They were a hundred meters back, and falling further behind. He wasn’t scared of the Wu Li, no.
But there were Diamonds among them, and they were gaining.
It was Summer 13, 2681.
FORTY-FIVE SECONDS later Kess broke through the trees and into open field. He saw a concrete structure, a bunker, rising up out of the hillside, off to his left. The research base? He was thoroughly lost, their world’s GPS satellites had been blown from the sky on the first day of the invasion.
But it was a building, only a quarter kilometer away. Kess veered and ran faster, if that was possible. He didn’t look back, but it wasn’t necessary; the heads up in the battle armor let him see what was behind him. Two Diamonds pursued him. Small ones, shaped like wolves, running on all fours, less than fifty meters back of him, and gaining. If they caught him they’d shred his battle armor, and him too, without even slowing down. It had happened to many of his friends.
A round whistled by him. Someone shooting from the bunker? Were they shooting at him? At the Diamonds?
It didn’t matter. Kess kept running. Behind him was death.
Another round struck the dirt at his feet. He swerved almost from instinct. If they were shooting at the Diamonds they were a terrible shot.
Kess didn’t know how intelligent the Diamonds were. No one did. At first, in the months after the invasion, everyone had thought the Wu Li their masters. Now it was anyone’s guess: at times the Diamonds took initiative on their own, left the Wu Li behind, and when that happened, Woodspeople died.
Sixty meters. Fifty –
Another round struck at Kess’s feet. Communication, he devoutly hoped.
He jinked left and a man stepped forward out of the bunker with a multiphase rifle raised to his shoulder. He wore Guard armor of the same generation as Kess’s. His first shot whistled past Kess in the space he had just occupied, and blew the closest Diamond into brilliant shards that tinkled against the back of Kess’s armor. The second Diamond reacted as quickly as any carbon life form could, abandoned the wolf shape and flattened itself against the ground in a thin sheet as the next explosive round whistled above it. And then it had turned and was running the other way, vaguely wolf shaped again, though much lower to the ground this time.
Kess ran into the shadowed entrance of the bunker, crashed into a wall he’d barely had time to see, and bounced back. The armor absorbed most of the impact, but it still rattled him.
The other man stood still in the entryway, rifle raised. He squeezed off one more round, and half a kilometer distant, one of the Wu Li exploded into blood and bone.
A minute later the green field before them was empty. The surviving Diamond and the Wu Li had faded back into the trees.
THE OTHER SOLDIER moved back behind the cement wall for cover, facing Kess with the bright sunlit entryway separating them, each of them in shadow. His helmet pulled back until Kess could see his face. He was a tall man, dark skinned like Kess. Older, Kess thought in the dim light.
The man said, “Where the hell did you come from? Are you with the rescuers?”
Kess was still catching his breath. He retracted his own helmet. “What’s left of them, maybe. Is this the research base that went quiet?”
“Yeah.” The older man hadn’t lowered his rifle; now he did. “That’s us.” He sighed. “I’ve got bad news, though, about –”
He fell silent, looking at Kess. His hair was a little gray. Then he laughed, not the laughter of the desperate, but wholly amused at something. “Success! Success isn’t having a plan. It’s not even having a Plan B. It’s Plan C, and Plan D –”
Kess said softly, in unison, “– and Plan E, all the way down.”
The older man slid down to sit in the dirt, back to the cement wall. He laughed again. “Yeah, all the way to Plan Z, and then we start over. But kid –” His shoulders slumped. Suddenly he looked infinitely tired. “The Continuing Time is too big. Diamonds fall out of the damn sky. Who can plan for that? They shoot at you from every direction, randomness, thousand and million to one odds – a son enters, Stage Right. How the hell do you plan for that?”
It was Sakamoto Modyan.
Kess said, “Hi, Dad.”
ON KESS’S fourth birthday, in 2665, they’d gone to the beach at Ambelray. It was the closest Kess had ever been to the border with Gombaki, the other, with Domain, of Tin Woodman’s two nations.
