Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (43 page)

“What happened?” she said calmly. “Where’s River Cloud?”

The brave sat in the firelight, looking no different from when he’d left. No blood on him, scarcely any dirt. For the first time, however, she saw one of the Cheyenne look tired.

He said succinctly, “The animal released the spores. Everything metal dissolved. We killed the enemy whites easily. Julian Martin was not there, and River Cloud has gone to find him.” The brave stretched out and fell instantly asleep beside Karim.

Not there. Julian Martin was not there. Gone to find him.

Jon said, “It worked! Martin couldn’t have known we were coming or anything about the spores … it’s just bad luck that he himself was gone before the Cheyenne got there. Do you think he went to find Jake Holman?”

Alex watched herself say evenly, “He wouldn’t know where to look. I couldn’t tell him where Jake and the others went because I didn’t know until you told me. It’s a big continent. I doubt Julian went to search blindly for Jake, and Jake’s too smart to have put out an electronic signal.”

“Then we don’t know where Martin went.”

“My best guess is back to his shuttle-bunker. He doesn’t know it was destroyed.” Or that Alex was no longer in it. Had he gone back to do something more to her?

“Yes,” Jon said. “Well, the Cheyenne will find him. I’m convinced they can find anything.”

Alex gazed at the sleeping brave. She couldn’t remember his name, if she’d ever known it. She reached out to shake him awake.

He sat up before her hand even touched him, knife in hand. Alex stayed very still, awed by his reflexes and unwilling to test them further. The brave said, “What?”

“What’s your name?”

He stared at her coldly, but he answered. “Gray Bird.”

Some instinct told her not to issue a direct order. “Gray Bird, I think Julian Martin may have gone back to the shuttle-bunker where he held me captive.”

“That is where River Cloud seeks him.”

“And I want to ask you something. What happened to the old female wild Fur with the spores?”

Something shifted behind his eyes, which, she now noticed, were a pale watery blue in the flickering firelight. “That animal is dead.”

“Did you kill her? Any of you Cheyenne?”

“No. One of the Terrans shot her before their weapons dissolved.”

“So she didn’t even know her daughters weren’t there.”

He studied her. “She knew.”

Alex didn’t ask why he thought that. She said, because she couldn’t help herself, “We betrayed her. I betrayed her. She thought I was helping her but I didn’t keep the bargain. I used her. Used all five of them and they’re dead.”

“Yes,” Gray Bird said, “we know. That is what white men do.”

Anger flooded Alex.
You’re as white as I am!
She wanted to yell to this blueeyed redheaded fake.
My history is your history, you cannot shed it just because you call yourself Cheyenne and embrace some antiquated tribal life, that will not restore your innocence or spare you history—

It was Julian who had insisted you cannot evade history. Or remain innocent and still survive.

She made no answer to the brave. Instead she let Jon carry out his watch duty and lay down on the opposite side of the fire.

She did not sleep.

Morning dawned spectacularly red, and the haze continued even after sunrise. “Dust from the alpha-beam attack,” Jon said. “We’ll probably see atmospheric effects for a long time.”

Gray Bird moved their camp to the edge of the kill-clean zone. Alex didn’t question him. She trudged behind the brave for hours until they were clear of the forest, and then she stood and blinked.

To her left was a mountain-sized pile of rubble, hazy with dust. The air tasted gritty here, out of the filter of trees. Alex’s eyes watered. The
Crucible’s
alpha beam had shattered acres and acres, starting avalanches of rock and reducing wooded slopes to slag and flinders.

By comparison, the Furs’ annihilation beam was clean and orderly. Where the terrible rubble stopped, the sterile plain began, empty and denuded. But not, Alex saw, completely so. The purple groundcover was starting to grow again in stubbly patches. She even saw the first shoots of what would be a deadly red creeper.

Something moved on the horizon.

Alex glanced at Gray Bird, but he didn’t seem alarmed. He set about building a fire. As the thing on the horizon came closer, Alex saw that it was a herd of some sort. In the kill-clean zone? What were the animals eating? Squinting, she realized that it wasn’t a herd at all; it was a parade.

Then she was running to meet them.

Three of the big herd animals the Cheyenne called “elephants,” although Jake had told her they bore no relation to the Terran mammals of that name. Greenie elephants were placid, stupid herbivores domesticated by the first generation of Cheyenne. They smelled awful; that was their defense against predators. The Cheyenne prided themselves on tolerating the odor.

Two of the lumbering beasts had their armored backs loaded with gear. The third, led by two Cheyenne women, dragged a travois made of branches lashed together on which lay Jake Holman, cushioned with blankets.

“Jake!” Alex cried. “Natalie! Ben!”

They were all there, looking thin, weary, and filthy. Kent, Kueilan, Lucy. Two braves walked silently beside the caravan, which seemed to be made up mostly of women and children. Gray Bird greeted the braves and the three conferred apart from the others.

Alex fell on her knees beside Jake. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he quavered. “You?”

“I—” She couldn’t go on.

“The Cheyenne told us. Everything. It’s over, Alex.”

“Not quite.”

“No,” he agreed, and went into a coughing fit.

The grit in the air. Alex gave orders to have his travois drawn under the trees, where the leaves would filter some of the dust. It turned out the elephants wouldn’t go under trees, so the travois was unhooked and Kent and Jon pulled it. Ben still had a bloody bandage on his head and seemed edgy and nervous. Natalie hung beside him, loving and tactful. Kueilan asked about fires.

