Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “Get down,” he said finally, raised his arm, and brought his spiked elbow down just as he’d done once to Samaritan’s head. And like the head, the kennel cracked.

  Again. Again. And then it split and Sanford was ripping it open and pulling T’aki out into his arms. There was no embrace, no father/son exchange of relief. Sanford grabbed him up, chirring in hard, panting breaths, and ran back to the laboratory.

  Sanford covered T’aki’s eyes before he went in and they all followed, their many running feet acting as a kind of harmony to the sound of pounding fists on the freezer door. Sarah struggled to keep up. A real hero wouldn’t have been slowed in the slightest by a broken arm, but she was all but blinded by it. Lingering in the lab to catch her breath was not an option. She could smell old yang’ti blood, chemicals, and the sharp stink of her own cooling vomit, all of it much worse than she remembered. Her stomach flipped warningly; she held her breath and didn’t take another until they were out again in the hall.

  “Now what?” one of the prisoners asked, not without a bitter sort of laugh. “We’re on a fucking boat. Where do you think we’re going to go?”

  “Home,” Sanford said as Sarah opened the door to van Meyer’s warehouse of alien technology. “We are going home.”

  Then the elevator doors opened and a young man in lab whites looked up and saw a hall filled with aliens, and Sarah in her blood-stained and tape-striped gown, holding a gun. His face dropped all its color, but he did not scream. He stepped calmly back into the elevator instead and closed the doors. A second later, the alarms went off.

  “Inside,” said Sarah. “Hurry!”

  She held the door as they poured in, then bashed at the pass-card console with the butt of the gun until it sparked and fell apart. Thunder came rolling down the stairs and Sarah pulled the storeroom door shut and hoped it held a little while.

  “Sarah! Here!”

  Yes, there. The other room behind the glass where the escape pod teased them. She ran, slipped, struck the door, and screamed.

  Sanford looked at her, then looked harder. “Your arm,” he said, almost conversationally.

  “It’ll keep,” she managed, tears of pain pouring from her eyes. She swiped the dead guard’s keycard.

  Nothing happened.

  “Give me the other one!” she shouted, waving frantically until one of the yang’ti stepped up with the doctor’s card.

  She swiped it. The LockLite blinked, but stayed red.

  Pounding on the storeroom door, followed by shooting, then an ominous sort of silence. Sanford glanced that way, snapped his palps, picked up his code-bank and jumped halfway across the room to land atop a neat stack of crates. He bashed it open with ridiculous ease and pulled out a gun. The code-bank emitted its polite, electronic tone; the gun charged; every yang’ti turned as one and looked at him. In that moment, they ceased to be prisoners as utterly as if they’d never been. They were not refugees. They weren’t colonists. No matter what they had been before, they were soldiers now and they were so much better at it than Sarah. Without discussion, the yang’ti pulled boxes out, took covering positions behind crates and metal counters, aimed their guns as fast as Sanford armed them, and waited.

  Sarah threw down her useless keycards and leaned in to look through the safety glass. Not at the ship, but at the door. No card-console on that side, just a latch. She bit her lip, looked at the gun in her hands, then at the glass.

  Sanford saw what she meant to do at once, took the gun, thumbed switches, and thrust it back at her. “Aim at an angle!” he called, backing up. “Target one place!” And then he took his position with the rest of them and raised his weapon.

  She stepped back, holding the gun out before her, forcing her broken arm up to steady the barrel. Her hand wouldn’t grip right and it weighed about a hundred pounds, but all it had to do was keep the bullets from going wild and she thought she could do that. She thought of all the shoot-em-up movies she’d ever seen with a big automatic like this one, braced her bare feet on the floor, then slipped her finger into the guard and squeezed the trigger.

  It was as if a baseball bat came flying invisibly out of space and slammed into her chest. She fell back and hit one of the yang’ti prisoners; he grabbed her arm and steadied her until she righted, then pointed at the storeroom door and clicked, “Hurry!”

