Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (45 page)

Three tiny specks, the skimmers, were in fact followed by a larger one that could surely only be the
Dawnforce
.

Kayleen’s hand went to her mouth. “Ghita,” she said. “Ghita won.”

“Or she heard whatever news she was waiting for,” Liam added under his breath while Tom stepped back and began speaking hurriedly into his earset and the others struggled to pick the offending points of dangerous machinery out of the backdrop of puffy morning clouds.

We couldn’t see Artistos from the fork. By the time Liam and I arrived at the first good vantage point, the speck of the
Dawnforce
had become as big as our thumbs, and settled onto the field, its malevolent, squat shape towering over the hebra barn.

“We have to get down there,” I said.

Liam shook his head. “Wait.”

Kayleen caught up to us, her face red with the exertion of running with a baby due any day. She flopped down on her side, looking out over the cliff face. “The skimmers are landing near the ship.”

I knelt down next to her, my hand on her arm. “Are you in their data?”

She shook her head, her voice slightly bitter. “After this, I’m not sure I couldn’t trust it if I was. Maybe I should just listen to them, and tell everyone the opposite.”

“Hey,” Liam said, “You’re doing the best you can.” He knelt on her other side, leaning down and kissing her sweat-streaked forehead. “You told them not to be sure of your conclusion. What more could you have done?”

She didn’t look at him. “I don’t know.”

Tom’s voice carried from just above us, still talking into his earset. Ruth walked by his side, silent and somehow accusing simply with her presence. “…Stile to get as many people as he can into the forest.”

At least Tom was giving direction. To run and hide. The worst part of it was that he was right. I wanted to go down there and make them leave. But we couldn’t just chase a spaceship the size of the
Dawnforce
away. I hated it. We should have cleared out the whole town. It was our fault everyone was living with enough unearned sense of security, or at least time, our fault that people were left in town.

Akashi and Hunter caught up with us next. Kayleen stood up, going to Hunter’s side. She glanced at Akashi. “I’ll go down to the cave with Hunter. You all go on now. You can travel faster without us.”

She meant without Hunter. After all, she had beat him here. If Hunter thought of that he was too graceful to show it. “She’s right,” he said. “Go on.”

An hour later, after having promised three times we wouldn’t get any closer, Liam and I stood at View Bend again. By the time we got that far, I sounded as winded as Kayleen had on her shorter run. The baby protested, twisting and kicking inside me. I whispered to it. “Shhhh, little one. I’m sorry. I’ll keep you safe.”

The look Liam gave me telegraphed frustration. “If only we can.”

For the second time in two days, we stood far above Artistos, watching helplessly as people we knew died. Right after we’d decided never to let that happen again, to get into the fight and be weapons ourselves.

Tears rolled down my face as I watched, for my baby, our babies, for our people.

People weren’t the only casualties. I gasped as one of the skimmers flitted out over the grass plains and dropped something onto the
hangar that held the colony’s two remaining shuttles to Traveler. It exploded in a flash of bright yellow and red, the color quickly engulfed with black smoke.

Barns and houses burned. Not all of them, and in no apparent pattern. Liam fed a steady stream of information into his earset, narrating the chaos.

The mercenaries drove the town goats and the few remaining hebras over a cliff. I cursed as each one fell.

Liam gave up on talking to anyone for a few moments. He leaned into me and said, “They could have just set them free.”

T
he midafternoon sun beat down on my sweaty forehead and my breath came way too shallow and fast for simply finishing the climb from the High Road to just above the Cave of Power. I twisted toward Liam, who sat next to me on the stones covering the cave’s entrance, patiently waiting for me to catch my breath and Kayleen to catch up to both of us. Our child kicked hard at my spine, eliciting a groan and a smile. I set Liam’s hand down on my belly, and the baby obligingly kicked again. Liam’s hand rose and fell as if he stroked a drum. Perhaps the baby felt my apprehension. We were taking the battle to the mercenaries tomorrow at dawn.

Kayleen loped the last bit up the well-worn path toward us, her swollen belly making her ungainly and awkward. She strayed from the path for a moment to look at a small reddish-brown rock, and her feet crushed tiny red and yellow star-flowers.

