124 - Is This The Right Desert for an Argument?

“Stop it! Mom, stop right now!” Terry barely kept the anger out of his voice. “Open up. Unbutton! Whatever you feel you have to do I want out of your perfidious carapace when I talk to you!”

“Terence, please.”

“I will ask Agadore to pull the plug on your inappropriately activated over-ride code if you do not stop this instant and let me out!”

Mom had been limping along the sand, partially repaired according to her reports. A slow swim north of the delta. She crunched to a stop in the shade of a red and white butte and Eshmaeel stood up behind him.

“Terry, it's my fault, don't threaten Mom.”

Terry wheeled on him. “All right, boy. I don't care what you think I need to have hidden from me, you are going to tell me what the Page and Proof you are keeping from me! Your cover as a spy for your people was blown the instant you got caught and you keeping things from me – me! I'm the one rescuing you from Prime! I know, I know it was my brother who set it up, but it's been me the whole way. I've been the one on the ground with absolutely no real understanding of who and what you two are, who we are going to and how likely it is that you people are going to be able to save me from Prime at all!” He stood, panting and as Mom stopped, and her front cabin doors opened, almost abjectly, he grabbed Eshmaeel and Davood's sleeves and dragged them out with him.

“You two are spies. I KNOW that. I'd be an idiot if you thought you could keep it from me.” The furnace heat from outside hammered down on them as they stepped out, the wind sending sand that burned and bite all along the edges of their face coverings. The sky was clear and almost white rather than the greenish blue that held sway over Xanadu.

“I figured it out. I'm not as smart as my older brother Gerrold but he couldn't turn you two the way he was supposed to, suborned me into running away with you. Cuviil me! Dracul me right up the ass if I go a step further without finding out what the first fekking Page is going on. Now you two have gotten the vehicle on your side and she's faking the length of time it's taking her to make repairs for some reason and no one.” He paused for breath. “No one is telling me fekking, WHY!”

He glared at Davood who was looking as though his rant was giving him something to hunt down. Eshmaeel who had the grace to look ashamed and then up at Mom's nearly invisible insect-eye-like screens.

“So?” He asked the three of them. “Isn't it time everybody started talking? All I need to do to shut down this little expedition is let Prime know where we are and he'll just send a flyer to fetch us back or bomb the shit out of this part of this continent.”

Silence except for the weird tonal hissing and whirring and moaning sounds he heard from a whirly kind of bush all along the edges of the butte that spun in the wind.

“Well?”

Mom rippled into sight and then out of it, as if blushing. “Terence...”

Eshmaeel yanked his sleeve out of his grip. “You're right. We were lousy spies. Lousy because we got caught and I have to bring Davood back to our parents like this.”

Davood was himself enough to stick his tongue out at his brother, even though it stuck to the inside of his veil.

“I've been asking Mom to slow things down because I've been letting my bossman get to where he could contact me. We've been out of contact for months and he won't know we haven't been compromised...”

“Eshmaeel,” Mom said. “I've been trying to tell you. I can access your network. You can get written confirmation from your boss through me.”

Terry stood glaring at the lot of them and Agadore buzzed gently to signal his presence. “Um, Terry, sir. Was I correct in staying out of this? Is this what humans call 'an argument'?