The belter trotted toward Locklear while an athletic specimen with a yellow crew cut moved out to watch the forest where Locklear had emerged. Locklear took the belter’s free hand and shook it repeatedly. They walked to the cabin together, and the rest of the group relaxed visibly to see Locklear all but capering in his delight. Two other armed figures appeared from across the clearing, one with curves too lush to be male, and Locklear invited them all in with, “There are no kzinti on this piece of the planet; welcome to Newduvai.”
Leaning, sitting, they all found their ease in Locklear’s room, and their gazes were as curious as Locklear’s own. He noted the varied shoulder patches: We Made It, Jinx, Wunderland. The woman, wearing the bars of a lieutenant, was evidently a Flatlander like himself. Commander Curt Stockton wore a Canyon patch, standing wiry and erect beside the woman, with pale gray eyes that missed nothing.
“I was captured by a kzin ship,” Locklear explained, “and marooned. But I suppose that’s all in the records; I call the planet ‘Zoo’ because I think the Outsiders designed it with that in mind.”
“We had these coordinates, and something vague about prison compounds, from translations of kzin records,” Stockton replied. “You must know a lot about this Zoo place by now.”
“A fair amount. Listen, I saw you firing on a village near the big lake an hour ago. You mustn’t do it again, Commander. Those people are real Earth Neanderthals, probably the only ones in the entire galaxy.”
The blocky sergeant, David Gomulka, slid his gaze to lock on Stockton’s and shrugged big sloping shoulders. The woman, a close-cropped brunette whose cinched belt advertised her charms, gave Locklear a brilliant smile and sat down on his pallet. “I’m Grace Agostinho; Lieutenant, Manaus Intelligence Corps, Earth. Forgive our manners, Mr. Locklear, we’ve been in heavy fighting along the Rim and this isn’t exactly what we expected to find.”
“Me neither,” Locklear smiled, then turned serious. “I hope you didn’t destroy that village.”
“Sorry about that,” Stockton said. “We may have caused a few casualties when we opened fire on those huts. I ordered the firing stopped as soon as I saw they weren’t kzinti. But don’t look so glum, Locklear; it’s not as if they were human.”
“Damn right they are,” Locklear insisted. “As you’ll soon find out, if we can get their trust again. I’ve even taught a few of ’em some of our language. And that’s not all. But hey, I’m dying of curiosity without any news from outside. Is the war over?”
Commander Stockton coughed lightly for attention and the others seemed as attentive as Locklear. “It looks good around the core worlds, but in the Rim sectors it’s still anybody’s war.” He jerked a thumb toward the two-hundred-ton craft, twice the length of a kzin lifeboat, that rested on its repulsor jacks at the edge of the clearing with its own small pinnace clinging to its back. “The Anthony Wayne is the kind of cruiser escort they don’t mind turning over to small combat teams like mine. The big brass gave us this mission after we captured some kzinti files from a tabby dreadnought. Not as good as R & R back home, but we’re glad of the break.” Stockton’s grin was infectious.
“I haven’t had time to set up a distillery,” Locklear said, “or I’d offer you drinks on the house.”
“A man could get parched here,” said a swarthy little private.
“Good idea, Gazho. You’re detailed to get some medicinal brandy from the med stores,” said Stockton.
As the private hurried out, Locklear said, “You could probably let the rest of the crew out to stretch their legs, you know. Not much to guard against on Newduvai.”
“What you see is all there is,” said a compact private with high cheekbones and a Crashlander medic patch. Locklear had not heard him speak before. Softly accented, laconic; almost a scholar’s diction. But that’s what you might expect of a military medic.
Stockton’s quick gaze riveted the man as if to say, “that’s enough.” To Locklear he nodded. “Meet Soichiro Lee; an intern before the war. Has a tendency to act as if a combat team is a democratic outfit but,” his glance toward Lee was amused now, “he’s a good sawbones. Anyhow, the Wayne can take care of herself. We’ve set her auto defenses for voice recognition when the hatch is closed, so don’t go wandering closer than ten meters without one of us. And if one of those hairy apes throws a rock at her, she might just burn him for his troubles.”
