Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (32 page)

ALONG A MOUNTAIN CREEK

L
ucy returned so exhausted from walking that she practically fell down the muddy bank to the river. Ben climbed up the slope to cover as much damage as he could from Lucy’s tracks. Jake was asleep in the back of the shallow depression. Alex and Natalie stared grimly at Lucy.

“I had to,” Lucy mumbled. “Karim … Julian …” She was asleep.

When she woke, she told them more. Her previous note of apology had disappeared from her voice. She addressed Jake, now awake and sitting in his chair, as if Alex didn’t exist.

“Jake, I had to warn Karim. This biomass could be the key. And Karim would have taken it straight to Julian Martin … you know him. Karim’s not really a suspicious person, and Jon McBain’s even worse. I did the only thing I could do, and I was careful to not let us be traced. I walked miles and miles before I fired the flare, and I set it for maximum flight before it released my message.”

Natalie said angrily, “But the message itself was intercepted, including its coordinates. I told you that! Now Julian knows where Karim is, not to mention the biomass!”

“I coded the message.”

“At class-three encryption! A child could break it!”

“No, I mean I coded it. No one but Karim will know what I was talking about.”

Alex snorted.

“It’s true,” Lucy said, glaring at Alex. “And anyway, there’s no time to argue about it. We have to start down there.”

“Down where?” Alex demanded. She just realized that she didn’t like Lucy.

“To Karim and the biomass!”

Natalie made a small noise. Alex opened her mouth but before she could blast Lucy for her arrogance, her assumption of command, and her stupidity, Jake spoke.

“Lucy, we already have a tentative plan, and it does involve going to the biomass. If you hadn’t come back by now, we were going to do it without you. We—”

Alex stalked away from them, moving along the river.

She had argued with Jake for an hour last evening, until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d been amazed at Jake’s tenacity. He’d sat in his chair—weak, drooling, quavery voiced—and just kept
at
her.
”I’d like to suggest the first step. There’s one other asset we have that I haven’t yet mentioned. It might mean nothing—or everything.”
Well, it meant nothing, in Alex’s opinion. Jake’s plan was just as wild-eyed and stupid as Lucy’s flare. If it had been anyone but Jake, Alex wouldn’t have listened for more than two minutes. But it was Jake, and so Alex had listened, and argued, and reasoned, To no end—Jake had remained firm about his insane idea.

Finally she had told him no.

And here he was telling the plan to Lucy as if Alex had agreed to it.

Alex plopped down on a rock jutting up from two inches of rushing river. Her boots and cuffs were wet, as was the rock. She was too upset to care. Lucy, Jake, Julian … no, don’t think about Julian. Too much pain. Think only about defeating the Furs.

How did you avoid thinking about someone you loved who was probably trying to kill you?

“You can’t think clearly just now,”
Jake had said last night, with compassion. Was he telling the truth or just trying to manipulate her again? Alex could no longer tell. Everything was too complicated, including her emotions.

Breathe deeply.

It was a glorious Greentrees morning. Fresh warm air blew above the sparkling river. The opposite bank was shaded by purple trees, the long thin leaves on their lower branches dangling into the water, which tugged at them in further elongation. Lacy moonrushes turned their tiny bluish petals to the fading sun. Overhead a flock of sue-birds wheeled and cried. And dripping down the bank, an enormous red creeper, capable of tangling and digesting small animals, waited for its prey.

Something flew into sight on the distant horizon above the red creeper.

Alex shrank back against the riverbank. She ran back to the others, who had already seen it and were moving Jake’s chair to the deepest part of the overhang. Natalie snatched up a breakfast bowl left to rinse in the river. With all their meager belongings they waited, hardly breathing, under the protection of dirt and rock.

The skimmer, flying very low, appeared over the top of the opposite bank, flew over the river, and disappeared.

Ben breathed, “if they saw the rover under those branches …”

“They didn’t,” Alex said. “Or they’d have landed.” Hatred flooded her, caustic as lye. Julian had probably not been in the skimmer; he would be holed up somewhere in a new “command post” as primitive as Alex’s own hideout. She was hiding from him, lie was hiding from the Furs. But he’d risked at least two of his Terran soldiers in the skimmer to hunt her down.

Or maybe she was wrong. She had not responded with a broadcast of her own to Julian’s announcement of her death. To that extent, anyway, she’d listened to Jake. So maybe Julian wasn’t hunting her. Maybe he was hunting Furs. Or just scouting out his new planet, taken by treachery and murder and pointless destruction.

Ben said, “The skimmer is heading west.”

“Good,” Lucy said. “We need to drive mostly south.”

Something else flashed above the river and was gone. “Oh my God!” Natalie cried. “That was a Fur shuttle!”

A second later they heard the explosion.

No one spoke. Then Alex said shakily, “Wait. If the shuttle had wanted to, it could have just annihilated the skimmer. But it exploded it instead. The Furs wanted it to register on human displays, so we would know… so we know…”

“Yes,” Jake said. “And probably the Furs want the wreckage to stay on the ground, too. It’s a decoy to lure humans to check for survivors. We’re not going anywhere near it.”

“But if there are survivors—” Ben began, and stopped.

Natalie said, “Commander Martin might come to look for his survivors.”

“No, Natalie,” Jake said. “He won’t do that.”

Natalie looked puzzled. Alex said, “The Furs will have left surveillance equipment by the crash, Natalie. Julian will anticipate that.”

