Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (19 page)

It was daylight outside the bunker, a cool clear morning. Hope of Heaven, a mile across the plain where the river made a wide bend, looked no different for last night’s murders, no different for Wong Yat-Shing’s absence, no different for the presence of the Fur ship, silent in high orbit. The rebel settlement’s graceful buildings rose from beds of bright flowers. Dew wetted the grass. Somewhere to Alex’s left something small rustled in the purple groundcover. Sunlight sparkled on the river.

She got in the rover and drove as fast as possible toward the cave where Jake, feeble in his wheelchair, awaited war.

Jake’s end point was pitifully visible. The tram tracks stopped only a hundred yards away. Security had done what it could to disguise the entrance with brush and to erase the signs of having wheeled or dragged patients from the tram end to the cave, but their efforts were pathetic. Jake was right; the sick and old were at the most disadvantage during fighting, and they endangered those who cared lor them, as well. But what other choice was there? These were Greenies, and they could neither travel far nor be left behind. Alex climbed out of the rover, leaving the two soldiers behind, and started toward the cave.

“Halt! State your name and business!” a young voice called, and Alex was back in the horror of the night before, two young Greentrees soldiers bleeding on the ground with spears in their chests.

“Alex Cutler, tray-o,” she said impatiently, “to see Jake Holman.”

“Ms. Cutler?” the voice said, and a helmet poked around a clump of brush, followed by the guard.

Not a Terran highly technical helmet, Alex noted, and not armed very well. Don’t waste valuable resources on the sick and the old. She should understand that, resource allocation was her business. And yet something in her cringed.

Then she saw that the girl was crying.

“What is it?” she said sharply. She’d comlinked with Ashraf and Julian just five minutes ago from the rover: no movement from the ship, nothing happening on the ground.

“I’m … I’m sorry,” the girl sobbed. “I know I shouldn’t… state your b-b- business.”

Alex fished a handkerchief from a fold of her wrap. The girl, she saw, was young even by Julian’s recruitment standards. But, no, this wasn’t one of Julian’s but an evacuation volunteer.

The girl blew her nose and wiped her eyes while Alex stood by helplessly. She was no good at this sort of thing. Finally the girl said, “Are the Furs attacking yet?”

“No. Why are you crying?”

“Mary Pesci was my sister.”

Again the picture in the mind of the dead soldiers at Hope of Heaven. No escaping it, for any of Greentrees.

“Why did the wild Furs kill her?” the girl cried. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Ms. Cutler,” came the voice in her ear, “you are exposed in the open. Please move into the cave.” Her new bodyguard.

Alex led the sobbing girl toward the cave. “What’s your name?”

“T-T-TiraPesci.”

“Tira, how did you learn Mary was dead?”

“A friend c-comlinked me. It’s… all over M-MiraNet.”

Of course it was. This time, no EMP had knocked out communications. Yet.

“M-Mary was older th-than me. I couldn’t qu-qu-qu—”

“I’m so sorry,” Alex said helplessly.

“—qualify for Commander Martin’s army.”

“I’ll find Jake Holman myself,” Alex said.

“Y-yes. I’m back on d-duty.” Tira left her at the mouth of the cave.

Poor child. The other dead kid, Mesbah Shanab, must also have a grieving family. Alex ducked through the brush, which scratched her face and arms. She wished savagely for Threadmores instead of this stupid wrap.

The cave was long and narrow. Powerlights illuminated the beds and wheelchairs lining both rough stone walls. Volunteers bent over some of the cots, feeding or tending patients. A few people nodded at Alex, but no one questioned her presence. She had, after all, been passed on through by their guard detail. Such as it was.

Her people, she realized all over again, were not of the right temperament or background to fight a war.

She found Jake asleep on a cot at the back of the cave. Duncan Martin sat reading in Jake’s wheelchair.

“Ah, the fair Alexandra approaches. Are the dogs of war howling in our ears?”

“No. What are you doing here, Duncan? I hear there’s a brisk trade in evac posts.” She knew she was being rude; his jocularity angered her.

“This is my assigned post and I made no effort to trade it, you enchanting shrew. Although as the bard tells us, ’There’s small choice in rotten apples.’”

She had no time to ponder the unknown in Duncan’s character that led him to keep a duty both dangerous and tedious. “I want to talk to Jake, alone.”

“Your wish is my command.” He ambled off, readerscreen in hand.

Alex sat in the vacated wheelchair and shook Jake’s shoulder. “Jake, wake up. It’s Alex.”

The old man woke instantly, staring wildly for a moment and then clearly remembering where he was. “Has it started?” His voice was thick and a little slurred, but there was no mistaking the inteligence in his eyes. He was still Jake.

“No. The Fur ship is just sitting in high orbit. Listen, I need you to think about something, dear, and it’s important. The Fur ship happened to make orbit near one of our orbital probes. It gave us a clear picture. But when it got too close, the ship fired on it, not a laser or alpha beam or anything else we recognized. It seemed to be a sort of beam of… of glitter, a lot of little things that spread outward fast.

“And it didn’t destroy on contact. The probe flew into the cloud and continued to send for another twelve seconds before the signal was lost. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the probe wasn’t destroyed but just the signal made to cease. We don’t know. Anyway, you’re the only one left alive from that first trip off-planet with the Furs. Do you know what that glittery beam is? Did you see anything like that, thirty-nine years ago?”

