Footsteps in the Sky (7 page)

Chapter Five

“No,” was all that Sand could manage.

“No” meant a lot of things. No, there could not be something alive in the tiny ship. No, it could not be her dead mother. No, she couldn't be losing her mind. No, the world could not be this different from what she thought it was. No, no, no.

It also meant no, get away from me, let me think, damn it. But the ghost—or Kachina spirit—of her mother kept coming towards her, slowly, tentatively. But she was coming, dressed in an ugly robe of blue material (the same material as the parachute, one lonely, reasoning part of her mind noted for later reference). And her mother looked young, stripped of hard years.

“No!” Sand gasped again, and then she ran. She ran as if her own spine were the enemy, feet thuttering at the dusty crater floor. There was nothing in her brain to prevent this, nothing between her fear and her feet.

Breathless moments and maybe half a kilometer later, she tripped on a cyan barrel, some relative of the whiskyberry. Her knees and palms slapped against the earth, but she scrambled back up despite the bruising impact. Sand ran twenty more paces before she turned around. The Dragonfly sat still in the distance, a silver toy. Near it was the alien craft. A small blue figure stood, looking in her direction.

SandGreyGirl, get hold of your thoughts!
She sat down, panting, eyes fixed on the distant figure.

Not her mother. That “woman” could be a million things, but not her mother. A planet somewhere where everyone looked like stocky Hopi women? No. A ghost or a Kachina? If the traditionalists were right, they would not come in space ships. They would not wear bad imitations of Hopi clothing. A two-heart?

Sand had to consider that last one, since her fine and beautiful world was now broken. She hadn't believed in witches before, especially shape-shifting ones. Did she now?

But again, why would a two-heart need a spaceship?

But it was not her mother. She believed that. She could not, would not, accept such a possibility.

Sand sat, watching. The figure seemed to be wandering around, looking at the landscape, at the Dragonfly.

The Dragonfly! Sand came to her feet. This thing—whatever it might really be—had come before and stung her mother. It knew her mother, knew what she looked like. Knew what she looked twenty years ago. And that's how it looked now, the way her mother had, one child and four handfuls of years ago.

“Damn you—get away from there,” she screamed, and broke into a run once again, this time towards the creature.

Fine, she thought, as her legs pumped her along. They know what mother looked like. This could be a hologram, a robot, something else. They want to appear human, and mom was their model.

But part of Sand believed in ghosts. This part controlled her breathing, her bowels, large portions of her spine and brain, and to some extent, her feet.

Ghosts don't need spaceships, she reminded herself, seven times and then seven times again. That brought her back to the Dragonfly. Back to the mother-thing.

Thing was a wonderful word, Sand thought. It could abstract fear or focus it, depending upon your state of mind.

Sand looked, long and hard, the light of her new skepticism shining brightly on the familiar face. She expected that light to melt those features away, reveal something hideous and alien, but it did not. Pela's face remained her face, though Sand was struck once again by how young it was. How much it was like her own, both broad ovals, though Pela's tended towards round and Sand's was more elongate. They both had the same almond shaped eyes, just touched at the corners by a hint of epicanthic fold. Pela's orbs were black, however, while Sand's held her father's grey. Their mouths were most similar; wide and full, both of them, able to lift into smiles of stunning beauty or fold into awesome, froglike frowns. They differed more in body, Pela generally thicker through the hips, waist and thighs, her shoulders a touch broader, too. It was like looking at one's sister; their apparent age was the same.

“I know you aren't my mother,” Sand remarked, aware of the hideous, uncontrolled sound of her own voice, jerking and quivering like a wrestling match between crying and hysterical laughter.

The Pela-thing looked at her closely.

“I am not your mother,” the thing agreed—with Pela's voice. And yet, finally, it wasn't Pela's voice. It had the same resonance and timber, but there was nothing else—neither inflection, modulation, nor tone—that reminded Sand of Pela.

“Then what the fuck are you?” This was upsetting Sand more, not less, though she couldn't quite see why. She couldn't quite see anything.

