On returning to his hidey-hole, Henry Morgan was welcomed tearfully by Connie Phamonyong. The tears took him by surprise. He'd recognized his scouting expedition was dangerous, but his imagination hadn't built on it. She'd managed not to infect Robert with her worries though; he greeted his older brother with casual cheer.
Almost the first thing Morgan did, with Connie and Robert, was message the prime minister and the defense office, newly named the Defense Ministry, or War House. Not that he had much to tell them, other than that the invaders had been clearing land. But he wanted them to know he was still alive, and intended further scouting.
This time he got more than brief acknowledgement; both the prime minister and War House thanked him for his efforts. They also told him about the Star of Hibernia and the Gem of the Prophet. But they didn't tell him about Drago Draveç reaching Hart's Desire; they'd wait till something had actually happened with that, besides a kidnapping.
Nor did they tell him to be careful. Careful, he thought wryly, isn't what they need from me.
The next morning he returned to the surface, this time headed for the gorge into which the hangar exits had opened. He set out with a blaster on his belt, and a lunch and heavy torch in his day pack. And a nervous stomach. Not because the invaders might have posted guards there; that seemed highly unlikely. His concern was that rockfall from the bombardment might keep him from getting inside.
Lack of rope was his first problem. Seen from the top, the gorge side appeared impossible to climb. Previously trees and shrubs had found rootholds on the precipitous slope, and where it had been bare, the rock had been solid. Now the trees and shrubs were mostly gone, and the surface rock extensively fractured. If he'd been an accomplished rock climber . . . but he wasn't.
He got around this literally, by hiking half a mile up the gorge, beyond the bombardment, picking his way down, then hiking back to a point from which he could size up the situation from the bottom. Hiking in the bottom wasn't easy, either. It held a lot more broken trees and rock than before. In places they'd impeded the streamflow, and he picked his way above the resulting pools.
A bloody mess, he told himself. But war always is. When he got there, the depth of destruction was worse than he'd foreseen. The gorge wall had been destroyed back nearly to the hangars themselves, and overlying rock had collapsed into the openings. The mass of rubble had one apparent opening, but from the bottom he couldn't tell if it went all the way through. Hell, he thought, the hangar roofs might even have collapsed.
The great pile of debris at the gorge bottom provided a start up; it required tricky scrambling, but not scaling. Above that it became more difficult. A couple of times it seemed to him he'd cliffed out, but each time he found handholds, a place to put a boot, and somewhere to go from there. After a bit, scratched and sweaty, he reached the opening, widened by invaders removing fallen rocks. The hangars had not collapsed.
"Centaurs?" Morgan muttered. Nothing horselike had climbed this. They must have used AG boats, he thought, or be more like goats than horses.
Inside was dark, and musty with the smell of old death—of bodies scavenged and dessicated—and dried animal excrement. But his torch beam found no carnivores. They'd been there, done what they did, and left. Bones and tattered cloth were abundant, and all the bones were human. And the spacecraft had open hatches; the people aboard them had come out to fight.
He went directly to his yacht, the Delight. She hadn't been destroyed, merely killed. The invaders had slapped magnetic "bombs" on the command panels of her bridge and engineering section, and fried her "brains." They'd also dug through all cabinets and lockers, but except for weapons, which were gone, they'd left the rest strewn around. Mostly they hadn't even taken the trouble to vandalize. Apparently if it didn't look dangerous, any damage was incidental.
He entered his suite with concern, saw the carrying case opened and empty on the deck, and felt sharp fear. Then his torch beam found the telescope itself on the bed, where it had been tossed. He carried it out, set it up, and tried it. It was all right.
Now to find some cordage, he thought. Putting the scope back in its case, he left with it.
He spent the next day with Connie and Robert. Then he left again, this time with eight days' rations in his pack, the scope in its case slung on one shoulder, and, of course, a blaster on his hip. The scope weighed far more than all the rest of it, and was awkward. He'd take a break every hour, he told himself.