“No,” Jake said. Alex wiped a thread of drool from his mouth. “But wait… George Fox said …”

“The biologist? That’s right, he was with you. I remember meeting him when I was young.”

“He died twenty years ago. Was the glittery cloud in full sunlight? Not occluded by Greentrees?”

“Not occluded.”

“The Furs who captured us,” Jake said slowly, “told us that we humans were supposed to destroy some sort of shield around a Vine planet. We never got that far, of course. But Beta Vine drew us a picture once and George thought it might be the shield. It showed a huge cloud of tiny dots completely surrounding the planet, with a space elevator that George thought might launch them. He theorized that the dots were spores or some microbe analogue—the Vines weren’t DNA-based, remember, and they were master biochemists, to say the least. George thought the microbe-things might be the shield. That they might eat metal or something like that.”

“But… that would make the ship up there a Vine ship, not a Fur one! Didn’t you say that the Vines used captured Fur ships, not the other way around?”

“That’s right. The Furs developed physics-based technology, the Vines developed biochemical tech.” Jake laid a shaky hand on her arm. “But, Alex, remember that all this was decades ago by Greentrees time. With their McAndrew Drive ships, it’s possible the whole situation up there has changed and Furs now recapture their own Vine-modified ships. Those
could
be Furs in orbit right now.”

Alex nodded. She could see how the long speech had tired him, “All right. Thank you, Jake. I’ll comlink Julian.”

“Wait… a minute.”

“What is it, dear? Do you need something?”

“It could not be Furs, too. It could be Vines. Don’t let Julian … we already destroyed their innocent people once and they tried to help us anyway… Karim and Lucy… infection … don’t let Julian …”

The easy tears of the old filled his eyes. Alex wiped them away, both moved and irritated. Too many tears today.

“If they’re Vines, Julian won’t hurt them. I’ve told him the whole Greentrees history.”

“Good. Where are Lucy and Karim? Karim and my Lucy … if they succeeded in infecting the Furs … if… I don’t know…”

“Just rest now, Jake.”

“No rest. One more thing—”

She was impatient to go outside the cave and comlink Julian, but he said gently, “What, dear?”

“Get that idiot Duncan Martin away from me.”

Alex sighed. Some things not even war changed.

SPACE

K
arim dozed, and woke, and dozed again. Time had ceased to matter. There was only the endless slow descent in the membrane that encased them like eggs in an alien womb.

At first he and Lucy had been terrified, then excited. They’d tried to understand what was happening to them.

“The bubble’s
alive,”
Karim said. “A thick sheet of some living molecules, maybe with clear hard carapaces joined together on one side, the outside of the bubble. Keeping the air in.” Neither he nor Lucy wore their Vine-made helmets. The helmets must have be stripped from them while they were unconscious. Without it, Karim’s head felt new and deliciously light.

Lucy said, “But if the bubble is alive, what’s it eating?”

“Sunlight. And my guess is that sunlight is also powering the descent. We’re not falling, Lucy. We’re descending to Greentrees; slow, controlled rate. I think the molecules in the bubble are creating and emitting gases that propel us downward. As we move through thicker atmosphere, the side of the bubble toward Greentrees will give off tiny jets of gases to prevent free fall. We’ll just float down.”

“So we’re really going home.”

“Yes.” He took her hand. Those small, fragile bones. Both of them were naked.

“But, Karim, why not just send us down in a shuttle?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not go down with us in the shuttle, if the Vines really want those death flowers so much?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

They fell silent, encased in their living bubble, watching the planet turn below them. Impossibly beautiful, impossibly alive. Home.

That had been a while ago. Impossible to tell how long, because Karim didn’t know if complete revolutions of the planet had occurred while he slept. He could only judge time by his stomach, which growled incessantly He was ravenous.

“ It isn’t like the Vines to not provide us with food or water,” Lucy kid. “Usually they… well, you know. They took good physical care us.”

“Yes,” Karim said. He, too, felt shame at his previous hatred of the Vines on their own planet. “But I’m not thirsty, are you?”

“No. Just hungry.”

“They must be keeping us hydrated somehow, Lucy. And no food argues that the trip won’t be longer than we can stand without eating.”

“I suppose so,” she said halfheartedly.

Karim slept again, and when he woke the bubble was drifting through cloud. He could see nothing. “We’re in the atmosphere, Lucy.” But she was still sleeping. The molecules of the bubble must be generating heat to keep them warm, as well as everything else it was doing. But why? Why not a shuttle?

Maybe he and Lucy were scouts. After all, it might have been decades since they’d left Greentrees. For all Karim or the Vines knew, Fus might have returned to Greentrees. They might have killed or enslaved all of Mira City. But if Karim and Lucy were scouts, how would the Vines upstairs find out what they reported? Was the bubble going to ascend again?

Maybe. And he, Lucy, and the bubble were all living things. No metal for probes to pick up, no speed to alert detection devices. They were coming in “under the radar,” as people used to say when Karim had been at school in London, UAF, another lifetime ago.

Two lifetimes ago.

He watched the featureless filaments of cloud slide past. Where would he and Lucy come down? The Vines who’d sent them must realize that they couldn’t survive long naked in the vast Greentrees wilderness. Humanity occupied only a tiny fraction of the planet. Surely the Vines would send their human scouts, if that’s what they were, to somewhere inhabited. Mira City, most probably.

But what would he and Lucy find once they arrived there?