Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  "What about you?"

  "As soon as you’re gone, I’ll jump out an emergency airlock. There’s one just…"

  The floor heaved beneath our feet. I grabbed at something to keep my balance; the "something" was Tobit, who was grabbing me too. "No more time," he growled, shoving me toward the pod. "They’re grappling the ship with tractors."

  "They’re really going to steal my ship?"

  "York," he said, "it’s not your ship and it’s not your fault. You’re just caught in a High Council fuck-up. Bad enough that this whole crew died… but the Admiralty must have opened itself a whopping security hole that let all the wrong people hear about Willow. Someone smuggled nano aboard. Someone else heard there’s a crewless ship here, ripe for the taking. It’s a grade A extra large chrome-plated cluster fuck, but you aren’t the one responsible. You’ve stepped in someone else’s dog shit, York; scrape it off your shoe and just walk away."

  "Can’t I do anything?"

  The ship lurched again; I barely managed to stay on my feet. Tobit stumbled and went down on one knee, but scrambled up again fast.

  "Yeah, one thing you can do," he said, pushing me all the way into the pod. "Ship-soul, attend," he called. "Captain is abandoning ship and invoking Captain’s Last Act."

  The computer voice came over the speakers outside the pod. "Captain York confirms Captain’s Last Act?"

  "Say ‘confirm,’ " Tobit whispered to me.

  "Confirm," I said.

  "Captain repeats confirmation?" the computer asked.

  "Repeat confirmation," I said. "Confirm, confirm, confirm. And, umm… immediate forced landing emergency."

  The corridor snapped completely black. I couldn’t even see Tobit in front of me in his bright white tightsuit.

  "What did I just do?" I asked him.

  "The ship-soul EMP’d itself," he replied. His voice wasn’t piped over the speakers now; it came out unamplified and muffled, straight from his tightsuit. "Every data storage on board just got fried with a massive electric pulse," he said. "As of now, Willow is a brainless chunk of scrap metal. The people stealing this baby won’t get any navy codes or records…"

  Something went clang in front of me. The next second, lights came on inside the escape pod and I could see the hatch had slammed closed, shutting me off from Tobit back in the corridor. The pod had computers of its own, and I guess they’d detected the main ship-soul dropping off-line. The evac module had decided to go automatic.

  "Ejecting in ten seconds," a computer voice announced.

  There were no seats or controls. The interior of the pod was just a room-sized cube, five meters on each edge, with grab-bars stuck into the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling. You could jam all of Willow’s crew into a single one of the modules… and now that I thought of it, the whole crew was here. Me.

  I dropped to the floor, wrapped my arms around the two nearest bars and tucked my feet under two more. "Five seconds," the computer voice said.

  Overhead, a vidscreen turned on: it covered half the ceiling and showed the outside of the ship. The idea must have been to let people in the pod watch what was happening, rather than making them wait blindly in a closed capsule. That was fine if you wanted to see what was coming for you. Me, I was more inclined to close my eyes; but that would be uncaptainly, so I kept watching the screen.

  The black ship had lined itself straight in front of Willow, shooting a snaky red beam back at the bulb on our prow. The beam was just starting to pull our ship forward, drawing us up toward the stranger’s long Sperm-tail. It wouldn’t take long to get us inside; once something starts entering a Sperm-field, it gets sucked in really fast.

  Meanwhile, a few klicks away, Jacaranda was just beginning to move in our direction. The crew over there must have been caught totally off guard; they didn’t even have their real-space engines warmed up. Most ships don’t, not when they’re inside their Sperm envelope — no point burning fuel if you don’t have to. So Jacaranda was going to be slow, slow, slow for a few more minutes. By the time they got up to speed, Willow would probably be nabbed.

  Even if Jacaranda got to us in time, I didn’t know what they could do. Navy ships don’t have weapons — the League of Peoples won’t let any ship in the galaxy sail around armed, not with the teeniest bit of killing power. Ships could carry nonlethal things like those missiles that ripped away the Sperm-field; but I doubted if Jacaranda had anything like that ready to hand.

