Tropic of Creation (42 page)

Vod’s hands felt cold, sculpted from ice. He knew now that he had misjudged dreadfully, misjudged everything. She was indeed ready. “No ships will leave, Nefer-as,” he said, bravely enough.

As his gun leveled toward her, she said, “We will see
what the dwellers choose. Your guards will bear witness to what they will see.” She gestured into the narrow corridor, and when none of her captors moved, she calmly turned and walked into it.

Vod followed her, gun drawn, his escort close behind.

They emerged onto a high balcony overlooking a great bay: the foundry. Its vastness was deserted, empty of the machinery and skeleton ships. A breeze wafted through the cavern, rippling their clothes. Vod’s skin cooled in dismay.

Directly across, in a tunnel so long it disappeared into blackness, the warships were lined up, one behind the other. The foremost ship sat like a ghost, its metal sides reflecting no light, its body hiding the secrets of distance and stars and domination. They could have the galaxy. Humans were no obstacle once ahtra were truly and finally geared for war. If there were twenty-three such ships as this one, human surrender would soon supplant armistice.

In the next moment a sustained cracking sound filled the cavern. Clouds of dust scuttled along the floor far below them. Then the floor of the foundry collapsed. Howling vents kicked in to suck up the maelstrom of dirt. Through a scrim of dust, Vod saw a gaping hole in the floor.

Then he understood why they must dig out the floor, for ships to leave Down World. He slowly raised his head to the overarching ceiling. Above them was the riddled soil of tunnels dug too close together, tunnels meant to collapse.

Nefer noted his gaze. “Yes. A digger by trade, aren’t you?”

“You can stop this, Nefer-as. You will die when the first ship leaves.”

She turned to the dwellers jammed into the balcony, saying: “There is a human warship approaching Home World. The humans will avenge their dead comrades, certainly.
Even now, they could fire weapons—world-destroying weapons, erasing our germlines.”

Behind him, Vod could hear his soldiers reacting in horror to this news. One muttered, “You said nothing of a human fighting ship, Vod-as.”

Vod fought back. “A convenient lie, this ship. Like the
safe
tunnels.”

“No, so regrettably true, Skilled Digger.” Nefer gestured toward a data screen on the balcony. An image assembled of a ship, a human warship, or at least a non-ahtran ship.

“Our long-range sensors tend to report all that approaches.” The view narrowed in on the armament ports. “It is of a class of weaponry sufficient to wreak satisfactory havoc.”

“Such a Skilled Liar,” Vod exhorted to his guards. But their eyes were all on the ship.

She went on. “We go to meet this threat. For your Extreme Prime, you dwellers may choose a tested war leader from the HumanWar, or a tested digger from the tunnels. I am susceptible to your wishes.”

In another instant a ringing crack pierced the air. A puff of dust shot along a network of lines in the ceiling. The cavern rang with an ear-wrenching blast, and another. The ceiling began to fall. And all the world above it. Great chunks of rock and clay cascaded into the waiting declivity in the floor. Then the whole chamber ignited for a moment, as dust fired to life, and receded. An avalanche of dirt and rock fell amid thunder, billowing up onto the overlook where they stood.

Someone was pulling Vod backward. He had clamped onto Nefer’s cape, yanking her back with him.

As they fell back through the passageway, dust poured after them, as well as the clattering sounds of the last of the rock debris.

There in the narrow rock passage, Vod stood with Nefer’s empty cape in his hands.

He hesitated only a moment before summoning his wits, his counterstrike. “To the foundry, lads—stop them from launching. Stop them.…” He led the way, shouting his orders, hoping that they followed.

Back through the passageway, and then onto the balcony. Nefer was gone.

Calling for rope, he and the nearest Whites secured their lines and dropped over the sides, rushing into the dust-filled cavern.

