Third Don: Ardulum, #3

by J. S. Fields

  Emn, I think I’ve got—

  From nowhere, an andal tree slammed into the side of her settee and then flew upwards out of the forest and into the sky. Atalant lost her grip on the controls. The ship rolled up the dirt mound, thrusters sputtering, and then resumed its course upside down. Her stomach rolled with it. It was so hot—damn it, why did it have to be so hot? Atalant fiddled with the interface, the controls burning her fingertips, as she tried to right the ship. It did so, groaning in protest, and when the settee completed its roll this time, Atalant had to swallow bile.

  FIREFIREFIRE!

  The andal continued to pound into her head, making holes in Emn’s erected barriers. Atalant slid her hands back onto the interface, desperately trying to convince herself that the fire wasn’t roasting her alive, and attempted to lower the settee back into the trench to continue digging.

  Almost done, and then I can help with the cleanup on your end.

  Emn’s voice echoed in her mind. We’ve connected most of the other channels, now, with all of the Heaven Guard helping me while I fly the Lucidity. I’m still moving trees, but I think we’re almost done. The fires have already been through most of the forests. There isn’t much left to salvage. When you join us, we can finish up and maybe still have dinner.

  Dinner sounds great. Atalant tried to push the engines, buoyed by the idea of a warm meal and a bath. The settee plunged forward, back into the earth. One meter. Two.

  The settee’s engines sputtered, and the ship stalled. From her left, Atalant could see the reds and oranges of the fire’s edge as it regained ground. Almost close enough to touch.

  Emn? Atalant tried to sound calm. My ship is down. Could we stop with the flying trees for a minute?

  I’m so sorry! Atalant struggled to hear Emn’s voice over the andal in her head. The andal is fighting me, and it’s hard to keep these mental barriers in place while trying to talk to the andal at the same time. It doesn’t want to listen. I’ve uprooted a fifty-meter buffer around the north and east ends of the fire, and the line is holding, but those were mostly saplings. Your line still has a few hundred trees between you and the next channel. I’m working on it, but the older trees are much harder to pull and can counter my microkinesis a bit.

  I can’t do much without a functioning ship, Atalant sent back grimly as another tree, a sapling, bounced off her stern. According to the computer, the temperature inside the settee was holding, but the view in front of the ship was now entirely made up of flames. The andal trees are not thinking rationally. Better to be uprooted and replanted than burned to death. Atalant kicked at the interface as the andal sent images of her being cooked alive. Suddenly, the settee sputtered back to life and rose back into the air in a sharp thrust. Atalant exhaled audibly and resumed forward.

  I’m back in the air, but the ship won’t take another ground impact. It’s toast. Send three settees my way so they can continue here and in the lowlands. Those channels are complete.

  Atalant tried to send the settee above the canopy, but its thrusters merely sputtered. Cruising just meters above the ground, the settee bumped over a large boulder, denting its biometal hull in far too close to Atalant’s hip. That shouldn’t have happened, but the settees were in sad shape after days of firefighting. Atalant received an aborted affinitive from Emn before the andal pushed its way back to the forefront.

  ATALANT! Another image superimposed itself across the interface of the settee, of steam rising from Atalant’s skin as it curled in on itself.

  I’m working on it, damn it, she sent again. The images were getting to her as Emn’s barrier continued to wane. Her stuk began to thicken again, forming a visible layer across her skin and causing her fingers to slide over the controls. The settee interface was textured for just such an occurrence, but Atalant’s volume of stuk production taxed even the built-in safeguards.

  Atalant tried to pull the settee up again, but the ship squealed in protest. Another tree lifted from the ground to her left as Emn pulled at the cellulose in large clumps, bringing everything bound with it along for the ride. Atalant veered the ship away, but the tree’s root ball swung wide at the last moment, cracked the settee’s viewscreen, and sent the settee rolling through the air. Atalant almost had the ship stabilized when it smacked into the side of a thick tree at the edge of the channel and fell to the ground.

