//Easy,// came the soothing Central flavor of Jindigar as the others recoiled from her.
//She’s conditioned against it,// argued Center. //We aren’t properly tempered or balanced yet. Let’s just see how long we can hold together.//
Krinata’s body moved of its own accord—at the will of the Oliat, or maybe of Jindigar?—out across the cargo bay, pulling herself along on one of the lines. Outriders cleared the troopers away from them, calling loudly, “Oliat coming through! They know how to get the power going again!”
Forever after, the rest came to memory shrouded in the veils of dreamlike unreality. There were sharp images embedded in long blurs, and she suspected that the clear memories were shuffled out of time sequence. Jindigar, when pressed, assured her that this was because none of them had ever occupied the Offices they were now handling, and because, using such an impromptu assembly procedure, he could not be delicate with the skills suffusion. “But we didn’t have six or seven days for the whole tedious business of stabilizing our form!”
At some point Krinata found herself bending over a nightmare tangle of circuitry hanging out of a buckled access hatch and tenderly snapping a wedge-shaped circuit element into place. A phrase drifted to the top of her mind on bubbles of laughter: ad hoc Oliat. //We’re an ad hoc Oliat!//
Amusement at the absurd concept spread through their shared consciousness, and in its wake tension subsided. The work went faster. Her hands flew even though her eyes tended to see the work under someone else’s hands in a far part of the fortress.
She staggered along a narrow passage, steadying herself against a bulkhead as repeated blows shook the fortress. She searched for a tubular access to a catwalk. Cy paced at her shoulder, keeping the troopers around them from demanding her attention. The thuds and shiftings had become muted because of carcasses piled against the hull and because the entire stampede was indeed slowing, more and more of the racing animals veering off before hitting the “hive.” Chinchee and the hivebinder were still projecting a hive, and the animals’ instincts screamed only, Wrong, wrong, wrong! as they hurtled into the symbol of ally, not enemy.
Suddenly a shudder slid the deck from under her, and a screaming of tearing metal filled the air. The thunderous sound of a million hooves pounding the turf redoubled as she smelled the reek of sweating animal bodies and freshly turned dirt on a puff of air. Her companions didn’t need her announcement, “Hull’s breached!”
The passage was inundated with small, brown-furred bodies, sharp teeth, beady eyes, short stubby tails, pointed ears. Carrion eaters, blood lust too aroused by the stampede to veer away from a hive—their natural prey,—swarmed into the fortress. And it wasn’t just here—she sensed Darllanyu and Jindigar both wading through a sea of small bodies.
Large goose bumps formed all over her, and she felt her begrimed hair standing on end. Her physical reaction was mirrored among the Dushau, making them all acutely uncomfortable, echoing a derisive, human, around the circuit. Jindigar interceded, //That’s not human sexual arousal!// Apology and curiosity swept them all, but she was at the panel Jindigar needed, and her hands flew.
How Jindigar managed to direct so many at once, she never knew. Later he only raised his hand, palm cupped, fingers pointing to the sky, and explained, “What must be done can be done.”
She asked, “Is that a Law of Nature?”
“Maybe,” he quipped. “Or maybe it’s only a local ordinance.”
But at the time, surrounded by a river of small, dirty, hot vermin nipping at her field boots with their sharp teeth until finally one of them actually hit flesh and made her yelp and dance, Krinata could only struggle against distraction, fight her natural inclination to resist the spooky possession that gripped her, and tell herself over and over that she couldn’t afford a nervous breakdown yet.
Finally, Chinchee and the hivebinder convinced the vermin with hivelike projections of repelling horrors to stop chewing on wires and the crew’s armored feet and find their meals outside. Then the board Krinata was working on came to life under her hands. Relief and a wild cheer rang through the Oliat linkages, infusing her with a warm glow unlike any other satisfaction she’d ever known.
