CHAPTER 14
Caitlin’s com pad pinged. She looked up, a bit surprised and a bit disgruntled, since she had set the pad to route all calls to one of her assistants except those coming from the top officers in the search fleet or in the base command. So if someone got through to her, it had to be someone pretty important with something they considered serious enough to call her. That didn’t bode well for her schedule for the rest of the day.
She tapped her pad, and Gabe Tully’s face appeared.
“Sorry to disturb you, Caitlin, but we need to see you.”
“We?”
“Yeah, me and Lieutenant Bannerji and Ramt.”
It took a moment, but then it clicked for Caitlin that those two people were the ones doing the interrogations of the Ekhat slaves they’d captured. Yeah, she’d consider anything in that area to be serious enough to call her.
“Okay,” Caitlin responded, reaching for the pad. “Let me see when I can clear you a meeting time.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Tully said. “I think you need to come to the Ban Chao. Real soon now, if you get me.”
The picture in Caitlin’s com pad began shifting. Tully was obviously turning his around. In another moment, the picture stabilized, and she could see the Ekhat slaves sitting in a row. A couple of them were wagging in the hind end like excited puppies, but it was the fact that they were all sitting neatly and more or less still that caused Caitlin’s eyes to open wide.
“I’ll be there within an hour,” she said.
“Right.” Tully broke the connection from his end.
Caitlin tapped her pad to open another call. “Caewithe, I need to go to Ban Chao now. Yes, I know it’s not scheduled. Get ahold of the command deck and get a shuttle cleared for us, please. Let me know which one, and I’ll meet you at the bay.” She tapped her pad again to break the call.
Caitlin looked at her work station and tried to decide what she could finish in the next five or ten minutes, closing down the rest of the files. All the while, in the back of her mind was running the thought that if those two Ekhat experts had made a breakthrough of any kind with the slaves, she would kiss them both.
The com pad pinged again just as Caitlin finished sending a note to her assistants telling them where she was going and to not let anyone disturb her for anything less important than an Ekhat attack. Caewithe’s message floated there: Shuttle 9 at Shuttle Bay Green 2. She shut down her work station, grabbed the com pad and headed out the door. “Did you get the message?” she asked as she paused by the guards.
“Yes, Director,” the Jao guard said, falling into place ahead of her. “Shuttle Bay Green 2. Captain Miller and Tamt will meet us there.”
“Let’s go, then.”
And go they did, moving through the corridors at a brisk pace with a burly human and an even larger Jao leading the way. Everyone else took a cue from the Jao in the corridors and cleared out of the way.
Tamt was standing by the shuttle and waved her through the hatch, following her through. Navy crew shut and locked down the hatch as they made their way to their seats. It was empty except for them and the crew—one of the perks of being The Director, Caitlin supposed. No one questioned her about this kind of thing. If she said she needed to be somewhere, then everyone in range would focus on seeing that she got there. A heady brew of authority, Caitlin thought. Her shoulders twitched, shaking off the allure, as she sat in her seat and fastened her harness.
Tamt took the seat next to Caitlin, and Caewithe Miller took the seat across from her. Caitlin waited until the pilot had maneuvered the shuttle out of the shuttle bay, then looked at her guard captain with a grin.
“So, have you seen Lieutenant Vaughan lately?”
Caewithe didn’t say anything, just nodded with a grin of her own.
“They’ve been spending more time in the water lately than we Jao,” Tamt rumbled from beside Caitlin. Caitlin turned her head enough to see flecks of green in Tamt’s black eyes, and her ears and whiskers tilted enough to hint at the posture for blatant humor, which probably ought to be translated as ribald humor. Jao humor, such as it was, tended to be pretty blunt. She looked back at Caewithe and raised her eyebrows.
“I have this one swimsuit, you see,” Caewithe said with a wicked grin.
“Cruel, evil woman,” Caitlin said, laughing, “to lure the poor boy on like that.”
“I’ll let him catch me before too long, I think.” Caewithe’s dimples appeared, then she laughed.
“You’re the first humans I’ve seen who pursue this mating thing properly,” Tamt said. “Although the officers’ pool is kind of public for a mating ritual.”
Caitlin started laughing as Caewithe spluttered. Tamt’s delivery of those lines was very matter of fact and dry, which just made it funnier. From the wiggle of Tamt’s whiskers, it seemed she agreed.
