Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 3

by Sharon Lee

  The pain was exquisite, wrapping his foot and leg with pressure and twisting it more.

  His vision phased to full sight—he hadn’t realized that he’d lost clear sight for a moment until it came back.

  He thought back over what he’d seen, felt the stickiness on his face going softer again . . .

  There it was—even his foot didn’t feel as bad. So rapid twisting and pushing made the trap tighter. Slow effort—very slow—might work.

  No way to be sure how long this had all taken, no way to be sure he’d ever see a one of help, given the cousins sitting there with the uncles out of the ship.

  Squithy was the key. She was real sharp with a lot of stuff, but couldn’t always reach it. She remembered patterns and numbers something fierce but she was scared of words. With Tranh and Rusko overdue, she was his hope, or he was.

  He felt the breeze stir now, thought he heard one of those flying things in the distance. Maybe he heard something closer, but maybe it was the stuff on his face, drying in the breeze. Whatever made the noises, the wind brought with it more of the stink.

  He felt his hand, the one still holding the gun. He could move it, and so he could shoot if he needed to, within much of his field of vision. Otherwise . . . if something came up behind him, say, he’d be in trouble.

  Figuring that getting the stuff off from top down was the key, he moved as fast as he could, slowly.

  It was hard to solve a puzzle from the inside, with both hands and both legs tied by gooey rope, and one hand needing to keep hold of the gun, just in case. It was harder with the breeze rising to colder and the star’s illumination falling as it moved behind several of the overhanging trees. It did seem that as time went on the web-stuff was greener than blue, and that he could move faster. Maybe it was drying, or aging, or—

  For a rare moment he wished that he was Squithy. Well, not that he was Squithy, but that he could have her absolute pattern recognition. He was sure that things had changed slightly in front of him, that the number of creatures appearing severely broken had fallen and that there were changes in the—

  Yes, there were changes. Surely there’d been six of the creatures hanging, apparently lifeless, in the web well across the way, and now there were three. Of the others—one of the remaining was no longer foot-caught, and there, had something in its paw—in its hand!—that was moving slowly.

  “Murble la. Vemarmurble.”

  He’d been hearing little noises, like leaves moving quiet, to his right, where branches of the skinny trees tangled in high bushes. He couldn’t turn his head quite that far to see what was happening, and he afraid to twist his whole body. Now, the sound grew to unknowable murmurs, like someone was talking real soft and a long way away, talking in a language he didn’t know. He listened, wondering if it was just those birds coming back. Birds made noises, flying things did, and some of them ate berries.

  Still, with caution, he got his elbow a little looser from the gunky rope and raised it, to bring the aim of the gun lower. He’d had to shoot up at the creature who’d charged, but these sounds were lower to the ground, stealthy . . .

  He heard now a distinct droning hum, and it came from across the clearing and from behind, it came from both sides and maybe even from the trees themselves. The sound rose, making it hard to keep track of the noises to his right, and then rose again as across the way brown, gray, and black-furred creatures stretched, rolled over, sat up, stood up, turned to look at him, all at once, all unblinking.

  Not all of the furry creatures were moving—but far more than he’d expected. Had they been stunned with fear? Paralyzed by the webbing? Yet the synchronicity of their movement was unnerving. And then the live creatures all blinked and stared at him at once and a kind of over-vision hit, as if he were watching a viewscreen through another viewscreen. More than that, he knew the drone was more than mere noise now.

  He felt the questions more than heard them—not as if he was asked out loud in a proper language but buried in the drone—the idea, bouncing in his head until he knew that these weren’t questions so much as demands: Who do you know, one was, accompanied by out of true images of a dozen or two humans, and the other was an image of Squithy—clear as a viewscreen straight on—with overtones of where is and will she return?

  Klay had no answers and a lot of questions himself.

  Klay was sure his voice was lost in the vast clearing; the trees had leaves that absorbed sound, the grass and bushes must surely do the same, the breeze itself—and the sound the creatures made.

