Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  "So, when do we report all this to the ship?" Decker said, after the landing party had gotten together and made breakfast. They all admired Barroo and discussed what Tahl was going through and how to help her adjust to her new baby. She had named the green drac Ha'ess, Ankuaran for "swift poison."

  There was a disturbing trend in naming dracs, M'kar noted.

  "They should be starting the ship's day pretty soon," Hanni said. "We didn't record everything, but we got enough to satisfy the captain, you think?"

  "Enough to prove you didn't go out and beg for those eggs?" Decker's eyes sparkled, even as he shook his head and his mouth curved down at a stern angle.

  M'kar suspected he was getting back at her for threatening to distribute those pictures of him.

  "Where is that third egg?" Sh'hari said. "Everybody but Tahl is here, so nobody else here got ambushed."

  "Maybe it's still back in the cavern M'kar told us about," Anyette said. "Maybe it's got normal drac parenting."

  "Maybe Granny dropped the egg, bringing it to the camp." JM hunched his shoulders. "I mean, think about it. You said, eggs can’t be teleported. They have to be carried. That's a lot of long flying." He waited, but M'kar didn't respond right away. "Right?"

  "I'm … not … sure."

  An awful suspicion hovered at the back of her mind. She wanted to keep her metaphorical back to it so she wouldn't see it and allow it to step into the light of day. At the same time, she had the awful feeling it was going to jump on her back, sink long fangs into her neck, and give her the worst headache of her life. In a metaphorical sense, of course.

  "What do you mean, you're not sure?" Hanni said.

  "The eggs the matriarchs brought from the other tribes all over the world had to be carried, but they were all pre-jewel stage. Their shells were soft and smooth. They didn't look like sugar casings, ready to crack. The babies weren't conscious. They weren't … well, they weren't baked all the way, you know?" She shrugged. "Besides, some of the images I saw, newborns teleported within hours. They were scared. They popped out and popped back in, no harm. At least as far as I can tell. It makes sense that the difference of a few hours shouldn't be a difference."

  "Hey, guys?" Brackton, who mostly supplied muscle for landing parties, stepped out of the shed with a fresh plate of breakfast. He was slow today. Usually by this time of the morning he had eaten three servings, and this was only his second. "The communication request light is flashing."

  "Why didn't you respond?" Decker snapped.

  "My momma didn't raise no dummy. Let an officer answer. Whoever is calling this early in the ship's day, they're not happy."

  "Oh. Heck. Heckety," Sh'hari whispered. She turned big eyes to M'kar. "I think I know where Granny and the third egg went."

  "As near as we can figure," Treinna said, a short time later, after much scrambling for ideas and talking over each other, "she must have had a good lock on someone's psi signal. Someone who leaks a lot. She followed them up to the ship. We had intruder alert warnings, registering energy blips all over the ship, all night. Not until this morning did we catch an image of her popping in and out."

  "Who in the landing party did she go after?" Decker demanded.

  M'kar was glad to let him take over the interrogation or whatever this panicky communication session was called.

  "No one. We're guessing she spent the night shopping for the perfect candidate," Veylen said.

  "Who?"

  "Oh, no," M'kar whispered, when the answer to "who could be the worst possible choice to bond with a highly questionable, possibly interdicted semi-sentient species?" popped into her head.

  Decker glared at her and his hands tightened on his fourth mug of caf to the point that it creaked. M'kar supposed she had gotten him back, in return. Not that she really wanted to.

  "Where is she?" M'kar asked. "More important, how is she? And what color is her drac?"

  "She's been spending time in the sparring simulator every morning before breakfast," Veylen said. "Nobody noticed when she didn't show up for breakfast. Only when she didn't show up for duty shift."

  "Who?" Decker barked.

  "Captain Arroyan." The Exo sighed loudly enough to be heard over the communication pod. "Her drac is black. Like polished obsidian. If it's any comfort, she looks very happy."

  Decker grumbled something under his breath, most likely the equivalent of, "No, it's not any comfort at all."

  Alarms blarred through the connection. Someone shouted. M'kar decided that it didn't matter the language, panicked, furious cussing all sounded alike.

  "Let me guess," she growled, meeting Decker's eyes as comprehension widened them. "A ship just popped out of the Chute? Hiver energy signatures and emissions?"

  "You know the drill," Veylen snapped, and the link went dead.

  Granny popped in about five meters up and dropped with a squeal. Decker leaped, snagged a blanket someone had brought out during the early morning panic alert, wadded it up, and caught her. M'kar saved that for later, to use against him when he complained about what useless pests the dracs were. She knew he would, probably just to counteract the "awwww" that he wouldn't allow out of his throat. He was the big, bad, snarling Security chief, after all. No soft spots.

  "Guys?" Sh'hari raced over with the screen that linked them with ship's status. "I just had an awful thought."

  "Join the club," Decker growled, cradling Granny close and making no effort to hide his concern.

  She looked exhausted. Teleporting far distances, carrying an egg about to hatch, would probably do that.