Kayleen sat beside me, looking out toward Artistos. “I’m scared,” she whispered.

“We’ve waited long enough,” I said. The mercenaries had held Artistos a month. Stile and a large group had made it to the cave, but eighteen people hadn’t. No funerals had been held, but we counted them among the dead. We had held four funerals for people caught in a raid.

The mercenaries hadn’t returned to the cave. Our hope was that one brush with the defense systems had been enough.

Liam stretched, jostling me from my worried review. “At least, this time, we’re fighting them.” He grinned, trying to make light even though his eyes were dark and worried. “All of us.”

“It still seems to me like they’re just waiting for us to attack them,” I said.

Kayleen sounded bitter. “And it’s better to let them pick us off one by one?”

It wasn’t. Besides, too many were spoiling for a fight now. The War Council’s decision was to try the same tactic that had worked at the end of the last war…a big, decisive battle. We were going to attempt to overwhelm them with numbers. On the surface, it should be easy. Except I was still convinced we were doing exactly what they wanted. But remembering the last advice we’d given, we’d chosen to cast our vote with the others, making it a unanimous decision.

“Well,” Kayleen said, “If we’re going to fight, then we had better eat.” I expected her to lead us down to the cave kitchen, but instead she produced a veritable feast from her backpack. Fresh bread, carrots, dried berries, and three strips of precious djuri jerky. “Remember when I planned that feast on Islandia? At least for this one, we’re all together.” She smiled a soft intimate smile that included both of us. “And, we’re home.”

I frowned, reaching for a carrot. “I miss West Home. I’d take Islandia—with no mercenaries—as home against being part of this damned war. If I ever catch whoever sent these people, they’re going to wish they hadn’t done it.”

Liam took a chunk of bread and meat, running a finger along the curve of Kayleen’s face. “I’m happy to eat your feast today.”

She nodded. “We should sleep too, while we can.”

The attack would begin at dawn. I would go with Tom and Paloma, the three of us forming the strategic part of the War Council, while Akashi and Ruth led the two main groups of attackers. Liam would be with his father. Kayleen would stay here, in the cave, listening to their nets and ours as best she could, and relaying information to those of us with precious earsets—Ruth, Akashi, me, Liam, and Stile.

This meal could be our last quiet one together. I didn’t have much appetite, but I was no longer eating just for me. I picked up a piece of bread, breaking it into small bite-sized chunks to follow the carrot. The baby in my stomach did a slow, lazy flip and I cupped it, stroking my belly. Such magic in a pain-shot time. I glanced at Kayleen. “What scares you the most?”

“Losing.”

I stared out over the hills. We’d set traps in them, but who knew if the mercenaries would walk into them? They’d never been willing to fight with us on the ground. Not once. All of our strategies felt more like hopes. How do you plan against an enemy with so much more technology and strength?

Liam answered my question about his fears. “I’m scared for you and the babies. I wish you weren’t in this at all.”

“We can’t help it,” Kayleen and I said together, grinning at each other. We often spoke the same sentences since we became a threesome. “Besides,” Kayleen added, “We want you safe, too.”

“I won’t be safe. But I’ll be successful.”

“Well, let’s hope so.” Kayleen’s blue eyes glowed. “Because I’m going to help you kill them for the babies.”

Liam grunted again, and said, “And for Gianna and Nava and Eric and everyone else.”

“And for Windy,” Kayleen added.

The bread in my mouth tasted like sawdust.

A
crowd filled the cave’s mouth, largely shadows, the occasional shaft of light from hand-held flashlights, and a single flower of flickering light from the kitchen fire. We had staged over two hundred fighters in the Cave of Power, waiting to take the most dangerous way down near Artistos—the High Road. Even with two of our three frizzers, tools Jenna had given us years ago to go through Artistos’s nets undetected, it was a dangerous approach.

The air crackled with coiled energy and anticipation.

Young men and women wearing forest-colored clothes and light packs stood in groups. Children clung tightly to adults, and parents too old to fight watched, generally silent, offering words of love and hope to their offspring. Sky and Sasha, going down with Liam in the first wave, moved in and out of the kitchen firelight, preparing small packets of food for the fighters. Sasha still limped, but she had been stubborn.

