Alien Chronicles 3 - The Crystal Eye (28 page)

She paused before him and gave him a quick smile. Her hands smoothed down her fur and patted the folds of the soft blue robe the archivists had given her. After having worn coarse-woven cloth for many years, this fine-spun, synthetic stuff felt wonderful.
I must not let myself be seduced by these luxuries,
she reminded herself. She had goals to keep, responsibilities that stretched far beyond the concerns of this night.

“Are you ready, Ampris?” Quiesl asked her.

Her ears went back. “Ready to commit treason?” she asked breathlessly.

His eyes remained steady and fearless. “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

Ampris lifted her muzzle, drawing on his courage. “Yes,” she echoed. “It’s been a long time. Are you sure they remember me?”

“They remember,” he said and slid the door open fully to let her in.

She walked into a circular conference room furnished with a long oval table and mismatched chairs. Perhaps a dozen abiru of various races were gathered there, some standing watchful and silent at the edges of the room, others arguing heatedly.

“Ampris is here,” Quiesl said, walking in behind her. His clear, calm voice silenced the conversations abruptly.

A dozen pairs of eyes turned to stare at her. For a moment Ampris felt frozen, but long ago she’d known the stares of thousands of spectators. She drew in a deep breath and forced her ears to stand forward. If these abiru remembered a champion, then Ampris knew she must look and act like one.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, making her voice clear and strong. “I understand from my friends here in the Archives that you are the leaders of various resistance groups in the city.”

“Thugs and thieves, more like,” growled a tattered, gray-furred Kelth with one eye and one ear. He glared balefully at the others. “Rather steal than work honest.”

A big Aaroun in a striped vest, wearing a grimy brim-less cap on his head, swaggered forward and glared at the Kelth. “You got nothing to say here, Luthien. You ain’t no—”

“Please!” Ampris said sharply, regaining their attention. “We’re here to discuss joining forces. I’m asking you to forget your feuds and disagreements, at least temporarily, so that we can work together for freedom.”

Luthien backed his single ear and yipped. “And here I thought we’d hear a long speech. But you come right out with it first, eh?”

Ampris concealed her embarrassment. She was no politician. She possessed no diplomatic arts. Straightforward honesty had always been her strongest trait. So she looked Luthien in the eye and said, “Yes, I see no reason to waste time.”

A dwarf-sized Reject waddled forward on his crooked legs. His rill was extended and his eyes held suspicion. “And you?” he asked, pointing at her. “You come out of nowhere and ask for meetings so you can talk treason. How do we know you’re not a spy for the Bureau of Security?”

Ampris backed her ears. “I am no spy!”

“That’s what
you
say,” the dwarf Reject said, coming even closer. The others clustered behind him, silent and dangerous. “But how do you prove it?”

Dismayed, Ampris stared at him. She’d had such high hopes for this meeting, from the moment she’d learned there were scattered resistance groups in Vir, from the moment she’d heard that their leaders would come to listen to what she had to say. Now, she realized her hopes had been naive. How could she have expected to gain their trust right away? Already the meeting was falling apart.

“You came here tonight,” she said. “To talk with each other, and to listen. You must want freedom.”

The mutilated Kelth yipped scornfully. “You recording all this? You want us to give you our names and confess right now? What kind of
nolos
you think we be, eh?”

“I already have
your
name, Luthien,” Ampris said.

Luthien turned away from her and lunged at the Aaroun in the striped vest, snapping at his throat. The Aaroun growled and shoved Luthien off. Snarling, the two circled each other.

The rest of the group cheered and howled, spreading out to let them fight.

Ampris looked at Quiesl, who raised his hands in dismay and said, “Please, please. You agreed there would be no fighting. Please.”

But Luthien and the Aaroun paid him no heed. Still circling each other, they bared their teeth.

Ampris could see at once that they were all bluster and bravado. If they were really going to fight, the combat would have already been over. She lost her temper. “Enough of this nonsense.”

She started toward them, but Quiesl gripped her arm. “No, Ampris,” he said. “You will get hurt.”

