Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  He looked into the dark and answered out of that mindset, consciously. “The hive,” he said, “is safety.”

  Pol’s retort was short and bitter.

  iv

  Itavvy rose and walked to the door, walked back again and looked at his wife Velin as the infant squirmed and fretted in her arms, taxing her strength. One of the Upcoast women offered a diversion, an attempt to distract the child from her tears. Meris screamed in exhausted misery…hunger. The azi outside the glass, with their guns, their faceless sameness, maintained their watch.

  “I’ll ask again,” Itavvy said.

  “Don’t,” Velin pleaded.

  “They don’t have anger. It isn’t in them. There are ways to reason past them. I’ve dealt—” He stopped, remembered his identity as Merck Sod, who knew little of azi, swallowed convulsively.

  “Let me.” The gangling young Upcoaster who had spent his time in the corner, sketch-pad on his knee, left his work lying and went to the door, rapped on it.

  The azi ignored it. The young artist pushed the door open; rifles immediately lowered at him. “The child’s sick,” the youth said. “She needs milk. Food. Something.”

  The azi stood with their guns aimed at him…confused, Itavvy thought, in an access of tension. Presented with crisis. Well-done.

  “If you’d call the kitchens,” the artist said, “someone would bring food up.”

  Meris kept crying. The azi hesitated. unnerved, swung the rifle in that direction. Itavvy’s heart jumped.

  Azi can’t understand, he realised. No children. No tears.

  He edged between, facing the rifle. “Please,” he said to the masked face. “She’ll be quiet if she’s fed.”

  The azi moved, lifted the rifle, closed the door forcefully. Itavvy shut his eyes, swallowed hard at nausea. The young artist turned, seta hand on his shoulder.

  “Sit down,” the youth said. “Sit down, ser. Try to quiet her.”

  He did so. Meris exhausted herself, fell whimpering into sleep. Velin lifted bruised eyes and held her fast.

  Then, finally, an azi in ISPAK uniform brought a tray to the door, handed it in, under guard.

  Drink, sandwiches, dried fruit. Meris fretted and ceased, given the comfort of a full belly. Itavvy sat and ate because it was something to do.

  The identity of Merek Sed would collapse. They were being detained because someone was running checks. Perhaps it had already been proven false. They would die.

  Meris too. The azi had no feeling of difference.

  He dropped his head into his hands and wept.

  v

  The truck laboured, ground up the slope from the riverbed, picking up dry road in the headlights. Raen threw it to idle at the crest, let what men had gotten off climb on again, the truck pinking on its suspension as it accepted its burden. She read the fuel gauge and the odometer, cast a look at Merry, who opened the door to look out on his side. “They’re all aboard,” he said.

  “Then go back to sleep.” She said it for him and the two azi crowded in between them, and eased the truck forward, walking it over ruts that jolted it insanely and wrenched at her sore arms. A thousand kilometres. That was one thing on the map, and quite another as Istrans built roads. The track was only as wide as the truck. The headlights showed ruts and stones, man-high grass on either side of the road, obscuring all view.

  A nightmare shape danced. into the lights before them, left again: Warrior stayed with them, but the jolting on this stretch was such that it chose to go on its own feet.

  By the map, this was the only road. They were on the last of their fuel, that which they had brought in containers, having used the stored power and both main and reserve tanks. They might nurse a kilometre back out of batteries after the fuel ran out. Cab light went on. Merry was checking the map again, counting with his fingers and making obvious conclusions.

  “It’s six hundred to go,” Raen said, “and it pulls too much. We’re loaded way beyond limits and we’re not going to do it.”

  “Map shows good road past the depot.”

  “Easier walking, then.” Raen looked to the side as a black body hit the door, scraped and scrambled its way to the roof of the truck. Warrior had decided to ride again. Six hundred kilometres more: easy on a good road with an unburdened truck. As exhausted men would walk it…days.

  “Could be fuel there,” Merry offered.

  “One hopes. If we get that far.”

  “I’ll drive again, sera.”