“I'm … I don't have a name. Not one that I can say.”

The thing spoke with a lowland accent, used lowland slang and contractions. Pela had always spoken with the conservative mesa speech, even when she was drunk, despite a year or two down there, by the sea.

“You look like my mother. Why?”

The woman's face twitched, as if trying to express something, but it never settled on anything Sand could identify as joy, puzzlement, or concentration. If it weren't so utterly bizarre as to be frightening, it might have been funny.

“I don't have all the words I need to explain that. I grew this body according to a plan I copied some time ago. Was this your mother?”

Sand just stared. It could be done. Almost anyone could do it. It wasn't magic, but technology that was centuries old. No ghost, no Kachina.

“What do you want?” She whispered, an obvious question, but obvious for an excellent reason.

“I need to talk to some of you, that's all. I need to know more than I can learn from your communications network.”

“Talk, then. I'm listening.”

“Yes. But first, I need for you to tell me something. Do I frighten you?”

“You scare me shitless.”

“Are the other people on their way here likely to be as frightened? How can I ease their fears?”

“What others?” Sand snapped, but even as she did so, she remembered the thing's ship, howling through the atmosphere like ball lightning with thunder to match. She also recalled her mother's story of the Tech Society people who had come so quickly to where her Kachina landed.

“From the industrial settlements by the ocean,” Pela-thing said. “Several atmospheric jets started towards here when I was making my descent.”

Sand bit her lip. She didn't have much time, but her decision was already made. The Tech Society knew a lot more about this situation than anyone else, and they had been hiding that knowledge for twenty years. They wouldn't do that unless there was power in that knowledge, in these things that came from space. And though she often sympathized with Tech Society aims, she wasn't yet ready to let them have something powerful, not until she understood, really understood. And she would not give them her mother, or any facsimile thereof.

There was one more, very selfish thing. Sand now knew, very broadly, why her mother had died. The coincidence was too great that the only mesa woman to have seen the earlier Kachina should die just before the second one landed. And any mesa trash—like herself—who ended up knowing too much for her own good was damn likely to be talking personally to Masaw themselves.

Sand was sure she already qualified for that conversation.

“Get in the Dragonfly,” she said, decision finally giving her control of her voice.

“What?”

“Those who are coming will kill you. We have no time for me to explain this. There are two seats in this craft. You sit in the back one.”

“Why would they want to kill me?”

“Come on!” Sand shrieked the last word, and the Pela-thing shrank back, almost like a little child, face pulled away in a parody of terror.

“I didn't like that,” it said, quietly.

For a moment, Sand felt her heart catch and her eyes mist up. Her mother. … Shit, it was her mother, in a way.

“I'm sorry,” Sand replied. “But you have to listen to me.”

The woman nodded. “Show me where to sit.”

Sand motioned towards the seat, which the woman tried to climb into clumsily. Sand had to guide her with a hand on her arm. The arm was warm, solid. Not a ghost, not a Kachina—and yet both, Sand began to believe. From the stars and her mother as well, spirit and ancestor made flesh.

But this was the time to fly, not to get mystical. Sand jerked down the windshield and lit the jets, heard the woman behind her gasp as acceleration crushed them both back into their couches. She would fly low, mere meters off of the ground, that the horizon might swallow them more quickly. The Dragonfly took her with joy.

For the second time I suffered the pain of acceleration. I, who fly with a barely tame star in my belly.

