“They won’t,” said General Lyapunov. “They can’t.”
“Five ships so far.”
“And five left. That should be enough.”
“Just four down here.”
“We aren’t about to cut and run,” said Tamiko. “We won’t abandon you.”
“Not until it’s too late.”
“Captain!”
“Sorry.” But Captain Quigg’s face was glowering, dark with resentment.
“Yes,” said the General. “It would be nice to have some reinforcements. But it would take weeks to go home and come back. And they don’t have the ships. It would take months more to build them. Maybe years. We’re really on our own. We have to do the job by ourselves.”
“No matter what it costs,” said Tamiko.
“I do wish we could land the Ajax. But …” The General shrugged. “Someone has to stay out of reach. If they somehow do manage to destroy the remaining ships, we’ll take the word back to Earth. We’ll have to, even though I would rather not go back at all without a clear-cut total victory. With no resistance left to plague us later.”
Many of the others were nodding in agreement with his sentiment, but their faces looked no more cheerful or optimistic than they had when the meeting began.
* * * *
“Stop grinning at me!” Tamiko Inoue was scowling at Sunglow, who was once more chained to the souvenir bench in the office the human had been given.
“I can’t really help it, you know. You’ve done your best to destroy everything we’ve ever made or done, like a bulldozer in a playroom. But we’re fighting back.”
“Gyppin’ coons!”
“We’re making you bleed for what you’ve done to us!”
“You had it coming! You’re unnatural! A blight upon this world! It’s our duty to destroy you!”
Sunglow tried to laugh, but the destruction on the world below was far too real and far too thorough. She choked instead and beat her cast against her chest. When the spasm subsided, she managed to say, “There was a time when I thought we could be friends.”
Tamiko stared at her desktop, apparently unable to meet the Rac’s eyes. “Me too,” she said at last. “But …”
“But you’ve made that impossible.”
“We had to. Can’t you see?”
Sunglow shook her head. No, she couldn’t. She could not see any circumstances when one group had to exterminate another or destroy the basis of its identity, not even when the groups were tailed and tailless Racs.
Nor could her fellow prisoners, who glared at her every time she returned from one of these sessions with the human woman and sang suspicion deep in their throats. “You carry no pain,” they said. “They do not shock you or beat you. What do they do? What do you do? What are you telling them?”
She had tried to explain that she had met Tamiko before the human attack, that her mate, or her one-time mate, was a prisoner on First-Stop, that she thought Tamiko felt some connection to him through her even as she asked her endless questions about where the Racs were hiding.
But all they said was, “What did you tell her? Did you reveal all our secrets? How long will our friends and kin survive your treachery?”
“We told them secrets enough before, when we thought they were Gypsies. And when we told them too much, they turned on us.”
“Traitor!”
“Traitor!”
“Trai …”
Now Tamiko was asking, “Would you like separate quarters?”
Sunglow could only stare. With all their other marvelous abilities, could the humans also read minds? Silly thought, she told herself. If they could do that, they would never need to ask questions. Secrets could last no more than moments. Opposition would be destroyed as rapidly as it formed.
Then her face, gone vacant and reflective while she recalled the reactions of her fellows, had been as transparent as window glass. Or else … “You watch us, don’t you?”
“Of course we do.”
Hoping to overhear some clue to where the natives hid with their guns and bombs and last surviving remnants of the Gypsy heritage.
“Then yes. Of course. Get me away from them.”
“I’d hate to see them hurt you.”
And I, thought Sunglow, would hate to have you hear what they might blurt out while attacking me.
* * * *
The new room was a narrow chamber. From one wall a padded shelf folded down to be a bed. There were also straps to hold a sleeper in place when the ship was in zero gee. There were empty cupboards and a toilet. And the door was locked, with a guard standing watch outside it.
“My own apartment is just three doors down the hall,” said Tamiko. She sounded pleased, as if she thought that Sunglow would make a good and friendly neighbor.
When she was gone, Sunglow pulled herself into the corner where the bed met the wall. She lay there for hours, staring toward the door and through it and everywhere within the ship that she had seen.
Strangely, she did not feel that she hated the humans. They were mad. Of course they were mad. But it was the madness of a force of nature, singleminded and unsympathetic, unaware that the beings in its path had hopes and dreams or that they suffered pain and loss. She thought that any single human might be as potentially a friend as Mark or Tamiko. But in the mass they were a tidal wave or forest fire, a flood or volcanic eruption.
One could not hate such things. One could fear, yes. And flee. And suffer the blows that came one’s way.
And sometimes one could defend. Erect seawalls against waves and levees against flood. Bring water against fire. Erect earthen dams to divert a lava flow away from homes and loved ones.
But how could one defend against a plague of humans?
How could one fight back when one’s whole world lay in ruins?
Chapter Twenty Four
The Racs had never thought it essential to make the interior surfaces of the caverns within the bluffs as flat and smooth as those of the buildings outside. They had filled holes in the floor. They had removed stalagmites and stalactites that posed hazards to toe and head and tire. They had carved away the largest of the bulges in the walls. But what remained was still more natural than artificial.
