Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  “No. Humans don’t know what the other guy doesn’t know, like you do. Ask a question, get an answer. That’s how we roll. If you’d asked, I would have told you I had a plan.”

  “What? Ask at the front door for the Yavi to deliver Jazen like a gift?”

  “Wow. Sex usually makes humans less grumpy.”

  “Sarcasm remains new to me.”

  “No, you’re right. I never planned to go in the front door. And I never planned to dig my way in. But I think I can drop down the chimney.”

  “Through fire?”

  “It’s not fire. Waste stack upflow is mostly toxic gas, superheated steam, cinders, metallic sparks and flaming debris. Most points on the inner walls of those stacks, you could barely fry eggs.”

  “Oh. Piece of pie.”

  “Cake. Piece of cake. But you nailed the sarcasm.”

  The rumble of rain against the Scorpion’s skin diminished.

  “Mort, I gotta go before I lose the storm’s cover. When I get inside, you have a precise location waiting for me, okay?”

  His head sagged with fatigue and he paused.

  Kit believed that she had concealed from him the manner of her initial phrasing, which had been “If I get inside alive.” And he felt that, beneath her banter, she was as coldly terrified as any limping woog was when it heard him approach.

  “I will do my best.”

  “You sound tired. Go get a bite while I’m busy.”

  Humans often attempted a joke to ease stress in others.

  He thought, “Kit? If you cannot be good, be careful. Ha-ha.”

  He felt her inner terror turn for an instant, but not to amusement. It turned to sorrow. “Mort, assassins can’t usually choose to be either.”

  Then her thoughts became cold, precise and impenetrable, as his own did, and his mother’s had, when tracking dangerous prey in dangerous terrain.

  Through her eyes, he saw Yaven’s broad, bronze skin, only a paw’s reach away as the Scorpion crept up the pyramid’s flank. Slick with rain that coursed down its slope, the metal sparkled in bright white flashes less and less frequently as the storm weakened and the lightning strikes ebbed.

  Red glow flooded Kit’s vision as the Scorpion rose above the edge of one of the great stacks.

  The Scorpion’s nose jerked toward the clouds, struck by the gale roaring up from deep within the great nest. Caught and buffeted, the Scorpion tumbled as insubstantially as a leaf.

  Kit forced the Scorpion’s nose back down. The stack’s opposite wall was so distant that had the circular opening been a plain, a hundred woog could have grazed comfortably within its area. The wall’s texture was distorted by the shimmer of rising heat and interrupted by an inverted storm of sparks, translucent steam, and twisting, unidentifiable, flaming bits.

  The entire mass roared upward twice as fast as one of the humans’ wheeled shells traveled across level ground.

  Kit tipped the Scorpion so that it floated, like the melon seed it resembled, blunt end down, its belly nearly grazing the stack’s vertical inner wall.

  Then the shell that protected one of the two humans who Mort most valued began to crawl down into smoky darkness and flame.

  For a time that seemed interminable, the Scorpion crept deeper inside the great pyramid, as he heard in Kit’s ears the roar of the scorching maelstrom that buffeted her. He saw through her eyes fire and sparks that rushed up and past her.

  It suddenly seemed to Mort that the Scorpion was more fragile than an eggshell.

  “Kit, can the Scorpion protect you within that fire?”

  “Piece of pie, Mort. Outside air temperature’s two twenty, in here a cozy seventy-two. A Scorpion fuselage gets twice that hot just poking along in atmosphere at two thousand miles an hour. The headwind I’m bucking from the updraft is only one hundred ten.”

  “How far are you descending?”

  “The map that rude lady at Teufelsberg Station uploaded shows an emergency maintenance hatch at level Thirty Lower. It exits into an inspection-‘bot storage chamber, then out to a quiet neighborhood. I’ll park alongside the hatch, pop the canopy, lean out and paste a couple thermite strips on the latch. Burn my way in. By then you’ll have Jazen pinpointed for me, right?”

  Mort touched the lining of his mouth with the tip of his index foreclaw.

