Shade's Children (18 page)

Despite Shade’s assurances that it was unnecessary, they kept a watch through the night. Two hours each, starting with Drum, ending with Ella, with Ninde and Gold-Eye in between.

Ninde woke Gold-Eye early, halfway through her own watch, putting her hand lightly on his mouth before shaking his shoulder.

He woke groggily, sitting up to a dark room lit by the red glow of the radiator and the glint of the rat robot’s eyes. There was no sign of the glowing spider robot that housed Shade.

Ninde’s hand traveled slowly across Gold-Eye’s mouth, then delicately traced the tendon in his neck till it came to rest just inside his T-shirt, cool against his collarbone.

“Ninde?” squeaked Gold-Eye. “What—”

“Shhhh…” breathed Ninde. She slid her hand around to the back of his neck. Feeling the smooth skin below the trace of stubble on his cheeks with her other hand, she grabbed Gold-Eye’s arm and put it around her waist, careful of his splinted fingers. Then she bent forward and brushed her lips gently against his.

Gold-Eye swallowed, suddenly dry-mouthed, and instinctively moved his arm more tightly around her. She moved close against him, and he slowly subsided back onto his blankets—with Ninde on top.

“Should be watching,” Gold-Eye whispered halfheartedly as she kissed his forehead and eyes. Then, “Shade?” questioningly as she slowly unzipped his coveralls and pushed up his T-shirt to run her hands up his ribs.

Then he didn’t ask any more questions, and they were somehow under his blankets and not on top of them, and he felt the aching, desperate desire to do more than just explore each other’s bodies with fingers and mouths and skin against skin.

But both were products of Shade’s “Sex Education I” and “II”—and they didn’t have a condom. Or three. Both knew pregnancy was quite possible from the first time—and both knew it would mean terrible danger and almost certain capture for a woman who was pregnant. They knew it, but still Ninde had to remind Gold-Eye of that fact more than once, and herself, too.

So finally they just lay together and whispered, slowly drawing their clothes back on in an effort to suppress desire.

Across from them, not ten feet away, Ella lay awake, listening, hoping they’d be sensible. She remembered her first sexual experiences, in the year or so she’d been in the Lottery. Before she realized that sex only made her closer to people, made it easier to love them, made it so much harder to bear when they were lost—and then Drum had come along and it had seemed unfair…. She hoped he was asleep, oblivious to what Ninde and Gold-Eye obviously believed were well-muffled sighs and groans. But she knew he wasn’t.

Half an hour before her watch began, she made a show of waking up, twitching and muttering for several minutes before acting out a sudden awakening, as if from a bad dream.

“Anything happen?” she asked a nervous Gold-Eye as she did up her equipment belt and slipped her sword back in the scabbard.

“No-nothing,” stuttered Gold-Eye, scuttling back to his blankets, nearly tripping over Ninde, who had already returned to her own makeshift bed.

“Good,” whispered Ella, half smiling. She waited for Gold-Eye to settle, then began her watch.

At six she woke everyone, judging it to be morning, though no sunlight showed this far down the tunnel. Shade still wasn’t back from wherever he’d gone, so after a good breakfast they sorted through the stores, packing backpacks with spare clothes, food, and other useful items. Ella emptied the explosives box onto the floor, but there was too much to fit in their already bulging packs.

She was working out what to take when Shade returned. Water ran from the crystal spider body as it clicked slowly up the steps.

“Bad news, that water,” said Shade. If he’d been human, Gold-Eye would have sworn he was tired. “No wonder the creatures avoid it. Very little Projector power. Had to use auxiliary electric batteries. Most frustrating. Wouldn’t want to do that again in a hurry.”

“I thought we’d probably go out straightaway,” said Ella, putting down a couple of sticks of the plastic explosive.

“Yes…yes…no time like the present,” declared Shade. “The sooner it’s done…the sooner…well, I am sure everyone looks forward to final victory.”

“Good,” said Ella, returning to the explosives laid out on the floor. “We’ll just finish packing….”

“Don’t worry about that stuff,” said Shade, moving toward her. “One of my robots can carry that box. That’s how it got here in the first place. Look.”

One of the normal-sized robots twitched as he spoke, extending its legs till it stood up. Then it quickly crossed to the empty box. Balancing with its front and back pairs of legs, it used the other four to set the box squarely on its rounded back. Something clanked inside its body, and the box was fixed in place.

“Electromagnet,” said Shade with satisfaction. “It won’t come off till I tell it to. Just load up, my dear, and I’ll go over my projected route.”

He laughed for no apparent reason, and a laser beam shot out from his underbelly. Familiar motes of light swarmed around it in preparation for a hologram—this time a map of the city and surrounding territory.

“Projected route,” chuckled Shade. “Rather good, don’t you think?”

Nobody laughed, but this didn’t alter Shade’s obviously good mood. Using another laser as a pointer, he outlined the route they would take from the tunnel to Mount Silverstone.

