Fire in the Sky tst-1

by Jo Clayton

  He didn’t answer, being too busy dying…

  Working carefully so she wouldn’t dislodge the filthy, sodden bandage, she got him draped over one shoulder, powered herself onto her feet, and staggered back to the tent.

  With the two unconscious men wrapped in blankets, their wounds coated with antiseptic and bandaged with sterile pads from her medkit, she stripped off her saturated clothing, hung it over branch stubs, hauled the rest of the packs inside the tent, set up a throway heat pac and hung a glow bulb from one of the tent poles. Aching with weariness, the crease on her shoulder sorer than a rotten tooth despite the plasskin she’d sprayed on it, the pain from the crease on her head beyond description, she swallowed a painpill from her personal pharmacopoeia, pulled the last blanket about her, and sat a moment gathering strength before she even tried to think of what else she should do.

  The rain pounded down on the canvas, a soothing steady beat, the heat eddied from the throway, seeping into her muscles and bones. Sitting up was too much trouble, she shifted position, shifted again, curled up beside Maorgan, closed burning eyes for just a moment…

  4

  Marrin Ola jumped, caught the leather ball as it flew out of bounds, sent it looping back to Glois and the others playing on the bare patch of ground out beyond the blai.

  He squatted outside the line drawn in the dirt and watched the game progress with flurries of activity as the ball was kicked and butted from end to end of the field, flying a few times through vertical loops barely wide enough to let it pass through, watched shouting arguments between the two sides, two Fior boys bracing nose to nose, chest to chest until Utelel teased them out of their fury, watched a couple of players go stalking off when they were called on fouls.

  He muttered a few field notes into the Ridaar remote, but didn’t bother with a detailed description. It was a game so typical of prepubescent youngsters in dozens of the cultures he’d studied that he could have recited the rules without even asking the boys. Besides, that wasn’t what he was here for.

  As the game broke up, he beckoned to Glois and Utelel.

  They came over and squatted in front of him, smeared with dust and sweat, scruffy and grinning.

  “Back home on Picabral when I was your age, my cousins and me, we knew everything that was happening round home. I figure you two’re about the same.”

  Utelel pursed his wide mouth, opened his eyes wide and managed to look as innocent as the yellow flower dropping over one ear.

  Glois turned wary. “Maybe so,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a problem. Our problem, not yours, but we could use some help. The other mesuchs, you know, the ones on Melitoлh, they’re probably going to send spies to kill us.” He sighed as he saw the two pairs of eyes start to sparkle with excitement. Aslan wasn’t going to like this, but he wasn’t going to tell her unless he had to. “This isn’t a game, Glois, Utelel. I’m talking to you because I think you’re smart enough to understand that”

  Glois’ tongue flicked across his upper lip, he turned to Utelel. The boy and the Meloach looked at each other for a moment, then Glois turned to Marrin. “You want to know if there’s strangers hanging about, asking questions, right?”

  “Maybe not just strangers. Anyone acting different than they usually act. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh. You think maybe somebody been bought?”

  “That’s the trouble with this kind of thing. You never know.” Marrin scooped up a small smooth stone from among those at the edge of field and sent it slamming against the goal post. It hit with a thunk, bounded off. “Don’t you go doing anything you wouldn’t ordinarily, huh?” He found another pebble and sent it after the first. “Otherwise you could warn ‘em we’re watching. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh. But nobody much looks at kids. Unless they should be in school and aren’t.”

  Marrin snorted as he saw hopeful faces turned to him. “You start skipping school and I’ll haul you back myself should I see you round.” He got to his feet. “Seriously, you two. You watch it, huh?”

  He walked off wondering if he’d just cut the throat of his own career. If those kids got hurt and it came out he’d recruited them…

  As he went back to mapping the Dumel and counting the population, he eased his conscience with memories of his own turbulent youth, the things he’d managed to survive until he finally got offworld.

