Read Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 Online
Authors: Crucible
THE AVERY MOUNTAINS
K
arim watched Alex stagger along the riverbed until he couldn’t stand it any longer and had to turn away. It should have been him. He had argued that it should be him. But Alex, with Jake drugged, had simply ordered otherwise. She was the leader on Greentrees, in the absence of someone called Ashraf Shanti, whom Karim had never heard of. And Shanti was unavailable: out of com, missing, possibly dead. The scientist in him knew it had to be a woman; the man rebelled.
“I’m doing it,” Alex said, and Lucy had nodded. Lucy! Why? Karim expected Lucy to side with him, and she had not, and before long he was going to find out why. No matter what personal quarrel it injected in the middle of a war.
Alex fell, lurched slowly upward. Karim clenched his fists. Above the bank he heard the rover return with Jake, roaring along fast… too fast. Kent had stayed with Jake when the first group returned to the bank—too many for one trip, Alex had argued, especially with Ben injured. But Karim suspected that she simply wanted Jake away until the disease had begun to affect her and she had started along the river to the wild Furs. Lucy had driven back to pick up Jake and Kent. But why was the rover coming in so fast?
“Get in!” Lucy screamed over the edge of the riverbank. “They’re coming! They know where we are!”
Who?
“Julian Martin! Get in, get in, damn it! They’re not coming from air, they’ve got rovers, they have these coordinates. Get in, everybody!”
Karim scrambled up the bank. His mind raced. If Lucy was right, rovers couldn’t trace them if they kept comlink silence, but they could follow the physical tracks …
Kueilan said, “How do you know?”
“Open comlink from somebody called Siddalee Brown … get in! Get in!”
Who was Siddalee Brown? Whoever she was, she would be dead now if she’d sent an open comlink to Alex Cutler warning her that Julian Martin was on his way to her … How had this Brown person known that Alex wasn’t already dead, as Martin had claimed? None of it made sense.
Kent sat in the backseat, holding Jake’s frail body, leaving as much room as possible. But in a four-person vehicle they were eight, without Alex…
Without Alex.
“We can’t leave Alex!” Kueilan cried, his own cry, but Karim already knew better. If they stayed, and Julian Martin was really on the way, they had no time to wait for Alex, who was probably better off than they were anyway. Julian might not look for her among wild Furs.
“They’ll probably just return me to you,” Alex had argued, before she’d stopped discussing and simply issued orders. “A female is a piece of lost property.”
But no one really knew.
People scrambled into the rover. Natalie, to Karim’s surprise, confronted Lucy. “I can drive along the river—Ben showed me the places to go. It’ll cover the tracks.”
Lucy said, “No, I’m—”
Natalie, twenty pounds heavier, simply shoved Lucy aside and took the wheel. Angry tears shone on Natalie’s cheeks. A small detached part of Karim’s mind registered this, as well as Natalie’s tender glance over her shoulder at the injured
Ben, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage, being cradled on Jon’s lap much as Jake was on Kent’s. Kueilan squeezed between them, half kneeling on the floor. Karim scrambled in beside Lucy in the front, the two of them squashed together on one seat, and Natalie took off down the riverbank into the shallows.
It was a ride so wild that later Karim would wonder how Jake and Ben survived it. But their two nurses cushioned them with Kent’s and Jon’s own bodies. Jon had the worst of it; Ben outweighed him by at least forty pounds.
Natalie drove expertly; she was a natural. The rover hurtled along in the gloom away from the wild Furs, toward the place Ben must have used to hide the rover. Wherever it was, Karim never saw it. When the last of daylight faded, Natalie switched on the rover’s lights but kept them pointed downward, toward the river. They drove over rocks, through pools, through shallow rapids, keeping deep enough so that there would be no tracks. Water sloshed into the rover, then flooded its floor. Could the vehicle keep going this soaked? Evidently it could. Natalie had said there wasn’t much left of the last fuel cell. What if it ran out?
“Jake?” Karim yelled once to Kent over the noise of the rover, the river, and Natalie’s cursing.
“I don’t know,” Kent yelled back.
“I’m … fine,” Jake said, and Karim thought again that whatever else Jake was, he was the bravest man Karim had ever known. Including himself.
I should not have let Alex…
“I’m going up,” Natalie called, and Karim saw that the river had taken them out of the kill-clean zone. Tall tranquil purple trees bordered the banks, silhouetted faintly against the starlight. The rover wrenched itself and then drove, it seemed to Karim, straight upward. Surely it would tip … It didn’t, and they were out. Natalie drove a while longer, then headed into a thick grove of trees and cut the engine.
Silence, shocking as gunfire.
Natalie twisted in her driver’s seat, her hair dripping and wild. “Ben?”
“Passed out,” Jon said from beneath Ben’s bulk. “Probably a good thing.”
Karim said, “Jake?”
Jake croaked, “I’m fine.”
“Let’s get out.”
They climbed, bruised and soaking wet, from the rover. Kueilan, clutching her medkit, grabbed blankets and arranged them on the ground for Jake and Ben. Kent and Jon began gathering armloads of brush to further camouflage both rover and people.
Karim stumbled deeper into the trees, trying to see how much cover they actually had. The forest seemed pretty dense; they were probably safe for the moment. But they had little food, minimal weapons, no plan against Julian Martin. And Alex had been left behind.
Karim picked his way back to the others. Above, branches entwined in a thick canopy. A night bird cried, then fell silent. Greentrees’ night smell surrounded him, sweetly spicy. God, how he’d missed that smell, that bird cry, in that other “forest,” on the sterile Vine world! That hellish alien nightmare world …
Karim suddenly stood completely still among the trees. He knew now what he should have done at the biomass site.
