Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [147]
Looking sharply to his left, Burgess snapped a question. “Any response to our queries, Tambri?”
The diminutive communications officer glanced over at him and shook her head. Her dark eyes were very wide. “Nothing, sir. I’m trying everything, from Terranglo through High and Low Thranx to straight mathematical theorems. They’re chattering noisily among themselves—I can pick up the wash—but they’re not talking to us.”
“They will. Keep trying.” Burgess turned back to the three-dimensional image floating in the air of the ship’s bridge. “Who are they and what the blazes do they want here?”
“Maybe they’ve already claimed this world.” The observation no one had wanted to voice come from the back of the command section. “Maybe they’re here to inform us of a claim of prior rights.”
“If that’s the case,” declared the first officer, “they’ve been mighty subtle about advertising any prior presence here. There isn’t so much as an artifact on the planet, much less an orbital transmitter. There’s nothing on either of the two small moons, or anywhere else in the system.”
“That we’ve found yet, you mean.” Having stated a contention, the dissenter felt bound to defend it. “We’ve only been here a couple of months.”
“Okay, okay,” Burgess muttered. “Let’s everybody keep calm. Whatever the situation, we’ll deal with it. We didn’t expect to encounter sapience here, much less evidence of another space-traversing species. They’re probably taking our measure as carefully as we are theirs.” But I wish they’d respond to our communications, he thought tensely.
“Look there!” someone in the growing crowd pointed.
A second, much smaller vessel was emerging from the side of the first. Winged and ported, obviously designed for atmospheric travel, it began to recede swiftly from the flank of its parent vessel. Its immediate purpose was self-evident. Anything else those aboard might intend could not be divined from tracking its progress.
“Get on to Pranchavit and the rest of the landing party,” Burgess barked at the communications officer. “Tell them they’re probably going to have company.”
Once again the officer looked up from her instrumentation. “They’ll want to know what kind of company, sir.”
Burgess glanced over at the tridee holo. “Maybe they can tell us.”
By the time Kairuna and his companions arrived at the camp, it was alive with questions and concerns, anxiety and confusion. No one seemed to know what was going on, including those who had recognized the audible signal for what it was. Now they troubled themselves with unsupported inferences and paranoid suppositions. In such company, Alwyn was in his element.
Pushing and shoving their way into an already crowded mess hall, the three late arrivals found themselves confined to the narrow remaining open space next to the rear wall. Up by the service door that led to the main stockroom, Jalen Maroto was waving his arms for quiet. When that didn’t work, he put a compact amplifier to his lips and simply shouted everybody down.
“Shut up! If you’ll just shut up, I’ll tell you what’s going on.” As the crowd noise subsided he added apologetically, “Or at least, what we know.”
“I know!” Shy as always, Alwyn was not afraid to proclaim theories where others were hesitant to venture facts. “Something local’s finally showed up to cause trouble. What is it?” he demanded to know. “A herd of predators? A fast-mutating plague?”
“There’s a plague, all right,” the team leader declared through the amplifier, “but it’s one we brought along with us.” Delighted to take advantage of the emotional release, a number of the assembled turned their laughter in the specialist’s direction. Unrepentant but temporarily subdued, he tried to meet the ridicule of each and every one of them with a defiant glare of his own.
“ A ship has gone into orbit near the Chagos,” Maroto informed scientists and support personnel alike. “We don’t know where it’s from, what species