Tropic of Creation (5 page)

“To hell and back
,” he whispered. His own voice was a startling, almost a tangible thing in this quiet world, and made him feel vulnerable for the first time.

He came to a side tunnel. A profound smell of mustiness hit his nostrils. Playing out the tether, he turned down this branch. In the beam of the lamp around him, Eli noticed that, at the base of the walls, there were long ropes of soil. Kneeling, he picked up a tubelike section, fingering its dust as it spilled through his fingers.

He came to an enlargement of the corridor. As he swung his lamp he saw that he was in a large cavern with curious walls. The closest section contained nooks perhaps three feet wide, filled with tightly rolled material. He moved forward to touch it, judging it to be cloth from the threads that dangled from frayed edges. Pulling on one roll to dislodge it, an entire section of cloth separated, releasing a thin stream of sand from the center. He took a better grip and pulled again, this time removing the entire roll, which finally dropped out of the nook onto the floor, raising a small eruption of dust. Then it was a simple matter to kick open the roll. As it unwound, the cloth split in protest. Eli stared at the contents.

Bones. Human bones. No, surely ahtra bones. It was a burial chamber. The nooks contained hundreds of bodies. Eli looked back down at the bones he’d dislodged. If ahtran, the skull should show the junction of the data tendril. As he knelt down for a closer view, a sound came to his conscious mind, a noise he’d been hearing for the last seconds that he’d thought came from his own ears. Someone was approaching, running.

He stood, dousing his light and withdrawing to the wall. He could feel a burial roll pressing against his neck.
In another moment, light burst into the cavern and two ahtra appeared. Eli had time to notice their full armament, their guns drawn, before they spied him. His own gun was pointing at them and they hesitated. One of them spoke and brought his hand up in a slicing motion. If there were only two Eli might bring them down, but his situation was ambiguous. He appeared to be grave robbing, or at least desecrating. To them he was an intruder.

Besides, it was peacetime. He wouldn’t be the first to fire.

He slowly lowered his gun.

The two ahtra advanced, circling him and herding him away from the burial cloth and its contents. As he stepped backward, Eli came in view of the corridor down which he’d come. Ten or fifteen ahtra stood there, holding greenish-yellow lights, casting their gray faces in a ghoulish light.

The first ahtra—whether male or female, he couldn’t tell—spoke again, in that deep register characteristic of the species, their language unintelligible. Eli held his hands up, palms out, in a gesture even the ahtra knew.

He was surprised when the blow came, the butt end of the gun crashing across his temple. He sprawled backward from the force of it, felt the breath erupt from his lungs. As he fell, his last thought was
Ought to make a hell of a scar…

King’s pawn four, came the opening gambit.

Badri Nazim made a conventional opening, clearing the way for her queen to swoop out on one of its killing missions.

Sascha countered with king’s pawn seven and the game was under way: nineteen-year-old corporal and veteran of the Great War against fourteen-year-old heir apparent to the Olander fortune. Nazim saw their chess games as a war of the proletariat against the entrenched monarchy.
But at another level, Nazim was utterly indifferent to the politics of status. To Sascha’s delight, she just wanted to beat Sascha’s pants off.

On the split screen, Sascha saw both chessboard and Nazim’s tent, shared with her five buddies. It was a view that might at any time include varying states of undress, blistering language, and an easy—but to Sascha’s mind, highly codified—six-way banter.

Nazim was fingering her unlit cigarette, flipping it over and under the digits of her left hand. Moving another pawn, she flicked her eyes at the screen. “Heard from him yet?”

“No.” It had been five hours, and they hadn’t heard from Captain Dammond. “It’s still early,” Sascha said. Hoped.

One of the enlisteds came up behind Nazim, putting his hand on her shoulder, apparently watching the chess game. He was smoking a cigarette.

“That was smart, figuring those fuckers for digging machines,” Nazim allowed.

Sascha hadn’t heard Nazim say either good or bad about Captain Dammond, so the compliment warmed her.

“Yeah, probably was,” Sascha responded, practicing the laconic style of Nazim’s world, a world where a man could put his arm around your shoulders and it didn’t mean anything. Unless it did … The private’s index finger was moving along the inside of Nazim’s collar. All of which Nazim ignored, but easy, smiling a little. It was wonderful to be so easy around men. Noncommittal, friendly, but holding your own. Sascha committed the style of it to memory, but feared it wouldn’t do in any social situation she could imagine. In her world, one must always have something to
say
. Preferably witty, or at least intelligent. Or knowingly gossipy. One didn’t sit mute while a man stuck his finger under your collar.

Nazim moved her queen’s pawn to a vulnerable d-4
position, which forced Sascha to decide between taking a pawn or continuing her attack on Nazim’s rook.

“Well, son of a bitch,” Sascha said, admiring the move. Nazim often thumbed her nose at chess theory; her approach could be summed up as
whatever works
.

Sascha made her decision—she took the pawn—so she could concentrate on the other half of the screen where the maneuvers were even more interesting.

From a cot in the back came the comment, “Marzano’s all the captain we need,” making it clear where the loyalties lay.

Nazim held her expression and her companion smirked. The game went on: chess, and finger in collar.

Sascha wouldn’t win an argument in this venue, didn’t want it to come between her and Nazim. Especially not tonight, when she’d hoped the captain would have been back, reporting on a moldering cache of weapons, long forgotten by the ahtra … or with a bloody but superficial wound, having taken on a bunker of thirty aliens.

