Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  Annia had jumped up to run away, but there was no place she could run. Tora put her hand on Annia's shoulder. "No enemies." Tora knew how to tell enemies from friends, so these big people with many legs must be humans.

  Liam straightened, carrying his weight on the back of the chair to ease his knee. The nearest stranger recoiled from his movement and altered the attitude of her tail. The bells clipped to her hide from head to toe said, alarm/surprise/discomfort.

  Tora said, "Friends. No enemies."

  The big stranger turned her head toward Tora, and her tail relaxed so it was not a weapon anymore. She rose up a little on her four thick legs and unfolded her arms from her chest. Her pale crest rose to half-height. Then Annia came forward, and the stranger recoiled again. Her companion swung her tail.

  Annia froze.

  "Too fast," Tora said. She approached the two hulking strangers with slow movements. They watched her with their crests flat on their skulls.

  The strangers stood again and raised their crests with greater confidence.

  The nearer stranger dropped her head to a level with Tora's eyes and hissed, "Hattia?" Query, This One (three) seeks One (one only). Assistance offered.

  Tora nodded her head toward Annia. "Annia is there."

  Annia stood very still. "I am Annia. You are friends of Maycee?"

  Both strangers slewed their heads around toward Annia. The further one said, "Chaythee?" Query/confusion.

  The other said, "Thaktalheth-Cahel."

  Comprehension/affirmative. "Thaktalheth-Cahel." Close-as-kin. This One (three) comes to assist. "Heth." She dipped her nose to jingle the bells on her face.

  The other stranger courteously dropped her head and chuffed. This One (three)also to assist. "Taha."

  The strangers were hard to understand because they didn't talk in their throats like Cho'en. They had to make sounds only with breath and their tongues and jaws because they didn't have lips for talking like other humans. So they could hiss and click their tongues and move their jaws, but they could not talk like other people.

  Annia held very still. "What exactly did Maycee send you to do? We're locked in this room, and there are people with weapons outside the door."

  Two gigantic heads swiveled toward the door and back to Annia. "Helch whith thucherth."

  Annia frowned. "Thuchers?"

  Heth and Taha looked at each other. Heth had a heavier jaw than Taha, and Taha was darker green with a paler green underbelly. Their pale crests flicked up and down as they hissed, clicked and jingled at one another. Taha turned again to Annia and raised one hand. Taha's hand was thick and square and four-fingered with heavy, blunt nails. She folded the fingers together into the center of the palm one at a time. "Itt, ith, eth, tith."

  "Numbers," Annia almost shouted.

  The strangers recoiled from the volume of her voice and flattened their crests against their heads.

  "I'm sorry," Annia said more softly. "The encryption on the data bank. Can you break it?"

  Both crests rose, and Taha dropped her head to chuff through her throat nostrils. Interest, enthusiasm/pleasure/affirmative.

  "This way," Annia turned slowly and made a gentle gesture to summon the big strangers closer. "It's here." She led them toward Liam.

  Liam leaned his weight on the back of the chair as the strangers closed around him and bent their heads over the monitor where Liam had been looking at numbers. They raised their heads.

  Distress/confusion, Heth said.

  Taha turned her head to Annia. Dismay/apology/query, This One (three) unable to assist.

  Annia frowned. "Your eyes. The monitor isn't designed for your eyes."

  Heth and Taha conferred for a moment and said, Affirmative.

  Annia leaned against the wall. She was very pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes. "Then there's nothing we can do."

  Liam did not understand. Heth and Taha could not see the monitor, but he had seen Cho'en look at monitors and see them. He leaned over the back of the chair and peered at the mass of numbers. They looked just as they had before.

  Taha swiveled her head toward him. She looked over the top of his head at Heth. That One (one only) sees.

  Heth said, Affirmative. Proposal, query, mind touch, invitation to suggest alternatives.

  Agreement, mind touch. Taha said, That one (one only) "Whill asthitht." Query.

