Skeen's Search

by Clayton, Jo;

  The camp was a group of mud-wattle huts built around tree trunks, their floors a meter and a half off the ground. Rain dripping in sharp brittle tip tap tunks about her, Ti-cat slid through the deep shadow under the huts, nervous because those high floors suggested strongly that predators like the skitterdiscs prowled here at night. She circled the outer rim of the camp, but found no sentries. That made her yet more nervous. There should have been sentries. Either she was missing them in the noise of the rain and wind, or the fugitives who lived here depended on local predators for their security. Lifefire, I’ve haven’t time to waste on this. She ghosted to the nearest hut, lengthened her neck and nosed aside the leather curtain blocking the small doorway. Two sleepers inside. She readjusted her vision, moved her head carefully so she could see the faces. No Rostico Burn here. She brought her neck back to normal, slid to the next hut, repeated the process. One by one she searched the huts, her stomach in knots, her ears flared to catch the slightest sound, hoping the watchbeasts had gone off to sleep since dawn was galloping closer, not really believing that. Hut after hut. Her neck muscles ached, the colloid was thudding in the veins in her temples, she felt like throwing up. Time passed. She squeezed down on frustration and impatience, continued with her careful controlled exploration. Long neck, nose about inside the hut, short neck, move on, slow slow, never relaxing, methodical, taking each hut as it came, working in ragged spiral deeper and deeper into the camp, cold uncomfortable, wet and angry.

  She moved round a patch of berry brambles and stopped.

  A rough cage made of lake reeds bound together with thin tough cords about three meters across and two meters high. Someone inside stretched out on the mud, sluggish streams of mud or blood moving across pale skin.

  She edged closer. Her foot touched cold metal sunk out of sight in earth the consistency of thick soup. A chain snaked past her, one end locked around the nearest tree, the other end about the captive’s waist. A man, naked, prone, either asleep or unconscious. From the look of his back, he’d been severely beaten and raped before he was thrown in the cage. Her muzzle wrinkled into an unhappy snarl. I don’t like this; Mala Fortuna, as Skeen would say. His head was turned away from the chain tree; she padded around the cage, dropped on her stomach in the mud and lengthened her neck again.

  He twitched and shivered, groaned as her head moved toward him. What she could see of his face was contused and distorted, but enough like the fots she’d examined to leave little question about who he was. Rostico Burn, Mala Mala Mala Fortuna yes. And he was very like Skeen, more than she’d expected now that she saw him in the flesh. She retracted her head, shook herself into shape for running

  A powerful kick in the side sent her tumbling over and over to crash into the chain tree. Dazed, she scrambled to get away, managed to throw herself around the tree in time to avoid a second blow though the skitterdisc’s foreclaws scraped a deep furrow into her flank before the tree intervened. The thing was fighting as silently as the other had, the one that followed them from the shelter; praying that it would maintain that silence, Timka clawed up the tree until she pulled herself onto a broad limb springing horizontally from the trunk; the tree shivered and swayed as the skitterdisc slammed into it, the limb groaned under her weight threatening to drop her under the claws of the silent furious beast below her.

  Flustered and panting, Timka clung a moment to the brittle bark, struggling to concentrate. She huddled next to the trunk, got herself propped as steadily as she could and finally managed the shift to her birdform. The shaking got more frantic. The skitterdisc whined, the sound rising and falling, growing louder and louder. Timka shuddered, her feathers rasping against the bark. She forced her mind away from her doubts and fears, began climbing higher in the tree using talons and beak to pull herself up. Nearly drowning as leaves emptied rain on her, fighting to hold on in spite of the soaking and the sway which got wider and more violent, she wrenched herself upward until she reached a level where there was a fragment of open sky. She launched herself into the rain, sank heavily until her wings bit into the air and powered her up again.

