I looked around for a likely spokesbeing and found one in the form of the nearest Brachiator, a great black shadow perhaps all of five meters away.
“Uh…hello? Can you hear me?”
The black shape swelled with breath, then exhaled. “Yes.”
“Are you the one called Friend to Half-Ghosts?”
“Yes. It is a pleasure to be your friend now, Andrea Cort.”
I cleared my throat. “Am I a Half-Ghost now?”
Another low, rumbling breath, with a cute little whistle in it. Maybe the Brachiator had a cold. “You have been a Half-Ghost for most of the night.”
“That’s all it takes, then? Just hanging here?”
“All it takes is a connection to Life.”
I wondered if Brachiators bored themselves to tears on a regular basis or whether they only spoke this way when humans were around. “What about the other human I spoke to last night? There was one here, wasn’t there?”
“There was more than one.”
“When?”
“First there was the one-in-two. The one that brought you here.”
The Porrinyards, obviously. Stupid of me not to specify that. And impressive of the Brach to perceive their nature so quickly. “And after them?”
“Another.”
“When?”
“After the one-in-two left.”
“Did you hear me talking to that one?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what we talked about?”
“We do not listen to conversations that are not our concern.”
That sounded prim. “It’s all right if you overheard.”
“Thank you. But we do not hear what we are not invited to hear.”
Brachiators, I decided, made the universe’s most useless witnesses. “Did you recognize the one I spoke to?”
“By reputation,” said Friend to Half-Ghosts.
I hadn’t suspected the word part of the Brachiator vocabulary. “What kind of reputation?”
“As a Ghost Who Kills Ghosts.” He sounded petulant, as if the answer was so obvious I’d wasted his time by merely asking.
“Would you happen to know whether it was male or female?”
“We have trouble discerning gender among Ghosts.”
“But you can tell the difference between New Ghosts and Half-Ghosts, right?”
Friend to Half-Ghosts sounded almost amused. “Yes. That is easy.”
“How?”
“Half-Ghosts are marked by Life.”
“Am I marked by Life?”
“Now you are.”
“And you can tell this?”
“It is what enables us to be friends.”
I almost recited my habitual response to offers of friendship: the one about not wanting friends and not looking for any. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome,” said Friend to Half-Ghosts.
He was being polite at best. He was not attached to me, or for that matter any of my semi-living kind. He could only be aggrieved by the intrusion of human beings, with their constant, distracting questions. Given common decency as an option, I would just leave him alone. But I didn’t have that option. There were still things I needed to know.
I subtly shifted my arms and legs within the network of roots and support wires that had held me fast for so long. They tingled like mad from impaired circulation, but would be able to move in a hurry if necessary.
I said, “I am happy we are friends. Because I need your help.”
Another rumble. “What would you like me to do?”
“I need your help staying alive.”
A low, disturbed rumble rose from the other Brachiators around us. I didn’t know how many members of the tribe had heard me, but those who had were scandalized, even angry, like the guests at any human gathering, hearing something distasteful from the stranger in their midst.
Friend to Half-Ghosts seemed more unflappable. “You are a Half-Ghost. You have all the Life you can ever know.”
“I don’t care. I’m tired of being a Ghost. I’m tired of having to return to the land of the Dead. I need more. I need Life the way you have Life.”
Was it just my imagination, or was Friend really trembling now, in fear or rage or frustration or dismay? It didn’t matter. I didn’t need imagination to hear a change in the timbre of his voice: a deepening, a hoarseness that had not been there before. “Too much Life is not healthy for Ghosts. We have heard this. The other Ghost—”
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one we have heard about. The one who embraced Life.”
“The one who died from it,” I said.
“Yes. She taught us that Life is not good for Ghosts. That it uses them up too fast.”
“It’s still a small price to pay for Life.”
A long pause. The quality of the air changed, and took on the quality of the last few seconds before a storm.
Friend to Half-Ghosts started begging. “Please, Andrea Cort. Do not ask for this. We do not want to use you up too fast.”
My throat went dry. I swallowed spit and said, “I know what I want, Friend. Give me Life.”
Everything in the world held its breath at once. The soft rustle of Brachiators shifting position on their vines, the sighs and grunts of Brachiator breath, the murmur of Brachiator words and all the other subliminal reminders of Life all abruptly cut away to nothing, replaced with the frantic, unspoken tension of creatures challenged to carry out an atrocity.
Then Friend to Half-Ghosts started to move.
21. PLUNGE
Friend to Half-Ghosts withdrew one limb from the Uppergrowth, held it before him like an offering, then reached up and found another handhold closer to me.
He withdrew another limb, hesitated again, and grabbed hold once more.
He did the same with his hind limbs, one after the other, each time at the same glacial pace, each time demonstrating hiccups of reluctance in what otherwise looked like an inexorable advance.
His pace was matched by his fellow Brachiators. They were all advancing on me.
Some were already removing the detached claws threaded into their fur.
