Survival Page 38

  It? Mac didn’t see anything happening, beyond the Ro’s assault. Brymn’s more sensitive hearing must have given him advance warning, for the terrace abruptly began to tremble in earnest, the vibrations continuing until portions of the rail began to spring loose and drop away, landing with a clatter on the terrace below.

  Brymn might have sounded fatalistic, but he moved as quickly as Mac could wish to pull them both close to the shelter of the wall.

  The trembling went on and on, enough to put Mac’s teeth on edge and drive her heart to pounding so hard she thought it could be heard outside her chest. Except that Haven was making noise of its own.

  The planet was screaming.

  Mac covered her ears, but the sound drove past flesh and bone, threatening her sanity. Just when she started screaming herself, it changed to a dull grinding from every direction at once. She closed her mouth and dropped her hands, looking out on the unbelievable.

  Lines drew themselves in the city below, some crossing the angry sore that was the Ro attack. The lines deepened as Mac watched, ripping wider and wider. All of them at once.

  The destruction caused by the Ro was nothing to this. Buildings toppled into newly formed valleys, roadways were torn apart, and still the lines widened as far as Mac could see.

  “What’s happening?”

  Brymn didn’t hear, or he didn’t know.

  Then, Mac no longer needed to be told. She could see for herself. The planet was breaking apart. Her mind’s eye flashed to the tunnels, the massive doors she’d compared to air locks. What if they had been exactly that? What if the Progenitors had rebuilt this world so it couldn’t be a trap for them?

  Being on the surface was a very bad idea, Mac decided.

  “We have to get below,” Mac shouted at Brymn. “Maybe there’s a door still open!” Standing was like riding a skim through a gale. Mac braced herself and pulled at the Dhryn. “We have to try!”

  “We do not matter. That which is Dhryn will survive,” he said, lowering his big head. “The Progenitors have always been ready.”

  “To run again?” Mac found herself trying to shake him, as if her muscles could shift Dhryn immobility when the entire planet couldn’t. “The Ro will follow. We can’t let—”

  The universe winked.

  “The Ro will follow. We can’t—” Mac stopped. “I’ve said that before . . . I just said that—”

  “Mac. Mac. Look!” She turned as Brymn stared past her, two arms pointing.

  The fire-rimmed hole caused by the Ro was no longer empty. Now, it contained a towering splinter of bronze and light, shaped like no ship or machine Mac had ever seen before. More splinters, smaller yet identical, hung in the air above it. More, smaller still, above those.

  And breaking through the clouds were ships Mac did recognize. “Those are Human!” she yelled at Brymn, jumping up and down. “Human!”

  The Human ships headed straight for the Ro, weapons firing. Mac was no expert, but the combination of percussions and lightninglike arcs looked deadly as they landed among the motionless Ro. She waited for the splinter-ships to fall from the sky, or blow up, or . . . do anything but what they did do . . .

  . . . which was to rise into the sky, large and small combining into one blinding mass, then disappear.

  “The Ro—in retreat?” Brymn sounded astonished.

  Mac was almost tossed to her knees by another, more powerful tremor. The Human ships hunting the Ro were flying over a landscape being torn apart along multiple fault lines. “Is there any way for the Progenitors to stop splitting the planet?” she demanded. “Is this reversible?”

  “I do not know such things, Mac.”

  “Next time—” she staggered and grabbed Brymn for support, “—next time I’m stuck on a dying alien world, remind me to make sure it’s with an engineer, not a damn archaeologist!”

  A faint but courageous hoot. “I’ll do my best, Mac.”

  Settling down together, side by side, Mac and Brymn looked out over the end of a world. In the distance, entire portions of the planet were already lifting free, shedding their thin cover of civilization to reveal the thickened forms of the ships beneath before vanishing into the clouds. Wind was howling around the remains. Mac wondered what the Humans thought of it all. They’d come to vanquish the Ro and, instead of triumph, were watching the planet they’d successfully defended destroy itself, its inhabitants so many refugees fleeing what should have been victory.

  “Someone’s coming for us, Mac. There.”

