Fourteen
Fourteen
H ey there!” Garral called out. “Hey!”
The woman wasn’t someone he recognized from the ships.
Wide-faced with hair in ringlets and a beaded vest over a disreputable blouse.
She could have been a field researcher from any of a dozen excavations he’d worked on in his medrey.
Her eyes went wide when she saw him, but she didn’t shout back to him.
Garral picked his way down the trail, catching up to her as quickly as he could. She waited.
The late morning sun was heavy on his shoulders, and the ground was dry and arid now, but with signs that water had flowed through it in other seasons.
Low, yellow-brown scrub and bushes hunched over wind-paved grassland.
Wide, shallow washes carved by rain and flood crossed the landscape and made the trail harder to follow.
It was strange seeing someone who wasn’t instantly familiar.
He wondered whether the five ships that made up their little group were the only ones on the mission.
He’d thought so, but there could also have been dozens or hundreds scattered around the planet.
Maybe they weren’t even the only ones in the vicinity.
The big fuckers didn’t always make sense to him, though, and they certainly weren’t keeping him up to date on their plans.
He was a little winded when he reached the small rise near the base of the limestone cliffs.
Her smile was amused, probably by how little it took for him to get out of breath.
He smiled and waved his hand. “Just give me a minute,” he said around a chuckle.
“I’m a little out of shape. Been a while since I did this kind of fieldwork. ”
At a guess, she was in her twenties. Only a little older than his eldest son would be now. The memory of his child was a small shock. A distant alarm started sounding at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t imagine what it was about. Nothing about the girl seemed threatening.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said. “Jessyn Kaul? She’s a biologist, and she was doing a survey right around here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen her?”
The woman didn’t say anything, but she made a little come-along gesture and started walking for the base of some nearby cliffs.
“Thank you,” Garral said, trotting a little to keep up. “Our camp’s up north a ways. By the ships. Where are you set up?”
The woman looked back over her shoulder, but didn’t answer. The alarm in the back of his head was louder now, but he still didn’t know what was bothering him.
“I don’t think we met back at the world-palace,” he said. “I’m Garral P?r. I’m an archaeologist. Hibbrin Medrey.”
She nodded, made the same follow-me gesture, and ducked down under an overhang that led to a cave in the cliff face.
He hesitated. It was probably nothing, but there was something very off about a young woman running into a strange man and leading him alone into a secluded cave.
If he’d been nearer her age, he’d have gone as an adventure, but he’d been an idiot when he was young.
Young.
She was young . She was the youngest person he’d seen since the attack on Anjiin.
All the captives had been plucked out at the height of their careers.
If he was right about her age, she would have been barely in her first placement when the Carryx arrived.
She looked back when she realized he’d stopped, and the smile dropped from her face.
She turned toward the deeper cave and called to someone.
There were words in her shouting, but he couldn’t make them out.
“Wait,” he said. “No, wait.” And then he ran, not even really knowing why, but some deep instinct driving him to flee.
The trail was off to his right now, and he made for it, adrenaline lifting him like he was a child again.
His legs pumped under him, and he flew across the low stones and through the scrub.
There was a commotion behind him, but he didn’t look back.
The absolute certainty that he’d triggered a trap set by the enemy of the Carryx blotted out all other thoughts.
They’d caught Jessyn. They’d lured him in. He’d almost been caught.
Might still be.
He reached the trail that he’d followed down to the coordinates and glanced back. The woman was nowhere, but something was coming at him, striding low and fast like a hunting dog, but larger. Darker.
Garral turned and sprinted. His heart was tapping against his rib cage like it wanted his attention, and his legs were starting to ache.
Too many weeks sitting in the hold of a ship traveling through asymmetric space.
Too many months and years getting weak and deconditioned in the halls of the Carryx world-palace.
Now the enemy was going to catch him. Was going to kill him.
He had to get back to the ships. The trail bent to the left, dipping down through an arroyo.