At four, long before his first tap, Kess was merely a genius by the standards of unreconstructed humans. And even four-year-old geniuses don’t know much about things they have not encountered. Kess had met K’Aillae, and humans, of course; he was almost certain his parents were human. Gombaki Federation’s residents were mostly Encherido – oxygen breathers, of course, it was still Tin Woodman, and Tin Woodman only had one atmosphere. But Kess had only a vague idea what an Encherido looked like.
Mom was still female, then, though talking about becoming male for a while, which Kess knew his Dad did not favor. It wasn’t a fight, exactly, Kess had seen them fight, but it made things tense when it came up.
But that day no one argued. Kess had never seen an ocean before. His parents had, but not recently; they were mountain people, with a house in the foothills of the Atarashī Yari range.
That day they swam in the ocean together, all three of them, and played catch on the beach. Kess climbed a rope tower on the beach while his parents watched him, and Kess was fascinated to see, when he got to the top, a small cluster of Encherido, pink and green and long-limbed, on the beach two hundred meters to the north, just the other side of the Gombaki border.
Later they had lunch in a restaurant with more people in it than Kess had ever seen before at once, and the K’Ailla owners came to their table and sang to Kess when they learned it was his birthday.
Before they left they went to a church, where his Dad prayed long enough to make Kess fidget. Kess’s father was a Trentist, a member of the Church of His Return, and while his mother Gemma tolerated it, he knew she did not approve.
Flying home that night, Gemma fell asleep. Kess sat next to his father, only half awake. “I wish we could always live like this,” he said.
“Perhaps when you are grown you can move here,” his father suggested. “Cities are fun, for young people.”
That woke Kess up. “But I don’t have to move here. I can live with you and Mama if I want to?”
His father hugged and kissed him. “You can always come home,” he said. “I love you forever.”
THEY RETREATED INTO the research base.
“How’s your armor?” Saka asked. “Green?”
“Green.”
“Airplant?”
Kess’s armor hadn’t been offplanet in decades, according to its maintenance log. “No.”
They passed through double doors mounted in a wall nearly a meter thick. Inside they came upon a well lit open space, a holding area with stonesteel floors. Twenty-three activated stasis fields – the length and width of human bodies – lined one wall, with three stacks of various weapons nearby. Kess had been a soldier two years now: he recognized all of the different classes of weapons in those piles, had been trained in most of them at least by tap.
The space smelled of disinfectant, and more subtly, of blood. Kess had learned both smells well, in the last two years.
“Grab a multiphase from the leftmost pile,” Saka said. Kess did, checked it over with professional thoroughness. It was loaded for energy bursts, so he took another pair of magazines to supplement, one with bullets for the Wu Li, another with explosive rounds for the Diamonds. Even the explosive rounds wouldn’t do much with the largest Diamonds, but a center-mass hit would take out one of the wolf-sized versions.
His dad nodded approvingly at his choices. “We’ve b
een fighting two days. Waiting for reinforcements. Been going badly,” he added.
Kess shook his head. “We only got notice last night that there was an infestation up here.”
Saka sighed. “Sneakernet.”
It was a habit of his father, to drop words from dead languages into conversation as if any reasonable person should have integrated it in core function. Kess encompassed eleven languages, but no human tongues other than Tierra, which even most non-humans knew, and classic Shiata, supposedly the first human language, used by the Face of Night in formal circumstances.
The research base was dead on every frequency Kess’s tap could reach, leaving him unable to look up new information.
Despite this Kess did know what the word meant – it meant to sneak information along by physical contact. He was a soldier of Kinderjim’s Domain and since the Diamonds had blown Tin Woodman’s satellites from the sky, Domish military had taken to all sorts of subterfuge to transfer information, in the face of near total control of the sky by the invaders.