I won't dwell on this; my brethren cannot comprehend it and Makers and Human Beings understand it all too well. The word for “pain” has always been in my vocabulary—the Makers know fifty-nine varieties of pain. I have always assumed that the alarm and even fear I have felt when something was terribly wrong with some part of me is analogous. It is not. Pain is a watery thing that confuses rather than denotes its cause. It altered my consciousness in such a way that I will never be the same—or even similar—to the way I was. Corporeality was a sickness for me, full of mirage and confusion. Since the human structure began growing in my womb I had been altering it, guiding it, so that its brain would be a replica of my own. That was, of course, impossible. I would have had much more luck with a little brother, whose brain would sensibly lie in a clean column along its spine, so like the way I am built myself. It took much trial and error, much patience, to imprint my tohodanet, that frail essence of consciousness—on such an alien organ. I did not dare to disconnect the many glands which affect the brain, since I never really understood them. If only there had been a little more time—but I saw the burn of the starship coming, though it tried to hide behind the sun. I knew the time to act was come and perhaps even gone. Though I had learned a lot from the body itself, from living in it, and by being very clever I hid it all from my sisters. If I presented my evidence, and it was not enough, they would stop me from any further experimentation.

I said I would not dwell on this, but glands are strange, stranger than the mere misfunctioning I am used to. They cause me to think in ways I despise. As we flew across the desert at what seemed a dangerously low altitude, they poked and prodded at my sanity, offered to relieve me of it.

“Strap in,” she said, or at least I believe she said. Her language was the one I had studied for many turns of the planet around the sun, and still much of the process behind it was difficult to grasp. It was more like the language of the Makers than my own flitting thought and communication, but just barely so. Regardless, though I understood her words, the meaning of them together lacked sense.

“That webbing,” she said, after I did not reply. “Pull it down across your chest and fasten it to those nodes on either side of you.”

I did so, but I was puzzled. I said so.

“In case we crash. The web will keep you from bouncing around in the cockpit.”

“Why should we crash?” I inquired. “Surely this craft is built to fly efficiently.”

As I said, their language is strange, and strangest are the many positions of the facial muscles, the meaning that they denote. But when she pulled her lips away from her teeth, I did not like it. Not at all.

Chapter Six

The Vilmir Foundation ship Mixcoatl peeked from behind the rugged face of the moon with disembodied eyes. Alvar and Teng scrunched over the terminal, intent on what it saw.

“Do they know we're here?” Alvar asked.

Teng shrugged. “They haven't responded to us in any way, whether you mean the colonists or the aliens.”

Alvar nodded, wondering why he asked. Teng would alert him if something important were happening. He assumed.

The image of the alien ship was the focus of Teng's attention. It looked like a stylized dumbbell, without much in the way of detailed features. Either end of the dumbbell was pierced by a dark orifice. There were a number of other, much smaller apertures arranged around the rims of the flared sections as well, little black portholes.

“Any guesses as to what we have here?” Alvar asked.

Teng answered him dreamily, as if most of her mind were thinking of something else.

“Only the obvious. One or both of those big holes indicates the drive. The little ones could be attitude jets, or gun ports, or both. I think the flared ends store fuel and I have some evidence that they may contain magnetic field generators.”

“For …” Alvar began.

“I don't know. It could be a lot of things. Maybe they create a fusion bottle outside of the ship, though I'm not sure that can be done. I'm no engineer.”

“Could it be a ramjet?”

“I don't see how. If you throw out a magnetic funnel big enough to collect sufficient interstellar hydrogen to fuel a ship, the resulting drag against those atoms is too great to allow you to build up much velocity.”

“Maybe they have an improved design.”

“Maybe,” she answered dubiously. “But if they could dispense with the inertia of hydrogen molecules, I don't think they would need a fusion drive at all. But you may be right, in a way. They could use a ramscoop to slow down after turnaround and refuel in the bargain. Especially if they nudged close to some of the gas giants … hell, strike that. They probably came around the sun, like we did. They could really pack in the fuel there.”

“If they intend to leave. If they don't have some kind of drive we've never even thought of.”

“True,” Teng deferred. “But for now we have to work from analogy. To guess at what potential threats we're faced with.”

“Go on.”

“A ramscoop generator is a formidable weapon, defensive or offensive. It could cripple our systems, disrupt any smart weapons and most dumb ones. It wouldn't affect our laser, but it could sure as hell confuse our targeter. Could kill us, too.”

