Kate chewed her lower lip, feeling the sudden certainty that they were right even though she was reluctant to believe the engineers hadn't taken the topography into consideration. "Maybe we should talk to the authorities and find out?" she said slowly.
The guys looked doubtful, which irritated her. On the other hand, she supposed she could see their point.
They hadn't exactly had a very good experience with the authorities.
She still wanted to at least see what she could find out about the plans. They had to have one. They wouldn't have overlooked anything with that potential for disaster!
Ronan wanted to carry her back, but she pointed out that they'd beaten a path down that she could follow that would make walking far easier and that it was also all downhill.
Not that it hadn't been sort of nice to have him carry her-disconcerting, but enjoyable because she got the chance to cuddle and also because she felt protected. But she didn't actually want to attract attention. She wouldn't have wanted to under other circumstances. She was uncomfortable drawing curious attention at any time, but she definitely didn't want to draw attention to her aliens.
And that had already been noticed more than she liked. The Earth people were struggling with the difference between Sirius and their home world. She doubted there were many men among those present that could've carried her so far even without the unaccustomed strain on their bodies, but it certainly made the Sirians stand out that they weren't having any difficulties at all!
As they headed back, those thoughts led to curiosity of the scientific kind and she struggled to understand why the Sirians didn't seem to be affected. They'd hatched in space and matured on a space station equipped with Earth conditions. It seemed to her that they should be having as much trouble as everyone else, but there was no getting around that they didn't seem to be.
The landing zone, when they reached it again, was ordered chaos. It actually looked like complete chaos, Kate thought wryly, but it was ordered. Most of the colonists had been assigned their temporary living quarters by the time her party returned from their excursion and had already picked up work assignments and were busy helping setup their temporary encampment. They'd landed early enough in Sirius' day cycle to allow them a full fourteen hours of natural light to setup their encampment for their first night on their new world, but everyone knew it would be a feat to accomplish what they needed to, even with the robots, before the night closed in.
While the civilian population divided their attention between clearing, unloading essential cargo, and erecting the temporary shelters, the colonial militia focused on setting up a safety perimeter.
After a brief debate, Kate led the way to the group making housing arrangements in the hope that she could kill two birds with one stone-acquire her temporary quarters and find out where to go and who to speak to about her concerns. They'd been standing in line for almost an hour when Kate noticed the Sirians sudden tension. When she glanced at Ronan, she saw he'd lifted his head and seemed to be sniffing the air.
Alarm instantly went through her. She glanced sharply at Dax and Jarek and discovered that they, too, seemed to sense some kind of threat that she couldn't begin to guess at. It was enough that they did to increase her alarm tenfold. She whipped a frightened look around, straining to pierce the vegetation in the direction that the men were so focused on. It didn't make her feel one whit better that she couldn't see anything.
"What is it?" she gasped in a low voice.
Jarek glanced at her when she voiced her question, but neither Dax nor Ronan seemed to hear her.
People.
Kate gaped at him blankly. His projection had barely settled in her mind, however, when Ronan's mental voice filled her head with a sound so explosive that she sucked in her breath on the edge of a scream and clamped her hands to her head at the sharp pain.
Go! There is danger here for you!
By the time Kate managed to unclench her eyelids, all three had vanished. Dizzy, fighting an abrupt descent toward darkness, Kate whipped a look around to see where they'd gone. With the surrealistic time suspension of shock, she saw people frozen all around her in a similar state, eyes wide, mouths agape. When she finally spotted Ronan, Dax, and Jarek, she saw that they were charging toward a small group of soldiers perhaps two dozen yards from where she stood. In slow motion, the soldiers brought their weapons up to firing position.
Horror washed through Kate. She reacted instinctively, racing after the men as it hit her that the Sirians were racing toward their deaths. She'd lost any ability to command her movements in anyway and her cognitive abilities were so hampered by her shock that she couldn't understand what had brought about the apparent attack by the militia against the Sirians.
It finally dawned on her as she raced to try to avert disaster, though, that the soldiers had pointed their weapons away from the Sirians, toward the higher vegetation along the nearest slope to the jungle. Following the direction, she searched for what it might be that had prompted the soldiers to lift their weapons. An explosion of sound from the vicinity of the soldiers drew her attention back to them before she spotted whatever it was, however, snapping her attention from the jungle to the men just in time to Ronan begin to change.
Time slowed by shock seemed to shoot forward beyond normal play to fast forward so that everything seemed to happen at once, too swiftly to completely grasp. Instead of the men she'd grown familiar with, Kate saw three creatures the likes of which was so alien to her that even a fertile imagination couldn't have concocted them. The people around her began to scream and shout and rush in every direction, slamming into her and nearly knocking her down. Through the melee of rushing people, though, Kate saw the Sirians reach the soldiers, engage them, and wrest their weapons from them after a brief-woefully brief for the soldiers-battle for possession of the weapons.
