So when we rode back this time, we didn’t sing or cheer or even howl. We just huddled in our robes and blankets and wished the ride would end as quickly as possible. We had boxes of firebricks and even a case of fresh meat we’d picked up at the commonstore. The moms planned to make sweet-stew with it. Maybe it was the scent of the meat that drew the kacks to us—
We had Kilter and Kale pulling the great-wagon, and they always stopped to rest at the bottom of Little Hill. It looked little to us, but we sat high in the wagon. Perhaps, to Kilter and Kale, pulling the wagon, the hill didn’t look as little.
Willow, as usual, pulled out his tablet and studied the display. Without comment, he pulled out his phone and called the monitors. I could see by the look on his face that he felt the situation had turned serious. I sat too far back to hear him clearly, but I made out enough. The kacks no longer watched from their usual place on the northern slopes. They had moved southward, arranging themselves along the road ahead. The horses stirred uneasily, stamping their feet and snorting.
Burr leaned over her shoulder and the two of them whispered together grimly. Any change in kack behavior stopped everything. So far, we’d all taken extreme care, regarding the kacks with enormous caution and giving wide berth to their hunting grounds. Although we’d had numerous sightings of kacks tracking great-wagons, as yet, we’d had no serious attacks. Not on humans, not on horses. Everyone wanted to keep it that way.
Authority wanted the dome environment as realistic as possible; the trainees could not regard Linnea as safe. We had to stay aware of the risks, every moment. Wildfires, floods, cyclones, kacks and other humans. But while Authority could control the threats of fire, flood, wind and human behavior in the dome, the kacks remained a wild, unknown quantity—an uncontrollable danger. Despite their implants, the kacks had become much more aggressive, and almost everybody believed that they would soon start attacking travelers on the main road. Even the scouts used the word “inevitable.”
Despite demands from some of the trainees, Authority remained reluctant to act. With three adult kacks and four surviving pups in the dome, the administors wanted to see how a wild kack pack behaved. And, if necessary—if the kacks attacked a wagon—they were willing to sacrifice one or two of the animals to see how well humans could defend themselves using only Linnean weapons. Crossbows. But those had to be a weapon of last resort. And if those didn’t work ... the wagons carried other devices, things the scouts didn’t want to use at all.
The dome was more than a training ground. It was also an experiment. And this part of the experiment was the treacherous part. This was the one thing that everybody argued about the most. It was an unnecessary risk—it was a necessary risk. The argument raged without end. And now, tonight, it looked like we would have to test it.
“No,” Willow said, before Da could even ask. “We won’t try to capture a pup. Not tonight. Not here. Not without an entire team. We’ve talked about it, all the scouts. We can’t afford the risk to the trainees. As much as we want you and your family to have the experience, not here, not now. Perhaps some other time. If the Old Woman sings true, we may never have the need. In the meantime—” He climbed back to the passenger part of the coach and started pointing around. “Kaer, do you know how to work the growler? Good. I want you to come up forward. No, don’t start cranking yet. Wait until I tell you.” He began opening up compartments and handing out weapons—crossbows, trank guns, taser-darts and even a couple of things I didn’t recognize. “I don’t want to use the crossbows. But we’ve never had a real confrontation with these things, and if nothing else works, I will take them down. I’d rather lose the entire pack than a single one of you.”
We’d performed this drill before. All of the adults already had their defense positions assigned. Burr opened the hatch to the compartment below and handed weapons down. But this time, it wasn’t a drill.
When everybody had taken up their posts, Willow and Burr stopped for another quick conference. They pointed to Da, Big Jes, Little Klin, Bhetto, Parra and Cindy. “The six of you, the two of us. We’ll walk the horses up the hill.”
“Wouldn’t we be safer staying in the coach?”
“We would, but the horses would not. You three, with me on the right. The rest of you, take the left. Kaer, you and Rinky ride next to Driver. Rinky, don’t fire unless I tell you. Kaer, do not turn the crank on the growler until I order it. We don’t want to panic the horses. All right, let’s move.” They didn’t wait to lower the steps; they went down the ladders on the sides.
