Seeds of Destiny

by Thomas A Easton

  “I want them anyway.”

  The soldier gave him an appraising look. His thought was as plain as if he had spoken aloud: He was in charge of the expedition, but Dotson was the Rac who had grown the bot whose ideas had sparked it. He wore an aura of authority all his own.

  It did not take long to fill the APVs with as much obsolete weaponry as they could hold, but by then it was far too close to dawn to leave. “They’ll spot us anyway,” said Edge-of-Tears. “But it might take a little longer at night. Especially if those clouds stay thick or the storm begins. And we only need a little time.”

  “Before we left you said two hours, driving.”

  “Make it four.” The soldier slapped a tread. “These aren’t as fast as wheels.”

  When the next night finally came and Dotson flipped the switch that opened the cache’s broad door, the sky was as black as the inside of a cave. The wind was louder than it had been any night of their quest, and occasional drops of water struck his face. He stared upward as if he could see the stars or the bright spark of the humans’ flagship through the clouds. A long moment later, he realized that someone was beside him.

  “We’ll stay here.” Trowel scratched the side of his short muzzle apologetically. He held a rapid-fire rifle with a massive clip in his other hand. “There’s light, and the roof is thick.”

  “The light won’t last,” said Dotson. He pointed at the generator to one side. Its steady hum showed no sign of faltering. “As soon as that tank is empty…”

  “Long enough, I’m sure. We’ll turn out most of the lights and leave the door ajar. It’ll last until you win.” The gardener’s face said he did not think that likely. He lifted his weapon a handbreadth. “Or until the humans go away.”

  “That could still be a while.”

  “Then we’ll need shelter for the winter, won’t we?”

  Edge-of-Tears snorted a laugh as he joined them in the doorway. “It’s all yours, then.”

  “Should we wait?”

  The soldier shook his head. “Do it now. Before we lose our edge.”

  “Our nerve, you mean. They’re going to see us. They always do.”

  “It’ll take time to get planes in the air. We’ll split up. We’ll be moving fast. And the wind will help us.”

  “Four hours.” Four hours of life as a target.

  “Maybe three.”

  The APVs roared out the door into pouring rain just before midnight. Edge-of-Tears had the lead vehicle. Dotson was behind him. The others followed, and in the back of each vehicle, crammed in between the crates and cylinders, was a pair of Racs with shoulder-tubes and antitank missiles.

  The storm quenched the glare of the APVs’ headlights— essential in the dark— and surely the rain washed from the air much of the heat the vehicles generated. But they remained detectable from afar. Shortly after they passed the ruined factory where they had found Trowel and the other gardeners tending seedling bots, the first fighters appeared over the horizon. The Racs left the road, twisting and turning among trees and ruined houses, hoping to evade the human fire.

  Slugs from airborne cannons hammered the sides of the vehicles, but their armor was thick enough to survive those blows. Fire sparkled in the air, marking the exhausts of air-to-ground missiles. Two of the APVs vanished in titanic blasts of light and sound and smoke. The remaining four raced onward, jigging in their paths, spurred by the explosions that rattled the landscape around them. One dove beneath a highway bridge. A missile found it anyway, but not before the Racs among its cargo got off a shot of their own. The larger explosion destroyed the bridge. The smaller turned the fighter into a ball of flame.

  The other planes sheered off. Dotson drove his APV frantically, desperately, wishing that he knew what he was doing, that he had ever handled more than an ordinary car. Where was Edge-of-Tears? Did he still live? Was he ahead? Behind? To one side or the other?

  Was Dotson the only survivor? Then he could not last. Six of the hidden vehicles had started out. Three were already gone. He had seen them, heard them, felt them go. Had he missed the others’ deaths?

  Why hadn’t the humans killed them all? The storm. Not the clouds. Not the rain. But the wind, that shook the warplanes in the air and spoiled their aim.

  But now the fighters were back. The Rac beside him counted those he could see: “Four. Seven. Ten.”

