Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (33 page)

The mine had been across river, away from the main section of the city that still rose in Jake’s mind. Ben pushed the rover through relative shallows, once spanned by a bridge. A mile farther, the entrance hole still gaped in the low hillside, although the building that had fronted it had vanished. In that building Ben’s mother would have directed the nanos that dug the tunnels, the robots that located the ore, and the trams that had carried it to the surface. It had been a big operation, Alex’s pride, employing at full capacity as many as seventeen people.

“Mr. Holman, I can go in by myself. You told me where to find it.”

“I want to go,” Jake said. But that was sheer sentiment, nothing else. The less time he and Ben spent at the blank that had been Mira City, the better. Jake slowed everything down.

“No, you go ahead, Ben. Find it. Go quickly.”

The boy leaped from the rover as if he’d been shot and ran toward the mine.

Ben might have played here as a child. He might have sometimes gone to work with his highly skilled mother and frolicked on the purple hillside above her head. The eco-team would have cleared the area of red creeper and other dangerous native flora and put one of their electronic fences in place against predatory fauna. Was she dead, Ben’s miner mother? Had he played here with brothers and sisters now as dead as the city itself?

Jake tried to fight off sleep and failed. Again the disturbing dreams, Lucy and Duncan and Alex and Rudy Scherer all mixed together, yesterday indistinguishable from today. William Shipley, the Quaker doctor who had first put the box in a secret passage of the mine, lectured Jake. “We owe it to these people, Friend Jake. We promised them.”

“They will never come back for them,” Jake had argued. “Perpetual supercold storage is damn expensive!”

“Nonetheless, we will keep our promise,” Shipley said tranquilly, and then the Quaker was shaking his shoulder. The doctor’s hand on Jake’s shoulder became Ben’s hand, a plastic box about one cubic foot balanced awkwardly on his other hip.

“Mr. Holman, I found it. Just where you said.” The boy had clearly willed himself to firmness. “Now please tell me what it is and what it will do.”

Jake looked at him. Ben had earned that much. The only reason Jake hadn’t explained before was that if they were captured, Jake hadn’t wanted Ben to possess any knowledge for which he could be tortured.

“I’ll tell you what it is, Ben. It’s a supercold perpetual storage box, capable of preserving organic material for several millennia through fire, flood, quakes, everything but annihilating weaponry. Inside are Vine death flowers.”

“Are what?”

Despite everything, Jake smiled. “We don’t know what they are, either. But on their first trip to Greentrees, the Furs killed all the Vines that had landed here not long before. Before the Vines died, they tried to give us some genetic material they called their ’death flowers.’ It didn’t work; the Furs annihilated the death flowers, too. But later, when Karim and Lucy and I and others were aboard a Vine ship to—well, you know the story. The Furs annihilated those Vines, too. This time, however, when they gave humans their death flowers, we were able to keep them. When we returned to Greentrees, we hid them here in case any Vines ever came back for them, as the Vines had said would someday happen.”

“But they never came,” Ben said.

“No.”

“So what are we going to do with these ’death flowers’ now?” Ben said, somewhere between bewilderment and anger. “We just risked our lives to get this box—what good is it?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “That’s what we’re going to find out. Get back in the rover and drive.”

They could have gone directly to the Avery Mountains, but instead they backtracked to pick up Alex, Lucy, and Natalie. Jake had argued against this; he wanted to reach Karim’s biomass as soon as possible, and going back for the three women would add another day to the trip. But Alex had insisted and, to Jake’s surprise, Lucy had for once agreed with Alex. Jake had given in. He had opposed Alex enough already. He knew, without wanting to think about it, how much pain she felt over Julian.

So Ben again drove at maximum speed across the kill-clean zone until he reached the relative safety of vegetation. Then he was forced to go much more slowly around or through thick stands of brush, red creeper, and purple trees. Once, rounding a copse to return to the river, the rover startled a herd of “elephants.” The ponderous, placid, evil-smelling beasts, like no elephants Jake had ever seen on Terra, stared stupidly at the rover before returning to their grazing. Ben said hastily, “I’ll move upwind.”

“Can you make the rendezvous point before dark? I’d rather not use the lights.”

“Mr. Holman, I’m not even sure where the rendezvous point
is.
We said ten miles down the creek from our camp, but that creek twists and doubles back and we weren’t even sure Alex and the others could make ten miles today. Alex is pretty old, you know.”

Alex was forty-five. Jake didn’t point out that by Ben’s calendar Jake himself must be fossilized. He felt fossilized.

The rover got tangled in a patch of red creeper. In the gathering gloom, Ben hadn’t seen it in time. The predatory plant mistook the rover for some large animal and shot out its tendrils to capture it.

The tough vines wrapped themselves around any protuberances they could reach and started, much faster than anything on Earth, to climb toward the inhabitants.

Ben slid the side panels up. “There’s a spray under the seat, Mr. Holman.”

“Can’t you just drive out? Surely the rover is stronger than a vine?”

“Yes, but when a friend of mine did that—” Ben suddenly faltered. The friend, Jake guessed, was probably dead.”—did that, he tore off the fuel cell water valve. Just hand me the spray.”

Jake found it, a spray wand. Ben slid open the side shield an inch, stuck out the wand, and pushed.

Jake said, “How long does it take to kill the whole plant?”

“A few minutes. The eco-genemod team is—was—pretty good.”

They waited in silence. Wild Furs materialized out of nowhere.

Ben gasped. Jake peered through the dirty windshield. Two … three… were there four? No, only three. They stood immobile, one in front of the rover and one by each side. All three carried laser guns.

“Julian Martin gave the Furs laser guns to use against the Cheyenne—”
Yenmo Kang’s despairing words.