“From here we’ll follow the Eastern Line railway to Central Station, but not through the tunnels here and here—they’re full of Ferrets, so we’ll go up. From Central we simply follow the Great Western Line out, crossing the Williams River via the railway bridge. Then we’ll leave the railway to take the Old Highway up through the hills here, and so on to Vanson. From Vanson we’ll climb up the Crookback Range using the service road under the chair lift and so on to Mount Silverstone, at the northwestern end of the range. If all goes well, I estimate it will take us about a week to walk it. Any questions?”

“Do you know anything about what the Overlords do west of the Dormitories?” asked Ella.

“Nothing, I think,” said Shade. “There are Winger patrols looking for escapees, but I don’t think they fight battles over anything beyond the Williams River Raceway. Not that my rat eyes have seen, anyway.”

“And we trust these new Deceptors to keep us safe from creatures all the way?” asked Drum, touching the wires around his head. “There’s no shelter from Wingers outside the city.”

“I assure you they work perfectly,” said Shade, clicking his forelegs against the floor with some impatience. “The only place they won’t work is where there is no Projector power at all. The middle of a big lake, perhaps, or a long way underground.”

“How high is mountain?” asked Gold-Eye, looking at the hologram. The topography of the map was displayed in different colors, building up a three-dimensional effect. Both the Crookback Range and Mount Silverstone looked awfully big.

“Not that high,” remarked Shade dismissively. “Six thousand feet or so. People used to walk up there often before the Change.”

“It will be cold,” said Ella, frowning. “What season is it, anyway? I can never remember, with the way they keep changing the weather.”

“Mid-autumn,” replied Shade, moving backward and forward with impatience. “You’ll be able to find winter clothes in Vanson, before we climb up. Now, if there are no more questions, we really must get a move on.”

“I do have one more question,” said Drum, arresting a general movement toward the steps. “Where did you go last night?”

“Hhhhmmphh!” coughed Shade. “That’s really none of your concern, Drum. However, I wanted to tap into the Overlords’ communications, which is not possible with all this water here—so I had to go outside.”

“And did you learn anything?” asked Ninde, thinking back to her fleeting contact with Black Banner’s mind.

“Nothing of importance,” muttered Shade. “I am still unfamiliar with their technology—I must take care not to be tracked. So nothing of importance. No. Now we really must be getting on. Every day lost means another hundred children used up in the Meat Factory, taken apart for the Overlords’ foul purposes—so we must hurry!”

Legs cascading all too like a hurrying spider, he left, followed by a procession of smaller spider robots. Much too like a wolf spider and its young. The rat robots went down the other steps, plunged into the water, and paddled away.

When they were all gone, Drum bent over and whispered very softly in Ella’s ear.

“How could he know that the Meat Factory chews up a hundred children a day?”

Three days after meeting Shade in the Eastern Line tunnel, they had left the city proper behind and were looking down on the Williams River. The train line stretched ahead of and behind them, surrounded by a sea of houses on both sides.

The river marked the boundary of this suburban ocean. The railway bridge crossed over the wide blue ribbon to green pastures, once the preserve of hobby farmers and the early retired, now still dotted with genuine farmhouses and large and mostly tasteless rural retreats. All empty now.

They had made a strange procession through the city, led by Shade in his spider-robot form. (He had constantly departed from their course to look into buildings or duck off down lanes. Rediscovering old memories, he claimed, moving like a sun surrounded by the lesser celestial bodies of all his subsidiary spider and rat robots.)

Fortunately the new Deceptors did work as Shade had promised, though their constant vibration never stopped being annoying.

It was a comforting vibration only when they encountered unseeing Myrmidon patrols and sense-blind Trackers or walked freely on the roads and railway tracks with oblivious Wingers flying overhead.

Only once were they threatened by an Overlord flying over on its giant Winger. But Shade seemed to know it was coming, or one of his robots spotted it early, so they had plenty of time to get under cover.

Now Ella was eyeing the Williams River railway bridge and thinking about that Overlord. A narrow railway bridge was not a good place to be caught by a low-flying Overlord armed with the sort of weapon that could burn a hole through a submarine.

They’d be on the bridge for at least fifteen minutes, she reckoned, unless they ran. It was easily half a mile long, traversing both the river and a good part of the high rocky banks on either side. Only four railway tracks wide, it was also at least two hundred feet above the water or the rocks.

A long freight train—half-empty ore carriers and half-boarded cattle cars—took up one of the four tracks.

“We should wait till dark,” Ella said, looking up at the clear sky. “We’re too close to the Dormitories here. An Overlord could easily fly over.”

“There’s no need to wait,” declared Shade. “I can track the Overlords via their communications system. There are none nearby at the moment—none close enough to fly here before we cross. Besides, we could always hide in the train.”

“I suppose so,” muttered Ella, thinking. “But I still would prefer to wait…. Drum, what do you think?”

Drum looked at the bridge and shrugged. He’d gone back to being largely silent again, particularly in the presence of Shade.