Locklear nodded. “A crew of seven; that’s pretty thin.”
Stockton, carefully: “You want to expand on that?”
Locklear: “I mean, you’ve got your crew pretty thinly spread. The tabbies have the same problem, though. The bunch that marooned me here had only four members.”
Sergeant Gomulka exhaled heavily, catching Stockton’s glance. “Commander, with your permission: Locklear here might have some ideas about those tabby records.”
“Umm. Yeah, I suppose,” with some reluctance. “Locklear, apparently the kzinti felt there was some valuable secret, a weapon maybe, here on Zoo. They intended to return for it. Any idea what it was?”
Locklear laughed aloud. “Probably it was me. It ought to be the whole bleeding planet,” he said. “If you stand near the force wall and look hard, you can see what looks like a piece of the Kzin homeworld close to this one. You can’t imagine the secrets the other compounds might have. For starters, the life forms I found in stasis had been here forty thousand years, near as I can tell, before I released ’em.”
“You released them?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have, but—” He glanced shyly toward Lieutenant Agostinho. “I got pretty lonesome.”
“Anyone would,” she said, and her smile was more than understanding.
Gomulka rumbled in evident disgust, “Why would a lot of walking fossils be important to the tabby war effort?”
“They probably wouldn’t,” Locklear admitted. “And anyhow, I didn’t find the specimens until after the kzinti left.” He could not say exactly why, but this did not seem the time to regale them with his adventures on Kzersatz. Something just beyond the tip of his awareness was flashing like a caution signal.
Now Gomulka looked at his commander. “So that’s not what we’re looking for,” he said. “Maybe it’s not on this Newduvai dump. Maybe next door?”
“Maybe. We’ll take it one dump at a time,” said Stockton, and turned as the swarthy private popped into the cabin. “Ah. I trust the Armagnac didn’t insult your palate on the way, Nathan,” he said.
Nathan Gazho looked at the bottle’s broken seal, then began to distribute nested plastic cups, his breath already laced with his quick nip of the brandy. “You don’t miss much,” he grumbled.
But I’m missing something, Locklear thought as he touched his half-filled cup to that of the sloe-eyed, languorous lieutenant. Slack discipline? But combat troops probably ignore the spit and polish. Except for this hotsy who keeps looking at me as if we shared a secret, they’ve all got the hand calluses and haircuts of shock troops. No, it’s something else . . .
He told himself it was reluctance to make himself a hero; and next he told himself they wouldn’t believe him anyway. And then he admitted that he wasn’t sure exactly why, but he would tell them nothing about his victory on Kzersatz unless they asked. Maybe because I suspect they’d round up poor Scarface, maybe hunt him down and shoot him like a mad dog no matter what I said. Yeah, that’s reason enough. But something else, too.
Night fell, with its almost audible thump, while they emptied the Armagnac. Locklear explained his scholarly fear that the gentles were likely to kill off animals that no other ethologist had ever studied on the hoof; mentioned Ruth and Minuteman as well; and decided to say nothing about Loli to these hardbitten troops. Anse Parker, the gangling belter, kept bringing the topic back to the tantalizingly vague secret mentioned in kzin files. Parker, Locklear decided, thought himself subtle but managed only to be transparently cunning.
Austin Schmidt, the wide-shouldered blond, had little capacity for Armagnac and kept toasting the day when ” . . . all this crap is history and I’m a man of means,” singing that refrain from an old barracks ballad in a surprisingly sweet tenor. Locklear could not warm up to Nathan Gazho, whose gaze took inventory of every item in the cabin. The man’s expensive wristcomp and pinky ring mismatched him like earrings on a weasel.
David Gomulka was all noncom, though, with a veteran’s gift for controlling men and a sure hand in measuring booze. If the two officers felt any unease when he called them “Curt” and “Grace,” they managed to avoid showing it. Gomulka spun out the tale of his first hand-to-hand engagement against a kzin penetration team with details that proved he knew how the tabbies fought. Locklear wanted to say, “That’s right; that’s how it is,” but only nodded.