WARP world (45 page)

His eyes moved to Ama and he tried to see her as his People would, tried to imagine her as caj. His fist clenched at thought.

“What is it?” Ama asked, stirring him out of his reverie.

“Hm?”

“You were staring at me.”

“Oh,” he glanced away, “I was just picturing you on my World.”

Ama stretched, her limbs syrupy in the warmth of the fire. “What’s it like? Your world?”

“Boring,” he said, and tilted his head back. “Dusty, dry, and full of self-important, feeble-minded, unimaginative fools. But I’m going to change that.”

“You’re going to change your world?” Ama asked, now perking up, a smile dancing at the edges of her mouth.

“Indirectly, yes. My People are pragmatic, disciplined, thorough, but they’ve strangled themselves with their own rigidity. I’ve always known it, I suppose, but seeing your world, your people, has solidified the notion for me.”

“I have studied cultures and civilizations, across the dimensions, at every stage of imagined development, and one fact is clear: stagnation is the precursor to collapse. For all its brilliance, the Theorist’s Guild, the cultural light of our World, is run by old men and women who care more for upholding tradition than searching out creative solutions to the challenges we face.” He stopped at the realization that she was the first person he had ever spoken to about his ambitions.

“Is that why you want Brin’s men? To help you change your world?” Ama’s face was serious now, almost studious.

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation, happy to have another soul to share this with. “I haven’t worked through all the…specifics, yet, but yes. The recon squad that escorted me to your world, and others of their kind, function well in a military capacity, but I need more than that to achieve my goals.” He sat upright, buoyed by the thoughts rolling through him. “I need what no training or schooling can teach: I need recon teams that don’t care about the rules and protocols, who come to the task without prejudice, who live with passion, creativity and loyalty.”

“A rebel?” Ama took his hand in hers, turned it over and traced her fingers over the red line Brin had cut into his palm. “Perhaps you truly are Kenda.”

“Your code,
blood for water
, where does it come from?” he asked.

“From the old Kenda resistance, from the war with the Shasir. It means we are willing to kill or die for what we love.”

“Blood for water,” he repeated, in the Kenda tongue this time.

When she lifted her face to his, they were only inches apart.

I want you. I want you to stay with me.
The words were trapped behind his eyes.

She cocked her head, then stood abruptly. “The storm’s passed. We have to go.”

They dressed in silence, shouldered their packs and headed to the door.

“Wait,” Ama said, spun on her heel and jogged back to the fire. Seg followed her back in, a question on his lips as she poked her hand into the fireplace and pulled out a chair leg that was half burned. Wordlessly, she held the glowing end to the bottom of the heavy drapes and handed the torch to Seg.

He watched the flames play up the curtain before he lowered the improvised torch beneath a highly decorative chair. Smoke billowed up from beneath the chair and continued to pour out as he pulled the torch away. Foolish action, perhaps, but they were not the first to vandalize this estate and by the time anyone noticed the fire he and Ama would be long gone. Satisfied, he put down the torch long enough to re-shoulder his pack, then stood for a long moment and watched the beginning of the conflagration.

There was enough fuel left for the blaze to take hold and burn the estate to the ground.

“There,” Ama said, leading him away by his pack, “now we’re rebels.”

By the light of the full moon, they walked through the woods. The trees were well spaced and Ama passed by a number of suitable spots to camp out for the evening. She didn’t explain her reason for pushing forward to Seg; there was no need. He understood, as she did, it would be prudent to put as much distance as possible between them and the burning Damiar estate.

At a stack of rocks, however, she stopped. “Here,” she said, turned an abrupt ninety degrees and led Seg through a tangle of brush.

“Here?” he asked, frowning as he pushed aside the damp, clingy vegetation.

He had his answer soon enough, as the greenery gave way to a cleared area. The spot was well disguised, he would have walked right past it on his own, but it had obviously been some sort of dwelling or meeting place years, perhaps centuries, earlier. A skeleton of a structure, made of stone and wood, was slowly being swallowed by the forest.

Ama dropped her pack and made preparations for the evening. “It’s no feast but at least they’re fresh,” she said, and held up two apples.

Seg plucked one from her hand, bit down and let the sweetness flood his mouth. “It is a feast.”

“Viren and his men stocked me up as well as they could.”

“Hult?” Seg asked, pausing mid-bite. “You found him?”

“It wasn’t difficult, once I managed to get word out to the Kenda that I was alive. He wasn’t very happy about me coming after you. Word’s spread that the men Brin sent after your people are dead. He said if I tried to talk to your people without you, they’d kill me too.”

“They would have,” Seg dropped down to his haunches beside her, his legs weakening at the thought of what would have happened if Ama had approached Kerbin. “Listen to me, whatever happens, do not go near my People without me.”

Ama looked uncertain but nodded.

“I’ve got a shortcut that will take us over the mountain tomorrow. It’ll be hard going but it will keep us away from the roads where Dagga’s men might be, and you should make the meeting with your people with time to spare,” she said.

“And you?”

“Brin’s men will be waiting for me at the safe house. They’ll make sure I’m protected until after the raid.”

