by Timothy Zahn
Even if that was all she accomplished, it would be worth it.
* * *
Nicole had expected it to be easy to get Jeff to come to her room after dinner. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. In fact, it was like he’d been expecting her to ask, because he had a whole set of excuses already prepared as to why he couldn’t.
It was an impressive list. It started with what the others would say if the two of them went off somewhere together, then moved on to what Bungie would say if he found out they’d gone off somewhere together, and finally ended up at the tired argument of whether a nice girl like her should even be learning about nasty things like weapons in the first place.
The whole thing reeked of Plato, though how he’d found out about the afternoon weapons demonstration she couldn’t guess. Apparently, Plato’s no-fighting policy extended to even fake fighting like weapons practice.
Unfortunately for Jeff, Nicole had her mind made up. She countered each of his arguments with one of her own, making sure to tag each of them with Jeff’s half-buried affection for her as a crewmate and as a woman, along with his overall dislike of Bungie. She eventually clinched the deal by pointing out that Bungie’s temper and responses were unpredictable, and that until her ankle was fully back to normal she needed a way to protect herself in case he got violent when no one else was around.
Sam had said her ankle would be mostly healed within a day, and she guessed Bungie wouldn’t surface again until long after that. But Jeff didn’t know the latter, and probably wasn’t thinking about the former.
By the time he left her room that evening, Nicole had the basics of stick fighting under her belt. She wasn’t good enough to actually take on an opponent, and her footwork was still pretty shaky, but hopefully she would be able to teach the Micawnwi some of the techniques.
The only question left was when she could get back to the arena and do that.
By morning, that last question had answered itself. Her ankle seemed back to normal, and though she treated it with extra care as she moved around her room, it remained strong and pain-free. She would take the crutches along today just in case, but even without them she should be able to get across the arena to the Micawnwi hive. All she had to do was give Carp an excuse that would let her disappear for a couple of hours, and she would have done everything for Mispacch and her children that she could.
Getting away from the work crew turned out to be the easiest part of the whole thing. She got Carp and the others started on their tasks, and as they set to work she made a few twitchy movements with her leg, a couple of barely audible grunts, and an occasional grimace. Five minutes into her performance Levi noticed one of the grimaces, called Carp’s attention to her obvious pain, and together they agreed she should go back to her room and rest.
Nicole gamely argued the order, just not very hard. Three minutes later she’d been relieved of her lunch-supply vest—minus the inhaler, which she’d already tucked into one of her jumpsuit pockets—and was lurching her crutch-assisted way back toward the hive. She made it out of their sight and, just to be on the safe side, continued on toward the hive for another half minute. At the next convenient cross-corridor, she turned toward the portside hull hallway and headed for the arena.
She had expected to find that the Masters had changed the keylock code on the door since her escape the previous afternoon. But the code was unchanged. A minute later, she was walking through the undergrowth toward the Micawnwi hive, her crutches tucked under one arm, watching her footing carefully to make sure she didn’t reinjure her ankle with another bad step.
Fortunately, the ankle held, and after a short walk she reached the first section of stone-covered pathway. With safer ground beneath her she picked up her pace, making sure this time to stay clear of the path’s edges.
She was nearly there when the whole crowd of Micawnwi strode into view from around the last hill. Three of them carried bows and quivers, the latter almost comically oversized given that each had only one or two arrows rattling around in it. The rest of the men carried halberds.
Nicole stopped short, her first panicky thought being that the Masters had alerted Amrew and sent them after her. A second later, she saw Amrew jerk as he caught his first glimpse of her. Clearly, he was as surprised by the meeting as she was.
Trake had always said that the way to take charge of a meeting was to get in the first word. Under the circumstances, it seemed worth trying. “Hello, Amrew,” she called. “I’ve come to help you.”
Amrew didn’t answer. Probably waiting until they got closer, Nicole decided, and he didn’t have to shout. She continued on toward them, eyeing their halberds and belatedly wondering if Jeff’s techniques would work as well with that heavy axe head at one end.
She got to within ten feet of the crowd, and was starting to wonder if they were simply going to plow straight over her, when Amrew finally came to a halt. “Why are you here?” he demanded.
“I came to see if I could help,” Nicole said. “I have some special techniques for fighting that you—”
“No,” Amrew said flatly.
Nicole blinked. “What do you mean, no?” she asked. “Look, if this is because I bailed when the Oracle told you to—”
“We don’t need your help,” he said, again cutting her off in midsentence. “Nor do we want it. We’ll rise and fall on our own strength and courage.”
“If by fall you mean the Cluufes will cut you into roadkill, yes, you probably will,” Nicole retorted. “Are you seriously saying you’d rather die than accept help from someone who’s not a Micawnwi?”
Amrew made a sort of squawking sound. “We will rise and fall on our own,” he repeated. “We don’t need the help of a woman.”
Before Nicole could even find a response for that one, Amrew hunched one shoulder and strode past her. The other men followed, passing around her on both sides. Nicole turned, watching in disbelief as they continued on down the path. Of all the stubborn, stupid—
“They won’t listen.”
