Da didn’t have any trouble finding us a place. As soon as the other team members saw who we were, they scrooched over to make room for us. A couple people even patted me on the shoulder and said, “Good job, Angel.” They meant it to reassure, but it had the opposite effect—I was beginning to wonder if maybe the boffili stampede was the Mother’s punishment for our audacity in the grass. It certainly felt like it.
As soon as we were settled on the rock, da said, “We’ve had a triple snafu. We’ve got choppers all over everywhere and none where we need them. The three who came in to strafe the train have already headed back to the Hole for refueling, they don’t have enough fuel to come back. We have three more orbiting south of here, and Smiller has called them in, but they’ll never get here in time. And once the stampede hits the boulder, who knows if they can get in close enough to make a pickup?” He listened to his comm-set again. I wished I’d asked for one of my own, but nobody had thought I’d need to be a part of the channel-chatter.
“It sounds like they want to try strafing the herd northeast of us. Maybe they can drop some of the animals and start a stumble-wall. I don’t think it’ll work, but maybe it will. They have to try.”
“What about the heavy-lifters?” I asked.
“You missed that argument. While Byrne rehearsed you, they decided to immobilize the train by stealing the horses. They’d put the horses out to graze. We sent in a team of six, they dropped the wranglers with knockout darts, sedated the horses, brought them around to the boulder, and walked them right into the heavy-lifters. They did it while the commando teams secured the battle-zone. They lifted off fifteen minutes ago, before we knew the boffili had stampeded. They can’t put the horses down in the sea and come back for us—it takes too long to offload great-horses from a cargo-lifter. You have to disconnect and disassemble all the harnesses and restraints and stall dividers. And then you’ve got to convince the horse to back out of the airplane and down the ramp. So they couldn’t get back here fast enough to do us much good—not for an hour or more.”
He reached over and squeezed my hand. “I won’t lie to you, Kaer. It looks serious. We’ve got the God-Chopper and one other surveillance machine still in range. But Smiller had them monitoring the herd, so they can’t get here before the herd does. And we’ve got more than sixty people to move. The choppers don’t have room for us all—and the commandos won’t evac unless the whole team can get out safely. If necessary, the choppers could shuttle us in groups of twelve to a safe place in the sea, out of the path of the herd. But nobody likes that idea. If the herd suddenly turns again, we could find ourselves in a worse position than before.” He added, “Right now, everyone thinks the boulder itself offers the most safety. They built the bottom flanks with triple-reinforced I-beams. Alex and Jake both insist that the boulder will stand; they engineered it for worst-possible case. But nobody ever expected to test it like this—”
The night air was chilly, but that wasn’t the reason why I shivered. “So we have no pickup?”
“Not as fast as we should, no. So I guess we have to hold out for a little bit. But we have three ships coming in and as soon as they get here—” He stopped. “No, wait a minute. It sounds like they want to try something. . . .”
“What?”
“I can’t tell.”
“What—?”
“I don’t know. Jake just said something about a package. And Smiller just agreed. Wait a minute—” He listened a bit longer. “Sorry, Kaer. They went to a private channel.”
People were still climbing up onto the roof of the boulder. It was starting to get crowded. Scouts, commandos, technicians—
“So if we don’t have a ride coming, then why did we come up here?”
“We have a ride. I think.” He listened some more. “First, we have to get the last of the commando teams back inside the boulder. They should just make it. If nothing else, they can take refuge in the lee side until we can open a hatch for them.” His expression changed suddenly, he listened with a frown. “Oh, this just got interesting. Smiller just ordered all available commandos to the gun ports with rocket launchers and taser rifles—to target any boffili headed for the boulder and shoot it before it gets here. If they shoot enough, they can lay down a wall of bodies.” He looked across at me, his eyes sad.
