Either Daisuke didn’t see the gathering enemies, or he didn’t understand the danger they posed. “Sir, please,” he said, “We— Ugh!”
The closest man-o’-war fired. Its plastic, stone, and glass bolt shot through the air and lodged with a sickening thump in the center of Daisuke’s chest. He screamed.
* * *
A scream rang through the alien forest just as the bolt struck a kelp-tree right behind Misha’s head.
Misha swiped out at the miniature blimp that had shot at him and knocked it spinning. “They have fucking crossbows?” he growled.
“That was Daisuke,” Anne said. “Come on, I said.” She bolted toward the sounds of battle, and Misha could do nothing but follow her. Sing might be there.
“Wait!” wailed Tyaney from behind them. “Don’t leave me!”
Misha stopped to take his bearing and pain flashed up his shin. Hissing through his teeth, he hopped back, away from another damn toy-creature. This one waved an obsidian knife, dripping with Misha’s blood.
He kicked the little bastard out of the way and called to Anne, “I thought you said the forest would be safe!” Shit. That English had been too good. But his leg stung like a motherfucker.
Anne didn’t seem to notice the lapse. She was up the path ahead of him, dealing with her own attackers. “I didn’t think somebody would start shooting at them— Ow! Christ, that’s sharp! It’s like they kicked a hornets’ nest.”
Which meant that Sing was in danger from more than just that kidnapping slimeball Tyaney. To rip that sweet little princess away from her family and turn her into a virtual slave? Misha swore he would kill the man if the toymakers didn’t beat him to it.
“Come now!” he shouted, running past Anne.
Trees and soba-weed flashed past him. Little murderous wooden dolls. Some of them were airborne.
Speed was the key. These things moved like windup toys. Lots of strength, but not much speed and no flexibility. A single soldier in body armor could obliterate this alien threat with his hands. But Misha had no body armor. He didn’t even have a baseball bat.
Misha had to make do with his crushing boots and punching fists. More obsidian-blade slashes. More blood loss. He’d suffered worse. And Sing needed him.
He broke onto the path, Anne and the disgusting native trailing behind him. He stood, took a moment to scan the scene. There was Sing, crouching next to Daisuke, who was lying flat on the ground.
Daisuke groaned and slapped at the crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest. It wobbled. Stuck, Misha saw, in the TV man’s bodycam. The lucky bastard had just had the wind knocked out of him.
“Get up!” Misha yelled at him.
Hariyadi had the same idea. The other soldier stopped yelling orders at Rahman and addressed Daisuke. “Get up! We fall back! Back to the cart.” He switched to Indonesian. “Get the…” something “…woman.”
Sing, he must mean. Misha sprinted toward her, ducking to avoid a rock hurled by a miniature catapult.
“Back!” shouted Hariyadi, and another gunshot slammed against Misha’s eardrums.
“Stop bloody shooting!” That was Anne’s voice. “Disturb a toymaker and they’ll hunt you down and kill you!”
“A bit late for that advice,” Misha muttered. He reached out toward Sing. She would know how to stop this. He would save her, and she would save them all.
* * *
Tyaney burst onto the trail, keening a Nun battle cry. “Oh, infelicitous witch born of cursed blood. All the spirits dead and unborn cry for your blood to be spilled. Cleanse it! Cleanse the hateful taint of the— Gah!”
He flinched back, but not far enough. The toymaker smashed into the side of his head, spraying bits of wood and glass. Tyaney stumbled, cold effluvia and warm blood sheeting down his face. That toymaker hadn’t flown under its own power. Someone, some person, had thrown it at Tyaney.
Tyaney turned, snarling, ready to kill whoever had attacked him.
He saw every toymaker on the path had focused its periscope on him.
Tyaney looked down at the stinking black slime on his hands. Whoever had thrown that toymaker at him, they had marked him for death.
“No,” said Tyaney.
A ballista bolt whizzed past his head. A rock smashed into his hip. He stepped backward, and a little wooden body rolled under his foot. Tyaney fell backward, down among the bustling toymakers. Obsidian blades flashed on all sides.
