by P. K. Lentz
Sometime during the second cold, sunless day, Leimya reported, “Andromache isn’t well.”
It came as no surprise that from the start, Andromache had seemed the least able of the band to endure the conditions of the Moon of Sorrows. She was a fighter and had earned her place in the Dawn, or else she would have died long ago in Scythia, but she was even slighter of build than Leimya. Unlike Leimya, she wasn’t augmented. Andromache’s breath had been the most strained, transforming sometimes to a cough Ivar figured must feel like vomiting hot coals.
Now, under flashlight, they saw that the skin on several fingers of her left hand had gone a dozen shades darker than it should be. She was conscious and softly weeping, and might have been just shy of full coherence.
“She needs... to keep her hands... near the heat,” Cinnea reprimanded.
Ivar called out for and received the blaster-turned-stone-heater—the second of its kind, created after constant use had drained the first of its charge. He used it to warm a mound near Andromache.
“Give her a... suit,” Leimya suggested. When other Dawners consented to forfeit their turns, it was done.
More dismal hours passed in an agonizing trickle. This moon’s air discouraged the use of voices, but some struck up a rhythm by striking the cavern walls with weapons. The careless act incensed Cinnea. The racket might get them caught. She was right, and Ivar submitted to the necessity of stopping it.
Two more men reported a loss of feeling in fingers and toes. Even more succumbed to despair. In the middle of the third day, that despair brought the Dawn to the edge of fresh mutiny.
“Enough of this.... I’m leaving!” a Scythian whom Ivar only later identified as Saulis announced with a roar.
“Aye!” others agreed. “Count me in.”
The words, weakly spoken, were accompanied by sounds of movement.
“No!” Ivar barked into the darkness. “Grab them! Let none... leave!”
“No one is coming! We are... buried alive... waiting to die!”
The sounds of movement intensified. A flashlight flared, illuminating a number of Scythians rising from their warmth-preserving human heaps. Through tortured eyes, Ivar saw their shadows on the craggy walls as dark, dancing blurs.
“You can’t see... any better out there... than in here,” Ivar pointed out. “And it’s no... warmer.”
“Heed him!” Tomiris cried in support. “Ivar leads!”
“He has led us... to this grave!” said one of those who agreed with Saulis.
“Six more hours!” Ivar pleaded. He pulled the number from the caustic air, an empty promise he only hoped he could keep. “Then we will... send out scouts.”
“It’s not enough!” Saulis said. “I must... be free of this place!”
Ivar said, with deep regret, “I will shoot... to kill any who... attempt to leave.”
This promise was no empty one. Without question, it was what Arixa would have done.
“You may as well...” Saulis answered. “Swift death... is bett—” He broke down in a fit of coughing.
A helmet was set over Ivar’s head from behind.
“Get your crew... under control!” Cinnea demanded.
“We can all live!” Ivar addressed the Dawn with greater ease thanks to the helmet. “If we avoid defeating ourselves! The hunt from the sky has ceased.”
Cernach had informed Ivar of this some time ago. He had withheld it from the Dawn precisely for the reason that it might cause some to consider a premature exit.
“Now ground vehicles pass nearby,” Ivar continued. “We’ve heard voices. They’re not Jir but Senekeen. Give it six more hours. If there’s still no sound of Jir pursuit after that time, we’ll send scouts. If they report it’s safe, then we’ll all leave this stinking pit—together.”
There was quiet at first, and then murmurs which included, “Sit down, Saulis. We can stand... a few more hours.”
* * *
When the six hours elapsed with no ominous signals detected by the siblings’ makeshift monitor, it was time to choose the scouts.
Cinnea would be one, simply because she said so, and Ivar had neither inclination nor authority to overrule her.
“Tomiris, go with her,” he ordered, to the Dawn’s consternation. Everyone wished to go, naturally. But for practical reasons, it could only be one of the augmented, which narrowed the choices to five.
