Hanna had been shut up in worse places. Only, after she sank to the floor, feeling dust under her hands, feeling a patch of damp that argued for a crack in a wall somewhere, waiting for her eyes to adjust—the space was not sealed, there was light at the edge of the door—she missed something. She put her hands to her ears, touched her mouth. She had not even felt the slight tug when Nakeekt, knowing what it was, jerked the translator away just as the door closed on Hanna. She ran her hands over the tangles of her hair, last chance, maybe the transparent web that held the parts together had gotten caught in it.
No.
She sagged against the wall, shivering with relief that she had not breathed in the stimulant. The hypothetical question posed months ago had been prescient: Suppose they take your translator away and you need to know what they’re going to do to you . . .
She could listen to alien minds, any minds, with a better chance of concealment in trance, and she had entered trance in worse places, too. So she thought of it, but rejected it. It would drain her body’s resources just as if she had used the stimulant; drain them too far, and it would only mean a quicker death.
Concealment without it might not be possible, but she had to know what was happening around her. She risked discovery, and sought Nakeekt.
• • •
Nakeekt did not trust Wox any more than she trusted the not-Soldier female, what was her name, Haknt? Wox might let her out, or rummage through the workplace and make it untidy. Nakeekt did not like disorder. So she took Wox with her.
She collected Pritk. No, do not speak now, we will all talk—
On to Genkt’s billet. The unusually persistent rains were a nuisance (and a worry—how much crop will we lose?) but Wox at least bore it like a Soldier, not like the ever-complaining Kwek—
This was the second time that not-Soldier, that Haknt, had arrived bringing an uninvited, uninvestigated Soldier. Is she doing it to annoy me—
This is Wox, he came from Wektt, come with us, no, wait, go and get—
She sent Genkt for the others and jogged back to her own warren with Wox and Pritk. Best not to leave Haknt on her own too long, who knew what not-Soldiers could do, perhaps she could burst out by herself—
Kwek, Kwek has had dealings with these not-Soldiers, here is Xext, you, Xext, go and get Kwek.
It was a good thing they had not executed Kwek yet—
Nakeekt’s head hurt. This happened frequently; she thought something might be growing inside her head.
(Hanna thought the headache might be hers; it kept getting worse, slowly filling up her skull. Starvation, or Wox’s blow? She tried to see why Nakeekt thought of killing Kwek, but it just made Nakeekt’s head ache more. Hanna desisted.)
How can I explain this, should I wait for Xext? No. Listen.
Strong personalities. Stronger than she remembered, except for Nakeekt, but on the first visit to That Place she had been focused on Nakeekt and had not paid much attention to the others. Wox might as well not be present. A little uneasiness in him; he had heard of assassination, but it had never made much of an impression. Certainly he had never expected to personally confront a question of loyalty. And loyalty was not the issue for Nakeekt and her band. It was—how very humanlike—the survival of That Place.
Does Kakrekt mean to become the Holy One, and who will become High Commander, who would she put in her place?
Nakeekt asked Wox, but Wox knew nothing.
• • •
There was the sound of heavy objects being thrown about. The door opened, Hanna was dragged from the closet, the translator was shoved into her hands and she dropped it. Nakeekt made a sound of impatience and picked it up and closed Hanna’s hands around it, shouting unintelligible words, though Hanna knew she cried, Utilize it! Make it work! She fumbled with it, clumsy. Her fingers did not want to work. The beings crowded around her, jostling. Then the filmy net did not want to fit over the tangled mess that had once been her shining hair and she mashed it down and adjusted the parts and suddenly it functioned. She heard Nakeekt say, “Why does Kakrekt want to do this thing?”
Hanna hesitated. She thought she saw Wox start to raise a fist, and winced reflexively, but no one had told him to hit her, and he had hardly moved.
“Kakrekt wants change,” Hanna said finally. “She wants an end to war. She wants to learn about—to learn everything about Soldiers and where they came from. She thinks, she thinks someone else made them, other not-Soldiers. Kwoort does not think Soldiers ought to learn these things, and Kakrekt does not want to wait for his natural death.”
“Kakrekt’s brain is malfunctioning, then,” Nakeekt said.
“You want to learn about what came before, too. You try to do it here.”
“Here. In this small space. Because we are hidden, because we are known only to a few. We can do it because we do other things which are forbidden. They cannot be done everywhere. They cannot even be known.”
“Why not!” The translator did not convey Hanna’s tone and Soldiers could not read her expression, but she made up for it in volume. “I don’t understand! Why can’t all of them just stop, if you can do it here?”
Stop breeding, was what she meant, but some subconscious instinct for self-preservation stopped her. If she said it aloud she would never leave the room alive, and if Wox heard it he would not either.
The room swayed. Something crushing approached—nothing material, and it approached only Hanna. She recognized despair when she saw it; she had known it before, but this time it was different. The woman who talked to aliens, who understood them, who at least had never failed in that before, looked at failure.