“Oh, you just thought you'd throw that in, eh?” Alvar said. “It might kill us.”

“It gets worse. If they use lasers to pump the fusion drive—and if the actual fusion takes place outside of the ship—then the lasers themselves have to be taken into account. And of course, the drive—a big nuclear blowtorch. All of that without even considering any specialized weapons systems we don't know about.”

“And the good news is, there are only three of them,” Alvar said, sarcastically.

Teng pursed her lips. “Uh-huh.”

“What about communication? Can we talk to them?”

“We'll try that eventually,” said Teng. “I don't want to do that until we've separated the landing drum from the drive section. Until we're on the planet, really. Then if they attack, we can work the weapons by remote, especially if the peacekeepers are killed.”

“I didn't think we were going to land yet.”

“Plans have changed. I have some intelligence from the surface.”

Alvar stepped back, scowling. “What? I thought you said no one had noticed us.”

“I said the colonists weren't behaving as if they had. But I have made contact with our agent. The one who sent the original communication twenty years ago.”

“Jesus. Why didn't you tell me this?”

“I just did.”

“I mean earlier.”

Teng smiled. “Need to know basis, my trusty steed.”

“Do they know?” Alvar jerked his thumb at the bulkhead, vaguely indicating the awakened peacekeepers, wherever they were on the ship.

“They will when I tell them. Are you jealous?”

Alvar fumed silently, chewing and swallowing a number of unpleasant responses. He finally let the matter pass without further comment, though he vowed to remember—not out of pique, but because he should never forget that no matter how he felt about Teng—or she about him, for that matter—there would never be much trust between them.

“When do we go down?” he asked, finally.

“Don't you want to know what the agent said?” Teng asked.

Alvar stared, chagrined that his anger had overwhelmed his curiosity. And curiosity was a survival skill. “Okay. Please,” he muttered.

“‘Barbell II”, over there just dropped a second probe down to the planet. Launched it several days ago, before we even got here.”

“A second probe? Then they know we're here.”

“What?” Teng turned to stare at him dead on, her earlier vague look replaced by hawk-like intensity.

“Where's your natural paranoia, Teng? Two probes in twenty years? Shit yes they know we're here. And they're up to something.”

Teng bit into her underlip and nodded.

“I'm slipping.”

“Maybe it's the smell of testosterone,” Alvar suggested, as a footstep sifted in from the corridor behind them. He turned to see Jones Cortez enter the cabin. Jones was a big man, black as carbon, with glittering diamond eyes. Jones scared the hell out of Alvar, though no more so than Teng did. But Alvar knew Teng. Jones was an unknown quantity.

“The landing drum is ready,” he remarked.

Alvar marked that. Jones, at least, knew they were planning to land.

“Fine,” Teng noted, avoiding Alvar's troubled gaze. “You, Rafin, and Vraslav will go down with us. The rest will stay here, under Becka. Go see it done.”

“Done,” said Jones, and padded off, catlike.

Alvar took Teng roughly by the arm, something he would have never done in a saner moment.

“What else aren't you telling me?” He hissed.

Teng looked down at his hand clutching her arm.

“Move that,” she said, in the merest whisper. Alvar let go slowly, color draining from his face, but he repeated himself.

“What else?”

Teng's face softened a fraction. She reached over and stroked his trembling hand.

“There are two big factions on the planet. The traditionalists and the coastal people. Both are generally unfriendly towards the Vilmir Foundation, but the coast people play along with us to get their supplies every decade or two. The traditionals don't even know that the ships are up here; only a few highly placed people among the progressives know. They snatched the last landing craft the aliens sent down, and they know about this one too. We have to get down there and beat them to it.”

Alvar acknowledged that with a brief snap of his jaw. “Sounds simple enough.”

“It's not. First, we don't know whether or not the progressives have managed to communicate with the aliens yet, although our agent has a good inside position and says they haven't. Second. …

“Yes?”

“We're already too late. It touched down hours ago.”

“Shit.”

“You bet,” Teng replied, sourly.