Ivar wasn’t about to offend Cinnea with his own presence, nor would he send Leimya. Of the remaining three, he decided Tomiris was best at sneaking around. More importantly, unlike himself or the others, she shared in common with Cinnea the possession of comm implants, which might prove useful in case of an emergency—a case which didn’t seem too unlikely.
Helmeted, Tomiris and Cinnea picked their way to the entrance. Ivar and others accompanied them and helped to clear the stone barricade so that the two women might conserve their faded strength for the mission at hand.
Ivar bid them luck, and they climbed up into the blur of dim light that was the cavern’s sole exit before those left behind plugged up the hole behind them.
* * *
The women’s return was to be signaled by a tiny, wordless comm transmission from just outside the barricade
“They’re back!” Cernach declared two hours later, when such a signal came. A hole was cleared in the barrier, and the two scouts clambered back in. Their expressions could not be read inside their obscuring black helmets, but the simple fact they had returned at all counted as good news.
“Senekeen have taken over the search,” Tomiris reported to Ivar, while Cinnea crawled past in the direction of her brother.
Her pause afterward, not being the result of the noxious air from which she was insulated, felt ominous. With good reason.
“Cinnea thinks our best chance is to surrender to the Senekeen.”
“Surrender? And what?”
“And hope they don’t hand us over to the Jir.”
“Did you not notice...? They work... together!”
“Not necessarily, Cinnea thinks. The ones searching aren’t Nemoora security. They’re some sort of... well, a war band, I suppose. Their emblem puts their allegiance with some Senekeen lord or another. His presence here makes him an exile.”
“Senekeen is... Senekeen!” Ivar raged. He had conversed with Tomiris in Scythian, but now switched to Nexus to include Cinnea. “There must be... another way!”
“There’s not,” Cinnea said in her mask-filtered voice. “The Senekeen are fractious. Its exiled nobility doesn’t typically love the Pentarchy, or want much to do with it.”
“Why look for us... except to hand us over?”
“The search is ground-based,” Cinnea said. “This exile must have a base not far away, for whatever purpose. Not much happens on this moon. Why wouldn’t they look? We may not have long. They’ll give up and go home soon.”
“And then we... escape!”
“To where?” Cinnea asked angrily. “Wherever these Senekeen came from is the only place our lives won’t be measured in hours. Cernach and I are going. The rest of you can decide for yourselves.”
“Easy choice for you...” Ivar began to argue but stopped. Not just because of the razors in his throat, but because he was wrong.
This wasn’t an easy or cowardly choice for the Eraínn. It was the right one. The two had done enough for the Dawn without dying for it like Llyr had.
“I’ll... go.”
The weak rasp in Scythian belonged to Andromache. She could not have comprehended the latter portion of the discussion, held in Nexus, but its nature couldn’t have been hard to infer.
“I’m first... in line to die...” Andromache said. “Have least... to lose. I’ll go to the... lizards and learn... if it’s safe.”
“You’d give them our location, whether its safe or not,” Tomiris argued.
“She can’t if she... doesn’t know it,” Ivar suggested, brightening. “If we move from here... without her... and then she gets h
erself found...”
“Then what? We’ll be no better off,” Tomiris said.
“Then the Senekeen... take her out searching... and she—”
Tomiris removed her helmet and stuck it on Ivar to let him speak with less pain.
He went on: “When the Senekeen bring her out to find us, Andromache will call out some code in Scythian telling us whether to emerge and surrender, to stay in hiding... or to attack.”
He translated the idea into Nexus for the Eraínn.
“How can she learn anything from them?” Cinnea asked. “She doesn’t speak Nexus.”
Deflating, Ivar passed on the frustrating observation to Andromache.
“Maybe they... know Greek,” she joked.
“This woman speaks a... second Gorosian language,” Tomiris volunteered. “Might that... help?”
“Possibly,” Cinnea answered, “depending on the language and the depth of the base’s data grid.”
“Her people’s cities were devastated by the Jir,” Ivar pointed out. “She must have distant cousins out here. Somewhere.”
