Catch the Lightning (36 page)

Tina
, the Jag thought.
You must decide
.

I can’t
. I felt as if I were shaking, even though my body— Althor’s body—was rock solid.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want Althor to die. But God, Jag, to be Iquar’s providers—that’s worse than death
.

You must make the decision
.

I can’t
.

And then I went insane. That’s the only way I can describe it; I lost rationality. In times of crisis, the human body can exhibit strength far beyond its normal capability: a man holds up the roof of a collapsing mine shaft, a woman lifts a truck off her child, a mountain climber holds back a boulder many times his weight. I blasted Althor’s biomech web past the known upper limits of its capabilities.

Spinning around, I kicked my leg above my waist and slammed my boot into the doors, again and again, with teeth-jarring force, like a high-speed drill, so fast that the motion blurred. Again, again, again. The force of the impacts slammed through Althor’s body, vibrating to his bones. The web’s timer said a mere fraction of a second had passed.

I heard a gun fire, felt the shots hit my chest, knew sedatives flooded my blood. It made* no difference; Althor had already been knocked out. His body was operating on pure biomech now. I kept at the doors—and with a screeching groan of metal they buckled, the huge serrations where the two sides joined crumpling inward. My foot slammed through the opening, up to my thigh, ripping Althor’s uniform. With enhanced speed, I pushed my/Tina’s body through the opening and squeezed through after it. More shots hit my side and legs, and shouts sounded behind me, echoing eerily in my boosted state.

Then we were in the bay, a small one located on the torus rather than the fluted tube where most ships docked. The Jag already had its airlock open. The outer doors of the bay were also open—wide open. We were running full tilt into the vacuum of space.

Even as I swore out loud, I saw the shimmer of a molecular airlock in the open doors. I ran to the Jag and shoved my/Tina’s body inside, then scrambled in and fell across the deck. The airlock sucked closed behind us.

Download
, the Jag thought. The rumble of engines vibrated in the deck.

Download
, the Jag repeated.

I lifted my head, still in Althor’s body.

Tina, get out of his web!
the Jag thought.

Download
, I thought.

Then I was in my own body again, sliding along the deck as the Jag accelerated out of the bay. A huge metal arm unfolded from a bulkhead in the cabin, gathering up Althor’s now unconscious body. I felt metal against my own skin, too, and the warmth of a membrane, as a second arm lifted me off the deck. A familiar cloying mist blew against my face.

Preparing taus, the Jag thought.

Jag, NO!
I fought to stay conscious. Millions of people live on the Cylinder!

Cannons primed.

NOOooo…
I tried to shout it, but sleep closed around me like a moth folding its wings.

Just before I passed out, the Jag’s thought whispered through my mind:
Taus fired
.

Darkness and warmth.

Gradually, I registered sounds, the noises of a ship in flight.

Jag?
I thought.

Attending.

Where are we?

Traveling in inversion.

How is Althor?

I am attempting repairs.

Will he be okay?

Pause.
He will function again.

But?

His web needs reprogramming. His degraded memory files must be restored. He may have lost some forever. His structural components must be repaired. Some must be regrown. He will need surgery
. A sense of sorrow came from the ship. I didn’t know any other way to describe what it communicated to me.
He also needs treatment to heal his emotions. I cannot give that
.

Can you make him forget?

This would require erasing extensive sections of memory. Much more would go than his memory of Iquar
. More gently:
Deleting parts of himself is no good, Tina. He needs to heal if he is to pe whole again
.

I just don’t want him to hurt
.

The Jag’s answer had a sense of softness.
Nor do I. Neither of you
.

Jug…

Sleep, Tina
. Mist curled around my face.

No. Wait
. I fought the drowsiness.
What did you mean on the Cylinder about my being Rhon?

Althor suspected it almost as soon as he met you
.

Back at Earth, you said you didn’t know my rating
.

I said I couldn’t determine a numerical value. The Rhon have ratings too high to quantify
.

Why didn’t Althor tell me?

