Why couldn’t he see anything?
Of course. It was night, wasn’t it? It was dark out. The only light the dimly starlit sky, the wash of starship spotlights directed elsewhere. That was dirt beneath his nose. It was shiny because his own blood covered it.
They were lashing his wrists together. Tight. Too tight. He tried to complain, but the words he could manage were only grunts, and when they kicked him in the ear with a bare foot, he wisely stopped trying to speak.
A bare foot? Then they were coons, weren’t they? They had to be. People wore shoes.
Why were they tying him up? Coons didn’t take prisoners. People didn’t either, not once they needed no more slave laborers or caged samples.
A foot struck him, two feet, hip and shoulder, and he rolled. He closed his eyes as if that could diminish the hammering in his skull.
He opened them again, and there was a coon standing over him.
He knew that coon. He knew he did, even though it was too dark to see the distinctive markings of his pelt. There was a shape to the head and muzzle and ears. There was…
He managed to squeeze the name from his reluctant throat: “Dotson?”
Dotson Barbtail turned his back. Other coons hoisted Hrecker into the air and threw him over a shoulder. Before he passed out once more, he glimpsed several furry bodies on the ground.
When he came to again, his right eye refused to open. The lid felt grainy. He remembered blood and knew that it had dried. There was pressure on his head. A bandage?
Someone stepped in front of his left eye.
He blinked. His head hurt, and there were haloes of light around everything he saw. He thought that meant he had a concussion. How bad was it?
There was an arched stone roof overhead. Solid rock cracked in natural, jagged, wandering patterns. But not a cave. Too regular for that. A tunnel, then.
He blinked again. “‘Hine, uh buff.”
The coon nodded.
“Do’sn?”
He nodded again, and Hrecker felt a flood of relief wash through him.
“You’re a prisoner of war.” The voice was as tight as a violin string.
He tried to smile. If anything, the relief felt even stronger now.
Behind him, a thin and acrid voice said, “He’s barely conscious.”
He shook his head. “Nnn— D-i-nn wann— ” He stopped to swallow and take a deep breath and try again. “D-i-n want, blup th’ tower. Don’ haff to, ‘ny muh.”
He was out of it now, out of the war, and in his mind he saw a coffee mug filled with thick fuzzy leaves and purple blossoms. It felt like a benediction.
He was no longer an Engineer, he realized. He was a prisoner of war.
He no longer had to destroy what he actually admired.
This time he did smile.
“He’s delirious,” said the voice behind Hrecker.
“Wh…” He struggled with the words. “Whuh Sung’ow?”
“Your people have her,” said Dotson Barbtail. Now his voice was almost shrill. “She may be dead.”
“It’s daytime now,” said the other coon. “We can see them building a cage. They must have prisoners.”
“I hope so.” But Dotson’s voice was no less bleak. “Maybe we can trade you.”
He tried to shake his head, but suddenly the pain was too much. “No,” he wanted to say. “Peez, no. Kee’ me.” But all he could do was close his eyes.
Dimly he heard the swack of something long and thin striking fur-covered flesh. The voice behind him, so thin, so bitter, said, “Interrogation.”
Later, alone in his segment of tunnel except for a row of bandaged coons who rarely budged, he tried to imagine how Sunglow would be treated as a prisoner of war.
Would they put her in that cage they were building?
Would Tamiko recognize her? The color of her pelt and the tail she didn’t have would help.
Was there anything else? Was her lower lip slightly fuller than that of other coons? He tried to picture her in his mind but failed. A coon was a coon to human eyes. Only another coon would register a tiny bald spot on a left brow, result of a childhood injury. Or an extra cluster of whiskers on the right.
Tamiko would not. Even if she chose to look at the prisoners.
He supposed she would do that. She would hear he was missing. She would be distraught. She would visit the cage because that would be the closest she could come to him. The coon prisoners of the humans would be proxies for the human prisoners of the coons.
He laughed at his idiocy.
Human prisoner. He had seen no others.
She had dropped him. She was with Silber now. She wouldn’t care about him.
But maybe… Would General Lyapunov tell her to see who they had? To see if they had any coon important enough to trade for him?
Not that he was that important.
And he hadn’t seen any other prisoners.
Maybe the General wouldn’t bother.
Then why build a cage? Why not just shoot the coons they had and be done with them?
Because they would want to interrogate them. Find out what they had been up to in the valley last night. Where they had been going. What the coons were planning.
Would she also ask what the coons might be doing to Hrecker?
When he rolled his head from side to side in slow negation, the lump of his bandage pressed on his head wound. The pain made him gasp.
No. Of course not. She was done with him. And there was always a price for victory, even to the righteous. This time, he was part of that price.
On the other hand, he did not feel like a price. He felt more like he had received a refund on his destiny. Or a transfer to another line.
CHAPTER 20
When they pushed through the blackout curtains at the end of the Turnstone tunnel, Dotson Barbtail showed his teeth and snorted. The truck on which he had stood to watch Sunglow’s near death so few days before was still there, intact, undamaged, and utterly useless. It could be driven within the tunnels and caverns, but what for? It was meant for use outside, where its exhaust could dissipate harmlessly. Yet no tunnel was open enough for more than Racs on foot to pass. Certainly no tunnel opened on a world or time without human foes, where one could move without fear of particle beams or guns or missiles.
