Battleground (48 page)

O
N OLD EARTH,
it was dawn at Admin. Commission staff signed in from locations across human space; those living nearby began to arrive on-site. Jameson spent a few minutes, as he did each morning, walking the corridors of his own floor of the vast complex, speaking to individuals regardless of status. He had found that the practice fostered loyalty. It was a normal morning,
Endeavor
the first thing on no one's mind. Except his.

He had not consulted his colleagues about the action he had ordered Captain Metra to take. Resupplying Contact personnel hardly required a Commission vote, and Metra had offered no dissension; allowing those personnel to starve to death, knowingly, was not something she wanted on her service record. But Jameson didn't want to embark on discussions after the fact, either, because inevitably they would lead to speculations about the future.

Commissioners were pragmatists—even Jameson's most likely allies, even Andrella Murphy. If Hanna and Gabriel failed to produce an experimental subject, they would consider the option of starting over again with new envoys. Someone would observe that if Gabriel Guyup died on Battleground his abbey might be satisfied with calling his death martyrdom. Someone might even think a kind of secular martyrdom would be an acceptable way of getting rid of the troublesome Hanna ril-Koroth. No one would say that. At least not in so many words; at least not in his presence. But someone would say something. He meant to keep them too busy to propose discussion.

The crisis on Colony One, he had decided, would swallow hours, giving no one time to be sidetracked to
Endeavor
. Civil war threatened; a Fleet presence had become necessary to remind would-be rebels what they risked if they did not stand down. If their response was intemperate, Polity detainment of certain citizens would be required. Personally and privately, Jameson wanted the dissidents got out of the way for good, because the half-life they advocated was ghastly. Perhaps he would suggest summary executions, cloaked as accidental deaths. That would provoke lively, and long, discussion.

It would keep Karin Weisz too busy to revert to hypothetical improvements in A.S., too. If the situation on her homeworld could not be resolved, she could be gone from the Commission in a matter of days; Colony One's council was pragmatic, too.

•   •   •

I
n Wektt, Gabriel focused on examining his conscience, suspecting that he had come to his last chance for contrition. Of course, it was possible he was not dying; that was up to God. Examination of conscience was never amiss, however. It was not a painful process. Gabriel knew God well understood the imperfection of His human creatures and in the infinity of His love, readily forgave their fallibility.

Oh, and here was the Angel of Death! The Angel was a woman. Why not?

Angel? Nobody's called me that before!

“Dema?” He wasn't sure he had actually made a sound.

Hang on. H'ana's found some meal tabs. Can you hold on a few more hours?

“If God wills it.”

The most extraordinary feelings flooded his mind, all of them Dema's. Exasperation, affection, anxiety. Resolution. Dema was going to keep him awake, keep him alive, until help arrived. Or until she had to let him slip away.

H
A
NNA EXPECTED SOMETHING EXOTIC. A
small, carved container, perhaps, filled with a deadly powder, maybe engraved with Soldiers' equivalent of skull and crossbones.

Instead Nakeekt loaded her down with a woven sack big as her torso. “Here,” she said economically, peering down at Hanna over the sack, and Hanna got slowly to her feet, pushing against the wall for support. Her joints hurt, her muscles ached, her clothes were still damp from the rain, and she was cold. The sack looked large and the pod seemed a long way off. Hanna took the burden in both arms and stumbled under the weight. Even if she had been in peak condition the mass would have been respectable. Now she would stagger if she tried to carry it.

She stood unsteadily, swaying and trying to hold onto it. The muscles in her arms trembled.

We can use this,
said a whisper in her mind.

How? Bella! Where's Bella!
she thought in panic, because the whisperer was Arch. He and Joseph had developed a plan; she had been given to understand that. And to understand that her part was to do as she was told.
Because you're addled,
Joseph had said. It was true, and she was at the mercy of a pair of D'neerans who were having a wonderful time with their plot.

You've never had to fight for your life!
she protested. She wanted Bella, who was at least not absurdly gleeful.

