Trang (13 page)

It was like she opened the
floodgates. “Why did you tell those bastards that we didn’t have to have the
cameras?” Vip yelled. “We told you last night—we gotta have those cameras.”

“And we have them,” said Philippe.

“Hey, Trang?” said Shanti. “Let him
say his piece.”

“We’re extending our perimeter,”
said Vip. “And we can’t fucking do that if we can’t fucking see. So don’t say
shit like that isn’t important, unless you want to spend your whole fucking
time here holed up behind the no man’s zone.”

Shanti pointed at Philippe.
I
guess it’s my turn,
he thought, making a face.

“I think you’re missing the larger
point here, which is that we have the cameras,” said Philippe. “We now have
explicit permission to put whatever surveillance wherever we like in the common
area.”

Vip made a noise, but Shanti
waggled her finger at him and pointed it back at Philippe.

“I’m sorry if you feel that I
slighted what you do,” said Philippe. “I know that surveillance is crucially
important. But you have to understand my job here, which is not only to get us
what we need, but also to do it without getting anyone upset. If I had stormed
in their and pounded my fist on their table, what good would that have done?

“I know you’re thinking, since it
is really important to us, I should have told them it was really important.”
Vip raised his eyebrows and nodded. “That’s because you guys do things
straightforwardly—if you need something badly, you say, ‘I need that badly’ so
that you’re sure to get it. But in diplomacy, you have to be a little more
devious, because everything’s a favor. If I say to you, ‘I need that badly,’
and you say, ‘OK,’ then you’ve done me a
huge
favor and I’m going to owe
you a big favor back. But if I’m a little sneaky and say, ‘This isn’t very
important, but if you don’t mind’—even though it is important, very
important—then you’ve done me only a small favor, so I owe you only a small
favor back. As far as you know, anyway.”

She smiled. “At least he didn’t go
with Cluster Fuck. I have a question for you. You noticed what the Hosts did
with their living quarters, with keeping the atmosphere and the gravity the
same as the common area.”

“Yes,” said Philippe.

“I was wondering, do you think we
should do that here, where we live? I mean, if we’re used to functioning with
different oxygen and different gravity, maybe that puts us at a disadvantage in
the common area if something bad should happen.”

Philippe wondered for a moment why
she was bringing this up to him. Perhaps after treating him like some soldier
who should just follow orders, she now felt compelled to acknowledge his status
by consulting him on something that he knew absolutely nothing about.

“Did you think it made a big
difference?” he asked. “After a few minutes, I didn’t even notice it.”

“But we weren’t really exerting
ourselves,” said Shanti. “What I’m worried about is what will happen in a
combat situation.”

“I really don’t know anything about
combat, but wouldn’t it all even out?” She shrugged. “Well, the atmosphere is
under our control, and I can talk to the Hosts about lessening the gravity—I’m
sure if I say that we too are trying to relate better to the other aliens,
they’ll be happy to do it. But maybe you should talk to George first—isn’t it
supposed to be bad for people to be in low gravity all the time? Of course,
that’s how they live on Titan. I wonder what they do there?”

“I’ll see what George says, and if
he thinks it’s OK to change the gravity, I’ll get back to you. But you know
what I
can
do,” said Shanti, snapping her fingers. “I can alter the
training simulations so that the gravity matches the common area. I was
planning to feed in some of the visuals from our cameras anyway—give them a
more realistic sense of the battleground.”

“Training simulations?” Philippe
asked, surprised. “Aren’t they already trained?”

Shanti gave him a withering look.
“It’s
combat
training,” she explained, the words
you idiot
hanging
unspoken in the air. “With combat training, you have to keep doing it, or
you’ll lose your skills. You won’t have that killer edge.”

He opened it on his workstation.
There were more than 80 messages in his office file. In his personal file were
seven messages. Five were from Kathy.

He deleted those and started on his
next report.

It wasn’t long before a Swimmer drone wheeled up to one of
the outside guards and extended a hearty invitation for Philippe to come visit.
Philippe—accompanied at Shanti’s insistence by four soldiers, even to take
three steps outside and talk to a friendly vacuum cleaner—arranged to meet the
Swimmers the next day in their living area.

Which was apparently a massive tank
filled with water.

“It’s not a problem,” said George,
sitting on a bed in the infirmary. “If you put on the gloves and the hood and
seal it all up, your suit can keep you alive for two hours under water,
assuming the pressure’s not too high.”