“Okay, that was funny,” Caewithe admitted, “but let’s leave my love life—or lack of it—out of the conversation now, unless you want to start talking about yours.”
Tamt shrugged. “Is nonexistent. Terra taif has offered potential mates, which is more than Kannu ever did.” That was the first time Caitlin could remember Tamt referring to the kochan she had belonged to before being called to Aille’s service and subsequently joining Terra taif. “But I won’t have cubs right now. A battle-ready fleet doesn’t provide the right environment for Jao cubs. They need space to roam and lots of water to play in before they must learn to be of service.”
“Do you want cubs?” Caitlin asked, looking at the being who was perhaps her first real female friend.
“Perhaps,” Tamt replied. “Before Yaut found me and called me to Aille’s service, when Oppuk ruled Terra and none of us knew when we would die from a sniper’s bullet, I would have said no. Now, sometimes I think I would.”
Caitlin looked at Tamt for a moment longer, then looked away with a quiet resolve that her friend would have that opportunity.
They sat in silence for some little while after that. Caitlin pulled her com pad out to see if any further messages had come through. Just about the time she was through with that, the crew announced that they would be docking with Ban Chao shortly.
* * *
Tully met them at the shuttle bay, along with Major Liang, his executive officer, and First Sergeant Luff. “Hi, Caitlin,” he said. “Glad you were able to make it. I really think you need to see this.” He nodded to Tamt and Caewithe, but didn’t say anything. Given what Caewithe had told her, that didn’t surprise Caitlin. They were both probably a little uncomfortable.
“Okay, I’m here,” Caitlin said. “Let’s deal with this, gentlemen, shall we? I’ve got to be back on Lexington before too long.”
“Right. This way, then.” Tully gestured toward a hatch and led the way in approved Jao style.
Caitlin found the corridors in Ban Chao to be just as mazelike as the corridors in the Lexington, as well as somewhat more congested. But the crew and jinau of Ban Chao made way for them just as well as the Lexington’s crew did, and before long they were entering a compartment that had a large window in one side of it that looked out over another compartment. “Hello, Ramt, Lieutenant Bannerji,” Caitlin said, greeting those who waited their arrival.
Both responded with a quiet, “Director Kralik.”
Caitlin moved to the window. She could see a glistening black mass of slowly moving bodies in one corner of the other compartment. It looked for all the world like a mass of puppies huddled together in sleepy togetherness. Nonetheless, her shoulders still twitched at how alien the Ekhat slaves were. Oh, she knew how weird that sounded in a universe where she had endured Ekhat and lived with Jao and Lleix. But still, the slaves were very different.
“So, what is it you want me to see that I had to come to Ban Chao rather than you com me or come to the Lexington?” Caitlin asked.
Tully pointed to Bannerji, who flipped a switch on the wall and barked something in what could only be Ekhat. Caitlin hadn’t been exposed to much of the language, but it was unmistakable. She did have to suppress a chuckle at the effect Bannerji’s British accent had on the alien tongue.
The effect on the slaves was extreme. The pile of black bodies in the corner flew apart as if a grenade had been pitched into it. They rolled and scrambled and scurried and scrabbled until they were standing in the line that Tully had shown her in the com pad call.
Before Caitlin could say anything, Bannerji spoke, and the line shifted to a circle. Again he spoke, and the circle morphed to a line again, only this time on a slant. One final command, and the slaves returned to the original straight line.
Caitlin’s mouth quirked. Her first reaction was to make a quip about producing an alien drill team. But then what she had seen sank in. “You’re able to communicate with them, to get them to follow instructions.”
“To a limited extent, yes,” Bannerji said. He waved a hand at the window. “They are like so many Labrador retrievers—more intelligent than we first thought, and eager to please.”
Caitlin laughed. “I thought they looked like a bunch of puppies huddled there in the corner before you said anything.”
“They are very gregarious,” Ramt said, stepping forward to join the conversation. “More so than any Terran species, even dolphins or whales.”
“Are they as much fun to work with as Labradors?”
“Yes and no.” Bannerji chuckled. “They are much stronger, and if they run into you they can knock you flying. And given their, ah, conditioning at the hands of the Ekhat, avoiding injury in themselves or others is not a high priority. But once we got them to calm down, then yeah, they’re fun.”
