“Lies,” insisted Potwheel.
“No more than the similar reports from elsewhere in our own land. Cities and libraries and universities. The Worldtree itself. We are all under attack, all victims, all allies in this war. There are no tailed and tailless anymore. And we don’t need your sort of attitude.”
His audience’s tone was now a brightly gleaming knife-edge of anger. Potwheel looked around the storeroom, realized that he and his friends were a distinct minority, and sat down.
Dotson was sure he would not change his mind. When the humans were gone, when the Racs had rebuilt their civilization as best they could atop the ruins, he would still be there. Whatever unity the crisis forged between tailed and tailless would not last. Certainly it would not meld the two groups like two lumps of clay kneaded and spun and shaped and fired into mugs or bowls.
Later that night, Dotson and Sunglow both accompanied Gypsy Blossom to the mouth of the Foldstone tunnel. The valley’s honeysuckle grew closest to the bluffs here, and one clump was high and thick enough to feel safe within.
The bot wore a light headset, and a wire trailed from her hiding place to the tunnel, where Racs listened to every word she murmured.
“There’s no one near the Lakeview tunnel.”
More wires strung through the tunnels carried orders: A squad of Racs left the tunnel she had mentioned. They would ambush humans if they could, lay mines in a well-traveled path, or…
“There’s a gap in the line across the pass.”
Or they would sneak out of the valley to mine paths nearer the landing field. They would leave, serving as couriers to other cities, other centers of resistance. They would guide incoming couriers back to the tunnels to reinforce the picture of disaster that sporadic radio reports could not make convincing.
The sound of gunfire reminded them all that she was only one, she could not see everywhere at once, and by the time a Rac squad reached a spot she had said was free of guards, it might be safe no longer.
And there was the hiss and crack of a particle beam striking through atmosphere. Fortunately that was rare at night, for radar could not easily pick out a Rac’s gun and other gear against ground echo, while infrared detectors could not tell the difference between Racs and their ancestors. And, of course, in air the beams had far less range and potency.
“Watch out for… Something new.” She had seen a hundred hand-sized machines scuttling from one of the humans’ starships. Tiny robots programmed to patrol the valley. Mobile sensors to spot the Racs and call in fire. She laughed very softly. “They’re everywhere, but not as everywhere as me. They’re hard to spot at night, but no one suspects the honeysuckle even if they do notice. I can still tell you how to get past them, but if they release many more… I wish they’d given the honeysuckle hands or tentacles.” Her own hands mimed grabbing, plucking, twisting.
Dotson grimaced as he watched her. Sunglow’s claws dug gently into his wrist. There was something the bot had said earlier. Something about the seeds…
“What can you see in the Center?” he asked. “The Great Hall?”
“Yes, of course. The honeysuckle is touching the floor tiles now.”
“Can you see that display case? The one with the seeds?”
“No. Where was it?”
He told her.
“There it is. But it’s broken.”
Its glass was smashed. Only one of the four legs upon which it had stood was intact.
“Didn’t you say there was a casket?”
That was missing. But there was a scatter of dark lumps upon the floor.
“The seeds,” said Sunglow.
Dotson nodded. “Can we get in there?”
The bot said nothing for a long moment. When she broke the silence at last, it was to whisper urgently, “We have to!”
“But can we?”
“They have blind spots even here,” said Gypsy Blossom. “There aren’t many of those machines this far from the ships.”
“Can they still sprout?”
“Hers did.”
“They designed them to last,” said the bot. “A thousand years. More. As long as it took you to find them and plant them. Then they would grow and multiply.”
“But we’ve only got you,” said Sunglow.
“It’s not too late.”
“Not if the war drags on,” said Dotson. “It takes months to grow a bot, and more months to teach it.”
“Not now,” said Gypsy Blossom. “Root-to-root is very fast.”
“But would they be safer as seeds?” asked Sunglow. “The humans haven’t even noticed them yet.”
“They’ll be safer in the caves,” said Dotson. “Under electric lights.”
Many Racs, both young and old, looked stricken by the destruction of the world they had known all their lives. Their pelts were rough for lack of grooming. Loose hairs rubbed off on walls and doorframes and seat backs. Their eyes were half closed, and the hairs of their brow ridges drooped. Their bellies already seemed less swollen than any could recall having seen before, though surely there had been famines in the past. Their voices shook and struggled not to keen.
Senior Hightail seemed even more distressed. His pelt’s layer of frosty white had soaked deeper. Half his whiskers were broken. His eyes watered constantly.
But his voice was as strong as ever when he said, “No!”
“We have to.” As earnestly and respectfully as he could manage, Dotson Barbtail scratched the side of his muzzle once more. He looked at the Rac beside his one-time supervisor. Scholar Starsight, as unkempt as any other, trembling, saying nothing at all. He had helped Dotson and Sunglow show Marcus Hrecker and Tamiko Inoue this world. He had disappeared after Tamiko had executed Johnny Gatling.
