Heritage of Flight (13 page)

She was
not
going to freeze. She waved at Borodin, the signal of a mechanic to a pilot before the catapult engages. He grinned and signalled back, then stepped off the bluff, and into smooth flight.

And, circling high above, the Cynthians folded their great, luminous wings, and plummeted down to block him. Their arc held a deadly beauty.

"Don't engage them!” Pauli shrieked. “Get back, Captain!"

The puzzle ... the puzzle ... no time to think of it.

Of course, they'd try to stop him. The eaters were revolting, but they were the Cynthians’ offspring.
And were they any less the same species for looking so different? Look at the children that the settlers protected. When they were rescued, they had all but degenerated into scratching, biting animals.

"What's wrong?” Rafe cried. He was methodically burning off the first eaters to crawl within firing range.

He wasn't a pilot. He couldn't read the conformation of the Cynthians’ flight pattern the way Pauli could. A concerted dive like that meant deterrence. And if it failed to deter, it could be turned into an attack.

Borodin, seeing the menace in those diving creatures, banked in a wide circle out over the plain where the eaters swarmed. Fiercely Pauli willed his glider to maintain altitude. It swayed in the crosswinds, and she felt the vibrations run up and down her arms as if she, not Borodin, were the one flying it.

"For God's sake, keep on firing!” Rafe shouted. The eaters were ominously close. They were hideous things, but except for those jaws and the acid, they were easy to kill. Just like the beautiful, sensitive creatures that circled overhead, trying to protect their ghastly offspring long enough to let them fatten themselves on the moist lowland grasses and enter dormancy—and then emerge as winged Cynthians.

Borodin veered and banked again, his wings slanting against the clouds and picking up the sunlight. Now he seemed to head back to the settlement along the route he had first chosen. The Cynthians dived at him again. This time they came even closer. They slashed at the glider's wings with their prehensile, gripping foreclaws. Again the captain banked. He lost altitude almost disastrously. Only a fortunate gust swept him aloft again.

Now, ben Yehuda and his son marched past Pauli. The muzzles of their flamethrowers wheezed and whistled blue fire. Three Cynthians dived at them. Ari yelped and bolted, then returned to retrieve his weapon.

One of the larger Cynthians saw Borodin making his escape. It launched itself at the captain and dragged its foreclaws on the metal fabric of the glider. Sparks ripped from the cloth. Then the Cynthian somersaulted backward, righted itself, and attacked again.

Borodin was only human, Pauli thought. He couldn't fight and fly a glider simultaneously. But compared with a Cynthian, what was a human pilot but the crudest interloper in the skies? The captain's attitude steadied; he gained altitude, then counterattacked by diving on the Cynthians.

Madness
, Pauli thought.
Madness. But what's his option?

She raised her gun, steadied it in both hands for a long shot. She had found the missing piece of her puzzle now. Judging from his expression, so had Rafe. And it had turned out to be sharp-edged and deadly.

"No!” One of the civilians hurled himself against her arm. Her gun jerked aside, and the energy bolt went wildly astray, sizzling across ground cover, narrowly missing another of their party. “That's an intelligent being!"

"So is the captain!” Pauli shouted. “And he's ours, like the woman you almost made me burn down. What do you call
these
things? We have to kill eaters. Does it really matter at what stage of their life cycle we kill them?"

She flamed down three eaters, then backed away to watch the captain. She gestured to the others to fan out and increase firing, but that one man still shadowed her. She'd been lucky when he'd deflected her aim the last time. If he did it again, someone might get killed. Like a civilian. Or Borodin, whom a bad shot could bring down.

The Cynthian he had dived at evaded him, then lifted, to swoop at him from the side. Borodin dodged it, so intent now on this one adversary that he didn't notice how the others had climbed high overhead. In a ship-based scramble, his boards would have warned him. But in the air, in a glider, he had only his naked, insufficient senses.

"Watch it,” Pauli whispered, knowing that her voice couldn't reach him.

One of the Cynthians launched itself into a power dive. At the last possible instant before swooping below the captain, it jerked its head sideways and brushed the captain's hand and arm with its poison horns. Sunlight glistened off the clear venom as it spattered onto his face as well.

Borodin screamed in surprise and agony. With his hand and face burnt, his arm paralyzed, he couldn't keep the glider level. Like the Cynthian earlier, he went into a somersault, head over flailing arms and legs, tumbling out of the sky with the now-useless glider, slamming against a rock spur. The struts of the glider twanged and snapped, and the metallic cloth tore. Then the broken man and the broken craft fell to the plain where the eaters swarmed.

"I hope he died before he hit ground,” Pauli whispered. Sunlight, shining like the spurt of venom that had killed her captain, threatened to flood her eyes.

"Oh, God. I didn't mean it,” muttered the man who had spoiled her aim. She turned her back on him. She didn't want to hear his voice or see his face. If she noticed him at all, she might kill him, and she needed him alive to kill eaters.

She began to shoot again, and eaters crisped under her harsh, steady fire. The stink of their execution became intolerable. Rafe and ben Yehuda were retreating, gesturing for the others to pull back too, but Pauli kept on shooting, kept on walking forward.

She wanted to reach the center of that plain. There had to be something left of Borodin for her to recover—his service disks, a belt buckle, even a broken strut from the glider. Pauli would kill all the eaters, then go after it.

People were running past her, coughing and retching from the stink. “Get back, Pauli!” Rafe screamed. He ran over to her, had her by the arm, was forcing her away from the dead place. “You can't do anything for him now, and we have to get back."

She let herself be led to safety. Overhead, the Cynthians flew back to the refuge of their mountain caves, high in the hills which their hungry, mindless children could not scale.