The shuddering and jerking of the deck ceased. The roaring thunder, a vibration in the bones more than a sound, did not slacken, but the tone changed. The Oliat focus shifted so Krinata had a moment of nauseating vertigo followed by a horrid drop in the pit of her stomach as she fell into a seething cauldron of wide-angle Dushau visual fields. //Sorry,// Jindigar apologized. //My fault. I’ve never done this before, either. Better?//
Krinata had both hands clamped over her mouth and her eyes squinched shut. Peripherally she felt Cy’s hand on her shoulder, and his touch steadied her as much as whatever Jindigar had done. She got her muscles unknotted and fumbled for the communicator he carried for her. It was set on full shipwide and crew address, so her voice was heard everywhere as the Oliat announced, “//Lateral forcefields generating; attitude jets on minimum, vectored to hold our position. Observers below report if a jet oversplashes the edge of the cliff.//”
//What did that mean?// wailed Krinata, suddenly weary beyond endurance. She knew the Oliat was viewing the entire outside panorama, but she, herself, was cut off from it because, as Outreach, she was to be aware of their immediate environment, not bemused by the larger picture. Jindigar’s fumble had given her too much information to process because when he functioned as Outreach, he was able to work inside the multiview contact as well. After over three thousand years’ experience! And in her exhaustion she despaired of ever being a real Outreach.
Jindigar used her hands on the controls to shape the forcefield into a hyperbola, transforming the animals’ forward momentum gently into momentum at right angles to the surface of the field where they hit, sliding them off along a vector pointing out into open plains. The terrified bellowing of the animals was louder than the rumble of their hoofbeats, and there was nothing the hivebinder could do to reassure them.
Hours and hours through the long night, the seemingly endless herd gradually slowed, gradually turned short of the “hive” forcefield and the cliff. As fewer hit the forcefields Jindigar diminished the power to the jets manually because they lacked the parts to give the Sentient control of those circuits. It was tricky work, balancing the forces to prevent the fortress from skidding into the stampede, yet not letting it slide over the cliff.
But at last, when Jindigar lifted the skills suffusion, the Oliat rejoined the gestalt the hivebinder struggled to maintain. With Chinchee’s help, the binder integrated the new seven-way unit that now replaced the five-way unit. It seemed upset with the vanished five-unit and two-unit, but gradually it adjusted. Shortly after that, the frantic eruption of small, furred bodies through the rents in the hull ceased altogether. The vermin already running in frantic circles within the walls of the fortress had to be picked up by troopers in armor and put outside.
Their hunger sent them swarming over the carcasses heaped around the fortress, some of them finding their way down to the piles of flesh at the foot of the cliff. By the first graying of dawn, the grisly business of cleaning up was well under way.
As quiet descended, the evacuation of the fortress began. All the able-bodied went down to help those below. The Oliat was among the last to leave. They emerged onto a launch platform overlooking part of the cliff and part of the plain. Jindigar was trying to reduce the intensity of the Oliat contact, preparing to adjourn them—not to Dissolve, for once he’d Dissolved his Oliat, he’d be unable to Center another.
Jindigar’s control was shaky, like a hand twitching uncontrollably from too many hours of clutching something. The scene of carnage she viewed around them alternated between the stark, revolting, but properly colored human vision; the dim, but semantically neutral, view seen by naked Dushau eyes; and the Oliat gestalt of a natural process proceeding in a healthy way.
Krinata was shaking all over with abating tension, too tired to celeb
rate properly, confused beyond endurance, nerves blasted, body aching. She barely remembered Cy urging her to step onto the largest weapons platform with Chinchee and the hivebinder. The rest of the Oliat crowded around her. The platform took off none too steadily with such a load, but as they moved out beyond the edge of the cliff, she ceased to worry about it.
The heaps of dead animals at the bottom of the cliff were crawling with scavengers and black with flying insects. The light of the rising sun gleamed off blood. Streams of animals carried chunks of meat and entrails away to their hives. But the sight that sent her groping for the railing to hang over open air and retch helplessly was the way the vermin attacked the dead settlers and troopers strewn about the battlefield. All over, surviving troopers still in armor teamed up with the settlers to fight the vermin off the bodies of their dead comrades.
