Free Conquerors' Heritage by Timothy Zahn Page A

thing in the first place.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, or at least no worse than everything that had gone before it. The first mistake had been a group one, with enough blame for everyone to get his fair share: no one had noticed that group of Human ground warriors until they were practically on top of the northern pyramid. The Zhirrzh warriors had done their best, but without a timely warning from the Elders their response had been unfocused and far too late. The Humans had reached the pyramid; but instead of destroying it, they'd simply poked around, broken into Prr't-zevisti's niche and taken hisfsss cutting, and moved on.

His cutting. Hovering at the edge of the lightworld, Prr't-zevisti gazed down at the thin slice of tissue sitting there in its tiny sealed box. It had been taken from hisfsss organ a little over seventeen cyclics ago, but he still remembered that event as vividly as if it had just been last fullarc. The procedure had been brand-new at the time, only a couple of cyclics old, and most of Prr't-zevisti's friends had sworn up and down that they'd never let a technic take a blade to theirfsss organs. But Prr't-zevisti had always had a reckless streak to him, and the prospect of getting to flit between two different areas instead of being stuck in just one had been highly intriguing. A little thought, a little boredom-a little goading from his friends-and he'd had his name put on the list.

Letting the Human warriors get to the pyramid had been their first mistake. The second had merely compounded it. Instead of redoubling their efforts to destroy or defeat the enemy, the Zhirrzh warriors had shifted their focus to merely driving the attackers back into the mountains.

At the time, of course, no one had thought of it as a mistake. With Prr't-zevisti'sfsss cutting bouncing ignominiously around in some Human's combat bag, an ill-placed shot by the Zhirrzh warriors could have vaporized the cutting and sent him snapping unceremoniously back to his mainfsss anchorpoint at the Prr-family shrine. The Elders would certainly have pressured Commander Thrr-mezaz not to take such a risk, a point of view Prr't-zevisti himself would definitely have supported if he hadn't been so quickly taken out of direct range of the discussion. Besides which, considering why Commander Thrr-mezaz had put the communicators' pyramids outside the village in the first place, he'd probably had some crazy notion of Prr't-zevisti serving as a spy at the enemy mountain stronghold.

He'd kept a low profile during the first couple of tentharcs of his captivity, staying deep in the grayworld where he couldn't see and could hear only through hisfsss cutting. Stoically enduring the Humans' discomforting and occasionally painful manipulation of the cutting.

Though none of it had been nearly as discomforting as the cutting process itself had been, seventeen cyclics ago. There was no way to apply an anesthetic, of course, and even though they'd used a cold-knife, a fair amount of pain had necessarily made it through to him. Far more sickening, at least to him, had been what the whole procedure had looked like. He'd seen other preservedfsss organs when he was a physical and had known that the preservation technique had left a thin, hard shell around the exterior of the small, finger-shaped organ. What he hadn't realized until the cutting operation was that either time, or those same preservatives, had turned the interior of thefsss into a fluid, jellylike substance. It oozed slowly around the knife as the healers cut, trickling down the side of thefsss like some sort of extra-thickkavra -fruit juice. Like something dead and decaying, even though he knew intellectually that it was fully alive and vibrant. He'd watched in morbid fascination, a combination of shocked disgust and stubborn pride preventing him from looking away, as they finished their cut and turned the parts right side up to minimize and contain the leakage. They'd applied a