alt.human (16 page)

I sensed movement behind me. Divine rested a hand on my shoulder, and it was as if her strength flowed into me.

We approached the little landing party.

Sol saw us, and looked instantly down at the ground. In that instant I saw a broken person; Sol, tall and strong and bullish, was now stooped, empty.

The chlick officer turned to leave, and before I could stop myself I stepped forward and said, “!¡
authority | command
¡! Hey!”

He-she paused, and turned towards me, twisting much farther than any human neck could twist.

“!¡
hostility | hierarchy
¡!” The grooves in his-her skin were moist, a sign of fight-readiness, we had been taught. Non-confrontational, I lowered my gaze away from the chlick’s glassy black eyes.

“!¡
deferential
¡! There were others,” I said. “Vechko. Meliss. Fairhead. Why have you not returned them, too?”

“!¡
dismissive | cruel
¡! They were weak,” said the chlick, sending a pulse of fear-inducing phreaks in our direction. “Interrogation broke them.”

The commander stepped onto a pad and retreated to the troopship with the grunts.

I turned to Sol. “!¡
kinship | respect
¡!” I clicked.

She just nodded, and we all turned to watch the troopship lift abruptly and swing back towards the north.

“!¡
respect
¡! Clan-mother,” I said, dipping my head, and Divine echoed my clicks, my words.

Sol straightened, and suddenly the life returned to her empty eyes. “!¡
uncertainty
¡!” Then: “!¡
authority
¡! Right,” she said. “So who’s going to tell me what I’ve missed, then, eh?”

Chapter Thirteen

O
N THE DAY
the four refugees from Angiere arrived in Laverne, Hope was waiting in the crowd near the transit station, her regular haunt at that time of day. She had come here many times, but today, finally, she saw Saneth, and then following in the ancient chlick’s wake, Marek, Callo and two others.

Just as Hope was trying to work out whether to approach them then or follow more discreetly, there was a disturbance in the crowd. A man and three women burst through – me, Sol, Divine and Ruth, although Hope didn’t know us then.

Chaos ensued. Grunts descended, shots were fired, hovering sentinel bots swooped in; gun-pods swivelled, scanned, aimed.

Hope didn’t understand what was happening. She thought we were attacking the four, at first. She didn’t realise that we were saving their lives.

When the crowd surged, Hope was carried along. There were more shots. A sentinel swooped so close she thought it was going to hit her. The air fizzed with excitement and fear and a dizzying medley of phreaks. And the voices in her head were louder than the roar of the mob.

She dropped to her knees and was battered and buffeted by legs and booted feet and bodies surging around her. She felt dizzy, out of control.

When the mob was finally contained within a fence of twitching jagwire, Hope was among them. She stood a little apart, dazed. The voices in her head were roaring, as if angry with her at getting caught up in this.

She knew this must be the end for her.

She saw Marek and Callo, pretending that they were not together. She saw one of the others staring at her, a tall, skinny boy who was barely a man. That was how she saw me that first time, what she made of me. Not so flattering.

The first human was scanned and, reluctantly, released by the body-pierced chlick commander.

Second up was Callo. Hope swallowed and looked away. Of all of them, it was Callo who had shown her the most kindness. A grunt scanned Callo’s wrist, there was a pause, and then the chlick said, “!¡
frustration | regret
¡! Formal apologies for improper detention, West Strider 46.”

They had done something clever, she realised, probably in that rush to embrace before the grunts intervened. They had done something to fool the security scanners. Hope was not slow to work things out.

She waited as more detainees were scanned and released one by one.

And then that boy, the skinny, staring one...
Me
. I touched her arm. She just looked, didn’t understand what was going on, didn’t comprehend my confusion when I realised she had no personal identifiers in her bloodstream.

She glanced down at my hand on her arm, the long fingers resting on her walnut skin. Then she felt a stab, a tingle of exchange, sensed something passing between us. The voices in her head surged, then calmed. She looked at me, trying to work out what had happened, what had triggered such a response.