  “My name is Klay, and I’m stuck. Can you help me? Can you hear me?”

  The ambient sounds quieted—he hadn’t realized the creatures were making so many sounds as they moved, as stealthy as they’d been. Eyes were on him again, and this time when he heard the murbles he was sure there was variation in them. Across the clearing a small group of the furries gathered, motioning and mumbling together so there was no doubt that they were communicating something to each other—the question was, what? Surely they’d seen him shoot the creature—were they more afraid of him than they were of the dead things?

  “My name is Klay Patel Smith and I need help. I’ve killed the monster. Can you get me out?”

  Across the way now there were two of the creatures still hung up in the webwork, and only one of them active—and that one ignored now by the others, who were again staring in his direction, and as he managed to pull his left elbow free they gathered energy, moving in his direction.

  Klay took a deep breath, carefully glancing to his elbow, and using steady pressure, peeled another inch or two of uniform away from the stringy mess, away from—

  “Sssssss! Ssssss!”

  He froze, hearing now not only another threatening sibilance but the giveaway sounds of movement close behind him. A tall green frond tipped with red fuzz swayed maddeningly on the edge of his sight, each movement accompanied by the sound of plant rubbing against plant.

  The movement slowed, and then more of them bending and waving, until one frond end, much thicker than the rest, began to slowly lever downward into his sight, the swish of moving leaves accompanied by the low hum he was starting to recognize as the willful mumbles of the creatures he shared the battlefield with. Another sound got louder, but it was more than that, it was a vibration of the netting he was swaddled in. A moment of dislocation as he felt a fleeting touch of that mind-vision and now, perhaps the out-of-sight sound and vibration started to make sense as chewing or clawing.

  Clawing?

  Twung!

  They were there, and they weren’t attacking him. Instead, they were trying to help.

  “Thank you,” he called out, but the mumbles got loud.

  He shivered, and only part of it was the result of major web-thread shaking and then going limp. Now the mumbles were murbles again, and that mind-vision was trying to get him to do what? He was getting a strange array of images, half of him and half like some fuzzy wraith in motion, like they wanted him to roll up into a ball!

  Below him now, he saw heads and fists full of cord-wrapped stones. If he could pull his feet up some, tight, yes into a ball, the creatures could worry the rooted web easier.

  The ball idea bounced around his head, and he risked trying to raise his feet, actually holding onto rather than denying the strands that held him. The web deformed around him, and another, much lighter twungging noise was greeted with acclamation from a multi-hued crowd that had grown from two or three to perhaps a dozen. The vibrations had grown to a constant, and he was bouncing as the creatures added their weight to his, stretching the overhead web at the same time they were tearing at the base.

  His left boot and leg came away from the sticky base and he dared to grab a spot behind his knee with his hand. The bouncing increased and then his other leg was free.

  That leg wasn’t easy to pull up—Klay looked down and saw a face staring into his, a non-human face, somehow full of worry and concern and intent. The fur had silver tips around the
eyes and into the skull-top, with a dark, almost black stripe swirling into brown around it.

  The creature was testing his boot, he saw, gingerly touching his pants where they overlapped his boot, and . . .

  He felt the concern enter his mind in the picture of something he didn’t know—maybe a fruit. The picture of a fruit, sloughing its skin, and overlaying it the image of a foot—not his—falling away from a furred body.

  Ah—he saw it, they were afraid they’d hurt him.

  He looked at his left leg where he’d grabbed it, pulled on it to show that there was slack in the pants, thought at the creature of his leg inside the pants . . .

  The creature climbed then, grabbing his boots and then his pants, a free hand or paw wrapping a string of greenish vine around the webbing, stretching it to insulate or isolate the webbing from him, using a rock on a stick as a lever to pull the web away . . .

  A loud murmur then, and a vision of Squithy running with others. At the same time an insistent vision of a fruit being pulled in many directions at once and the creatures around, including the one on his leg, all grabbing at web-strands and huffing and dashing straight away form him with their particular strands of the net . . .

