Orphans

by Kevin Killiany

  Comprehension dawned.

  “ QI’yaH,” Kairn swore.

  He had no idea what Kahless would have done in this situation, but his own honor gave him only one choice. Sheathing his dagger, he scrambled back down the hill.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Day two of the Quest

  Pattie would have laughed if her survival hadn’t depended on silence.

  Three deadfall traps, set with only minimal concealment, were ranged along the side of the stream. The hunters clearly did not expect bugs to be observant.

  They were also not clear on what sort of bug they were dealing with, she saw. One of the traps was baited with a mound of flowers, another with cut fruit, and the third with what looked—and smelled—like carrion. From the wilting of the flowers she concluded the traps had been set just before dawn.

  For a moment she considered tripping all three traps, but her sense of self-preservation won out over her sense of humor. Moving back into the underbrush, she made her way around the clearing.

  Almost too late, she noticed the cut branches. Someone had made one route through the thicket slightly easier than the others, then made an effort to conceal their handiwork. Here was a hunter with more respect for her intelligence. She backed away from that path, having no interest in finding out what sort of trap had been prepared.

  Unfortunately, this put her in the position of having to decide on a course of action when she could see no more than a few meters in any direction. On the other hand, her size placed her easily under the canopy of shrubs, making her at least as invisible as her pursuers.

  Until three local days ago, Pattie had never regretted not having to wear clothes. Her exoskeleton protected her against everything from the vacuum of space to the crushing pressures of an ocean floor with equal ease. The only time a Nasat wore any sort of artificial covering was for aesthetic effect—a flamboyant taste Pattie did not share.

  What her satisfaction with her natural form did not anticipate, however, was first contact with members of a primitive, clothes-wearing culture. The natives had no concept of alien life-forms, much less alien intelligence. To them a naked being who resembled one of their local insects could not possibly be anything other than a giant insect.

  Or, depending on the nature of their mythology, if any, she might be regarded as a magical creature, like a unicorn on Earth. While the idea of being a unicorn appealed to her in the abstract, in the concrete— or rather, in the underbrush—the prospect held little charm.

  In any event, her first meeting with the colonists native to this vessel had degenerated almost instantly into headlong pursuit. And after three days running without food or medicine and precious little water, she was tired. The fact that three local days was only a bit over two standard days comforted her not at all.

  To her right was the stream and beyond it the trail she thought the others had followed. Even in her flight, she had been following that road without actually using it, a strategy in concealment her pursuers had evidently figured out.

  That stream was a problem. In the last kilometer or so it had begun flowing faster; she was no longer sure she could ford it easily. She wondered if the natives understood how unusual a brook with a slanted surface, sloshing twice as deep along its left bank, really was. In any event, somewhere ahead of her she knew it had to either turn across her path or join a greater current flowing to her left, against the spin.

  Either way, it presented a danger. Not only was crossing it problematic in her condition, she would be in the open, exposed as she made the attempt.

  To her left a twig snapped. Pattie fought the reflex to flee right.

  The hunters obviously knew within a few hundred square meters where she was. They were trying to herd her, trying to get her to bolt in panic in a direction of their choosing. She had to admit she was perfectly willing to comply with the bolt in panic part of their plan. The trick would be doing it successfully in a direction they did not expect.

  The more she thought about it, the more backtracking made sense. They knew where she was trying to go, or at least they knew what direction she had held to for three days. And, though the concealed trail in the underbrush indicated at least one dissenting opinion, they did not have much respect for her intelligence. Doubling back now might just throw them off. She’d ford the stream farther up, above the traps where it was running slow, and move perpendicular to her course for a day or so before continuing after the others.

  Her mind made up, she turned back the way she had come. She ran low, close to the ground to avoid the branches overhead. She didn’t want any snapping twigs or shuddering shrubs to give away her position.

  She was not following her exact route, staying a bit farther from the trail and stream than she had before, just in case there was someone following her tracks directly behind.

  A native called out in musical baritone from somewhere behind her and to her right. A second answered, his voice a mellifluous counterpoint, from almost directly to her right.

  I’m being chased by a humanoid opera,Pattie thought as she jigged slightly left.

  When she judged she was upstream of the little clearing with the traps, she cut left and bolted for the stream. She knew she didn’t have much reserves left and put everything into a flowing scurry she hoped was too close to the ground for the giants to notice.

  She came up short at the edge of the undergrowth. Forty meters of open grass sloped down from her position to the water.

  Perhaps sixty meters to her left, still looking downstream to where the shrubbery grew to the water’s edge, stood two natives. One had what looked like a bow, easily as long as he was tall, while the other bore a shield and drawn sword.

  Pattie paused, gathering her strength for a dash to the river. She had seen natives run and knew that neither of these two could catch her before she reached the water even if they saw her break cover. Her goal was to get to the water without being seen. Her real fear was that they would catch her before she made the woods on the other side of the trail.

  Taking a final breath to steady her nerves, she moved into the open, keeping as close to the ground as possible. The two natives continued to watch upstream.