Driver tossed a couple of dark sacks down to the snow. Willow and Burr opened them and pulled lengths of leather-wrapped chain down to the ground—hobbles for the horses. We couldn’t risk having them bolt in fear. They could easily topple the wagon. The sacks themselves unfolded to become blackout hoods. Willow tapped Kale’s neck with a baton, reached up, grabbed the strap at the bottom of the horse’s bridle—it had a handle on it that looked like a subway handle—and pulled down hard. The great-horse obediently lowered his huge head so that Willow could throw the sack over the top of his skull and cinch it tight, tight enough that Kale couldn’t shake it off. Then he helped Burr do the same with Kilter.
We couldn’t keep the horses calm, but we could keep them from seeing the danger. We could keep them from running and hurting themselves and us. If they ran, the kacks would run them to exhaustion and surely bring them down.
Now the scouts hobbled the horses with the leathered chains. Burr hobbled Kilter, Willow hobbled Kale. Both the horses stamped and snorted, shook their heads unhappily and made ugly threatening sounds. When an animal the size of an elephant makes noises like that, most people step back; but the two scouts just poked the horses hard in the ribs with their batons, harder than I would have, hard enough to make them both go oof, a great punch to the belly. “Shut up, you great noisy sack of potatoes. We have too much work to do to listen to your complaints. Damn, I hurt my hand.”
Then, each of the scouts went back to the lead, reached up and grabbed the handle straps hanging from their horses’ bridles—and began pulling the animals forward. One lumbering step at a time. “Come on, you lazy things. Let’s go show the kacks who really runs this world.” It took a couple baton pokes. Once I would have thought it cruel, but to the great-horses, those pokes must have felt like gentle nudges.
The wagon was 600 kilograms lighter now. At least. Probably closer to 800. Assume eighty kilos per person, not counting boots and robes and weapons and ammunition; figure another ten per person for all that. And even more for Big Jes and Da. Okay, 700 kilos. Enough to make a difference. The horses grunted—more for show than out of any real sense of weight. I’d already learned that great-horses love to complain, especially in Earth-normal gravity.
Up the slope we headed. Rinky had the tablet display and held it so the driver could see. So far, the kacks hadn’t moved. I could hear the overlapping conversations coming from the speaker. A lot of unfamiliar voices. It felt strange to see an electronic device here on Linnea. For the first time in a long time I wondered how many people were watching us.
“Do you need backup?”
“Dunno. Probably wouldn’t hurt—”
“We’ve got you all on the ceiling cameras. And we’ve got armed skyballs moving in. We can scare off the kacks with shock-grenades—”
“That might frighten the horses.” A pause. “We need to see how well the growler works.”
“The growler works, we know that—”
“We don’t know if it will keep them from stalking prey. We need to find out.”
“You have the call on this one.”
“Keep the choppers on the ground.”
“You sure?”
“So far. Position?”
“Still holding. Inching forward. How do you think they’ll come in?”
“Sideways across the slope. Halfway to the top. They’ll want to exhaust the horses quickly by forcing them to run uphill.”
“The k
acks have the same disadvantage—too large for Earth-gravity.”
“Yes and no. We don’t know. We’ve hobbled the horses. We’ll stand and fight. If we don’t run, it could confuse them.”
Burr’s voice now. “Use your rangefinders now, people. Get a sense of the distances across this hill. You won’t have time later.” She pointed. “See that stand of leftover summer grass—too confused to lie down and die—right, the tall one. Halfway between here and there, anything farther than that, you won’t make the shot. Wait till they cross the halfway mark.”
Willow picked out a similar landmark on the right. “Everybody clear? Don’t fire until I say. If you don’t have a clean shot, don’t waste your bolt. Tranks and tasers first. Crossbows only on my command. Kaer, stand ready—”
He yanked the handle he held; so did Burr. Kilter and Kale lurched forward, grumbling and complaining. The wagon jerked. I heard a couple of unhappy remarks from below. One of the babies had started crying and Mom-Lu couldn’t comfort her.
“I see them.” That was Da. He pointed across the snowfield to the edge of the slope.
“Got it,” said Willow. Almost immediately, the others confirmed. I could barely make out the dim black shapes shifting in the darkness.
