Trident's Forge (22 page)

A
nother fitful night passed
. Benson snapped awake twice from the same old nightmare: sucked out of the hole in the side of Avalon module's hull, spinning free and untethered through space as the Ark shrank to a point, besieged by the disembodied voices of all the people he'd left to asphyxiate in Shangri-La module. A stillborn infant floating face down in the growth tank. That component was more recent, but the novelty had worn off pretty quickly before he'd grown just as tired of it.

Benson missed drinking. The nice thing about a good blackout was it was dreamless. He still partook from time to time, like the previous night. But his nearly four decade-old body didn't snap back like it had when he was a young, elite athlete. That and Esa had come to expect her husband to be more than an incoherent pile of flesh snoring on the couch come the early hours of the morning.

Esa. He missed her terribly. In many ways, she'd stepped into his life and taken over many of booze's duties. She comforted him, calmed his jagged nerves, helped him go back to sleep. The warmth of her body lying next to him late at night, her slow, even breathing, the curve of her waist and the swelling of her hips. It was a kind of inebriation worth sobering up for.

It seemed no time at all had passed between when he fell back asleep after the last nightmare and Mei tried to flip him out of his hammock. Fortunately, momentum, or rather the complete lack of it, was on his side and she only managed to get him halfway out.

“Get up, lazy.” She planted her feet to try again.

“Good morning to you, too, crabby.”

“My daughter's been up for an hour already.”

“She's three. Wait until she's a teenager, then tell me if she's so damned perky.”

“Sun's already up. We're leaving soon. Get up.”

With a groan, Benson swung his legs over the side and executed the sophisticated balancing act necessary to successfully exhume oneself from a hammock. The tamped clay of the floor was still cool on the soles of his feet. He wished he'd thought to pack his slippers.

“I still don't like you going, Mei,” Benson said as he slipped a leg into his trousers.

“And I still don't care. Somebody has to represent my people. And watch your ass.”

“Let's hope that's not necessary.”

“It's
always
necessary.”

Was that a fleeting smirk on her face, Benson wondered. He finished dressing, then gathered up his bag of supplies. It was quite a bit lighter than he would have preferred for an excursion that was to last a week at minimum, but it would have to do.

Outside the Unbound's shelter, the village bustled with preparations for their own expedition. Two large bonfires burned brightly in the crisp air as villagers huddled around them, rubbing warmth into their stiff muscles. Atlantians weren't exactly coldblooded, but they suffered in the early hours.

Next to the fires, two broom-heads… dux'ah contentedly ran their mouthparts through piles of seeds and pollen while their handlers loaded their backs with provisions. The signal tower was already busy capturing and redirecting the orange light of the dawn to the other villages on the network, updating them with what they'd learned and informing them of Kexx's plan to confront the Dwellers. Benson wasn't thrilled about the danger for leaks, but he'd been outvoted.

Kexx stood off to the side of the bustle, quietly watching things come together. Benson still wasn't very good at picking out individual Atlantian faces, relying more on their size and ornamentation than anything. But he'd spent more time around Kexx than any of them. The truth-digger carried himself, zerself, in a certain detached way. Always observing, always one step removed. Never quite fully a part of the group.

Benson recognized the loneliness. As a Zero Hero, then later as the savior of mankind, he'd gotten used to being held above the rest. But standing on a pedestal was still standing apart.

“Truth-digger,” Benson greeted him.

“Detective,” Kexx answered.

“How long before we can move out?”

Kexx looked glance over zer shoulder at the dawn. “Later than I would like, but we should be walking the road by midmorning.”

“You know we're probably going to be ambushed out there, right?”

Kexx shrugged. “It's hard to set an ambush when your prey expects it.” Ze pointed at the rifle hanging on Benson's shoulder. “And when it has such sharp teeth.”

“Don't rely on me to save us,” Benson objected. “All they need to do is send more warriors than I have bullets, and we're dead.”

“Fortunate, then, that we're the only ones who know that.”

“And if they're stubborn enough to figure it out the hard way?”

