Wordlessly, a pale Davis turned and reached into one of the first aid containers on the bridge. From it he withdrew a green-brown bottle marked “Fungicide: Toxic if taken by mouth!” and two Styrofoam cups.
“Courtesy of Father Dwyer,” he announced as he poured a generous measure into each.
Though neither Davis nor McNair could hear it, Maggie and the kittens could. From the very hull and walls of CA-134, USS Des Moines, came the joyous sound of a new birth. The felines, along with the ship herself, meowed in happiness. Morgen, Davis’ favorite kitten, stropped the walls repeatedly.
The mantra which so thrilled the cats was simple. It was repeated endlessly: We are alive, We/I have a place. I/we have a history. I have a name.
Interlude
The great clans of the Posleen could afford to make up entire globes, indeed entire fleets of globes, on their own. For lesser clans, it was always necessary to contract with others to make up full globes. These lesser clans were usually the point of a Posleen migration.
When the time of orna’adar approached, the more powerful clans would squeeze out the lesser, driving them to space early. Sometimes these lessers would find planets settled by thresh. Sometimes they would be forced to migrate to a planet held by even weaker clans of the People, driven forth even earlier.
Very often, when fighting to seize living space from a weaker clan of Posleen, the newly arriving, slightly greater, clan would be so weakened that it could not recover before one of the great clans descended upon it. Sometimes, by leaving and conquering early, a lucky clan might prosper enough to hold its own when the great ones arrived.
Clans rose and fell all the time.
Guanamarioch’s clan, though it had once been great, was small now. It shared a globe with several others. Thus, in the same globe as held the ship on which Guanamarioch rode, but on nearly the opposite side, traveled the clan of Binastarion.
Among his people, for that matter among the People as a whole, Binastarion was a fine figure of a Kessentai. Strong legs were topped by a solid barrel of muscled torso. The scales of his surface shone well, even by the dim light of the ships. His claws and teeth were sharp, his face cunning, and his eyes glowed yellow with intelligence. Even his crest, when erected, was of an unusual magnificence.
It was, in many ways, a great pity he had been born to a lesser clan. It might have done the People as a whole much good had Binastarion’s birth been more favorable. As one measure of his ability, when the time of orna’adar had begun, and the great ones had preyed upon the lesser, Binastarion had fought two clans to a standstill, then created the circumstances that set them to battling each other. This had allowed Binastarion to escape with nearly three quarters of his clan before their threshgrounds were overrun. Already, the Rememberers spoke of adding another scroll to the clan’s own set of holy books.
Binastarion’s follower and son, Riinistarka, looked upon his father with respect bordering upon adulation. The juvenile Kessentai was Binastarion’s chosen successor-in-training, albeit only unofficially. Indeed, to have made his son his successor, officially, at this stage of his development was to invite assassination from jealous siblings.
Of Binastarion’s roughly three thousand sons, nephews, cousins — however many times removed — half were, in his opinion, idiots not much improved over the semimoronic normals. They had a full measure of the same stupidity that had driven the clan from the pinnacle of power to the bottom-feeding position they now held.
Binastarion hoped to undo that damage from long ago. Riinistarka was his chosen means, along with a very few others. Already, though the child was young, the father was breeding him and the best of the others, regularly, in the hope of producing more Kessentai of similar quality. Results, so far, were uncertain.
None of those selected for the clan’s little program in selective breeding seemed to object, Binastarion noted dryly.
But breeding was only the half of it. For Binastarion’s prize breeding stock, the hope and future of the clan, education was called for beyond that provided by the Rememberers or ingrained in the younglings’ genes.
Chapter 5
The sea breeze caused the white pleated material to rustle and twirl as Daisy Mae stretched her legs. Ahead of her Tex, stocky and stout, lumbered along in his dumb way. Tex wasn’t much to look at, Daisy Mae thought, but she felt much safer with him in the lead. Behind Tex and beside Daisy Mae was that witch Sally.
Sally, so prim and proper, thought Daisy, with annoyance. Thinks she’s something special because she got that damned part in that Brit movie. Well, I am just as good looking as she is. Besides, I’m the older sister. That part should have gone to me. Twat.
Daisy let her annoyance lapse. Ahead Tex began making a broad, lumbering turn around a corner. She increased her pace to keep up even as Sally slowed.
With a slight, sexy twist of her ass, Daisy turned her two magnificent frontal projections and followed big brother Tex to the south.
This far south in the Darien jungle, at this time of the year, the rain came down in unending sheets. Its steady beating made a dull roar on the thick leaves of the triple canopy jungle. Beneath that canopy stood an ad hoc training base — little more than some tents and a few prefabricated huts — just down the trail from the middle of nowhere.
In that base, a mixed team of U.S. Special Forces and Panama Defense Force troopers did their best to train local Indians, a mixture of Cuna and Chocoes clan chiefs, to defend their people against the horror to come.
The Cuna were mostly hopeless; they were simply too nice, too nonviolent and rather too standoffish. Still, the soldiers tried. On the other hand, the Chocoes had some promise… if only they could have been taught to shoot.
Antonio Ruiz, clan chief and brevet sergeant first class, Armada de Panama Chocoes Auxiliary, couldn’t shoot. The men who had tried to teach him were at the end of their tether. They’d tried rifles, machine guns, pistols, grenade launchers. Nothing had worked; the chief-cum-sergeant just couldn’t shoot and neither could most of his people.
Truthfully, the guns terrified him. In Ruiz’s world, the loudest noise was natural thunder, or the rare crash of a tree limb cracking before dropping to the earth. Ruiz had never heard a louder sound in his life. Neither had all but a few of his people. The noise of a firearm discharging simply shocked him and most of them silly, every time, and no amount of practice seemed to help.
Silencers had been tried, but the sheer muck and corruption of the jungle made them impossible for irregular troops like the Chocoes.
Finally, in desperation, the gringo captain had made a call to his higher headquarters. Ruiz didn’t know the details of that call. What he did know was that two weeks later a shipment of bows and arrows had arrived on one of the gringos’ flying machines.
Culturally and racially similar, though not actually closely related, to the Yanamano of Brazil’s Amazon basin, Ruiz’s people were almost as ferocious as the “fierce people.” They had openly hunted heads not merely from time immemorial but as recently as the 1950s. Truth be told, the ban on trading of shrunken heads had only reduced the scale of the headhunting enterprise. Ruiz and his people still took heads, occasionally, in the old fashion.