The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  “Gee, Sanja, I’d like to help you, but I’m busy right now,” I said. The hawk had wheeled around for another pass, but the goat was taking his chance to find a more defensible position, scrabbling along the cliff face like he was on level ground. “How the hell does he do that?”

  “He’s got suction cups on his feet!” Sanja snapped. “I don’t know. Are you going to talk to Skull, or are you going stand there all morning?”

  “I’ve been standing here all morning, and this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen all day.” A part of me did marvel at how preoccupied with this Kyle/Skull triangle she must be. Any other time she’d be as glued to the fight as anybody, and probably taking bets.

  Eventually the goat found a small cave and disappeared inside, to the disappointment of the firehawk and all of us on The Dark Lady. We waited a while, but the goat never came back out. I looked around for Sanja, but she’d left. Now she probably was mad at me.

  Women. Apes, humans, doesn’t matter. I wondered if goats were any different. Probably not…

  As fascinating as staring at a cliff waiting for a rock to fall is, I finally had enough excitement and returned below decks. The Dark Lady wasn’t the same ship as she had been the first time I visited, when Keryl and I had been stuck downstairs in the slave quarters. Now that area had been subdivided into cabins and storage rooms—some of which did not appear on the ship’s diagrams. Supposedly they were impervious to scanning, so that in the event the ship were boarded by Nuum when Maire wasn’t around, all of the guns could be hidden away, not to mention any extra cargo or passengers that were none of the overlords’ business. One of these cabins had been given to Zachary Kyle.

  I hadn’t expected to like Kyle; I had kind of expected him to be more like Keryl, the product of a primitive age, always charging into things without looking. Crazy dangerous, yeah, but fun, like the way my Uncle Balu used to tell me he did things in his day. Up until I met Keryl my idea of fun was sneaking out into the jungle and making noises at the Nuum from the local research lab while I hid behind the bushes. Man, did they jump! Some master race…

  That was what I was trying to do to Keryl when I met him, except that I was going to steal his fighting staff. It makes me laugh to think about it now: I dropped down in front of him, made a big show of me being a gorilla and all, and he took a swing at me! Well, turns out he was aiming at the tiger spider sneaking up behind me, but still, it wasn’t what I was expecting.

  Zachary, though, he’s not like that. He’s a lot more…deliberate. More like my mother, always wanting to gather the facts before she does anything. But I guess I can understand; he’s risked a lot to come here and find Keryl, and we don’t even know if he can get home again, so if he’s not a barrel of laughs I can see his point. And he does have a good side: he’s the only person I know who doesn’t know all my stories about Keryl. Yeah, he’s read Keryl’s book, but he hasn’t heard them from my perspective. I used to get a kick out of telling the folks back home everything I’d done on the outside, but even Uncle Balu finally got to the point where he knew the stories as well as I did, and I had missed having an audience.

  Kyle usually spent his time down here when he wasn’t on deck, so I took myself to his cabin, but he wasn’t there. Oh, gods, please tell me he’s not in Sanja’s cabin. What he and she did was their business, but if things got any more serious between them, we were all going to have a hell of a time of it.

  This discovery left me with two choices: I could either go back to my own quarters and mope around waiting for Skull to decide when we could leave, or I could go to the control room and ask him. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have any call for doing that, but when I’d first met him, Skull had been in charge of the galley slaves—until Keryl and I beat them up and dumped them in a corner. Given our shared history, I figured I was safe in demanding some answers—although in his present mood, I might just be making a place for myself next to Zachary Kyle on that mountaintop.

  I wondered how goat tasted.

  To my surprise, I found both Kyle and Sanja there ahead of me. Kyle was staring at one of the nav-screens like he wanted to jump into it, Sanja was practically vibrating with tension, Skull was doing a great impression of a marble statue, and the poor pilot, stuck in his chair but with nothing to do while the ship wasn’t moving, looked like a mouse in a room full of cats.

