by Joe Pace
Crutchfield emerged from the bushes, his sidearm drawn and trained on Briggs.
“Not one move,” he said, his voice low and commanding. She didn’t move, not at all, still as a mountain except for her eyes. Those eyes, the human, feminine part of her, glittered. The Cygni male with his head in her lap started, but she calmed him with a murmured word. He was a small, mousy sort, still handsome in the manner of his people, but short, and oddly delicate. He was nestled under the crook of Briggs’ arm, her fingers tangled in his hair. Is she his lover or his mother?
Lamb had taken three quick steps forward at the first sound. He was shirtless, his muscled, scarred torso glistening with sweat while his meaty fingers clutched a thick wooden club. His eyes were wild, like an animal, and Crutchfield prepared himself to shoot his crewmate.
“Leave it, Lamb,” Briggs said archly. “You idiot. You think he’s here alone? There’s at least one ’rine, maybe two, in these woods, and if you swing that stupid twig they’ll burn you quick.” She called over her shoulder, to the women, who had melted into the brush; her gaze never left Crutchfield. “Don’t worry, girls, he won’t hurt you. It’s just us he wants. Just us.” Pale faces peeked out from the trees, furtive and uncertain.
Lamb dropped his club and it struck the ground with a sullen thunk. He spat.
“Damn that Pearce to Hell,” he growled. There was no malice or violence in his voice, only misery. “He could have left without us.” He looked at the sergeant. “Figured if we got up here, got far enough, it might be more bother than not to come looking for us.”
“Idiot,” murmured Briggs again. She resumed stroking the native man’s hair.
“The King takes desertion seriously, and the Captain is the King himself to lads like us,” Crutchfield said, his weapon still centered on Briggs. He knew Luther and Ambrose had Lamb covered, and could handle him. It was Briggs he didn’t trust.
“The Devil take the King, too,” Lamb replied, again in that flat, lifeless tone.
“Watch that,” Crutchfield warned.
“Or what? We’re dead already, whether you kill us now or he kills us later.” A thought seemed to come to him suddenly. “You could say you couldn’t find us, you know. Or better yet, come with us.”
“Are you really that stupid?” Briggs asked cuttingly. “If they came looking after your useless ass, they’d sure as hell come after two machrines. And Orpheus is a good King’s man, right?” She laughed, a sound Crutchfield had never heard from her before. It was a disquietingly beautiful, melodious sound.
“Why?” he asked, before he could stop himself. “What were you thinking, Briggs?” She shrugged.
“Worth a try.” Her eyes assumed a faraway look. “You ever been to the Glasgow yeast pits, Orpheus?” He said nothing, which she apparently interpreted as negation. “Lamb was a yeastie, before he ran off to space. What were you, Lamb, seventeen? Fifteen years later, and still the stink of it on him. Some things never wash off. Almost as bad as my childhood home.” She said these last two words with a slow, biting sarcasm, as if neither home nor childhood had ever truly existed for her. “The pits stink, but at least they’re dry. The Alberta algae flats, now, they stink and they’re wet. And cold. And they go on forever. Nineteen thousand square kilometers of green scum, all alive and breeding and in your hair and between your toes. My old man, even his eyeballs and teeth were green. Algae and yeast. Belowdecks is no kind of life, but compared to that…” She shook her shaved head and laughed again. “Made this Eden. What’s another touch of the Cat compared to a grab at paradise?”
Crutchfield had never heard Briggs string ten words together before, much less hear her talk about herself at such length, and with such intimacy. It was almost enough to make him feel bad for her. Almost.
“Everyone’s got a cross to bear,” he said. “Time to come back to the ship.”
“No!”
To Crutchfield’s surprise and horror, the diminutive Cygni sprang up from Briggs’ lap, seized Lamb’s club from the ground, and threw himself at the sergeant. Before any of the mortals could react, there was a flash and a beam. The native fell. One of the Cygni women screamed. From the edge of the clearing Ambrose-226 materialized, his hand in the air, the emitters of his narrow-field microwave projector still evident on his metal forearm.
