Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (2 page)

“Don’t go in,” Guy said. “A detail will be there right away. Do you hear me, Alex, don’t go—” She clicked off and entered the building.

The corridor was cool and shadowed, a sharp contrast to the sunlight outside. There was no lobby; this was a completely utilitarian structure. Alex walked past closed doors, some with Restricted signs. At the end of the corridor, the door to the animal labs stood open. Something crashed inside, and suddenly the air was thick with shrieking.

She sprinted forward. “Stop it! What are you doing here! My God, you can’t— ” And stopped dead.

Two groups of Chinese kids faced off across the room. Cages surrounded them, and half the noise came from a pair of lions, the only predator on Greentrees dangerous to humans. Tree dwelling, the lions had the long sleek bodies of cats but with tentacled forelegs and a powerful prehensile tail to wrap around branches. Like so much else on Greentrees, their skin was purplish blue. Alex knew that the geneticists were trying to modify the lions’ genome to make them less aggressive without disrupting Greentrees’ food chain. So far this had failed.

The female of the experimental breeding pair screamed in her cage. The male stood in the middle of the floor, baring its teeth at the unarmed group of kids huddled against a side wall.

“Get out of here, Alexandra Cutler,” one of the others said. That group stood beside the door Alex had just burst through, their leader armed with a laser gun he should not have been able to obtain.

She forced herself to calm. “You’re Yat-Shing Wong, aren’t you?”

“Wong Yat-Shing,” the boy sneered. “In Hope of Heaven, we’ve reclaimed true Chinese usage in our naming.”

Hope of Heaven. Alex’s heart sank. Hope of Heaven was the dissident settlement established ten miles downriver from Mira City, and this was some sort of youth war between the Chinese of Hope of Heaven and the Chinese in Mira. Alex couldn’t imagine anything more stupid, or more dangerous. The lion growled softly.

“Mr. Wong, you don’t want that animal to hurt anyone.”

Wong only smiled.

“Ms. Cutler, it’s coming closer!” a captive girl in a brief red wrap said, although the lion wasn’t. Alex considered her chances of seizing Wong’s gun and shooting the beast; not good.

“Stay calm,” Alex called to the girl. “Yat-Shing, you don’t want to be charged with murder. I know you don’t.”

There had never been a murder on Greentrees, not in fifty years.

Wong snarled, “You don’t know anything about what we want in Hope of Heaven!”

The lion gathered itself to leap.

The girl in the red wrap screamed. The three others in her group tried to run toward the door, one of them tripping and sprawling facedown in front of the lion. Alex grabbed for Wong’s gun and was easily shoved away. As she fell, pictures of the scene registered on her numbed mind, each preternaturally hard edged and clear:

The girl in the red wrap with her hands over her face, long slim hands with rings on each pinkie.

The sprawled boy, raising his head from the floor as the lion soared over him toward the girl, his look befuddled as he glimpsed the underbelly of the attacker.

The spear arcing through the air and catching the lion in midflight, so that it shivered on the air and then dropped short of the girl, pierced through the soft tissue of its right scent organ and into the brain.

A spear?

Alex rose slowly and turned her head. If she had expected anything at all, if she’d been able to think of anything, it would have been a Cheyenne brave. There were Cheyenne in Mira for the celebration. The Cheyenne, those southern romantics reviving a primitive lifestyle from an earlier planet, used spears. A Cheyenne might have—oh yes,
this
made sense—just wandered by and happened to hurl a spear at a deliberately loosed lion deep inside the genetics lab building—

Framed in the doorway stood an alien Fur, seven feet high, balanced on its jumping tail, a second spear in its tentacled hand.

The room went absolutely silent, even the sobbing rescued girl. Probably half the kids in this room didn’t even believe the Furs existed. No more native to Greentrees than were humans, their population was small and their history completely improbable. Almost no one in Mira had ever seen one. The primitive Furs lived far to the south, in the same subcontinent as their enemies the Cheyenne, countiess light-years from their space-faring cousins who had sworn to destroy humanity.

Alex scrambled to her feet and lunged a second time for Wong’s gun, before he could shoot the Fur. She was too late. Nan Frayne stood beside the Fur, the boy’s gun in her hand, his arms laced painfully behind his back to a thonged stick she held casually in her other hand.

