by Diann Read
Three
The soldier shifted his weapon to one arm, a posture that looked no less threatening, and his free hand moved to an object at his waist. Light shot across the bowl.
Tristan winced, expecting a shock, but none came. The light ate concealing shadows, slid into corners like water—found him, then Pulou, by the ship’s ramp. He squinted at its brilliance, showing his teeth.
Without lowering his weapon, the man spoke rapidly into the palm of his hand. His light never wavered from Tristan’s face.
In moments three more legionnaires, dark shapes on dark beyond the blinding light, entered the bowl at a run. They spread out, invisible but for the noise of their boots, to close from both sides.
Tristan had seen jous hunt: surrounding a lone peimu, worrying at it, springing clear of striking forefeet and horned head while one attacked unguarded flanks and disemboweled it on its feet. The legionnaires seemed to be using the same tactic. Glancing from one side to the other to keep them in sight, he began edging clear of the ship, backing toward the wall; he saw Pulou at his periphery doing the same. He dropped his game bag, took his knife from his belt and gripped it in his teeth.
“Back to me, back to me!” said Pulou. He’d begun to hyperventilate with the onset of tsaa’chi and his mane stood on end. Tristan sidled closer, taking an attack stance, teeth clenched and hands flexed.
Lights closed on them from three directions, mesmerizing, blinding. Pulou grimaced at it, plainly in pain, and when one lamp thrust too close to his face he lashed out. The light spun away in a spray of red and its bearer sank back with a yell, clutching one hand with the other. The rest hesitated.
In that half moment, Tristan lunged. He seized the nearest soldier in a bearhug, throwing his whole weight forward. The man staggered, losing weapon and lamp. The beam cut a crazy arc across the blackness, struck and rolled between the combatants’ feet. Pinning his opponent with one arm, Tristan reached for his knife with the other, twisting its point to the man’s throatpiece.
The soldier got his left hand free. He caught Tristan’s wrist and pushed it up and back, hard, behind his head. Pain lanced through Tristan’s wrist and shoulder blade, but he didn’t lose his knife. He felt the man’s heavy breaths in his face, felt a twinge in his shoulder at an increase of pressure. “Drop it, cat boy!” he heard close to his ear. Tristan hissed through his teeth, tried to duck out of the hold. The grip only tightened, abruptly forcing his arm down and backward, behind his neck. He gasped, and the knife fell from his fingers.
The man wrenched him around, gripping both his arms, and someone shoved a light at his face. “This ain’t no cat boy,” he heard. “Look at his eyes and skin—his stripes are rubbing off! What’s going on here, kid?”
Heart racing, still panting, Tristan turned his face away from the heat of the light. A gloved hand smacked his jaw. He snapped his head up, teeth locked.
“I said, what do you think you’re doing, kid?” the soldier with the lamp demanded.
Tristan only swallowed. He slid a glance sideways, looking for Pulou, and the hand struck his face again.
“Somebody get over here!”
The voice came from a few yards off to Tristan’s right. His captor jerked him around, and the lampbearer turned his light on the spot.
The man who’d been hit first, bloody hand pressed between his other arm and his side, stood over two shapes stretched motionless on the ground, one armored, one not. He held his weapon clumsily, like a club, in his uninjured hand and shouted, “Get some links on him before he comes around, will you? I had to hit him four times to drop him. He almost tore out Kreg’s throat first!”
“Pulou!” Tristan’s heart contracted. He lunged against the restraining hands as the legionnaires crouched over the gan, but his captor wrenched his arm up behind his back. He went to his knees, breath catching with pain, and a large hand shoved his face onto launch-kilned tarmac.
“Hey, Scully, hurry it up! This one isn’t unconscious!” his captor called.
The lampbearer came back to crouch at Tristan’s shoulder. Metallic rings glinted in his hand. He seized Tristan’s pinioned wrist and crossed it over the other, clamping cold bands around both. He had no opportunity to resist. One man hauled Tristan to his feet. Steadying himself, he twisted to look around for Pulou.
