, since some other race could have come up with the technology on its own. Not every piece of tech in the universe is a hand-me-down from some more advanced race. Occasionally people think these things up on their own.
"None," the ambassador said. Another lucky break for us. If nothing else, it gave us some time to figure out how to get around it.
"You still have one more question," Jane said, and pointed me back in the direction of the ambassador, who stood, waiting for my last query. So, I figured, what the hell.