David Weber - The Road to Hell

“True.” Sarma nodded. “But I think there may be one universe this side of Mahritha the Expeditionary Force doesn’t control.”

December 17th

In a quiet Ricathian corner of Sharona, Soolan chan Rahool stretched his toes and sucked coconut milk out of a freshly broken shell. The rough-barked tree at his back and the hopeful, grinning Minarti clan youngsters gamboling at the tree line reminded the simian ambassador just how much he loved his job. The chimpanzees shrieked in a high glee, making noises not unlike human toddlers. And he chuckled and laid his own coconut at his elbow, where it would be handy, to set about cracking open the pile of coconuts the Minarti clan grandmother had decided were snack for the day.

The thump of a round rock against a pointy rock made neat drinking holes in the hairy coconuts. He struck each one twice for easy sipping, fully aware that one of the older chimps minding the youngsters was watching him for quality control. Chan Rahool didn’t mind in the least.

He’d served two and a half years in the Ternathian Army almost a decade ago as a Voice. His superiors there had graciously marked his early discharge as “due to excess force capacity,” but chan Rahool liked to be honest with himself. He’d been released from service because he was an awful Voice and a poor fit for military service in general. His Voice range was barely more than line of sight at the best of times, his secondary talent as an Animal Speaker wasn’t all that useful to the Army, and the strictures of military life had simply made no sense to him.

But the simians didn’t care that they had to come all the way up to arms length to talk to him. And they appreciated that he preferred to wear a webbed belt suitable for hanging many bags of sugared nuts rather than a slimmer one matching uniform trousers and approved of by some uniform board at headquarters.

It amused chan Rahool even now that he owed the military for his dream job. Without the heavy shoulder muscles built from years of punitive exercise, chan Rahool’s limited Voice range would have again stunted any hope at a career.

Instead the embassy recruiter had asked that first wonderful interview question: “How do you feel about climbing trees?”

Chan Rahool’s answer, “Do I have to wear shoes?” won him the apprenticeship. Being willing to climb triple canopy jungle to visit orangutan nests earned him a career.

Ternathia’s Combined Simian Embassies tried hard to be a traditional government organization with hierarchy charts and field position rotations. Chan Rahool found it amusing. His fellow ambassadors were all much like him in their love of outdoor places and a relaxed life with minimal oversight.

Chan Rahool honored his former noncoms’ efforts to instill a sense of organizational pride by actually reading all the silly instructions that came from CSE and composing much shorter summaries for his fellow ambassadors. He liked to distill and emphasize the parts that truly mattered. To make sure they got read, he packaged the letters with bottles of his local moonshine.

He’d learned that from the military too. There’d been a supply corps armsman who’d always found a way to incentivize attention when he really needed something.

Chan Rahool’s current clan, the Minarti chimpanzees, preferred their alcohol as fermented fruit but they tolerated his preference for the liquid form and would even supply him with arm loads of suitable fresh fruit in exchange for a ration of bottles in the dry months between the wet seasons.

That private exchange might have been why chan Rahool was always able to reach his assigned clans. So he wasn’t at all surprised when a big chimp, quite a bit more mature than the youngsters he habitually shared coconut with, knuckle-walked up to the official embassy cabin and sat down on the veranda.

Chan Rahool didn’t make a habit of feeding the youngsters there, but for the adults he tried to keep drinking in the house or on the porch. The fragility of glass was sometimes a difficult concept, and he didn’t want shards scattered in the roots and rocks where they’d be hard for him to clean up properly.

With a grin, chan Rahool began distributing snacks. The young chimps caught the thrown pieces of coconut, and chan Rahool ambled back to do his ambassadorial duty.

* * *

The gray dappling the older simian’s back fur distracted chan Rahool momentarily from the sheer mass of muscle underneath it. Then the simian turned and displayed even more muscle and a weapon belt and chan Rahool’s eyes widened. He was no chimp. The silverback gorilla’s smug expression shocked chan Rahool so much, that he opened the door and invited him in before he quite placed where he’d last seen a look like that.

It certainly wasn’t on any simian in the Minarti clan. No, that was the look a veteran infantry armsman had given him once when he’d had a few too many and decided he was tough enough to out wrestle anything. Chan Rahool was significantly stronger now, but he was also far too sober to want to wrestle a silverback…especially a silverback who chose to wear a sharpened eight inch tusk at his belt.

What kind of animal even had an eight inch tusk? Chan Rahool mentally labeled the silverback as Tusk immediately. The simian undoubtedly had a name of his own, but he was unlikely to bother to tell it to chan Rahool what it was.

Tusk walked straight through chan Rahool’s home and opened the back door to admit two more silvers and a smaller decidedly elderly female nearly white with age. White-hair entered with a pronounced, regal assurance and assembled her guard-that was what they had to be-around her as she took possession of the house.

Chan Rahool was quite certain that three such powerful males wouldn’t have come to a place pitiful enough to be granted to the CSE for a cabin to fight for territory, and the grandmother of the matrilineal Minarti chimps had assured him that he was considered a youngster for the purposes of male hierarchy and wanted more shoulder mass before he could begin challenging to attract a female. He hoped that would apply to gorillas as well.

“Good morning Ma’am,” chan Rahool said. It didn’t seem like a bad start. Chimps were usually peaceable, happy creatures with the straightforwardness of a toddler…once he figured out what they wanted. Gorillas, well, chan Rahool had never worked with gorillas. He reached out a hand to touch White-hair’s closest knuckle to begin to translate her thoughts.

Tusk made a discouraging noise and batted chan Rahool’s hand back.

‹A BOWL OF SHRIVELED FRUIT.› Chan Rahool almost fell over. ‹ A bowl of shriveled fruit,› White-hair pushed the picture at him again, a bit more gently but with added details of pink and blue kittens painted on the outer rim of the bowl that chan Rahool recognized as one of the mismatched dishes from his own kitchen.

Somehow he got the sense that she was doing the pictorial equivalent of speaking loudly with exaggerated enunciation. What he strongly suspected might be the most senior simian ever to speak with a CSE representative had come to visit him. And she’d already decided he was an idiot.

The problem was that chan Rahool didn’t have any fermented marula fruit. Why hadn’t they gone to their own ambassador?

Chan Rahool was rewarded with a series of images in fast succession starting with medicinal plants and ending with giggling chimp babies. Right. He’d arranged for the Minarti’s exchange of medicinal herbs for periodic medical care. No good deed goes unpunished. I figured out what grand dame Minarti wanted, so now I get all the hard cases. Of course that one was easy because Dorrick over with the Nishani told everyone about the trade of chimp mineral rights for human medical care. The only tricky part was that the chimps asked me instead of the other way around.