Neither has Bella! And she's been commandeered to keep an open line to your director with the funny name—

What?

Evanomen. By order of your very own commissioner. Not that she's told him what we're doing about Kwek.

Hanna could not hold the sack any longer, and it fell to the floor, lumpy and slack. Before Nakeekt could think she was refusing she said, “I can't, it's too heavy.” Arch prompted her and she added, “Wox is strong, he will have to carry it.”

“It is to be given only to you,” Wox said.

“Then you'll have to carry me along with it.”

He hesitated, and the clicks he made were probably a growl, but he picked up the sack. Hanna felt Arch and Joseph cheer.

Nakeekt said, “Tell Kakrekt she must distill what she wants from the leaves in this sack. Tell her water will suffice for solvent, she is to steep the leaves for at least ten days, beginning with a like ratio of water to leaves and adding only enough to keep them moist—”

Hanna looked at the bag again. She could see wet patches on it. Nakeekt's Soldiers had not mixed or made anything; they had gone out into the night and stripped leaves from stems or branches. Many leaves: the distillate must have to be administered over a long period. Nakeekt went on for some time, but Hanna could not make anything after the water stay in her head. That did not matter because at the end Nakeekt thrust a rolled paper at her and said, “I have written everything down, Kakrekt must read it. Go now. This is the second time you have disturbed my sleep. For the second time I tell you: don't come back!”

They went, Hanna trailing behind Wox, feeling as addled as Joseph had said she was, her mind a jumble of the external (the rain had diminished), and the internal (she was a little stronger, not much—and her stomach, waking up, howled with hunger). Behind her she felt Nakeekt put the episode into the past, attention already turning to tomorrow's work with drowned crops. Arch watched through her eyes, and she felt a tendril of his consciousness extended to Kwek, strong and sure.

Have you ever thought about Adept training,
she thought muzzily,
you're very good.

Too much work,
he answered,
now pay attention. You're almost there. Get ahead of Wox. Make him slow down.

How can I—

Give him a reason. Order him. He's conditioned to obey. Lie to him; you're good at that. Tell him—

They were nearly at the foot of the ramp to the pod. “Wox!” she said sharply. “Wait. I instructed this craft to repel intruders when we left it. I must go first and tell it to allow your entry.”

He hesitated; she edged around him and he followed slowly. At the top of the ramp she turned and said, “Give the cargo to me.”

The translator made it an order. She held her breath; she felt Arch hold his. But Wox stopped.

You can do this,
Arch said, and she managed to take the sack without falling and started to turn into the pod.

And Kwek was there like lightning, seizing the bag, hurling it behind her, shoving Hanna in and with a mightier shove throwing Wox off the ramp. Kwek sprang back inside.

Lift!
Arch said urgently,
override the failsafes, the hatch doesn't matter!
and Hanna gave the order, but Wox was on his feet in a second, grabbing for the end of the ramp and somehow getting hold of it. He hung there as they rose into light rain, pulling himself hand over hand with grim determination, and fingers appeared at the lower edge of the hatch. The pod was still lifting and Hanna seized manual control and shot it down and forward, skimming treetops. She heard them thump against the dangling ramp, but Wox's fingers still clutched the edge of the hatch, and she took the pod up again, fast, zigzagging, desperate to dislodge him.

Kwek stomped the implacable fingers. She did it again and again with all her strength, smashing stubborn joints until the fingers jutted at pitiful angles, until it seemed Wox could bear any hurt, could haul himself into the pod with one fingertip—but he could not. The hands disappeared.

Hanna had shut out Kwek's viciousness, Wox's excruciating pain, while the endless seconds went by. Now she looked at the altitude readout. Wox could not have survived the fall. And through the whole brutal attack and the plunge to his death he had not made a sound.

The horrified silence in her head was Arch. Kwek was crowing, saying, “I can still fight!”—burbling, excited, bouncing around the cabin. But all Hanna listened to was the emptiness that stretched between her and Arch. Finally he said,
He's dead?

