Conquerors' Pride

8

It consisted of six flattened hemispheres sitting on a contoured tray just inside the dog flap they'd stuffed his survival pack through the previous day. Each of the lumps was a slightly different shade of tan paste, with chunks of brightly colored food items of different sorts embedded in them. The overall effect was that of holiday cheese balls assembled by color-blind children, and Pheylan wasn't at all sure it was something he really wanted to face first thing in the morning. But his ration-bar stock was being steadily depleted, and he wanted to save at least a couple of days' worth for whatever escape attempt he wound up making. And after all, the Peacekeeper recruiter had promised him new and exotic experiences.

Figuring out the utensil they'd supplied with the meal was the first challenge. The main part was shaped basically like a half-melted spoon, but it had a spring-loaded textured stick attached at the back end that worked against the edge of the spoon bowl like something midway between tongs and chopsticks. Probably a breeze to use with that extra opposing thumb of theirs, Pheylan decided, but his human hands couldn't seem to get the hang of it. The whole thing was made of a soft, rubbery material, and eventually he just gave up on the chopstick attachment and bent it back out of his way.

The aliens' first attempt at a home-cooked human meal was, not surprisingly, a decidedly mixed achievement. Only one of the six food lumps tasted genuinely good, the rest ranging from so-so to nearly tasteless to a near-perfect reenactment of the time he'd misread the heat setting on the oven and turned his mother's roast into charcoal. He ate all of them, though, except the last, starting with the best-tasting and working his way down the scale. It would be interesting to see if his observers took note of the order and adjusted the menu accordingly for his next meal. He rather thought they would.

His three interrogators arrived near the end of the meal, and this time he spotted the unobtrusive door they came in by. It was sandwiched between two consoles, one of which blocked any view of what lay beyond. A prep room, maybe, with no guarantee of another exit from it. Still, something to keep in mind.

"Greeting, Cavv-ana," Svv-selic said as Pheylan laid the tray aside. "You well?"

"Reasonably well," Pheylan said, dropping the tong-spoon on the tray and taking a last sip of water. Svv-selic's proficiency with English seemed to be improving, though perhaps not as quickly as Pheylan would have expected of someone equipped with the aliens' version of Mindlink connections. Either they were having trouble deciphering the data in Commodore Dyami's computer, or else their translators weren't as sophisticated as the equivalent Peacekeeper programs. He hoped it was the latter; it would be nice if humanity was ahead of them in at least one area. "And you?"

"We well." Svv-selic motioned, and the shortest of the three—Thrr-gilag, if Pheylan remembered right—stepped forward with what looked like a folded jumpsuit under his arm. He opened the dog flap and stuffed it into the cell. Pheylan watched the operation closely, counting off the seconds and trying to gauge whether or not he would have time to leap forward and grab a wrist before the alien could withdraw it. It would be barely possible, he decided, though how useful it would be he wasn't sure.

"You wear this," Svv-selic said as Thrr-gilag closed the dog flap again.

Pheylan stepped forward and picked it up. It was a jumpsuit, all right, made of the same material as the one he was wearing but with a stiffened and slightly thickened ring around the upper arms, forearms, midthighs, and ankles. There were also rings around the chest and waist, their placements corresponding to that of the arm rings. Scattered across the suit, on the chest, back, and arms, were a number of small glassy disks embedded in the material. "What's this?" he asked.

"Wear," Svv-selic said. "We go outside."

Pheylan frowned at him. "Outside?" he repeated. "As in, outside this room?"

The other seemed to consider, or maybe was waiting for the translation to catch up. "You need outside. We go."

"Yes, sir," Pheylan muttered, stripping off his clothes and climbing into the new jumpsuit. The thicker rings weren't particularly heavy and didn't seem to constrict his movements any. "All right," he said, patting the fastening strip closed. "I'm ready."

"You not leave we," Svv-selic warned as Thrr-gilag stepped to the door and opened it. "Do, punish."

