Trident's Forge (28 page)

Kexx considered pressing the issue, but let it sit. Kuul was set in zer paths and unlikely to change quickly. Behind them, Benson's foot slipped, spilling zer unceremoniously onto the floor of the cave from about an arm span up.

The human clambered to zer feet. “I'm good.”

“Hardly,” Kuul taunted. “Just keep anything from biting our backs, deadskin.”

“Will do, cuttlefish.” Benson's light came on with a click, flooding the rear of the cave with harsh light. Not a cave, as it turned out, but a tunnel. It reached back until the light faded back into complete darkness.

Kexx looked at zer feet and noticed the rocks strewn about the floor, just about enough of them to cover the hole in the ceiling. Ze ran a hand over the cool stone wall and muttered a curse. It was rough, and free of the hanging teeth of the caves ze'd explored before.

“The Dwellers
dug
this?” Kexx said incredulously. “It's enormous. It must go on for stones.”

“I don't think so,” Benson said. “It looks like a lava tube. The ceiling probably just collapsed recently.”

“Lava?” Kexx asked.

“You know, liquid rock?”

“Like mudstone?”

“No, really hot rocks, glowing hot. Comes out of volcanoes?”

“Volcanoes?”

“Er… fire mountains?”

Both Kexx and Kuul looked at the human like ze was running on a cold head. “Nevermind,” Benson said, breaking the silence. “What I mean is it's probably natural.”

“It certainly smells enough like a Dweller cave,” Kuul said.

“You've been in one?” Kexx asked.

“Well, no. But you hear things from traders.”

“Let's move on,” Kexx said. “Quietly.”

“Which direction?” Benson asked.

“That way,” Kexx pointed down the tunnel. “Stay close.”

“That won't be a problem.”

For a hundred spans or more, they walked on in silence. Benson kept zer light pointed behind them as ordered, but enough of it bled back up the tunnel to cast everything in a faint, unnatural glow. Patches of fungus clinging to the walls, excited by the light, glowed back in response hoping to be eaten so their spores would spread.

Kexx's skin glowed, reflexively changing to match the color and luminosity of the fungus patches as ze passed. Kuul, having never spent the time wandering the forests and the night to learn the skill, remained dark. In all ways, Kuul was an unsubtle creature. Ze'd never needed nor wanted to remain hidden from a potential foe. It wasn't a warrior's way.

They stalked onwards, carefully placing their feet to muffle the sounds of their footsteps. They really needn't have bothered, considering the racket Benson made behind them, shuffling zer shoes through the thin layer of silt and pebbles.

“Ze makes as much noise as a dux'ah herd,” Kuul whispered in annoyance.

“At least we won't have to wait long before they find us,” Kexx said, always looking for the bright spot in any situation.

“I'm sorry, all right?” Benson shot back at them in a loud whisper. “But I'd like to see you two try walking backwards in a dark tunnel quietly.”

Without breaking stride, both Kexx and Kuul turned around, reversed their knees, and continued walking without any apparent additional effort.

“All right, all right, nice trick,” the human admitted. “Now do it with knee caps.”

The bickering came to an abrupt close as a low, rumbling growl echoed through the cavern, filling the space and making the point of origin difficult to pin down.

“What was that?” Benson asked.

“Our prey,” Kuul said as ze lunged forward, spear held high in attack. “I see it! To the right, four fullhand armspans.”

Kexx caught sight of it as well and followed after Kuul. A solitary caleb, out in the open, its left front paw mangled and held above the ground. Something was wrong with the scene. It was injured, it should be hiding, or protected by its pack mates. Unless… it was bait.

Kexx grabbed Kuul's shoulder and tried to reel zer back. “Kuul, wait. It's an–”

Before ze could say “ambush,” a shrill whistle cut through the tunnel, so loud Kexx winced from the assault on zer ears. Above them, three large shapes detached from the ceiling and fell to the ground like shadows.