  Now, it was hot. The stuk on Atalant’s skin evaporated in the heat as alarms and lights went off across the interface. “Damn it!” Smoky air filled the cockpit. Atalant tried to engage the auxiliary thrusters, but the engine sputtered, the ship remaining still. The computer emitted a high shriek before the interface went dead. All around her, the forest burned.

  My ship is down, again! Atalant yelled to Emn as she engaged the manual flight controls. She still had the low-altitude thrusters, which wouldn’t get her much higher than the canopy, but it might be enough to get her away from the burn line. Atalant flipped the low switch to engage the thrusters. The ship jerked, pushed from the ground, and hovered roughly six meters up. It wobbled from left to right as Atalant manually adjusted each of the two thrusters for balance, but finally stabilized. She couldn’t fly like this for long, but she couldn’t stay grounded either. There was an area not far from here that had remained an oasis in the blaze. She had a chance of getting there, maybe, if the andal left her alone. She knew the area. She just had to get there without suffocating or burning to death.

  When no response from Emn came and the temperature inside of the cockpit rose to burning, Atalant decided to chance it. Forget directing controls, she was going full manual. She moved her hands under the console to the thick yokes just next to her thighs. She grabbed them, one in each hand, and waited just a moment as her stuk, tacky from evaporation, moistened the leather. Once she had a firm grip, she jerked both to the left. The settee made a hard arc back into the blaze from which she had come, gaining another few meters in the process. She was brushing the canopy now, the dead tree tops scraping her hull.

  The forest began to transition to old growth, and with it, the percentage of dead trees decreased. The trees became thicker, their arrangements less ordered, and the oldest stood amongst the dead, their leaves curled in but intact. The settee couldn’t get high enough to clear the tallest trees now, so Atalant skimmed around them as best she could. The smoke was thinner here, but the fire still bloomed, and flying around the oldest trees meant flying closer to the flames as well.

  Help is coming! Atalant— Emn’s words were cut off as a thin branch hit the settee and snapped in two. The branch wasn’t big enough to affect the ship, but it felt like Atalant’s left arm broke in tandem, although Atalant suspected that was the andal playing tricks on her mind again. Damned andal telepathy. She dropped the yoke and screamed at the pain that she hoped was only in her mind. The settee listed to port. Atalant eased the thrusters but, without another arm, had no control over the ship. The settee began to arc back towards where she had come from until it grazed a giant andal tree, stripping part of the hull plating away. Atalant managed to pry her boot off using the edge of her chair and finally pushed on the left yoke with her foot.

  It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t graceful, but it worked. The now-sputtering ship resumed its course, alternatively losing altitude and jerking to port at random intervals. Atalant pushed the ship deeper into the forest, determined not to die in a settee with her old Heaven Guard identifier still etched into the side.

  The smoke began to clear, as did the pain in Atalant’s arm. Three other settees came into view ahead. Two were to her left and one to her right. The solitary one dropped almost immediately after Atalant caught sight of it as four saplings broke through the canopy. Emn’s microkinesis sent them a little too close to the settee, and their roots wrapped around the hull.

  Emn! Atalant sent as the wind changed direction. I’m fine. Send the Guard to finish my channel. I’m going to land.

  Atalant didn’t get a response, but the block in her mind thickene
d and the andal screams—and the pain in her arm—faded to a whisper. Thank you, she sent, even though Emn’s thoughts were elsewhere. Atalant pushed her settee to starboard and, without the mental connection to the trees, accidentally clipped an old-growth branch. It caught in her cracked viewscreen and peeled it off. She gasped through the smoky thickness of the air.

  “I can’t believe this is the ship I wanted,” Atalant muttered as she emerged on the other side of the fire, into a landscape of black char and andal corpses.

  She skimmed what was left of the treetops, the settee’s altitude no longer an issue. As the snags thinned, Atalant eased the thrusters, lowering closer to the ground. Ahead, granite began to poke through the earth in jagged formations of gray and green. She urged the settee even lower and to port, weaving in and out of the shale as her ship allowed. Abruptly, the ground dropped out, and expecting it, Atalant let the settee free fall for several heartbeats before the thrusters caught the ground again, buoying the ship.