She felt the Oliat react to her illness, but this time not with derision or contempt but a determined patience with her differences. She tried to open herself to their attitude– a joy that they had been fully accepted by this world—that even their dead would not be ignored but integrated into the natural processes. But she couldn’t.
//Jindigar!// she protested through the fading Oliat linkages.
The Oliat embraced her, looking out at the scene through her eyes and her perceptions. The stark horror multiplied until she thought she’d fly to pieces. But then they moved as one, accepting her with all her differences. //Zunre.//
She spoke once more as Outreach, addressing Chinchee in his own language—scraping her throat raw in the process. Then the hivebinder’s gestalt urged the scavengers away from the dead strangers, understanding suddenly that the renewed fighting was not a rejection of a kindness but a defense of a deep integrity.
As the platform reached treetop level Jindigar stood behind her, one long-fingered hand draped over her shoulder. //Now.// She felt a shifting, rending, straining realignment, the strange yet familiar compartmentalizing as when Jindigar loosened the duad or made it dormant. Only this time it was a pit-of-the-stomach bereavement, a needle-sharp shock, a wail that screeched along the nerves and made her hair stand on end and her teeth ache.
She gasped as the seven of them began to move and breathe in disconnected patterns. She hadn’t noticed, before, how they had synchronized—even little things like blinking. Now it felt suddenly as if her other eyes blinked in spasmodic twitches that shattered her nerves.
Jindigar turned to each of them singly, making eye contact, somehow adjusting everything to ease. She thought she sensed him being critical of how roughly he performed this adjournment. At last he said to Cy, rather wistfully, “Consider us adjourned for the moment, though we may have trouble maintaining that.”
Cy frowned at Storm, and then they both nodded agreement. Storm passed the word to the Outriders squeezed onto the platform with them: “Adjourned, then, but watch for sudden changes.”
Below, people who had been fighting vermin off the bodies of the dead now stared after the retreating creatures. Some troopers began assembling the scattered bodies into neat rows. But Krinata noticed how they placed armored troopers beside settlers, making no distinctions.
As the Oliat platform passed overhead, aiming to land at the Dushau compound, troopers with their helmets off, settlers with their wounds bandaged, all stopped to gaze up at them. They’d been bound into the hive linkage. What did they think had happened? Would they keep the peace among themselves now?
She had barely thought the question when it was answered. In a single voice the people below raised a cheer that rang off the cliff and startled the busy scavengers into stillness.
Again the cheer, and again. Cy took Krinata’s hand and raised it in a gesture of victory. Storm stepped to the forward railing and raised Jindigar’s hand.
Trooper and settler together, at least five species, cheered louder and clearer, until she made out then– words, “Krinata and Jindigar! Krinata and Jindigar!”
“But we didn’t do it alone!” she protested, pulling her hand from Cy’s.
Jindigar pulled his hand out of Storm’s grasp and hugged the Lehiroh, though his voice was distant, distracted by the Oliat threads he still held. “No, we didn’t. How could they have come by such an impression?”
Storm said, “Terab’s been talking, I’ll bet. And Shorwh. Even Viradel. They all went down hours ago.”
Something caught Krinata’s eye in the east, the sun clearing the horizon accompanied by a slice of new moon. “Look!” She pointed.
Above the rushing of the wind and the chanting cheer below she heard Darllanyu whisper, “Darllanyu again, but a good omen this time.”
The Cassrian Commander, standing in the pilot’s dock, bent over his instruments. “Good omen? For whom?”
“What do you mean?” asked Storm, craning his neck to see, but Cy pointed at the horizon again.
“A ship!”
“Can you identify it?” asked Krinata tensely, knowing Jindigar’s wish that he hadn’t adjourned them.