“Ears!” Benson's cone of light swept upwards, tracking one of the calebs as it fell to the ground. Kexx slapped zer hands over zer ears just in time for the thunder and lightning to roll in. The entire cavern flashed in time with the pulses jumping from Benson's gun as tiny spear after tiny spear struck the beast, shredding muscle and sinew as they burrowed.

Drawing on reflexes honed by years of practice, Kuul spotted the caleb falling on zer head in time to plant the haft of zer spear into the silt and brace. With a stomach-churning shriek, the spear point pierced the creature's belly as its weight and momentum carried it sliding down the shaft until the black glass point blossomed from its spine like a morbid flower, severing one of its nerve tracks and paralyzing its right side.

Panicked and furious, the beast thrashed about on three legs, trying and failing to compensate for its dead hind limb. Zer spear lost, Kuul quickly transitioned to zer knife, crawled on top of the crippled creature, and thrust the tip into the spot just behind the caleb's shoulder blades where the nerve tracks crossed, instantly ending its struggles, if not its life.

That left only one monster to contend with.

Kuul and Benson closed in on the beast, circling it and cutting off its available lines of retreat. Perhaps focused on Kexx's spear, perhaps noticing Kuul's abdominal wounds, the caleb turned on the warrior and tensed for a charge.

“Ears!” A pair of flashes from Benson's gun ensured that it never had the chance. With a greater sense of self-preservation than its fellows had shown, the injured caleb retreated down the tunnel with impressive speed, considering its limp.

“Well, that was easy,” Benson said just below a shout.

“It's not over yet,” Kexx replied. “Detective, shine your light along the walls, please.”

The human obliged, tracing a circle of white light down the rough tunnel surface. It passed over a lumpy outcropping, much smoother than the coarse rock surrounding it.

“There!” Kexx pointed. “Hold your light there.” Benson obliged as Kexx and Kuul moved to flank the outcropping. “You may as well come down,” Kexx announced. “There's no chance of escape.”

The lump remained immobile.

“Well, talking didn't work.” Kuul reached down and picked up a fist-sized stone from the floor, then heaved it at the lump with an expert flick of zer arm, striking the person clinging to the wall squarely in the back of the head.

The figure shouted out in pain as it peeled off the wall, but managed to land on its feet. Benson's light, and therefore gun, trained on it in an instant.

Kexx continued as the person stood and shielded zer eyes from the harsh light with a forearm. “I don't know if you were watching just now, but my friend's weapon is… well, awe-inspiring. If I were you, I would stop moving and start talking.”

The stranger's skin went white as ze started shouting a string of words Kexx didn't recognize in the least. Kexx glanced over at Kuul. “Did you catch any of that?”

Kuul shrugged. “Not a word.”

“I did,” Benson said, nearly embarrassed.

“You did?” Kuul repeated. “Is ze speaking
human
?”

Benson shook zer head. “No, no human language, but my plant is still feeding me a translation.”

“It's not any tongue I know,” Kexx said. “How is it possible your head tool knows it?”

“I have no idea,” Benson said. “It shouldn't be possible. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless someone has been listening in on their tribe as long as we've been listening in on yours and they forgot to lock out the dialect in the translator upload.”

“What's an upload?”

Benson waved a hand. “Way too long to explain that one.”

“That can wait,” Kuul said, losing patience. “What is ze saying?”

“Ah, hang on.” Benson leaned in and listened to the stranger, who hadn't stopped jabbering the entire time.

“They say they're the brood sibling of the under chief, and we wouldn't dare kill them for fear of… er, something about Cuut's garden? Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense.” With a wet-sounding jerk, Kuul yanked the shaft of zer spear free of the paralyzed caleb, then strode forward and stabbed the babbling stranger right through the knee. The stranger's voice switched from shouting to screaming as ze grabbed zer leg and collapsed.

“What'd you do that for?” Benson demanded.

“Ze's right, I wouldn't dare kill the under chief's brood sibling. Ze's far more useful as a hostage.”

