"How did you know that?" Taleed asked angrily. Perhaps at this point he just wanted her to expose him. RJ wasn't about to make it that easy.
"Someone must have told me. Or it just made a certain amount of sense."
"It is customary to cut out the tongues of the palace staff," Taleed obviously found her revelations annoying. "How do you know things which no one tells you? Do you read people's minds?"
Levits laughed and muttered under his breath. "That seems to be the question of the evening."
"It's just simple deductive reasoning," RJ said with a shrug of her shoulders. She walked over and threw some sticks on the fire. "You ought to understand that. From what I've observed while I've been here, you and your people are very good at it as well."
"Like I know that there is something wrong with your brother," he said pointing at Poley, still mad and wanting to aggravate her if he could.
"He's perfect," Janad explained to Taleed.
RJ smiled at her answer. "Who told you that?"
"He did," Janad said. She got up and walked off into the brush.
"Getting a little full of yourself aren't you, Tin Pants?" RJ asked.
Poley shrugged. "I am perfect."
"If you say so. Remind me to come and borrow an ego circuit next time I'm feeling bad about myself," RJ said.
"I think you have quite enough ego, dear," Levits chided.
Taleed realized they had forgotten all about him, and this really aggravated him. He turned to Haldeed and said in his own tongue, "These people are fools. Perhaps we had better leave."
"Oh, no, you're our insurance policy," RJ said in his own tongue.
He frowned, really angry now. "I thought you didn't know our language," he said accusingly.
"I told you I'd know it by tomorrow evening. I just learned it a little faster that's all," RJ said reaching in her pocket and pulling out a coin. She bent the coin around a link of chain to mark their victory today. "Going to have to get off this planet soon or I'll run out of coins, and even I can't bend rocks," she said to no one in general. She watched as the look on Taleed's face turned from one of surprise to one of total defiance. "Put all that out of your head. You wanted to join this party, and you know too much now for us to let you go. Get comfortable and enjoy yourself. You aren't going anywhere."
Janad walked up then carrying some large skinned and gutted reptile on the end of a sharpened stick. Apparently she had been hungry. She held it over the fire.
"Wow," RJ said taking a whiff. "That smells really good."
Topaz nodded his head in agreement. "Funny I can remember a time when I would have been completely grossed out at the thought of eating a lizard."
"You can remember a time when rocks were soft, Old Man," Levits laughed.
"Why do you call him an old man when he is not?" Taleed asked, his curiosity peaked.
"Because I am," Topaz said with a smile. "I most probably predate your race."
"You think this race is that young?" RJ asked skeptically.
"Well at least human influence on the race. Remember that I was alive when they first discovered interstellar flight and humans couldn't have gotten here before that," Topaz said.
"You still think these creatures have human origins?" Levits asked curiously.
"Yes, they must," RJ said. "Besides the fact that they look like a human race that has disappeared, and speak an ancient Earth language, their cloud making god is a human made machine?"
"Oh?" Levits prompted.
"It turned out to be an old thermo-electric generator. The kind they sent out with the old colony ships. It even still had the Reliance bar code on it," RJ explained.
"Are you saying," Taleed ran through everything he had just heard again to make sure he'd heard what he thought he had, "that my people are related to the Reliance people?"
"Yes," Topaz said. "Had to be. Ironic when you think about it. The white man is once again enslaving the black man, and once again it is your own chief who is selling you. But then they always have said that history repeats itself."
"What do you mean?" Taleed asked.
"And gravy!" Topaz said adamantly. "Gravy was always very important, especially with potatoes. No sense in even trying to eat potatoes without gravy – all dry and get caught in your throat and make you cough." Topaz started coughing until he was jerking around on the ground. Janad ran to try to help him as RJ rolled her eyes.
Suddenly Topaz quit coughing and sat up. He looked at Janad. "So, do you want to ride my pony?"
Janad had grown very fond of the old man and didn't understand the way the others seemed so unconcerned about him. Even if he did heal really fast. "What does he want?" Janad asked.
"Just say no," Levits said with a laugh.
Topaz stood up and started walking into the brush. "My hair is an absolute mess. Now if I was a hair brush, where would I be?" he mumbled. Janad started to go after him, but RJ grabbed her arm.
"Poley, go after Topaz. Keep an eye on him, and don't let him get too far," RJ ordered.
Poley nodded, got up and went after Topaz.
Janad looked at RJ and said with concern, "What's wrong with him? Does he have the same thing that David does?"
RJ let go of the girl's arm. "No, he's fine. He does this sometimes. It's nothing to worry about really, Janad. He's not sick. He's only insane."
Somehow Janad was not comforted.
Toulan bowed low as he entered the throne room.
"Well!" Taheed bellowed.
The Captain of the King's guard visibly cringed.
"My lord
. . .
We went down the
Agua'boue
, and we found spots where a camp had been made. We believe this is where the Prince made camp. "We
. . .
Lord we found a broken reed boat which was destroyed at the bottom of
Agua'boue
falls."
"What are you trying to say!" the King bellowed. "Did you find any bodies?"
"No, My Lord, but
. . .
"
"Are you an unbeliever, Toulan? You know my son cannot die. He is a god. Now get out there and find him. He must have gone on from there on foot." The King got shakily to his feet and pointed at the door. "Now go. My time grows near, and he must be here to take my spirit."