  Marble Statue Man turned to me as I walked in, his expression never changing.

  “Don’t ask.”

  I stood there with my mouth open. “Um…ask what?”

  “You know what.” His eyes took us all in one by one, then he laid a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. “There’s a nice view outside,” he said gently. “Go check it out.”

  The pilot’s wake left my fur askew.

  Sanja couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Look, Skull, you—”

  “Quiet.”

  She stopped in her tracks and stared. She might have expected such an order from Skull, and been prepared to run right over it, but she never expected to hear it from me.

  “All right, Skull. You’re right. You’re the captain and it’s your call. But right now I’m the only person on this ship who isn’t a member of your crew—and who you’ll listen to. Here’s what I’ve got to say. Keryl and Maire sent us away to save Kyle, and keep him from the Nuum. Now we don’t know where they are, or what they’re up to. All we know is that at some point they’re going to want to get in touch with us, which is something they can’t do right now. They don’t know where we are any more than Farren does.”

  Skull took a moment to think about what he wanted to say.

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “I’m suggesting that there are only two places where the Nuum can’t find us but Keryl can. One is my home, Tehana City, but I can’t take us there because it’s a secret—and if the Nuum found us there, they don’t have any defenses anyway.” Skull made no answer, so I went on. “The second means we’d have to make a run for it, but if we can get there, we’ll be safe.”

  “You want to go to Jhal.”

  I nodded. “I think we should go to Jhal. All of us except for Kyle have Jhal citizenship.”

  Skull surveyed our two friends, but neither said anything. Sanja was, if anything, paying more attention to me than anyone else. She was probably really mad at me now.

  At some narrowly-focused signal from Skull, the pilot returned and resumed his seat.

  “Commence the course we were discussing earlier,” Skull directed. No wonder he took my “suggestion” so well—he was about to do it anyway!

  “Given our course,” the pilot said a moment later, “we should be in Jhal in 30 hours.”

  “I want to stay as far as possible from normal travel routes,” Skull explained. “As long as the Nuum haven’t put sentries near Gaz Bronn’s airspace, I think we’ll be all right.”

  “And once inside,” I said, “it’ll take an act of war to come after us.”

  Although no one actually said so, everyone agreed that this was an excellent plan. And it worked to perfection, flying outside of normal flight lanes and avoiding detection all the way to Jhal—

  —whereupon Gaz Bronn promptly told us to get lost.

  Chapter 24

  Gone Underground

  After Jhal reached its accommodation with the Nuum, one of the first projects they started was to enlarge and stabilize the fissure that provided the only way for airships to enter or leave the huge cavern the city was in. Usually, to hear Maire tell it, that kind of job would require years just because the bureaucracy moved so slowly. But because Gaz Bronn’s wanted to normalize relations with the surface world (and start trading) as quickly as possible, it had been completed in a matter of months.

  It was starting to look as if our return to Jhal was going to take about as long.

  I’d been waiting on deck to watch our descent. I’d become rather a connoisseur of rocks lately because of a lack of anything better to look at. You’d think th
at an ape who was raised in a cave would have had enough of rocks, but there you go. In Tehana City, the roof was the sky. How often do you just stare at the sky?

  So I’d thought it might be fun to look at all the newly-exposed strata. Who knows, maybe I’d spot a fossil or something. Except I wasn’t looking at the rocks; I was looking at the sky. And we know how exciting that is, so I went to find out what the delay was.

  It should be pretty obvious by now that Skull had spent the entire trip since we picked up Sanja holding in his anger like a runaway reactor. And here he was, mad again. Except this time, he had somebody to take it out on.

  “And I’m telling you, you can’t keep us out! We’re citizens!”

  The face floating across from Skull was a lizard, naturally, so I couldn’t tell if he was getting ready to spit sparks or spit laughter. His (?) voice was soft and sibilant, and his tongue would slip in and out of his mouth at odd moments, which he never seemed to notice. I wondered if he found Skull’s theatrics as confusing.

