Strangest, perhaps, was the mass of purplish, translucent jelly riding on the creature’s shoulders and the back of its slightly elongated neck. A thin slime of the stuff coated the being’s skin and seemed to be leaking from nostrils and the openings at the base of its jaw that must be its ears. Threads of the gel stretched from the Ahannu’s shoulders to the floor and the back wall of the room, like a spider’s web made of glistening mucus.
Garroway brought the Colt Puller up, aiming it at the creature’s flat face, his finger tightening on the trigger.
“Nu!” the creature shrilled. “Sagra nu!”
Without the net, there was no hope of a translation. What the hell was sagra nu?
But as near as Garroway could tell, the being was unarmed. It wore torso armor that looked like green-stained leather, and some bangles on its arms that might have been gold. Unless that purple crap on its head and shoulders was dangerous…
“Sagra nu,” the Ahannu said, still holding up its open hand. “Ga-me-e’din!”
Primitive the being might be, but it was afraid of the pistol. “You’d better not even twitch, Frog,” Garroway said. He knew damned well the Ahannu couldn’t understand, but he tried to throw enough authority and menace into his voice to get the message across anyway.
“I…no…twitch…frog…” the Ahannu said, its voice raspy and hard to make out, but intelligible all the same.
“Jesus!” Sergeant Dunne said at Garroway’s side. “The thing speaks English!”
“We…thing…speak…” it said. “A few of…we…thing…speak….”
“Who are you?” Captain Warhurst demanded, keeping his laser carbine aimed at the Ahannu’s chest. “What do we call you?”
“We are…Zu-Din,” the being replied. “We are…the Mind of God.”
“No weapons,” Garroway said. “He must either be a scout…”
“Or what?” Warhurst asked.
“Or an officer, sir. I don’t think he’s a regular warrior.”
“We’ll let Intelligence sort that out,” Warhurst said. “Schuster! Evans! Dumbrowski! March our friend here up to the top. Ride with him back to the compound and tell the colonel it speaks English. Sort of.”
“Aye aye, sir!” The three Marines led the Ishtaran out.
Warhurst, meanwhile, was studying the only piece of equipment in the small, black-walled stone chamber, a football-shaped object two meters wide suspended from the ceiling by a cable that appeared too slender to bear its weight. A dark red cloth had been draped over the top, covering it. Carefully, he used the muzzle of his laser to tug the cloth off.
Underneath, an oval screen glowed softly deep within black crystal. A human in civilian clothing was visible on the screen, apparently reading an e-pad in her hands.
“Excuse me,” Warhurst said. The woman didn’t react. Warhurst reached out and touched the bottom of the device with his gauntlet; there was supposed to be a touch-sensitive volume control there. “Excuse me,” Warhurst said again.
This time the woman jumped. She turned her head and stared at the Marines with eyes widened in shock. “Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. She launched into a torrent of something sounding like French.
“Whoa, whoa, there,” Warhurst said, holding up his hands. Reaching up, he removed his helmet. “We do not have net access here, so I can’t understand you. Uh…non comprendez. Do you read me?”
The woman blinked. “I understand,” she said in heavily accented English. “I am Giselle Dumont of the Cydonian Quebecois Research Team. And you are…?”
“Captain Martin Warhurst, First Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, 1st Division, 44th Regiment, UFR Marine Corps,” he replied. “Can you patch me through to the UFR Military Communications Network, Code one-five-alpha-three-echo, Priority One, please?”
“I am sorry, sir, but the WorldNet interplanetary relays are offline at this time. We have had a period of bad solar weather….”
Garroway stood to one side of the chamber, beyond the FTL communicator’s pickup field. It figured. Communications between Llalande 21185 and the vast underground facility on Mars were obviously crystal clear. The ordinary speed-of-light channels between Earth and Mars, however, seemed to be out of commission.
Or…was that really the whole story? The woman was Quebecois, and the nation of Quebec was allied with the EU, had been ever since the UN War. What if there’d been some political or military changes back home in the past ten years? What if the Cydonian complex was under EU control now? Hell, how were they supposed to know anything was as it seemed?