  “We’ll change over at the depot. Rest.”

  Merry turned the light out. He did not seem to sleep, but he said nothing, and in him, in the two with them—likely in all those men in the rear—there was evident that familiar blankness. They lost themselves in that, and perhaps found refuge.

  She had no such. There was a stitch in her back which had been growing worse over the hours, and fighting the steering aggravated it; the right shoulder ached, until finally she chose to let the right hand rest in her lap, however much that tired the left. The jolt of the crash, she reckoned. Pain was something she had long since learned to ignore. A stoppered bottle sat beside her; she moved the right hand to it, flipped the cap with her thumb, took a drink of water, capped it again. It helped keep her awake. She worked a bit of dried fruit from her pocket, bit off a little and sucked at that: the sugar helped too.

  The road worsened again, after a little smoothness; she applied both hands for the while, relaxed again when it passed. Imagination constructed a picture of the men in the back, jammed in so that some must constantly stand, or lie on others, whose muscles must cramp and joints stiffen, all jolted cruelly with every hole she could not avoid and every lean and lurch of the turns.

  Figures flicked past on the odometer, a red pulse far too slow. The fuel registered lower and lower, most gone now out of the last filling.

  Then the road smoothed out on a fiat high enough to see no flooding. She kicked them up to a better pace, and Merry came out of his trance and shifted position, causing the other two men to do the same.

  “Should be coming up on the depot,” she said.

  Merry leaned to take a look at the fuel and said nothing.

  There was a scraping overhead. A spiny limb extended itself over the windshield. Warrior slid partially down, and Raen swore at that, for they had no margin for delays. It gaped at the glass, insisting on her attention, and at the realisation it was urgent her heart began to beat the faster.

  She let off the accelerator, coasted, rolled down the window lefthanded. Warrior scrambled off when they slowed enough, paced them, the while the headlights picked out only dusty ruts and high weeds.

  “Others,” Warrior breathed. “Hear? Hear?”

  She could not. She braked, threw the engine to idle, quieter.

  “Many,” Warrior said. “All around us.”

  “The depot,” Merry said hoarsely. “They’ve got it.” Raen nodded, a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  “Get the men out,” she said. “They’d better limber up, be ready for it, be ready to dive back in on an instant. Third thorax ring, centre; or top collar-ring, if they don’t know. Make sure they understand where it counts.”

  Merry bailed out, staggering, felt his way around to the back. Warrior was dancing in impatience beside the truck. The two men in the cab edged out and followed Merry.

  “How far?” Raen asked. Warrior quivered very rapidly. Near, then. She felt the truck lighten of its load, eased off the brake and set it in gear, not to waste precious fuel. Merry’s door was open. She left it so; he might need it in a hurry. “Warrior—hear me: you must not fight. You’re a messenger. Understand?”

  “Yess.” It accepted this. It was majat strategy. No heroism, she thought suddenly, not among majat: only function and common sense, expediency to the limit. Warrior was very dangerous at the moment, excited. It paced the slow-moving truck as the men did. “Give message.”

  “Not yet. I don’t want you to go yet”

  The road curve
d, took a small decline, rose again. Then blockish shapes hove up in the starlight, among the distinctive structures of collectors.

  The depot. The road went through it, that cluster of buildings that likely spelled ambush. Raen kept the truck rolling, watched the fuel that was registering just slightly: enough to carry them through—maybe.

  Then the shrilling of Warriors erupted from the left of the road. She began to feel the jolting of the truck, men climbing aboard in haste. She kept it slow.

  “Warrior,” she said, “don’t answer them.”

  “Yes,” it agreed. “I am very quiet, Kethiuy-queen.”

  “Can you—” The wheels jerked into a rut and she wrenched it over again. “Can you tell their hive?”

  “Goldsss.”

  That made sense. Golds even on Cerdin had chosen the open places, the fields, avoiding men. Once reds had done so too.

  The headlights picked out girders, the frame of a collector, the wall of a weathered building, with barred and broken windows. The light flashed back off jagged glass.