  9. Incursions

  1

  Kurz landed the flikit on an island in the middle of one of the Marishes and started unloading his gear beside the spring of clear, clean water that welled up between the high-kneed roots of a tree, smiling as he thought about the meltdown in the software of the Yaraka satellites that made his security possible.

  Clotheads too dumb to suck tit.

  He worked quickly and silently; the faster he got the flikit out of here, the safer he’d be. Too bad it was only the longcoms gone down. Yark security not connected with sat tech was still running and the fur-heads were a sneaky lot.

  Chav satellites had located this fleck of dry sand in the middle of one of the seacoast Marishes. Though the islet wasn’t all that far from a knot of shacks used by a band of choreks that made a habit of attacking travelers on the road that passed close to the edge of the Marish, the satwatch reported they never visited it. The others in the Marish also avoided the place, the swampies who lived in the heart of the wetlands in widely scattered hutches, none of them less than a day’s walk apart. They tended to make constellations, not settlements. If one could have a collection of hermits, this might be the way they organized themselves.

  He knew there had to be a reason for this careful avoidance, but the satwatch hadn’t discovered anything in the three weeks before this-no large predators, no wash-over with flood water, not even any insect swarms. Whatever it was, he trusted himself to deal with it. He’d met and defeated hairier things before this. No chichin-haunted islet was going to get him.

  The weather was so perfect for his purpose it might have been engineered for him, clouds gone black with rain, boiling overhead, darkening the day to twilight. He braced the Yaraka kreash in the pilot’s seat using burnaway straps, clicked his foreclaw on the sensor square and stepped hastily back as the flikit’s motors began to hum.

  He watched it spiral upward then dart away to the north, forgot it as soon as it vanished and started pacing the edges of the islet, inspecting the sand and the water for problems before he set up his camp, humming his pleasure at being on his own in a monotone not unlike the buzzing of the black beetles that clustered on the trunks of the odd bare trees that clustered at one end of the island.

  He’d been born to a Drudge and would have stayed one if Hunnar hadn’t chosen to lift him into Unskill and train him as spy and saboteur/assassin. To this day he didn’t know why it was him that was picked, but he was grateful to the highborn for that and for the good things that had come from it.

  A wife and children for one. They had a comfortable life on the edges of the tech sectors; his children would be tech class, not Unskill like him and, Taner be blessed, not Drudges. He saw them for a few months every few years, but didn’t miss them much. In a mild, mostly abstract way, he was pleased with his family, but more with the idea of them than their actual physical existence. They gave him a sense of being rooted in something while he wandered the universe in Hunnar’s service.

  He was no longer young, pressing the far edge of middle age, and everything he did took more effort these days. He didn’t like to think of retiring, but he was a meticulous methodical chav and one not given to avoiding hard truths. For the past several years he’d been looking around for a position he could retire into, preferably one offworld. He’d been running study flakes every spare moment, economics, xenopsychology, the languages native to the worlds Chandava Minerals controlled and anything else he thought might be useful.

  He wanted work offworld because he was shorter and slighter than the ordinary chav and had always been t
he butt of jokes and booted about by those stronger than him-which had included almost everyone his age and older whether they were male or female. He’d learned very early that his wits were all that would protect him-but he couldn’t be seen to be clever because that just made things worse. Invisible wits. The ability to maneuver others into protecting him while keeping them ignorant of what he was doing. Perhaps that was what Hunnar had recognized in him.

  He noted a line of large depressions in the sand at the upstream end of the island, the print closest to the water’s edge clear enough that he could count the toes and see what looked like claw marks. He set his hand on the damp sand beside it, pressed down, extruded his claws, walked the hand out of the depression. Claws longer than his, with a broader splay to them.

  He examined the other prints, noting that their spacing increased suddenly about halfway across the island, as if the creature had gone from stroll to all out run between one breath and the next. What would scare into flight a creature with such formidable defenses? And without corning close enough to leave traces?