  Had too many hopes failed? Mac wondered when she could feel nothing but numb at this news. She glanced up anyway. Brymn wasn’t wrong. One of the Human ships had released a handful of skims, now heading in their direction through the rain.

  Self-preservation took over from hope. Mac rose to her feet on the cracking terrace, pulling Brymn with her. She started to wave, then dropped her arm. They’d never see her.

  It didn’t seem to matter. The skims continued straight on course toward them. How? The bioamplifier! “Nik?” she whispered, tasting the rain and soot on her lips, feeling life surging through her entire being. “Nik!”

  Mac drew in a deeper breath, when from behind and above she heard:

  Scurry . . . spit! Pop!

  23

  DESTINATION AND DISCLOSURE

  TIME SAT on a shelf.

  Rolled off.

  Landed at her feet.

  Turned into a shiny salmon and wriggled its way into the floor.

  “Okay, now I know I’m crazy.”

  She heard the words but stretched so thin she could see eternity between each syllable.

  When was she?

  Breathing. That was the sound. Deep breathing, so deep it was more a moan than exhalation. A moan so full of pain she hurt to listen.

  It wasn’t her.

  Who was she?

  “Don’t open your eyes.”

  Mac opened her eyes on light, fractured and moving, filled with shapes formed in impossible dimensions. She promptly threw up.

  “I warned you.” A pressure on her now closed eyes, hot then cold, wet then dry. Hot/wet, cold/dry. Mac rolled her head, trying to be rid of the confusion.

  “Give it time, Mac. You’ve got sensory overload on top of the sub-teach.”

  Mac? The voice thinned and thickened, deepened and raised, but the name caught her attention. She was Mac. If she was Mac, where was . . . “Brymn?”

  “He’s here. Don’t ask me why.”

  Mac grappled with consciousness, feeling it slipping away again, knowing herself close to an answer.

  Where was she?

  Brymn. The moaning had to be Brymn. Mac groped in the dark, fingers catching on cloth—a blanket?—then on a hard coldness—rock? Her eyes fought the dark even as she remembered legs, feet, and a body, even as she somehow contorted all of those to rise to her . . . knees. Hands and knees.

  Good enough.

  The moaning had direction, if no consistency of volume or tone. Mac stayed as she was to follow it, moving her left hand forward on the hard, rough coldness, then the right, bringing forward her left knee, then her right, all motions small and cautious. Just because she was blind, didn’t mean others were.

  Time remained slippery and unpredictable. Mac couldn’t tell if she’d crawled for seconds or hours before her outstretched fingers touched something. Warm, rubbery. She sagged with relief. “Brymn,” she whispered. A moan answered. She sat, freeing both hands to explore what she’d found.

  One touched flame!

  With a cry, Mac fell back, but her hand stayed in the fire. No matter how hard she pulled, it wouldn’t come free. The flesh was searing off—the bone would be next—it would take her arm—

  “I should have known you wouldn’t stay in bed, Mac.”

  Light blinded her as the fire went out in her hand. Whimpering, Mac cradled her injured fingers to her chest, only to find they were no longer burning. She touched them with her other hand, amazed to find them whole, as if noth
ing had happened.

  The light was more normal this time. Mac blinked over and over again, trying to make sense of the images moving in her field of view.

  “You’ll see soon enough. Go back to bed and stay there.” The voice was as distorted as the images; as distorted as time itself. Mac let herself be guided to an area of rock that felt the same as the rest, then lay down while the blanket was replaced.

  Under it all, the moaning.

  Time found its teeth at last, ripping apart illusion.

  “Emily!” Mac shouted, sitting bolt upright as she knew the voice.

  “Here.”

  Here . . . ? Mac squinted against what still seemed too bright a light. She brought her legs underneath, but didn’t try to stand. “I can’t see you.”

  “How’s this?” The light dimmed, cut by a piece of familiar fabric held as an umbrella. A Dhryn shroud.

  Mac focused first on the figure blocking the light. The stylish black jumpsuit was coated in pale dust and cut down the left sleeve, the edges of the cut ragged and frayed as if the damage had occurred weeks ago. The face was older, worn to the bone.