This meant that the map pinned to the wall of the briefing room rippled and swelled and dipped as if it were trying to imitate the surface of the world outside in three dimensions instead of two. When Edge-of-Tears tried to draw a circle on the paper, the stone threw his line off. When he stabbed at the paper in frustration, the point of his pencil broke through.
He threw the pencil aside and used his finger instead. “There,” he said. He was indicating an intersection of two main roads. “The nearest cache. There’s a hidden door in the bridge abutment.”
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker stood near the back of the room, watching quietly. They were, he knew, plotting a last desperate resistance. He thought the effort was doomed, but he knew better than to say so. Many coons would not even care to be reminded of his presence. It was better that he remain inconspicuous.
“How long will it take us to get there?” asked Dotson Barbtail. He himself had brought Hrecker from the cell he still occupied at night.
“If we could drive, full speed, two hours.”
“We can’t do that. They’d spot us.”
The burly soldier nodded. “So we hike. It’ll take us three nights. And then, if it’s still there, if it’s still intact …”
“We drive back.”
They would travel at night because then it would be a little harder for the humans to spot them. They would drive back because they could not possibly carry what they hoped to find. And they would hope desperately to escape notice, knowing all the while that that was impossible. The humans had proved the
mselves far too good at spotting the night-running trucks that brought supplies and arms to the caverns. Sometimes only one in ten made it all the way.
“Maybe we’ll get away with it,” said Dotson.
“There are clouds coming,” someone said.
“That won’t help. They’re ahead of us, and we had infrared sensors on our satellites.”
“But a storm. That could keep them from flying.”
“If we’re lucky,” said Edge-of-Tears. “But we can’t tell this far ahead. We don’t have weathersats anymore.”
Hrecker knew he should say nothing, but he could not help himself: “I want to go with you.”
The first response was silence. Then Edge-of-Tears asked, “Why? Do you think they’ll spot you if you can get outside? Rescue you?”
“Or do you want to light a fire and give us away?” asked another Rac. Dotson did not know his name, and his pelt was a nondescript gray.
He was shaking his head when Dotson gestured apologetically, sympathetically. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not fit anyway.”
The others stopped protesting as if Dotson held much more experience and rank than he did. Briefly, Hrecker wondered whence the other’s authority had come. It could not be his loss of Sunglow, for others had lost loved ones too, either to death or to captivity, and they had gained nothing for their sacrifices. But then he realized: Dotson had given them Gypsy Blossom, and he remained close to that emblem of their gods.
He touched the bandage on his head. “It’s almost healed.”
Edge-of-Tears showed his teeth. “Almost won’t do. Even if we could trust you.”
“When do we leave?” asked the gray Rac when Hrecker slouched defeatedly against the wall.
“Now,” said Edge-of-Tears.
“Why wait?” asked Dotson.
Within a day after Gypsy Blossom’s suggestion that there must remain caches of hidden weapons, the soldier had found a survivor of the headquarters team that had overseen the caches’ maintenance. She had had no maps or other documents, and she had not been able to recall where all the hiding places were. But she had remembered this one, and she had known the codes that would open it.
“What are we going to find there?”
Edge-of-Tears could only shrug. “She didn’t know. They varied. But no nukes. No strange, new superweapons. Just ordinary stuff. Vehicles and guns and ammo. The sort of stuff you need when your back’s against the wall.”
* * * *
Once they were beyond the boundaries of Worldtree City, the road was no longer blocked by piles of rubble over which they had to clamber. Yet the pavement was rarely as clear as it had been before the human starships had appeared in First-Stop’s sky. Homes and shops had been destroyed, and their wreckage sometimes spilled into the roadway. Vehicles stood where warheads and cannon shells had found them. Water stood in potholes that had never been before. Once they had to detour around a fallen warplane.
The only hint that Racs had died was an occasional whiff of rotting meat from beneath some ruined building or curl of honeysuckle vine. The survivors had been able to remove and bury only bodies in plain view, and not all of those. Nor were they done, for here and there beside the road were small groups of Racs with shovels in their hands. Some stood beside one or two oblong, canvas-wrapped bundles.
They spent their first day hiding in the forest beyond the city, listening as human pilots patrolled First-Stop’s own jets and helicopters above their heads, watching thin clouds grow thicker and spread across the sky, listening as fitful breezes strengthened and made the tree limbs lash. Few slept, even though whenever two or three began to discuss the prospects of this last desperate effort, Edge-of-Tears hissed them quiet.
That night, the clouds thinned again and a few stars peeped through. Yet the wind continued to strengthen, and when Dotson said, “No storm after all. They’re sure to see us,” Edge-of-Tears answered. “Can’t tell yet.”
By the time that dawn was near, several members of the party were complaining of sore feet. All were happy when Edge-of-Tears pointed at a silhouette of bare girders and twisted metal roof-edge against the cloud-racing sky beside the secondary road they were following. “They won’t see us in there,” he said. “And tomorrow night, we’ll have to hike for just three more hours.”
