Harybdartt inflated his membranes with difficulty, not moving a muscle. He was in a compartment several body lengths in each dimension, a compartment filled with workbenches and lockers and one Human soldier. The soldier floated out of the corner, weapon trained on the El. Harybdartt was drifting, and beginning to tumble in the weightlessness. He reached out to grip the edge of a panel to arrest his movement. The soldier hissed and made a jerking motion with the weapon.
Harybdartt looked in the direction indicated, then back at the Human. The soldier repeated the gesture. He seemed to want Harybdartt to move. Harybdartt pushed off and drifted to the far wall, then turned and tried to steady himself without touching anything that could be construed as a weapon. Each time he reached out, the Human waved its weapon agitatedly. Finally he caught an arm over a section of piping, and the Human seemed satisfied. It moved over to the panel near the airlock and manipulated several controls, vocalizing with a flat barking sound. Apparently it was unsatisfied with the results, because it repeated the sound, insistently—all the time keeping its weapon aimed at Harybdartt.
Twice the compartment vibrated with the dull sound of distant explosions. The Human stopped what it was doing and stared at the El. It seemed distressed and unsure of itself. The battle was still on. Harybdartt remained silent, and in the silence he heard the sound of air hissing away. There was a leak here too, then. The inner airlock door had failed to close; there was no other hatch; and so the only way out was into the depressurized corridor. How long could they last here before the pressure became critical again? How long could they continue this standoff? The Human banged on the airlock panel with its fist and made another barking sound.
Finally it looked up at Harybdartt and lowered its weapon slightly.
Harybdartt had no wish to fight, and nothing to gain from doing so. Could he communicate? He knew few Human words—and anyway had only heard them in his head. Nevertheless, he decided to try. "Harybdartt!" he said, tapping his head.
The weapon came back up. The Human's eyes narrowed.
"Harybdartt!" he repeated, patting his chest. "Harybdartt!"
The Human's mouth tightened. It lowered the weapon another fraction. "Harhhyip . . ." Its voice stuck on the word, but it seemed to understand the intent.
Harybdartt thought quickly. What was the name the Humans Sage and Ramo had given him? "Har-ry!" he said. He tapped his head again. "Har-ry!"
This time the Human succeeded in nearly duplicating the sound. "Harry," it said. Its mouth tensed again, and it slapped itself with its free hand. "Kent," it said. "Kent."
Harybdartt repeated the name. Kent bobbed its head. "Harry," it said again, pointing to Harybdartt. The El clicked his nails.
For a moment, they gazed at each other in uncertainty. Then they turned their heads almost simultaneously to trace the whistle of escaping air. It was coming from a cracked joint on an air duct near the ceiling. Kent moved toward it, put a hand near the joint and pulled it back quickly. He began rummaging in the lockers, probably looking for a patch.
Harybdartt searched the room with his own eyes, but saw nothing that looked useful. He sidled slowly toward the broken joint, hoping to examine it without alarming Kent.
He didn't get far. A sudden concussion knocked him across the room. He heard a crash as something broke loose. Bouncing painfully from a wall, he caught hold of a work stand and clung, dazed, waiting for another blast. It didn't come. But when he blinked back into focus, he heard a much louder rush of escaping air, and in the same instant saw Kent's weapon floating free; then he saw Kent pinned against a locker by a bench that had broken loose and swung on a pivot. Kent was groaning; his thorax was being crushed.
Harybdartt hesitated only an instant, then launched himself across the room to Kent. The pivot wedging the bench against the Human was bent. Harybdartt pried against it with all of his strength, and finally it gave with a metallic groan and rotated away. Kent seemed unable to move, so Harybdartt grasped his garment and pulled him clear. Both of them were panting. Ignoring the Human's attempts at speech, Harybdartt released him and sprang back to the broken air duct.
It had sheared apart completely and was drawing air out of the compartment. Dizzily Harybdartt tried to force the two ends together, but it was hopeless. He saw only one other way to plug the duct—and he used it. He maneuvered his body into the gap and pulled the two broken ends up against either side of his abdomen. He felt a painful bite as the suction pulled the sharp metal ends through his undersuit and into his skin; but the escaping air dropped to a whisper.