Her first indication that the battle wasn't localized was a peppering of rifle launched projectiles that flew past her like a swarm of furious bees. She dove toward the ground, slamming into the dirt hard enough that if she hadn't had her shock to cushion the blow she thought she might have lost consciousness. As it was, the impact knocked the breath from her, sending her hurtling toward blackout. It was only her need to see what was happening, to assure herself that none of the Sirians had been mown down by the shower of bullets that kept full darkness at bay.
The soldiers, she discovered, were on the ground and the Sirians had vanished from the scene of battle.
A short search for them in the surrounding area revealed no sign of them, but when she glanced toward the jungle again, she saw them … airborne. They'd taken flight with the wings she'd never believed actually functioned, but there were nearly a dozen of them now and she simply couldn't grasp for many minutes how it was that her three mates had become so many winged, almost dragon-like creatures.
And then she recalled the words Ronan had shouted just before he had raced away.
Go! There is danger here for you!
The Sirians had found their clansmen.
* * * *
How much time passed after the Sirians had vanished into the forest before Kate came to her senses sufficiently to realize the entire encampment was in an uproar, she had no idea, but her focus was drawn from her efforts to watch the retreat of the Sirians into the jungle to her own circumstances first. The pain her shock had held at bay infiltrated every pore. With an effort, she struggled upright and began a visual search for wounds. The sight of blood on her chest sent a wave of fear through her, but when she'd searched her chest for a hole, she realized the blood was dripping onto her clothing, not seeping from her chest.
Her nose was bleeding, she discovered when she'd examined her face with her hands. She stared at her bloody hand blankly for several moments, trying to decide whether she'd bumped her nose when she'd dived toward the ground for cover or not. Some of the blood had already darkened, however, and that discovery sent her mind back over the events that had preceded her dive for shelter.
Her head had felt like it was going to explode when Ronan had shouted his warning-to the people, she realized. Jarek had told her that and she'd been completely bewildered since they were, and had been, surrounded by people. He hadn't meant her people, though, she realized belatedly, recalling the way all three men had suddenly tensed, lifted their heads, and looked around. He'd meant their people.
The activity at the settlement had drawn curious Sirians to see what was happening.
She frowned, trying to decide if that made sense. Any animals in the area would have fled, but the Sirians weren't animals. They were intelligent beings.
Which made her wonder why they would have approached so close so incautiously that they'd been spotted by the soldiers.
Children, she realized after a moment-or at least young Sirians who wouldn't be as experienced or cautious as a fully mature adult. She couldn't be certain, of course, but she recalled abruptly that, of the Sirians she'd seen flying away, three had been notably larger than the others.
And Ronan, Dax, and Jarek had been so focused on protecting the younglings that they'd abandoned their own protective forms in order to save them from the soldiers.
The realization that everyone in the camp must have seen the transformation abruptly shifted Kate's focus from her focus on sorting her own confusion and she looked around in dismay. The encampment was virtually deserted, she discovered after she'd scanned the entire area. Approximately half of the soldiers had retreated to the ship's ramp and taken up guard positions. She discovered the rest creeping warily toward the point at the edge of the jungle where the Sirians had disappeared.
"Oh god! Oh my god!" she gasped, surging to her feet. They hadn't been on Sirius more than a couple of hours and they'd already had a confrontation with the Sirians that could bring the two species to all out war!
She had to do something! She had to stop what was happening before it escalated completely out of control!
With no idea what to do, she headed as quickly as she could toward the ship, trying to ignore her battered, bruised body and her painfully stiff joints. She caught the attention of the soldiers as she headed toward them and a small group detached themselves from the others and hurried toward her.
"Are you injured? Do you need to be carried?" one of the men barked at her, his voice showing evocative of the strain clear on every face.
"I'm alright," Kate responded shakily. "I need to talk to someone in charge."
He either didn't hear her or he ignored her. "We'll get you to safety so you can be checked by a medic."
"I need to talk to whoever is charge!" Kate insisted when the man gripped her arm and began hurrying her back toward the ship.
"You can give a statement later," the man said distractedly.
"I don't want to …." Kate broke off the half-hysterical denunciation, realizing it was worse than useless to try to talk to the man. He was only focused on handing her off to someone else.
She discovered when she'd been thrust onboard the ship that the colonists were gathered in the hold-and so badly shaken by their experience that fully half of them were still babbling in terror. Her heart clenched painfully in her chest at that discovery.
Despite every effort by the government to prepare the colonists mentally and physically for colonization of a new world, they weren't at all prepared for their first encounter with the natives. From the comments Kate heard as she passed, she thought it wouldn't be a stretch to say that half of the colonists were ready to head back to Earth right then.
"Did you see those … things? They were huge!" a woman close by exclaimed to the group of women she was standing with.
"They lied to us! They said they hadn't found anything dangerous! No way in hell am I going to believe something that big and that … scary isn't dangerous!"
"They came out of nowhere! One minute they weren't there, the next they were right on top of us!"
"Did you see how they mowed the soldiers down and took their weapons? It was like … the soldiers were … children! They didn't stand a chance!"
"Monsters!"
"Flying … apes!"
"They looked like dragons."
"They didn't look like dragons, moron!"