Gently she removed his hand and took a running skip that favored her crippled leg, yet was fast. She slammed into Luthien, and as he yipped in startlement and turned on her with a vicious snap of his teeth, she gripped him by the front of his grimy coat and slung him bodily into the Aaroun, knocking both of them down. As they went sprawling in a heap together, the Aaroun roared with anger and thrust himself upright.

Ampris kick-boxed him twice, rapid-fire, then dropped back, masking a wince as her weight came down too hard on her bad leg. Staggering off balance, the Aaroun righted himself with a roar. He glared at her, and she glared right back.

“Want more?” she taunted him.

He snarled and rubbed his chest where she’d kicked him. He did not move to accept her challenge. The others jeered loudly.

By now Luthien was back on his feet. Cursing vividly, the one-eyed Kelth rushed at her, but Ampris caught him expertly, spun, and used his impetus to toss him over the top of the table. He slid down its polished length, yelping with fright, his arms flailing uselessly, and crashed among the chairs on the other side.

Someone started laughing, and another Aaroun cheered.

“The Crimson Claw!” he yelled enthusiastically, stamping his feet. “Money I used to win on her.”

Luthien floundered about, still tangled with the overturned chairs, and shot her a look of hatred from over the edge of the table. “You—you—”

“If you are going to fight, then fight the Viis,” Ampris said tartly.

That got their attention. The hoots, jeers, and laughter stopped abruptly. They turned toward her once again.

“Please,” Quiesl said worriedly. Now his tail was coiled tightly around his leg. “Please, you must make less noise. This room is not scanned, but too much noise can be registered and might trigger an investigation by Security.”

“You swore this room be safe,” the Aaroun in the striped vest said.

“Yes, it is, provided you do not brawl.”

“She started it!” Luthien said, gaining his feet at last. He was panting and furious. “She attacked me. You all saw her.”

“We saw you whipped by a crippled female older than you,” said the dwarf Reject. “Be quiet. Luthien. You are a fool.”

“Yes, a fool you be!” someone else echoed.

The Kelth slammed his fist down on the table, snarling, and headed for the door. “Then this fool be leaving.”

Exasperated with him, Ampris moved to block his path.

Luthien stopped, looking at her warily. “You let me out of here,” he said in a fierce voice.

“Or what?” she asked. “You’ll turn us in?”

“Maybe you going now to turn us in anyway,” the Aaroun in the striped vest said.

Luthien glared at him with his single eye. “So now you think I be a traitor, eh? Harval, you been known to sell your own mother.”

Growling, Harval started toward Luthien once more, and again Ampris stepped between them.

Both of the males backed away from her. She glared at first one, then the other. “You’re wasting time,” she said. “And I can see why all of you are still slaves.”

None of them liked that, but at least they were listening . . . for the moment. “You’re slaves because you won’t work together,” she said to them all. “Look at you, feuding over petty—”

“Luthien betrayed my group,” Harval said hotly. “Gave us to the patrollers last week for—”

“It doesn’t matter!” she shouted.

“It does!” Harval said. “He don’t belong here, not with us. He’ll turn us in as soon as he goes out of here.”

“Liar!” Luthien said, yipping. “You Aarouns think you be better than everyone else. It ain’t so. You got no right to come in on my territory.”

“It’s the Viis who should be our enemies, not each other,” Ampris said. “As long as we’re divided, the Viis can keep us in chains.”

“The Viis got too much firepower,” said the Aaroun in the back. “Got patrollers, got Security. We can’t fight them, even if we do join together.”

“How many abiru live in Vir?” Ampris asked them.

They looked at each other. Many shrugged.

“How many Viis live here?” she asked.

“The official registry lists two point five million Viis citizens,” Quiesl said quietly. “Slave registrations number approximately five million, although probably neither number is accurate. There has not been a census taken in—”

“Twice as many of us, in this city alone,” Ampris said, breaking in before Quiesl could start a lecture. “We outnumber them.”

“But they have weapons,” Harval said, tugging at his striped vest. “They control the food supply. They have—”

“Who operates the machinery that makes this city work?” she broke in. “Who does the maintenance, the repairs? Who unloads the food supplies shipped here?”

They were silent again, but she could see her words sinking in. She said, “The Viis citizens can’t even dress themselves without someone to hand their clothing to them.”

