Elee screamed in anguish; some fled; some struck blows with glass shards. And Hlil and Ras and Dias were instant with a fence of blades. Dusei launched themselves. What elee were within reach of those paws died worse than the others.
A section of the board went out, a city dead.
And by that dead panel, the Husband and the she’pan-second died. Kalis of the ka’anomin killed them, and the several elee who had fled, armed, into that corner.
“Coming up on target,” the City Ele’et droned. “Priorities: shields or fire?”
“Shields,” Melein said at once. She had killed; white-robed, she had struck in anger; she was dazed by that enormity—at the touch of sen’ein, who seized up her arm and tried to stanch her wound she realized that blood was running freely off her fingers. And beyond the hedge of kel’ein were others . . . Niun was back; and Duncan; and with them a strange small woman. Melein stared at her, at success and failure at once, while the city rocked with fire which sent the sound of breaking glass everywhere at once. She flinched, as they all did, despite dignity, stood still again as a sen’en bound her arm.
“Your ship is under fire,” Melein said to the human who wore sen-color. “I have spoken with your sen’anth. They accuse regul; two ships lifted from here; I permitted. But one was destroyed.”
“We are holding the way open,” Niun said, came to her, took her good hand. “Come. Please, let us get you out of this place, while there is time.”
She hesitated, reason persuading her that he was right; and if there was Sight, he was wrong. She leaned upon it, that inward turning which she had constantly distrusted.
Intel’s kind of madness, she thought; it had launched them in the beginning, a she’pan’s vision.
“Come!” Niun pleaded with her. “If this can be fought, humans are fighting it. For once, we cannot.”
“We can,” she insisted, but reckoning the cost. She turned from him, and from the sen’ein, looked up at the machine. “Ele’et. Location of the enemy. Show me.”
Screens leapt to life. She saw the world, and a point above it which flashed in alarm, another point, stationary, a third, indistinct.
“Fire on ships which fire at Kutath.”
“They have passed this range,” Ele’et said, “coming up over Le’a’haen. Le’a’haen priorities: shields or fire?”
“Fire,” Melein said. The membrane hazed her eyes a moment, cleared again. She watched the steady advance of the enemy.
In time another set of lights began to flicker on the boards.
* * *
There was nothing for the moment, only the dark and the stars, and change-over. Galey struggled with suit-fastenings, locked on his helmet; it was an exhausting exercise in the tight space of the shuttle, trying the while to keep an eye to scan.
“Not getting anything,” Shibo muttered, fussing with com with one hand and working at his helmet with the other.
There was, ominously, something on scan.
It was Santiago, by its size; and it gave no answer to hailing.
“Where’s Saber?” Kadarin asked. “What’s going on, that Saber’s not up here doing something? They wouldn’t have let regul through to us.”
“Didn’t let them, I’m thinking.” Galey freed both hands, kicked in full toward the silent object in scan. Computer signal raised nothing. “No more com,” he said. “Hold it. Let’s give no one anything we can help. All we have for protection is being too small to spot.”
They had visual finally, stark shadow and stark metal-glare in the light of Na’i’in. It was Santiago, hard to recognize, for the black shadow was in the wrong places on its hull, and it was rolling very slowly, describing its own peculiar dance about the globe of Kutath.
“Dead,” Shibo whispered through the suitcom. “O God, we’re up here with nothing. Santiago, Saber . . . both gone.”
“Not our regul allies,” Kadarin said, a thin, cold sound. “They’re here, I’m betting, somewhere around the curve. Pounding the surface into rubble. And Flower . . . Flower’s all we’ve got can get us home.”
“What do we do?” Shibo asked. “Sir?—We dive back down there?”
Galey took several quick breaths, trying to think, with nausea heaving at his stomach. “The regul have to be close in,” he said. “If Shirug’s firing on the surface, they have to be close in as they can get; and they don’t like to do that.” The silver and black hulk of Santiago filled all their view now; he put the shuttle under comp, to match with its roll. From the others there was not a word, only careful breathing hissing over the suitcoms. It was an ugly operation, matching the tumbling hulk; comp did most of it. He jerked control back again at the last, contacted the flat plane aft with a jolt and grappled, trying not to look out the ports or at the screens which tumbled and spun with them.
