“Cooperation?” echoed Brigid. “For what?”
“For the return to Earth of me and my people, to retrieve our long-denied legacy as Terrans.”
“Why should we?” Grant asked.
Sindri nodded toward the trestle tables. “There are discoveries here worth taking back to Earth.”
“You’re proposing a trade agreement?” Kane’s tone still quivered with barely suppressed surprise at the mention of the Danaan.
“Naturally. You can make it easier for us. You can tell us the safest places for us to settle, to transplant the colony.”
“Why do you want to come to Earth so badly?” inquired Brigid. “It’s not exactly an Eden.”
Sindri’s features contorted, as if he were struggling to keep himself composed. ‘ ‘It is not that we want to. We need to.”
“Why?” Brigid persisted. “The environmental conditions are not those in which you were raised, the planet is still trying to recover from the war”
Sindri’s words came out in a rush. “I told you we were all that remains of the Cydonia Compound colony. I meant that literally. We are the last of our kind, the final, dwindling generation. Unless we leave Mars, we will diethere will be no more after us. Utter extinction, Miss Brigid. Thorough and complete.”
He drew in a sharp breath through finely drawn nostrils. “That is all you need to know, for the moment.”
“The hell it is,” rumbled Grant. “The little you’ve told us so far is through inference, feeding us information in unconnected bits and scraps. If you want anything from any of us, wipe the snake oil off your tongue and speak straight from the shoulder.”
Sindri’s face revealed conflicting emotions. Anger, desperation, doubt and something else, raw and primal and not easily identifiable. Finally, in a very hushed tone, he declared, “I will tell you what you want. But as Mr. Kane mentioned, I seek a trade agreement. I tell you and you tell me. We will barter with information. A fair exchange, I think. Do we have a bargain?”
Brigid, Grant and Kane regarded him silently, with flinty eyes and expressionless faces.
Sindri rapped sharply on the floor with the ferrule of his cane. Elle sidled close, stubby fingers poised over the harp strings. In the same low voice, he said, “Make no mistake. I can put all three of you in so much agony you’d kill each other to be the first to answer my questions. I prefer not to do that. It is coercion, not cooperation, and such actions do not come naturally to me. However, if you leave me with no other option, I will undertake that course. Regretfully, but very, very devotedly.”
His eyes flicked back and forth across their faces. “Do we have a bargain?”
When the answer wasn’t forthcoming, Sindri clenched his delicate hands, the knuckles standing out against the flesh like ivory knobs. He thrust his head forward and roared furiously, “Answer me! Do we have a bargain ?”
Lips compressed, Kane glanced into his friends’ faces, cast his gaze to the harp, remembered the universe of pain it had put him in and said grimly, “Bargain.”
Sindri instantly unknotted his fists. He extended his right hand. Kane reluctantly took it, noting how his almost completely folded over Sindri’s. The little man gave his hand two swift, perfunctory pumps and announced, “Done and done.”
He laughed, his eyes shining brightly. Kane recognized the quality of the laugh and the light burning in Sindri’s eyes. They were those of a madman.
Sindri smoothly slipped back into the persona of congenial host. He offered to take them on a tour of the space station, not that there was, he added, anything particularly remarkable to see.
He directed them to a comer of the warehouse where a small, four-wheeled, battery-powered cart was parked. He had rigged an enclosed canopy of sorts with sheets of transparent plastic draped over an aluminum framework. A small tank hissed a steady stream of oxygen into the cramped interior.
Brigid sat beside Sindri in a bucket seat as he manipulated foot pedals and a steering wheel. Grant and Kane sat facing each other in the back, heads low, their knees pressed into each other’s.
Sindri drove the cart along the corridors, chatting gaily, as if he were on a Sunday drive in the country with long-lost cousins. He told them about Parallax Red , or at least what he knew about it.