The gan came to gradually. Using only feet and legs, he shoved himself onto his side, and Tristan saw the heaving motion of his ribs. He didn’t sit up, just lay in a tight huddle.
“How’s Kreg?” asked Tristan’s captor from behind him.
“Dead.” The other legionnaire glanced over his shoulder at the shape sprawled beyond Pulou. Crimson that appeared black in the moonlight splashed the figure’s breastplate.
Tristan had seen the aftermath of tsaa’chi before. He turned his face away.
He counted more legionnaires now, almost two hands of them, covering and carrying away the dead man, flashing their lights all around, picking up flint knives and game bag and human weapons lost in the fight, staring at Tristan. He glared back from beneath disheveled hair, baring his teeth at them, and most of them laughed.
He watched two of them drag Pulou up by his arms and saw how the gan swayed, still dizzy, but they pushed him with the ends of their long weapons to make him walk. He seemed lost until Tristan called his name, then he raised his head and came, unsteadily. His nose had been bloodied.
The legionnaires prodded them from the spacecraft nest and across the loading yard to one of the long buildings. Tristan stopped at its threshold, staring into the square cavern beyond, but someone pushed him forward. He glowered at the armored man, and tried to steady Pulou when he stumbled.
Three soldiers marched them along the passage to a boxy space at its end, where one man touched a panel of small lights on its wall. Another wall slid across the way out, and the ground dropped beneath their feet. Tristan’s stomach dropped, too. When he glanced around, startled, he saw the soldiers watching him and grinning.
The fall stopped abruptly, and Pulou almost buckled against him. The box opened. Tristan shrugged away from the legionnaire’s prod, but the tunnel he faced seemed darker and colder than the one the door had closed on. He felt a cave’s dankness on his skin, smelled it on the air. Confused and abruptly frightened, he planted his feet.
Somebody caught him by the shoulder and shoved him forward, out of the box and up to a wall, face first. He tried to twist away, hissing through his teeth, but the hand between his shoulder blades pressed hard enough to take his breath in a gasp. Hands probed around his waist, ran down one leg and then the other. He shifted his feet, trying to escape them. They grabbed the canteen still dangling over his shoulder, cut its strap, and took it away.
The pressure between his shoulder blades let up only so the soldier could shove him into another box, larger than the moving one and built of stones. They thrust Pulou in, too, hard enough that he fell into Tristan. Unable to catch himself, the gan sank to his knees, grimacing, and slumped forward on the floor.
Tristan dropped down beside him. “Pulou!” He struggled to loosen wrists locked at his back, but the rings bit into his skin.
He jumped, his head jerking up, when the legionnaires slammed a heavy door across the way out. He swallowed as its echoes rang between stone walls.
* *
Brigadier General Jules François scowled at the bundle on his desk and glanced at his console screen for an explanation. A brief message glowed back at him.
FROM DEPARTMENT OF SECURITY AND INVESTIGATION
2234L HOURS, 5/8/3307 SY
THE FOLLOWING REPORT WAS FORWARDED BY COL LANSILL, OIC DS&I, RE: INTRUDERS APPREHENDED IN LAUNCH BAY 12. POSSIBLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE; SAFEGUARD PENDING CLASSIFICATION. SEE CONFISCATED POSSESSIONS.
François secured the office door before he sank into the molded chair behind his desk. He entered his access code to call the report onto his screen and deliberately left the voice synthesizer turned off.
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The military policeman’s report contained only the circumstances of the apprehension, listed two casualties, and gave physical descriptions of the intruders. The MP’s commander, Colonel Lansill, had safeguarded the report.
François caught the skin bag with a sweep of his hand and upended it over his desk. He had no idea what to expect—certainly not the handgun that clunked onto the desktop. Leaning forward in his chair, he poked among strips of dried meat, a handful of nuts in wrinkled shells, a pair of ID tags on a chain.