  At most, Jacaranda could latch onto us with its own tractors and try a tug-of-war… but even that was a waste of time till they got nearer. Tractor beams are strong close up but weak farther off. Seeing as the black ship had grabbed Willow at point-blank range, Jacaranda would have to get nearly that close before they had a chance of holding onto us.

  Willow shuddered. Up ahead, I could see the open mouth of the stranger’s Sperm-tail, like a milky ghost-worm about to swallow us. Any second, we’d be slurped inside… The evac module blew straight up into space, strong as an explosion. My body was squashed hard against the floor, all my bones and muscles pressed down like something wanted to roll me flat. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move a finger. My eyes were watering, but I could still see enough of the vidscreen to make out Willow, far away already. There was the black ship, there was Jacaranda lumbering up slowly, there were the seven other escape pods soaring all around me.

  And there was something fuzzy pushing hard on my face.

  Uh-oh.

  Eyeball nano, here in the escape pod; that’s where the nanites had been hiding all along. Maybe the defense clouds didn’t search much inside the evac modules, because the modules weren’t critical to ship’s operation. Our defenders were busy watching Willow’s life support and engines and all; why worry about the escape pods, when they were hardly ever used?

  Now I could feel the fuzz of little bugs, dragged down by the force of acceleration and squishing against my cheeks. Little jelly eyeballs pressed hard onto my skin. How much squish could a microscopic eyeball take before it mushed open?

  My face felt damp. Was that hive-queen venom or just cold sweat? On my forehead. My lips. Around my eyes.

  A computer voice said, "Confirm immediate forced landing emergency."

  I didn’t want to open my mouth. But if I didn’t, the escape pod would never land on Celestia; it would just hang around the ejection site to make it easier for rescuers to find. Sooner or later I’d get picked up by the black ship… or Jacaranda… or just hang out in space forever, me, the nano, and the venom.

  "Confirm," I said, keeping my lips closed as tight as I could and still let the word out. Even so, I didn’t want to think how many nanites got driven down my throat through my clenched teeth.

  "Maximum acceleration in five seconds," the computer said. "Placing passenger cube into safety stasis." That meant the escape pod was going to freeze time for me, so I wouldn’t get mashed to pulp when the propulsion kicked in. It was the same principle as getting put into a Sperm-field’s pocket universe, except that a stasis field’s universe didn’t have a time dimension. It just sat there, a dumb old R3 with no ambition or progress.

  "Five," the computer counted, "four, three, two, one…"

  There was a soft sound, like a BINK. Then suddenly, the vidscreen showed a blue sky with stringy clouds wisping high above me. The escape module had completely stopped moving — nothing but an easy rocking, and the sound of water lapping at the outside of the pod.

  "Time in stasis, forty-six minutes, twenty-one seconds," the computer voice said. "Successful forced landing."

  Sure, successful. Except that I had a tinny pickly taste in my mouth. When I wiped my face with my shirt cuff, the sleeve came away green with venom.

  Part 2

  HEARING THE CALL

  9

  RETURNING TO SOLID GROUND

  Venom on my face and in my mouth. It didn’t burn or sting, but it terrified me. How long till I started shivering again? How long before I went frothing crazy — sick with
poison?

  Maybe this time it’d be better; maybe I’d built up resistance. But it could just as easily go the other way, with me all weakened and sensitized from the last dose. The effect could hit me ten times harder than before.

  You can never be sure with venom.

  Out loud I said, "If I get sick, I get sick; there’s nothing I can do." Which sounded noble and stoic and all, but didn’t untie the knot of fear in my stomach. My mouth was still puckered with the pickly aftertaste of poison… and that was more real than any brave words.

  I went to the exit hatch and hiked up the OPEN lever. That got me into the airlock, which had a peep-monitor showing the world outside the pod. I could see a stretch of water so muddy it looked like creamed coffee… but the shore was only a stone’s throw away, a low dirt bank supporting a scraggly line of trees. The trees looked shining wet, as if they’d just got doused with rain. Considering how blue clear the sky was, I figured all that drip-off had actually come from my module smacking the water. Escape pods make relatively gentle landings — they don’t come in like fireballs, and they always aim for water to avoid smushing houses or people — but even a soft landing splashes down like a kid doing a cannonball. A good slap. Much spillage.