He felt you would be incapable of hiding that knowledge were you put into a situation such as the one that occurred.

He was right
.

At Epsilani, I linked your Kyle centers to my El, the Jag thought. When the mercenaries shut me down, they also damped your Kyle fields
.

You should have protected Althor
.

I couldn’t do you both. It would have strained my resources too far
. Its next thought came with a sense of pain.
I had to choose
.

Why me?

You needed it more. And they already knew what he was.

Jag—

Tina, sleep
.

Mist wafted over my face.
Jag, wait. The taus…

Sleep
, it thought.

I slept.

The Raylicon sky glowered red above the horizon, its streamered clouds lined with fluorescent pink. Directly above us the sky calmed into gray and at the opposite horizon it deepened into black.

Althor and I stood alone, surrounded by desert. Low red hills rolled out in every direction as far as we could see. In the distance, claws of rock stretched like skeletal fingers up to the angry sky. The horizon was closer than on Earth and the gravity weaker. Although it looked like how I imagined Mars, Raylicon is actually a darker red than Earth’s neighbor and has a more complex biosphere. Her atmosphere is oxygen rich and dense, giving the daytime sky a pale blue color.

Althor still wore the pants and boots of his dress uniform, with a black knit pullover. He had given me his flight jacket, and it hung down over my dress to my hips. Made from the same insulating material as his regular uniform, it even carried its own web system.

We stood staring at the sky. The receding spark that had been the Jag was gone now. “Do you think it can make it back without a pilot?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Althor said.

I wanted to offer comfort, to take away his haunted look. But in the few minutes since the Jag had revived us, Althor had remained distant and closed.

“The Jag was right,” I said. “We’re safer here. Both of us.”

“It needs a pilot.” He looked no more accepting now of its decision than he had when it first told him it was going solo.

A rumbling finally registered on my mind. As I became aware of it, I realized it had been in the ground for a while, growing stronger. With it came the memory of that morning so many years ago in Chiapas, when an earthquake shook the ground until fissures opened. After it was over, my aunt and uncle had been dead, our home destroyed, our sheep lost, and our crops gone.

The rumbling grew stronger, shaking the desert, stirring dust. Thunder in the ground. I moved closer to Althor, but when I touched his arm he stiffened. So I dropped my hand. He wouldn’t look at me, just stood staring at the horizon.

They came silhouetted against the crimson sky, hundreds of them, sweeping over the curve of the world like phantasms created from the burning horizon. In wave after wave, a horde of riders thundered out of the sunset.

“Go away,” I whispered. “No more.”

“These are friends,” Althor said. “Abaj.”

“Your ancient bodyguards?”

He nodded, his attention on the riders. The force of their coming raised clouds of dust.

“If these are bodyguards,” I said, “why weren’t they here when the Jag set us down?”

He continued to stare out at the riders. “The Abaj Tacalique control the ground-based, orbital-based, and interplanetary defenses for this system. They’ve one of the most extensive defense matrices in settled space.” Dust swirled around his feet, agitated by the rumbling ground. “It makes no difference where we are on the planet. They have been guarding us since we entered the system.” He motioned at the riders. “This is ceremony.”

They came on, resolving out of the gathering shadows, tall forms on mounts. Long strips of cloth trailed behind their heads, snapping in the wind.

From a distance, their mounts resembled Tyrannosaurus rex, but differences became clear as they neared. About nine feet tall at the shoulder, the animals ran leaning forward, back legs thrusting against the ground like pistons. Their scaled forearms were longer than on a tyrannosaurus, enough so that every now and then one dropped into a four-legged gallop, a loping stride with front legs skimming the ground. Refracted light from the fading sunset made their hides scintillate with gold, blue, and glass-green glints.

Their riders were lean and angular, well over seven feet tall. Scarves covered their faces, except for their eyes, protection against the storm of sand they raised. Black cloaks billowed behind them, revealing glimpses of vivid gold, red, green, and purple clothes. They came on, line after line in the deepening crimson light, as if they meant to run straight over us.

