Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  It had been Lucy who reached for the clawing hand and gripped it firmly, tenderly. Alex had been grateful to Lucy. She herself had nothing left to give.

  Julian had abducted, tortured, killed Lau-Wah Mah.

  Julian had betrayed…

  Mira City. She must think of Mira City. Most of the people had left during the evacuation. If the Furs really wanted Greentrees, they would, afraid of further infection, hunt down all the rest of the humans and kill them. Mira City wasn’t its buildings, it was its people, and Alex must find a way to defend them against the Furs, against Julian Martin…

  Julian had abducted, tortured, killed Lau-Wah Mah.

  Julian had betrayed …

  Greentrees. She must subdue this pain, this adversary, and think of Greentrees. The pain was only personal; Greentrees was a whole world.

  Julian had abducted, tortured…

  “Alex!” the tech said. “Wake up! The Fur shuttle is moving!”

  Alex rose. “I’m awake,” she said. “Where is the shuttle headed?”

  It flew south, away from Mira City, or what had once been Mira City. “It’s going toward the Cheyenne subcontinent,” Alex said. “The space Furs want to gather up more wild Furs before they all flee into the wilderness or hide or whatever they’ll do. Or maybe they won’t flee—they’re highly xenophobic. Nan Frayne is—was— the only human they ever accepted. Maybe the wild Furs will welcome the space Furs with open arms. I have to tell Julian—” She stopped.

  Natalie said, “Alex—the Fur mother ship is dropping orbit!”

  Jake spoke urgently. “Alex, break esilence. Now. Do an all-comlink broadcast, including MiraNet. Tell everyone that Mira City has been annihilated by a Fur weapon, nothing left, and that the mother ship is descending to do the same thing from space to a much larger swath of Greentrees. Tell everyone to get underground, in caves or under overhangs or anything they can. Tell them to dig a pit if that’s all they can do, and to cover the roof with dirt. Dirt, not branches!”

  She stared at him.

  “Do it!” Lucy Lasky said. “The beam somehow stops at the surface, it’s everyone’s only chance!”

  Natalie said, “Enemy ship still dropping orbit.”

  Julian’s voice said sharply over the link, “Alex, are you tracking? I’m not getting any transmissions from Bunker Three.”

  Alex froze.

  Jake said to Natalie, “Open all comlinks, without exception. When they’ve been opened, no one should talk to or about me or Lucy. Julian doesn’t know we’re here. Alex, go. ”

  They all looked at her. Weirdly, it wasn’t Jake’s weary and ruined face, or Lucy’s stern and impossibly young one, that made it possible for Alex to move again. It was young Ben’s, still in the Greenie version of a uniform, a corporal in Julian’s army, his eyes fearful and naive and optimistic that Alex could do something. The eyes of Greentrees.

  Julian had abducted, tortured, killed Lau-Wah Mah.

  Julian had betrayed…

  Alex’s voice held steady, without a single break. “Open all comlinks, both ways, including MiraNet.”

  “They’re all open,” Natalie said.

  “Attention, everyone who can hear this. This is Alex Cutler. The Fur ship has annihilated Mira City and is descending in orbit to annihilate a huge area of Greentrees’ surface. We don’t know how big. But you must take cover. Their weapon beam stops its destruction at the planetary surface. Get under stone or soil however you can, and do it now. We don’t know how long we have. Find—”

  “Alex!” Julian said on his private channel. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “—a cave or an overhang on a stream bank. If there’s nothing else, cover yourselves with rocks. Trees and brush won’t protect you, and neither—”

  “I didn’t authorize this broadcast!”

  “—neither will foamcast. The beam leaves stone, dirt, and water but nothing else. Find cover now, and stay under it until I broadcast again. Do not use your comlinks because that will give away our positions. Keep all comlinks—”

  “Alex!”

  “—on receive. We can survive this, my fellow Greenies, and we can and will reclaim our planet for ourselves. For now, take cover. ”

  “Alex,” said Julian’s voice, and now his was deadly calm, “I cannot raise Captain Lewis. Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said, and still her voice didn’t quiver or break. “He went outside.”