  Unwilling to fight the windshears along the face of the low scarp, Timka flew the extra distance around the end of the lake where the slope and windspeed both were gentler, circled round behind the ridge and finally dropped beside Skeen, cawing a warning before she settled. She shifted to Pallah, shivered and grew herself a thick coat of fur. Though the rain had slackened a little, it cut deeper, combed into long stinging lines by the icy wind.

  Skeen twisted round, pulling the ground sheet tight about her face, blinking away the rain that hit the side of her head and dripped into her eyes. “Well?”

  “Found him,” Timka said. “There’s a problem. He’s inside a cage and chained to a tree. And he’s been pounded into chopped meat, he’s not going to be walking out of there. Another problem. The men there don’t bother with sentries, they sleep in huts they’ve built in the trees and let a herd of skitterdiscs handle their security. One of them nearly got me, came down on me before I knew it was there. Between the wind, the rain and the mud, I wouldn’t have noticed a stampede of draft horses.”

  “Shit.”

  “True. You’ll have to help me carry him. Will that thing keep the skitters off?” She leaned over and tapped the barrel of the stun rifle.

  “I think so. Let’s hope I don’t have to use it. Noisy. If you and that skitter haven’t already waked the camp, this will do it.”

  “Maybe we should wait till tomorrow night.”

  Skeen moved restlessly, the ground sheet rustling as it shifted about her body. “We probably should. No.” She turned her hand over, looked at the ringchron. “We’ve still got an hour of real dark and there’s more rain blowing up, I want to go now.” She frowned. “You’re sure it’s him?”

  “He’s enough like you he could be your brother.” Timka grinned at her. “A MUCH younger brother.”

  “Snip. You’re going to have to swim me across that lake.” She got to her feet, shook out the groundsheet and rolled it into a small neat bundle, then she took the rope and the piton that had shared the sheet’s shelter with her, exploded the piton into the stone and dropped the rope over the rim. “Come on. The sooner we get started.…”

  Timka flowed out of the shadow under the trees, shifted to the Pallah-cat hybrid. “As far as I can tell no one woke or noticed the noise the skitter and I made. There’s a herd of the beasts poking in the mud around something that smells like a garbage dump, but none prowling in the rest of the camp, the one who chased me must’ve given up and gone back to his kin. Mud’s getting deeper by the minute. If Burn doesn’t wake up soon, he’s going to drown in it.” She dragged her arm across her flat muzzle, squeezing some water out of the short plushy fur on it, water immediately replaced by the hard rain now falling about them.

  Skeen kicked at something obscured by the mud. “I cut two of the reeds in case we need a stretcher to carry the man.”

  Timka clicked her tongue against her teeth. “To get him across the lake, maybe. Better I carry him and leave you loose to guard us.”

  “If you can manage the weight …”

  An exasperated snort. “Better than you, Nemin.”

  Skeen knelt beside the cage, cursing under her breath as the light blade labored to cut through the tough reeds. Built the fuckin’ cage around the man and didn’t include a door, stupid gits. Timka prowled about, nervously alert, watching for early risers and wandering skitterdiscs, feeling the miniscule changes that announced the arrival of dawn. Rain dropped around her, the drops splatting like bullets into the mud; the wind was turning erratic, the steady pressure changing to powerful gusts that swung unpredictably from side to side.

  Setting the lengths of reed beside the stun rifle that she’d left leaning against the cage, Skeen crawled through the opening. The captive was blowing bubbles in the mud; as Timka said, a bit more and he’d drown in it. The light blade cut through the soft iron of the chain far faster than i
t had the reeds. She put her hand on the man’s shoulder, cursed again. Hot. She lifted his head, slapped him lightly. He grunted incoherently, moved his arms, his hands in feeble aimless gropings, subsided into passivity. “Djabo,” she muttered. She touched the butt of the darter, shook her head. “Better not.” She got him belly down over her shoulder and began crawling through the opening.

  Timka was waiting there. She knelt and took the body as Skeen slid it off. A hand on his wrists to hold him in place, she shrugged his body about until she was satisfied with her balance, then rose carefully to her feet. “Far as I can tell nothing’s moving,” she told Skeen.