  Unexpectedly, all the strands holding him parted, and he fell with a bone-jarring impact on his hip, the added weight of the silver-furred one twisting again that foot that had been sorely stressed to begin with.

  “Dammit!” he yelled, and fought for breath. A flash of light tore through half-closed eyes, and a horrendous explosive thunder shattered the near-evening glade’s urgent murbles into silence, leaving Klay’s ear’s ringing in the aftermath.

  A high human voice screamed, “No, no, no!” as he scrambled to get up and instead fell heavily, face down into a crowd of furry shapes.

  The unfamiliar smell of dirt and vegetation assaulted his nostrils but he spent only a moment righting himself and lunging to his feet from an awkward crouch. Across the way were crew members, and around him, thigh-high and shorter, a dozen of the creatures who’d freed him. He stood on uncertain legs, startled to find he still held the gun in near-nerveless fingers.

  The noise was all over there, where a chemical cloud drifted away onto the looming dusk.

  On the edge of the clearing Squithy stood, red-faced and yelling, purposefully standing between Cousins Susrim and Falmer waving her arms, not just standing there but actively disrupting any chance any of the three had to aim.

  “You can’t! You can’t. They’re good!”

  Klay yelled too, instinctively moving between his silver-fringed helper and the weapons being leveled in his direction, too.

  “Stop. I’m fine, don’t shoot! They helped me!”

  Instinctively Klay moved his hands repeatedly palm down, miming the slow slow slow one might use on moving stuff dockside. “Stand down, damn it, just stand down!” he said, trying to insist across the distance and not willing to trust his foot to move.

  A sigh went through the glade, as if a wind of hums and murbles had worshiped itself into a breathy quiet, and all around, the creatures seated themselves where they were, silent and expectant, watching him, watching Squithy. Waiting.

  Klay sat quiet in his berth, staring at familiar walls, waiting for a decision. The decision. What decision he wasn’t sure of.

  He’d studied some star charts. He’d thought of how it would be if he was in charge, what he’d change, what he’d keep the same.

  Wasn’t really up to him, but he thought hard about it, writing a file in his head but not recording it anywhere. Rusko and Trahn Smith—his uncles, officially—were Senior Pilot and Captain, and they were Trader and Senior Trader, one by one. For that matter they were Senior and standard everything else on the ship, from ’ponocists and medicos to tech and cooks and the cousins— Cousins Susrim and Cousin Falmer and Cousin Squithy—they were all general crew, ’cept they should have been more, but maybe not Squithy.

  Anyhow, usually not Squithy.

  And since he was a pilot and a tech, and mobile, too, at the moment he was back-up everywhere, a hardly known outside cousin to the general crew who’d lived the ship since birth. All awkward, and needing a cure.

  Their ages, that was the problem, their ages and their experience. Everyone but Trahn was almost too young to be what they was, the ship having come to them after a really stupid firefight on Trask-Romo took out Trahn’s Da and Ma, who were Squithy and Susrim and Falmer’s parents, too.

  Susrim was studied to be cook and arms, and was up to a local back-up-pilot rating any day now, but he didn’t have the credits from a recognized school or committee yet. Falmer, she was one cycle behind Susrim in age but ought to have been head cook awhile back, but Susrim was studied there and she wasn’t. Falmer had some medico stuff and was in charge of Squithy when Trahn wasn’t, which it turned out was most of the time. At the moment Trahn was Falmer’s ward, hard as that was on both of them.

  Captain Trahn was where he was because he took the warguilt payoff the bar came up with on account of the bloodshed and boom, brought in pretty Uncle Rusko, who’d not been much of a fit on his home ship despite his top-grade piloting, on account of that ship, Proud Plenty, was looking for blood-heirs, and then that meant Groton needed a Patel or a Smith, and when it all filtered down through a standard of people-trades from ship to ship—Klay’d ended up here, on a ship where neither the Captain nor the Senior Pilot had ever run a crew meeting, and where the crew, aside from him and Rusko, had never even been in a real crew meeting on account of the Dulcimer’s departed owners hadn’t run a crew-share ship.

