41

They crept through the night, not stopping to rest, the five of them, the last of the contingent of the Lucia and the Fury. With Juric and Pig wounded, the defense fell to Eli, Nazim, and Vecchi. Vecchi fought like a madman, an ah-tra mav in one hand, an L-31 in the other, firing alter-nately, or two-fisted, at anything that moved.

By dawn they were staggering, and pressing on through a light rain that evaporated under the crushing light of the two suns. Juric looked like the walking dead, his face rigid and blanched. His arm smelled like it had been dead a long time.

Then they heard Vecchi shouting up ahead. Nazim strode forward, the domino raised for action. In another moment she was back.

"Sir. It's there." Her grin looked positively feral. "The Lucia."

They walked out of the tall grass to see Pig stand-ing at the edge of the clearing, gazing on the Lucia with something close to religious rapture. Vecchi was prancing around the ship, slapping its sides and hooting.

Even to

Eli the squat, gray transport ship was a vision of beauty. The industrial housings of the external modules were sculptured and symmetrical. A profusion of rivets dot-ted the craft like stitchery, interrupted by tanks, ports, casings, feed lines, forward and aft fuel tanks, and land-ing/take-off assemblies. A work of Congress Worlds art.

And swarming with vines.

Vecchi jumped up and swung on one of them that draped from the radio array. He warbled like Tarzan, then jumped down, managing to convey his thoughts without accumulating push-ups.

"That will do, Private," Eli said, grinning despite him-self.

"Goddamn fool," Juric muttered. He eyed the perime-ter of the clearing, as though expecting one last assault from Null.

"We have made it," Pig pronounced solemnly. He looked like he might cry.'t A quarter mile off, the remains of the Fury protruded from the rampant green. It might have been in a previous life when Eli had stood here last, gazing at that ruined ship, thinking that his unpleasant duty was to know whether it had failed with honor or without.

The world had changed since then. As had his duty.

Nazim called to Eli from a short distance away, where she knelt in the grass.

When Eli joined her, he saw the remains of a soldier. Nazim examined the ID chip. "Corporal Nuninga, In-fantry."

Vecchi raised his hand, jumping with excitement.

Eli nodded at him.

"That's Bill Nuninga, Captain, he went with Captain Marzano, he was one of her unit that went to bring in the ship." He stared down at the gnawed bones. "He got chomped ten feet from the fucking ship!"

Pig frowned at the volley of words. Looking at him with fiendish delight, Vecchi continued, "Ten feet from the fucking ship!" To shut him up, Juric set him to cutting away the vines probing the ship's vents and nozzles as he and Nazim searched the grass, finding three more bodies.

Then, with Pig standing watch toward the sea of grass around them, Eli, Juric, and Nazim clanked up the ac-cess ramp of the ship. Nazim touched the commands into the hatchway panel. The ship crooned a smooth, panel-release sound, and the hatchway slid open.

The fetid odor of putrefaction met them. As Nazim turned right toward crew quarters, Eli and Juric headed left down the grated corridor to the flight deck. They passed the blackened scar of plasma fire on the bulkhead, and Eli steeled himself for a view of the flight controls. But as they came onto the bridge, another sight commanded their attention.

There on the floor, propped up against the back of the navigator chair, sat Luce Marzano, dead a week or more. Her body bore savage wounds. An L-31 lay in her lap, one of her hands still fixed on the trigger.

Eli's heart felt inert in his chest. He'd had no reason to believe that Marzano had survived, but it hadn't stopped him from hoping.

The flight deck instrumentation looked in good order. Chances were, the ship was serviceable. They would go home. Some of them.

Juric knelt next to the body, where he picked up a folded wad of paper.

"Sir." He stood, handing it over to Eli.

One side was a ship readout. On the other was a scrawl-ing note, written in pencil.

He read through it once. Then he turned and gazed out the nearest flight-deck port, encompassing a tidy circle of gray-green, brilliant in the tropical sun.

Then he read the note again.