• • •
There was a jumbled hour that Hanna could not, later, remember with clarity. Kwek missing from her billet. Of course. Find her! Nakeekt ordered, and more Soldiers were roused to search. A memory that insinuated itself and brought a half-life to Hanna’s reluctant muscles; dogged by Wox, she made her way to the billet where Gabriel had slept. He had carried something to it because—We might be here a little longer than I thought, she had commented, and when they brought supplies from the pod for the first meal in Nakeekt’s warren, Gabriel, the good planner, had brought . . .
Meal tabs for another day. You could dissolve them in water or swallow them whole. She could still think clearly enough to be cautious, and begged a tumbler of water from one of Nakeekt’s lieutenants. No one tried to stop her from dropping in a tab; she sipped carefully at the brew. For a long time every cell in her body was focused on it. Sip. Low voices that seemed to come from a great distance, talking of poison. Sip. Kwek could not be found. Sip. So tired, she wanted only to sleep, but presently something was different, it was not so much that she was stronger but that she had stopped losing strength. Sip. Sip.
Nakeekt began to wonder aloud if it was worth searching for Kwek any more tonight. The not-Soldier seemed to have said everything she was going to say and sat quietly in the corner, drinking something she said was nourishing, apparently not interested in anything else. Maybe Kwek has stumbled into the tides and drowned, one less task—
Hanna drifted into half-sleep, but not so far that she lost her hold on the precious nutrients. She thought idly of Kwek, who would die tomorrow in any case—
Sopping wet, exhausted, dragging herself miserably here and there, with no idea where the settlement lay. Cold, too. And unaware that tomorrow she would—
• • •
Die?
Kwek stopped. For a moment she was too startled to be cold. She was not going to die, it was not that cold, and if she could not find her way back she was sure Nakeekt would send Soldiers to find her in the morning. Nakeekt wanted to see her in the morning, she had said so.
That is because they are going to kill you in the morning. Why are they going to do that, Kwek?
She looked suspiciously at the communicator pulled ti
ght on her slender wrist. The words had not come from it. But it wasn’t Arkt, either.
It is Haknt. I have listened to Nakeekt’s mind. You will be killed tomorrow.
The speaking-to-the-mind left no space for doubt. Kwek began to run again. The night was not impenetrable to her Soldier’s eyes and she did not bump into anything. She still felt Haknt in her mind, but now there was a dim sense of another presence she did not know and then another that she knew.
“Kwek,” said the communicator, and kept repeating her name. Finally she slowed and stopped and leaned against an eat-anything plant. It would be sluggish in the rain, and Pritk had told her that in any case an animal the size of a grown Soldier could escape it easily enough.
“Who is talking to me?” she said.
“This is Arkt. Haknt said she told you what is going to happen tomorrow.”
“She said, she said—” Kwek couldn’t repeat it. “Why would they want to do that? I know they are not satisfied with me but there are others who don’t work even as hard as I do, and nothing happens to them!”
“What is different about you? Never mind now,” Arkt added quickly. “We would like to remove you from That Place. Will you come?”
“Yes, yes, if they are going to—to do that to me!”
“You know where Haknt’s aircraft is? On the landing field?”
“Yes, but I’m lost, I don’t—”
“Listen to me, listen, listen.”
Now he spoke to her mind, just as he had on the spacecraft. He was calm and certain. He knew where the aircraft was. He knew where Kwek was, too, because of the com unit. He could guide her to the aircraft. The hatch was open and she could go into it and hide there, and then when Haknt returned, go with her.
The rain came down harder. Kwek slapped away a questing tongue, pushed off from the eat-anything plant, and set off, following Arkt’s directions.
• • •
This is a complication, Hanna said to Bella. Nakeekt and her Soldiers had eventually come to some decision and two of them had gone to get something that Hanna thought was the poison Kakrekt desired. They would not return immediately. They would have to make it, or mix it, or something. Kwek’s predicament had made Hanna more alert, but she had been too distracted by it to pay attention to the discussion going on around her.
It is a complication, but you don’t want to leave Kwek to die, either, or you wouldn’t have broken silence. What’s the silence about, anyway? Bella asked, trying to be crafty, and Hanna shot a barrier into place. Her reflexes were slow and Bella got a glimpse beyond it first, but it was not enough to tell her any more than the telepaths already knew.
Wox will not want to take Kwek along, Hanna said, closing the door firmly on her reason for being at That Place.
Kwek will not want to go with Wox! Bella said, and showed her Kwek’s reaction to the prospect of the “Demon’s Soldier’s” arrival.
Hanna finished the last drops of her drink.
Tell me about Gabriel.
Asleep. Not really unconscious. Somewhere in between.
I found meal tabs.
So that’s why you’re better.
Better. Not good.
She felt for the reassuring lumps of the meal tabs in a pocket. Someday, when there was time, she might sit down and weep with gratitude for Gabriel’s forethought. There were five tabs left. Three had to be saved for Gabriel; at least three. Wait, or swallow another one now?
She thought of the likely scene when not only she, but Wox as well, got into the pod with Kwek.
She asked for more water.
Chapter XIV
ON OLD EARTH, it was dawn at Admin. Commission staff signed in from locations across human space; those living nearby began to arrive on-site. Jameson spent a few minutes, as he did each morning, walking the corridors of his own floor of the vast complex, speaking to individuals regardless of status. He had found that the practice fostered loyalty. It was a normal morning, Endeavor the first thing on no one’s mind. Except his.
