by Richard Fox
“You let the others down there!” a Toiler shouted.
“Blooded and a Constable, thank the gods.” The young man slapped his chest twice in greeting. “I don’t…I’m assigned to this shelter and—”
“How many are in there?” Pyth stopped at the top of the stairs and held his arm up to keep some space between himself and the crowd.
“I have eighteen children, seven elderly, and nine…of age. I’m only supposed to have thirty in here and—”
“Wait here,” he said to Lussea and pushed past the youth. He unsnapped the cover off his flashlight and turned it on by biting down on the button. Clutching it beneath the fingers holding his pistol, he swept it over the shelter.
Small families clutched at each other in the dark, mostly family groups with grandparents and a few fathers, but there were a half-dozen Royal males in the corner.
“This is for women and children,” Pyth said. “King’s edict.”
“Do you have any idea who we are?” one of the males said. “We’re Countess Qaurana’s nephews, and we’re not going to have some brute like you tell us—”
Pyth cracked him across the crown of his head with the butt of his pistol. The Royal’s eyes rolled back and he fell into the arms of the others.
“Women and children. Unless that matches your description—or you’re on the honor rolls of the elderly or combat-disabled—then get out of this bunker or I’ll shoot you where you stand. You’re not going to steal the air from those that need it more!”
The group of Royals considered their options then quickly retreated from the bunker.
“We’ve got your name, Pyth!” one shouted.
“Tell your aunt I said you were a bunch of arseholes too!” He gave a few more encouraging snarls to lone adults and cleared out a decent amount of room in the shelter.
“There’s another at the corner of 2nd and Riktan’s Gift,” the Blooded at the entrance said to those leaving.
“If you’re supposed to be in here, get in here.” Pyth went to the door and shouldered up next to the guard as more civilians came down. “What’re your orders, unblooded? And what’s your name?”
“Bandar…sir. Orders are…ah…Don’t overload the bunker. Ration food and water and…oh gods, I don’t remember,” he said, still counting noses as more came down to fill the bunker.
“Keep the peace. Songs and prayer go a long way, trust me on this.” Pyth put his flashlight away. “You’ve got one space left.”
Lussea stood at the bottom of the stairs, just outside the bunker.
“Daddy, you should stay,” she said. “You’re combat-injured.”
Pyth looked down at his badge and sash, then gave her a quick hug. He turned and shoved her into the bunker, then bounded up the stairs, ignoring his daughter’s cries, though his heart ached to leave her.
Heavy doors shut behind him and he heard the locks engage.
Pyth slammed the cover down on the bunker stairs, then looked over those still there. Most were terrified Toiler men, flinching with each boom that carried through the city.
“I fought beside those just like you during the war. We did it to protect our families from Slaver trash and it’s time to do it again. There’s a constable force at the Linker quarter nearby. Come with me and I’ll see you get weapons and we’ll fight…whatever this is,” Pyth said.
“But what are they? Demons? I heard there was a lost Slaver kingdom in the Storm Seas and now they’re—”
“I don’t care what—or who—it is.” Pyth’s jaw clenched as he thought of Clay and whatever he really was. “Standing here crying about it won’t make the situation any better. Now you either come with me and fight or run off and—”
Several of the Toilers turned and ran.
“Bloody typical,” Pyth sighed. “The rest of you with a bit of steel in your balls, follow me.”
He ran toward Clay’s house, his lungs burning and sweat pouring off his face by the time he got there. A few from the bunker managed to keep up.
“Pyth!” his lieutenant shouted from the ring of officers around the dark pit where the Clays’ home used to be. Most were in various stages of riot gear, some looking like they’d just gotten out of bed and only had time to don their sash and boots. A crowd was trying to force their way through the cordon. “Get over here!”
Pyth holstered his weapon and started flinging Tyr aside until he got to the cordon and squeezed through a pair of officers. He made his way to the lieutenant’s vehicle, where the other Tyr had a radio to one ear.
“You’ve got someone?” Pyth asked.
