Staré: Shikari Book Two

by Alma T. C. Boykin

  Rigi and Makana shared wary looks, and she wondered if Cy had inherited insanity sideways from Uncle Eb. It wouldn’t surprise her. “Let’s move, please, in case someone lands.” Jaihu would stay with the flitter for the moment before going to the Staré pilot lounge. He couldn’t walk long distances because of his crippled leg and tail, so he stayed at the landing port.

  Cy, Rigi, Martinus, and Makana followed the pedestrian path marked on the landing field, keeping wary eyes and ears open for the sound of an arrival or departure. She saw a few big transports but not many personal flitters or rentals. Well, bouncing through solid clouds probably excited most people as much as it thrilled Rigi. Most Staré not in the military avoided flitters if possible, and Rigi had heard rumors that flying could affect Stamm, although exactly how or why no one seemed to know. Rigi wondered if a first Stamm elder had been taken flying with a scout, didn’t care for it, and announced that he would not fly again, sparking the story.

  The quartet hired a carry-all and rode to the institute. Rigi stared out the window, noticing how few people seemed to be out on the pedestrian walks, be they human or Staré. The end of the cool season did not always “go quietly,” as they said, and cold rain and the little biting wind discouraged most people from going outside if they could find a reason not to. The road passed the sign of the Happy Wombow Restaurant and Rigi thought back to the triumphant supper with then-Major Prananda, Tomás, and Uncle Eb after meeting the Royal Governor and Dr. Xian. The food had tasted so good, even better than Shona’s.

  “Miss Auriga, to whom was the meeting announced?” Makana enunciated in Staré with crisp precision and //concern/irritation.//

  “To the members of the expedition, Col. Deleon, and to Lt. Prananda, Makana, and I believe Uncle Ebenezer as well, because of his reports.” Rigi peered around Makana. A group of humans and Staré milled around the doors of the institute’s building, some with holo-signs and what appeared to be a banner that they were attempting to hang over the main door. The wind and wet seemed intent on complicating their task, and one end of the banner slid off the moist, slick synth-stone of the façade. “I do not care for this.”

  “Neither do I,” Cyril and Makana chorused, one in Common and one in Staré. The driver stopped at the end of the section of road, not wanting to be involved in any sort of fuss or confrontation, or so Rigi suspected. “Rigi, is there a back or side door?”

  “I don’t know, but,” she saw a familiar stooped, tall figure coming toward them from the opposite direction. “Uncle Eb does.” She opened the door of the runabout and climbed down, followed by Martinus and Makana. Cy paid the driver and followed, watching the small crowd up the block. “Good morning, sir.”

  Uncle Eb watched the crowd, not her, eyes focused above the top of her head. “It was better. Follow. Makana?” The Staré hand bowed. “Good. You come after me, Auriga, Martinus, and then Cyril. I’ll explain later.” Rigi glanced over her shoulder. Cy had his mouth open as if to protest, then heard something from behind him and closed it, waved a sort of salute and stepped sideways, behind Martinus. Uncle Eb spun on his heel and returned the way he had come, into the wind, Makana behind him and Rigi in the center of the line. It reminded her of the narrow track in the Reserve on the edge of the Kenusha Plain and the hunter-lizard attack. She went on alert, listening and watching, walking like a hunter. Uncle Eb led them around the corner, over one block, before cutting back through an alley that dead-ended at a large door. He beckoned Makana, who turned around and took up a watch/wary stance. Rigi noticed that Makana also blocked Uncle Eb from view. She heard a faint ping, an under-the-breath mutter, a plop, and the door opened. “In.”

  Rigi almost stepped on Makana’s tail. As soon as Cy cleared the threshold, the door closed again. Uncle Eb muttered something about budgets and lighting and then a second door opened. “Ah, good. Act as if we came in the front way, please. Ladies room there, gents here. Makana, around the corner if needed. Rigi, take Martinus and if anyone fusses, say you named her before she was old enough to check.” He winked and the old Uncle Eb reappeared as Cy rolled his eyes, then headed for the washroom. Rigi smiled and nodded, then led Martinus into the ladies’ lounge. No one shrieked, probably because no one else seemed to be there. She met the men in the hallway and they went up the now-familiar stairs to the Xenoarchaeology and Affiliated Sciences Institute door.