  She had just begun to think she was going to make it when an animal whinnied loudly to her right. On the trail, across the narrow brook, was a native she had not seen, dressed in heavy leather armor and mounted on a huge black beast. She’d been so focused on the other two hunters she hadn’t even looked in this direction.

  To her left the natives shouted. The armored rider drew his sword and answered, his voice sounding more angry than victorious to Pattie’s ears.

  For her part, closer to the water than the bushes by a dozen steps, she bolted for the water. She hoped the rider’s heavy armor would…

  Pattie’s back legs slid to the right and she spun around, flat to the ground. For a fateful heartbeat she lay splayed out, her head toward the underbrush. Then she tried to rise. Pain radiated from her left lower shoulder.

  She was pinned to the ground. But how? The mounted native was still across the river, the other two just now running toward her. It wasn’t until she saw the bowman reaching for another arrow that she realized what had happened.

  Prideful idiot,she berated herself.

  She was an engineer, she knew a projectile of thin enough cross section could pierce her armor. But she had become so complacent in the superiority of her exoskeleton to the thin hides of softs that she hadn’t even considered one of their primitive arrows a threat.

  Now here she was, pinned ( like a bug,she couldn’t help thinking) to the ground while enemies closed in on either side.

  The rider would reach her first. His mount leapt the stream that had looked so impassable to Pattie with apparent ease. She could feel the thunder of the beast’s hooves as he charged toward her, leaning far out and down out of his saddle, his sword raised. Was he so eager to be the first to kill the monster?

  She clenched her ey
es as his sword swung forward, and braced for the blow. Dirt sprayed her face. She heard the animal grunt and the sword swish through the air and ting against…what?

  She opened her eyes, turning her head to follow the mounted warrior as he closed with the two natives on foot.

  The one with the sword and shield braced himself, ready to meet the rider’s charge. At the last moment the mount seemed to prance, jumping suddenly sideways to the swordsman’s weak side. Even as the man turned, the animal kicked out with its hind legs, catching him full on the shield and sending him sprawling before charging past.

  The bowman ducked, clearly expecting a sword slash, then turned, his back toward Pattie as the rider brought his mount around.

  The beast pranced again, a strangely delicate move, then wheeled and plunged. Pattie saw an arrow fly wide, missing the wildly dancing target just meters in front of the bowman.

  The rider leaned out again, his sword raised, and again the bowman ducked. The sword parted the air just above his head, neatly clipping the top third of the bow away.

  Without a backward glance, the rider trotted toward Pattie, sheathing his weapon as he came. As he drew close he spoke, his voice lighter than the other’s.

  “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” Pattie answered, straining to focus on the figure towering above her.

  “Excuse me for not getting up.”

  Through the beast’s legs she could see that the swordsman continued to lie on the ground. The bowman, however, was running toward the distant underbrush. She bet he’d be returning soon with reinforcements.

  The mounted native spoke again, this time raising one hand, palm up.

  “Oh, you do want me to rise,” Pattie said.

  All things considered, compliance seemed in order, though she doubted she’d have much success. She pushed against the ground and was surprised to discover the shaft of the arrow had been lopped off centimeters above her back. She was able, just, to pull herself free.

  The native spoke again.

  “Oh, my lower left arm is shot, so to speak,” Pattie said. “And I’ll leak for a while, but otherwise no real harm done.”

  Stooping down, she pulled the arrow fragment from the turf. The point was buried nearly half a meter down. And the point itself…

  “See this?” She held it up for the native to see. “No wonder it cut through me. This arrowhead is durillium. From the way it’s beveled, my guess is it’s an insulating tile designed to tessellate with other tiles just like it. Someone has been dismantling a nuclear reactor.” She turned the arrowhead over in her hands. “I wonder if they realize that?”

  “Atwaan,” said the native.

  “Atwaan?” asked Pattie, raising the arrow high.

  “Atwaan,” the native repeated, pointing in roughly the direction she—and he, she now realized—had been traveling.

  Pattie could hear shouts from the woods.

  “I hear Atwaan is lovely this time of year,” she said.

  Then, taking a risk she wouldn’t have dreamed of moments before, she raised her upper arms to the rider.

  “Give a bug a lift?”

  CHAPTER

  20

  The sky above was gray and rough, but light, light was everywhere. Lights, lamps, torches…

  His mind shied from torches. Shadows on the sky? Ceiling. The ceiling was gray and rough. And moving toward his feet. He was floating? Being carried, gently, by giants. Where was the tunnel? He had been in a tunnel.

  “Where am I?” he asked the giant at his feet, carrying the foot of his stretcher.

  “We are in a medical facility, Fabian,” said the giant as it set him down on a table. A bed? But its lips hadn’t moved.

  “How?”

  The giants left without speaking.

  “Over here, Fabian.”

  Stevens turned his head and regarded a blank wall of the same clean gray as the sky. He considered this for a moment, then turned his head the other way.

