Timothy Zahn - Conquerors' Pride

From behind Thrr-gilag, Svv-selic muttered something in their own language. "You command human spacecraft," Thrr-gilag pointed out. "You know human weapons."

Pheylan shrugged. "Commanding a ship doesn't have anything to do with it," he said, starting to walk toward the woods behind the base. "Not with CIRCE."

"But CIRCE is human weapon," Thrr-gilag persisted, taking a couple of quick steps to catch up to him.

Pheylan glanced at him... and looked back again. Close up, he could see for the first time that there was a small button the same color as Zhirrzh skin nestled beneath a shallow horizontal ridge on the side of Thrr-gilag's head. It was hard to tell for sure, but it looked as if there were four thin appendages extending from the button into the four parallel slits curving across the skin beneath the ridge. "What's that thing?" he asked, pointing to it.

"This?" Thrr-gilag asked, his tongue snaking out around the side of his head to point at the button. Pheylan twitched his hand back a little; he'd almost forgotten Zhirrzh tongues could do that. "It connect to interpreter."

"To an interpreter?" Pheylan repeated. "You mean a mechanical interpreter? A computer?"

"Yes."

"But I thought... never mind."

"Explain."

"I said never mind," Pheylan said, starting to turn away.

Thrr-gilag's hand snaked out, its three fingers and two thumbs wrapping around Pheylan's upper arm. "Explain," he demanded.

Pheylan looked at the audio link again, threw a quick glance over his shoulder at Svv-selic and Nzz-oonaz. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see that each of them was wearing one, as well.

So then what was that scar all of them had at the base of their skulls? The scar he'd assumed was the mark of a Copperhead-type Mindlink implant?

Thrr-gilag was still waiting. "I assumed you were connected to a computer translator in a more permanent way," Pheylan told him. "These scars back here." He reached out toward the back of Thrr-gilag's head—

He didn't fall flat on his face this time, but only because he was more or less balanced when Nzz-oonaz triggered the magnets in his obedience suit. His right elbow did crack painfully against his rib cage, however, as his arms were yanked to his sides. "Hey!" he snapped, bending violently back and forth at the waist as he fought to keep his balance. "I was just trying to point to it."

Thrr-gilag said something, and the magnets shut off. "Explain word 'scars,' " Thrr-gilag said.

"Scars are marks of surgery," Pheylan told him, throwing a glare at Nzz-oonaz as he rubbed his elbow. "Cutting into someone's body to take something out or put something in. All three of you have them, right at the base of your skulls." He started to point, changed his mind, and indicated the spot on the back of his own neck. "Right here."

For a long moment the three Zhirrzh just looked at him, their nonhuman faces unreadable. Nzz-oonaz muttered something to Thrr-gilag, who replied in the same tone. Svv-selic joined in, and for a minute they held a quiet three-way discussion. Pheylan waited, blinking against the dusty wind blowing across his face and surveying the landscape around them. The last time they'd been out here, he'd spotted what had seemed to be a path leading back into the woods from a corner of the building where his cell was located. He was hoping today to get a closer look at that area.

"Humans not have fsss organ?"

Pheylan shifted his attention back to Thrr-gilag. "What?"

"Scar mark of fsss organ," Thrr-gilag said. "Humans have here?" His tongue darted out to point to the right side of Pheylan's abdomen.

Pheylan frowned. There was nothing noteworthy there except the small keyhole mark where he'd had his appendix removed when he was ten.

A mark which, now that he thought about it, the Zhirrzh examiners had paid an unusual amount of attention to during that long physical exam his first day here. "I don't know," he told Thrr-gilag. "We don't have the same names for organs that you do. What does a fsss organ do?"

Svv-selic growled something, his tongue flicking restlessly in and out of his mouth. Thrr-gilag replied—reluctantly, Pheylan thought—and then turned back to Pheylan. "Not proper subject," Thrr-gilag said. "You tell about CIRCE."

"There's not much more to tell," Pheylan said. So Thrr-gilag was changing the subject; and in a suspiciously abrupt way. Was this fsss thing something taboo to discuss in polite conversation? Or was it something they didn't want humans to know about? Either way, one more bit of information to tuck away for future reference. "The name CIRCE is supposed to be an acronym—that means it's short for the full name of Collimated Ion Resonance Cannon, Ephemeral. Everything else I know is just the history that's in the public record. Only a few humans know what CIRCE really is or how it works."

"Tell history."

Pheylan took a deep breath, an unexpected shiver running up his back. They must have shown the cadets that old watchship recording fifty times back at the academy... and it had been as eerie the fiftieth time as it had the first. "It was an ambush," he told Thrr-gilag. "Five top-of-the-line Pawolian warships were hanging off Celadon system's innermost planet, hiding in the umbra—the shadow. They headed straight out toward the three NorCoord ships, none of which was more than half the size of theirs. They launched their fighters ahead of them, we launched ours, and they had at it."

"You see?"

Pheylan shook his head. "This was thirty-seven years ago. I wasn't even born yet. I've just seen the record."

"Tell more."

"There's not much more to tell," Pheylan said. "The fighters met between the converging warship lines, and the battle was getting started when the Pawoles' tactical structure suddenly just collapsed. They started retreating, with the NorCoord fighters in pursuit... and on the record you can see that the warships behind them have started drifting out of formation. CIRCE had killed everyone aboard."

There was a moment of silence, followed by another three-way conference. Pheylan kept walking, watching the forest off to his left. It hadn't been just a trick of angle and lighting: there was a path there, all right. More or less straight, heading back into the trees and underbrush behind the complex. Altering his direction a few degrees, he headed toward it.

The conference behind him ended. "How?" Thrr-gilag asked.

"How what? How did CIRCE kill them?" Pheylan shook his head. "Radiation burns of some kind. Beyond that I haven't the foggiest."

Thrr-gilag seemed to consider that. Or else was listening to their computer floundering over the word "foggiest." "Why CIRCE not used in attack against Zhirrzh?" he asked at last.

Pheylan glared into his alien face. "Get your facts straight, Zhirrzh. We didn't attack first. You did."

"Not true," Thrr-gilag said. "Commanders and Elders say. Human ships attack first."

"Were you there?" Pheylan demanded. "You personally?"

Thrr-gilag's tongue flicked out a couple of times. "No. Kee'rr clan Elder speak—"

"I was there," Pheylan cut him off. "And I don't care what your Elders or your commanders or anyone else tells you. Your ships fired first."

He turned his back on the Zhirrzh, the faces of his murdered crew flickering across his vision. Rico, Hauver, Meyers, Chen Ki—

"You not speak words against Elders," Svv-selic admonished him. "Too'rr clan Elder say same."

"As say Flii'rr clan Elder," Nzz-oonaz chimed in.

"I don't care what your Elders say—"

"No more!" Svv-selic snarled, taking a step toward him. "You speak no more words against Elders. Or punish."

Pheylan felt his lip twist. So that was how it worked here. The official line was that the Jutland task force had been the aggressor, and that was how it was going to be. And Svv-selic and Nzz-oonaz were going to fall dutifully into line like loyal party functionaries. Unwilling to question the supreme Zhirrzh authority, or even to listen to anything that might conflict with the official version of the truth. Their minds already made up.