Quiet Invasion(169)

Good luck. We would like to see Ambassador T’sha or Ambassador D’seun, please.

One of the People broke away from the others and dived toward the base. The other two stared at the drone, each other, and their vanishing companion.

“Think they got the message?” asked Josh dryly.

“Looks it. Can we hover here?”

“After a fashion. Nothing like them.” Josh worked the stick and the keyboard for a moment, and the drone slowed its flight. The propulser readouts that appeared on the desk crept up from green toward yellow. Josh hit a few more keys and they faded again. The view on the camera bobbed unsteadily up and down, but it stayed where it was.

“You’ll be up for Adrian’s job next,” remarked Vee.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to do Adrian’s job.” The sourness in his voice told Vee that Josh was thinking about Kevin, and the exodus that was going on over their heads, and whatever might be coming next. She touched his arm, but he didn’t look at her.

Two People rose from the base. As they got closer, Vee was surprised to see the Engineer Who Looked Familiar beside the stranger. He carried a lumpy, mottled gray-green package clutched in his hands.

He did not stop level with the others. He kept going until he was almost on top of the drone. His muzzle and tattooed wings blocked out the rest of the view.

Vee sucked on her cheek and typed. Hello, Engineer. What is your name?

The engineer stared at the message and then looked straight at the camera lens. He raised both of his forehands, a greeting gesture, Vee remembered T’sha saying.

The lumpy package the engineer carried turned out to be a knotted ropelike thing with several objects clinging to it. Without looking down, he ran his hands over several of the objects, and Vee realized that most of the time the People couldn’t see what their hands were doing.

What must their hands be like? Are they more sensitive? Less? Do they have more senses than the five humans have?

“I think he’s about to make a few improvements,” remarked Josh.

“Oh good,” said Vee. “Always room for improvement.”

The engineer plucked something off the rope and spread it on the drone’s hull. It was silver skinned and glistened. It spread out tendrils that gripped the hull as tree roots would grip a stone.

Josh typed quickly, bringing up status readings that flashed past on the deck. Vee couldn’t understand half of them, but they all shone green. Whatever their engineer was doing out there, it wasn’t hurting their experiment.

The engineer pulled a clear disk off his rope and nestled it in the center of the tendrils. Then he took what looked like a balloon filled with pinkish jelly and settled it on the disk. The bag swelled, puffing up as if being inflated by an invisible pump, until it became a perfect sphere about the size of Josh’s head. When it stopped growing, the engineer pulled a small white box with a grainy surface that reminded Vee of unpolished coral and slid it next to the sphere. He backed away with one stroke of his wings. Words appeared inside the sphere.

Good luck. I am Engineer Br’sei. Is this hybrid harming your transport? Is your visual field blocked? This hybrid should function down to the freezing point of, wait…water. Will that be cold enough?

“Good luck? Good lord,” laughed Vee. The thing clinging to the drone looked ridiculous. It looked like a child’s clay masterpiece surmounted by a pale-pink crystal ball.

It’s probably an incredible jury-rigging, she thought

“Everything’s still green,” reported Josh. He looked at the conglomeration again. “Doesn’t block too much of the camera.”

The hybrid is not harming our transport. The temperature tolerance is more than adequate. What is its range? Vee typed out the new message.

At the moment, the hybrid is limited to vocal range, came the reply. He shifted his weight. Embarrassed? I must ask you to feel these words, Br’sei went on. Ambassador T’sha is not here. She is trying to save the life of her city. If she were here, she would surely tell you that you need to warn your families. D’seun is trying to get you all declared insane.

“What?” said Vee before she remembered that Br’sei couldn’t hear her. She typed her question.

What?

“The Law Meet has determined that your distant family is insane. We are finishing the means to separate their souls from their raw materials.

“Distant family?” said Josh.

Vee’s heart thudded once, hard. “They mean the Terrans.” The words almost choked her. She typed,

You are going to kill the Terrans? The people on Earth?

Br’sei dipped his muzzle. An affirmation. They say the Terrans are insane. The sane and the insane cannot live together.