  Too bad I missed seeing it. I bet it would have been great.

  When I looked again at those trees on shore, I noticed their leaves weren’t the nice chlorophyll green of New Earth and Troyen. Their colors ran a lot more funereal. Purply black. Bluish black. Orangey black. Yellow with black spottles. Gloss black on matte black with ebony accents.

  But it’d take more than dark leaves to make me feel gloomy. After twenty years of living inside a lunar dome, never seeing a tree except in VR sims, I was kiss-the-ground happy to be this close to the real thing. I pushed the EXIT button; the interior airlock door closed, the door to the outside opened… and I jumped into the muddy water, doing a cannonball of my own. Okay. Maybe the water was bone-shaking cold. And I’d swum halfway to shore before it occurred to me Celestia might have its own types of piranha or anacondas, not to mention swarms of alien germs. But nothing sank its teeth into my leg, and a short swim was exactly what I needed to wash the venom off my face. I even considered taking a glug of water to rinse the venom out of my mouth; but there was all that mud, and maybe the water did have germs, and anyway, some of the venom must have already gone down my throat. Keeping my eyes and mouth closed, treading water, I ducked my head under a few times, then wiped off my face with my hands. At least that rinsed the venom from my skin… and it made me feel cleaner in general, even if I could still taste the stuff I’d swallowed.

  When I clambered onto the bank, I was muddy, wet, and cold. It felt good. I found a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees and sat down to wring the damp from my uniform. While I squeezed out water, I looked around to take stock of my situation.

  Escape pods try not to put you down in a desert or an icecap or the middle of an ocean. They pick a spot with nice weather and plenty of plant life, preferably with signs of intelligent civilization.

  Me, I’d landed in a thirty-meter-wide canal. You could tell it wasn’t a natural river by how straight it ran, a perfect line in both directions. The water showed almost no current: the escape pod was floating free, but it’d barely budged since I’d left it. I wouldn’t have to worry about it drifting out of sight downstream anytime soon.

  If need be, I could swim back out and ask the pod’s computer for food rations when I got hungry — I hadn’t noticed any storage bins, but it’d be a pathetic excuse for an evac module if it didn’t carry basic supplies. On the other hand, I didn’t think I’d have to settle for bland protein bars and squeeze tubes of fiber paste… because behind me were fields full of vegetables as far as the eye could see.

  The canal ran along one edge of a valley whose soil was almost jet-black. That meant the dirt was as rich as gravy… and it was covered with crops planted in neat rows forming neat squares — a checkerboard in shades of green stretching from the canal all the way to some distant hills. The plants looked young, like this was only late spring or early summer, but I could already recognize onions and lettuce and carrots in the fields closest to me. Honest-to-goodness Earth food growing in a big gorgeous garden that smelled of humus and greenery.

  A paved road ran close in front of me, parallel to the canal and separated from the water by the scrawny trees growing on the bank. Here and there along the road stood little environment domes in clusters of two or three — living spaces for the families who worked these farms. At the moment, I couldn’t see anyone out in the fields… but the strong orange sun was straight overhead, and toasty hot even with my clothes soaked to the skin, so I guessed everybody had gone inside for siesta.

  I got up, brushed the worst-caked mud off my uniform, and started down the road toward the nearest domes. No one would want me showing up unannounced in the middle of lunch; but I’d wait till people went back out to work, and I’d say hello then. On a day like this, there was no need to hurry. It was heaven just to breathe real air, away from the nanites and the black ship and Troyen…

  A doorway dilated in the side of the closest dome. Out stepped a Mandasar-warrior caste, big and red. The instant he caught sight of me, he screamed a battle cry and charged.

  Mandasar warriors are only half as big as queens, but they’re still the size of Brahma bulls. They’ve got the basic lobsterish look, but bulked-up and stocky, from their flat wide faces to their strong blunt tails. If a warrior props his tail good and solid on the ground behind him, you can hit him with a truck and he won’t be knocked backward; in fact, once he gets his eight legs on solid footing, he can push that truck back the other way, over rough terrain, for hour after hour. Put a bunch of warriors together and you get a line of foot soldiers who can steamroll over anything in their path… except another line of Mandasars driving the opposite way.

