by Ivan Cat
A Khafra life ended by Patton.
Patton's orb eyes went unfocused. He sat up, suddenly paralyzed. His glowbuds flared a somber blue, and then began to blink out in sequence, from his hind haunches up, spiraling around his thick body, like the unraveling threads of a sweater. His blackening body fell, rigid, into the bottom of the skimmer hull.
Halifax, blood dripping from a gash across his forehead, scrambled over to him.
"Wish we could afford to take more of them on missions," Tesla said as the skimmer cleared the island and the banks of the inlet began to fall away.
Halifax ignored the Prime Consul, cradling Patton's head in his arms. "You did good, Patton," he whispered. "You did good."
Patton's teeth chattered feverishly. "No problem. Skimmers safe?"
"The skimmers are safe," Halifax said gently. "And you saved my life, again."
"Halifax owes Patton," the domestic joked, getting weaker by the moment.
"Big time," the soldier agreed.
As the skimmers raced out to sea, Patton heard the victory yowl of a thousand Feral hunters thundering from behind.
"What see?" Patton asked faintly.
Halifax looked back at FI-538. "Ferals. The shore is lined with blood-red Ferals. What a sight."
Their massed cry resounded across the water, drowning out the whine of the single straining turbine and sending shivers up the spines of the beaten humans in the skimmers. Even in the darkness filling his head, Patton knew what it was, as one fighting creature knows the blood lust of another.
It was a declaration of war.
"It won't stop now," he heard Tesla say self-righteously. The Prime Consul's voice sounded full and determined, no longer drawn and remote from his defeat in the Chamber of the Body. "It won't stop until we kill them all or they kill us all."
Patton lost consciousness.
Halifax tilted Patton's closed eyes toward the brilliant afternoon sun. The domestic would need all the light he could get for the next little while. His scarred, blood-anointed face heavy with the losses that day, the old human murmured, "Animals incapable of independent thought: two. Humans: nil."
The blank-one force retreated, decimated. Tlalok's horde throbbed the colors of exultation.
Sweet was the odor of blank-ones on the run.
The forces of Radiance, so long in retreat, had evened the score one small notch. Soon Tlalok's horde would even it more. The blank-ones would return to their slave colony with the tale of what they had witnessed, a tale of Feral atrocity. And the blank-ones would be horrified. They would know what it was like to live in terror as all Pact had lived in terror for so many years. If Tlalok's horde had its way, the blank-ones would soon know subjugation and death, too.
Tlalok himself had impaled the blank-one raiders yesterday, growing the impaling poles with his own immune venom as other pack members held the despicable bipeds in place. Tlalok had pinched each sapling around its base, injecting temptations to grow here and here, there and there. The immune venom did not force compliance, only entice. There was no master and slave between Pact and plant, only need and want. Where those needs and wants converged, there were results.
In this case, vengeance.
How the raiders screamed when venom-enticed shoots and runners grew through their insides where there was no room to grow! It was shockingly savage, even to a Pact. But Tlalok remembered Lleeala screaming as sharkworms ate her alive, one bloody bite by one bloody bite. And when the blank-ones whimpered for mercy, Tlalok remembered how he had whimpered for mercy as his forcebonded blank-one inflicted Sacrament upon him so many years ago. Tlalok returned the same amount of mercy that had been meted upon him then. None. And when shoots and creepers grew, bulging out of blank-one mouths, stopping the hunh, hunh, hunh of overwhelming, unbearable torment, when the ugly pink faces prayed for death as the only escape from a haze of misery, Tlalok remembered the misery of his ten-season-old nurslings, slaughtered in a blank-one raid gone bad, tiny bodies broken and big-eyed with incomprehension at the horrible world that he, Tlalok, had not been able to protect them from. That memory killed any pity he might have felt for the blank-one raiders. He did not flinch, he did not falter, he did not stop.
He would never stop.
But he must pause. The horde could not move night and day. They must rest and gather their ferocity. After that, nothing could turn them aside from massive retribution. The horde outnumbered the blank-ones ten to one. Tlalok champed his teeth selfishly and clawed at the roots under his feet. Somewhere in the coming strife, he would find the blank-one Karr. And then... and then the payback for unleashing the False Radiance on Tlalok's world would be good.
