The Exalting

by Dan Allen

  “There’s something interesting,” Angel said, through the tablet.

  Jet nearly dropped the tablet. “What are you doing up? Who woke you?”

  “I did a few hours of retraining, but I didn’t want to leave you alone—check that out. The animals are drinking from the ocean. Given common elemental abundances, it’s got to be saltwater just like on Earth. Why would they do that?”

  Jet scrolled through a time-lapse microbot video showing monkeys coming in and out the forest to drink from a coral pool at the edge of the ocean. “Yeah, but they only drink from those coral rings. If they could drink saltwater, they could drink from anywhere on the beach.”

  “The pools could be desalinated,” Angel said. “You know, fresh water.”

  Jet nodded. “That would make sense.” Then, spotting a pattern in the time lapse record, he paused the video feed. “Why do those monkeys only drink from one pool—always the same pool? There are hundreds to choose from along that beach.”

  Angel didn’t venture an answer for a few seconds. “From a tactical standpoint, its idiotic. No animal would risk returning to the same spot to drink every day, unless it was a matter of life and death. It’s like moving a supply convoy. You never run supplies on a schedule. That’s begging for an ambush.”

  Jet zoomed in on a thermal image time-lapse and watched dozens of heat signatures of varied size move from the jungle to the beach and back. “So . . . all the animals drink from the pools.”

  “But each family apparently drinks from the same one.” Angel reminded. She had a habit of restating the obvious when she was stuck.

  Jet rubbed his chin. “What about the Xahnans—the humanoids?”

  “Care to place a wager?” Angel said.

  “One pool per city?”

  Angel’s silence told him he was on to something.

  “And one ka per city . . .” A grin crept across Jet’s face. “Angel, there’s gotta be something in the water, something that makes them keep coming back.”

  “Wonder what happens when someone drinks from the wrong pool,” said the AI.

  “They probably die or get very sick. You said it yourself. They wouldn’t go back to the same water source all the time unless it was a matter of survival.” A chill ran down Jet’s spine. “Feels like some kind of horror sim: which pool will you drink from? One is life. One is certain death.”

  Angel gave a mock maniacal laugh.

  “Okay, enough of that. That’s just freaky. Turn down your freaky setting.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “That’s even freakier.”

  * * *

  Dana’s greeder fled Norr in a blitz of raw speed, sprinting and gliding as it picked the shortest path down the steep Kyner River Canyon. The ride was as thrilling as she had imagined, though worry ate at her constantly, both for the fear that the Norrian rangers or the kazen would pursue her, and for her own safety.

  Dana held on to the two handles on the sides of the neck strap with a desperate grip. A fall from the greeder would cost her a broken leg at best, her life at worst.

  The young greeder’s legs sprang outward in blurred flashes as it ran, then took its characteristic split-legged leap into the air. While faster on the ground, the gliding greeder easily avoided trees, boulders, and the rushing Kyner River as it wound back and forth among the canyon grottos.

  After a quick series of bends in the canyon, the ground flattened into a marshy meadow, and Dana risked a backward glance.

  Nothing.

  Perhaps Chancellor Orrek hadn’t sent out a ranger after her. A ranger on a mature greeder could have easily caught her.

  It hurt as much as it was a relief.

  Had the big-bellied bully of the city court merely shrugged at the report and said, “Just let her go”? Or perhaps an exuberant, “Good riddance!”

  The words, whether spoken or not, echoed inside her, feeling out the most tender parts of her heart to thrust their thorny edges, like briars caught in the underwear of her soul.

  Outcast.

  Deviation.

  Abomination.

  The young greeder slowed in a meadow beside a flat section of the canyon stream. As the road turned uphill to cut the corner of the next bend in the canyon, the greeder stopped entirely and poked its head about in a tarberry bush that had been long since been picked clean by other birds.

  Dana, after having pressed herself into the greeder’s consciousness for several minutes to hasten its flight, had little will left to do anything other than sit and wait. Eventually, she felt the first tingling of anxiety returning.

