Lost In Translation (6 page)

“This concludes my initial statement. Full details of these decrees have already been downloaded to the planetary data bank. Flight Leader, Wing Leader, if you will come aboard my lander, I can answer any questions you have more fully.”

Jarrikk held his breath.
Now,
he thought. Now Kitillikk would answer this ridiculous reptilian. Let those murdering creatures, those humans, back on Kikks' sarr after what they had done, after Hunters had died to drive them off? Trade with humans, with the enemy, after the destruction of Thik'rissik Station and the slaughter on Unindarr?

The history Kitillikk had made him study came back to him. Once before the Commonwealth had decreed the end to a S'sinn war, the war with the Orrisians that had lasted only a few homeworld days before the Orrisians called for help, the war, just a hundred homeworld years ago, that had brought the S'sinn into the Commonwealth. The memory still rankled. It could not be allowed to happen again.

But, somehow, it
was
happening again. Leaving behind Ukkarr, Jarrikk, and the Hunters, Lakkassikk and Kitillikk followed the reptilian and the two Translators into the central ship; and as time passed and nothing else occurred, the crowd surrounding the field dispersed, until, as the day slipped into dusk and at last the commander and Kitillikk emerged, only Jarrikk, Ukkarr, and the Hunters were left. The Hunters stood in silence, facing the equally silent Commonwealth soldiers, in a staring contest that might have been comical if it weren't so deadly serious.

When Kitillikk emerged, Jarrikk saw at once, by the suppressed anger in her stance and the ridge of raised fur on the back of her neck, that she had acquiesced. The rage that had filled him since the slaughter of his friends drove him forward, despite Ukkarr's angry shouts and the sudden movement of Commonwealth beamers being trained on him.

He faced Kitillikk in the gathering dusk, his hot breath forming clouds of white vapor in the chill air. “How could you? How dare you? The humans are murderers, they killed my friends, they
skinned
them—”

Kitillikk's hand lashed out, claws extended, ripping fur and flesh from Jarrikk's upper arm. Shocked into silence, he grabbed the wound with his hand and stared at the Flight Leader as blood oozed between his fingers. “You forget yourself, youngling,” she growled. “We accept the Commonwealth Treaty because we must, because our destruction hangs over our heads. But the humans remain our enemies. Always.”

“You're the youngling whose report started this war, aren't you?” Lakkassikk said in his deep voice. “Be assured, cub, nothing is forgotten. Nothing is forgiven. There will be another day to fight.”

“Words.” Jarrikk felt dizzy from pain and shock, only a little of it from the wound. “Nothing but words.”

“Not words.” The Wing Leader opened his wings and his arms. “A promise.”

“Ukkarr!” Kitillikk shouted. The Hunter came over to them. “Take Jarrikk back to the fortress. Tend his wound, and see that he's fed. I have matters to discuss with Lakkassikk.”

“Yes, Flight Leader,” Ukkarr growled. “Come on, youngling. And be thankful she didn't rip off your ear.”

Jarrikk followed Ukkarr into the dark, metal-ceilinged sky. Kitillikk could punish him for speaking, but she could not control his thoughts. Humans were coming back. The Wing Leader could talk about fighting in the far future,
when his courage returns,
Jarrikk thought. But he would not wait that long.

When the humans returned, Commonwealth Treaty or no, they would find they still had one enemy willing to fight them.

 

Kitillikk flew with Lakkassikk to the entrance to his underground headquarters. Despite herself, she shuddered as they rode an elevator to the lowest level, a hundred spans below. The caves they had dwelled in for so long had been bad enough, but to deliberately bury yourself beneath the ground, to cut yourself off from the sky—it was not the S'sinn way. It should not be necessary.

But, of course, it was; the humans had made it so. The inner depths of her own fortress, of every building in the city, were no better, though at least she had some rooms open to the winds. “How well do your Hunters adjust to this place?” Kitillikk asked as at last the elevator stopped and thick steel doors slid open to admit them into a featureless gray corridor.

“Well enough,” Lakkassikk growled. “Those few who fail join the Flightless in oblivion.”

Kitillikk nodded approvingly. “Their deaths do you honor.”

