by Timothy Zahn
Fievj’s voice.
Nicole broke into a run, her heart thudding. The branches and grasses swished loudly as she pushed through them, announcing her presence to anyone listening, but there was nothing she could do about that. At all costs she had to get away before he caught up with her.
And as she ran the chilling thought struck her that if the hidden door didn’t open—or wasn’t there at all—she would be trapped against the arena wall.
She glanced over her shoulder, wondering if Fievj was gaining. But she couldn’t see anything back there except trees and shrubs. If he would bark another order she might have a clue as to where he was, but after that first shout he’d remained silent.
Maybe he was listening, tracking her through the noise she was making. Forcing back her panic, Nicole concentrated on running, wondering belatedly if Fievj wasn’t trying to catch up because he knew there were other Shipmasters or Wisps in front of her and his job was just to drive her into their arms. For a moment her pace faltered as she tried to decide whether to keep going or to veer off at an angle or even abandon this plan and head toward the ocean—
And then, suddenly, she was there.
There was a narrow strip of open ground between the forest and the wall. The wall itself was the usual metal, unbroken by any cracks or other hints that there might be a door there. “I’m the Protector,” Nicole said, trying not to gasp for breath. “Open the door.”
Nothing. “I’m the Protector,” she said again, trying to think. What exactly had she said before? “Protector says to open the door.”
Still nothing. She could hear someone moving through the brush behind her now, Fievj or one of the other Shipmasters. There was a whiff of moving air from her right—
As if the main door on this side had just opened.
Nicole clenched her teeth. That was not what she wanted, at least not right now. “Protector says”—she had a flash of inspiration—“open the emergency door.”
And three feet to her left, a door-sized section of the wall swung open.
She was there before it had even finished its swing, ducking through the opening and leaping up onto the stairs. “Protector says close the emergency door,” she said. She glanced down to see the door swinging shut again, and then focused on the stairs. As on the other side of the arena, the stairs ended at the level of the balcony. “Protector says open the floor.”
Above and in front of her, the floor dropped open, the stairs unfolding down to her deck. She climbed past the thick section of floor, then did two more flights just to be safe. Then, with a heaving sigh of relief, she opened the door into the corridor and stepped out.
And instantly ducked back again as she spotted a Wisp gliding down the corridor barely ten feet away.
The Wisp was heading the other direction, and Nicole had no idea whether or not it heard the door open. But she had no intention of finding out the hard way. She continued up the stairs, pausing only when her legs refused to go any farther, and started up again as soon as she could force the fatigued muscles back to work.
Midway to the top of the Fyrantha she once again risked going out into the corridor, stealing to the center line and calling for a Wisp. But there was no response. She tried again, then returned to the stairs. The Wisps who’d brought her and Kahkitah across from Q2 had been told to wait there for her. She’d find out in a few minutes whether or not they’d obeyed those instructions.
Finally, she was there. Wearily, she opened the door and dragged herself out into the corridor, almost not caring anymore if the Shipmasters had gotten there ahead of her. To her relief, she could see the three Wisps waiting patiently by the centerline wall fifty feet away.
Limping on aching legs, she walked over to them. “Take me across to Q2,” she ordered, turning and backing into the closest one. Q2, then a walk back to Q4, and her own bed. The arms folded around her—
Will your companion be traveling with us? the voice came in her head.
No, Nicole answered with an unexpected sense of loss. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much better and safer she’d felt with Kahkitah beside her. But there was nothing she could do about it now.
Actually, there was nothing she could do about much of anything right now. Allyce needed to mix up the drug, Jeff needed to stall Fievj’s battle until the stuff was ready, and until that was all done Nicole’s job was mostly to stay out of sight. Q4 would be the best place to do that.
On the other hand, Q4 was way back at the rear of the ship, and Nicole’s feet and legs were already hurting. Even the thought of her own room and bed wasn’t enough to make the difference.
Besides, the Wisps in Q4 might be under her control, but there wasn’t anything to stop Fievj or another Shipmaster from marching back there and grabbing her, at the point of a gun if necessary. And if they decided to take that kind of action, her old hive would be the first place they’d look.
Do you wish to go straight across?
Nicole hesitated, feeling the rush of hot air as the door into the heat duct opened up. Her own bed. Her own dining room, and real food.
The Shipmasters hunting for her.
No, she needed someplace where Fievj wouldn’t look. Ideally, a place where he and his Wisps couldn’t sneak up on her.
Fortunately, there was such a place. Not straight across, she told the Wisp. Take me down to the Q2 arena.
Very well.
The Wisp turned her toward the wall and the open door. Distantly, Nicole wondered if the young Ejbof she and Kahkitah had run into earlier was still on guard duty.
And if he was, whether or not she would have to make him eat his paintball gun.
fourteen
Nicole had hoped her new Protector Says routine would get her into the arena without having to use her inhaler to ask the Fyrantha for a code. To her relief, it did. For the first time, she was able to simply tell the ship to open the door.
Still, even if she never used the inhaler again, whatever damage the drug had done to her body was still there. As she pulled open the door, she wondered who Ushkai would pick as the Fyrantha’s next Protector after she died.