  Dotson wished he knew who his companions were. But he knew only their names: Silvertouch and Laughs-at-Locks. Had one been a musician once, before? The other, a burglar?

  Two warplanes collided in the air, victims of the wind.

  He had no idea who was in the back, ready to fire what they had at their attackers.

  He wished he dared to close his eyes long enough to ask the Remakers, Gypsies, gods of First-Stop, to intervene once more. “Make them cautious!” he keened out loud. “Too cautious!”

  Another disappeared in flame.

  So did another APV, too distant for Dotson to feel the air and ground shake with pain although the flash was visible through the storm.

  Near misses made Dotson’s vehicle lurch and grind its gears. But somehow he never took a direct hit, and then there were the ruins of Worldtree City, hulks of brick and stone to shield him from the human gunners and intercept their missiles. The ground shook. Masonry fell around him. But the tracks of his vehicle roared over every heap of rubble that would have stopped a car or truck on wheels. He hardly slowed as he spun around one corner, another, and here was the avenue he wanted, there the yawning tunnel mouth.

  He was diving deep into the interior of the bluffs around the valley. He was safe.

  And there was another APV. One more. Wet tracks and puddles and two Racs lowering bodies from the back. A third standing beside it, proudly erect even though fatigue was visible in the set of his shoulders. A military bearing. Edge-of-Tears had made it too.

  The rest had not.

  CHAPTER 25

  Tamiko Inoue stared at the guard as she approached the door. He slouched in the corridor, eyes half closed. His cheeks were lean, his muscles cleanly limned under smooth cloth, the sliver of pupil that showed between his eyelids gleaming with an alert readiness his posture belied.

  As she approached, those eyes opened wide and held her steadily, darting away only briefly to check other approaches to the door. The guard wore a snug jumpsuit that left no cuffs or collars free for an opponent to grab or an object to snag. He held a compressed-air gun that fired slivers of glass that would shatter when they struck the ship’s hull but would destroy a human target.

  Tamiko knew he was not there to stop her from opening the door and entering the small room beyond. But still she hesitated.

  “Forget your key, ma’am?” His eyes were as watchful as ever, but now he was smiling and holding his own copy of the magnetic card that barred the door. He remembered her.

  She shook her head. That wasn’t the problem, though she was less sure that she knew what was.

  He ignored her. He slid his cardkey into the slot in the jamb. The door slid open. “There you go.”

  She did not answer as she slipped her own cardkey back into her thigh pocket and entered the room. The door slid shut behind her.

  Sunglow was sitting on the edge of her bed. There was still a cast on her arm. The bandage on her thigh was gone, leaving only a livid line of nearly healed flesh. Already the fur was growing back.

  “Do you think he’s still alive?”

  “He is if Dotson is.” Sunglow was quite sure of that. He would honor the implicit agreement Tamiko had offered by releasing one of her prisoners to pass the word that she herself survived.

  “I wish I knew.”

  “At least, if he’s dead it’s an accident.” The coon’s fingers twined together, as expressive as any human’s of worry. “You made sure Dotson wouldn’t hurt him. But if Dotson’s dead…”

  “You could help us settle this.”

  “It’s all settled. You’ve destroyed us.”

 
“Not entirely. You’ll rebuild.”

  “And you’ll be back.”

  Tamiko nodded matter-of-factly. Indeed, that was the plan. “You could save a lot of lives.”

  “Wherever I told you, you’d attack. And Dotson…”

  Tamiko did not need to hear the coon say that if he was still alive, her words could kill him. Or that once Dotson was no longer there, the remaining coons might well vent their anger, their need for vengeance, on the one human in their grasp.

  She shook her head. “A quick, surgical strike,” she said. “A rescue mission. And then we can leave.” She reached across the narrow room to activate the veedo and call up all the reasons why Sunglow should want the humans gone as soon as possible: images of the world below— airports and military bases littered with wrecked equipment; ships awash in waves; cities in ruins; a line of hotspots racing along a highway toward the valley of the Worldtree, diverging across the landscape, planes diving and swooping and jigging, explosions on the ground and in the air.

