Sky Hunter (12 page)

They made their way back to the edge of the
slum and the meandering route they took was as much the result of a
lack of compass as it was to appear to be a rebel patrol. Things
finally began to look familiar to Djari who’d spent far more time
in these quarters than she had. But the Rhuwacs no longer loitered
in the alley and no one else was moving nearby, according to her
scanner. The hospital showed only a handful of life signs.

“
No!” Djari exclaimed and she had to
grasp his arm with both hands to keep him from rushing back into
the building.

“
Stop,” she hissed. “We don’t know
who’s in there.”

He scowled at her but after a moment relaxed
enough for her to let him go. She pulled him into the shelter of a
courtyard wall and studied the dim glow of the scanner. This model
only showed life signs but no specifics about species or state of
health. At least they were alive. “Not moving. Could be our
patients. Or people hiding.” She pointed at the screen. “Is that
the back area where we left Reko?”

“
I think so. That’s the hallway there,
I think, given the exit.”

She nodded. “Let’s use the back door again.
Just move very quietly. We’re not helping anybody by walking in on
rebels.”

They stole around the side of the improvised
clinic and pried the door into the washroom. The floor was slippery
with things she refused to examine more closely. No sound came from
the main hall and power to the building seemed to have been cut.
Feeling their way in the dark with an eye on the scanner, they
crept forward to the nearest person.

It was, indeed, someone hiding. A Centauri
woman, her black hair a tangled mess and wrapped in a sheet from
her bed, cowered in a corner. “Shh,” Nova whispered and touched her
gently as she crouched beside her. “Are you hurt?”

The woman raised her tear-streaked face and
looked from Nova to Djari, taking a moment to recognize them. “They
shot them,” she said. “All of them.”

“
Who?” Djari said. “What
happened?”

“
I don’t know! They just came in here
and started yelling and shooting. I ran and hid. They were shouting
about the Union but no soldiers came. They just left.” She stared
blindly into the dark. “They just left.”

“
Stay here,” Nova said. “Stay
quiet.”

Djari moved ahead of her around the corner
and to the front entrance. They found another survivor, this one a
Bellac worker, and then one of the locals that had supplied them
with food these past few days. Nova pressed her hands over her face
to stifle her cry when she saw a tall Centauri sprawled face down
near the door.

“
Gods, Reko,” she moaned, although her
scanner had already told them that none of the bodies strewn
through the hall were alive. “Please, not this.” She dropped to her
knees beside him and heaved him onto his back. “Oh, damn!” She
squeezed her eyes shut and dug her hands into his borrowed tunic as
if to tear it.

“
Come,” Djari gripped her arm to pull
her up. “We have to get out of here.”

She shook him off. “I can’t leave him here,
in the dirt.” The half-closed eyes in the dusty face seemed to
accuse her of something. Why had she left him here, unable to
defend himself? Now who would teach her to curse in Centauri? “I
can’t…”

“
We have to. Come on!”

“
Djari,” they heard a whisper. Coria
came out of the shadows, uninjured but her eyes were wide with
fear. “You’re alive! Thank the Gods!” Djari held her closely, his
voice a soothing murmur, until she had collected herself. She
seemed less excited to see Nova near him.

The three of them shifted Reko onto a pallet
and covered him with a blanket. The next priority was to collect
the survivors and leave the hospital, more to escape the gruesome
carnage than with any hope of finding a better hiding place. The
alley outside was silent although they stopped and listened
anxiously when some shouts reached them from afar. Another escapee
huddled in a doorway of a looted and burned home and they convinced
him to join them.

Coria led them to a small stable, smelling
cleanly of hay and wood where Nova arranged them along a rickety
stairway to hide their true number on the sensors. She took stock.
None of them were too injured to move on their own. The Centauri
woman was shell-shocked and would have to be minded carefully. One
of the Bellacs was little more than a child. The others just looked
stunned and exhausted.

“
What happened?” Nova asked Coria. She
glanced guiltily at Djari. “Did they notice we left?”

“
Then it’s our blood on your hands,
Human,” Coria snapped.

“
They did not,” the Bellac medic said.
“There is some sort of mutiny going on. Some of the rebels are
trading captives to save their hides. Taking them out in the dark
to bargain with. Thank the Gods they took the young ones out,
first. Arter’s people came and shot whoever’s left, just to make a
point. They shot their own, too!”

“
The rest are trying to get back into
the hills,” Coria said. “The ones who aren’t turncoats.”

Nova tapped her lips with a forefinger,
considering this. “Air Command is going to be all over those hills.
Snipers are just going to pick them off. Surrendering is probably
much healthier right now.” She looked to Coria. “Do you know where
and to whom they’re delivering the hostages?”

The woman shook her head. “Guessing along the
east side where it’s more open.”

“
Going to be light soon,” Nova said to
Djari. “We need to get out of here. No guarantee that we’ll be
found by the right sort of rebel.”

“
No, I suppose not. What do you have in
mind?”

She looked up at the people on the stairs.
“We’re going to play Shri-Lan. I’ll be your prisoner, and so will
they.” Nova pointed at the Centauri and a Bellac with a long gash
across his cheek and a bandage around his head. “The rest of you
look well enough to be rebels. We have a few guns.” She turned away
from them and pulled the data sleeve she had taken from the dead
rebel from her pocket.

“
Calling home?” Djari said and looked
over her shoulder.

“
Sort of.” Nova frowned when the
unsophisticated device balked at her manipulations. She managed to
recode the access scan and then briefly touched the device to her
neural implant.

Djari raised an eyebrow. “You can interface
with that?”

“
Not exactly, but I can create a
recognizable signal. They’ll know it’s me.”

“
How?”

She shook her head. “You’d have to hold a gun
to my head to find that out.”