He felt cheerful about the situation, and after leaving the zone of bombardment damage, made good progress. On the second afternoon he reached the prominence he'd climbed before, and started up the side away from the alien clearing. At the top, he selected the same scrubby tree he'd sheltered beneath before, and set up the scope in its shade. Here lay a certain risk. He'd brought his belt recorder, and both it and the scope were powered by power slugs. If the invaders were monitoring the electronic environment, they might just possibly detect them, though it seemed doubtful.
Setting the scope at 10X, he focused on the distant opening. It had rained, enough to soak out the fires and lay the dust. He began scanning, increasing and decreasing magnification as needed, pausing to describe anything that seemed worthwhile. His voice activated the recorder. Building construction continued. Here and there large machines—crawler tractors!—moved across the clearing, apparently cutting the coarse root network of the cleared forest. The activity left little question: the aliens planned to stay, and grow crops.
He focused on one who appeared to be a supervisor. It stood sideways to the telescope, watching builders at work, seeming to comment to a recorder of its own. The long head had upright ears, and overall it had reddish-brown fur. Prieto had said they looked like "centaurs from the Jurassic." He should have said Miocene, Morgan thought, or whatever period it was when Terran mammals were trying out bizarre body forms. He was pretty sure, though, that there'd been no six-limbed mammalian species in Terra's history.
It hadn't occurred to him to bring a vid. He didn't realize he could let Connie view the cube, and the prime minister's savant would see what she was seeing, via Robert.
So he described the alien in words, portraying the features of face and harness, the articulation of the limbs, and the four fingers and two thumbs on each hand. The feet were obscured by vegetation. From what he could see, the teeth were "cone-shaped and not particularly large," but the back teeth could be different.
Then the creature strolled to one of the buildings being assembled, and disappeared inside. Morgan shifted focus to another alien then, this one the color of wet sand. It stood on a gently sloping roof, using what appeared to be some sort of spot-welder. The feet had two splayed toes, suggesting a camel's but with heavy claws. Blunt claws, he thought, for traction instead of fighting.
He thought of measuring its height, but that required knowing its distance, and this was not the place to use his range finder. Use your map, and estimate, he decided. His computer made the worker's height twenty-eight inches at the withers. He couldn't get a figure for height to the top of the long skull; torso and neck were bent forward, eyes on its work.
"Not as big as I thought," he said, "and not horselike at all." Again reducing magnification for scanning, he found a dozer piling sections of fallen trees. As Morgan watched, the operator began flailing its arms, and jumped from the driver's platform with the dozer still running. Its legs gave as it hit, but it was back on its feet in an instant, arms still flailing, hind feet kicking.
Morgan stared. The machine, he realized, had disturbed a nest of Tagus's version of hornets. The operator's dance became extreme, then it fell, limbs thrashing. Quickly Morgan increased magnification till he could glimpse the hornets, big as his thumb joint, strafing the invader until its limbs went slack, and its head flopped sideways on the ground.
"Jesus!" Morgan murmured. He'd been stung a few times himself—twice just the day before; presumably he'd gotten too near a nest. It hurt like hell when they hit, but it hadn't laid him low like that. Of course, from what he could see, the alien had gotten stung a lot more than twice. But still . . .
He cut magnification, and scanned for reactions by other workers who might have seen it happen. Two had left their machines, each holding what might have been a spray can, but instead of running to help their comrade, they watched from a distance, moving nervously, apparently anxious, as if they wanted to move in, but were afraid. Morgan reported that, too.
He continued scanning and recording for another half hour, feeling increasingly edgy. Abruptly then he made a decision, and after disassembling the scope, packed it in its padded case. Then he loaded his gear on his back and picked his way carefully down the knob. At the bottom he stashed scope and case beneath the trunk of a large fallen tree, and set out for home.
If I hike till deep dusk, and get an early start in the morning, I can get back to Robert and Connie by noon, he thought. And debrief myself to the PM and the military.
It seemed very important.