Tropic of Creation (31 page)

At last Sascha opened her eyes and looked up at Watchful, squinting at the beast, through the slicing pain in her head. Along Watchful’s left haunch a mighty scar gouged out a valley all the way to her foot, and left her with a limp. No less impressive for that, Watchful was a terrible beast, capable of killing her with a swipe of her hand. Yet the creature gave her milk and protection, and to Sascha’s relief, had not resumed her terrible facial contortions.

While Watchful hovered, the triplets climbed over Sascha’s legs, tugging at her clothes and wrinkling their high foreheads. The thought occurred that Watchful Singer had taken her to the nest to give the youngsters hunting practice. The babies were the size of small dogs, perhaps a foot high, with teeth and claws that would have put a hyena to shame. One of them nipped at her pants legs. Reflexively, she jerked away, and the cub pounced on her
shin. Crippled or not, Watchful didn’t hesitate. With a powerful swing of her arm, Watchful swiped the legs out from under the cub, sending it toppling. The youngster ran back to Triplet, who was still producing a caterwauling that drowned out the noises of the woods.

Sascha saw a huge insect perched on the top of the stockade, amid the green, growing tips of the sticks. Black with many appendages, it moved with a familiar slow-motion deliberation.

It was the bot. Beneath Triplet’s screams, she could hear the bot morphing, pointing a tube at the retreating cub.

“Don’t kill the little ones,” Sascha told it. “The Singer is protecting me. You’ll make things worse.” The bot was still taking aim. It wouldn’t obey her, she didn’t know the command language it responded to. But the bots could learn, were programmed to learn, and since it was directed to protect humans, it might not need a fourteen-year-old’s suggestions on how to do it.

Keeping one eye on the metal creature, Watchful offered her shoulder to Sascha, where milk trickled amid the grooves of her skin. With a high-pitched whine, the bot pointed its warning finger at Watchful. It hesitated when Sascha lapped at Watchful’s milk. It was her only source of nourishment, and she was thirsty. Then, exhausted, she lay back down, resting her hand on her lamp, still strapped to her chest, proof of her previous life.

When Sascha woke again the day was bright, even in the canopied nest.

A shaft of sunshine struck a pile of bones lying near her. Opening her eyes fully, Sascha saw a very small human skull. She stared, trying to process this sight, doubting her senses. Much of the flesh was gone from the small body, but on the back of the skull the remains of a tendril
lay withered. Three feet above her, the bot was clinging to the stockade, regarding the body with interest. It slowly climbed down into the nest and approached the bones, examining them with an extruded prod.

Out of nowhere, Watchful erupted. She came charging, sending Sascha into a tight curl of protection. The Singer’s hums soared ever higher, and finally out of hearing range. When the screaming stopped Sascha opened her eyes, seeing Watchful bending over the bot, and the bot bristling, nozzles pointed at the beast. The soft ridge on Watchful’s head fluttered, perhaps trying in vain to smell the bot.

The Singer won the face-off. The bot reversed, sliding away from the bones and back to its perch on the tree wall.

With the crisis passed, Sascha considered what to do with the body. It stank.

She began plucking the large, round leaves from the vines around her. When she had an armful, she carefully laid them out in an overlapping pattern to form a small blanket. Then she lifted the bones and placed them in the center. Watchful hummed her anger.

“I can’t sleep next to bones,” Sascha told her. Then, thinking better of it, she sang the phrase to Watchful, keeping the tones low and soothing. She covered the bones with more leaves, then folded it together, tying it with a fragment of vine. She offered the package to Watchful, who rippled her forehead furiously, but remained immobile.

“I’m going to bury this,” Sascha sang. As she stood up, dizziness overtook her for a moment, and she leaned on Watchful’s thigh. The nest looked skewed and blurry. It had a ragtag population, some large, some small, some mechanical, some flesh. There were humans and ahtra … it was a mix of life, all confused in one place.