Unsubtle indeed. Kexx sighed and looked back at the hole in the ceiling.

“We're going to need rope.”

I
t took half
an hour to properly bind the squirmy fucker. Benson was pretty good at fixing restraints after a career in law enforcement (not to mention certain… erotic proclivities enjoyed by both he and his wife), but tying decent knots onto someone whose joints were more like guidelines to be ignored at their convenience was a difficult task indeed.

In the end, Kuul simply knocked the stranger in the head with a rock hard enough to leave zer dazed and limp. Benson certainly didn't agree with such rough treatment of prisoners, but neither could he argue with results.

They hauled their semi-conscious prisoner up through the hole in the ceiling by rope, while Benson puzzled over jurisdictional boundaries. Wherever his might lie, he was certain he was far, far outside of them.

“When in Rome,” Benson muttered to himself.

“Where?” Kexx asked, reminding him just how good the Atlantian's ears were.

“Rome,” he answered. “It was a great city, long ago. The saying just means ‘do as the locals do.'”

“Wise advice for guests, maybe not as much for invaders.”

“Which are we?” Benson asked.

“Somewhere in between, I expect.”

Benson looked around the caravan. “Invaders usually bring more people.”

“The successful ones, certainly.”

Kuul and two other warriors busied themselves lashing their prisoner to the back of one of their dux'ah. From the looks of it, ze wasn't going to be taking any bathroom breaks for a while.

Benson pointed at the trussed-up animal trainer. “Whoever this under chief is, they aren't going to be happy about that.”

“I expect not. But I'm not terribly happy about the people we lost in the caleb attack. I'm quite angry about it, actually. The under chief will hear my grievance.”

“About that,” Benson started. “How exactly are we going to get this audience? They've already tried to kill us twice. Why do you think we'll be able to walk right into their territory and make demands?”

“I won't be making demands, I will be airing accusations.”

“And that's better?”

“It's protected,” Kexx said. “Once accusations have been leveled, my work as a truth-digger cannot be interrupted. Uncovering the truth is a sacred duty, not even the Dwellers would interrupt it.”

Benson smiled. If only his own people had been so accommodating to the requirements of his job. “All right, then what?”

“Once the truth is known, the elders of each village confer and settle on appropriate punishments or compensation.”

“And if the elders of different villages disagree on what's appropriate?”

Kexx was silent for a second. “Then the warriors sharpen their spears. But we will be back in our beds long before then.”

“Still, there's so few of us here. You're putting a lot of faith in procedure. What's to stop them from slaughtering all of us and sending our heads back up the road?”

“I know you mean no offense, Benson, but this is just how things are done here.”

“Times change, Kexx. We were attacked by the calebs, after all. That sounds like ‘interference' to me.”

Kexx's skin fluttered involuntarily. “They may not have known there was a truth-digger in the caravan.”

“I doubt that. Someone among my people is feeding them information. I'm surer of it now than ever.”

“They could plausibly claim that they didn't know before. That will be difficult now. Besides, stories of your gun and the presence of our hostage will give them pause.”

Benson didn't like where his new friend's thoughts were going. “Don't count on me to fight a war for you, Kexx. I only have so many bullets, and I'm not a warrior.”

“Nonsense. You are brave. I've seen you kill.”

“That's not how humans define bravery,” Benson said, knowing it wasn't entirely true but wanting to believe it anyway. “You've seen me kill animals, not people.”

“You killed a warrior back in the village, with a lowly fishing trident.”

Benson's memory flashed back to the Atlantian from the fight that started all of this, zer head impaled on the center spine of a trident, the body still trying to march forward, not yet aware it had already been killed. The image turned his stomach even now. He'd never killed before that moment. He'd tried to, once, but Kimura's suit had protected him from Benson's bullets, just not from his own bomb.

“That was self-defense, and it was more of an accident than anything. Ze charged straight into it. I just held the shaft.”