  But the raised eyebrow and challenging look was pure Emily Mamani.

  Mac had her priorities. “Where’s Brymn?”

  “Behind you.”

  They were outside, in some rough sort of camp on bare rock. That much Mac gathered as she looked around for Brymn. When she saw him, she scrambled to her feet with outrage. “Take those off! Take those off now!”

  The Dhryn had been wrapped, once more, in the painful threads of the Ro. Mac curled the fingers of her hand, reliving the burning pain. No wonder Brymn moaned with every breath.

  “Not my call, Mac.”

  Mac took a step closer to Emily, moving so the sunlight wasn’t in her eyes. “Then whose is it?”

  “The Survivors.” Emily tossed the shroud material to one side.

  “The Dhryn are your damned Survivors!”

  That challenging look. “Are they?”

  It was so—normal—of Emily to force Mac to rethink her position on a subject that she actually paused. Then Mac shook her head in disgust. “If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise, either give me what you used to free my hand from that stuff, or get out of my way while I look for it.”

  Not that there were very many hiding places. The camp, such as it was, consisted of two large dirty-white bags, some sheets of shroud material—one of which had been Mac’s blanket—and a fist-sized portable heating unit. Their surroundings were even less hospitable: an overbright sun, dry air with a bite of morning chill to it, and dull gray rock that formed a cuplike shelter around three sides.

  Except it wasn’t rock, not all of it. Mac’s eyes narrowed as they traced what might be the line of a wall, the remains of a doorway, perhaps a window. Farther away, what appeared to be the ruins of other buildings rose in the distance, giving the horizon a jagged edge. She’d seen that lack of perpendicular before.

  “I take it this is somewhere in the Chasm,” Mac said, refusing to be impressed—or terrified. A lower moan than the rest brought her attention back to Brymn. “I’ll ask why here later. Right now?” She made her hands into fists. “Help him.”

  “And have this two against one? Do you take me for a fool?”

  “I took you for a friend.”

  The word hung between them until Emily’s lips tightened. Without grace, she reached into a pouch on her belt and drew out a tiny vial she tossed to Mac. “Use this on the nodes—where the threads cross.” She brought out a weapon. “If he makes one move I don’t like, he dies.”

  Vial in hand, Mac paused to look back at Emily. “Like Nik?”

  “The bureaucrat?” Emily frowned. “He’s dead?”

  “You should know!” Mac snapped. “You were the one who shot him!” She believed she’d seen every expression possible on that face. Now she watched puzzlement flash across it, followed by stunned comprehension.

  “I remember now. You’d think you’d never forget something like that,” Emily said in a strange voice. “But the trans-ships mess with the brain—the humanoid brain, at any rate. I’m sure you noticed. Takes days, sometimes, to sort it all out. Some stuff is just . . . gone. Takes getting used to, Mac, believe me.” A pause. Emily opened her mouth, inhaled a sharp, deep breath then let it out slowly. “I do remember. Shooting our Nikolai, that is. Didn’t know who he was at first, but it didn’t matter. I was making the wrong move, Mac. I knew it even as I called out to you. I thought I should get you out of it—I couldn’t handle it anymore. But everything was in motion, the players onstage. It was too late to stop. Wrong. I shouldn’t have tried.”

  “You aren’t making any sense!” Mac cried.

  “The idea was to make everyone believe you were in danger, convince everyone you were important to the Dhryn. That way, they’d offer you their very best protection. The protection they only give their own. But you’ve figured that out.”

  Mac pushed the words aside with an angry gesture. “You killed him, Emily.”

  Emily raised her eyebrows, something closer to sanity in her eyes. “Didn’t. He wasn’t dead—not from that, anyway. Sore, maybe. Mad as hell, likely. Not that you’d care, right?”

  Emily knew her face, too. Before it could betray her, Mac turned back to Brymn, blinking fiercely in order to see what she was doing. Bad enough her relief was making the ground as unsteady as the death throes of the Dhryn world. All this, including shooting Nik, so she could blithely lead the way to the hiding place of the Progenitors?

  Forgive me, Mac . . .

