Footsteps in the Sky (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Once, a solar flare licked us as we fell past a star. My sisters and I watched it coming, felt the outer wave fuzz our sensors. Then the pulse hit.

We were much younger then, still thinking alike for the most part. But in that moment when that electromagnetic wind blew through our minds, my sisters became as distant to me as another galaxy. Along my backbone brain, my tohodanet scrambled, and I became chaos. Sensory impressions became disjointed and mixed, others vanished entirely. My thoughts became strange, unrecognizable as my own. We would have all ended there, if our creators did not build redundancy into their designs.

My tohodanet rebuilt itself from protected memory, but because of the nature of that consciousness, images and fragments of the chaos remained. It was then that I realized how fragile our selves were, that one day that which was “us” would leak out into the great suck of entropy and never reconstitute itself.

Being human was a constant reminder of this, but the drug introduced into my system distorted that realization beyond all measure. Already afraid of becoming the sum of my limited sensory impressions, I felt my consciousness melt onto the bizarre reordering of my physical impressions, become a mere interpreter of pointless cross-circuiting. Only later did I even understand about the drug; at the time I assumed that the mesh of human brain and my tohodanet had finally become untenable, the fit broken down.

Sand would call it nightmare; my abduction by Sand's father and the woman, Teng. The ride through the storm. None of it made the least sense to me; my concerns were all inside my watery, organic brain.

It was only after the crash, as they pulled me out into the storm that lucidity began to return, and I realized I could be sane again, or what passed for that when one was human. But then, of course, my memory was clouded by pain, pain I never imagined could be felt. It was no mere reminder that my body was injured: it was the universe itself.

Teng stared up into the pounding rain and laughed. It was a nonsensical thing to do, and she realized that a little madness was stalking her reason, but she indulged it.

Lightning coiled and struck above, like a snake.

The storm had certainly been a gamble, but due to Jimmie's poor planning (she hated men) it had been necessary. The pitiful excuse for a flyer would never lift again, but with any luck she still had a chance to get back to the drum. Without their satellites, with this storm, nothing could see them. But the flyer from the drum—the one she had called for to meet her halfway—might be able to. If her pursuit had skirted the storm, that would become all the more easy. If they had not, well, they were probably down too, or flown on over her.

“What the fuck do we do now?” Jimmie hissed, shivering. “I think her leg is broken.”

Teng glanced over at the “alien” who was staring at her with glazed eyes. The hallucinogen in her blood stream was probably wearing off now. Teng crouched back under the survival tent, licked a few raindrops from her lips, tasted the blood washing down from her scalp wound. She rain her fingers up the woman's leg, experimentally.

“Yeah, it's broken,” she acknowledged. She set about finding the medical kit, which contained self-stiffening strips for splinting­' primitive, but effective enough. She gave the woman a broad-spectrum­ antibiotic, too.

“They'll get us now,” Jimmie groaned. “I know Hoku too well.”

“Do you,” Teng said quietly. “You don't know me at all.” She got up and crossed back over to the wrecked ship. The smell of alcohol was almost overpowering inside; thus far, nothing had ignited the fumes, and she moved quickly, both to avoid becoming lightheaded and the risk of explosion. She found the rifle and the handgun Jimmie had procured for her. Both were primitive affairs; the handgun was merely a pain stimulator, useful at extremely close range. The rifle was better; it fired both armor-piercing and exploding shells. Such a weapon—like the laser the “whipper” had used on her—was supposed to be illegal to colonists.

Unfortunately, she had only one magazine, with perhaps twenty rounds. Well, the ship following her could scarcely hold twenty people.

The rain was slacking a bit, which meant only that the air was no longer an opaque curtain. She remembered the radar image of the crash site, and now she saw it revealed to her somewhat-better­-than-human eyes. The flyer had skipped across a flat plain and fetched up against a rugged ridge, foothills to the mountains they would have soon crossed. The flyer would be in plain sight when the storm cleared.