For a while Tlalok glowed blood red.
And then he realized what he was doing and dimmed the glow-buds on his right side, to be half-blank in mourning, as so many of his pack were half-blank. He looked around. None of them seemed to notice. But none of them had any trouble observing the grieving ritual, as was proper. As Tlalok turned his back on the receding blank-one skimmers, he wondered why it was that he struggled to consciously do what any Pact should do without even thinking.
XXVI
Question: When you look into the radiant sun, what do you see?
Answer: Yourself.
Question: And when you look into the waters of the shadow world, what do you see?
Answer: Yourself.
—Feral riddle
The lifter flew deep into the Dead Zone, deep into the belly of a storm. Rain came down in smothering sheets. It was afternoon, although the dark sky gave no clue. Karr had been flying seventy-two straight hours since leaving the Enclave, unable to land. This was not because of Ferals—they had been left behind long ago— but because the water was too choppy to set down. And the winds were too violent to risk letting Arrou spell him at the controls. Fatigue numbed Karr's muscles, dulling his mind, enticing his eyelids to close over raw eyes, eyes hypnotized by never-ending, swirling droplets of rain. Just a few minutes of sleep, that's all he needed. A nap. Then he would be all right. But Jenette wouldn't let him. Neither she nor the rest of the crew would relent. Karr was dimly aware that they were staring at him, but he didn't register their concern and anxiety. Didn't they have duties to attend?
"I've decided something," Karr mumbled.
"What?" asked Jenette.
"You can let me sleep now."
Jenette turned to Arrou. "Can we set down?"
The alien looked over the edge of the lifter. Whitecaps tore across waves big enough to swamp the lifter. "Not think so."
"No sleep," Jenette said to Karr, slowly and forcefully. "Now pay attention. Look at the water. Look."
As if he could look at anything else. "Rain, rain, rain," Karr griped.
"No, look at the ocean," Jenette corrected. "See how it's not shiny? See?"
Zombie slow, Karr looked down the side of the cockpit. The water below was dull, like normal oceans on other, normal planets. Only a few marbled streaks of mirror-like surface were mixed in.
"The shiny parts are nutrient rich," Jenette explained, trying to keep his mind engaged. "The dull parts aren't. You can swim in them because nothing lives there. No nutrients: no plankton. No plankton: no sharkworms, no ring-islands, no nothing. Anything that drifts into the Dead Zone is doomed to a slow death."
And where does that leave us? Karr wondered idly.
As he looked down, his weary body leaned along with his lolling head—and unconsciously pulled the control yoke over, too. "Mmmm, I see."
The heavy lifter began to bank.
"Okay, stop looking!" Jenette said with rising alarm.
The wind kicked up, catching the rectangular hull like a sail. The lifter bucked up. Humans and domestics slid and skittered down the steepening, slippery deck. Dr. Marsh yelped as a bubble tent broke its moorings, bowling her over. Toliver and the Guards chased it downwind, barely grabbing the hemisphere before it could flip over the side. Supply crates strained against tie-downs.
&nb
sp; "Level off! Level off!" Jenette yelled, hanging onto exposed cockpit struts.
Eventually Karr's sluggish reflexes kicked in. Shuddery muscles pressed the controls and the deck became level once more. Again, he didn't see the worried looks the expedition members shot his way, but an influx of adrenaline momentarily revived him.
"Why...?" Karr gulped, struggling to wake up and correlate Jenette's words with what Bigelow had told him back at the Enclave. "Why pick an island in the Dead Zone to plant the original colony base?"
Breathing heavily, Jenette said, "It was deemed a good choice because there were no Ferals living anywhere near."
"Safer, I guess," Karr mumbled.
"Safe had nothing to do with it." Jenette looked around the lifter. No one had fallen off. "The original colonists bent over backwards to be friendly with Ferals, setting up lines of communication, rudimentary trade, and exchanging knowledge. Humans and Ferals got along well at first."
"Then why move the Enclave?"
"It turned out the reason no Ferals lived on Coffin Island was because it was a bad place to live."
"Because it was in the Dead Zone."