The kacks didn’t come running in. And they didn’t come in howling. They moved easily across the snow, barely breaking the crust. Sitting high on the driver’s bench at the top of the wagon, I could see everything. The kacks came in on the right. Willow and the others spread out sideways, putting themselves between the kacks and the horses. Burr and her squad moved forward of the horses, to provide crossfire and keep the kacks from flanking the team.
“Kaer! Hit the growler!” I began cranking as hard as I could. The sound started low, like a deep scrape; then as I turned harder, the sound became louder and higher-pitched. It became a siren, then a scream, then an incredible banshee howl. The kacks stopped, uncertain. They cocked their heads. They stepped sideways, as if trying to figure this new thing out.
Beside me, Rinky turned her lantern like a spotlight, focusing it toward the approaching beasts. On my other side, Driver held up what looked like a flare gun and fired a stink-grenade. It arced up high, reached its peak and came down trailing a billowing plume of smoke. Strange perfumes filled the air—musky, rotten, repugnant, a fruity mix of pheromones and flavors. For a moment, I thought I might vomit.
The horses caught their scent then—of the kacks or the stink-grenade, I couldn’t tell—but it upset them. They whinnied and stamped and snorted, suddenly eager to get away. Driver held the reins tight and made comforting noises. “Easy, girl, easy—” but they ignored him. Da had hold of Kilter’s bridle strap, and Big Jes had Kale’s now; leaning in with all their weight against the great-horses’ urgency, forcing their heads down and keeping them from bolting in fear.
Disconcerted by the noise, by the brightness surrounding the wagon, by the sudden confusion of strange smells—the kacks hesitated. Rinky focused the glow of her lantern on the largest.
I’d seen pictures of kacks, lots of pictures. Big-screen, high-resolution pictures. Pictures more vivid than reality. Close-ups from the probes and overhead shots from the sky-cameras. I’d always thought them beautiful, impressive. I’d always felt a kind of nobility in these predacious giants. But not tonight, not now—this was different. This was real. I could smell the creatures; they stunk of sourness and rotten meat—a stench of carrion and rot. Whatever nobility I’d imagined, that had been an illusion; these were stinking death-machines.
The adults were as tall as bison. The pups were the size of ponies. These things were just too big—all meat and bone and muscle. Their skulls were oversized, their jaws were long and distended, their heads were all teeth. And each of them had two large incisors that curved down below its lower jaw—saber-tooth wolves, huge and hungry, white eyes glistening in the moonlight, fur bristling, low throaty growling—
I turned the crank of the growler and the kacks stared up at me, unblinking, curious, focused intently, studying, examining, weighing—
“Easy there, easy....” I didn’t know if Driver was talking to the horses or to me. I turned the crank, afraid to stop, afraid to look away. Beneath us, Willow’s squad took careful aim—
And then it was over. Two of the kacks were down. And the rest were retreating up the slope, hesitant, unsure, each one pausing to look back, then resuming the strategic withdrawal, following its fellows. Too fast. So fast, I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. I’d have to see the pictures from the ceiling cameras.
Slowly, carefully, Willow and Burr approached the fallen kacks. They stood off a distance, Burr surveying each with a scanner. Satisfied, they turned and waved to us. The animals were tranquilized; they’d each be out for hours. A bio-team was on its way to retrieve the animals, take them back to the labs and properly implant them.
Willow and Burr unhobbled the horses, then removed their hoods. They reassured the animals, giving each a dozen apples. Kilter and Kale were not assuaged, but they ate the apples anyway.
Da climbed back up into the wagon and pulled me into his lap. He wrapped his great arms around me, and I should have felt safe, but I didn’t. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t know why. “Shh,” said Da, stroking my hair. “Save it for later.”
A few moments later, we were on our way again. We got home just as the first flurries of snow began to fall. There really wasn’t much to say anyway. This was Linnea.
NEWS
THE CALL CAME IN THE MIDDLE OF BREAKFAST. We had fifteen minutes to get dressed and get upstairs. By the look on Da-Lorrin’s face, we knew it was urgent. By the time we got up the ladder, a tractor-bus was already crunching across the plain from the direction of the Kelly farm, leaving harsh tracks in the snow.
