“You’ve destroyed our ships.”
“The ones on the ground?” But there were no others, were there? Not here, not at First-Stop, except for the one that held her. And that one was safe, out of reach from the ground, untouchable, impregnable. Certainly she would have known if it were not.
Tamiko nodded jerkily. “Every one of them. All of them.”
“Then we’re safe! I can go back.”
The human head was shaking now, almost trembling in its negation. “No. There’s no way to take you back. This ship can’t land. Just the others.”
“You mean I’m stuck.” A prisoner forevermore. Yet that thought did not strike her as she might have feared it would. She was doomed, but her world was safe.
Or was it? Tamiko was all nod and shake and tremble and then two ominous sentences: “You’ll be better off with us. We have one last card to play. We can’t leave them thinking they’re better than us. Or else, when we come back …”
Sunglow pushed off the bunk and hovered over the human woman. Tamiko shifted to one side, flicked the veedo on, and said, “Look at that.”
The grainy, foreshortened view was enough by itself to say the camera was attached to the orbiting Ajax. The ships stood in the valley and on the landing field. Smoke billowed in and around them. Rac troops gathered on the ground at their feet. There was no sign of combat or of prisoners. Bodies were arranged in lines like the pickets of flattened fences.
“You killed them all,” said Tamiko. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Sunglow almost laughed. “What do you want them to do? Make pets out of them? You said yourself, there’s no way to send them home.”
“And you wrecked the drives. But just in case, we’ll put some nukes right there. Then we’ll …”
“Sterilize our world.”
“No. No-no. We can’t do that. We couldn’t possibly, not with ten times the bombs we carry. But we can make the soil and water toxic to you and raise clouds of dust that will block the sun for months. The plants that feed you will die. If you don’t freeze, you’ll starve.”
Sunglow was close once more. “Then we’re dead anyway.”
A trembling nod. “Most of you. But we won’t be able to settle here for centuries.”
“And that’s our victory.”
“A Pyrrhic victory.”
Sunglow could not possibly have recognized the reference, but she thought she understood its meaning: the victory of the pyre. She also understood she could no longer hope ever to see Dotson Barbtail again. She would never bear his children. She would never …
“You’ll be okay.” Tamiko sounded placating, as if she thought the Rac’s personal survival was all that mattered to her. “We’ll take you with us, take care of you. We’ve got some males too. You can have cubs, or whatever you call them. And …”
Sunglow blinked as tears flooded her eyes. There was only one chance of avoiding the fates her captors intended for her people and for her.
As calmly and as deftly as if she were spearing a tasty-tail, an aquatic dumbo larva, for a snack, she reached out her hand and extended a single finger and its claw.
The movement felt like it took forever, but the eternity through which it stretched could not have lasted half a second.
Tamiko neither tried to flee nor closed her eyes as the claw approached her throat.
Nor did she scream when Sunglow ripped through her flesh. The only sound she made was the gurgle of blood in her windpipe.
She was no longer capable of protest when Sunglow reached into her thigh pocket and found not one cardkey but two. The Rac took them both.
* * * *
The guard in the corridor proved no more difficult to kill.
Sunglow slammed the wall with one hand, pulled herself to one side, activated the door, and as it began to slide open grunted desperately as if she and Tamiko were struggling. The guard thrust himself through the opening, his gun in one hand, ready to intervene.
The sight of Tamiko stretched upon the room’s narrow floor, blood extending sticky tendrils toward the walls, froze him for just the instant Sunglow needed to use her claw once more.
* * * *
She clutched Tamiko’s cardkeys in the hand that jutted from her cast. The other held the gun she had taken from the guard. The door of her prison was closed behind her.
The ship murmured with the sounds of humans. Occasional soft, sliding footsteps. The small collisions of solid objects. Voices that raged and soothed and rang with vengeful determination.
What could she do now?
She wished she looked like a human. As a Rac, she would be recognized instantly. She would have to shoot as soon as any human appeared in front of her.
But she could not possibly shoot them all. Sooner or later they would kill or capture her, and then the remaining humans would destroy all that was left of her world.
A buzzing sound heralded one of the humans’ tiny robots. It rounded a corner, its wings folded against its back, its propeller still, its insectile legs a blur of motion. She poised her gun, but it gave no indication that it even noticed her much less knew that she was loose. Besides, it was electronic. If it was going to cry alarm, it would have done so already.
When it was gone, she stared at the cardkeys in her hand. She needed help. And there was only one place where she could find it.
The gun in her free hand burped almost before she realized that a human had emerged from a door just three steps away.
“Hey!”
Someone else was in that room. Someone else had seen the body jerk and go limp and fall while blood pooled upon the floor.
She reached the door before the other human could do more than lay one hand on the room’s communications panel.
The gun burped again.
She caught herself against the door frame. She looked at her latest victim carefully. Yes, he was dead. He could not possibly be alive, not with that much blood, not with his abdomen so ripped that the residue of his last meal was mingling with the blood, not …
She almost vomited.