“Thank you.” He stopped before a door barely visible in the gray wall. “Open.”

“Wing Leader Lakkassikk identified,” a male voice replied, and the door swung inward. At Lakkassikk's gesture, Kitillikk entered the sparsely furnished quarters beyond; two shikks and a computer terminal seemed its sole adornments. To her right, an arch led into a waste elimination cubicle; directly opposite, another arch led into a grooming room; and to her left, a third arch opened into a small kitchen.

“Close,” Lakkassikk said to the door, and as it complied, motioned Kitillikk to one of the shikks. “Re freshment?”

“Silverwine, if you have it.”

“I do—direct from S'sinndikk.” He went into the kitchen, and after a few minutes of clinking of flasks and goblets, emerged with two glasses of a thick liquid that glistened like mercury under the harsh white overhead lights. He gave one to Kitillikk, then held his up in a toast. “Death to the humans.”

“Death to the humans,” Kitillikk agreed, and tipped back her head to let the heavy wine course down her throat, filling her belly with fire and bringing blood pounding to her ears.

Lakkassikk took a deep breath and arranged himself on the other shikk. “You accept my toast,” he said. “I take it then the matter you wish to discuss with me is our response to this outrageous intervention by the Commonwealth.”

“You take it correctly.” Kitillikk drained her goblet and set it aside. “This cannot stand.”

“Yet we cannot fight the Commonwealth. Their technology is overwhelming.”

“Give us time, Lakkassikk.” Kitillikk looked around the room. Lakkassikk willingly lived here, like a criminal, to serve the cause of furthering S'sinn policy. That bespoke admirable loyalty. She already knew him to be an able commander; he had led several raids on human colonies himself, before his promotion to Wing Leader, by its very nature a more ground-bound rank in the military, though not in the ancient hierarchy of the S'sinn. Such a one must chafe at the restrictions binding him: restrictions strengthened by the Commonwealth's intervention. Such a one was ripe to recruit to a new cause.

“Time for what?” he finally replied, breaking her long silence. “Time for the humans to return to this world, foul the air with their cursed flyers and groundcars, cut down our forests? What good is time?”

“You said yourself we cannot fight the Commonwealth. But what if the Commonwealth were to fight itself? There are many strains, many stresses. There are long-buried hurts and fresh new offenses. Race can be played against race. When the time is right, the humans will provide us with some new insult, some new outrage, and the Commonwealth will crack like a rotten branch. Then we will take our revenge: on the humans, and on the Commonwealth. Then only the strongest will survive—and the strongest will be S'sinn!” Kitillikk waited for Lakkassikk's response. If she had judged her S'sinn aright . . .

“If this can be done,” he breathed at last, “then we must do it, though it take years!”

“So it will,” Kitillikk said solemnly, while inwardly cracking her wings with glee. “Before we can even begin, we must enlist allies—powerful allies. The Supreme Flight Leader . . .”

“She will never agree!” Lakkassikk protested. “She has detested this war from the beginning, though she's fought it well enough. She will be glad the Commonwealth has ended it.”

“Then she will be glad when the Commonwealth grinds us underfoot!”

“Flight Leader!”

“I'm sorry.” Kitillikk put just the right amount of contrition in her voice. “I mean no disrespect. Nevertheless, it will be a challenge to all of us to help the Supreme Flight Leader see the dangers of the course she pursues. As I was about to say, we need powerful allies to accomplish that. I have those I can contact within the traditional hierarchy, but within the military . . .”

Lakkassikk's ears pricked. “I can help there. I know many military Wing and Flight Leaders who will help. They will find this intervention in our affairs as intolerable as I do.”

“Then select a few, those you consider most trustworthy and most useful to us. Approach them discreetly. I will do the same within the traditional hierarchy. We will arrange a meeting—somewhere out of the way, and quiet. And thus we will make the first few wingbeats of a long journey.”

“My honor is yours, Flight Leader!” Lakkassikk bowed and spread his wings loosely before her.

Kitillikk's blood pounded in her ears again, but not from the silverwine. She had indeed begun a long journey—but longer and far more daring than even Lakkassikk knew, for at its end lay the Great Hall of the Flock: and, clasped around her neck, the Bloodfire Collar of the Supreme Flight Leader.