  A pinpoint of fire had appeared high along the door’s lock-plate. They were cutting their way in.

  Sarah staggered forward and peered at the window. The bullets had hit the glass all right, and ricocheted harmlessly off into the unoccupied end of the storeroom, but left nothing behind that she could see as proof of damage, not even a nick. She braced herself again, forced her bad arm up to really grip the barrel, and fired.

  Bullets spat out by the dozens, by the hundreds it seemed, rattling her bones and shaking her vision. She stopped, gasping, checked her aim, and fired again.

  Cobwebs appeared in the glass, all at once, as if slapped up by God’s own hand. Sarah stopped, adjusted her aching grip, and fired, now with something tangible to aim at.

  The cobwebs spread, great chunks of broken white erupting side-by-side until, with a wheeze, the gun gave out. Empty. The window stood.

  Sarah half-ran, half-fell against it, tears of pain and disbelief streaming unnoticed from her eyes. She touched the glass and felt hairline cracks and miniscule chips under her fingers. When she pushed, she thought she felt a little give to it. Raising her gun in both hands (and screaming, although she could not hear that and didn’t know she was doing it), she swung it like a club over and over against the window.

  The barrel cracked in her hands. The butt splintered. The bullet chamber flew off and hit someone in the back. She kept swinging, bashing at the broken patch like a cavewoman until, all at once and all in one piece, the whole section of cracked glass caved in and fell away, leaving the rest of the window whole around it.

  The hole was small. Even after she broke off what she could with her bleeding hand, it was scarcely larger than a basketball.

  Fortunately, she knew someone very small.

  “T’aki!” she cried. She could barely hear herself, like she was shouting into a pillow. “I need you!”

  He grabbed her hand while she was still looking for him in the shadows of the crates. She picked him up in one arm, hugged him tight, and fed him into the other room. He was his father’s son and didn’t need to be told what to do.

  The storeroom door crashed open. Yang’ti and humans opened fire at once. Bullets tore through chitin. Human bodies turned in an instant to charred vapor.

  T’aki opened the door.

  “Sanford!” Sarah shouted, but dimly, so dimly. “Where are you? We’re in!”

  He came running, pushed her and T’aki together into a protected corner of the smaller room, and ran to plug his code-bank into the panel at the center of the escape pod’s only door.

  Nothing happened.

  “Oh God no!” she wailed, and a more heartfelt prayer she had never spoken. It couldn’t all be for this—Fagin and Larry the nice guard and Kate and the horrors in the lab for a dead ship with a locked door.

  “Fuck!” snapped Sanford, the only time she’d ever heard him swear. He slammed his foot up on the side of the ship, wedged his fingers underneath the panel and heaved on it until, with a shriek of twisting metal she could feel in her fillings, the whole panel peeled up, snapped off, and went flying off into the corner. Sanford hunkered down, his eyes moving urgently over the exposed cables. A few crossed wires, a loose connection, a little dust in the works; he worked fast and when he slammed the code-bank into its port for the second time, the door released a hiss of ancient air and came groaning open. Sanford was inside at once, shouting for T’aki.

  Sarah ran the boy over and got her first real look at an alien craft. It was small. A whole lot smaller than she’d thought from the outside. Bigger than her van, maybe, but not by much.

  She turned and looked out into the storeroom, whe
re the firefight went on and on. She could see a dozen yang’ti from here and she knew there were others.

  They weren’t all going to fit.

  “Sanford…” She leaned into the belly of the ship and saw him in the cockpit, fitting the code-bank to what she could only describe as a dashboard. He pushed three buttons on the console, just three, and light and sound flooded the pod’s interior at once. “Sanford, listen—”

  “T’aki, sit down and don’t move. Sarah, find out how they brought this in,” Sanford said curtly, his fingers flying over the controls. Beams of light were shooting up into the air before him, opening into grids, spilling out lettering, flashing symbols as bright as stars for him to dash away with hurried taps and touches. “Something must open—a wall, a panel, something! Hurry!”

