Dimly a voice was shouting at him.
“Fire, Alex, fire!”
“It’s no good, Grig. I can’t do it. Turn back, get us out of here, I can’t!”
“You can and you must.” Grig blinked as the gunstar scraped a barely sensed projection sticking out into the tunnel. “Steady now, steady. We’re still on them, still in range. Use your sensors.”
“It’s no good, Grig.”
The tunnel ahead ballooned into a vast open airless cavern. The Xurians whirled and sped back straight toward their pursuer. The cavern was a dead end and further retreat was blocked.
It took only a second or so. “Shoot, Alex!”
“Grig, I can’t!”
If the pilots of the Xurian ships had ignored the gunstar they might both have escaped, shooting past their pursuer on either flank. Instead, they panicked and fired their own weapons. It was just enough to galvanize Alex into action. His fingers danced on the fire controls. Energy shot from the gunstar and the ship rocked as it passed between two expanding spheres of hot gas and vaporized metal.
Grig slowed and turned easily in the cavern. “You did it! I never doubted for a moment, Alex.” He dropped their speed to a crawl, let the gunstar coast on maneuvering thrusters.
Alex sat stunned in the gunnery seat. “I did it? You did it. You almost got me killed. I said I was willing to help fight, but not a suicidal battle against impossible odds. If this is how it’s going to be, I withdraw the offer. I volunteered to contribute to a defensive effort, not be the defense. I’m not cut out to be a martyr, Grig. I’d rather face Xur’s assassins one at a time. The odds are a damnsight better. Take me home!”
Grig was silent a long time before asking quietly, “Are those your final words on the matter, Alex?”
“I hope so!”
Grig made a gesture of acknowledgment and spoke quietly as they cruised the tunnel. “My humblest apologies, then. I had hoped that by putting you in the thick of battle, a great Starfighter might emerge, the polished gem from the rough Centauri was so certain he’d found.
“Alas, perhaps there was never one within you to begin with. So it would seem. I cannot make a Starfighter of you against your will, Alex. I will take you back, as you request. You may still be able to live out a long and comfortable life on Earth before the Ko-Dan reach it. Then again, you may not.
“You may relax now. Keep your fingers clear of the fire controls until I can deactivate our weapons systems. There’s no need to alert any other Xurian or Ko-Dan vessels to our presence through a burst of unintentional fire.” A sensor beeped, nudged the ship around a large floating chunk of torn ceramic plating.
“Also, I am not trying to make you feel guilty. That would be impolite.”
“I don’t feel guilty,” Alex insisted guiltily.
“That is good. I do not have the right to manipulate your emotions, no matter how worthy the cause. Let us talk about something else.” He let his gaze take in the smooth ceiling of the tunnel.
“Cheerful, roomy place,” Grig said. “With air and gravity and heat it could be made almost homey. Rather reminds me of the town I was raised in.”
Alex frowned as he studied the stone tube. “This reminds you of home?”
“Oh yes.” Grig made an effort to appear cheerful. “My mate and I live below ground with our sixty little Griglings. We’re very comfortable. Living below the surface of a world has many advantages, Alex. Stable climate, unvarying scenery, the feeling of your friends constantly around you.”
“Sixty, huh? That’s quite a family. I guess you didn’t spend all your time preparing to be a Navigator/Monitor.”
“We tend to have large families. The fertile period among us is brief, but most births that occur are multiple. Would you like to see?”
Alex wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“My family.”
Alex relaxed. “Yeah, sure.”
Grig fumbled with his flight suit and harness and extracted a strip of dark plastic. He ran a finger along the right-hand edge. An image appeared on the smooth, thin surface, lit from within. As Alex watched the picture change automatically, each of Grig’s numerous offspring appearing in a predetermined sequence. The images changed quickly and it didn’t take too long to run through the entire oversized family.
When the last one had faded, Grig slipped the plastic back inside his suit.
“Very nice,” Alex admitted.
“They are a joy to me,” the Navigator confessed. “I have high hopes for them. That is, until Xur makes them slaves.” This was said in a flat, unemotional tone, which did nothing to lessen its impact on Alex.
“Now tell me, where do your kind live, if not beneath the undisturbed and insulating surface of your world?”
“In houses, mostly. Caves above ground.” Suddenly he shoved a hand into his right-side pocket and removed the contents. He’d switched them from his jeans to the uniform when he’d changed clothes back on Rylos.
Sitting in the fire control seat of a gunstar they looked very out of place. There was his wallet, with its limp, useless currency; a few keys, some coins, a paperclip, a couple of stamps (how much was postage from Rylos to Earth, he wondered?), and a few bits of gravel. Of all of it, he most prized the few fragments of decomposed granite. They were pieces of home.
He returned everything to the pocket but the wallet, unsnapped the catch on the vinyl and flipped through the pictures as he showed them to Grig.
“See, here’s where I live. And that’s my family. It’s a lot smaller than yours.” The picture showed happy younger children gathered around a barbecue. A smiling older man and woman stood together next to the metal utensil. The man had his arm around the woman’s shoulder while hers was around his waist. Distant, half-remembered images of an ancient time. Even there, in that alien planetoid, they conjured up rarely felt emotions.
“See, that’s my mom and my dad before he died. The one with the wrinkled face and the dumb expression is my little brother Louis. The girl, that’s Maggie.”
“Your wife?” Grig’s interest was genuine as he glanced up and back toward the picture.
“Uh, no, just a friend. A very close friend.” Alex swallowed hard. “My family lives above ground in a mobile home cave that goes anyplace you want it to. Only we never went anyplace.”
Grig nodded politely. Alex wondered if the gesture stood for the same thing among his people or if, having seen Alex utilize the gesture, the Navigator was simply displaying his courtesy through the use of it.
“A mobile cave that never went anywhere. Fascinating, if something of a contradiction in terms. Why call it mobile if it never goes anywhere?”
“That’s our fault, not the trailer’s,” Alex explained. Aware he’d been staring at Maggie’s face for a long time, he removed the picture from his wallet and placed it on a nearby console, copying a gesture learned from watching old black-and-white war movies. The familiar snapshot was an island of sanity among all the smooth Rylan technology. He put the wallet back in his pocket.
“We do have caves, though. Some of them are pretty big. People used to live in them a lot. A few still do.”
“Ah, then we are not so very different.”
“No, I guess not. We have a lot of below-surface caves near our trailer park. Me and Louis used to play hide and seek in them.”
“Hide and seek?”
“A kid’s game. You’ve probably played it yourself, only you call it something else. Or else it’s not translating properly. See, one person or more runs and hides and . . .” He hesitated, thinking.
“Hide and see k,” he mumbled again.
“Alex, what is it?”
“Oh, nothing, Grig. Nothing.”
“Tell me. Anything worth labeling nothing has to be composed of something.”
“Yeah, right. I was just thinking, though. We could hide inside this asteroid and let the Ko-Dan armada pass by on its way to Rylos. It would shield us from their detectors just like those Xurians were trying to hide from us. Then after they’ve gone by we could come out fast and hit them from behind.”
Grig nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it would give us the necessary element of surprise. It might actually have worked. I do not think the Ko-Dan would run an extensive survey of all the asteroids. Any such survey would surely exclude time-consuming internal examinations. The rock here is more than thick enough to block out their sensors. Yes, it might well have worked. What a pity there are no Starfighters left to carry it out.”
“Yeah, but we . . .”
“Please. It is a waste of time to discuss plans one has no intention of putting to use, and I am not in the mood to discuss tactical theory when reality is at stake. I will take you home now, Alex.”