Footfall

“This is the Breakers’ problem, not ours.” Siplisteph’s eyes returned to the pictures.

“Lead me,” said Chintithpit-mang, and he went to rejoin his octuple. But it bothered him. By now the taking of Winterhome, in falling rocks and disrupted supply chains, must have killed close to eight to the sixth of the poor misshapen rogues. Well, that was what war was about. But a fi’ did not kill needlessly, did not kill when he could take surrender. If the beast was so fragile, why did it continue to fight?

Chintithpit-mang remembered its rib cage sagging under his foot. It thrashed and clawed and finally stopped moving … it didn’t know how to surrender. They didn’t know how to surrender. Bad.

16. SUBMISSION

A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh and shudderingly vulnerable.

The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be laid on men. Some of these stresses are ca!Ied civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership.

—T. R. FEHRENBACH, This Kind of War

COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 80 HOURS

The huilside wall was down and level; the door was in the ceiling. Wes judged that things were likely to remain so for some time.

There had been an hour or so of acceleration, then half an hour of freefall; then the ship had begun to spin. Some days had passed without further change. Odds were it would take an hour or more to remove the spin.

Spin would hamper the mother ship in a battle. Earth must he far aft and out of reach.

Nikolai and Dmitri talked qialetly: Nikolai sullen, Dmitri doing most of the talking. Wes understood a few words, and sympathized. Nikolai was once again a cripple.

The aliens had wasted no time. They were already teaching their language to the humans. Wes found this reassuring. However, the Soviets were educated separately, and they had expressed disinterest in sharing their lessons with Wes. He went over them alone, whispering alien sounds as he remembered them.

Srupk: Wes had memorized the term as swank, “standard trunklength.” It was just about six feet. A makasrupk was five hundred and twelve strunks, just about a kilometer.

Wes had sought a word for the trunk. There wasn’t one. A sharp snort, snnfp, named the nostrils, or the upper trunk. Pa’ was one branch, one finger of a trunk; pathp, the plural, could mean the entire cluster.

Chaytrif meant foot.

Sfaftiss was Takpusseh’s title; it meant teacher. The other sfaftiss didn’t speak, and his name was harder: Raztupisp-minz. The two sfafissthp looked aged, but as if they had weathered in different patterns. Were there two races of Invader? But they called themselves by the same words:

Chsapt meant move. Chtaptisk: moving. Chtaptiskfithp meant themselves, everyone who had left their home planet. The Traveler People?

Fi’ was the word for an alien. A syllable chopped short by a kind of hiccup, it sounded like a piece of a word. And fithp was the entire species. As if an individual was not a whole, complete thing, just as a pa’ was only one branch of the pathp, the trunk. Herdbeasts? Takpusseh said tribe, not herd; but men didn’t say herd to mean thinking beings.

Tashayamp was Takpusseh’s assistant. Dawson thought of her as female: the leather or plastic patch on her harness covered a different area, further back on her torso. He knew he might have the sexes reversed; he was not prepared to ask—

The door opened upward, a trapdoor. The prisoners looked up, waiting.

Takpusseh: Wes had learned to recognize their teacher or trainer by the loose look of his thick skin, and by his eyes, which behaved as if the lights were always too bright. Takpusseh watched while alien soldiers attached a platform at the level of the trapdoor. The platform descended smoothly along grooves in the padding of the starboard wall. The platform might have held one alien; it held Wes and Arvid with room to spare. Wes had expected a ladder, but a ladder would be useless to these aliens.

Takpusseh and Tashayamp and eight armed soldiers waited in the corridor. The platform descended again for Dmitri and Nikolai. They had left Giorge behind.

Arvid had been hoping for a window. There were none. The soldiers moved four ahead, four behind. Takpusseh and Tashayamp moved forward to join the prisoners. They had found a wheeled cart for Nikolai. Arvid took charge of pushing it. Wes was trying to tell Tashayamp that they needed heat to prepare their food. Arvid ignored that. He was trying to get some idea of the mother ship’s layout.