"Right. It seems obvious now, but it wasn't then. They didn't know shiny water was better. And they didn't call it Coffin Island. They called it Elysium island." Jenette pursed her lips wryly. "The Coffin part came later, after we strained its ecosystem to the limit, drained its reserves of fresh water, and had to move or die. That's when the Feral Wars began."
Karr nodded, but stopped when his head threatened another sleepy loll. "The Ferals saw weakness and attacked?"
"Oh no," said Jenette. "They tried to help, but the Scourge was wiping us out." Her voice lowered into an angry mutter. Karr strained to hear her over the wind. "My father spied out a large inhabited island, took it by force, dubbing it Golconda, moved the Enclave there, and promptly enslaved the Feral population to use for Sacrament, which he had just invented. Ferals call it the Great Betrayal. The War Years. Our losses were frightening, Feral loses devastating. We didn't get everything transferred from the Enclave's old location to the new one. We lost all our heavy vehicles, all our flying machines, our manufacturing plants, the larger items in the armory—your C-55s for instance..." Jenette trailed off as Karr's eyelids began to droop again.
She sent Arrou back to the tents.
Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Karr surmised that he was in bad shape, because he heard music in the wind. Hollow, foreboding music, like a distant pipe organ. It couldn't be real.
Arrou returned, legs and claws spread against any unexpected gust of wind or kick of the deck, the cone of his teeth pinched delicately on a steaming mug. Jenette took it and shoved it at Karr, but he turned his nose up at the vile liquid.
"I don't want it." If Karr drank, he would have to urinate again—it seemed that one could not truly own New Ascension pseudo-ghll, just pay rent on it—and that meant forcing his sore muscles to work. That meant moving.
"Drink," Jenette ordered, forcing the cup to his mouth.
Karr gulped, burning his palate and choking on bits of chitinous legs. He knocked the mug back, spitting scalding fluid. Jenette lost her grip on the mug and it tumbled over the side, down, down, down... splish, a tiny spot punched in foaming sea. Under it went, to the serene water below the surface. Karr wanted that serenity. He could rest in serenity like that, wrapped in a womb of primordial water, like Long Reach was wrapped in water. Karr was too far gone for the pain in his mouth and lips to revive him. Distant conversation behind him:
"Deena, give him another stimulant."
"I've already given him twice the safe dose. I can't give him any more."
Jenette swore.
"Corporal Toliver! Where's that damn island?"
Leaning against the wind, Toliver jogged over and checked his map-reader. "We're at the right spot on the charts," he apologized.
"Then where is it?" Jenette repeated.
"Islands drift," Arrou reminded.
"He's right," Toliver agreed. "And these charts haven't been updated since the satellite went offline ten years ago. Sorry, Consul."
Jenette cursed again.
For some reason, the exchange amused Karr. Coffin Island, like a piece of driftwood, had floated away, like Karr's mind was floating away, spiraling into dreamy mist, like the spiral search pattern he was trying to fly.
An ethereal organ hummed a lullaby. Sleep. Sleep.
Discontinuity.
Karr's head jerked upright. Jenette was screaming in his ear.
"Pilot Karr, Pilot Karr!" At first Karr's fuzzy reasoning concluded that he had suffered a fugue-flashback: an unexpected release of fugue from fat cells into his bloodstream, which could and did paralyze Pilots at the most inopportune times. Then Karr thought that the lifter had gone down. That they were drowning. Water choked his eyes and nose, but it was just a thicker deluge of rain, beating against his head as the organ music moaned on. He couldn't see five yards in front of his face.
"Wake up! Wake up!" Jenette cried. "Arrou, help me!"
Unnerved humans and Khafra struggled not to be blown overboard behind them.
Karr felt claws on his shoulders. Shaking him. Fishy breath on his neck. And he remembered that fish lived in the sea. The sleepy. Sleepy. Sea.
Discontinuity.
"Aaaah!" he cried, awaking to a painful cone of teeth biting into his shoulder. A leathery alien hand gripped his, pulling the steering yoke back to center. The lifter rotated out of its dive. And the moaning music vibrated through the hull, his body. Toccata and fugue in Sea Minor. Ha ha. There was a crazy thought.
But not so funny were the moaning bones around them.