  “Outside? I should still be able to link with him.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t.”

  Jake tugged at Natalie’s Threadmore and made a quick slicin novement, surprisingly strong, with his hand. She cut off the comlink. Alex closed her eyes.

  Jake said quietly, “He knows that you know.”

  “Yes,” Alex answered. “He does.”

  The Fur ship descended to fifty clicks, a lower orbit than any human technology could have sustained. It made two more orbits of Greentrees. Then, silently and invisibly, it fired … something. On Alex’s displays, the high-resolution digital images from orbit showed vegetation, and everything else, disappearing. The multicolor Graphics represented different reflection properties, different material compositions, different temperatures. After the invisible beam passed over them, the images held only two shades: bare soil and bare stone.

  “The beam’s path is ten miles wide, north to south,” Natalie said in a voice of forced calm. “It starts about a hundred miles east o Mira … east of where Mira was. It intersects that site and goes on to … wait, destruction has stopped.”

  Jake said, “They’ll make another pass on the next orbit.”

  They did. This ten-mile-wide swath lay north of Mira, slightly overlapping the first path. Natalie said, “Destruction stopped, same three-hundred-mile length. They’ll probably—”

  All images vanished from all displays.

  “What—”

  Alex said calmly, “Julian has cut us off. He deslaved our monitors. Ashraf’s, too, most likely. Now Julian is the only one receiving comsat information.”

  Jake nodded.

  That was the moment the pain stopped.

  Alex looked at Jake, at Lucy and Ben, at Natalie, who, Alex now saw, had been working through tears. Calculating rapidly, she realized that if the ship didn’t change trajectory, and if its band of destruction kept moving north before the Furs began doing the same thing south of Mira, the beam would sweep over Bunker Three a few hours from now. It would destroy everything aboveground: the grove of trees where she had lain this morning, the tiny pale lavender wildflowers, the brush covering the bunker entrance, the body of Captain Lewis, whom Julian had assigned to watch her.

  Alex eyed the bunker door. “We have to strip down one or both rovers to minimal essentials and bring them down, too. We’re going to need them.”

  “For what?” Ben blurted.

  “To fight the Furs.”

  The boy gaped. ”With what?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Alex said. “But we—”

  Lucy broke in. “Maybe Karim and Jon—”

  “—are going to fight the Furs with something,” Alex finished steadily. “And fight Julian Martin, too, if we have to.”

  She stood a moment, thinking, and then amended her statement.

  “When we have to.”

  28

  THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

  Nate Cutler’s fish recorder proved disappointing. Karim hauled it out of the river and took it apart but couldn’t find anything usable to translate the vibrating signals of the biomass into visuals. He and Jon had taken the device a quarter mile downriver, to a place where the river grew shallow, babbling and breaking on stretch of boulders. Here erosion had created an overhang, at least while water levels stayed low. They felt safe there, although while Karim tinkered, Jon peered out at the clear sky, watching for the Fur shuttle. It did not reappear.

  “There’s a comlink in this device, or at least the makings of one,” Karim said. “But it’s not trans
mitting.”

  “Julian Martin ordered all continuous transmission devices turned off,” Jon replied. “It was part of the preparedness push. Gives away a research facility position.”

  “Microwave silence didn’t save your camp.”

  “No. What else is in there? God, I’m hungry.”

  Karim said, “You ate more than half of those fruits.”

  “And will probably have diarrhea for my greed. What else is in that thing?”

  “Not much, unless you want an accurate count of twenty-two different fish species. But I think I can set this comlink to receive continuously. That way if anything is broadcast from Mira, we’ll get it.”

  “Good. Of course, we’ve already missed a few days’ worth of broadcasts. Do you think we can—”

  “No, Jon,” Karim said patiently, for perhaps the eighth time. “We can’t risk going to the biomass pole in broad daylight—if the pole is even still there. And anyway, we don’t have any way to translate its signals into pictures, and pictures are the only way we’re going to open real communication with the biomass.”