“If so, their language might be in grids. But I wouldn’t stake our lives on it.”
“If this base is... well-equipped...” Cernach interjected, “they could... imprint her... with Nexus.”
“Another slight possibility,” Cinnea half-conceded. “Both options require her to be taken back to their base while we wait. And maybe die.”
“This is the Dawn’s plan,” Ivar said firmly, once in each tongue. Then he added for Cinnea, “You and Cernach can go with Andromache or stay with the rest of us. Make the choice that’s best for yourselves. You’ve suffered too much for us already.”
“Cinnea...” Cernach said. “The Pentarchy... will treat us no better... than it will treat them. It’s a... good plan. We may as well... let her go first.”
A brief deliberation ended in Cinnea’s agreement, and after three days in a dark hole, the dormant war band stirred.
Three
Once more, the blocking stones were cleared, and after a short delay spent watching and listening for searchers, the hiders underground filed out into the dim, purplish light of an alien moon. Not that a person could see any better in the light than in darkness when the air itself burned the eyes.
All walked out of the cave but Andromache, who remained in concealment just inside the the mouth, which was barely visible until one was almost on top of it.
The Dawn would do well to find another such hiding place. That was their aim. Out of one pit and into another.
Ivar crouched by feeble Andromache and ensured she knew the codes to be spoken in Scythian when she accompanied her soon-to-be-captors in a search party:
The hearth fire burns, if it seemed safe to surrender.
The arrow flies true, if the aliens were hostile and using Andromache to bait a trap.
In the latter case, the Dawn was to attack. It didn’t matter if they stood no chance, being tired and blind and probably outmatched. The band refused to lie any longer in a premature grave when a better death could be had.
If any avoided dying, and the aliens were defeated, the survivors were to seize the losers’ vehicle and equipment and keep living as long as they could.
The two Eraínn didn’t love the second contingency. With Ivar’s full approval, Cernach and Cinnea would sit out any violence and emerge only afterward to throw in their lot with whomever remained.
“Ivar...” Andromache said, weakly clasping his arm before he departed. He knew that under their cloth wrappings, the fingers of her hand were black. “I ask no reward, but please... try to forgive Memnon.”
Ivar would have sighed had the past three days not taught him to breathe with more care. “If we can live... through this... then truly anything... is possible,” he obfuscated. “Whatever happens... you’ve stepped out of... your brother’s shadow. You are brave and... strong, Andromache. The gods... are with you.”
With that farewell, Ivar joined the rest of the Dawn. The band proceeded to wind its way, walking almost blindly, around and between endless mounds of pink stone in a direction they selected almost arbitrarily. They moved for hours, leaving Andromache far behind. Only once, at Cinnea’s urging, did they briefly take cover from distant searchers, whom Ivar himself never saw or heard.
A few hours’ march brought them to a new hidden crack in the moon’s barren surface. With resignation, the Dawn descended.
“We remain one day...” Saulis muttered at Ivar on his way down. “Not a minute... longer.”
A day, or the equivalent of one, was how long they had given Andromache. Any longer, and the Dawn would no longer be Ivar’s to control. The Scythians would drag themselves as far out of hiding as they could and range the Moon of Sorrows in search of the best possible death.
Ivar would take that path, too, if it came to it. It was better than drifting to sleep in a cold grave.
But the Dawn was not to be faced with this choice. In the middle of that final day, Cinnea’s sound detector picked up words spoken in Scythian:
“The hearth fire burns.”
“I know the idea of surrendering is hard to swallow,” Ivar said to the Dawn with the aid of one of the three voidsuit helmets. “It brings me no joy. But it’s our only chance of living long enough for Arixa to come back for us. I’m all for fighting and dying when it makes sense. Maybe it will make sense tomorrow. But today, the kind of courage we need is the kind it takes to lay down our arms and trust some lizard-men. If anyone isn’t with me, say it now. Otherwise, any who have guns, hand them over.”