“We must continue to be careful,” Ramt cautioned in her even tones. “They are not dogs. They are not tame animals. And for all that they are sentient beings, they are also hideously ‘programmed,’ to use a human word, to consider themselves as nothing in relation to the Ekhat. At the right—or wrong—word, they will kill themselves; or they are just as likely to attempt to kill whichever one of us is with them.”
Caitlin took a deep breath, then released it. “You’re saying they really are slaves, not just prisoners or drafted labor.”
“Bred and born to it,” Bannerji said soberly. “So much so that I wonder if it will ever be possible to emancipate them without tinkering with their genetic code.”
Anger began to rise within Caitlin. The Ekhat could never be forgiven for this. “Okay. No quick fix here, obviously. But this can’t be why you asked me to come over. What do you want?”
Ramt and Bannerji looked to where Tully leaned back against a wall with Liang and Luff, arms folded.
“I think we need to keep them with the fleet.” Tully straightened and clasped his hands behind his back.
“Why?”
“This is the first time we’ve managed to get anyone from an Ekhat ship to talk to us, even a little,” he said. “Ramt and Vikram here are getting more and more out of them every day. Little bits, granted, but get enough of them and put them together, and who knows what we might find? I want to let them continue to work with the slaves.”
Caitlin shrugged. “Makes sense to me. So what’s the problem?” She was beginning to see that there must be some kind of issue with Tully’s plan.
“The problem is that Gram of the Ekhatlore elian wants them left here at Ares base for him and some of his fellow Ekhatlore to study.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Number one, I don’t think they’ll do any better than these two at working with the slaves.” Tully jerked a thumb at where Ramt and Bannerji stood together. “Number two, we won’t get any information they might develop in anything like a useful time frame; and last but definitely not least, there’s no guarantee they will be able to keep them alive.”
Caitlin understood Tully’s points, and the last one in particular was important to her. None of the captives taken from the Ekhat ships during the Valeron battle had lived long. The sole Ekhat they had captured by lasering off its legs had gone into what seemed like a catatonic state not long after being taken aboard the Lexington, and had died before it got to Earth. The few slaves that had survived the battle hadn’t lasted much longer. They all seemed to just lose the spark of life and fade away, one by one. So the fact that Ramt and Bannerji had managed to not only keep these slaves alive, but get them to actually start interacting with humans and Lleix made them the experts, as far as she was concerned.
“Let me guess—Gram is senior to Ramt in the Ekhatlore elian.”
Ramt folded her hands together. “He is. And I have not the stature within the elian to stand against his orders.”
“Hmmph. Not a problem,” Caitlin said. “I have oudh over this whole effort. It’s my decision that it is necessary for the slaves to remain with the fleet so that we can derive immediate benefit from any intelligence gained from them.”
Tully grinned.
“But,” Caitlin said, raising a hand, “can we divide the group? Leave some here and take some with us?”
Both Bannerji and Ramt shook their heads. “No,” the human said. “We think one of the reasons they’ve survived is because we have enough of them together to reach a critical threshold to keep a colony of them alive. If we reduce that, even by just one or two, we may drop below that threshold, and then we’d lose all of them.”
Caitlin nodded. “Makes sense to me. So,” she turned to Tully, “that’s my directive, Gabe. We keep all of them.”
“Right.” Tully’s grin flashed again for a moment, then he sobered. “But there is one other thing…”
Caitlin sighed. “Spit it out, Gabe.”
He spread his hands at waist level. “I think they need to be on a different ship. If Ban Chao is going to be leading the way with these pathfinding jumps, you run a greater risk of losing them.”
Caitlin’s stomach lurched at the thought of losing the ship and everyone aboard, including Tully. But that discussion had already happened, and she couldn’t go there now. It took a moment, but she moved beyond that thought and said, “Okay, point. We’ll move them to Lexington. And these two as well.” She pointed to Bannerji and Ramt.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Tully objected. “Vikram’s my intelligence officer. I’m going to need him.”
“Have Ed assign you another one,” Caitlin said. “Right now he’s one of the two best Ekhat slave wranglers in the universe, so he’s not any more disposable than they are. My orders,” she declared, staring Tully in the eye.
Tully stiffened and his jaw set for a moment, then he unbent. “Yes, Director.” He looked to Bannerji and Ramt. “Pack your stuff, guys, and get ready to move.” Then to Liang and Luff. “They’re going to Lexington. Make it happen, preferably without breaking either the prisoners or anyone else.” Back to Caitlin with a wry grin. “They’re all yours.”