Pepper grabbed Heutzin’s oil-stained shirt and yanked the man closer. “I want to walk again. Is that so hard for you to understand?”
Heutzin stared back at him. “Is that all?”
“I’m crippled, Heutzin, and at a tremendous disadvantage. It’s making me very irritable. And I’m dangerous when I’m irritable.”
“Now you’re making threats.”
“That was no threat. I am no threat. Had I been a threat you would know.” Pepper sat down next to his amputated leg. “Give me your knife.”
“What knife?”
Pepper cocked his head. Heutzin could keep a straight face. He liked that. “The one in your left pocket.”
Heutzin shrugged and pulled it out. Pepper opened it with a quick flick of his one hand and retrieved the chit and gold discs with several quick surgical cuts.
He dropped the bloody payment in Heutzin’s hands. “You’re no longer a simple dockworker now.”
Pepper wiped the blade on the fabric, rewrapped the leg, and stood back up, fumbling slightly with the crutch. He watched Heutzin nod, then back away. He paused at a notch in the courtyard wall near a pair of torches and tossed one of the gold discs into the middle of rotting grapes and bananas. “Thanks to this house’s gods, for their blessings.”
“You are all annoyingly superstitious,” Pepper said. “The boy’s ramblings, your obeisance to a notch in the wall. I thought you a stronger man than that.”
“Timas still refuses to change his story?” Heutzin turned back, concerned. “He will risk his family’s status.”
“He believes he saw aliens in the smog,” Pepper said. “He’s easily spooked.” He turned to hobble inside and rest. Enough intrigue for one night.
“Not spooked,” Heutzin said softly.
Pepper kept ambling along by crutch.
“The boy isn’t mad.” Heutzin’s voice rose. “Don’t dismiss him like that. There are things down there.”
Heutzin walked toward Pepper.
“Not just shadows in the mist?” Pepper said.
“I will never forget what I saw,” Heutzin said. “You talk as if we’re ignorant, but I worked the surface like Timas for years. I was the best. And I paid the greatest price for what I saw. So will Timas. When I returned speaking about things on the surface I was told to remain quiet. But I know what I saw. I even went out. I tried to find them. Almost died from running out of air. And they took it all from me. My suit, my life, my pride.
“Now I work on the docks, but only on the condition that I never blaspheme again. And if you say I told you this, I will lie and say it wasn’t so. But you see me, Pepper, a direct man who’s seen death and suffering and toil. You see me, and tell me if I don’t believe I saw something real down there.”
Pepper stared at him, watched his pupils dilate slightly, listened to the rhythm of his breathing. “You may believe that you saw something, that does not make it any more real.”
“It was a box.”
“What?”
“The creature, it just wafted out of the mist, running at me. It gave me a box, a steel box, and it pushed its helmet against mine and spoke to me. It asked me to open the box and just mail the letter inside.” Heutzin’s eyes were wide with his eagerness to be believed. “It said I would save many lives if I were to post that letter.”
“A physical letter?”
“The pipiltin said I was addled,” Heutzin spat.
“And the letter?”
“Just a random letter, someone talking about the damned weather. I didn’t understand that.”
Pepper blinked. The last detail sounded too jarring to be made-up. Made-up would be that the letter revealed something profound, not that it was useless. “Do you have the letter?”
“The pipiltin threw it away. But I have the box. I know it’s alien, it has strange silver writing all over the sides. It’s loopy, with lots of circles inside circles.”
That sounded like Nesaru writing. The wrong kind of alien for the ones anyone on Yatapek would know much about.
It could be faked, but still . . . “Bring it.”
Heutzin tapped his forehead. “Of course. When I come with the parts.”
“Now.” Pepper looked at Heutzin. “Bring it to me now.”
And there was suddenly the faintest gleam of something in Heutzin’s eyes.
Relief that maybe, finally, someone believed him. And Pepper thought maybe, maybe there was something to the man’s story.