“No. All the freqs have gone to shit. I’m just trying to look like I’ve got a clue.” The lieutenant shrugged. “You have any idea what in the Far Darkness is happening?”
“Weird fighters in the sky. Big bolts of light destroying the Spring Bridge.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the pit. “That bronto shit. It’s adding up to…I barely know either.”
“Here,” the lieutenant said, tossing him a baton. “Your family safe?”
“My girl’s in the park bunker. My wife…I don’t know. She should be OK. Lieutenant, why are we guarding a hole in the ground?”
“Because no one’s told me to go anywhere else!”
A beam of light—so bright that it washed out all color around Pyth and stung his eyes—hit the car. Screams rose around him and he kept one hip against the car to keep his bearing as the cordon failed and Tyr went running blind.
The light shifted to the pit and Pyth steadied himself at what he saw.
A craft floated silently overhead, though he felt a constant thrum in his chest from something. The light washed out what he could see at the front, but the back had two stubby wings with open rings, the space within wavering like it was over a fire.
There was a hiss of air, and a single green point burned even brighter than the floodlight. A bolt shot down and struck the pit just before an explosion slammed the side of the trunk against Pyth and he went tumbling over the back and hit the ground hard.
Pyth wasn’t sure how long he lay there, but when he got up, he found the lieutenant nearby…dead, a hole burnt through his chest. Pyth rolled onto one side and looked back to the park where he’d left his daughter.
Fire.
Infernos roared through the buildings around the park and smoke darkened the sky.
“Lussea!” He reached out weakly, feeling all the broken bones in one leg and pain through his ribs. He flopped onto his face and pulled himself forward with his one arm.
Someone grabbed him by the ankles and another man picked him up.
He howled in pain—and grief—as they carried him away.
Chapter 47
Sazon heard the chanting in the air and smelled the burning gasoline, more pungent than the smoke that lingered over the wrecked air base. She brought the top of her blouse up to cover her nose and mouth with one hand, while the other clutched clothes and a glass bottle to her chest.
She hurried down a line of cargo trucks, the faint light of a flashlight in the back of a covered cargo bed tipping her off and telling her where to go. She got to the truck and lifted her chin, which barely came over the level of the floor bed.
“Clay?” she asked a seated figure cast in shadow by a weak flashlight. A crate covered by a tarp was in front of him.
“Right spot. You have it?” Clay asked.
“I do.” She slid the clothes with the bottle on top toward him, then struggled to get a foot onto the handlebar at the bottom of the open tailgate. Clay grabbed her by the wrist and lifted her up.
“My, this is…quaint.” She ran her hand along a wooden bench on one side of the truck bed.
“The Blooded might tell you that the worst ride is better than the best walk,” Clay said. He tugged on the flashlight and it lengthened to expose a glass cylinder around the bulb, flooding the truck bed with light from the flashlight-turned-lantern.
The bandage over his eye was gone and Sazon could see Clay�
�s true skin beneath.
“I should have my camera for this,” she said.
“So someone could find it and watch the movie without knowing what they’re seeing?” Clay popped a cork on the bottle and sniffed the contents “Good. This is good.”
He poured drops of deep-green oil into his palm, then slapped it against his damaged synth.
“Why is it so important to keep to a skin-care routine?” Sazon asked. “My matron would never stop pestering me about my ketafik. ‘Have to have that gentle, downy complexion or you’ll be married off to a landlord with grish herds.’”
“Being on a grish pasture doesn’t sound so bad right now, does it?” Clay took his oily palm away and turned his head to Sazon. “How’s it look?”
“Should it be…foaming?”
“Yes, that’s my synth layer recombining the fats and protein in the oil into new tissue. Easy enough to repair the occasional ouchy boo-boo. Exposing it to fire slows down the repairs considerably,” Clay said, applying more oil.
“How much damage can it take?” Sazon poked a finger at the bubbling section of Clay’s forehead, but he pushed her hand away.