Well, she did not have to be. Slinging the rifle on her back, pistol at her waist, Teng began cautiously climbing up the wet stone of the hills. She found a high point with good visibility. Rain was washing constantly down into her eyes, so she unfolded a broad-brimmed hat from her belt pockets. She sat there, eyes scanning the plains and sky through the drizzle of water pouring off of her hat. She switched on the cloaker, a fine net in her clothes which would confuse her infrared image and sonar, and settled in to wait.

Alvar closed his eyes against the fine mist the rain had become and yearned to be in a bed. His body ached from a million bruises and shocks, from the effects of plague, and from adrenaline burn. His brain, for the same reasons, was as useful for thinking as his mother's home-made marmalade had been for toast, which was not at all. So he didn't think; he just groaned inwardly and tried to imagine himself elsewhere.

“It'll still fly,” someone was saying.

Alvar found that hard to believe. The flyer had seemed to fall apart like wet fibercard, tearing at the seams. How could it still fly?

“How fast?” That was Hoku, the scary one. Actually, the little man—Homik-something-or-other—was frightening too, but in a different way. A more distant way.

“Not fast at all. There are no afterjets, just fans. But the underjets work.”

Because we slid in on our goddamn side, Alvar remembered. On reflection though, landing right-side-up—sliding along the ground at high speed on underjets—might not have been such a good idea. As it was, they were all alive and relatively uninjured.

Sand was a few feet away from him, still manacled as he was with resistance cuffs. Like his, her arms sagged, lifeless and numb. She appeared to be deep in thought. Above them, the dark clouds still rolled and thundered, but the heart of the storm seemed to have passed on.

“If it will fly, we should get going, then,” Hoku said. His visage seemed like a skull filled with some black flame. Like the skeletal images who danced in the halls of the arcology on the Day of the Dead.

The small man and Hoku marched Alvar and Sand back into the hovercraft. Inside, the angles seemed wrong, but without the titanic hands of the wind pulling at it, the flyer felt solid again. Kewa was already inside, a dazed look on her face. A clot of blood on her brow suggested the cause of her disorientation. Hoku stopped briefly to take her chin in his hand.

“This will be over soon,” he promised her. “We'll treat that. Can you hang on?”

Kewa nodded, and a bit of clarity returned to her features.

The Bluehawk rose shakily on sputtering jets, but rise it did, and soon Alvar felt the hovercraft moving through the sky, a bird wounded but not yet dead.

Hoku watched the terrain and the radar-sonar composite intently.

“If they made it through, we'll never catch them,” Homikniwa said.

“How could they have made it in that little sparrow? Bluehawks were designed to ride out storms.”

“True enough,” Homikniwa admitted. “But with an enhanced person like this Teng at the controls. …”

“Enhanced? You mean like the Kachina? Conditioned with deep hypnosis and engineered microbes?”

“More than that. Bones of chainsteel, extra organs, faster neurons. Enhanced.”

“What do you know about such things, Hom?”

The little man shrugged and returned his attention to fully to flying.

The flat cube pinged for their attention. It was Captain Rosa.

“Mother-Father,” the man began reluctantly.

“Go. Talk,” snapped Hoku. He had no time for confidence building now.

“Two flyers left the drum, some time ago. I tried to contact you.”

“Did you shoot them down?”

“We got one of them. They were so fast. And they had some kind of deflection field. We were lucky to get the one we did, and that with an X-ray laser, one of the big ones.”

“Idiot. A Whipper shot one down by himself.”

Rosa grimaced. “They were too fast, Mother-Father,” he repeated.

Hoku nodded. “When it comes back, you have to hit it. Be ready.” He closed contact.

“Well,” he told Homikniwa. “There's something else to worry about. How are our weapons?”

“One of the lasers still works. We have two missiles, but I have red lights on one of them. We have a laser rifle, too, and a pair of handguns.”

“Wasps?”

“No, slug-throwers.”

“Fine. That Teng bitch doesn't make a very good prisoner. Better if she dies, I think.”

Homikniwa nodded. “I agree”

They swept over eight kilometers in silence. Then Homikniwa pointed solemnly at the screen.

“That's it,” he whispered. “That's them.”

Even at this distance—still too far away for visual contact—the reconstructed image their instruments gave them was one of a badly damaged ship.