  Already, the membrane was stiff and dry. Next, his vision would deteriorate. Since his cousins all across his world had realized that he had undertaken this task, he had felt first their mild consternation, then bewilderment. The death of a cousin was inevitable, but an untimely death rare. However, he had mated successfully, so his life had served its purpose. His demise, if he chose a behavior that hastened it, would be merely sad. But the choice was his to make.

  “Right?”

  “Right. Kit, you will go out into the fire?”

  “This flight suit’s fireproof and insulated, and I’ve got a rebreather. I could work outside in that crap for ten minutes before I was toast.”

  He felt her rock forward as the Scorpion paused. “Level Thirty Lower. All passengers transfer here for hell. Thank you for flying Air Born.”

  As his mind touched human minds with increasing urgency and decreasing efficiency, he scraped the soil, recovered a few grubs, and smeared them inside his mouth. He tried to pound the soil in frustration, but could no longer curl his foreclaw into a fist.

  He could no longer save himself. Worse, he feared that, despite his sacrifice, he could not save his friends.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “Sonuvabitch!”

  The voice in his head startled Mort out of his weakness. The faint afternoon shadows before him had scarcely shifted since he had last communicated with Kit. “Kit?”

  “There’s no hatch at Thirty Lower! Or anywhere else down to Ninety-two Lower, ‘cause that’s where I am now. And that’s as low as the Scorpion can go. There are structural transverse braces across the stack at Ninety-three Lower that the ship can’t fit between.”

  “How can all that be?”

  “Spying’s an inexact science. Teufelsberg Station hacks into these maps from a half million miles away.”

  “The plan has failed?”

  “The plan is every battle’s first casualty, Mort.”

  Despite her confident words, he felt her anxiety and fear swell, then heard through bone conduction in her skull the sound of her grinding her teeth across one another. The sound now seemed amplified in the Scorpion’s confined space. The sound was replaced in Kit’s ears by metal jingling against metal, and he saw in her hands bundles of multicolored vines around which dangled irregular wire bits.

  “What are those?”

  “Rappel ropes. I can extend the ramp tow hook and anchor one of these to it. The Scorpion will hover here on auto indefinitely, solid as houses. Basically, I can make a controlled fall down this rope to Ninety-Six Lower. There’s a grating across the stack at that level that catches crap that fizzles and falls back down the stack. I’ll crawl through one of the grate’s clean-out ports, then I’ll be through clean and safe into the industrial levels. Simple backup plan.”

  “You said you would be toast in the stack if you were outside the Scorpion.”

  “I said I’d be toast in ten minutes. I can be out one of those ports in five, tops.”

  “Are you sure these clean-out ports exist? The hatch did not. And when you return, will you be able to ascend your rope in the same way that you descended?”

  Kit sighed again as she plucked at the multicolored vines. “I said it was a simple backup plan, not a complete one.”

  When she had finished with the vines she grunted, then manipulated a round, red stone that protruded from the Scorpion’s forward interior space until it chirped rhythmically, in time with a similar chirp from a tiny vine that she fastened round her foreclaw.

  “What is that sound?”

  “Countdown timer.”

  “So you will know when ten minutes have elapsed?”

  “I
won’t need a timer to know I’m toast. Howard almost handed one Scorpion to the Yavi already. He wouldn’t let this one get within a half million miles of Yavet without booby trapping it. If I’m not back here in three hours, this ship will burn itself to ashes. All the Yavi will have to analyze will be cinders. So when I get out the bottom of this stack, I’m gonna need a rock-solid location for Jazen and company. And I’m gonna need it fast. Deal?”

  Deal? He blinked to clear his head, because he could no longer shake it. Had he not made a deal with Kit before, to resolve a question that had troubled him greatly? She still owed him, and the matter seemed vital, but he was too weak to insist, and closed all his eyes as he said, “Deal.”

  Through Kit’s ears, he heard a hiss, then a great roar as the Scorpion opened like a shelled nut, and she climbed out into the blast and heat of the stack.

  Chee-chee-chee.

  He opened his left eye slightly without turning his head.