Sitting in my own blood, guarding the hatch access. If my people come through that hatch, I'll kill them. In their favor, it was a bad seven miles, about the worst any of these young patches ever saw, and no sleep for three days, so they went a little nuts. No excuse.

We lost half our number in the first day. Hard slogging. Bad rivers. Came upon a great humming beast who killed Veracruz. The patches were crazy with fear. It made a likeness of Hammond Farley, who they all knew. Seeing Farley, they couldn't fire, and they died, Privates Reese and Corulian. We fled while it ate them. The beast didn't follow us, but one by one we went down. By the time ive crossed the last river we were six in number, and so tired we were careless. Private Loeb walked right into the arms of a tall, wingless bird. The rains didn't stop. When we found the Lucia, they all thought we couldn't fly into the jagged valley of Charlie Camp and land. The men demanded to go home. All a little crazy, but I killed Private Nuninga when he turned his gun on me. I cleared the ship, but took a gut wound, then a slug in my hip, so I can't move. Nothing works from the waist down. Keep them from coming in the hatchway. Cold.

Sounds outside. I sent them out to die, God help me. Don't trust them anymore. Hope to outlast them.

Dying. Now, on my honor, tell you and swear my ship failed and limped into orbit. Decayed.

Brought us down, is God's truth. No deserters. We were all ready to die for our Worlds. So we have.

God bring you to the ship, though it be

without Captain Eli Dammond, a brave man. The first to die. God bring you home.

For Congress Worlds, Capt. L. Marzano.

Eli handed the paper to Sergeant Juric, who read it in si-lence, then passed it to the others when they came in from their duties.

As Eli stared out the port, Juric supervised the removal of Captain Marzano's remains to the body freezer.

Pig volunteered for meal prep. He coaxed the meal processors into cranking out beef stew, creamed corn, and apple pie. The standard gripe about army onboard beef stew was no bread. Processors never could make leavened bread. This time they ate in silence, no comments about the bread, grateful just for the stew, and their lives.

That accomplished, Eli called for systems checks, and Juric took over the control panels, one-handed, not trust-ing the job to anyone else. They lit up, real pretty.

From deep in the grasses, Maret watched the ship as the launch systems whined to life. Now that the humans had come, she faced a dilemma, whether to help them or not. She did not forget her promise to Eli Dammond. But then she had seen the bodies of the dwellers, massacred by Congress Worlds soldiers or their robotics.

Maret watched as, inside the ship, people passed in front of the ports in the forward cabin. One of them was Eli. Was this the same captain of ships that she had known Below? It was possible humans changed their patterns with ease, one guise among captors, another among their own.

She had waited here in the grass, knowing the sur-vivors would come. When she saw them, she watched them intently as they searched the field, and cut vines away from the ship. They looked ugly and desperate, all but Eli. But no matter how hard she stared, their pat-terns became no clearer, her foremind became no more resolved.

Maret had come to tell Eli she had seen the young hu-man, the girl that he hoped to save. And that the vone kept her.

She didn't think the vone capable of mercy. But per-haps more unfailingly than either human or ahtra, they recognized one of their own.

From the high ground where she had been walking, Sascha looked down on the swamp waters. Shafts of light plunged through the mosses and trees, spattering the wa-ter's surface with freckles of light. Standing in a deep well of sunshine, she let the heat dry her back. Butterflies alighted on her skin and hair, also drying themselves, as she had seen them do on the Singers. Perhaps by now she smelled like a Singer, or looked like one. She hoped so. In this world it was better to be one of its denizens than a foreigner.

For all that had happened, she couldn't blame the world itself, only that they had come here ignorant and unprepared. It was, like every living thing, wondrous and perfect in its own right. She hoped it wasn't a betrayal to think so.

She covered the body of the soldier with layers of moss. It was an imperfect burial that wouldn't last long, but it was the only respect she knew how to give the body after she had taken the clothes and the equipment. Nearby, the soldier's shirt now hung drying on tough, upright canes. Laid out before her on the ridge were a canteen, water-sanitization kit, utility knife, and handgun.

