Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (51 page)

Banichi and Jago had been coming up the steps. The man lying inert against his knee had pulled him into a protected nook that seemed to go back among the weeds, and he thought it might be a way around and down the hill that didn’t involve going out onto the walk again.

He let the man slide as he got up, made a foolish attempt to cushion the man’s head as he slid down, and in agitation got up into a crouch and felt his way along the wall, scared, not knowing where Ilisidi and Cenedi had gone or whether it was Tabini’s men or the rebels or what.

He kept going as far as the wall did, and it turned a corner and went downhill a good fifty or so feet before it met another wall, in a pile of old leaves. He retreated, and met still another when he tried in the other direction.

The gunfire stopped, then. Everything stopped. He sank down with his shoulders against the wall of the cul de sac and listened, trying to still his own ragged breaths and stop shaking.

It grew so still he could hear the wind moving the leaves about in the ruins.

What
is
this place? he asked himself, seeing nothing when he looked back down the alleyway but a lucent slice of night sky, starlight on old brick and weeds, and a section of the walk. He listened and listened, and asked himself what kind of place Ilisidi had directed them into, and why Banichi and Jago didn’t realize the place was an ancient ruin. It felt as if he’d fallen into a hole in time—a personal one, in which he couldn’t hear the movements he thought he should hear, just his own occasional gasps for breath and a leaf skittering down the pavings.

No sound of a plane.

No sound of anyone moving.

They couldn’t all be dead. They had to be hiding, the way he was. If he went on moving in this quiet, somebody might hear him, and he couldn’t reason out who’d laid the ambush—only it seemed likeliest that if they’d just opened fire, they didn’t care if they killed the paidhi, and
that
sounded like the people out of Maidingi Airport who’d lately been dropping bombs.

So Ilisidi and Cenedi were wrong, and Banichi was right, and their enemies had gotten into the airport here, if there truly was an airport here at all.

Nobody was moving anywhere right now. Which could mean a lot of casualties, or it could mean that everybody was sitting still and waiting for the other side to move first, so they could hear where they were.

Atevi saw in the dark better than humans. To atevi eyes, there was a lot of light in the alley, if somebody looked down this way.

He rolled onto his hands and a knee, got up and went as quietly as he could back into the dead end of the alley, sat down again and tried to think—because if he could get to Banichi, or Cenedi, or any of the guards, granted these were Ilisidi’s enemies no less than his—there was a chance of somebody knowing where he was going, which he didn’t; and having a gun, which he didn’t; and having the military skills to get them out of this, which he didn’t.

If he tried downhill, to go back into the woods—but they were fools if they weren’t watching the gate.

If he could possibly escape out into the countryside … there was the township they’d mentioned, Fagioni—but there was no way he could pass for atevi, and Cenedi or Ilisidi, one or the other, had said Fagioni wouldn’t be safe if the rebels had Wigairiin.

He could try to live off the land and just go until he got to a politically solid border—but it had been no few years since botany, and he gave himself two to three samples before he mistook something and poisoned himself.

Still, if there wasn’t a better chance, it was a chance—a man could live without food, as long as there was water
to drink, a chance he was prepared to take, but—atevi night-vision being that much better, and atevi hearing being quite acute—a move now seemed extremely risky.

More, Banichi must have seen him ahead of him on the steps, and if Banichi and Jago were still alive … there was a remote hope of them locating him. He was, he had to suppose, a priority for everyone, the ones he wanted to find him and the ones he most assuredly didn’t.

His own priority … unfortunately … no one served. He’d lost the computer. He had no idea where the man with his baggage had gone, or whether he was alive or dead; and he couldn’t go searching out there. Damned mess, he said to himself, and hugged his arms about him beneath the heat-retaining rain-cloak, which didn’t help much at all where his body met the rain-chilled bricks and paving.

Damned mess, and at no point had the paidhi been anything but a liability to Ilisidi, and to Tabini.

