His telephone hissed. The sound, designed to get his attention, made him start with alarm, though danger on Tosev 3 was likelier to start with angry shouts from Big Uglies or with the frightened yappings of their animals. He put the phone to a hearing diaphragm, listened, said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and set the instrument back on his belt.
“What shall be done?” Gorppet asked.
“I knew trouble was stirring somewhere,” Fotsev answered. “The Big Uglies have captured a bus on its way into Basra from one of the new towns and kidnapped all the females who were riding in it. The suspicion is that they intend to hold them for ransom.”
“Clever of the authorities to figure that out,” Gorppet said with heavy sarcasm. “Lesser minds would have been incapable of it.”
“Why kidnap only females?” Betvoss said. “Males are more dangerous to them, for there are no female soldiers.”
“That is not how the Big Uglies think,” Gorppet said. “Females matter more to them, because they are always in season. And besides, females do not know how to fight back. If they captured males, they might capture a trained soldier, one who could harm them.”
“That makes sense,” Betvoss said-he was being unusually reasonable today. “If we can find them, we can probably earn promotions.”
“If we see some evidence that we are near these kidnapped females, of course we shall try to rescue them,” Fotsev said. “But we must not forget everything else while we search for them.”
“Truth,” Gorppet said. “Otherwise, the Tosevites will make us regret it.”
“Onward, then,” Fotsev said.
Onward they went, through the narrow, winding streets of Basra. A breeze sprang up, sending new and different stinks onto their scent receptors. After a while, the Big Uglies came out of their houses of worship. Gorppet, who spoke their language, called out to some of them. A few-only a few-answered. “They deny knowing anything about these females,” he said.
“Did you expect anything different?” Fotsev asked.
“Expect? No,” Gorppet answered. “But you never can tell. I might have been lucky. The Tosevites have feuds among themselves. Had I found a male at feud with the kidnappers, he might have told us what we need to know.”
For a small stretch of time, the Big Uglies returning from their worship filled the streets. Then they might have disappeared off the face of Tosev 3. Everything grew quiet again-much too quiet, as far as Fotsev was concerned. Something simmered under the surface, though he couldn’t tell what. That sense of walking on uncertain ground gnawed at him.
The breeze picked up and swirled dust into his face. His nictitating membranes flicked back and forth, back and forth, protecting his eyes from the grit. “Weather reminds me of a windy day back on Home,” he remarked, and a couple of the other males made the affirmative hand gesture.
Then, all at once, the breeze blew him a scent that also reminded him of Home. “By the Emperor!” he said softly. He was not the only male in the patrol to smell those pheromones, of course. Everyone else started standing more nearly erect, too.
“She’s close,” Betvoss said hoarsely. “She’s very close.”
“She… maybe they,” Gorppet said. “The scent is strong.” His voice was hot and hungry, and he added an emphatic cough.
“I wonder if these are the kidnapped females.” Fotsev reluctantly reached for his telephone to report the possibility.
“Investigate with caution,” a male back at the barracks told him.
“It shall be done,” Fotsev replied. But that other male, that distant male, did not have a cloud of pheromones blowing into his face. When Fotsev relayed the order to the rest of the patrol, what he said was, “We have permission to go forward.”
A couple of males exclaimed in delight. Betvoss said, “It will probably be a couple of ginger-addled females from the new towns. But if they are ginger-addled, they will want to mate, and smelling them certainly makes me want to mate. And so…” He hurried in the direction the delicious scent led him. So did Fotsev. So did the whole patrol. They were investigating, but had forgotten all about caution.
Rounding a corner, Fotsev saw a couple of females at the dark dead end of an alleyway. The pheromones came off them in waves. He and his comrades rushed toward them. Only when he got very near did his lust-impaired senses note they were bound and gagged.
He tried to make himself stop. “It is a trap!” he shouted. The realization came just too late for him. Big Uglies concealed in houses on either side of the alley had already opened up with rifles and automatic weapons. Males fell as if scythed down. Fotsev screamed for help into his telephone. Then something struck him a heavy blow in the flank. He found himself on the ground without knowing how he’d got there. It didn’t hurt-yet.
The Tosevites swarmed out of their hiding places to try to finish off the patrol. “Allahu akbar!” they shouted. A male fired at them, and some fell. The rest kept shouting, “Allahu akbar!” It was the last thing Fotsev ever heard.
“Allahu akbar!” The cry echoed through Jerusalem once more. Reuven Russie hated it. It meant horror and terror and death. He’d seen that before. Now he and the city he loved-the only city he’d ever loved-were seeing it again.
In the most hackneyed, cliched fashion possible, he wished he’d listened to his mother. If he hadn’t gone in to the Russie Medical College this morning, he wouldn’t be worrying now about how he was going to get home in one piece. Things hadn’t been so bad this morning. He hadn’t wanted to miss the day’s lectures or the biochemistry lab-especially not the latter, whose equipment and techniques far outdid anything human technology could offer.
And so he’d come, and he hadn’t had too hard a time doing it. People had been shouting “Allahu akbar!” even then, and there were occasional spatters of gunfire, the pop-pop-pop s sounding like fireworks. But Reuven had gone through the empty market square without so much as seeing a man with a rifle or a submachine gun. The shopkeepers who’d stayed home and merchants who hadn’t set up their stalls, though, had known something he hadn’t.
The Race, as a matter of course, efficiently soundproofed the buildings it put up. Reuven approved; distractions were the last thing he needed when trying to keep up with a Lizard physician lecturing as quickly as he would have for students of his own species. He and his fellows never heard Jerusalem’s ordinary street noise, which could be pretty raucous.
But the noise outside today was anything but ordinary. Nearby small-arms fire and helicopters roaring low overhead provided constant background racket, now louder, now softer. Even the most efficient soundproofing in the world couldn’t keep out the deep, thunderous roars of exploding bombs. And some of those bombs burst close enough to shake the whole building, as if from an earthquake. Reuven had been through a few quakes. The shaking here wasn’t so strong as in a bad one, but he kept wondering what would happen if a bomb happened to hit the medical college square. It wasn’t the sort of thought that helped him pay attention to Shpaaka, the male of the Race who went on lecturing as if it were an ordinary day.
After a miss that sounded and felt nearer than any of the others, Jane Archibald leaned toward him and whispered, “This is bloody awful.”
“Oh, good,” he whispered back. “I thought I was the only one scared out of my wits.”
Blond curls flipped back and forth as she shook her head. “I don’t know how anybody stands it,” she said. “It takes me back to the days when I was a tiny little girl and the Lizards were mopping up Australia after they’d bombed Sydney and Melbourne.”