“We’re going in?” Kadarin asked. “Its armscomp can’t have lasted.”
“Easy,” Galey muttered, his mind too muddled for argument. He applied power carefully, biting blood from his lips as the shuttle strained to control the derelict, sliding and, grating metal on metal. It began to have its effect, a gradual stability, easing over to come level in the concealment of shadowside.
“We got us a ship,” Shibo muttered. “And what, sir?”
“Hang to it,” Galey said. He heaved himself out of the cushion and slung hand over hand aft, toward the hatch. “I’m going in to see if the E-system’s active. If I can move her, we’ll see.”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“Aim her; keep her straight at them.”
Shibo’s voice and Kadarin’s exclaimed protest; he did not stop, did not argue orders; it was not a thing that bore thinking, what there was left for them to do.
Shirug was due over that horizon sooner or later, downworld from them.
He was acrophobic, always had been, mildly. He seized a handjet from the locker, vented himself out the lock, looking steadily at Santiago’s surface and not the stars, nor Kutath. There was no need to use the lock for entry; the gaping hull afforded access. The big ships were never meant to land, fragile compared to the tough downworld probes and the shuttle-workhorses: she had blown badly. The blackness inside was absolute, and his light showed barren ruin . . . no bodies, no gee, no power, no atmosphere, dead metal. He used the handjet in total dark, walls and bulkheads and hazards careening insanely past in the momentary contact of his suit lamp . . . fended a jagged edge of metal with his boot, bounced a wall in his haste, hurled himself through a hatchway and against another hatch. He used manual, and it opened, without the blast of atmosphere he had braced for. There was void, gaping ruin here too: the bridge had blown. Comp was down; the cold had got it. One light still showed, a red eye in the dark, on a panel at the right.
“Got some life,” he sent back into the static. “E-light’s lit. Think I can get her moving. You ungrapple when I do. Get yourselves downworld.”
There was faint acknowledgment. He eased over to the panel. His stomach kept trying to heave and he swallowed repeatedly, sweating in the suit and cold at the same time. He found the whole progress of it like a bad dream; kept thinking traitor thoughts of taking them all and diving downworld to live: they did not know, in fact, whether Flower herself survived, whether the whole exercise had any use at all for anyone, any use.
Only he was Santiago’s sometime pilot; she was his ship, and there was no one else.
Think job by job, he urged himself, held the handgrip. With a punch at the glowing button, other lights flickered in, an emergency-powered trickle of life in the vital systems.
Waiting: that was hardest. He held still, staring at the panel and trying not to think at all.
“You need help?” a thin voice came, lifeline to reality. “Sir?”
“Stay put, you copy? You see if you can’t line us up real carefully when they show; I don’t know what I have for directionals: you’re my guidance. And don’t you miss. Or hang on too long. I’ll do what I can for myself.”
Th
ere was prolonged silence.
“Shibo, you copy?”
“I copy clear, sir. We’ll do it.”
And a moment later: “We got a ship in scan, sir. Think it’s Shirug.”
A small anomaly fixed to the flat surface of a dead ship, a hulk which had been gently rolling: he hoped the regul were paying more attention, for a few moments, to Kutath. He imagined the angles for himself, the curvature of the world, the likely course of the regul over the major sites. Hoped . . . hoped, that it was not for nothing.
That was the hardest thing: that he would never know.
He looked out, holding the handgrip, letting his body drift until he could see the stars beyond the rent . . . the vast deep. He suffered the old inside-out wrench, the down-up-sideways of the senses trying to remember which way was which. It was a trick of the mind, human stubbornness. He knew with a curiously certain sense which way Kutath lay; goblin whispers urged at him, stirring at his neck.
Down . . . as far as a man could fall.
There was a shifting of the stars which attended movement, a fine adjustment.