What did you think would happen?

We thought, I didn't think he would try to—

Hanna managed to give orders, voice breaking; the ramp retracted, the hatch slowly closed, and the pod steadied into the course back to Wektt. Adrenaline had drained away, and she let her head sink onto her folded arms. They ached from the brief weight of the sack, but it was nothing compared to the way her head hurt. There would be a remedy in the medical cabinet, if only she could make herself get up and get it. She should have thought of that hours ago.

We just thought, if he and Kwek were together it would be chaos, we just wanted to keep him from boarding—

I hoped,
she said,
I hoped we could get out of this without killing anybody. I wanted, when we got here, for a minute, to kill Wox. But now I wish it hadn't happened.

She tried to shift her focus to Nakeekt. Nakeekt had withheld some knowledge about the poisonous leaves; did she even know how to be straightforward? There was something unreal about the last hour, a tinge of deceit in what Nakeekt had said of the leaves, but Hanna did not know what it was. Touching her now did not help. Nakeekt was only saying:
“...have to cut new channels, start now, start with this field, it must be drained, always there is either not enough rain or too much . . .”

Thoughts of crops. Nothing else.

Now Kwek sat down beside Hanna, still bouncing, making the seats vibrate. “Now we will go to your spacecraft!” she said—and there was something unreal about Kwek, too. Something different, at least. Or were all Hanna's senses playing tricks on her?

She turned her head slowly

“No,” she said. “First we have to go to Gergtk.”

K
AKREKT WAS FUMING
(though she had no such word for it). She should have heard long since from Wox, who carried a radio transmitter, or
from Nakeek
t. The not-Soldiers had been surprised to learn that Wektt and That Place communicated—as did That Place and Rowtt, and Wektt and Rowtt, for that matter. Communication was sporadic, true; perhaps that was the reason the not-Soldiers had missed it. So much for their technology! So much for listening to the mind!

“You have been asleep,” she accused the sentry in the station that looked in the direction of That Place. Like the others, it commanded a view of the physical terrain in case electronic surveillance failed and Rowtt succeeded in invading overland.

“I have not slept,” the Soldier said. “There has been no communication except from the not-Soldiers above, which does not cease and does not change and only repeats demands. There is nothing in the air, there are no missiles, there is nothing.”

Kakrekt resisted a need to kick him. It seemed that her life consisted of one internal imperative after another, many of which she prudently resisted. She remembered distinctly that once she had had few needs. Young Soldiers did not need much: to eat and drink, to sleep, to mate and feed the young, to carry out orders; to fight, to die. She had been the same, until one day the formula Soldiers repeated to each other upon parting—
survive
—had ceased to be a matter of rote and became a personal priority. Soon afterward, in an engagement where continuing to fight was hopeless, she had run away, taking care that none of her fellow-Soldiers saw her do it—not that it would have mattered, because they had all died. She had suddenly
needed
to survive, as she understood later when she examined her actions. Examining what she had done was new then, too—

The sentinel was wrong. Something was coming. Kakrekt's sudden conviction of this was absolute.

It was not to be fired upon.

Also absolute.

A rather shaky image of the not-Soldier aircraft formed in the air before her eyes.

Not eyes.

Now she understood that it was an illusion, the image was in her own brain, and in the next instant she understood that this was the not-Soldier female “speaking to the mind,” the phenomenon that so interested Kwoort, but which Kakrekt had not yet experienced herself.

It did not, at the moment, seem to have any advantage over Wox's radio, and why did he not use it?

“Now there is something,” the sentinel said. She saw him begin to move a hand and said sharply, “Do not fire,” and waited until she was sure he understood the order before she left the sentry station, immediately breaking into a run, because it wouldn't do for Kwoort to find out the aircraft was returning and get to it first with questions.

The sentry, however, had additional orders. He had not told Kakrekt about them because she had not asked. He moved his hand after all; he signaled Kwoort.