  “We better be.” Rifle ready, Skeen went trotting off, heading for the lake.

  They reached the lake in a gust of wind and rain; the sun was up and the darkness was diluted to a mottled gray; the water was gray, the jewel colored reeds were dark grays and light, the water was a choppy hard gray, small wrinkled chop that struggled with wind and gravity; the rain was gray, hard hammering drops that catapulted from the clouds with force enough to bruise Timka through her fur. Rostico Burn’s body shielded her from some of it; for one fleeting moment she wondered what the beating was going to do to his already battered flesh, but the smell of blood, feces and mud that clung to him was powerful enough in spite of the rain to wipe away whatever charity she had for him; what she wanted most of all was to get him off her so she could shift and leave the stench behind.

  She slid him off onto the hard dirt of the lakeshore, sighed with relief as she straightened.

  Skeen knelt beside him, touched his face, tucked fingers under his chin to check his pulse. “Tough kid. Got fever but going strong.” She scowled at the icy gray water. “Though what swimming the lake’s going to do to him, I don’t know. Or me. Djabo, that stuff is cold.”

  Timka glanced at the gray anonymity of the trees a few meters off, then at clouds that looked close enough to touch. “Not much choice,” she said. “The sooner we get him to the miniskip the sooner you can do some temporary repairs on him.” She waded into the water, shifted to her dolphin form and waited, jolted about on the rough surface, for Skeen to pull Rostico Burn into the water so she could take them across the lake.

  Cross the lake. Skeen half-drowned and chilled to the point she is close to losing control of her fingers, her legs. Rostico Burn’s pulse turning thready and uncertain, his body shuddering with waves of chill. Skeen swarms up the knotted rope, tosses the ground sheet down to Timka. Timka wraps it around Burn, ties the end of the rope about him, then scrambles up the rope to join Skeen and help her haul the man up the face of the scarp. Load Burn on Timka’s back (still wrapped in the ground sheet which gives Timka a lot of trouble since it makes him slippery and less flexible), run recklessly downslope without caring what noise they make or what predators they stir up. Shoot him full of antibiotics, turn on a small heat radiator, fold him up in the cargo-pod, slam it shut over him and take off, vanishing into the clouds to begin the dangerous flight back, tossed about by the powerful but erratic winds, dipping into swift dangerous slides, only Skeen’s quick reflexes and the longago craftsmen who built the miniskip for her keeping them off the rocks, eight hours of storm and slide, roller coaster ride, gravity exaggerating every drop and drift. Eight hours, eyes burning, head aching, body almost forgotten so intense her concentration on the sensor readings. Tempting to put down for a while, a rest, she can’t maintain her alertness that long, so long since she’s slept and the sleep so disturbed, yet if she stops to rest, Rostico Burn will surely die, he needs food and relief from the pull of the gravity, he needs his wounds cleaned out and bandaged, he needs plasma and more than the rough guess and go for it medicine she’d pumped into him so he wouldn’t die on them right there. Eight hours, she felt her age as she hadn’t felt it in years, so weary, so sore, so feeble, feeble as Mamarana, are the ananile shots being eroded? should she get them redone? they were supposed to last another ten years, all this effort, this drag of a planet, were those nullifying the shots? Don’t get off on that, Skeen, don’t let your mind wander. Pull up and away from the cliff that almost sucks them in, almost feel the surface of the miniskip scraping on the granite. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, Skeen, you can worry about this nonsense later. If it is nonsense. Eight hours, interminable hours, then, finally, the crater and the round lake below them. Glide down beside the mound that was the Lander and hope, pray, will the camouflage to be sufficient, hope, pray that the Kliu have not located them and aren’t waiting there, spider for the draggle flies they were.

  They landed at the lake in a gray afternoon hush, high clouds, no rain, and the wind had dropped to a whisper.

