Footfall

Then, suddenly, beams were falling directly on Thuktun Flishithy. Messages, demands for answers, words promising peace before there had been war: first a few, then more, then an incessant babble.

What was there to talk of? How could they expect to negotiate before their capabilities had been tested? But the prey had sent no missiles, no ships of war. Only messages.

The Breakers wondered if the prey might not know how to make war. This violated all the Herdmaster knew of evolution. Yet even when the attack began, the prey did little. The orbiting satellites didn’t defend themselves. Half of them were gone in the first hour. Warriors braced to fight and die veered between relief and disappointment.

But the natives did have weapons. Not many, used late, but … a long scar, melted and refrozen, lay along Message Bearer’s flank, crossing one wing of a big troop-carrying lander. Digit ship Forty-one might still operate in space, but it would never see atmosphere. Four more digit ships had been destroyed in space.

Missiles still rose from the planet’s surface, and missiles and beam weapons still fired from space. A few satellites remained in orbit. Message Bearer surged under the impact of a plasma jet, and trembled as a missile launched away toward the jet’s origin.

Oh, yes, the great ship had suffered minor damage. But this was good, in its way. The warriors would know, at least, that there was an enemy … and now they knew something about the alien weapons, and something about their own fighting ability. And the Herdmaster had learned that he could count on the sleepers.

He’d wondered. Would they fight, these ancient ones? But in fact they were doing well. Ancient they might be, considered from their birthdates; but frozen sleep was hard on the aged. The survivors had been eight to sixteen years past sexual maturity. They had run the ship for four years before their bodies had been frozen; they knew its rooms and corridors and storage holds as well as those who had been born aboard.

“Permission to report,” said Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp.

“Go ahead.”

“I think we’ve cleared everything from orbit, Herdmaster. There could be something around the other side of Winterhome, moving in our own orbit. We’ll have to watch for that. We find four missiles rising from Land Mass Three. Shall I send them some bombs?”

“No. Wasteful. We’ve done enough here. Defensemaster, take us out of here, out of their range.” Most of the native weapons would barely reach orbit — as if they were designed to attack other parts of the planet. Knowing the launch site was enough. It could be destroyed just before the troops went down to test the prey’s abilities.

The digit ships could trample lesser centers before they descended: destroy dams, roads, anything that looked like communication or power sources. He hoped it would go well. His son Fookerteh’s eight-cubed of warriors would be in the first assault. K’turfookeph was much concerned about him, though pride would never allow her to admit it …

“Follow the plan, Defensemaster. Take us behind that great gaudy satellite on a freely falling curve. Hide us. Attackmaster, I want every prey’s eyes on that moon stomped blind before we begin the second phase of our acceleration.”

The Herdmaster waited for acknowledgments, then ordered, “Get me Breaker-Two.”

Breaker-Two had been a profession without an object until now. Takpusseh had been chosen young. He was only entering middle age, if one excluded the decades he had spent in frozen sleep, and the years worth of damage that had done. He had been trained to deal with aliens since before the starship ever left home; yet his training was almost entirely theoretical.

Almost. There had been another intelligent race on Takpusseh’s homeworld. The Predecessors had died out before Takpusseh’s race developed gripping appendages and large brains. They were the domain of Fistarteh-thuktun the historian-priest, not of Takpusseh.

Fistarteh-thuktun was a sleeper. Since the Awakening he had become more stiff and formal, more withdrawn, than ever. His spaceborn apprentices spoke only to him. His knowledge of the thuktunthp would be valuable here. Perhaps Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz — with the authority of a spaceborn, and a tact that was all his own — could draw him out …

The sleepers knew, in their hindbrains and spines and in their very cells, how to live on planets, what planets were like. The spaceborn could only guess. And yet — more was at stake than this artificial division of the Traveler Herd. The sleepers would die, one by one, eventually, and the Traveler herd would be one fithp again. The fithp needed what Fistarteh-thuktun knew: the stored knowledge of that older, now alien species.

Before they received the first pictures broadcast by the prey. the question had been debated endlessly. Would Winterhome’s natives resemble the Predecessors? Or the fithp?

They did not.