The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [55]
Nor was the attack entirely sublethal. At least two of the pirates managed to fight back the miseries of their bodies long enough to fire a few rounds at the helicopters from their assault rifles. (Unfortunately for Ranjit, this included Kirthis Kanakaratnam.) That was a mistake. Each of the choppers contained two open doorways, one occupied by a machine gunner, the other by an equally death-dealing man with a grenade launcher, and neither pirate survived firing his weapon by more than a minute.
And as to those other watchers from the skies…
They found this incident puzzling, even the ones called the Nine-Limbeds.
Oh, the Nine-Limbeds had seen human firefights before. The Nine-Limbeds were the only client race the Grand Galactics encouraged to be linguists, and their main mission was to tell their masters what these humans said to one another—but you couldn’t spy on humans for very long without encountering violence. The Nine-Limbeds had thought they knew what was coming this time. When they had identified a surface craft abristle with chemical explosive weapons lurking in slow-motion pursuit of another that was apparently unarmed, they had supposed the outcome would be another human bloodbath. They had even wondered if it was worth their while to stick around to observe just one more example of human mass murder.
It was a surprise to them that so few of the humans on the beach were put to death as a result of having their integuments penetrated by the projectile weapons from the aircraft.
They recognized the nature of the choppers’ primary weapons—the compression air device, the ring vortex cannon, and all the others—because they had seen their like before. After all, there were few weapons employed by the human race that had not been employed, over and over, by other races at other places and times in the galaxy. And the Nine-Limbeds well understood, from the histories of other species who had employed similar weapons in the long galactic past, what unpleasant and debilitating effects such weaponry might have on an undefendable animal body.
The puzzle for the Nine-Limbeds was this: Why would these primitives employ such weapons in preference to their usual armorarium of explosively propelled penetrants, which produced even more destructive effects on organic bodies?
When the encounter on the surface was over, the decision makers among the Nine-Limbed crew debated for many minutes before deciding whether to report what they had seen.
In the long run they did. They reported it exactly and in detail, letting the Grand Galactics make of it what they would, although the Nine-Limbeds did attempt to give themselves a little wiggle room by the title they gave the report: “An Example of an Anomalous Encounter.”
12
JUDGMENT
Ranjit didn’t see much of the actual bloodshed, being totally absorbed by his own humiliatingly nasty problems. Apart from the fact that he felt as though a herd of mad swine had been stampeding through his digestive system, the subsonics had, as they were programmed to do, caused him voluminously to foul himself. He had not done anything like that since early childhood, and he had forgotten how repulsive a process it was.
He managed to strip off the soiled garments and stagger back into the warm wavelets, using the least filthy of his own clothing to scrub himself nearly clean. After that he had a plan. He looted the bag of George Kanakaratnam’s clothing that Dot had given him. There were no shoes in the bag, and Ranjit chose not to put on another man’s underwear, but all the rest was there: slacks, and pullover shirts, and thick woolly socks that Ranjit hoped might protect his feet from the sharp-edged pebbles of the beach. Then he stepped out of concealment to take stock of the situation.
It looked bad and smelled worse. The choppers