  "If we found the camp by the equipment they left behind, what's to stop the Hivers from finding it now? Especially if they know drac screams are repellants for them? What's to stop them from blasting this place off the surface of the planet, using it as a starting point to hunt down any life signs and trying to wipe out the last of the dracs? You said they basically collected all the eggs that were left. The last of the species are pretty much here, right?"

  "Always looking at the black side of things." Decker shoved the blanket and Granny into M'kar's arms. "That's what I love about you. All right, people! Evacuation. Now! Double-time! Pack up! Don't leave a single scrap of anything not native to this world."

  "Not even the latrine?" JM muttered.

  They solved the problem of transporting and disposing of problem items that wouldn't fit inside the two shuttles by strapping them to the outside. Anyette came up with the idea, based on a series of training simulations she had been designing for the children preparing to apply to the Academy. Small explosives at strategic points on the straps would enable Decker, who needed the catharsis of destroying something, to jettison the "luggage." Other explosives among the building panels and unwanted equipment would create a cloud of debris to hide their trail, if necessary. In theory.

  The Hivers didn't seem to notice the Defender, slipping around the other side of the planet to put it between the two ships. They didn't seem to react to the emissions trail, or the sensor sweeps. They didn't go after the shuttles as they angled up through the atmosphere, heading away from them. M'kar thought Decker was a little irritated, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, his finger poised over the button to set off the first round of explosives. There was no need, so it appeared, to use the last-ditch-effort camouflage strategy. Then again, she thought Decker was in desperate need of a long, long shore leave. The shuttles moved up into orbiting altitude and adjusted course to sweep around the planet and meet the Defender, coming from the other direction. Everyone in the shuttle, including the three dracs, seemed to deflate a little and breathed easier.

  "Am I seeing things?" Quimble muttered, leaning forward a little further to look at the sensor screen devoted to the Hiver ship. He looked over at Decker, got a glare, and glanced over his shoulder at M'kar. "Do you see them … I don't know … wobbling?"

  "Wobbling." M'kar wondered if Quimble needed the shore leave more. She unfastened her harness and settled the blanket bundle of dr
acs on the deck. Barroo immediately chirped protest and hopped up to her thigh. He got in the way for a moment as M'kar scooted forward to kneel between the pilot and co-pilot seats to get a good look at the screens. Sighing, feeling a little silly for her delighted reaction to Barroo's clingyiness, she shifted him to her shoulder. He immediately latched onto her braid, which was coming apart even more, wrapped his tail around her neck, and let out an audible sigh of satisfaction.

  Granny stayed curled up in the blanket. Her eyelids closed and she deflated, falling asleep. At least, M'kar hoped she was falling asleep.

  Then all her attention focused on the screen. The Hiver ship was nothing but a blip about the size of her thumb on the tactical screen, with a grid indicating distances. Quimble tapped the controls and increased the magnification. Then a second time. Decker leaned forward, his scowl relaxing.

  "Yep, definite wobble." He snorted. "Didn't think those ships could do that."

  "Considering the only Hiver ships anybody has ever seen have been damaged, seriously gutted? There's a lot we could learn from them if …" M'kar held her breath as Decker's scowl turned into a smirk. Barroo trilled and ducked down, hiding his head in the collar of her shirt. "No."

  "Just thinking ahead. If, say, we got a chance -- Look, Lieutenant, something's hinked up those Hivers. They're ignoring an easy capture. Us." Decker gestured at the screen. "They're flying like they're smashed on the Green. For all we know, their ships really are a mixture of plant, insect and machine, and …" He sat back, eyes narrowing, and slowly nodded.

  "Somebody got their ship drunk?" JM offered from the row of seats behind M'kar.

  "Who knows what drac screams do to the bugs? I was doing some research, once you identified that Le'ankan monster. That theory about mind control. What if the people are just like robots, mind-controlled, doing the bidding of the bugs? What if there's never been an alliance, but all the people we see as the Hivers are just drones? So who's flying the ship if the drac screams blitzed the brains of the operation?" He spread his arms, visibly challenging the others in the shuttle to come up with a better theory.

  "We still have to get our hands on that ship to find out," JM said. "How do we do that, when they don't seem to see us?"

  Decker got that evil grin on his face M'kar had only seen twice. Both times, he had been about to dive into a riot and beat the snot out of opponents bigger and stronger and smellier than him. Then he raised the control pod for the explosive packs.

  "No --"

  The shuttle bucked as all the explosives shot off at once.

  "Step on it," Decker growled, and tossed down the control to grip the armrests of his seat.

  M'kar settled back into her seat and persuaded Barroo to slide down inside her jacket, where he would be held in place but not crushed by the harness when she put it back on. Granny stayed asleep, even when M'kar adjusted the bundle of blanket where she nested so it was firmly between her feet and the seat support post.

  "Here they come," Quimble announced.

  Tahl opened her eyes. Her tent-mates had carried her to the shuttle and wrapped her and Ha'ess in blankets, before strapping them into a seat between M'kar and the bulkhead. She looked around, then pulled her arms out of the blankets and snuggled the baby drac closer.

  "Do I want to know what you lunatics are doing?"