There were no shouts of challenge from the close-packed forest as Nicole pulled the arena door closed. Nor, luckily, were there any sudden paintball shots. Nicole thought about calling out to the Ejbofs to let them know she was here, decided the hell with it, and headed down the path into the woods.
From the open area by the door, the trees looked pretty much impassable. Now, as she walked through the middle of the forest, she could see that it wasn’t quite that bad. There were a lot of places where she had to walk sideways to get through, but most of the trees were far enough apart that she could walk straight through the gaps.
But the most important point was still there: Fievj in his centaur armor and Wisps with their outstretched arms would find their way seriously blocked, which was exactly what she’d hoped for. Picking a likely-looking spot, she walked a dozen steps off the path, found a leaf-filled dip where she could stretch out, and lay down. An hour of rest, maybe two, and her legs should be recovered enough for her to head back to the edge of Q4 and see if she could get Ushkai to tell her how Allyce’s drug had to be delivered.
She was dreaming about ghosts and monsters and sharp sticks when she started awake.
To find herself surrounded by a dozen Ejbofs, four of them standing over her on the ground, the others hanging off the surrounding trees.
All of them looking at her.
The nearest of them poked her in the side with the muzzle of his paintball gun. “You. Awake,” the words came through Nicole’s translator.
“You. Poke me again and lose some teeth,” she growled back. She lifted herself up on one elbow. “Hey—you—Shooter—the guy who was watching this door last time I came in. Did you forget to tell them you weren’t supposed to mess with me?”
“No one has shot you.” A voice came down from above her.
She peered up. Alien faces were hard t
o distinguish, but that was Shooter’s voice and it was more than likely his face looking down at her. From a safe distance, she noted with dark humor. “Yeah, well, not messing also means not poking,” she said. “What do you want?”
“We need your help,” Shooter said. “I need your help.”
“Sorry,” Nicole said. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
“But—”
“Silence,” the Ejbof who’d poked her said, staring up into the tree. He looked back down at Nicole. “The truth is that we’ll all die without your help.”
Nicole felt her stomach tighten. Since when did being the Fyrantha’s Protector translate into being mother hen for everyone and everything aboard? “I’m not going to help you in your hunt,” she said. The faces of Mispacch and her family flashed up from her memory; ruthlessly, she forced them back. Helping the Micawnwi had been what had gotten her, Jeff, and her whole world in trouble in the first place. “My job is to keep the—”
“We don’t need you to help the hunt,” the Ejbof leader cut her off. “The hunt is over.”
“—keep the Fyrantha—” She broke off. “What?”
“The hunt is over,” the leader repeated. “We know how to catch the beasts. We need merely to know how to hold them.”
Nicole shook her head. “You lost me.”
“Come with us,” the leader said. He gestured at the woods with his gun and then hoisted it up onto his shoulder. “We’ll—”
He stopped as a distant grinding sound drifted through the woods. Nicole had just figured out the direction it was coming from when it changed to a sort of crunching noise, then quickly cut off and was followed by silence. “What was that?” she demanded.
“Our quarry,” the leader said. “Come, we’ll show you.” He led the way back to the path, then headed along it deeper into the arena.
Nicole hesitated. She had no intention of getting involved in their war. Still, going along to find out what the noise was didn’t count as a promise that she would do anything about it. Getting up, she followed the three other Ejbofs who’d been standing over her. The other aliens stayed in the trees, moving nimbly from one to another like ugly monkeys.
The grinding noise had started again, much closer this time, when the leader motioned for them all to stop. “It lurks on the other side of this line,” he said. “Stay back, and beware of its teeth.” He circled the nearest tree and disappeared behind it. Wishing even more that Kahkitah was here, Nicole followed.
She’d expected to find a nasty-looking animal, maybe something like a lion or tiger or at least a big snake. To her surprise, the creature on the other side of the trees was more like a giant slug, five feet long and three feet wide. It had no arms or legs, but she could see hints of lots of little feet underneath the edge, rippling as the creature moved along, like some insects she’d seen running around the Philadelphia alleys. The thing was mostly brown and gray, but there was a big yellow splotch across its back.
She nodded to herself. So that was what the paintball guns were for. The creature’s colors would make it very hard to see as it moved across the forest floor, but tagging it that way made it much easier to find and trap.
In fact it looked pretty much trapped right where it was, crowded in by close-set trees in front and on both sides. The only open space was behind it, and the way the feet moved she wasn’t sure it could even walk backward. The grinding noise was coming from somewhere near its front—
With a sudden crackle of torn wood, one of the two trees blocking its path suddenly tipped over. It fell a few feet before its top jammed between the trees nearest it, the impact knocking the bottom of the tree off its base and to the side. The creature lifted itself slightly, walked over the miniature stump that was left, and continued its slow but steady progress.
“You see the problem,” the leader said. “We can catch and trap them, but they easily break free.”
Nicole pursed her lips as she watched the slug move on to the next tree in its path. Some weird combination of beaver and buzz saw, plodding through the forest knocking it all down. “Can you pick it up?” she asked. “Turn it over onto its back, maybe?”
