Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  "Time to set up camp." Decker gave the other sheds a sour look. "I'm not going to risk another boobytrap and getting my ears scoured again. Start unloading, folks."

  M'kar flinched, feeling something brush against the edges of her mind. She looked up and caught a flicker of violet and silver among the puffball tops of the pseudo-trees.

  Hello, Granny. I'm a friend of Dulit.

  She included an image of her classmate, with Poki tucked inside the flap of his jacket. Releasing a few chitters that sounded like she refrained from scolding, the little silver drac spiraled down to come to rest on M'kar's shoulder. She hunched her bony shoulders and looked at the other crew, tipped her head to one side, and finally let out a cooing trill.

  "So, does that mean we pass?" Sh'hari said.

  "For now." M'kar focused on the largest structure left behind by the Corona’s crew, asking with images if it was safe. Granny rubbed her cheek with her soft muzzle, then gave her an image of folding tables and chairs and cooking equipment stashed in the building.

  Now was not the time to ask if the dracs had seen any Hivers, or worse, a dymcrait. The scratches on the shed, the sweet smell, the sticky grit all answered the second-most-important question: Had Hivers come down to the planet? The most important question, and one they would have to answer soon, was if the Hivers were still there. Hopefully the Hiver repellant Dulit had put together worked so well, they wouldn't come back.

  M'kar couldn't ask that question until she had made some progress establishing friendship with the dracs. Dulit was concerned for their welfare, clear enough. The Corona had realized the Hivers had infiltrated their navigation system and implanted a beacon that let them follow the survey ship. According to the records decrypted so far, the Hivers had latched onto the Corona and were dragged to this end of the Chute. Solid science proved that a ship being towed through a Chute didn't experience the same readings as a ship that flew under its own power. That resulted in problems on the return trip if the second ship wasn’t towed again. The Corona's crew could have just turned off the beacon and fled, and the Hivers might never have followed them back to the other end of the Chute. The crew of the Corona had left the beacon broadcasting, letting the Hivers know they were fleeing, prompting them to follow. They had latched onto the Corona and were dragged back to the other end of the Chute. The survey ship crew had risked their own lives, probably gambling that they could emerge with minimal damage on their fourth trip through, able to flee while the Hivers were recovering from the trauma of the passage. The Corona had almost won their gamble.

  "So, tonight we make friends and I break the bad news to you as gently as I can. Then tomorrow, we figure out how to save you, okay?" she murmured, and reached up to trace her finger down the little drac's neck ridges. Cobalt had let her know he liked to be rubbed there. Judging from the slow closing of the three sets of eyelids, the blue sparks in her eyes, and the soft little croon, Granny liked it too.

  By twos and threes, the other dracs reappeared while the team unloaded the shuttle and set up camp. Five tents were set up for sleeping. Outdoor and indoor meeting and conference areas were set up, with the kitchen in the largest shed. By that time, more than three dozen dracs in a wide variety of colors and shades were perched in the trees or the roofs or the benches and tables, watching everything the landing party did. M'kar watched her crewmates responding to the subliminal pressure of all those beseeching eyes and soft croons. As the only true animal telepath among them, she clearly heard the psionic communication among the dracs. Not a group mind or hive mind. She caught flickers of their social hierarchy. Maybe because Granny stayed on her shoulder, she had a physical link and overheard much of the discussion -- not that she could ever claim to speak drac, but she caught enough images to get an idea of how they worked together. The smaller gave information to the larger and older, until finally it came to Granny. For all she knew, the intermediate dracs cleared the information, so the little silver matriarch wasn't overwhelmed. There was an orderliness to it all that made her laugh.

  Or maybe she was just amused that having Granny sitting on her shoulder seemed to excempt her from camp-building chores. M'kar strolled around, listening to and responding to whatever Granny cared to share. She walked a fine line between having her mind wide open for the old drac to rummage through at her leisure, and presenting information as simply as she could, whenever she had an impression of a question. She had never been interrogated before by any creature, but then, neither had she encountered anything so close to sentient. So close to having a soul.