Kexx considered this for a while before responding. “You are an interesting pile of contradictions, Benson.”

Benson laughed genuinely. “I've been called worse.”

“We must move on. There's still a day's hard march ahead of us.”

“Ugh,” Benson said. The march seemed endless. He already had blisters on his heels where his shoes had been rubbing for three days. He was dirty and exhausted. Out of morbid curiosity, Benson checked his plant and was startled to find that since leaving the village, they'd gained almost fifteen hundred meters in elevation. That explained why he was so damned exhausted. He decided to remove his chestplate for a while and let himself breathe. They were out in the open now. If there was trouble, he'd have time to slap it back on.

The caravan headed further into hostile territory, tension building with each uneasy step. Kexx was certainly confident in zer belief that they would pass through without further harassment. The rest of the Atlantians, however…

They walked in silence for an hour, another, a cloud of dust rising into the still, hot air behind them, alerting anyone who cared to look to their presence for kilometers around, yet they remained alone on the trail.

For a time, their prisoner ranted and raved at zer rough treatment. But after three hours, zer throat went dry and hoarse. Ze asked for water, but no one was in a big hurry to quench zer thirst and invite renewed auditory assault.

The blessed quiet gave Benson a little time to think. He'd seen other veins of what looked like metal inside the lava tube. Not gold, but then again nearly any metal would be worth its weight here. Iron, aluminum, lead, magnesium, nickel, they would all be of immense importance. And in concentrations high enough for old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining instead of the parts-per-thousand chemical stripping processes and asteroid mining they'd been planning for. It would shave years off their projections, accelerating the growth and development curve of the entire colony by a generation, maybe more.

And make someone very rich in the process. The only things that stood in their way were the rightful land owners, and of course any humans in positions of authority burdened with a conscious. People like Captain Mahama, for example.

Benson's mind recoiled at the thought, but it was hard to escape the logic, the coincidences. First, Administrator Valmassoi is mortally wounded in an ambush that was almost certainly organized with outside help, then Captain Mahama dies of a heart attack in the same week, of all the preposterous things that could happen to her.

The heads of both the colony and the crew, dead inside of a few days of each other. This conspiracy was starting to look more like a coup.

And Esa was standing smack dab in the center of it. She was sharper than he'd ever been at deduction; her mind must have already gone down these tracks. But if she pushed too hard too fast, she'd be painting a target on her back. These people obviously didn't care about the popularity or status of their victims.

Benson's sweat turned to ice at the thought. Here he was, marching through the grasslands thousands of kilometers from home looking for the killer, while his wife was probably no more than a stone's throw away. Like a fool, he'd taken himself out of the real game. Now he was mired on the sidelines while the casualties mounted. He had to figure out a way to help her without giving it all away.

Kexx sauntered up alongside Benson and offered him a pull from zer waterskin. The thought of drinking from an unidentified bladder was less than appealing to him, but he had a better sense of diplomacy than to refuse the gesture. The water was warm, foul tasting, and probably held more than a few tiny surprises that his immune nanites would have to contend with, but he slurped it down anyway.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all.” Kexx pointed at the lines of dust-stained sweat trailing down Benson's forehead, cheeks, and neck. “You look like you need it more than I.”

“We humans do like to sweat.”

“You never seem to tire,” Kexx said admiringly. “Your legs move like broken branches, but it seems you can do it forever.”

“We walk, we run, it was one of the things humans were best at, actually. We weren't the fastest animals on Earth, not by a long shot. But our ancestors could run further and for longer than anything else alive.”

“Your world must have been large, then, if you could wander so far.”

Benson shrugged. “I never saw it, except in video.”

“Ve-de-o?” the Atlantian asked.

“Er, moving paintings, very detailed and lifelike. We watch them to learn and to entertain. Earth was actually just a tiny bit smaller than your world. With bigger oceans and less land.”

“Did humans share their world well with each other?”