Neither of us had to say it. The commandos had just been ordered to kill as many of the great shaggy animals as they could. So the ones stampeding in behind them would crash into the fallen ones. They’d trample the injured ones, trip over them, hurting themselves, breaking their necks or their legs—to be trampled in turn by the monsters coming in behind them. A dreadful cascade of death. An avalanche of death. I hung my head. “The Mother will really love that.”
He put his hand on mine again. “Kaer, if we can lay down a wall of dead boffili, we can save the boulder and everyone in it.”
“You don’t have to convince me, da,” I said, twisting a piece of plastic netting between my fingers. “But now we have one more thing to add to the list of our crimes against the Mother. When do we start living with the Mother’s wishes instead of against them, da?”
“I don’t think that day will ever come. Not for human beings. Humans always know better than God, Kaer—”
“Is that true, da? Is that what you really think?”
He hugged me close. “Not always, but tonight I do. Ask me again tomorrow or next week and maybe I’ll think better of us. Most of us still have to much learn. You and me too.”
I leaned against him, satisfied for the moment. I wondered about the old woman in the grass. Had she gotten herself safely away from here? I hoped she had. Maybe she lived close to the tracks for a reason. Maybe she followed the rail-line. Maybe she’d hurried away last night and was thirty or forty klicks away from here. And maybe she lying somewhere not too far from here, trampled so far into the good dark earth that all that was left of her was a richer patch of soil for a while.
“So who gets here first, da? The choppers or the stampede?”
“Wait a minute—” He listened to his comm-set. “They’ve ordered the boulder locked down. That means they’ve got everybody back inside. Thank God for that.”
“What about the people at the wagons. We put them all to sleep? And what about the others who fled into the grass, or down the track?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some of them will survive. I hope so.” He held me close and whispered in English. “I don’t know that any of them were bad people, Kaer. I’ll bet that most of those poor dumb jerks were just grunts doing a job—the same as most of our poor dumb jerks. They didn’t deserve to die because of someone else’s ideology—but they did anyway. And that’s true of every war. Good men die on both sides. And I’m sorry you had to learn this lesson so early in life. Maybe it’ll make you wiser sooner.”
Before I could reply to that—it didn’t matter, I didn’t know what I was going to say anyway—the boulder lit up with spotlights pointed north and east, toward the direction of the onrushing herd. Maybe they hoped the lights would frighten the oncoming animals to veer away. Or maybe they did it to increase the accuracy of their shots.
The surface of the sea looked black and shiny. The wind still rippled it in ominous waves. Was it my imagination, or could I already feel a thunder in the ground? Da must have felt it too, because he held me tighter. He pointed toward something in the black distance. “Dust. . . .”
And then the first of the rockets went streaking out, exploding too far out in the dark for us to tell if it had hit anything. I felt sure it must have. The shooters were using computer-guided targeting. They could fire at a boffili a kilometer away—and those things were big targets impossible to miss, and even if you did there was probably another one right behind, it didn’t matter. The more dead beasts they scattered in front of the onrushing herd, the more likely they could lay down an obstacle course to keep the rest of them from slamming the boulder into rubble. Another rocket went arcing out. I hoped we’d have eno
ugh. I couldn’t imagine that we didn’t. But we’d used an awful lot of our ordinance on the rail-wagons. How much ammunition did we bring? Had we planned for this too? A third and a fourth rocket fired. This time the explosions were closer. A fifth rocket, a sixth and a seventh. And we still hadn’t seen any boffili yet.
But we could hear them now. And feel them. The sound rose all around us in the dark. Just beyond the lights. Mostly off to the east. Thunder in the ground, in the air, in our bones—the giant hooves of dinosaur-sized beasts, pounding the anvil of the earth. The grass flattening into mash beneath them. The acrid dust clouding up into the air. And the snorting. The grunting. The lowing. The moaning. The screeches and shrieks of fear and pain. The noise grew louder and louder until it was deafening and we had to shout at each other, and even then we still couldn’t hear what we were saying to each other. We couldn’t even hear our own words.