The flares four nights ago came from the west. She judged she was heading northwest along the ridgeline, not the right direction. But surrounded by teeming swamp waters, she had little choice but to follow the dry land. She hoped it would lead out of the forest. And before nightfall.

It seemed that Demon preferred the dry route as well. He had been following her all morning.

She looked along the spine of the ridge where, forty yards away, the creature stood, always keeping the same distance between them. He toyed with her. Maybe he wanted her to run, for the sport of it. She'd lose that race. Her defense was to ignore him, as she usually had in the nest. She might have used the L-31 against Demon. But the big weapon lay buried under the moss with its owner. It hadn't saved that soldier, and it would be heavy to carry. Besides, she saw how the forest creatures deferred to Demon, quieting and slinking away, or rushing head-long for the uncertain refuge of the waters just to avoid him.

With this great beast a few paces away, her path was oddly safer.

It hurt that Watchful had turned on her. But Sascha knew she hadn't been entirely innocent. It wasn't long before she'd figured out that the old Singer needed a babe to nurture—still living with the bones of the real one as Watchful was—and Sascha had played along. She still remembered the rage in Watchful's face at having to confront the truth. That Sascha was no child. And no Singer.

The air colored with the green wings of butterflies as they arose from her back. Pulling on the army-issue shirt, she belted it with the soldier's web belt. Then she took a swig of water from the purified contents of the canteen and hooked it to the belt, stuffing the first-aide pouch in her breast pocket. Her boots were still better than what this private had worn, and with the shirt long enough to hang to her thighs, she had no need of the trousers. She had gone past the time she needed moss to catch her blood. She considered cutting her hair, now that she was a woman grown, but instead tied it behind her neck with a length of vine.

Around her for as far as she could see, lay the water-colored world of greens and browns, woven with silvered water. Amid the chittering of the forest animals she could hear Demon's humming, a more assured melody than when he had been an outsider, at the nest where Madame and Watchful held sway.

Sascha thought she caught strands of song that she had taught Watchful, but oddly revised, de-caying into other, deeper songs.

It occurred to her that at any time she could turn and walk toward Demon. She could choose her own moment. That choice calmed her nerves, and her dread of Demon evaporated in the streaming sun. All the worst had hap-pened. Everything that she had hated to lose was already lost. Even Watchful's protection and the uneasy truce of the Singer nest had fallen away. Lost, too, was her bot, de-parted with all her research, perhaps to sink into a perma-nent slurry of mud. A calm sense of freedom coated her thoughts. It wasn't that she no longer cared. Indeed, she cared more than ever before. Each moment held all her care, her memories of her father, her observations of the watery world—held it all. If she stayed in this moment, and then this one, everything remained.

Her equipment thumped gently against her as she re-sumed her trek along the ridge. Her flashlight sprayed its light around her and she moved in an easy stride, hearing Demon's footfalls behind her.

By late afternoon she came to the end of the ridge, where it sloped gently toward swirling water.

The slope pulsed with movement. There in the shade afforded by the ridge, hundreds of amphibs slumbered. Heads bobbed up at her approach. The nearest ones jumped onto two legs, watching her, swaying. Long tongues darted out, tasting the air. Now the entire hill-side stood up.

Sascha pointed her light, her heart thudding. Stopping transfixed, the nearest amphibs blinked into the light. Then advanced.

The ridge rumbled behind her. Whether it was the ground shaking or a rumbling sound in the air, she had no time to discern before she felt herself shoved to the ground. Demon passed by, stomping into the midst of the swarm.

In the next instant he was flicking the amphibs away with savage swipes of clawed hands. Sascha heard the whoosh of his jointed arms as he sliced the air and the am-phibs' bodies. The water boiled as the farthest of them plopped into that refuge. Others were stomped beneath great, flat feet. Within moments the ground was littered with small bodies. Demon casually ate several as he watched the remnant leap into the river.

He turned then, eyes scanning for further assaults to his command of the ridge. But there was only Sascha. She shut off the lamp hanging by its strap on her chest. Demon hated her lamp, and she judged him in none too fine a mood as it was. The crenelated folds on his forehead quiv-ered as he sampled the smells around him.