“But they own everything,” a female Kelth piped up.

“What of it?” Ampris retorted. “It’s the abiru folk who have the knowledge and skills necessary to run the Viis civilization. A Viis household cannot cook for itself. It will not do the marketing, or the cleaning. Viis citizens possess few practical skills. Strip a lord of his guards, his servants, and how long could he survive?”

Many were nodding.

Ampris’s spirits rose. “We can accomplish more than you think.”

“Abiru folk have rebelled before,” the dwarf Reject said. “Always they have failed. You sneer at the Viis, but they are not as helpless as you say.”

Ampris looked at him and realized she must take care not to offend the Rejects. They might live in the ghettos of Vir, hidden away from public view, but they were still Viis. Quickly she said, “The Viis are an intelligent race. In the past they achieved great things. How could they have created such a vast empire if they were not clever, resourceful, courageous, and brave?”

Harval growled suspiciously, and his ears flattened to his skull. “What talk is this?”

“Listen to me!” she said. “The Viis were a valiant people once, but so were our ancestors. Just because our people were conquered and tricked does not make them inferior or worthy only of being slaves. But now, the Viis have become a cruel and lazy people. They rely on their slaves for everything. Their cities, their space stations, their ships, their jump gates, their equipment—all of it is falling apart, and why?”

“Because that is the way things are,” replied the dwarf.

“No!” Ampris said. “Because no Viis will come down here to the Archives to look at repair manuals. Everything wrong with the empire could be fixed, if they would just bother to come and learn how. Everything! Do you know that once the Viis could control the weather? They never knew what drought and famine were. They designed technological marvels. They reached the stars. But now they rely on us
completely,
and they have forgotten almost all that they ever knew. Things keep breaking down. Often they do not even realize that we—resistance groups working in secret—are sabotaging them. Don’t you think jump gates were engineered to last forever? Yet they keep failing across the empire. Why? Because someone makes them fail.”

Ampris raised her clenched fists. “We can overthrow our masters, because they have buried themselves in denial and self-seeking pleasure. The only reason they have held us this long is because the abiru folk will not trust each other.”

“Can’t trust when we get betrayed all the time,” Luthien said fiercely.

“That’s good,” Harval said with contempt. “And you with your middle name being Informer.”

“That’s a dirty lie!” Luthien shouted.

“Shut up!” the Aaroun in the back of the room shouted. “I want to hear the Crimson Claw speak, not the two of you.”

“If we work together we can succeed,” Ampris continued. “Our common enemy is the Viis oppressors. They have lied to us, deceived us, and tormented us for generations. As for the Rejects,” she said, turning to the dwarf again, “your people have been treated the most cruelly of all.”

“Them? Hah!” Luthien snarled. “They get free food, all they want, while we—”

“There won’t be free food much longer,” Ampris said. “Not if the drought continues. I have seen the stelf fields, the stelf that feeds you all, yes, even the Quixlix that you buy with your wages. Or steal,” she added.

A few chuckled.

“The fields are blighted with a disease that makes the grain poisonous to any who eat it. I have seen the patrollers burning those fields.”

“Not all. Grain still coming into city,” said a brown-furred Kelth. He had a shrill, nervous voice. His eyes darted back and forth constantly, unable to meet anyone’s gaze squarely. “Seen it on black market. Seen a tenement house over in the Red Quarter, and all in it found dead only this morning. Seen the patrollers going in there with condemned laborers to pull the corpses out. Me, I been eating meat globes and fruit. Ain’t no Quixlix going down my gullet.”

“That be a story you done made up,” Harval said. “It ain’t been on the vidcast.”

The dwarf Reject raised his rill and flicked out his tongue contemptuously. “Do you think the government would broadcast news about something like
that?”

“Yeah, and if they poisoned all the Rejects in the city, there’d be enough food for us abiru,” Harval shot back.

The dwarf hissed, and again Ampris had to intervene.

“The point is, we don’t want anyone, Reject or abiru, to be poisoned,” she said. “I brought it up only to make you understand that we’re all in this together. The Viis have betrayed even their own kind, folk like you.” She gestured at the dwarf. “And why? Because you look different? What reason is that? We are all different, individuals in our own way.”