Battleground (32 page)

Once inside the warren she had targeted, though, she stopped. She had used a subsidiary door here as well, and coming in this way, she could not get her bearings. The door opened into a hallway that showed her only other doors in the darting beam of light, one facing this entrance and others to its left and right. One of those might open onto yet another hall leading to an area Nakeekt had bypassed, but she could not guess which one.

There was nothing to do but open door after door: at first, the wrong doors. The spaces behind them were small. Some of the things in them were homey and familiar: one held towels and clothing and other things made of fabric, folded neatly onto shelves, seen quickly in fast, thin stabs of light. She thought they had all been made here; there had been looms in the work areas, electric-powered. She left the coverlet there, where it did not look out of place. In another room there were neatly racked tools; in another, broken ones tumbled helter-skelter, waiting for a day of repair that might not come. Some dust, in that room. Unused furnishings were wedged into still another so tightly that the door closed, when she closed it, with difficulty. (She could almost hear someone say, human-like:
I am sure one more will fit . . .)
More dust, there.

It did not seem like anything she shouldn't have been allowed to see.

She had started with the first door, the one that faced her, and moved down the hallway to her right. When she was done with that direction she went back and opened the door just to the left of center.

She stepped into a much larger space.

Every door on this end of the hall opened into it. She faced a series of tables, one long line of them, running the width of the room. When she went closer she saw that there was a parallel row of benches behind them. The tables and benches were identical to those in the hall where she and Gabriel had eaten with their hosts. They were without decoration, and there was nothing on the tables. Behind those, solidly built into the wall, were cabinets or cupboards.

Hanna went through a gap in the tables. Closer now, she saw that the cabinets were really ranks of shallow drawers, and they filled up all the back of the room, floor to ceiling. The bank was made of wood that gleamed almost black. She thought it was painted, but when she touched it, changed her mind: the wood was not painted but worked to a smoothness that mimicked polished metal, and the design was utilitarian in the extreme. A single hollow was set into the face of each drawer, the depression topped with an overhanging lip to use for a handle. It had the pure beauty of simplicity.

She chose a drawer at random. It was so well made that the pressure of one finger drew it out.

Inside lay a few sheets of something that might have been paper, though it had nearly the flexibility of fabric. She took the sheets out and put them on the nearest table, and turned them over one by one. There were five in all. One had half a dozen lines of script on it; the second was almost covered with writing; the others were full, with a note at the bottom of each that might be a numeral.

She could not read any of it. She had not learned to read what Soldiers thought worth writing down.

She put the sheets back and began moving along the columns of drawers, opening them at random. Some were half-full, none more than half, and others were empty; most held sheets of the vellum-like substance.

She picked one that was covered with script top to bottom and looked at it carefully, holding the light close. The lines were not evenly spaced, and other telltales made it evident that the text had been written by hand. Using what?—she looked back at the tables and saw that drawers were built into them too, and when she opened one, there were writing implements and small ceramic containers that gurgled when she picked them up. Ink, she guessed.

The pages were important, she supposed; they must be, if Nakeekt was anxious to keep them hidden; but why hidden from alien visitors? They were unlikely to have to do with war, which apparently did not engage the people of This Place; but whatever they were about, if they were important enough to hide . . .

Hanna sighed, and called to the D'neerans on
Endeavor
. They were awake and they were bored.
Get Communications to stand by for incoming data,
she told them, and ordered the communicator to another mode. She began transmitting pictures of page after page.

After a while she heard:
They say some of it's in code!
—Joseph, gleeful at a mystery.

Then tell them to decode it!
—she wondered if she was wasting her time. Possibly, but it was worth some effort to find out what was written here. Battleground's people were such a puzzle that she wanted a solution any way she could get one. She tried to remember if any alien species had ever been so opaque to her understanding before, and decided none had. Of course, she had never before pretended not to be a telepath, either, and had found other beings generous with their thoughts—

She checked the chronometer, decided she could risk an hour or two for this task and still have time to investigate that outbuilding—and a boring, repetitive task it was, too, turning pages, sending images, more pages, more images—time went on.

•   •   •

Glitch.

Nothing serious, the telepath
s said. A short interruption in reception, Metra radiating fury, someone would pay for this.
Stand by,
they told Hanna. She shrugged, kept storing images.

•   •   •

Gabriel's communicator uttered a seri
es of plaintive beeps. He was not, for once, sleeping like the peaceful dead, and the sound woke him. He took the thing off and talked to it, and it informed him that it was working just fine, thank you, except that at the moment it was not able to communicate with anything. Shaking it did not make it change its mind.

He sat up and looked around. The displays were indeed working, and gave enough light in the windowless room for him to find the switch for the electric light like the one next to Hanna's bed. The room seemed comfortless, and he suddenly realized that if the communicator was not working, he was cut off from
Endeavor.

He got up and started for Hanna's room. Maybe she had woken at a cascade of tones, too, but maybe not, and if she did not know what had happened, probably she ought to hear about it.

Going through the dark hallways was unnerving; he powered up the communicator's light source just enough to allow him to shuffle along. The halls were completely silent, like the abbey's in the small hours of the morning, and the swish of his footsteps sounded very loud. At Hanna's door he called to her softly and then, when there was no response, more loudly; he knocked on it, too, and finally opened it. She was not there. There was no sound except a susurration of rain outside. He turned on the light and waited a little while, wondering if she had gone to use a communal lavatory, but time passed and she did not return, and he began to worry. There was no cover on her bed and no sign of it in the room, and he could not imagine what had happened to it or to her. The communicator still did not respond; there was no one to ask.

