Conquerors' Pride (20 page)

The truth that their government was lying in order to justify a war could be that spark. And with a sudden surge of adrenaline, Pheylan realized that the necessary tinder might be standing right there in front of him.
Thrr-gilag hadn't joined in the quick chorus of reproach that had come from the other two Zhirrzh. On the contrary, he was being noticeably quiet. "I was there," Pheylan repeated, looking directly at him. "I know what happened."
"You not speak against Elders," Thrr-gilag said. But to Pheylan's ears the words sounded hesitant and unsure, and there'd been just a slight pause before he said them. "Not proper subject. Tell why CIRCE not used against Zhirrzh."
Pheylan turned away and started walking toward the forest path again. "CIRCE isn't standard-issue equipment aboard human ships," he said. "Contrary to what your leaders have probably told you, we humans don't kill just for the hell of it. Only when it's absolutely necessary."
"CIRCE used against others."
"It was used against the Pawoles." Pheylan threw them a grim smile. "But, then, the Pawoles attacked first."
They had reached the edge of the forest before Thrr-gilag spoke again. "How often CIRCE used?"
"Just that one time," Pheylan said. "The Pawoles were smart enough to capitulate before we had to use it again." He looked Thrr-gilag straight in those three-pupiled eyes. "Other nonhumans we locked horns with were smart enough not to make us use it at all."
He turned back to the forest. "Looks like a path here," he commented, gesturing to it. "Where does it lead?"
"Not go there," Thrr-gilag said.
"I won't," Pheylan assured him, taking another step toward it. The feathery grasslike ground-cover plants were worn away from the center of the path, he could see now, exposing the familiar reddish dirt and mixed with bits of leaves and twigs.
And a handful of flat, finger-sized gray stones.
"I just wanted to know where it went," he continued as he took another step toward the path. His knowledge of geology ranked near the bottom of his expertise list, but those stones sure looked like slivers of flint. With sharp edges...
"Not go there," Thrr-gilag insisted.
"Is more of the complex that direction?" Pheylan continued as if he hadn't spoken, taking another step. Eventually, Nzz-oonaz was going to wake up to the fact that he wasn't stopping and trigger the obedience suit. He had to be in position in front of those stones before that happened. "Will you be putting a real road through to it?" he added over his shoulder. One more step... two... three...
"Kasar!"Thrr-gilag called.
Even braced and ready for it, the obedience suit still packed a terrific wallop. Arms glued to his sides, Pheylan winced as he toppled helplessly over to slam chest first to the ground. "Hey, you didn't need to do that," he snapped indignantly, twisting his head around to glare at the three Zhirrzh. "I wasn't going to go in there."
"You did not stop," Thrr-gilag said.
"You didn't tell me to," Pheylan countered. They were moving toward him; but from their angle, for another second or two, his left hand would be partially hidden from their view. Carefully, keeping the movements as inconspicuous as possible, he searched across the ground with his fingers. "All you said was not to go in there. I didn't."
Thrr-gilag paused, his face twisting slightly in something that might have been a moment of uncertainty... and as the alien stood there, Pheylan's fingers found what they'd been looking for. Easing the stone beneath his palm, he closed his hand halfway around it.
"Say not go there," Thrr-gilag said. "Mean you stop."
"I'll try to remember that for the next time," Pheylan growled. "Can I get up now?"
Thrr-gilag made a gesture. Nzz-oonaz lifted the black trigger gadget and pointed it at Pheylan, and the magnets shut off. "Thank you," Pheylan said, pulling himself to his feet and rubbing his elbow where it had cracked into his ribs again. Nzz-oonaz had pointed the trigger at him, just as he had the first time they had used the suit. Did that mean the trigger worked with a directional signal, like infrared or a tight sonic, instead of radio? "Some kind of warning might be nice in the future," he added, rubbing his chin where the ground-cover plants had scratched it and then tugging his jumpsuit collar open another couple of centimeters.
Under cover of the motion he dropped the stone into the neck of the suit.
"You go back inside now," Thrr-gilag said.
Pheylan looked back along the path, cutting along the shrubbery to disappear among the trees. Whatever was down there, he couldn't see it. Probably nothing more useful than the Zhirrzh equivalent of an outhouse, anyway. "Suits me," he told Thrr-gilag. "Let's go in."
