Snare

by Katharine Kerr

  ‘Idres.’ Jezro interrupted him. ‘She means your watch.’

  ‘Oh.’ Warkannan took it out and checked the time. ‘It’s eighteen hundred now, more or less.’

  ‘I know this,’ Sibyl said. ‘I merely wanted to ensure that you know it, too. Have Ammadin come report to me at nine in the morning.’

  They hurried out, then paused on the ledge just beyond the cave. Although the summer sky still shone blue above them, the shadows of the traps lay across the pale grass below.

  ‘Look!’ Jezro suddenly pointed. ‘Hassan’s back, and Stronghunter Man.’

  Below them, in the messy sprawling camp, Stronghunter Man stood talking with Water Woman while the other Chof clustered around. Ammadin and Zayn had gone together to tend the horses tethered out in the grass.

  ‘They’ve brought back Arkazo’s horse,’ Warkannan said. ‘Soutan’s, too, and the pack horses.’

  ‘Well, at least Kaz will have something to ride when we get him out.’

  ‘If we get him out. I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this.’

  ‘So have I, actually, but I’m refusing to give in to it. I suggest you try to do the same.’

  Warkannan managed to smile. Together they walked down the path and rejoined the camp.

  ‘So, Hassan,’ Loy said. ‘You managed to get yourself a gun after all.’

  Ammadin, who’d been heading back to Sibyl’s cave, stopped to listen. Loy had come up to talk with Zayn as he knelt by his bedroll. The pistol lay between them on the blankets.

  ‘It was Arkazo’s,’ Zayn said. ‘I don’t know where Soutan got them, but he had one, too.’

  ‘That’s bad news.’

  ‘I’d say so, yes.’ Zayn held out the pistol and power pack. ‘Here, take it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I were going back to Kazrajistan, I’d want it, but I’m not. These things start fires if you look at them wrong. Out on the grass, that could mean disaster in summer.’

  ‘You’re quite right.’ Loy took the proffered pistol. ‘Thank you, Zayn. This will go back to the guild with me.’

  Ammadin smiled in something like relief. Zayn was still thinking like a comnee man; she was beginning to trust the idea that he’d return to the grass with her.

  That evening, as the others sat around the fire to listen, Water Woman and Jezro decided that in the morning they would pack up the camps and move them two miles east, so that Sibyl could assure Soutan that no one was waiting for him directly outside. Soutan would be easy enough to track once they emerged.

  ‘I’m assuming Arkazo will want to stick with him,’ Jezro said.

  ‘Probably so. Kaz thinks the world of him.’ Warkannan kept his voice steady, but Ammadin could see how much the admission pained him.

  ‘If they come out,’ Zayn put in. ‘Look, sir, Soutan must realize we’ll chase him down.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jezro said. ‘But I’m betting that he’ll be so desperate that he won’t care. Wandering around in the dark till you starve to death – a few years in prison for rape will look pretty good compared to that.’ He paused for a wry smile. ‘Even a lot of years in prison.’

  ‘Well sir, you’ve got a point,’ Zayn said. ‘But I don’t trust the slimy little bastard, I just don’t.’

  Zayn’s doubts proved well-founded. At nine the next morning, Ammadin and Loy went to the Analysis Lab to relay their plan to Sibyl. The hologram appeared the instant that they stepped into the room.

  ‘I was about to attempt to summon you,’ Sibyl said. ‘A problem has developed. Yarl has realized that his enemies are here waiting for him.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Ammadin said. ‘He’s not stupid.’

  ‘Unfortunately this value judgment is correct.’

  ‘We came up with a plan –’

  ‘Good, but here is new data that you will have to take into account. He is refusing to come out unless he has guarantee of safe passage. That is, he wants Jezro Khan to promise that he will be given a horse, food, and time to make his escape.’

  ‘The little turd!’ Loy said. ‘Let him stay in there and starve, then.’

  ‘You lack a crucial datum, Loremaster Millou. Yarl is also refusing to allow Arkazo to leave N’Dosha without him. He has a pistol, and despite his lack of skill, at close range it will be effec-tive. He has taken Arkazo hostage. If we do not agree to his terms, he will kill the captain’s nephew in cold blood.’

  Loy stared open-mouthed. Ammadin could smell how furious she was, too enraged even to swear.

