The gun burped again.
She caught herself against the door frame. She looked at her latest victim carefully. Yes, he was dead. He could not possibly be alive, not with that much blood, not with his abdomen so ripped that the residue of his last meal was mingling with the blood, not…
She almost vomited.
She told herself, “Don’t linger. Someone else will come around a corner, and you may not be so lucky. Or the gun’s magazine will go dry.”
She turned and ran. She fended off a wall with one shoulder, wincing when the blow shook the healing bone within her cast. She shouldered another wall, zigged down the corridor, paused at open doors and intersections to be sure no one would see her before she was ready.
She killed twice more before she heard two voices beyond a door that was not quite closed. She stopped to listen:
“It’ll take a little while, sir.”
“Why?” This voice bore the crackle of electronic transmission, but it was clear enough to tell her the speaker was older and used to giving orders. “They’re racked right there in the missile bay.”
“They were, sir. When we didn’t know what we faced.”
A third voice butted in: “Standing orders, General. Safety procedures. As soon as it looked like we wouldn’t need them, we safed them again. Put them back in storage.”
The ensuing silence was broken only when the older, commanding voice said slowly, “I must have approved that.”
No one answered.
“How long?”
“An hour before we can launch the first ones.”
Sunglow did not wait to hear any more. It was enough to know she had an hour. At most an hour. Certainly not two, and maybe less, and then the humans would do exactly what Tamiko had promised just before she died.
She hoped that was time enough.
She ran again, searching, searching, through corridors that all looked much the same. Was this the one through which they had led her when they brought her here? Was that the corner they had turned? Yes!
This guard too died without a cry. Her first cardkey failed to work. The second was successful.
A heartbeat later, her fellow prisoners were free.
Surprise had worked in their favor. So had contempt, for the humans had despite the evidence of a civilized world below their ship seen them as little more than fuzzy animals, quite safe to have around as long as they were caged.
General Lyapunov himself had wasted one precious second gawping when Sunglow and three other armed Racs appeared on the bridge. Then the ship boomed and shook and an entire panel of indicator lights turned red and began to flash.
Sunglow herself shot the General.
The other humans winced and looked resigned to what they knew was about to happen to them all. Tears flowed from one young man’s eyes.
Two burly Racs began to growl and snarl. Sunglow knew they were approving what she had done and savoring the turning of the tables. For a moment she was aware that they had tails and she did not, and she almost growled herself.
“What was that noise? What are all those lights? Are we going to blow up?”
The man who was weeping raised one hand, twitched convulsively when a Rac glared and pushed a gun forward, and pointed toward the viewport.
“Jesus!” cried a human woman.
Sunglow recognized the shape that drifted across the view, dwindling rapidly as it grew farther and farther from the ship. She stepped to the side of the port, and there was another, barely visible to the side.
“You weren’t fast enough.” The woman’s tone was jeering now. “We jettisoned the tanks, and now you’re not…”
A gun burped.
Sunglow gestured. “Let’s go.”
“It won’t do you any good. You don’t know how to work the ship, and there’s no more reaction mass. You’re not going anywhere. You can’t even land.”
“That doesn’t matter.” One raised hand forestalled another shooting. “You aren’t either.”
It was another day before Sunglow could settle herself in one of the bridge’s seats and stare at the controls of what had to be a long-distance communicator. There was a screen and a speaker grille, a slide labeled “Volume” in the very same language the Racs had inherited from the Gypsies, several tiny windows that displayed numbers when she turned knobs and pressed buttons, a digital time display.
The Rac behind her pointed at the time. “A few more minutes. He’ll be there. We told them you’d be waiting.”
She glanced over his shoulder. His name was Crumbcake, and the skin of his abdomen was loose from the weight he had lost in captivity. “Did it take long to figure this out?”
Crumbcake shrugged. “Not really. A com’s a com.” He hesitated before adding, “It’s a shame, you know. We think so much alike. They could use our planes. We can use their…”
“We were made that way,” she said abruptly.
“Yeah,” he said a second later. “The hardest part was finding a frequency they were listening on.” He paused. “Are we going to keep them long?”
“As long as the food holds out.”
“It’d last longer if…”
“Not long enough. It’ll be years before…”
A light flickered on the panel before her. A familiar voice issued from the speaker grille: “Sunglow?”
“Dotson!” His image was forming on the screen. Behind him stood Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. Both males looked tired, but where Dotson seemed to glow through his fatigue, the human sagged with exhaustion. Gypsy Blossom watched from the side.
The delay before Dotson answered was noticeable. The Ajax was, after all, in synchronous orbit, high enough above the planet for light to need nearly a third of a second for the round trip.
“They told me you were okay.”
But where his voice rumbled with pleasure and relief, hers did not. It could not. It could only whine with tension and anxiety and a fear that should have disappeared with the Rac victory. The flatness of her words was a startling contrast: “But I can’t come home. Not even in a crash landing. We don’t have any fuel.”
“Ah.” Gypsy Blossom set a gentle hand on Dotson’s shoulder.
