“To stop the ghota?”
“To back what I do. Don’t you understand it yet, minnow? You will.” Static sputtered, Duun’s hand at the side of his mask clicking the other channel in. “How are we doing?”
“Dsonan’s screen’s going to drop in a minute to let us through,” the pilot’s voice came to them. “It’s hot up ahead. Two missile strikes got to the base. The 3rd Wing’s going to throw everything they’ve got at them while we get in, sey Duun.”
“Gods save them,” Duun muttered. “Gods save us all. Do it right, Manan.”
“Damn sure trying.”
Thorn eased over to look out the canopy as best he could. There was no sight of anything beyond their wings, beyond the pitiless sun and the endless sky.
Static snapped again. “Not to make you nervous, minnow,” Duun said, “but what that means is Dsonan’s keying its missile defenses down to give us a window to get in, and don’t ask me what happens if something glitches. Kosanin are moving to be sure nothing gets through that gap for the five critical minutes it’s going to take us to get through that screen. Then it goes up behind us. When we get on the ground we get over that side and off that wing: and it’s going to be hotter than hell. You go down that wing edge and jump once I’m down. I’ll steady you in landing. Don’t think about anything, just run for that shuttle pad and go.”
“Shuttle?”
“Tallest thing you’ll see in front of you.”
“I know what it looks like! Where are we going?”
“Station.”
Static snapped. The nose of the plane dipped in a dive. Altitude traded for speed.
(“Mach two plus if it has to.”)
Thorn trembled. There was pain, pain from his burns, from warmth; he gasped at the sluggish thin feed of the mask and his nose and throat and eyes were raw. Sweat ran on him. There was a high strange sound, a sense that quivered through his bones and bowels like elemental fear. (I’m scared, Duun; Duun, I don’t want to die like this—)
There was a blur ahead of them, the first substance there had been, a shadow in front of them, a blaze of light.
(That’s ground coming up, that’s the river— O gods, that’s ground, the city—)
Pressure began, a constriction of his limbs, the pain again— the world tilted violently and became half earth and sky split vertically, flipped straight again as Thorn felt the straining of the straps. (They’ll break, I’ll go up and into the canopy, I can’t hold on—)
Then another force slammed in, and they were losing speed. One ear failed to pop, reached a painful point and pressure went on and on in acute agony that made one fabric with other things.
Smoke on the horizon. Smoke palling the city in the one direction, a gray blur to either side.
A runway ribboned out of the forward perspective, a straight pale line ahead. The plane came in knife-straight, sank on its haunches in a long jarring rush before the thunder of the reversing engines made headway against their speed. More speed down. More. Tires squealed and the jets roared again as a gantry loomed up, a shuttle poised like a white tower against the smoke-stained sky. On the horizon a red sun burst and swelled and faded. Another, burning bright.
Closer and closer. The plane jolted and thumped and rocked over uneven pavement; there was a truck coming toward them. The plane’s canopy retracted and metal stank, pinging and popping with heat. Duun reached and yanked connections as the engines whined down: popped Thorn’s belt and his own, stood up and vaulted the side. Thorn scrambled up on the seat, flinched at heat and saw Duun spring from the wing’s back edge to the truckbed and go to one knee as he landed; Thorn rolled over the side and hit the wing as Duun got up, strode once on a yielding surface and leapt for the truckbed and Duun’s arms.
Duun and he both went down, rolled, and the truck lurched into motion, leaving the plane dwindling behind. On the horizon more suns burst, and one flowered in the sky and faded in a smudge of smoke.
Duun held onto him. Thorn trembled, felt Duun unfasten his mask for him and let him fill his lungs with cold gasps of air. Duun clenched him the tighter as the truck whined and jolted and the gantry towered into view, white girders against the smoke-ravaged sky. It braked. “Out,” Duun said, and helped him balance as he got up, vaulted the rear of the truck to the ground and was there to steady him when his feet hit the pavement.
