Instead, the Ulltrian shrieked, and then crouched to jump at him.
Bria burst from the fallen hut. Her fur was matted, wet all over with her purple-dark blood. In two leaps she landed on the eye-studded front carapace of the Ulltrian.
Bria’s armor loped into the clearing now, coming to her call, but in the fierce fight it would be impossible for Bria to put the suit on.
Tarkos cursed. He could not fire into this twirling mass of fighting Sussurat and Ulltrian. He would have to jump into the fray.
An alarm pinged in his armor. A sensor array in his armor had been triggered. An immense probability field and an equally immense electromagnetic field grew around them now, ramping exponentially more powerful. Tarkos turned in place, looking for the source. His gaze settled on the river: something swelled up, bulging the surface, lifting a rising mound of swirling water.
A ship. A ship rose from the center of the broad river.
“Damn.” Tarkos sent a command to their cruiser, telling it to fire up the engines and come to him. Then he threw himself at the Ulltrian.
Just at that moment the Ulltrian kicked Bria with two of its strangely twisting chitinous arms. Bria slammed back into the wall of a hut, shattering through pale boards. Tarkos leapt into her place and struck the Ulltrian, but the monster retreated, stumbling away from him, and slipped around a Yanomamo hut. Tarkos did not dare fire a heavy weapon at it: as far as he knew, people crouched, hiding, in any or all of these huts.
He ran after the Ulltrian, following it toward the river. It dodged between huts, leapt over a stunned child, and swung around a tree, always five paces before Tarkos. He couldn’t catch up. And then the Ulltrian leapt past the edge of the village, and in a bound startling for its size shot over the river bank and into the current. A huge splash of brown water shot up in its wake.
Tarkos jumped in after it. The brown, muddy water closed over his field of view. He called up a sonar image, and saw an outline of the Ulltrian shoot away with surprising speed into the depths. The Ulltrians had evolved from amphibians, and were still fast in water, even given their bulk and seemingly unhydrodynamic shape. In a moment the sonar image became a muddle as the Ulltrian shot past fish and debris.
The water shuddered, a heavy pulse slamming into his armor: the Ulltrian ship had moved. Tarkos knew he couldn’t catch up down here. The Ulltrian would be inside the ship soon. He climbed back up the bank quickly, his armor’s boots digging deep into the muddy bank.
He reached the top of the bank in time to see the Ulltrian ship rise from the river, streaming brown water. For a moment, Tarkos’s training failed, and he simply stared in awe. A birdlike shape of black and gray, but covered all over with twisting black spikes, the ship looked more like some monstrous medieval torture device than an interstellar vessel. It looked like ire and death. The probability field around it made his head swoon, his gorge rise.
And then the ship disappeared, shooting for the horizon. The surface of the river exploded into white foam from the wake of its engines.
Tarkos called to their ship, now above the village. It slid toward him, snapping huge tree branches as it forced its way down to the river bank. The ramp on the bottom lowered. When it came within two meters of the ground Tarkos leapt, and caught the ramp with a single hand. The gecko grip fibers in the glove held tight, and the power assisted arm let him pull himself and the heavy armor up onto the ramp.
A boom shook the air. A second sonic boom from the Ulltrian ship echoing back across the forest.
“Damn,” Tarkos cursed. He would have to get into the pilot seat before he dared any aggressive acceleration. He scrambled up onto the deck, eyes adjusting to the dark interior. Water and mud streamed off his armor, puddling on the floor. He snapped open the helmet, and breathed the musty smell of the mud and vegetation that clung his armor. He crawled quickly to the control seats, and climbed up into the human command chair. Acceleration straps wrapped themselves around him.
Tactical screens showed nothing. The Ulltrian ship was radar and probably now visual light invisible. He told the computer to look for sonic and atmospheric disturbance, and use the speed of sound to project a location and course. That did it: the retreating Ulltrian ship appeared on the tactical screens, near the horizon and racing East toward the sea. He turned on the inertial dampers, but there was no time to wait for them to come up to full power. He pointed at the figure on the screen. “Pursue!” he shouted. “Maximum acceleration.”