  Thaddius met them. “This way, please.” They went to a meeting room farther down the hallway. “I apologize for not having Staré seats,” he told Makana. “The protest took us by surprise.” Makana nodded and settled into a corner where he could watch the doors. Rigi took the hint and sat just in front of him, Martinus beside her. Uncle Eb took the chair at her right, not incidentally giving both of them clear fields of fire. Rigi shivered. She shouldn’t even think like that. She wasn’t hunting, wasn’t in a place where hunter-lizards and striped-lions lurked in the brush. Even so, the commotion outside made her as wary as if she were in the wilds.

  The door opened and she heard, “…I do not care who failed to keep quiet. I care deeply that someone did not. No one should know about this meeting except those who were invited.” Dr. Xian stormed in, scowling, carrying a large roll of something pale under one arm. “And our findings have nothing to do with the rights of the current residents of Shikhari. The culture that built the structures might not be Staré at all! Of all the foolishness.” She slapped the top of the large table in the center of the room with a plump hand. Mr. De Groet and Lt. Prananda made placating noises, then burst into large smiles. Dr. Xian finally looked at the room and Rigi thought she was going to either faint or slap someone. “How did you get in?”

  Rigi managed to keep a straight and innocent face as she answered, “The door, ma’am.” She saw Uncle Eb shaking his head a little and she wondered if he’d intended to say those exact words.

  Dr. Xian shook her finger at Uncle Eb. “You were going to say that, weren’t you?”

  He drew himself up a little and rested the tips of his fingers on his chest. “We certainly did not come through the wall, or cut a hole in the roof. That would be rude, as well as letting in the wet.” Behind the xenoarchaeologist, De Groet and Tomás did their best to keep straight faces, with marginal success. Rigi smelled //amusement// from behind her and bit the tip of her tongue.

  Dr. Xian shook the roll at them, then moved clear of the doorway as Margit and a few others trickled in. Cy took a chair near the door so he could stretch his legs out without tripping anyone, if possible. He’d probably fall asleep, Rigi sighed, and hoped that he would not snore this time. When Paul snored he made a cute little whiffling sound. Cyril’s snores brought down loose leaves from the trees around the house. After several minutes Micah De Groet closed the door and locked it, then pressed a switch beside the latch. A faint buzz tickled Rigi’s ears, and Makana shook his head. Mr. De Groet said, “I apologize for the scrambler field, but after the security breach, I do not want to risk someone listening in and taking the wrong information away.”

  Dr. Xian unrolled the pale thing, revealing a large map of the Indria Plateau and the lands around Keralita, Sogdia, NovMerv, and as far as the Kenusha Plains. The printed sheet took up most of the pale synth-wood table. Rigi and the others stood so they could see better and Dr. Xian backed up, arms crossed, waiting. Tomás came around and stood on Rigi’s left side. “Here’s Keralita, so that’s Stela Site,” he used a small red light-dot indicator to circle it. “And the quarry.”

  “Yes, and the shaded circles are the provisional sites that have been located and rough surveyed but not named or officially announced,” Uncle Eb had a yellow dot projector and circled those.

  “They form a ring around Stela.” Rigi looked up at Dr. Xian, blinking. She moved a little and Tomás got out of the way so she could lean forward and see the Kenusha Plain. “There’s Fountain, and the grassland sites, and they are in a pattern centered on River Site One.”

  “Same thing on Indria, except, well, look.” Marg
it circled around to where Rigi and Tomás and Uncle Eb had been and they took her place.

  “A loose ring, and the secondary sites, the ones without melting or large walls, are outside and between the others.” Uncle Eb tapped the map. “Something’s missing.”

  “Roads,” Tomás said, at the exact moment Rigi said, “Fields.”

  “Yes.” Dr. Xian smiled. “Except.” Mr. De Groet handed her a small projector and she set it on the table, then pushed the activation button and stepped back. Thad dimmed the lights. Roads appeared on the projection hovering above the map. “There are roads. And every single one on the Indria Plateau was partly torn up and then buried. We have no idea who or what did the initial damage, but I suspect the concealment followed immediately after the abandonment of the major settlements.”

