Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  Chapter Eleven

  "Life forms detected," Porter announced as the retro impellers replaced the hover thrusters for the shuttle. He glanced up from his screen, one eyebrow cocked as his gaze met M'kar's.

  She felt when everyone not working a sensor or screen or piloting the shuttle turned their gazes on her. The weight of their silent questions tugged up one corner of her mouth. Sighing, more for show than to help her concentrate, she closed her eyes and reached out mentally for that semi-familiar, not-quite-audible chord in the psionic atmosphere she had labeled the drac carrier frequency. Every Talent had a slightly different way of sensing the presence of psionic energy or the broadcast of minds. Some saw changes in the background light spectrum or radiating from those using psionic energy. She heard tones. Her teachers on Le'anka had taught that whatever sensory input Talents picked up were not actually sounds, smells, colors, temperature changes or other impressions, but only how their minds translated the psionic “event.” She considered herself lucky. A student three years her junior registered the presence of psionic activity as smells, and she had a very sensitive stomach. Most of her training consisted of blocking psionic energy and impulses, for her comfort and everyone else's.

  Focusing on the location of the Corona's camp below them, M’kar reached out with her mind, imagining it spreading out like a net, simply "being" there, waiting for whatever touched it. The various sensor reports had indicated few lifeforms in the general area large enough to detect, so she could lower some of her shields and not worry about being suddenly ambushed by an overload of psionic input. That was always a bad way to start a landing party expedition: having the Talent they all depended on to make contact with possible semi-sentient lifeforms knocked flat on her back. Or worse, curled up into a fetal ball and shut up inside her mind behind a dozen Le'ankan-trained shields.

  Just because she didn't need to impress her captain and crew didn't negate the desire to do so.

  A flicker of awareness set off discord in her mind for half a second, enough to make her flinch. It shifted, like a shield reversing polarity. Instead of repelling her, it pulled her in. M'kar caught her breath and gripped the armrests of her seat as she followed the call from that new mind. Others answered. She followed the stream of awareness, like a web weaving itself, each mind joining the rising hum of energy.

  "Anything?" Decker said, when M'kar opened her eyes.

  Fortunately, her eyes weren't blurry with tears of relief. She had been half-convinced there would be total silence, meaning no dracs left on the planet. If she heard their minds, then the Hivers hadn't found them. That increased the chances the Corona had brought the Hiver ship out with them and it hadn't gone back to the drac world.

  "Landing in ten," Qimble, the shuttle pilot announced.

  "I know this doesn't make any sense …" M'kar looked around the shuttle compartment at her teammates. Everyone here had some psi Talent, even if it was just shielding. They would understand better than the average crew. "Cobalt's mind was a chord of music. The minds I'm feeling are playing one specific note, all of them in perfect tune."

  "The more minds there are joined together, the more easily fractured elements of a note join together?" Maccenzy offered. She glanced up from the medical equipment she had been inspecting during the voyage down. "My older sister is a music theoretician, constantly searching for the perfect instrument. There are some alien instruments her teacher found, a weird conglomeration of crystal and metal and bio-mass. Anyway, they have their own notes when you play them separately, but when you play them all together, yeah, they sound like one note, no chords you can discern with your ear. Sensors, yeah, they can pick apart the individual notes. It's freaky."

  "Meaning?" Decker said.

  "Somebody is down there. They know we're coming. And I think they're glad," M'kar said.

  "You think." The Security chief's mouth flattened in his usual we're-gonna-die-but-we'll-make-them-pay grimace. Then a scary little grin twisted up the corners of his mouth and an oddly comforting spark of insanity lit his eyes. "This is why I signed up."

  "We estimated the drac wasn't even an adolescent," Liberty offered. "Maybe when they're young, their mental voices are fractured --"

  "Maybe it was an adolescent, and its voice was changing," Carhan offered in his deep, gravelly voice, earning a few chuckles.