  Objects lay in the road, where it widened to include the buildings. Corpses, she realised, avoiding one. Human forms, desiccated by heat and sun, scattered in a pattern of flight from the central building. Another shape hove up, brown metal—the rear of a truck, with open doors.

  Merry darted past, running to it, a group of men with him. Her eyes picked out something better: pumps, a fuel delivery in the shadow of the truck, a spidery tantalus with lines intact.

  She pulled in, braked, bailed out and ran round to the side; Merry was before her, the nozzle in.

  “It needs a pump,” he said, anguished; and then flicked a glance up, at the collectors. She had the same thought. “Go,” she said to the man nearest. “Should be a switch in the building. It ought to work.”

  The azi ran. All about them now, the shrilling was ominously louder.

  “Golds,” Warrior boomed. “Here, here, watch out!” It moved, swiftly, dancing in its anxiety. Fire spat in the building.

  “Watch it!” Raen cried, ran for the door of it; Merry was in the same stride with her.

  A Warrior sprang out at them; she fired from the hip and crippled it, as Warrior pounced. Two others were on them: azi-fire raked past and took them. Raen clutched the rifle and kicked the door wider, on a dark room and an azi convulsing on the floor, majat-bitten. There were no others; Warrior shouldered past her, and she was sure by that. Merry found the comp, called out, and she punched POWER-ON. Lights came on, inside and out, blinding…local reserve, from the collectors.

  “Works!” she heard an azi call from outside. “Works!”

  And the shrilling was moving in on them.

  “We could use that other truck,” Merry said.

  “Don’t be greedy.”

  “Less load, better time.”

  “Try it,” Raen said. “Hurry.”

  He left, running. She walked out after. They were no clearer to majat eyes in the lights than in the dark; but the heat of the lights themselves was an advertisement. The golds knew beyond doubt now, perhaps delayed in the process of Grouping.

  Warrior had darted out again; it rose from the corpse of a gold, mandibles clicking. “Other blues,” it translated for her. “Both dead. Gold-hive killed blue messengers. Lost. Message in gold-hive now. Bad, Kethiuy-queen, bad thing. This-unit goes now.”

  “Wait,” she said. It would not get through, not with golds ringing them. She bit her lips and kept scanning beyond the lights, reckoning how blind they were to the land outside the circle of them.

  And the majat were cut off by the cluster of buildings; that was why there was no rush as yet. Majat sought them visually, and the buildings were between. The group-mind had to be informed, to make nexus.

  Quickly now she passed among the azi still outside, touched shoulders, ordered them into the truck with the tank most full. Warrior danced about in her wake, quivering with anxiety, wanting instruction. “You too,” she told it. “Get inside, inside the front of the truck, this side, understand? Merry, we may have to give up on the second.”

  “First is full.” Merry snatched the nozzle from the first truck and passed it to another man, who swung the tantalus over to the second. Ire put the cap on. “We can make it, sera. And if one should break down on the road—”

  “I’m putting most of the men in my truck. We’ll sort things out if we both get out of here.”

  “Good, sera. Leave me two men, that’s all.”

  “Get up there and be sure this thing starts,” she yelled at him, over a rising in the majat-sound. She hastened then, saw that Warrior had contrived to work its unyielding body into the cab. She slammed the door on it, raced round the back, giving last orders to the men jammed inside, vulnerable with the rear of the truck open to the air. “Get the tanks when we’re clear,” she shouted at them. “Pick your time and do it.”

  “Sera!” several cried suddenly.

  She looked over her shoulder. A glittering tide swept under the lights and the girders, with speed almost too great for the eye to comprehend.

  “Merry!” she screamed, and ran, flung herself into her seat, slammed the door, rolled the window up as she started the motor. It took. She slung the truck back and around, screening Merry for the instant, saw him and his partners dive for the cab and get the doors closed. The truck rocked, and all at once majat were all over them, tearing at the metal and battering at the glass. Some had weapons, and sought targets for their vision.