I closed my eyes, imagining how much it would hurt to have those claws driven through my wrists and ankles, persuading myself that this was in fact my fate, struggling to summon fear of the torments about to fall upon me.
I finished the count to thirty and then, living dangerously, started at zero again.
One, two…
I still heard them coming.
Fifteen, sixteen…
The rumble of their approach was enough to make my body shake.
Twenty-one, twenty-two…
I expected a furry hand to close around my wrist at any moment.
Twenty-five, twenty-six…
I couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten here yet.
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight…
I could feel them all around me, their hot breath already warming my skin.
Thirty.
I opened my eyes.
They had advanced at varying speeds, reflecting the variation in their ages and physical conditions. A burly, many-scarred specimen with gray streaks in its coat had overtaken the somewhat slower Friend to Half-Ghosts and might be upon me minutes ahead of its brother.
There was no doubt what they intended to do to me.
Given a chance, they would gather around on all sides, seize my arms and my legs with a strength natural to any creatures who never knew respite from the need to hold on. One or two would take each arm. One or two would take each leg. They would hold my merely human limbs in place, not out of malice but out of simple animal awareness that the passage into Life always causes great pain and might lead weaker creatures into convulsions. They might even speak a few comforting words.
And then they would drive the claws through my wrists and ankles.
They understood that this might kill me. It had, after all, killed Warmuth. But they would still see it as an act o
f kindness.
By their lights it would be the ultimate act of friendship.
The Brachs were still minutes away, their charge as interminable as it was inexorable.
I made my voice very naïve and very small. “What are you doing?”
“We are giving you what you have asked for,” Friend to Half-Ghosts said.
Would Cynthia have looked around herself and seen sudden menace in a population now converging on her from all sides? Would she have wondered if she’d said the right thing, or instead offended them in some way? Or would she have been proud beyond measure that she had succeeded beyond all measure whereas all of her mocking, unfriendly co-workers had failed?
The gray Brachiator was almost upon me. There was no reason to believe its catalogue of facial expressions carried the same spectrum of meanings as the nearest human equivalents, but that little half-smile at worse seemed kind, compassionate, even holy.
The claw it drew back for a strike was cracked with age and stained with the blood of Brachs fallen in battle.
If I stayed here it would know my blood as well.
So I sprung all my lines but one and plunged, spread-eagled, toward the clouds.
I gasped, felt terror and panic fill my veins with liquid ice, called myself a thousand resentful names, wondered if crucifixion at the hands of the Brachiators would have been all that bad an alternative to falling, angrily told myself I was being stupid, and screamed.
Then I gasped again as a jolt pulled my spine taut and flung me upward, back toward the Uppergrowth, and the Brachiators gathered around my home of the night before.
The cord attached to my chest harness was too elastic. I was going to bounce too high and give the Brachiators a chance to grab me on the rebound.
It was a stupid thing to be afraid of. No cord is that elastic. And the Brachs could not see what my body was doing. Their gazes were fixed on the Uppergrowth, not on anything taking place below them.
I still came so close to their assembled backs that I could read their respective histories in the scars cross-hatching their flesh.
For a moment I heard thunder.
Then I fell again, the urge to scream not quite as overpowering this time.
When the cord drew taut I was left whirling at its lowest point, the cloudscape and Uppergrowth reduced to kaleidoscopic whirs.
I hadn’t registered making fists, but when I unclenched them now, my palms tingled from freed circulation. Which struck me as stupid. Panic’s no good as a survival mechanism if it’s so clueless it thinks you can punch a deadly drop into submission.
The spinning of the circle of clouds, down below, slowed to a stop, then changed direction as my line uncoiled. Clockwise this time. No less disorienting, but at least a change.
No point in panicking, then. So I tapped my throat-mike. “Oscin? Skye? I have what I need. I’m ready for a pickup.”
Silence.
I tapped my mike again. “Oscin? Skye?”
They came in, brusque and out-of-synch. “I read you, Andrea. I’m also a little busy.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m under attack.”
I had heard an explosion, but had been too busy fighting back my own fear that I’d been unable to register the sound as anything but One One One’s constant ambient thunder. Now I realized it had been louder, and closer, than any of the storms had been. “From who?”
“Please be quiet, Andrea. This is hard work even for two heads.”
I spun at the end of my line, searching the open air for signs of a skimmer under attack. For a long, terrifying moment I found nothing: there was simply too much sky, too many clouds, too many distant specks journeying toward their own unknown destinations. Then more muffled thunder arrived from somewhere to my immediate right, and I spun again, tracking the sound.
I saw a gray speck that could only be the skimmer drawing a line across the sky, a mere thousand meters below, and a bright object too small to be a vehicle following close behind. A bright red flower bloomed between them before vanishing: an airburst of some kind. The purple afterimage was just beginning to fade when the sound reached me: a muffled, comical pop that sounded more like a failed attempt at an explosion than the real thing. Even as I watched, the skimmer seemed to wobble, then spin, before beginning a steep dive.