When her vision cleared, she made her way along the inside perimeter of the den, looking for a suitable gap in the
braided tree-wall. When she found one, she tucked the package inside. As she crouched there, she could see through the maze of trunks into the surrounding woods. The Gray Spiny Forest had become a vast and shadowy swamp, replete with streams, hanging moss, and giant stands of circular growths, looking like massive stubby trees.
Banyans
, came to mind. Nazim’s Banyans. She peered into the altered world, watching for Nazim, or any human soldier, trying not to conjure up the cruel hope of the sight of her father.

Giant eyes regarded her from the other side.

In her surprise, she fell backward, landing on her rump, and jarring her head with horrible effect.

It was a Singer. Bigger than Watchful. It had pressed its face close to the tree mass, rumbling deep in its throat, making an ugly sound, unlike any sound Watchful had made so far. Sascha stepped away from the hole, but when she passed another gap in the wall, the great eyes were there, waiting for her. The big Singer’s forehead ridge curled dramatically. Its eyes watched her with a decided unfriendliness. She plucked a leaf from the vines and stuffed it into the keyhole, as she thought of it. A needle-claw pierced the leaf, and pulled it through the hole to the other side. She had a bad feeling about this Singer, with its unsettling interest in her. She named it Demon Singer.

Sascha’s stomach clenched in taut pangs. She had to relieve herself, but was not about to put on a show for the spying beast. For privacy she found a thick section of the tree wall, squatting to relieve her bladder, which eased but didn’t erase the ache in her belly.

Nearby, the bot had found a gap in the tree, and was intent on looking through it. From the other side, she heard Demon Singer mimicking the bot’s tiny screams, un-fazed by the array of weapons pointing at it. Then the lethal extrusions retracted. The bot was uncertain about Demon—about all the Singers. Its confusion prompted mouselike screams.

The nest had grown quiet. She turned. The Singers had all gathered around Triplet. As Sascha crept in among them, she saw Triplet lying on her side, humming sweetly. Between her legs lay a birth mass, which she was licking clean.

One swift lick revealed a disturbing feature of the new cub. If it were not impossible, Sascha would have said that amid the glistening birth sack lay a wriggling infant—with a data tendril.

P
inned down by gunfire, Eli lay flat in a shallow trench. It was the sound of an L-31. The shooter had the advantage of having seen Eli, but Eli had not yet seen his assailant. He had called out several times, but it had no effect.

After a quarter of an hour, Eli became convinced it was just one person. He or she was ensconced on a promontory forming a tower at the end of a long saddle jutting from the hills. It formed an excellent vantage point, commanding the entire section of the valley. The way to it held no cover except for a small hill a hundred yards to his left. He sprang up, firing toward the hilltop as he ran, sprinting through an obstacle course of braided ground.

He skidded over the top of the ridge, dropping into a small gully. It was occupied.

A soldier dressed in rags of infantry brown lay flat against the gentle rise, pointing a gun at the high nest where the shooter had dug in. Eli flung himself down beside the soldier out of the hail of fire.

“Sir,” the enlisted said, managing a salute from a prone position.

She had short, colorless hair, sprouting from a skull composed of a puzzle of pieces like tectonic plates. The rest of her skin was mahogany brown.

“Slime alpha can’t shoot worth shit,” she growled.

A few feet away a bot occupied the top of the hill, swiveling a sensor in the direction of the ridge. It was the best sight Eli had seen in weeks.

“Corporal, are you coded for AI?”

“No, sir, but anyway, this one’s on automatic, and its gone dumb as alpha brass.” She twisted her mouth. “Sorry, sir.”

Eli let it lie. “Name?”

“Corporal Badri Nazim, third infantry, Baker Camp.” Then: “Fucking hells,” she growled as a hammering volley pressed them farther into the ground.

They watched as the bot disappeared down the other side of the hill.

“Where’s your unit?” he asked.

Nazim glanced at him, taking in his new clothes, his shaved face. Then she turned away, sighting through her rifle eyepiece again. “I’m it. Baker Camp. I’m all that’s fucking left.”

The words took their good time soaking in. All that’s left. One out of sixty-three. After Charlie Camp he was prepared for grim news, but he kept on, determined to find the ones too mean to die. Now he’d found one. And, apparently, another, up in the bunker. The thought that there might just be the three of them cooled his heart. And if the bot had gone after the shooter, there might soon be one less than that.

