Twenty-One
Twenty-One
T he black soldier led them, then came Jessyn and Garral, who shifted their places now and then depending on the terrain, and Omco at the rear.
Corvall’s steps were so sure, Jessyn could almost forget that one of his legs was nothing more than rebar and hope.
The day was hot, and the air had a thickness to it that made her think of the hours before a storm.
Their trail led south and west, far outside the evacuation line that Third Gardener had set for them, but not so far that Jessyn lost sight of the dead city.
The killed city. The home that all the children had lost. She could use it to find her way back.
The path through the underbrush didn’t look like a human artifact.
In some places, it reminded Jessyn of a deer trail.
In others it widened to something that would have let two transports drive abreast. Never paved, and never straight.
She let herself speculate about what had made it.
About two hours into the walk, Garral touched her arm and asked, “What are you going to tell them?”
“My story is going to be that you and I were investigating signs of habitation there when we were attacked. We left the notebooks and packs behind because we were running for our lives, and not so that they couldn’t track where I went after the cave.”
“Yeah, all right. I didn’t want you to see where I went would raise some questions.”
“Wouldn’t it? Anyway, you got killed, and I got away. Then if Third Gardener makes a trip out, the footprints and poop from the kids will be part of what we were investigating, not signs we were collaborating with the enemy.”
“Nice. That tracks,” Garral said, hesitated like maybe there was something more to say, then fell back into the rhythm of the trek. Then a few minutes later, “How did you learn to do this?”
“How to walk?”
“How to think through the implications of everything. I mean, no offense. I’m an academic at heart too, but you look at the situation like this, and you see why I have to stay behind. You put together solid lies. You think tactically.”
“I was an amateur war leader back at the world-palace. I killed some fellow prisoners,” she said.
“Are you joking?”
“Nope,” she said, stepping carefully on an unstable rock. “But they had it coming.”
Was there a little pride in her when she said it?
Jessyn had been brought up with all the same hatred of violence that any civil parents tried to give their children.
Don’t fight in the schoolyard. Don’t hit.
Don’t bite. Use words to express your anger.
She hadn’t been an athlete, hadn’t studied fighting arts.
Her body and mind had been sources of shame and vulnerability, not instruments of power.
She hadn’t been bloodthirsty. So why, when she thought back on the death of the Night Drinkers or fantasized about the slaughter of the Carryx, did she find pleasure there?
Somewhere between the woman she’d been and the one she’d become, the ethos of killing her enemies had gotten very comfortable. The remnant of her personality that found that unnerving was smaller than she would have thought.
Corvall held up his good hand, signaling them to stop.
For a long moment, the black helmet scanned back and forth across the landscape.
Trees, brush, a few birds. The deep sky above them.
The red-brown soil peeking out where the ground cover didn’t quite do its job.
Corvall drew his gun, aimed at a clump of bushes farther down the trail, and fired twice.
Something hidden in the brush yelped and fled.
Corvall holstered the weapon. They marched.
She didn’t know what she’d expected the downed ship to look like—something sleek and black and shaped like a raptor maybe—but the wreckage they found wasn’t anything like that.
The machine that had crumpled itself against the side of a stony hill looked more like a performance stage than a ship.
A central metal beam as wide as a dinner table had buckled in the crash.
When it had been intact, the platform would have had eight pods at its edge.
Three were left. Omco and Corvall spoke to each other, and Omco gestured for her and Garral to step back from the crash.
Corvall made his way to the ship alone, opening each of the three pods in turn.
The first two were empty, though the soldier took something small from each of them.
The last one had something in it the size of a human, but its blackness was different from Corvall’s.
It was the gray-black of ash and soot. Corvall paused for a moment, his head bowed, and he closed the pod again.
His posture spoke of grief so clearly that Jessyn didn’t need a translation.
The soldier said something, and Omco gestured them forward.
The four stood together like they were about to pray for the dead, but instead of a candle, Corvall held out a black ceramic cylinder the size of a fist. Its cap had indentations around the edge to make it easier to turn.
When Corvall put it in Jessyn’s hand, it was surprisingly heavy.
Corvall said something to Omco, who listened carefully for almost a minute. Omco and Garral’s conversation was longer, with more back and forth, negotiating and clarifying until the two men were nodding at each other like salesmen at the end of working out a deal.
“All right,” Garral said, turning to her.
“You know I have literally no faith that what you’re about to tell me is accurate, right? Those kids’ games where each person whispers something into the next player’s ear, and everyone laughs at how garbled it gets? That’s the game we’re playing right now.”
“If there were a better way, I’d be for it,” Garral said.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s really all that complicated.
Not your part, anyway. This is the thing that will disable the ships and weapons.
It’s easy to use. You just open it. It’s packed with a swarm of very, very small machines that are pre-programmed to do what needs to be done.
Corvall says that if you open the container as soon as the Carryx start gearing up for a fight, that’ll be all you need to do. ”
“Crack it open and stand back,” Jessyn said. “That doesn’t sound too hard.”
“It’ll work better if you’re close to the ships.
Or inside one of them. The only trick is going to be not having anyone find it.
If you get caught, the whole thing goes to hell, and they’re probably going to be suspicious of you when you first get back.
Corvall’s thought was to put it at your research site before you go back and then retrieve it later, when they aren’t on high alert. ”
“How much later have I got to work with?”
“A while. After the beacon fires off, it could take some time before the rescue team shows up. The message has a long way to go, and it’ll take the good guys some effort to get here. He’s going to wait here until just before sundown. It’ll give us time to get to the backup camp and for you… Fuck.”
“Garral?”
“I don’t like this. I don’t like you going back alone. I don’t like having a plan with zero tolerance for failure. For this to work, a hundred things need to go right, and failing takes one thing going wrong.”
Jessyn put the cylinder in her pocket. It was heavy enough to pull at the shoulder of her tunic. Omco asked something of Garral, but she didn’t know what and Garral didn’t answer him.
“Look on the bright side,” Jessyn said. “Maybe it’ll go wrong and we’ll all die. Then it won’t be our problem anymore.”
“How can you joke about it?”
How can you not? Campar said in her mind. Instead she said, “He’s going to wait until just before sundown.”
Garral looked down, like he was speaking to the ground they were standing on instead of to her. “When they come for him, he’ll lead them away from the kids. From me and Manta and Omco.”
“Anything else?”
The wind muttered over the hill. The sky was growing hazy. The storm maybe on its way after all.
“No,” Garral said. “That’s it.”
Jessyn turned her attention away from Garral.
The soldier was facing her. She couldn’t see his features beneath the mask, but she assumed he was judging her and how likely it was that he could trust her to make his death worthwhile.
On impulse, she put out her hand toward his too-thin arm.
When he clasped it, it was like being wrapped by living wire.
“I won’t fuck this up,” she said.
Corvall said something. Judging from the inflection, he’d understood her intention if not her words.
He raised a finger in a gesture that seemed to mean Wait , fumbled for a moment at his leg, and put a small black object into her palm.
It was lighter than the cylinder, with a grip that fit comfortably in her fingers.
She put the gun in her pocket, bowed to her fellow soldier, then to Omco the teacher.
And then to Garral. She turned toward what she hoped was the right direction and started walking.
The city was small and farther away, but in the correct part of the horizon.
She’d keep it just to her left. Getting back to the pear orchard was the next problem, and she tried to put all her other concerns aside until she could solve it, but—
“Jessyn!”