Tonight she didn’t want to hear the barracks’ side of things, the stories of the alpha captain, the coward captain. She’d no heart to hear him vilified, his wrong background, attending the wrong schools—his hasty field promotions in the wake of the fifty million dead. She’d heard it all before—and deflected it all with cool disdain. She knew jealousy when she saw it. Eli Dammond was a self-made man whose humble background might never earn him a colonel’s bars, but who loved the infantry, the command of troops. It was said that, given a new company, he knew every enlisted’s name within a week and where they hailed from. With his prodigious memory, he could recite the RSC, Revised Starship Code, from front to back. Thus even the story of the
Recompense
made not the slightest wobble in her conviction that he was unjustly despised.

Nor would she hear of it tonight, of all nights.

Nazim was looking at her with a raised eyebrow, no more than a white scar arching over her eye. Sascha’s mind had been wandering. How had Nazim threatened both the pawn and rook in one move?

“One of ‘em’s dog meat, Olander.” Nazim could smell blood, and Sascha sat forward, concentrating.

As Sascha sorted through her moves, Nazim casually reached up and tugged on her companion’s shirt, bringing him down to her level, kissing him full on the mouth. To Sascha’s astonishment, when she released him, she exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke in a long, sinuous spurt. Sascha tried not to stare, but her concentration was blown.

It was purely the most elegant and sensual thing that Sascha had ever seen, both for its outrageousness and its casual execution. Already, as though it hadn’t even mattered, the enlisted with the lit cigarette was moving away, talking with someone else. Unconscious of, or taking for granted, Nazim’s playful and artistic act.

Sascha was deeply envious. It was an odd feeling, having consistently been the object of jealousy, to so desperately want a thing someone else had. She wasn’t even sure what it was that Nazim had, that she wanted. Maybe it was a particular grace, in a woman whom Sascha’s mother would judge to have none at all. Or perhaps it had to do with freedom, with ways of being a woman that had never occurred to her, or with being superbly suited to the place you chose. Again, the word came to mind:
grace
.

“Your move, Olander,” Nazim said.

Sascha was three pieces down, but she hardly cared. “I am outmatched,” she murmured, and Nazim smiled, taking the compliment as her due.

D
eep in the flow of data, Maret Din Kharon became aware of a disturbance. Something was pushing on her body. This would be highly discourteous in the public data lobe where she had gated in. Reluctantly she disengaged from her devotions.

Vod Ceb Rilvinn stood at her side, nudging her shoulder. His gritty digger clothes were noted with sidelong glances by those nearby.

“Maret-as, attend me!” he said, careful not to touch her again.

“I am here, Vod-as.” In truth, she was struggling to return. She released the data plug, and curled the tendril to her neck. “What is it?”

“Nefer Ton Enkar. She calls for you, but you haven’t heard a thing; you’ve been wasting yourself with kin wagers.” His expression conveyed what he thought of her devotions.

Maret’s skin prickled at the mention of Nefer. “She calls me? When?”

“Now! For the past span and more.” His agitation drove him to his feet again, tugging at her.

If Nefer was calling her so urgently that even the diggers knew, then she was very late. More debits against her. Nefer would rejoice.

Vod hurried her along with a discreet touch at her left elbow, urging her past others who found this little side way conducive to their data needs. No one would interrupt here—unless it was Nefer Most Prime herself.

Vod fumbled at the portal to the nearest travel chute, opening it wide for her. He had paled in his emotional distress, causing his markings to recede. Vod was ever too emotional, but his concern was sweet.

“Vod-as, why hurry me to my detractor?”

“So she won’t debit you beyond recovery.”

“I am ever in her debt.”

“She’ll ruin you,” he growled. His eyes held hers in a gaze that would be rude had they not been friends so long.

“Nefer needs me.” She was Nefer’s Chief Data Illuminator. It was not a trivial position.

“Then don’t keep her waiting.” He slammed the hatch behind her.

“Nefer Ton Enkar,” she vocalized, and the sled shot away, an approved transit from Nefer herself, no doubt, and a luxury of mixed benefit that Maret had come to associate with excruciating audiences with her static mistress.

Eli fought his way back to consciousness. Through blurry vision he saw a small room without ornament or furniture other than the pallet on which he lay. But it was less a room than a smoothly carved space, walls meeting ceiling in an uninterrupted line. He was bound firmly, lying on his side.

An ahtra kneeled before him. He or she wore loose
long pants and a cropped shirt, cut from a richly patterned material in brown and red. From his one previous encounter with ahtra civilians, he recognized the typical garment pattern of squares within squares. Males and females dAressed alike, he knew, but by the drape of the shirt he guessed this individual was a female. The face, hands, and forearms were covered with the faint circular markings for which humans gave ahtra the sobriquet
pocks
. This individual bore a large oval pattern precisely between the eyes.

Eli spoke. “I am Captain Eli Dammond, of Congress World Sixth Transport Division. I meant no harm, coming here.” If they hadn’t heard the war was over, he hoped they’d take the news well.

The ahtra gave no indication of having understood him. Eli noted the thick data tendril that curled from the left side of the back of the bald skull. It was folded tightly against the head, reaching almost to the neck.

The ahtra leaned in closely, staring at him, eyes profoundly dark blue, the whites no more than a halo around the extended iris. A nictitating membrane closed up from below as it blinked. Its graceful lips parted to reveal small white teeth and an expression that might have been a begrudging smile or a heartfelt sneer.

They left him alone then, tightly bound, ignoring his calls of protest. When they finally came for him and summoned him to his feet, it was a relief to move.

They led him out of the cell, and down a brightly lit corridor with a ceiling just a little too low to look proper. He was taller than his guards, a full head taller, but it wasn’t a great advantage when they were armed and he wasn’t. Passages diverged frequently from the corridor they followed, revealing a bewildering array of tunnels and stairwells. All were covered in a slightly irregular, rubbery-looking material. He took pains to remember this route, trying to maintain his orientation to his entry point.
Though he’d been stunned or drugged, he thought he had been conveyed some distance from the burial chamber on a mechanized transport.