by Ellis, Don
“We can make you anything you need.”
“Brassieres? Pants? Extra shirts? No offense, but it doesn’t look like clothing is high on you guys’ list of priorities. And how about toothbrushes?”
“We can make anything you need,” Navrel said again. “We must go now.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “At least let me get my bag off the ship. It’s right here.”
“Go, then, but hurry.”
David followed her up the ramp. “I’m going, too.”
“I figured you were.”
“Is that okay with you?” He didn’t mean the question to sound belligerent, but the stress in his voice made it come out wrong.
“Do what you like. I’m sure there’s room enough for us to avoid each other if we—”
“Stop.”
She did, halfway up the stairs to the upper deck. “Now what?”
“Just stop being so touchy for a minute. I don’t give a rip about the Kalirae. I mean, it’s great to meet aliens and all that, but I want to go with you.” He swallowed, then said, as softly as he could manage, “Okay?”
She leaned back against the railing. “I thought guys were supposed to get all cold and distant after a night in the sack.”
“Surprise.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. You mean I’ve been bitchy and defensive all day for nothing?”
“You haven’t been bitchy all day.” He grinned weakly. “Just most of it.”
She rolled her eyes and took a step down toward him, but he never learned what she intended to do because just then the sound of gunfire erupted from outside.
“Shit!” He whirled around and rushed for the airlock, but a hail of bullets bouncing off the ceiling convinced him that was a bad idea. He dropped to the floor, yelled, “Get down!” and pulled his pistol from his belt.
She yelped and clattered down the stairs, sprawling beside him and clawing at her chest. At first he thought she was going for her own gun, then he saw the bright red stain against the black leather.
“No!” he screamed. He fired his pistol wildly out the door, then jumped up and slapped the emergency close button halfway up the left side. The airlock slammed shut with enough force to rattle his teeth, cutting off the bullets from outside. He could still hear them bouncing off the hull, but he bent down next to Raedawn, who was holding her left hand tight against the right side of her chest.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“I don’t . . . think I want to know.” She was breathing hard, and her whole body shook from the pain. Blood flowed around her fingers.
“Hang tight,” he said, standing up and slapping his pistol back onto his belt. “I’m going to get you to the hospital.”
“How?”
“We’re in a spaceship.”
“You can’t . . . land there.”
“They’ve got a parking lot.”
“Jesus, David. It’s . . . full of cars.”
“And you’ve got a bullet hole in your chest!”
He turned and took the stairs two at a time, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling when he hit Martian gravity on the upper deck. He jumped into the left-hand chair and switched on the agravs, then ran the throttle forward until the ship leaped into the air. He immediately cut the power and let it arc over so he could see the base. He recognized the hoverpath they had taken before and followed it with his eyes until he spotted the boxy medical building. The emergency vehicle pad on the roof confirmed that it was the right one, but the ship was way too big to land there. It would crush the whole building.
He looked for the main ground entrance, then brought the ship down in front of it, pausing only long enough to let anyone below flee the area before he dropped it the last dozen meters onto the ground. He felt trees snap and cars buckle beneath its bulk, then the ship bumped hard and stayed put. He switched off the agravs and rushed down the stairs again, slapped the door button, and turned to Raedawn.
“This is probably going to hurt,” he said as he bent down to scoop her up in his arms.
“It already does,” she whispered.
“Here goes.”
He slid his hands underneath her and picked her up. She kept her left hand tight against her chest, but she put her right arm around his neck as he rushed outside and down the ramp, staggering under her weight in the full Earth gravity.
“My hero,” she whispered as she leaned her head against his chest.
“Hang on. We’re almost there.”
The automatic doors didn’t open fast enough. He kicked them out of the way and rushed on in, stumbling up to the admissions desk, where he deposited her on the counter with his last ounce of strength. “Gunshot,” he told the startled ward clerk, a middle-aged woman who had just been getting up to see what all the commotion was outside. “She’s been hit!”
The clerk took one look at Raedawn and immediately forgot the spaceship in her parking lot. She snatched up her phone and said, “Code blue to the admissions desk. Code blue, gunshot.”
Footsteps pounded down the corridor behind her, and two orderlies in soft green scrubs rushed in, saw Raedawn lying on the counter, and grabbed one of the gurneys waiting in the hallway. David helped them move her onto it, then followed them down the corridor to the emergency room.
“Sir, you can’t go in there!” the ward clerk protested, but he ignored her and she apparently considered her duty filled with one warning.
The orderlies rushed out and a doctor rushed in, still tying on a surgical apron, then he gently lifted Raedawn’s hand, pulled her jacket aside, and pressed a bandage into the wound without removing her shirt. The hole was well to the right of center, just under her breast, and it gurgled as she breathed.
“You’re going to be okay,” David told her. “You’re going to be okay. Isn’t she?”
The doctor whistled softly. “That’s a nasty wound, but yes, I think she’ll live.” He turned toward the cabinet beside the door for another bandage, but he stopped in midmotion. The air swirled, a patch of blackness formed, and Navrel stood there before him.