His head slammed back, and he blacked out.
_____
When consciousness returned, he heard Bria growling over the comms, “Tarkos, report.”
“Uh,” he grunted. The world came back in spots and shimmering stripes of color. He sank heavily down into his seat, but probably only at two gees. He’d not thought that last order through: the ship could accelerate at many e-gees. He looked at the tactical and saw they’d been moving at seven e-gees for forty seconds.
“I’m here,” he grunted.
“Slowed ship,” Bria said. “Too fast.”
“How are you?” he asked. “You looked pretty beat up back there.”
Bria ignored the question. On the tactical screen, Tarkos saw the Ulltrian ship pull far ahead, maintaining ten gees. It shot out over the Atlantic.
“I’m going to speed up to three gees,” he told Bria. “The inertial dampers are warmed up. They should kick in after a while.”
“Acceptable.”
He sent the command and felt himself squeezed farther into his seat. But he did not pass out. He called up a downward view. Land shot by below.
“Why did it show itself to me?” Tarkos asked. “We didn’t know it was there. I never would have suspected that an Ulltrian was on Earth. It could have evaded us.”
Long silence followed. Tarkos knew Bria must be thinking hard. Finally, she said, “Human woman.”
“Right,” Tarkos said. “She said something about the Ulltrian did not know she was there, until she spoke to us. Until she called to it, I think she said.”
“It wants her.”
“She must be very important,” Tarkos agreed, “If catching her is worth exposing itself. Is she alive?”
“Broken neck. Many other bones. Bleeding, inside and out. Will live.”
To Tarkos, that didn’t sound like a diagnosis you could survive. But he would take Bria’s word for it. Yeats, and local medical facilities, were probably already on the case.
Shimmering sea suddenly filled his downward view. He checked the tactical view. “I’ve got a weak neutrino signature from the ship. I can track it now. Hey, wait a minute. The Ulltrian ship is deaccelerating. Hard. Almost coming to a stop. No. Wait. It disappeared.”
“Dove,” Bria said.
“Damn. You’re right. It dove. It had to slow: hitting water at the speed it was going would be like hitting stone. It came to a near stop, and dropped into the sea. I’ll be over the spot in a few minutes. I’m deaccelerating.”
He steered the ship low over the water, till he could see out of the crystal windows before him to the white caps of individual waves. When the ship slowed to a hover, he dropped altitude.
Even managing a slow descent, he hit the blue water hard, bounced in his seat, and then was slammed down as a big wave pummeled the ship. But in seconds the swaying stopped and he was under the surface. He closed the blast doors over the windows and switched to camera views and sonar.
The ship comms switched over to hyperradio, so it could transmit through the water. “I’ve got a sonar fix. It’s diving, hard and fast. Aiming for a deep sea trench.”
“Cruiser not made for high pressure,” Bria answered back.
Which was true. But their ship could take sitting on the bottom of the sea for a few hours. The real problem was that the stealthing, and the shields, could not work in the thick and conducting fluid. Nor would most of their weapons. He throttled the engines forward. The inertial dampers were warmed up now: he did not feel the change as the ship dov
e.
In a few minutes he was a kilometer below the surface. Visuals were useless: it was darker than space down there. He had the computer reconstruct the clearest images it could using sonar, and turned on every other passive sensor. The tactical showed them passing a huge cliff, plummeting into ever greater depths, still several kilometers behind the Ulltrian ship.
“It’s not moving fast,” Tarkos reported. “The Ulltrian ship is maybe too big to outrun me in this water.”
Bria did not answer. Tarkos started to wonder what he should do when he caught up with the Ulltrian. Demand its surrender? Find some suitable weapon that might work at these pressures and try to disable the ship? But Ulltrians were famed to have never surrendered. That’s why the war lasted until—or so the Galactics had thought—the genocide of the Ulltrian species. And he certainly knew nothing about the strange, spiked-covered Ulltrian ship. He wouldn’t know how to disable it.