“Nan—”

“I was with a security detail when they were comlinked,” the old woman said. “Old”—not the right word, no. Nan Frayne looked old as boulders looked old, weathered and strong and something not to get crushed by. “You need better security people, Alex.”

And now Guy’s forces came puffing through the door, two men as middle-aged as Alex but much fatter, guns drawn, looking helpless.

“Security’s fine,” Alex said crossly, which was stupid because clearly it wasn’t. Nan Frayne, the two times she’d met her before, made Alex feel like an idiot.

“Could have fooled me,” Nan said. “Gang stomper?”

Alex didn’t know what the words meant; Nan was First Landing and they all used Earth words that had slipped out of the language because there was no need for them. Alex didn’t answer. Nan said something in a low, growly language to the Fur, who answered her. The kids gaped at the alien. The security men began to yammer at Alex. Yat-Shing Wong, or Wong Yat-Shing, began, “If you think you—” and Nan gave a casual twitch of the stick holding him that made him yelp in pain. Through this babble Nan turned to Alex and spoke as if the rest of the din didn’t exist.

“I was coming to see you anyway. Your mayor wants you. He just got word. There’s a ship approaching Greentrees.”

Alex opened her mouth but no words came. No ship had approached Greentrees for thirty-nine years. There were only two possibilities whose ship it was. Finally she managed, “Is it—”

“I don’t know if it’s Karim Mahjoub—or if it’s the enemy. You go find out. I’ve got better things to do.”

A moment later Alex found herself holding the stick that tethered the furious Wong, and both Nan and the Fur had melted out the door.

MIRA CITY

J
ake had warned them. For thirty-nine years he’d warned them, and it had done very little good. Now he slumped in his wheelchair, his old bones aching and his mind struggling to stay awake, because they hadn’t listened to his warnings and the time had finally come to pay for that.

Maybe.

The hastily called meeting included the triumvirate, Jake, and the physicist in charge of Mira’s dwindling array of space sats, David Parker. Contain the information, Jake had said immediately, and for once Alex had actually listened to him.

“The ship is coming in at a tiny fraction of c, and it’s just beyond Cap,” said Buder, and everybody shut up because that put a new spin on everything. Cap was the farthest-out planet in the star system; in Mira City, major landmarks were given nonsense-syllable names to avoid favoring any one of its three dominant cultures. So the planets were Mel, Jun, Greentrees, Par, and Cap. Cap was 2.6 new AUs from the sun, David said, while Jake tried to remember what a new AU was and failed.

“So if it’s coming in that slow,” Alex said, “it isn’t using a McAndrew Drive? And it’s not Furs
or
Karim Mahjoub?”

“No way to tell,” David answered. He was a thin, nervous, balding man with startling blue-green eyes, undoubtedly the legacy of a vanity genemod three or more generations ago on Earth. He was some sort of distant cousin to Alex, Jake remembered, but, then, three-quarters of the scientists on Greentrees belonged to the vast Cutler clan. As Parker spoke, he plucked at his left ear. “There’s no reason I can think of why either Karim or attacking Furs wouldn’t use the drive to come in, if they had it. If this ship keeps on the way it is, it won’t be here for eleven days. Our orbital probes are giving us plenty of warning.”

Mayor Shanti said, “Then I don’t see how it could be Furs. An enemy wouldn’t do that.”

Lau-Wah Mah said, “I don’t think Karim would, either.”

The Cheyenne leader, whose name Jake had forgotten (he forgot too much these days), and who had been asked to the meeting only because he was in Mira City for the celebration, said nothing.

In the general silence that followed Mah’s remark, Jake shifted his chair for a better view of the Chinese governor. Shifting the chair cost Jake effort and pain. Once the chair had been powered, but a few years ago the parts had worn out and Alex as tray-o had, rightly, not deemed powerchair replacement parts the best use of limited metal-factory resources. There was a limit to how many different things a pioneer society could manufacture. More important things than powerchairs had gone to the bottom of the list. Still, Jake missed his old chair.

Lau-Wah Mah’s face gave nothing away. Did he know yet what had happened at the genetics lab? In his second year of his six-year term as governor, Mah was the third most important man in Mira, after his fellow triumvirates Mayor Shanti and Alex Cutler. Mah was a quiet, focused man with a smooth blank face like a peeled egg. So far he had let the other two, advised by Jake, make most of the decisions.