  She ducked out and looked around. Okay, sure, they didn’t squeeze the pod in through the door or build the room around it. There had to be a hatch. Right.

  The walls were completely featureless.

  But the rear wall was different from the other three, made of corrugated metal instead of metal panels. And there was a power strip next to the door, with two buttons, one green and one red.

  Sarah pressed the green one.

  A siren went off directly over her head. In the storeroom, yellow lights spun and flashed. And in here, the rear wall began to fold in on itself like an accordion. She stepped out a short ways onto a metal ramp, letting the sea air hit her in the face and sting at her little wounds, staring around in disbelief at the lower deck of van Meyer’s Zero. She’d imagined somehow that they were so much deeper that to see open sky and ocean was not merely shocking, but actually a little embarrassing.

  It took her a moment to realize that in addition to all of IBI’s spare helicopters and a few stacks of lifeboats, Sarah was also looking at dozens of soldiers and people in flight suits just staring back at her.

  “Oh,” said Sarah, blinking at them. She took a few steps back; some of them took a few steps forward. She stumbled up against the escape pod and shouted, “Help! Big…Big open door and lots of people headed this way!”

  “Get back, you idiot!” someone snapped in her ear and yanked her behind the cover of the pod’s hull. Yang’ti filled the doorway she had just vacated, opening fire. People started shouting, screaming, and shooting back.

  Now what? She backed up, clutching her broken arm, smelling smoke and seawater, and turned around. Time to go. The pod wasn’t big enough. The wounded, then. The wounded first.

  She ran out into the smoke and the noise, and tripped over her first two targets, sprawling stupidly out in the open as bullets tore over her head. She heard choking and crawled towards it, feeling her way through the smoke until she fell against the chitinous body prone at her feet. She got her arms around him and pulled; he was lighter than she expected. The yang’ti were all so much taller, but of course, they had no bones, not a lot of muscle. She dragged him back to the relative protection behind the safety glass and only then saw the gaping hole in his chest, the blood pouring from between his palps.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she heard herself say. “You’re going home. Can you stand?”

  “I’m going home,” he gasped, flecking her chest with his blood on every word. “I can fly.”

  He knotted his hands in her hospital gown and heaved himself onto his feet with her help. He kept laughing as he ran with her to the pod, laughing through his wet, pain-taut breaths. Sanford was waiting to help them inside. He tried to pull her up too, but she ducked away and raced back into the battleground.

  The next man she found shook her off. “Someone has to hold the line!” he shouted at her, firing.

  “You have to go now, while you can!”

  He looked at her, piercing alien eyes holding her to the spot. “There’s not enough room for everyone,” he said. “You know it. I know it. Leave me alone and get to work.”

  She did. She had to. There was no time.

  As yang’ti fell back, the humans pressed in. Soon, a small number of soldiers had made the lunge in and were slowly but steadily working their way around the edge of the room, behind the crates, flanking the prisoners and pinning them in cross-fire. It was getting hard to see through the smoke and the electric spray of human bodies, but Sarah kept her feet and concentrated on getting back and forth as fast as possible, bringing them in by ones and twos to the safety of the pod.

  And it filled up so fast.

  “Strap the wounded in,” she kept saying. “Everybody else, stand up! Leave the guns, there’s no room for guns! Get close, as tight as you can! Please, you’ve got to make room!”

  “Sarah!” Sanford fought his way through the hold, pushing some bodies aside and climbing over others in his effort to reach the door. “Now you! There is still room for you! Get in!”

  She reached for him, but ducked down screaming as something exploded in the main room, cracking that heavy glass window into instant lace. Crouching here, under the smoke, she squeezed open her eyes and saw a yang’ti sprawled in the doorway, looking back at her.

  And it was Baccus.

  Half her arm was gone and that side of her body was burnt black from her head to her hip, but recognition was immediate and incontrovertible for all that. It was Che Baccus; it could be no one else. She didn’t speak, maybe couldn’t speak, but in her eyes, Sarah could see that Baccus knew who she was too.