“Good,” he said, but his voice was flat. It was strange to even consider returning to that life. And as for leaving Ama… He took another bite of the apple but his appetite had deserted him.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she dug in her pack again, this time producing a familiar slim, rectangular object.

“Where did you get this?” Seg asked, eagerly pulling the VIU from her hand, as he set the half-eaten apple to one side.

“Your pack was in the cartul Viren stole. I couldn’t carry all of it but I remembered you said this piece was important. I brought your banger too,” she said, withdrawing Seg’s last remaining pistol

Ignoring the weapon, Seg slid open a cover on the back of the VIU and pressed on the small dimple. A faint, green icon appeared and he tapped it to light up the display screen. He waited for the self-diagnostics to complete and the menu to appear.

As the reading lights flashed, Seg frowned at the mechanism, smacked it against his leg, then powered it down and restarted it. The People’s equipment was built for much harsher conditions than the VIU had been exposed to, but who knew what treatment it had received in Hult’s care. Once powered up, the flashing resumed, displaying the same readings.

He was about to shut it down when a thought struck him.

“What is this place?” he asked Ama, as he stood and walked to one of the stone pillars.

“Oh, it’s just an old Welf grovel pit.”

“A what?”

“A grovel pit, a place that Welf used to come to—back before the spooks—and pray to rocks and stuff. This one’s in pretty good shape, I figured it would be a good place to hide and,” she spread out a bedroll, “the ground is dry.”

Intricate carvings were revealed, as he pulled aside the vines. He looked down at the VIU, amazed at what he saw. The readings weren’t anywhere near those he had taken at the temple in Alisir but they were substantial. This ‘grovel pit’, this crumbling Welf holy place, had more vita than T’ueve.

It wasn’t possible that he would have missed something this promising as a potential target. To be sure, he tucked the VIU under his arm, dug into his pocket and pulled out the digifilm, with the stored the locations. A scroll through the list made no mention of any sites near Sansin. Strange.

“Do others know about these ‘grovel pits’? Would the Shasir know of them?”

Ama shrugged, “Maybe. Pre-Unification gods are forbidden, though. They aren’t even to be spoken of. The spooks don’t like competition.”

That could explain it. The Welf had no written history prior to the arrival of the Damiar and if the Shasir forbade their religion, it would have been abandoned and forgotten. “And yet you know of them?”

“Anyone who’s spent time in the forest knows about them.”

“Are there many more?”

“Lots, especially in the Ymira Valley; that’s an old, old Welf settlement.”

“Why did you not tell me of this?” His voice was stern, as he gestured to the vita-rich site around them.

“I thought you were looking for important places, big temples, fancy…stuff. Grovel pits are just old dirt piles nobody even uses. All the dots on the globe you showed me were on Shasir holy sites, I thought that’s what you wanted.”

His flash of annoyance subsided. She was so competent in her world, he sometimes forgot she could know nothing of his. And even a normal Person might have missed the relevance. This was, after all, what Theorists trained for and why native contact was essential to missions

“I should have been more explicit,” he conceded, returning his attention to the readouts and his new, expanded plans for the raid.

This site was not as rich as Alisir but it did have ample vita and was about as easy a target as his People could ask for–undefended, easily penetrated. While the larger raids were under way, a single squad could make away with enough vita from a half dozen of these sacred sites to make the entire raid break even, likely without a single casualty. Ideal.

He raised his eyes from the screen to look at Ama, who was busy carving slices of the apple that was her dinner. “Can you show me, on the map, where more of these grovel pits are?”

With a smile, she knifed a slice into her mouth and took the digifilm from his hands, “How many would you like?”

It’ll be tough going.
If he were not half delirious and ready to pass out, Seg would have laughed at Ama’s description of their journey. The last portion of the ascent had been the worst: baking hot, steep and at points treacherous, the air so dense and humid it could almost be chewed.

Even the short descent to the banks of the river had been difficult. There were swarms of insects, and the heat was relentless. By the time they made it to the riverbank, they both collapsed in silent heaps and panted in a patch of shade. But there was no relief, even there. Summer had arrived with a vengeance, the numbing cold of the previous night’s storm a delicious and taunting memory.

By the map on his digifilm, they had not much further to travel. However grueling, the route
had
been a shortcut and there was ample daylight ahead of them.

When she had recovered a bit, Ama left Seg and set out to find the cable crossing over the river.

He was sitting up when she returned, guzzling the last of the tepid water from his bottle. He had removed his shirt; his skin was slick with dirt and sweat.

“We need to talk,” she said, then stripped off her shirt and trousers until she was down to her waterwear, “I need to teach you to swim.”

“This is hardly the time for humor. We’ll use the cable crossing.”

“Gone. A flood most likely, took out part of the bank on the far side and the cable tower with it. We have to swim.”

“Swim? In water?” he shook his head, “No. You’ll have to come up with another solution.”

“There is no other solution, believe me.”

“Impossible.”

“OK, then here are your options: One, you let me teach you how to swim, to float, actually—just the basics, you don’t even have to put your head underneath—so that I can help you across the river. Or two, I drag you under the water and breathe for you, just like I did back in T’ueve. I know how much you enjoyed that. The choice is yours.” She put her hands on her hips, cocked her head and waited for his reply.