Footfall

Breaker-Two watched the surviving locals through a one-way transparency, while his assistant and a pair of soldiers worked with the alien artifacts. “They look so fragile,” he said.

The ship shuddered.

“They’ve hit us again,” one of the soldiers said. “Fragile they may be, but they’re fighting back.”

“They do fight. Some were dead and some surrendered. Their plight was hopeless,” said the Octuple Leader. “Yet one fired a weapon through its life support system! It killed itself to kill two of my warriors!”

“Your explanation?”

“Do you forget your place?”

“Your pardon. Shall I request that your superiors ask you? Shall I call the Herdmaster and request that he tell you to answer my questions? Wish you to continue this?”

“I don’t know! It killed itself to kill two warriors! Surrender would have been easy. I — I have no explanation, Breaker. This is your own task.”

“Have you a theory, Octuple Leader?”

“Mad with battle lust … or sick? Dying? It happens.” His digits knotted and relaxed, knotted, relaxed. “I should be fighting.”

It happens. Fumf! The spaceborn know only what they have read, and studied, yet they — These thoughts were useless. “If you’re needed, you’ll be summoned,” Breaker-Two Takpusseh told him. “I need you now. You were aboard the ruined space habitat. I will have questions.”

“Ask, Breaker.”

Takpusseh hadn’t yet learned enough to ask intelligent questions. “What did we take, Octuple Leader … Pretheeteh?”

“Pretheeteh-damb … sir. We took out quite a lot of stuff; there wasn’t room for it all in here.”

Alien voices from the restraint room formed a muted background. Takpusseh half listened while he meandered through the loot Pretheeteh-damb’s troops had moored to walls. For fifteen years he had studied the alien speech that crossed on radio waves between Winterhome and the ringed giant. Sometimes there had been pictures. Strange pictures, of a herd that could not exist. Boxes that danced with legs. Bipeds that changed shape and form. Streams of very similar paintings arriving within tiny fractions of a second. Contrasts; cities with tall buildings and machines, cities of mud huts and straw roofs.

Reception was terrible, and some of what could be resolved was madness. Such information was suspect, contaminated, contained falsehoods. Better to trust what one learned directly.

One fact stood out. Most of the broadcasts had been in one language. Takpusseh was hearing that language now, but he was hearing another too.

The prisoners were of two or more herds. For the moment that hardly mattered, but it would. It would add interest to a task that was already about as interesting as a fi’ could stand.

There were big metal bins filled with smaller packages, each bearing a scrawled label: FOUND FROZEN. Piles of cloth too thin to be armor: protection from cold? Alien-looking machines with labels scrawled on them:

FROM FOOD PREPARATION AREA (?)

COMPUTER (?)

PART OF WASTE RECYCLING SYSTEM.

PROJECTILE WEAPON.

Corpses, bloated by vacuum, had been stuffed into one great pressure package, half frozen during the crossing and stuck together. Breaker-Two Takpusseh pulled the package open and, ignoring a queasy tremor in his digestive system, let his eyes rest on an alien head. This body had been ripped half apart by projectiles. Takpusseh noted sense organs clustered around a mouth filled with evil-looking teeth and a protruding flap of muscle. Two bulging, vulnerable-looking eyes. The nose was a useless knob; the paired nostrils might as well have been flat to the face. But the array was familiar, they weren’t that peculiar. Bilateral symmetry … He reached to pick up a partially thawed foreleg and found five digits reinforced with bone. The aliens used those modified forefeet for making and using tools. They certainly didn’t use that bump-with-holes for anything but smelling. All known from pictures — but this was different.

The weapon: it was a tiny thing, with a small, curved handle. Could this modified foot really hold it aimed and steady? “This is the weapon it used?”

“Yes, Breaker-Two. That weapon killed two warriors.”

“Thank you.” Takpusseh moved the digits of an alien forefoot, thoughtfully, noting how one could cross over the flat surface behind the other four. And they all curved inward—

He was wasting time. “First priority is to get their food separated out. They’re bound to need water, they’re certainly wet inside. Then autopsies. Let’s get some idea what’s inside them. Pretheeteh-damb, did you put these things in pressure containers after they had been subjected to vacuum?”

“Breaker, they were bound to suffer some damage during an assault. I suppose you could have come along to guard them.”

Takpusseh was stung. “You suppose wrongly. The Herdmaster refused me permission.” Because he was too valuable, or because a sleeper was untrustworthy: who could know?