  Now—well, things had changed when he’d come out of hydropnics, where he was back-up to the injured Trahn. Trahn’s legs . . . not good. One was broken just below the knee, and the other was ankle-sprained. Falmer had seen one of those problems for real in life, meaning everything gettting done doing was by the file and devices, not from experience.

  Rusko had cornered Klay yesterday, he being the mobile one of the high command at the moment, a finger-to-lip followed by a beckoning motion bringing them both outside to the rough camp still in place beside the ship. They stood well within the clearing, the usual camp followers lounging watchfully around the fringes of the three new paths they’d made for themselves, and sometimes watching the path to the fight-scene.

  “I see seven of them,” Klay’d offered, not trusting that there weren’t two dozen more sitting behind the weeds laughing at them. It wasn’t that they were malevolent—but that they were so quiet and sneaky when they weren’t talking to themselves or each other.

  “Quick eyes, Pilot,” Rusko said then, “really quick eyes. Squithy tells me that there’s seven of them here most times but not the same seven—that three of them hang out all the time together and—she says they are living here—but the others change off. She’s being a regular field biologist!”

  “But she’s not here with them right now . . .”

  Rusko smiled a wan smile—“No, I had to come get her and ask her to talk to the Captain. She hasn’t had a word to say to him, seems like. We need to get some stuff cleared up real soon . . .”

  He’d let that sentence go reluctantly, and took up again, with a sudden urgency.

  “Normally, on most ships, this is something command ought to know but not official. But since this is all so odd, we need to get things clear. Can you tell me what you’ve done—I mean, are you and Squithy playing pair?”

  Klay shook his head as he recalled, remembering that he’d burst out laughing and then shook his head at the time.

  “Muddy tracks, have you lost your mind?”

  Rusko’d sighed, and held his hands up.

  “It doesn’t matter to us, really—you’re split cousins far enough away that’s not a matter. But here, understand where we’re coming from. And I mean we in this, since it has been bothering Trahn so fierce.”

  Klay’d waited, maybe not patient, and Senior Pilot had made hand-talk of something like clear glide path before speaking agai
n.

  “Something happened. We know something happened. It wasn’t just that you shot that thing, hard as that must have been, but did something happen between the pair of you before then? Because we all know that Squithy now isn’t the Squithy she was before. And if she got that way because you paired in the bush that’ll do for us. We just need to know . . .”

  Klay knew it, he’d known it for sure the moment she’d stepped in front of the guns between her cousins and the clearing. She was changed—and he was afraid he knew why. He’d played it over a bunch of times in his head, wondering if the shock of the attack had done it, or if the air had done it.

  “All we did was what I told the crew we’d do. Hadn’t heard from you, so we walked out the trail you’d marked to the clearing, partly for some exercise, partly looking for you. Comms were coming up empty—not even time signal—and we figured, that is, I figured three hours overdue was pushing things. It was on my head since you’d told Susrim and Falmer to stand tower watch.

  “Got out the trail, and there you weren’t. Hiked on to the clearing with three paths out, like you said, but the clearing wasn’t empty—there were all the creatures there, trying to get some of them out of the webs, the rest quiet and waiting and watching, and then Choodoy’s monster came in and—”

  “The fight stuff, we have that recorded, Klay, what you told us, and what you told Susrim right then. There’s a couple things we’ll need to talk about there, but some of it I’ll have to clear with Trahn anyhow before I can say a word on it.”

  Klay hand-signaled acknowledge.

  “I mean, it all happened so fast. The thing broke out of the woods of a sudden, and it was like it looked at the littles and was just going to eat them all—I mean, we knew that’s what was going to happen, we could feel it!— and then it looked at us, and Squithy yelled, ‘No, you can’t, Tobor! Klay, stop it!’ and it looked at us and made that charge . . .”