  "Decker wants to know what it's like to be the bait in the Ba'exa Games." M'kar wished, just for a moment, dracs were big enough and strong enough to teleport all of them out of the shuttle and back to the Defender. She would leave Decker here to deal with the Hivers who, fortunately, hadn't gained on them yet, even though they were visibly on the trail of the shuttle now.

  Tahl looked around the shuttle, then cuddled Ha'ess closer, covering the baby drac's head. Maybe she was covering her ears, because a moment later she spilled a stream of High Ankuar that colored the air a filthy, rotted sort of green and put a definite scorch of sulfur in it. Or maybe that was Low Ankuar. Decker tipped his head back. His mouth moved a few times without any sound.

  "You kiss your mama with that mouth?" he muttered, before offering a grin.

  Tahl sighed and leaned back in her chair. Then her mouth quirked up in the corners.

  "Does anybody want to explain what Ba'exa is?" Hanni asked from the fourth row. "Since we've got nothing else to do while we wait for the Hivers to catch up with us and turn us into batteries."

  "They won't," M'kar said. "Not with three dracs on board." She mentally nudged at Granny's mind, checking to make sure she would be up for some defensive shrieks.

  "Besides, they're chasing us, but they're still wobbling." Quimble offered a slightly shaky grin. "More like zig-zagging."

  "Zig-sagging," Decker said, after leaning forward to check several other screens. "I don't see any signs of mechanical problems, nothing wrong with their emissions or engines, but they can't seem to keep their hands on the steering harness."

  "Maybe everybody is trying to get their hands on the steering harness," Sh'hari offered.

  "Shuttle Gambogen," Veylen said, his voice crackling through the overhead speaker grill, "we have you on sensors. Do I want to know what that debris trail is, disintegrating behind you?"

  Everyone cheered, including the baby dracs, who let out trills that wobbled and chimed in chords.

  They had just enough time before they met up with their ship for M'kar and Tahl to explain that Ba'exa was a rite of passage for Ankuar. It had started as a means of taming the brutal wilderness on some of the nearby colony worlds, when the warring race had first headed into space. That was the public explanation. The private reasoning was to weed out defective genetics. The competition became so popular, the winners each season so highly regarded, that the ruling and scholarly bloodlines joined in. Anybody who got through Ba'exa retaining at least three appendages was declared a winner and allowed to reproduce.

  Fortunately for the Ankuar, but perhaps unfortunately for the rest of the universe, within two generations a disturbing trend became visible. Those who spent their adolescent years learning to use their brains to come up with important things like starship drives, weaponry, sensors, and other valuable tools for Ankuar plans of conquest, didn't spend three-quarters of every day training to survive Ba'exa. They struggled for two more generations, determining what was more important to them: battlefield valor and brutality or developing the technology that would let them take their brutality to the universe. Then a genius died in Ba'exa with several convoluted scientific principles still tangled and a strongly anticipated battleship design unfinished. No one could decipher her notes or follow the fragmented reasoning until nearly forty years later. By then, they came up with a cerebral version of Ba'exa that the intelligentsia dove into just as eagerly as the single-digit IQ athlete-warriors did with the original, bloody, tooth-and-claw version.

  Nobody asked Tahl how she had done in Ba'exa. M'kar considered that very wise. Just because she was a healer didn't mean she didn't have scars.

  "What's the situation with the Hivers?" M'kar demanded, the first to stumble out of the shuttle bay when they landed.

  "Does the song, What Can You Do With a Drunken Ankuar? come to mind?" Genys said.

  "Oh. You're awake." M'kar reached up to check that Barroo was settled securely on her shoulder, in case this was one of those situations where Genys wouldn't let anyone get away with a really stupid remark. Such as had just come out of her mouth.

  "I honestly hope so." The Defender's captain gave them all a sleepy smile and the glistening black, fringed head of a drac with sparkling royal blue eyes peeped out of the collar of her robe.

  That, M'kar realized, should have been her clue that maybe she wasn't going to get her head handed to her. Genys wasn't officially on duty. Not wearing her long, fuzzy green robe and looking like she hadn't done more than rake her fingers through her hair.

  "What's his name?" Tahl exchanged a lopsided grin with M'kar and stepped up, the two of them holding their little dracs steady on their sho
ulders.

  "Her name …" Genys sighed, stroked the crest. "Is Battleaxe."

  "Uh huh."

  "I was kind of planning on that for …" Decker shrugged and looked around. "Well, since we seem to be getting bombed with eggs, figured I'd be ready." Another shrug.

  "The Hiver ship is currently weaving around, with weaponry in standby mode, according to energy readings. Of course, no one has ever been able to study an undamaged Hiver ship from this close, so we're not really sure." Genys heaved herself up from the bench next to the door. "While I love gathering as much scientific data as possible, let's finish this, people."

  Battleaxe let out a chirp that sounded so much like, "So there," M'kar snorted. That was better than falling down laughing in the corridor. She hoped they would all be able to do that very soon.

  Granny gave a clearly cranky trill as Hanni put her blanket down on the seat Genys had just vacated. She pried one eye open, then the other, and spread her wings, to rise about half a meter before whimpering and dropping back down. M'kar didn't need to translate for anyone: Granny didn't want to be left behind.