  "Whatever noticed us, whatever reacted to my foray, did have a little bit of the flavor of the drac consciousness." M'kar wrapped her mind around the theories. Her teachers had been right. She learned more about her Talent once she was out in the universe, exploring and testing and experimenting. Learning was best done on her feet, in action, rather than theorizing in a comfortable chair with a pot of good seeoli tea to indulge in.

  "And we're down, secured, engines going into ready-rest mode," Qimble announced. "I put a patch of vegetation -- not exactly trees -- between us and the camp. Just in case."

  "Good job." Decker stood up from his seat just behind the pilot, where he could turn to see everyone in the compartment or all the instrument panels. He met everyone's gazes, then tapped the central button of his equipment belt. Green sparkles momentarily washed over him from head to toe. The four members of Security also leading the disembarkation turned on their personal shields.

  M'kar stood and turned on her shield, then rested her left hand on the knife attached to her belt. It wasn't standard issue, and in the final analysis it would protect her just as little as the personal shields if something big and nasty attacked without warning. The security sensors in the shuttle could only detect so much. If there was something out there in the jungles of the drac planet that contained a heretofore unknown element or compound, it might not register on the sensors immediately. Other landing parties had been ambushed and decimated, and any equipment that had survived the attacks indicated nothing had blipped enough to send up a warning. The personal screens were more to protect from dangerous microbes and to monitor bio-status. Most protection came from the beam-blasters everyone carried and the repulsor fields the shuttle could generate. Still, M'kar trusted her strong arm and the knife her father had given her when she couldn't hold the haft in both hands. It was a combination good luck charm and security blanket. She had yet to meet anything, short of a lifeform that was pure energy or coated with a particularly dense alloy, that couldn’t be harmed by a good, sharp blade.

  The usual debate over wide open spaces where an attack could be seen coming from a kilometer away, versus close cover that hid hunter and hunted from each other, went through M'kar's head. She and the five Security crew stepped from the shuttle and down the very visible trail through the vegetation. Qimble was right in saying the tall, swaying, spicy-scented plants towering a good two or three meters over their heads weren't exactly trees. Neither were they ferns, grasses, or a dozen other tall-stemmed types of plants she had seen on various other worlds. The stems drooped over just slightly, with some sort of bulbous brown-green object at the top. Seed pod or fruit or perhaps a spore globe, she couldn't tell. She would leave that up to the botanists. For all she knew, the dracs nested in those bulbs. Maybe the eggs came from them, rather than mature dracs. This wouldn't be the first planet where the dividing line between plants and animals zig-zagged. Proof, her father had said, that Enlo had a very wicked, sometimes downright demented sense of humor.

  Comfortingly, the colors of plant life they had seen so far, or gleaned from the Corona’s records, were the standard green and brown of most worlds where Human life had been discovered. Green leaves, brown stems and trunks. That could change, depending on the minerals in the soil, the seasons of the year, the weather.

  A cry that was part crystalline, part silvery trumpet fanfare, erupted overhead as the six reached the edge of the patch of vegetation between them and the camp. That shimmering web of music plunged through M'kar's head and threatened to knock her flat to the ground. She pressed her hands over her ears, even knowing it would do no good. The sound was in her head. She let the
touch of a dozen wordless voices guide her out into the open. Decker didn't like that. Through the shifting song, she heard his voice. Fortunately, not his words. Just the sharp, furious tone. Probably ordering her back into cover. She fought the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

  Staggering, she looked up, and slowly lowered her hands from her ears as a swirl of colors descended from the sky, turning into a spinning vortex of elegant winged shapes and jewel-toned eyes. The song merged into a single, pure, crystalline note that vibrated in her bones. The overwhelming sensation of welcome brought tears to her eyes. Piteously joyful, like a pet that had been left alone too long.

  Dracs of multiple colors, the sun shimmering off their mottled hides, spun around her, performing acrobatics. Amazingly, she made out distinct voices, and matched them to specific creatures as her gaze landed on them one by one. She wanted to laugh, as they competed with fancy flying, upside down and twirling in mid-air and weaving up and down and around each other, demanding attention. Pearly white. Four different shades of blue, from the soft shade of a rainwashed sky just before dusk to the deep hue of Cobalt. Crimson that seemed to glow with heat. Deep black, glossy where the sunlight hit it, dark enough to swallow all light where shadows touched. Soft green like springtime leaves and the deep gleam of fist-sized emeralds. Brown richer than caf, and the creamy soft brown of caf that was half cream. A yellow with tinges of green, like poison, and another yellow like fresh lemons.