She told herself, “Don’t linger. Someone else will come around a corner, and you may not be so lucky. Or the gun’s magazine will go dry.”
She turned and ran. She fended off a wall with one shoulder, wincing when the blow shook the healing bone within her cast. She shouldered another wall, zigged down the corridor, paused at open doors and intersections to be sure no one would see her before she was ready.
She killed twice more before she heard two voices beyond a door that was not quite closed. She stopped to listen:
“It’ll take a little while, sir.”
“Why?” This voice bore the crackle of electronic transmission, but it was clear enough to tell her the speaker was older and used to giving orders. “They’re racked right there in the missile bay.”
“They were, sir. When we didn’t know what we faced.”
A third voice butted in: “Standing orders, General. Safety procedures. As soon as it looked like we wouldn’t need them, we safed them again. Put them back in storage.”
The ensuing silence was broken only when the older, commanding voice said slowly, “I must have approved that.”
No one answered.
“How long?”
“An hour before we can launch the first ones.”
Sunglow did not wait to hear any more. It was enough to know she had an hour. At most an hour. Certainly not two, and maybe less, and then the humans would do exactly what Tamiko had promised just before she died.
She hoped that was time enough.
She ran again, searching, searching, through corridors that all looked much the same. Was this the one through which they had led her when they brought her here? Was that the corner they had turned? Yes!
/> This guard too died without a cry. Her first cardkey failed to work. The second was successful.
A heartbeat later, her fellow prisoners were free.
* * * *
Surprise had worked in their favor. So had contempt, for the humans had despite the evidence of a civilized world below their ship seen them as little more than fuzzy animals, quite safe to have around as long as they were caged.
General Lyapunov himself had wasted one precious second gawping when Sunglow and three other armed Racs appeared on the bridge. Then the ship boomed and shook and an entire panel of indicator lights turned red and began to flash.
Sunglow herself shot the General.
The other humans winced and looked resigned to what they knew was about to happen to them all. Tears flowed from one young man’s eyes.
Two burly Racs began to growl and snarl. Sunglow knew they were approving what she had done and savoring the turning of the tables. For a moment she was aware that they had tails and she did not, and she almost growled herself.
“What was that noise? What are all those lights? Are we going to blow up?”
The man who was weeping raised one hand, twitched convulsively when a Rac glared and pushed a gun forward, and pointed toward the viewport.
“Jesus!” cried a human woman.
Sunglow recognized the shape that drifted across the view, dwindling rapidly as it grew farther and farther from the ship. She stepped to the side of the port, and there was another, barely visible to the side.
“You weren’t fast enough.” The woman’s tone was jeering now. “We jettisoned the tanks, and now you’re not …”
A gun burped.
Sunglow gestured. “Let’s go.”
“It won’t do you any good. You don’t know how to work the ship, and there’s no more reaction mass. You’re not going anywhere. You can’t even land.”
“That doesn’t matter.” One raised hand forestalled another shooting. “You aren’t either.”
* * * *
It was another day before Sunglow could settle herself in one of the bridge’s seats and stare at the controls of what had to be a long-distance communicator. There was a screen and a speaker grille, a slide labeled “Volume” in the very same language the Racs had inherited from the Gypsies, several tiny windows that displayed numbers when she turned knobs and pressed buttons, a digital time display.
The Rac behind her pointed at the time. “A few more minutes. He’ll be there. We told them you’d be waiting.”
She glanced over his shoulder. His name was Crumbcake, and the skin of his abdomen was loose from the weight he had lost in captivity. “Did it take long to figure this out?”
Crumbcake shrugged. “Not really. A com’s a com.” He hesitated before adding, “It’s a shame, you know. We think so much alike. They could use our planes. We can use their …”
“We were made that way,” she said abruptly.
“Yeah,” he said a second later. “The hardest part was finding a frequency they were listening on.” He paused. “Are we going to keep them long?”
“As long as the food holds out.”
“It’d last longer if …”
“Not long enough. It’ll be years before …”
A light flickered on the panel before her. A familiar voice issued from the speaker grille: “Sunglow?”
“Dotson!” His image was forming on the screen. Behind him stood Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. Both males looked tired, but where Dotson seemed to glow through his fatigue, the human sagged with exhaustion. Gypsy Blossom watched from the side.
The delay before Dotson answered was noticeable. The Ajax was, after all, in synchronous orbit, high enough above the planet for light to need nearly a third of a second for the round trip.
“They told me you were okay.”
But where his voice rumbled with pleasure and relief, hers did not. It could not. It could only whine with tension and anxiety and a fear that should have disappeared with the Rac victory. The flatness of her words was a startling contrast: “But I can’t come home. Not even in a crash landing. We don’t have any fuel.”
“Ah.” Gypsy Blossom set a gentle hand on Dotson’s shoulder.