He took up the weapon to turn it in his hands, weighing and balancing it. Some type of energy pistol, probably about twenty-five standard years old. Not of Dominion make, and the Issel Sector hadn’t produced its own arms then. He scratched at a raised place on the grip, and crusted grime chipped away to reveal part of a crest: an oval enclosing an eagle’s head with a planet caught in its beak. “Unified Worlds,” he muttered.
Setting down the sidearm, he gathered up the chain, activated the desk’s illuminant with a motion, and held one tag to its light.
His fingers tightened on it as his casual gaze turned to intense examination. He punched the intercom to his exec’s office, and when the major replied he said, “I want to see Colonel Lansill from the DS&I in here ASAP.”
Returning to his console, he called up the stills retrieved from the guardhouse vid monitor for inclusion with the report.
The first two showed the native curled on his side in the middle of the cell floor, grid-marked with his own stripes and the sunlight that breached the small window. He lay with eyes closed and mouth open. The third image showed the youth stretching up to the window bars, his wrists still crossed in restraints at his back.
François flicked through the frames until he found one that focused on the boy’s face.
The youth had sandy blond hair, long enough to brush his shoulders, and his skin showed a healthy tan under the smears of dust across his face and torso. François noted blue eyes and a cleft in the chin. He dredged his memory.
Boot heels clicked at the doorway; the colonel said, “Lansill reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Come in. Have a seat.” François motioned at a chair and leaned back in his own. “Your soldier’s report neglected to state how the prisoners entered the base compound and what their intentions were. Didn’t your people interrogate them?”
Lansill said, “No, sir. Neither speaks Standard. But I doubt that’s your foremost concern.”
“You’re right; it isn’t. Does your man know that you forwarded his report to me?”
“No, sir.”
“Leave it that way.” François’ glance dropped briefly to the sidearm on his desk and he reached for his intercom again. “Major, contact the anthropology unit and get an expert on indigenous races over here. And while we wait, load the colonial history files and send me any references to contacts with the Unified Worlds during the last twenty-five standard years.”
To the colonel he said, “If the kid doesn’t speak our language, we’ll find somebody who speaks his.”
* *
Tristan had spent the rest of the night crouched beside Pulou; the restraints didn’t allow him to do much else. As darkness gave way to gray he had tried to curl up for warmth, but the restraints made it awkward and uncomfortable.
Pulou slept now, uneasily, but Tristan couldn’t. Anxious, he stretched up to the ground-level sill again to watch disciplined squads of boots tramp the gravel, sneezed at the dust they raised, and squinted at the sunlight beyond them.
A grating shriek tore his attention to the door. He jerked around, swallowing hard. On the floor, Pulou stirred and opened one eye.
The barrier scraped open. Legionnaires paced outside, shiny shapes in the dimness, but the man who entered wore no plating. He dropped to a squat, rested forearms on knees with his hands hanging down, and said, “Peace in you.”
Tristan stared, embarrassed at being approached with a greeting given only to mothers, and startled at hearing a human speaking gan at all. He moved away from the window to place himself protectively between the human and Pulou. “You are who?” he demanded.
“I am Nuan to ganan,” the man said, and paused. “I ask you questions.”
Tristan said nothing, just studied him through narrowed eyes—a message in itself if this intruder knew ganan. A message of distrust, of warning.
“One man is dead,” said the human. “Another is hurt.”
“They attack us,” Tristan said. “Tsaa’chi comes.”
“Why do you come here?” the man asked. “Why are you in—” he resorted to Standard, “—launch bay?”"
“Jwa’lai,”" Tristan said, and turned his back.
He heard a long pause, and the man rising with a grunt and crossing to the barrier, and voices outside, and the noise of the barrier closing. He kept his back turned to it.
“It’s what, little brother?” Pulou asked from near his knee.
“Flat-tooth. He asks questions.” Tristan glanced down at him. “Your head is better?”
Pulou tried to lift it and winced. “Hurts to move.”
“Sleep more.” Tristan settled himself on the floor, awkward with his arms bound. “I sleep, too.”