Every animal halted at the same instant, the closest less than fifty yards away. In the sudden silence, wind ruffled our hair and whispered across our skin. A mount shifted its weight, another snorted, but no other sound broke the silence. Had someone on the horizon called, we would have heard.

A rider jumped to the ground. He released the scarf from his face and it blew back, its long ends rippling in the air. His legs devoured the ground as he strode forward. I recognized him: the cast of his features, his hooked nose, the angles of his face, his dark eyes. He was much taller than a man of the Maya, but that was his only real difference. If anything, with my small nose, I looked less Maya than he. Separated for millennia, across different universes and times, yet still I felt the kinship. Like knew like.

He stopped in front of Althor, towering over him. Then he knelt on one knee, his head bowed. Althor touched his shoulder and spoke in Iotic, the language I almost understood, words with the sound of ancient ceremonies.

Standing, the man answered, his voice deep and resonant, ringing with notes. His words had a sense of ritual, like a chant. At the time I thought he spoke a different dialect of Iotic, one harder for me to decipher, but in fact I understood Althor better only because he and I were more attuned to each other. All I picked up from this man was that he was called Uzan. I’ve since learned Uzan is his title, as leader of the Abaj. If he has a personal name, he has never told us.

The Uzan unsheathed the sword that hung at his side, a long blade with a curving tip. In form it was identical, to the one Althor wore with his dress uniform. But this blade was a metal-diamond crystal grown in one piece from nano-bots, built atom by atom, with a razor-sharp edge. The Uzan raised it above his head, and its blade glinted in the dying sunset.

He brought it down at Althor.

Before I could shout a protest, the sword hit the ground and sent up a fountain of sand, one inch to the right of Althor’s foot. Althor didn’t even flinch. The Uzan raised it again, and this time a rush of air brushed my cheek as he brought it down. I made myself stand utterly still, my heart thudding in my chest. Its tip hit between Althor’s foot and mine, spraying sand as high as my face.

The Uzan turned to his warriors and lifted his sword. In response, they raised theirs in perfect unison, hundreds of blades pointing at the stars. The Uzan lowered his and the Abaj followed suit, again in unison. I wondered how they timed it with such precision.

Althor slid his hand under my elbow and we walked forward with the Uzan. It was hard to see now, as the shadows deepened. A man appeared out of the enveloping darkness leading a riderless animal. It loomed over us, forearms reaching out with claws as long as my lower arm, daggers that could easily tear a human to shreds.

Althor ran his hand along the animal’s side with a practiced touch. It responded by lowering its bulk to the ground, folding front and back limbs under its body like a camel. It smelled of sand and musk, with breath as sharp and bitter as lemons. The head came so close that I saw the scales on its face, blue prisms edged in green, with an echo of the sunset trapped inside. It watched me out of large gold eyes.

A bony ridge extended down the animal’s neck, and another crossed its lower back from haunch to haunch, like a natural saddle. Althor grabbed the animal’s neck ridge and swung gracefully up onto it. As soon as he was astride its back, the creature rose to its feet, higher and higher, until it towered above us. Althor spoke to the Uzan, and the Abaj bowed. Then he turned to me and knelt on one knee, his head bowed.

Flustered, I glanced at Althor. He just sat on his dinosaur, no help at all. So I did what he had done, touching the Uzan on the shoulder. The warrior rose to his feet and leaned slightly forward. I looked at Althor again, but he just continued to watch, his face shadowed, emotions hidden.

Then I realized the Uzan was actually listing toward the riders. I stepped in their direction and he bowed as if I had answered a question. I had in fact, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had accepted his offer of a ride. As he led me to his mount, the animal settled to the ground, folding its legs under its body. Condensation rose from its snout into the cooling air.

The Uzan put his hands around my waist and lifted me onto its back. Startled, I grabbed its neck ridge. The Uzan swung up behind me—and the ground dropped away, lost in pooling shadows as the animal rose to its full height. When I started to slide, at first I thought I would plow into the Uzan and knock us both off the animal. But instead I settled into a smaller ridge across the middle of its back.