“Not since I ordered some of our people to clean him up.”
“Sir?”
“That purple jelly. It must’ve been rolling in the stuff, or something. I thought at first that it might be blood and had a corpsman start washing—”
Warhurst’s eyes widened. “General…I don’t know what that purple stuff is, but we’ve found it on several Ahannu corpses. Not on all of them, but on a few.”
“You think it’s something for communication?” Ramsey asked.
“Yes, sir. I do. Look, for primitives, these guys have been doing pretty damned good at coordinating their attacks. Up there on top of the pyramid, they started coming up out of a hole behind us at the same instant they were coming up over the sides of the building. Some of their other attacks have shown a high degree of synchronization too. Somehow they manage to talk to each other. That guy was up in the Chamber of the Eye, which gave him a perfect OP from which to watch us. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t a sniper…which means he was watching us and passing on information to his HQ.”
“But how would that help him speak English?” King demanded.
“Well, we know some Ahannu spoke English ten years ago. They learned it from the Terran Legation, right?”
“Right.”
“So…what if the Frogs have something like our net? A means of transmitting data among themselves very quickly? An Ahannu who knew English could have been listening in when we captured this one and been telling him what to say.” Warhurst shrugged. “Or maybe the purple gunk is just the local equivalent of a computer translator. Whatever it is, we’ve got to be damned careful not to make assumptions about things we don’t understand based on our human experience.”
“Good advice, Captain,” Ramsey said. “What do you suggest so far as talking with our friend here goes?”
“Well, sir, like you said, we have some people coming now who speak the lingo. But if you want to talk to the Ahannu leadership, our best bet might be to take our friend here right back up to the Chamber of the Eye.”
“Hmm.” Ramsey considered this. “I’m not sure I want to trust him up there. Like you said, we can’t afford to make assumptions about things we don’t understand. That includes what passes for their technology. We’ll wait and see what a translator makes of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ramsey stared long and hard into the unblinking golden eyes of the prisoner.
What was it thinking? How did it think? Like humans…or in some way utterly and fundamentally different—alien, in other words?
What did it know?
And would it ever be possible to communicate with something that alien?
26
15 JULY THROUGH 23
JULY 2148
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1930 hours ALT
“You know, they used to call this kind of party a steel beach,” Dunne said.
“Steel beach?” Garroway asked. “How do you mean?”
“Navy and Marine personnel on big, oceangoing ships,” Dunne replied. “Like aircraft carriers, y’know? They’d have some time off, they’d go out and sun themselves on the deck, maybe smuggle in some liquid contraband.” He raised a can of beer in explanation. “They called it a steel beach ’cause all there was to lie on was steel.”
“We’re not on a ship, Sarge,” Vinita pointed out.
“Sure, Kat. But remember your basic Marine terminology. It’s a ‘hatch,’ not a ‘door,’ a ‘ladder,’ not stairs. Even ashore.” He waved the beer can to take in the Legation compound, the alien green sky, the distant purple jungle, the untidy sprawl of New Sumer. “We’re ashore. We treat the place like a ship, anyway. Hence…‘steel beach.’”
“With not a single bit of steel in sight,” Womicki said, looking around at the flat expanse of the pyramid’s top. “Makes as much sense as anything in the Corps.”
“Fuckin’-A!” Dunne exclaimed. He drained the last of the beer, then smashed the can against his forehead, crumpling it flat. A small pile of flat, crumpled disks on the ground in front of them paid mute testimony to beverages already consumed.
Garroway still wasn’t sure how they’d managed it. Dunne claimed that he and Honey Deere had smuggled a couple of cases of brew onto a supply pallet destined for the Regulus before their departure from Earth. Those cases had been hidden inside supply containers marked “dietary supplements” and seemed to have survived the four-years-subjective voyage in reasonable taste. Beer smuggling was by now a grand tradition in the spacefaring Corps. Old-timers liked to regale newbies with the exploits of a Marine unit at Cydonia seventy years ago. Some of old Sands of Mars Garroway’s Marines, it seemed, had managed to smuggle a few cases of beer to Mars. Garroway’s famous ancestor had appropriated it and turned it into makeshift chemical weaponry against the occupying UN forces.