  Annia said, "Do you mean Liam can help you?"

  Liam had not realized they were talking about him. "Can help," he said.

  Annia came to his side so quickly she startled Heth and Taha. "Sit down and look at the monitor, Liam." She guided him into the seat as though he could not do it himself.

  Heth and Taha loomed up beside and behind him. They settled their bellies to the floor and put their hands on him. Taha's thick, blunt nails pressed into his cheek. Heth's hand circled his wrist.

  When they touched him, their minds came into his. They had big minds with many parts that glanced apart and merged again. When all Heth's circling minds combined, numbers ticked deep in her dark and solitary center. Taha never came all the way together as one. Language filled her mind like bright fabric in wind.

  Heth requested him to look at the numbers on the monitor. Liam looked, and the numbers turned back into patterns and fit into other patterns to make bigger patterns, and this time, Heth's three minds combined and took in the whole pattern as Liam saw it. Then Taha took all the numbers and patterns and made them into ideas humans could understand. Taha dropped her head almost into Liam's lap, blocking Liam's view of the monitor, and aimed one golden eye the size of Liam's open hand at the control panel. She raised her head and put her thick, olive-skinned hand over a lighted sensor. Her fingers moved, and in the monitor, some of the patterns moved around and came together in bigger pieces. Every time she moved a small pattern, a big pattern became bigger. He liked to see how the numbers went together. He bent closer to the monitor. His eyes felt dry. They burned from staring into the cloud, but he did not want to look away and not see when Taha moved more numbers.

  Then Heth began to take the pattern that Taha made bigger and bigger, and Heth began to make the numbers do things. The numbers weren't just numbers. They meant things. You could put them together in ways that weren't just numbers but could be places that turned into pictures or words or symbols or different numbers, and the pattern told the numbers what to do. He could not make his head go fast enough to keep up with the moving patterns.

  Both Heth and Taha had their hands over the lighted sensor that told the monitor how to move the patterns. Liam wanted to put his hands over the sensor, too, and do things to the patterns, but he did not know how to make them do things that would make sense to humans. He tried to understand what the big strangers did, but he had no simulations, and he could hear their minds the way they heard his, but he could not understand, and it was all too big and he wanted to understand all the numbers and the patterns, and the movements, but he couldn't fit it all inside his head, and his head hurt, and his eyes burned, and he was dizzy, and he couldn't sit up, and he fell down, and got tangled up in numbers and couldn't get up again.

  #

  While Liam and the gaeans—and Annia wouldn't have expected the original gaeans to be so different from Cho'en—worked on the encryption of the database, Annia moved to the com station. She gathered up Honeybear's limp body, piled it in her lap, and tried to find a way to communicate with the DPH in Cyrion. She scrolled through frequencies, looking for one that registered above or below the range of the interference field projected around Murrayville. From time to time, she caught a burst of something like speech through the static, but when she tried to focus on the channel, it disappeared. The shield had enough jitter to permit the occasional momentary wave to pass through, but never enough to allow communication.

  Where had Maycee popped off to? She could get into the DPH with a crystal—assuming Liam and the gaeans managed to extract Annia's data from the bank—and convince them to star
t compiling the cure.

  She didn't have Maycee, so Annia plodded methodically through the communication channels. As she sifted down the spectrum, she began to hear coherent conversation. There must be dozens of low-frequency short-range transmitters in Murrayville, and their owners were exchanging information. They might have been below the range of the blockade, but they didn't have enough power to transmit outside the town limits anyway. As with so many of her problems lately, she didn't have much choice by way of solutions, so she sifted until she found the clearest channel.

  Someone said, "...just saw two militia go by here with one of Solante's bulls."

  Voice only, no holographics. A female voice replied, "They're working together now, but it's the Colonel in charge of them all."

  Annia wondered exactly how Tora had seized control of Solante's police. Of course a 222 wouldn't rest until she had all the soldiers she could see. Tora was probably already trying to figure out how to get her hands on the Cyrions.