If true, it would mean they sat on top of one hell of a big target. Pepper watched the dockhand leave the courtyard and then set to burying his own leg in a patch of ground, underneath a set of flowers.
He was exhausted, and for a while he lay near the flowers, looking up through the clear dome at the stars. From down here, they looked peaceful, twinkling away. They didn’t look at all like they harbored the sheer malevolence and ill will he’d come to expect of the universe.
A small dart stung him.
Pepper looked at his good thigh and pulled it out. Normally he could accelerate his metabolism and burn through the sedative, but already exhaustion from healing and moving around had set in. He’d been teetering around all day.
He spotted the Jaguar scout who’d fired the dart.
Pepper picked up a crutch to throw, but then slumped to the ground. Fast-moving feet surrounded him, and then the edges of a reactive armor cape.
A man in an Aeolian helmet looked down at him. “I’m using nanofilament to bind your hand to your neck. Struggle and you’ll cut your own head off.”
Another Aeolian soldier tapped his helmet. “We have him. Get the ship warmed, we’re moving now before any of the locals get any bright ideas.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Aeolian soldiers had Pepper. They came for Katerina, and the moment Timas saw them he followed them out, Katerina just behind him. Pepper lolled in the back of the cart with Aeolians sitting alertly on either side, their feet dangling near the ground. One of them had his gun raised up as Timas stepped into the courtyard, tracking him.
Timas ignored the barrel and walked up to Pepper. “They captured you.”
Pepper straightened his head with effort, then slumped back again and groaned.
“What are you doing here, kid?” The faceless Aeolian with the gun raised it slightly. Timas stood up straight, as if standing before a large audience.
“Hey. Pepper! I wanted you to know who did this to you,” he spat.
Pepper didn’t turn.
“I did it. I helped them,” Timas yelled. “People like you don’t care about people like us, down here. But at least this once, you’ll remember the name when you get dragged back out.” It felt good to let this loose. Let this killer see what happened to people who didn’t care about the troubles they brought on others.
“And what do you think you accomplished?” Pepper shifted, and the cart squeaked.
“There are consequences to the things you do.” Timas stood triumphant in the early morning sunlight of the courtyard. He’d done something, a measure of payback. A measure of justice for what had happened to Cen. And in some small way, him.
“A butterfly flaps its wings and on the other side of the planet, a hurricane develops,” Pepper grunted. “Everything everyone does has consequences, kid, not just the things that the people you’re mad at do.”
“You kill people.” Timas pointed at him. “You killed Cen.”
“And what do you think will happen to this city when I’m gone? You think you’ll repel the Swarm without me? Remember this when your friends and family are screaming and dying all throughout this city of yours.” Pepper leaned forward and snapped the next words out: “Remember that you chose to help get rid of me.”
Timas flinched. “You’re a bully.”
Pepper shook his head, very softly. “Just hold this conversation in your head, child. Keep flapping those little butterfly wings. You’re just as responsible as I am for anything that comes next.”
Child? He was no child. . . . Timas started to say something, but saw Heutzin carrying a dull black box with silver circles and loops scattered all over its sides. He cradled it in his left hand, walking quickly toward them. The dockhand looked at Pepper, concerned. “What’s going on?”
“Bring the box over.” Pepper paid no attention to Timas now.
“Hold it.” The nearest Aeolian soldier swung and aimed at Heutzin, who froze in place.
“It’s just a box. An empty box.”
“Not damn likely, you keep your distance. Back up.”
Heutzin did so. “He wanted me to show it to him.”
“Move any closer and we won’t fire a warning shot.”
“I understand.” Heutzin looked frustrated.
“Open it from there,” Pepper said.
“Don’t do that,” the Aeolian said.
Itotia and Ollin came out. “Ma’am, stand back,” another Aeolian said. A woman. Her voice sounded just as edgy as the others, Timas thought.
But Pepper ignored them all. His eyes never left the box. “Never mind, just turn it slightly this way, Heutzin.”