The Ulster Protocols, recalled Crutchfield, staring at the machrine, make no provision for the safety of bystanders. He knew, without having to check, that the man was dead.
Silence, smoke-thick, hung in the air for a prolonged moment. Briggs was the first to break the tableau, unfolding onto her feet, her bare arms cords of sinew and tensed muscle, the tattooed anchors on her neck showing a deeper inky black against the reddening skin.
“Go to Hell,” she whispered at Ambrose, the words coming from some deep, enraged part of her. She knelt in the dirt beside the Cygni’s crumpled, inert form, and cradled his head. The machrine’s weapon had left no mark, no indication that any damage had been done at all, but the Cygni’s internal temperature was likely still in excess of eighty degrees Celsius. Minutes before, it would have been above a hundred, his blood rising to a swift boil, his organs cooked inside his skin. “Timma wouldn’t have hurt you.” Briggs continued, agony in her quiet voice. “He was weak and gentle.” Poison in her eyes, she looked up at Crutchfield. Overcoming his initial shock, Lamb made to move forward and found himself suddenly and securely in the grasp of Ogden-92, who had silently slipped into the clearing. He began to struggle, but then grunted as the robot tightened its inhuman grip on the starman’s upper arms.
“He’ll break both your arms,” Crutchfield said. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a man cut down, and probably wouldn’t be the last. He didn’t have time or attention to spare, at the moment, for sympathy or remorse. The bystander had complicated this operation, and that had to be remedied. “This isn’t one of your stupid roulette games now. Stand down, or be put down.”
“I ain’t going back,” Lamb roared suddenly, thin spiderwebs of saliva flecking the black whiskers on his cheeks. His chest surged forward, muscles straining, but Ogden’s hold was immovable. Lamb’s arms remained static until a sickening crack filled the clearing. The flesh gave way, and he bellowed in pain as jagged white bone jutted through the skin of his bicep.
“Or maybe he’ll just break one,” Crutchfield said with a sigh. “The hard way, then. End it.”
The tip of the index finger on Ogden’s left hand swiveled aside, a short syringe emerging into the vacated space. The machrine inserted the needle into Lamb’s side with precision, and the writhing crewman abruptly crumpled into a heap. Ambrose approached Briggs, who never shifted her gaze from Crutchfield and never let go of the Cygni male, not even when the tranquilizing injection paralyzed her muscles and drove her silently to the ground.
“The Cygni females?” inquired Ambrose-226. Nearby, Ogden deftly reset and temporarily braced Lamb’s fractured arm, a procedure during which the man was fortunate to remain insensate. Crutchfield glanced around the clearing, but there was no sign of the three women. They appeared to have melted away during the confrontation.
“We don’t need them,” the sergeant said, finding himself suddenly and immensely tired. “Just keep an eye out in case they come back with friends. Keep these two sedated.” He touched his wristlink wearily. “Harvest.”
“This is Harvest, Pott here. Report, sergeant.”
“Briggs and Lamb in custody. One native casualty, three fled. Standing by for shuttle extraction.”
“Stand by. Shuttle to your location in forty minutes. Harvest out.”
Crutchfield sat heavily on a nearby rock, wiping the sweat from his face. The Cygni male – Timma, Briggs had called him – lay in her unconscious embrace, and it looked for all the world that the two were lovers in a peaceful shared sleep. Crutchfield felt as though he were intruding on something both profoundly intimate and deeply disturbing.
The sooner we get off thi
s damned planet, he thought, the better.
****
It did not take long for Pearce to find Venn Arkadas. The intellectual leader was home, and waiting for him.
“I knew you would come,” the Cygni said, “once you discovered what became of your robot.”
“You know, then?” Pearce asked.
“Know?” Arkadas’ face eased into a placid smile. “William, it was my idea.”
Pearce stood in the dooryard of Arkadas’ handsome house, shaded by a row of charming little trees, flanked by low plots of blooming flowers his wife had planted, and nowhere the slightest hint that a yawning chasm had just opened in the ground, threatening to swallow him whole.
“Your…”
“Come in, please,” Arkadas beseeched. “I will admit I am surprised to find you alone, however. I half suspected you would come in force.”