His face twisted. He reached toward the camera that sent his picture to the distant Ajax and the female who should have become his mate. His rumble disappeared. “I’ll miss you.”
Hrecker leaned forward, stroked the side of his nose with a finger in a passable imitation of the Rac greeting gesture, and broke in behind his words: “They’ll build monuments to you, Sunglow. If you hadn’t freed yourself and captured the ship…”
“I’d rather she could come home,” said Dotson.
“The humans can’t do that either,” said his mate. “That’s more important. But what will they do on Earth when these ships never return?”
Hrecker sighed and shook his head. “They’ll build another fleet. A bigger one, better armed. But it will be a while. They’ll have to give up on waiting for this fleet to return. Then they’ll talk and plan for months, perhaps even a year. Maybe they’ll concentrate on building defenses against a horde of ravening coons.” He gave Dotson a brief, sidelong glance. “Or Racs. And when that doesn’t come, they’ll send the second fleet. It may be years. It may be only months.”
“You have to act as if you have time enough,” said Gypsy Blossom. “Soon you’ll have the other bots. The records in the honeysuckle. You can do it, rebuild, get back into space.”
“We’ll be waiting,” said Sunglow. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Crumbcake nodding. “It’s just another Worldtree to climb. And then you’ll have this ship. That will help.”
Dotson was nodding, but Hrecker looked even more depressed. “You have plenty of supplies, but…”
“Too many mouths to feed,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“We’ll take care of that,” said Sunglow. When Hrecker’s mouth twisted with the pain of what he thought she meant, she added, “We don’t know just how yet. We have to tal
k about it.”
“A ship of ghosts,” said Hrecker. “That’s all that will be left.” He sounded and looked as if the words pained him terribly. “Where’s Tamiko? Is she… ?”
Sunglow turned away from the com as if she could not bear to meet his eyes even in an image. Her shoulders heaved as she took a deep breath. When she turned back again, her face was frozen stiff. “I had to…”
Hrecker did not force her to finish the sentence. When she stopped, he said, “I see.”
There was silence then, broken only when Sunglow finally said, “Where are you? That looks like…”
Dotson nodded. “We wrecked the drives, but not everything. One of the ships just needed power to work…” He gestured as if at the equipment surrounding the screen that held his image. The Racs no longer had facilities of their own that were capable of communicating with an orbiting starship. But they did still have receivers, and it was one of those that had detected the ex-prisoners’ attempts at contact. “When someone noticed you were calling, we ran a cable.”
CHAPTER 28
“I feel like a specimen in a zoo,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. “Or a pet.”
“You’re not in a cage.”
“No, but…” Hrecker glanced toward the pair of Racs who stood, their arms crossed, near the base of what remained of the Saladin. They followed him everywhere. “I’m the only one left.”
“You’re alive,” said Gypsy Blossom. And the others weren’t. Not one of the humans who had been on First-Stop that night remained. If any who had ever landed on First-Stop were still alive, it was only because they had returned to the Ajax. Some had died there. Some survived, at least for a while.
“There’s that,” Hrecker agreed. Not far away he could see the cage that had held Sunglow and other prisoners for a short while, before they had been lifted into orbit, to the Ajax and its own doom. He remembered the smaller cages that had held single prisoners, specimens indeed, destined for Earthly zoos. He paused before adding, “I’m glad we failed.”
“Did you?” Dotson swept a hand to indicate the devastation that surrounded them. “It will take us decades to rebuild, to reconstruct the records and libraries you destroyed, to remember the plaques.”
“But you will. You know what I mean.”
Not one of the other Racs nearby had any response to that, though they did look where he looked, at the Saladin and the scarred, dented, punctured reaction mass tanks from which still trickled dust from the asteroids of Earth’s distant Solar System, at the cones of dust upon the ground, at the jagged edges that marked where the missiles had torn through the sides of the ship and destroyed the drive.
As near as Dotson Barbtail could tell, the bare ground on which they stood was where he had once trembled in a bank of honeysuckle while a pedestrian strolled along a gravel path. Now the honeysuckle was gone from this spot, scorched into ash and soot although it grew more vigorously than ever, unpruned, untended, not far away. The path was still visible.
The Great Hall that had been his target was gone. Nothing remained but a broken stone curtain that had been a wall, a stretch of floor, piles of rubble.
The Worldtree that had been the center of his life, his world, and all his people still stood. But it was shorter. Its top, the chamber the Gypsies had stocked with carefully engraved summaries of their sacred knowledge and in which the Racs had entombed their heroes, was gone. In its place was only jagged stone.
Finally, he said, “Why did you even try?” His voice was much more a snarl than it had been for weeks.
“Some of us were just following orders,” said Hrecker. “Taking the path of least resistance. I was. But that’s not what you want to know.”
“Who gave the orders?” Senior Hightail’s voice cracked, interrupting the gruff sounds of relief with a note of rage.
“No one,” said Gypsy Blossom. “The hierarchy. The government. The ideology. The sheer momentum of history. Thank goodness they could not destroy it all. Not even if they crushed every plaque and burned every paper copy and every book that used what the Gypsies taught you.”
