Richard stood up on a rock and people gathered around him. Charlie came close, a little to the side. This time, Richard spoke almost conversationally. “We wait. Hide in the rocks. They run along this road just after full dark.” He pointed down at the road. “We don’t attack until our air cover arrives.”
Charlie raised a hand. “Don’t they know we’re here?” he asked. “Surely they have cameras.”
The question seemed to irritate Richard. Nevertheless, he answered it. “They surely do. We’ve done this three times, now. We watch them, and we’ve spread rumors that we watch them because we want to be them. That’s the whole reason they leave the old ranger station alone. They see us as spectators.”
“Thanks.” Maybe the Next who ran things here were far enough away from real human behavior to buy that kind of story. He didn’t like it.
Richard turned his attention back toward the whole group. “Our job is to pick off any of the bots that get away. Remember that they look human. Every one of them. But you are not killing people. They are no longer people.”
“All right,” one woman said. “I’m ready.”
Charlie considered. He needed to stop hesitating. It wasn’t like he was going to get any more help, and even if the broad distribution caused a problem, having a small group was a blessing. Everyone was close.
Richard stood on a flat rock with room behind him for at least two people. He was focused on his message and on his people.
Charlie signaled Jean Paul, took a deep breath, and vaulted onto the rock beside Richard. He braced his feet, grabbed one arm, and twisted Richard toward him. Richard managed a step that allowed him to keep his balance and raised his right arm.
“Stop them!” someone yelled.
Jean Paul grabbed Richard’s raised arm from behind, unbalancing the bigger man.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
NONA
Nona faded back into the suddenly dismayed and chaotic crowd, trying to take the whole scene in at once. She hadn’t expected Charlie to act quite so . . . precipitously. Stupid of her. He had told her that they would do it this way.
Richard’s followers seemed to be splitting, some toward the action, some stepping away, assessing.
Most attention focused on the rock where Charlie and Jean Paul struggled to hold the far bigger and more muscular Richard.
Two men flanked them in front, armed.
Charlie had his stunner buried in Richard’s side. He yelled. “Stand down. We’ll kill him.”
They backed away, but not far. Waiting for a moment.
The same woman who had yelled for action earlier had been stopped by two of the women who came with them from the farms. Even though she was smaller, she was spitting and scratching, snarling at her captors, “Let me go!” The women held on.
Jean Paul forced Richard into a sitting position. A man and a woman she recognized from the Storm came in and took Charlie’s place; between the three of them, they kept Richard contained.
He stopped struggling, glaring at Charlie. “You’re making a mistake.”
Charlie ignored him, speaking to the larger group. “We came to stop this fight.”
Richard managed to spit on him, hitting him in the cheek.
Charlie didn’t flinch. “Murdering the most innocent of the Next won’t help anything.”
Nona would have said something different. She started edging toward the rocky rise behind Charlie, Jean Paul, and the others.
Richard struggled to a stand, still held, but almost looking like he was still in charge. The force of his personality shone more clearly than she had seen before; she understood why so many people had followed him here. He spoke calmly. “It doesn’t matter. Save your energy.”
An off-worlder woman sidled to the edge of the ridge, maybe hoping to come behind the three men. She wore holstered weapons, and one hand was on the biggest, preparing to draw it.
Nona moved up between her and the men and said, “No.”
The woman stopped, an infuriated look on her face. “Traitor.”
“To what?” Nona hissed back. Even just the few steps upslope that Nona had taken to stop the woman gave her a much better view. She was above the action, and she could make out each and every face. Amy was completely focused on Richard, looking like she might jump up and try to free him.
One man turned and ran away.
No one followed him. Nona didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean much. He could alert the other groups.
She couldn’t think of anything to do about it.
Richard remained calm, even though Charlie and Jean Paul still held him. His body language proclaimed he was still in control. “It’s okay,” he said. “The attack will happen anyway. We’re the cleanup crew.” Richard straightened and smiled in open defiance.
Charlie risked a glance in the direction Richard was looking.
Hiroma walked toward them with Amanda just in front of her.
Richard tried to twist free again, and Charlie pulled harder on his arm. “It’ll break,” Charlie whispered, barely loud enough for Nona to hear him.
Hiroma looked puzzled until she came close, and then angry. She grabbed Amanda by the arm to pull her off balance, pointed a small, deadly-looking gun at her, then looked directly at Charlie. “We’re even now. So you let Richard go, and I’ll let Amanda Knight go.”
Amy gasped. “Mom!”
Hiroma looked pleased.
Amanda stood taller and looked at Charlie. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I won’t,” he said.
In spite of the fact that Hiroma leveled a weapon at her, Amanda smiled. Whatever fear had been holding her back, she’d given it up in this instant. She and Richard were the show, two captives who refused to look cowed. The situation created a fascinating standoff.
“What do you want?” Hiroma asked Charlie, her voice laced with disdain. “We’re not the main attack force. You heard him. We’re the cleanup crew.”