“So long as there’s still some of the synth layer attached to the nerve bridges along my spine, it will regrow completely. Every synth is made for the user. They’re implanted as tiny patches up and down my nervous system, takes up to a year to grow in fully.”
The clang of metal on metal and a low roar from dozens of throats rose in the distance.
“Blooded,” Sazon said, “their customs are always so…strange.”
“They’re chasing away the spirits from the bodies of the slain,” Clay said. “A ritual as old as their caste has records for.”
“And they won’t let anyone but Blooded participate, even their Royal commanders. It always strikes me as an act of defiance. Did you know that non-Blooded are forbidden from even touching one of their dead? There’s even…” her voice lowered to a whisper, “there’s even a curse for watching the pyres burn.”
“I know, which works out for us. No one’s looking for us during the ceremony. We can go through what was salvaged from the ship.” Clay removed the tarp and Sazon clapped excitedly.
The crate was of human manufacture. Tiny gold hexagons formed a network over the green exterior.
“Graphene-composite.” Clay rapped his knuckles on the top. “You could drive a tank over this and not break it.” He slid a latch to one side and there was a hiss of air as the top cracked open. He lifted it off and his jaw worked from side to side.
“What did we get? A repository of alien knowledge? An energy source that can destroy the mothership? Recordings of erotic art?”
Clay leaned away from her and raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t keep me in suspense!” She glared at him.
“We’ve got…” He reached inside and brought out a small box with a grey-colored flap. He tipped it to one side and water poured out. The flap came up with a flick of his finger, and he took out a small cup with a hole in the top. He sniffed deep and sighed. “A coffee maker. A coffee maker with a broken power base, so I couldn’t get it to work even if I had a transfer plate. Or coffee.”
“Cough-y?” Sazon smelled the cup and wrinkled her nose. “Bitter. Disgusting.”
“Don’t knock it. It’s the stuff of life, and people have been stabbed when there’s not enough around,” Clay said. “It’s not a systemic weakness—don’t think we’re going to slow them down by taking away their coffee.”
He set the machine on the ground.
“Then we’ve got…oh, hello…” He drew out a matte-black case and unzipped it. Silver instruments glistened in the light. “This is a field armor repair kit for the Myrmidon suits. Non-Newtonian layer sutures, frame ratchets. This might be useful.” He zipped it back up and set it aside.
“What the hell?” Clay picked up thin metal rods and a see-through plastic sheet. “A shower. Crews on those ships tend to stay embarked for days at a time, but…The Blooded ripped apart a shower. Looks like the crew tapped in to the feed lines to set this up for themselves on the ship…”
Clay sat down. Dejected.
“You said everything that wasn’t nailed down,” Sazon said, raising her hands.
“Worthless.” Clay tossed the aluminum rods past Sazon and out of the truck. “Absolutely worthless. Our one chance to…” His grumbling continued as he threw out the last of the sheeting and then pulled out a bra and panty set fastened to a clothes hanger.
Sazon gasped and he handed it over to her. “This fabric…it must breathe so well.” Sazon rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, looking at Clay and pressing her lips together.
“The Tyr don’t need a quantum leap in underwear technology, and no, you can’t try it on right now,” Clay said.
“I don’t have to ask you to do anything,” Sazon snapped. “This artifact crossed the stars to reach me. How many centuries of knowledge went into its manufacture, to get just the right feel against the skin, to—”
“It’s underwear,” Clay said.
“—to know that a non-Tyr made conscious decisions to obtain this, to…clean it out in a sink, apparently. This is a symbol of comfort that the other sex of your species—wait, your females—appreciate bosom support as much as we do?”
“I’m not having this conversation…bingo.” Clay smiled.
“What is a ‘bingo’?”
He brought out a metal case the size of a footlocker and set it on the bench with a grunt. He twisted latches on either side of the case in opposite directions and the top lifted up with a hydraulic hiss.
Light from inside the case illuminated a rack of laser carbines.
