Part 31 (1/2)
”No-no they won't.”
Wren pulled at Nitpicker's sleeve. ”They're coming around. We've got to go. If they loose a parbeam
cannon on this landing pad, we'll be flash-fried like oil on the sun.”
”Wait!” Tsia clutched Doetzier's arms. ”What did you mean, they won't stand trial?”
”We sabotaged the life support,” Nitpicker snapped. ”They can't go skyside. They won't have cabin
pressure. They won't have air. They won't have enough temperature to keep from turning to instant ice. They won't even be able to regulate the pressure flows for their internal systems. If they go up, they'll blow apart like thin gla.s.s.”
Tsia stared at her in horror.
”It's done! It's done. You can't change it. Now move!”
Wren thrust her toward the far side of the landing pad. The other meres were already running. Away
from the huts; away from the freepick structures. Toward the gray-green forest, where the trees danced
like demons in the wind, and the shadows looked like shrouds.
Like a slow-moving hand, the skimmer turned in the air. A rounded snout protruded from its nose.
Seeking, it turned and tilted till it pointed along the landing pad, following the steps of the meres. Tsia
could almost feel Shjams's hand on the conn. And when it fired, the crack of the beam was like thunder. The air seemed to split. The metaplas surface of the landing pad melted instantly into a soft, black, bubbling pool. Fire leaped up. The metaplas burned. Acrid smoke warred with rain. As if the beam lifted their feet, Striker, then Bowdie dove into the trees. Doetzier was a second behind.
The parbeam flashed out again. The forest crackled, bursting into a column of brown-black smoke. Nitpicker and Wren dove away into the brush. Tsia took a running step, and half turned to look back. The third blast caught her like that, on the edge of the tarmac, between the fire in the air and the flash of the forest, in a rush of heat and ash.
Her body flew through leaves and twigs, then crashed like a log through the shrubs. Her arms were crossed over her head, and they were the only thing that protected her from smas.h.i.+ng her face against the boulder on which she finally landed. She lay for an instant, stunned, her body one ma.s.sive scream, with the air blasted out of her lungs. She didn't feel the bruised ribs. She didn't notice the blood that ran down her arm and dripped from her hand like syrup. There was only the growing heat that clogged her nose with breathlessness. The fire-she could feel it, growing and sucking her air. Her throat tightened; her smoke membranes closed.
Slowly, as if in a dream, she pulled herself to her feet. The world was a turning image, and her ears did not seem to hear the shout that came from away to her left.
The skimmer still shuddered over the landing pad-she could feel its subsonic whine in her bones. But it was beginning to rise even as she staggered away from the fire that had followed her to the trees. She stepped in flame and barely noticed. The creeping blaze was slow and it sputtered in the rain. Like a zombie, she stumbled back toward the landing pad. She didn't have to call the sweat to her skin. It ran down her face and neck, soaking her body further and burning into her blood. She fell to her knees and nearly choked on the branch that cut across her neck. She snarled like the cats who fled the crisping forest, but she crawled on to the landing pad.
She fell on the smooth, hard edge, and stared blindly up at the sky. The catspeak that snarled in her head made her roll over finally and stagger to her feet. To her knees. To her feet again. A furred shoulder shoved its way under her hand. Her fingers clenched. Ruka hissed.
Above, the skimmer faded in the sky, its sonic hum rising in her bones. She could not control the s.h.i.+vers that shook her. She could not open her gate wider past Ruka, past the cats, to feel a thread of her sister. There was no echo in her gate of Shjams's presence; no final touch through the node.
”It's the way of family, is it not?” Nitpicker's voice was quiet as a grave beside her, and somehow cut through her deafness like a metal scream that shatters a silent night. Nitpicker did not look at Tsia's face; her shuttered eyes were glued to the sky. ”When she tried to kill you,” she said softly, ”she destroyed herself instead.”
Tsia stared at the sky. She felt nothing. It was as if her disbelief had warred with her grief until all that was left was a void in which she could no longer think. Her breath seemed to catch in her lungs and freeze so that her chill spread from the inside out.
