Cottonwood (25 page)

“Gone,” said Sanford, and T’aki echoed, “Gone.”

She looked at them. Her eyes were still wet. One of them was swollen.

“Once a home is raided, it becomes a target for the squads. Baccus won’t be back.”

“Oh.” She picked up her case, looking at it and not at him. “I was going to try to requisition some things to replace what got…burnt. And maybe go with him to the Heaps and help get stuff to cover the walls. It can’t be healthy to…to buh-breathe in all this s-soot. I have to get out of here,” she said suddenly, too loud and too fast. She started walking, stumbling through ashes and half-buried debris until she was clear of the wreckage, and then just stood, shivering in the sunlight.

She didn’t ask if he knew where Baccus had gone. He had an idea, actually. He realized he might even tell her if she asked him. He thought she probably knew it too.

“I’m going to requisition those things anyway. It’ll make it look like he’s still living here for a while. If the stuff comes through…I guess someone here will take it.” She looked up again. “Do you know someone who can make Baccus’s mark?”

“I can,” said T’aki.

“Hush. Let’s go inside,” he said to her, and she nodded and went, head down, at his side.

She sat on his chair, pulled his son onto her lap and held him as if it were the most natural thing in the world for either of them. She stared at his walls and didn’t speak.

Sanford poured water from his cache-drum into the purifier and turned it on. The sound of the filter working was very loud when there were no other sounds to compete with it. After a long time—the water was half-clean—Sarah suddenly pulled a breath and said, “I want you to go outside for a bit, jellybean. I want to talk to your Dad. Big-people talk.”

“I’m big,” protested T’aki.

“Bigger than you were, but not as big as you have to be to hear this talk. Go on now.”

“Stay close,” said Sanford, and his son went, muttering and kicking at stones.

In the dim light, Sarah looked sallow, unhealthy, scared. She stared at her hands, at his walls, and then at him.

“My community event approval came through this morning,” she said. “I should receive the funds within the next five days.”

Sanford waited.

“I still want to do it,” she said, her eyes bright and welling with pain. “I do, but…it just doesn’t seem as important as it did. What I saw…” She pressed her hands to her face, shook her head, and then dropped them and looked into his eyes. “I have to get you out of here.”

The words fell out of her and landed, broken, between them. It hurt more than he would have thought. “Don’t say things like that,” Sanford said, rubbing at the plates between his eyes until they hurt, too. “Just…don’t.”

“I have to.” Her voice shook, but she kept talking. “As many as you think will come. I’ve been looking at the van. I think I can hold…maybe six of you? More, if they’re…small.”

Sanford said nothing.

“The windows are tinted,” she told him hurriedly, hopelessly. “So as long as no one’s looking straight in through the windshield, no one should be able to tell you’re…what you are. And we can drive at night.”

The purifier popped softly, its timer completed.

“I don’t have a place to take you, but it’s…it’s a big planet and they can’t be everywhere. Maybe they won’t even notice you’re gone. How could they notice everyone when they…” She passed a hand over her eyes and made herself look at him again. “When they’re killing you.”

He looked away.

“Are they killing you?” she whispered. Her whole body begged him to tell her no, that the world was still a sane place, that there were only small miseries, and that people were all essentially good. Please.

He said, “Yes.”

She held his gaze one second, two, and then trembled over into her hands and began to weep. Sanford, deeply unsettled, clicked for his son, heard an answering rattle close by, and poured the woman a cup of water.

“I can’t drink that,” she sobbed. “It’s all you have.”

“Drink it,” he said, in the same tone he used to tell T’aki to go to sleep at night.

She drank, holding the cup in both hands.

Sanford sat down. He watched her, he clicked to keep his son close, and he listened as he always listened, for IBI to come. He realized he trusted her. He realized he’d trusted her for some time. He said, “Stand up.”

She did, sniffing and wiping at her face.

He moved her aside, pushed the chair away, pulled up the rug. She watched him open the hidden hatch with wet, incurious eyes. He put his hands on his knees and looked at her. “Down, please.”

She knelt.

He pointed at the hole. “Down. Please.”