•   •   •

Hanna had tried to spend the flight locked away from the telepaths—and they didn't understand why and wouldn't let her alone. What could be so terr
ible that she had to conceal it?
Maybe it's not so awful,
they tried to tell her.
Maybe it's something you've blown bigger than its size, looking worse the longer you hide it.

Never mind that,
she said,
help me think up something to tell Kakrekt. She'll want to know where Wox is.

Tell her he stayed. Why not? Nakeekt doesn't talk to Kakrekt.

She talks to somebody. Kwoort's been “cooperative in the highest degree,” she said. I've got to get past Kakrekt. I have to get to Gabriel, I can't reach him, is he even alive?

Alive,
Dema said as if from a great distance.
Stable. And
Endeavor
's sending supplies, loading now. Don't worry.

But Hanna worried; she couldn't quit seeking Gabriel, it didn't seem fair that Dema could touch him and she couldn't. There were reasons, in the tricky logic of telepathy, and she knew, she
knew
what they were. She just couldn't think of them right now.

Calm down,
they kept saying.
Calm. Calm. Have another meal tab.

I can't, I'm saving them for Gabriel—

Try to rest—

I can't—

to relax—

I
can't
!

Over and over, round and round, with Kwek slowly subsiding from exuberance into suspicious watchfulness, as it sunk in that they were going to the Demon's chief city. But it was a good thing Kwek was there, because twenty minutes out from Wektt she said suddenly, “The Demon will fire on us!”

Oh!
everyone said; and then Hanna had to focus on Kakrekt and warn her to hold fire, and so she lived to land the pod in Wektt.

•   •   •

She got out of it and swayed where she stood. Two meal tabs had barely replaced the energy she had spent on this little trip; at least she had raided the medical cabinet again and the headache was better. It was still dark and the air was impossibly cold after the comfortable twenty-one degrees of the pod. Wind slapped her face, bearing crystals of ice. She heard Kakrekt, shrill and whistling and coming closer, a light bobbing in her hand. She was aware of the telepaths far, far above, not thinking to her, not even breathing, a great stillness; nobody knew what would happen next. Kwek had drawn as far back into the pod as she could get. Hanna just stood there. She couldn't think of anything else to do.

Now Kakrekt was inside the translator's range, and now she was in front of Hanna.

“Quickly, quickly, where is it? What do you have for me?”

“It's vegetation,” Hanna said.

Kakrekt looked at her as if the translator was not working.

“In there,” Hanna said. She gestured wearily over her shoulder. “Nakeekt sent somebody with it,” she added. “Wox stayed. She wanted to show him things to report about to you. She said you must send for him later.”

Kakrekt's ears lifted and tightened and her face shifted. It was the human equivalent of a shake of the head, dismissing the unimportant.

“What use is vegetation?” she said.

“Here are the instructions on how to use it.”

Hanna lifted the little scroll from her pocket, careful not to allow it to catch on a single meal tab, afraid of losing one, or the stimulants that might have to serve if something didn't change soon, and Kakrekt seized it.

•   •   •

She never remembered very well how she got back underground. She remembered trying to walk up the mountainside and falling; the earlier snowfall had stopped, but she had staggered off the roughly cleared path and snow came up over her ankles. She might have gotten up and tried again. She must have been terribly cold, but she did not remember that. She must have tried to connect with her D'neerans, but she could not concentrate because Kwek distracted her with unceasing grumbles about the weather (
I would not have come if I had known!
—forgetting that Nakeekt had meant to kill her) along with Kwek's indignation at having to carry the sack. It would be dropped for later retrieval if Kwoort should appear, but he did not; meanwhile Kakrekt had read Nakeekt's instructions with disbelief, puffs like steam coming out her breathing tubes in the cold air, followed by indignation nearly as great as Kwek's.