Dotson nodded. “We can write it down again, can’t we? They didn’t kill us all. Enough of us remain. Surely we remember what we have learned. And then there is the honeysuckle.”
“Yes, there’s that,” said the bot. “I can read that information. And so will all those other bots as soon as they leave their beds. But there’s something even more valuable that you still have.”
Dotson said nothing, but when he looked at Edge-of-Tears and Senior Hightail and the other Racs nearby, he knew that he was not the only one who failed to understand.
“It’s a way of thinking,” said Gypsy Blossom. “Knowledge as a sacred goal. That’s something the Engineers could take away from you only by exterminating all your kind.”
There was silence. Of course, the bot was right. The Gypsies, the Remakers, had given all Rackind the pursuit of knowledge as a holy mission. And yes, if every library lay in ruins, every ceramic plaque in shards, every paper book in ashes, that would be enough to restore everything the humans had laid waste. And then to advance beyond that level, into space, even to wherever their gods had gone.
“What do you think they’ll do?”
No one thought Dotson meant the humans. He was staring too intently at the sky now, toward that spot where the Ajax would be a spark at night, where Sunglow and the other one-time prisoners of the humans debated the answer to just that question.
A long moment later, Edge-of-Tears said, “It will be years before we can get up there. There is just too much to rebuild. And they cannot last that long.”
“Too many to feed,” someone said.
“They should kill the humans,” said another. “They’re outnumbered. If they don’t, there’ll be a battle, a rebellion. They’ll all die, or the humans will escape and take their ship home and bring more humans back before we can possibly be ready for them.”
“But they need the humans,” said Senior Hightail. “They can’t maintain that ship without them. They simply don’t know how.”
“Then sabotage.”
“Could they survive long enough if they could run the ship?”
Edge-of-Tears shook his head. “Not without a miracle. If we could rebuild the engines of one of these…” He indicated the nearby Saladin. “But we mangled them all far too well.”
“I wish I could help,” said Hrecker. When someone snorted, he added, “That was my field, designing drives.”
“Then you can fix these?” The voice was eager.
He shook his head and pointed at the wreckage. “I wish I could, but… Once you get your industries working again, I can show you how to build a drive. Until then…” He shook his head again.
“And there’s one waiting for us right up there.” Edge-of-Tears pointed at the sky. “Intact.”
“It’ll still be there.”
“Waiting,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“There’s no hope,” said Dotson. “It’ll take years. I’ll never see her again.”
“Probably not,” said the bot.
He craned his neck to see the Saladin’s bulging top, which concealed its bridge and the com that was their only contact with the Ajax. “I wish she’d call again.”
“There’s a lot to say, isn’t there?” said Hrecker. “I never had the chance.”
The ensuing silence lasted until Dotson said, “How long? A year? Or ten years?” His tone said he knew the answer.
“Maybe twenty,” said Senior Hightail. “In which case I won’t see it. But you will. And then what? You’ll refurbish the ship and take off, but where? Will you go looking for the Gypsies?”
“I think,” said Gypsy Blossom. “That’s what they themselves hoped you would do someday.”
Dotson made a chuffing sound with his breath and turned around. “I’m going to call her.”
But no matter how many times he tried, no one answered the Ajax’s com until the first Rac Q-ship boosted into orbit
eight years later.
Dotson was not on that ship, but he was at the spaceport control center, waiting for the com to come alive once more, at last, and tell him what he had expected for so long that the pain of confirmation seemed no worse than the pain that still lingered in the hip of his injured leg.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was not with him. The human had helped the Racs build their Q-drive, and then he had retreated, isolating himself in a small house on the outskirts of the rebuilt Worldtree City. Dotson thought he must have found it difficult to face the inevitable antipathies of the many Racs who had lost everything they owned at human hands, but he never complained. Perhaps he thought he deserved whatever glares and taunts came his way. Perhaps he wished for a murderer or a lynch mob that would join him with his fellow Engineers. He never said.
Gypsy Blossom was supervising the education of the third generation of bots. Like their parents, many would be intermediaries between the Racs and the data stores held by the honeysuckle. Many more would, like the Racs, be builders and discoverers.
A bank of screens showed the Ajax’s exterior. Enlarged in one, the ship’s lock stood open as it had on the Rac ship’s first approach. Another showed the ship’s bridge, a withered body strapped into the captain’s seat, its blonde pelt identifying it unmistakably as Sunglow. The controls before her included an override on the ship’s main entrance.
The Ajax held no air, no living thing. Its storerooms still held all they needed for a one-way voyage to Earth. All but two of its dust tanks, still holding much of the reaction mass for that same trip, orbited not far away. Nuclear-tipped missiles lay ready for launch in its bays. Human bodies filled two locked rooms.
Other Racs lay where they had fallen when the airlock opened.
THE END
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. (http://www.alexlit.com/)
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CHAPTER 1
Seeds of Destiny Page 28