Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  Dade’s voice spoke through my earpiece. "You really think the Explorers transmitted from this building? It doesn’t look safe."

  "Maybe that’s why they chose it," Festina replied. "The floors look strong enough to hold humans but maybe not Mandasars. Plebon and Olympia could go in, set up their equipment, and know they wouldn’t be disturbed."

  "Why would they be disturbed?" Dade asked. "I thought we were assuming the Explorers had got friendly with the palace guards."

  "Friendly is one thing," Tobit said, "but guards might get a wee bit anxious if they knew humans were broadcasting radio messages to the world at large. Some nasty paranoid folks would suspect you were sending intelligence to the enemy. Better to set up your transmitter where you’ll have a little privacy."

  "Besides," Festina added, "we don’t know for sure our friends are on good terms with the guards. They may be on the run and hiding out. Always suspect the worst, and… uh-oh."

  The Bumbler’s screen showed a pair of warriors coming toward us. They were moving cautiously from the direction of the palace, gas masks over their heads and crossbows held steady in their waist pincers. Each had a Cheejretha finger resting on the bow’s trigger mechanism, so they could instantly fire an arrow with the slightest squeeze.

  The warriors passed in front of the crumbling embassy, peeking in through gaps in the brickwork. They had to be looking for something… and I suspected it was us. Some keen-eyed lookout at the palace had spotted the Sperm-tail lingering a few seconds in this neighborhood; the team coming our way got sent to investigate.

  "What do we do?" Dade asked over the radio.

  "Let’s invite them to tea," Tobit said. "No, wait… let’s stun their fucking gonads off." He handed the Bumbler to me and quietly drew his stun-pistol. Festina had hers out too. They hadn’t let Dade bring a gun; he’d been just a teeny bit too eager to shoot, back at the Fasskister orbital.

  Me, I didn’t want a gun. And nobody had offered me one.

  The guards’ footsteps came closer, clicking softly on the pavement. Festina lifted her hand, with three fingers showing. Silently she lowered one finger, then a second, then the last… and together she and Tobit dived out of the alley.

  Arrows twanged at almost the same instant the stunners whirred; but the warriors shot high, not prepared for humans who could throw themselves belly down on the street. The guns fired again in unison. That was enough. I heard the bows clatter to the pavement, and a moment later, two heavy thuds on the ground.

  "Are they out?" Dade asked excitedly.

  "We stopped shooting, didn’t we?" Festina answered.

  Without another word, she led us forward.

  When you hear me talk about streets and alleys, maybe you’re picturing some city you know — your local downtown late at night, with the sidewalks empty and everything quiet.

  No. Put that out of your head.

  First of all, Unshummin was dark. Really, really dark. The city had plenty of streetlamps, but none of them worked — there hadn’t been electricity on the planet since the Fasskisters loosed their Swarm, except for chemical batteries and maybe some motorized generators protected by thick nano defense clouds. The only significant light was a glow from the direction of the palace, where I figured soldiers were burning cookfires; but the palace lay to the rear of the embassy and we were in front, so most of the light was blocked by the building. Neither of Troyen’s moons was up, so we had to make do with the stars… and after all the lights on Jacaranda, my eyes needed time to adapt.

  Next, you’re probably thinking of a normal human street paved with asphalt or cement or gravel or stone. Nope. Every road on Troyen was built from a pebbly stuff called Ayposh: kind of like coral, because it consisted of a whole bunch of tiny shelled organisms, some alive, some dead. They’d been bioengineered to grow in long level sheets, photosynthesizing most of their nutrients straight from the air. Every few months, the board of works sent out sprayers full of fertilizer and mineral supplements to feed the little guys; and each year, crews would paint the highway shoulders with a chemical suppressant to keep the Ayposh from spreading off the roadbed. It was cheap, it was simple, it was elegant… and with the war on, maybe it was doomed. All of a sudden, I started wondering if people had time to spray fertilizer when they were all busy fighting. I thought of millions of miles of pavement, slowly starving to death for lack of vitamins. Maybe all the streets around me were nothing but corpses, teeny husks that would slowly crumble away and never get replenished by new generations.