  M'kar made note of her crewmates who responded to the first forays at friendship from the dracs. Most of those in the landing party had just enough Talent to raise psionic shields. Nothing they could consciously control, such as her animal-oriented Talent, or touching a rock and sensing the ores in it, or touching the ill or wounded and knowing the problem. The responsibility, the effort of communication rested mostly on the dracs, but they didn't seem to mind. They had found a Human they liked, and they were going to get that person to hear them no matter what it took.

  "This is going to be fun," she murmured so only Granny could hear her. "Still haven't decoded enough of the data wafer to know how, but it seems to me only the littlest dracs made a fixed psionic bond with the other crew. Is that how it works? Just the babies?" She gazed into Granny's softly swirling violet eyes. "Maybe it was an accident? No discipline, no control when they’re little, and wham, instant bond?"

  Granny made a quizzical little cheep-burp and tipped her head to one side. M'kar laughed and scratched under the little drac's chin, then down her long neck to her chest. Granny purred, vibrating against her fingertips.

  "Okay, after dinner, we need to talk. You up for that?"

  ~~~~~~

  M'kar woke with a headache like she had never known -- not even when someone decided to test the genetically engineered Nisandrian resistance to alcohol. They had spiked her bottle of nutrient drink at an Academy sporting competition. She couldn’t get drunk, but Gatesh Green made her deathly sick.

  Problem: after that horrid experience, she could smell Gatesh Green from half a kilometer away. No one had been able to slip her any since then, so how had she ingested it, to feel how she did now?

  "Where does it hurt the most?" Brea murmured, breaking through the throbbing that filled M'kar's ears, skin, eyeballs, and tongue.

  "Hnnnn?"

  "I'll take that as 'all over,’" the medic said, a ripple suspiciously like laughter in her soft voice.

  M'kar could have sworn her friend's breath, brushing across her face, made the throbbing worse. She tried not to stiffen as the dermo-spray tip touched her throat, because even that slight movement made the throbbing increase. A groan escaped as the expected ice circled her throat from the injection spot, then encased her head, then slid down to calm her stomach before it joined the rebellion. The quiet spreading through her body made her want to weep in gratitude.

  "Who hit me and why don't I remember the fight?" M'kar moaned as she pried her eyes open.

  She stared up at the domed top of the tent she shared with three other women. Details dive-bombed her. They were on the drac planet. She remembered the rest of the team setting up tents and establishing sensor perimeters. The dracs were impervious to the repeller fields that protected the eighteen members of the landing party from insects and airborne inimical bacteria. They made a game of flying through the domed field over the camp, which had tripled the size of the original camp established by the Corona. Granny gave the impression that the field tickled more than the one the Corona's people had used. The dracs had learned to use it to rid themselves of tiny pests in their hides. The dracs who watched the technicians setting up the field seemed to understand the equipment and were excited about it. When M'kar asked, she got the impression that yes, the dracs' other friends had used similar equipment and taught the dracs to like the tickling.

  "Feel like you went through the Grand Finale all night long?" Brea
asked, handing M'kar a tumbler of luminescent black liquid that smelled of anise.

  M'kar opened her mouth to say no, then decided she was better off drinking the tonic while it smelled and tasted of anise. Some of the natural remedies Brea experimented with, based on plants and minerals collected on the various worlds they visited, tasted best when fresh. If the patient delayed taking the dose, the smell and taste, color and texture could devolve to something far worse than the illness it cured. Many in the crew theorized Brea did it on purpose, to penalize those who wouldn't cooperate and take their medicine immediately.

  The taste of anise spread over M'kar's tongue. She frowned. Where was that awful, thick, licking-the-garbage-scow sensation and taste in her mouth, like she had after drinking Gatesh Green for the first and only time?

  "Yeah, maybe." She lifted her head a little more and sighed as the aching, swollen, ready-to-shatter stiffness faded from the back of her neck and down her spine. "You are a lifesaver. Remind me to name my firstborn after you."