“Your idea?” repeated Pearce, numbly, before regaining some measure of his senses. “No, damn your white head, I don’t want to come in! I came here to see if you knew what was going on, if you knew who stole my machrine!”
“I can appreciate your irritation, but please, keep your voice down.” He glanced anxiously over his shoulder at the interior hallway. “My wife has no idea about any of this, and I would prefer not to involve her.” Arkadas stepped outside, closing the door behind him. He looked at Pearce, not unkindly, and sighed. “Will you let me tell you everything?”
“I’ll let you give me my property back!” Pearce spat. “And then we can discuss whether or not my ship will rain fire and death on your city.”
“If you meant one word of that, I would be afraid,” Arkadas replied in calm tones that Pearce found increasingly infuriating. It was all he could do not to rip the silver head off this man he had thought a friend. First Fletcher’s betrayal, now this…it was almost more than he could stand. He had not labored so long, sacrificed Rowland and el-Barzin, come back to this birthplace of nightmares, to see it all slip away now. Rage, and more than a little shame at being so easily and thoroughly duped, began to build, until a sudden and blinding realization struck.
“You planned all this,” he said with the swift dawning of understanding. “You set up Jairo to suborn Christine Fletcher from the moment we arrived.” Then, rapidly on the heels of the last, another thought occurred to him. “My crewmen! Briggs and Lamb!”
“They are in no danger,” Arkadas replied. “At least, not from me. Some of our people are with them now, some distance from here. That particular wrinkle was General Leyndar’s idea, one of his rare good ones, I’ll admit, as a way to divert and divide your forces. I do have to tell you that it took very little encouragement for them to be convinced to desert.”
I should never have come back here, Pearce thought. Or we should have come with an armada, and simply taken what we needed. Now he was ensnared in this web of intrigue and lies, and the one man he had hoped to trust on this planet was the chief architect of his woes.
“Come with me now,” said Arkadas gently. “I have something to show you.” He held up a hand, warding off Pearce’s question before it could be spoken. “Yes! Yes, then I will take you to see Luther-45.”
“If this is a trap,” Pearce hissed, “know that in the event I do not return soon, I have left specific orders for my officers to follow. They are not orders your people will find pleasant.”
“Well, maybe you have and maybe you haven’t. Follow me. I know you are angry, and hurt, but I believe there is still a way for us both to profit from this.”
With a weary exhale, Pearce nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do. At the moment, Arkadas held all the cards. He followed as the tall Cygni moved down the path to the main road, and then walked with swift dignity to the Law-House, past the threshold, and into the library where they had first met weeks ago. That was when a swift and smooth achievement of their goals had still seemed possible. Arkadas strode to the broad fireplace, depressed a cleverly disguised stone button, and the entire hearth slid aside on floor casters, revealing a gaping entryway.
Down the rabbit-hole, Pearce thought, remembering Mary’s comment not so very long before at Spring Grove.
“You must understand,” Arkadas was saying as they made their way down a wide, curving stairwell, “just how much unrest you left in your wake ten years ago. When you came, when Jane Baker came, that initial contact with beings from beyond the stars shook us to our core. We are isolated here, far even from our closest neighbors. Our identity is tied to our city. We are Horfans, and have been for the thousand years our histories record, dating back before permanent buildings were here, when the name Horfa referred more to a tribe than a place. The Faith…” Here he hesitated, clearly uncomfortable talking about a subject that was wrapped in a great many taboos, but he glanced at Pearce, cleared his throat, and continued with difficulty. “The Faith bears the central tenet that we are a chosen people, that Horfans are the inheritors of all the bounty of the land and the sea, that all things will come to us in our need. That we are, and always have been, the pinnacle of all that is.”
“And then we came,” Pearce murmured. They had stopped in the stairwell. Arkadas, tall and elegant as ever, though visibly agitated now, remained one step higher.
