Sly Mongoose (26 page)

She dropped the giant rock-eating belt out in front of the dredge and turned it on. The vicious teeth blurred as they spun past the camera. The dredge lumbered out from under the shadow of the processor and rose up into the space between it and the carrier. It twisted slightly in the turbulent space between the two craft.

“Here we go.” Katerina tapped the console, and the dredge slipped forward and struck the docking tube.

It pierced it, sending shards of metal flying. Air puffed out in a spreading cloud.

A faint mist of red covered the camera and Timas winced. Katerina groaned, probably seeing something similar in her internal world.

As the dock collapsed, Timas saw bodies tumbling out and falling slowly down toward the clouds. Ruddy Chilo air burst inside through the half-open airlock door. The miners struggled to force the nearest Swarm back through the door, and Achmed showed up, swinging the ax and using it to help them.

Katerina’s hands shook. She let go of the joysticks. “I don’t feel so well.”

“You did it.” Timas looked at the screens. The miners had shut the airlock door now, although several of them looked hurt.

Achmed ran through the door of the control room, out of breath, his shirt covered in blood. He didn’t have any bite marks, though. “This is insane,” he said to both of them. “Tony’s dead! Tony was on the docking tube, they
bit
him and left him in the tube, whatever they were.”

Katerina pursed her lips. “Tony was dead the moment those things bit him.”

On the screen the crew cursed and nursed their wounds, breathing fresh air out of a pair of emergency oxygen masks they passed back and forth.

“We told you,” Timas said to Achmed. “This’s happening all over the planet. Now some of your crew’s infected, and there might not be any cities for you to return to.”

“He’s right.” Katerina stared at the screens. She put her elbows on the edge of the panel and pushed her face into her hands.

“The carrier is moving.” Achmed looked around at the screens. “And there’s a second airship, off in the distance, not talking to us.”

“More Swarm,” Katerina predicted.

The carrier lumbered at them. “They’re going to ram us.” Achmed blinked. “They’re actually going to ram us.”

“Do something,” Timas said. “Drop the ore.”

Achmed looked startled. “You’re talking about bankrupting us.”

“It’s the ore, or your lives.” Timas leaned across the panel to stare at Achmed. “They’ll ram us, then throw more of them through. You’ve seen these things face to face. They’ve taken whole
cities
. Do they look human to you?”

“You’ve got to do it now.” Katerina walked over. “The cities will understand later, they’ll work something out. But time it well, you don’t want them trying to rise over us. You dump half your load now, then half when they pass underneath us. As an avatar, I beg you.”

Achmed stared at her, then nodded. “You’re right, that kind of load, all at once. We’ll shoot right up.” He turned back and stared at the screen as the carrier, long and tapered, grew larger.

Timas thought he was waiting too long, but then Achmed tapped the screen several times, and hatches along the underside banged open. On the screens Timas could see that they rose, the carrier falling below them.

“He’s under us,” Achmed said.

The rest of the hatches on the underside swung open. Metal and metal-rich rock, slurry, and ingots tumbled out and hit the carrier, now several hundred feet below them.

Parts of the skin crumpled and the entire carrier shook with the impact of the sudden weight. It fell hard as the
Triple-Two
continued to ascend. Not too fast, however. Achmed tapped away, dumping air.

The carrier folded at the center now, and then began to spin. Air vented with occasional bursts of fire that extinguished the moment Chilo’s atmosphere snuffed it out, giving it no oxygen to burn.

“The other ship’s coming,” Katerina said.

Achmed strapped himself into the seat by his consoles. Now he wasn’t tapping commands out manually: his eyes rolled back up into his head, concentrating. He looked posessed. “We’ve got a jump on it.”

“What are you going to do?” Timas asked.

“We’re a processor. This thing’s built like a tank, ready to get down to fifty thousand feet easy, forty maybe. We dive low, gain us speed, and keep ahead of him.”

“They might have bombs to drop, or missiles,” Katerina said.

“Not that ship. It’s a passenger ship. I don’t see anything mounted on it that looks like that.” Achmed had his confidence back, Timas noticed. For a while there Achmed had been trying to process what was happening and he had looked dazed.