She slid from the shikk, pulled Lakkassikk to his feet, and pulled him to her, fur to fur, her wings wrapped around his folded ones. “Let us seal our pact, Wing Leader,” she breathed into his ear. “Fly with me.”

His breath came hard and fast. “It's so far to the surface . . .”

Kitillikk laughed. The military mind was so unimaginative. “There are other ways to fly, Lakkassikk,” she said, and proceeded to prove it.

 

Only three days after the Commonwealth decree, the humans returned. Their ships appeared in orbit, their shuttles descended, and garrisons and guard posts and arms depots went up all along the river that marked the border, matching those the S'sinn had established in anticipation of the humans' return. What the Commonwealth thought of those warlike preparations Jarrikk didn't know, or care. The border was not far from the city, because of the Commonwealth's insistence that the humans be granted the place where their original colony had stood: where, Jarrikk hoped, they had found the unburied skeletons of their original colonists still lying among the burned remnants of their tents and buildings. Across the river's deep gorge, S'sinn and humans glared at each other with mutual hatred.

Among the S'sinn was Jarrikk, in defiance of Kitillikk's direct orders. He didn't care. He despised her for her submissive response to the Commonwealth decree; he only continued his daily visits to her fortress because of Ukkarr's training, training he now wanted more than ever so he could fight the humans as soon as possible. The rest of his time he spent at the border. After being chased off a couple of times by Hunters from the nearest S'sinn garrison, he found a hidden place on the rim of the gorge from which he could watch a human guard post, and for days now he had been returning there to watch them build their ugly buildings, to listen to their harsh shouts—and to dream of flaying the skin from their still-living bodies.

Kitillikk's orders to stay away from the humans had come shortly after he had first started watching them, when he had made the mistake of telling her. “The time will come,” she said. “But not for years. Concentrate on preparing for your coming-of-age. Concentrate on becoming the best Hunter you can be. Then, when we strike back at the humans at last, you will be ready.”

He said nothing, but he kept going back to the river gorge. By the treaty, the humans could not cross that gorge; if they did, they were fair game. That was what he awaited.

And then one day, as Jarrikk sat on his rocky ledge in the sun and enjoyed the warmth as much as he allowed himself to enjoy anything anymore, he heard the sound of one of the humans' incredibly noisy motors starting up. Then a second motor roared to life, and two brightly colored objects rolled out of one of the guard post's buildings, one blue, one red. Jarrikk focused prey-sight on one of them, but that didn't help much: he still had no idea what it was—until a human climbed into the ungainly harness hung beneath the huge triangle of blue fabric, and the whirling thing on its tail spun even faster, and the whole contraption lifted into the air, followed a moment later by the other.

Jarrikk gaped at them. So these were the artificial wings he'd only heard rumors of before! And then he laughed. If you could call them wings. Powering through the air, pushing aside thermals and ignoring eddies, no grace, no beauty . . .

Unbidden, the memory of his dead brothers rose up, of Kakkchiss riding the air so perfectly in control, slipping aside at the last possible instant as Jarrikk dove on him, and his bitter amusement gave way to a fury and grief that threatened to choke him. The pain of it nestled between his hearts like a knife blade driven to kill. These monsters, these
humans,
dared to foul the air with their choking exhausts and their stiff, unnatural wings, when they had torn from the sky the likes of Kakkchiss?

The Commonwealth and Kitillikk could go to flightless hell:
this could not be borne!

And with that thought Jarrikk leaped into the sky and rose up over the gorge, high above the humans' crude machines, puttering around in circles far below; and from five hundred lengths above them, he focused his prey-sight on the metal spine of the lead craft, and with a shriek of defiance and rage, folded his wings and dove.

In the few seconds of his descent, he heard humans from the outpost shouting a warning to the circling aircraft, but not even Kakkchiss could have avoided that dive; at the last instant, almost too late, Jarrikk's wings snapped open. He crashed heavily and painfully into the bright blue fabric of the wing, but he was strong, and young, and angry, and he drove upward again with huge rent streamers of cloth in his claws, while below him the wing, its spine broken, crumpled and dropped, tumbling its squalling rider into the thundering white water below.