In the smoke of the ruined foundry, Vod groped his way over the avalanche of rocks and soil toward the great tunnel of ships. His battle cries sounded thin and small compared to the amplified, bodiless voice of Nefer, repeating:
“The humans come to destroy us. Even now, they approach … to destroy us.…”

He didn’t believe her. Why, after all the lies, would anyone believe Nefer Ton Enkar?

He clambered over the mighty fallen rocks, his hands bloodied, side by side with a few White stalwarts, rushing to block the ships’ maiden flight. Dust choked his vision. He pushed on, shouting for others to follow, hoping that they did.

The warship loomed over him. In the haze he saw a cluster of Red, armed and braced for the attack. Cries of fighting erupted from points in the cavern behind him, but now he faced off in silence with a cadre of Nefer’s supporters.

He was alone. In the white-out of dust, he stood on a chunk of the fallen ceiling, staring at some twenty dwellers who thought him a traitor.

“Nefer is wrong,” he called to them. It was not the profound thing he might have hoped to utter.

They stared at him.

“That ship isn’t coming to attack us,” he went on.

A dweller stepped forward. “Nefer says they will kill us.”

“J say she is wrong.” He wasn’t sure what provenance
his own word had, but he would have to test it now. “
I
say she is a liar. The same liar who told us to dig those tunnels, who sent us to die there.” He looked overhead, and felt the shock of daylight on his face. “The same liar who planned a war and played at peace.”

“Then why is the ship coming?” someone shouted, and many added their supporting shouts.

Vod drew himself up. He made his best guess, gambling that he was right. “It comes for its missing crew,” he said, and suddenly
believed
it. “For their lost kin. Let them have their dead. And go home.”

He was aware of several White standing nearby, and others of his band moving up to join him from the rubble of the cavern. But this couldn’t be a contest of force. In the long haul, it would never be enough.

Vod threw down his weapon, and made his way forward over the debris, to the waiting Red. Their ranks opened and he walked into their midst. He moved among them, saying their names—those he knew—exchanging a comment here or there.

“Let them have their dead,” someone said. And then others. The air cleared, revealing the ruins of the foundry and the quiescent warships in their long bay. Behind him, Vod heard his own followers cast aside their weapons. Then Red and White were milling together.

“And you, Vod-as,” one of the Red asked, “what will you have?”

Vod looked him square in the face and said, “Bring me Nefer.”

J
ust after dawn it began to rain. The tall grasses lay over, yielding to the rain, affording Eli and Maret what might have been a good range of view had it not been for the hugging white fog. They walked with weapons drawn, straining to hear any threat as the staccato drone of rain ate all other sounds.

Hours later, they were still pushing through rain and ankle-deep mud, putting feet down softly, careful not to wake the burrowing habsen.

They came upon another hexadron, the second since their departure from the ship. Once again, as he had with the first hexadron, Eli said, “Go back, Maret.”
Go down, down to safety
. It would have done his heart good to see her safely tucked in and descending.

Maret kept walking. “There will be more carriers, one is certain.”

“One is a fool,” Eli muttered. She was determined to accompany him. They had argued it in his cabin, and the resolution was no different now. She would keep her
promise to help his people, despite his insistence she had already fulfilled it.

“You risked your life to come to the ship and tell me.”

“It was little.”

“It was enough. I release you from your promise.”

“You cannot go up a downway, Eli. The promise remains. Besides, here you are a babe in the river. We must help each other.”

“A babe in the
woods.”

“That, too.”

He bit his tongue. The truth was, he didn’t want Maret’s help. This task was his to do. Without troops, without more deaths … Sometimes he thought a rescue ship might come and a full search-party would go out for Sascha; but he didn’t hope for it; hoped the opposite, if the truth were told. He would do this on his own.

“I am sorry that my company displeases you, Eli.”

He turned to her, wiping the rain from his eyes. “Damn it to everlasting hell, Maret!”

Her lids covered all but the top fraction of her eyes, as though she narrowed them in anger. But she watched him impassively.