Karr was flying through the grim reaper's erector set. Above, below, and to either side were what looked, to Karr's deluded mind, like titanic femur and humerus and ulna bones. More, dead ahead. Collision course ahead. Karr yanked the controls hard right. The heavy lifter veered off, banking back through the forest of hollow, petrified bones. Silver-white fossils swayed in the wind, clattering in eerie syncopation. Wind blew over their open ends, playing a horrible pipe organ thrum as the lifter flew back out over water.
The chaotic snapshots merged. A picture built up. Storm and wave battered against an endless curving shore, cliffs made of bones piled on bones towered one hundred feet high. And rising from the undead plateau, highlighted by the flash and rumble of lightning, were skeletal tree trunks, like hoary bristles on an old hog's back, needle fangs biting the sky, arching inland, the landscape of death blurred into darkness by ever more distant curtains of water.
Coffin Island.
Karr knew it with certainty before he heard the gasped exclamations behind him. Lowering the throttle lever, he brought the lifter down, nosing back inshore, weaving in between the curving bone columns. He flew slowly inland, sinking lower and lower. The lifter lurched, scraping against a fossil tree. The bone shattered, toppling into other howling bones. A hail of shards pelted down on the island below.
Karr spotted a break in the vertical bones and aimed the lifter for it, descending and scraping across uneven ground.
"Hold on!" Jenette warned the others.
Karr brought the lifter to a cockeyed halt. Once more, loose gear skittered down the deck. Karr looked around and, with a bleary-eyed "Okay," swiped off the engine switches and collapsed into deep, deep sleep.
XXVII
From the transcripts of Major Vidun's implanted personal recorder, planet Solara, 10.29.3531.
Document status: CLASSIFIED.
(Looking out of place, Dr. Uttz enters a dim bar, scans the lethargic crowd and spots Vidun, who hunches over an empty slammer rig. Uttz joins the military man.)
Vidun (looks up bleary-eyed): Well, if it isn't the good doctor. What brings you to my lair?
Dr. Uttz: Fifteen years of daily briefings, rain or shine, then today nothing. It gave me pause. When heard a rumor you might be found here, I came. May I sit?
Vidun: Suit yourself. You won'
t partake, of course.
Dr. Uttz: In fact, I will.
(Surprised, Vidun motions to the barkeep, a rundown anthrosimalcrum robot, who brings over a new slammer rig and refills Vidun's. The Academy instructors attach the transfer tubes and patches to their necks and absorb the luminous fluid in silence. Uttz is the first to empty his rig.)
Dr. Uttz (slumping): Why so melancholy, colleague?
Vidun (brooding): Only a few years left. He's seventeen today. In the blink of an eye, he'll be assigned a ship and we'll never see him again.
Dr. Uttz: We may not see him, but we will be near for a while, in the dreamchamber of his fugues hip.
Vidun (head hangs glumly): It all starts again. Hop from planet to planet. Test the populations. Gather the candidates. A century or two passes, and then we set up another Academy on another world. I'm too old for this shit. Dr. Uttz (shrugs): You and I have a few more terms in us each.
(Vidun leans overly close to Uttz, waxes maudlin.) Vidun: He hates our guts, doesn't he? Dr. Uttz: I fear you are correct. Vidun (pounds table): Goddamn, whore-mongering, mother-fucking shit! Well... (laughs suddenly)...
I guess we did our jobs then? Dr. Uttz: I suppose we did.
(Their bloodshot eyes twinkle. Vidun motions the barkeep.) Vidun: Two more!
Karr dreamed of Long Reach. He dreamed of flesh, of being enfolded deep in the warm cocoon of his fugueship, of being caressed and comforted by the velvet folds of its fleshy body. Like the security of a baby nestling at its mother's bosom. Flesh. The handshake of a friend. Flesh. The press of a sleeping lover's embrace ... all nurturing kinds of contact denied to a Pilot, all except the flesh of his ship, the only living thing he had ever been allowed to care about, to belong to. The flesh was his life. The flesh was his friend. The flesh was home.
Karr awoke.
The flesh was gone. He did not open his eyes. He was alone in his mind with the strangling feeling of separation, as it had been every morning that he woke away from Long Reach. Every morning it was harder to fight the emotions back. Karr had never been separated from his ship this long before. He struggled to regain his wits.