The Kalira took in the entire situation in one glance, then said, “How quaint.” He stepped up to Raedawn and held his hands over her, then the air shimmered and they both were gone.
The doctor opened and closed his mouth a few times, then said, “What was that?”
“Somebody who’d damn well better know what he’s doing, or I’m going to put a bullet hole in him.”
He got his chance a moment later when the Kalira re-materialized beside him. “She’s hurt, dammit!” David said. “She needs help before you snatch her off—”
There was a moment of discontinuity, then they stood in a different emergency room, this one larger, with three other Kalirae standing over Raedawn, who lay on an exam table twice as long as it needed to be. The aliens weren’t touching her, though. They held their arms extended over her like Navrel had, but from their hands a soft blue-green light began to descend, wrapping itself around her upper body like a cocoon.
Raedawn gasped, then stopped breathing.
“Navrel!” David growled, pulling his gun from his belt.
“She lives. See.” Navrel’s eyes never left Raedawn. David looked at her again, saw her chest rise and fall, saw her eyelids flutter, and put his pistol away.
“Our methods are faster,” Navrel said. He nodded to the exam table beside her, where Harxae rested, the bandage removed from his thigh and the bullet hole nowhere in evidence.
“It seemed expedient to leave before someone else got hurt,” Navrel said.
“What happened?” David asked. “Who started shooting?”
“One of the soldiers,” said the Kalira. “I knew he was xenophobic, but I misjudged the extent of his fear. When Harxae stumbled going up the ramp he thought we were about to attack, so he fired on us. In the confusion that followed, everyone else opened fire as well.”
“Did you . . . did you hurt them?”
“That was not necessary.”<
br />
He was surprised to find that he actually cared, even about Lamott. Then Raedawn sat up and he rushed forward, all thoughts of Lamott forgotten.
“Are you all right?” He reached out for her, but didn’t know where to touch. She was like some delicate crystal sculpture that had miraculously escaped an earthquake, and now he was afraid to risk going near.
“That was . . . bizarre,” she said. She raised her arms experimentally, then twisted her chest from side to side. The bloodstained shirt and jacket glistened in the bright overhead light, but she showed no evidence of pain. The three Kalirae who had healed her bowed slightly, then turned away.
“Hey!” she said.
As one, they turned back toward her.
“Thanks.”
They bowed again, then left the room.
“Vow of silence?” she asked Navrel.
Navrel gave a little shrug of his bony shoulders. “There was understanding enough without words.”
She reached out for David, and he helped her off the exam table. Gravity here was somewhere between Earth and Mars normal.
He hugged her, gently at first, then tighter when she didn’t cry out. He kissed her, and she seemed to be okay with that, too, but a moment later she backed away and said, “Oh, yuck.”
“Yuck?”
“I got blood all over you.”
His uniform had a big stain just below the left pocket. He felt a brief moment of panic at the sight of so much blood, still fresh and red, but he fought it down. She was okay. He pulled her close and kissed her again.
“That’s all right,” he said. “This time. Just don’t do it again.”
25
Where are we now?” Raedawn asked.
Navrel tilted his head as if listening to a distant voice. “In space. We are currently engaged in battle. Come see.” He said it nonchalantly, as if space battles were a natural part of any trip.
They weren’t natural for David, even though he’d been in more than his share lately. He felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck at the thought that missiles might be approaching at that very moment. “The Union is still trying to shoot us down?”
“No. I believe the first wave were Pharons. Others have since joined them. The Shard are standing off to let us wear each other down. Come.”
Raedawn took a cloth from the side of the exam table and wiped off the worst of the blood from her shirt and jacket, then she and David followed Navrel and Harxae through the ship to the control room.
It felt like they were in an office building: wide corridors with high ceilings, rooms opening off to either side, elevators and stairways for moving between levels. Even though the ship must be maneuvering, there was no sense of motion. Kalirae engines and artificial gravity generators were apparently more tightly attuned to one another than human ones.
“Other races?” David asked as they walked. “What’s going on? Did they all decide to gang up on Earth, or are they after you?”
“Considering how quickly they arrived, I believe they were already coming simply to investigate the latest arrival in the Maelstrom,” Navrel told him, “but now they’re after you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. They don’t know it’s you in particular whom they seek, but they all watched an Earth spaceship approach the remnant of the veil that brought your world here, and they watched you manipulate it and lead it where you wished. They watched holes appear in it, however briefly. You did something no one has seen before, and they all want to find out how you did it.”
“Me,” David said again.
“Yes. They chase us because it’s clear that we got to you first.”
Raedawn, holding his hand as they walked side by side through the immense ship, gave him an odd little smile. “Sounds like you’re almost as hot an item as you think you are.”
“He doesn’t regard himself as—Oh. I see. That was sarcasm.”
They turned a corner, and Navrel led them down another corridor. Raedawn eyed him speculatively. “You wouldn’t by any chance be after the same thing everybody else is, would you? That was what’s called a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering.”