He fluttered his membranes rapidly in the thin air, determined to remain conscious. He was immobile now. There was nothing he could do except try to suppress the pain and wait for help. In his haste, he had put his face to the wall; even twisting his neck, he could see only a small fraction of the room. He could neither see nor hear Kent. The bite in his sides was growing to a deep and dull pain, but he overlaid the pain with numbness and ignored it.
His awareness blurred.
He was brought back by a rush of cool air, and a slight increase in air pressure which sharpened the pain in his sides. Dimly he realized that he was hearing the air inlet from the open airlock. The sound cut off after a few moments, and he was aware of Kent moving behind him. "Harry?" he heard. Kent drew up alongside him, breathing rapidly. The Human appeared to be in pain, as well. Nevertheless, it maneuvered until Harybdartt could see it, then spoke in a strained, harsh voice. Harybdartt couldn't understand a word, but he thought he recognized the tone: concern.
How to respond? "Kent!" he whispered back. He tried to remember, desperately. What other words had he learned? In the thought-link, the Human machine, not the Ell, had translated.
The Human spoke again, incomprehensibly.
"Yesss!" Harybdartt said finally, with difficulty. "Yesss, Kent!"
Kent peered at him intently, then reached out a hand and touched the air duct where it was pressed to Harybdartt's side. There was a slight hissing as his hand passed over the imperfect joint of metal, fabric, and flesh. Harybdartt felt the pain within the numbness spreading as the vacuum inside the duct pulled at his flesh and his blood, drying and stretching his skin.
There was another concussion, distant.
Kent moved away. Harybdartt couldn't see what it was doing, but there was another brief rush of fresh air, and then he heard the Human opening and closing lockers, muttering. Perhaps it was looking for a substitute patch. There was another, different banging noise—and the Human barked and moved quickly (Harybdartt thought) toward the airlock. Harybdartt tried to look, but couldn't turn that far.
There was more noise. Kent returned, gesturing anxiously, then went away again. There was another concussion, and another. His sides ached more than ever, but he didn't dare pull away.
There was a blast, right behind him, near the airlock. He was seized by a whirlwind and torn from the air ducts—and he tumbled away from the wall and somersaulted toward the airlock.
It happened too quickly to follow. Several space-suited Humans were crowded into the blown hatchway, and he was spinning toward them, along with the outrushing air. He was scarcely aware of weapons, but he heard Kent's thin voice shouting, "Way-tt!" There was a flash and a dim distant shriek of pain, and a burning sensation in his right arm; and he collided with another wall, and then a bubble popped into existence around him with a whoosh of air, and his membranes filled with acrid oxygen. He twisted, ignoring the pain, until through the transparent film he caught sight of Kent writhing in another bubble, being dragged out through the airlock.
"Kent!" Harybdartt hissed. "Kent!" But he was alone in a tiny, isolated world, and there was no one to hear him—just a suited Human outside, pointing a weapon at him through the transparent bubble.
* * *
Commander Fisher was having a devil of a time getting reports on what was happening in the rest of the station. Crowded with eight of his men into a tiny rescue compartment lighted by one flickering red light and stinking with sweat and fear, he was continuously on the intercom; but all he could get through to was another pressure shelter. He didn't even know yet how many people had died in the command center—just meters away, but now in hard vacuum. He knew he had lost crew members, but some must have made it into other shelters. His aide Ensign Graves was among the missing.
Ultimately it took five hours for a relief team to get them out, using a large emergency bubble. Only after they'd made their way to a secondary command center did Fisher get a clear statement that the attack was over; the enemy had moved on, leaving much damage and many casualties in their wake. The alien prisoner was still alive but injured, and was being held under close guard after attacking an unarmed medical staffer in a leaky compartment.