  Rostico Burn was babbling with delirium, fighting feebly against the constriction of the ground sheet and the four intrusive impertinent hands that struggled to pry him out of the cargo-pod. He shrieked and drooled and clawed at them with fever-driven strength, but they finally peeled him out and got him on Timka’s back. With Skeen trotting beside her, the stun rifle ready, Timka hauled him to the shelter.

  The tall spikes of the guard ring were kicked over, more than half of them with the caps knocked off and carried away, the hard packed earth was clawed into tatters, but the shelter stood where they’d left it, somewhat frayed and dusty but intact. The small clearing was empty. Skeen unsealed the entrance, Timka dumped her burden on the floor of the common room and shifted to Pallah to rid herself of the man’s stink. Burn gabbled and clawed at the floor, managed to get onto hands and knees and started crawling toward the entrance. “Idiot,” Timka said, “doesn’t he realize he’s been rescued?” Face twisted with distaste, she put her foot on his flank and pushed him over.

  “Obviously not.” Skeen was bending over the sensor board, waking up the facilities of the shelter. “We’re going to need plenty of hot water and the medkit.” She sneezed. “Djabo’s drippy nose, not just for him.” She shivered. “A bit more and I’m coming down with pneumonia. Ti, you think you could set up the water comber? We all need baths. Here.” She gave the small combox to Timka. “You mind? Go talk to the Lander, she’ll get things ready for you, tell you what to do if you run into trouble. I want to get some hot soup ready. And there’s enough water for me to clean the boy up some so your tender nostrils won’t be offended.” She gave Timka a weary smile to take the sting out of her words.

  “Lifefire, yes.” Timka closed her fingers about the combox, concentrated and grew a covering of short thick fur. “I’ll bring the medkit.” A last glance at the feebly scrabbling form, then she left.

  Skeen touched the back of her hand to her own forehead, grimaced as she felt the warmth there, acknowledged the boiled onion feel to her eyes and the prickle at the back of her nose. No help for it, she was in for a bout of coughing and sneezing and general misery. Ananile shots to retard aging, regrowing limbs and organs, meddling with genes, but still no cure for the common cold. She yawned, stretched, slouched across the room to the kitchen nook, sidestepping as Burn reached for her ankles. She dialed hot broth and a tubful of water. Sipping at the broth she ambled back to Burn, wrinkled her nose at the stench rising from him. The bruises were coming up nicely, plum purple with tinges of red and ocher. The rain had washed some of the mud and blood away but streaks and stains of both wound about his body in a lazy calligraphy of violence. He was quieter now, weaker. She emptied the mug of broth, wiped her mouth and knelt beside him; setting the mug on the floor, she twisted her fingers in black hair that felt distractingly like her own when it was long unwashed and turned his head so she could see his face.

  She stopped breathing, closed her eyes but couldn’t erase the image. This was her uncle as she remembered him, maybe a little younger, a little leaner. Opening her fingers, she let his head thud down, she couldn’t bear to touch him a moment longer. They kept telling me he looked like me, I couldn’t see it, not in the fots. Ay, Djabo Djabo, Mala Fortuna, I can’t.… She swallowed, her throat pricking with the developing cold, her eyes prickling with tears she re
fused to shed. He muttered, his hand came round and slapped down on her knee. She struck it away and started to get to her feet, changed her mind and settled back. Shivering convulsively, she forced herself to look at him. Slack mouth moving, half open eyes glistening wetly, swollen nose. Tongue clamped between her teeth, she lifted his head again and examined his face more carefully. He wasn’t as much like her uncle as she thought, not really. Not when she took his features apart. Her stomach stopped knotting and she could breathe again instead of gasping. She set his head down, more gently this time, got to her feet. Poor young Rostico Burn, kicked about and left to welter in his gore. Time and more than time to clean him up a bit. She took him by the wrists and dragged him into the bathroom. By the time Timka got back with the medkit, she had him cleaned up and stretched out on a pair of towels. He was unconscious, breathing hoarsely, his pulse thready and uncertain.