“Think we’ll find any extra-large exos down there, Thinker?” Merlin asked. He crouched near Psycho, balancing his E on one knee.
“If we do, I’m putting in for sick leave, Merlin,” I informed him. “I don’t ever want to see another one of those things.”
“You think too much,” Psycho cut in. “Always scheming to get into Valkyrie’s pants. Anything for sick leave. You knew she’d visit her wounded hero. I wish you’d tell me how you arranged that run-in with the exo. I wouldn’t mind a few days in the body shop.”
I ignored him. “I should have used the laser,” I said quietly. “Slice off its legs. They can’t hurt you without legs.”
A short silence ensued as Merlin and Psycho pondered my comments. I knew Psycho would probably say something crazy.
“You know what I’d like to do?” he finally said. “I’d like to take on one of those critters with this.” He raised his hot knife and triggered it. It flared to life, hissing blue-hot. The light from the knife flooded his faceplate, revealing his evil, boyish features. “Can you imagine that,” he asked, his eyes glowing, his mouth twisting. “Man Kills Bug With Knife. They’d laugh in the Inners, of course. But I’d be famous out here.” His eyebrows rose, and I could not help laughing. I knew he was serious and crazy enough to try it.
“A shame, Psycho,” I responded. “We’d have to get another Five.”
“Thinker’s always thinking,” he said, putting away the knife. “What a pain. You can screw up your life, thinking all the time.”
He was right, of course. During Basic, I’d been known as The Thinker, for over-thinking everything. I’d probably missed a lot, by agonizing over the possible consequences of my actions. Psycho had not missed a thing. It amazed me that he survived.
“What do you think the Scaler was trying to tell us with his drawings, Thinker?” Merlin had a talent for guiding conversations. Then he would sit back and listen. His IQ probably topped the rest of us put together. He certainly didn’t need our opinions. I had no idea why a scientific wizard like Merlin hauled an E instead of working in a biolab somewhere. He tended to be nervous, a bit clumsy in the field. I could not fathom his friendship with Psycho. I suppose he secretly admired his brash approach to life.
I thought about the drawings. “I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s strange.”
The lifies had thought they were making progress with their catch, the Boy Scaler. When he settled down, they showed him all sorts of wonders, in an effort to communicate. He calmly took it all in for a while, silent, eyes glittering like black gems, cold and hard. And then he showed a wonder or two of his own. He sketched out the night sky on a datascreen. He drew it expertly, with all the stars right where they should be, seen from his forest. He drew a moving star, and traced it right down to the horizon. After that, he did another sketch, an exoseg, Exoseg Gigantic Soldier, eating a man. Then he smashed the d-screen with the lightpen, suddenly convulsed with rage and tears. The lifies could get nothing further from him. But it gave us something to work on.
They took Boy Scaler by aircar to the edge of the flower forest near where he’d been captured, and released him. Dressed once again in his tunic of scaly skin and armed with his slingshot and spear, he bolted into the forest and disappeared. The lifies had injected a c-cell into his scalp. It would lead us to him, wherever he went.
He’d gone here, to Site 2012. The probes quickly confirmed that the bowels of this dead city crawled with Scalers. Now we had what we wanted: a big Scaler community. We were ready to come calling.
We knew so little we could have been blind, but the primary mission was certainly to defend this planet from the Systies. Everything else was secondary. I munched a mag, leaning against the doorway of the dome.
“It’s simple,” Psycho declared. “The star was a Systie ship. The exos came from the ship. Command knows it, they just don’t want to get the troops upset.”
The rain eased off. It would be dawn soon. “It seems obvious, Psycho,” I said, “but why would the Systies want to transport exosegs from one world to another? It’s crazy. Why would anyone want to do that? Even Systies aren’t that crazy.”
“How should I know? Ask Merlin. He’s the brains of the outfit. I just work here. Maybe the Systies are using the exos to do something for them.”
“Do what? They’re not smart enough to do anything.”
“How do you know? They sure know how to eat people. Maybe the Dominants are running the show for the Systies.”
“Come on…they’re not that bright.”
“We don’t know how bright they are,” Psycho insisted. “Not until we capture one of the Dominants alive, and disassemble it. Then we’ll know.”
“The Dominants are not intelligent. They live in holes in the ground, and the high point of their day is when they get to suck on somebody’s abdomen. They couldn’t be doing anything for the Systies.”
“Why not? That’s the high point of my day, too!” Psycho exclaimed. “Look-the exo soldiers are from Andrion 3-fully developed natives of Andrion 3. They didn’t develop here. But they got here somehow. They don’t have wings, and they can’t breathe vac. Why couldn’t a comet or asteroid blow a chunk of Andrion 3 to Andrion 2, with some exo eggs attached? I don’t know. I think they came here by ship. It’s the only way to get from planet to planet.”
“What do you think, Merlin?”
“I think we’ll know the answer when we find the Systies,” he replied.
“Do you think they’re here?”
“I don’t know. But somebody’s been here. And done some mighty strange things. I don’t think there’s much doubt it was the Systies.”
Strange! The exosegs were natives of Andrion 3. And if the Systies had transported them, where were the Systies? We had swept the planet clean and found no advanced signals or power sources. It’s not easy to hide a starship. Despite all our biomag wizardry, there could be whole cities, whole nations, whole empires, hiding from us in the forests, in the mountains, and deep underground. But if there were any Systies here, they weren’t using power systems.
“All right, you tell me how they got here. Soldier exosegs, from Andrion 3.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out. Probably sooner than we’d like. And if the Systies show themselves, we’re certainly not going to be worrying about exosegs.”
Psycho let it go. He got bored easily. It was one of his problems. I let my mind wander back to the moment when Priestess and I had suddenly come face to face with the exoseg. Instant combat. Two worlds meeting. Our reactions had been correct. Only an Inner could doubt it. An Inner would have tried to reason with the creature, tried to communicate with it. An Inner would have been lunch.
“You know,” Merlin quietly interjected, “if the Scalers think the exosegs came from a ship, they may not be too thrilled to meet us.”
He was a master of understatement.
“Bring the psycher to Alpha,” Lowdrop’s voice crackled over the tacnet. Lowdrop was CAT 24’s commander and he was right up front for this op. Alpha was to make first contact with the Scalers and Beta was backup. We had followed the probes and now we were crouched against a corridor wall in the underground city, guarding Alpha’s flank. The Scalers were a few levels below us. It was as black as a tomb down there, but with our darksight we could see just fine.
As we waited, I wondered which psycher they had assigned to the mission. Psychers were a solitary breed, desperately lonely, trapped in the prison of their own talents. They did not even associate with other psychers.
Painful memories asserted themselves from my previous life. Tara, close beside me in the warm night of my own lost world, a silken cascade of glistening brown hair and faraway liquid brown eyes, exotic Assidic eyes and pale brown velvet skin. I could still feel her heart beating next to mine, but she had never really been mine. I think she knew what she faced, but it was her own dark secret, and she didn’t share it. Not even with me. I had sensed that something was wrong. I’d always felt that her mind functioned in another dimension. I only had her for a year, and then they came one night and she’d left with them without a fight or a word. I never knew if she really had a choice, but she never looked back. Never even said goodbye.