  A tiny silvery drac wobbled through the air toward M’kar. The others made way for her. That was the first impression: the drac was female. The second impression, as she came closer, was that she was incredibly old. She wasn't tiny, M'kar realized as they looked into each other's eyes and she marveled at the swirling violet sparkles in the little drac's eyes. She was shriveled up with age. Her skin was a crinkled mass of wrinkles, clinging to her bones. Her wings were five times longer in proportion to her body than the other dracs, who had retreated a meter or so and now swayed back and forth in a holding pattern.

  "Hello," she whispered, and focused her mind as gently as she could on the curious, almost pleading intelligence behind those spinning sparkles of violet. The little silver drac came closer, bobbing up and down in time with the slow beats of her wings as she hovered. A soft chirp escaped the elderly drac, and what M'kar could only interpret as a sniff of pique.

  The next thing she knew, she was on her knees. Decker leaped at least four meters in one bound, and the dracs vanished like a soap bubble popping. Her head didn't hurt so much as it rang and felt stuffed with impressions.

  "What'd they do to you?" the head of Security growled as he dragged her back to the cover of the pseudo-trees.

  "They're a little pissed." A giggle escaped M'kar. Mostly from his confused look and the way he had of snapping his head back like an offended goose when something completely surprised him.

  "When a lot of them teleport, they leave a backwash," Maldoon announced. He held up his datapad. "Fascinating -- you can almost see the air splitting open for them, like they can create their own jump gates."

  "Pissed at what?" Decker demanded. "Are they bringing back friends? Old lady pissed or ‘we're going to destroy your entire solar system’ pissed?"

  "She wanted to know what took us so long getting back." M'kar swallowed. "She got scared when she realized we weren't their friends."

  "Okay," Maldoon said. "They had contact with the survey crew. That's good, right? They expect people to be friends. Right?"

  "I don't think we're in any danger." She gestured across the clearing, about ten meters deep on all sides around the camp.

  It was simple, four buildings made of two-meter by three-meter panels of impervious, camouflage-programmable alloy that snapped together into whatever configuration necessary. One building looked large enough to house a dozen people and probably served as a dining hall. The crew probably used tents, like the landing party planned to do. The other three buildings were small, maybe storage sheds.

  The six crossed the clearing to the camp. M'kar studied the ground visually while the others swept their sensor equipment in all directions. Her impression from the great-granny drac --

  M'kar groaned. That little silver drac was probably who Dulit meant when he said to find Granny. She hoped she hadn't botched things. Of course, "botched" might be a relative term, when she reported what had happened to the shipload of dracs and their adopted Humans.

  If she was right, she had some time to figure out what to say and how to say it. Her impression was that the dracs needed time to sort through the brief encounter. In the information and images that had passed from the not-quite-group-mind to hers, one detail jumped to the forefront. They weren't a hive mind or individuality-blurring collective, but their minds were united enough for information to pass among all of them. So what was the difference between them and Cobalt and Poki, that they got pulled down with the dracs who suffered what their Humans did?

  "Okay, they've got claws." Sh'hari gestured at the first shed they came to. "Sharp enough to do that?" She waved her sensor recorder over the myriad thin scratches going down one side.

  If the lines weren't so long, and half the front panel hadn't been untouched, M'kar might have passed off the marring as blown sand. Then again, this particular type of alloy was made to withstand far more than sandstorms.

  "They wanted to get inside. What's in there?"

  "Doesn't make sense." M'kar looked around at the other structures. This one stood alone on the other side of the clearing. "Dracs can teleport, so if they wanted something, they could just pop in and get it and pop out." She pressed her hand to the door and measured the distance between the gouges, as well as the depth. She remembered the feeling of Cobalt's delicate talons penetrating her uniform but not her skin.