  A second male voice said, "There's nothing going on in the north quarter except their black flyers. We've stopped fifty people from trying to leave town that way. Sure as the Black Man, those police would shoot them down, and I don't mean stun."

  Tora bent over Annia's shoulder. "Stun only," she barked at the pickup.

  Annia jumped and put her hand to the broadcast key. "Say again," she told Tora.

  Tora said, "Black-uniforms do not use projectiles. Stun only."

  Annia lifted her hand from the key.

  "Who's that?" the woman asked.

  Someone else, a man Annia hadn't heard before, said, "Hey, that's the Colonel. What's she doing on the exchange?"

  This time Tora got her hand to the broadcast key before Annia. "I negotiate with black-uniforms. No projectiles. Stun only. All humans stay in quarantine."

  "That's not her," a second woman said. "The Colonel wouldn't talk like that."

  "Don't be stupid," someone sneered. "She's a clone. Everybody knows she talks like that."

  "There's no way a clone could even control the militia, never mind Solante's bulls, and that's just tug dung to say she can tell the Cyrions what to do."

  "I heard she's a special model the Federation designed to control humans. Then they plant them on United Worlds planets programmed to take over everything. Then the Federation comes in and sweeps it all up."

  Tora hip-bumped Annia out of the com chair. "Be quiet. Doctor Annia has cure for disease enemy. Doctor Annia wants to talk to doctors at the city. How does she do that?"

  "A cure?"

  "That's impossible. The plague can't be cured."

  "I heard it mutates too fast for a DV to kill it."

  "That's part of the Federation strategy. They weaken us with the disease, so we'll give up without a fight when their ships get here."

  Annia rubbed her palm over her forehead. Her face felt hot, but that might have been because her fingers were cold and sweaty.

  "No wasting time," Tora barked. "Doctor Annia wants to talk to city doctors. How?"

  A moment passed in silence while the exchange operators internalized Tora's instructions. Finally, one of the men said, "We can't help. We don't have enough power to transmit through the field."

  The woman said, "You could line up two or three power generators."

  "You'd have to be right up to the edge of the com shield."

  "Three generators would melt the transmitters."

  "It won't matter how close you get to the inside of the shield; there's no one on the other side near enough to receive."

  "The relay buoy will be disabled."

  Tora interrupted. "You tell General Baldwin. General Baldwin is with Marines."

  "No way we can reach the Navy base."

  "Don't the Marines use a different frequency range than civilian communications?"

  "Not as low as our range," the woman said. "We can't broadcast that high."

  Someone cleared his throat into his pickup. "Actually..."

  "Saahir, is that you?" the woman asked. "I thought you were barred from the exchange for the year."

  Long silence.

  "Saahir?" the woman repeated.

  "But it's an emergency," the boy protested, his voice breaking into an adolescent squeak on the end of the word. "...and I know how to get our equipment to broadcast in the navy range."

  Tora sat with her eyelids half shut and a smile of satisfaction on her mouth while more and more faceless voices debated the merits and technicalities of the young man's proposal. Finally, the man who had gradually emerged as the leader of the exchange said, "You there, Colonel Miraz?"

  "I am here," Tora said.

  "Because we think we have a way to work it, and Saahir is going to be off the exchange for another year when his mother finds out he already had the equipment built and set up."

  Tora nodded, still with that smug smile on her face. "Good. You go tell General Baldwin Doctor Annia has cure." Annia expected at any time to see Tora plant her booted feet on the com board and lean back with her hands behind her head. Instead, she got up and went back to patrolling the perimeter of the room as if the guards outside might burst through the walls at a moment's notice.