You don't smell too good yourself, she thought. Then, reliving the scene of the living hillside, she slumped to her knees, shivering. She looked up at the monster of the Sticks as it approached. But she couldn't move, and be-sides, it was far too late.

When his arm draped along the ground in front of her, she stared at its rough hide, its circular pockmarks. She knew the difference between Watchful and Demon, and considered her options. Then, making her choice, she climbed on Demon's arm.

Raising her up into the air, and tucking her against his body, he strode down the slope into the dark water.

* * *

Engines thundered, vibrating the flight deck. The whine of the hydraulics sang of systems at the ready.

Sergeant Juric, still able—but barely—to sit copilot, toggled the switches for departure.

Eli had delayed as long as he could.

"Advisory check," he said over headset to Juric.

"Satisfactory," Juric responded. "Cabin pressure nomi-nal."

"Nitrogen supply switch—on. Cabin vent complete."

"Crew secure? Corporal Nazim?"

From aft, at crew stations, "Yes, sir."

From Juric: "Main engine pressure at 93 percent."

"Looks good, Sergeant…" Eli stopped in mid report, his gaze caught by a movement in the field, in front of the ship.

"Standby."

Then: "Throttle down, Sergeant."

"Sir?" from Juric.

It was an ahtra. Standing in view of the near port, a spot where the blast thrust would blacken the ground. Standing gazing at the ship, clothes fluttering in a brisk wind. In a clear human gesture, the ahtra beckoned.

Looking closer, he recognized her. It was Maret.

"Abort launch, Sergeant." He nodded at the port, as Juric leaned over him to stare, seeing what Eli saw, or see-ing an ahtra, anyway.

Eli nodded to him. The sergeant powered down the en-gines, a twitch in his good cheek the only comment.

In another instant, the crew pounded up to the flight deck, stopping in the corridor, worried faces poking through the hatchway.

He turned to face them. "Corporal Nazim," he said. "Here is an ahtra that we will have reason to speak with. Escort her to captain's quarters. With all cour-tesy."

"Sir," the astonished Nazim managed to say. Vecchi's face had gone closed and narrow, while Pig looked like he had just lost the last thought he ever owned.

She stood facing him, small and dark, eyes so large they must take in a wider world than he could ever know. Her skin markings, affording such excellent camouflage out-side, set her into sharp relief against the bulkheads.

He reached out his hand. "Maret." It surprised him, how much it pleased him to see her.

Looking at his hand, she answered, "Eli."

The low register of her voice made her hard to hear when she spoke softly, as now: "You have done everything we told you was impossible," she said. "It gives me two happinesses to see you yet alive."

"And me, I'm more than glad. I never thought to see you again." He couldn't know what she had endured, but saw her scars, here and there. "Are you well? Would you like water, anything?"

"No, but one thanks you."

Not wanting to embarrass her about ronid, he care-fully said, "Do you have everything you hoped for?"

"Yes," was all she answered. She was looking around his cabin, observing his personal space.

Seeing it from her perspective, he thought the place should be more than it was. It had no decoration, no art, nothing personal. A photo of his parents and brothers was all. It was this she looked at for a long while. Then she waved her hand at him. "Please sit down, Eli. You tend to be too tall."

He sat and they faced each other in silence.

"Your people are not happy to see me, Eli."

He smiled. "They don't want to be here longer than they have to."

"Neither do mine."

At her level stare, he knew her suspicions. The bots.

"We stopped them," he said. "We shut them down and left them disabled."

Her face acquired a softer expression, if he could re-member from what now seemed a very long time ago, and very deep underground.

"But now we have a harder job," he said.

"War…" she said. "Your people dead. You must tell your generals we raised no hand against them."

He shook his head. "That doesn't matter now. Nefer has changed the game. Raised the stakes."

Maret closed her eyes for a moment, as though just the sound of her old nemesis' name brought dismay.

She sat on the extra chair, hands resting on her knees. "Tell me."

He said what he knew, which was only as much as Tirinn had told him. They sat a long while in silence.