  ‘Go get Jezro,’ Ammadin said to her. ‘I’d say that Soutan has judged us all about right. We’ll have to agree.’

  ‘Very well. I’m on my way.’ Loy turned and raced down the hall, heading for the outer cave. Sibyl turned to Ammadin, and her illusionary face displayed real anxiety.

  ‘I should have anticipated this,’ Sibyl said. ‘I had forgotten how illogical my species can be.’

  ‘I think Soutan’s being perfectly logical,’ Ammadin said. ‘Treacherous and despicable, but logical.’

  ‘I will revise my judgment in line with yours. You are right. Some of my circuits seem to be wearing out with age.’

  Ammadin heard the sound of Jezro’s walking stick, clicking fast down the hall, and in a few moments Jezro came limping into the room. His face, normally tan, looked pale and waxy in the cold silver light.

  ‘Loy told me,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll swear. Tell him I’ll swear it before God, or does the little bastard need to hear my voice?’

  ‘He insists on hearing you.’ Sibyl’s image turned into a stack of cubes, and she paused while the distant bell chimed thrice. ‘I have created access between this room and Yarl’s position. Please repeat your oath, Jezro Khan.’

  ‘Soutan?’ Jezro said. ‘I swear I’ll give you the safe ride out of here that you asked for. For the love of God, Yarl, and if ever we were friends, I’ll beg you: don’t harm Arkazo.’

  Soutan’s voice, still arrogant even though it cracked with exhaustion, seemed to originate behind Sibyl’s left shoulder. ‘I know you keep your promises, Jezro. As for Kaz, his safety is up to you, isn’t it? Do what I want, and I’ll send him back to you once I’m in the clear.’

  ‘All right. We won’t do anything risky.’

  ‘Good. We seem to have only a short distance left to walk before we reach Sibyl. We should emerge soon, but I don’t want to see you, Warkannan, Hassan, or any of the Chof in the cave when we do.’

  ‘Very well. You won’t.’

  ‘Good. There are a few things I want to talk to Sibyl about before we come out, too. Make everyone stay well back from the entrance. I warn you, if anyone makes a move to harm me, Kaz dies.’

  A soft click and a shrill bell sounded. Sibyl returned to H’mai form and reached up to push her hair back from her face. ‘Yarl can no longer hear us,’ she said. ‘He is indeed very close. He has walked within range of one of the few functioning visual relays. He has his pistol drawn and is using it to prod Arkazo along in front of him. Arkazo appears to be greatly distressed, angry and grief-stricken both.’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ Jezro said. ‘He’s been betrayed by someone he thought was a hero.’

  A siren began to shriek as if it were announcing demons from the Deathworld. From the ceiling a red light flashed, glittering on the metal panels and boxes. Slowly a section of the wall slid back to reveal another door, off to Ammadin’s right. Sibyl turned around in her chair, and the siren abruptly died.

  ‘Interesting,’ Sibyl said. ‘The warning system is still functional.’

  ‘We’d better leave,’ Ammadin said.

  ‘Jezro Khan should, yes, but Yarl never listed you in his demand. Yesterday I told him that you were not here in the complex, which appears to have made him believe you are not present at all. There is a probability that I will need a person with physical mobility to deal with Yarl. Turn to your left. Hide behind the inoperable ventilation panel you will see behind that stack of blue metal boxes.’ />
  With a wave of his stick, Jezro hurried out of the room. Ammadin followed Sibyl’s directions and ducked behind the tall sheet of grey plasto. Through the slots on its upper fifth she could see into the room, provided she held her head at an uncomfortable angle. Figures appeared in the newly opened doorway, and Arkazo stumbled in, his hands behind his back, with Soutan following a few feet along. Dust streaked their clothes and grimed their stubbled faces. Maroon bruises swelled around Arkazo’s eyes and his broken nose. Dried blood covered the front of his shirt.

  When they turned to face Sibyl, Ammadin noticed that Arkazo’s wrists were bound together by a strip of some material too shiny to be leather. Soutan was holding the handle of a stubby metal tube connected to a power pack slung over his shoulder – the pistol, she assumed. Wide-eyed, his mouth half-open, Soutan looked around him. Sibyl took on the appearance that Ammadin had first seen, the unmoving body and stylized face. Soutan spent a long few minutes studying her.