“I’m trying,” answered the Cassrian working intently. “It’s a lander—large one. Could be that privateer. This colony may be a short-lived one.”
“Can you make voice contact at least?” asked Krinata.
The distant rumble finally attracted the attention of everyone on the ground, and cheering subsided as they scanned the sky. The silver-white dot grew as its impellers strained to dump velocity.
“Can the Oliat identify it?” asked the Commander, frustrated.
“We’re adjourned,” answered Jindigar, as if it were only of academic importance, yet she could feel his anxiety. “Can’t dip in and out of Oliat as easily as a duad.”
She remembered how much more difficult it was to assemble and adjourn a triad and realized that if she were pulled back into that deep seven-way contact again right now, she’d probably go into a screaming fit and drive them all beyond the ends of sanity. She shuddered. Don’t let it be necessary!
The Commander announced, “It’s going to land at the clay dig!”
Jindigar pulled the microphone for the platform’s address system out and shoved it into Krinata’s hand. “Tell them.” Then he gently replaced the Commander at the controls, saying, “Let me see what I can do.”
His fourteen long fingers danced over the controls as he spoke into the pickup in Dushauni. In moments he had an image on the tiny screen, an indigo face, and a voice came tinnily through the miniature amplifier. Krinata recognized the Dushau woman, exclaiming, “Ambassador Trinarvil!” Then she explained to everyone, “The Dushau Ambassador to the Emperor’s Court!” Her voice boomed out over the crowd below, and she added, “It’s a Dushau ship!”
Another cheer and everyone was running toward the clay dig to greet them.
Trinarvil was a small woman, stately, darker than Jindigar’s deep indigo. Her voice was high and pleasant, and her face now unmarked by the intense anxiety Krinata had last seen there the night before Dushaun withdrew its embassy from the Allegiancy, breaking diplomatic relations. “Jindigar!” sang the Ambassador with obvious joy. “I should have known you’d get here before I could, but when we saw the Squadron leaving, we feared we’d find nothing here but pulverized ground. It looks like that from the air, you know, and your signal is being generated by Imperial equipment.”
“Where’s the Squadron?” asked Jindigar.
“That’s the curious thing. They took one look at us and detimed.” Trinarvil added to Jindigar, “I brought The Organizer, an unarmed passenger ship. Ripped out bulkheads so we’ve got three hundred aboard, with about fifty ephemerals. A good bit of cargo too. Couldn’t have run from them as Truth could.”
“They’ve gone for reinforcements,” predicted Jindigar with that detached air, but he was gradually beginning to seem himself again.
The Cassrian Commander said, “I don’t think so. They left expecting the stampede to wipe us and the settlement out. Our—objective—had been accomplished.”
Trinarvil’s eye ha
d traveled over the armor with the neutrality of a trained diplomat, and Jindigar told her, “We both have long stories to tell. Can you land by the clay dig?”
“Jindigar,” she answered with good-humored asperity,
“I’ve been piloting since before you were born. I could land in that dig if I had to.”
They all laughed, and Krinata glanced down. They were over the dig now, and the small lake that had gathered in the center. The settlement was already experimenting with farming fish in the pond, and Krinata was unsurprised to see a piol waddling out of the water with a wriggling catch in his mouth.
Then she saw his destination—a mud-and-straw nest halfway up the slope. “Jindigar, look!”
Cy leaned over the forward rail, peering below. “Piol cubs! How many?”
Jindigar was working with the screens and brought a close-up onto the weapons target. “Four,” he counted. He flashed an intimate, private grin to Krinata, then warned Trinarvil, “You’d better not land in the pond. The colony has begun to establish itself!”
FB2 document info
Document ID: c53652c1-954b-42d1-9272-8287880b698e
Document version: 2
Document creation date: 2005-10-07
Created using: doc2fb, FBTools software
Document authors :
El
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon’s FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it’s usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
Farfetch tdt-2 Page 22