Below us, the rockets were firing steadily now, exploding in one thunderous roar after another. I couldn’t imagine how bad the noise must be inside the boulder, if it was this loud out here. The dust was in my ears and in my eyes so bad I had to bury my face against da’s chest. He held me tight against him. No chopper was going to get near us in this. I couldn’t imagine it. The ground seemed to be bouncing. The air itself was shuddering with the force of the stampede around us.
And still the intensity of the stampede grew. The animals rushed through the darkness around us. Something was happening to the northeast of us, but I couldn’t see clearly through the dust and I was tired of trying. It felt like the world was shaking itself apart.
I’d always thought boffili were too big to stampede, but this was Linnea where the gravity was lighter and everything was bigger, and the animals massed at least twice as much as they did on Earth. So when the boffili moved, maybe they didn’t move as fast, but they moved a lot more thoroughly. They pounded slow and heavy through the night, as big and as forceful as old-fashioned steam locomotives. And there were hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of them—they were just as deadly in their slow ponderous panic. A wall of stinking flesh rushing across the sea, steamrollering everything into mud and blood.
I lifted my eyes to look. Through the dust and the stench, I could barely make out black shapes rushing through the night below us. Da tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. Dimly, I saw a lumpy landscape to the north. Great shaggy shapes were stumbling through it, weaving wildly. More explosions lit up the night—
The first of the boffili crashed into the rock below us. The whole boulder shook as if it had been dropped from a height. Around us, people gasped or screamed or cursed. The boffili were coming thicker and faster now, and spaced much closer. We were well into the main body of the herd—but there was still so much more to come. Most of the rest of it.
And if it was this bad for us up here, how bad must it be for the boffili themselves? I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be down in the herd—especially if you were a young animal, not able to keep up. But you didn’t dare stop, you couldn’t. You had to keep running, no matter what, even past the point of exhaustion, because if you stumbled or collapsed, you’d be trampled. You’d never have a chance to get up again. You’d be dead in minutes. And it wouldn’t be a quick or a painless death either.
More explosions. More shrieks of pain from the herd. More bodies piling up—and a growing stink of blood and shit. I knew we weren’t going to make it. We couldn’t stop enough of the boffili, we couldn’t build a big enough barrier to keep them from thundering into the boulder. They’d come stumbling over the bodies, clambering over one another, hurtling through—another one crashed into us. And then a third almost immediately after. Two more explosions punctuated the night. The boulder rocked again with another horrendous crash. And again. I lost count. One of the impacts came with a hurtful crunching sound, and it felt like the boulder sagged to the side, but it was hard to tell—the endless roar and bounce of the world made all sensation impossible. Everything was a blur—
And then da was pounding on my back and pointing toward the Crow’s Nest. “They’re calling us all back down.” He pushed me toward it, guiding my hands to safe handholds. The world rocked and shook.
He followed me down into the Crow’s Nest, we crouched low against the banging walls, while others clambered past us.
“What happened to the choppers?”
“They can’t get in low enough. The wind—and the rockets.”
“Then why the flaming fuck did they leave us up there so fucking long?” I screamed back at him.
Somebody was pounding me on the back and pointing toward the ladder down. It was our turn. Someone else helped me find a handhold. I lowered myself down, more hands grabbed me to keep me from being knocked off the ladder. Da came down right behind me. He grabbed me to keep us both from falling over. We hung onto a hand-rail. It was a little quieter in here, but not by much. Everything was bouncing like the inside of dogfight.
“They didn’t know we’d gone out on the top—” da shouted. “They fucked up.”
“Didn’t they know their own plan—?”
“They had to change it on the fly—” He pointed at the next ladder. “Come on, let’s go down. Can you make it?”