Kexx's skin fluttered. “How fast can you run?”

Benson sighed. “Not as fast as I used to.”

Kexx rubbed absently at a fresh, angry looking scar on zer thigh. “I know the feeling.”

I
t was closer
to midday by the time the caravan pulled out of the village's northern gate and pointed down the laser-straight road toward the horizon. Benson's eyes actually had trouble looking down it. Maybe not his eyes so much as his sense of depth. He'd spent the first thirty-five years of his life inside an artificial habitat only two kilometers long and two kilometers in diameter. Avalon and its twin module Shangri-La were, without a doubt, the largest enclosed spaces ever built by mankind, but they were still miniscule compared to an actual planet. He'd had enough trouble upon landing dealing with an infinite sky, especially after his incident in the EVA pod, but somehow the straight line of the road reaching all the way out to the horizon helped define the distance, fixing it in his mind. The longest street back in Shambhala was less than three kilometers, and he'd watched it being built incrementally over the span of three years.

This Atlantian road, by contrast, was many dozens of kilometers long. Some part of his stunted visual cortex told him it was impossible. Benson actually felt a pang of vertigo when he looked down it for too long. Instead, he spent quite a bit of time looking at his shuffling feet.

Aside from Benson, Mei, Kexx, Kuul and zer two bodyguards, the caravan was made up of one surviving warrior from each of the other twenty-three villages for a total of twenty-nine. It took a little more than an hour to walk clear of the swaying crops and out into true wilderness. There was no defined border. The rows of yulka simply grew more disorganized until they couldn't be differentiated from chaos. Undergrowth and stands of trees sprang up, although not into anything thick enough to be considered a forest. Birdsong, the buzzing of insects and the chirps of animals hiding in the underbrush filled the air.

A particularly nasty-looking customer with four dragonfly-like wings and a pair of pincers that could have been stolen from a fiddler crab landed on Benson's forearm.

“Ah, hi,” Benson said to the chitinous interloper. He raised his arm and presented it to the Atlantians. “Is this thing venomous?”

“To us? No,” Kuul called out. “To you? Who knows?”

“Thanks for the help.” For a scary moment, Benson debated whether swatting or shooting it would be more prudent. He settled on gently brushing it off in the hope it would continue about its day elsewhere. It buzzed around his head once in protest, then moved on.

For the first couple of hours, almost no one spoke. No boasting of their accomplishments during the fight, no tales of past hunts. But then, why would they? Aside from Kuul and zer two companions, none of them knew one another. And it was among this group of strangers that they were all marching into danger.

No wonder everyone preferred the company of their own thoughts. Still, some team-building was in order. This wasn't any different from a crop of fresh recruits. Maybe tonight around the fire he could get a chorus going or something. Something to get them all laughing.

Several times, Benson caught Kuul eying him, trying to get his measure. It made Benson's skin crawl. There was another situation that justified planning ahead for. Benson slowed his pace a little and dropped back to where Kexx and Mei were chatting.

“Hey,” Benson said in a low voice, speaking English so as not to be overheard. “I don't care for the way Kuul is looking at me.”

Kexx very deliberately did not look in the warrior's direction. “Yes, I've noticed. Ze isn't very subtle.”

“Are we going to have a problem with zer?”

“There will always be problems with Kuul,” Kexx whispered back. “The only questions are how big, and how soon?”

“What's the problem, do you think?”

“Kuul is not happy with me. Ze thinks I tried to embarrass zer yesterday by continuing our investigation.”

“Didn't you?”

“Not intentionally,” Kexx said. “But… it was a consequence.”

Benson smirked. “What's that got to do with me?”

“It's not you, Benson, it's your gun. Kuul fears it, envies it. Ze knows that as long as you have it, ze cannot move against me.”

“Ze's welcome to try and take it, but it won't be any use to zer.”

Kexx scrunched zer face. “A weapon that powerful would be of great use to Kuul.”

“Sure, if Kuul could fire it. But it only works for me.”