The three of us stood a bit to the side, seeking privacy in these last few moments before Liam and I left. He bounced on the balls of his feet, looking out in the direction of Artistos. We had tried to sleep,
succeeding only in sweating and tangling together, Kayleen and I both awkward and Liam shifting between stroking our hair or bellies and sitting up, staring. Now, his face was set, hard, and his jaw tight. He’d cut his hair short, and he looked older for it, and fiercer. Or maybe the fierceness was in his blue eyes. Someone flashed a bright light against Liam’s bronzed skin, so that for just a moment he looked like metal.

Fighters lined up to take additional packets from Hunter. Small packets of poisons made by Paloma, some for the water, some for the air. Larger bundles of dried trip-vine thorns and fresh sticker-vine, harvested in the last day or two and kept damp in a barrel of stream water until an hour or so ago. Fremont’s wild things, fighting with us instead of against us. Liam left our side to take one, then returned.

A bird-whistle came from above us. Our signal. Liam turned to Kayleen and leaned in over her swollen waist, kissing her fiercely. After they separated, he took the ladder, leading the group out of the cave. I leaned in to Kayleen and kissed her full on the lips, something I almost never did in public. I stroked her cheek, looking into her deep green eyes.

She returned my gaze, steady, but her voice shook as she said, “Good luck.”

I swallowed. “Stay safe.”

I waited for everyone else before I left, stopping halfway up the ladder to take one more long look at Kayleen. She stood in the kitchen, firelight bathing her face as she watched me go, her hands folded quietly on the shadowed shelf of her belly. Her job would be as hard as ours.

Outside, the silence of early morning filled the air so that every step we took seemed loud enough for Artistos to hear. Destiny shone above us, a small white disc in the sky, the only moon visible. By dawn, when we went in, we would have Hope and Summer as well for a few hours before Destiny set. A three-moon moment, portending luck.

I stayed with the attacking force, and thus with Liam, until they reached the High Road. There, Liam waved at me, a dark movement against a dark time of day. Then he was gone. I watched as two hundred fighters passed me, Sky and Sasha among them, all of them
solemn and intent on silence. I closed my eyes, wishing them safe. Sky, Sasha, and Liam would break away to go with Akashi, and Stile would take the rest.

I turned uphill and went on, alone, up the road that they went down, loping as quickly as I could manage, staying near the trees at the side of the road. At the top of the Old Road, Tom and Sugar Wheat met me, Stripes at their side. “All’s well so far?” he asked.

“The crew from the cave are on their way. They looked good, ready.” They would meet others who had been working their way toward town all day.

Tom dismounted and held out his hands, boosting me high enough onto the mounting strap that I only needed to slide a foot into one more loop before I swung my right leg over the high back of Stripes’s saddle. We rode with only the small wedge of moon and stars visible from the deep, steep trail for light, letting the hebras pick their footing. Halfway down the Old Road, we cut right, threading through dense underbrush, trusting the hebras to keep us safe. Tom had put me in front, and except for the occasional snort from Sugar Wheat or the scrape of a cloven hoof against a stone, I might have been riding alone through the darkening woods.

Tom called out from behind. “Go right. The path will look straight up.”

I turned Stripes up a tiny side trail and grabbed for the thick hair on top of her neck as she seemed to actually pull vertical for a few strides, her haunches gathering and her head low as she strained to do what I needed. Shortly, it got better, or at least became only nearly straight up. Trees brushed my legs on either side, and I ducked under low-hanging branches. Once, Stripes jumped as something small and furry raced between her legs.

Twenty minutes after we left the Old Road, we broke free of the trees just below the ridgeline. From here, we could see more than from View Bend, could look down onto View Bend and the High Road, in fact. My sharper eyes would be useful here.

“Hello,” Paloma called from above me. I turned to see her and her hebra, Sand, resolve as movement from a chaos of dawn-grayed tent-trees, redberry bushes, vine maple, and tall grasses escaped from the plains to find brief purchase on the stony ground. Long shadows cast
darkness across about half of the open place, the rest visible now in the first early crack of light. In a few moments, the first sunshine would fall upon us and the battle would begin.