Lost In Translation (2 page)

Jarrikk reached into his own case, took out the warm silvery cord of the Link, and touched it to the contact patch behind his right ear. He proffered the other end to the human, but she didn't take it, staring instead at his polished black claws. Behind her the dominant male, the Ambassador, stirred and muttered something, but the human Translator didn't respond. Jarrikk wondered if even now she would refuse the Link, and felt shame at his half-born hope that she would; or, more accurately, shame at his lack of shame at the thought.

Confusion,
he thought.
Humans bring nothing but confusion. Confusion and pain.

But he had sworn an Oath, and so he kept the Link extended: and, at last, the human took it, careful not to touch his clawed hand, careful to the last, though it seemed she, too, would uphold her Oath, and all her care would mean nothing momentarily.

For the last time, the human hesitated, staring at her end of the Link. Then the Ambassador cleared his throat and said something, his voice deep and painfully harsh to Jarrikk's ears.

The human Translator snapped something even harsher and louder in return, and firmly touched the cord to the patch under her own ear.

As human and S'sinn memories, terrors, and anger melded and fused, a great many things became clear.

The wind caressed the leathery membrane of Jarrikk's wings and tickled the soft hair of his belly like his brood mother used to, to soothe away a nightmare. For a thousand heartbeats he'd been holding his wings imperceptibly angled, spoiling the airflow ever so slightly. His chest and shoulder muscles ached with the effort, but he would have shrieked with excitement if it wouldn't have ruined everything, because Kakkchiss and the others now flew thirty lengths ahead of him and had yet to realize that he lagged behind.

With relief, he drove toward the clouds with powerful strokes. This time he had Kakkchiss. The youngflight leader would never know what hit him!

High enough. Jarrikk focused prey-sight on the sleek black hairs rippling over the powerful muscles in Kakkchiss' back, folded his wings, and dove.

Kakkchiss flapped on, his attention apparently entirely on the forest below. “You wait,” he said to Llindarr, on his right. “Flight Leader Kitillikk will threaten to rip our wings off when we get back, but she'll be glad to hear a clear-eyed report of what these aliens are doing, just the same. She'll probably make us full-fanged Hunters on the spot,
isn't that right, Jarrikk?
” And at the last possible instant, Kakkchiss sideslipped smoothly out of Jarrikk's way. As Jarrikk hurtled through empty air, Kakkchiss' laughter followed him down.

Claw-rot!
Jarrikk snapped his wings open, grabbing air so suddenly he almost tumbled out of control. He righted himself but stayed put a good fifty lengths below Kakkchiss and the other four members of the youngflight, their good-natured abuse raining down on him. “Give it up, Jarrikk! Kakkchiss is Leader to stay!” “Noisiest dive I ever heard!” “Hey, even those aliens could fly better than that!”

That stung, because the strange aliens who had just landed on their planet of Kikks'sarr—
their
planet, Jarrikk thought, with a familiar sense of outrage that the aliens had
dared
—flew only with noisy motors and stiff artificial wings. “There's one now!” Jarrikk shouted suddenly, pointing down, and had the satisfaction of seeing all but Kakkchiss spill air, proving pretty conclusively, Jarrikk thought, that they weren't nearly as unconcerned as they claimed to be about this flouting of Flight Leader Kitillikk's command to roost until she decided how and when to contact the aliens.

Not that they planned to contact them, Jarrikk hastily reminded himself; just spy on them.

Kakkchiss hadn't put a wingtip out of place.
He really is good,
Jarrikk admitted to himself.
An excellent leader. But I could be better.

Still, Kakkchiss caught his eye and clawed the air with his arms in a gesture of respect, and Jarrikk felt a little better. One thing about Kakkchiss, he never begrudged Jarrikk's attempts to dethrone him, and Jarrikk thought if—no,
when
—he finally succeeded in catching Kakkchiss off-guard, Kakkchiss would accept it—and then, of course, immediately set about getting the leadership back.

Well, it was no good sulking down here all day. They must still be at least two thousand beats from the aliens' landing place. Jarrikk strengthened his wing-strokes and started to climb.