“Raoul, grab a pal, go outside, and
find a Swimmer. Find out what the pressure’s like in that tank. If the Swimmers
don’t give you an answer that you can understand, ask the Hosts,” said Shanti.
Raoul took off from the infirmary like a shot.

She slapped her mike. “Patch, Rojy,
get over to the infirmary.” Two minutes later, Patch and Rojy walked in, and
she asked them. “What do we have that works under water?”

“Under water? The guns will work
with the right ammo, which I’m pretty sure we have,” said Patch. “I’ll check
that. But the range is going to be a lot shorter, only about a third of the
usual, and the ammo will be slower and less lethal.”

Shanti looked at Philippe,
questioningly.

“I am
not
carrying a gun,”
he said.

“What might be better is some of
the stuff that burns,” Rojy volunteered. “Even if it doesn’t burn them, you
could heat up the water pretty quick and boil them. And some of the really
powerful explosives do just fine underwater.”

“I don’t need to be a part of this
conversation,” said Philippe, and took his leave.

He passed Five-Eighths and Thorpe
in the hallway.

“His full-body massage is
amazing,
”
Thorpe was telling Five-Eighths. “Everything they say about older men is so
true.”

“They can’t get it up?”
Five-Eighths replied.

“No, asshole. It’s just a much
better experience. Sensual, you know? You should totally check him out.”

Philippe walked into his office and
shut the door, manners winning out over curiosity. He went to work on his mail,
but a few minutes later someone knocked on his door and opened it without
waiting for a reply.

“Were I actually Amish, it might be,”
Philippe snapped. “As things are, it’s standard DiploCorps policy—diplomats do
not carry weapons of any kind. If you were Union Police, you would know that.”

Shanti left, and he returned to his
work—several SA and DiploCorps officers had read his report on their reception
and had sent in additional queries, some of them laughably naive. He was in the
midst of explaining that he lacked the expertise, equipment, and time to have
made a detailed chemical analysis of the alien construction materials—nor had
he permission to take samples in the first place—when someone banged on his
door again.

It turned out that Raoul’s question
about water pressure had proven difficult to answer because, of course, the
aliens did not use the same measurements for pressure that humans did. After
talking around it with a Swimmer drone for several minutes, the drone led Raoul
and Bubba to the Swimmers’ living area in hope that they could satisfy their
concerns that way.

An open scroll in the infirmary
displayed what Raoul’s camera had recorded: The Swimmer living area was a
massive fish tank. There was a large window at the end of the living area that
faced the doors to the common area. A wide ramp cut diagonally across the
window. That section was lit, but the rest of the living area was not. Large,
dark, tube-like shapes were moving in the dark water, barely visible.

“But,” said Raoul, “it’s open on
top. You see right there—” he pointed to the top of the scroll, which was
displaying a shot taken with the camera right up against the glass, pointing
upward “—that’s air there. You go up the ramp and there’s a place where you can
just drop right into the water.”

“It’s like a swimming pool,” said
Shanti.

“Yeah, it ain’t sealed, so it ain’t
under pressure,” said Bubba. “Their place has the same atmosphere and gravity as
the common area, it’s just filled with water.”

“That’s good, that’s good, that
means there’s oxygen,” said the doctor, patting Philippe on the shoulder. “I
was wondering about that—you know, the suit keeps you alive underwater by
pulling in dissolved oxygen from the water.”

“And you weren’t sure there’d be
oxygen?” Philippe asked.

“Hell, I’m not sure that’s
water
,”
said George. He drew his thick eyebrows into a frown, and then shrugged. “If
you feel like you’re drowning, get out of there.”

“This is excellent,” said Shanti.
“This is good. Bubba, you gotta download what you have too. Patch and I are
going to look this shit over. Men, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“Damn straight,” said Bubba. “Ain’t
nobody better than us at playing dumb.”

“You sure you’re playing?” Raoul
asked. Bubba responded with an obscene gesture.

“Hey, Trang,” said Shanti, watching
the screen. “I realize that if I were a good Yooper instead of a dumb Sister
Fucker, I would know this, but: Would you object to a tether?”

“Not at all,” Philippe replied.

As the hour to meet the Swimmers approached, the hallway
outside of Philippe’s office became ominously silent. Philippe’s nervousness
had caused him to get ready far in advance, and now he was just sitting around
in his lonjons and his dress suit, too distracted to concentrate on anything.
Because he was going underwater, Vip had given him translator and com mikes
that stuck directly to his skin, and they felt like a persistent worry on his
collarbone.