“Now,” Kadarin’s voice hissed. “God help us.”
He pushed the main thrust in, and Santiago started to move in earnest, with the emergency systems full. It was meant for pulling a crippled ship out of proximity to some mass; it was good for one long run.
“Closing,” Kadarin’s voice said. “Straight as she bears, sir.”
“Cast off!” he shouted into com, sick at heart. “Cast off!”
Fire flung the bridge into blinding white. He reckoned he had done what he could, scrambled hand over hand for the gaping hole forward, one desperate chance.
A black wall blotted out the stars before him. It was Shirug.
Fire hit again, flung him back, drifting, with cold spreading through his legs.
“Evade!” Suth screamed into the unit, felt the wrench as Shirug made an abrupt maneuver.
“Fire does not stop them,” the youngling voice of command wailed, breaking in panic. “They do not react—”
There was impact. It grated, rang through the whole of the vast teardrop; the sled-console went chaotic.
“Eldest!” Nagn cried; and Tiag and Morkhug tried to break through on their channels, drowned in static.
“Leave orbit!” Suth ordered. “Witless, leave orbit!”
There was no response. There was a lightness, a feeling that the least movement would unbalance things, his own great bulk, the sled itself, for all it was locked down.
“Command!” he ordered. Across the room the youngling Ragh, ghastly in its pallor, attempted to reach him, holding to furnishings which were fixed in place.
“Command!”
Nothing responded.
“See to it,” he bade Nagn. Fearfully she detached from safety, trundled across the carpet, disappeared from his vision. Ragh reached him, held to the sled, moaning.
Gravity was not what it had been. Suth sat very still, his hearts persistently out of phase; there was sudden silence, the air circulation cut off.
Eventually the lights dimmed. He punched buttons frantically and received only chaos.
“Youngling!” he cried, but Ragh had sunk down by him, huddled down in a ball, out of his reach. “Youngling!” he kept shouting and punched buttons until he knew that no one would answer.
Then he began in his terror to go to sleep, to slow his pulse deliberately, shutting down, for there was a strange sensation of descent, whether truth or madness he had no experience to know. He wished not to know.
For a considerable time they would descend, as the orbit decayed.
* * *
All but a last handful of lights went out on the boards. Niun watched, crouched, his arms about his knees, in this dimmed hall which they held at the cost of lives. Duncan was by him, the dusei, and the others of his comrades of the several tribes. The doors were guarded, that to this room and that of the one beyond, all that they did hold securely, for the elee found courage to fight when their treasures were threatened, and no few of them had distance-weapons.
Melein turned from the machines, in the dimming of the world’s cities, of Ele’et itself; signaled wearily. Young kel’ein hastened to bring her a chair and she settled into it, bowed her head, her injured arm tucked against her, a silence in which none dared intrude.
The woman Boaz was there, sitting in the corner where elee dead had lain . . . and mri, until kel’ein had carried out all the dead which profaned the she’pan’s presence. An elee robe sheltered the human, for she was beyond youth by some few years, and very tired, and the air was, for a human, cold. Niun had ordered that himself, the plundering of a dead elee, of which they had numerous.
Outside was dark, night fallen . . . dark in the hallways of broken glass and shattered monuments, where elee scurried about gathering possessions, furtive scavengers, armed with distance-weapons, in which they had no great skill, but then, the weapons needed little. Some of them had come into mri hands. Honor does not forbid, Niun had told his Kel plainly. If tsi’mri fire them at you, fire back, and do it better.
They learned aim very quickly; and practiced on injudicious intruders.
More such fire came from outside. The sen’ein Boaz lowered her head into her hands, looked up when it was done. “Is there no talking with them out there? Could I try?”
“Tsi’mri,” Niun muttered.
“Tsi’mri,” Boaz echoed him. “Is there no talking—ever—with you?”
“Boz,” Duncan said, “be still. Don’t argue.”