When the spark came, it was tiny. It flashed in the clouds like a pinpoint strike of lightning. Tiny, and growing orange-red against the gray, rus.h.i.+ng sky, the spark became a flame. The flame became a fire. And a tiny sun fell from the sky.
Like Lucifer, whose wings burned as he plummeted, the skimmer twisted and turned, falling to the east. A meteor, whose heart was human, and whose skin as alien as the stars... A comet that struck the plain on the other side of the forest like a spear that sinks into mud. A fall of char and ash like snow. Red rain. Ash rain. A black cataract above the gray, flooded Plain of Tears.
Epilogue.
Tsia sank to her knees. Not in my death, she had shouted to Shjams. But it was her sister who had died. And now there was nothing but gray storm winds clouding the sky. Nothing but gray-washed tarmac, and streaks of black slagged metaplas where the landing pad had been. And nothing in her heart but a numbness, which spread like shock through her limbs. She pressed her hands to her chest. She could barely breathe for the weight of her own body. The b.u.m in Ruka's paw-it seared her thoughts. Her throat, with its swollen ring of bruises, felt like a collar that tightened and choked off her air. She cried out inarticulately, and it was Striker, not Wren, who touched her. She clung to the woman's arm for a moment, lost in the smoke, while the forest burned in the rain.
Doetzier stared to the east, where the sparks fell in a silent, burning rainbow. ”Gone. All of it-gone.”
Bowdie followed his gaze. ”At least the chips burned with the s.h.i.+p,” he said flatly. ”No one will be able to use them.”
”Billions of credit destroyed,” Doetzier said to himself, as if he did not hear the other man. ”Thousands of man-hours in tracking blackjack from Denes to Interference to Risthmus. And it's wasted. Just like that. Not a shred of evidence. Not a single zek to stand trial. Not a single hard link to the Ixia. An operation eight years in the making, and all of it for nothing. No biochips. No blackjack.”
Tsia opened her eyes and stared at his face. His cheeks were taut, and the hollows under his eyes seemed suddenly p.r.o.nounced. His biofield was steady now, without the sparks of light, and his expression flatter than she had seen before, as if exhaustion had somehow stolen the definition from his features. She tried to speak, then looked away. Her voice was hoa.r.s.e with the snarl of Ruka's mind.
Over her shoulder, two silver shapes dropped out ,of the sky and seemed to hang for a moment over the tarmac. A third s.h.i.+p appeared in the east, over the Plain of Tears. The subsonic hum of the s.h.i.+eld s.h.i.+ps vibrated in Tsia's bones. Ruka hissed from the forest, and she called him to her. The meres parted.
Bowdie's eyes looked from Tsia to the cub, then back to Tsia's taut face. Before them, the skimmers began to settle down on the flight deck.
Doetzier cursed again. Tsia followed the snips with her eyes. ”There is one zek,” she said. ”Decker.”
Watching his backup s.h.i.+ps arrive, Doetzier turned his head. He eyed her for a moment. ”Alive?” he demanded, his voice suddenly sharp.
”Was. On the other side of the landing pad. He needs a scame if you want him to live long enough to testify. He had a shaper stuck to his face.”
He glanced sharply at her face. ”And Kurvan?”
Her face was blank of expression, but her eyes burned like fire in the rain. Her fingers dug into Ruka's fur.
”Dead,” he answered for her. ”What did you use?” he said, his voice suddenly harsh. ”Your bare hands or your flexor?”
”Cougar took him out. Not me.”
Doetzier stared at her for a moment. She could smell his disbelief. One of the skimmer hatches opened. s.h.i.+elds began to drop out and sprint across the tarmac in twos, and a large group ran toward the meres. ”And the alien?” Doetzier said. ''The Ixia at the s.h.i.+p? Why didn't you stop it from going aboard?”
”Flexor didn't work anymore.”
Nitpicker looked at her suddenly. ”A flexor only breaks if its biochips are fried,” she said slowly. ”It was your weapon, not mine which didn't work, and we traded before we reached the stake-you had mine on the tarmac.”
Bowdie shook his head. ”I saw her give the biochip case back to the blackjack on the landing pad. Her weapon didn't work-they threw her flexor away. I didn't mistake that.”