When the Devil Dances

Tulo’stenaloor looked over the shoulder of the God King and reined in his impatience. Goloswin had been almost impossible to find, and even harder to dig out of his comfortable rut on Doradan. From the point of view of the young hotheads that made up the majority of the Host, Kesentai like Goloswin were not much more than Kenstain. They may have fought well enough to get a few small possessions, a square of property and a factory or two. But then they quit, leaving the fighting to their betters. And they had odd… hobbies was not a Posleen word, but it fit.

In the case of Goloswin the hobby was… devices. He seemed to understand the Alldn’t equipment better than its long dead Alldn’t and Posleen designers. He could improve, another human word, “tweak” came to mind, a tenar so that it was faster, smoother and the sensors interacted even better with the guns. His sensor suites were a thing of legend and many well-to-do Kessentai waited years for one of his systems to be built and eventually catch up with them.

And one of them cost more in trade credits than a basic oolt, fully equipped.

But the technician’s real love was new discoveries, new devices to tinker with, such as the sensor box floating in the stasis field.

“These humans, so endlessly inventive.” The God King sighed. “Look. Not just a communicator, not just a relay and not just a sensor, but all three rolled into one. Crude in places; I think that some of these components undoubtedly came from something else. But quite, quite inventive.”

“And now a defense device,” Tulo’stenaloor pointed out. “The last one that we tried to take down blew up when it was moved.” The loss of an oolt’os and a Kessentai who was supervising was not worth commenting on.

“I need a sample of one of those,” Goloswin said. “I have an oolt’os who will probably be able to take one down successfully.”

“After this little problem is rectified,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “They are dependent for untraceable communication on these things. I would like to remove that link if I could.”

“Oh, it’s not untraceable,” Goloswin pointed out. He slid his talons through some glowing dots in the air and a new holofield opened and configured. It was a rough map of the region and Tulo’stenaloor realized that the “bright” areas were where the human sensors could see. And he realized immediately what he was looking at.

“You’re in the sensor net?” he breathed.

“Oh, yes,” Goloswin agreed. “Trivial exercise, quite trivial. The nice part is this.” He highlighted a field and four purple icons sprang to life on a ridgeline. “There are your pests. Now go take care of them and get me a sample of the new sensors. I look forward to examining this ‘boobytrap.’ And the next human you talk to, please ask it what a ‘booby’ is before you eat it.”

* * *

Mosovich looked at the map and got a sick feeling in his stomach. The fact was that, no matter how much artillery fire they got, they were in a box. There were only three places where crossing the Talullah River would be a reasonable proposition. As Mueller had pointed out, if they had SCUBA gear they could have crossed any of the lakes at any point. But without the gear they would be four obvious targets, out on the flat nowhere and open to fire from any passing patrol. And the crossing would not be quick. Even if they could “drownproof” Sister Mary and drag her across on a float. But otherwise it was a matter of choosing the bridges; crossing the streams would be nearly impossible and — between having to rig ropes to keep from being swept away and making their way across — sure to take too long as well.

However… these Posleen were acting like humans. They seemed to be thinking about the possible actions of their quarry and reacting in a reasonable manner. Which meant that they would be expecting the team to either cross the bridges or the lakes heading more or less directly towards the lines. They might or might not know that the latter would be virtually impossible.

If they could break through the lines to the west, then break contact, two very big ifs, they could make their way towards the lines around Tray Mountain. That was a wilderness area and the roads were few and far between, making it much better from their perspective.

But getting there would be a long damned walk with, apparently, damned little support. The artillery, though, what there was of it, would be able to cover them the whole way. The important point would be to make sure they didn’t get spotted by where the artillery was firing.

He chuckled silently. This was almost as bad as fighting humans.

* * *