When her turn came, she knew they had her.

She had managed to stay free for this long, but now...? She eyed the jagwire and considered throwing herself onto it, ending things then and there.

She let the grunt lead her to the steps, its gloved hand too tight on her arm.

She stood before the chlick commander and studied its pierced features, the rings and studs and bars driven through the folds in her face. She was much slighter than Saneth, and her skin had a fiery flush to it.

The chlick commander hissed something in a language Hope did not recognise. One of the grunts seized Hope’s hand roughly and raised her arm to be scanned.

Hope gasped at a bolt of pain in her wrist where the grunt had squeezed and twisted her roughly. She tried to pull free, then realised it was pointless and slumped.

There were more hissed words and then the grunt with the scanner said, “!¡
identity
¡! Reed Trader 12, authorised all indigene and mixed zones.”

Hope was confused. She was not Reed Trader 12. She knew that much. Then she remembered Callo’s new name, West something.

She looked around and briefly found me in the crowd.

Then the chlick commander flapped an arm, irritated that Hope was still standing there. “!¡
anger | frustration | confusion
¡! Improper detention!” the chlick rasped.

Hope looked at her. The commander’s cheeks were flushed a vivid red now and her eyes were bulging.

“Move!” hissed someone from nearby in the crowd.

Hope moved.

She dipped her head and left through a parting in the jagwire fence.

She had barely left the corral when she was confronted by a broad-bodied alien in a grey cloak. Its eyes were grids of metal and crystal, set in rows around a head that was crusted with some kind of scabby growth. It seemed agitated, excited, and she couldn’t be sure whether that was its normal state or the result of too much phreaking.

“!¡
outrage | alarm | confused-distress
¡! You! That is not that is you!” it cried. Its shrill voice made its heavily accented words and clicks hard to understand.

Hope tried to sidestep past the creature, but even in its agitated state it was able to block her.

“!¡
etiquette breach
¡! You are not that is Reed Trader of 12. This is one that knows that one that is not you.”

The voices rose as one, and for once the normal clamour coalesced as a single word:
Run!

She ran.

The alien who knew she was not Reed Trader tried to block her again, but Hope careened off the body check and kept running, leaving the alien jabbering angrily in her wake.

Attracted by the disturbance, a sentinel swooped in and flew before her at just above head height, matching her pace, its three glistening eyes trained on her. She didn’t know what it would do, whether these small hovering spheres were capable of anything more than just surveillance, and so she ran. When she came to an archway over a side-street that led away from the square, the sentinel crashed into the brickwork in a fizz of blue sparks.

Something fired at her then, leaving a black burn line on the wall nearby. The shot had come from the Square.

A couple of people just ahead of her had ducked down, shouting and pointing at the burn line.

Hope barged past them and sprinted the length of the side-street, other humans and menial aliens shying away from her, not wanting any of whatever grief she was carrying.

At the end of the narrow street she twisted again, took another turn into a short alleyway, and found herself in a yard piled high with garbage. She kept running, and used her momentum to clamber up the stacks of old plastic casings and over the containing wall, dropping down into another street.

Instantly, she gathered herself and slowed to a walk, her pace casual but swift, as if nothing had happened. Either she had thrown her followers or she had not, but either way, running would just attract more sentinels and the attention of any patrolling grunts.

All she could do was walk and hope and desperately keep an eye out for any sign of pursuit.

S
HE HAD THROWN
them.

All she knew to do was put distance between her and Precept Square, so she kept walking. Instinctively, she stuck to streets where there was a human presence. She did not know this city, but it seemed larger and more...
extreme
... than Angiere had been. The voices were quieter when she kept away from aliens, too.

She passed through a district where stone-built buildings huddled together, and it reminded her of the harbour quarter in Angiere. Human-built buildings, on a human scale. None of the strange materials and improbable angles and dimensions of alien constructions.

She considered finding somewhere in this district to stay for the night.