Ben reached for his own gun.

“No,” Jake said swiftly. “Don’t fire. Don’t move.”

“You’re not a soldier, Mr. Holman,” said Ben, who’d been one for a few months. And then, in the first flash of bitterness Jake had seen from the boy, “You weren’t ever a soldier.”

“But I’m still Alex’s senior adviser. And she’s in command.
Don’t move. ”

Please let Julian have made a fetish of the chain of command.

Apparently he had. Ben hesitated, dropped his hand.

Jake was acting on instinct, not thought, and he hated that. But there was no time to plan. “Slide down both side panels of the rover, Ben.”

“But-“

“That’s an order.”

Ben obeyed. But Jake knew he wouldn’t blindly obey too much longer; Ben had, after all, made up his own mind to believe Lucy and Jake about Julian. The boy was not completely broken to military obedience; he was a Greenie.

The three wild Furs didn’t move. They were a fearsome sight in the deep dusk: powerfully muscled, heavily furred, their high-set third eyes scanning the sky and their thick balancing tails resting just beyond the patch of withered red creeper. Three laser guns pointed at the humans in the rover.

But the guns were only pointing, not firing.

Jake said, “Get out of the rover, Ben, very slowly. Let them see your every move. Lift out my chair and set it up in the clear, then put me in it.”

“Why are you making us vulnerable to them?”

No more blind obedience. “If they wanted to attack, they’d have done so already. This is the most xenophobic species in the known galaxy. Our smell alone arouses rage in their hindbrains, or whatever the analogue is. If they’re controlling that response, it’s by an effort of will we can’t even imagine. They want cooperation from us, and that’s unprecedented.”

“We don’t need their cooperation.”

Oh God, the bullheaded arrogance of even the meek young. Jake held his temper. “Yes, we do. Don’t you see? They can lead us to space Furs.”

Jake hoped that “lead us to” didn’t sound too exploitative. How much English had these aliens learned from Nan Frayne?

Ben moved slowly out of the rover, treading over the now-dead red creeper. Jake could read Ben’s reluctance in every movement. The boy’s very hair practically bristled. Not only Furs were xenophobic.

When Jake sat in his chair in the dark, he tugged Ben to sit on the ground beside him. Finally the Furs moved. One crouched and expertly built a small fire, starting it with a spark struck from a stone. The three lined up across the fire from the humans, tall menacing animals in the flickering light. Did the smoke mask the human smell? Jake hoped so.

The largest alien put away his laser and pulled his spear from its harness. Jake’s nerves quivered. The Fur reached across the fire with the spear and slashed through the groundcover until he’d exposed bare ground. Then he made a single line in the dirt and uttered a single syllable: “Aaaaaannnnnttttttt.”

“Nan. Nan Frayne,” Jake guessed, and the Fur nodded clumsily, obviously not a native gesture. Jake felt Ben’s surprised respect. Well, let the boy be impressed. Jake had already realized that these Furs must have been trained—socialized? recruited?—by Nan Frayne. Otherwise he and Ben would be carrion.

The Fur drew another line and uttered another syllable, this one too guttural to echo correctly. With his free hand he hit his own head.

“You,” Jake hazarded; he could not reproduce the alien’s name. The alien nodded, apparently willing to accept “you.”

Many more lines in the dirt, and now the alien went back and added smaller rising lines to each. Jake was mystified until Ben said softly, “They’re crests. He’s drawing their males.”

“Males. You males,” Jake said. A nod. When Nan had taught them to understand a little English, had she also taught herself to differentiate the guttural Fur sounds? Then she had a better ear than Jake did.

The Fur drew more lines, this time without crests. “You women,” Jake said. No nod. “You females.” A nod. Nan had thought the sounds of “men” and “women” too close to use.

Now the Fur drew a circle, a line coming out of it, and a smaller circle. A McAndrew Drive ship, which the alien had certainly never seen. Nan again. He drew many crested lines coming from the ship and leading straight to the wild Fur females. Then savagely he erased the wild Fur males.

“Enemy,” Jake hazarded. “You enemy. Kill you men. Take you females.”

All three Furs nodded.

Exhilaration surged through Jake, which he carefully hid. He had the answer to his question. The wild Furs had chosen. Their xenophobia toward humans mattered less than their desire to regain the breeding females carried off to the space Furs’ ship.

Or, rather, their xenophobia mattered less as long as the humans remained very careful to not provoke it. Submissive in posture, helpful to wild Fur goals. And downwind.

“Ben,” he said softly, “we have a sort of ally.”

They were late to the rendezvous point. It took a lot of picture drawing to communicate to the Furs that the humans would help the Furs against their enemy in the ship, that the rover was going to drive slowly to meet three more humans, that after that it was going to go to the place Nan Frayne had been killed. This last, which Jake had feared would be the most incomprehensible to the Furs, was actually accepted instantly. He had no idea why. Maybe he had stumbled on some death ritual, some expectation that he would commune with Nan’s spirit. Maybe it seemed logical to them that he start his aid at a place where some females had been captured. Maybe it was the right conjunction of moons.

Ben had to use the rover’s lights, after all. The three Furs disappeared; Jake assumed they were following. He let himself sleep, knowing he had to conserve his strength. The rover jostled him awake every few minutes. Nocturnal birds whistled, unseen creatures rustled the groundcover, and Greentrees’ sweet, distinctive night smell drifted on the wind. Clouds covered and uncovered two small, high moons. And somewhere in the darkness, three aliens with revenge in their unknowable hearts trailed the human vehicle toward what Jake could only think of as an unholy alliance: dangerous. Temporary. And as unconscionable, in Jake’s planning, as anything Julian Martin could ever have done, anywhere.