One of the first things Fisher wanted to do, once medical rescue and damage control were in hand, was to go and finally lay his eyes on that damned alien—and see what the hell kind of creature it was that had so devastated his station and crew. It was several more hours before he got the chance. There was a constant flow of communication in the makeshift command center, and he forgot just about everything else when he saw the preliminary casualty lists—Ensign Graves was now among the confirmed dead—but he chewed his lower lip and went on directing the picking up of the pieces. Finally he ordered a shuttle for an exterior inspection, and after surveying the damage to the station's blackened outer shell, he told the pilot to take him to what was left of the medical research wing. An enlisted spaceman met him at the outer lock.
"All right," Fisher growled, kicking off down the shambles of a corridor. "Where is the wretched thing?"
"Back in its original cell, sir," said the spaceman, leading the way.
"As you were," Fisher muttered to the guards as he followed the spaceman into the compartment. It was a diagnostics and surgical theater, the walls crowded with instruments. Fisher stared at the alien strapped to a table. It was smaller than he had envisioned, perhaps a meter and a half tall, with an angular head and hard lips, four bony but powerful-looking arms, and a pair of muscular legs. It had greenish-copper skin under a garment—underwear, apparently. A clear plastic respirator covered the creature's face. Its sides and right shoulder bore open wounds, but it was conscious. Its eyes followed his approach. "This thing attacked one of your boys, I understand," Fisher said to the medical staffer, a freckle-faced young man who looked as though he had seen too much death in the past few hours.
"I'm afraid there's been some confusion about that, Commander," the med answered wearily.
"What do you mean?"
The med grimaced. "Actually, the alien did not attack Kent—or at least that's what we think Kent was trying to say before he lost consciousness." Fisher scowled at the med's words. "Apparently Kent got in the line of fire—either accidentally, or trying to protect the alien—when the rescue crew blew the hatch."
"Why the hell would he do that?"
The med shrugged. "They were trapped together in a leaky compartment—and it seems the alien used his body to plug the air leak. See here?" The med indicated a round welt on the alien's side where its skin had turned a nasty purple. "If Kent survives, we'll find out the rest."
"If he survives? How bad is he?"
The med let out a breath. "Pretty bad. He took it in the chest. There was a lot of confusion, and someone was a little too fast on the trigger."
Fisher cursed. As he gazed at the alien, he felt a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. "Can you communicate with it?"
"With the rap-field, if you can get the GCS back on line. That's how it was being interrogated before."
Fisher nodded. "Well, have it ready. But I don't know when we'll have the GCS back. All right, I've got wounded men to look in on. Spaceman!" He turned and, without waiting for his escort, launched himself out of the compartment and down the corridor.
* * *
Harybdartt's awareness was foggy for a long time, though he was aware of intense pain. In addition to his injuries and his body's efforts at accelerated healing, he was suffering the effects of an incorrect breathing mixture. He felt alternately a vague nausea and a feeling of euphoria.
Gradually, perhaps adapting to the air, he began to regain a bit of his strength and mental clarity. He recognized his old place of confinement. There were many more Humans coming and going than before, watching him, barking among themselves, but making no effort to renew the thought-field or to communicate with him. What had happened? He had a memory of a brief skirmish in that other compartment, even as the air was exploding from it; and he remembered the Human Kent leaping to protect him as another Human fired its weapon . . . and then capture and separation, and blurring of consciousness.
And now . . . what had happened to Kent? He remembered the Human's outcry of pain.
How odd, to find himself focusing on this event and feeling concern for a Human, of all things, a Human with whom he had merely shared a compartment. And yet it had taken a mortal risk for him—each had taken a risk—Human and El. Human and El together? In that strange thought-field earlier, he had touched minds with Humans; but it was quite another thing to deal face-to-face, to hold life and death in one's hands.
He remained quiet, watching the Humans come and go. Once he tried to speak, gesturing weakly at the panel from which the gas tubes supplying his mask emerged. He pointed to himself, pointed to the controls. They didn't seem to understand that he wanted to adjust the gas mixture: it was making him light-headed. Perhaps they weren't trying hard enough to understand, or didn't care.
Let me speak to you, he thought. Bring back the thought-field.
He wanted to learn what was happening on the outside, between Humans and Ell. He wanted to speak to the Korr again, and to Lingrhetta.
But more than anything else, he wanted to speak to Kent. He wanted to acknowledge, to note, to honor that the Human Kent had saved his life.