Nicole turned back. Mispacch was standing just in view at the side of the hill, her two children clutched to her sides. Even since just yesterday the two smaller Micawnwi seemed to have gotten thinner. Probably her imagination. “They’re fools,” she told Mispacch.
“We do as we’ve always done,” Mispacch said. “That’s the way of all life. The path is found that seems best, then is faithfully followed.”
“That’s nice,” Nicole said sarcastically as she walked up to the three Micawnwi. “Only this particular path is going to get them all killed.”
“You don’t know that,” Mispacch said. “They’re very strong. With hand weapons, strength can be the deciding factor.”
“Maybe,” Nicole said. Mispacch could be right, she supposed. Based on the size difference alone, the Micawnwi were almost certainly stronger than the Cluufes.
But the Cluufes were fast. Did fast trump strong in this kind of fighting?
She didn’t know. But right now, that wasn’t her problem. She’d gotten within reach of the arena door, and all the men who might have stopped her were gone. Time to see what she could do with the food dispenser. “I guess we’ll find out,” she said, handing her crutches to Mispacch. “Here—hold these for me, will you? I’ll be back in a minute.”
She headed down the path toward Door One, going as fast as she dared. “Where are you going?” Mispacch called after her.
“Got an errand to run,” Nicole said. “Just stay put.”
She reached the door and punched in her code. Fortunately, it worked at this end of the arena, too. She pushed the door open and peeked out into the gray metal hallways beyond.
Once again, the place seemed deserted. She slipped through the opening, closed the door behind her, and headed for the room where she’d found the choke valve on the Micawnwi’s food supply.
She was in the final corridor, within sight of her target door, when she heard the sudden clink of metal in the distance.
She
froze, crouching against the nearest wall, her ears straining. There was another clink.
And then, almost too soft to hear, she heard voices.
Human voices.
A chill ran through her. Plato was the overseer for eight different work crews, and though each group lived in a different hive area and seldom mixed with the others, she’d seen several of them in passing. Certainly she’d met all the other Sibyls. Along the way, she’d also wormed enough information out of Carp and Kahkitah to get a feel for which areas and clusters of decks each of the crews was assigned to.
The problem was that all of those work areas were on Nicole’s side of the arena, the impressively huge area she’d always assumed was most if not all of the Fyrantha. If the voices she was now hearing were from a repair crew, it seemed likely they were an entirely different group from the ones under Plato’s control.
But that would imply there was enough area on this side of the arena to warrant basing another crew here. Maybe even more than one.
How many more people had the Wisps snatched and brought aboard, people that Plato never mentioned? Where were all of them, and who was running their crews?
How big was this ship, anyway?
She didn’t know. But in the meantime, she had more important things on her mind. The distant voices didn’t seem to be getting closer, which hopefully meant they weren’t going to be a problem for her. Straightening up again, she hurried the rest of the way to the room and popped the door. Time to see if yesterday’s trick had paid off.
It had. The nearly invisible touch of blood she’d put on the knob had rotated a tiny bit to the right. Assuming the Masters were still working their policy of slow starvation, that must be the direction that slowed down the food supply.
Smiling grimly, she turned the knob all the way the other direction.
The new bounty wouldn’t last long, she knew. The minute the Masters checked the knob they would realize it had been messed with and would undoubtedly put it back. The Micawnwi needed to get what they could while the getting was good.
And with the men all off playing soldier, there was only one person who could do that.
Mispacch and her kids were waiting where Nicole had left them, each of the children holding one of the crutches, all three staring off in the direction the Micawnwi men had gone. “Okay,” Nicole said as she came up to them. “The dispenser should give you some extra food now. It won’t last, though, so you’ll need—”
“What?” Mispacch interrupted, her fur flaring. “Extra food?”
“Right,” Nicole said. “But the extra won’t last more than a day—maybe only a few hours—so you need to get in there and pull out everything you can right now. Stockpile it away someplace where it’ll be hidden. And don’t talk while you’re doing it—I’m pretty sure the Oracle can hear everything that goes on in that room, though I don’t think it can see. Got it?”
“Yes,” Mispacch said, her fur rapidly flaring and flattening. “Yes, I’ll get the other women onto the task at once.” She snatched the crutches from her children’s hands and handed them to Nicole. “Here—I have to go. Thank you, thank you.” Grabbing her children’s hands, she loped back toward the Micawnwi hive.
Nicole let out her breath in a tired but contented sigh. And that was that. She’d now done everything she could for these people. Time to back off, put the whole thing out of her mind, and get on with her life.
She retraced her steps back to her end of the arena. She saw no sign of Amrew or the other Micawnwi men along the way, but she also didn’t hear any shouts or other sounds of battle. Had they given up? Or were they just being cautious with their approach?
She’d cleared the final set of low hills, and was thirty yards from the exit, when she finally spotted them. They were lined up on the mostly flat area where she’d seen that first battle, the one with Hunter and the Cluufes and the greenfire guns on both sides. It was the only really level area in the arena, which might explain why everyone picked it to do their fighting.
Or else it was because this was the end with the stone building. If this hunger squeeze was the Masters’ standard game, it made sense that the hungry group would always come to this end to attack, while the side that already had the stone building and its extra food dispenser would be fighting just as hard to keep it.
