by P. K. Lentz
Zhi fiddled with the pilfered, blood-covered item. “Kephis females lay eggs inside of Kephis males,” she said. “Gorosian or other hosts can serve the purpose, although the resulting offspring are considered impure. The hosts do not survive the spawning.”
Ivar gulped in horror. “Do you mean this Shadow-man has eggs inside him?”
“Possibly. But I think it unlikely she would implant them outside of her ship. She probably hasn’t yet.”
“Probably?” Arixa looked upon the dark man’s serene face. Not just his color but also his broad features and short, coarse hair were different to anyone she had seen. But one thing was familiar about the so-called Shadow-man. He bore the look and scars of a warrior.
“Can you tell for sure?”
“Not with the equipment available here.”
“At your base?”
“That’s irrelevant,” Zhi stonewalled.
Rising, Arixa walked past Ivar, who continued to look down upon the man with a persistent look of disgust, and went to Zhi, whose attention was on the alien device.
“If he might have Kephis eggs in him, I won’t leave him here,” Arixa said decisively.
Zhi looked up. “He probably doesn’t.”
“Probably isn’t good enough. Not for him, and not for those who might be killed by whatever comes out of those eggs.”
“They’d be small and not all that dangerous,” Zhi said with little concern. She was focused on the recovered device.
“Unless they scuttle into the forest and grow.” Grabbing the other woman by one arm, Arixa demanded and got her full attention. “Zhi, I won’t leave him.”
Zhi shrugged her arm from Arixa’s grasp but said nothing. When she tapped her fingers a few more times on the Kephis’s device, the shimmering wall of air above the broken trees suddenly became the alien’s ship.
It greatly differed in appearance from Zhi’s spherical shuttle. The Kephis vessel was blue-black, at least three times larger, and shaped something like two horizontal teardrops laid side-by-side with an upright crescent moon stuck between them.
A pentagonal opening, easily large enough to accommodate the Kephis female, appeared on its hull surface. While the members of the Dawn gathered and gawked, Zhi strode to it and pulled herself up into the opening, which was set too high off the ground for human legs.
Arixa ran after and boarded behind her.
The ship’s interior was lit by a harsh violet glow that made her squint. Its equipment and furnishings were on a larger scale than anything she had seen in Fizzbik’s base or the shuttles, and their forms made even less sense to her, if that were possible.
Zhi hunted around a little before walking through a pentagonal opening.
“Are we taking this ship?” Arixa asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it armed?”
“Yes.”
“Could we use it to fight the Jirmaken when they come?”
Continuing to hunt around in various chambers, Zhi gave no quick answer.
“Could we?” Arixa prodded.
“It depends on how willing you are to die.”
Zhi vanished behind a wall. When she returned, she held two identical, intricately carved black items which Arixa knew by warrior-instinct were weapons, even if she didn’t comprehend their function.
“There are eight vazers aboard,” Zhi announced. “A thorough search might turn up more.”
“What do they do?”
Zhi explained, “Vazers fire a ray of... think of it as concentrated sunlight that will burn a hole in any material not designed to resist it.”
That sounded extremely deadly.
“Is eight enough?” Arixa asked.
A distant look came over Zhi. Her skin and hair shone purple in the alien light. “Same answer,” she said. “It depends on how willing you are to die. Arixa, I’m sorry, but—”
Arixa cut her off. “Wait a moment.”
Returning to the entrance, she shouted instructions to the Dawn to begin carefully loading Dak and the Shadow-man into the Kephis ship.
Returning, Arixa said to Zhi, “Let me ask you this. When I met you, you thought fighting the Pentarchy was futile. Suddenly you didn’t. What changed your mind?”
Zhi looked helplessly at Arixa and then around the ship. Her guard was lowered in a way that Arixa hadn’t yet seen.
“There is a Han city among those the Jirmaken will destroy,” she said. “I sent drones to visit it. Drones are... eyes and ears that fly,” she explained helpfully. “The faces I saw, voices I heard... they reminded me of my home. I felt kinship. It hurt me to think of them eradicated or else ripped from their homes, as my ancestors were. I wanted to save them.