  She had to go, and quickly.

  But her greeder was still resting. Dana slid off the greeder and took the reins tied to the pierced waddle on its lower jaw. She led the curious, oversized bird away from the road and onto a game path. Her brisk pace was merely a ponderous gait for the long-legged greeder.

  The night grew chill, and neither the brother moon Calett nor its sister Osoq had yet to rise. The colluding pair were conveniently hiding somewhere below the horizon to aid her escape from Norr.

  Dana thought of the food in her travel bundle but managed enough self-control to not raid her limited supply just yet.

  Beyond hunger, there was a worse problem.

  She would need water. It was the one thing that sustained life. And the fastest way to die.

  There were bound to be sayathi-tainted springs feeding underground water into the river. With its moss and slime, and the hordes of tiny creatures that lived in the water, the river could eventually cleanse itself of the toxic, unseen sayathi leeching in from the ground. But it wasn’t a chance Dana would bet her life on. She would have to find a source of rain water.

  Dana decided to call her greeder Loka, the name of the ancient Norrian ka symbol of joined triangles—now banned.

  “Come on, Loka. Just a bit further to the vista.” Dana led Loka on a shortcut and promptly ran into an unseen hedge of low-to-the-ground tie brambles.

  Dana climbed back into the saddle to save herself more scratches. Loka easily stepped through, her thick skin and toe claws unaffected by the thorns.

  They emerged from the thicket onto a flattened step on the mountainside, like an ancient shoreline before an empty sea. Below lay the lush lowland jungle of the Aesican coast.

  “Go!”

  The young bird leapt forward, jostling Dana like a rag doll as it sped toward the edge. It took a staggered foot hop as it leapt from the edge. Its feathered wings reached out as the bird dropped precipitously out over the steep mountain slope.

  Just as the tops of the trees began to appear under and on either side, Loka’s tail flared, her wings arched, and the bird caught the wind like a sail, rising above the forest canopy.

  For miles it glided down over the steep slope, occasionally taking a brain-jolting leap from a boulder. The speed of the wind made Dana even colder, but even as the night grew on, she passed through pockets of warm air from the great Kyner Valley below.

  They’ll never catch me now.

  The low forest was far too dense to track anything.

  Which brought up an immediate concern.

  Loka, as a captive highland greeder, had likely never even seen the predatory rhynoid vines of the lowland jungle. So she wouldn’t recognize them.

  Forz grafted harvested rhynoid vines to his wooden mechanodrons, but Loka could hardly know the danger they posed.

  Dana began to hope that Loka would find a nice wide road before she ran out of altitude. Instead, the bird veered toward the Kyner River. She set down on the bank in a series of bounding hops that nearly threw Dana over the top of the saddle.

  Good idea, Dana thought. Better to wait out the night in the open—and hope there are no saber panthers.

  Dana opened the saddle bag and tucked her modest supply of food into pockets in her trousers and overshirt for safekeeping. She sat down in a patch of grass at the edge of the riverbank, being sure to choose a spot with no overhanging branche
s. She brushed her fingers through her sifa, pulled back her hair, and lay on the ground.

  Loka found a spot on the river stones not far away and tucked her head.

  Dana covered her face with her blanket to avoid bloodsucking nightfeeders and promptly fell asleep. Her dreams were filled with animals moving past in a great herd, drifting by lazily.

  Animated bird calls woke Dana. But as she blinked into the morning sunlight, she was surprised to find that she had not lost the feeling of animals drifting past.

  Intrigued, Dana sat up. She was nestled between two hillocks covered in dense jungle, the gentle and wide Kyner River passing between them.

  Dana walked past the still-slumbering greeder. Approaching the edge of the river, Dana stepped slowly along the bank, utterly fascinated by the sensation. Peering into the river she saw no schools of fish moving downstream. The sensation of drifting life grew as she walked, until the flowing animal presence in her mind seemed to turn away from the river and up the bank.

