The Children of the Sky

Scrupilo was beside himself. “This is an outrage!” The six of him crowded together, two members climbing up on the shoulder straps of the others to get their muzzles closer to Ravna’s face. “They were stolen. This is treachery, and I will not stand for it!”

Ravna had arrived at the North End quarries a few minutes earlier. Looking down from the edge of the carven stone walls, things had seemed relatively quiet, no blast banners or fire-in-the-hole beeping. This seemed like a good time for a nice chat with the science advisor.

As she’d started down the open stairs, she had waved to the humans who were helping with the work. They cheerily waved back, so maybe Scrupilo wasn’t too angry. She was still halfway up the rock face, when she heard the science advisor’s outraged shouting. By the time she arrived at the laboratory entrance, two of his assistants had come racing out, passing her with scarcely a how-de-do.

Now she faced the madpack in his own office. She hadn’t dreamed that Scrupilo would be so angered. For that matter, she’d never had any pack get in her face so abruptly. She backed toward the open doorway, raising her hands at the snapping jaws.

“It’s just temporary, Scrupilo! You’ll get the cameras back soon enough.” At least she hoped so. If they had to keep those cams from Scrupilo’s use for very long, large sections of her own research program would get jammed.

The good news was that Scrupilo did not bite her face off. The bad news was that the pack continued to lunge around—and he wasn’t speaking Samnorsk anymore. The chords she could hear were loud and jagged, probably cursing. Then abruptly Scrup’s oldest member, the white-headed one, hesitated. In half a second, the surprised silence spread across the pack, like some comedian’s exaggerated double take. “Cameras?” His volume dropped by some decibels. “You mean the three video cameras that officially failed earlier today when Woodcarver’s goons came and took them away?”

“Y-yes.” Hopefully the world beyond Scrupilo’s office had not made sense of this exchange, state secrets being betrayed in a temper tantrum.

Scrupilo climbed down from himself. For a moment he just circled around, glaring. Scrupilo could be an officious twit. On the other hand, he was a genius and a true engineer. As long as you could keep him pointed in the right direction, and keep him from getting too jealous of the perks of others, he was a treasure.

“Honest, Scrupilo,” Ravna continued in a soft voice. “This is an emergency. We’ll get those cams back to you as soon as possible. I know—at least as well as you—how important they are.”

The Science Advisor continued his angry pacing, but now his voice was level. “I don’t doubt that. It was the only reason I went along with the confiscation and the cover story I’m supposed to tell everyone.” Jaws snapped a couple of times, but not in her direction. “But I fear we are talking at cross-purposes. The video cams were lawfully confiscated by Your Highnesses and with some explanation. So then, you and Woodcarver had nothing to do with the disappearance of the radio cloaks?”

“What? No!” The cloaks would have been practically useless for surveillance, and wearing them was dangerous to boot. “Scrupilo, that was never our plan.”

“Then I was right. There is treachery afoot.”

“How could the cloaks disappear? You keep them in your private vaults, right?”

“I took them out of the vault after the Queen’s agents made off with my cameras. I had this idea for using the cloaks … a clever idea really, a way I might wear them without getting killed in the process. Y’see, maybe if only part of me wore them, and off-the-shoulder, then—” Scrupilo shook himself free of geekish distraction. “Never mind. The point is, I had the cloaks laid out in the experiment factory, ready for use. I was still afume about Woodcarver’s confiscation, and there were way too many other distractions this morning. Let’s see…” Scrupilo brought all his heads together for a moment, the very picture of Tinish concentration.

“Yes. You know how the experiment factory is set up.” Long rows of simple wood benches. Hundreds of experiment trays, each a simple combination of reagents, all designed by the planning programs on the Oobii as the ship matched the reality of Tinish resources with the archival data that it possessed. Some of the rooms would go for hours without any pack or human presence—and then the starship automation would issue a flurry of wireless requests to the scheduling receivers in the dispatch room. Scrupilo’s helpers would sweep through, removing some experiments entirely, shifting some to new stations, placing some under cameras for Oobii’s direct observation.

“I was alone with the radio cloaks, quite distracted by my new idea.” Scrupilo’s heads all look up. “Yes! Those clowns from the Tropical madhouse showed up.”

“They came in among the experiments?”