  She skimmed the side of the cliff, a stream of emerald green below her. Its banks were white with trillium flowers that trailed up the cliff’s crags and depressions. The fire hadn’t fallen into the canyon, but the piled, damaged andal that lay half submerged in the water told her how close it had come.

  Are you all right, Atalant? Emn’s voice was laced with fatigue. It hadn’t sounded too weary minutes ago, but that might have been because Atalant could now hear her more clearly with the fire contained. Emn eased back on the mental barrier again. This far away from the blaze, with no living andal in sight, the screams were quieter. It was a silence appropriate for a graveyard.

  The fire? Atalant asked.

  Contained. All of it. Your channel was the last section. Just dousing left to do now and uprooting as many of the andal trees as I can save before passing out.

  Don’t do too much, okay? I’m going to land. When someone gets a minute, can they come pick me up? No rush. I have something to do. Atalant sent a mental image of her current surroundings—the choked river, the white-coated shale, and, as she followed the slope of the land back up, the charred remains of her uncle’s home.

  Someone will be there soon. We’ve got three downed pilots, and ground transports are coming for them. If you’re safe, I’ll send someone once the pilots are rescued.

  Atalant hovered the settee over the remains of the concrete foundation. The rest of the house was a pile of charred boards lying in a roughly rectangular pattern. She considered landing for a moment and salvaging something for her uncle from the rubble, but then decided against it. This was not why she had come out this way. She had another destination in mind.

  It doesn’t have to be just anyone, Atalant sent. Especially if someone needs a break. She didn’t want to ask Emn directly, even if shyness at this point was utterly ridiculous.

  Instead, she turned the ship and accelerated north, staying below the canopy this time. The trees were wider apart here and the ground vegetation almost absent. Deep channels marred the earth—breaks cut to protect the ancient trees. The damage waned as Atalant continued on until she finally flew above an unbroken terrain of greens and reds. Here, the andal whispered of danger, spoke of smoke and ash that coated their leaves and deprived them of photosynthate production, but the fire had never reached this far into the preserve.

  Atalant angled the settee towards a diamond-shaped break in the canopy that she knew by heart. She closed her eyes and mentally went through a landing sequence she had practiced every night for the last ten years, a sequence she had performed thousands of times during her Heaven Guard training. Ease the thrusters. Set the ground sensors. Wait, wait—the ship proximity alarm pinged—cut thrusters, turn ship ninety degrees starboard, engage landing pulse.

  Of course, she couldn’t do half of those things without a computer. Instead, she eased the thrusters and let the ship skid upside down through the sedge, scarring the land. The settee finally stopped at the base of an old andal tree.

  Atalant unbuckled her harness, collapsed onto the ceiling, and then gingerly stood. There was still glass and metal and smoke inside the ship, and when she tried the only door, it was jammed shut. Dented, too, from one of the impacts. Exhaling loudly, Atalant instead picked her way through the opening in the viewscreen dropped to the ground below. An old wooden swing suspended from the tree by a thick reed cable greeted her with a soft tiptap tiptap.

  Atalant let the image settle into once forgotten familiarity. The ship was nestled in a field of tall grass and sedge, the white tassels of which bent and fluttered in the mild wind. Directly in front of the settee was a dirt path that ended at a two-story oval house made from dark andal heartwood. The front door—a large, rounded slab of andal—stood agape. Leaf litter had spread across the threshold.

  They left in a hurry, Atalant thought to no one in particular. They couldn’t risk talther’s health, likely.

  Gatois were just as precious, and just as rare, on Neek as they were on Ardulum. Their genetics weren’t strictly necessary for procreation, but the additional parent was thought to increase fitness in the offspring. Scientifically established by whom, Atalant didn’t know. It might have been more myth, perhaps, or maybe cultural preference. She, Arik, and Ekimet had gatoi parents, after all. Maybe the andal preferred it that way. Maybe it was a stupid thing to be thinking about right now, while her planet burned.