She hesitated, hugging her cup, then set it aside, unfolded her legs and dropped down. He joined her, found the hand-light and switched it on.

The first things she saw, as he’d known she would, were the guns. He heard her gasp, then saw her clap a hand over her mouth so that she could not betray herself with sound again. Sixteen IBI rifles stood in a rack on the wall, alongside fifty boxes of ammunition. Packed in around them anywhere they would fit were two yang’ti pulsars, two disruptors and one annihilator. Perhaps the largest cache of yang’ti weapons in yang’ti hands on Earth. Certainly the largest in Cottonwood. But this was not what he wanted her to see.

There were several shelves stacked deep with canned food and impure water, a box of tablets, an extra purifier, and batteries of every kind. There were boxes filled with food-chits, even a packet of human money, just in case. Not even Sam knew he had that. None of this was important either. He picked up the one thing that was and gave it to her.

It didn’t look like much. A round, metal device, heavier than it appeared, black and grey, with dark panels, lifeless in her hands.

“What is it?” she whispered, her eyes huge.

“It’s a key,” he told her quietly. “My son and I are leaving.”

* * *

It took some explaining, which he did up top, the hatchway hidden and his son playing on the floor between them. The ship was a colony transport, to begin with. Its cargo, primarily civilian, partly support, including military support, as he was.

“You’re a soldier?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Of a sort. My specialty is in threat-assessment. Please, may I go on?”

The navigations systems had failed. This, humans had already surmised. But they had failed long before their ill-fated arrival on Earth. The colonists and crew, sleeping out their ten-year trip to the empty world they hoped to seed, had been awakened by the ship’s failsafe alarms only after they had been careening blindly through the galaxy for three years. The ship, spinning madly at the threshold of—

“Of what?”

Sanford clicked helplessly and spread his hands. There was only so much the translator could do.

He and several others had managed, after a terrifying interlude, to slow the engines before they ruptured, but the other repairs, the greater repairs, required considerably more time, and meanwhile, other systems, stressed by three years’ unchecked overuse, were on the cusp of explosive failure. They had to stop.

“Why not stop in space?” she asked, which was a fair and intelligent question.

“We were afraid our life-support systems would fail. In that event, best to have come to a planet capable of supporting us. Your Earth was nearest.”

“But wait…I mean, I know I studied this once in school, and, like, the nearest star to Earth is still four or five light-years away. How could you—”

“Light-years are…?”

“The distance light can travel in one of our years. And the speed of light is supposed to be as fast as anyone can go.”

Sanford clicked again, relieved. “Excellent. You grasp that. Yes, there are ways to circumvent the light-speed barrier to space travel.”

“There are?” And her face, pinched by unhappiness and dread all this while, slipped gently into wonder.

His heart throbbed. He looked down, as if surprised enough to want to see it, then up again. “Using those methods, we were able to reach your world in a little less than two months from our position in space. And once the cartography system had been repaired, we saw that while we were far off-course, frighteningly off-course, we were not entirely lost, thank Ko’vi. Once our ship is repaired, our engines at maximum efficiency, we could conceivably be home in less than two of your years.”

“That’s incredible!”

“Our world has three moons,” T’aki said, climbing up onto his lap.

“Yes,” Sanford agreed, patting him. “Three moons. And a yellow sun, like Earth’s. The oxygen levels of your atmosphere are somewhat low, but still breathable. It was in many ways an ideal destination, particularly in the emergency we found ourselves. But it was inhabited.”

They crashed through a shell of blatting satellites and transmitters to skip over the blue world’s surface as a stone over a pond. He’d been afraid, he remembered, of going right around the damn thing six or eight times, picking up unstoppable momentum on each revolution, until they were thrown off and into the gravitational grip of the sun. But no, they’d managed once more to slow and stop the engines, and, as if in divine punctuation to their premature relief, the instant the ship
had
stopped, the emergency systems failed and expelled every last one of the escape pods into the sea.

There was no way to leave the ship now. The failing, deteriorating ship.

