Rance shook his head. "I don't know if the surviving men can stand up to three jumps in quick succession."
"Di-trexane."
"What?"
"Di-trexane. It was issued to the medians and officers to ease them through the jump. It wasn't issued to you."
The anger among the men was like a physical presence.
"I fucking knew they had something."
There was real disappointment that nobody was left to kill. The jumps had been bad enough when they'd seemed unavoidable. Not it was like some hideous conspiracy of pain.
"But why?"
"The Therem move according to strange logic." "Don't they just."
There was one other major flaw in the aliens' plan. It was Renchett who voiced it. "We don't have no women." "I beg your pardon?"
"Women. We don't have none. It going to be a pretty sad little colony with just a bunch of old soldiers getting older."
"I'm sorry, I don't understand you." "Seems simple to me."
Rance stepped in. "Without females, our species cannot reproduce."
"We didn't know that."
Renchett was getting angry. "Everybody knows that."
"We are all specialists. None of us have a grounding in comparative biology."
"That's as may be. The question still remains. What are we going to do about it?"
The interpreter moved an unhappy tentacle. "There seems to be nothing we can do about it."
Renchett bristled. "There damn well is."
"There is?"
"We could head back to the last recstar and liberate the women there."
There was a murmur of agreement from the humans. Then the lantere boomed.
"That's impossible. Even if this ship had operational weapons and shields, it couldn't take 6n an asteroid base."
The other aliens signified agreement.
"We can't go back into combat space."
"And we ain't sitting around on some mudball waiting to be the last one to die."
Rance held up a hand. "Wait a minute. There could be a way to do this. How many fighting men could the ship muster if it really came to it?"
"Perhaps two hundred if we armed the technical personnel."
"We could take a recstar with two hundred motivated troops."
Renchett grinned. "And we'd sure as hell be motivated."
The navigator emitted bubbles. "It's impossible."
"No, it's not. Listen, we could approach the recstar pretending to be exactly what we are, the lone crippled survivor of a destroyed cluster. They must know by now that the Anah was wiped out in the JD4 system, and they won't suspect anything. We limp in, and we dock. While we're docking, the ground troops drop to the surface of the asteroid. We hit 'em hard before they know what's happening. The women will join with us. We'll have the ship ready-powered so we can jump immediately everyone's back on board."
The interpreter conjured an image of men silently floating down across the asteroid's rocky terrain. "It has a certain plausibility."
The dauquoi didn't agree. "The rest of us can't risk our new freedom for the comfort of one species." The lantere rumbled agreement.
Rance looked meaningfully at his weapon. "As a representative of that species, I can assure you all that we take our comfort very seriously."
Topman Benset moved up beside Rance. "It's more than comfort. It's the continuing freedom of our species. We're prepared to fight for that."
There was a sudden tension in the dome. The interpreter started pumping out calming abstracts, but they had little effect on the increasingly belligerent lantere.
"Are you threatening us?"
"We're trying not to, but if we don't do this our way, I think you're going to have problems with our future cooperation. We do have the firepower."
Weapons were being hefted to emphasize the point. The interpreter seemed to accept the situation.
"I think we have to go along with the humans' proposal."
The lantere was still being stubborn.
"If we were to attack the asteroid base, I could find myself fighting against my own kind."
Rance nodded grimly at the charred bodies of the medians.
"That can sometimes be the price of your freedom."
There was a long silence. Finally the lantere gave in.
"Very well, I will agree to this foolhardy expedition, but I still have grave doubts."
Renchett whooped and spun his weapon. "Let's get ourselves some girls!"
Rance looked at him. He wasn't smiling.
"This may not be that easy."
Sixteen
"The suits don't work," Dyrkin told Rance.
"What do you mean the suits don't work?1
"Try one. They go on the way they always did, but once they're on, there's no flexibility. You can't move your arms and legs. Also, they're secreting something that's got everyone close to throwing up."
"What the hell is going on? We're only hours out from the recstar. There's never been a problem with the suits before. Why now?"
Rance followed Dyrkin to the messdeck. The ship had completed its third and final jump, and preparations were under way for the attack. A problem with the suits was little short of a disaster. Rance immediately stripped off his dress tans.
"Somebody throw me a suit."
Hark tossed across one of the shapeless black blobs.
"It's like they know what we're doing and they're refusing to go along with it. It's like they won't go against the Therem."
"That's ridiculous superstition. The suits don't have the brains for anything like that."
Rance placed the suit on the deck and stood on it. The suit began to crawl up his leg, but it moved more slowly than usual. The slowness was easy to interpret as reluctance. When the suit covered his body, he experimentally flexed his arms. The suit resisted. The same happened when he tried to bend his legs.
"See what we mean?"
"We're not going to be able to use them."
"What are we going to do? We can't go into combat without suits."
"We could use radiation armor."
"It's goddamn bulky. It's going to really cut down on our mobility."
"What the hell else can we do?"
"Nothing. We'll have to go with the radiation suits. Dyrkin, scout around and see how many you can come up with."
"What are we going to do with the suits?"
Rance shook his head. "I don't know. I'm going to talk to the aliens and see if they've got a line on any of this."
The meeting with the aliens was brief. They had nothing to contribute as to why the suits should be behaving the way they were. Strangely, they seemed more inclined than Rance to accept the men's idea that the creatures were actually refusing to act against the interests of the Therem.
"Even though it seems at the time to defy logic, an intuitive feeling may be a pointer to the truth." "Sure."
"We don't feel that these things should be allowed to remain loose in the ship. The current loss of function may be only the start of an entire destructive cycle. We have no idea what might be built into their genetic code. We urge you to destroy them."
"The suits are not that easily destroyed," Rance reminded them.
"So simply jettison them into space."
"You want us to do that?"
"It would seem the obvious solution."
"The men aren't going to like this. They've been a long way with those suits. Remember that we and the suits are symbiotic."
"The men would probably like it even less if someone else disposed of the suits."
"You've got a point there."
The men didn't like it. The announcement was received by a hard silence. No one cursed'and no one complained, but also no one moved. Nobody wanted to be the first. Finally Dyrkin broke the deadlock.