Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [103]
Shresht and his aide once again exploded in a clamorous outpouring of intense insectoid emotion. Degra gathered from the increasingly outraged-sounding noise that Guruk’s announcement was news to them, and that they found the reptilian’s cold-blooded hind-brain logic as bizarre as Degra did.
Shresht rose to his chitinous feet, apparently ready to plunge his sharp exoskeletal pincers straight into the tough scales that covered Guruk’s heavily muscled neck. Guruk reached for his sidearm, obviously more than ready to meet the insectoid’s charge. The aides of both Shresht and Guruk rose and faced off against one another with hate-filled glares, aggressive postures, and hissing, rattling exterior body parts.
At that moment, Narsanyala surprised everyone present by issuing a bellow so stentorian that it brought to mind the end-of-the-world prophecies of Xindi-humanoid mythology.
Shresht subsided and resumed his seat, as did his aide. Guruk and his aide did the same a moment later.
Still somewhat shocked by Guruk’s revelation, Degra had to learn more about the deaths of the weapons facility’s insectoid personnel, despite the risk of inflaming the highly unusual insectoid-reptilian breach he had just witnessed. “Why didn’t you try to rescue them?” he asked Guruk, his voice pitched scarcely above a whisper.
“Because we could not afford to risk giving the humans any opportunity to capture and interrogate them,” Guruk said. “Any one of them might have betrayed the location of our homeworld.”
“No Xindi insectoid would have done that,” Shresht said, his frantic clickings somehow taking on an almost sullen quality. “We all know our duty.”
“As do we reptilians,” Guruk countered. “That is why I did what I did. And that is why we must go after the Earth ship now, using every resource at our disposal. We can no longer afford to simply observe their progress and lay ineffectual traps in their path.”
That seemed to disarm the bellicose Shresht, at least somewhat. “I must agree.”
Degra shook his head, his eyes fixed on Guruk. “Doing that would be an enormous mistake, Commander. A large Xindi counterforce would be far too easy for the humans to trace to its point of origin.”
Narsanyala spoke again, addressing the whole Council in much milder tones than he had used only a few moments earlier. “I must agree with Degra. As long as the Terrans have sent only one ship of any consequence after us, they pose no significant danger.”
“But we do not know for certain that the one large human ship we have seen so far has not been accompanied surreptitiously by others,” Shresht chittered, reiterating the fear the insectoids held in common with the reptilians—a bond that was evidently stronger even than the blood of the insectoid warriors whom Guruk had sacrificed on the altar of that fear.
Qam sang again from the tank. “No, we do not know that for certain. Therefore we aquatics agree that we must continue to err on the side of caution. Let us do nothing yet that would serve to attract undue human attention to our homeworld.” The Inner Sanctum fell silent, as the proxies for each of the Xindi world’s sentient species stared at one another across what might well prove to be an unbridgeable gulf. For most of the duration of the current crisis, the danger posed by the human interlopers had brought unprecedented unity to the Xindi homeworld’s five often contentious races.
But it had also recently introduced some entirely new cross-species tensions, stresses that now threatened Xindi security every bit as much as did the humans themselves.
While Degra was sometimes uncomfortable with the fact that his own species resembled the Terrans much more closely than any other Xindi race did, he also thought that this resemblance gave him some insight into human motivations that members of the other Xindi species lacked.