  Scroungers? A trio of the vile beasts scuttled toward him, bellies down and each propelled by six muscular legs. Smaller, black-furred, and stupid grotesques of his own race, they were the size of creatures Trueborn humans visualized as lions. But unlike lions, the scroungers’ mottled red-and-blue snouts were hairless, the better to poke into the carrion they scavenged to survive.

  If he had been healthy and undistracted, they would never have been able to approach so near undetected. More to the point, they would not have dared.

  The largest of the pack rose onto all six, trotted forward, sniffing.

  The scrounger’s bravado startled Mort. Did he really appear to them to be that near to death?

  Mort steeled himself against the revulsion he felt when the pack leader nudged Mort’s flank with his snout, and Mort stifled even his shallowed breathing.

  When the leader’s exploration yielded no response, his two minions capered forward, black eyes aglitter, chittering and careless.

  It was over in a violent instant.

  The leader lay sprawled beneath Mort’s left midlimb, his skull crushed by a single punch. The smallest still whimpered as it lay immobilized alongside the leader, licking obscenely at its own intestines, which had spilled from an underbelly ripped by a slash from the claws of Mort’s left rear leg. The third scrounger’s head rested within Mort’s mouth, severed cleanly by one bite.

  Mort dropped his jaw slightly, then used his tongue to position the head between his upper and lower right molars, bit, then felt the skull crackle deliciously as the sweet taste of brain flooded his mouth.

  He lay still a moment after swallowing, devoid of joy or remorse at the simple act of being what he was. He felt strength and mental energy begin to return even as he tidied the rest of his windfall meal into piles with his forelimbs.

  “Kit?” As his confidence swelled, he reached out to her mind.

  “Sonuvabitch!”

  It was the same expletive she had employed when she had discovered the nonexistence of the hatch, and his heart sank. “There are no clean-out ports?”

  He saw by the light of a tiny artificial beam, which humans affixed to their foreheads at the place where their third eye should have been, that Kit was struggling to move irregular slabs and branches piled around her that rose as high as the hinge joint of her rear limbs.

  “You’d think when somebody installs clean-out ports, they’d come and clean out once in a while.”

  Her breathing was labored, and her limb muscles burned with lactic acid. He saw her pause, straighten, then direct the beam at the small vine that encircled her forelimb.

  “How long do you have remaining?”

  “Two minutes. But I feel like toast already. Mort, I can see the goddam way out!” She growled, kicked a battered, cubiform object as large as her torso, and pain shot up from the tip of her hind limb. She screeched aloud, limped in circles on the heel of the injured claw, and again he heard the sound of her grinding her teeth.

  She said, “But I can’t budge this big hunk of Yavi junk. And now I broke my fucking toe.”

  Mort paused.

  To his knowledge, the injured appendage and coitus were unrelated, but now hardly seemed the moment to address his question.

  He thought, “When I need to move a rock to access food beneath, I prise it up with a tree trunk.”

  The tiny light jerked across jumbled debris that flapped in the scalding gale thundering up through the openings beneath Kit’s feet.

  “A lever? Mort, where in hell would I find a—oh.” Kit dug an elongate, tubular metal root from beneath rubble, wedged its tip beneath the object she had kicked, then shifted all her tiny body weight onto the root’s far end. “Ahhh!”

  The object atop the lever’s short end remained stationary.

  Kit stepped back, folded forward, foreclaws on her upper hind limbs and panted. “’S no use.”

  “Kit, reascend your vine and recover inside the Scorpion seed.”

  “Nope.”

  “You must! Or you will die there. And so perhaps will Jazen. If you will not try for yourself, try for Jazen.”

  “My suit’s sleeve patch is already in the yellow, Mort. I’d never finish the up rappel.” She gasped, then whispered aloud, “I’m cooked.”

  But despite her words, this time she stepped back four paces, sprang forward toward the root, then leapt up and twisted her body so her hindquarters landed on the root.

  The root bent beneath her weight, then snapped, so that Kit landed on her hindquarters amid the debris. But when her light swung back, the object had shifted, exposing a long passage tall enough for a human to crawl through.

  Kit yelped, then scrambled through the opening.

