"All uninjured personnel who are not engaged in repair or fire-fighting should proceed immediately to section eighty-two."
"What the hell is that?"
Although the voice had been speaking in their language, it was definitely not human.
"Section eighty-two is median country."
Rance halted and faced the men. "I think I know what that was."
"You don't look too happy about it."
"Anybody know what the interpreters are?"
"Some kind of alien, right?"
"We never see them. I heard they were ugly suckers, kind of blue globs with tentacles."
"Is it true they can talk everyone's language?"
"They're supposed to be part instinctive linguists and part telepaths. Their function is interspecies communication. If one of them is issuing orders, there can't be too many of us left alive on this hulk."
Section 82 was just inside the ship's hull. Its center was a transparent fire-control dome. Although most of the equipment was burned out and the dome was badly scarred, it was still intact and airtight. When Rance's squad arrived, there was already quite a big gathering in the large circular area. It was a gathering that only a few days earlier they would not have envisioned even in their wildest dreams. Almost every species on the ship was represented, including a number of aliens that the men had never seen before. The atmosphere was set for humans, and three of the alien species present were contained in their sealed environmental enclosures. The trooper who had described the interpreters as blue globs with tentacles had been very close to the truth. There were three of them in their tank, floating in a soup of methane and ammonia. One side of their mobile tank was covered in a complex of communication equipment. The lone lantere was still in its battle armor, as were the pair of wormlike dauquoi. Another tank contained a dim,' constantly changing shape.
Hark whispered to Dyrkin. "You know what that is?"
"It's a navigator, boy. I doubt even the medians saw a navigator before. Nobody ever sees the navigators. Nobody. They live in the heart of the ship in their own sealed environment."
"What exactly do they do?"
"What their name says. They navigate. Don't ask me to explain it in detail. They navigate the cluster through jumpspace. They know instinctively where we are, and they sculpt the jumps accordingly."
"Weird."
"You said it."
Including Rance's troopers, there were some thirty humans in the room. Most were rank and file, other troopers, spacecrew, riggers, sluicers, a motley bunch who had managed simply to survive both the attack and the jump. The medians stood apart from the others of their kind. Rance noted that there wasn't a single officer present.
The interpreter's voice came again.
"We are in a unique position. The Therem on this ship are all dead." The alien's voice echoed strangely; somehow it was speaking in a number of languages at once. "We have also lost the other ships in the cluster."
Everything with eyes looked up through the dome. It was true-they were alone in space. Beyond the dome, there were no other ships, just the stars. The closest object was a glowing cloud of gas that hung in space like a furled silver flag. The emptiness seemed very close.
"What of the Yal?"
"It's unlikely that they are able to track or follow us. They probably believe that this ship was destroyed along with the others."
One of the medians had a question.
"How badly is the ship damaged?"
"A number of levels are out of commission. We have no weapons capacity, but the ship has spatial mobility, and it's capable of short jumps."
"Do we know where we are?"
A dim green light glowed in the navigator's tank. The interpreter's equipment translated.
"We know where we are. We are away from the normal avenues of combat. Do you require the coordinates?"
The median shook his head. "It would appear that our duty is clear. We should proceed, in short stages, to the nearest Alliance base and await orders."
The lantere made a noise that was a cross between a grunt and a bellow.
"That might be open to a certain amount of discussion," came the translation.
The median's voice was cold and particular. "Surely any such discussion might be construed as treason when our duty is so obvious."
This time the interpreter spoke for itself. "There are those of us who don't see it as quite so obvious. Some might say that fate has freed us from the Therem and our duty might, in fact, be to pursue that fate."
"We still belong to the Therem Alliance," the median argued.
There was a rumble from the dauquoi. "You mean we still belong to the Therem." "We still belong to the war."
The navigator blinked and bubbled. "Ah, yes, the war. It was never a war of our choosing."
"There is no escaping the war."
"Do the other humans share their median's devotion to our master's war?" the interpreter asked.
Rance looked around, wondering who was being addressed. Then he realized that everyone had turned in his direction.
"I… don't think we're crazy about going back to the war. Is there any alternative?"
The median cut him off. "There is no alternative."
"Let the humans speak for themselves."
The median took a step forward. His tone was now coolly threatening. "My men don't need to speak. They do what they're told."
Rance started receiving a telepathic image. It showed him and his men burning down the medians. He realized that the men were seeing it, too. They were looking to him for direction. The median must have also received the image. He started to draw a sidearm.
"You men will stay exactly where you are!"
Rance fired without thinking. The other men did the same. The three medians were cut down by a withering hail of MEW lire. The troopers kept on firing until the medians' bodies were nothing more than shapeless blackened stumps. The interpreter was making a high-pitched keening. Rance slowly lowered his weapon.
"What now?"
The interpreter got its voice back under control. "You must pardon me. I find it very distressing to be in close proximity to death."
"We've just committed grand mutiny. What are we supposed to do now?"
"You have killed all your remaining superiors. What you do now is your decision."
"There are no more medians and no officers?"
"The human officers' level was destroyed in one of the first explosions. No one survived. The other medians died later."
"What do you intend to do?"
"We have a plan that we will outline."
The aliens' plan was a relatively simple one. They would take the Anah 5 and get as far away from both the Yal and the Therem as possible. Their offer to the troopers and the other humans still on board was a free ride to the planet of their choice. The best choice, as the aliens saw it, was a planet in a system three jumps away. It had recently been terraformed by a party from the Anah cluster.
"The existence of the planet would only have been recorded in the cluster's brain net. Now that has been destroyed; only we know that it's there. It's a bleak, bare place where it rains a lot of the time, but over the years," conditions will improve. The important thing is that the odds against being discovered are astronomical."