Then maybe she had fallen again; she only remembered that there had been a bustle of more Soldiers, Kakrekt hooting orders, a rough ride uphill on an open platform. After that, nothing, until she opened her eyes once more and found that she was crowded with Kwek into a cart that moved silently through the gray maze. Kwek no longer had the sack. No one else was with them except the driver and a guard.

She pulled upright from her slump and managed to say to Kwek, “What are they doing with us?”

“Kakrekt Commander has sent us to your billet. Both of us! We will have to stay in the same billet!” Kwek's complaints had not diminished. “I did not have to inhabit a billet with anyone in Rowtt at any time unless I was in the field! It was not necessary at That Place either—”

The driver's ears pricked. Hanna was starting to think again, though slowly. She wondered fleetingly how old the Soldier was. Old enough to have heard a rumor of That Place; old enough to be interested in it, too.

Her toes hurt, and her fingers. Her hands appeared unharmed when she looked at them. Finally she realized they must have gone numb with cold, and now circulation was coming back.

•   •   •

The billet had not come with niceties like tumblers to drink from, but Kakrekt had seen to it that Hanna and Gabriel got one so they did not have to drink from their cupped hands. Hanna filled it, swallowed a meal tab for herself—acknowledging the telepaths' gentle insistence that her own collapse would do Gabriel no good—dissolved another, and got Gabriel to take the liquid. The change in him frightened her. She had only been gone a few hours, but the hollows in his cheeks were even more pronounced and his eye sockets looked cavernous, and though he roused enough to be conscious of her presence, she had to help him sit up, and his hand fell away when he tried to take the tumbler for himself. Kwek hovered, not in anxiety but demanding his attention—for a few minutes; then Arch intervened, explaining why she must back off. Kwek sat on the hard bench after that, looking at the ever-yammering video unit and jeering at what she saw. This was not the shy and uncertain Kwek Hanna had known on
Endeavor
. Something, clearly, had changed. Hanna remembered the evasiveness with which Kwek had answered Nakeekt's question when they first went to That Place—
How does your mating time cycle?
—and suspected what the change meant. How she was to share quarters with Kwek and stay sane was a question for later.

She spoke to Gabriel from time to time as he slowly drank, small meaningless words meant to reassure—
“
It's all right”—
something
she could not do with her thought, because she hoped rather than believed what she said—
“everything will be all right . . .”

But it might be,
came Dema's whisper.
Metra's been transmitting nonstop for hours that she wants you to return to the ship, and if Kwoort won't consent to that she'll land supplies.

What's he said—?

Nothing. No response at all. But another pod is coming anyway. Starr's orders.

Images: A servo would put packages and bins on the ground and return to the pod
.
The pod would take off and Soldiers would gather up the cargo. That was how it was supposed to go.

Gabriel had slipped into a light doze, still leaning against Hanna. It was sleep, though, not unconsciousness. She woke him gently and fed him another life-giving drink. By the time he finished it he was more alert.

He touched her cheek and said, “You were gone a long time.” His voice was hoarse but there was some strength in it that had not been there before.

“Yes, I'm sorry, I didn't know I would be gone so long. Kakrekt sent me away.”

“I know about that,” he said, not altogether accurately, because he did not know the reason. “Do you need to rest?”

“Yes . . .” Badly.

He lay down again, making room for her on the pallet. She let herself stretch out next to him and felt sleep close in almost at once. Gabriel murmured, “Do you think we could just walk out of here?”

“You know,” she said drowsily, “we could try, if we get desperate enough.”

“I'm just about that desperate. Are you?”

“Yes—” She was starting to be afraid she would never see Mickey again. “There's still a Soldier outside the door. I don't know what he'd do to stop us. If we got past him maybe we could just go out to the pod and—but I don't know the way.”

“Couldn't
Endeavor
help us with that?”

“Maybe.” She woke further. “Kwek has the com unit we gave her when we got to That Place. I think they could track that, even underground.”

“Suppose we try it? Soon?”
When I'm stronger,
he thought. He said, “A few more meal tabs. Then we'll try.”

But there was only one tab left.