Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [133]
Cheelo took a deep breath. “It sure is. Now we’ll never learn the activation code for the truck. We’re stuck.”
The poet’s eyes rose to fix the surviving biped in their multilenticular stare. “I don’t mean that. I mean that two sapient beings are dead.”
Cheelo pushed out his lower lip. “Nothing terrible about that. Not as far as I’m concerned.” His voice rose in protest. “Hey, you think I wanted to shoot them?” Desvendapur took a wary step in the direction of the accessway. “Take it easy. The conversation got kind of tense, I got a little confused, and they tried to jump me.” When the alien did not respond, Cheelo became upset. “Look, I’m telling you the truth. They thought I was going to shoot them after they activated the truck. I wasn’t going to. Sure, I wanted to, but I was going to leave them alive. All I wanted was out of here so I could get to my meeting. And before you go getting all bent out of joint, remember that they’d figured it out, about your being from a colony and all. If they’d been left here they still could’ve sold that information. Look at it like this: I had to shoot them to protect your people down in the Reserva.”
“They might have tried to persuade others to go looking for the hive, but without specific coordinates they would never have found it. Never.” Desvendapur continued to eye the biped accusingly, or at least in a manner that the defensive Cheelo continued to interpret as accusing.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cheelo finally declared curtly. “They’re dead and we’re not. Believe me, it’s no loss to the species.”
“The death of any sapient is a loss.”
His human companion uttered several sharply intoned words whose meaning the thranx did not recognize. “I don’t know about species wide, but there are sure some variations in our individual values.” With the muzzle of the rifle he roughly nudged the corpse at his feet. Maruco the poacher did not move and would not poach again.
Walking over to the tool rack, Cheelo snapped the rifle into an empty charging cradle and turned to ponder the silent airtruck. “I can try to start this big bastard up, but unless these guys were completely confident in their isolation here, or were total idiots, there are probably about two million possible key codes.” His gaze rose to the nearest of the one-way windows. “You saw the country around here on the way in. This place is really isolated. There’s nothing nearby but some automated farming projects. We can try for one.”
“I do not think so.” Desvendapur argued.
“Why not?” His respiration slowly returning to normal, Cheelo stared at the thranx.
“While you were fighting with our captors I was hearing voices from their communicator. Someone with an especially authoritative voice was demanding to know where the one called Maruco had gone. When no response was forthcoming, the transmission was terminated with the words ‘See you soon you little shit.’ While I do not interpret that to mean that the speaker’s appearance is imminent, it struck me as a promise to arrive in a finite period of time.”
“You’re right. Dammit!” Cheelo thought furiously. “I forgot about their bug buyers. We’d better not be around when they show up.” A look of distaste on his face, he calmly contemplated the human debris staining the floor. “Help me with these two.” Moving off, he searched for the manual door opener he knew had to exist.
“What are we going to do? Carry out some kind of formal burial ritual?” Despite his dismay at the carnage that had occurred, it would not prevent the poet from recording the details of what promised to be a particularly fascinating human rite.
“More like an informal one.” Locating a control panel, Cheelo brushed touchplates, activating lights, servos, and an automatic washer before finding the one that operated the garage door. Cold, intensely dry air swept in from outside as the barrier rattled upward.
Working together, they hauled the bodies of the two poachers one at a time to