“Gold-Eye. Any visions?” asked Ella, snapping his attention away from Ninde. He’d been like that for days—both of them had been. Holding hands when they thought no one could see, stealing kisses at night. Ella had forestalled further exploration, though, by rearranging the watches. Even with the Deceptors and the robots, Ella wanted a human awake and actively watching. Not engaged in other activities.

“Nothing,” replied Gold-Eye, shaking his head. As he did, he realized he had a headache, and his Deceptor seemed to be vibrating more than it usually did.

“Okay,” said Ella. “See if you can pick up anything down there anyway, Ninde.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Shade smoothly. “My rat robots have already crossed the bridge. There are no creatures on it.”

“Can’t hurt for Ninde to check it out,” said Ella. She knew Shade didn’t like Ninde using her Talent near him in case she read his thoughts. “Can it?”

“Sure,” said Ninde. She put her knuckle in her mouth and started to chew—but at the same time, the Deceptor on her head vibrated wildly and starting getting hot.

“Ow!” she exclaimed, hand darting up to touch the Deceptor crown. “This thing is vibrating like crazy…. Oh…it’s stopped….”

“Odd,” muttered Shade, spider body stepping up close to Ninde, one anemone-ending limb reaching up to touch her head. She flinched, and the limb drew back.

“I shall have to revisit the design again,” said Shade. “I thought I had managed to make them subtle enough for you to use your Change Talents.”

“It wasn’t a problem yesterday,” protested Ninde. “It didn’t vibrate or anything when I listened to those Wingers.”

“An intermittent fault then,” said Shade. “The worst kind. I shall have to look at it tonight. But now that we have finally come to our bridge, I suggest we waste no time in crossing it.”

“Okay,” said Ella, after some hesitation, running over her objections in her mind. If Shade could warn them of an Overlord flyover, the crossing should be safe. Even if there were creatures the rat robots had missed, the Deceptors would fool them….

They were halfway across the bridge when Gold-Eye suddenly stopped, clapped his hands to his head, and stood absolutely rigid, swaying on his feet. Ninde almost ran into him. Then, recognizing that he was probably having a vision, she held him up. Drum drew his sword, expecting attack. Ella, standing next to him, looked at the sky, half expecting that Gold-Eye was seeing the imminent visitation of a Winger-borne Overlord.

But Gold-Eye was seeing something worse, the vision coming intermittently across the barrier of his malfunctioning Deceptor. He could see Myrmidons stepping down from the cattle cars, hundreds of Myrmidons swarming from every part of the train to block both ends of the bridge. Myrmidons bellowing battle cries, Myrmidon Masters shouting orders…

He came out of the soon-to-be-now hearing the harsh roar of Battlespeech—and kept on hearing it in the happening-right-now.

There were Myrmidons pouring out of the train. Black-armored Myrmidons with great axes and net guns, leaping out shoulder to shoulder with red-armored Myrmidons waving swords and capture sticks.

At the same time Gold-Eye realized that the vibration on his head had stopped. The Deceptor was no longer working. In that same fearful second, he saw Ella and Drum touch their heads and knew that theirs weren’t working either. Then Ninde, still holding him up from behind, screamed, “My Deceptor…Gol—”

Whatever she was going to say never came out. It was cut off by the popping of multiple net guns and the sudden impact of the sticky web, throwing her down on the concrete ties with Gold-Eye stuck to her in a hopeless mix of tangled plastic shrouds.

Ella saw them go down, in time so constrained it was like a slow-motion nightmare. She saw the mass of charging Myrmidons readying their net guns. Worse, she saw Shade’s spider-robot form standing untouched. Two Myrmidon Masters—one of Black Banner’s and one of Red Diamond’s—stood by his side. Deferentially, as they would stand next to an Overlord. They would be oblivious, of course, if his Deceptor was on. But it wasn’t.

Ella knew then that Shade had betrayed his Children. The realization hit her even as she dodged a spray of silver net webs and her hands fumbled the cold steel of the grenade from her pouch. Her fingers wrenched the pin away, arm and eye acting in perfect coordination to pitch the grenade to a spot exactly halfway between her and Drum and the sticky, writhing mass that contained Gold-Eye and Ninde.

The lever flew off with a zing, arcing away like a glittering arrow as the dark-green egg landed and bounced. Ella watched it bounce once…twice…and then closed her eyes. At least none of them would be taken to the Meat Factory, to become nothing more than fretful dreams of lost identity in the back of some creature’s mutilated mind.

But when the shock came, it was not from an explosion. Ella’s eyes flashed open to gather in a confused image of the side of the bridge and spinning blue sky, coupled somehow with Drum’s enormous arms. Then her stomach flipped, and she saw the underside of the bridge.

Drum had thrown both of them over the side. Down into the river, two hundred feet below. Much too high a fall to survive…

Unable to help herself, Ella screamed, a scream punctuated by the sharp crack of the grenade going off somewhere high above them.