“I even flew over their city as I did at Roxinaki, in the hope that some might flee and be safe. But to evacuate a city requires one such as you, working toward it on the ground. I began to consider how a small number of fighters might defeat the Jirmaken operation. We have taken this one step, but now...”
Looking up, Zhi made her gaze hard again. “I allowed sentiment to blind me,” she said more resolutely. “My feelings change nothing. This idea is foolish in the extreme. We’ll fail and possibly doom all life on Goros. In the best case, the Pentarchy would only send more ships. It’s not worth—”
“It is, Zhi!” Arixa said desperately. “If there is a way, we must find it! If not now, then when? The Jir will not come again until after we’re dead. When is the time for us to make a difference? Tell me, this rebellion of yours, what is it called?”
“It has no name. It is thought best—”
“It has no name because there is no rebellion, Zhi! Only talk and excuses. If we don’t try to save your people, and yes, they are your people, will they wind up any more dead because of us? And if we try and fail, and the Jir wipe out Earth, I say it’s better that way. Better that we perish as a race than submit to these cullings, as if humans are a mindless herd and Earth our pasture.”
Arixa gripped the other woman by the shoulders and met her eyes intensely. “Zhi, let’s fight!” she urged. “I don’t know anything about skyboats or vazers or alien empires, but I do believe in you, Zhi. If you thought, even just in a moment of sentiment, that we might be able to save thousands of lives, then what is there to lose? What’s of greater value than justice and dignity for our kind?”
Zhi sighed nervously, averting her gaze. “We’ll die,” she said softly. “Never knowing what we achieved, if anything.”
“Then we shall become legends,” Arixa said. “Our sacrifice can inspire others who will succeed.”
“What if Goros itself is to be the sacrifice?”
“Then our legend will inspire the ugly creatures of some other so-called Lesser Race,” Arixa countered easily.
Zhi scoffed faintly. “You’re crazy.”
Arixa smiled. “I don’t think so. You don’t think it, either. You know I’m right. If we don’t seize this opportunity, then you’ll die an old woman under the yoke of overlords who erase human lives with impunity. People like Rivann’ivoth and Vax will wait and plan and hope for generations to come. They will never be heroes. We will. Don’t you see that you are exactly what your so-called rebellion needs?”
Zhi resumed her customary reticence. From around a corner came the sounds of her warriors clambering into the Kephis ship.
“I know you’ve never killed,” Arixa said quietly to Zhi, whose look of mild surprise confirmed the suspicion. “I also know that you’re ready to. So...” She gently thumbed a strand of Zhi’s short black hair. “When you are ready, tell me your mad plan to topple a mighty empire with eight weapons and one skyboat. I’ll worry about making it reality.”
As Zhi nodded blankly, Arixa knew that her words had had an effect. Zhi would overcome her fears and doubts, even though they were entirely warranted.
Those fears and doubts were familiar to Arixa, as someone who had led many a battle-virgin on their first headlong ride into a cloud of arrows.
Som
e virgins, of course, never made it through that first cloud. Arixa would do her very best to see that Zhi did.
Twenty
While Zhi vanished deeper into the captured ship to do whatever else needed doing, Arixa helped to get the Shadow-man and others aboard. Loading the seriously wounded Dak demanded extra care, but together the less injured members of the Dawn managed to hoist him gently inside.
When all were aboard, with a bowman keeping watch at the entrance, Arixa went in search of Zhi. She found her in a purple-lit chamber full of complex displays which Arixa guessed was the chamber from which one piloted the ship. There were no seats here, or anywhere in the vessel, at least not according to the human conception of a seat.
“What of the shuttle we came in?” Arixa asked.
“It will follow us,” Zhi answered as she manipulated floating controls written in light.
“It can fly without a pilot?”
“Yes.”
“I must return to Scythia. Where will you go?”
Zhi paused briefly in her work. “Are you asking if Vax and Fizzbik know I’ve helped you? The answer is that they are not stupid. If they don’t know by now, they soon will.”