  But that doesn’t fit the story, Rigi thought. The story of the Second World she and Tomás had heard said nothing about people hiding the ways to the old, ruined cities. They had been destroyed, but the people living in the rural areas survived and did not attempt to return, instead staying in the forests. Rigi asked, “Margit, are there roads from the Stela Site?”

  “No, or at least none that show on the projection.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Xian’s voice said, “Notice that there are no roads on the Kenusha, either. However, we did find some small places, like temporary camps, that fit the pattern of the secondaries on Indria.”

  Rigi, Tomás, and Uncle Eb turned to Makana and without saying anything, cleared space for him. He stood and looked at the map near Keralita, then came around to their side and looked at that area, before returning to “his” continent. Rigi and the others followed. He pointed with a claw. “There are stories I heard as a pouchling of the time after the remaking of the world, of a few who returned to the lost places. Some did not come back. Others brought word of the turning of the land, and the elders ruled that the people would not go looking again. But, if I remember, the people who looked went here,” he indicated a lake well south of NovMerv.

  Rigi and Tomás translated what Makana had said into Common. Dr. Xian and Mr. De Groet looked hopeful, then both drooped. Dr. Xian said, “There’s nothing there. After Fountain, we sent some students down to Ring Lake and they didn’t find a bit of evidence for a settlement of any kind.”

  “Lots of blood-suckers and those little gnat-like things that get into everything, but no structures or evidence of people having lived there.” Mr. De Groet sounded thoroughly disgusted, and Rigi, Tomás, and Uncle Eb shared sympathetic looks. Micah had a gift for attracting biting insects.

  “Who’d want to live there?” Thad snorted. “There’s no lake shore, just a round hole that isn’t a caldera but should be, like someone punched the land with a pipe and added water.”

  Tomás and Uncle Eb both inhaled sharply. Rigi looked from one to the other, and they had almost identical serious expressions. They leaned back from the table and seemed to have a private, silent conversation. What was it? Rigi thought and thought hard. Punched a hole, should have been a caldera, caldera lakes were from volcanos that erupted straight up and filled with water. There was that one on LimWorld that had all that volcanic glass around—

  Rigi gasped, then clapped her hands over her mouth before she blurted her idea in Common. “Energy discharge, sir?” she asked Uncle Eb in Staré.

  “You are quick, Miss Auriga, very quick indeed.” Neither he nor Tomás looked happy, though, and she wondered if she’d guessed wrong, put the pieces together wrong. “I’m not comfortable about this, Lt. Prananda.”

  “Neither am I, sir.” Tomás turned back to the others. He switched from Staré to Common. “I realize this is a wild guess pulled out of air and cloud wisps, ma’am, sir, but what if.” He pointed to the lake and took a deep breath. “The energy discharges that melted and burned some of the other sites. What if a much larger discharge happened here?”

  “Or not a discharge per se, but an impact of some kind,” Uncle Eb added. “A smoking crater would strongly discourage me from going back for a second look.”

  Absolute silence. The archaeologists looked at each other, then at the map. “It, um, if something like that happened, and I thought it came from outside, from an evil spirit, I wouldn’t want it to find me, would I? That might explain why people tried to hide the roads and scattered out on the Plateau, ma’am, sir,” Rigi ventured.

  More silence. Rigi shivered a little, not wanting to follow that line of thought too much farther. “That speculation does not leave this room,” Dr. Xian stated. “Not a word. None of us are going to talk about that line of thought.” She took what sounded like a shaky breath. “I don’t disagree that such a series of events might not be possible Auriga, Mr. Trent, Lt. Prananda, but I do not want the media or others embroidering their own version and trying to stitch it onto what we can positively know.”

  From behind Rigi, Makana said, “Agreed.” Rigi shivered and felt an arm on her shoulder. The touch and warmth reassured her, and she didn’t fuss, even though it was not truly proper. Tomás was an adult, after all. Yes, but we are also cousins, she told herself, and that makes it different even if we are very distant cousins indeed, and that by marriage. After a moment he withdrew his arm.

  “Indeed,” Cy intoned, speaking for the first time. “If a human and a Staré arguing over the cost of wombow feed can turn into assault and battery, imagine what the holo-casts would do with catastrophic fusion generator failure?”

