Timothy Zahn - Conquerors' Pride

The moment never came. He was lying on his bed, drowsily watching the Zhirrzh techs puttering around, when suddenly the outer door flew open and six of the aliens stormed in and headed straight for his cell. Two of the Zhirrzh were carrying the same long gray sticks he'd seen earlier in the hands of the pyramid guards on his first trip outside; two others were holding stubby flashlight-sized devices. The last two appeared to be unarmed.

"What's going on?" Pheylan demanded as they took up military-precise positions around his cell, the two unencumbered Zhirrzh moving to the door, the other four flanking them on either side. All four weapons, Pheylan noted uneasily, were pointed straight at his face through the glass... and up close, those long sticks looked even nastier than they did at a distance. "What's going on?" he asked again, less aggressively this time. Unlike the projectile and missile weapons used by the Peacekeepers, the Zhirrzh ships had used high-energy lasers. If the sticks and flashlights pointed at him were scaled-down versions of those, they could burn him to ash right through the cell wall. Possibly one reason they'd made it out of glass in the first place.

"You stand away," a voice came from behind him.

Pheylan turned. Thrr-gilag was standing there, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, the corkscrewing tail going at double-time rate. "What?" he asked the Zhirrzh.

"You stand away," Thrr-gilag repeated. His tongue stiffened to point across the cell at the shower. "Stand there."

Wordlessly, Pheylan stood up and walked over to the shower, the weapons tracking him the whole way. The outer door swung open and the two unarmed Zhirrzh stepped inside. One stood beside the open door as the other walked to Pheylan's bed. Pulling open the drawer, he pushed the survival pack out of his way and retrieved the stone.

Pheylan looked at Thrr-gilag. "Not proper," the Zhirrzh said. "Not keep."

"I see," Pheylan said, the words coming out mechanically through a dry mouth. So he'd been wrong. All the cleverness, all the subterfuge—all wasted. They'd known about the stone, probably from the second he picked it up.

No. That was wrong. It had been sitting in that drawer for a good twelve hours now. If they'd known about it from the beginning, they would surely have taken it away from him before now.

He looked back at the two Zhirrzh as they stepped back through the door and swung it shut. And yet, they'd known where it was. Exactly where it was, in fact—that Zhirrzh had gone straight for it, without any hesitation or groping around. And from the way they'd burst in here like that, he would swear that they'd just that moment found out about it.

So how?

The first Zhirrzh circled around the cell to where Thrr-gilag was still standing, and for a minute they conversed quietly between themselves, turning the stone over in their fingers as they examined it. Pheylan watched them, possibilities swirling through his mind like leaves in an aircar backwash. They were slightly telepathic, and they'd only just figured out that he had the stone. They were very telepathic, but only some of them, and the one with the power had just gotten into town that night. They'd just completed some nightly scan of his cell, a scan sensitive enough to pick up a five-cubic-centimeter chunk of flint and place it precisely in the proper corner of the proper drawer. They had a direct pipeline to God, and God didn't want Pheylan leaving just yet.

Or more likely, they'd known about it all along and had just been playing with him. Letting him have twelve hours of false confidence and hoping like blazes that he didn't plan to use the stone before they could get it away from him.

Thrr-gilag looked up at him. "Not proper," he said again. "Tomorrow not go outside."

"That's not fair," Pheylan protested, knowing full well that argument was useless but also knowing that he had to try. "You never said something like this wasn't allowed. Besides, I need to go out. I need the sunlight."

"You punish," Thrr-gilag said. "Not do again."

He turned away and strode back toward his private door. On the other side of the cell, the Zhirrzh commander collected his troops and led them out the other way. The techs in the outer room, the incident over, went back to their tasks.

Slowly, feeling numb, Pheylan walked back to his bed. All right. He'd lost the stone; but then, realistically, he shouldn't have really expected to get away with it in the first place. He'd lost the stone, but in its place he had another bit of information to take back to the Commonwealth when he escaped.

Cavanagh awoke with a start, to find a shadowy figure standing beside his bed in the darkened room, gently shaking his shoulder. "Who's there?" he croaked through a sleep-dried mouth.

"It's Kolchin, sir," the figure said quietly. "We've got visitors."

"Really." With some difficulty Cavanagh focused on the bedside clock. The glowing numbers read 4:37. "Bit early for casual conversation, isn't it?"

"There's nothing casual about this group," Kolchin said. "They're an assistant liaison and three heavies from the Commonwealth consulate over on Mra-ect."

"From Mra-ect, eh?" Cavanagh said, sitting up and reaching for his robe. "Nine light-years, just to see us. How flattering. What do they want?"

"I'm not exactly sure," Kolchin said. "But I think they're after Fibbit."

Cavanagh paused halfway into his robe. "Fibbit? What on Earth for?"

"No idea," Kolchin said. "They keep skating around the issue—say they want to talk to you personally. But they keep looking around like they're hunting for something."

"What do you mean, looking around?" Cavanagh asked, getting his robe in place and pulling on his house shoes. "They're not already in, are they?"

"No, Hill's got them pinned in the foyer," Kolchin assured him. "But they keep trying to look through the privacy glass into the hallway and social room. Seemed pretty annoyed I wouldn't let them in any farther."

"Let them be annoyed," Cavanagh grunted. At four-thirty in the morning he was capable of considerable annoyance himself. "Where is Fibbit, anyway?"

"Actually, I don't know," Kolchin admitted. "She was working on that threading you asked her to do for a couple of hours after you went to bed. But after that I sort of lost track of her. She didn't leave, and she's not in your room here. That's all I know."

"Probably asleep in a corner somewhere," Cavanagh said, giving his robe sash a final tug. "Let's go see what's going on."

The four visitors were visible only as vague shapes through the smoked privacy glass divider that separated the foyer from the rest of the suite, with Hill another vague shape facing them. "I'm Lord Cavanagh," Cavanagh said, coming around the divider into the foyer behind Hill. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm sorry to bother you, Lord Cavanagh," a burly middle-aged man in the middle of the group said, taking a short step forward. He looked tired and grumpy, but not particularly sorry. "I'm Assistant Commonwealth Liaison Petr Bronski." His eyes flicked over Cavanagh's shoulder. "May we come in?"

"State your business and I'll consider it," Cavanagh said.

One of the young men flanking Bronski muttered something under his breath and stepped forward to join his boss. Hill shifted position in response to block his path, and out of the corner of his eye Cavanagh saw Kolchin move up a pace as well. All four of the visitors had a brittle, no-nonsense air about them, the sort of men the Commonwealth would naturally post to a former Yycroman colony world only recently awarded to the Mrachanis. Still, even at two-to-one odds, if they decided to get rough, Cavanagh's money was on Kolchin and Hill.

Maybe Bronski saw that, too. He lifted a hand; reluctantly, his subordinate stepped back again. "I'd advise cooperation, Lord Cavanagh," he said, pulling a wallet folder from his pocket. "I don't really need your permission to come in."