“Bria,” he said. “I’m getting close. I could use some advice on what to—”
“Forgive the intrusion,” a familiar voice called, “but you must, if I may say so with as much urgency as courtesy—nay, even discourtesy—allows, you must retreat from this dark trench immediately.”
“Wicklepick?” Tarkos called. Even in his present circumstances, he was surprised by the brevity of the Thrumpit’s sentence. It must have been the equivalent of a short shout for it to use so few words. “How’d you get on this hyperradio frequency?”
“Implant,” Bria hissed.
Tarkos grunted. He’d never heard of a hyperradio implant.
“I’m sorry, Wicklepick, but—”
“Forgive again, I beg, this intrusion, Harmonizer, but consider: a Predator Cruiser—a fine ship I’m sure and one that a humble individual like myself, a mere mycologist, without adequate training in engineering, can only marvel at with admiration and admitted ignorance—nonetheless, such a ship, without shields, in a highly dense fluid, is vulnerable, the most basic physics would tell us, because of the vigor of the resultant shock waves that a single explosion could generate—which in turn, if one follows my reasoning and the very basic physics I mean to cite—could crush the ship, or tear it into shreds, given—”
“Ascend!” Bria ordered.
Tarkos flipped the ship around, and then aimed the nose for the sky, trusting the ship’s instruments because all visual cues were absent in the black down here. He gunned the engines. The ship responded sluggishly.
“Oh no,” he said, as he looked down at the tactical.
“What?” Bria demanded.
“The Ulltrian ship just took off at a godawful speed. It was just baiting me, drawing me into the trench. The trench, where the two walls will squeeze an explosion even tighter.”
He just started to gain speed when alarms howled as a blast of radiation slammed into the hull. Behind him, deep in the trench, an explosion had gone off. More radiation, and then the sound, washed over the ship. Tarkos knew the shockwave of the explosion would be shortly behind. He gripped the seat, and told his armor to close his helmet visor. He told the ship to turn on its shields, and promptly received an error message because the sea-water was shorting the field.
“Inertial dampers brace for impact,” he told the ship. “And maximize acceleration.”
The ship sped faster as it rose into less dense water. Dim light showed on the view ahead.
The explosion hit. Inside the inertial field, Tarkos hardly felt it, but alarms shrieked from the control panel. A grinding whine emanated from the hull. Spaceship hulls did not whine, unless things were very bad. The view ahead was filled with turbulence and bubbles, but it brightened, brightened—
And then the ship burst through the surface, and into the air. He switched the view to backwards, and saw a huge bulge of rising water form on the ocean, and then explode up, casting fuming white sea at him.
“Thanks, Wicklepick,” Tarkos said. “You just saved my life. That was a terrible explosion. Anti-matter bomb. Or a tactical nuke.”
“Serious lifecode violation,” Bria said.
The Thrumpit began a very long sentence explaining it was a pleasure to be of service. Bria cut in: “Other Predator ships come there to hunt. Return. We have what the Ulltrian wants. We have advantage. We protect the human woman.”
The ship felt uneven—some damage to the hull might have harmed the engines—but the inertial dampers were fully functioning still. Tarkos leveled the flight path, and headed back to the Amazon, a sonic boom screaming in his wake.
CHAPTER 10
“We’ll be at the Harmonizer Headquarters in an hour,” Tarkos said, checking the controls. He turned and looked back at the strange human woman, now unconscious and laying in the autodoc bed that the ship had extruded. The controls of the autodoc blinked unhappily: they were uncertain of whether to attempt to remove the vicious implants in the woman’s cracked skull. Choosing caution, Tarkos had told the autodoc to keep her stable but attempt no repairs. In Paris, the doctors and machines would be far more sophisticated.