“Will they try to stop us?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“I can’t return to that place,” Arixa said. “In both of my visits, I’ve been knocked out and woken up many days later. If that were to happen now, all would be lost. And all would be lost if I lost you, Zhi. I don’t even know how to use a vazer yet.”
“I’ll teach you,” Zhi offered with little spirit.
“Nor could I conceive alone of a plan to stand against this enemy.”
“My plans are mere notions,” Zhi said. Arixa saw that her fingers trembled as they worked the controls. “Probably foolish. But I’ve come this far. I’ll be beside you in their execution.”
“I’m happy to hear that. How long before we can be underway?”
“Not long. Once we’re in flight, I can work on changing the lighting.”
“We’d all be grateful for that.” The purple lighting of the alien ship was headache-inducing.
Before turning to leave, Arixa set a hand on one of Zhi’s, which trembled.
“It gets easier,” Arixa assured her.
Zhi drew an uneven breath and confessed quietly, “I can barely breathe.”
“It’s natural,” Arixa said. “None of us wants to die. Know that your life is very valuable to me, Zhi, and not just because you can fly skyboats. I can’t promise you won’t die. But I swear by all the gods I’ll do all in my power to keep you alive.”
Zhi said no more, focusing on her work and presumably on breathing.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, the members of the Dawn stood or laid belted into cushion-like depressions in a wide chamber of the Kephis ship, which thanks to Zhi was now less harshly lit. The captured ship ascended skyward, its movement invisible to the passengers but lightly felt in the bones. Its destination was Scythia.
A short while into the voyage, Zhi emerged from the pilot’s chamber and tended once more to Dak’s wounds as well as those of Ivar, Tomiris and Arixa using various implements from a small kit. The hands which held them no longer trembled.
In future, Arixa thought, Zhi would have to teach as many of her skills as possible to as many of the Dawn as possible. It wasn’t prudent in war to let one individual be so irreplaceable.
Later in the journey, Arixa met in private with Zhi and heard her ‘notions’ for striking at the Jir. Arixa helped her refine them into the elements of a plan. One which, to be sure, might end in all their deaths and invite brutal Jirmaken reprisals. But it was resistance in more than name—by humans and for humanity.
A token and doomed resistance, perhaps. Arixa hoped not. She believed not. Even if it was doomed, it was worth the undertaking. In this, Arixa had little doubt that her Dawn would concur.
When she put it to the warriors present, they justified her faith by voting as one in her favor. All except unconscious Sandaksatra, that is, but none doubted what the felled giant’s choice would be.
With plenty of daylight remaining, Zhi landed the big Kephis ship in the mountains southeast of Roxinaki. Its cloaking capability was engaged, as it had been in the thick forest, preventing it from being seen. The unpiloted spherical shuttle landed nearby. Their intention was to keep the Kephis ship here in the mountains with all but Arixa staying behind to guard it.
Arixa would return to Roxinaki in the shuttle, piloted by Zhi, under cover of dusk.
Until then, Zhi was to show the Scythians how to use the eight identical vazers found on the Kephis ship.
The weapons looked like thick chunks of intricately etched, black-painted driftwood, each about the length of a forearm and tapered at one end into a ‘handle’ of sorts which featured some twig-like protrusions that may or may not have been decorative. Although designed for the skeletal, two-fingered hand of the Kephis, the weapons could be wielded, if awkwardly, by human hands. Pointing a vazer at an enemy (or a rock, for today’s purposes) felt a bit like aiming a curved ceremonial dagger.
At first, Zhi kept the vazers disabled while her students merely got used to holding and handling them in such a way that they refrained from killing themselves or nearby comrades.
“Hand vazers are not often carried aboard ships,” Zhi told them, “because of their invisible beams and propensity to put holes in hulls, accidentally or otherwise.”
Enabling hers, Zhi aimed it at a rock. On the rock’s surface there appeared a slightly wobbling pinprick of orange light.