Jake said to her, “Now you’re starting to think like a soldier.” There was no pleasure in his voice.

Natalie said, “Then we can’t stay here, either!”

Jake said, “Not unless you’re willing to hide under a riverbank twenty-four hours a day, every day.” He spoke to Natalie but his eyes were on Alex.

“All right, Jake,” she said.’“We’ll leave now. But not all together.”

They loaded Jake and his chair into the rover. Ben drove it south along the creek, staying under tree cover as much as he could. Alex watched them drive away and thought how brave both of them were: the boy whose loyalties had been pulled and jerked like a balky tree stump, and the old man who kept his frail body going by the sheer will of his wily mind.

She might never see either of them again. They had the dangerous part of this insane mission, which included splitting up in order to increase survival odds for at least some of them. In the rover Jake and Ben, heading for Karim’s biomass, would be far more exposed than would the three others. Julian’s skimmer was gone, but the Furs still had one or more shuttles, plus who knew what sort of land transport. The Fur mother ship orbited above Greentrees, as did Julian’s
Crucible.
Julian had the loyalty of all the humans on Greentrees who didn’t know what he had done, which was all the humans on Greentrees except five.

Maybe nine, if Lucy’s “coded” message had indeed reached Karim and if Karim had indeed known what the hell Lucy meant. Alex doubted both these things.

The rover disappeared from sight. Alex slid back down the bank, where Natalie handed her a pack made up of as many essentials as each of them could carry. They’d buried everything else. Alex, Natalie, and Lucy were to stick to the creek, sheltering beside its wild banks and following it south to the rendezvous point with the rover. If, of course, the rover actually returned.

Natalie asked, “Do you really think Ben and Mr. Holman can get to MiraCi-

ty?”

Alex glanced at the girl, then bit back her first sarcastic reply:
There is no Mira City to get to!
Natalie deserved more than that. She, too, had been incredibly brave and loyal.

“I hope so,” Alex said gently. “Meanwhile, let’s get going.”

The three women started to walk along the creek.

M I R A C I T Y P L A I N

H
e drifted in and out of sleep, an old man who knew he confused past and present, thinking and dreaming. Beta Vine emerged from his shuttle for the first time in his little domed cart. Lucy Lasky scattered kisses on Jake’s sleeping face. Alex’s face became her aunt’s, Gail’s, dead for twenty years. Furs imprisoned humans, then more humans, then more and more until all of Terra howled inside cages with invisible force-field walls. And over all, Star Chu sang that ditty all the young people liked:

“On Greentrees we are For good, but is it good,

How would I know, all I know For sure is yooouuuuu…

Yooouuuu…

Yooouuuuu…”

“Mr. Holman,” Ben said in his respectful young voice, “you said to wake you at the start of the kill-clean zone. We’re here.”

Jake forced open his eyes. Every bone ached from jostling along in the rover, even though Natalie had given him painkillers. The patch wasn’t very effective

because the effective ones also sedated, which Jake couldn’t permit. Painfully he leaned forward to peer through the rover’s mud-spattered windshield.

There was nothing whatsoever to see. Ben had halted under a clump of purple trees. A few feet in front of them, all vegetation stopped. In all directions the plain was as blank as an empty display screen. No life, no remains of previous life. Sterile as a moon.

Incongruously, he thought of Alex’s cat. Katous had gone with him to the hospital cave but had then run away. Undoubtedly the animal had been vaporized along with everything else. Alex had been fond of Katous.

A sue-bird flew through Jake’s field of vision, squawking indignantly.

Stupidly cheered, Jake said, “How far to Mira City?”

Ben glanced at the rover’s display. “Another hundred miles.”

And nothing had annihilated them yet. “Go on.”

Ben drove onto the blankness. And yet, Jake thought, it wasn’t completely blank. Somewhere ahead were caves that had been end points for Mira City’s evacuation. It was from one of those caves that Lucy had taken him. Were people still holed up there, rationing their supplies, waiting for instructions from Alex that were not going to come? End points closest to the city had been reserved for the old, the ill, the helpless. Jake doubted that Julian Martin would be mobilizing those Greenies anytime soon.

Jake suddenly wondered what had happened to Alex’s efficient, perpetually disapproving assistant, Siddalee Brown. He’d always liked Siddalee.

Ben pushed the rover as fast as it would go. They were now exposed visually as well as thermally, perfect targets. Shooting fish in a barrel, Jake thought, on a planet that technically had never had either.

But nothing had annihilated them yet.

Sometime later, Ben again woke him. This time Jake heard tears in the boy’s voice, which Jake tactfully ignored.

“This is where Mira City was, Mr. Holman. Right here.”

Jake inched forward in his seat, and Ben suddenly stopped the rover and slid down the windshield.

Nothing. To Jake’s left the river babbled and sang. The slight hill on the right horizon must be where the mausoleum had stood.

Nothing remained as a hint that a city had stood here—houses, manufacturies, power plant, farm, genetics laboratories, parks, children. Not so much as a sapling.

But Ben’s young eyes were stronger than Jake’s. “Look, Mr. Holman—the groundcover’s starting to come back.” He pointed.

A faint patch of lavender, in a depression where the soil must be wetter. An embryonic swath of Greentrees’ ubiquitous purple groundcover, tough as hide and adaptable as cockroaches. Give the plain two Terran months and it would again be in bloom, home to frebs and… and everything else native.

“Drive toward the iron mine, Ben. Do you know where it was?”

“My mother was a miner,” Ben said, swinging the rover around.