Before the Aeolians could object, he’d done just that, though he looked ready to jump out of his skin at a moment’s notice.
“Shit.” For the first time Pepper looked surprised at something, though, Timas thought. Someone who fell out of the sky was probably hard to impress. And to Timas’s surprise, Pepper looked right over at him. “You’re right.”
“I don’t understand.” Timas felt uncomfortable under Pepper’s surprise. It felt so unnatural coming from the man.
“You’re right. And so is Heutzin. There are aliens on the ground under us.”
“Blasphemy,” Ollin muttered.
Pepper snapped his head toward Ollin. “Oh for fuck’s sake, man. Get your superstitions straight. You know aliens exist. You know one set posed as your gods once, and that they still live out there. Just because you reject the slavery they put you under on New Anegada doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge some other batch might be on the surface of Chilo. That box has Nesaru writing on it.”
Timas felt like he was falling, his stomach rising, rising up past his throat.
“There are those in Yatapek who’d take that as an excuse to spill blood,” Itotia said. “We ran away from that after our men fought alongside the mongoose-men against the League. We helped gain your independence. We reformed our beliefs, and some of us moved away from New Anegada to leave those memories behind us. And now you say something like that again has followed us here. It’s a hard pill to swallow so quickly.”
Heutzin looked down at the box. “Many used shadows to jump at, wanting the return of all that because it was better when we were on top, favored by them, instead of scrabbling here in this city, in the winds of this world. Not all who moved here did it because they reformed, but because they were with families they loved.”
They all looked like they were wavering. Aliens were real. Timas hadn’t been crazy. He’d seen something real. Cen hadn’t died for a vision.
And maybe, maybe Pepper didn’t deserve Cen’s death on his hands. How could he have known Cen and Timas were under the city? Was Timas dooming him for something he couldn’t have helped?
One of the Aeolians almost dashed Timas’s hopes when he laughed. “Anyone could buy a box with Nesaru writing on it.”
Pepper leaned back against the cart and spoke into the air. “Not this box. It has a return address on it.” He looked over at Katerina who stood impassively by the Aeolian soldiers. “Query it, the encryption key will prove me right. It’ll verify the handwriting on the side.”
She looked a bit startled to be caught up in the scene, but stepped over to Heutzin and put her palm to the box, then pulled it away as if it had burned her. “You’re right. It says it comes from Hulbach Cavern, on Chilo.”
Timas had helped condemn the man who just proved that what he’d seen was real, and Katerina and her millions of fellow citizens just behind her silver eye had seen it. And yet, he’d also been proved right. He looked over at his parents, who didn’t say anything back. A tiny, electric moment of shock rippled through him, and then Itotia smiled sadly.
Timas dropped to his hands and knees as his stomach continued its motion, and his last meal spilled out. He kept his eyes on the cart as Ollin and Itotia rushed to him, as well as Katerina.
“What’s wrong with him?” She pushed through and grabbed his shoulder.
“It’s nothing.” Ollin pushed her back.
Timas sat back, breathing heavily. “I was right. I did see something.”
“You’re too stressed. You shouldn’t be involved in things like this.” Itotia pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lips. “They should never have been brought here, Ollin.”
An Aeolian pulled Timas up by his bicep. “Come on, kid. We need you to come with us.”
Itotia moved between them both. “And why is that?”
“Legal maneuvers: another name has been added to the people this man is accused of killing. Cen. The accuser needs to be there. You will be witnesses.”
Timas shook his head. “I take it back. I take it back.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Katerina said softly, still near him. “We all heard what you said. You made a good point, and although he’s innocent until proven guilty, it is a fact that we now know Cen died because of his actions. You are right that he should at least be charged with this. You will face him.”
“I don’t want to anymore.”
“He’s just a child,” Itotia protested.
Katerina looked at her. “So am I. But death is death, and Pepper is to be taken before the courts.”
“Ollin, go with Timas.”