The guard left, only too glad to do so. The King and the priests were afflicted with some disease. It had started simply with vomiting and diarrhea like many other diseases, but had quickly escalated to skin lesions and hair loss. Obviously they had enraged the God of the Clouds, and He had sat a plague upon them. They had lined their pockets and their necks with the people's blood. This was not the intention of The Ancestor, nor was it the intention of the god. It was the will of the priests, and the King/God had allowed himself to be lead by the nose by his brothers to keep the peace. Soon the Reliance would swoop down and capture their prize, and the world as they knew it would be no more. As it had been written, so mote it be.
Sergeant Bradley surveyed the ruins of the transmat bay from the supposed safety of his radiation suit. He was supervising the clean-up operation. He was in charge of maintenance on this space station; as such someone had just made damn sure that he was going to be busy for several weeks.
What an incredible mess! Tainted gold, shredded bodies, and twisted metal everywhere. Not to mention the outside hull breach, which was way beyond their ability to repair. Thirty people, mostly soldiers and medical personnel had been killed, dozens of others wounded before the automatic safety system had been able to patch the hull. Unfortunately someone had been caught up in it, their legs dangling from the patching substance. The corpse couldn't be removed without damaging the temporary seal so there the body would stay until permanent repairs had been made. He for one didn't feel comfortable with the only thing between him and the vacuum of space being a substance that was basically sprayed out of cans, no matter how big those cans were. But he couldn't in all good conscience send his crew into any place he wasn't willing to work himself. It was hard to know where to start when you had to tackle a mess like this. It was Bradley's job to make sure that as the debris was cleared away they find out just what had been broken and fix it.
They had spent most of the day reinforcing the temporary patch because they just weren't trustworthy, and trying to divide the debris into two piles – human and not human. A crew was on its way from Stashes with the materials and the specialists to put a proper patch on the hull. The patch itself could take days. He still couldn't be sure how badly damaged the actual transmat system was because it still wasn't clear of debris.
To make matters worse the ship that was supposed to show up to pick up the latest batch of natives had never arrived, and all attempts to contact it both from the space station and from Moon Base had failed. They didn't know whether the ship had undergone some breakdown that was making it very late, had been lost in hyperspace, or had been abducted by the Argy. The damned magnetic pulses made it hard to be sure of anything, and short of blowing up the planet they had done everything that they could do to decrease its influence. They should have sent out a distress beacon if they had been attacked, and that would have been picked up by somebody somewhere, but Moon Base said that the ship had trouble with communications just prior to take off, and it may have undergone a complete systems breakdown. Shoddy maintenance! It would be the end of them all.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder and he turned. "Yes, corporal?"
"The Captain wants to see you, sergeant," he said.
Sergeant Bradley smiled broadly and punched the corporal playfully on the shoulder. "Well, yes, of course he would. He couldn't possibly come down here with us grunts and check this crap out first hand. Ten will get you twenty he will ask me a bunch of stupid assed questions I don't have the answers to yet. Any word on the missing ship?
"No, I'm sorry, sergeant," Corporal Riley said.
"Well at least that isn't one of my problems. Just trying to see what kind of mood the old man is in. Be a good fellow and keep an eye on this cluster fuck for me." He started to leave, then turned back around. "I don't have a clear picture yet of what actually happened, but between you and me this is what we deserve for giving those natives radioactive gold. I have pulled some shit details before, but between you and me, this is tops."
The Corporal nodded his head in silent agreement.
The sergeant went into the temporary decontamination air lock they had set up. He unsuited, stepped into the showers then dried off and dressed quickly. What a pain in the ass this was! What a giant waste of his time. This was what com-links were for. There was no need for him to leave his post where he was needed and march up to the bridge so that he could tell some idiot Captain a bunch of crap he wouldn't understand anyway.
Briggs was a commissioned officer – an elite. He had never cranked the handle on a wrench. He didn't know one kind of power supply conduit from another. He knew space ships flew and space stations were stationary around a planet. He had no idea how they kept air in and space out. How they created gravity or even where his damn food came from. He appreciated the maintenance staff not at all. It never occurred to him that his safety and that of his entire crew was in the hands of the men and women who fixed all the things that they broke. The people who maintained the machines that made sure they didn't go crashing into a sun and that made their air and gravity.
He walked to the bridge and entered. Captain Briggs swiveled in his chair to face him. "What took you so long?"
Ever have to go through decontamination, you old prick
? Sergeant Bradley thought, but bit his tongue and answered. "I had to go through decontamination. I was working in the contaminated area. In fact the entire damaged area has been contaminated by the radioactive gold we originally sent to the surface of the planet."
"Do I hear a hint of insubordination in your voice?" Captain Briggs screamed.
Only if you're listening
.
"No, Sir," he said quickly. Every day this job just got harder and harder. His last Captain had been a decent sort, a man who understood the importance of maintenance and went out of his way to make his maintenance staff happy. So of course their ship had sustained minor damage during a skirmish over Stashes, and Captain Johnson had been killed when he fell during the attack and his head struck a sharp corner on the arm of his command chair. It was a freak accident really, not the way you would expect a combat ready veteran to die in a hundred million years.
Now he was stuck with this bastard Briggs who had lived his entire life behind a desk. He didn't have any clue how important the maintenance staff was, and he didn't care to learn. To him they were nothing more or less than glorified toilet cleaners, and he treated them like such paying no heed at all to either their rank or their service record. Unless you lay around on your ass all day waiting for a chance to use your gun, he didn't consider you important at all.