  “Perish the thought,” Mr. De Groet and Margit said at the same moment.

  “Is that what it was?” Rigi asked her brother.

  “Yes, and it ended with some pushing and dirt scuffing. No battery, although insults did fly, or so I read in the security report.” He snorted. “The Staré said the human, a Mr. Keuyper, overcharged him for two bales of dairy wombow hay. Keuyper said the Staré couldn’t judge hay quality, and it went from there.”

  Rigi looked up at her eyebrows and shook her head a little. How silly. Of all the things to fight over, wombow food had to be one of the least reasonable. Then she remembered that little spat she and Lyria had over Rigi not wearing certain colors, the one that ended with both of them with torn dresses and missing hanks of hair and grounded for a month except for Temple worship, and she squirmed.

  “Ma’am,” Thad asked at last, “What can we conclude from this, beside the glaringly obvious?”

  “The glaringly obvious,” Dr. Xian riposted. “And that we are still missing agricultural sites and household or community materials, and remains. The Stela Culture, which is what I’ve decided to call it for now, is the opposite of almost everything on Home and LimWorld. We have buildings and urban areas but no graves or troves.” She sounded as if it were a personal insult, Rigi thought, watching the xenoarchaeologist glowering at the large map. “I’d hoped we might find something on the Plateau, a scrap of writing, or metal and glass, or remains, but no.”

  Tomás caught her eye and raised a black eyebrow, tipping his head toward Makana. She guessed that he wanted to ask Makana if he had heard anything more, and she shook her head just a little. She didn’t care to press him, lest he go completely silent. Tomás looked disappointed but nodded a touch. After all, in a way Makana was Rigi’s just as the Staré in his military unit answered to Tomás. Or didn’t, as his last message had grumbled. Staré priorities did not always coincide with those of junior officers, apparently. Rigi suspected that Uncle Eb would laugh if she forwarded the message to him.

  Speaking of Uncle Eb… She noticed that he’d gone to the window. He’d lifted one edge of the light-blocking screen and leaned a little, looking down at something. “Su, Micah, you might notify building security to watch the door below our current position.” He lowered the edge of the heavy screen. “Lt. Prananda, you need to leave.”

  Tomás snapped out of his lean against the edge of the table, nodded once and thumped Rigi on the shoulder, then started toward the door. Mr. De Groet turned the scrambler field off and To
más eased out the door, moving without making a sound. “What kind of trouble, Ebenezer?” Mr. De Groet asked, sounding resigned.

  “Two holo-vid crews, and someone pretending to be a dead Staré, hmm, eighth Stamm, with what appeared to be a remarkably poorly done beam-shooter wound to the chest.” He ran a hand over his stand of grey and white hair. “That or the faux-Staré suffered a tragic encounter with a package of blood-fruit jam.”

  Rigi wrinkled her nose. She didn’t care for blood-fruit, either the color or the taste. She started to make a comment, then hesitated. A terrible chest wound from a shooter? The memory of the dead Indria Staré sprang up and she could see him laying on the ground, smelled crushed stems and leaves, watched blood oozing past the scorched edges of the hole where his chest had been, saw the hairs on his ears. She’d killed a Staré, she’d been the only human to do so. The soldiers hadn’t killed any Staré, had they? Rigi didn’t remember hearing. Surely it was just for drama, to catch people’s attention. No one could know, because she’d only told Tomás, not even the chaplain. She smelled cooked meat, cooked Staré, burnt fur, and saw the wound, the hairs, the bits of bone—

  “Stop it,” Uncle Eb snarled, shaking her. Was he shaking her? No, but she was shaking. “Come. Makana, Martinus.” He put his hand on her shoulder and steered her out the now open door, down the hall and into an empty side hallway. How had she gotten turned around to face the door? “Makana, guard.” Uncle Eb looked around and rested his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not seeing the carnifex leaper, are you Miss Auriga?”

  “N, no, sir.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I killed a Staré, Uncle Eb. When I was hiding from them, after I ran away. I told him to stop, to go away. He tried to kill me, threw a spear, missed. I, I didn’t lower the power on the hand-shooter, still had it set for wombeast or big hunters, his chest, how could they know?” She shook harder, panting, seeing it all again, smelling it all again.