  There was Soloman sitting on a high bed. He must be on a high bed, too. But he was lying down and Soloman was sitting and surrounded by books and papers.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “I believe your hair loss and pallor indicate acute radiation poisoning in humans,” Soloman said. “Are you experiencing vertigo and disorientation?” Soloman paused, then added, “Ignore that question; they would not have carried you here if you had not collapsed.”

  Stevens focused on ignoring the question. Soloman helped by ringing a bell.

  The four of them had been guests or prisoners of the Barony of Atwaan for how many days? He was not sure. But he had slept at least twice, and it had been dark when he was on the surface at least twice. That was twice twice.

  Tev he had not seen twice. Tev had been with the baron. Abramowitz had been in the tunnels, too, but not the same ones. He saw her more than twice and they talked.

  Lauoc was…He could not remember seeing Lauoc. He was somewhere, though. Of that Stevens was sure.

  He had spent most of his time underground, going as deep as he could. They, the baron’s archeologists or scientists or whatever, were exploring tunnels that were clearly engineering decks. Decks designed for beings at least a meter taller than they were.

  There had been great rooms of what looked like suspended animation capsules, or maybe coffins. Hundreds of them. The natives had hurried him through those to the corridors beyond.

  The corridors seemed to lead somewhere. There were signage and panels and labels he could not read and which they clearly did not understand, either. They seemed to think he should. He thought he should, but though machines had to comply with the natural laws of physics, nothing he saw looked familiar.

  Or everything looked familiar, but not familiar enough.

  When a giant appeared, he started, then remembered he was in a hospital room. This giant, not the one who had spoken to him, had come in response to Soloman’s bell.

  Soloman held his hands flat in the air, indicating various heights shorter than giants. Then he held his arms wide and pulled them in. Hugging the air? Gathering together. Right.

  The giant left.

  “I’ve asked that the others be brought here,” Soloman said. “I’ve tried that before to no avail, but perhaps they will believe this situation requires next of kin.”

  Stevens laughed, coughing. “Tev is my next of kin?”

  “Here, he is,” Soloman said. “As am I.”

  “I knew that.”

  Soloman dissolved into shadow as the walls and ceiling flowed together. Stevens sat quietly on the back porch of the Corsi farmhouse on Fahleena III until Pattie shook him awake.

  “Fabe!” she shouted, sounding like Carol Abramowitz.

  He laughed. That was funny.

  “How’d you do that?” he asked.

  But when he looked at Pattie closely, she flowed like water, turning into Carol. That wasn’t funny. Pattie was gone.

  He cried.

  “Stop it,” Abramowitz said, but not cruelly. “You’re wasting water.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Tev’s voice; his next of kin.

  “Radiation poisoning, dehydration, starvation, electrolyte depletion,” Abramowitz answered. “And that’s just a guess, made without tricorder or medical degree.”

  “Why is he so ill?” Soloman asked.

  “The baron is apparently looking for the same sort of access we are,” Lauoc said. “He put us to work with teams exploring the tunnels. Stevens made a big show of being enthusiastic about going as deep as possible. He thought it offered the best chance at finding the control center. He said they’d found a region with warm walls. He was sure they were near the epicenter of whatever went wrong here.”

  Stevens nodded.

  Abramowitz took his belt pack.

  “Hyronalin, vitamins, everything, gone,” she said. “He was keeping himself dosed to try and stay down there as long as possible.”

  “Foolish.” That was Tev.

&nb
sp; “Dangerous, yes, but not foolish.” And that was Abramowitz. “He was taking a calculated risk to follow up on the best lead we have.”

  “Will my medications help?” Soloman asked. “I require far less protection from radiation.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tev stated flatly.

  “Thanks, Soloman,” Abramowitz answered. “I think under the circumstances if we each donated half a dose of hyronalin, we may have enough to stabilize him.”

  “For how long?” Tev asked.

  “If he doesn’t go back down those tunnels, days. Certainly as long as the rest of us. Relief should be here by then.”

  “Relief should have been here two local days ago,” Tev countered.

  But Stevens could hear him removing his medkit. Good ol’ next-of-kin Tev. He drifted into darkness.

  When he awoke he had a sense that he had been unconscious for some time, but the others were all more or less where he had left them. Or their shadows were; his vision was not quite clear. He reshut his eyes and listened.

  “One of the advantages of being in a hospital is that medicine relies heavily on diagrams,” Soloman was saying. “I think I have puzzled out what is happening to the infants.”

  “Obviously an effect of the buildup of radioactive heavy metals in the environment,” Tev said.

  “No, that causes underweight and unhealthy infants,” Soloman said. “And birth defects of the sort they think I am. I’m referring to what may be a near total infant mortality rate.”

  “How can you see what their own doctors have missed?”

  “Their doctors are unaware of radioactive metals and their effect on living tissue.”

  There was a rustle of stiff paper.

  Stevens opened his eyes and was gratified to clearly see Soloman awkwardly holding up a heavily diagramed parchment with one hand. Of course, it was too far away for him to see what the diagrams depicted, but that didn’t bother him as much as the taste in his mouth. He wished the water were safe to drink.