It took some doing to sneak the stone out of the obedience suit as he undressed, what with all three Zhirrzh watching him like misshapen hawks. But he managed it, palming the stone in his left hand as he pushed the suit back out through the dog flap, and then smuggling it into the shower with him.
The ventilation system, operating through a series of small slits in the ceiling, was pretty good; but while Pheylan had never been able to steam up the cell's outer glass wall, the open-topped shower stall itself was another matter. He got the hot water going... and under the temporary cover he examined his new prize.
It was a small treasure, as treasures went, perhaps five centimeters long and three wide. It was thin, too, no more than three millimeters thick, and while the edges weren't pleasant for human fingers to handle, they were a long way from being sharp enough to cut either obedience-suit material or Zhirrzh skin.
Still, it was something; and just having a solid, potentially dangerous object in his hand again was an immense boost to his morale. If he could successfully hide it, and then find a way to sharpen one of the edges without his captors catching on, it would open up a whole range of new options for him.
What those options were, he wasn't exactly sure yet. But he'd think of something.
He washed and got out of the shower, rubbing vigorously at his hair with the stone again concealed in one hand. He still wasn't sure why he was getting away so easily with this, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the design of the Zhirrzh hand probably didn't allow this kind of undetectable palming. His original plan had been to conceal it in his jumpsuit boot, snuggled up beneath his toes, but the difficulty of retrieving it quickly had made him change his mind. Sitting on his bed as he pulled on his jumpsuit, he slid the right-most of the under-bed storage drawers open a centimeter and dropped the stone inside, sliding it down between the drawer itself and the crumpled survival pack that filled most of the space.
He spent the rest of the day in his by-now-familiar routine, dividing his time between isometric exercises, his memorization of the outside room, and the continual contemplation of how he might escape this place. Several times he found himself wanting to ease the drawer open and touch the stone, to feel its edges and reassure himself that it was still there. But he resisted the temptation. He'd already noticed that their surveillance of him seemed to ease up after he turned in for the night. That would be the proper moment to move the stone to a more permanent hiding place.
The moment never came. He was lying on his bed, drowsily watching the Zhirrzh techs puttering around, when suddenly the outer door flew open and six of the aliens stormed in and headed straight for his cell. Two of the Zhirrzh were carrying the same long gray sticks he'd seen earlier in the hands of the pyramid guards on his first trip outside; two others were holding stubby flashlight-sized devices. The last two appeared to be unarmed.
"What's going on?" Pheylan demanded as they took up military-precise positions around his cell, the two unencumbered Zhirrzh moving to the door, the other four flanking them on either side. All four weapons, Pheylan noted uneasily, were pointed straight at his face through the glass... and up close, those long sticks looked even nastier than they did at a distance. "What's going on?" he asked again, less aggressively this time. Unlike the projectile and missile weapons used by the Peacekeepers, the Zhirrzh ships had used high-energy lasers. If the sticks and flashlights pointed at him were scaled-down versions of those, they could burn him to ash right through the cell wall. Possibly one reason they'd made it out of glass in the first place.
"You stand away," a voice came from behind him.
Pheylan turned. Thrr-gilag was standing there, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, the corkscrewing tail going at double-time rate. "What?" he asked the Zhirrzh.
"You stand away," Thrr-gilag repeated. His tongue stiffened to point across the cell at the shower. "Stand there."
Wordlessly, Pheylan stood up and walked over to the shower, the weapons tracking him the whole way. The outer door swung open and the two unarmed Zhirrzh stepped inside. One stood beside the open door as the other walked to Pheylan's bed. Pulling open the drawer, he pushed the survival pack out of his way and retrieved the stone.
Pheylan looked at Thrr-gilag. "Not proper," the Zhirrzh said. "Not keep."
"I see," Pheylan said, the words coming out mechanically through a dry mouth. So he'd been wrong. All the cleverness, all the subterfuge-all wasted. They'd known about the stone, probably from the second he picked it up.
No. That was wrong. It had been sitting in that drawer for a good twelve hours now. If they'd known about it from the beginning, they would surely have taken it away from him before now.
He looked back at the two Zhirrzh as they stepped back through the door and swung it shut. And yet, they'd known where it was. Exactly where it was, in fact-that Zhirrzh had gone straight for it, without any hesitation or groping around. And from the way they'd burst in here like that, he would swear that they'd just that moment found out about it.
So how?