  ‘Very well,’ Sibyl said. ‘In the tunnel you stated that you were determined to speak with me. What do you want to ask?’

  Soutan made her wait for a long moment.

  ‘One of the Settlers,’ he said at last. ‘You must be a holo of one of the Settlers.’

  ‘You have identified my origins correctly. What do you want to ask?’

  ‘A great many things, Sibyl, the most important things in the world. Let me start with the crucial question. The ships, the starships that brought us here. Do they still exist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they still in working order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does the Ark survive?’

  ‘No. Not in its original form.’

  Soutan caught his lower lip between his teeth; his eyes blinked rapidly as he thought something through. ‘Is it possible to operate the ships without the Ark?’

  ‘Yes, under certain conditions.’

  Soutan smiled, his eyes wider than ever, and Ammadin could hear him breathing, panting really, in anticipation. His arm hung flaccid at his side, the weapon forgotten in his hand. Arkazo, handcuffed though he was, stared at Sibyl with something of the same intense desire to know.

  ‘Then,’ Soutan paused to gulp for breath, ‘where are they?’

  ‘You may look at the image field to my right.’

  When Soutan and Arkazo turned half-around, Ammadin risked moving in order to ease the ache in her neck. Soutan seemed to have neither heard her nor registered the flicker of motion behind the panel that hid her, but Arkazo glanced her way, blinked, then hurriedly looked only at the dais.

  ‘I shall begin,’ Sibyl said.

  First a square of blue mist sprang into existence; then images built up to overlay it. Against a black background a sphere of many colours hung gleaming. Blue ocean wrapped most of it around, but across the equator lay a sprawl of land, roughly shaped like two hands held flat, one above the other, with the thumb of the upper linked to the little finger of the lower. In the palm of each ‘hand’, far from the sea on all sides, stretched an expanse of tan and pale gold. To the north, white ice glittered.

  To the east and west of these vast deserts the land lay mottled and textured with dark mountains, magenta hills, plains in brown, purple, red, orange, all threaded with thin lines of blue rivers and dotted here and there with blue lakes as well. In the west of the northern land mass, Ammadin could see the Rift, but it looked bizarrely small, set against the entire world.

  ‘This is Snare as seen from an imaging satellite in a distant orbit,’ Sibyl said. ‘You are looking at the pangea, the only continent on this planet. As you can see, the only lands truly hospitable to sapient life lie around its western, southern, and eastern edges. Notice the chain of rocky islands out to sea in the west. Without them the ocean tides would be so extreme that the habitable western coast would be periodically flooded.’

  Soutan sucked in his breath. Home, Ammadin thought. This is my home, and it’s so beautiful.

  ‘The ships will appear in oh-five seconds,’ Sibyl went on, ‘oh-four, oh-three, oh-two, oh-one, now.’

  At the top edge of the world’s image, gleaming silver spheres appeared, floating, or so it seemed, above the world’s surface, moving slowly and majestically across the face of Snare. Each ship trailed a smaller sphere behind it, joined by cables wound around access tubes. Huge ships, ships the size of cities – Ammadin realized that they had to be enormous to show up so clearly against an entire planet.

  ‘First battalion of six from fleet of sixty ships,’ Sibyl went on. ‘Placed in pole to pole orbit, self-sustaining, powered by solar lumino-magnetic propulsion systems, and self-correcting. Since the navigational units aboard the ships required the freedom to correct their positions in case of meteor strikes or other accidents, strict geosynchronous orbits were not possible. All the ships together comprise the array known as the observational grid, the Riders, or the Phalanx.’

  Soutan swore under his breath, then steadied himself. ‘Very well. What about the shuttles? There must be shuttles.’

  ‘There are a hundred and twenty shuttles.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Two sit in the shuttle bays of each ship.’

  Soutan’s face turned dead-white. ‘Is there another way to reach the ships other than the shuttles?’

  ‘At the moment there is not. If a trained operator were aboard a ship, then it would be possible to raise an emergency pod. There are no trained operators aboard the ships. There is in fact no one aboard the ships.’

  ‘Then there must be one shuttle on the ground.’ Soutan began to tremble. ‘There absolutely has to be one shuttle, the one that the last persons down used to get here.’

  ‘There is no shuttle on the ground. All ships and shuttles are in orbit.’

  ‘God damn you! How did the last person get back then?’