“No!” I shouted.
Oscin spoke alone, his voice calm but harried. “Please, Andrea. If we really think we’re about to die, we’ll be sure to let you know.”
The skimmer faded from sight long before it reached the clouds, the blurring effects of the intervening atmosphere camouflaging its exact position against the roiling storms. Even the explosions became harder to see. When one blinding retort lit up the sky, I was so certain the skimmer had gone up that I actually screamed.
I felt a tug on my back.
Looking up, I saw something else happening. The Brachiators had reached my line and gathered around it. Friend to Half-Ghosts was probing it with his claws, as he struggled to puzzle out its meaning. They had to be a little confused. After all, their perspectives were fixed; they just saw the line itself, and how it was anchored. They couldn’t look down and see vulnerable little me, bobbing like a trinket at the end of a string. And even if they could they probably couldn’t pull me up. Their muscles were built for clinging, not lifting.
At least, that’s what I hoped.
There was another burst of light down below.
“That wasn’t us,” Oscin said. “But it was close.”
“You have any ideas?”
“Lots. But we need better ones. This is just a clumsy old transport. We don’t have the weapons or the maneuverability to win a dogfight, and our enemy doesn’t seem to place much stock in playing fair.” Whatever he said next was drowned out by a loud roar. “—wounded.”
Another tug from up above. I bobbed a few centimeters, thrashed, saw the Brachiators huddle as they conferred over what to do next.
I tapped my throat mike and murmured the code I had for Lastogne. It took all of five seconds for him to answer: five seconds inhabited by the terrible suspicion that something had befallen all the people in the hangar. Then I heard a clutter, a muttered curse, and a voice thick with sleep. “Unngh. Counselor? Aren’t you back yet?”
“No,” I said, “and we’re not going to be back at all unless we get a rescue mission out here, right away.”
A pause. I heard another voice in the background, female, asking Lastogne a sleepy question. He relayed it. “Are you still in the habitat?”
“That’s affirmative. We’re under attack and we need a pickup.”
He didn’t ask me who was attacking. “You have a location? A grid number?”
“I didn’t even know you used grid numbers!”
“Can you ask the Porrinyards?”
“They’re busy! Just track my signal!”
“Hang on,” he said. “I’ll get Mo Lassiter.”
I felt another sharp tug on my line, lifting me a few centimeters. This time it wasn’t followed by an equivalent drop. When I looked up, I understood why. The Brachiators were working out a plan to retrieve me. Even as I watched, the gray-haired one had cupped one of his hands around a length of cord and was lumbering away from its anchoring point, turning himself into a pulley that would draw me up the farther he traveled. Other Brachiators were stepping in to take the slack.
Retrieving me could take hours, but the Brachiators had plenty of time. It was all they did have. I wasn’t sure I had any. “Damn you, Peyrin! This is getting serious!”
He came back on. “We’re working on it, Counselor. Still looking for Mo.”
“Does it matter who you get? We’re in trouble here!”
“I recognize that, Counselor. I want her because she knows the Uppergrowth better than just about anybody, and she’s most equipped to find you based on your signal. But we’re not waiting for her. We’ll have a party outfitted and ready to go in just under tw
o minutes, with or without her.”
I felt another tug, and began to wonder if I even had two minutes.
A point of light emerged from the clouds, became an arc, then headed back in. I couldn’t tell whether that was the Porrinyards or their pursuer. Oscin’s signal broke into mine: “I’m having a rough time, Andrea. I’ve had to descend a little farther than I wanted to, into a storm, and it’s going to take me a few minutes to pull out. Don’t overreact if I’m out of touch for a while.”
I was still wondering what overreaction was supposed to entail in this situation when Lastogne returned, all out of breath: “Found Mo. She’s getting ready. What’s happening?”
Another tug, yanking me upward.
“Counselor?”
The Brachiators were now acting in concert, the cord strung through several sets of hands as everyone involved in my retrieval followed the gray-hair’s lead. Several were drawing up their own slack, increasing the speed of my ascent. A few seconds ago I had considered the sluggishness of the species a near guarantee that they wouldn’t have me back within reach for hours. Now I figured I had minutes.
At that point I’d have nothing but words to save me from what had happened to Cynthia Warmuth.
Lastogne prodded me. “Counselor?”
“Tell Lassiter I’m hanging from a safety line and under assault from Brachiators. Tell her I think I have five minutes or less. Tell her the Porrinyards are in a skimmer, under attack by someone airborne.” A thought occurred to me. “Contact the AIsource too.”
“They must know what’s happening already.”
“I’ve no doubt of that. But they may not refuse a direct request for help.”
The Brachiators had a rhythm going. The stop-start-stop-start I’d endured up to this point had given way to constant effort. When I looked up I saw that the number of Brachs working on the project had increased to half a dozen.
Emissaries from the Dead ac-1 Page 28