8

Pauli stared up at the night sky and shivered. “Can we build up the fire?” she muttered in a plaintive voice she barely recognized as her own. “Eaters are afraid of fire."

Now, she was afraid, not only of eaters, but of the beautiful creatures who might come swooping out of the starlit sky, bearing stars on their wings, and death on their horns; creatures who had resolved their dilemma of whether to protect their own kind or their friends in a way Pauli now would have to emulate. If she would be allowed to. Right now, the civs’ priority seemed to be debate. She couldn't afford the luxury; she had to defend.

The only defense that she saw terrified her. Easier to die.

She started to lever herself up, to sit nearer the fire. “It's warm enough, Pauli,” Alicia Pryor told her firmly.

Rafe reached out and gripped Pauli's shoulder, returning the comfort she had lent him just the day before. Somehow it felt like years. At least, that much was right again. Before the physician could intervene with her drugs or her counsel, he bent and tucked the foil blanket firmly about her. He heard her whimper, buried in the hands she clutched about her mouth, and hugged her reassuringly. She turned her face against his chest.

Then the full reality of the situation hit him. With the captain zeroed out, command fell to Pauli. Sure, she was younger than he (though not by all that much), but commission dates and specialties were what counted in chain of command: her commission preceded his, and she had elected command track, as opposed to his own research specialization. He had promised her all during the hike back to camp that he would do anything, anything at all, to help her, but not this. He was devoutly grateful that their positions were not reversed.

At least we're together again
, he thought. Otherwise, Pauli might easily have retreated from him into her new rank. But now what? Would she try to convince the Cynthians to set boundaries to offspring—you could hardly call eaters “children"—they feared and couldn't control? But even if they could control the eaters’ feeding frenzy as they moved from pasture to pasture, would they? They were fliers, and fliers recognized no boundaries.

"What worries me now,” said Pryor, “is the next wave of eaters. We can retreat into the perimeter defenses, but inevitably we're faced with problems of food, sanitation..."

"They didn't know they would kill him, Rafe,” Pauli whispered. “They were only trying to warn him off. They treated him like one of their own. They didn't, couldn't, know how limited his maneuverability was, or that he'd try to fight them. And they had to protect their young."

"As we must?"

"What else can you expect, man?” asked ben Yehuda. His big, capable hands twisted, then dropped down on his knees. “Do we just sit here, depleting our resources, every year a little more gone, a little less hope? You call that living? What sort of life would that make for the children? Look: my kids have seen enough. I can't tell them no, you can't go out, you can't walk about freely because there are things crawling around there that will eat you up, like a bad fairy tale."

"That's not the issue!” shouted Beneatha. “This isn't our world; it's the Cynthians'. And if they and the eaters are truly part of the same race..."

"Why doesn't she just come out and say it?” Pauli murmured. “The word is
genocide
."

Someone heard her and repeated the word. Like a curse, it hissed from mouth to mouth. Genocide: forbidden by treaty and moral imperative since before the first ships had left Earth.

"That's what you call it when you eliminate an intelligent race,” Rafe said. “We might as well call it by its rightful name. The only problem is that in our situation, any other option may be suicide. Very possibly, if you'll remember Captain Borodin's speech, racial suicide. All right! My friends, you may be willing to accept death for yourselves, but will you let your children die too? And seeing the death that the eaters deal out, will you help them to an easy death?"

"What about
you
?” Beneatha asked ben Yehuda brutally. Black face and weathered one locked eyes, and neither bothered to look away.

"You would have to remind me,” he murmured, and shook his head in sorrow. “Genocide. Can you really call it that? After all, for all we know, these creatures might live on every continent. Maybe, we could just..."

"Just wipe out the locals?” Beneatha asked sarcastically.

It was strategy, just strategy, Pauli told herself. But she had never been able to look past the abstraction of the armscomp grids to the actual ship that she targeted. She realized now that that had been a mercy. Now, she could not look away either, nor permit anyone else to do so. “Dave,” she broke in, “think it through. You're right. For now ... for this season and maybe for the next few, all we need to do is secure this area. But we don't know if these creatures..."

"They're
Cynthians
,” Beneatha put in. “Cynthians. And they're sapient."

Fighting a rush of bile to her mouth, Pauli raised her voice over Beneatha's ... “if these creatures breed with other, other, let's call them flocks. If they do, anything, any biological measures we might take against them are likely to be spread."

And then there would not be the slightest relief, the slightest mitigation of what she knew she must do if she was to protect the littlests—her children!—from suffering like ‘Cilla.

Alicia Pryor grimaced and looked away.

Pauli could not command them in this, though obedience might, in this case, be a blessing, be, perhaps, even a form of absolution.

For people other than these civs and survivors, she realized. Not for these people. She would have to persuade; and that would mean that they would share in the deed.

She blinked hard. In a much lower, huskier voice, she continued, “Does it matter if we kill them all? The intent in this case, it's as bad as the deed. Look at ‘Cilla's foot, people. Look at it, and then tell me this: if you could press a button and wipe out what caused it, if you could prevent any more of the littlests from suffering, wouldn't you press that button?” Her eyes found Dave's, held them ruthlessly. “Well, wouldn't you?"

He covered his eyes. “God knows. Perhaps..."

Ayelet looked up at her father and interrupted. “You used to tell me the stories from before the Earth blockade. I remember: you'd say, ‘Ayelet, you're too young to ask; so you must be told. You must remember. So you told me. About the camps. A thing called the final solution. Do you know, when we escaped Gamma, I thought that must have been something like what we escaped. And then there were other stories too. Do you remember the one you told me about a place called Masada? All its defenders killed themselves. Very heroic, you said ... but very dead. Weren't you the one who told us, when Ari and I wanted to lie down and sleep more than anything else, ‘Masada must not fall again.’”