“That’s a bingo.” Clay slapped the top. “Field-ready Kawasaki off-brand battery stack. This has got enough charge to cycle those laser weapons—and the ones I had stockpiled—several dozen times each.”
“More effective weaponry…it’s a start,” Sazon said.
“The battery stack is more important. There isn’t a more—” he paused, thinking of the shuttle his wife hid in Vinica and opted not to share that bit of information “—not a denser source of energy anywhere else on the planet.”
“Are there any more bingos in there?” Sazon asked.
“Last thing is…” Clay picked up a leather-bound folder and opened it to find pictures of a blonde-haired man hugging a woman with a snowy mountain background on one side. The same couple with corgis in a backyard on the other. He tapped the screen and the picture changed to a wedding.
Clay set it aside.
“A bingo?”
“A dead man’s memories,” Clay said. “Fastal saw the body aboard the ship. I have to wonder if he was…what was he like? Just another hive kid willing to do anything to get out of the deep dark and have a shot at a real life? Maybe he signed years of his life away to the Corporation to get them to finance his wife’s medical treatment. I knew men that had to do that…”
“What about the Blooded killed during the attack? They were all young. Strong. They’ll be mourned too. And let’s not forget the King,” she said.
“When did you get so sentimental?” Clay asked.
“I was raised at my father’s court,” she said, opening the picture book and tapping the screen, frowning at more pictures of corgis, “a fishing duchy on the Bay of Dreams. Only ever saw the other castes when they were cleaning or maybe I saw them working the docks. Then I shared that little hole with Nemsi during all the shooting and…he was a real person to me. How scared he was.”
“You weren’t scared?”
“I’ve been inured to bizarre human things more than the average Tyr. Searing-hot bolts of light going over my head was almost normal. OK, what are these hairy beasts?” She turned the book around to a mother corgi nursing a litter.
“That’s a dog.”
“Dog?”
“A mammal. Warm-blooded. Gives birth to live young. Breathes air. There are no mammals on this planet…except for the
Tyr,” Clay said. “And my family. I suppose.”
Clay closed the gun chest and put it back in the crate.
“The scientific explanation for why the Tyr are alone in our…mammal-ness…to the rest of the planet’s biome has always been lacking…the faith-based reason wins out: because the gods placed us here to be unique in their sight.” Sazon repeated the old Speaker saying.
“Interesting.”
There was a rap of metal against the edge of the truck bed. A small group of Tyr were there, looking restless in the deep shadows.
“You,” one said, pointing a half-arm length of pipe at Clay. “Come out here.” His voice was rough.
“Don’t presume you can order us around.” Clay moved the flashlight so the new arrivals could see his and Sazon’s Royal caste markings.
“The only thing worse than a false voice is a false face, Clay,” one of the Tyr said. “You come with us easy,” there was the click of a pistol hammer locking back, “or we’ll make it hard on her.”
Clay stepped in front of Sazon and the flashlight in his hand illuminated the Tyr outside the truck. Their caste markings were…off. Blooded had lighter coloring around their eyes, like they were fading into Toiler ketafik. One had a dark smudge down his face and neck.
“I don’t know who you are, or who you think I am, but you’re making a mistake,” Clay said. “Disappear or your foreman will be punished for this.”
“The ghost face thinks we’re his slaves just because he puts on the paint,” one said. “I say we beat a lesson into him and kill the other.”
“He’s an insult to the Queen,” said the one with the pipe, and then he swung it at Clay’s ankle. Clay stomped on the weapon, fixing it to the floor. He flung the flashlight at one of the assailant’s faces, hoping it was the one with the gun, and he dove forward. Clay’s shoulder hit the pipe wielder in the chest and he landed hard on top of the Tyr.
The flashlight spun around, shining like a lighthouse beacon moving way too fast. Clay knew he had a brief advantage: he was surrounded by foes, and whoever he was fighting had to identify him in the oscillating darkness before they could attack. He kicked out and his heel hit the thigh of another, sending the Tyr’s leg straight back.