  Honybear had begun to twitch. Apparently the sonic assault had knocked it unconscious, but hadn't killed it. Annia gathered it back into her lap and dropped into Tora's abandoned chair. She leaned her forehead on her hands. Her headache had intensified, and her forehead definitely felt hot. She turned her head to cough into the fabric of her uniform. The virus had reached her lungs. The partial treatment had barely bought her a few hours. How many hours left? She forced herself to think only as far ahead as getting the cure to the DPH. Once they had it, every compiler on the planet would be dedicated to manufacturing, and Annia could survive long enough for the cure to get back her.

  She rested her head on her folded arms. A little sleep would help. Not even sleep, just a doze. The rest might hold the plague at bay just a little longer. She didn't really believe the exchange operators could contact Baldwin. How could they—a bunch of amateur hobbyists with scavenged equipment—if Solante's station couldn't broadcast powerfully enough to get through, the amateurs didn’t have a chance.

  Something thumped off to her left. Something closer to hand than the muffled pounding of fists and heavier, harder things on the door. She picked up her head.

  Liam had slumped to the floor. The darker-colored gaean...Annia thought it was Taha...raised his head and upper body off the floor and supported him on her arm..

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The other gaean had dropped her crest flat to her skull. She turned her head toward Annia. Surprise/consternation/assistance requested.

  Alarm overcame Annia's painful lethargy. She dropped Honeybear, climbed over Taha's huge tail and slid down the alien's flank to Liam's side. "What happened?" She peeled back one of his eyelids to check dilation and found it normal. The pulse under his jaw beat strong and even in its slower-than-human rhythm. "What did you do?"

  Heth ducked her head like a catpil caught stealing food from the table. "Thtall hnind, fery thtrong." Admiration/respect/approval.

  The alien had said, small mind very strong. Annia supposed human minds just weren't made to bear up under the force of two gaean brains. The two creatures were comically contrite with their necks extended and their big second eyes swollen half shut with distress.

  "Move him over to the wall and lay him down," Annia instructed.

  Taha lifted Liam like an infant and shuffled out of Annia's way with Heth hovering close and peering down at Liam like an anxious mother. Annia pushed between them and patted Liam's cheek. He opened his eyes and stared up into Taha's big golden plate of an eye poised over him. He struggled in her arms, trying to get up. "Numbers," he said. “Finish pattern for Annia."

  "Iss shinnist," Regret/apology/consolation, Heth said.

  The decoding was finished.

  Tora had come to inspect Liam. She peered past Taha and said, "No damage."
She went back to her patrol.

  Since Tora wasn't concerned about Liam, and the gaeans seemed to be more than concerned enough, Annia returned to the databank. The access display still demanded a code before it would allow Annia to use the bank. She had no idea what the code might be. She looked back at the gaeans hissing and jingling over Liam like little girls with a new-formed catpil. Did gaeans understand things like security codes? She put her hand in the waldo field and flicked the code request aside.

  It disappeared. Apparently, the gaeans had disabled the lock. A cloud of rotating storage sectors appeared in the monitor. Too many sectors to scan individually, and even if she had time to do that, Solante might have stored the plague data under a false name. Annia tried a search filter, looking for plague, virus, cure, DV, and Annia.

  The com station buzzed, and someone said, "Colonel Miraz? Colonel Miraz, we got to General Baldwin. He's with the navy. They're coming upriver with flyers and gunships. Admiral Hirshorn is declaring martial law."

  "No," Tora said firmly. "You tell him Murrayville is mine. He does not have command here."

  "You tell him." The operator sounded aggrieved. "You're the one in charge. I'm just a tailor."

  Tora scowled. "You tell the Admiral Hirshorn talk to me."

  "Okay." The operator sounded dubious.

  Annia leaned past Tora. "Did you tell them we have the plague cure?”

  "We explained that part. They said for you to sit quiet and wait for them to get there."

  "It would be faster to drop the com block and let me send it to DPH now." As soon as she pried it out of Solante's twice-flaming databank.

  "I'm just a messenger. I can't tell an admiral what to do."

  Tora said, "You tell General Baldwin. He knows Dr. Annia fights plague enemy. He will tell the Admiral Hirshorn."