“You came,” he repeated. “You came from the sky in an airship, a…spaceship, like nothing we had ever seen. You brought your tools and your weapons, your technology, so vastly superior to our own, and many of us, perhaps all of us, wondered that such creatures could exist. Our society, always at tenuous peace amongst the castes, was riven with disunity. We intellectuals argued that there was so much we could learn from you, that this was an opportunity like no other for a great leap forward in our knowledge and wisdom. There was no such enthusiasm from the High Priestess. The Faith was threatened by your presence, by your very existence. It jeopardized the position of the Cygni in general and the Horfans, in particular, as the preeminent beings in our universe. They were,” he said, his eyes wide and so very blue in the semi-darkness, “afraid, my friend. Afraid for the culture we have built over the centuries, afraid for their role in it, and, I truly believe, afraid for the hearts and souls of our people.”
“So,” Pearce said, his voice low, “the intellectuals and the priestesses stood in opposition to one another.”
“Yes,” Arkadas replied. “And it fell to the leadership of the military caste to make their choice and thereby determine our policy.” He blew out a long breath and shook his head. “That debate was long, I have been told, and heated. I was not there, of course, not yet senior enough to sit on those councils, but the tale of that Council session has been told and retold over the years. The three leaders of that time will probably still be written of in histories many centuries from now, remembered for their stewardship in that pivotal time. My predecessor, Pag Branit, at the end of his illustrious career, his eyes on the future of our people. High Priestess Kaitsma, the only one of the three still in power, her eyes on the past. And General Tavar.”
“Yes?” prodded Pearce, after a prolonged silence. He was anxious to get to the bottom of these stairs, to find what it was Arkadas had hidden all these years, to retrieve Luther, to try to extricate himself from all of these mysteries and to complete his mission. They had been on Cygnus too long, he knew, his crew getting too accustomed to the idleness, to the verdure, to the companionship of the natives. There would be more desertions soon. But he was finally getting the truth now, or some version of it, at least.
“General Tavar was the most powerful of the three,” Arkadas said. “He was a brilliant tactician, and had been responsible for the glorious victory over the invading Etela forces from the south many years before. He was – and remains, five years after his death – a hero. A legend, really. So while Branit and Kaitsma debated, Tavar weighed the options. Would he partner with The Faith, declare you Englishmen from beyond to be marauding enemies and try to repulse you, in order to prop up our eroding sense of superiority? Or throw in with the thinkers an
d extract what knowledge we could from you during your stay?” He sighed. “You must understand, we knew nothing of you. You could have been the vanguard of a conquering armada, or raiders, or enslavers. We were terrified. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and probably the most politically expedient for an old man at the end of his days, to agree with Kaitsma and succumb to fear and demagoguery. But Tavar, ah, Tavar, he was too shrewd for that.” Arkadas smiled at Pearce. “He knew there was no way to defeat you militarily, not overtly. His plan, or so the story goes, was to welcome you, at least initially. To take your Captain Baker’s overtures at face value and learn what we could from you. To welcome you, to draw you in, to lull you into security.”
“And then to spring the trap.” Pearce had bitter tang in his mouth and a churning in his stomach. “Damn you, Arkadas. I lived with your family. We ate together. I played with your children. I thought you were my friend.”
“I was!” he protested. “I tell you, I knew nothing of this ten years ago!”
“And now?” Pearce mounted the higher step, his nose coming within inches of the Cygni’s.
“I am still.” Arkadas was whispering, and Pearce could see the slightest glimmer in the man’s eyes, the hint of tears. “I want no strife between us, judar. But I am a leader of my people now, and theirs is the welfare I must put first. You spoke of my children. Their future, and that of their children and grandchildren, is more to me than any friendship. It is that I seek to secure. You do not understand us.” His voice cracked. “You do not understand General Leyndar. He is no Tavar, no tactician, no hero. He is a brute, and he hates you.”
“Hates me?”
“His brother died that night, William. Right next to him. And even if it weren’t for that, for that personal vendetta, he isn’t a forgiving man. His dreams are of power and revenge. He will kill you, all of you, given the chance. But for all that, he is a creature of duty and has his own kind of honor. He will deny himself his dreams for the welfare of his people. At least,” Arkadas spread his hands, “that is my read of the man. I have been wrong before.”