  Don’t get the idea warriors are slow-moving hulks; they can storm forward on those eight strong legs as fast as horse cavalry. When they’re running they look like old Greek centaurs, because the front part of their body is angled up vertically as tall as a human. Upright front, lobstery behind.

  Like queens, every warrior has pincer claws, but only two of them, on stubby arms down at the waist. The claws are sharp and nasty enough to lop clean through a human’s leg, bones and all, if you’re careless enough to let your ankle come within reach. At shoulder level, warriors have another set of arms, called the Cheejreth or "clever twigs": spindly six-fingered things used for fine manipulation. Cheejreth are nearly as long as human arms, but skinny and fragile — so weak, a human five-year-old could wrist-wrestle a warrior ten wins out of ten. During a serious fight, the Cheejreth stay folded against the chest, tucked into arm-sized niches in the warrior’s carapace; those niches evolved to keep Cheejreth safely out of the way, rather than flopping around and getting snapped off.

  Topping the body is a head like a cannonball, its carapace armor twice as thick as any other part of the warrior’s shell. The head has a few delicate parts — huge feathery ears like moth antennas, and cat-style whiskers around the snout to serve as extra scent receptors, waving about to catch odor molecules from the air — but the flimsy bits aren’t at all vital. If they break or get mangled during a fight, it scarcely hurts a bit. The warrior just can’t hear or smell as well for a few days, until the damaged part grows back.

  The one indispensable part of a warrior’s face is the spike on his pointy snout. It’s sharp and bony, only as big as a human thumb, but perfect for use as a bayonet — in an emergency, the warrior can use his spike to stab an enemy in the eye. Of course, it has to be a big emergency. All Mandasar castes have a finicky sense of smell, and they absolutely hate the stink of someone’s blood gucking up the tip of their noses.

  The warrior charging toward me had a shell so fiery red, I knew he had to be young, in his twenties — the color fades as warriors get older, not to mention that they learn not to attack people at firs
t sight. You never know when you’ll meet someone who spent years on the Mandasar home-world, learning all kinds of tricks to show overeager youngsters that humans aren’t as soft as they look.

  All the same, I didn’t want to hurt an impetuous kid just because he was short on common sense. Fast as I could, I crossed my hands over my chest in the high-court submission posture and hollered, "Naizo!"… short for Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo, which means I yield to your queen and her rightful hegemony over these, her duly apportioned lands. (A thousand years ago, old-time Mandasar warriors got their kicks by trying to recite the long form of the phrase before they got a pincer rammed through their guts. They did it as a test of nerve — to show how cool-headed they could be, speaking calm and slow while an opponent raced straight at them. The flowery words got collapsed to Naizo about the time firearms were invented, when it suddenly became important for surrenders to be short and snappy.)

  Of course, if someone barrels down on you, either with guns or with pincers, there’s always a chance he won’t stop, even when you yell uncle. The warrior charging toward me didn’t slow a bit when I Naizo’d him — he pounded on like a thoroughbred stallion, intending to gallop down my throat at trampling speed.

  I’d have been pee-in-the-pants scared if he were a real horse; horses have hammer-hard hooves, and real good instincts when it comes to kicking. Lucky for me, Mandasar warriors are built all wrong for horsy maneuvers like rearing up, and they can’t kick worth a darn unless they practice for years. Nature designed them for using their waist pincers and nose spikes; get around those, and they don’t have much left to throw at you.

  I kept shouting, "Naizo!" as long as I could, in case the warrior was just putting on a show to impress the rest of his family — four other Mandasars, three workers and a gentle, had come out of the dome behind him and were watching his every move, all excited and worshipful. But when the warrior got so close I could see he really planned to run me over, I dropped the submission stance and faked a move to my left, as if I were dodging out of the way. The warrior swerved in the same direction… which showed he had zero training in actual fights. He spread his waist arms wide to prevent me from going around, and opened his claws to catch me; but I was already slipping back to the right, outside the reach of his pincers.