“This is the best present you ever got me, sweetheart,” I said. Zo? grinned.
“You should know that this field is of very limited duration,” Hickory said. “The power source here is small and will only last a few minutes, depending on the size of the field you generate.”
“If we use it to cover Croatoan, how long would it last?” I asked.
“About seven minutes,” Jane said. She had figured out the control panel.
“Real possibilities,” I said. I turned back to Zo?. “So how did you manage to get the Obin to give us this?” I asked.
“First I reasoned, then I bargained, then I pleaded,” Zo? said. “And then I threw a tantrum.”
“A tantrum, you say,” I said.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Zo? said. “The Obin are incredibly sensitive to my emotions. You know that. And the idea of every person I love and care about being killed is something I could get emotional about pretty easily. And on top of every other argument I made, it worked. So don’t give me grief for it, ninety-year-old dad. While Hickory and Dickory and I were with General Gau, other Obin got this for us.”
I glanced back at Hickory. “I thought you said you weren’t allowed to help us, because of your treaty with the Colonial Union.”
“I regret to say that Zo? has made a small error in her explanation,” Hickory said. “The sapper field is not our technology. It is far too advanced for that. It is Consu.”
Jane and I looked at each other. Consu technology was generally breathtakingly advanced over the technology of other species, including our own, and the Consu never parted lightly with any technology they possessed.
“The Consu gave this to you?” I asked.
“They gave it to you, in point of fact,” Hickory said.
“And how did they know about us?” I asked.
“In an encounter with some of our fellow Obin, the topic came up in conversation, and the Consu were moved to spontaneously offer you this gift,” Hickory said.
I remembered once, not long after I met Jane, that she and I needed to ask the Consu some questions. The cost of answering those questions was one dead Special Forces soldier and three mutilated ones. I had a hard time imagining the “conversation” that resulted in the Consu parting with a piece of technology like this one.
“So the Obin have nothing to do with this gift,” I said.
“Other than transporting it here at the request of your daughter, no,” Hickory said.
“We must thank the Consu at some point,” I said.
“I don’t believe that they expect to be thanked,” Hickory said.
“Hickory, have you ever lied to me?” I asked.
“I do not believe you are aware of me or any Obin ever lying to you,” Hickory said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe I am.”
At the rear of the Arrisian column, soldiers scrambled in retreat, back toward the gate of the colony, where Manfred Trujillo waited, sitting at the controls of a cargo lorry we’d stripped down and tinkered with for the purposes of acceleration. The lorry had sat at the side of a close field, quiet and with Trujillo hunkered down until the soldiers had completely entered into Croatoan. Then he powered the lorry’s battery packs and slowly crept it along the road, waiting for the screams that would be his signal to put the pedal to the metal.
When Trujillo saw the plumes of Jane’s flamethrower, he accelerated hard toward the gate opening of Croatoan. As he passed through the gates he threw on the lorry’s floodlights, stunning a trio of fleeing Arrisian soldiers into immobility. These soldiers were the first to be knocked out of their mortality by the massive hurtling truck; more than a dozen others followed as Trujillo plowed through the ranks. Trujillo turned left at the road in front of the town square, sideswiping two more Arrisian soldiers, and prepared to make another run.