He had not consulted his colleagues about the action he had ordered Captain Metra to take. Resupplying Contact personnel hardly required a Commission vote, and Metra had offered no dissension; allowing those personnel to starve to death, knowingly, was not something she wanted on her service record. But Jameson didn’t want to embark on discussions after the fact, either, because inevitably they would lead to speculations about the future.
Commissioners were pragmatists—even Jameson’s most likely allies, even Andrella Murphy. If Hanna and Gabriel failed to produce an experimental subject, they would consider the option of starting over again with new envoys. Someone would observe that if Gabriel Guyup died on Battleground his abbey might be satisfied with calling his death martyrdom. Someone might even think a kind of secular martyrdom would be an acceptable way of getting rid of the troublesome Hanna ril-Koroth. No one would say that. At least not in so many words; at least not in his presence. But someone would say something. He meant to keep them too busy to propose discussion.
The crisis on Colony One, he had decided, would swallow hours, giving no one time to be sidetracked to Endeavor. Civil war threatened; a Fleet presence had become necessary to remind would-be rebels what they risked if they did not stand down. If their response was intemperate, Polity detainment of certain citizens would be required. Personally and privately, Jameson wanted the dissidents got out of the way for good, because the half-life they advocated was ghastly. Perhaps he would suggest summary executions, cloaked as accidental deaths. That would provoke lively, and long, discussion.
It would keep Karin Weisz too busy to revert to hypothetical improvements in A.S., too. If the situation on her homeworld could not be resolved, she could be gone from the Commission in a matter of days; Colony One’s council was pragmatic, too.
• • •
In Wektt, Gabriel focused on examining his conscience, suspecting that he had come to his last chance for contrition. Of course, it was possible he was not dying; that was up to God. Examination of conscience was never amiss, however. It was not a painful process. Gabriel knew God well understood the imperfection of His human creatures and in the infinity of His love, readily forgave their fallibility.
Oh, and here was the Angel of Death! The Angel was a woman. Why not?
Angel? Nobody’s called me that before!
“Dema?” He wasn’t sure he had actually made a sound.
Hang on. H’ana’s found some meal tabs. Can you hold on a few more hours?
“If God wills it.”
The most extraordinary feelings flooded his mind, all of them Dema’s. Exasperation, affection, anxiety. Resolution. Dema was going to keep him awake, keep him alive, until help arrived. Or until she had to let him slip away.
Chapter XV
HANNA EXPECTED SOMETHING EXOTIC. A small, carved container, perhaps, filled with a deadly powder, maybe engraved with Soldiers’ equivalent of skull and crossbones.
Instead Nakeekt loaded her down with a woven sack big as her torso. “Here,” she said economically, peering down at Hanna over the sack, and Hanna got slowly to her feet, pushing against the wall for support. Her joints hurt, her muscles ached, her clothes were still damp from the rain, and she was cold. The sack looked large and the pod seemed a long way off. Hanna took the burden in both arms and stumbled under the weight. Even if she had been in peak condition the mass would have been respectable. Now she would stagger if she tried to carry it.
She stood unsteadily, swaying and trying to hold onto it. The muscles in her arms trembled.
We can use this, said a whisper in her mind.
How? Bella! Where’s Bella! she thought in panic, because the whisperer was Arch. He and Joseph had developed a plan; she had been given to understand that. And to understand that her part was to do as she was told. Because you’re addled, Joseph had said. It was true, and
she was at the mercy of a pair of D’neerans who were having a wonderful time with their plot.
You’ve never had to fight for your life! she protested. She wanted Bella, who was at least not absurdly gleeful.
Neither has Bella! And she’s been commandeered to keep an open line to your director with the funny name—
What?
Evanomen. By order of your very own commissioner. Not that she’s told him what we’re doing about Kwek.
Hanna could not hold the sack any longer, and it fell to the floor, lumpy and slack. Before Nakeekt could think she was refusing she said, “I can’t, it’s too heavy.” Arch prompted her and she added, “Wox is strong, he will have to carry it.”
“It is to be given only to you,” Wox said.
“Then you’ll have to carry me along with it.”
He hesitated, and the clicks he made were probably a growl, but he picked up the sack. Hanna felt Arch and Joseph cheer.
Nakeekt said, “Tell Kakrekt she must distill what she wants from the leaves in this sack. Tell her water will suffice for solvent, she is to steep the leaves for at least ten days, beginning with a like ratio of water to leaves and adding only enough to keep them moist—”
Hanna looked at the bag again. She could see wet patches on it. Nakeekt’s Soldiers had not mixed or made anything; they had gone out into the night and stripped leaves from stems or branches. Many leaves: the distillate must have to be administered over a long period. Nakeekt went on for some time, but Hanna could not make anything after the water stay in her head. That did not matter because at the end Nakeekt thrust a rolled paper at her and said, “I have written everything down, Kakrekt must read it. Go now. This is the second time you have disturbed my sleep. For the second time I tell you: don’t come back!”
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