  They stared at each other as Sanford called her name.

  A second explosion knocked a few chips from the window. They had to go.

  Sarah stretched out as far as she could. Baccus took her hand and let herself be pulled, coughing and spitting, to the pod. Sanford held out his hand when he saw her, but his fingers curled when he looked down and saw Baccus clinging to her hospital gown. He looked up again, torn. Behind him, clutched in some stranger’s arms, T’aki began to skree and struggle.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Sanford said, again almost conversationally.

  “Yes,” she answered. “You are. Please understand. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t if it means leaving someone else behind. You’ve got to take her.”

  He reached out again, not for her hand or the injured yang’ti huddled against her knees, but to touch her face.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “I do.”

  If he answered, she couldn’t hear him. Explosion after explosion rocked the storeroom; they’d started lobbing in concussion bombs. The window cracked and cracked and finally shattered.

  Sanford took his hand away. It was bloody. He closed it in a fist, reached down with his other hand and pulled Baccus into the already-packed pod.

  There was no more room. He turned away as T’aki screamed for her and shut the door. It sealed with a hiss and a metallic clang of finality. She backed away, her eyes swimming, and was seized in thorny arms and carried out of the little room. “Don’t look!” someone bellowed in her ear. “Burners! Get down!”

  So she stumbled with him blindly in the smoke and was still knocked flat when the pod’s engines fired, blasting out safety glass in half-melted hunks of slag. She rolled onto her back and watched it right itself, raise up, slowly turn.

  Another concussion bomb went off, this one practically at her feet. She was shoved back, smacked up hard into a stack of crates, and did not see the pod in flight. It didn’t matter, she decided, as her world bled out to grey. He got away, that was the important thing.

  The only thing, really.

  * * *

  It was over by the time she awoke, so she didn’t see the point in resisting anymore. Exhausted, disorientated, and in tremendous pain that seemed to occupy a space ten times the physical dimensions of her broken arm, Sarah let herself be pulled off the floor and cuffed. Someone punched her, she didn’t see who. Someone else spit on her. That was all right. That was just fine. Sanford and T’aki were on their way home and that was all she needed to know.

  She was taken belowdecks to a conference room of some kind, where van Meyer, Piotr Lantz
, and a handful of other soldiers were already waiting, along with eight yang’ti on their knees with their hands on their heads, most of them bleeding and still choking on smoke residue. Sarah’s escort shoved her roughly down among the yang’ti. Van Meyer calmly came around the side of the table and helped her up, seating her with his usual dignity and chivalry in a chair and patting her on her uninjured shoulder.

  “So,” he said, returning to the head of the table. He sat, laced his fingers, and looked at her. “Have you anything to say?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” she said, honestly.

  The soldier nearest her gave her the butt of his rifle right in the worst part of her arm. She screamed, thrashing mindlessly away from the pain until she fell out of her chair onto one of the aliens. Her eyes swam with tears of pain and, yeah, okay, fear. Some hero. She began to understand that she was going to die and even though she accepted that, she didn’t think she was going to be terribly brave about it when it happened. Those tears became a little more insistent; for the moment, she could still blink them back.

  Someone put her back in the chair. Van Meyer did not appear to have moved. His expression was one of very mild disappointment and no more. “You should be sorry,” he told her seriously. “You could have done more. Oh ja, you could have cut me so much deeper if only you had been clever instead of…what is the word…? Spunky. How fortunate I am that you are no more than a stupid child.”

  “Call me all the names you want. I don’t care.”

  “Nee, I suppose you do not. You have done your little mischief and so you are content. And your bug, the one who convince you to trade your life for his, he is content as well. Look around you, my dear. You will not see him here. After all you sacrifice, after all you do for him…he leave you behind. He scuttle away, nee? He abandon you.”

  She did not have to look at her fellow prisoners to know they were not dismayed by this pronouncement. Although none spoke, she could hear the soft snaps and scraping sounds that meant contempt. Even she was smiling.