  Jon shifted on his hams. He was filthy, his blond hair matted, and he stank. Karim thought he himself probably smelled worse. It didn’t matter.

  “Tell me again,” Jon said. “If the biomass is anaerobic, and if it spent its entire life two clicks underground on Greentrees, why do you think it’s going to comprehend any pictures we send it? Let alone pictures of a space war?”

  Karim put the jerry-rigged comlink on a flat rock in the river beyond the overhang, where it would be able to receive. He splashed back through the warm water and sat again under the safety of the overhang. Hypothetical safety. His stomach growled.

  “I think—I hope—that this biomass is like the one I saw on the Vine planet. That one was open, because the atmosphere, whatever it was, wasn’t oxygenated. Here the anaerobic biomass is deep belowground, for protection. But it’s not native. It was brought here by the Vines before humans even colonized Greentrees. If that’s so, either it’s the sentient part of a Vine creature or else it’s an extension of sentient Vines, maybe programmed like some sort of computer analogue. Either way, it may know things, have seen things or been told them, from before it was buried here.”

  “So you think it knows about the war with the Furs, the genetic experiments on Greentrees … but not, presumably, us. Think, Karim. If we came after the biomass was put down there by Vines, it has no idea we exist.”

  Karim said grimly, “It will know after we tell it.”

  “Here’s another question for you, then.” Jon sat up, looking like a wastrel gnome. “Why didn’t the Vines ever tell Jake Holman, or anybody from that first contact with humans fifty years ago, abou the biomass?”

  “I think they didn’t trust us enough.” After a moment Karim added, remembering, “And they were right.”

  “And what do you suppose—”

  Another voice started shouting.

  Karim and Jon both jumped. Karim realized, a beat too late, that the voice came from the comlink, shouting only because he’d turned the volume up to be heard over the babbling river.

  “—descending in orbit to annihilate a huge area of Greentrees’ surface. We don’t know how big. But you must take cover. Their weapon beam—”

  “ That’s Alex Cutler!” Jon blurted.

  “—stops its destruction at the planetary surface. Get under stone or soil however you can, and do it now. We don’t know how long we have. Find a cave or an overhang on a stream bank. If there’s nothing else, cover yourselves with rocks. Trees and brush won’t protect you, and neither will foamcast. The beam leaves stone, dirt, and water but nothing else. Find cover now, and stay under it until I broadcast again. Do not use your comlinks because that will give away your positions. Keep all comlinks on receive. We can survive this, fellow Greenies, and we can and will reclaim our planet for ourselves. For now, take cover.”

  The message began to repeat. Jon and Karim, with one last glance at the sky, shrank even farther back under the overhang. After a long silence, Karim said, “I saw this beam once before. Here, on Greentrees, from a shuttle. I saw it vaporize an entire village of wild Furs instantaneously.”

  “Mira City is gone,” Jon said numbly, and Karim realized that Jon might have family there. Not everyone had been away in space for thirty-nine years.

  Jon said no more. He turned his face away, toward the dirt at their backs. Karim didn’t intrude. Where his people came from, the ancient Terran city of Isfahan, men did not cry in front of outsiders.

  The ship didn’t reach them with its overlapping swaths of destruction until evening. Although it must have been in a very low orbit, Karim didn’t see the ship. Nor did he feel anything pass above him. But the vegetation on the opposite riverbank began to disappear.

  It was eerie and horrifying to watch. One moment bushes, trees, groundcover were there—and the next moment were not. It was almost a swiftly moving parody of a screen wipe, the kind children liked on their computers to erase school-work. A small animal of some type emerged from scrub, seemed to look directly across the river into Karim’s eyes, and then silently ceased to exist.

  Nothing existed for as far as he could see, except for rocks on bare brown soil. All the human building and planting and striving during that first joyous year on Greentrees … and during the fifty years since. All gone. Had Lucy reached Jake in time to learn about the Fur attack? To take cover in Jake’s cave?

