CHAPTER 13
They carried the injured guards away as the security officer fumed and snarled and slowly regained her self-control. At last she used the comm unit on her desk to speak to her superior, the base commandant. Within a few minutes I was brought to her office.
The bearded human, the one called Delos, was already there. The base commandant seemed older than the other Skorpis I had seen. The fur of her face and hands was graying. Her uniform was a pale blue, crusted with ribbons and decorations. The human scientist still wore gray shapeless coveralls.
“Is that all the uniform you have?” the base commander growled when they shoved me into her office.
“I’ve been swimming,” I replied. “With the Old Ones.”
Delos nearly jumped out of his chair. “The Old Ones? You’ve been with them?”
“I’ve spoken with them. They have a message for us.”
The base commander waved the security officer out of the room. “I’ll call if I need you.”
Once she had shut the door, the commandant got up from behind her desk and indicated the table on the other side of her spacious office.
“Sit there,” she told me. Delos got up from his chair in front of the desk and joined us. The table was too high, the chair too big, for me to feel comfortable. It was like being a child at an adult’s table. I felt small, almost humiliated.
Delos did not seem to mind the furniture at all.
“What did the Old Ones tell you?” he asked eagerly. “How did you make contact with them? Where are they from?”
“Will they join us in this war?” the base commander wanted to know.
“They refuse to join either side,” I said. “They reject all attempts to draw them into the war.”
“Reject, do they?” the base commander rumbled. “A nuclear bomb or two exploded at depth might change their opinion, I think.”
“Your weapons will not work against them,” I said. “That is what they told me.”
“Nonsense!”
“I believe them. They are far older and wiser than we.”
“So were the Tsihn, and we bashed them halfway across the galaxy.”
“And made eternal enemies of them,” said Delos.
The commander’s slitted eyes flashed, but she turned away from the scientist and said to. me, “You must tell me everything that the Old Ones told you. I must know precisely what they said.”
I repeated their message word for word, several times. The base commander sank deeper into a glowering unhappiness each time. The human scientist, though, seemed to grow more excited with each telling.
“Tens of millions of years older than humankind!” Delos said, almost smacking his lips with anticipation. “The things they can teach us! The things they must know!”
“They won’t teach us anything as long as we continue killing one another. They regard us with loathing.”
“But surely they would talk to scientists,” Delos pleaded. “We’re not fighters. We haven’t killed anyone.”
“Perhaps,” I replied. “In time.” I smiled inwardly, knowing that the Old Ones’ contemplation of time was so far more leisurely than our own.
After repeating my story another half-dozen times, I was dismissed by the base commander. Outside her door, the security officer was waiting for me. If the Skorpis still had feline tails, hers would have been twitching with impatience.
“She believes you, does she?” she asked as she personally escorted me back to the prisoners’ compound.
“How do you know that? Can you hear through closed doors?” The thought occurred to me that perhaps she had bugged her commander’s office, under the guise of her security duties.
“No need to eavesdrop,” she said grimly. “If the old tigress hadn’t believed you, you would be chopped meat by now.”
Before we were halfway to the prison compound, though, Delos came sprinting after us.
“The base commander’s given me permission to house Orion in our quarters,” he panted.
The security officer snorted, but we changed direction and went to the scientists’ fenced-in area.
“He is your responsibility,” she said ominously as she left me there with Delos.
He nodded and gestured toward the nearest of the low-roofed buildings.
“Wait,” I said. Turning to the security officer, I asked, “What’s going to happen to the rest of my troop?”