"Perhaps," Holloway said. On the other hand, if that tame ghost of Melinda Cavanagh's had been telling the truth about Zhirrzh life cycles, they might not even care all that much about physical death. "To me it says those copters are as valuable to him as our Copperheads are to us."

Takara cocked an eyebrow. "And as irreplaceable?"

"Could be," Holloway agreed thoughtfully. And if true, that might be the best flicker of hopeful news they'd had since the invasion. If the ground troops here were having trouble getting resupplied, it might mean the Zhirrzh invasion of the Commonwealth had stretched their war machine dangerously thin.

Or else it could mean they were having too much fun stomping Earth or Centauri to bother with this military equivalent of a flea bite. "Let's see just how nervous he is about losing them," he said, clicking on his comm again. "Copperheads: veer to intercept those copters. Don't actually pursue—just scare them a little. Be sure you stay out of range of those ground lasers."

"Acknowledged."

Holloway clicked off and peered at the monitor. The two Corvines, which had been flying a parallel close-wingtip formation at treetop height, shifted smoothly into high-low pursuit mode. Holloway shifted his attention to the copters and their superimposed vectors, watching closely for any sign of reaction—

And without warning a blaze of light flashed upward from the forest.

7

The room was a large one, probably encompassing the entire underground structure, though measurements would have to be taken to confirm that. The beams from the hand lights swept across Human-Conqueror-style chairs and tables, a curved desk with a ring of darkened monitors facing an empty chair, and walls lined with tall, slender equipment cabinets. Some of the cabinets hummed softly, with small rows of colored lights set into their fronts, which glowed steadily or flicked on and off in complex patterns. Other cabinets stood quietly, with no indication as to whether or not they were functioning.

"Looks like some sort of command room," one of the warriors commented.

"Perhaps," Klnn-dawan-a said, looking behind her. There was a hand-sized panel with two small blue lights set into the wall just beside the door. She waved her hand over them without effect, then gingerly touched the rightmost light with a fingertip. She'd guessed correctly: abruptly the room was filled with a soft white glow radiating from hidden sources behind the cabinets.

A strange multiple stuttering sound came faintly from the direction of the stairway. "What was that?" she asked.

"Human-Conqueror projectile weapons," one of the warriors told her, moving to the door and looking up. "Better hurry, Searcher—I don't think we're going to have much time."

"Understood," Klnn-dawan-a said, feeling her tail speed up again as she crossed to the cabinet directly facing the monitor desk. That particular cabinet was also the one with the most flickering lights: fifty of them, laid out in a rectangular pattern of five rows with ten lights each. A row of Human-Conqueror letters was affixed beneath each of the lights, with other lines of letters in the cabinet's two upper corners. The cabinet itself was humming—a low, pervasive tone—and felt oddly cold to the touch. "Do any of the warriors on Dorcas understand the Human-Conqueror language?" she asked, pulling a field camera from her waist pouch and starting to photograph the letters.

"We all had a short orientation course before we got here," Tbv-ohnor said, stepping up beside her. "The written language ought to be programmed into our interpreter, though."

Another stutter of projectile gunfire from overhead wafted its way down the stairway. To Klnn-dawan-a's apprehensive ear slits, it sounded as if they were getting closer. "Here," she said, thrusting the camera into Tbv-ohnor's hands. "I want you to get me photos of all the cabinets. Pay particular attention to words and other lettering. I'm going to take a look inside this one."

"Right," Tbv-ohnor said, slinging his laser rifle and moving off across the room with the camera.

The front panel, Klnn-dawan-a quickly discovered, was an independent piece of metal, attached to the sides of the cabinet with a variant of the helical fastener that the Zhirrzh and every other race they'd come across had independently developed. One of the fingers of her manifold tool was the right size for the cruciform fastening slots of these particular helics, and in half a hunbeat she had the front panel off.

Given the obviously advanced state of Human-Conqueror technology, she had expected the equipment inside the cabinet to be highly complex. What she hadn't expected was the incredible extent to which that equipment had been miniaturized. Perhaps a hundred cables fed into the cabinet from openings in the back panel, snaking their way individually and in bundled groups to a mere six sites evenly spaced from top to bottom along the centerline. There the cables split into individual fibers of metal or glass, which vanished into the faces of small cubes suspended in midair by thick gray cylinders running horizontally across the cabinet. The cylinders themselves disappeared in turn through openings in the right and left walls, presumably into the cabinets on either side.

It was strange and very alien, and for a beat a disturbing vision flashed through Klnn-dawan-a's mind: that of a group of trillsnakes trying to swallow cube-shaped nornins, sculpted perhaps by some old neofacetist artisan.

Hastily, she chased the image from her mind. Considering what was going on above them, the last thing she wanted to think about was trillsnakes devouring nornins. Leaning halfway into the cabinet, she focused her light on one of the cubes, looking for some way to open it.

Surrounded by the pervasive hum of the cabinet, she never heard the footsteps that must have charged down the stairway. But suddenly Tbv-ohnor was there beside her. "Time to go, Searcher," he said urgently.

"Now?" Klnn-dawan-a asked. "But—"

"Now, Searcher," Tbv-ohnor snapped, grabbing her upper arm and yanking her bodily away from the cabinet. "The enemy's almost here."

Klnn-dawan-a's protests died at the back of her tongue. A few beats later they were all heading up the stairway.

"It might already be too late," Tbv-ohnor warned grimly as they clumped hurriedly up the steps. "Commander Thrr-mezaz pulled some trick that's keeping the Human-Conquerors' warcraft out of the sky in this area—I didn't get the details. But their ground warriors were already down, and the commander's reinforcements won't get here before they do."

"Maybe we should just stay down here," Klnn-dawan-a suggested, her tail spinning harder with the exertion of the climb. "If the room is that important to them, they won't risk damaging it. We could wait until it's safe to come out."

"Unless they prefer destroying it to letting us have it," Tbv-ohnor countered. "In which case they'll just roll some of their explosives down the stairway."

The stuttering sounds of Human-Conqueror weapons were getting louder, and as they neared the surface, Klnn-dawan-a could hear the hissing of laser rifles as the Zhirrzh warriors returned the fire. They reached the entrance chamber at the top of the stairs to find one of the warriors crouching beside each of the walls while the third, lying on the metal floor a stride back from the entrance, methodically sprayed laser flashes back and forth across his angle of fire. "Are they out there?" Tbv-ohnor asked as they reached the chamber.

"I don't know," the warrior at the right-hand wall said. "The Elders say they're not close enough to see us yet, but I keep seeing movement out there in the trees."

"Nothing that says Elders can't make mistakes," Tbv-ohnor grunted, moving up behind him and peering cautiously outside. "Especially with the kind of visual camouflage the Human-Conquerors like to use. Question is, how do we get around them?"