“It knows you?” Kexx asked, glancing down at the rifle.

“I guess that's the simplest way to explain it.”

“More human magic.” Ze paused, considering. “That is good, but still, if you are killed, Kuul and his spears will be the strongest group.”

“What should we do, then?”

“Make friends and keep our eyes open,” Kexx said simply.

“I was thinking the same thing.” Benson became aware of a growing number of Atlantian eyes glancing back at their conversation. “We should probably stop talking before everyone thinks we're conspiring back here.”

“Aren't we?” Kexx flashed a strange, lopsided attempt at a smile, showing zer beak-like teeth.

“Jeez, that's creepy, Kexx.”

“I did it wrong?”

“Not… exactly. Anyway, I'll keep my eyes peeled.”

“That sounds most unpleasant.”

“It just means I'll keep them open.”

“I would hope so. How else will you see where you're going?”

“Nevermind.”

They marched on through the afternoon along the long, flat, featureless road with only the occasional milestone to break up the monotony. The further from the village they walked, the more the environment encroached. Vine-like runners from wild plants reached out and tried to find purchase. The crisp edges of the cement blended with windblown sand, fallen leaves, and dirt. Here and there, cracks meandered across the pavement, giving small, ambitious plants a place to set up shop.

“How old is this road?” Benson asked in Atlantian, just a little bit louder than he needed to.

“Five years,” Kexx replied.

“Seems older.”

“It is our newest.”

“Really? Doesn't seem to get a lot of care.”

“That's because it doesn't go anywhere.”

“OK,” Benson said. “Then why are we walking on it?”

Kexx chuckled. “It would be more accurate to say it goes halfway to somewhere. Whenever we add a new road, the villages on each end commit to building half of it, starting at their own gates and meeting in the middle.”

“Sounds sensible.”

Kexx snorted. “You would think. But even that led to arguments. The smaller villages would say the larger should build more because they had greater resources, while the larger villages would say the smaller ones would reap greater benefits from trade and demand the same. It seems we can always find something to fight about.”

Benson nodded along. “That's politics for you. So, what happened to this road?”

“Years ago, we reached out to the Dwellers, tried to mend our troubled history. After a long time, we reached an agreement to build a road and connect with them, bring our trade with them out from the shadows. We built our road, expecting to meet them in the middle as we'd always done.”

“But they never showed up,” Benson said.

“No. At first, we thought their inexperience building roads had caused their half to stall. We sent envoys and mud-stoners to offer assistance and training.”

“And they didn't come home again,” Benson said, anticipating the rest of the story.

“Their heads did. As for the rest of them, I couldn't say.”

“Charming.” Benson pulled his rifle in just a little closer and wondered not for the last time just what the hell he'd been thinking when he agreed to this crazy-ass mission. It wasn't like he had anything to prove at this point. But then, his mind inexplicably drifted back to a conversation he'd had just over three years ago as he lay on a bed in Avalon's sickbay, half deaf and a quarter burned from his final confrontation with David Kimura, the fanatic who'd killed twenty thousand people and came a hair's breadth from killing the rest.

Kimura's accomplice among the crew, Avelina da Silva, had asked him as she was taken into custody, “And who will stand up for the Atlantians?”

The words still echoed in his mind. At the time, he'd said he would stand for them, and he'd meant it. Benson had given his word, even if it was to a genocidal maniac. He'd come out here to look after Mei and her people, to see that they were all right, for the chance to meet genuine aliens, and if he was being honest, to be present at a moment that had few equals in human history.

But, after the attack on the village, he'd decided to stay because an all-too-familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach told him something was wrong. This wasn't just inter-tribal conflict. The timing of the satellite gap and the attack, the downing of the drone, the shuttle transmitter going dark, it was too convenient. And now he could add another point to the timeline. It was a six-day march from the village to the Dwellers' territory. The attack happened only four days after the first contact expedition had touched down. Even if they traveled fast overland, they would've barely made it in time. But to move over a hundred armed troops across open country unseen by anyone, that wasn't something one could do fast.