“I’m asking them something. I want an answer. I want to know why they don’t want to reason . . . why a hundred twenty-three worlds are dead out there, and this one has to be added to the list. I want to know why. You face regul, and you take on the elee and us too. Why?”
Niun frowned, anger hot in him; he took a moment, to gather self-control.
“I answer you,” Melein said, startling him. “You ask me, sen Boaz. Of the dead worlds?”
“Why?” Boaz asked, undaunted when she should have been. “Why? What could make a reasonable species do such a thing?”
Niun would have spoken, but Melein lifted her hand, preventing; “You were at Kesrith, sen’e’en?”
“Yes. I was there.”
“What happened there . . . to the mri?”
“Regul . . . turned on you; we had nothing to do with—”
“Why did regul do this thing, when regul do not fight?”
“For fear.”
“That we would go away?”
Boaz grew quiet, thought proceeding in her dark and human eyes. “That they couldn’t control you any longer; that you . . . might go to us. That you were too dangerous—to leave loose at the end of the war, not obeying them.”
“Ah,” said Melein. “And when the People have served, sen Boaz, always we ask a place to stand, where only our feet and theirs walk; when the agreement is gone, we go—The dead worlds, sen Boaz, . . . were ours. You have seen Kesrith. In Kesrith—we defended while we could; at Nisren—we might have left regul service, and did not, to our great sadness—I suspect, because we had no means to rescue a thing . . . very precious to us. We used regul; we took a new homeworld. Nisren is a dead world; Kesrith is almost so. Who made them dead? We? You are the killers of worlds. Among the hundred twenty-three . . . are many Nisrens, many Kesriths. And you have come to make another.”
There was profound silence. Of those who could have understood, there were three, but dus-sense translated something of it, that sat in the anguished eyes of Boaz, of Duncan.
“We have lost the shields,” Melein said in the hal’ari. “We might survive another pass here; the living rock is over us here, and more stubborn than stones that hands have set. But I think of the camp, of Kath and Sen. We cannot send a messenger to them from here, through the elee; and any who tries to reach us will be murdered in their treachery. I weary of this place. The rocks outside can shelter us. And reaching them . . . cannot be too difficult, w
ith the walls broken out. We will go there. We will learn whether our Kath and Sen survives. And you other tribes, go, if you will, but I ask otherwise.”
“Let us,” said kel Rhian, “send messengers each to our own tribes, to know how they fare. But the hao’nath stay.”
“So do the ka’anomin,” said old Kalis. Other kel’anthein nodded, Elan and Tian and Kedras.
“What for our dead?” asked the path’andim second. They mourned their kel’anth Mada, and no few of their number, for in their rage at the elee, they had been forward in the defense. “They will be butchered by elee hands.”
“Can the ja’anom dictate to any?” Niun asked. “We go with weapons in our hands and as quickly as we can, to protect the she’pan. We do not quit serving when we are dead; for me, if I fall, I am glad if the elee waste their strength on me, and if my brothers save what I would save if I lived.”
“Ai,” muttered the path’andim. “We hear.”
“Ai,” the murmur ran the room. Niun stood up, and Duncan, and all the others, sen Boaz last, and uncertainly.
“We are leaving the city,” Duncan translated for her.
“Our ships will come,” Boaz insisted, looking from him to Melein. “We should wait here. They will come and help, she’pan.”
“Then we should be alive when they come,” said Melein, honoring her with a touch of her hand. “Come with us, sen Boaz. Walk with our Sen.”
She opened her mouth as if she would dispute; and closed it, bowed her head. When they prepared to go out, she wrapped her elee cloak about her and adjusted her mask, and set herself where other sen’ein put themselves, inward of the Kel, with Melein.
Swords came out, a whisper of steel. For his part, Niun drew both gun and kel-sword; so did Duncan; and those who possessed elee weapons held them ready. They walked quietly into the next room, where path’andim and the patha of Kedras held the door.
“They are massed out there,” the patha second said softly, “all in hiding. Behind the pillars, behind the rocks both small and large. Some of the dead are not dead, to our reckoning, but wounded who fear to move.”
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