The paidhi was sitting freezing his rump in a dead-end alley, where he had no way to maneuver if he heard a search coming, no place to hide, and a systematic search was certainly going to find him, if he didn’t do something like work back down the hill where he’d last seen Banichi and Jago, and where the gate was surely guarded by one side or the other.

He couldn’t fight an ateva hand to hand. Maybe he might find a loose brick.

If—

He heard someone moving. He sat and breathed quietly, until after several seconds the sound stopped.

He wrapped the cloak about him to prevent the plastic rustling. Then, one hand braced on the wall to avoid a scuff of cold-numbed feet, he gathered himself up and went as quickly and quietly as his stiff legs would carry him, in the only direction the alley afforded him.

He reached the guard’s body, where it lay at the entry to the alley, touched him to be sure beyond a doubt he
hadn’t left a wounded man, and the man was already cold.

That was the company he had, there in the entry where old masonry made a nook where a human could squeeze in and hide, and a crack through which he could see the walk outside, through a scraggle of weeds.

Came the least small sound of movement somewhere, up or down the hill, he wasn’t sure. He found himself short of breath, tried to keep absolutely still.

He saw a man then, through the crack, a man with a gun, searching the sides and the length of the walk—a man without a rain-cloak, in a different jacket than anyone in Cenedi’s company.

One of the opposition, for certain. Looking down every alley. And coming to his.

He drew a deep, deep breath, leaned his head back against the masonry and turned his face into the shadow, tucked his pale hands under his arms. He heard the steps come very close, stop, almost within the reach of his arm. He guessed that the searcher was examining the guard’s body.

God, the guard was armed. He hadn’t even thought about it. He heard a soft movement, a click, from where the searcher was examining the body. He daren’t risk turning his head. He stayed utterly still, until finally the searcher went all the way down the alley. A flashlight flared on the walls down at the dead end, where he had recently hidden. He stayed still and tried not to shiver in his narrow concealment while the man walked back again, this time using the flashlight.

The beam stopped short of him. The searcher cut the flashlight off again, perhaps fearing snipers, and, stepping over the guard’s body, went his way down the hill.

Mopping up, he thought, drawing ragged breaths. When he was as sure as he could make himself that the search had passed him, he got down and searched the dead guard for weapons.

The holster was empty. There was no gun in either hand, nor under the body.

Damn, he thought. He didn’t naturally
think
in terms of weapons, they weren’t his ordinary resort, and he’d made a foolish and perhaps a fatal mistake—he was up against professionals, and he was probably still making mistakes, like in being in this dead end alley and not thinking about the gun before the searcher picked it up; they were doing everything right and he was doing everything wrong, so far, except they hadn’t caught him.

He didn’t know where to go, had no concept of the place, just of where he’d been, but he’d be wise, he decided, at least to get out of the cul de sac; and following the search seemed better than being in front of it.

He got up, wrapped the cloak about him to be as dark as he could, and started out.

But the same instant he heard voices down the street and ducked back into his nook, heart pounding.

He didn’t know where the solitary searcher had gone. He grew uncertain what was going on out there now—whether the search might have turned back, or changed objectives. He didn’t know what a professional like Banichi might know or expect: having no skill at stealth, he decided the only possible advantage he could make for himself was patience, simply outlasting them in staying still in a concealment one close search hadn’t penetrated. They hadn’t night-scopes, none of the technology humans had known without question atevi would immediately apply to weaponry. They didn’t use any tracking animals, except mecheiti, and he hoped there were no mecheiti on the other side. He’d seen one man ripped up.

He stood in shadow while the searchers passed, also bound downhill, and while they, too, checked over the dead man almost at his feet, and likewise sent a man down to look through the alley to the end. They talked together in low voices, some of it too faint to hear, but they talked about a count on their enemies, and agreed that this was the third sure kill.

They went away, then, down the hill, toward the gate.

A long while later he heard a commotion from that quarter, a calling out of instructions, by the tone of it. The voices stopped; the movements went on for some time, and eventually he saw other men, not their own, walking down toward the gate.