“Help me.”
But the Them were retreating, running back to the cart. They wouldn’t help him. They didn’t like him. Tyaney wasn’t part of their tribe, and now he’d never have the money or power to force the Them to obey.
“To the cart!” Hariyadi’s voice rang through the forest. “Now, while they’re distracted.”
By butchering me. A sharp pain in his chest. Another in his leg. Now Tyaney knew how a tree must feel when it was felled by puny humans. Chopped into pieces.
Wooden wheels and stone knives blocked out his vision.
* * *
They ran toward the cart. Misha carried the protesting Sing and Anne tugged on Daisuke’s arm as he stumbled along after, blood dripping down his front out from under his skewered, life-saving bodycam.
Behind them, the toymakers clacked with apparent glee as they chopped into Tyaney with their stone and glass hammers.
“Got to get the cart,” Anne muttered as if to herself, tugging on Daisuke. “No point in escaping the toymakers if we starve.”
Daisuke was in no position to judge her logic. Most of his brain was consumed with the pulsing agony from his chest. His body camera swung free, spinning around the fulcrum of the arrow that had pierced it. At least it isn’t embedded in my chest. At least I am not being butchered like Tyaney.
Stones turned under his feet. Cold, stinking air burned in his chest like a vanilla-scented outhouse. His vision narrowed and darkened. Tyaney’s screams cut off.
A restraining tug on his arm. Daisuke stopped. Blinked.
The cart was there. It lay waiting for them like an old forgotten treehouse. The site of so many childhood adventures that now, in the light of lethal adult experience, looked small and useless. A toy.
“Everyone, push,” commanded Hariyadi. “If we can get past them before they’re done with Tyaney, we might have a chance.”
So Daisuke, bleeding and trembling though he was, took up the strap at the front of the cart and heaved. His vision blurred and washed red. Broken blood vessel in my eyeball. Don’t worry, gentle viewers, it’s happened to me before. I’ve never lost a native guide, though, and I can’t recall a time I was shot in the chest. Gentle viewers, never has your humble wilderness survivor been so close to…not surviving.
The cart ground forward.
And never have I wanted to survive quite so much.
Daisuke felt the heat beside him. The solid presence of Anne Houlihan. She was yoked together with him like in that Buddhist aphorism.
“Ready and heave!” came Hariyadi’s voice from somewhere.
The ground rolled out from under him and Daisuke flailed with his legs to stay upright. His feet found the ground. Bit in. Pushed.
Daisuke’s chest was a roiling ball of agony. He blinked, but the blood did not clear from his eyes. The stalks of kelp-trees swayed and rushed past them. The cart rattled down the path, past a scuttling scrum of murderous little wooden robots, through the hostile, alien woods.
Until they hit the wall.
Chapter Twelve
At the Wall
The cart rumbled under Daisuke. The kelp-trees rushed by overhead. Shapes flashed up there like ghosts or hostile aliens.
“Stop!” shouted Misha, and Anne said, “Of all the— A bloody wall?” before she lurched to a stop. Daisuke kept running for a few steps, the cart slewing behind him, before he tripped and nearly fell onto wha
t, yes, appeared to be a wall.
It was a palisade of the woody skeletons of log-worms, cut to make sharp stakes and driven into the ground at an angle. Fortunately for Daisuke, that angle was downhill, the sharp points of the logs facing away from them. Rather than impaling him, the palisade had only stopped him.
Had Sing’s people built this wall? Had their expedition made it to human habitation at last? But no. Sing didn’t know this place. And the stakes protected the kelp-tree forest. This wall had been built by toymakers.
Daisuke risked a glance behind them. The forest was still and silent. No bamboo rods tap-tapped their coded messages of war. But how much noise need an armed clockwork dirigible make? The ambush could be drawing in around them even now.
“We need to cross this border,” Daisuke croaked. He coughed, rubbed his chest. His shirt was sticky with blood, but the flow seemed to have stopped. It just felt like that time a kangaroo had kicked him. And the familiar weight of the bodycam around his neck had taken on a strange new imbalance. It tugged on his shirt as if something was holding it.
