Alien Chronicles 3 - The Crystal Eye (7 page)

“Later,” Paket said. He yanked harder on Elrabin’s coat. “Later.”

Growling, Elrabin bared his teeth. Slowly he pulled his emotions under control. Giving himself a shake, he moved away from Paket’s restraining hand and rubbed his muzzle. He hated losing his temper. Only Nashmarl could make him go crazy like this, where he lost track of everything except the desire to attack and punish. The cub had a talent for irritating him. Elrabin knew he ought to stay iced, not let Nashmarl get to him. but every time he looked at the cub he could see so much potential, so much promise. And it infuriated him to see what Nashmarl was growing into.

The faint echo of the cub’s jeering laughter carried down the hill on the hot breeze. Elrabin heard the noisy progress as Nashmarl pushed through the thicket, and he sighed to himself. He knew Nashmarl was making the noise on purpose, just to irritate him even more.

With a shrug, Elrabin turned around and resumed walking.

Paket puffed and struggled along beside him. “That cub is getting too full of himself. Has no manners. Has no brain. Someone’s got to tell Ampris.”

Elrabin’s exasperation boiled over. “Tell her what?” he demanded. “You want to get in her face with criticism of her son? He’s got the prettiest manners in the world when his mother’s around. Gah!” Elrabin slapped a branch out of his way, letting it whip viciously behind him. “She got a lot of smarts. Paket, but when it comes to her cubs she’s blind,
blind!”

“The mother love of Aarouns,” Paket said with a sigh. “We Kelths are much smarter.”

Elrabin thought of his own mother, stressed and thin, working too hard to support her lits, too tired to share much affection. Twitching his ears, he angrily slammed old memories away. Time to think of the here and now.

He shot Paket a glance. “Nashmarl ain’t my problem, see?”

“You get mad like he is.”

Elrabin fumed. “Going to get his mother out of trouble, I am,” he muttered. “Then she can deal with him.”

“You know we got another rule in camp,” Paket said quietly, ducking a branch that Elrabin had heedlessly let whip back. “Anyone who gets to be a problem can be shunned.”

Elrabin snorted to himself. “Yeah, sure. You going to shun Ampris’s cubs—”

“Not both of them. Foloth’s all right.”

Elrabin looked over his shoulder and met Paket’s gaze. “Foloth ain’t all right. One cub’s as bad as the other. Just in different ways. Which don’t mean they can’t be straightened out.”

“Who’s going to do that?” Paket asked him.

Elrabin shrugged. “So you going to shun them, and you think Ampris won’t fight it. I want to see that.”

“I’m not saying we will,” Paket said earnestly. “I’m saying we can.”

“We need her,” Elrabin said, getting angry again. “We be nothing without her. Don’t you forget that.”

“I know what I owe Ampris,” Paket said in a low voice. “I wouldn’t be following you here and now if I’d forgotten.”

The rebuke made Elrabin flatten his ears. “Yeah, yeah,” he said and squinted ahead where the hill began to flatten out. The fire had already burned up the field and was now dying out with huge billows of black smoke. He saw that the shed where Ampris had concealed their cache of stolen food had also burned. His spirits plummeted. All that hope and risk for nothing.

He slowed down and glanced at Paket, then decided not to mention the grain they’d never eat. It seemed to be a bad omen, but he shook the thought off.

Feeling bleak, he coughed as the smoke gusted their way.

“So what do you think?” Paket asked him. “How far to the compound from here?”

“Another hour, maybe more if you can’t keep the pace.”

Paket bared his teeth. “I can keep up. I ain’t slowing us down.”

“Got to have something left when we get there.”

Growling, Paket shouldered past him and moved out into the open between the underbrush and the charred edge of the field. “Let’s can the gab and save our breath for being heroes.” He shot Elrabin an impatient glare. “Come on.”

Elrabin hesitated, reluctant to leave the safety of cover. “We better go around—”

“The long way won’t help us.” Paket waved at the empty, smoke-filled sky. “We’ll take the road. No one’s going to pay any attention to us.”

“If we get buzzed by a patroller—”

“They’re busy burning stelf,” Paket said. “My legs be too old to take the long way. You go whichever way you want. I’m taking the road.”