The first Zhirrzh circled around the cell to where Thrr-gilag was still standing, and for a minute they conversed quietly between themselves, turning the stone over in their fingers as they examined it. Pheylan watched them, possibilities swirling through his mind like leaves in an aircar backwash. They were slightly telepathic, and they'd only just figured out that he had the stone. They were very telepathic, but only some of them, and the one with the power had just gotten into town that night. They'd just completed some nightly scan of his cell, a scan sensitive enough to pick up a five-cubic-centimeter chunk of flint and place it precisely in the proper corner of the proper drawer. They had a direct pipeline to God, and God didn't want Pheylan leaving just yet.
Or more likely, they'd known about it all along and had just been playing with him. Letting him have twelve hours of false confidence and hoping like blazes that he didn't plan to use the stone before they could get it away from him.
Thrr-gilag looked up at him. "Not proper," he said again. "Tomorrow not go outside."
"That's not fair," Pheylan protested, knowing full well that argument was useless but also knowing that he had to try. "You never said something like this wasn't allowed. Besides, I need to go out. I need the sunlight."
"You punish," Thrr-gilag said. "Not do again."
He turned away and strode back toward his private door. On the other side of the cell, the Zhirrzh commander collected his troops and led them out the other way. The techs in the outer room, the incident over, went back to their tasks.
Slowly, feeling numb, Pheylan walked back to his bed. All right. He'd lost the stone; but then, realistically, he shouldn't have really expected to get away with it in the first place. He'd lost the stone, but in its place he had another bit of information to take back to the Commonwealth when he escaped.
Lying back down again, he closed his eyes. And tried to figure out just what that bit of information was.
14
"Lord Cavanagh?"
Cavanagh awoke with a start, to find a shadowy figure standing beside his bed in the darkened room, gently shaking his shoulder. "Who's there?" he croaked through a sleep-dried mouth.
"It's Kolchin, sir," the figure said quietly. "We've got visitors."
"Really." With some difficulty Cavanagh focused on the bedside clock. The glowing numbers read 4:37. "Bit early for casual conversation, isn't it?"
"There's nothing casual about this group," Kolchin said. "They're an assistant liaison and three heavies from the Commonwealth consulate over on Mra-ect."
"From Mra-ect, eh?" Cavanagh said, sitting up and reaching for his robe. "Nine light-years, just to see us. How flattering. What do they want?"
"I'm not exactly sure," Kolchin said. "But I think they're after Fibbit."
Cavanagh paused halfway into his robe. "Fibbit? What on Earth for?"
"No idea," Kolchin said. "They keep skating around the issue-say they want to talk to you personally. But they keep looking around like they're hunting for something."
"What do you mean, looking around?" Cavanagh asked, getting his robe in place and pulling on his house shoes. "They're not already in, are they?"
"No, Hill's got them pinned in the foyer," Kolchin assured him. "But they keep trying to look through the privacy glass into the hallway and social room. Seemed pretty annoyed I wouldn't let them in any farther."
"Let them be annoyed," Cavanagh grunted. At four-thirty in the morning he was capable of considerable annoyance himself. "Where is Fibbit, anyway?"
"Actually, I don't know," Kolchin admitted. "She was working on that threading you asked her to do for a couple of hours after you went to bed. But after that I sort of lost track of her. She didn't leave, and she's not in your room here. That's all I know."
"Probably asleep in a corner somewhere," Cavanagh said, giving his robe sash a final tug. "Let's go see what's going on."
The four visitors were visible only as vague shapes through the smoked privacy glass divider that separated the foyer from the rest of the suite, with Hill another vague shape facing them. "I'm Lord Cavanagh," Cavanagh said, coming around the divider into the foyer behind Hill. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm sorry to bother you, Lord Cavanagh," a burly middle-aged man in the middle of the group said, taking a short step forward. He looked tired and grumpy, but not particularly sorry. "I'm Assistant Commonwealth Liaison Petr Bronski." His eyes flicked over Cavanagh's shoulder. "May we come in?"
"State your business and I'll consider it," Cavanagh said.
One of the young men flanking Bronski muttered something under his breath and stepped forward to join his boss. Hill shifted position in response to block his path, and out of the corner of his eye Cavanagh saw Kolchin move up a pace as well. All four of the visitors had a brittle, no-nonsense air about them, the sort of men the Commonwealth would naturally post to a former Yycroman colony world only recently awarded to the Mrachanis. Still, even at two-to-one odds, if they decided to get rough, Cavanagh's money was on Kolchin and Hill.