  No other tracks on the sand. A flier of some kind? A firejelly? Not likely. If there were any hanging around here, the satwatch would have noted it. They were too big to miss. Hmm. Smaller version? Predator with poison on those dangling tentacles? He looked up, noted that the trees that grew here were mostly bare trunk, with small hard leaves the length of his shortest finger, nothing to impede the path of a flying predator. Good. Make a note. Watch overhead. He took a step, stopped, thinking about the clinging, yielding sand, thinking about the lethal burrowing worms in the Kumar Waste back home. Note, too, watch underfoot.

  Happy with his choice of first camp, he went back to his pile of gear and began hauling it into the area under the trees. A dangerous place would provide its own watchbeasts and the privacy he needed. He strung a hammock between two trunks, settled the steelskin shelter in the webbing while he used the spare rope to weave other nets to hold his gear and his food supply off the ground. He left the miniskip and its drag trailer to the last, fired them up, and roped them into the highest crotch that would support the weight.

  When he had everything else settled to his satisfaction, he dropped onto an upthrust root knee and sat contemplating the largest of the packs, a locked box that held the weapons he meant to pass along to these choreks-which was a delicate process since he didn’t fancy being sliced apart by one of his own cutters, but it was one he’d done before and he’d worked out a procedure that got his business done and kept his hide intact.

  By the time he had the cache hoisted up beside the miniskip and tied securely in place, it was nearly sundown. He expanded the shelter, sealed it in place about the hammock, then collected a cup of water from the spring and a hot pack of stew and went to watch the sun go down while he ate his dinner.

  2

  Ilaцrn closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the faces of the lab techs, but he couldn’t close his ears because he had to keep playing that chertkum noise that Hunnar considered music. He couldn’t stop hearing them talk about the plundering of his world, his people, because the Keteng were as much his people as the Fior.

  “… the organics involved are extremely complex. We don’t have the facilities for a full investigation. Nor, I’m sorry to say, the expertise. It’s much more Yarak’s sort of thing. Would you know if…”

  Hunnar grunted. “Classified.”

  “Ah. Ta’ma. We’ve put the Drudges you sent us through a number of tests. If you will follow on the screen. Yes. This pair we put through a saturation test. We kept them for a week in a sealed chamber. There. You see the haze? They were hm in smoke you might say for a full week at a level just below suffocation. Then they were strangled and autopsied. We have examined cell structure insofar as we were able, we are somewhat limited since there has been little need for more sophisticated instrumentation hm none beyond that necessary to maintain the health of hm our techs. If the Ykkuval could hm… No? I will go on.

  “The female Drudge was pregnant. It is one of the reasons she was chosen. We examined the fetus and are reasonably certain the smoke is not teratogenic. As to the adults, there seems to be little effect on the structure of the brain and none of the other organs show any stress. However, I must remind you that this is a very short-term study and effects could be too subtle for us to notice. We are arranging a long-term study with smaller doses, with your permission five years would be a suitable length for this project.”

  “Leave your proposal on my desk, I will consider it later.” His claws click-clacked on the wood. “In the meantime, I’ll have Memur send his men out to collect a sampling of the local Cousins addicted to the stuff. You can put them through your grinder. Surely at least some of what you learn will have application to Chave. We are, after all, a branch of the Cousins, however much some of us like to forget it.”

  “A branch that has diverged rather significantly from the others, by your leave, Ykkuval. Nonetheless we will appreciate the addition to our knowledge. If you will look at the central bank of four screens, you will see the results of our second study. We selected a second pair of Drudges, one male, one female to study the pleasure factor, to determine what happens to the mind when one breathes that smoke. We made this a separate experiment because the probe alters conformation when employed as extensively as we intended to use it this time. We wanted to be sure the physical stats were not corrupt.”