His face twisted. He reached toward the camera that sent his picture to the distant Ajax and the female who should have become his mate. His rumble disappeared. “I’ll miss you.”
Hrecker leaned forward, stroked the side of his nose with a finger in a passable imitation of the Rac greeting gesture, and broke in behind his words: “They’ll build monuments to you, Sunglow. If you hadn’t freed yourself and captured the ship …”
“I’d rather she could come home,” said Dotson.
“The humans can’t do that either,” said his mate. “That’s more important. But what will they do on Earth when these ships never return?”
Hrecker sighed and shook his head. “They’ll build another fleet. A bigger one, better armed. But it will be a while. They’ll have to give up on waiting for this fleet to return. Then they’ll talk and plan for months, perhaps even a year. Maybe they’ll concentrate on building defenses against a horde of ravening coons.” He gave Dotson a brief, sidelong glance. “Or Racs. And when that doesn’t come, they’ll send the second fleet. It may be years. It may be only months.”
“You have to act as if you have time enough,” said Gypsy Blossom. “Soon you’ll have the other bots. The records in the honeysuckle. You can do it, rebuild, get back into space.”
“We’ll be waiting,” said Sunglow. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Crumbcake nodding. “It’s just another Worldtree to climb. And then you’ll have this ship. That will help.”
Dotson was nodding, but Hrecker looked even more depressed. “You have plenty of supplies, but …”
“Too many mouths to feed,” said Gypsy Blossom.
“We’ll take care of that,” said Sunglow. When Hrecker’s mouth twisted with the pain of what he thought she meant, she added, “We don’t know just how yet. We have to talk about it.”
“A ship of ghosts,” said Hrecker. “That’s all that will be left.” He sounded and looked as if the words pained him terribly. “Where’s Tamiko? Is she … ?”
Sunglow turned away from the com as if she could not bear to meet his eyes even in an image. Her shoulders heaved as she took a deep breath. When she turned back again, her face was frozen stiff. “I had to …”
Hrecker did not force her to finish the sentence. When she stopped, he said, “I see.”
There was silence then, broken only when Sunglow finally said, “Where are you? That looks like …”
Dotson nodded. “We wrecked the drives, but not everything. One of the ships just needed power to work …” He gestured as if at the equipment surrounding the screen that held his image. The Racs no longer had facilities of their own that were capable of communicating with an orbiting starship. But they did still have receivers, and it was one of those that had detected the ex-prisoners’ attempts at contact. “When someone noticed you were calling, we ran a cable.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
“I feel like a specimen in a zoo,” said Marcus Aurelius Hrecker. “Or a pet.”
“You’re not in a cage.”
“No, but …” Hrecker glanced toward the pair of Racs who stood, their arms crossed, near the base of what remained of the Saladin. They followed him everywhere. “I’m the only one left.”
“You’re alive,” said Gypsy Blossom. And the others weren’t. Not one of the humans who had been on First-Stop that night remained. If any who had ever landed on First-Stop were still alive, it was only because they had returned to the Ajax. Some had died there. Some survived, at least for a while.
“There’s that,” Hrecker agreed. Not far away he could see the cage that had he
ld Sunglow and other prisoners for a short while, before they had been lifted into orbit, to the Ajax and its own doom. He remembered the smaller cages that had held single prisoners, specimens indeed, destined for Earthly zoos. He paused before adding, “I’m glad we failed.”
“Did you?” Dotson swept a hand to indicate the devastation that surrounded them. “It will take us decades to rebuild, to reconstruct the records and libraries you destroyed, to remember the plaques.”
“But you will. You know what I mean.”
Not one of the other Racs nearby had any response to that, though they did look where he looked, at the Saladin and the scarred, dented, punctured reaction mass tanks from which still trickled dust from the asteroids of Earth’s distant Solar System, at the cones of dust upon the ground, at the jagged edges that marked where the missiles had torn through the sides of the ship and destroyed the drive.
As near as Dotson Barbtail could tell, the bare ground on which they stood was where he had once trembled in a bank of honeysuckle while a pedestrian strolled along a gravel path. Now the honeysuckle was gone from this spot, scorched into ash and soot although it grew more vigorously than ever, unpruned, untended, not far away. The path was still visible.
The Great Hall that had been his target was gone. Nothing remained but a broken stone curtain that had been a wall, a stretch of floor, piles of rubble.
The Worldtree that had been the center of his life, his world, and all his people still stood. But it was shorter. Its top, the chamber the Gypsies had stocked with carefully engraved summaries of their sacred knowledge and in which the Racs had entombed their heroes, was gone. In its place was only jagged stone.
Finally, he said, “Why did you even try?” His voice was much more a snarl than it had been for weeks.
“Some of us were just following orders,” said Hrecker. “Taking the path of least resistance. I was. But that’s not what you want to know.”
“Who gave the orders?” Senior Hightail’s voice cracked, interrupting the gruff sounds of relief with a note of rage.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 152