  Had Kent and Kueilan, on their way to Mira City to bring back a computer, known to take cover? Had they been able to find any cover?

  When Jon finally spoke, his voice was steadier than Karim had dared hope. “They do want Greentrees, Karim. You’re right. They’re wiping us out to have the planet for themselves.”

  “And to avoid being infected. They don’t know that no one on Greentrees is a carrier.”

  “But they can’t hope to get all the scattered Cheyenne, all the far research stations … God, we’ve even got a few research stations on another continent?

  “They don’t need to get everybody. Just most humans. They probably assume the rest will degenerate or die off, or at least pose no real threat. Certainly the Cheyenne, armed with spears, don’t.”

  Jon spoke with a sudden, fierce energy. “Well, they’re wrong. Thanks to Julian Martin. A lot of us were hidden at end points … maybe even most of us. Bunches went off into the wilderness. We have leadership in protected bunkers, and weapons hidden far from Mira, and a leader experienced in warfare!”

  Karim nodded. But he didn’t think bands of humans who had to stay physically hidden and electronically silent were going to pose much threat to Furs. Karim had seen Furs and their weapons; Jon had not. Nor could Karim have much faith in this Terran, Julian Martin. The man had anticipated well so far, but Martin had no idea what he was actually up against.

  No, if humans were to stand any chance at all, it would be because of the biomass.

  If Karim could find a way to communicate with it.

  If the biomass was willing to help.

  If the biomass knew of any way to help.

  If—

  The sky grew darker. Karim curled into a ball under the overhang, conserving heat against the coming night, courteously pretending he didn’t know that Jon’s tears had started again. Hi stomach rumbled; he was so hungry.

  He tried not to think about Mira City.

  Karim woke shivering after a fitful, cold night on the bare rock under the overhang. To think that he had hated the hothouse warmth of the Vine planet! Jon still lay curled in a filthy ball beside him. Slowly Karim rose, every muscle stiff, and ventured cautiously toward the river.

  The sun, just breaking above the horizon, as yet offered no warmth. But at least the sun was the only thing in the sky. No alien ship annihilating everything beneath it. As far as Karim could see across the river, the landscape lay empty, inert, desolate.

  Nothing to see, nothing to expect, nothing to eat.

&
nbsp; Stiffly he clambered up the riverbank, to the top of the overhang. The view didn’t change. A whole lot of nothing.

  But at least here the damp was less. Karim sat down on a rock to await the sun. He doubted the Fur shuttle would return; there was nothing left here to destroy.

  Warmth was just beginning to return to his flesh when he saw the rover top the horizon.

  His first reaction was fear. But it was a rover, a human means of transport; surely the Furs couldn’t have as yet commandeered rovers? Still, Karim ducked behind the rock he’d been sitting on until he was sure. Kent and Kueilan! He leaped up, waving wildly, and passed out from light-headedness. The next thing he knew Kueilan bent over him, forcing water through his lips. He shoved the flask away.

  “Food!”

  “Give him some of that soysynth,” Kent said, and for a few minutes there was nothing in the world but Karim’s primitive self, squatting on its hindquarters, chewing and grunting. Good! Good!

  “Don’t eat it too fast or it’ll just come up again,” Kueilan said severely. “You, too, Jon.” But her hand rested compassionately on Karim’s shoulder.

  When he’d eaten enough, Karim gasped, “Tell me.”

  She knew what he wanted to hear. “The computer is in the rover. We took it and the rover from an end point by force, I’m afraid. They had no real defenses, it was a sort of pathetic hospital cave …” Her dark eyes shifted with some painful memory.

  Kent said, “They didn’t believe who we were or what we wanted. It was just after Alex Cutler’s call to take cover, and we didn’t know if you’d be wiped out by the Fur beam. It was just lucky you were under that overhang!”

  “No, it wasn’t luck,” Karim said. But that part of the story could wait. “I don’t think the Furs are coming back here—no reason. So we need to take the computer to the biomass right away, see if we can communicate, then get word to this Commander Julian Martin.”