Daisuke examined the shaft protruding from his chest. It was made of wood. It had a divot at the end where it could fit into a firing mechanism. It even had three stubby fins to help it fly true. Daisuke only realized as he clapped his hands around the crossbow bolt what a stupid thing that was to do. But instead of debilitating him with pain, wiggling the bolt only pressed painfully against the bruise on his chest. Glass tinkled.
With trembling fingers Daisuke unbuttoned his shirt and pulled out his bodycam. The thick square of plastic came free, spinning at the end of its strap, bleeding bits of plastic and electronics around the shaft of the crossbow bolt that had impaled it.
“Dice, you okay?” Anne was out of her harness, standing sideways between two of the logs of the palisade.
Daisuke probed his breastbone. “Barely a scratch,” he said in wonder.
“Good. So get a move on.”
He did, slipping off the cart and pressing his painful way between the palisade logs. There was another fence beyond them at knee height, followed by a third at the level of his ankles. Definitely toymaker work.
Animal carcasses hung impaled from the stakes or lay decomposing on the ground. Some were mere piles of unidentifiable slime and scales. On others it was still possible to make out thick legs and long, curving claws. One of the corpses was the size of a brown bear.
Daisuke crossed the wall. The others were already on the other side arguing. “How will we get cart over bitch wall?” Misha complained.
“We cannot abandon our supplies,” said Hariyadi. “And we must move quickly.”
“Oh right. You’re the one to give orders, Colonel Start-an-Interstellar-War,” Anne said.
“Shooting it seemed the best thing—”
“I’ll bet it always does, to you.” Anne’s face was red, her hands on her hips in full aggression mode. “But guns didn’t work on the shmoo and they sure as hell didn’t fucking work on that toymaker. Are you—”
Wait, Anne, Daisuke tried to say, but inflating his lungs began a coughing fit that totally failed to stop her from saying, “Are you trying to get us killed?”
Hariyadi drew himself up. Put his hand on the butt of his pistol. “I am not responsible for Tyaney’s death. I am not responsible for Colonel Pearson’s. I have done my utmost to preserve the lives of everyone on this mission—”
“No,” said Anne. “That was me. I’m the one who’s been keeping us alive. You’ve just been ordering me around as if, as if your bloody rank means anything out here. It was bad enough when you weren’t actively endangering us all, but now? Oh no, mate, now I’m done with putting up with you.”
Hariyadi’s expression didn’t change. His hand didn’t move, either. “I did what seemed prudent.”
“Prudent?” Anne stomped on the corpse-strewn earth. “If you hadn’t blown up their convoy, the toymakers would have gone right past us and Tyaney might still be alive.”
“Or that ‘convoy’ might have been a weapon that would have killed us all rather than only one of us,” Hariyadi said. “It’s all very well to point the finger of blame after indulging in hindsight, but we need a leader.”
“Correct,” said Anne, “but here’s my question: why the hell should that leader be you?”
That question seemed to shock Hariyadi. He blinked, mouth working as if he’d never before considered the implications of letting someone else run the expedition.
“Of course it should be me,” he said. “I have experience in leadership. I brought us to this point.”
“Except for the two who died,” Anne pointed out.
“More would have died had I not kept my head and given the orders that saved the rest of you.” Hariyadi raised a finger before Anne could muster an objection to that. “And, had I not shot down Sing’s balloon, she would have stranded us here.”
Sing was squatting a little way down the slope with a blanket wrapped around her.
“Poor girl,” said Misha. “She needs help.”
Did she really? Had Tyaney really abused Sing, or had she been abusing him? Had those toymakers been an accident, a distraction, or a weapon? Had Tyaney’s death been an accident or…not? No answer seemed to be forthcoming.
Daisuke felt the attention of the group swing back around. He could almost hear Anne spinning her mental engine, getting ready for what she thought was another round of rational argumentation. Had she forgotten Hariyadi’s gun?