  After twenty years of real people dying, it seemed kind of horrible to go misty-eyed about the roads and sidewalks. You’d have to be pretty stupid to do something like that.

  Anyway, there’s one last thing you’ve probably got wrong in your mental picture of Diplomats Row: the buildings. If you’re thinking of human architecture, think again. Yes, the Fasskister embassy was built of bricks; but the bricks were clear crystal, the same sort of stuff as the huts back at that orbital. It wasn’t glass, I can tell you that much — when the front wall had been smashed in, not one of the bricks had broken. They were all perfectly intact, lying on the ground as we stepped into the darkness of the half-demolished building. The bricks’ edges were still crisp and clean despite years of weathering, and I couldn’t see a trace of mortar on them. Don’t ask me how the walls held together without some sort of stickum to attach each brick to its neighbors… but the side and back walls were still intact, and I couldn’t see mortar in them either. Just rows of crystal bricks that let in the tiniest glimmer of starlight so I wasn’t completely blind.

  Dim light or not, the Explorers could see fine. Their tightsuit visors had vision enhancers that made the night bright as day. I had to tag along on Festina’s heels, so I wouldn’t walk into a wall or pothole or something… and even then, I had a heck of a time not getting lost, with her practically invisible in camo. Mostly I went by the sound of her footsteps and the smell of her suit — as if I were a full-fledged Mandasar, navigating by nose.

  It took me by surprise when we started going upward: a slow-sloping ramp that must have been in the middle of the building. Ramps were pretty common on Diplomats Row — lots of nonhumans (including Mandasars) didn’t do so well on stairs, and no alien species ever liked each other’s elevators; the compartments were either too big or too small, the lift mechanisms were too quiet or too clanky, they went too fast or too slow… and the interior always smelled of something you didn’t want to inhale any longer than you had to. The diplomatic solution was to build your embassy with ramps at easy-to-climb slants, so as not to irritate important visitors.

  We went up slowly, switching back four times for each floor. Once we got above first-story level, the side of the stairwell was missing, giving a clear view of the street out front — Diplomats Row in all its glory. The other buildings seemed pretty well intact, even if they were dark and empty: the high silver towers of the Myriapods, like tinsel hanging from the sky; the clear glass globe of the Cashlings, its multicolored interior lights now gone dark and lifeless; the embassies of the Divian sub-breeds, Tye-Tyes in their rock mountain, Ooloms in their giant tree, Freeps in their neon casino; the Unity’s mirror garden where they’d held masked rituals every night; and at the end of the block, the mall of the up-League envoys.

  Once upon a time, that mall held a fifty-meter-high flame on one side and an even taller tornado on the other, both real and roaring but never moving from their positions. Gawking tourists used to argue whether the envoys actually lived in the wind and fire, or if it was just a flashy gimmick aimed at impressing lesser species. None of us ever learned the truth… but the night Queen Verity died, the flame and tornado winked out of existence in the exact same second. It was a sign, if anybody needed one, that the higher echelons of the League were turning their backs on Troyen. By dawn, every other embassy had been evacuated too — no one wanted to go down with a sinking ship.

  Now, here we were, back again.

  There must hav
e been a door or something closing off the stairwell from the roof, but it had vanished into the general wreckage. Still, the roof itself seemed in pretty good shape — at least the back half was. My eyes were getting used to the darkness; as we came up the final ramp, I could see a flat expanse of those smooth crystal bricks, with no dips or sags all the way to the rear edge of the building. Tobit checked with the Bumbler and grunted a few seconds later. "It looks safe," he announced. "If you want to trust the engineering judgment of a stupid machine."

  "Any sign of the Explorers?" Dade asked.