Her skin had paled, and Eli realized how much better she looked in her clear, dark markings. Finally she said, "Vod has challenged her. Perhaps he will prevail." Her voice be-trayed how likely she thought that was. "He demands fluxor rule. But such a thing has never been seen in ten-thousand cycles."

This was news. "How does Vod fare against her?"

She shrugged. "It has been three intervals since I had any news from those ascending."

"Go and lend him your support, Maret." He didn't know much about Vod, but he thought of Nefer and won-dered who could prevail against her.

"Yes, one will, soon. But first, there is my promise to you. That I would help your people…" She blinked, one of those slow ahtran blinks.

"What is it, Maret?"

Another blink. Then: "The young one lives, Eli."

As his eyes locked on hers she continued, "The one you call Sascha Olander. I saw her."

He sat very still. He whispered, "Where?"

"In the OverWoods, in the nest of the vone."

His voice came out scrappy. "Nest?"

"Yes, in their kin grouping. They keep her."

He took a deep breath to replenish the air he'd been holding in his chest for the last while, maybe the last weeks.

"Tell me. Tell me what you saw."

He listened to her story—the gray-green swamp, the young human in the trees, with black ropes of hair—but in his heart, he was already on his way back to the forest.

The crew would not be happy about this.

The crew be damned.

It was news best told quickly. "We're going back," he said.

Nazim, Vecchi, and Pig stared at him, each with their own thoughts, but not hard to parse out. Juric slept on a bunk some paces away, finally collapsed. Maret waited outside, on the access ramp, Eli's concession to the crew's long history of killing ahtra and being killed by them.

He told them about the granddaughter of the general, alive out there in the woods. They didn't seem as relieved as he was.

Vecchi raised his hand. At Eli's nod, he said, "That pock could be lying. Sir."

"I judge otherwise, Private."

"It's a bloody pock!" Vecchi's mouth quivered with more words itching to get out.

"Shut up," Nazim snarled at him.

Vecchi turned on her as though she had struck him. "Shut up? Shut up? That's all I done is shut up for the last bloody ten miles!" He turned vacant, urgent eyes on each of them. "We'll never get home, you know?

We'll never get out now. Pitch your tents, boys and girls, and slit your throats!"

Pig shook his head sadly. "Now you went and made me lose count."

"Enough, Private," Eli said.

"Enough? You think it's enough?" Vecchi looked star-tled, like a vessel had blown somewhere in his head. He turned, lunging for the gun belt slung on the post of the nearest cot.

Pig fumbled for a gun, but before he could fire, Vecchi stopped short, gulping.

He took a step backward. Swiveling around to face the others, he looked surprised. A knife protruded from the front of his neck. He ripped it out, clutching his bleeding throat, then sat abruptly on the bunk.

Then he slid to the floor, slowly, as though careful not to hurt himself.

Juric was propped up by one elbow, staring at Vecchi as he twitched on the floor. "Should have killed him days ago," he mumbled.

Eli nodded at Nazim to attend to Vecchi. She went for a med kit, and by the time she got to work, Vecchi was un-conscious. Nazim applied pressure to the wound, but it streamed blood between her fingers.

Juric managed to sit up on the edge of his bunk,, cra-dling his arm and staring at his knife on the floor as though it were a damn shame he'd have to clean it again.

Pig was fumbling to get his pistol back in the holster.

Noticing, Juric caught Pig's eye. "Boy," he said almost gently. "No call to fire a gun shipboard, now, is there?"

"No, sir," Pig answered, eyes wide.

Juric nodded. "Just so you remember. We got a long flight home."

Nazim stood up from her position by Vecchi's body. "Dead, sir," she said to Eli.

"Chi Chi was scared shitless of going back out again. Guess he died anyway."

"Then he died for nothing," Eli said.

Pig looked at him, a furrow between his eyes.

"I'm going alone. I never thought to take any of you. That ahtra and I are going back for the girl by ourselves."

A coughing sound came from Juric's cot. He lay back down, very slowly, favoring his arm. After a few more rumbles from that quarter they realized that Juric was laughing.