Corth had been sitting in the Commander’s chair, keeping Martha company. He got up as Tedra entered, but she waved him down, too nervous to sit herself. Now that she actually had a planet to investigate, she’d be using Transfer for the first time, and she still remembered the nightmares she had had for nearly two years after she had first learned about Molecular Transfer, the means to get from ship to planet and back without benefit of spacecraft or landing. One second you stood surrounded by metal walls and flashing grids on board ship, and the next your feet were planted firmly on whatever planet you’d been sent to. It didn’t take even a full second to Transfer. Just pop, and you were in a new location.
Transfer was made possible only on crysillium-powered spacecraft, which the Rover just happened to be, crysillium being the highest source of energy known to man, and the only thing strong enough to allow a safe Transfer. It was that word “safe” that had got to a child of seven, which was how old she’d been in her second year of Explorations study when the class learned of Transfer, making her active mind imagine all kinds of things that could go wrong, thatshe’dbe the only one Transfer wouldn’t work on, that she’d end up lost somewhere between Transfers, wherever that was, and no one would ever find her. Switching to Military Arts at eight, she thought she’d never have to experience Transfer, but she’d still had the nightmares about it for another year.
She might be an adult now and know that those childhood fears had been silly, but the nervousness was there anyway. As long as Martha didn’t detect it and ride her about it, she’d be all right. And once the Transfer was made she could relax—until she had to go through it again.
“So where is it?” she asked, walking toward the four observation screens that divided the area surrounding the ship into quarters for viewing, but were all blank presently. And then the left top screen came on to reveal a huge blue-and-green sphere, and Tedra gasped. “It has vegetation!”
“We’re a bit far from our own Star System to trade for food, kiddo,” Martha felt it necessary to point out.
“I wasn’t thinking of trading for it. I just want to see it. I’ve never thought it was fair that Kystran citizens are forbidden to visit their own space gardens.”
“Contamination, doll. If you want to eat it, you have to keep away from it.”
“I know.” Tedra sighed. “But look at all that green. It’s certainly prettier to look at from up here than Kystran’s drab brown and gray. So tell me. If there’s plant life, there must be other life. Is any of it humanoid?”
“The wide-range scanner indicates it’s not an overly populated planet, but there are enough people in small groupings, probably their idea of cities, so you won’t have trouble making contact.”
“Do I get lucky with a known language you have on file, or will I have to trudge through universal communication?”
“I’ve spot-checked in each hemisphere with the short-range scanner that picks up voices, and the language appears to be the same worldwide, with only slight differences in accent.” Short-range scanning could pick up clear conversations, but only in a five-foot radius. Anything on a larger scale would be just a jumble of noise. “It’s a language you’ve recently learned, too—Sha-Ka’ari.”
Tedra stiffened and turned around to glare at the huge computer that took up an entire wall, plus a huge console base in the center of the Control Room. “Did I miss something while I was sleeping, like an unscheduled trip home?”
Martha brought forth her offended tone. “You are fully aware that Kystran is three weeks, four days, eighteen hours, eleven—”
“I know how far away it is, damn it! Just tell me that’s not Sha-Ka’ar down there.”
“It’s not.”
“But you’re picking up their language?” Tedra asked. “There’s no mistake?”
“I don’t make mistakes.” The offended tone was stronger.
Tedra sighed and looked back at the observation screen. “Sorry, Martha.”
“Wait a minute! I’m going to short-circuit.”
“Oh, shut up,” Tedra said with a chuckle. “You’d think I never apologized to anyone.”
“I only think it because it’s true.”
“Let’s keep to the subject, please. Can this find of ours be the Sha-Ka’ari mother planet?”
“Good possibility.”
“Notgood,” Tedra groaned.
“Not necessarily,” Martha disagreed. “You must remember that the Sha-Ka’ari showed up in Centura Star System about three hundred years ago. They don’t remember where they came from, having brought no records with them, and remember very little about how they got to their new planet, only that they were captured to mine for silver, and ended up killing their captors and taking over the planet instead. We can’t know how this world here has evolved in that amount of time. Also, the Sha-Ka’ari were conquerors, and conquerors tend to enslave the conquered. It goes with the territory. It doesn’t mean they were taken from a slaveholding planet. So you don’t really know what you have down there, except it’d be a good guess to expect a warrior class of men … and I don’t like that look on your face.”
“Are you kidding, Martha!” Tedra came back excitedly, the idea falling on her in full bloom.
She had been going nuts with frustration, thinking about all those Kystran women being forced into slavery, friends of hers, women like herself who would fight against it, and keep on fighting until they either were killed or succumbed to madness. They had to be rescued, somehow, and before there was nothing left of their former selves. And here, miraculously, was the how.
“Crad Ce Moerr used the Sha-Ka’ari to take over Kystran,” she continued. “It’d be poetic justice if we could use their ancestors to get it back. After all, our weapons were proven useless against them, and we aren’t sword-wielders ourselves. But warriors just like them—”
“I only said it was a good guess.”
“But if they are—”