  But there were not as many ground explosions as there had been fleeing hotspots. Two of those frantic vehicles had reached Worldtree City and sped through the rubbled streets while human-piloted planes pursued and fired guns and missiles. Then they had vanished from the screen.

  “There used to be more of those,” said Tamiko. “We got them too. Most of them. And then you gave up. Or ran out of trucks. We don’t know why…”

  “Food,” said Sunglow. She knew better, for she knew the storerooms in the caverns had been full enough to keep the refugees alive for months more. “They’re running out of food. My friends are starving. So’s your Mark.”

  “Food shipments don’t blow up like that. And they don’t run so fast, so frantically, or shoot back. These were weapons smugglers.”

  “They must have had something impressive.” Sunglow was not surprised, but hearing the human say the words made her both feel and sound hopeful. Her people had not yet given up.

  “They were only desperate.” The human’s tone and gesture dismissed the hope as beneath contempt. “And we got them all. There’s nothing left you coons can do.”

  “You’re wrong.” There had been no explosions to mark the ends of the last two vehicles. They must, Sunglow thought, have reached the tunnels and vanished from human sight.

  “Don’t you want to save him?”

  “It’s not up to me.”

  “In your position, I…” Tamiko sighed. “Don’t you love him after all?”

  The coon only glared at her.

  “You’re not very sentimental.”

  “I try— we try— to be sensible. To recognize reality.” She paused. “We have our feelings, of course. Our sentiments. But we know the world does not bend itself to suit mere wishes.”

  Tamiko shook her head once more. “That’s not very human.”

  “It’s as human as the Gypsies.”

  “They were monsters, not…” She stopped. She told herself that calling Sunglow a monster was no way to gain her cooperation. And, she knew, the coon was not a monster. Really, she was human enough despite her fur and the shape of her head and her race’s origins in a genetic engineer’s test tube. They shared a common worry, their males, their mates.

  She tried to change the subject. “The General thinks we’re too friendly.”

  Sunglow did not answer.

  “He wants me to use the electrodes.”

  Silence.

  “He said that if you cooperate, you’ll be well treated when we get home. No cage, but an apartment. Bigger than this one. Though I’ll be there, too.”

  “You can be her keeper.” He had laughed when he said that.

  Still silence, though the coon had turned and now faced away, her shoulders shaking.

  Her voice emerged, a quiet, wordless keen.

  Tamiko said nothing more, though she asked herself why she bothered. She knew the answer, of course. It was obvious. They had been two couples. They had known each other briefly, even liked each other, and then…

  Of course, the coon had not discarded her mate and then discovered that his replacement was no better.

  “You can’t kill us all,” Sunglow said at last.

  “We don’t want to.”

  “Some of them escaped, you know.”

  She was looking at the lifeless veedo screen. “Not really,” said Tamiko. Did the coon think they were blind? “Underground garages or warehouses. We dropped a few bombs down the holes. They were trapped. Now they’re dead.”

  Sunglow turned back to face the human woman, but she said nothing more for fear of what she might reveal. Instead her eyes, hot and heavy, noted the lack of weapon, the flat outline of a cardkey in the pocket on the woman’s thigh, and then she looked away once more.

  “I’d like to get him back before we leave,” said Tamiko. “We’re almost done, you know.”

  “Then tell them that.” Sunglow did not think Tamiko had noticed what had drawn her attention. She shifted her gaze to the door behind her visitor, to the sliding doors of empty cupboards, to the blank screen, everywhere but that pocket and its contents. “Tell them that you have finally destroyed everything that’s worth destroying. Tell them the libraries and books and plaques are gone. The universities and factories. Everything, and now we must rebuild it all.”

  “But now what you build will be all yours. Pure native coon, uncontaminated by the Gypsies.”