  Atalant stepped from the ship, boots sinking into still-wet soil. She paused to kick at the duff. This close to the fire, it should have been powdery dirt, but instead it was thick with moss and flowers, and the air was heavy with condensation. The rich dampness of the temperate rainforest was heartbreakingly familiar, if not a bit surprising, but Atalant still inhaled until she became lightheaded. There was little smoke here, although the ground was coated in ash. How the fire had skipped the area, she didn’t know, determined not to dwell on it.

  Atalant moved slowly up the path, fingers twining through grass stems as she walked. A question came from Arik—surprising her, given the long distance—but she sent only a cursory response. She didn’t care about galactic telepathy right now. Ekimet tried to prod her with a different question—she shut zir out as well. This fire was contained. The Heaven Guard was dousing what remained. She would return in due time.

  She closed the link to both elds before Arik could respond. Atalant sorted through the remaining voices in her mind as she dallied in the sedge. She mentally pushed past the old-growth andal yawning for attention, past the pitiful moaning of the damaged plantation trees, and found who she was looking for. She reinforced their connection, thickening it until Emn’s senses wound into hers. Emn was close—surprisingly so.

  Atalant finally stepped into the large arc of trimmed lawn that surrounded the oval house. She was close enough now to see the acorn-shaped tip of the Lucidity peeking out from behind the building, its magenta hull in the shade. She hadn’t heard it land and was surprised at herself. The calmness that pervaded the area was more substantive than she’d realized.

  I didn’t want to disturb your reflection, Emn sent as she stepped out from behind the ship and into the sunlight. I know I could have sent a guard, but when I saw where you were headed, I thought the Lucidity might be more appropriate. Emn’s blue dress twirled about her legs as she walked, and it reminded Atalant of their landing on Keft. It exposed more of her skin than Atalant had seen in weeks. Well, more than she had seen outside the hall to the Talent Chamber, anyway. Atalant would have preferred to have had better clothing options for this clandestine meeting as well, but she wasn’t going to fight fires in gold robes.

  “Thank you for coming,” Atalant said as Emn walked towards her. She held a hand out, and Emn took it, stepping into an embrace. Atalant tucked her head into Emn’s neck and exhaled, letting the remaining tension slip from her shoulders. “I didn’t want to ask you to come, in case it made you uncomfortable, but I am glad you are here.”

  Emn pulled back enough to find Atalant’s lips. Their kiss was slow an
d sweet. Emn’s hand stroked the back of Atalant’s neck, her fingers tangling and grabbing Atalant’s hair. Andal help her, Emn’s possessiveness was going to melt her into the grass.

  I’m glad you get to come home, Atalant.

  Atalant snorted at the word “home” and looked towards the open door, breaking their kiss. I like what we’re doing, but…would you come in with me? There are some things I want to see and a few things I’d like to collect. I didn’t get to bring anything with me when I was exiled. I’d like a few photos, if nothing else.

  Emn kissed her lightly on the cheek and smiled. Of course. She took Atalant’s hand, and together, they stepped into Atalant’s childhood house. The interior wall color had changed—now a bright blue instead of a muted yellow—but the thick-lidded bench still sat near the doorway and the andal dining table her grandtalther had made still took up most of the kitchen. A funny memory came to her, then, of her brother sitting her down with paper and a blood pen at that table. Asking her to draw the table, theorize better joinery, to build it better. She’d been ten and confused as to why he was so serious, all of a sudden, about something as silly as joinery. Looking back on the memory, Atalant still couldn’t discern any reason behind that day, but that didn’t trouble her. It was kid stuff, likely. It wasn’t worth dwelling on. There were other memories she wanted to relive.

  Atalant and Emn continued their slow walk through the house. There were more pictures on the wall than Atalant remembered, and she was enveloped by the warmth of memories. A family portrait from when she was six, her hair in tight braids, smiling as she held a toy settee. All three of her parents in formal wear, younger than Atalant now and smiling, at their familial binding ceremony. Her brother’s newborn photo, covered in the red of childbirth, head still coned from the birth canal. A formal photo of Atalant on the day she entered the Heaven Guard Academy. Atalant paused at this picture as melancholy twinged inside her. She took it from the wall and expanded the image on the screen to just her face, which shone with pride.