  Brea just snorted and sat back on the folding cot next to M'kar's, to put equipment and bottles and bowls back into her field kit. E&D crews generally formed a unity of mind and soul that nearly guaranteed long-distance courtships were doomed to failure. Brea and others agreed that if they didn't find their husbands or wives from among the tried-and-tested crew of the Defender, they wouldn't until after they had left the ship. And no one wanted to leave the ship. Not after all they had gone through. Parenting was a team sport and lifetime commitment. While catastrophes often resulted in single parenting through necessity, it was not something most starship crew willingly risked happening to them through biological carelessness.

  "What do you remember?" Brea asked.

  M'kar tottered to the washstand in the center of the tent and twisted the spigot on the bottom of the ten-liter collapsible bottle of water.

  "Going to bed, worn out from the kids pestering me with so many questions." She let the cool water trickle into the basin for a ten-count, then twisted the spigot closed and filled her hands with it. She splashed some on her face, then ran her wet hands through her hair. Even the roots of her hair ached, like her brain had been smoldering all night.

  She frowned, then looked up at the domed top of the tent. For half a second, she expected to see little dracs perched on the support bars. Looking down at her. Ready to pounce with dozens more questions, all communicated with emotion and sensory impressions and images. A groaning sigh escaped her.

  "The Grand Finale, indeed." She sank down on the cot and held out her arm for the in-depth analysis cuff before Brea pulled it out of her kit. M'kar knew what was coming.

  The cuff was something of Brea's own design, still in the tweaking stages. Unlike other medical scanning devices, it was made to work with the consciousness of the patient and required some rudimentary psionics. The theory was that even untrained Talent had an instinctive reaction when probed, even by friendly forces, to pull up shields and resist scanning or testing. The cuff created a psionic bridge, using various constantly adjusting frequencies to reach into the brain and help the patient reach out through the last shield or barricade to determine what was wrong.

  "You'll laugh when you see the images we've been taking. Oh, yes, we were up all night. Some of us didn't go to bed. Your bunkmates had to sleep elsewhere," Brea added.

  The cuff's tiny pinlights shifted through the rainbow, signaling it generated the necessary frequencies.

  "What did those pests do to me?"

  M'kar sighed when the medic just stuck her tongue out at her and focused on working the cuff.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Grand Finale was the perfect analogy for what had happened to M’kar last night. Anyone who would participate in a landing party or survey team of any kind had to go through an intensive win-or-die-trying test between graduating from the Academy and being assigned to an E&D ship. The most intensive, highly detailed scenarios were assembled to put the graduates through situations they could face when exploring new worlds. Alternating between freak weather patterns, mental challenges, mechanical breakdowns, attacks by Gleaners and Hivers, even volcanic eruptions and floods, they were strained to the breaking point intellectually, physically, and emotionally. No one knew how long the tests would last. Rumors said many of the newer tests copied situations that had killed landing parties. Their trainers and teachers at the Academy wanted to find out what went wrong. Rumors also said that the homicidal maniacs who designed the scenarios were coming up with one that would reach into the minds of those being tested, so they would forget it was a test -- to ensure their reactions were entirely honest, because they thought the situation was real, with no safety net. Meaning they could die.

  M'kar's Grand Finale had lasted four days. No one in her team got any sleep the entire time, and none of them would have eaten if she hadn't followed her nose to a patch of what were the only edible, non-toxic native plants in the entire testing area. Just because they wouldn't poison Humans didn't mean anyone enjoyed the gritty, stringy, bitter stalks. They contained a natural caffeine compound and provided much-needed moisture. The team that put together the twenty-kilometer-square testing arena received a black mark on their record for failing to remove everything that would give the test subjects assistance.

  "Why do I have this impression of being on exhibit all night?" M'kar murmured. The anise taste had faded and the overall throbbing had dialed down to a slight itching sensation right behind her eyeballs.