Jake couldn’t remember when the triumvirate system had informally devolved to mean one Arab, one Anglo, and one Chinese, but he didn’t like it. This wasn’t the way he and Gail Cutler had designed the political system on Greentrees to work.

Well, nothing had happened as designed. How could it, when they’d discovered sentient Furs living on Greentrees, and then it had turned out that the Furs weren’t native to Greentrees but imported, part of a vast biological experiment by another alien race at war with the real Furs. Mira City had been caught in the crossfire between these two technologically superior races. Jake and eight others had been kidnapped by the Furs to send them to the Vine planet to destroy the Vines’ defenses, but of course the Fur plan had failed because Karim Mahjoub—

“Jake,” Alex said gently, and he realized he’d been doing it again, letting his mind wander back to the vigorous past. Ah, it was no fun being old. He forced himself to pay attention to the here and now.

David Parker said, “We haven’t had any radio communication from the ship. But I agree with Lau-Wah—I can’t see why Karim would come in that slowly, when he can use the McAndrew Drive for rapid balanced deceleration much closer in. Why take the extra time?”

The mayor said tentatively, “Maybe to investigate what he’s coming back to. After all, he’s been gone thirty-nine years.”

They all contemplated this.
Thirty-nine years,
Jake thought. And for Karim, how long? A year, maybe. Maybe less, depending on how much time they’d spent under McAndrew Drive. Karim and Lucy would still be around thirty years old. Lucy, whom he’d once held in his arms, kissed, loved …
Stay in the present.

Alex said, “Caution could be the reason for Karim’s radio silence, too. Waiting until we contact him.”

“No, no,” Jake said, suddenly glad to be paying attention. “It’s not caution. There’s no radio on the
Franz Mueller.
Remember, I told you all—it’s a captured Fur ship! They use quee, and Greentrees no longer has that capacity. I told you!”

“I forgot,” Alex said.

“You all have forgotten too much! I’ve tried for decades to keep up the war preparations for this city because I
told
you it would happen, but each year there’s more and more slack, and if we get an actual Fur attack I don’t know if anyone is prepared at all, and…”

Jake stopped. Wrong, wrong. He was ranting, sounding exactly like an old man no one would heed. And no one was, except Alex, who was listening out of compassion rather than belief. Even now, with a ship coming in…

Lau-Wah said, “What is the state of war preparations? Who is in charge of that?”

Mayor Shanti said uncertainly, “Isn’t it Donald Halloran? Or, no, he died and so his assistant must have taken over. Alex?”

She shrugged, not looking at Jake. “I know we all received a com about it, but I can’t remember the name. An Anglo, I think.”

“Well, it would hardly be a New Quaker,” Jake said curtly, and Alex laughed. A second later her face showed how much she regretted the laugh.

The mayor said, “I know it’s serious, Jake. This ship … Alex, find out who the new defense admin is and call him here.”

Alex nodded and opened a comlink. “Siddalee? Who’s the defense admin since Donald Halloran died? … Well, find out and get him or her here, please.” She closed her link.

And that was another thing, Jake thought—in his day, they could have called up the information by computer. But fewer and fewer computers still worked, and Greentrees simply did not have the resources to manufacture many replacements. What they did create or adapt was usually assigned to the genetics lab, but even there people had taken to keeping the bulk of their notes on paper. Mira City numbered—what?—maybe fifteen thousand people now (once he would have known the exact number), but that wasn’t enough to sustain every aspect of a fully digital society. And a lot of those people were New Quakers, who weren’t interested in machinery, and neither were Larry Smith’s ridiculous Cheyenne… no, wait, Larry Smith was dead long ago, somebody else led the tribes, Larry had been the founder, when the Cheyenne were still learning how to live off the land and glorify it with the spirit dances Jake had attended once, at dawn in the—

He was wandering in time again.

“—evacuation if necessary,” Mayor Shanti said.

“How would we do that?” Lau-Wah said. “Where could we evacuate that many people to?”

“Our people aren’t exactly good at living off the land,” Alex said. “Maybe the Cheyenne had the right idea all along. No, don’t scowl at me, David, I was joking. There’s Siddalee comming back.”