“So.” The word rattled in Daisuke’s chest, but Hariyadi’s attention snapped onto him like a targeting laser. Well, that’s not so different from a spotlight. “I think we should make sure the toymakers are gone, then try to move the cart to this side of the wall.”
“If we can trust Sing,” said Nurul.
This earned her a growl from both Anne and Misha.
Nurul grimaced. “If we can understand her, then.”
There was more grumbling, but Daisuke had stopped paying attention.
At some point, they had crossed over the mountain. The ground east of them sloped into a clouded valley, then rose up again in another fold of mountain, this one colored a bright and artificial-looking yellow. At least the parts of it that weren’t cloaked in shadow.
“Night is coming,” Daisuke said. “We have to make camp fast.”
“Right,” said Misha. “Making camp. Nothing here but rocks and mud. Is too much to ask for hotel? Or at least McDonald’s?”
“We can erect tents,” Daisuke said.
Hariyadi grunted something, and Nurul said, “We can burn those fence posts.”
Everyone agreed that was a great plan, except, apparently, Sing. Sing waited under her blanket until Daisuke had dug through their supplies, found the axe, and made his first chop against the wall. The Nun woman screeched like a demon.
Daisuke straightened slowly, his heart slamming against the inside of his bruised chest. “What?” he said. “What is the problem?”
“I can understand two words of what she says,” Misha said. “‘Toymakers’ and ‘death’. Maybe Sing thinks our vandalism of wall will cause…what is word?”
“A curse?” said Anne.
“Reprisal,” Misha corrected. “If aliens knock hole in your civic infrastructure, what will you do?”
“But how do we know if the native is right?” Hariyadi asked.
“If Sing’s our expert, she’s our expert,” said Anne. “She says don’t cut down the wall, so we won’t.”
Daisuke thought of a cold dinner of surplus American army rations and felt like weeping. He looked down at the hatchet, shut his eyes tight. Sighed.
He turned. “What should we do, Anne?”
It was like watching a spotlight shift from Hariyadi to Anne. She was their leader now.
She didn’t seem to notice. “What should we do? Obv
iously, we should make camp. Get the stuff off the cart. Misha, make sure Sing thinks this is a safe place to sleep. Better get the first aid kit too, for Daisuke. Anybody else have any wounds that need taking care of?”
“I will get the first aid kit,” said Daisuke. While he was unspooling medical gauze and uncapping the tube of antibiotic ointment, he snuck a quick peek at their supply of morphine.
“What’s the matter?” Anne said from behind him. “You hurt worse than you look, Dice?”
“No,” said Daisuke. “No. I was just…. How much morphine did we use on Pearson?”
“How much did Misha use?” Anne asked. “Two syringes’ worth, I think.”
And indeed there were two empty spaces in the plastic roll. So Pearson didn’t die by overdose, thought Daisuke, but he didn’t die by allergy, either. And now Tyaney is dead as well. And less subtly this time, as well. Killed in a second animal attack.
“You want some help with those bandages?” asked Anne.
“No,” Daisuke said, but she already had her arms around his chest. Her face was hot, pressed up against his cheek.
“Don’t die,” she whispered.
“I will try my best.” He leaned down. Brushed his lips across hers.
Shouts from the cart.
Anne started. “What now?”
Misha was standing on the unpacked cart, axe in his hands, engaged in a shouting match with Hariyadi. It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying, but Daisuke didn’t have to understand the conversation; he could see the problem. Behind Misha, Sing had stood, shrugging off her blanket, exposing the object she’d been holding.
It was woody and brown, about the size of a watermelon. A periscope like a bent drinking straw poked from its nose, swiveled toward him.
“That’s why Tyaney called her a witch,” whispered Anne, probably to herself. “Her people know how to tame toymakers.”
Daisuke shivered, as if hearing the voice of a ghost.
Hariyadi’s head swiveled toward her. “So, Ms. Houlihan, you think the toymakers are intelligent? What sort of threat do they pose?”
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