  Ilaцrn’s eyes came open when he heard the word probe. Despite his misgivings he stared at the screens, his fingers plucking absently at the strings, falling into an old exercise, one he’d played so often when he was a boy he knew the trick of it without needing his mind at all. There was an ache in his loins that distressed him; it made him feel soiled, his soul compromised beyond redemption. He’d been dreaming recently about the probe sessions with Hunnar and more than once come half-awake to plot how he could force another probing without betraying half the Bйluchar left on Melitoлh. He wanted those orgasms again, that total plundering of self, wanted them with a passion greater even than any he’d shared with his sioll. And despised himself for all of that.

  He fixed his eyes on the screens. If he couldn’t participate, at least he could watch.

  “You will find, O Ykkuval, that the visuals are both interesting and disturbing. We have censored nothing, but naturally the flakes will be put in your hands for disposal as soon as this presentation is complete. No copies have been made. We begin with the female subject.”

  Two of the screens expanded to fill the wallspace. The Drudge was stretched on an examining table, wide straps about her arms and legs, another crossing over where her waist would have been if she’d had much of one. She had broad shoulders and hips, a thick layer of fat between muscles and skin hiding her bone structure and making her look like an ugly rag doll. A lab tech in white with a breathing mask that obscured most of his face came into view carrying the probe crown. He set it on the bed, gave the woman’s shaved head a hard polish with a cream he took from a small jar. When he was satisfied, he placed the crown on her head, taped it down and began a series of tests.

  Sensing Hunnar’s impatience, Tech First Muhaseb said hastily, “We left all that in place on the flake so that you would see that it was done properly. Indeed we have done no editing at all of what follows. What the probe finds will appear in the second screen.”

  Thick yellowish smoke boils up from a bowl set on a tripod beside the head of the female Drudge. The heavy features of her face begin to twitch. She fights against the straps, turns her head restlessly from side to side for several minutes, as if she were a riding beast trying to shake off a pesty persistent fly. After a few minutes of this her movements grow more violent. A masked attendant appears in the image, draws up a broad strap, passes it over the lower part of the woman’s face, draws it tight and locks it down, then retreats from view. The woman struggles a moment more, then shudders and lies still. Her eyes open but her inner lids stay deployed and her eyes glisten in the ra
ge sign of both sexes of the Chandavasi. Her body jerks and twitches for several minutes, then the smoke seems to get to her at last and she lies quiet for a few moments, her hands open and close several times, then curl into fists. Her outer lids droop lower until her eyes are glistening slits. After a moment she begins to pant, her legs move under the strap, her knees try to come up, to spread… nothing nothing nothing nothing Murky colors swirl in slow turgid whorls, coil along the edges of the screen, eddies of color about a pool of ink. The blackness is still, then lights begin flashing erratically, brilliant, near blinding light, like a strobe at a light show. A shape slowly takes form in the broken blackness, a misshapen woman, tiny then swelling until the image fills the frame and is thrusting against the edges as if by sheer power of rage and will it would burst free. This image shrivels suddenly into a small ancient baby with a huge distorted head and limbs atrophied until they are little more than boneless tentacles. This happens at the exact moment when the strap tightens across her mouth and chin. The ancient infant begins to melt as if it were cast from wax and left beside a fire. The runny wax begins to coil into a whirlpool, bits of the wizened form still recognizable, an eye slides past, a horribly distorted mouth, an ear, a breast like an empty sack with a huge brown nipple. The shapes melt into the mud-colored whorl and for a brief while the frame holds only ugly others and dirty reds. Then another form begins to…

  The images in the dream screen grew murky, muddled, a birthing scene with the cord wrapped about the bloody infant’s neck, strangling it, shifting to increasingly violent sexual imagery, violence the woman directed at herself and at the males in her fantasies, all of them techs and admins, one of them a distorted but clearly recognizable version of Hunnar. The sounds of breathing in the Ykkuval’s conference room quickened, went raspy. Ilaцrn kept his eyes on the screen, he didn’t want to look away, he didn’t want to see their faces, knowing they would be echoes of his own.