"I understand," Pheylan agreed. That must be what the rings were for: some mechanism for keeping him in line. Under the circumstances, certainly a reasonable precaution.

Unfortunately, he couldn't just leave it at that. At some point along the way he was going to have to find out what exactly the mechanism consisted of. He hoped it wouldn't hurt too much.

The third interrogator, Nzz-oonaz, stayed well back as Svv-selic and Thrr-gilag moved into step on either side of him. That made Nzz-oonaz the backup, which implied that he was the one with the obedience-suit trigger. The one to be watching, then, when Pheylan made his break.

They moved across the room to the door. Svv-selic did something to one of the consoles flanking it, and the door swung open; and for the first time since his arrival nearly a week ago Pheylan stepped outside.

The weather was much as it had been the day he landed: blue skies and white clouds, a cool but not uncomfortable temperature, light breezes. At the far end of the landing area sat a small ship about the size of a Peacekeeper courier, with a handful of the aliens working busily around it. The second complex he'd seen under construction at that end of the landing area was coming along nicely, and two more of the low weapons-style domes had joined the first.

And in the center of the triangle formed by the three domes was something else that hadn't been there before. A small pyramid shape sparkled in the sunlight, perhaps three meters high, brilliant white but with dozens of dark spots scattered irregularly across the top two meters of its surface.

"Good?"

Pheylan looked at Svv-selic, trying to decipher the other's economical use of the language. Then he got it: he'd told them humans needed sunlight to survive. "It's helping," he nodded, opening the neck of his jumpsuit a few centimeters and turning his face to the sun. "Though it's going to take a while, dressed like this. Not much exposed skin area. It would go a lot faster if I could take off this suit."

Svv-selic's tongue flicked out. "You not do."

"Okay." Pheylan shrugged. "I was just asking." He took a deep breath, stretching his arms out to the side. "Do you suppose I could run a little? Humans need exercise, too."

The tongue flicked out again. "You not leave we."

"Can we at least walk, then?" Pheylan persisted, pointing over to the forest about sixty degrees to the left of the domes and pyramid. "I'd like to take a look at those trees."

There was the usual pause as the translation came through, and another moment as Svv-selic and Thrr-gilag consulted among themselves. "We go," Svv-selic said at last. "You not leave we."

They started off toward the trees, crunching through the loose red dirt surrounding the complex and raising small clouds of dust with each step. Thrr-gilag and Svv-selic stayed close beside him, with Nzz-oonaz still hanging back. "You—Thrr-gilag," Pheylan said.

The shorter alien looked up at him. "Speak."

"How come you never talk to me?"

Thrr-gilag's corkscrew tail picked up its pace a little. "Not understand."

"You never talk to me," Pheylan repeated, throwing a glance toward the domes and pyramid and shifting his path a couple of degrees in that direction. "Neither does Nzz-oonaz, for that matter. It's always Svv-selic who does the talking. Don't you two want to be here?"

Thrr-gilag looked past him to Svv-selic. "Too'rr rights," he said.

"Who or what is Too'rr?" Pheylan asked.

"Svv-selic Too'rr," Thrr-gilag said.

Svv-selic Too'rr? Pheylan ran the two words around his mind a couple of times. Was Too'rr a family name? A title? A military rank? A caste designation? "I don't understand," he said, easing a couple more degrees toward the domes and pyramid. "Is Svv-selic an expert at this type of alien interrogation?"

A pause. "Not understand."

"Is he expert at talking to non—what do you call yourselves, anyway?"

Another pause, and another short conversation between the two aliens. "We Zhirrzh," Svv-selic said at last.

Pheylan tried it out. It wasn't as hard to pronounce as their names, actually, though the word tended to buzz unpleasantly against his tongue. "So is Svv-selic the resident expert at talking to non-Zhirrzh?" he asked again.

Abruptly, Svv-selic's hand snaked over to grip Pheylan's upper arm. "Not go," he said.