“At least it isn't strung out all across the landscape,” Homikniwa offered. “They may still be alive.”

Moments later, the ship itself came into view, a crumpled silver and blue toy against the Cornbeetle Foothills. Homikniwa began descending.

“I have two people down there,” he said after a moment. “Two live people anyway.”

“That's one missing,” Hoku observed.

“It's her,” Homikniwa said, with quiet certainty. “The warrior. Hiding somewhere.”

“Where?”

“In those hills. That's where I would be.”

Hoku stared intently at the folded black stone that was growing close with each moment, searching.

“Why can't the infrared pick her out?”

“She could be wearing some kind of screen. She had her offworld clothes, you know. I'm sure the traditionals took her weapons, but they might not have noticed a screen woven into her clothes.”

“Or, like me, they never heard of one,” Hoku said, shooting his old friend a suspicious glance.

“Just trust me, Hoku,” Hom said.

The ship hove closer, and one of the infrared figures suddenly began moving. Hoku squinted through the viewport.

“That must be Jimmie,” he said. “Shoot him.”

“Not right now,” Homikniwa said. “I don't want her to know where the laser ports are.”

“She could be dead,” Hoku hissed in frustration.

“If Jimmie lived, then Teng certainly did, Hoku.”

“She was wounded.”

“Makes no difference.”

Hoku considered that for a moment and nodded. Homikniwa was usually right about such things, and he had to trust somebody besides himself.

They settled to the ground thirty meters from the ruined ship.

“Maybe she isn't armed,” Hoku suggested. “She hasn't fired on the ship. Oh!” Hoku mentally chastised himself. Of course not. She wanted their ship. She would fire on them, when they came out of the craft.

“Right,” Homikniwa confirmed, seeing the realization dawn on Hoku's face.

“What, then?” He could see the woman, slumped beneath the awning of a survival shelter. So close, but the ground was too rough to move the hovercraft any closer. They would have to walk out there and get her.

Hoku made his decision quickly.

“Kewa and I will get the woman. You keep your eye on the hills and shoot her with the laser if she fires at us. Surely she will miss her first shot.”

Homikniwa looked grim. “No, I wouldn't count on that. Kewa and I should go. You man the laser.”

Hoku felt a brief irritation. Homikniwa had been gently countermanding his orders and discarding his suggestions for the past hour. But then he saw the sense of the suggestion. Certainly Homikniwa was quicker than he, more adept at surviving injury. Kewa, though, with her head wound. …

“Take one of the rifles,” Hoku said, by way of assent. Homikniwa stood, nodded confirmation. He opened a locker and lifted out a tough-looking weapon. He already had a sidearm.

“Keep your eyes up there,” he told Hoku, pointing at the highest reach of the first ridge. Then he went back.

Hoku saw Homikniwa and Kewa after they exited the Bluehawk. Homikniwa was moving quickly, not quite running, and Kewa stumbled after him. She seemed better, and Hoku felt a bit relieved; maybe she didn't have a concussion after all. Ten more steps and they would have the alien. Hoku could deal with Jimmie later. For now, they just had to get out of here, before the Reed flyer showed up.

There was no sound at all, but a red rose bloomed on Kewa's back, and she spun around like a child playing “whirlwind”. Her eyes were very wide, the one glimpse he had of them. Then she was lying on her face in the dirt.

Homikniwa was moving faster than a human being ought to move. A score of bright green spears stabbed out from him toward the ridge as he sped across the ground, leapt over a two-meter high shelf of stone, and vanished.

Hoku gaped, comprehension suddenly inserting itself into his forebrain. Where the fuck had those shots come from? He hadn't seen!

But Homikniwa had been shooting at a specific target; Hoku had seen the bursts. Furiously, Hoku thumbed the gun sight around and fired a missile towards where Hom's shots had been aimed. The Bluehawk seemed to gasp with its release, and Hoku watched the white trail bridge the distance to the mountain. There was the briefest of pauses, and then a blue-white flash that left spots before his eyes. A few seconds later, the sharp roar of the explosion shuddered the Bluehawk.