I nodded and grabbed the ladder. We followed a technician down. I slipped once, but he reached up and grabbed my foot, pushed it back on the rung. The boulder was shaking, and it was loud in here, but not as bad as it was outside. We could manage. Every few seconds, the northeast wall would thud as something slammed into it, shaking a fine layer of dust loose from the walls and the catwalks. The dust was rising thick in the air here. Enough to make me cough.
We rode the elevator down—that was another scary experience. The cable was swinging so wildly back and forth I thought it had broken loose. Even da looked scared. When we got off at the bottom, almost falling off, he faked a laugh and said, “I guess it wasn’t stretched as tight as we thought.” He put a hand on my shoulder and we helped each other across the thudding deck back to the bus-tractor.
We climbed up the stairs and da pointed me toward my bunk. “That looks like the safest place—”
But even as I went to lie down, Byrne turned and saw us. “Oh, Kaer—good. We wondered where you’d gotten to—”
I pointed up.
She looked puzzled. “Didn’t you get the callback?”
“No one did.”
“Shit! Forgive me! We’ve got a real mess in here. We need you.” Before she could say anything more, a klaxon began to sound. She looked as if she expected it. “Brace yourselves—”
“Huh? Why?”
“Thirty seconds—”
Da took the helmet off his head and plopped it down on mine. He grabbed me and tossed me into the bunk, then put himself over me, holding onto the metal frame with both hands.
“What?! What?!” I shouted.
“FAE!”
“Fay who?”
“Fuel-Air Explosion. Three of them. In the path of the herd. Very bad news. Big enough to destroy a town!”
“That won’t stop the stampede—” I started to say. And then the ground heaved. And maybe I was wrong. Because it heaved again. And then a third time. The world slammed sideways into us and everywhere I could hear things clattering, clanging, breaking—people screaming, cursing, praying, crying, shrieking—the whole world went BANGGGG-AAANNNNGG!! BAAAAAANNNNNNGGG!!! I must have screamed. I must have screamed a lot of things, because the next thing I knew, da was holding me and shaking me, “Kaer, Kaer! Can you hear me! Can you hear me!”
“Wha-what?”
In English. “It’s over. It’s over. Listen—” He pulled himself off of me, and let me sit up. I stood.
The ground still thundered, but very far away now. There was dust falling through the air everywhere in the boulder. People were holding their heads, their ears—someone was crying upstairs. I saw a man rush by the door, blood streaming from the side of his head, his hear. He held his hand over it, and the blood dripped d
own his forearm—
But the boffili were no longer plunging into the side of the boulder. The slamming against the northeast wall had stopped. I followed da, staggered to the forward part of the bus-tractor. Smiller was slapping screens back to life. The overhead view of the stampede wavered and bobbed—the image correction kicked in and we saw three flaming craters. The boffili were still charging into it—though most were veering to avoid the towering fires now. Some of them charged through and came out the other side, on fire. Burning boulders of flesh. Oh, Mother! Won’t this nightmare ever end?
Byrne was there again, holding her arm where she’d been slammed sideways against a wall. “We had to do it, Kaer. To save ourselves. And the rest of the herd. Some had to die to save the rest.”
I didn’t answer, I was crying again—
“Maybe when you get older, you’ll understand.”
“I understand!” I sobbed. “I just don’t have to like it!”
“Kaer, forgive me—but we still need you.”
What she said didn’t register. I was still crying over what I was seeing on the big displays. But da heard her very well. “For what?” he demanded.
“Tell me to go fuck myself, and I will—any position you name, Lorr.” She turned back to me. It was starting to sink in. “Kaer, can you put the costume back on again? I can do a quickie makeup job—”
“Have you lost your mind?” da said. “Can’t you see what you’ve done to this child already?”
“For what?” I asked, in spite of myself.
“A very simple job. We’ve got one of their head magistrates. We’ve can drug with happy-friendly stuff and he’ll answer any question we ask. But we thought—well, we thought it might work better if you—I mean, if the Angel, came to him and asked. Just ask what they’ve done with our Scouts.”
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 28