None objected. Even the most hard-headed among the band, even Saulis, understood that the cold and caustic air of this place, combined with days of hunger and thirst, had rendered the Dawn toothless against any enemy. A warrior’s death sought in this place would amount to nothing more than a war-cry and a death-groan.
The alien weapons were passed to Ivar, who piled them in a stone nook. The Dawn and two Eraínn climbed to the surface and spread out, defenseless. Ivar, Cinnea, Leimya and a few others who had the strength for it mounted stone mounds and began to cry out and wave their arms.
After some time, a metal monstrosity appeared. It had smooth sides, like the facets of a huge gem, which shone in the pink light. Some of the facets bore a triangular emblem containing images vaguely resembling a snake and a bolt of lightning.
Underneath the metal body were short legs, and at the end of each leg was an odd-looking assortment of wheels. The short legs flexed as they rolled over the uneven terrain, keeping the faceted body more or less level.
Affixed to its upper section at various points were thin cylinders which even a moderately educated savage like Ivar was able to recognize as weaponry. The angles of the barrels adjusted, aiming into the midst of the thin crowd of half-dead fugitives, as this ‘crawler’ approached.
It ground to a halt fifty paces away. A hatch opened on top, and a humanoid upper body appeared. It wore a gray helmet shaped for the large head of the Senek whose purple face was partially visible through the translucent faceplate. The alien’s uniform was likewise gray, rather than the white of Nemooran security, confirming Cinnea’s observation that these Senekeen were exiles.
Their hopes hinged on the truth of that.
“The Dawn, I presume?” the Senek said in a mechanically-boosted voice. “Approach in peace, and you will not be harmed”
* * *
A large facet at the back of the conveyance hinged open, and three armed Senekeen emerged. They gave terse orders and searched the Dawn for weapons, finding none of the type that mattered to them. Those had been left piled in the cavern, where it seemed likely they would remain forevermore unless the Senekeen went down and searched.
Their bows and picks and axes and knives were set in a pile for separate loading, and then the disarmed Dawn was ushered one by one, not roughly at all, into the large rear compartment of the crawler, where each found a seat on the cushioned benches lining the sides. With seventee
n Dawners and two Eraínn sitting shoulder to shoulder, along with the three guards, there was barely enough space.
Tomiris tapped Ivar’s shoulder and pointed out a glass pane on the compartment’s far end. Through it he saw Andromache looking back. The blur that was her face appeared to smile faintly, and Ivar set hand over his heart in display of gratitude.
Andromache wasn’t alone, he managed to notice. Some further number of Senekeen occupied the small, separate chamber with her. Unlike those they’d seen, these Seneeken wore no environmental protection.
Sound and motion made Ivar turn to see the guards on the benches begin removing their helmets and exposing purple lizard-heads. As Ivar’s own breath became less and less like inhaling needles, he understood that the acidic air which had entered the crawler with them had been replaced with the clean kind.
A certain surface tingling in his limbs probably indicated that it was warmer in here, too. He imagined he would not actually feel warm for many days, but this was a start.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The stinging in them eased slightly, leaving him able to see better than he had in days. The three humans who wore helmets followed the aliens’ lead in removing them.
“We thank you,” Ivar said to the guards, who looked over but didn’t respond.
He was certain he would one day look back on this first taste of clean air as among the greatest moments of joy in his life. Still, not being sure what their rescuers’ intentions were, Ivar wasn’t ready to feel too grateful just yet.
The bulkheads vibrated, a dull rumble became a roar, and the passengers felt a sense of motion. Whatever their fate was to be, they were on their way to it.
One of the Senekeen seated with Andromache came to the glass pane. His garb was more decorated than that of the guards, comprised partly of a long tunic that might have been made of embroidered silk.
“I treasure the sight of you,” the Senekeen said, employing one of the formulaic greetings common to the Nexus language.
It was often abbreviated to simply treasure the sight, and like such sayings in any tongue, its meaning wasn’t necessarily literal. Its utterance could quite easily be followed by “Prepare to die.”