And if Marlowe’s reaction was anything to go by, Ferrol had at the very least managed to sour the atmosphere on the bridge a bit. A subtle but genuine form of damage.
“Got it, Captain,” Kennedy announced. “Bearing 96.4, 15.3. Distance, six hundred thousand kilometers.”
“Send the direction to the Tampies,” Roman told her. “Straight-line path, once we’ve come around, and have Sso-ngu keep acceleration at 0.9 gee.”
He would have thought Ferrol would be willing to quit while he was ahead. He was wrong. “Shall I compute turnover point for them, sir?” the other spoke up. “Their excuse for a computer may not be able to handle the calculation.”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Roman countered. “Lieutenant, just give Sso-ngu the location and let the Tampies do the rest.” He cocked an eyebrow to Ferrol. “If they can, that is.”
They could, and did… and just under five hours later Pegasus eased the Amity smoothly into geosynchronous orbit around Alpha.
If Ferrol had won the first round of his private duel, the Tampies had clearly won the second.
Roman had seen a fair number of planetary landscapes over the years, either in person or in holos, and he’d found that in almost every case his first impression was of the wild and exotic color combinations alien plant life always seemed able to come up with.
It was a rule that Alpha had proved a glaring exception to. The wide prairielike field the landing party was busy poking around, as well as the forest beyond it, were done entirely in black, white, and shades of gray.
“It’s really rather amazing,” Ells Sanderson commented, and even through the muffling of his filter mask there was no mistaking the excitement in his voice.
“The predominant black-and-gray plant coloration makes considerable sense as far as photosynthesis goes—allows more energy to be collected, including more of the infrared than straight chlorophyll-variants can utilize.”
“Pretty dull as far as looking goes, though,” Roman commented. “Are all the animals and insects naturally color-blind?”
“It’s one of the things we’ll be checking,” Sanderson said. “Though you bring up an interesting point: namely, how pollination takes place without brightly colored flowers to attract the insects.”
“Maybe it’s not done by insects at all,” Roman suggested. “Couldn’t the pollen be airborne, or transmitted by animals that brush by?”
“The anthers of most of these plants are wrong for that,” one of the other scientists put in. Steef Burch, Roman tentatively identified the voice. “Besides which, I can see various insects doing flight patterns through and around clumps of specific plant types.”
“We’re taking some proximity air samples,” Sanderson added. “That should tell us if the flowers are putting out chemical cues.”
“Sounds good.” Roman scanned the multi-split screen that showed all of the lander’s fixed cameras and the landing party’s portable ones, chose one of the two that showed the analysis table that had been set up a dozen meters from the lander’s air lock. He keyed for it, and Sanderson’s close-up of dull gray foliage was replaced by a close-up of a small gray-brown creature that looked like a nightmare blend of aardvark face, turtle shell, short monkey legs, and lobster claws, the whole thing strapped to the table by a covering of mesh net. “Dr. Peyton? How are the animal studies going?”
“Ttra-mu and I are doing just fine,” Miki Peyton said in the vaguely distant voice of someone absorbed in her work. Peyton’s file had put her as marginally anti- Tampy, a fact that had worried Roman more than once as the lander was heading down. The Tampies would be watching this part of the work closely, making sure there was nothing that could be construed as mistreatment, and the last thing Roman wanted was someone who might go all twitchy under the aliens’ lopsided gaze. But Peyton had been the head of the group who’d designed and built this particular analysis table, and she’d made it more than clear that she personally was going to be there for her pet project’s official debut. The risk of friction down on Alpha hadn’t been worth risking civil war on the Amity for, and Roman had reluctantly given in.
But so far it seemed to be working out all right. He just hoped Ttra-mu would have the sense to look but not touch.
“We’ve got the preliminary layer scans done now,” Peyton continued. “Is the data coming through clearly enough up there?‘
“Dr. Tenzing?” Roman invited.
“Coming in very clear,” the voice of the survey section’s chief came promptly over the intercom. “We’ve already started sifting through it.”
“Good. Ttra-mu, how’s your hand?”
“The damage is not serious, Rro-maa,” the Tampy whined. “As I said before, the inner skin was not broken.”
Which ought to eliminate any risk of infection or poisoning, even if there was anything in the lobster-clawed creature that could affect Tampy physiology. “Keep the analyzer on it, anyway,” Roman ordered him. “Dr. Peyton, have you figured out yet how the creature did that?”
“You mean how it could pinch Ttra-mu through the net at a distance further than its claw-arm could physically reach?” she asked dryly. “Not yet; but at least I’ve proved that what happened wasn’t actually impossible. This thing has no bones.”
Roman frowned. “None at all?”
“None at all,” she confirmed. “And very little cartilage, either. Most of its skeletal framework seems to be nothing more or less than an organic type of bi-state memory plastic, which can apparently be rigid or flexible as the need arises.”
Roman eyed the creature on his display with new respect. “Interesting. Is this something unique to this particular species, or do you expect it to be the Alphan norm?”
“Well know in a minute,” a new voice broke into the conversation. “This is Singh, Captain; Llos-tlaa and I are just about to net you a rabbit.”
Roman scanned the split screen, found Audrey Singh’s chest camera and switched to it. Sitting on its haunches among the squat gray ground shrubbery was a creature that bore not a shred of resemblance to an Earth rabbit. “That’s a rabbit, is it?” he asked Singh.
“Well, it looks like it would fill that niche in the ecosystem, anyway.” A hand clutching a net gun appeared at the edge of the screen as Singh eased toward his prey, and across the way Roman could now see Llos-tlaa, similarly armed, moving in from the opposite direction. “Easy, friend,” Singh murmured soothingly under his breath. “We’re not going to hurt you, just take a painless look at your insides.”
He carefully raised the netter—
And the creature abruptly changed into something else and leapt away.
“Bloody hell!” Singh gasped, the view swinging dizzyingly as he spun around to watch the new creature’s bounding escape. “It can’t do that.”
His last word was almost swallowed up by the hoarse sputter of a rapid-fire needle gun. Across the field, the creature jerked in mid-jump and slammed unmoving to the ground. “Hold your fire!” Roman barked. “Who was that?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “It was me, sir—Garin,” the head of the landing party’s four-man guard detail spoke up. “I figured the scientists would want the thing caught for study—”
“There was no need to kill it!”
Roman jumped. The scream was high-pitched, almost shrill, its tones rich with grief and agony and a sense of frustration and reproach. His eyes skated across the split screen, seeking the creature still netted to the analysis table, his first horrible thought that the scream had somehow come from it. “Who said that?” he demanded.
“Forgive me, Rro-maa.” —And in those three words the shrill pitch of the voice dropped down the scale back to the normal Tampy whine. “I was angered.”
“So I gather, Llos-tlaa,” Roman said, his own anger at Garin’s unauthorized killing vanishing in the shiver running up his back. Nowhere in any of the briefings had there been any hint that Tampy voices could do that. “Garin, unless you’re under a deadly and immediate threat, you will not fire again without orders. Understood?”