  "That's a pretty good summation of what we went through." Brea didn't look up from the data spilling through her tablet from the cuff. "Decker compared it to being in a zoo, with the dracs as the visitors and all of us the critters in the cages. I'm surprised your tent didn't collapse with the weight of all the dracs perching here all night. Anyone with the slightest bit of psi strength higher than shielding discipline got a few …" She shrugged and met M'kar's eyes for a moment.

  "Pests. Adorable pests. Clinging, even without touching you, and constantly asking 'why, why, why.' Just like the kids on the ship."

  "Our crew children are exceptionally intelligent and alert." She winked and bent her head over the tablet again. "And spoiled rotten by dozens of adopted aunts and uncles, willing to teach them anything they want to know. If it wasn't for the minimum age requirement, every one of them could go to the Academy by their twelfth birthday. And skip Basic. They'll ace all their survival and hand-to-hand training, thanks to you and mean old Uncle Decker."

  "Yeah, they will." M'kar snorted and then laughed for real when the sound didn't irritate her head. She felt like her brain had finally shrunk back to normal size. "That's exactly what happened all night." She rubbed her face with her free hand. It was worth her life to move the arm with the cuff on it while Brea was gathering data. Once her crewmate had given her an image to start from, she was able to untangle the twisted knot of impressions. "I basically got interrogated all night. They answered my questions—dracs dracs have good manners, actually. They just got so excited to have people back. They like people." A sigh. "It's going to take a while putting it all into words."

  "Going from animal imagery and the way they relate to their world, translating into Human terms, is never easy."

  "Not that. It was like … like dozens of little ones asking the same questions, over and over, passing them up the line. Or maybe dozens going to bigger ones, and the bigger ones taking the questions to the biggest ones, so only the oldest dracs actually made contact. But I could hear and sense the little ones trying to get close and ask, the whole time." She pressed two knuckles to her temple, though it wasn't necessary by now. "Got really noisy in here."

  "Anything clear right off the top?" Brea handed her a second tablet. She grinned when M'kar stuck her tongue out at her.

  Unfortunately, she did need to start putting together a report on what had happened to her. Brea had probably been making notes since someone noticed the dracs congregating on M'kar's tent. She was good at realizing som
ething noteworthy was about to happen. But M'kar needed to record her side of the entire encounter. Because that was what it was, a mass, group-mind encounter and learning opportunity presented by the dracs.

  "They miss their friends from the Corona. They know something bad happened. They didn't know or sense anything until they touched my mind, so that kills the hope that they can communicate telepathically over enormous distances and through Chutes and other anomalies."

  "That's good to know."

  "Is it?"

  "If we could have used the dracs to create more secure communication lines, like Decker was speculating over dinner last night, then the unfriendly worlds could do the same thing. Or even use dracs to spy on us." She reached over and tapped the control for the cuff. The lights turned off and the latch popped open.

  "Ugh. Yeah. There's always a downside to every wonderful new invention." M'kar grinned in relief and tugged her arm free, rubbing at the wrist. She got up and filled the tumbler with water. The first mouthful tasted faintly of anise from her tonic. "I picked up a lot from them, while they were kind of … rummaging through my head like little children getting used to a new playground."

  "That's not a very comforting thought."

  "Like, they can take over our minds? Not really that, so much as being overwhelmed. Lots of shouts for attention. I think I've got it sorted out. At least enough to keep them from ganging up on me again. Besides, I didn't go through Granny. I'm pretty sure if I tell her what happened, she'll scold them all into behaving in the future. There's an interesting hierarchy or social structure or whatever. The bottom line is that they're glad we're here, even knowing what happened to their kin on the Corona."

  "They know?" Brea stopped short and her eyes got wide.

  "They know everyone is sleeping. They know that the bad things that need shrieking -- that's the impression I get when I visualize the dymcrait -- they know those bad things put the people to sleep, and the dracs who are their special friends are sleeping too. They aren't worried."