“We’ve been calling them ogres mostly at Wilcox’s insistence. Initially the radio chatter and phone calls refer to them as giants. And I think that’s how you’ve probably been hearing about them up till now. But…well, Wilcox…you’ll meet him later,” the left-hand staffer said to Dr. Susan Martin, M.E.
“These gentlemen are surprisingly fluent in English, but sometimes they sound like they have food in their mouth. They don’t. We haven’t been feeding them and they haven’t asked,” the staffer to her right added.
“Don’t let their apparent fluency fool you. These aren’t, in fact, gentlemen. They butchered several of our men and two of their own before we subdued them. I admit, they’ve been polite since the skirmish—that’s partly why we’re treating them more like guests than prisoners. Partly. But I’d rather not have any more people sympathetic to their cause than there already are,” said the left-hand staffer.
“Are they restrained?” Dr. Martin asked.
“They’re behind a stunner,” the right-hand staffer interjected like a puppy. Dr. Martin ignores him and looks quizzically to the left-hand staffer.
“A stun wall? A force field?”
“We have those?”
“We have those.” The left-hand staffer emphasizes the first word. “You won’t see it; you’ll hear it—a little. What you’ll see is the threshold. Don’t step over that and you’re fine.”
Day 313