She hadn’t paid much attention back in grade school, especially the history lessons. But she did vaguely remember something about the British having to walk in straight lines during the American Revolution while the colonists got to hide behind trees and rocks.
Apparently, the Micawnwi were big fans of the British approach.
Sure enough, as she peered at the trees and bushes in the distance she could see the shadowy forms of the Cluufes moving around outside the building. The Cluufes’ archers would be somewhere in the area, too, maybe inside, where they’d have some cover from the attackers.
She refocused on the Micawnwi. Now that she thought about it, she realized that Amrew’s three archers were nowhere to be seen. Had he sent them into the hills where they could shoot down on the Cluufes? That would make sense. In fact, she could see a couple of locations from here where a bowman would have the height and the cover from trees and bushes to avoid being instantly seen.
But that wasn’t her concern. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be the fighters’ concern, either. She kept a wary eye on the looming battle as she made for her door, but neither side seemed to be paying any attention to her.
More importantly, neither side was shooting at her. So far, that was the best part.
Though now that she thought about it, Amrew’s bowmen probably didn’t have enough arrows to waste on her anyway. Distantly, she wondered if the Micawnwi had already shot off most of them, or whether the Masters were just as stingy with arrows as they were with food.
She’d punched in the keylock code and pushed the door partway open when, with a hoarse shout that her translator apparently couldn’t handle, the line of Micawnwi lowered their halberds and charged.
Nicole paused, her hand braced against the door, staring with morbid fascination as the aliens raced through the grass, dodging bushes and grass clumps and warbling more untranslatable words. It was like seeing a bad car wreck about to happen, impossible to look away from even knowing it was going to be ugly.
The attackers were about twenty yards from the nearest Cluufes when there was a flicker of movement through the tree branches and three of the Micawnwi jerked and toppled to the ground, arrows now sticking out of them. Two of them were still alive, Nicole saw: one writhing in pain, the other gamely trying to lurch his way back to his feet. The third just lay there, unmoving, probably dead.
A second later there was an answering volley from up in the hills, right in the area Nicole had thought of as being a good shooting position. But if the Micawnwi arrows had any effect, she couldn’t see it. Maybe the Cluufes’ more stationary positions meant that their wounded or dead collapsed without any visible fuss. Maybe the Micawnwi archers had missed their targets. If Nicole had to bet, she would bet on the latter.
But if the Micawnwi didn’t have much skill, they had courage to burn. The remaining attackers didn’t even break stride at the loss of three of their number. They kept going, their halberds pointed ahead of them, converging on the stone building and the Cluufes crouching half-hidden there.
They were maybe ten yards from the building when a half dozen Cluufes rose out of concealment on both sides of the Micawnwi line and charged. The Micawnwi at those ends, clearly startled, turned to face this unexpected threat. At the same time, the Cluufes beside the stone building rose from their own positions, leveled their halberds, and charged the center of the Micawnwi line.
And the nice, neat battle line dissolved into chaos.
Still, it wasn’t as badly one-sided as Nicole had expected. The Cluufes were definitely faster than the Micawnwi, darting back and forth and jabbing their halberds at the bigger aliens’ torsos or legs. They seemed more sk
illed with the weapons, too. But as Nicole had already noted, the halberds were pretty heavy, which put a limit on how fast the Cluufes could make the long sticks change direction. The Micawnwi, while not as expert, could nevertheless whip the things around like they were extra-long broom handles.
And while a couple of fighters from both sides were already staggering back out of the battle with blood leaking from them, so far only the one Micawnwi who’d been shot seemed to have actually died. It was, Nicole guessed, going to be a long-drawn-out day.
Nothing to do with her. She took one final look and started to turn back to the door—
And jerked around again as a fast-moving object caught her eye. It was Mispacch, for once without her children, rounding the hill behind Nicole and racing across the level ground toward the raging battle.
“Mispacch!” Nicole shouted, reflexively gesturing even though the other now had her back to her. “What are you doing? Come back!”
“I have to stop them,” Mispacch called over her shoulder, her voice barely audible above the clash of metal and the snarls and shrieks of the fighters. “We have food now. I have to stop them.”
“But—” Nicole broke off with a curse. The extra food wouldn’t last—she’d already said that. Hadn’t Mispacch understood? “Get back,” she shouted again, taking a step toward the alien woman. “You’re going to get hurt.”
“I have to stop them,” Mispacch said again. “I have to try to save Amrew.”
“Why, because he’s the leader?” Nicole snarled.
“Because he’s my life-mate.”
Nicole felt her mouth drop open. Amrew was her husband? The same man who’d decided that she and her children should go without food so that he and his buddies could be comfortable was her husband?
And now she was charging into battle to try to save him?
Nicole drew her lips back in a snarl. Damn it all.
Throwing down her crutches, she headed toward the battle, pounding along the ground without the slightest consideration for her ankle. She’d seen this same insane thing played out over and over: traumatized girl sticking with abusive man, taking whatever garbage he dropped on her, never complaining, always making excuses for him. And then, if and when the cops or some rival finally took him down, crying her eyes out over what she’d lost.