  Mac had never experienced anger like this, anger that waited deep inside her like a mountain lion ready to leap from ambush, nerves aquiver and muscles locked.

  The vial had a closed slit along its length. Mac took a guess and aimed the slit at the nearest “node,” squeezing the vial from both ends. It didn’t spray out a substance, as she’d anticipated, but instead released a narrow beam of greenish light. The thread reacted to this as it had to Nik’s weapon, shriveling away from that contact in both directions. It was the work of seconds to free Brymn.

  He stopped moaning, but remained still, eyes closed. “How long was he bound?” Mac asked, running her hands over his skin and relieved to find no areas of oozing or obvious damage.

  “Two hours,” Emily answered. “Maybe three. We came straight here, but you didn’t take the trip well.”

  Straight here? What did that imply about the Ro? Mac shook her head to dismiss what didn’t matter at the moment. She eased the positions of two of the Dhryn’s arms, then sat beside him on the rock. Or rather dust. The dullness of their surroundings was due to it, a fine powder that filled in crevices and pillowed corners. She glanced down at herself. Her brilliant Dhryn colors had picked up a layer already, especially on the knees. “Why did you bring us here?” she asked coldly, finally looking at Emily. “Wasn’t my work for you done?”

  Emily did contrite better than anyone. She tried it only as long as it took for Mac to stare her down. “Two reasons,” she said then, sitting on the bags and stretching out her long legs. Despite this show of relaxation, Mac noticed her dark eyes flicked constantly to Brymn and her hand rested on the weapon she’d put back in her belt. “We need to—share—certain facts with you. And I’d made them promise you wouldn’t be harmed. I told you I’d help you.”

  Mac ignored the wistful look on Emily’s face. “You’re helping the Ro,” she accused.

  Emily shook her head. “The Myrokynay,” she corrected. “ ‘Ro’ is a Dhryn corruption of the name.”

  Myrokynay? Mac dug her fingers into the dust. “The transects—”

  “Were their invention, yes. Their—gift.” Emily’s mouth twisted over the word. “The Myrokynay are masters of no-space. Their entire technology is based on it. You’ve experienced some of it. Their ships create their own temporary transects. They wear suits that allow an individual to be here and not here, at the same time. It would drive most other sentients quit
e mad. Sometimes I wonder if it’s why communicating with them is so difficult.”

  “But you can.”

  “To a point. The effort to understand us originated with them; first contact, if you can call it that, was made by their choice. Me. Others. I don’t know who or how many, so don’t bother asking.”

  “Why?” Mac breathed. “Emily, what could they possibly want that’s worth any of this?”

  Her friend’s face had never looked this old and tired. “What we wanted, Mac, was to stop this—” her toe kicked the dust, “—from ever happening again. But we’ve failed.” Emily lifted the corner of a piece of shroud fabric with one finger. “Did you give this to Nik and his misguided cronies?” At Mac’s puzzled frown, she shrugged and let the fabric fall. “Irrelevant. We’re a clever species, Mac. Too clever for our own good, sometimes. Show a monkey a new approach to a problem and caramba! A new problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were there, Mac. On the Dhryn world. Where we so-clever Humans took the Dhryn’s method of nullifying the Ro’s devices and adapted it into something that could yank their ships right out of no-space. Quite a shock, believe me. I thought the Ro were going to abandon us there and then.”

  Mac held up her hands. “Whoa, Em. Yes, I was there. And the Ro weren’t helping anyone—they were attempting genocide. For the second time!”

  Another flick of the eyes to Brymn, then a somber gaze at Mac.

  “Yes.”

  - Portent -

  THE RAIN continued to fall, obedient to gravity and dew point. It cratered dust and puddles, it slipped through abyssal cracks to become steam and rise again.

  It tracked like tears over the great ships as they pulled free of the earth below, froze as they passed beyond cloud into the fierce glow of the sun, outgassed to randomly drifting molecules as those ships left air and world behind.

  The great ships, silent and swifter now, ran for the Naralax Transect. The Others, witness to grief and flight, gave way. Well wishes followed the survivors of a world as they fled its system forever.