Dotson had not even thought of him before this hour. He told himself that if he had, he would have assumed he was dead, along with so many other priests and scholars and other Rac elders who had been in Worldtree Center when the humans first attacked.
His supervisor had survived, though he looked like he wished he had not. Now he was part of what government the Racs still had.
“The seeds are there,” Dotson said. “They’re lying in the open, waiting for us. If we don’t go get them, some human will see them and recognize them for what they are. Or he’ll step on them. A wall will fall on them. A bomb will destroy them. And they’ll be lost.”
“My kin,” said Gypsy Blossom. Did her petals really smell more pungently floral for a moment? “We can’t leave them there.”
“They’ll help us,” said Sunglow.
“Not right away, of course.” Dotson had to be honest. “It takes a while to grow them up.”
“It’s a suicide mission,” said Senior Hightail. “I won’t allow it. No one else will either. We’ll tell the tunnel guards not to let you out.”
“We can do it,” said Dotson. “We have to. Our people move under the very noses of the humans. They set mines and lay ambushes. They— ”
“Not without me, they don’t,” said the bot. “The honeysuckle tells me where it’s safe, and— ”
“And she’ll tell us.”
“You’re not going without me,” said Sunglow. She slapped her cast with an open hand. “I can manage.”
Scholar Starsight, still speechless, was nodding.
Dotson clamped his mouth shut for a tense moment. He wished she would stay safe in the caverns. Yet he knew she surely wished the same of him.
Senior Hightail was watching them both as if he knew what they were thinking. Once he looked aside at his nodding companion.
Dotson had to struggle with himself to say the words: “This is more important than either of us. Than anyone. It has to be done.”
“We don’t know how long the humans will stay,” said Gypsy Blossom. “If it’s very long, those seeds could be your only hope of survival. They’ll be able to use the honeysuckle just like me. They’ll be spies and guides.”
“And the loss of the plaques won’t matter,�
� said Dotson. “The data are all there in the honeysuckle.”
Now, at last, Senior Hightail was nodding. He understood.
He sighed and blinked and turned away with water pooling in the corners of his eyes. “I suppose you’re right. But…”
“I’m coming with you,” said Scholar Starsight.
CHAPTER 19
The air boomed. The room shook. Dust sifted from the cracks of the stonework overhead, smelling of ancient, bone-dry vermin turds.
“The Baron’s right,” said Bela B’Genda. “We aren’t going to get anywhere without a nuke.”
“No,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker, though his mouth was twisted sour. He turned, scanning the nearly empty room. It was half of one of the old buildings that had survived the destruction of Worldtree Center. Just beyond the low door, a pair of insectile robots squatted on a fragment of masonry. Each waved a pair of slender antennae in the air, reporting whatever it saw and heard to a monitor at some Security console.
“Not very gyppin’ fast.” Eric Silber was watching Hrecker as he did every day now, his eyes half closed, his lips slightly curved. A stranger might have thought he looked content, relaxed, even happy. Hrecker thought his expression smug, smirking, superior. He had Hrecker’s woman, after all.
“Tough stuff,” said Bela B’Genda. “Cellulose-reinforced rock.”
“But we are getting there,” said Hrecker.
Unfortunately, one small carton was all that remained of the high explosives the humans had brought with them. It sat on a stone shelf beside an empty wooden crate that had come from a quarry not far from the valley. The crate was stencilled with the coons’ danger symbol, which looked something like a bright red numeral seven. It signified a cliff over which one should not walk.
There had been other crates with that same symbol, all of them full of cylinders wrapped in waxy paper. All of them were gone now, packed into the holes they had drilled into the flank of the tower that once had been a tree, converted into noisy blizzards of chips and dust.
The cylinders were not dynamite but something that served the same purpose and did it just as well as what the Engineers had brought with them from Earth.
It was a shame, thought Marcus Aurelius Hrecker, that the coons hadn’t come up with something better. Maybe, if they had, the dent in the side of the tower would be a little bigger, a little more impressive, a little closer to toppling the massive thing.
But it wasn’t. And the building they had been using as a storeroom was empty. Empty of everything except that one yellow carton, and that was not enough to bother using.
“We’ve found a mining area,” said Silber. “Not a pit, but a mountainside full of adits. Tamiko said to tell you.”
Meyer Smith appeared in the room’s doorway and stepped quickly to Bela B’Genda’s side. They touched each other very briefly as he said, “A few more chips. Another foot. That’s all.”
Hrecker tried hard to bury the pain of the dual reminders of what he had lost by asking himself when Bela had shifted her attachment from the Baron to their chief.
“An overflight spotted a central equipment area,” Silber went on. “One building had a big seven on the door.”
Smith scowled. “The last time we raided one of those, they blew it up in our faces.”
“We thought of that for you. The chopper will be ready at eleven.” Silber laughed. “Tonight. Beside the Saladin.”
They waited till he was gone before they reacted. Then Hrecker swore. “A filthy waste of time.”
“There’s always the nuke,” said Bela B’Genda.
“We’d have to wait till we were leaving. So we wouldn’t have anything else to do. They’d set us to burning libraries. Hunting coons. Eric would like that.”