Ollin stood up. “I have to stay here. The council will need . . .”
“Rot the council,” Itotia snapped. “If you don’t want to stand by your own son, I will.”
“And meanwhile, Chilo is in danger from the Swarm,” Pepper spat from over on the cart. “You’re all wasting my time. We need to move, we now know why the Swarm is here, and what it’s coming for. Bring Timas and his mother and let’s get this pathetic show on the road. We don’t have time.”
The Aeolians surrounded Timas and his mother and moved them forward. Timas looked up at Itotia, and she put her arms around him. “It’ll be okay.”
Timas didn’t think so.
As the tiny cart moved forward with its strange accompaniment, Katerina asked Pepper, “You said it won’t be long now, what did you mean?”
“Before the Swarm attacks here, in strength. This is its goal. Some alien presence below us. The League unleashed this to get at that. And Yatapek will be the focus of the Swarm’s entire army as a last stop on its way to this Hulbach Cavern.”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aboard the Aeolian airship organized chaos reigned. Something had upset the three crewmen; they had sour looks as they dashed about.
“This shows you how cheap this operation is.” Katerina leaned in close to Timas and pointed out the window. “Prop-powered airship. They must have rented it. We’re not even important enough to warrant an escort, particularly now that everyone is worrying about their own airspace.” She again reminded him that these Aeolians were just bounty hunters. Yatapek wasn’t important enough to rate real Aeolian military, just its retirees.
From inside the docks they’d walked out along a corridor, into a gantry, and then into a long docking tube straight into the airship’s car. The peek Timas had gotten from a porthole in the docking tube showed him a sleek, cigarlike ship with the teardrop-shaped section attached underneath.
The large propellers jutted out on struts, bracketing the airship’s car. They started up as Timas watched.
“Why do they look so troubled?” he finally asked.
“City Lipari fell silent,” Katerina said. “Just like the others.”
“That’s three entire cities,” Timas hissed.
“We k
now. We feel it every second, their voices and votes are gone.”
Twelve Aeolians filled all the remaining seats of the tiny airship car. The floorboards up and down the aisles had been pulled up, bags of gear tossed quickly in, and the boards replaced. They squeaked as people walked over them to their seats.
A shudder rippled through the ship from the direction of the airlock in the back. Everyone bounced as the craft drifted away, passing through vortices left by the city’s passage through Chilo’s atmosphere. This would be a bumpier ride than just standing on the layer of one of the giant, implacable cities.
“Undocked!” someone to the rear yelled. The airship car stretched maybe twenty feet and had room for fifteen passengers and the pilot, strapped into a large chair at the front. Cables draped from the helmet over his head, a thought-control interface, but the usual assortment of panels, dials, and manual switches remained in front of him. Even a wheel and some levers.
In any other instance Timas would have been trying to look over the pilot’s shoulder.
Pepper sat in the row of seats in front of them with a pair of Aeolians on either side. Timas sat between Itotia and Katerina.
The Aeolian on their left swore and smacked the seat.
“Okay,” Timas said. “What was that about?”
“Upper Alucido.” Katerina lowered her voice. “It’s happening just like Pepper described. People are breaking out of the lower levels and attacking citizens. Alucido’s fighting back, though. It’s messy.”
“Isn’t anyone going to help these cities?” Itotia asked.
“Yes.” Katerina looked out at the propellers. “While some are going silent, or reporting Swarm outbreaks, others are refusing to let airships dock. There’s also a general referendum to move to emergency war footing.”
“Then why take us?” Timas asked.
“Pepper will be safer and more secure in an Aeolian city,” one of the soldiers said. “And he may have more memories and observations that will help.”
They watched from the portholes as the airship floated away. The winds buffeted it, and Yatapek’s giant curved underside stretched over them. The props howled, chopping at the thick atmosphere outside, and soon Yatapek was a giant bubble in the distance, floating high over the clouds, its multiple decks visible behind its thick transparent shell.
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