"What?" Pheylan frowned as he stopped.

"Not go," Svv-selic repeated. His tongue jabbed out to point at the domes and pyramid Pheylan had been easing them toward.

"What do you mean, not go?" Pheylan asked. So his gut feeling had been right: the domes and pyramid were something important. "I just want to look at the trees."

"We go," Svv-selic said, pointing with his tongue at a group of trees ninety degrees away from the domes.

"I want to see those trees," Pheylan insisted, pointing again near the domes. Sneakiness hadn't worked; time to try bluster. If it didn't work, it would at least give him the chance to test out his obedience suit's capabilities. He hoped that they hadn't overestimated human physique when they'd designed the thing. "I'm going, and you can come with me or not. Your choice."

He started off toward the trees, watching Nzz-oonaz out of the corner of his eye. The Zhirrzh had raised one hand toward him, and he could see a small black device nestled in the curled fingers. The obedience trigger, or else a weapon. "Not go," Svv-selic said.

"Don't worry, I'm not running away," Pheylan called over his shoulder. "Where would I go? I just want a closer look at those trees."

"Not go," Svv-selic repeated, more insistently this time.

Pheylan ignored him. Nzz-oonaz was still pointing his black gadget at him, but so far nothing seemed to have happened. Setting his teeth together, Pheylan took another step, wondering whether it would be an injection or an electric shock and wishing irritably that whichever it was they would get on with it. He took another step—

"Nzz-oonaz: kasar!" Svv-selic called.

It was indeed painful, but not in any way Pheylan had anticipated. From somewhere over his shoulder came a faint hum; and suddenly his legs jerked together and his arms were yanked to his sides and he toppled forward to slam face first into the ground.

For a long minute he lay there, feeling the feathery stalks of the local grass-equivalent prodding against his cheek and fighting to get some air back into his stunned lungs. So that was what they'd come up with. No risky drugs, no potentially dangerous electrodes, just a few strategically placed electromagnets designed to completely immobilize him. Simple, elegant, and very safe, provided he didn't break his neck when he fell. Carefully, trying not to let the effort show, he tested the magnets' strength. He might as well have saved himself the effort.

The humming behind him stopped, and he was once again free to move. Laboriously, he got his feet under him and stood up again. "You not go," Svv-selic said.

"I get the message," Pheylan agreed, rubbing his cheek and jaw where they'd hit the ground. "I wasn't going to do anything, you know. I just wanted to look."

"Why go?" Svv-selic asked.

"Because I was curious," Pheylan told him. "We humans are curious people. It's probably our most distinguishing characteristic."

Svv-selic jabbed out his tongue toward the domes. "Curious not good," he said emphatically.

Pheylan looked. A triangular-shaped door had opened in each of the three domes, and a Zhirrzh was now standing just outside each opening. All of them held long gray sticks with thin rectangular muzzle openings and lots of small but sharp-looking edges arranged around the business end.

And all three of the sticks were pointed at Pheylan.

"You not go," Svv-selic said again.

"You're getting repetitious," Pheylan grumbled. There seemed to be a strange shimmering deep inside the muzzles, like some kind of eerie pilot light. Maybe it was just his imagination. "But you make your point. All right. We'll go look at the trees over there instead."

Pheylan had hoped for a chance to examine his new obedience suit more closely, but the Zhirrzh weren't naive enough to leave him alone with it any longer than they had to. They escorted him back to his cell after the brief exercise period and Svv-selic ordered him to strip the thing off. Pheylan did so, they opened the dog flap for him to put it outside, and then they and it disappeared back through the back door.

Pheylan put his old jumpsuit back on, trying to make sense of what he'd just seen. It was clear now that the three domes out there were guardhouses, not the weapons clusters he'd first thought. Their arrangement, furthermore, made it equally clear that what they were guarding was the white pyramid.

The question was, why?