Smith ostentatiously leaned toward the door, pretending to check for eavesdroppers though all three knew that if Silber was lingering outside the room, there was nothing they could do.
“I’d rather keep at it like this.” Hrecker felt disgusted with himself, with the Engineers, with everything they were doing on First-Stop. “It may be a crucial symbol to the coons, but it’s only a symbol, after all.”
Smith was nodding.
An alarm was hooting.
Hrecker twisted to keep the rifle slung from his shoulder out of his way. His body-armor vest thumped against the side of the helicopter’s hatch. Then he shoved the last box of ammunition under the nearest seat and straightened. He remembered only at the last moment that he should not stand fully erect. This coon copter was low and long and narrow, a waspish affair with double rotors and a single line of seats, one behind the other. The landing gear— heavily sprung legs that could flex or straighten on command— added greatly to the insectile impression. Stubby wings were there more as supports for missile racks and cannons than as airfoils. To his right, a freshly painted cogwheel gleamed against the metal of the copter.
Meyer Smith swore and said, “We can’t go yet. The Drake’s on its way down.”
The alarm stopped.
The sky began to rumble.
“It’s in air,” said Smith. “I can feel it.”
Hrecker pointed at a cluster of robots scurrying for cover in the cleft beneath a chunk of fallen wall.
“Greenshit,” said Bela B’Genda. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hrecker looked up at the ship. “The lock’s already sealed.”
They did not dare try to fly the copter to some safer place, for the rocket blast of a landing starship would stir the valley’s air with impossible turbulence. Nor could they simply stand and wait for quiet to return. Unprotected ears could be deafened. And if a ship wandered even slightly from its descent path…
They wasted no time in discussion. They turned and ran straight toward the ruins around the coons’ Worldtree tower. Five minutes later, they were huddled in what had been a basement corridor. The guns in their hands and against their backs were trembling in sympathy with the shaking ground and air. Sweat pooled beneath Hrecker’s body armor. The hole that had led them to their shelter was flooding with bright light. More robots were visible now, clinging like lizards to the walls and ceiling of their burrow.
“He’d better keep his distance,” said Hrecker. He had to shout. “That chopper…”
“Don’t worry.” Bela B’Genda took his arm. “You want your old bunk back? The Baron needs taking down a peg.”
The Baron laughed. “They think only captains should have a whole room to themselves!”
“I’ve got a roommate already.”
“But not the one you had.”
“It’s easy to come back. You don’t even need to suit up now.”
Hrecker was tempted. But somehow he did not think that this was the moment to make the decision. He still hoped…
The sound outside was now nearly deafening. “He sounds right on top of us,” he screamed.
The Baron shook his head and shouted back, “Right where he oughta be.”
“Where’s he been?” When he realized he could no longer hear his own voice at all, he gestured.
The Baron gestured back, pointing skyward, drawing stars on his shoulders, indicating bars and confinement, and he understood. The ship had been taking the coons they had caged to meet the General. Or at least the General’s ship, the Ajax, which would carry them to Earth.
The sound cut off. The entrance to their shelter went black once more.
“He’s down.”
“Let’s go.”
“Give the dust a chance to settle.”
Hrecker wanted to check the helicopter. But he knew that Meyer Smith was right. It would be a little while before the air had cleared enough to breathe comfortably. And the copter would surely be okay. The Drake would have landed in the same charred circle it had made when it first came to the valley, and there was another ship— or was it two?— between that spot and the Saladin.
When they emerged from the ruins, a single spotlight was scanning the ground around the Drake, searching for
signs of fire. But the ship had landed nearly in the center of the circle it had left. There was smoke near one edge. Elsewhere there was nothing, not even steam, for the ship had baked the ground quite dry when it took off earlier that day.
“The copter looks okay.”
“Let’s go, then.”
They were nearly back to the copter when something rustled in the honeysuckle beside the path they were following.
“Down!” barked Meyer Smith.
All four obeyed. The Baron was firing into the vegetation even before he hit the ground.
Someone was shooting back.
Hrecker tugged his own gun into position and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, he remembered the safety. An instant later, he was contributing his share to the din.
Beside him, Bela B’Genda made a grunting, sighing noise.
Was she dead?
“Back up! Back to the ruins! We’re getting reinforcements!””
He began to snake his body backward along the path, into grass, among honeysuckle stems, still firing.
Bela lay where she had fallen.
He stopped. Was she dead? If she wasn’t, how could they leave her behind?
He said nothing.
He simply set down his rifle, raised himself to a crouch, and scuttled toward the body.
He heard someone yelling, “Hrecker!” just before he stopped hearing anything at all.
He could not have stayed unconscious long.
He woke when someone yanked his hands from under his chest and he lurched. Pain stabbed through his skull. His shoulders protested when his arms were pulled behind his back.
“Unhh,” he grunted. The left eye opened. The other struggled to pry open the slightest of gaps, and then the sticky goo that sealed it tore apart. His blood. Still wet. Clotting. Not dry.
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