Could she have gone back to the pod and tried to raise
Endeavor
from there? Possible.

He told himself:
She does not need my help, whatever she is doing
. He had never faced real danger in his life, if you didn't count Kwoort and the Holy Men, and they had not attempted physical harm. Hanna—he knew now—had been born with or developed an immediate, sometimes deadly response to danger and had survived several different kinds of it.

All the same, she was alone. And protectiveness was built into Gabriel.

He left the room and went to find her. He would try the pod first.

He was pleased to discover, at the head of the downward ramps, a switch on the wall that turned on lights all the way down, and he moved down the ramps with confidence. He remembered to turn the light off when he got to the bottom, thinking belatedly that it would be good if the people here were sound sleepers.

•   •   •

Nakeekt was not.

She woke when she he
ard Gabriel knock on Hanna's door, and she heard him call out words that obviously were not meant for her because they were in the not-Soldiers' language. The creature must have disengaged or put aside his translating device, she thought. She heard him go into the female's room. Kwek said the not-Soldiers mated frequently (but without issue, somehow) and did it most often in sleep periods, so perhaps that was why the male was abroad.

Nakeekt was nearly asleep again when she heard him come out. He did not start back to his own room, but came past Nakeekt's door.

She got out of bed and peeked out.

When the male was out of sight she stepped into the hall and looked toward the female's room. The door was open and the light on, but when she went and looked into it, the female was not there.

Farther down the hall, a wall lit up with reflected light. Nakeekt knew from long experience where it came from. Why was the male going downstairs?

Her own room was directly above the main entrance. She went to the window and waited. Soon she saw the male go out and stand hesitating in the rain. Then he started walking slowly in the direction of the airfield. Were they going to fly away in the middle of the night without telling anyone?

Kwek was her chief source—her only source—of information on not-Soldier behavior. Nakeekt went to wake her up.

•   •   •

Joseph:
Translation's starting . . .

Oh . . . ?

Arch:
It might be history. Can't be sure yet. Did you begin at the beginning of this archive?

I don't know where the beginning is . . .

She pictured the wall of drawers, showed them where she had started. In the middle, approximately, and she had not attempted to reach the topmost rows. She showed them how she had proceeded, and how far she had gotten with recording images she had not been able to transmit.

Bella:
They write left to right, like us, and that's how we tend to order objects. Go to the farthest left stack of drawers and start again there.

All right. Is it informative?

It might be.

And you've learned . . . ?

Nothing, yet. We'll need to analyze. Get as much as you can. How much time do you think you have left?

Hours yet if I stretch it . . .

It would mean more tedium, but she might have found a prize.

•   •   •

Kwek, unlike Nakeekt, was deeply asleep. Her usual assignments, even as record-keeper, had one obvious disadvantage—she might cease to survive quite suddenly, possibly being chos
en for that fate arbitrarily (she suspected that was the case)—but they did not involve any stooping or bending or the pulling up of tough plants. Her hands were sore, her back hurt, and she had seldom been this exhausted. The whispers about That Place had not included such details as how the inhabitants obtained food.

She woke quickly enough when Nakeekt, without gentleness, shook her.

“Is it an attack?” she mumbled, not remembering immediately where she was.

“There is no attack, but the not-Soldiers have gone out into the night. They never said they were going to do that. Why did they do that?”

“I don't know,” said Kwek, memory reviving.

“Do they mate outdoors? Do they go out to do it?”

“How would I know? I have not known them long enough to know their customs.” She remembered one of the interesting conversations. “Arkt said they do it on the spacecraft, though. They don't have to be outside.”

“I'm going to look for them. I want you to come along.”

“All right,” Kwek said.

She did not know it was raining until they got to the doorway to the outside. Kwek had not had to go out in the rain for some time, and she balked.

“Why do we have to find them?” she said.

“I want to know what they are doing. They might find out some things I don't want them taking back to Rowtt or Wektt.”

“They might find them out anyway,” Kwek said. “The male said some of them can see thoughts. He told me when I was on the spacecraft. He said it's not like reading orders, but they can find out a lot that way.”

“Oh, can they,” said Nakeekt.

“Where are we going to look for them?”

“The airfield, first. They might be going to communicate with the spacecraft.”

“They don't have to do that either. The devices they wear on their arms do that. Anyway, the female can talk to some of the not-Soldiers on the spacecraft with her thoughts. Gergtk told me.”

“Is that so,” Nakeekt said, “tell me more,” so Kwek did, and they caught up with Gabriel just as he got to the pod, surprising him, because he hadn't heard them behind him over the sound of the rain.

•   •   •

I'm getting sick of doing this,
Hanna said.

The telepaths consulted the true-humans.

Captain says keep going. Signal's back. Everything you've got is in. Captain says get more.

I
don't care. I want to sit down and rest my eyes.

Which she did. The room was peaceful. She ached; some of the muscles in her legs hurt from the long hours of walking.
I am not getting enough exercise,
she thought to herself; she had been focused on Battleground so long and so hard that she had strayed from her customary ways of staying strong. And she was tired in spite of a few hours of sleep, as she seemed to have been more of the time than not since her first tentative contact with the thoughts of a Soldier.

She tried to let her mind rest, too, shutting down directed thought, drifting. She was not likely to fall asleep, seated on this hard bench. She drifted into—

A howl—

Tearing through the dark, tearing to the sky.

I am ending I leave behind nothing nothing nothing