“Yes,” Kess said. “The waldo you sneakered arrived at the base at Ramchen yesterday afternoon. All it knew was you’d spotted Diamonds. We’d no idea there were this many. They sent eight of us, but our pod was shot down half a kilometer before arrival.”
Saka looked at him. “The others soldiers are all dead?”
Kess nodded. There was no doubt about that. “Ramchen Command will send another team, probably larger, certainly more careful and more heavily armed, now they’re sure there are invaders up here. But not until a dozen hours from now, at the earliest; perhaps as many as forty if they didn’t get the death squeal from the pod.”
Sake looked at Kess thoughtful. “The enemy knows what we were doing here. I think. Do you?”
“No,” Kess said shortly. He had survived two years of war: he was a senior private now, Sicho Wu. But they told him no more than he had to know. “They didn’t even tell me you were here. We had Professor Modyan on the list of personnel, but it’s a common enough name. It didn’t occur to me it was you, I thought you still at November.”
Saka shrugged. “Possibly they didn’t know. I arrived after the invasion was well under way. The master data model was scrambled and data chains broken by the time I got here.”
There was one source of information near enough for Kess’s tap to reach by near field: it reached for Saka’s tap, and Saka’s tap responded.
I, SAID SAKAMOTO Modyan’s tap, was on November when the Spacethings attacked.
(Spacethings? Kess’s tap queried – What you have called Diamonds, said Saka’s tap.)
P’Rythan November had called together a great convocation – representatives of the Face of Night and the Source, from Earth: of the K’Aillae, the slissi, the Hotfer, the Encherido. They invited the Zaradin Church, and two small Missionaries came. Two Platformer caravans – two of the largest, S’Pollant and Kaishono – arrived.
The Domain of Kinderjim sent me. I won’t argue this one with you again, Kess: you have seen what happened. The intelligence we had was frightening, and I had to go.
We traveled aboard Westerby Kono’s Glauketas by spacelace tunnel, and we arrived at November on Winter 12, 2679. A tachyon starship from Earth had beaten us there with the news: during the forty-three days we had spent in transit, Tin Woodman had been attacked.
I demanded we return immediately. Captain Kono announced our intention to do so – the Novembri stopped us. We knew too much to be sent back into territory controlled by the Spacethings and the Wu Li.
(We weren’t controlled, Kess’s tap said. Aren’t. The Gombaki Federation fell immediately; but the Domain kept fighting. And is still fighting.
(A brief pause before Saka’s tap continued with its representation of Saka’s experiences.)
We didn’t know that. I didn’t, then. The Wu Li had overrun every world they’d attacked, and no one had reason to think things were going differently here at Tin Woodman. They’d have been even more skeptical if they’d known what I learned after returning: the Wu Li came from Tin Woodman. You, son, are related to them; your mother’s family split a generation after arriving on Tin Woodman, in the early years of the Exodus from Earth. Some of them continued on into what was in those days unexplored territory. Somewhere in their travels, the Wu ran into the Spacethings.
(Kess has been mocked for his last name, by other soldiers, Kess’s tap said – For better cause than they knew, said Saka’s tap.)
The House of November would not let us leave.
Slowly, it went. They argued, they near fought, K’Aillae threatened war with humans; the K’Aillae who had come with us were sneered at as traitors by others of their people, for the crime of living among humans. But slowly, wiser heads prevailed; agreement was made to make common cause, to share intelligence, to coordinate troops –
One day a Zaradin Cathedral arrived at the Promethean system. Cathedrals are large, Kess; its arrival damaged equipment at the Gate it passed through. It said not much: collected its Missionaries and prepared to leave.
There are six Gates at Prometheus. The Spacethings forced and held them open, something we ourselves do not know how to do, which even the Church and the Platformers do not know how to do. Held them open and flooded the Promethean system with ships and troops.
They destroyed the Cathedral.
They destroyed Kaishono. S’Pollant attacked at November’s First Gate, and broke through the Spacething defenses, and a dozen ships, Glauketas among them, fled into the spacelace tunnels behind them.