"They sure as hell didn't look like apes! They weren't hairy! They had … well, they looked almost scaly."
"They looked like people with wings!" someone else insisted. "Yeah the skin was different, but I saw their faces and they looked like human faces-only the skin was different."
A medic had surged forward as she was escorted inside by the soldier. The woman had grasped Kate's arm and began leading her toward the lift at the back of the hanger bay. By the time Kate and the medic reached the lift and entered, so many doubts had filled her mind that she was no longer certain of what to do.
Maybe it would be better to wait until things calmed down a little before she tried to talk to the council?
Or tried to approach whoever was in command of the militia?
She didn't realize the medics intended a full examination until she was told to remove her clothing. Even then she was too distracted by her worry about the Sirians to fully grasp what an examination might mean to her. She balked for the simple reason that she didn't believe she had any injuries to worry about and she was too tense and worried to feel like being poked and prodded. They overruled her objections and insisted and she didn't feel up to fighting them.
She would have, though, if it had occurred to her that the last thing she needed to add to her problems was an examination. That didn't occur to her until, unfortunately, until they'd already started the scan. She made an aborted attempt to abandon the examination table as the scan reached her breasts-aborted because she knew it was useless to attempt when she was restrained for the scan.
She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to convince herself that either the scan would turn up nothing or the medics wouldn't be aware, or wouldn't report, her state. It was a forlorn hope-completely unrealistic. They would have her file and nowhere in that file did it say that she'd obtained a permit to breed.
The medic's face was grim as he turned to her. "Were you aware that you're fourteen weeks pregnant?"
Kate gaped at the man operating the scanner, struggling to come up with an answer that wouldn't incriminate her. "Fourteen?" she echoed faintly.
The man frowned. "I don't see a permit in your file."
His voice was carefully neutral, but she knew he didn't think for a moment that she couldn't have been aware or that there was some mix up to explain the lack of a permit. "They haven't updated my file yet?" she said weakly, knowing the lie she'd suggested wouldn't hold her long but desperate to put off the consequences as long as possible.
"You're saying you did apply and were granted a permit?"
Kate licked her dry lips, trying to think if she'd ever heard exactly what the penalty was for unsanctioned breeding. All she could remember, though, was that the fine was enormous. Could she possibly be in more trouble if she lied at this point? Tried to brazen it out and convince the authorities that it was their error? "Yes,"
she lied.
His look was both skeptical and assessing. "You're in violation, regardless, and will be fined. There are three fetuses in your womb."
Kate gaped at the man in disbelief. "You cannot be serious?" she gasped. "You're saying even if I have the permit I'm going to be fined for three? Like I had some control over that!"
The man had the grace to look uncomfortable. He shrugged. "It doesn't matter what I think-or that nature screwed you. A permit to breed a child is a permit for one. You'll be fined for the other two. I'll have to report this." He looked almost sympathetic for a moment. "If I don't, they'll find out anyway and then I'll be charged with failure to report the violation."
"But …! That was a law on Earth, for god's sake! Why would it apply here when everyone has been encouraged to produce!"
He shook his head as he released her from her restraints. "Indiscriminate breeding can't be allowed …
even here. You know that. If we don't follow the protective guidelines the government has enacted we run the risk of creating the same mess here that we had on Earth."
She knew that and she also knew it was pointless to argue with him. He was certainly right when it came to reporting. The scan would go into her file automatically and it wouldn't do any good to try to bribe him to delete it. Eventually, she was going to have to face the consequences.
She just wanted to wait for 'eventually' as long as she could!
Her personal dilemma pushed her anxieties so far to the back of her mind that it wasn't until much later that she even remembered her intention to try to reason with the council about the Sirians. Even then, it loomed over her until she couldn't nerve herself to walk into the 'lion's den'. All she could think was that it might already have been reported and she would be accused the moment she appeared.
Once everyone had calmed down somewhat, they were sent back out to work. It was obvious no one really wanted to and that nobody believed the militia's assurances that, whatever it was that 'had attacked' was long gone.
That attitude both frightened her and angered her. She supposed she could see their side of it, but the truth was that all Ronan and the others had done was prevent the soldiers from killing the young Sirians for nothing more than curiosity. They hadn't attacked! They'd merely been watching … and they had every reason to be both curious and alarmed. It was their world after all. They'd never seen a human anymore than the majority of humans had ever seen a Sirian. They had probably been frightened themselves to see the strange creatures busy building in their backyard!
Those thoughts led Kate to a memory she hadn't examined earlier. Between her shock at what had happened and the fears the medic had brought to the forefront of her mind, she'd been too shaken to think about the fact that Ronan, Dax, and Jarek had not only assumed their forms for the first time, they'd done it in broad daylight where anyone could have seen the transformation. Even the realization that she'd seen their true forms for the first time, as jolting as that was, paled beside the fearful certainty that someone must have seen them.
Maybe the witness or witnesses were still too shaken to fully assimilate what they'd seen, but she had a terrible fear that, eventually, they would remember. And whether the rest of the colonists believed them, she was afraid, depended upon just how many witnesses there had actually been.