“Come on. Run!” Duun dragged him for the gantry, for the white wall that was a shuttle fin. There was an elevator, its door open, and a woman who motioned at them hurry, hurry, in a violence like an oath. They made it in: the woman shut the door and moved a bar-switch that set them moving up. The whole elevator reeked of their suits and sweat and fear, and Thorn staggered as it lifted. Duun’s hand met his chest. “Hold on, dammit, Thorn! Hold on!”
Thorn locked his knees, leaned on the wall with his forearm. Girders whipped past the window in a blur; then the woman jammed down the switch and the car slammed to a stop. The door opened, showing them a thick-walled open hatch.
“Come on,” Duun said, and shoved Thorn into it and followed. Thorn looked back in distress as explosions came like distant thunder.
Still outside, the woman swung the hatch shut, disappearing in a diminishing crescent of the murky sunlight. Thump. (What about her?) The world seemed an unsafe place, no place to leave alone. But Duun spun him about and all but threw him into a seat in this cubbyhole of a place, one of three seats built flat on this dimly lighted floor.
“Belt in,” Duun said, and Thorn groped for belts as Duun fell into his seat and got them, fastened them for him and got his own helmet off. Duun hugged it to his breast and pushed a button on the arm of the seat. “We’re set, we’re set back here.”
“Understand you clear.”
Thorn stripped his helmet off with his wrists; Duun helped him, bent and stowed it in a bin in the floor beside his seat. The lid latched and echoed hollowly. Thorn lay there breathing in great gasps while Duun secured his own belts. “They’re waiting on the attendant to get down the escape route,” Duun said, his own head back, his eyes shut. “Driver of that truck’s got to get out too.”
“What about the plane?”
“Maran and Koga— they’re headed out and over to Drenn. Refuel and up again. It’s their wing that’s taking the beating out there. They’ll have a window— ours: they’ve got to take that missile screen down again for us to clear this port.”
(People are dying. Everywhere those shells go off. All those people—)
A thunder began to grow. (They’re hitting close to us.) Sweat flooded Thorn’s body in a sickly sense of doom; then the sound went to his bones and the force came down on him, dizzying and all-encompassing. Another thunder began, pieces of the ship rattling, as if it was all coming apart. (We won’t make it, we won’t make it— some missile will stop us.)
The weight grew, pressing him down into the couch.
They were leaving the world. Everything. There was void ahead, incomprehensible and without end.
(I looked up at the moon and tried to see where they were, but of course I couldn’t.)
(The world’s wide, minnow, wider than you know.)
(The world’s beautiful. Haven’t you seen it in pictures?)
XIV
There was peace, eerie peace and stillness, in which moving cost little and breathing cost far less. A gentle air touched Thorn’s face and a breeze stirred against his cheek.
Duun floated above him, balanced crazily on one arm that gripped the back of the seat. Thorn blinked, and Duun freed him of the restraints. A little move of Thorn’s arm against the seat freed him from the cushion.
“We’re up,” Thorn murmured. “We’re up.”
“Where the worlds spin, yes. You can be easy awhile, minnow. It’s a great ocean you’ve come to. It’s easy to move and easy to move too far.” Duun grinned at him. (Can he smile after all that? Can he be happy
? Can anyone ever, after that?)
Duun pulled gently at his wrist— “Keep your arm stiff. Never mind, don’t try to hold.” The fastenings of the flightsuit gave way. Duun’s own suit drifted in pieces, loosed at chest and wrists and ankles. Duun worked him free: torque set them spinning and they drifted together while the cabin revolved slowly about them.
Freedom, then, Thorn drifted, shut his eyes in exhaustion, half-slitted them to watch Duun come and go through a hole he had not seen before. A hatch had opened above them. In the lazy spin Thorn caught sight of white light, of shonun bodies that drifted to and fro about some business. Duun went up to that place and sailed down again like some graceful diver. Duun’s ears were up; his eyes were lively and bright.
(He knows this, he knows all of it, he’s been this way more than once.)
“Where are we going, Duun?”
“Hush. Rest. People are busy.”