He marched off, and Elrabin groaned to himself. If he wasn’t having to deal with Ampris getting greedy and staying in the field until she got caught, he was busy trying to knock some sense into her offspring. Now Paket had thrown caution to the winds. The old one had to be losing his mind.

Elrabin hadn’t lived this long by being reckless and crazy.

Except once in a while. This seemed to be one of those times. Sighing to himself, he left the safety of the thicket and trotted into the open, following the old Kelth, who had set his muzzle grimly to the south.

Together, they headed for the compound.

CHAPTER
•THREE

The sun was setting, spreading huge rays of copper and gold across a sky smudged indigo and charcoal. The air smelled of smoke. With twilight, the breeze had shifted directions, bringing coolness for the first time all day.

Within the farm compound of a Viis landowner whose name Ampris did not know, she waited with the other field slaves inside a circular holding pen located between the barns and the ramshackle quarters which housed the slaves. It had been a long time since Ampris had found herself pushed down a loading chute and held prisoner inside a pen of wire mesh. The pen was fitted with a security field that delivered stinging electric shocks to anyone who touched the wire.

“Prisoner” . . . the very word conjured up old memories of hurt and cruelty that Ampris did not want to relive. She fought to hold back the panic that kept rising inside her. She was not someone who lost her head in a crisis. She was too experienced for that. Fear had to be held down and controlled. But no matter how hard she tried, it kept getting away from her and filling her with cold surges of worry that made the fur around her neck bristle.

Most of the other slaves had clustered in the center of the pen. They crouched on their haunches, murmuring softly among themselves and pointedly ignoring the heated conference going on among the Viis standing in the garden. The garden’s wall was no more than waist-high and served not as a barrier within the taller walls of the compound but instead as a demarcation of private space reserved for use by the landowner’s family only. Right now, the landowner himself stood among his shrubs and flowers, with his wife wailing softly behind her veil and the fat Gorlican overseer standing a short distance away. A delegation of patrollers in black uniforms, helmets tucked beneath their arms, faced the landowner. Arguments in Viis flew back and forth, furious and heated, but too far away for the words to be clearly overheard.

Ampris stayed at the perimeter, continually circling the pen. She was unable to keep still, unable to remain passive. All her instincts warned her to stay alert, to seize the smallest chance to escape.

She watched the argument, wishing she were close enough to hear better. She had managed to retain her fluency with the Viis language and had taught as much of it as she could to her sons. The other members of the group disliked her doing that, saying she was teaching her sons to become Viis, to become the enemy. Only Elrabin understood her reasons and gave her his approval. Many Myals of course understood Viis, especially those who worked in areas of research and historical preservation, but Ampris knew of no Aaroun besides herself who was fluent in Viis. She could even read and write it. In an age when so many of the abiru folk could not always speak their own native language and instead knew only the multilingual abiru patois, Ampris’s level of education was both unique and remarkable. She wanted Foloth and Nashmarl to have the same advantages and knowledge base she had, so that when they grew up they could deal with the Viis both intelligently and resourcefully. But teaching them was difficult at best. Foloth was willing but slow to pick up abstract concepts. Nashmarl had a brilliant mind, but he was too impatient to work hard.

Thinking of her sons, growing so tall yet with so much still to learn, Ampris’s sense of urgency increased. She had to get out of here.

Panting, Ampris halted and leaned as close to the wire fence as she dared. The current in it crackled in warning, but she went on peering intently across the compound at the landowner and the patrollers. She believed that everything depended on the outcome of their discussion. Not just the landowner’s fate, but hers as well.

The Viis wife wailed again, more loudly than before, and staggered away with her hands pressed to her face.

Ampris strained her ears and heard the word “taxes,” then “enforced sale of all assets now under confiscation.”

The landowner was ruined. Growling, Ampris drew back. She was not concerned about him or his family, but his ruin meant serious trouble for her too. If the patrollers had been satisfied to simply burn the fields and leave, Ampris figured she could have gotten away the next time the slaves were taken out to work. But if the government confiscated not just the harvest, but also the land, equipment, and slaves, then she had to get out of here before she found herself shipped to Vir’s slave auction.