  “I’ll give you marks for creativity, sir. That’s a new one. But as I keep saying, Jhal is closed to outsiders for the duration of the emergency.”

  Skull’s eyebrows narrowed. “What ‘emergency’? You never said anything about an emergency.”

  The tongue rapidly slipped out and in several times. “I’m sorry, it was a figure of speech.” Even I could see it; if klurath could sweat, this guy would be sweating. “The inlama has declared all visitors must be kept outside for the time being.” He paused, then went on in what I was sure was a sudden inspiration. “We live in a cavern, sir. There is only so much room.”

  Skull went very quiet. “I’ve been in your cavern. I spent weeks in your cavern working and carrying as a slave. There’s room in there for a hundred ships like mine!”

  “You were a slave? I beg your pardon, but even former slaves are being asked to stay away. As a…citizen, you will understand that the welfare of Jhal supersedes all other considerations.”

  Can you believe this guy? Skull asked me telepathically. We’ve been at this for half an hour!

  I had an idea, and I wrestled briefly with whether I should say anything. But Skull wasn’t getting anywhere, and the longer we sat up here completely exposed made me nervous, especially if something was going on down there which might make the klurath unwilling or unable to help us if we needed it.

  “You mind if I try something?” He shrugged and threw his hands in the air, moving aside so I could use the screen.

  “Hi,” I said. “Arlen Timash. The name ring any bells?” No response. “Right. Well, I have to tell you something honestly. All of you klurath look the same to me. Well, except maybe Gaz Bronn. Him I know.” Was that a flicker in his eye? “Look, here’s what I want to say. I know that all humans look pretty much the same to you—probably can’t tell the females from the males. Don’t blame you, I have enough trouble myself.

  “But here’s the thing, friend. I’m not human. I’m a gorilla. And I was a slave down there too, for a while. So I know damned well that there weren’t any other gorillas down there and probably never have been! And the one gorilla who was a slave took over as inlama until Gaz Bronn got his country back—and then helped him write the constitution! Now do you want to be the guy who has to tell the new inlama that you wouldn’t let the old inlama into Jhal? Because I’ll tell you what, my friend, I wouldn’t want to be that guy.”

  The tongue disappeared, and after a long moment, so did the klurath on the screen. I turned to Skull.

  “Since when did you help write their constitution?” he demanded.

  I spread my hands apart innocently. “Are you going to argue with a gorilla?” I glanced back at the blank screen. “I give him ten minutes.”

  Our landing permissions came back in six.

  And the face in the screen was a completely different guy. I can tell.

  Gaz Bronn, the inlama of Jhal, did not greet us with open arms. In fact, he didn’t greet us at all. But then, he’s the president, pretty much, and I figured he had better things to do. Apparently, he had much better things to do, if there was so kind of emergency that nobody could talk about that had made him close his borders. Jhal was just getting into the swing of being back in the world, and I know that Gaz Bronn had been hoping that all the Nuum coming in with all their technology, not to mention wanting to get their hands on klurath technology, was a big part of his plans. For him to have closed the borders and thrown everybody out something huge—and bad—had to be going on. I was kind of surprised Keryl and Maire hadn’t heard about it. But I guess they’d been busy, too.

  We set down on the edge of Jhal’s airfield. The first time I’d been here we’d snuck up at the head of a small army, taken out a couple of guards, and basically overran the place. Given that Jhal had been protected by secrecy for 3000 years and the only threats they ever had were from the slaves, they hadn’t been really up on the latest security measures.

  That had changed.

  The soldiers lining the field, waiting for us to come down, had been briefed that we were coming, because they weren’t pointing their weapons at us, but they weren’t standing around telling dirty jokes, either. Jhal has a long history of banning any kind of projectile weapons, because they’re afraid they might bring the roof down on themselves, but these guys were well-equipped with swords and eight-foot-long lances, and they looked like they knew how to use them. Sure, if we’d been invaders, we could have mowed them down with our guns, but then we’d have the entire population of Jhal at our throats.