Something flashed, blindingly white. Jarrikk blinked. Lightning? Out of a clear sky? “Kakkchiss, did you—” he started, then stopped, gaping.

Kakkchiss' wings, those smoothly powerful tools that never stumbled in even the roughest air, fluttered uselessly, spasming like they had suddenly developed minds of their own; and then they stopped altogether, and Kakkchiss dropped from the sky.

He plummeted down toward Jarrikk, and for a moment Jarrikk thought he'd been wrong and Kakkchiss intended to take revenge; but as Jarrikk spilled air and swung out of the way, he glimpsed the gaping, blackened hole in Kakkchiss's chest. Trailing a thin stream of smoke and blood and the smell of burned meat, the youngflight leader hurtled a thousand lengths into the forest below, striking the treetops with a terrible breaking sound that carried clearly to Jarrikk's horrified ears.

Jarrikk's own wings suddenly didn't want to work anymore. He circled down toward the scar in the forest canopy, while above him the other younglings whirled, shouting in confusion. “Jarrikk, what—” Yvenndrill called, then the strange bright flash came again and the call became a choking shriek that dop plered toward Jarrikk.

Jarrikk tore his eyes from the place where Kakkchiss had fallen just in time to see Yvenndrill spinning helplessly down, blood streaming behind him, his agonized shrilling ending abruptly as the sharp splintering branches of the trees broke his fall and his back. His severed wing, still twitching, fluttered down seconds later.

Stunned, almost numb, Jarrikk spiraled down to the trees and clung to a high branch, staring back up at the sky, where Llindarr and little Illissikk, the youngest, still circled in terror and confusion. The light flashed again, and this time Jarrikk saw an energy beam split the air between the two bewildered younglings and realized at last someone was shooting at them. “Dive!” Jarrikk screamed at them, just as they reached the same conclusion and headed for the trees.

Llindarr had only descended a few lengths when the beam flashed again. For a moment Jarrikk thought it had missed, because Llindarr's dive still seemed in control—but he never pulled up, and the upthrust tip of a forest giant impaled him.

Illissikk almost made it: might have made it, if he hadn't tried, at the last minute, to pull up low over the forest and join Jarrikk. The beam flashed one last time, and Illissikk's headless body slammed into the clearing below Jarrikk's perch so hard it shook the tree he clung to. A thin pattern of deep scarlet drops spattered the dark brown fur of his chest.

Jarrikk wanted to shriek himself, then, wanted to throw himself in blind panic into the sky, but fought down the instinctive urge to flee with reason—and rage. If he left cover, he would die, too, cut in two by the beam, and the Flight Leader might never know what had happened. But if he stayed, he would see the hunters who had used this horrible weapon come collect their “trophies.” And then he could tell the Flight Leader with absolute conviction what he already knew in his hearts: that the strange aliens who had landed on their planet were bloody-handed murderers.
And then it will be the S'sinn's turn to Hunt!

And so he waited, and watched, a hundred heartbeats, and a hundred more, and a thousand after that, absolutely still, absolutely silent, until at last, as he had known they must, the murderers emerged.

There were three of them, hideous, near-hairless four-limbed monsters, like wingless, bald S'sinn. Two were much larger than the other, whose face had the unformed look of a youngling. They wore brightly colored coverings like the S'sinn sometimes wore on holy days, and both carried black, evil-looking tubes with knobby handles: the murder weapons, Jarrikk thought. It was all he could do to keep from diving on them then and there and tearing out their ugly throats.

The youngling seemed agitated about something, pulling on the upper limb of one of the adults, his voice shrill and painfully loud, but the adult pushed him away and said something in a deeper, harsher voice.

As the youngling alien watched with wide eyes, the adults knelt beside Illissikk's corpse. Then—Jarrikk's claws dug deep into the branch—one of them drew out a glittering knife and began cutting at the dead youngling, skinning him as though he were a jarrbukk!

Worse followed. One of the large aliens went into the forest and emerged moments later carrying something wrapped in giant leaves. With a flourish, he swept them aside, revealing Illissikk's head. A branch or rock had ripped out his left eye, but his right remained, wide with his final terror.