  ‘I do not understand why you are using profanity, Soutan. I will answer your question regardless. The person who flew the last shuttle up to the ships committed suicide. He did this in order to ensure that we would abide by the Landfall Treaty.’

  ‘Admiral Raynar,’ Soutan whispered.

  ‘Yes, your identification is correct. After the Treaty had been signed and ratified, there was a mutiny. The mutineers were determined to break those clauses of the Treaty that forbade technological exploitation of the planet’s resources and the establishment of a technological society. They began to use the on-board equipment and research facilities of the ships to produce what they needed for their projects, which included living quarters, an underground transport system, scientific laboratories and the like. They used the shuttles to unload these resources and supplies from the ships.’

  All at once Sibyl changed. Her image solidified, took on depth, and she became once again a seemingly real woman, pausing to flick her brown hair back from her face with one hand. Her eyes blinked, and she considered Soutan for a moment.

  ‘You’re a Cantonneur.’ She sounded surprised, as if she’d just realized it.

  ‘Yes,’ Soutan snapped. ‘How else would I have learned about the ships? Don’t you see? I want to get us all off this wretched world and let the Chof have it back.’

  ‘What you want is irrelevant,’ Sibyl said. ‘Let me continue answering your original question. Admiral Raynar tried reasoning with the mutineers. It is probably redundant to inform you that they would not listen. He then pretended to collaborate with them and feigned enthusiasm for their projects. Thus he could discern the precise moment when no mutineers were on board the ships and only one shuttle remained on planet.’

  Soutan’s tremble turned into a rhythmic motion. He was shaking his head no no no repeatedly as Sibyl continued.

  ‘He flew the last shuttle to its ship and docked it. Then he shot himself with a handgun much like the one you carry.’

  ‘No,’ Soutan was whispering. ‘No. It can’t be true, you heartless bitch! No one would do that. There must be a shuttle. Just one. That’s all we need. Just one.�
��

  ‘There are no shuttles on planet.’ Sibyl sat back in her phantasmic chair. ‘In this form, I cannot lie.’

  ‘Damn him.’ Soutan’s voice was full of tears. ‘How could he? Oh my god, damn him!’

  ‘Similar sentiments were voiced by the mutineers at the time.’ Sibyl’s image folded her hands comfortably over her stomach. ‘The rest of us, however, applauded his honour and bravery.’

  ‘Bravery?’ Soutan was squealing, stammering, barely able to speak. ‘You call that honour? To abandon us all here, no hope, no future, his own people –’ He stopped, panting for breath.

  ‘Similar sentiments were voiced by the mutineers at the time. His course of action had however rendered them powerless, and they were forced to abide by the Treaty in at least its main lines. The situation developed naturally from then on.’

  ‘The situation? The mess we’re in now, you mean.’ Soutan took a step towards her. ‘That’s why the tunnels, the fiexstone, the supply depots, all those things we find lying around, half-done, useless, oh god damn him!’

  ‘He was a good man.’ Sibyl slapped both hands hard on her knees. ‘He honoured his pledges to the indigenous sapient race.’ Her voice suddenly swelled into life and rage. ‘He honoured his promises. If the others had done the same, he would have lived many years more.’

  ‘Who the hell cares!’ Soutan’s voice rose to a shout. ‘There must be some way to reach those goddamned ships! Tell me!’

  He raised the handgun and aimed it at Sibyl.

  Her image returned to its usual blank calm. ‘I have been dead for seven hundred and forty-two years. Why are you threatening to kill me?’

  Soutan snarled, a ghastly mad animal sound, and tipped his head back as if he would curse the very gods. Arkazo glanced at Ammadin, then made his move. He bent his knees and slammed into Soutan from below, knocking his gun hand away, hitting hard with his shoulder against Soutan’s hips. The two of them went down, and Soutan was screaming, swearing, flailing as he tried to bring the handgun around to shoot his attacker. Ammadin darted out from behind the screen. It seemed that everything began moving slowly, just as when she’d killed her saur. Soutan waved his hands slowly, Arkazo twisted his body like a man turning leisurely over for a nap. As she hovered over them, she had time to remember Lisadin saying that comnee people were stronger than anyone wanted them to know. She reached down and grabbed Soutan’s arm. Her hands found his bones, twisted, and broke his wrist.