The gap above the pile of rubble was filled with night. They could see only stars and the lighted ports of the human starships. The buildings in what was left of Worldtree Center were black.
“It’s dark enough.” Gypsy Blossom leaned forward, grasped the rubble with her one good hand, and began to crawl toward the outside. “Let’s go.”
“Wait!” The Rac who seized her ankle had once run a restaurant called the Saucepot. He had gone by the same name. Now the harness that crossed his paunch sagged with clips of ammunition and grenades. The left side of his face and neck had been shaved; a livid, puffy seam crossed the bare area, the stitches still in place, black against the skin. “Can’t you hear that?”
“What?”
He gestured, and every Rac in the tunnel fell silent. Dotson lay one hand against the side of the tunnel. The rock vibrated. The air throbbed.
“Oh, no.” His guts felt loosened. “More ships? More humans?”
No one answered him, and he began to tremble with the air and rock around him. Was the destruction of all the Racs had built about to intensify? The humans were foes of the Gypsies, their Remakers, but they were destroying everything, even what the Racs had accomplished on their own, before they had climbed the Worldtree. Would anything be left?
Not, he thought as his and the world’s trembling grew ever worse, if those humans could not be stopped. If they ever left, the Racs would have an empty world. They would have to rebuild everything from the barest of beginnings.
Yet that might not take long. The survivors held a great deal of what the humans were attacking in libraries in their heads. There was, Gypsy Blossom assured them all, a memory in the honeysuckle that she a
nd the other bots they would soon be growing from Remaker seeds could read. If they ever met the humans a second time, they would not be crippled so easily again. Indeed, he hoped, the outcome would be quite the opposite.
If only Kitewing had planted those seeds when he first found them!
Or if the priests had not chosen to treat them as holy relics.
The human starship, far too huge to be called a thundertree like those the Racs had just begun to use, was now near the ground. The glare of its exhaust lit the valley like a noontime sun and flooded the tunnel. Dotson clutched the side of the truck’s flat bed with both hands.
Someone finally screamed an answer, audible only because the mass of rock around them muffled the deafening roar outside. “They sent one up this morning. This must be it, come back to its roost.”
Silence. Silence that left their ears ringing, and dark that dazzled with afterimages. The ship was down.
“They’re just as stunned,” said Sunglow. “And their attention is all on the ship. If we hurry…”
Dotson led the way over the rubble mound and out of the tunnel. In a straggling line, they dashed across the open ground outside toward the nearest honeysuckle clump. He could hear the thumps of bare feet against bits of wreckage, hissing intakes of breath, muttered exclamations. He hissed himself when blossoms poured cold, sticky liquid down his back and side. But no one cried out in pain or swore aloud.
Gypsy Blossom was beside him when he reached the greenery. As soon as they reached the bare spot where she had stood once before, they stopped. She unfurled her ruffs of roots and probed the soil. “No guards,” she said. “They had to take shelter from the ship too.”
“The robots?” asked Scholar Starsight.
“They stay out of the honeysuckle.” She pointed at a darker lump beside a stem. Dotson knelt and picked it up and let his fingers explore its segmented shell and jointed legs. It was sticky.
“Nectar,” said the bot. “I poured a blossom over this one the other day. There were sparks and now they avoid the vines. So we can stay out of their way.” She paused, and there was just enough light for him to see the tip of her tongue between her lips. “But there’s someone in the ruins. In a hole. They must have been caught outside. We’ll have to wait.”
“We can get closer.”
As in the ruined city above the bluffs, the valley’s honeysuckle still showed the influence of pruning shears and other restraints. Yet its powers of growth were asserting themselves. It stood higher than it ever had before, and each clump was putting out tendrils of vine and leaf and nectar-laden blossom as if it wished to merge with its neighbors and cover all the valley. Its cloying fragrance filled the night air.
But there still remained a great many open spaces— the rubble-strewn road that had encircled the valley, the flattened remnants of what had been homes and other buildings, gravel paths, and patches of mossy lawn.
The Racs had to move from cover to cover, pausing only when honeysuckle vines surrounded them. At each such moment, Gypsy Blossom put down her roots again to consult their shelter’s senses.
The newly landed ship turned on a spotlight and swept the perimeter of its landing zone. Human guards began to emerge from the other ships and resume their patrols of the valley. The robots moved about.
The bot deftly guided them around each hazard.
They passed a ship beside which sat a Rac helicopter, long and narrow. They crossed another path to slip among the honeysuckle stems, and footsteps made them freeze.
The night was no less dark than it had been, but Dotson could see that the pelts of his companions were as matted with spilled nectar as his own. The bot, on the other hand, seemed untouched.
Four humans were approaching on the path. He could see that they were armed. Three men, one woman.
Someone shifted position. A vine branch moved. A blossom spilled. A twig snapped.
“Down!”
Dotson obeyed the shouted command as promptly as the humans for whom it had been meant. Bullets whipped through the vegetation over his head. The Racs beside him fired back.
