The Uplift War

Robert nodded. Indeed, if closer, “better” ambush sites had been chosen, few if any of the chims would have made it back alive.

The plan was good.

No, not good. Inspired. It hadn’t been intended to hurt the enemy but to build confidence. The troops had been dispersed so everyone would get to fire at the patrol with minimum risk. The raiders could return home swaggering, but most important, they would make it home.

Even so, they had been hurt. Robert could sense how exhausted Athaclena was, partly from the effort of maintaining everyone’s mood of “victory.”

He felt a touch on his knee and took Athaclena’s hand in his own. Her long, delicate fingers closed tightly, and he felt her triple-beat pulse.

Their eyes met.

“We turned a possible disaster into a minor success today,” Benjamin said. “But so long as the enemy always knows where we are, I don’t see how we can ever do more than play tag with them. And even that game’ll certainly cost more than we can afford to pay.”

30

Fiben

Fiben rubbed the back of his neck and stared irritably across the table. So this was the person he had been sent to contact, Dr. Taka’s brilliant student, their would-be leader of an urban underground.

“What kind of idiocy was that?” he accused. “You let me walk into that club blind, ignorant. There were a dozen times I nearly got caught last night. Or even killed!”

“It was two nights ago,” Gailet Jones corrected him. She sat in a straight-backed chair and smoothed the blue demisilk of her sarong. “Anyway, I was there, at the Ape’s Grape, waiting outside to make contact. I saw that you were a stranger, arriving alone, wearing a plaid work shirt, so I approached you with the password.”

“Pink?” Fiben blinked at her. “You come up to me and whisper pink at me, and that’s supposed to be a bloody, reverted password?”

Normally he would never use such rough language with a young lady. Right now Gailet Jones looked more like the sort of person he had expected in the first place, a chimmie of obvious education and breeding. But he had seen her under other circumstances, and he wasn’t ever likely to forget.

“You call that a password? They told me to look for a fisherman]”

Shouting made him wince. Fiben’s head still felt as though it were leaking brains in five or six places. His muscles had stopped cramping capriciously some time ago, but he still ached all over and his temper was short.

“A fisherman? In that part of town?” Gailet Jones frowned, her face clouding momentarily. “Listen, everything was chaos when I rang up the Center to leave word with Dr. Taka. I figured her group was used to keeping secrets and would make an ideal core out in the countryside. I only had a few moments to think up a way to make a later contact before the Gubru took over the telephone lines. I figured they were already tapping and recording everything, so it had to be something colloquial, you know, that their language computers would have trouble interpreting.”

She stopped suddenly, bringing her hand to her mouth. “Oh no!”

“What?” Fiben edged forward.

She blinked for a moment, then motioned in the air. “I told that fool operator at the Center how their emissary should dress, and where to meet me, then I said I’d pass myself off as a hooker—”

“As a what? I don’t get it.” Fiben shook his head.

“It’s an archaic term. Pre-Contact human slang for one who offers cheap, illicit sex for cash.”

Fiben snapped. “Of all the damn fool, Ifni-cursed, loony ideas!”

Gailet Jones answered back hotly. “All right, smartie, what should I have done? The militia was falling to pieces. Nobody had even considered what to do if every human on the planet was suddenly removed from the chain of command! I had this wild notion of helping to start a resistance movement from scratch. So I tried to arrange a meeting—”

“Uh huh, posing as someone advertising illicit favors, right outside a place where the Gubru were inciting a sexual frenzy.”

“How was 7 to know what they were going to do, or that they’d choose that sleepy little club as the place to do it in? I conjectured that social restraints would relax enough to let me pull the pose and so be able to approach strangers. It never occurred to me they’d relax that much! My guess was that anyone I came up to by mistake would be so surprised he’d act as you did and I could pull a fade.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

“No it did not! Before you appeared, several solitary chens showed up dressed likely enough to make me put on my act. Poor Max had to stun half a dozen of them, and the alley was starting to get full! But it was already too late to change the rendezvous, or the password—”

“Which nobody understood! Hooker? You should have realized something like that would get garbled!”

“I knew Dr. Taka would understand. We used to watch and discuss old movies together. We’d study the archaic words they used. I can’t understand why she …” Her voice trailed off when she saw the expression on Fiben’s face. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m sorry. I just realized that you couldn’t know.” He shook his head. “You see, Dr. Taka died just about the time they got your message, of an allergic reaction to the coercion gas.”

Her breath caught. Gailet seemed to sink into herself. “I … I feared as much when she didn’t show up in town for internment. It’s … a great loss.” She closed her eyes and turned away, obviously feeling more than her words told.

At least she had been spared witnessing the flaming end of the Howletts Center as the soot-covered ambulances came and went, and the glazed, dying face of her mentor as the ecdemic gas took its cruel, statistical toll. Fiben had seen recordings of that fear-palled evening. The images lay in dark layers still, at the back of his mind.

Gailet gathered herself, visibly putting off her mourning for later. She dabbed her eyes and faced Fiben, jaw outthrust defiantly. “I had to come up with something a chim would understand but the Eatees’ language computers wouldn’t. It won’t be the last time we have to improvise. Anyway, what matters is that you are here. Our two groups are in contact now.”

“I was almost killed,” he pointed out, though this time he felt a bit churlish for mentioning it.

“But you weren’t killed. In fact, there may be ways to turn your little misadventure into an advantage. Out on the streets they’re still talking about what you did that night, you know.”

Was that a faint, tentative note of respect in her voice? A peace offering, perhaps?

Suddenly, it was all too much. Much too much for him. Fiben knew it was exactly the wrong thing to do, at exactly the wrong time, but he just couldn’t help himself. He broke up—

“A hook… ?” He giggled, though every shake seemed to rattle his brain in his skull. “A hooker?” He threw back his head and hooted, pounding on the arms of the chair. Fiben slumped. He guffawed, kicking his feet in the air. “Oh, Goodall. That was all I needed to be looking for!”

Gailet Jones glared at him as he gasped for breath. He didn’t even care, right now, if she called in that big chim, Max, to use the stu

It was all just too much.

If the look in her eyes right then counted for anything, Fiben knew this alliance was already off to a rocky start.