  Tobit fiddled with dials and peered at the Bumbler’s screen. "No… no… wait. Back there in the shadows," he said, pointing at the far rear of the roof. "I think it’s an Explorer’s backpack."

  Dade immediately started forward, but Festina grabbed his arm. "You and Tobit stay here. In case the roof isn’t as solid as we think."

  "And in case it’s a trap," Tobit muttered.

  "Why would it be a trap?" Dade asked.

  "Because anything could be a trap!" Tobit growled "We don’t know dick about what’s going on. Someone may have lured us here with a fake signal so they could blow us to smithereens. And don’t say that doesn’t make sense, junior — stuff that doesn’t make sense can still make you Go Oh Shit."

  Festina was already heading toward the knapsack. Since nobody stopped me, I jogged a few paces and caught up with her. Side by side, we walked toward the building’s rear… and the farther we went, the less I cared about the pack and the more I worried about something else.

  The smell of buttered toast trickled through the air.

  Like I said, the back of the Fasskister embassy faced the palace — just a stone’s throw from the diamondwood palisade surrounding the palace grounds. Shining from inside that wall came the glow I’d thought was cookflres. A dull red glow.

  The queen-shaped palace had its tail toward us, but not quite straight on. There was enough of an angle that we could see along its body, past the glass conservatory domes, up the torso, all the way to the head and its outstretched claws.

  Moss. Balrog moss. Covering every square millimeter of the building from the venom sacs forward. In the dark, it glimmered a very self-satisfied crimson.

  36

  LYING LOW ON THE ROOF

  "Holy shit," Festina whispered.

  I just nodded. The buttered-toast smell was making me dizzy.

  "That queen," Festina said. "The one who dumped those spores on the Fasskisters. She must have left some here too — to make the place uninhabitable for the Black Army."

  "Kind of hard on her own guards," I said. It gave me a crawly feeling, thinking about that. I could understand a queen setting up a nasty parting gift for her enemies, but not when it would also hurt her own subjects. Protecting your citizens should always be your number one concern, shouldn’t it? A king who didn’t put his people’s safety ahead of his own hunger for revenge…

  A queen. I meant a queen who didn’t put her people’s safety ahead of her hunger for revenge…

  Never mind.

  Festina growled under her breath. "That fucking Kaisho. She had to know about this."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "She took that damned satellite photo," Festina said. "The whole front half of the palace should have been glowing, for Christ’s sake. But there wasn’t any shine in the shot she showed us. She must have deliberately told the computer to filter out the red." The admiral made a disgusted sound in her throat. "And I never double-checked. I checked the landing site, and the spot where the signal came from, but I never bothered to look at the palace. Sloppy, Ramos — really sloppy."

  "You didn’t know," I said.

  "I knew enough," she snapped. "Kaisho has jerked us around time and again. I kept letting her do it, in the hope she’d go too far and we could justifiably whack her. But enough is enough." She tapped a button on her wrist, changing the channel on her radio. "Tobit, Dade: full paranoia mode."

  Dade’s voice sounded in my ear, even though he was standing back at the stairwell. "I thought we already were in full paranoia mode."

  Festina sighed and rolled her eyes. "What can you do with a kid like that?"

  "Um," I said, "if you want I can keep an eye on—"

  That’s when the cannons started firing.

  A real soldier probably wouldn’t call them long-distance guns — they were shooting from the top of the palace toward that kill zone beyond Prosperity Water. Only about a kilometer; in artillery terms, that was practically point-blank range. But from where we were standing, the shells looked like they were zooming past us and heading way off in the distance before they blew up.

  Of course, we didn’t stay standing too long.

  I dropped flat to the roof. Festina did a dive, then rolled to her feet again, fists up… like it was some pure reflex to hit the dirt and come out fighting. A second later, she threw herself onto the roof again, cursing in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish, I guess. Considering how comfortable she was swearing in English, she must have been really mad this time.

  Another boom of a cannon. While its thunder still echoed from nearby buildings, Dade’s voice came over my earphone. "It’s all right," he babbled excitedly, "they’re firing over our heads. Shelling the enemy."

