“The thing is, Vesey,” he said, “we’ve had star travel for less than two thousand years, and to adapt ordinary humans into forms like those we saw underground would take either genetic engineering beyond what’s possible today or a very great deal of time. It couldn’t happen in less than fifty or sixty thousand years, and it might require as much as ten times as long.”
“Then they’re not human after all, sir?” Vesey said. She sighed with obvious relief. “I’m—well, it was just so creepy to think that they might be. What if my children—”
She stopped, flustered, then blurted onward, “If I ever had children, I mean, not that I . . .”
Daniel kept a straight face, suspecting that if he smiled it would delay the midshipman even more. Besides, he had more to say. Vesey’s misunderstanding was comforting to her, but Daniel couldn’t in good conscience leave her in it.
“That’s not quite what I meant, Vesey,” he said. “None of the starfaring races we’ve met in the last two thousand years could live on human-habitable planets without full life-support systems. There’s some evidence, though—I’ve found some evidence myself—that in the distant past there was another race living on planets we’ve colonized recently. The—seeming mammals we’ve found here on South Land, call them that . . . they’re the only native vertebrates on Sexburga. If they’re native.”
Vesey raised her visor so that she could rub her eyes. “I see,” she said. “Thank you, sir. That was very informative.”
Which in the tone she used was equivalent to, “And next time, I’d prefer you give me a rectal exam with a shovel.” Well, Vesey knew as surely as Daniel himself did that the RCN didn’t train its officers to lie to their subordinates.
Daniel turned, his mouth open to order his people to fall out for a ten-minute break. “Unit!” said Jeshonyk over the intercom. “There’s an aircar coming from the south. Hear it? Over.”
Daniel did hear the distant mixture of high and low tones now, though he hadn’t until Jeshonyk called it to his attention. Power room crewmen had an almost mystical ability to pick up mechanical noises—and particularly variations in mechanical noises. When you were dealing with fusion bottles, quick diagnosis of strange sounds could be the difference between life and death for the whole ship.
“Everybody into the ravine under cover!” Daniel bellowed, lifting his visor so that the helmet wouldn’t muffle his voice. He deliberately didn’t trip the intercom. “Radio silence, but everybody echo images from my helmet so that you know what’s going on.”
The spacers scrambled over the edge of the ravine like children entering a swimming pool: in a variety of fashions, all of them clumsy. Hogg disappeared also, but without kicking up a sand grain or disturbing a leaf of the sheltered bushes. Hogg looked portly and seemed slow until he saw a need to move quickly.
“Sun, you’re in command if there’s a problem,” Daniel continued. He faced the south and smiled for the oncoming vehicle which he couldn’t see without magnifi—no, he could after all, there was a glint in the sky. “I suggest you be guided by Hogg till you reach an environment more familiar to you, however. God and the Republic be with you, spacers!”
Daniel lowered his visor again and increased the magnification. He sounded like quite the sanctimonious prig, now that his mind had leisure to review what he’d just said. At the time it had seemed like what was called for, though; and maybe it was.
The oncoming vehicle was an aircar, not an armored personnel carrier. It was large enough to carry quite a number of soldiers, but marksmen as good as Hogg and Sun could shoot it into a colander if that were required. Daniel’s people wouldn’t start the firefight, though, and Daniel himself made an easy target as well.
He grinned naturally at a further thought. He’d just made the sort of speech that would look well in a book like Our Navy’s Martyred Heroes; which he’d read when he was eight, and which he might very possibly have stolen the words from. Well, the RCN put more of a premium on propriety than originality.