If he followed it, his pursuer would be able to cut across the landscape and catch him.
He turned right instead, his feet sliding against the soft clay of the ditch bottom.
He was slowing down. As much as he tried to force himself to go faster, each step was harder to take than the one before it.
Something cracked through the brush at the top of the ditch behind him. He wasn’t going to make it.
But maybe he didn’t have to.
A boulder had fallen into the stream back when there had been water in it.
The pile of stone and silt built up along its side was testament to floods that were gone now.
Garral threw himself into the shadow in its lee and scrabbled for his pack.
If he could get his notebook and call for help…
He didn’t know what would happen. Maybe the Carryx would come, maybe they wouldn’t.
The black thing appeared around the boulder and lowered a gun to Garral’s head.
It couldn’t be a man. It had to be a mechanism.
Black and hard, it looked like a child’s design of a super-soldier if the child had gotten bored halfway through and decided to draw the right side as a stick figure.
Its voice sounded human, though. The annoyance and anger were recognizable in any language.
“I’m not armed,” Garral said, raising his hands.
The soldier barked an order that Garral didn’t understand, then gestured with the gun. Garral stood up.
“I’m not the enemy,” he said. “They took me prisoner. I’m a captive. I’m not a threat.”
The soldier sighed, shifting in the mud.
Its thinner foot sank deeper into the clay, giving it a kind of limp.
Or maybe it limped naturally. Garral kept his hands up and his palms open while the soldier took his notebook and pack from him and marched him back along the arroyo to the trail, back along the trail to the cave, and then into the darkness.
The young woman was there, and a man maybe a little older than her in similar clothes.
And a classroom’s worth of kids that could have been approaching their teen years.
The man had a knife, and he pushed Garral to his knees.
The soldier stalked through the gloom. Garral didn’t see Jessyn in the darkness until it lifted her one-handed by the hair.
“No no no,” Garral said. “Leave her alone. She didn’t do anything.”
But the soldier was patting her down with its wire-thin hand.
When it found her notebook, it dropped her again and held the two devices—her notebook and his—up toward the man with the knife.
The soldier said something angry. The man answered sharply, and then the two were in the middle of some argument that seemed more immediate than their new prisoners.
The woman put herself between the two, speaking in firm but soothing tones.
A teacher’s voice. Without standing up, Garral slowly scooted across the cave floor to Jessyn.
The soldier tracked him without losing a beat in the angry conversation it was having.
But it didn’t point its gun at him, and he was able to reach Jessyn’s side.
“So I found something,” she said.
They both laughed, and if it was a touch manic, Garral felt they could be forgiven. Jessyn looked unharmed, but dirty and frightened. He found himself wanting to pull her into his arms, but didn’t think their short period of flirtation gave him permission for such liberties.
“Yeah,” he said instead when they’d stopped laughing. “I can see that. I was just thinking yesterday about how the city structures were all reading like human design choices. I thought I was anthropomorphizing. It felt very unscientific of me at the time.”
“Are you all right?”
“That black thing didn’t shoot me. Not yet, anyway. But it got me before I could get help,” Garral said. And then, a moment later, “They didn’t know you had your notebook, did they? Why didn’t you call back to base?”
“I didn’t want squid-face to know about this,” Jessyn said. “That’s why I sent you a coded message.”
“Not sure that was your best plan,” Garral said. “Third Gardener could have mounted a rescue.”
Jessyn looked at him like he’d said something obscene. “That’s the point. We can’t let the Carryx know about these people. They’ll be killed. Or taken prisoner like us. I think these are the deathless enemy. The war that the Carryx are fighting? It’s against humans.”
“That… That doesn’t track, does it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Wouldn’t the Carryx have recognized us when they took Anjiin? I mean if humans are the species they’re waging galactic war against, they have to have seen some before us, right?”
Jessyn went quiet, her focus turned inward. Garral was sorry he’d pushed back. “But obviously they’re here,” he said. “It’s unexpected.”