Caitlin turned reddened eyes to him. “The Jao almost never lie. Whether that’s a cultural trait or something biologically hard-wired in their brains, I couldn’t tell you, but they don’t. They can and do exaggerate readily—sometimes even wildly—or refrain from mentioning, but they rarely invent from whole cloth. They’re just not easily imaginative, the way we are. That’s why they find our fascination with novels and movies so peculiar—even distasteful. To them, fiction is a form of lying.” She raked perspiration-soaked hair out of her face and shuddered. “They definitely weren’t exaggerating about this.”
Aille and Yaut climbed in behind them.
“How are we going to leave?” Kralik said. “They’ve damaged the ship. We don’t have a hatch left.”
“I can generate a field to reinforce the inner hatch,” Aille said. “It will draw our power down very low, but it will probably hold until we reach Terra.”
Caitlin hugged her broken arm across her chest. “Do you have spacesuits, in case it doesn’t?”
“We have suits for Jao, none for humans,” Yaut said. “This vessel was never intended to transport your species.”
So the three of them, Caitlin, Kralik, and himself, might not make it back. Angrily, Tully dropped into one of the seats. Just because the Ekhat were too damned impatient to wait until they’d opened the fricking door.
Insanity was one thing, but that plain pissed him off!
* * *
After Aille piloted the small ship safely away from the Ekhat vessel, Caitlin found a flavored drink in the ship’s stores and offered it around, one-handed. Aille and Yaut waved the carafe away, preferring to analyze recordings of what had just transpired. She could tell by their twitchiness that what they really wanted was a good long swim. Banle had often displayed a similar mussed discontent during long formal occasions and always made her way to the nearest pool afterward.
Humans, though, liked to have something to do with their hands, when they were under stress, so she wasn’t surprised when Kralik and Tully drained their cups and asked for more.
Caitlin served them, then retreated to her own seat, her head reeling, suddenly cold with an intensity that indicated shock. That terrible ship with its deranged crew—she could still taste the miasma that passed for their atmosphere, feel that excruciating racket jangling through her bones. Jao had been warning humanity about the Ekhat for over twenty years, but no one had ever really believed them. And, unfortunately, with their lack of imagination and creative expression, they had never been able to fully communicate the depth of the Ekhat’s strangeness.
She herself had only thought she understood how alien another species could be before today. Compared to the Ekhat, the Jao were almost human and their rule positively benevolent. The universe was clearly a much more dangerous place than humans had ever credited. She had to get back and warn her father.
” ‘Unharvesting.’ ” Kralik looked up from the work station where he was searching the ship’s archives. His face was as grimy as hers surely must be, his jinau uniform stained with dark circles of sweat. “So far I can’t find any references, but I don’t like the sound of it.”
“It may not mean an attack,” Caitlin said, glad to have something to focus on. Her broken arm throbbed and she needed a bath herself. The Ekhat ship had been sweltering and her clammy shirt clung to her body. Her hair would probably carry that stink for days. “The Subcommandant wasn’t sure. It could mean something so totally off the wall, we’ll never be able to make any sense of it.”
Tully had wedged himself in the back of the cabin, as far from the two Jao as he could get, and had the look of a caged animal. His eyes kept returning to the missing hatch. The forcefield Aille had rigged glimmered green and was all that stood between them and naked vacuum. Some of the brighter stars were visible beyond. “All they had to do was wait five more seconds,” he muttered, “and we would have opened the fricking door!”
“Get over it.” Kralik punched up another file. “They’re aliens. Really aliens. They not only don’t understand doors or humans—or Jao, for that matter—they don’t want to.” He hesitated, then scrolled down through the data on the display. “Okay, here it is. I found a reference to ‘unharvesting.’ “