He nodded. “This close to the sea is tidal. The area gets washed over now and again. I’d say those tracks aren’t much older than ours. It’s possible that they were coming toward us and heard us.”
Mogutu nodded. “If they’re still here, they’re very good,” he said, continuing the whisper. “I can’t see anything at all ahead and I’m a damned good hunter.”
“They’re there,” the colonel breathed. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I’ve stayed alive this long by sensing such things. We’re being watched right now. I can feel their eyes. Just in the grass.”
“Want me to flush ’em, sir?” Mogutu asked him, tongue licking his lips in tense anticipation of a real bit of action at last.
“No, you wouldn’t be able to,” N’Gana replied. “They would just pull back into what could be an infinite field of grass until they suckered us into a trap on their ground. No, Sergeant, let’s make them come to us.” He straightened up and added in a more normal tone, “Sergeant, cover our back. Harker, take the edge of the grass. Doc, I want you and the Father, here, behind me. Don’t look around or give them any sense that we know where they are.”
“If they attack?” Mogutu asked him.
“Then we defend ourselves. Otherwise, we go back to a point on the other side of the highway ruins and dig in there. Anyone coming at us will have to do so in the open.”
“Or wait until night, or the predictable storms,” Kat Socolov added worriedly.
“Cheer up, Doctor,” the colonel said. “If they don’t kill us or run from us, you might just get your first chance to use your skills in native contact.”
She shook her head. “I’d bet on them running. If they’re as primitive as I think they are, they won’t want any strangers around. Remember the rule? Draw no attention to yourself. Why risk a fight? Besides, Colonel, no offense meant, but the ethnic population here was entirely Greek and what was called Near Eastern and Caucasian, because that’s where the ethnic roots came from. There might have been some Hamitic types from Ethiopian Coptic stock, which Sergeant Mogutu might be taken for, but most likely they’ve never seen anyone who looks quite like you, Colonel.”
“She’s right, Colonel. There were diplomats and traders, certainly, but no native Australian, African, or Asian types outside the city trading centers and spaceports, and they’d have gotten out.”
The colonel grinned. “So I’m a monster, am I? I kind of like that. It starts us off with some fear and respect, I think. That’s if they really saw me, though. Hard to say. Some of your skin flaps and other oddities might make you seem a bit odd, too, come to think of it. I think, though, that we’ll play games and go back and forth, but I doubt that these people want contact. I didn’t sense that there were very many of them. Two or three, perhaps. Four tops. Hardly a hunting party or a tribe.”
Still, none of them would get the sleep they had been looking forward to only a little earlier. Not this night.
Mogutu was thoughtful. “You know, Colonel, we could use that storm. How about it?”
“Just what do you have in mind?” N’Gana encouraged him.
“I could get up and around, using the storm for cover, then, when they’re still drying out, I could make a godawful demonstration that might panic them right toward you.”
“Possible. Equally possible is that these people, born and raised in this environment, will do the same to us instead, or simply come after you with everything they’ve got including knowledge of the terrain, weapons, their numbers, your position, and so forth. Not a good option. Still, I shouldn’t like them on our back if we have to cross that damned river and swamp combo. I keep giving mental commands to my combat armor and deploying my heat and motion detectors.”
Harker smiled slightly when he heard that. He’d been doing the same thing.
Finally, Kat Socolov cleared her throat. “Um, Colonel? You and your bloodthirsty sergeant here keep treating these people as if they are lions in some imaginary ancient jungle. Have you considered speaking to them instead?”
N’Gana looked completely baffled. “Speak to them? What the devil do you mean?”
“You know—talk. Like we’re doing now.”
“But these people are—are…”
“Stone Age primitives? Probably, but it’s also true that, even in a worst-case scenario, they are only a few generations removed from us. From the Helena of the Confederacy and Father Chicanis. Knowledge can die with frightening suddenness, and ignorance can march in a heartbeat, but, Colonel, changing your language takes a lot longer than this. Conquered nations held on to their native tongues even if they had to learn the speech of their conquerors, and those languages survived even when there was a conscious effort to suppress them. You came from this highly civilized background a couple of worlds removed from your ancestry, yet what was the language spoken in the streets of your homeland during your youth?”
“Uh—well, around the house they always spoke Tuareg, a Berber language. Of course, we all spoke English.”
“And you, Sergeant?”
“Well, it was a dialect of Ethiopian, actually, although everyone also spoke French because there were so many dialects and nobody would ever standardize on one. Yes, I begin to see what she means.”
Even the usually quiet Hamille, whom they tended to forget most of the time, was in tune with this concept. “My people speak—” It gave a series of sounds no human could ever utter. “There are many other tongues on my world. No one speaks human speech except to humans.”
Socolov looked at Harker, who shrugged. “I always talked like this,” he said.
“Well,” said the anthropologist, “as someone who speaks both Ukrainian and Georgian, I think I’ve made my point. Father, what would they speak around here? Greek? Turkish? Confederacy Standard, which is really a form of English although they never admit that?”
“Why, Greek was common, but everyone used Standard, too, because the fact was that this was an attempt to recreate an ideal of a rich family’s past and they came from Greece. Still, there were a number of ethnic languages even on Helena, so Standard was everywhere. I feel certain that they would understand it, at least if you didn’t use any words or terms that might be outside their experience. I suspect much of our technological jargon would be meaningless to them, but if you kept it basic, I see no reason why, using your logic, they wouldn’t understand something. And, if it’s Greek, I can certainly help there.”
“So can I,” she told him. “You simply can’t get a degree in my field without Greek and Latin even if you intend to excavate the ruins of the third moon of Haptmann circling Rigel.”
“I think we are elected then,” the priest responded, ignoring N’Gana and Mogutu. “We’re also probably the least threatening.”
“That is why one of us must accompany you,” N’Gana told her. “If they attack—remember the man who sent the message that brought us here!—someone who will react without hesitation is necessary. Harker, why don’t you go? You’re—nonthreatening but capable, I think.”
“Thanks a lot,” Harker sighed. “But if we’re going to do it, we’d better move. I doubt if we’ve got a half hour’s light left.”
Feeling a little like targets in spite of the moral certainty of their position, the pair walked cautiously back out along the riverbank and up toward where the footprints had been seen. As they did, the trio of military men spread out and, from whatever concealment they could muster, they slowly closed in on the same spot to give the pair some invisible cover.
Kat Socolov was suddenly wondering if this was a good idea after all. What if they were some sort of savages, the survivor dregs who had kept going by killing off and preying upon the other, weaker groups?