The aliens seemed to take forever going about their grisly business, but Jarrikk held down his impatience with the same cold calculation he had already applied to his revenge. There
would
be revenge, and soon enough, but first he must bear the tale back to the colony. First, Flight Leader Kitillikk must know. And then—

—then it would be the aliens' turn to feel the cut of knives and beams in their hairless, pale skins.

At last the monsters finished, and disappeared into the forest again, leaving behind a pile of bloody meat indistinguishable from any dead beast. Illissikk had vanished as if he'd never existed, reduced to less than nothing by the aliens' cold knives. They had moved on, no doubt to do the same to Kakkchiss and the others; and now at last Jarrikk moved, too, unfurling stiff wings and sweeping silently away into the gathering twilight, low to the treetops, where he knew he would be all but invisible.

He would not allow himself grief; he clung to his need to report to the Flight Leader as he might have clung to a slim green branch in a thunderstorm, refusing room to the other black thoughts that tried to shoulder in to share it. Thirst and hunger soon joined the throng, but he refused them a place to land as well. Cold rage and the hope of hot revenge were all he needed to sustain himself this day.

They'd been a half-day's flight from the colony when the aliens attacked; deep night's bitterly cold black wings covered the world when Jarrikk, with ever-slower wingbeats, finally began flapping wearily up toward the high mountain caves into which the S'sinn had withdrawn with the coming of the aliens. They had abandoned their airy tree-top structures with a prudence Jarrikk had thought foolish at the time. No longer. A dark shape slashed down to meet him, briefly silhouetted against the star-lit glimmer of snow-capped peaks before swinging into position wingtip-to-wingtip on his right. “Jarrikk?”

“Ukkarr,” Jarrikk rasped, with barely enough breath to talk. “Must see—Flight Leader.”

“So you shall, since the Flight Leader left standing orders to bring you younglings before her the instant you returned. Where are the others?”

“Dead.”

Ukkarr's steady wingbeats stuttered. “Dead? How—”

Jarrikk concentrated on keeping his own wings beating. His story was for the Flight Leader first, not for her lieutenant. Just a few more beats . . .

Ukkarr didn't ask again. Silent, he climbed with Jarrikk, guiding him away from the cave complex's main entrance to a smaller, isolated cavern higher up the slope. “Wait here,” Ukkarr commanded, and plunged back into the night.

Wings still at last, Jarrikk slumped in the cold dark, chest and back ablaze with pain. He pressed the backs of his hands hard against his eyes, then slowly massaged his wings' muscles. Thank the Hunter of Worlds that Ukkarr had thought to bring him here first. He couldn't face their brood mother—not yet. What if she had seen him and asked about the others? He couldn't lie to her. And the bloodparents . . .

Alone, no longer able to concentrate solely on the act of flying, the magnitude of what had happened threatened to overwhelm him. He folded his wings flat against his back and crouched on the cold stone floor. Wind whispered across the opening to the cavern, a soft, keening sound like a youngling just taken from its bloodmother, before the brood mother came to nurse and comfort it: but this night, Jarrikk knew, no comfort would come at all.

 

Flight Leader Kitillikk rested on a shikk outside her dwelling caves, overlooking the large central chamber that had served as their Flock Hall since the arrival of the aliens on Kikks'sarr drove them underground. Blood-red and smoky from a thousand torches and fires, it seemed a primeval place, like the legendary hot, hollow center of the home world of S'sinndikk, where the Hunter of Worlds was said to dwell when not soaring through the universe on space-black, star-studded wings.

Or so the priest who had just left her had described it, but Kitillikk was of a more prosaic turn of mind. To her, it looked like a prison—a prison they had been forced into by the alien invaders. Her lips drew back in an involuntary snarl. The priest had all but ordered her to attack and drive the aliens back into space—had almost accused her of cowardice. But the priest didn't have to answer to Supreme Flight Leader Akkanndikk back on S'sinndikk, who had given unequivocal orders: no attack unless attacked. To strike first would contradict the First Principles of the Commonwealth.

Kitillikk had her own opinions about the Commonwealth, opinions she intended to one day make S'sinn policy, when she became Supreme Flight Leader. But achieving that goal meant first succeeding at her current task of leading the colonization of Kikks'sarr, and that meant following orders. No attack unless attacked.