  Mort had picked the carcass of the first scrounger clean to the major bones by the time Kit had recovered sufficiently from her ordeal to direct a thought to him.

  He saw that she sat with her bare hind limbs sprawled ahead of her, visible by the beam of her forehead light. The cubic space in which she rested was vast, but dull gray, calm, and no longer scaldingly hot.

  As she thought, she pulled a replacement integument from the bag she had worn on her shoulders. It was the shade of tree bark, and she pulled it up over her hind limbs and torso. “Yavi civvies. Not my color, but now I blend.”

  “Your final effort was most impressive.”

  “It had nothing to do with the size of my ass.”

  “I said nothing. Kit, if you are prepared to continue, I am prepared to assist.”

  Kit stood, slipped one of the small stingers that humans carried into a pouch in the Yavi civvies that she now wore, then stepped to the closed hatch that separated the chamber from the rest of the Yaven hive. “How far do I have to go, Mort?”

  “Forward one half of the Gateway. Upward one fourth of the Gateway. Forward again one half.”

  “A mile and a quarter? Piece of pie.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  Kit touched one foreclaw to the chirping vine that wrapped the other, silenced it then tugged the civvie down so that the vine was concealed. “Two hours, twenty minutes and counting. Have you been able to contact Jazen, let him know I’m here?”

  “No. It is unlikely that I will. It is easier to maintain contact as I have with you than to reestablish it, even with Jazen.”

  “When I get to Jazen, where will he be?”

  “In a chamber much smaller than the one you occupy now. Some around him that I have touched think of it as a crummy hotel room. Others think it represents good value for money.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “Three humans share the space with him.”

  “Three?” She grasped the hatch latch with a foreclaw, then pulled the hatch toward herself, opening a slit perhaps as wide as the diameter of a human forelimb. Then she pressed her cheek against the hatch edge, in the way that a coot peered round a tree trunk to avoid detection.

  Through Kit’s eyes Mort saw a dimly lit, featureless passage that stretched ahead perhaps one-tenth of the length of the Gateway, then ended w
here it intersected another.

  Kit opened the hatch and looked in one direction, then the opposite direction, down the passage that crossed immediately to her front.

  When she saw it was also empty, she sprang out into the long passageway, then ran as though pursued until she reached the far intersection.

  Breathing heavily, she rounded the first corner, and he felt her elation. Even the pain in her coital toe appeared to have diminished.

  “Kit, you appear rejuvenated.”

  “Damn right! I’ve still got two hours and fifteen minutes to get to Jazen, get everybody out, get them back aboard the Scorpion. Then it’s adios freakin’ Yavet. The foot traffic ahead will slow me down, so I blend, but the Yavi have no clue I’m here. Mort, I hit a little speed bump back there, before. Maybe even got a little down. But from here on out, this job is a piece of pie.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Max Polian woke in the middle of the night and felt pressure in his bladder.

  He was, regardless of how he felt otherwise, an old man, and he woke for that reason every night. Then his bed quivered, and he swore. It had not been an old man’s need to pee, but the damn bed that had awakened him. He could have sworn he had set it to do-not-disturb. But he must have forgotten. Another curse of aging. In body, if not in spirit, Max fit the profile of a Central Committee member already.

  And who the hell was calling in the middle of the night?

  When the notification buzz came again, this time accompanied by a chime, Max realized that the notification was not of a message, but a warning of movement in the passage outside his doorway. At least that meant he hadn’t forgotten to set the do-not-disturb.

  Max swung his legs onto the floor as he squinted at his ‘puter, and the fringe of hair remaining at the back of his neck rose.

  Three hours past midnight. Someone or something was moving in the passage outside his front door in the middle of the night.

  Foraging little people, who wormed into even the better uplevels neighborhoods like this one through the utilities, were more nuisance than danger. But he was paying for peace and quiet up here.

  Max shrugged into his robe. Then he lifted the hand needler he kept on his nightstand, thumbed off the safety and padded out of his bedroom and across his main living space. As the foyer felt him, its flat screen alongside the passage door flicked live and displayed the outside passage’s monitor feed.