One bay over, he saw a Jao floor-supervisor stop and hand Aguilera a board to sign off. Aguilera read it, then looked up. Tully sat back on his heels to wipe sweat from his brow, surreptitiously gauging the older man’s reaction.
“Goddammit!” Aguilera narrowed his eyes, obviously angry. “Are you sure about this?”
The Jao’s ears shifted into an angle that made Tully uneasy. He realized he was becoming all too conversant with Jao body language.
“You question orders?” the Jao said in heavily accented English.
“No,” Aguilera said, “but I thought we’d proved our artillery worked better in an atmosphere—” His gaze strayed to the upper floor, where Aille’s office was located. “Never mind. I’ll check with the Subcommandant, when I get the chance, just to be sure.”
“These—orders!” The Jao loomed over Aguilera and the difference in their body masses was all too evident. As always, the human looked fragile in comparison. “You follow—without question!” He cuffed Aguilera, knocking him to the floor.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tully was on his feet before he’d realized he’d spoken. “He didn’t deserve that!”
The Jao turned with all the grace of a bulldozer. He was not angry, Tully realized with a start, reading the lines of his body. The big alien was just confused. The cuffing he’d given Aguilera would not have done more than jar another Jao. It certainly wouldn’t have felled them.
Probably new to Terran service, Tully thought. He could almost see the wheels turning inside the Jao’s head. Humans were supposed to serve, he’d been told. They did not argue about decisions any more than a refrigerator had an opinion on whether it should be plugged in. After a very short time, Aguilera had grown accustomed to having Aille krinnu ava Pluthrak’s ear and had forgotten how few Jao were interested in hearing what humans had to say.
He dropped his gaze. “Forgive him,” he said in Jao, as humbly as gritted teeth would allow. “He is tired from working all night and forgets himself. Orders will be followed, of course.”
Other men had stopped and were watching, their faces grimy, their hands full of tools that could become weapons on a moment’s notice. They bunched together, muttering. Tully pulled Aguilera to his feet. “Tell him!” he whispered forcefully.
“Forgive me,” Aguilera said, weaving and unable to focus. “I meant no disrespect.”
The Jao sniffed, then strode off. Tully stared after him for a moment, his face tight with anger. “That was stupid,” he said finally.
“Yeah.” Aguilera passed a hand over his pale face. “Get back to work,” he said finally to the watching men. “This isn’t doing any good.”
“But the tanks—” Ed Patterson began.
“They want them with lasers,” Aguilera said, “so they’ll get them with lasers. Then, maybe, if these Ekhat do ever show up, they’ll kick their fuzzy butts and they’ll all have to go somewhere else to have their war.”
Tully eyed the locator control box on Aguilera’s belt. He should have plucked it off when the other man was half out on his feet. Then he could have been off the base in fifteen minutes.
Aguilera caught his eye. “Want it?”
He flushed and looked away.
“What’s it like, back there in Rockies?” Aguilera’s voice was low. “Plenty of medical supplies, enough to eat, warm clothes? Can the kids go to good schools? Is there fuel for cars? Munitions for guns?”
There was damned little of any of that, Tully thought, but whose fault was it? Certainly not the Resistance’s!
He was not surprised that Aguilera had figured it out. Collaborator or not, the middle-aged ex-soldier was no dummy.
“Just let me go, Rafe,” he said in a low voice. “Sooner or later, this Subcommandant and his goddamned fraghta are going to crack me like a nut, and then I’ll spill everything.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “You’re human. You can’t want that.”
“What I want,” Aguilera said, “is what’s best for humanity. We’ve lost this battle, but we don’t have to lose the war. If you keep your head down and stop making trouble, you might just learn enough to help down the line when things are different.” He glanced around the refit floor where most of the workers had resumed the morning’s tasks. “Right now, there’s no chance of getting rid of the Jao. We have to survive and learn as much as we can.”