Now that it was too late.
Or
maybe not.
He ran the rest of the short way to the rover, crashing into trees, tripping over roots. Beside the rover a powertorch shone downward, onto Ben’s still figure. By its feeble light Karim grabbed Natalie’s arm.
“Natalie, how much power is left in the rover?
How much?
We have to go back!”
T H E A V E R Y M O U N T A I N S
S
omething was wrong. Alex, weak and still feverish, couldn’t at first find the words for what it was. She opened her eyes, was stabbed by blinding light, closed them again. Slowly she turned her head, which set off cascades of pain inside it. And when she opened her eyes again, she realized that turning her head had been futile. The light was everywhere. It was weak daylight.
She lay on a cot. That was what was wrong.
Cool dank cave walls rose a foot away on either side of the cot. Evidently her cot sat in an alcove inside a cave. A clean blanket covered Alex. She was naked. As she watched, helpless, weaker than she had ever been in her life, a hairy figure passed across her field of vision at the foot of the bed, outside the alcove. It was a Fur.
The odd, distinctive smell came to her a moment later. Furs, all right.
She tried to piece it together. Wild Furs didn’t have cots and clean blankets. A space Fur? But the alien’s pelt had been matted and dirty; she was sure she’d seen that much. And somehow the creature
moved
wild. But then shouldn’t it be sick? She’d breathed on the Furs, the virus was supposed to be so contagious …
Alex strained to remember.
“They’ll probably just return me to you,”
she had argued to Karim, before she’d stopped discussing and simply issued orders.
“A female is a piece of lost property.”
Had that happened? Yes, she thought she remembered being picked up by the wild Fur, carried back along the river toward ihe human camp … then what? She couldn’t remember.
Clenching her teeth, she tried to sit up, but fell back weakly on the cot. It rattled against the stone wall.
She had definitely seen a wild Fur, and now she realized that it had been accompanied by another figure, mostly hidden behind the alien. And the Fur had not looked sick. Either the incubation period was longer than Karim remembered, or else something had gone wrong.
“It’s possible,”
said Jon, the biologist,
“that this group will be immune to the virus. They’re several generations separated from the Fur group the Vines created the virus for, remember. Also on a different world. Viruses mutate and immune systems develop—the whole genetic thing at a microbial level changes amazingly fast. And your Vines on that ship had never actually seen the Furs created on Greentrees. They had only very old samples from the space Furs.”
She waited, unable to do anything else. Even if Jon was right, and the virus had failed to infect the wild Furs, where had they brought her? And why? And how did wild Furs have a human cot and blanket?
She examined the edge of the blanket. Alex was tray-o; she recognized goods produced anywhere in Mira City. This was from the Trimball manufactury, run by New Quakers. Strong, well made, durable, warm.
Now she remembered something else. The wild Fur that she’d briefly glimpsed, the dirty matted alien with the terrifying teeth and third eye on the top of its head—it had been crestless. A female. Now nothing at all made sense. Wild Fur females, the prey of the space Fur gene pool, were always kept away from danger. Not even Nan Frayne, Alex had understood, had been able to talk to a female. Unlike their technologically advanced cousins, wild Fur society was patriarchal and strictly gender divided. What was a female wild Fur doing observing Alex?
Julian Martin walked into the alcove. “Hello, Alex.”
So much emotion swamped her that she thought she might faint. She did not.
“Don’t stare at me with such hatred,” Julian said. “You’re too weak to spare the effort. No, you won’t give your pneumonia, or whatever it is, to me, not even if it’s caused by a Greentrees microbe. I’ve got immune-system genemods your biologists can’t imagine.”
Alex said nothing.
“I wasn’t sure you were alive until I found Siddalee Brown. She’d had a tracer sewed into the Threadmore in your command bunker, did you know that? A new invention of Chu Corporation, infrasonic, nothing my equipment picked up. But she knew where you were, and she told me.”
Bile rose in Alex’s throat. Siddalee would never have told Julian voluntarily; she’d never trusted Julian. The image of Lau-Wah’s tortured body rose in Alex’s mind.
“Not that you’ve been much of a threat to me since the Fur attack,” Julian said. “I expected you to make a broadcast, Alex. You didn’t. That was Jake Holman’s insight, wasn’t it? Where is he?”
So it was Jake that Julian really wanted. Of course. Julian had to fight the space Furs for Greentrees. Jake was the only one who had successfully done that before. Julian wanted Jake’s invaluable assistance. He didn’t know about Karim and Lucy.
“I know that last incapacitating stroke of Holman’s was faked,” Julian said, “so don’t try to pretend otherwise. I talked to that void-brained teenaged girl who helped him to his transport during the evacuation. The one with your cat.”
What faked incapacitating stroke? What teenage girl?
Julian said, “You don’t have a poker face, Alex. You never did. You probably don’t even know what poker is; they don’t seem to play it on Greentrees. Never mind, darling. You just told me you don’t know anything about Holman’s playacting, and you were telling the truth. Do you know where Holman is?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “Don’t… Siddalee … Lau-Wah …”
He moved closer, bent toward her cot to stare at her. His crotch was level with her face. His brilliant green eyes under their thick black lashes glittered scornfully.
“So you’re afraid of torture. You disappoint me, Alex. Although I probably should have expected it of Greenie softness. All right, darling, no torture. I promise you a quick and merciful death if you tell me where Holman is.”
Alex started to cry. Tears falling on the Quaker blanket, too weak to lift her head, she gave him the coordinates of the hospital-cave end point where Jake had been taken during the evacuation.