He felt too scared to sleep. He still lay wide awake, every muscle in his body taut, when the barrier scraped open once more. He twisted just enough to glance over his shoulder—and struggled to sit up, to free one hand to touch his brow. The best he could do was duck his head.
The woman who entered the stone room appeared to be about the age and build of his own mother, but with hair the color of fire. She didn’t crouch down, but Tristan didn’t expect her to. He whispered, “Peace in you, mother.”
Her smile held no cruelty, but it held no warmth, either. She said, “I am Marna. You are who?”
He eyed her. “Tristan,” he said, and ducked his head. “Why, mother?”
“Flat-tooth name,” she said, “not gan. Why are you with him?” She pointed at Pulou with her fingers straight, threatening.
Tristan tensed his bound hands at his back. “He’s my brother. We hunt together.”
“You come from where?”
“Out there.” Tristan indicated the general direction with a motion of his head.
“Why?”
“Jwa’lai,” Tristan said, watching her.
She nodded, and her smile warmed at last. “You live with ganan for long time?”
“When I am very little,” Tristan said.
“Other flat-teeth are there?”
It seemed a harmless query but something about it made Tristan uneasy. He cocked his head. “Flat-teeth, mother?”
“Yes. Like me, like you. Humans. Think when you go to live with ganan. Other flat-teeth go with you?”
Tristan hesitated. “I’m little then,” he said.
He hadn’t answered her question and he saw her recognition of it. But she asked, “You come here for jwa’lai? Why?”
He hesitated again; his mouth had gone dry. “I hunt for—my father.”
Her eyebrows lifted. He studied her, fidgeting with an increasing discomfort.
“He’s in this—camp?” she asked.
“No, mother.”
“He’s where?”
“I don’t know,” Tristan said. He hunched lower, still watching her face. “Why do you ask me, mother?”
She paused this time, and then said, “We try to help you.”
He cocked his head, questioning that.
“You’re hungry?” she asked. “You and—your brother?” She pointed at Pulou again with her straight fingers.
“Yes,” said Tristan.
She reached out then, slowly, and touched his forehead with her fingertips—not the backs of her fingers that kept her claws curled toward herself—and he braced himself and bore it. She might be the jwa’nan here; he wouldn’t risk her tsaa’chi.
“I tell them to bring you food,” she said, and the le
gionnaires opened the barrier and let her out.
* *
“Well, Doctor.” François indicated a chair facing his desk and waited until the woman seated herself. Then he asked, “How do your interrogation methods differ from those of your colleague?”
“Ganan are matriarchal, sir,” she said. “Your prisoners would have talked to any female older than themselves.”
“Humph.” The general shifted forward in his chair. “What were you able to learn?”
“It’s rather difficult to take someone’s history in a language which has no past or future tenses,” the woman said, “but the boy claims to have come here out of jwa’lai—‘duty to mother’ in the gan language.”
“What’s that?” the general asked. “Some sort of native idolatry?”
She smiled. “You might call it that.”
François raised an eyebrow.
“One’s mother,” said the anthropologist, “is his personal incarnation of Yung Jwei, the life-giving deity. Because of that, a request from or promise made to her takes higher precedence than life itself. One even approaches his mother—all mature females, in fact—with a gesture—” she touched her brow, “—symbolic of putting his head—his life—into her hands. That’s jwa’lai.”
“Interesting.” François leaned back in his chair. “So what’s the story on the native that came with him?”
“The boy referred to him as his brother and said that they hunt together,” the doctor said.
“His brother?” said François.
She gave a single nod. “Male ganan practically live in pairs,” she explained. “It takes two individuals to carry the large game they hunt for food and shelter, and it provides mutual protection against natural threats. After one’s mother, a male gan’s strongest allegiance is to his hunting partner, who usually is a brother.” She hesitated. “It’s not all that different from the cohesion you’d want among your troops in battle, sir.”
“Hmm.” François stroked his chin, considering that, and nodded.
“But I’ve never heard of a human-gan bonding of this type before,” the anthropologist continued. “It suggests that the boy is deeply assimilated into the gan culture. This is definitely worthy of further study.”