His wrinkled face grew even more so. “Yes, we are also interested in learning what he knows. Perhaps our combined knowledge will prove useful, since we do know a little about the Maelstrom ourselves.” He paused, then added, “That was what’s called an understatement.”
“First things first,” said David. “How do we get past those alien ships, and what can they do to Earth if we don’t stop them?”
Navrel gave him a puzzled look. “We fight our way past them, of course. And what they do to Earth is not our concern.”
“It is mine. I’m not going to stand back and let them attack my homeworld because of something I did.”
“You are not in a position to do anything else.”
“No? I think maybe I am. You can take what I know out of my brain, but you can’t take how I think. If I refuse to work with you, my knowledge isn’t worth a tenth of what it could be.” In fact, he thought, if Lamott was right, then it wasn’t worth a damned thing.
The Kalira bit his lip in a decidedly human gesture. He looked at Harxae, who looked back, their eyes locking in intense concentration. Were they trying to hypnotize each other into agreement? David had no idea how deep a level their conversation occurred on, but it only took a few seconds before they broke it off and Navrel said, “What do you propose? We are only four ships against many.”
Four ships the size of battle cruisers, David thought, but he hadn’t seen what they were up against. Fortunately, he didn’t intend to fight them all if he didn’t have to. “Who’s faster, us or them?” he asked.
“We are, but not by a wide margin.”
“So much the better. They wouldn’t chase us unless they thought they stood a chance of catching us.”
“Do we want them to chase us?” Raedawn asked.
“Just long enough to draw them away from Earth,” he said. “And to pick each other off when they think they’ve got the upper hand.”
They approached a wide door at the end of the corridor. It slid sideways into the wall when they drew close, revealing the inside of the vast domed control room. Ten to fifteen Kalirae stood at their stations, flying, shooting, and communicating with the other ships in perfect coordination and total silence.
“Yes,” Navrel said in answer to his unvoiced thought. “We can be of one mind when we wish it.”
The dome was clear as glass. It looked as if they were standing on the outer hull while the battle raged overhead. Bright flashes appeared in space, the white, symmetrical ones indicating near misses; the reddish, ragged ones revealing hits. Drive flames drew arcs through the darkness.
“Holy . . . how many ships?” whispered Raedawn.
“Forty-three,” said Navrel. There was another red blast. “Forty-two.”
“Ten to one,” said David. “Not the best of odds, but they’ll have to do. At least they’re fighting among themselves, as well as with us.”
He tried to spot concentrations of ships. There were three obvious alliances, each taking occasional pot shots at one another as they poured most of their firepower at their mutual objective. David couldn’t see the other three Kalirae ships, but he could tell where they were by the continual barrage of antimissile fire spreading out from three separate points in space beside and behind their own. The defense seemed sufficient; nothing got even close. It looked like the Kalirae strategy was to wear down their attackers’ numbers through attrition, but the Kalirae ships would have to take an ungodly amount of incoming fire to do that. No matter how good their defenses, something was bound to slip through eventually.
And Earth, hanging like a glass Christmas ornament behind them, was way too close for comfort.
“Let’s make a break for it,” David said.
“We are not in a good position for that,” Navrel protested.
“Then they won’t be expecting it, will the
y? That’s the best time. Make like we’re going to attack, fire a few missiles to keep ’em busy, then split up and go like hell for deep space.”
Navrel didn’t have to relay the command. The other Kalirae in the control room picked up on David’s thoughts, reached consensus, and acted before words would have become necessary.
The immense craft leaped toward one of the three clusters of alien ships. David smiled as he realized that he was already thinking of the Kalirae ship as his own. Only the unknown enemies were “alien.” They scattered when the Kalirae fired on them, but regrouped immediately and poured a steady barrage of missiles at the fleeing ship.
Off in the distance, two other Kalirae ships each drew their own retinue in their wake. The fourth joined one of the others, the one with the biggest following. Earth fell behind, ignored in the heat of the chase.
“Okay, now we cross paths. Force the clusters of ships behind us to pass right through each other.”
That plan needed no relaying, either, not even to the other ships. The Kalirae craft angled toward one another, crossed close enough to make David and Raedawn cling together in surprise, then split apart again.
David watched behind them. The pursuing ships might as well have gone through a shredder. Half their number erupted in spectacular explosions, the first few taken out by missiles and the rest by their debris. The survivors were the ones who went wide at the first sign of trouble, but they regrouped again, and this time there was no more firing between them.
“Plan B,” said David. “Do you have—?”
He didn’t need to finish his thought. Even as he was voicing it, the Kalirae ships each vented thousands of gallons of water from their holding tanks. It immediately flashed to vapor in the vacuum of space, but it had the same mass either way. The pursuing ships veered frantically aside, but five more didn’t make it in time. At the speed they were going, even water vapor hit like a brick wall, smashing open their hulls and spilling their contents into space.
There were maybe fifteen ships left. These stayed well away from each other as their commanders reconsidered their positions and their strategy.
“Okay,” David said. “Let’s look for fast space and run for it.”