He had retrieved Bria, Yeats, and the mutilated woman after his escape from the Ulltrian trap. As their cruiser settled, steaming heat, onto the waving grass, Wicklepick had performed an extremely long request, transmitted also over radio so that Tarkos could hear, urging Bria to allow the Thrumpit to come with them. But Bria had asked Wicklepick to remain behind and, as a Galactic Citizen, make apologies and arrange for restitution to the Yanamamo. Fortunately, not one of their tribe had been hurt, though several homes had been destroyed during the short battle with the Ulltrian. The Thrumpit, seemingly proud to be deputized, agreed to the mission.
“On account, and conditional on the request, that I be made privy and partner to your endeavors to stop this Ulltrian menace that, it is no exaggeration to say, threatens all Galactic civilization, even were there only a handful of these creatures yet alive and acting in secret consort on worlds such as this, Earth, newest potential member to the Alliance that has so long afforded all its members the graces of a civilization that is, I do not hesitate to say, numinous in its achievements and sometimes beneficence, and which it is my duty to represent in its scholarly endeavors since I am the only member of the Galactic Science Academy that is present on Earth and witness to these events, the greater moiety of my duty being to—”
“Yes,” Bria interrupted. What she had assented to, or promised, Tarkos could not fathom.
Once aloft, Yeats paced the ship, except during their brief microgravity apogee, dividing her time between scowling at Bria and Tarkos, and looking with concern at the human woman. Tarkos felt intimidated by her scowl, but he felt some relief when, after they settled into their descent, Yeats looked at him, the scratches on his dirty armor, the blood caked on Bria’s fur, down at their patient, and then out at the horizon and Europe below them, and said, “Are we being invaded?”
“No,” Tarkos told her. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”
When the Pyrenees shot by under them, Tarkos stole some glances at Bria’s wounds. Two gaping cuts along her shoulder were visible to him. Seemingly indifferent to the oozing blood, his commander worked through diagnostic screens, assessing the damage to the hull of their cruiser. Tarkos wanted to tell her to climb into the spare autodoc, but he knew that his Commander would ignore him if he spoke of her wounds. She always found it impertinent if he showed any concern about her well being. So, without the commander’s notice or approval, he instead sent ahead an extra message to the ground crew waiting in Paris, letting them know that Bria also had suffered wounds. Then Tarkos took the opportunity to unstrap and walk back to Yeats’s side.
“What was that?” she said. “Wicklepick said it was an Ulltrian. Was that one of them? An Ulltrian?”
Tarkos nodded.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew it was there.”
“No. I absolutely did not. I never dreamed that one was on Earth.”
“Right,” she said. “You didn’t tell me and I guess I understand that. I’m no
t inside your Galactic Alliance elite. And I can’t be trusted.”
“That’s unfair,” Tarkos said. “I knew there were Ulltrians alive out in the Galaxy. But everyone knows that, after the attack on Neelee-ornor. But no one suspected one was here.”
She glared at him. “Do you understand what this means? You have to tell people. And when people know, the referendum will fail.”
Tarkos frowned. “You can’t tell people.”
“We have a right to know. Human beings have a right to know. This is our planet.”
“Agreed. But right now we are hunting them. Secrecy might help us. And we cannot just announce that Ulltrians are here. Most people don’t even understand the history. They won’t even be able to distinguish between Ulltrians and the species of the Alliance.”
“That’s not for you to decide!” Yeats shouted. Tarkos noticed in the corner of his eye that Bria flinched. But she did not turn around. No need to. With her ears, she heard every word of this conversation, and watched a translation stream through her eyes while she steered.
Yeats closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again she said, carefully. “It’s not for you to decide. People should know.”
Tarkos shook his head. “You have sworn to maintain security protocols. We have to know what’s happening before we know what to announce. And if there is any chance that keeping this secret will help us catch that Ulltrian, then we’ll have to keep this secret. And that is not for you or me to decide.”
Yeats looked down at the woman in the autodoc.
“This is what’s going to happen to all of us, isn’t it?”
“Not while Bria and I are alive.”
She touched the glass. “Why would they do this?”
“The Ulltrians… experiment with their prisoners.”
“What about revenge?” Yeats said. “Could they want revenge for their defeat in the great war?”
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