The House of November fell. We went to Sol System, which shortly thereafter was besieged. Earth still stands, or did when I left. Late in 2680 Earth dispatched the tachyon starship Cheng I Sao to make scouting forays through Spacething lines … and to bring me home. I was thrown toward the atmosphere of Tin Woodman, inside a small comet. The Spacethings let me burn up in the atmosphere – they thought: but like the Uncatchable surfing his house out of orbit at Earth, I made it to the ground alive. Two days later I’d managed to make contact with Domish troops. We squirted a message toward the Cheng I Sao’s position, giving them the truth of our situation here: I don’t know if they received it.
And so, here, today.
IT TOOK HIS father’s tap only a moment to dump the story of his journey to Kess’s tap. It took Kess half a minute to ingest it.
Kess’s first response was, “We have K’Ailla troops. It’s why we’re still standing – Gombaki fell in a week. We don’t think the invaders knew there were Domish K’Aillae: the Diamonds don’t like them at all.”
Kess’s first question was, “How did you end up here?”
“The Source had some thoughts upon the probable construction of Spacethings – of Diamonds. And some suggestions about how to destroy them. The Domish Army chose this base to attempt the research.” His dad smiled at Kess. “I could hike to our old house from here.”
“No you couldn’t,” Kess said bluntly. “These mountains are swarming with Diamonds. We’ve been ceding them, peak by peak. We didn’t know they’d gotten this far, though, our models didn’t have them reaching this valley for another forty days or so.”
“They’re not here in force,” Saka said. “This is an expedition, and it’s cut off from the main body of their army.” He paused. “A large expedition, admittedly. Only one reason I can come up with for why they’d send an expedition this far behind our lines.” He looked around the long room one more time. “Let’s seal these doors and go into the base. The Diamonds will soon return.”
THEY MADE THEIR way through two airtight hatches, and down two ramps, and through two more hatches. Kess noted it, but said nothing. It would not have been unusual on some worlds, or of course in any unpressurized environment: o
n Tin Woodman it meant they’d been working with some danger that could propagate through the air.
There were four shaped charges stacked on the inward side of each door. When Saka sealed the first door, he mounted the shaped charges at the door’s four corners. After that Kess, without asking, mounted the charges and toggled them active while his father sealed the doors.
“You didn’t seal the first entrance,” Kess observed.
“No,” Saka admitted. “We want them to get through that one. Then we start dropping anvils on them.”
IN THE SUMMER of Kess’s fourteenth year, he interrupted his father during Saka’s entertainment.
“I would like to speak to you, Saka.”
“This cartoon has barely begun,” Saka observed. “Perhaps you can wait six minutes? This cartoon is only six minutes and twenty-five seconds long, and that does not seem an unreasonable time to wait. Look,” Saka gestured at the holo, “thirty-five seconds before the Roadrunner even appears! So the cartoon itself is only five minutes and fifty seconds.”
“I can wait five minutes and fifty seconds,” Kess said. Trentists and their cartoons, he thought.
Saka grinned at him. “Excellent. You won’t be sorry. In this one the Coyote tries to kill the Accelerati Incredibilis, or Roadrunner, with a knife and fork, a bow and arrow with a stick of dynamite, a rubber band and a Y-shaped branch, quick drying cement, a hand grenade, subterfuge regarding the Coyote’s gender, an interrupted roadway and clever matte painting with reversed end of road sign, and a falling boulder. Then he turns to Acme! They send him an anvil, a weather balloon, a street cleaner’s bin, and an Excelsior electric fan.” He paused. “Observe how the coyote falls faster than the anvil! Even in the year 1952, Kess, humans knew this was not the true way of Gravity!” The Coyote crashed to the ground, creating a crater in the roadway. He poked his head up out of the crater a second later … and the anvil fell directly atop him, and then the Roadrunner ran over the top of the anvil. Beep, beep!
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 8