Grunts and cries of pain signalled that not every bullet was going overhead.
“Run! Go back!” That was Gypsy Blossom’s voice, as shrill as a panicked Rac’s.
The humans had stopped firing. Were they all dead? Or were they only falling back to await reinforcements?
The Racs staggered into view, trampling the remnants of the honeysuckle vines. There were three bodies on the ground. Someone was squatting over Scholar Starsight, feeling his throat. “Dead.”
Saucepot had survived the encounter so far. Now his voice was saying, “We got one.”
“Let’s go.” But Dotson had taken no more than three steps before he stumbled on a body. Covered with cloth, said his toes, not fur. Human, then.
It groaned.
“Grab this one,” he said, and then he stood aside while others bound the man’s hands and rolled him over.
“What for?” asked Saucepot. “They’re the Enemy. We should kill them all.” When he kicked the bloody head, one eye blinked and opened and stared at Dotson. The mouth worked and croaked his name.
He recognized the man. Hrecker. Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. What was he doing here?
He refused to ask. He turned his back. But then he said, “Bring him.”
It was not until the remains of the Rac squad were once more safe within the tunnel, their eyes adjusting to the lights, that he realized neither Sunglow nor Gypsy Blossom was with them.
Where were they? Dotson slapped his hand against the smooth stone of the cul-de-sac that had been their quarters, all three of them.
Was this small space now his alone?
Were they dead or captive?
He muttered shrilly to himself. He pounded the walls. He kicked their meager possessions and paced and spun and swore in the light of the lantern.
A brown Rac appeared in the opening to the larger storeroom outside the cul-de-sac. “Will you quiet down and go to sleep? You’re keeping us awake.”
Dotson froze and glared and hunched his shoulders. He could feel his back hair raising, bristling with aggression. He could not attack the humans. He could not rescue his mate or the bot. But… “You’re Potwheel.”
“Right.” The other curled a lip and exposed teeth as if to say, “So what?”
“You insulted her.”
Now the other was bristling too. Both males began to sing deep in their throats. Dotson took in the bulge of muscle in the potter’s shoulders and knew that he had no chance of victory. He would be immobilized as soon as those hands touched him, those arms wrapped around him, those teeth tore into his ear or throat or shoulder. Yet he stepped forward anyway.
But before Potwheel could do more than lean toward the fight, an arm tugged him backward. “Get out of here, idiot.”
Potwheel obeyed. Dotson did not know the ancient female who faced him now.
“You’re an idiot, too. You think you’re the only one who’s lost people?”
He hung his head. The other could not possibly be a physical threat to any adult male, but her scorn was a lash.
“Get out there in the tunnels,” she said. “Walk it off. Maybe by morning you’ll know what to do.
“Where’s the bot?” cried a scratchy voice behind her.
She jerked her head. “Better you should worry about her. She’s the only one we’ve got. Now, git.”
He too obeyed, though he had no hope. If Sunglow was dead, there was nothing he could do. If she was a prisoner, she would surely soon be dead.
Gypsy Blossom was gone as well, and with her much of their hope of ever restoring what the humans were destroying.
It was all his fault. He had led them into a trap.
Why had they let him do that? What had made his fellow Racs think he was a leader? There were so many who were better qualified. They had the age. They had the experience, gained in skirmishes with the Farshorns.
But none of them ha
d stolen a bot seed and raised a bot and worn the aura of the Remakers.
And what would the humans do when they realized what that corpse or prisoner was?
He could not sit still. The hormones that had flooded his system in preparation for battle left him restless. So did sheer anxiety.
He walked endlessly, until he blinked and yawned and staggered. He tried to rest, but hormones and worry drove him to his feet once more, and again. Shortly after dawn filled the valley with light, he reached the tunnel mouth. There were others there before him, holding powerful binoculars to their faces. One heard his steps, looked, and held out his binoculars. He did not speak.
Dotson stepped up onto the truckbed and accepted the offer. The lenses brought the ruins of Worldtree Center leaping into view, and the wall of the Great Hall, a bare floor, a grid of steel rods being welded into a large cage by human workers. Nearby, guards watched a dozen huddled prisoners.
“They flew most of them in this morning.”
One of the prisoners was bedraggled and dirty, but her pelt was a distinctive gold. She had no tail. Gray fabric dangled from her crooked arm; where it had been her cast shone white. The similar camouflage wrapped around the bandage on her thigh was intact.
Every time she goes anywhere near those humans, he thought. I should cage her myself the next time she wants to do that.
“She’s alive,” he breathed. Then he yawned, and he felt for the first time that night as if he might really be able to sleep.
“Looks like she’ll stay that way too.” The other Rac was holding out his hand for his binoculars. “For a while. There’s not much we can do.”
“But she is alive.”
“Why are you doing this to us?” The voice was taut as wire. It sounded like burning hair smelled. It grated on the nerves.
It belonged to the military interrogation officer who had been with Dotson when their prisoner first woke up and claimed that he had not wanted to destroy the Worldtree, that he did not want to be traded for Sunglow, that he wanted to stay with the Racs. He had not believed then. He did not now.
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