“I’ll hear your story, soldier,” Eli said. “Right now, we’re going to follow that bot.”

“That dog kept me alive, I’m not going to take it too well if the asshole up there kills it.”

Eli saw how Nazim would take it, and figured he’d better be on hand to mediate. “Go,” he said, directing her over the top, then following.

They ran, hunched down, but no fire followed them. There was no sign of the bot. Nazim ran alongside the saddle, picking a place to scramble up that wasn’t too steep. Eli took a more direct path, coming up on the opposite side. He topped the rise, ready to fire, but the bot had already arrived and taken a long-nozzled aim at the shooter’s forehead. The shooter was tucked back into a makeshift trench, pointing two guns at the bot, afraid to move his eyes from the multilegged machine.

“Make him stand down,” the soldier whispered, voice hoarse.

“Drop your weapons, Private.”

The soldier—dressed in transport blue—spared Eli a quick glance, then focused back on the bot. “They must’ve took the bots, reprogrammed them. Or why is it trying to kill me?”

“Because you’ve been shooting at your commanding officer, that’s why.”

“No, the valley’s full of pocks and ghouls. They’ve been killing us off, one by one.” He looked up at Eli, licking his lips, eyes staring hard. “Pocks and ghouls. Lemon’s a ghoul now, same as Perez.” He panned his gun in Eli’s direction, squinting. “Maybe you are, too.” He recoiled, visibly. “Yeah, you been dead for weeks!”

“Drop the gun, or the bot will figure out which one of us has rank. And it isn’t you, soldier.”

The private licked his lips. Then he was flying forward, sprawling at Eli’s feet.

Nazim jumped into the trench. “You mucking bastard son of a whore.” She advanced on him, still aiming her gun.

The soldier scrambled to grab on to Eli’s ankles. “She’s one of them, gonna kill me, Captain, then she’ll eat us both.
She’s Baker Camp, they’re all dead, everybody knows Baker Camp never made it through the Sticks!”

“Tie him up, Corporal.”

“Oh, sir, don’t tie me up, the hummers, sir, we need all our guns.” As Nazim bent down, yanking his arms behind his back, he jabbered, “You haven’t seen them, sir, but I’ve seen them, they got us up on the ridge. And the rippers, they’re fast, real fast. Don’t tie me up.” He started to cry.

Nazim muttered in his ear, “Shut the fuck up, or I’ll give you a chance for a regen prick.”

Eli bent over him. “Name?”

“Private William Vecchi. They call me Chi Chi, you remember, sir? We come down on the
Lucia
together, sir, you remember?”

“I remember.” Eli knew this Vecchi, but he was so covered with grime, so bristled with beard, he hadn’t been sure it was the weasel-faced whiner of second platoon. Too mean to die. Eli had the feeling that was going to prove horribly true.

Vecchi’s eyes glittered. “You’ve seen the pocks?” He looked from Eli to Nazim and back again. “You’ve seen them?” A small frown appeared between his eyes. “I’m not voided out, am I, seeing pocks?” He waited, mouth open, panting from the heat.

Nazim nodded at Eli. “There’s pocks, sir. I saw one. It was alone, as far as I could tell.”

Turning his back on them, Eli looked down into the valley. “Yes,” he said. “There are ahtra here.” He turned partway around, eyeing them both. “It doesn’t mean we’re at war. And it doesn’t mean we fire on them.”

Vecchi gaped. “But they’re armed!”

“So are we. Doesn’t mean we’re breaking treaty.”

Nazim said, “What are they doing here, sir?”

Eli gazed out over the valley. “Trying to survive, same as us.”

The view was remarkably like Nefer’s virtual lookout. Not so high, and the terrain below was more open. In the distance he could see a herd of animals bunched between two rivers, hardly moving in the blistering heat.

A shadow passed over the bunker. The bot whined, as one of its firing arms followed the drifting shape.

“Chopper,” Vecchi said. “They drop in for meals.” He giggled. “Drop in!”