That way of escape was shut, then. There
wasn’t
a way out the gate. If any of their party was alive, they weren’t going to linger down there, he could reason that. The force was concentrating behind him for a sweep forward, and he visualized what he in his untrained and native intelligence would do—hold that gate shut until morning and scour the area inside the gate by daylight.

He took a breath, looked through the screen of weeds growing in the chinks in the wall near his head, and ducked out again onto the walk, wrapped in his plastic cloak and aiming immediately for the next best cover, a nook further on.

He found another alley. He took it, trying to find somewhere in it a small dark hole that a searcher might not automatically think to look into even in a daylight search. He could fit where adult atevi wouldn’t fit. He could squeeze into places searchers couldn’t follow and might not realize a human could fit.

He followed the alley around two turns, feared it might dead-end like the other one, then saw open space ahead—saw flat ground, blue lights, and a hill, and a great house sprawling up and up that hill, with its own wall, and white lights showing.

Wigairiin, he said to himself, and saw the jet down at the end of the runway, sitting in shadow, its windows dark, its engines silent.

Ilisidi hadn’t lied, then. Cenedi hadn’t. There was a plane and it had waited for them. But something had gone terribly wrong, the enemy had moved in, taken Wigairiin the way Banichi had warned them they might. Banichi had been right and no one had listened, and he was here, in the mess he was in.

Banichi had said Tabini would move against the rebels—but there was that ship up in the heavens, and Tabini couldn’t talk to Mospheira unless they’d sent Hanks, and, damn the woman, Hanks wasn’t going to be helpful to an aiji fighting to solidify his support, to a population dissolving uneasy associations and lesser aijiin trying to position themselves to survive the fall of the aiji in Shejidan. Hanks had outright
said
to him that the country assocations didn’t matter, he’d argued otherwise, and Hanks had refused to understand why he adamantly took the position that they did.

All around him was the evidence that they did.

And Ilisidi and Cenedi
hadn’t
lied to him. The plane existed—no one had lied, after all, not their fault the rebels had figured their plan. It got to his gut that, at least that far, the atevi he was with hadn’t betrayed him. Ilisidi had possibly meant all along to go to Shejidan—until something had gone mortally wrong. He leaned against the wall with a knot in his throat, light-headed, and trying to reason, all the same, it didn’t mean they didn’t mean to go somewhere else, but after hours convinced they were being dragged into a trap, knowing at least that the trap closing around him was not the doing of people he’d felt friendly …

Felt friendly,
felt, friendly
. … Two words the paidhi didn’t use, but the paidhi was clearly over the edge of personal
and
professional judgment. He wiped at his eyes with a shaking hand, ventured as carefully as he knew along the frontage of abandoned buildings, among weeds and past old machinery, still looking for that place to hide, with no idea how long he might have to hold out, not knowing how long he could hold out, against the hope of Tabini taking Maidingi and moving forces in to Wigairiin along the same route they’d come.

Give or take a few days, a few weeks, it might happen, if he could stay free. Rainy season. He wouldn’t die of thirst, hiding out in the ruins. A man could go unfed for a week or so, just not move much. He just needed a
place—any place, but best one where he might have some view of what came and went.

He saw old tanks of some kind ahead, facing the field, oil or jet fuel or something, he wasn’t sure, but the ground was grown up with weeds and they didn’t look used. They offered a place, maybe, to hide in the shadows where they met the wall—his enemies might expect him down closer to the gate, not on the edge of the field, watching them, right up in an area where they probably worked. …

Another, irrational flash on the cellar. He didn’t see where he was, saw that dusty basement instead and knew he was doing it. He reached out and put his hand on the wall to steady himself—retained presence of mind enough at least to know he should watch his feet, there’d been other kinds of debris around, in a disorder not ordinary for atevi. Old machine parts, old scrap lumber, old building stone, in an area Wigairiin clearly didn’t keep up.

Knocked down an ancient wall to build the airstrip, Ilisidi had said that. Didn’t care much for the old times.