“Don’t make us drag you,” Klein said. “You could get damaged and slow us up.”
“Then get on with it and damage me,” Ruiz said. “But I won’t lift a finger to help you put Earth in jeopardy.”
Klein lifted his gun. “I’ve seen your file, Ruiz,” he said, his voice rising. “With your Reliability Index, I’m at a loss to understand why they trusted you on this mission in the first place. I’d give you summary termination right now if I felt like wasting ammunition.”
Beefy hands closed on Ruiz’s arms. Smitty was behind him, an arm crooked around his throat. Ruiz tried to scuffle with them. Klein looked around at the crowd with worried eyes.
Gifford, hauling a limp Kiernan through the gate, said, “We don’t need the old crock. Maybury does all his figuring for him anyway.”
“Leave her out of it!” Ruiz cried. He actually broke free for a moment, and then a lead pipe came down on his head. He crumpled to the ground. Smitty and one of the Chinese began methodically to kick him in the ribs.
“Stop it!” It was Maybury. She ran to Ruiz and cradled his battered head. “Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz, say something!” Ruiz’s head lolled. He was as limp as an empty pressure suit.
They dragged her off him and hustled her through the gate, her feet off the ground. Jameson knelt beside Ruiz. “He’s alive,” he said. “Somebody go get Janet, quickly!”
Klein’s troops and their prisoners filed through the opening in the gate, weighed down with their improvised weapons and bundles of supplies. Somewhere nearby, Jameson heard Liz say bitterly, “They took practically all the food we got from the ship’s stores.”
The delay with Ruiz had been a mistake for Klein. As the last couple of Chinese got through the gate, backing up and brandishing their weapons warningly at the people left inside, somebody up front piercingly yelled: “Liu hsin, liu hsin!”
Dmitri was shaking Jameson by the shoulder. “An alarm,” he said. “They must have set off some kind of alarm when they opened the door. The Cygnans are coming.
Jameson heaved himself to his feet and ran to the gate. Ignoring the threatening gestures of the Chinese in the rear guard, he sprang to the bars and hauled himself up for a better look.
Two Cygnans were skittering down the curving corridor of the hall of bipeds. One of them was down, snake low, on all sixes, the long tubular snout aimed like an arrowhead. The other trotted on four legs like some nightmare centaur, cradling a gleaming blunderbuss in its flexible arms.
It was Tetrachord and Triad, come to put the animals back in their cages.
The neural weapon had a short range, a cone of modulated microwaves that lost its efficiency at twenty or thirty feet. But when Tetrachord fanned it over the twenty-odd people in Klein’s party, the floor was going to be covered with blind, writhing bundles of short-circuited nerves who would be kept that way until they could be hauled back to the cage.
Klein’s group split in two and scurried to opposite sides of the hall. Basic military tactics. A pair of zookeepers wouldn’t be much on strategy.
Jameson clung to the bars, taking in the scene. In the cusped vestibule that formed the intersection of the narrow ends of the five major habitats, the fleeing humans had spread out in two broken arcs that bent toward each other like pincers, some fifty feet apart. No matter which angle the Cygnans approached from, the neural weapon was not going to be able to sweep the nearer half of one of the two lines.
As if realizing this, Tetrachord veered first to the right, then to the left. Triad failed to change direction fast enough, and that was what saved her.
At a distance of about ten yards, Tetrachord, still running, reared up and shouldered his blunderbuss—or, rather, deployed it with the bulb-shaped grip braced in one rubbery claw. Jameson, seeing the whole thing in the slow-motion vision of stimulated adrenals, irrelevantly admired the unbroken rhythm of the Cygnan running pattern as he shifted from four legs to three to two.
And then the creature’s long flexible head disappeared in an explosion of orange gore.
Jameson caught a frozen glimpse of Klein picking himself off the floor, where he’d thrown himself for a prone shot. Then he realized that Tetrachord’s headless body was still running, and he remembered that a Cygnan’s brain was somewhere below the neck, a swelling of that central ganglion. He shuddered, wondering what thoughts might be going on within the blind, deaf isolation of the body. Klein was in no hurry to fire his explosive darts again; perhaps he enjoyed watching the creature’s agony. Tetrachord dropped to four legs, then six, the neural weapon clattering to the floor, running more and more jerkily, then lowering the long sleek body almost deliberately, the legs still twitching. A great gout of orange fluid, thick as syrup, was spurting from the tattered stem of the neck.
A sound like a steam whistle split the sudden hush, and Jameson saw a golden flash streak between the two lines of humans toward the safety of the cage. It was Triad, chittering with fear, her six legs peddling in a feathery blur.
Klein had lost his chance to fire at her. He swiveled around, his gun held stiff-armed, and for a moment Jameson feared that the man was insane enough to hose down the humans clustered at the cagefront, and some of his own people, with a stream of microflechettes. The moment passed, and Klein lowered the gun as the Cygnan oozed past the open gate and, flinching away from the humans, cowered against the wall, afraid to go farther.
Klein laughed. He strode to the cage and looked in. Jameson dropped to the ground. His eyes met Klein’s.
“Stupid snakes!” Klein said. “Ruiz was right about one thing—their brains must have gotten frozen six million years ago. They don’t look so tough now. We’re going to make it, Jameson.”
“Listen, Klein,” Jameson said. “All right, escape if you can. But don’t use the nukes.”
Klein didn’t bother to reply. He motioned Jameson and the others away from the door with his gun, then rolled it shut all the way. There was a solid-sounding thunk, then a series of clicks as ratchets fell into place. Klein tried the door with a tug of his powerful arms. It held firm. He turned on his heel and walked away.
Jameson followed him with his eyes as he walked the length of the vestibule toward the headless Cygnan body. It had stopped twitching. Klein bent and picked up the neural weapon. He handed it to Chia, and the little procession, with its herded prisoners, moved past the rows of cages down the hall and disappeared around a bend.
A circle of people were gawking at the huddled Triad, keeping well out of reach of the rasping snout. It hadn’t occurred to anybody to try to harm her. Jameson went over to her. It was up to him to try to retrieve the situation.
The other people let him through. They looked at him expectantly. Perhaps they were wondering what the Cygnans would do to them in the morning. He bent over. “Careful, Tod,” somebody said.
The Cygnan was shivering violently and uncontrollably. Her three eyestalks waved purposelessly around the central orifice at the tip of the flexible snout, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Jameson doubted that the creature had distinguished him from the other suddenly dangerous animals that surrounded her.
He tried her name three times before he got her attention. Then her long head quested toward him like an elephant’s trunk and she whistled the three tones that meant “Ja-me-son.” It sounded a little like the call of a whippoorwill, and for some reason Jameson read pathos into it.
He looked her over carefully. She didn’t appear to be hurt, but she was behaving strangely. A human being in the grip of some powerful and uncontrollable emotion might writhe the way she was now doing. Was it grief over the loss of her mate? Fear? What the hell was it that a Cygnan felt?