But then if Timas hadn’t heard Pepper’s story, what would
he
have done? Timas grabbed the control panel as the floor shifted, the entire ore processor angling down until Timas felt like his feet would slide out from under him.

“We’re diving. But where should we go?” Achmed looked at Katerina.

“Yatapek,” Katerina and Timas said at the same time.

“Yes.” Katerina stumbled back across the floor to the chair by the panel with joysticks. She snapped herself into it. “Timas, get in.”

“What about the crew?”

“They’re safe in the room, it’s small. . . .” Achmed stopped and locked eyes with Timas.

Timas swallowed. “It takes four hours, Pepper said. They start off
with a heavy fever, then pass out. They awake as part of the Swarm. There are bitten people down there. What are you going to do to protect us from them?”

A long moment passed in the control center, and then Achmed tapped his throat for an announcement.

“Would everyone bitten hold up your hand?” he said.

Everyone in the hold raised their hands. Only Achmed, with his ax, had held the infected away from him.

Achmed sighed. “I have to ask you all a favor,” he said, voice catching. “Please get in the airlock, because you’re all infected. In four hours, you’ll be like . . . the things that attacked us.”

Confusion bubbled out, and then anger, and then finally, after a series of silent, fast arguments, they all moved into the airlock. Three of them walked to corners, arms gesturing as they talked into the air.

“What are they doing?” Timas asked.

“Last messages for loved ones.” Achmed turned the screen off. “We’ll give them their privacy.”

“They went in there so easily.” Timas still couldn’t believe it.

Katerina looked at Timas. “They voted. Consensus said it was the best thing to do, giving us three a chance to live.”

“And you voted?” Timas let go of the console and slid his way toward an edge of the room for a chair of his own.

“We abstained.”

“I know you want to give them their privacy, but we should keep an eye on them.” Timas buckled himself in. “When they change, they might try and figure out how to get back in using manual access.”

“We’ll leave them alone for three hours,” Achmed said. His voice sounded firm. It was final.

The entire bulk of the processor shook. Turbulence? It shook again and Timas turned his chair around to look at Achmed. “That didn’t feel quite like turbulence.”

“It wasn’t. We’re pulling away, but they dropped an explosive, hoping to rattle us. This is as close as they’ll get, distance-wise, until we stop our dive.”

“And then they catch up?”

“Then they catch up,” Achmed confirmed and nodded his head.

“I thought,” Timas said, “that you said there weren’t any weapons on that ship.”

Achmed held on to the edges of his panel. “I was wrong. At least they don’t seem to have missiles.”

It was a small comfort.

P
epper walked the ranks of Yatapek’s citizens among the fields of the upper level of the city, outside the circle of buildings that clustered around the atrium. The long, edged blades of billhooks smacked against each other all around him, and the crack of practice fire echoed from the top of the city.

Up there Yatapek had mounted more anti-pirate batteries, pulling the long-barrelled guns out of storage from somewhere deep in the city.

All around the upper area residencies, where the few elite lived clustered around the atrium, the corn and wheat had been cut back to give fighters a good zone of fire.

When trying to arm a whole populace in the space of a couple days one realized that guns weren’t realistic. There just weren’t enough lying around in a city to arm everyone. And not enough time to build any. The billhook was a throwback. Nothing but a chunky, slightly curved bit of steel fastened to a pole nine feet long. But, Pepper hoped, it would let Yatapek’s volunteers keep their distance and thrust at the necks of the Swarm.

Quite a few had armed themselves with pikes, hammering iron spikes onto poles, but Pepper doubted those would be effective.

The traditional macuahuitl of Yatapek, an iron or stone-studded club, would be good for skull-crushing.

Pepper clambered up and sat on the roof of one of the last houses on the edge of the cleared land. He watched a group of twenty teenagers struggling to keep themselves in a tight square, imitating a phalanx.

A wall of them with shields and swords made the first line, and then rows of billhooks followed, the bristling formation struggling to keep their long weapons steady in front of them. A clumsy hedgehog.

They couldn’t turn quickly, but stumbled apart as they tried to attack a set of scarecrows.