It was too small to be a house, at least for anyone the size of a Zhirrzh. Could it be a tomb? But again, the proportions were wrong for a Zhirrzh, and there was no reason why a tomb should be guarded that way in the first place. A monument? Again, he couldn't think of any reason why a monument would need a three-man guard on it.

Except that they were aliens. There were no guarantees that they would think or behave anything at all like humans. No guarantees that Pheylan could even hope to understand their reasons and motivations.

He shook the thought away. No. They were vicious, cold-blooded killers; but they'd brought him here, given him food and clothing, and so far seemed to be doing all they could to keep him alive. Whatever alien quirks their psychology and culture might have, there was enough overlap here for him to figure out what was going on.

Something flickered at the edge of his vision. Pheylan turned, but as always he was too slow to see anything. Outside the glass wall of the cell one of the Zhirrzh techs, attracted by his movement, looked over at him. Pheylan looked back, and the alien turned back to his work.

So what was the pyramid? If not a monument, could it be something technical? A transceiver, maybe, for that instantaneous communications system of theirs? Or something even more esoteric?—a terminal, say, for some kind of broadcast power?

But, then, why wasn't it taller? Or inside a building or protective shell where it would be out of the elements? The Commonwealth's experiments with broadcast power, he knew, had been notoriously finicky with regard to atmospheric factors. Unless the pyramid shape was its protective shell.

Pheylan shook his head. On the face of it, he had to admit, this was a pretty ridiculous waste of mental energy. The pyramid could be any of a thousand different things, from a planetary communications beacon to a traffic-control signal for the landing area. It could be the Zhirrzh equivalent of a torus music system, a wind-powered computer, a piece of government-mandated artwork—

Or a weapon.

Pheylan looked out at the Zhirrzh working at their consoles, his mouth suddenly dry. An unknown, guarded device in the middle of a Zhirrzh base. A base with no obvious ground-to-space or ground-to-air weapons clusters.

He went over to his bed and lay down on his side, folding his arms across his chest. There had been innumerable late-night bull sessions back at the Peacekeeper academy centering on the possible science and technology of the mysterious CIRCE weapon. One of the more intriguing ideas Pheylan had heard had been that it was a field-effect gadget of some sort, requiring two to five electromagnetic poles and an equal number of resonant-locked tachyon generators. The resultant radiation cascade was theorized to occur at certain specific intersection points between the field contours, supposedly unaffected by any matter elsewhere in the area.

Such as the fighter squadrons at Celadon. Or the atmosphere of a planet.

Did the Zhirrzh have a version of CIRCE? Was that white pyramid one of its poles?

All right, Cavanagh, settle down. First question to ask was whether this place was a forward military base or a colony or a major Zhirrzh world. Presumably they wouldn't bother setting up a CIRCE on just any old world they happened to land on. Second question was whether the pyramid out there was unique or whether it had lots of brothers nearby. Third question was whether the pyramid was fixed in place or had mechanisms for transport or aiming.

Good questions, all of them. Problem was, he couldn't think of any way to get any answers.

Outside the glass wall two of the Zhirrzh had gotten together and were consulting on something. Pheylan watched them, wishing that Aric were here. He, Pheylan, had always been the physical one of the family; Aric, in contrast, had been much better at manipulating words. More than once Pheylan had watched in secret awe as Aric had finessed information out of their father that he'd flat-out said he wasn't going to tell them.

Pheylan had admired that ability. Admired and envied it both, though he'd been careful to hide that from his brother. In their youth Aric would simply have taken such an admission and found a place for it in his arsenal of verbal abuse, a sport he already got far too much pleasure out of. And after they'd both become adults, the subject had somehow never come up.

Pheylan wished now that he'd said something. Now that it was very likely too late.

He swore under his breath. Thoughts like that weren't going to do him any good here. So he wasn't a wizard with words? Fine. He'd get out of here without them. He had a brain, eyes, and muscles, and it was time he started using them.

And the first step was to learn every square centimeter of this place. Every square centimeter, and every move his captors out there made.