“Oh, no, you don’t. Not again,” Maati said.
The driver of the Khieevi ship designated Fourteen Klack^i am) Two Kiiclu was the first to put his tractor beam on the vessel containing the life forms.
As soon as he had them, he could not resist looking into their vessel to see what his courage and intelligence had netted. He could hardly believe his luck. The ship was filled with humans-most of them immature! How the Young -would love that! And even better, there were two tender OneHorns aboard.
With considerable glee, hampered only a little by the arrival of his fellow stragglers, he began running the demonstration of Khieevi diplomatic methods when dealing with aliens. The Niriians had proved so unsatisfactory that the driver decided to give the OneHorns a little preflight fright by showing what had been done to dismantle the body of the last OneHorn captive.
That should tenderize their youthful emotions, get them ready to scream all the way back to the homeworld, providing a substantial emotional appetizer before what was left of them could be physically delivered to the Young.
The driver could not resist, before boarding the ship and scooping out the sweet OneHorns and humans from the hull, taking a look to see their fear and horror at the film he had just transmitted. The smaller of the OneHorns stared back at him, baring her teeth, Then she raised a metal canister of some sort, dipped a gloved hand into it, and pulled out a glob of the horrible, carapace-eating sap, which she smeared across the corn screen.
Perhaps the Young would rather extract the OneHorns and humans themselves.
The AcaBecki had simply disappeared.
Nadhari shook her head in disbelief. “How could it have just vanished?”
“There’s a lot of space out there,” Becker pointed out, sounding a lot more nonchalant than he felt.
“Of course there is,” she said, her voice overly sweet, as if talking to someone with a bad case of stupid. “But the Ifnt and the other security ships have the ion trail ID for the AcaSecki and all of the other ships on MOO. And the trail ends here. Poof!”
“I wish I had my maps to check,” Becker said. “Maybe they have a Bermuda Triangle in this quadrant.”
“A what?”
“Well, long ago back on Mother Earth, there was this area in the ocean where airplanes and ships disappeared without a trace. It was called the Bermuda Triangle and people thought-”
“Yes?”
“That maybe aliens from outer space were responsible.” His voice faded off at the end.
“That certainly stands to reason in this case,” Nadhari said dryly.
“Can your ion trail ID thing check for other kinds of ion trails-those not left by Hafiz’s or his allies’ ships?”
“Like Khieevi ships for instance?” she asked. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. We only had one encounter with the Khieevi in Federation space and that was rather brief. I’ll check for any strange trails however.”
She worked at the control panel for a bit, the colored lights bouncing off the planes of her face, and then said, “Got it.”
“What?”
“There’ve been a number of other ships here. Similar trails all. I’m reprogramming so -we can follow them but the trails are confused.”
“Think it’s Khieevi?”
“Who else? It’s not us, that’s for sure.”
“Follow that ion,” Becker said.
“What?”
“You have just got to watch more of my antique vid collection, honey,” he said.
Acorna and Aari had the Condor fitted for the sap shells first. They could use their installation as a prototype to show the others. After a few glitches, which the Com)or accepted with its usual savoir-faire, the modifications were made and the Condor -was pronounced Khieevi-ready.
The most effective way to persuade all of the other merchants to go along with the plan, Acorna decided, was to have a meeting and show the vids to all of them at the same time.
Once the vids had finished playing, the boardroom was absolutely still as the lights came up.
Then Holland Barber, the lawyer for Cascade shipping company, which had won the bid to transport merchandise to and from MOO, spoke up. “Ms. Harakamian-Li,” the thin-faced blonde in the abbreviated silver synsilk power suit said, “Your allegation that we need to modify our ships in such a drastic way to deal with an alien race that clearly, from your own film, has been almost annihilated by those sticky things, appears to us to be unfounded. You are overreacting to a ridiculous degree. With Mr. Harakamian missing, there is actually no reason even to suppose that MOO will continue to be operational. Why, therefore, should we risk unnecessary modifications to our ships when we could simply claim because of your lack of foresight in providing a satisfactory business climate, we are no longer bound by our contract? We shall simply withdraw and return to Federation space.”