She shot me a skeptical glance. “Are you sure you can handle it? Inserting a ship into planetary orbit isn’t as easy as you may think, Orion.”
Her meaning was clear. Even the slightly tolerant smile on her lips betrayed her thoughts. I’m a scientist, she was saying, and I can understand how to pilot a survey vessel by studying its control panel and calling for instructions from the ship’s computer. You’re a soldier, you can’t be expected to know anything or to do anything you haven’t been specifically trained for.
I reached down and grasped her arm. Lifting her gently from the pilot’s seat, I said, “I can pilot a dreadnought if I have to. Go on back to the galley and ask your husband if he thinks I’m capable of running this little tub.”
She looked surprised, annoyed. But she came out of the chair without resistance and started back toward the galley, casting a resentful look at me over her shoulder.
“You too,” I told the scientist in the other seat. “I’ll handle this by myself.”
He huffed a little, but he left me alone in the cockpit. Scanning the control board, I saw that the vessel had an automated orbital-insertion program built into its computer’s memory. Sensors were already estimating Lunga’s mass and distance. All I had to do was touch a pressure pad on the board and the ship did the rest by itself.
I activated the communicator, instead, and asked for the Skorpis base commander. Several underlings tried to talk to me, but I refused to speak to anyone until the base commander’s grim, gray-furred face appeared on the display screen before me.
“You are surrendering, Orion?” She made it sound more like a statement than a question.
“No,” I said. “I have returned to offer you an exchange.”
“What have you to offer that I would desire?”
“Your team of scientists.”
Her lips pulled back slightly to show her teeth. “You captured them and now you return them?”
“I saved them from the Tsihn and now I offer them back to you.”
Unconsciously she began grooming the fur of her face. “They must be of very little value to you if you offer them back to me.”
I almost smiled, remembering the wonderfully fierce bargaining that would go on in the bazaars of cities the Mongols had taken or even in the boardrooms of interplanetary corporations.
“Their value to me is not so important as their value to you,” I said.
“What value are they to me? They cannot fight. They cannot entertain. They cannot be used for food. They have not succeeded in their mission. Because of them I have lost nearly two whole battalions of warriors.”
I jumped on that point. “Your orders were to protect these scientists. You fought honorably and well to protect them. Unfortunately, you must tell your superiors that you failed. The scientists were captured, despite your spending nearly two whole battalions to protect them. It is very sad.”
If a cat could smile, she did it then. “I have not lost the scientists. They are on your ship.”
“But not on yours.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I will blow up this ship, with the scientists in it, if you do not agree to my terms.”
“You will kill yourself, then?”
“Yes, and no Skorpis will ever eat my flesh. I will blast this ship and all of us into an ionized gas cloud.”
Her massive shoulders moved in a very human-looking shrug.
“Go ahead, then. It is no fur off my face.”
“But what will your superiors say when you report to them that you failed to protect the scientists? What will they say when you report that you refused to take them back after they had been captured and returned? You will be meat for their larders, I’m afraid.”
That brought out a snarl. “We can take your ship—”
“Not before I blow it to atoms.”
She just stared at me. Even though it was only an image on the display screen I could feel the fury of that yellow-eyed stare. At that moment she would like nothing better than to sink her fangs into my throat.