“My brother was our official courier. You know how ’tis on planets like ours, without much population or money: who-ever’s got the best spaceship gets a subsidy an’ carries any special dispatches. I helped him. We used to go off jauntin’ for days at a time, an’—No,” she broke off. Her fists closed. “I won’t bawl. The aliens forced a landin’. Hank went off with our groun’ forces. He didn’t come back. Sev’ral days after the surrender, when things began to settle down a little, I got the news he’d been killed in action. A few of us decided the Imperium had better be given what information we could supply. Since I knew Hank’s ship best, they tol’ me to go.”
“I see.” Flandry determined to keep this as dry as possible, for her sake. “I’ve a copy of the report your people made up, of course, but you had all the way to Sol to study it, so you must know more about it than anyone else off Vixen. Just to give me a rough preliminary idea, I understand some of the invaders knew Anglic and there was a certain amount of long-range parleying. What did they call themselves?”
“Does that matter?” she asked listlessly.
“Not in the faintest, at the present stage of things, except that it’s such a weary cliche to speak of Planet X.”
She smiled, a tiny bit. “They called themselves the Ardazirho, an’ we gathered the ho was a collective endin’. So we figure their planet is named Ardazir. Though I can’t come near pronouncin’ it right.”
Flandry took a stereopic from the pocket of his iridescent shirt. It had been snapped from hiding, during the ground battle. Against a background of ruined human homes crouched a single enemy soldier. Warrior? Acolyte? Unit? Armed, at least, and a killer of men.
Preconceptions always got in the way. Flandry’s first startled thought had been Wolf. Now he realized that of course the Ardazirho was not lupine, didn’t even look notably wolfish. Yet the impression lingered. He was not surprised when Catherine Kittredge said the aliens had gone howling into battle.
They were described as man-size bipeds, but digitigrade, which gave their feet almost the appearance of a dog’s walking on its hind legs. The shoulders and arms were very humanoid, except that the thumbs were on the opposite side of the hands from mankind’s. The head, arrogantly held on a powerful neck, was long and narrow for an intelligent animal, with a low forehead, most of the brain space behind the pointed ears. A black-nosed muzzle, not as sharp as a wolf’s and yet somehow like it, jutted out of the face. Its lips were pulled back in a snarl, showing bluntly pointed fangs which suggested a flesh-eater turned omnivore. The eyes were oval, close set, and gray as sleet. Short thick fur covered the entire body, turning to a ruff at the throat; it was rusty red.
“Is this a uniform?” asked Flandry.
The girl leaned close to see. The pictured Ardazirho wore a sort of kilt, in checkerboard squares of various hues. Flandry winced at some of the combinations: rose next to scarlet, a glaring crimson offensively between two delicate yellows. “Barbarians indeed,” he muttered. “I hope Chives can stand the shock.” Otherwise the being was dressed in boots of flexible leather and a harness from which hung various pouches and equipment. He was armed with what was obviously a magnetronic rifle, and had a wicked-looking knife at his belt.
“I’m not sure,” said the girl. “Either they don’t use uniforms at all, or they have such a variety that we’ve not made any sense of it. Some might be dressed more or less like him, others in a kind o’ tunic an’ burnoose, others in breastplates an’ fancy plumed helmets.”
“Him,” pounced Flandry. “They’re all male, then?”
“Yes, sir, seems that way. The groun’ fightin’ lasted long enough for our biologists to dissect an’ analyze a few o’ their dead. Accorclin’ to the report, they’re placental mammals. It’s clear they’re from a more or less terrestroid planet, probably with a somewhat stronger gravity. The eye structure suggests their sun is bright, type A5 or thereabouts. That means they should feel pretty much at home in our badlands.” Catherine Kittredge shrugged sadly. “Figure that’s why they picked us to start on.”