  Whatever had scratched at the shed, it wasn't a drac.

  She pulled her hand away and grit coated her palm, sticking to her skin. Correction -- something sticky adhered the grit to her skin. A chill of anticipation coiled through her gut as she brought her hand to her nose and sniffed. Sweet. Strong enough to be bitter.

  "Uh, guys?" Sh'hari waved her sensor wand at the shed. "Something is powering up in there. We just got scanned."

  "Trap!" M'kar ran, stretching her legs as far as she could, and didn't wait for the others to believe her or think about it. Time seemed to slow as she crossed the clearing and put more jungle or forest or whatever this thick plantlife could be called between her and that shed and --

  "Blowing!" Sh'hari called, right behind her.

  Drac shrieks, a full chorus of fury, rising higher so the shed panels rattled, rang across the clearing and out into the jungle. Yeah, jungle, she would think of it as jungle. Forget about hair-splitting. Decker dropped to his knees, pressing his hands over his ears, spilling a torrent of "security-foul."

  The drac cries went on for a solid ten minutes. She counted off the seconds, crouching at the foot of one of the slender pseudo-trees with her hands over her ears. She bit her lip to keep from grinning wide enough her teammates might decide to clobber her. This trick had Garion Dulit written all over it.

  The amusement died when she thought past her classmate's cleverness and theorized why the boobytrap had been set there. The survey crew expected Hivers to invade their camp. This was set up to drive them away. So what was the Corona's crew hiding?

  Her first thought was the dracs, but they seemed able to defend themselves with their shrieks and with teleporting out of harm's way, so what did they need help defending? It had seemed to work with the shed, because it was still standing, despite the scratches from what had to be dymcrait claws. M'kar shuddered, flashing back to that battle at the Academy two years ago. All that had blocked a dymcrait from escaping to terrorize a planet full of Talents was a class of eight misfits.

  "I said, are you hurt?" Decker shouted, reaching down to grab M'kar's shoulders.

  She leaped to her feet, at the last minute wrapping her arm around the thin tree trunk to pivo
t herself out and away from him, rather than body-slamming him. Decker was braver than most, startling a Nisandrian in full-on panic-mode analysis trance. Or he was in one of his we're-all-gonna-die-so-why-not-go-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory moods.

  Then she realized the dracs had stopped shrieking a minute or so ago and Decker had asked her several times.

  "Fine. Thinking."

  "Yeah, I can tell from the smoke coming out of your ears," he muttered, and stalked away.

  "What's in that shed?" she said, gesturing across the clearing.

  "As far as I can tell …" Sh'hari stuck her little finger in her ear and pivoted it a few times. She scowled at her scanner readout. "Just sensor and broadcast equipment, and a power pack. It's broadcasting something, but it's too low for our ears to hear."

  "Before or after they got sandblasted?" Maldoon said.

  "Can you turn it up so we can hear?" Decker stomped back over to the shed, to glare at the door.

  After a few seconds of tapping the controls of two different pieces of equipment, Sh'hari nodded and pointed the sensor wand at the shed again. Soft little trilling sounds and whimpers drifted through the clearing. The Security team just frowned and looked at each other, eyebrows raising, silently asking if anyone understood. After a few moments, everyone turned to M'kar.

  "I think they're drac sounds," she offered. "Maybe soft enough only dymcraits could hear. To lure them in."

  "Why?" Decker demanded.

  "I'll have to ask Granny when she gets here."

  "Who's Granny?"

  "If I'm right, the little silver drac matriarch who got so pissed at me." She turned to look around the clearing. "Might as well get comfortable."

  "Meaning?" Maora asked from the shuttle, her voice coming over the communicator link in Sh'hari's sensor pad.

  Everyone in the group grinned those guilty, sheepish grins that often plagued the first part of a landing party team. Involved in scoping out the lay of the land, determining the safety, the pitfalls, or examining something fascinating, they forgot there was a shuttle full of crew waiting to get out and help.