She listened to her call, while Jake studied her. Such a strong face. Not pretty, exactly, although her slim body curved nicely. Her features were too big and angular for feminine beauty, especially her jaw, but she had thick glossy hair, brown only slightly touched with gray, and undeniably beautiful eyes. Deep gray, wide, fringed with black lashes. Expressive eyes. Too expressive, maybe; Alex was not good at hiding her feelings. She’d had a very bad time when her young husband was killed in a mining accident, but that was long ago and she seemed all right now.

“The new defense admin is named Jon McBain,” Alex said. “Does anybody know him?”

No one did.

“Well, I do. Siddalee says he’s out in the bush right now, doing a field survey. He’s a xenobiologist who’s supposed to be developing a microbial battery, but he—never mind. Siddalee’s still trying to reach him directly.”

Jake said, “The defense admin might be unreachable while Mira is
under attack?”

“We’re not under attack, Jake,” Alex said soothingly.

“Not yet! Give it a few days!”

“Jake is right,” the mayor said, looking from one to another as if afraid his opinion might be rejected. “We went slack and now we might have to pay for it… Allah willing, not too heavily. Alex, could you ask Siddalee to reach McBain any way she can and get him back here? Meanwhile, David, we need to go over what still works of our equipment in space and what we might be able to do with it. Alex, maybe you could do the same for the resources in the city. Lau-Wah, would you mind digging up the last approved set of evacuation plans so we know what’s usable and what we need to devise new? David, you’ll know the second that ship signals anything at all, by any method?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Shanti said, smiling diffidentiy at Jake. “Jake, you’re the only one who really knows the Furs. If they attack, what can we expect? Maybe you could start with background.”

They were actually going to listen to him, thanks to Ashraf’s timid courtesy. It almost made up for their criminal ignorance. But only “almost”—thirty-nine years of peace and hard pioneering work were no excuse for that ignorance.

Alex was staring at him hard. Silentiy she mouthed,
Don’t rant.

She was right, fuck it all. Jake had to be careful to sound focused, sound
right.
He chose his words carefully.

“Every single contact humans have had with the space-faring Furs was bellicose. They’re apparentiy xenophobic to an almost unbelievable degree. They’ve been at war with the Vines for thousands of years, trying for genocide. When they discovered that the Vines, whose technology is bio-based rather than industrial or digital, had created clone colonies of Furs on Greentrees in order to develop some virus to neutralize them …” Jake fell silent, remembering those cloned Fur colonies. One practically too passive to feed themselves, one all female, one perpetually intoxicated by some parasite lodged in their brain …

“Jake,” Alex prompted.

“I haven’t lost track. The Furs killed every one of their own species in the Vine-created colonies. Just wiped them out, along with the Vines on Greentrees, because the created Furs were defective. They even tried to wipe out the control colony of Furs, who weren’t defective, just because the Vines had made them. They got a lot of them but not all, because so many males were away hunting in the forest. The Greentrees-born Furs left are primitive but just as bloodthirsty as their space-faring cousins. The Cheyenne, as you know, are intermittentiy raided by the survivors. The only human who has ever been able to make contact with them is Nan Frayne.

“If the space Furs attack here, they’ll be just as ruthless to us as they were to their own clones.”

“Unless Karim has succeeded,” Alex said quickly.

“Yes.”

“That could be the—” David Parker’s comlink shrilled.

Jake closed his eyes. This was about the ship; he knew it. How? No point in trying to figure it out; if there was one thing you knew when you were eighty-five, it was that not all knowledge operated rationally. He waited.

No one said anything for too long.

Jake opened his eyes. The other three sat gazing expectantiy at Parker, who looked stunned. The physicist cleared his throat, tried to speak, failed. He tried again.

“That was the monitor on duty. The ship doesn’t have a McAndrew Drive. It’s not Fur, and it’s not Karim Mahjoub, and it just radioed … not ’just,’ of course, it took the signal some hours to come in from their distance out… I’m sorry, I’m not making sense.” He stopped.

“David—” Alex said.

“The ship radioed. They’re human. From Earth.”

Stay calm,
Alex told herself, and knew there wasn’t a chance in the world that she would.
Well, then, fake it.

“David, what was the exact message?”