  Dana stopped. A small rivulet ran down through the river stones from an outcropping laden with lacey, dripping moss and small sayathenite nodules.

  A spring.

  It wasn’t the river she was feeling, or any large creatures in its depths. It was the tiny sayathi, makers of the acoustoelectric sayathenite crystal and the even more rare bloodstones—just one per colony.

  Dana laughed. “So, I can feel them.”

  It was a relief to realize that she could sense sayathi like Forz. Dana decided she had probably never had the patience to listen for the tiny microorganisms until she was nearly swimming in them.

  Dana started at the sound of splashing water. She whirled around.

  “No!”

  Loka stood with one foot in the river, her beak buried in the water. At Dana’s cry, she lifted her head. River water dripped from her mouth.

  “No. No. No!”

  Dana ran toward Loka but stopped. It was too late.

  The bird shook its head. It opened its mouth and tilted its head up, as if trying to swallow something stuck in its throat. Again, its head shook from side to side.

  The pain struck Dana, searing her throat. She tried to cut off the connection between her mind and the greeder’s, but the desperate bird kept reaching out to her, invading any wall she put up.

  Pain raked her insides. Nausea drove Dana to her knees. She gagged at the phantom sensation of blood filling her stomach.

  Loka fell to the ground writhing, kicking. Another cry escaped the tortured bird.

  It was innocent, raised in captivity, away from the safety of its native breeding grounds. It had no family to teach it where it was safe to drink.

  The sayathi of the spring that drained into the river had not acquired her essence, her scent—whatever it was that passed from mother to child by blood.

  Loka had not paid the blood sacrifice required for immunity.

  No Norrian did. They lived and died by snowmelt or rain. Norrians were forbidden to be blood-bound to a sayathi colony. The effects were immediately recognizable.

  You could see it in their eyes. Blood-bound Xahnans simply looked more . . . alive. It was no trouble at all for Dana to spot a foreigner in Norr.

  No one could hide from the civic guard the fact that they were drinking well water. So quick to recover from illness and injury, living so long, blood traitors were always discovered and executed in the same brutal way that Loka was dying.

  They were forced to drink water from a foreign well.

  Dana wavered at the edge of consciousness as Loka’s pain took her beyond what she had ever experienced. No trap, no arrow, could ever amount to this. She shook violently. Darkness gathered in the corner of her vision as river vultures landed nearby, anxious to feed on the creature that dared drink from their blood-bound wellspring.

  And still, the sayathi flowed on, down the river and spilling from the greeder’s disintegrating veins.

  Blood ran out on the river stones, returning the sayathi to the stream as Dana screamed.

  Then all at once it stopped, and the contented sensations of feeding vultures filled the void.

  Dana stayed on her knees, offering a petition of forgiveness to whatever ka she owed for her negligence. She hadn’t tied Loka up away from the ground water.

  Less than day from Norr, she had killed the animal she had stolen. It was yet another crime, this one horrific beyond description.

  Unable to stay at the scene, and fearful of rhynoid vines waiting to snag and electrocute her if she strayed into the jungle, Dana hurried past the carcass, stopping only to take the blanket, which she wrapped around her shoulders. She continued downstream, keeping clear of the water, lest any sayathi enter through a bramble scratch on her ankles.

  After a short snack for breakfast, Dana’s thirst grew ravenous. She could no longer sense the diluted sayathi in the river, but she had no assurance that the river water was below the toxic limit.

  Only a test on a living creature could prove that.

  Dana had seen more than enough death for one day. And even if she did force an animal to drink, there was no guarantee the creature wasn’t already blood-bound to the wellspring colony and immune.

  “That’s a lonely traveler if ever I saw one.”

  Dana jerked up her head to see two men standing on a small river barge laden with two piles of sayathenite.

  “Do you have water?” Dana called out.

  “Can you cook?” bellowed one of the bearded men. His inferior sifa rattled with his friendly laugh.