“Your company doesn’t displease me. Your place is below, that’s all, and mine is up here, getting my people home.”

She looked away, as much as to say,
It’s a little late for that.…
She nodded, scanning the mist behind him. “You have a desire to die the good death.”

He grabbed her arm, making her look at him. “And you have a desire for progeny, to replace the line we killed in the goddamn war that will start all over again unless you get down there and stop those ships!”

He slowly released her. She hadn’t even jumped. Either she was that much in control, or she had learned not to fear him. He felt himself flush hot despite the dousing rain. “I’m sorry.”

“I will go, Eli. After we find your Sascha. First things will tend toward first.”

They pressed on. Lights flickered now and again in the curdled air, signal fires of photophoric animals, some with poison, some pretending poison.

By mid-morning they passed another hexadron. Eli refrained from comment.

At first they thought it was thunder. Distant booms sounded, muffled, erupting from behind the jagged hills. No lightning followed. And again, concussive blasts, deep-bellied, despite distance, rain, and fog.

Eli and Maret stood on the hilltop bunkers, where three days ago—God, had it only been three?—he and Nazim had released flares, hoping for troops to rally to him, hoping for something simple, like survivors. Now that seemed such an innocent hope. Small, by current standards.

“That was not thunder.” Maret looked at Eli for confirmation.

“No, I think not. She had to dig the ships out of their tunnels. To blast away the lid.” He sat on the floor of the bunker, unutterably weary. Raindrops indented the soft mud, forming a regular and meaningless pattern of divots. He listened for the roar of warships, but then they heard thunder in earnest and were left none the wiser.

Maret crouched down beside him, holding a flare casing in her hand, examining it. At last she said, “Sascha is not here, Eli.”

He looked into Maret’s eyes. She was clear-eyed, still focused on the mission, though now it was only for the sake of one small girl.

He hadn’t really thought to find Sascha here. It was only a remote possibility that Sascha would have seen the flares, much less come this far on her own. But they were in the business of remote possibilities.

Maret stood, hiking her mav up on her shoulder.

He joined her on the lip of the bunker and, with another glance toward the serrated hills, they began threading their way down the steep slope, in the direction of Charlie Camp, in case Sascha went to the only place she knew.

They walked into the old settlement, the place that had been Charlie Camp, now a green and soggy ruin. Each time Eli returned to this place it lost a little more of its human component. Last time it had been deserted, stinking and torn, sagging into the rain. Now, washed daily with the colors of Null, it was half a swamp. Here and there, broken tents elbowed up from the shallow water like great webbed feet. Some tents remained intact, on slightly higher ground. Light poles still rimmed the outpost, the only thing left with a proper military bearing. As for the dead, the bones had washed away, been dragged away, sunk into the mud. The smells were now of clean mud and rotting foliage, and fruit gone past its prime.

Thunder broke out nearby. Eli knew the Sticks were close, obscured by quavering mist. Lightning inflamed the swamp waters for an instant. Then the water went gray again, hammered flat by raindrops.

Maret looked at him. “We are lucky to have come so far, Eli. Nothing challenged us the whole way. The season is ending.”

She meant to cheer him. He put his hand on her shoulder, wordlessly.

“One will check the remaining tents,” she said. He nodded, and they struck out separately to search the place.

So quiet. In the background, the silken rustle of moving water, the crackle of rain.

Photophores played among the dead branches of the
swamp, winking on and off. One remained a steady glow. Eli approached it.

There, behind an abandoned generator, the source of the light lay on the ground. An oddly fashioned lamp. Affixed to two long straps.

And it was turned on. Shining into the fog.

Eli knelt down, resting his rifle on the ground. He picked up the lamp. It shook in his hands, as though trembling with the effort to stay lit. Vecchi had said Sascha wore a lamp strapped onto her chest. Its light flooded out in a strong beam, probing the white void. Drawing a ragged breath, he stood, spraying the light in a new direction.