“The beacons weren’t working,” Sanford said. “We had stopped the engines, only to discover that we couldn’t start them again, not even to move us over land where we might have some chance of surviving should the hover-drive fail and drop us. We were only two years’ hard flight from home, but no one knew to look for us or rescue us. With every colonist and crewman awake—breathing, drinking, passing waste—our life-support systems began to show strain. Anyone who could hold a diagnostic scanner was working. All shifts, every second. It was—” He stopped there, rubbed at his son’s seams. “It was a bad time.”

“We wondered why nothing happened right away,” Sarah said. “Why nobody came out. You were trying to hold the ship up. But…looking at how things turned out, I realize this is going to sound stupid, but why didn’t you ask for help?”

“No one had expected to encounter an alien civilization in the course of our mission, let alone one so advanced. On a diplomatic level, none of us had the authority to negotiate treaties or trade agreements. On a military level, asking for help meant admitting that we needed it and placing our lives in the hands of an unknown power. No. Our only objective in those first days was to fix the ship just enough to get off the planet before anyone knew we were there.”

“We knew you were there before you even stopped. I mean…” She puffed out a puzzled sort of laugh, gesturing vaguely upwards. “We saw you!”

“I know. But when no one came immediately, we dared to hope you did not possess the technology to locate us. In any event, the ship’s repair was our greatest priority, in specific, life-support. To that end, we moved everyone into the cargo holds and shut down life-support on the upper decks. We moved the cargo anywhere it would fit to make room for everyone. We moved far more than we had to. It was make-work, to keep the civilians occupied, make them think they were helping…but in retrospect, it was the most crucial thing we did.”

And then the humans came. Every day, more of them appeared in their floating cities and crude airships, during which time, he and the other military personnel had plenty of opportunities to figure out what to do about it. His specialty was threat-assessment; he saw a damned lot of threat.

“We can’t kill them,” he’d said, because the pervading argument had been to do just that. “We can’t kill even one of them. They’ll swarm us, they’ll shoot us down. We don’t know anything about their technology.”

“We know they can’t open a door.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t shoot us down!”

“They’ll swarm us even faster if we offer no resistance. We’re hopelessly outnumbered out there. Here, we can hold them off.”

“Not indefinitely,” Sanford said, before he had been Sanford. He had been Nk’os’a’knko then, son of an ancient House, officer of the Tes’xrian guard. He gave orders and was obeyed. The man who would someday be living in a metal crate, letting his son piss in a ditch while he rebuilt alien entertainment devices to sell for greasy bones—the man who would be Sanford—was unimaginable to him. “They are coming,” Nk’os’a’knko said, frustrated with his inability to convince them, with the need to convince them at all. “And if they have to cut their way in, they’ll do it and we’ll lose the integrity of the hull and be stranded here! Unless we can get this ship back into space right now, today, we’d better open up and talk to them.”

He’d been roundly refused. They were in no position to negotiate, even if some sort of communication could be managed, and they absolutely were not going to initiate contact with an alien race by asking for aid and refuge. They were yang’ti.

Nk’os’a’knko left them arguing and started breaking down weapons. His specialty was threat assessment. He knew they were going to need them and need them in disguise.

Soon after that, the gunship came. So it was either argue and be broken or open and be damned. Commander Tlee’tathk called his senior officers to him and gave his last orders. The ship’s systems were set to automatic-cycle and locked down. All doors were sealed and armed. It was Tlee’tathk who produced the code-bank and placed it in Nk’os’a’knko’s hands. “When the time comes,” he’d said, “and the last hope is ended, do not hesitate to destroy it.”

There was a final speech, during which the warnings which were soon to become law were heard and agreed upon. As the humans built their scaffolds, Commander Tlee’tathk led his people in prayer and then he opened the ship. And the monsters came.

Sarah smiled weakly.

“They were, you know,” Sanford said. “Especially in those first moments. The suits they wore…shiny and formless and faceless. The first thought I was able to make was of…monsters made of white clay. We could hear them speak, but they had no mouths, only voices that seemed to come from nowhere. They came for us, with the light from their world behind them…and no one knew what to do. No one fought them.” He knew he should stop there, but the words seemed to come out on their own: “No one escaped.”