  “Of course,” Dana replied hastily. She was an awful cook, but she placated herself with the thought that the men probably wanted company more than good food, and Port Kyner couldn’t be that far away anyway.

  The shorter of the two men cupped his hands and hollered, “Run ahead and catch us at the next jetty.”

  Dana scrambled over the rounded river stones. Please don’t pass me. Please don’t pass me.

  Her throat was parched. Her lips were dry and mouth cottony.

  Dana ran along the outer bank of the curve, where the turning current carved a steep bank.

  The two bargemen pushed the lashed-log raft closer to the shore, and Dana, with a thrill of hope, spread her sifa and leapt into the arms of the bargemen.

  Chapter 12

  Jet ripped off the simulation visor and looked down, just to make sure he didn’t have a real hole in his chest.

  “I hate dying. Are you going to lower me?”

  Earlier, while Jet was stuck in a room with Teea going over Xahnan pronunciation, Angel had apparently spent the morning borrowing resources from fleet processors to rig up a ground training simulation. The Excalibur’s immersion rig was top notch. The simulation of a thunder bison attack had been a little too real for Jet’s comfort. The fact that his sidearm was useless once the thing lowered its four-horned head was even more disconcerting.

  “Not so fast,” Angel said. “Round two. No help this time.”

  Jet pulled the goggles back on and found himself falling into some kind of sink hole filled with water.

  “Big breath,” Angel reminded.

  Jet sucked in. Halfway through his breath, the mask valve shut off. Cold water doused him.

  Holy crap, these sim suits can change temperature fast.

  His limbs moved sluggishly as he peered around the dim water of the cave, looking for a place to climb out. But the cave was a bulb shape with a sloping overhang roof. There was little chance he could climb out.

  Have I got a grappling hook? Jet wondered. As he searched his body, a shadow moved in the water.

  Holy double crap.

  Jet found his knife strapped to his chest and drew it as the shape grew larger and larger. It was a fish nearly as big as him.

  The fish turned away at the last second, moving to Jet’s left side, away from his knife hand. Only then did he see the long claws on its pectoral fins.

  Electricity raked his side in a painfully realistic simulation of a gash.
The water around him began to turn red. Jet whirled to face the foe but caught another searing laceration from behind.

  Two of them!

  Jet let the knife go, reached lower, and drew his pistol from the holster at his thigh. He squeezed off a shot at what he thought was one of the cave fish. There was a flash as the powder in the shell erupted and a stream of bubbles ran out from the gun.

  Did I get it?

  Then the electricity burned at his neck.

  “Game over. You just got owned by a couple of fish.”

  Jet ripped off the goggles and hauled in a breath through his breathing mask—at least the valve was back on. “Turn down the voltage—are you trying to kill me?”

  “Pansy.”

  “Easy for you to say. You can’t even feel pain.”

  “You should have noticed the claws on the fins.”

  Jet shrugged. Angel was right. He couldn’t get in the habit of relying only on his AI to assess threats.

  “Your flashlight probably would have blinded them.”

  “Right, the flashlight. Where was it?”

  “Tool belt. Right side. Or you could have just shot the first one before it cut you.”

  “Quick draw,” Jet said. “Got it—but a bullet only goes a meter in water.”

  “And it makes you deaf . . . and probably bleeding internally from the pressure wave.”

  “So, I’m dead either way?”

  “Flashlight—just saying.”

  “Fine.”

  “Next sim starts now.”

  Jet’s ribs and neck still ached from the simulated wounds. He pulled the goggles down.

  “What the heck is that?”

  Standing in a jungle clearing, he was face to face with a long-legged creature, like an ostrich from Earth but bigger, more like a feathered running dinosaur with wings.

  “It’s a greeder,” Angel said. “Say hello.”

  Jet stamped his feet to see what it would do.

  The bird took off through the woods and was instantly gone from view.

  “Too easy.” Jet surveyed the jungle for some way to get off the ground. “It’s going to come back with more of them, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” Jet said. “You built this sim from the microbot footage.”