“That's a very long story. For much of our history, no, to say the least. We were a lot like your people, focused on our small differences, ignoring our enormous similarities. There was a long time where we believed one group of people or another was something other than human, too. But we got better toward the end, and during our time on the Ark, we learned to live together peacefully. Well, most of us did.”

“Then why did you decide to leave it, Benson?”

“We didn't. Decide to leave, I mean. Our world was going to be destroyed by a…” He thought for a moment. Kexx got hung up badly enough with radio waves and bacteria. An invisible star collapsed down to an infinitely dense point with enough gravity to bend light was probably going to be beyond zer capacities. Frankly, it was beyond Benson's capacities.

“It was destroyed,” he said instead.

“Your
whole
world?”

Benson nodded. “Every pebble and raindrop. Everything we didn't bring with us is gone forever.”

“Only the gods could do such a thing.”

Benson felt the same chill drip down his spine as the first time Captain Mahama had confirmed Kimura's insane claim that the black hole Nibiru had been pitched at Earth deliberately. They may not be gods, but their power was such that it was a semantic distinction, at best.

“Maybe so,” Benson said.

“Why did you choose to come here and live with us?”

“Again, we didn't choose it, Kexx. This was the only world close enough for us to reach. And we didn't think anyone was living here. Hell, we didn't think anyone
could
live here.”

“I don't understand,” Kexx said. “If you thought our world wasn't livable, why come at all?”

“No, that's not it. We knew your world had life on it. We could, um, see what kind of air it had and know plants lived here. But we also knew about your, what do you call them, Cuut's Seeds?” Kexx nodded. “We call them asteroids or comets, and your planet is surrounded by ten times as many of them as ours was. On our world, an asteroid as big as a mountain would hit us every few tens of… I don't suppose you have a word for million?”

Kexx shook his head. “No.”

Benson struggled for an example until one presented itself. “If you counted every yulka bean in a harvest, it would be millions.”

Kexx's eyes widened as he tried to process the concept. “Why would you ever need numbers so large?”

Benson couldn't help but chuckle, thinking of the tens of
trillions
of kilometers the Ark had traveled to get here. “Trust me, someday soon, your people will need numbers much bigger than even that. Anyway, every few tens of millions of years, a huge asteroid would hit Earth and wipe out all life much bigger than this.” Benson held his hands approximately mouse-length apart. “Every time it happened, it took life a very long time to regroup. And here, we assumed an asteroid that big was hitting your world ten times as often. Our, er, wise men didn't think that something as smart as humans could have grown up quickly enough between the strikes.”

Kexx nodded along, absorbing the lesson. “You didn't know about our caves,” he reasoned.

Benson shook his head. “No, we didn't.”

Kexx adjusted his legs and sat up a little straighter before continuing. “The number of times Cuut's Seeds have razed the surface and sent us into the safety of Xis's womb has been lost to memory, but it surely numbers in the hundreds. Sometimes it's only a year before Cuut relents and the clouds give way to sunlight again. Sometimes, it's much longer. Once, a thousand years ago, an entire generation passed below ground, dwindling as the food ran out until there were only so many left as the cave fungus could feed.”

“How many was that?” Benson asked. Kexx held up both his hands and splayed his eight fingers. A
fullhand
, as the Atlantians counted. “Eight? Your entire civilization is based on only eight people?”

“So the legend goes.”

Benson blanched. He remembered reading once about a great population bottleneck in human prehistory. But even that cataclysm had only reduced their numbers to a few thousand, not
single digits
. Suddenly, the Atlantians' huge litters of young didn't seem like such a bad evolutionary tactic. It could all just be an overblown legend, of course, but Benson knew just enough about anthropology not to dismiss native mythology out of hand. There were usually more than a few kernels of truth hidden in them.

Kexx continued. “It is said we once had many fingers, like the dux'ah or the ulik, but after the Shrinking, Cuut changed our hands, one finger to represent each of the chosen, so that we would never forget the lesson.”