Her growl grew louder, and determination hardened inside her. Never again would she go through that humiliation. She was a person, free, not an object to be possessed or purchased.

“What is it?” asked a deep, rumbling voice from behind her.

Ampris jumped and spun around to find herself looking at the striped Aaroun male. He had not been friendly earlier that day when they were all crammed inside the broiling interior of a transport and hauled here. But now he looked at her in open inquiry, and worry filled his eyes.

She hesitated, not certain what to answer. Not all Aarouns could be trusted. She’d learned that the hard way.

“You understand what’s going on over there?” he asked, pointing at the patrollers.

Ampris glanced that way and saw the landowner handing over his seal of warranty. Her heart sank inside her. Time was running out.

“Your Viis master just lost his farm to government confiscation,” she said. “He has surrendered his seal of warranty.”

The Aaroun looked at her without understanding.

Ampris backed her ears impatiently. “The seal is a symbol of his ownership, like a title or a deed to the property. It was probably given to one of his ancestors long ago. Now he’s giving it back. He doesn’t own this farm anymore.”

The Aaroun shrugged. “Oh. Nothing about us, then.”

He started to turn away, but Ampris sprang after him and gripped his arm. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “You belong to the farm, all of you,” she said, sweeping all the slaves with her gaze. “So you now go to the government. You’ll be transported to the nearest city and auctioned off for whatever profit you can bring.”

Consternation rippled through their huddled ranks. Several rose to their feet.

“I told you,” a Kelth female said shrilly. “I told you we’d be sold.”

Someone started to ask a question, but one of the younger Kelths yipped gleefully.

“Good!” he said. “I’m tired of breaking my back over stelf. Now we can do city work, live the easy life.”

“Easy!” Ampris echoed, amazed by his naivete. “What makes you think city workers have it easy?”

“Sure they do,” he said, rising to his feet and brushing himself off. His fur was a tawny hue, and his upright ears were tipped with black. “They ain’t out here, grubbing weeds and hauling—”

“No,” Ampris broke in scornfully, “instead most of them work the docks, unloading cargo off the shuttles. Or they go on deliveries and unload those. Or they break their backs hauling construction stone. Or they stand waist-deep in the city sewers all day, never seeing the sky, while they scrape out the built-up sludge from the tunnels. Or they go wash out the contaminated tanks in factories, never mind how many die of chemical poisoning. Instead of choking on dust, they breathe industrial pollution. Instead of living in quarters behind the barn, they live in decayed tenement buildings, crammed in tiny spaces too small to hold their families.”

The brown Kelth blinked at her with his narrow jaws agape.

It was the striped Aaroun male who said softly, “Least they can have families. They live in their own place they can call home. They ain’t chained and whipped.”

“You want a home that leaks, that has no heat, no sanitation, sometimes no running water?” Ampris replied. “And do you want to have little ones, only to see them kidnapped in raids to be sold on the black market? I was taken from my mother at birth, and never saw her again. I do not even know her name or clan. We were still in the birthing hut, and I never even saw my father to have a memory of him.”

The Aaroun dropped his gaze from hers, looking abashed, while the other Aarouns in the group came up to surround her.

“What is your name?” one of the females asked.

“Ampris.”

Her name brought no recognition until the striped Aaroun lifted his head. He stared hard at Ampris, as though trying to remember something.

“Kuma?” one of the others asked. “What is it?”

The striped Aaroun went on staring at Ampris and said nothing.

Another female tapped Ampris on the arm. “Kuma was born in Vir. He and his litter mates were sold for farm work when he was very young.”

Pity filled Ampris. She shot him a look of compassion. “I’m sorry I spoke so harshly. You understand what I—”

“Yes,” he said. His gaze flickered to the young Kelth with the tawny fur. “Moska here is always looking for a way to escape field work. He thinks anything else must be better.”

Moska’s black-tipped ears twitched nervously, although the look he sent Ampris was sly. “I don’t believe—I
know,”
he said arrogantly. “There is nothing worse than here.”

Ampris wanted to laugh at him. In some ways he reminded her of her sons. “No matter how low you go, there is always something worse,” she told him.