The Kellys were already aboard and as we climbed up into the warmth of the cabin, they hailed us warmly. We hadn’t seen anyone for a while, so even the Kellys seemed like good company now. I sat down next to Patta and we started chatting as if nothing bad had ever happened between us. She told me that they were going to be listed on the next crossover schedule, and I nodded politely without saying anything at all. I wondered what Da-Lorrin would say when I told him; nothing repeatable, probably.
All the moms were talking about the snow, how real it looked—of course, it was real—and Patta and I just rolled our eyes upward. All the dads and uncles were talking about this emergency meeting; not exactly speculating, but not hiding their concerns either. Whatever had happened on Linnea to make the Dome Authority so darkly secretive, we were about to find out. I felt as much dread as anticipation.
The main auditorium was almost filled by the time we got in, and Administor Rance was already at the podium impatiently ringing her bell and demanding that everyone take their seats as quickly as possible. Da-Lorrin led us down the aisle toward our assigned section. We saw families from all over the dome, a lot of people we hadn’t seen in months. I wanted to wave hello, but Mom-Woo pulled me down onto a bench and hushed me up quickly.
Administor Rance looked like she’d swallowed a frog. She rang the gathering sternly to silence. “We have some information for you,” she said, and then stepped away from the lectern. A scout named Byrne stepped up to the podium and began speaking immediately. At first, I didn’t understand why we needed to hear her story, but as she talked the enormity of the situation became apparent.
Byrne had been traveling across the western continent on the Linnean rail lines. The Linneans didn’t have real railroads, not with locomotives. They didn’t have an iron industry and they hadn’t invented steam engines yet. But they had rails, sort of. They made bricks—the same kind we made—and used them to build heavy roadbeds with raised edges like rails; then they ran horse-drawn wagons along them. The wagons looked a lot like the ones we used, except they had wheels shaped for running on the rail-edges.
A horse-drawn wagon could go fifteen kilometers a day over dirt, but three or four times as far on rails. The Linnean
s didn’t have rail lines across the continent yet, but they were building steadily, if slowly. The railroad extended all the way to Callo City now, the real one.
Byrne and two companions had boarded at Callo City and traveled as far east as anyone had yet dared. Their instructions were to turn back at the first funny look, but they had gone all the way to the eastern seaboard, and then north as far as the wall of glaciers. Beyond the glaciers, the mountains looked as sharp as knives, so they turned south and west again, working their way back to Callo City through the northern wastelands and scrub forests. That took a while because there weren’t any railroads there. Few Linnean families lived that far north and those that did kept mosty to themselves. The people held their trust close and did not talk easily to strangers who might be outcasts or hostiles.
But the scouts did attend a few county fairs and local celebrations and other gatherings where few questions were asked. They listened to conversations everywhere they went—“everything from preaching to speeching to barroom screeching,” as Byrne put it. They went to church services and town meetings and market days. They traded boffili robes and beaver pelts for copper and iron coins. And once they’d traded a gold nugget for paper banknotes printed by the Church.
Wherever they traveled, they always learned new things about the Linneans; but this time, they had noticed something different in the talk of the people, especially as they worked their way back westward. They discovered not just a growing awareness of strange sightings in the sky, but stories even more worrisome. A new mythology had sprung up, about another world just beyond the wall of purple mountains lining the western edge of the continent: a world called Oerth.
The people of Oerth weren’t like the people of Linnea; they were sort of like elves, tall and thin, pale and emotionless—and they had mysterious magicks. They lived a hundred years or more and they never fell sick. They flew to the moon in fiery chariots. And they dove under the sea in ships of metal. The pale folk of Oerth had mirrors that let them look a thousand miles away and oracles of captured-lightning held in glass that gave them answers to any question they could ask. They built bridges ten kilometers long and towers a kilometer high. The cities of Oerth shone with magical light all night long, and carriages without horses ran through the streets. Paintings of the dead could talk to their grandchildren. And eeriest of all ... some of the faerie-folk of Oerth lived under a giant bowl twenty kilometers across and pretended to be Linneans, practicing for the time when they would move unseen among the Linnean people for purposes of their own....
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