“The teeth go around the entire edge,” the leader said. “We cannot pick it up without severe injury.”
“So how did you trap it?”
“We dug a cliff edge in its path and concealed it with tree branches,” the leader said. “When it reached the edge, it toppled down the slope to the circle of closely packed trees that we hoped would hold it.” He gestured toward the slug. “As you can see, the beast is not trapped.”
“Can you dig a pit, then?” Nicole persisted. “Not just an edge, but a hole in the ground. Get it to fall in, and you’re done.”
“Sadly, they’re now alerted to that tactic,” the leader said. “We tried the same edge technique with one of the others. It detected the woven branches, and turned away.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Six.”
Nicole winced. Six buzz-saw beavers, who could learn and could talk to each other across the arena. Terrific. “Is there something in the hive you could lure them on top of?” she asked. “Like part of a door or something that you could lift without getting in range of their teeth?”
“We’ve searched,” the leader said. “There’s nothing.”
“We tried to use a tree branch to tip one over before the teeth could cut all the way through,” one of the other Ejbofs offered. “But they’re too heavy.”
Nicole nodded, eyeing the creature. The thing certainly looked heavy. Still, if tipping it onto its back was all it took, Kahkitah could probably do it.
Only Kahkitah was busy with a more important job: helping Jeff and Allyce and making sure Bungie’s team didn’t hurt them or the others. The minute she dragged the Ghorf in here, that would probably be the moment the Shipmasters ordered the attack.
In fact …
She gave the Ejbof leader a sideways look. Could that be exactly what Fievj was up to? Could he have found out she was here and ordered the Ejbofs to stall her while the battle got started?
She clenched her teeth. Damn them all; and she didn’t have time for this.
“Their goal is to reach the food dispensers,” one of the other Ejbof put in. “When they reach one, they demolish it.”
“There were twenty dispensers in different parts of the forest,” the leader said, sending a sharp look at the one who’d spoken, just like the one he’d given Shooter earlier. Maybe he was the only one who was allowed to talk to the stranger. “There are now only fourteen.”
“Are there any rivers you could—Wait a second,” Nicole interrupted herself. “They’re demolishing the dispensers?”
“Yes,” the leader said. “We were told their goal is to deny us food and cause us to starve.”
“Before they demolish them—or maybe while they’re doing it—do they eat any of the food?”
“Why would they?” the leader retorted. “I told you: their goal is simply to deny the food to us.”
“Yeah, like the Shipmasters never lie,” Nicole muttered. “Give me that.” She snatched the paintball gun from the leader’s grip. It was heavier than she’d expected, all metal and heavy plastic—
Eleven other guns instantly snapped around to point at her.
“Oh, stop it,” she growled. “I’m not going to shoot anyone. You want to fix this? Then get those things out of my face. You—up in the tree—Shooter. Tell them.”
“She means it,” Shooter said. “Point them away. Leader?”
Reluctantly, Nicole thought, the leader gestured, and the others lowered their weapons. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s try something.” Sidling her way through the trees, she caught up with the slug. She stepped in front of it, making sure to stay clear of grinding teeth that could take down a tree, and lifted the gun high over her head. She held the pose a moment, picking her spot—
And jabbed it down with all her strength, burying its barrel in the ground
right in front of the creature.
She took a step back, holding her breath. The slug reached the gun, bumped into it, and the forest once again came alive with the sound of grinding.
But this time, nothing happened. Teeth that could take down a tree apparently couldn’t make any headway against gun-barrel metal.
The slug tried twice more, with no greater success. Then, backing away a few inches—so the thing could go backward—it started to change direction.
Only to once again come to a sudden halt as another Ejbof stepped forward and rammed his gun into the ground in front of it.
As if that was a signal, the rest of the Ejbofs came to life, dropping from the trees with guns ready. A moment later, the slug was penned in by a fence of gun barrels.
“You have saved us, Sibyl,” the leader said, bowing low in front of Nicole. “When we sing of this day your name will be lifted high—”
“I’m not finished,” Nicole interrupted him. The slug was still moving, shifting direction over and over as it tried to find a way out of the cage. “How much food do you have?”
“How much—what?”
“How much food do the dispensers provide?” Nicole asked.
“The ones our enemies have destroyed provide nothing,” someone bit out.
“I mean the ones they didn’t destroy,” Nicole growled. “Do they give you enough to eat, not enough to eat, or more than enough to eat?”
“That’s of no matter now,” the leader said. “We now can trap them—”
“More than enough,” Shooter spoke up.
“Good,” Nicole said. “Bring me some.”
For a moment the only sound was the grinding sound as the slug tried his luck with yet another of the paintball guns. Then, Shooter stepped up to Nicole. “I have some,” he said, pulling a handful of the familiar granola-like nuggets from a hip pouch. “Are you hungry?”
“Not me.” Nicole took the nuggets and walked over to the slug. “But he might be.”
“Are you mad?” the leader demanded. “Are you now our enemy?”
“Shut it,” Nicole ordered. Picking a moment when the slug had backed up and was starting into another turn, she dribbled the food into a small pile in front of it.