It was like a mantra for these people. Being the cleanup crew. Better, he supposed, than thinking they could take on the Next by themselves.
Amanda answered her without looking at Amy. “We want our people back.”
“What if we don’t want to go?” Amy said, her voice stiff with conflicting emotions. “I’m making Lym safe.”
“No.” Amanda sounded unnaturally calm. “If it can be made safe, it’s not by destruction.”
“Tell that to the Next,” Richard said.
Charlie swept his gaze across the crowd. “If we all destroy each other, no one wins. If we allow Lym to be destroyed by a war we take part in, we are killers. Killers of Lym, which we all swore to protect, and of the creatures that share her with us.”
Nona swallowed, surveying the crowd. Blood pounded through her, demanding that she move, that she break the standoff. But how? They were out of time. Above them, the brilliant colors in the sky had nearly all faded.
It would be dark soon. The robots would come.
Amanda spoke loudly enough to carry to the whole group. “It’s our job to protect Lym. These others—the ones who aren’t us—are baiting the Next. They plan to bring war down onto our heads, war upon the living things we love. War on the tongats and the tharps, on the birds and the farms and the town. If you—” she looked at Amy and her friends “—if you are part of it, the Next may assume more of us in Lym are breaking the agreement that Charlie negotiated with them. That’s why he’s here, and me as well. We aren’t oath breakers; we can’t afford war.”
“Why do you love the robots so?” Hiroma asked.
Nona bit her tongue; this wasn’t her peace to negotiate.
“We don’t,” Charlie said. “We don’t want them here at all. But to have the Shining Revolution or the Next blow this continent to pieces isn’t going to help anyone. Have you seen Neville? War shattered it. There are still dead ships sticking out of buildings, still destruction everywhere.”
“It’s too late,” Hiroma said. “If we don’t
stop the Next here, they will take all of the Glittering.”
There. The first crack in the armor.
Amy stared at the woman who held her mom captive. “But you can’t let them hurt Lym. That’s the point.”
Hiroma didn’t seem to understand the shaky ground she’d put herself on. She dug the hole deeper. “Lym matters, but driving the Next away matters more.”
Amy’s eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. A look Nona had seen on Amanda’s face when she was about to get stubborn and dig into a position. But which one?
Amanda also watched Amy. “It’s been too late to stop the Next since this started. But it’s not too late to get our children out.” She glanced around at the whole crowd. “Or to do our best to take care of Lym. A year ago, that meant managing the borders of habitats and re-introducing species. But today protecting Lym is stopping a war from exterminating everything we love.”
Nona glanced at Charlie; he looked pleased.
Hiroma answered Amanda. “It is too late. The robots are coming now.”
Nona tore her eyes away from her friend and looked toward the road below them. Slight movement gave away another group of humans opposite them, on the road. Then all was still. Stations now glittered in the near-dark skies, and the brightest stars kept them company. Night birds wheeled above the desert, their wingspans as wide as Nona was tall. Perhaps wider.
The wind and the taste of dust told her the Next were coming. In the nearly full dark, it was far easier to hear than to see them, but as they came opposite of Nona the light of the Glittering and the stars showed her two huge metal beings with no real pretense at being human. Three times the bulk of humans, they moved as smoothly as water. Behind them, two rows of soulbots followed, all looking as much like people as Chrystal and Yi and Jason. From time to time, light illuminated typical mods from the Glittering: colored hair, longer legs, fully round oversized eyes, bulked muscles, exaggerated figures. They were stranger by far than the simpler farmers of Lym. Nevertheless, they looked like people.
Every so often two more of the larger Next loped outside of the lines.
Even though she couldn’t see them, Nona had the impression the other groups were all spread out pretty close along the ridge. Surely some of the group leaders still had power regardless of the fact that they held Richard.
Maybe they were all waiting for whatever death was supposed to come from the sky.
Everyone from their group now stood on top of the ridge. They were eerily silent, some wide-eyed, a few trying to conceal themselves behind rocks, but most simply watching.
Jean Paul and the two others still held Richard between them. He practically ignored them, his gaze on the sky. Hiroma still held a gun on Amanda, even though she herself didn’t seem to be paying attention to it.
Someone close to her counted aloud. “Twenty-five. Twenty-six.”
Perhaps it was the near darkness, but they looked unmarred and perfect, machinelike and human at once. They were beautiful, running past in precise rows. Fast. Not as fast as she’d seen Yi or Chrystal, but faster than anyone standing on the ridge beside her could run. As she watched them go by in lines (“forty-one, forty-two”), she realized that it wasn’t external beauty that made them attractive.
They were having fun.
Richard kept looking up.
“Maybe your friends aren’t coming,” Charlie said.
“They’re coming.”
Hiroma sounded more desperate than Richard. She poked her weapon at Amanda. “What did you do to them? Did you stop our support? How?”
“We did nothing,” Amanda replied. “What you see is what you get. A bunch of farmers keeping our families and our employees safe and protecting our land.”
Amy had come to stand beside Amanda. The two women weren’t looking at each other in spite of the fact that they were close enough to touch if they wanted to.
“Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.”
So many?
The night air had grown cold and the dark become so absolute that the counter lost track and trailed off at around eighty-six. They all stood listening to the soft scuff and hiss of running feet until even those slid away, and they were left in silence.
No one had come from the air.
No one had been harmed. Not even one of the invaders or one of the children.
Maybe it was because no harm had come, but Nona felt oddly fulfilled. She had witnessed a moment of magic. A set of moments of magic. Amanda speaking eloquently, the desert sunset, the soulbots running in the first dark of night.
She remembered herself and realized that her body was tired, thirsty, and sore with unspent adrenaline. She unhooked her canteen and drank deeply, the water tasting of desert and robots, of the planet she stood on and of the sky she had seen.
The person who had been counting whispered, “Over a hundred.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHARLIE
Charlie and Jean Paul still clutched Richard’s arms, in spite of the fact that the fight in the large man had faded with the robot’s steps. Because of the clear night and the number of stars, they could see well enough to read expressions.
Lym had once had a moon, but it had been lived on, moved into a more convenient orbit, and then to an orbit around its star, Adiamo, instead of its planet, Lym. Eventually, humans had used up the entire moon in the production of space-based habitats. All of this had happened long before the age of explosive creation and long before the last war.
This was the kind of night when Charlie wondered what moonlight might look like spread silver across the rocks. He growled at Richard. “We can walk you back like this, between us. Do we need to do that to control your people?”
Richard laughed, the laugh giving him some control over the moment. “You aren’t our targets. That’s the robots. You’re just people like us. If you hadn’t just done this—” he flexed his arms, the muscles cording against Jean Paul’s palms “—I wouldn’t have known you’re not bright enough to understand why we have to fight.”
“What happens if we let you go?” Jean Paul asked. “Can all of us just walk back together?”
“You can’t take my fighters.”
Charlie matched Richard’s tone. “Your fighters aren’t our targets. But any of our people who want to come back with us are going to.”
Hiroma had come close enough to hear. “Let them all go. They’re frightened and stupid. They’re also extra mouths to feed.”
Richard laughed. “More trouble than they’re worth.”
If he took Richard’s word, walking back would be easier. It was bad enough that they were in the desert at night. Trying to keep captives would make it more dangerous. He told Richard, “If we let you go, we will watch you. Best if you and we behave like we just want to get home in one piece. Nobody fights.”
Richard stared at him for a long time, his gaze so intense Charlie could practically hear him think. “All right.”
“You won’t fight us?”
“If you won’t fight us.”
Charlie gave a signal to Jean Paul, and they let Richard go, stepping back carefully.
Richard shook his arms and stretched them up above his head. He wore a cool and collected look on his face, as if he were broadcasting that he hadn’t really been caught and of course they let him go. He turned to Charlie. “If you didn’t stop them, who did?”
“It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t anyone I know.”
When Richard didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Who exactly was supposed to help you?”
Richard laughed. “Not your business. But they would have come if they could. I’m certain of that.” He stared into the sky as if whatever help he had wanted might still come and save the day.
Richard let out a long whistle that carried far across the desert. He started walking, and the other groups began to join up, strings of people converging back into the fold. Kyle came in with Samil trapped between him and two of his rangers, a weapon at Samil’s back.
Charlie said, “Kyle. Let him go. But watch him.”
Kyle hesitated, but when he looked around no one else was being held. He let go of Samil. The small, wiry man favored Kyle with a nasty glare but went to Richard’s side and watched as the groups gathered back into one.
The travel back wasn’t nearly as neat and orderly as the trip out had been, nor as silent. People called out obstacles like rocks and talked in low tones. Amanda and Amy held hands in the dark, and at one point, about halfway back, Charlie and Nona did the same for a few steps. It felt good.
He found Kyle and pulled him a little ways outside of the larger group. “So what do you think? Will they let us go?”
Kyle looked thoughtfully at Richard. “It would be hard work to keep us, and there isn’t much point in killing us. No one on the planet would ever help them again.”
“That’s true.” Charlie stepped around a small pile of rocks. “But don’t they lose respect if they just let us go?”
“It’s probably not as bad as all this preparation going into absolutely nothing.”
Even Charlie felt the malaise that shrouded the returning soldiers, the small cracks in trust that Amanda had opened up with her talk. He had succeeded in a way, had gained control during a moment when he might have needed it. But he hadn’t needed it, and everyone on either side seemed to be cloaked in a cold, silent mood. The only injury in the whole evening was an off-worlder who had fled when Kyle had taken control of their group and broken a wrist falling over a rock.
Of course, they’d see if they had succeeded when they got back and asked all of the wayward people to come home. If that worked, it was due to Amanda as much as him. Good thing she hadn’t been leading Manna Springs. Manny might still be waiting in a bar in Hope.
The whole night had been strange. If it had been his to plan, he might have had them bring sleeping bags. Walking so many people through the dark was stupid. At least no one was using lights and ruining what vision they had.
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