She depressed the trigger. A light buzz sounded, and the head-sized rock collapsed into about six smoking pieces, with smaller fragments scattering widely in all directions.
The faces of the Dawn lit with astonishment. Several ran over to the debris and inspected the broken chunks, some surfaces of which glowed red and burned their fingers. They whooped and laughed.
“Can you imagine a Gotar war-band charging into eight of these?” Ivar exclaimed.
“They never will,” Arixa said sternly. “These are not for settling human squabbles. We have a common foe now.”
“I know, I know,” Ivar said, chastened. “I only said imagine...”
“We have sixteen days to become experts with these,”Arixa addressed her warriors, “without killing ourselves. Then it will be time to turn the Jir into smoking chunks.”
The next several hours were taken up by vazer training, conducted two-by-two so that Zhi could always keep a careful eye on proceedings. After her own turn, Arixa shed her armor, and bathed her wound with water from a nearby stream. She helped tend to Dak, who soon regained consciousness.
She pondered her plans and began to yearn for the coming of Devastation Day.
A great many humans were sure to suffer to die.
But the day would not go as the Jir planned.
* * *
The sun began to set, and preparations for departure were made. Six of the vazers were stowed aboard the Kephis ship in receptacles which performed an invisible task which Zhi called charging. The remaining two Arixa would take back to the Dawn’s camp in order that others might be trained in their use. Even if there weren’t enough of the weapons to go around, it was wise to have more warriors capable of using them.
By the same reasoning, Arixa spoke with Zhi about the possibility of training Scythians to fly skyboats, prompting Zhi to explain that the easiest way would be to imprint the skill on one or more of her people in the same manner that they had been imprinted with the ability to speak and understand Nexus.
That, however, could only be accomplished at Fizzbik’s base. The equipment which could determine whether the Shadow-man had been implanted with Kephis eggs was also located there.
“Perhaps we must consider...” Arixa began, hesitantly.
“What?” Zhi asked in a rare show of ire. “Taking over the base?”
“It would prevent Vax and Fizzbik from interf
ering in our plans,” Arixa reasoned. “We needn’t harm them.”
“No, just force them at vazer-point,” Zhi finished angrily.
“I understand your reluctance,” Arixa said in conciliatory tones.
In truth, she would have liked to force her will on Zhi, but Zhi’s cooperation was too valuable to jeopardize in that way.
“I only worry that when you return to them, they may physically prevent you from aiding us. Maybe it would be best if you remained in our camp.”
Cooling, Zhi sighed heavily. “That wouldn’t prevent those two from stopping us if they chose to. They need only inform Rivann’ivoth, who could still get armed operatives here in plenty of time to intervene.”
“Then I ask again,” Arixa said, “do you think they will choose to stop us?”
“Dr. Fizzbik agreed to augment your fighters. He gave you the ILA. He is not on the best of terms with our administrators, or with authority in general. I think he will stand aside and watch. Vaxsuvarda... I don’t know. I will talk to him.”
Making convincing arguments didn’t seem likely to be among Zhi’s many skills, Arixa thought, but she kept the impolitic point to herself.
“I won’t risk visiting Vax except in force,” Arixa said, “but if he won’t listen to you, persuade him to speak to me by comm.”
Zhi answered, “I imagine he will insist on it.”
Suddenly Arixa chuckled, but not at Zhi’s last remark. Rather it was a belated response to something she had said earlier.
Arixa groaned. “A rebellion run by administrators!”
Twenty-One
At dusk, Zhi landed the shuttle in a secluded spot within an hour’s walk of the Dawn’s encampment north of Roxinaki.
“You’d better come back,” Arixa beseeched Zhi in pleading tones. “Your Han cousins depend on it. Earth depends on it. I depend on it. There is no resistance without you.”
She felt reassured by Zhi’s somber response: “I know.”
Arixa embraced the other woman. As expected, Zhi received it stiffly, prompting Arixa to break it off. Perhaps all star-folk were less warm than Scythians, or perhaps Han were, or maybe just Zhi.