Pepper had a secret. Now that he had mobility, late in the night he’d gone hunting. A little bit more clumsy in this metal skin, but he’d found an emergency balloon that could hold the weight of him in his new incarnation.

He’d made his way to a spot near the rim of the upper level, by a set airlocks leading out. These were service ways to let people get out on the city’s skin for repairs. And a useful exit for him.

He wasn’t sure how long the city would hold when the Swarm came. It had only cost him a half hour’s worth of power to make sure he had a backup plan. Pepper had moved quickly, in bursts. Three hours and thirty minutes of continuous power remained in the suit’s batteries.

Maybe, if the ten xocoyotzin now on the surface found anything, got contact with the aliens, then they’d be in a different place. With the aliens found, the Dread Council would have to move to take Chilo under its protection to gain access to their technology and resources, and protect them from the League. And the aliens might offer a hand in the fighting. Either way, if that didn’t happen soon, Pepper would need to move on. Yatapek, as he saw it, was doomed.

“Pepper.” Itotia walked to the wall and looked up at him. “I just got a call. There’s a ship full of Swarm at the docks.”

He jumped off the roof, enjoying the flight, his dreadlocks flying behind him, the suit a second skin around him, weightless.

The ground dented and threw up dust when he hit with a grin.

“How bad?”

“Some of ours are wounded. We forced them back into the ship.”

“Let’s see it.”

Smoke roiled in the docks, and fifteen dour-looking warriors with rifles guarded one of the docking tubes.

Four dockworkers lay curled up on the grating, bleeding. A doctor crouched between them, bandaging their wounds.

“We’ve shut the docking tube down and forced them back,” Necalli told Pepper, falling in beside him as he thudded his way from the elevator through the docks. “We can fire on the airship with our guns, if we aim just right. We can rip it apart where it sits.”

“But it hasn’t moved?” Pepper stared at the door. Why the hell hadn’t they had the docking tubes closed? Had they just been letting people aboard?

Necalli must have guessed what he was thinking. “It won’t happen
again. Not everyone was taking the new policy too seriously. Now we are. And no, the ship remains docked.”

Pepper walked up to the wounded. “Get them in a cage, hang it over a drop hatch with a rope.”

Itotia tapped his shoulder. “These are fellow friends, neighbors, coworkers, family.”

“For the next few hours. After that, they’re Swarm.”

“You push us. First, you arm women and children. The traditional among the city are outraged. Now this.”

“There will be less outrage when the Swarm pours over us and people realize that they at least have a weapon in their hand to face this with.”

There was a reason the ship had come early. The Swarm, with cities full of people, was now sending out emisarries. Was it arrogant, Pepper wondered, to assume that there was a message from the Swarm here?

A cage was found and dragged down, and the four feverish men bundled into it. The men were too far gone in the process to notice what was happening, but someone slipped food and water into the cage anyway.

The hours slipped by as Pepper waited. Itotia stayed with him, watching the men pass out in the cage from the fever.

Eventually the still forms stirred, and then stood up as one. They grabbed the bars of the cage and looked at Pepper. “We again come to offer you something.”

Pepper stepped forward and looked at the vacant-eyed faces of the Swarm. “Talk.”

“Surrender,” said the first.

“Stand your city down.”

“We will only take one in three of you for our needs to replace what is lost to attrition and time.”

Pepper leaned forward toward the bars, and the moment the nearest Swarm lunged for him, Pepper grabbed its hand. He snapped its finger back, then tore it off with a ripping pop.

He walked over and slapped the button to open the hatch below them. Acrid Chilo air roiled in, forcing everyone to grab their air masks. He walked over to the rope holding the cage and cut it loose with a knife.

None of the four Swarm made a sound. They calmly stood by the bar as the cage fell down through the hatch, whipping the rope with it.

Pepper looked over the edge as it silently dwindled down to a dot. He pulled out a small vial and massaged blood out of the finger into it, then tossed the finger down after the cage. He capped the vial and tucked it into a niche under the suit’s collar.

“You should have taken the offer to the pipiltin,” Itotia said. “They are the ones responsible for this city. Not you.”