“Build cooking fires in the kill-clean zone, apart from the trees; we’ll make a smaller one in here at night for Jake. What do you have to cook?”

“Some things the Cheyenne women gave us, plus a glenning a brave just shot on the way here,” Kueilan said. “They’ve been good about sharing their food. Alex … do you want a … a less skimpy blanket to wear?”

For the first time in days Alex became aware of how she must look. She still wore the “wrap” she had made from the blanket in her prison cell, plus a pair of boots taken from a dead Terran soldier. She had not bathed in … how long? She couldn’t remember. Kueilan must have washed in the river; the girl looked clean, her long black hair in a neat plait, and her Threadmores were as whole and durable as ever.

“I’m fine,” Alex said, idiotically.

“You look like you should sleep.”

“Don’t fuss over me, Kueilan. Fuss over Karim.”

“Lucy’s doing that,” Kueilan said neutrally.

Alex busied herself with food, fires, security, knowing all the while that none of it was necessary. Kueilan was better at creating comfort than she was, and the Cheyenne better at security. Alex went to sit by Jake, but he was asleep. The old man looked frail and papery, as if he could blow away on the freshening wind.

The wind
was
freshening.

The first metal dissolved in midafternoon, just before the rain started. It was Ben’s laser gun. Ben sat, with Natalie close by, on a fallen log at the edge of the tree line, chewing on a hard piece of something the Cheyenne called pemmican, a revolting mixture of dried meat, fat, and wild berries. His laser gun lay beside him. Alex happened to be watching when the metal started to ooze, then dissolved to nothing.

“Hey!” Ben cried, even though he had been told what might be coming.

“It’s starting, Karim,” Lucy said.

“Yes. Greentrees will be … different.”

Which was an understatement if Alex ever heard one.

The spores were self-replicating, Jon had decided, flourishing whenever they had food, going dormant when they did not. “Food” included most metals, including natural metallic ores. The Vines had not known what metals their enemies the Furs could create, and so the Vines had shielded their planet with a spore cloud of voracious, catholic tastes.

The “cloud” on Greentrees would grow slowly but inexorably. Blown by the wind, feeding where it could, it waited to attack any technology based on metal. Laser guns, cooking pots, starships, spoons, computers, solar arrays, hair clips, batteries, comlinks, rovers, rings, manufactury looms, nails, mining equipment— everything Alex had allocated and hoarded and funded and counted and tracked as tray-o was shortly going to pass out of existence.

Greentrees could not loft the spores into space. She lacked a space elevator, a shuttle, even missiles. But the Fur ship still in orbit could not send anything down. The minute a shuttle approached the planet, it would begin to dissolve.

Nor, after the spores had had time for sufficient replication (how much time?), could the Fur ship itself risk assuming a low enough orbit to fire its kill-clean beam.

It probably wouldn’t take the Furs upstairs long to learn that. Their ship, with whatever uninfected Furs were still aboard, would leave orbit. They would have to find another planet to colonize, if they could. Their home planet and who knew how many colony worlds had been infected by the Vines’ diabolical viral weapon, and now Greentrees was infected in a different way. The war here was over. The Furs had lost.

But Alex wasn’t sure exactly who had won.

“Jake wants to see you,” Lucy said.

It was nightfall again. A brisk wind blew, dissolving things. The Cheyenne women, amazingly efficient, had erected an entire tented village on the empty plain just before the kill-clean zone ended and the forest began. Fires burned, children played, food cooked, braves stood watch. The spores would make very little difference to the Cheyenne. They already functioned in the Stone Age.

That was not what Alex had wanted for Mira City.

She walked toward the trees. She still had not slept. Exhaustion hung over her like a smell—like the elephants, like the wild Furs. But rest would not come. Bloodshot in the eyes and wobbly in the knees, she stumbled through the forest to the second camp set up for Jake, sheltered a little from the dust.

Julian Martin stood by the fire.

His hands were bound behind his back and a strip of animal hide around his ankles let him walk but not run or kick. Gray Bird stood on one side of him, River Cloud on the other. A long jagged wound ran from one shoulder down Julian’s arm, bloodying his black uniform. But he stood easily, arrogantly, and smiled when he saw her.

“Hello, Alex.”

Jake sat wrapped in hides and propped against a tree by the fire, Karim and Jon standing beside him. For once, Jon stayed quiet. Karim looked at Alex’s face and then away.

“Alex,” Jake said, “there is something we have to decide. With you. Julian is the last of the Terrans left alive. The Cheyenne … Julian is the last Ashraf is dead. He—”

“How do you know Ashraf is dead?” Alex got the words out somehow.

Julian said, “I told them so.”

Jake continued, “You’re in charge on Greentrees now. In charge
of
what’s left of Mira City’s population, anyway, which I suspect is actually quite a lot, scattered around. You can decide to keep Julian in custody until we build a judicial system again, but I don’t think that’s wise. He will always be dangerous.” Jake paused, swallowed with difficulty—Alex, her vision preternaturally and painfully clear, saw his Adam’s apple move in his withered throat—and said, ’The Cheyenne want him.”

It took a moment for the words to register.

River Cloud said, “He is ours. He armed the wild Furs against us, he and the woman Nan Frayne. The Cheyenne nation agrees to help you learn to survive in harmony with the Great Spirit and from His bounty, but only if you give us this man. He is ours.”

Alex looked at Julian. He smiled easily at her.

He
smiled.