“What’s happened to the world?”
“It’s still there. Fighting’s centered mostly now around the shuttleports and Avenen and Suunviden, but it’s dying down now— now that we’re away and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”
“Why did we do it? Where are we going?”
“Why, why, and why? There’s a shower on board. I’m going to use it. When I have I’m going to tape some plastic around those hands of yours and make you pleasanter company.” Duun drifted off from him. Thorn twisted in midair and saw him disappear down yet another hole. Thorn tried to maneuver himself, spun and brought up against the cushions, remembering only at the last moment not to use his hands; he rebounded helplessly and drifted, waiting.
• • •
A vacuum went on in the shower and Thorn watched the water droplets run in clinging trails until they were gone and the lamp dried him. He elbowed the latch and drifted out again, turned once in midair in slow revolution before Duun snagged him and wrapped a plain blue kilt about him, tugged the self-belt about his waist with a touch familiar years ago, exactly the snugness, exactly the way Duun had done it then— Thorn looked into Duun’s face from a grownup angle, met him eye-to-eye when Duun finished with the small pat on the side he had given him when he was small. Time went backward and forward, spun like the room.
“Follow me,” Duun said, trod on the cabinet wall and drifted upward with unerring grace through the narrow hatch.
Thorn kicked off, angled his body with what grace he could manage and sailed through in Duun’s wake, followed him again, up into a light, into the mind and heart of the shuttle where crew came and went.
They stared— (they shocked; they want to be polite; they don’t know whether to stare or not, whether staring’s honest or only rude.) Duun drifted on and stopped and Thorn imitated his move, ignoring the stares— (The world in flames. They ought to hate me. I don’t blame them. I was born for it.) And he floated strangely free, taking all their blame, ignoring their eyes on his smooth pale skin, suffering Duun’s grip on his arm that drew him toward the window.
The bright blue world— was there. Its fires were invisible. The perspective denied everything— the fires became one more illusion beyond a window; his life shrank to invisible scale, lived out on a mountain and in a city whose burning could not even stain the clouds.
He stared and stared, and the tears beaded in his eyes until his blinking drove them. He wiped his eyes and a droplet floated free from his fingertip, perfect, a wobbling orb like the world in space.
“Do you love it?” Duun asked. “Do you love it, minnow?”
“Yes,” Thorn said when he could say anything at all. He wiped his eyes again. “It’s still there.”
“So long as you aren’t on it,” Duun said, and it was truth; he had seen it. Thorn’s chest ached. He put out a hand and touched the window and the world.
• • •
The ship left the world, while they belted in below. The engines kicked them hard and long.
Thorn shut his eyes. I can’t sleep, I can never sleep, he told himself, but the strength ebbed out of him and he felt the pain reminding him of what he was and what it cost, constantly, like the beats of his heart. “Drink,” Duun said, and fed him something through a straw that he wanted no more of after the first sip. “Drink it.” Again, in that voice that had drilled him all his life, and it left no choice. Thorn drank, and slept; and when he woke Duun slept by his side— his unscarred side toward him, that side that gave its own illusions, of what Duun had been before.
Thorn shut his eyes again. (Is Sagot alive? Did Manan and the other pilot live? The guild— did the missiles defend it?)
(Children standing on the rock at Sheon, seeing red suns bloom on their horizons. Smoke palls the sky. Thunder shakes the ground.)
(In the halls at Dsonen people run in confusion, not knowing where to go.)
The sun whirls past the canopy and men like great insects manage the controls. The plane hangs in the sky and time stops. The war goes on in a moment frozen forever, all war, all time.
Sagot sits in her lonely hall. There is thunder. She sits frail and imposing at the end of that room, waiting in front of all the empty desks.
A shuttle flies in place and the universe rushes past it, sweeping the world out of its reach.
• • •
There were mundane things. There had to be: there were bodily needs, and Thorn cared stubbornly for himself, once Duun had shown him how things worked; there was a breakfast of sorts, and Thorn found his hands a little less painful. Crew came drifting through their compartment in the urge of like necessities and coming back again. There was still the surreal about it, like the drifting course they took, a leisurely pace, a slowness like a dream.