He frowned. “You don’t trust me?”

She looked up, startled. “Of course I do.
It’s just not the sort of thing we talk about.”

“
Of course. I’m sorry.”

“
No need.” She touched his hand and
felt his fingers close around hers like the briefest of hugs. She
turned back to the others. “Coria, you and this young fellow go
back to the hospital and grab some clothes that look more like
something rebels would wear.” She met the woman’s eyes. “I’m sure
you can figure that part out.”

Coria looked as if some retort burned to be
flung at Nova but then said nothing. She tugged on the medic’s arm
and they slipped back into the street.

* * *

There were nine of them now, making their
way slowly along the outside of the old city wall toward the north
end where Union patrols were sure to pick them up. The sun had
risen not long ago, but a hot, dry wind was already flapping their
loose clothing and fraying their nerves.

Nova turned to walk backwards for a moment,
counting heads, before returning her eyes to the uneven terrain
around them. She now showed her Air Command uniform and her hands
were loosely tied behind her to appear as a hostage. It made
walking on the uneven ground awkward and tiring.

A young man with a crutch hobbled beside her,
slowing them all down, but he was a great story teller and managed
to keep them distracted with his commentary. The Centauri woman had
stopped talking long ago and continued moving only because Coria
had tied a scarf around her wrist. Djari and the medic walked in
the back, armed with the guns. The others surrounding them tried
their best to look armed and menacing, a difficult feat for any of
them as they stumbled along in the heat, not having eaten since the
day before and with only a small bag of gritty water to sustain
them. They stopped often to rest in what shade they found and each
time they started out again it seemed more difficult to put one
foot in front of the other.

They had met a small group of retreating
rebels earlier. Their questionable disguise had worked or perhaps
the rebels were too intent on fleeing into the hills to bother with
challenging them. Feeling a little more confident, they continued
their journey without having seen anyone else. The arid ground now
sported considerably more scrub and the occasional tree, blocking
the view from town and offering a little more shade.

She turned again, briefly, to look back at
Djari. He looked up as if she had called to him and his tired face
lit up with a smile. She remembered their brief moment together
those few hours ago and the thought of another one like it, as his
smile seemed to promise, gave her hope and renewed strength.

Nova glanced at Ulos, the young Centauri
beside her. “Didn’t anybody notice that he wasn’t from around
there?” she asked, referring to his latest, somewhat convoluted
tale. Her head ached and she had trouble following the plot but it
kept her from thinking about other things.

“
That’s the fun part. The difference
between his markings and his lover’s people are some loops across
the left chest. So he used her paints to change his
markings.”

“
He must have been truly in love,” Nova
said. Few things were as prized by Caspians as the intricate
patterns on their short hide, a system that proclaimed their
birthplace as precisely as a regional accent. Some females colored
their hair to better display the patterns but males spurned the
practice as effeminate. Neither men nor women would readily change
the markings with which they were born. “So did they get found
out?”

“
Yeah,” he said dryly. “He painted
himself in front of a mirror.”

Nova laughed.

They found an ancient wash-out and moved into
the shade provided by the striated rock face of the gully. The
ground sloped gently toward the north. “Let’s hope it doesn’t start
raining,” Ulos said. “A man could drown in here.”

“
Do not mention water.”

He shrugged. “Would be salty, anyway.”

“
Someone coming,” Coria said. She was
holding the scanner. Interference was again reducing its range to
just a short distance around them. “Four of them, that
way.”

Only a few moments later an armed rebel group
traveling in the opposite direction came into view, like many of
them hurrying to escape into the hills. Their guns were loosely
pointed in their direction but they seemed to have no clear
intent.

Nova’s ragged column came to a halt when
their way was blocked by the newcomers.

“
Where would you be going?” a Centauri
in a desert robe walked among them. He stopped in front of Nova who
kept her eyes on the ground and tried to look like a captive. It
didn’t take much pretension. “And where did you get the
soldier?”

“
Taking her back to them, what do you
think?” Coria said.

The rebel shifted his eyes to her. “Arter
broke off those useless talks. He said to scatter into the canyons.
So you’re heading into the wrong direction.”

“
To hell with Arter. We’ll be scraped
off the hills one by one as target practice. I’m getting out of
here.”

“
You might want to rethink that,
Bellac,” he said. Nova groaned inwardly at their sad luck of having
run into a rebel actually loyal to this lost cause. The man stabbed
his gun into Nova’s midriff. “I think we’ll be taking her off your
hands.”

Just then a row of armed Union soldiers rose
up on the embankment above them, appearing out of absolutely
nowhere. No one had noticed their silent approach, too worried
about the rebels coming their way. Confused, all of them looked
around to face a wall of muscle in battle gear.

“
Away from her,” one of them
ordered.

Nova gasped when she recognized Captain
Beryl, not monitoring his squad, but himself behind the barrel of
his gun.

The leader of the newcomers whipped around,
gun ready, and was immediately met by a storm of laser fire.
Others, too, fell to their aim and Nova saw Coria collapse and then
Ulos also dropped before she managed to tear herself out of her
shock. She pulled apart the loose knot that tied her hands and
waved frantically.

“
Stop! Cease fire!” she shouted, not
daring to move into the crossfire. “Stop! Civilians!”

They did stop, but her companions lay dead or
dying on the ground. She turned to find Djari still on his feet but
with an arm scorched from wrist to elbow. Another burn had
blistered the side of his handsome face. He stared at the bodies on
the ground and stumbled back, shaking his head in disbelief. She
took a few steps toward him but someone gripped her arm.

“
Djari!” she cried, but the look he
gave her felt like an accusation. He lurched away to flee into the
scrubby hillside. When one of the soldiers aimed to fire after him,
Nova pushed the gun aside to let the shot go wild. “That’s not a
rebel!”