“Bad news,” he muttered, hauling his head back in and gripping the steering wheel more tightly. “Mood they’re in, they’ll likely shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Stop the truck,” hissed Aguilera. “Let me get into the bed. Maybe when they see the jinau uniform they’ll let it go.”
* * *
They did, and they didn’t. True, the scout car didn’t just blast them. On the other hand, it continued to pace the pickup for a minute or so, as Tully continued south, and apparently got in touch with the military base. They hadn’t gotten more than a few miles further before two Jao combat vehicles coming northbound on I-5—on their side of the divided interstate, human traffic laws be damned—had intercepted them.
The first minute or so was tense. The Jao suspected them of being deserters, and Tully knew that the normal Jao method for dealing with desertion was summary execution. The aliens considered “court martial” another frivolous human pastime.
Fortunately, however, the Jao were not as prone as humans to assume that everyone lied at the drop of a hat. Rather to his surprise, they accepted Tully’s explanation without question—and the mention of Aille’s name worked like a charm. By now, it seemed, all Jao troops on Terra knew that the new Subcommandant had taken humans into his personal service. Discovering that Tully and Aguilera were the fabled creatures in question, their suspicion and hostility vanished, replaced by something akin to country rubes gawking at exotic animals in a zoo.
There had been a time, and not so long ago, when Tully would have been angered by that. Another example of Jao arrogance and xenophobia. But his experiences over the past period had taught him to see the shades and colors in Terra’s conquerors. They were no longer simply a monochromatic oppressor—as the lumpy shape of the locator tucked out of sight in his pocket reminded him, all the way back to the base.
That didn’t take but a few minutes, since exotic animals have their privileges. The Jao officer had summoned the scout car and the three humans were flown the rest of the distance. With, of course, the two pilots of the scout car gawking at them the whole time.
* * *
After Tully saw Aguilera and the old man into the medical compound, he wandered through the darker areas of the base until he found shelter from the rain under a tree. The base had been set up hurriedly in an agricultural sector of Willamette Valley, and sprawled all over. Tully decided he could run the risk of staying there until sunrise, before anyone noticed him or thought to ask what he was doing.
By sunrise, Aille would be back. Whatever decision Tully was going to make, he didn’t have much time to do it.
For the first time in his life, Tully was suffering from divided loyalties. He had been Resistance from the time he was a boy. This was the first real chance he’d had to escape since he’d been dragooned into Aille’s service, and he’d learned a great deal that might be valuable to the Resistance. It was his plain and simple duty to escape and rejoin Wiley’s forces in the Rockies. Try to, at least.
On the other hand . . .
He had told Aille and Yaut he would return; had given them his promise, his word. And he could no longer deny to himself that the young Jao scion of Pluthrak—even the crusty old fraghta—had had a genuine impact on him. The vow he had made was not something he could simply dismiss as a necessary lie given to conquerors. Things had gone beyond that. How much farther beyond, and in exactly what way, still confused Tully.
Maybe there was a third alternative, he thought. His fingers closed around the smooth cool box in his pocket. Maybe the fraghta wouldn’t ask for it back now, and he would retain control over his own movements. He could stay a bit longer—maybe more than a bit—and learn more about how the Jao top levels of command operated. In the long run, he was starting to think, that might be more important than anything else he could do.