  “Tell them that too. And then, even then, if they— if we— really believe it will make you go away and not come back, we will give him back.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The tunnels that had led them to safety beneath the ruins of Worldtree City were now choked with rubble. The warplanes overhead had dropped bombs and fired missiles. Dark tunnel maws had vomited flame and smoke and roared with pain. Ceilings had collapsed. Shock waves had rumbled through the deeper caverns. Dust had ridden a gust of wind and sifted from the walls.

  And the warplanes had gone, their human pilots surely grinning in their satisfaction at a job well done. They could not have known how deep the tunnels led, how extensive the network of caverns beneath the surface, how numerous the refugee Racs who waited for a time when they could emerge to reclaim their world and not just by ones and twos at night to bury their dead.

  The remnant stink of high explosives drifted even here, where the roadway widened to form a parking area. The tiles that covered the walls were missing in spots, broken loose by the shaking of the rock. Window glass sparkled on the pavement. Doorways and window openings were crowded with refugees despite signs that said they had once belonged to food shops and bookstores.

  The chamber’s bright lights seemed to pool near the edge of the roadway like the spotlights of a theater stage. The eyes of every watcher were drawn inexorably to the two surviving APVs, gouged and dented and torn, their metal gleaming where cannon shells and shrapnel had stripped away their drab paint. Their crates of guns and ammunition had already been removed, delivered to the Racs who would use them. The ground-to-air missiles were laid out on the pavement beside them in three rows of half a dozen each, all that had survived the journey to the cavern.

  The dust stirred up by the humans’ futile attack had mixed with the storm water that still clung to the vehicles. The resulting mud had had time to dry. Now Dotson Barbtail stood beside the APV he had driven so desperately. One hand brushed at a clot of dirt in front of the windshield, over and over, even after the dirt had crumbled to dust again and fallen to the pavement below. One foot was awash in a puddle of engine oil or coolant, but he barely noticed that either. He was exhausted. He craved a quiet corner in which to fall asleep. He wanted to see Gypsy Blossom and hear her latest discoveries. He ached to get Sunglow out of the human clutch.

  Lined up on the other side of the ranks of missiles were nine small trucks of the sort Racs who spent their days behind desks had once used to pretend they were country folk. Their paint jobs were bright and flashy, their transmissions provided power to all f
our wheels, and their tires had treads more suitable for mountainsides than paved roads. In case of accidents, they had roll bars. Each truck bed was large enough to hold two missiles.

  Edge-of-Tears rounded the front of the APV and cocked his head. “Go to bed,” he said.

  “I’d never wake up,” Dotson mumbled.

  “You’ll pass out. You’ll miss the excitement for sure then.” He pointed at the nearest truck. “The seat’s soft enough. And the driver’ll have to push you out of the way.”

  Dotson knew the soldier was right. He was swaying on his feet. “I am a driver.”

  “Not in that condition.”

  “Where are the rest of them?”

  “The drivers? In bed. We can’t do a thing till dark. You know that.”

  “They’ll still see us.”

  “By then it’ll be too late.”

  “Dotson?”

  He grunted. He tried to avoid the hand that tugged at his shoulder by rolling over, but something stopped him. It pressed against his muzzle, rough fabric, stiff but yielding, curved.

  He opened his eyes. Stripes. Blue and mauve stripes. Above him a low roof and a tiny light.

  His bed lurched and rocked. Something made a metallic bang.

  “We need the truck, Dotson.”

  The truck. Memory returned. He let himself fall flat on his back, and there was a face framed in the open door of the cab. A human face but topped with petals instead of hair. “Gypsy Blossom. Did you see… ?”

  “Yes. I saw you wave. They’re safe. So far. And we’re ready to go.”

  He pushed himself into a sitting position. He peered groggily through the windshield. The walls were lined with refugees, many more than had been leaning out of the shop doors and windows that morning. The APVs were gone. The trucks in front of him each held a pair of missiles, their noses pointing over the downfolded tailgates. Technicians labored over them, making last-minute adjustments, readying them for the task ahead. To one side was a single pipework rack, slanting nearly horizontal instead of vertical, a launch-stand for a missile.