  "And what happens," Tobit growled, "when the enemy starts shelling back? If the guns are a few degrees too low, we’re bang in the line of fire. How do you think this building got wrecked in the first place?"

  Good point. The front of the embassy could have got hit by a barrage intended for the palace — just a few hundred meters short, that’s all. How long ago would that have been? When the Black Army first surrounded Queen Temperance? Or back earlier in some other battle… maybe when Temperance herself grabbed the palace from whoever held it before her.

  "What do we do?" Dade called over the radio. "Leave?"

  "No," Tobit and Festina snapped in unison.

  "We’re here to pick up fellow Explorers," Festina said a moment later. "We stay until we absolutely have to go."

  "Yeah," Tobit put in. "We aren’t going to get another chance down here."

  He was right. If the palace was firing, the Black Army must be attacking out on the defense perimeter — going for their final offensive. The moment they saw our Sperm-tail, someone must have called the attack.

  Someone. Maybe Sam. Whose time of waiting was over.

  In a few hours now, the war would end… right where it started, inside the high queen’s palace. There’d be fighting in the halls, just like the night Verity died — loyal palace guards without a queen, just trying to survive till the dawn. It made me feel guilty, realizing I was soon going to run off on them again. We’d pick up the other Explorers, or we’d decide they weren’t coming and hightail it back to Jacaranda. Either way, I was abandoning a lot of warriors, when I should be there with them, helping them, leading them…

  Wait a minute — what the heck was going through my head? I was no leader.

  The cannons fired again. I covered my ears and tried not to think.

  Festina began to crawl on her belly back to Tobit and Dade. It didn’t look very graceful, her in that big fat tightsuit… but she moved surprisingly fast, and if you took your eyes off her the tiniest split second, she disappeared. That camo was good. I started to crawl too, then stopped. The Explorer’s backpack was still lying on the roof behind me; Festina hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I turned around, and slithered up to it, sniffing furiously.

  It smelled of the same stuff as the tightsuit, plus the odor of a male human. No trace of female scent. Maybe Plebon had been here an hour ago to send the contact beep, but Olympia Mell hadn’t been with him.

  Was that a bad sign? I couldn’t tell.

  I sniffed at the knapsack again, not sure what I was looking for. Even if the pack was booby-trapped with some kind of bomb, I wouldn’t know what explosives smelled like. Anyway, there were a whole lot of odors jumbled together: Explorer stuff, like a radio transmitt
er, and food rations, and a Sperm anchor…

  My fingers twitched. I didn’t make them do that. Uh-oh… getting possessed again.

  I watched as my hands reached out and flipped open the pack. Nothing went boom. That was the good news. The bad news was my hand scrabbling into the mess of equipment and pulling out the little anchor box.

  "Edward!" Festina called over my earphone. "What do you think you’re doing?"

  The spirit that possessed me didn’t answer. It set the anchor down on the roof and flicked the activation switch.

  I didn’t even see the Sperm-tail coming — it was somewhere behind my back, still flipping and flapping, swishing aimlessly across Unshummin and far out into the countryside, like some cat-toy bouncing on a string. One second it was a dozen kilometers away; the next instant, it had snapped into place against the anchor, plastered to the side of the little box with only the tip of its mouth hanging free.

  Festina’s voice rang loud in my ear. "Turn off the anchor, Edward. Turn off the anchor!"

  Too late. The Sperm-tail’s tiny mouth suddenly became a nozzle squirting out a crowd of newcomers: Counselor, Zeeleepull, Hib Nib Pib, exploding out of the tube, smacking down hard on the crystal-brick roof. I could feel the impact under my feet; it must have jarred the Mandasars to their very bones. Right behind them was Kaisho in her hoverchair, shooting forward, spinning sideways, almost flipping over in a somersault… till the chair’s stabilizers kicked in and pulled upright with a whine of engines.