Dotson Barbtail found a windless niche beside a fallen girder, leaned his back against the metal rough with rust, and rubbed his feet. He sniffed honeysuckle in the air and heard above the wind-noise in the dark around him soft voices saying:
“Three more hours.”
“Three too many.”
“I can hardly wait. Even a bulldozer would be a ride.”
“Whatever they stashed for us.”
“I’d rather have a nice, comfy command car.”
“A tank. Then I could shoot back when they spotted me.”
“You’d never have a chance.”
“At least I’d die comfortable.”
“Shh.”
Sunlight struck him in the eyes. He blinked and pulled himself to a sitting position. Had the sky cleared? He stared upward. There were still clouds, thick and dark, but to the east there was indeed an open zone.
He blinked again. Who was that in front of him?
“Shh,” again. A female with a mirror in her hand. Young and well shaped, her barred auburn pelt sleek with recent grooming, no signs of injury or hunger.
He touched the side of his muzzle. “What—?”
“Shh. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why not?” He blinked again and craned his neck, and yes, someone stood over every one of his companions.
“You might attract attention. You have to go.”
“Tonight,” he heard Edge-of-Tears’s voice protesting.
“Now,” another voice insisted.
“But why?” asked Dotson. “What’s so important about a ruined factory?” He scanned the framework of what remained as if he hoped to see the answer. There were broken windows, high brickwork, twisted beams like the one he leaned against, chains and pulleys and apparatus he did not recognize. Beyond an expanse of unbroken roof, green-tinged light suggested the out-of-doors.
“We can’t tell you,” said his awakener.
“Why—” But before he could complete his question, voices arose from the direction of the light:
“Hey! C’mere! You won’t bel—”
“Stop!”
“Leggo!”
Dotson almost laughed. Someone had risen early and gone in search of a bush or water or perhaps a fruit tree.
The other Rac slumped and shrugged and said, “I suppose we might as well show you now.”
A few minutes later the entire party was overlooking an oblong of dark, weedless soil. One of the locals was gesturing them to remain beneath the overhang of roof and explaining: “We wish you hadn’t come. If you attract any attention at all, we’re lost.” A wave indicated the plot of soil. Three small shoots of green jutted from the dirt. Hard by the edge of the plot was a bank of honeysuckle vines.
“What are they?” asked Edge-of-Tears.
Dotson smiled. He had no trouble recognizing the young plants before him. He had first seen a similar shape in his own apartment, many months before the humans had appeared in First-Stop’s sky.
He shook his head and wished that Gypsy Blossom were with them. She would love to see this, even though she could surely see something very like it deep inside the caverns where he had left her.
Yet perhaps she could. He looked at the vines once more, and then, feeling like an idiot, he waved at them. If the roots reached so far, if she were plugged into the network and watching over her kin …
“We had four of the seeds,” an older Rac was saying. “But one was cracked. Someone stepped on it.”<
br />
“Trowel!” said another. “It was that way when we first saw it. It was crushed when the Great Hall’s roof fell in.”
“They’ll grow very rapidly,” said Dotson.
“That won’t save them if the humans see you here. Stay back. Please.”
Dotson and his companions obeyed, retreating into shadow, leaving the seedlings and their caretakers behind. Only Trowel, the senior gardener, remained with them, saying, “Better yet, leave. Get as far away from here as possible.”
“They’d surely see us if we left right now,” said Edge-of-Tears. “But tonight. We were planning to go then anyway. We’re almost to our destination.”
“What’s that?”
He told the gardener.
“Then you’ll be coming back this way?”
The soldier nodded.
“You have to take another road!”
“There isn’t one.”
“But you’re bound to draw fire!”
“We know.”
“They’ll destroy you all!”
“We hope a few will make it through.”
“They’ll get us too!”
Edge-of-Tears shrugged as if to say that was a price they might have to pay. If he did not pursue his mission, if the cache proved empty, if the humans indeed destroyed them all and whatever they found on their way home, it would hardly matter whether a few bot seedlings lived or died. There were others after all.
Trowel sighed heavily. “Then we have to move.” He turned away and began to give decisive instructions. Shovels and large buckets appeared. Soon the seedlings were ready to depart to what their caretakers hoped would be a safer refuge.
The two groups of Racs then settled down together, talking quietly of times before the humans came, watching the clouds thicken once more, waiting for dark to come again.
* * * *
The remainder of the journey was uneventful. A few planes passed high overhead or to one side of their path. Three times helicopters chattered at the windy night and they dove for whatever cover there was beside the road they followed. They threw themselves flat in ditches, huddled under bushes and in tangles of honeysuckle vines, rolled under abandoned vehicles. Once Dotson felt cold and matted fur beneath one hand, but before his stomach could do more than roll within him, the helicopter was gone. They got up and hurried on, eager to reach their destination.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 149