“Where are we going, Duun?”
“Gatog.”
“Is that the station?” Thorn had never heard it called that.
“It’s one of them.” Duun said.
(Is there more than one?) Sagot’s teaching developed cracks, fractured in doubts. (Is no truth entire?)
“We had a report,” Duun said, “the ghotanin have sent a messenger to Tangan offering to talk. The kosan guild refused at first, but they’re going to relent.”
“Is that part of your solution?” Thorn asked. His mind worked again. Duun looked at him with that closed hatani stare to match what Thorn gave him.
“Balance is,” Duun said. “It was never my intention to destroy the ghota.”
“They call you sey Duun.”
“It’s a courtesy these days.”
“You led kosanin?”
“Once.”
No more than that. Duun would not be led.
More of sleep and meals and bodies. The gel on his hands began to peel. The crew grew familiar: Ghindi, Spart, Mogannen, Weig. Half-names. Pet-names. But it was enough. Duun knew them and talked with them in quiet tones, and talked sometimes with voices on the radio from one end or the other of their journey.
None of it concerned Thorn. And everything did. He eavesdropped in mortal dread and caught nothing but city names and Gatog’s name and jargon after that.
Intercept, Thorn heard once, and his heart delayed a beat. He looked Duun’s way and kept looking Duun’s way when Duun stopped the conversation.
“Minnow,” Duun said to him, drifting toward Thorn. And nodded to him that he ought to follow.
Duun drifted down into the place they slept in and came to a graceful stop. Thorn reached with his foot and a half-healed hand and did almost as well. “Are there ghotanin here?” Thorn asked.
“Maybe there are,” Duun said. “They’re not our job to fight.”
“Is it a game?” Thorn asked in anger. “Am I supposed to discover what we’re going to? Where I am? Isn’t it over, Duun?”
Duun looked at him in a strange, distant way. “It’s only beginning. It’s not the right question. Haras-hatani. None of those is the right
question.”
Thorn grew very still inside.
“Think on it.” Duun said. “Tell me when you know.”
The void that had sped past him, about him, shrank to a single familiar dimension.
(“Again,” Duun said, standing over him on the sand. “Again.”)
Thorn sucked in a breath and stared at Duun as Duun pushed off and soared up through the lighted hatchway like some sleek gray man-sized fish.
(He’s been waiting for me. Where have I been? Where has my mind been? It was pity he felt for me.)
(He belongs here. This is his element, like Sheon; and the city-tower and the guild-hall never were.)
Thorn pushed off and extended his body the way Duun had, with the same grace, conscious of it. He came up into the light of the crew-compartment, found his touch-point with one sure motion and drifted to the counter-hold he sought, there where he could see Duun and the others.
They were receiving and sending messages again. Duun listened and answered in that jargon again which made little sense. “Is it custom,” Thorn asked when there was a lull, “to talk like that; or have we enemies up here?”
“Is that your question?” Duun asked.
“I’ll tell you when I ask it.” Thorn held to the counter and felt the sensitivity of his burns. “If this is an ocean, this minnow had better learn to swim. He should have learned days ago.”
Duun looked at him and slanted his ears back in an expression Thorn had seen a thousand times. “There are enemies. The same as we met on earth. The companies who maintain factories and mines up here use ghotanin for guards. And some of them have ships. Not like the shuttle. The shuttle’s not built for what we’re doing. Ships are moving, some friendly, some not. We’ve burned all the fuel we have getting out of earth’s pull. It wasn’t a scheduled launch. It was the reserve shuttle we used. One’s always kept launch-ready: the companies like their schedules kept. And getting it powered up without letting Shbit and the ghotanin trace that order to me— that took some work.”
(You knew it all in advance, then. Dammit, Duun—)
The Deep Beyond: Cuckoo's Egg / Serpent's Reach Page 18