She still had the small purse Saneth had left her, its contents untouched. She did not know if it would contain enough to pay for a bed for the night. Up to now she had slept rough, but she felt exposed now, vulnerable. Where before four walls had felt like a prison, now they offered security, protection.

But there was something unsettling about this district. At first she had taken it for an Ipp, but now she realised that while humans worked here, they no longer lived here. Once a human district, now this was occupied territory.

When she went into a bar to ask the price of a room, there was not a single human customer. Most were chlicks, and most of these were wearing some form of military shell.

She backed out.

In the street, she was suddenly aware of the hovering sentinels, and the air of unease hanging over the humans as they hurried about. She had encountered districts like this back in Angiere. The humans here seemed like flat versions of the real thing: lifeless, no spark, no spirit. Marek had called them trogs and nearly-men.

Rounding a corner, she came to a wall where two men and a woman hung naked, impaled on a single spike each that pierced their backs and emerged through the chest.

Flies buzzed around the corpses, and a crow perched on the tip of one of the spikes, tilting forward precariously to pull at an open chest wound.

She hurried on.

S
HE HAD TO
pass through a checkpoint to get out of this district and enter what was clearly marked as an Ipp by the five-fingered hand sign at the junction.

An orphid grunt peeled itself out of its veiny recharge pod to challenge her. She remembered the orphids from Angiere. They were ruthlessly violent and showed no compassion. Emerald had said they were machines made of flesh and blood, not sentient beings at all. Whatever they were, this one stood across Hope’s path, a gun dangling from one hand, its thin bodysuit drying almost instantly in the sun.

Turning its neckless head on her, it said, “!¡
caution | threat-but-boredom
¡! Halt. Identify.”

The thing intimidated her, and the heady rush of phreaks exuded by the buds suckered onto its body made her want to turn and run. The thing was pumping hard, beating her up with its phreaks. At its shoulder, a sentinel hovered, and she wondered if this grunt knew already that she was a fugitive.

She raised an arm and the grunt waved a scanning wand past it. It paused, and she wondered if it was communicating somehow with the sentinel, or with others more remote.

“!¡
authority
¡! Identify, verbal.”

She hesitated. Then, “Reed Trader 12,” she said. That was the name they had given her at Precept Square. “I’m Reed Trader.”

After another pause, the orphid turned away, the confrontation over. Hope watched the grunt’s retreating figure as it hurried back to the comfort of its pod.

She passed through the checkpoint, and found herself in a densely populated Ipp. The buildings were high here, some of them reaching five or six storeys. She should have been content with this. She should have found something familiar, a bar or a club or a huddle of homeless, clanless street people.

But the sentinel had disturbed her. The way it had hung at the grunt’s shoulder, the way it had watched her.

She still felt the need to put distance between her and the disturbance at Precept Square.

And that was her downfall.

T
HIS
I
PP WRAPPED
itself round the great sweep of a wide river, and for a time it really did have the feel of the docks back at Angiere. There were even the same big river barges out in mid-channel. The district was dense but compact, and after a few blocks she came to a point where a canal cut away from the river.

A hunched bridge crossed the canal, but before she could traverse it she had to pass through another checkpoint. This one was controlled by a grunt of a species she had seen around this city but never anywhere else. Strangely humanoid, with a coating of short fur and long, looping ears. It was so tall it had to stoop to hear her when she identified herself again as Reed Trader 12. It scanned her wrist to confirm her identity, then waved her through.

Hope crossed the bridge and entered an Ipp where the narrow streets were lined with wood-framed buildings, so close together that little sunlight penetrated.

Partway along that first street, Hope heard a series of clicks from behind her.

She stopped, turned, and the first thing she saw was a pistol crossbow aimed at her chest. It was held by a girl of about Hope’s age, maybe a little younger. Her too-white face was framed by straight black hair; her eyes were smudged black, her lips a blood-red rosebud. She was clad head to toe in a black lace one-piece, its lace dense in some places and wider than fishnet in others.