  Immigration Control had already warned us to leave our weapons on the ship, which we would have done anyway. The only person ever to get away with carrying a gun in the cave was Keryl, and even he barely managed it.

  Skull, Sanja, Kyle, and I took a gravsled down to the ground, where we were met by an unarmed klurath.

  “Welcome, my friends, in the name of the inlama. I am Praja Waluu, Gaz Bronn’s chief of staff. I have a car waiting.”

  If I had any doubts he was the real thing, that clinched it. Getting a car in Jhal is like owning your own airship; they’re around, but there aren’t many, and a car that could fit all of us was rare. But there it was, and we fit with room to spare. The driver took off without instructions.

  “I don’t suppose you’re authorized to tell us what’s going on,” Skull ventured.

  Praja Waluu gave a klurath headshake meaning “no.” “I’m sorry, but Gaz Bronn wanted to tell you himself. He was actually very excited to hear you’d come back. He seems to think you might be of assistance.”

  Maybe Keryl could have told if Praja Waluu was being sincere or if he thought his boss had been hit by a falling stalactite, but I wasn’t that good.

  “Whatever Gaz Bronn needs, we’re there for him,” I said, “but I’m not sure we’re in any position to help him. We were kind of hoping he could help us.”

  Praja Waluu’s tongue flicked. “I’ve only been his chief of staff a short time, but I’ve already heard a lot about Keryl Clee.” He turned to Zachary Kyle. “I was on duty with the army patrolling the lower caverns when you were here last. It’s an honor to meet you.” He extended a claw in an awkward handshake that probably would have raked a Thoran from fingers to elbow. Kyle looked completely lost.

  “I’m sorry, I think there’s been a mistake. I’m not Keryl Clee.”

  “You’re not?” The claw faltered, then retreated. “Oh. Oh. I think we have a problem.”

  Gaz Bronn had apparently left word we were coming, because before we got to the door with the double guard, one of them ducked inside for a moment, and klurath quickly began filing out, stealing glances our way as they left.

  “Timash!” He came at me with that gliding walk they have that leaves you wondering how they moved so fast, and we banged each other about the shoulders. “Skull! Sanja! Good to see you again!” Sanja was brave enough to hug him.

  “Uh, Timash?” he asked when the greetings were done. “Where’s Keryl? And wher
e’s Maire?”

  I made a hissing noise between my teeth. “They’re not here.”

  “Why?” he looked around at us frantically. “Has something happened?”

  “Kind of.” The team seemed happy for me to take on the job of explaining. I should have let Skull lead. He was the captain, after all. “That’s why we’re here. We should sit. This is going to take a while. Oh,” I said, seeing him glance at Kyle, “this is Zachary Kyle. He’s—like I said, it’s a long story.”

  Gaz Bronn took a moment. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a while. We have a crisis, and when I heard Keryl was coming back, I thought it was exactly the kind of thing he excels at. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I replied. “We all know what you mean. But honestly, now that we’re here, we aren’t in any hurry, so maybe you should tell us what’s going on.”

  He gave the klurath rolling nod that meant yes. “All right, but only because we need to decide what we’re going to do in a hurry. But please tell me Keryl and Maire aren’t in any immediate danger.”

  “As far as we can tell, they’re not,” Skull said. Yeah, now you’re explaining things…

  “In that case, this is our situation. We are at war.”

  Chapter 25

  An Immodest Proposal

  For over twenty years, the second-dearest thing to my heart had been the idea that someday I might confront Farren again and put an end to him. During one of my low periods, I was riding the rails and met a hobo who bore a striking resemblance to Farren in a boxcar outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. I disliked him because of his looks, and he returned the favor with interest for reasons of his own. That night he jumped me, hoping to steal what little I had to add to his meager store. I left him more dead than alive, not because of what he had done, but because he reminded me of someone whose neck I longed to take between my hands and squeeze.