  Merry’s truck started moving, lurched forward at full; she hit the accelerator hard behind him. The tantalus ripped loose and raked the majat clinging to the front; Warrior, tucked beside her, squirmed and shrilled in its own language, deafening, itself blind by reason of the glass about it. “Sit still,” Raen shouted at it, trying to rake majat against the corner of a building.

  Suddenly everything flared with light.

  The tanks. One of the men had gotten them. Majat dropped from the truck; rear-mirrors showed an inferno and majat scattering across the face of it, blinded in that maelstrom of heat. Red fire laced in their wake, and open road and grass showed before them, the whole area alight with that burning. Buildings caught, and blazed red.

  She sucked in a breath, fought the wheel to keep in Merry’s wake, down the road, her own vehicle overladen, but free. A sound pierced her ears, Warrior’s shrill voice, passing down into human range. “Kill,” Warrior said, seeming satisfied.

  The road smoothed out. They began to make time, blind as they were in Merry’s dust cloud.

  And when the light was out of sight over several hills she punched in the com and raised Merry. “Good work. Are you all right up there?”

  “All right,” he confirmed.

  “Pull off and leave the motor running.”

  He did so, easing to a comfortable stop. She pulled in behind and ran round the front to open the door for Warrior before it panicked. It disentangled itself, climbed down, grooming itself in distaste, muttering of gold-scent.

  “Life-fluids,” it said. “Kill many.”

  “Go now,” she bade it. “Tell all you know to Mother. And tell Mother these azi and I are coming to blue-hive’s Hill, to the new human-hive nearest it. Let Warriors meet us there.”

  “Know this place,” Warrior confirmed. “Strange azi.”

  “Tell Mother these things. Go as quickly as you can.”

  “Yess,” it agreed, bowed for taste, that for its kind was the essence of message. She gave it, that gesture very like a kiss, and the majat drew back. “Kethiuy-queen,” it said. And strangely: “Sug-ar-water.”

  It fled then, quickly.

  “Sera.” Merry came running up behind her; she turned, saw him, saw his partners sorting men from truck to truck.

  “We have casualties?”

  “Eight dead, no injured.”

  She grimaced and shook her head. “Leave them,” she said, and walked back to supervise, put several men on watch, one to each point, for the headlights showe
d only grass about, and that not far. The glow was still bright over the hills.

  The dead were laid out by the road, neatly: their only ceremony. Units organised themselves, all with dispatch.

  “Sera!” a lookout hissed, pointed.

  There were lights, blue, floating off across the grass.

  “Hive-azi,” she exclaimed. “We’re near something. Hurry, Merry!”

  Everyone ran; men flung themselves into one truck or the other, and Raen dived behind the wheel of her own, slammed the door, passed Merry in moving out: she had the map. The truck, relieved of half its weight, moved with a new freedom.

  And suddenly there was the promised paving, where the depot road joined the Great South. Raen slammed on the brakes for the jolt, climbed onto it, spun the wheel over and took to it with a surge of hope.

  Behind them, reflected in the mirrors, the fire reached the fields.

  vi

  The sound of hammering resounded through the halls of ITAK upstairs. Metal sheeting was going into place, barriers to the outside. The hammer-blows echoed even into the nether floors, the levels below. In the absence of air-conditioning and lights, the lower levels assumed a strange character, the luxury of upstairs furnishings crowded into what had been lower offices, fine liquor poured by the lighting of hand-torches.

  Enis Dain lifted his glass, example to the others, his board members, their families, and the officials, whoever had been entitled to shelter here. There was still, from above, through the doors still open, the sound of hammering.

  Some had fled for the port. Unwise. There was a Kontrin reported there, the Enemy that the Meth-maren had warned them would come. Likely they had met with him, to their sorrow. Dain drank; all drank, the board members, his daughter, who sat by Prosserty—a useless man, Prosserty, Dain had never liked him.

  “It’s close in here,” Prosserty complained. Dain only stared at him, and, remembering the batteries, cut off the handtorch, leaving them only the one set atop the table. He began calculating how long a night it would be.