Strider's Galaxy (37 page)

The afternoon sun was very bright behind her as she climbed. She was not accustomed to seeing such a stark shadow ahead of herself. Far high in the sky small motes whirled: the planet had birds or bird-analogues.

The humans chattered as they went along, relieved to be released from the oppressiveness of the Preeae's underground realm. Strider realized that, for almost all of them, it was the first time they had been out in the open air for years—and that for the children it was the first time ever. Part of the reason for the incessant gossip might be that they were taking their minds off the fact that the open air might be killing them, even as they breathed it, but Strider thought not. This was the school outing.

A couple of hundred meters below the snowline there was a copse; Strider hadn't seen one since girlhood. They could hide in that for a while, leaving it only in ones and twos. Presumably the techs on F-14 had fairly sophisticated surveillance systems, so the less the cohort of humans was exposed on the hillside the better. If the copse was made up of anything remotely resembling trees, there would be food animals living within it. There might also be fruit—the Images would doubtless be able to analyze the vegetation to determine what was and what was not safe for the humans to eat. Berries. Nuts. Anything. She was beginning to come down off her oxygen high, and the prospect of eating something was becoming very appealing indeed.

They reached the copse and stumbled through the undergrowth into the green-grey shade of what looked not unlike trees. Strider stripped off her spacesuit: there might be predators or stinging creatures around, but she was prepared to take the risk. Most of the other personnel did likewise; she insisted they each put their suit somewhere distinctive, so that they could find it again in a hurry. Because they were high up on the hillside she reckoned that, come nightfall, the current pleasant coolness of the air would turn into extreme cold: the suits would offer protection against that. Some of the people had been naked when the order to abandon the
Santa Maria
had come, and she issued orders that these people—except Polyaggle—should keep their suits on: there were no longer any medbots on hand to treat minor cuts and abrasions.

There was a sudden commotion within the undergrowth. Some largish animal was running away from them in panic.

FOOD,
said Heartfire.

"Are there a lot of them in here?" she subvocalized. She wished she'd been able to see what the animal looked like.

ENOUGH FOR TEN OR FIFTEEN DAYS. ALSO, THE BARK OF SOME OF THE TREES IS EDIBLE AND NUTRITIOUS. THE FRUITS ARE NOT, ALTHOUGH THEY LOOK SO.

Strider barked out an order that no one was to eat anything until it had been verified by one of the Images. One of the kids—the one called Hilary—looked momentarily rebellious. She faced him down.

They had food. They could make fire. Water, in the form of snow, was only a few hundred meters away, although she guessed that this copse wouldn't have been here if there weren't running water somewhere around. Ten or fifteen days, Heartfire had said: with luck the Helgiolath would discover them before that. If not, there must be other places to go.

For the first time in a long while Strider began fully to relax.

#

A week later Strider was the chieftain of a tribe of naked primitives. Or, at least, that's what anyone would have thought had it not been for the way they used lazguns to shoot food and climbed into spacesuits every night. At the height of the day it was impossible to move around in your standard-issue SSIA jumpsuit, because you sweated so much from the heat—and anyway, after a couple of days, the garment stank not just of sweat but of quite a lot more, because the copse had turned out not to have running water after all. The best way of keeping clean was to have a snow-bath, though Strider allowed only two people at a time to do this. The process was reasonably effective but freezing: quite a lot of ribaldry was directed by the women at the men. The big animals in the copse turned out to look like mammalian seven-legged spiders on whose upper surface someone had mounted a rabbit's head; once you forgot about the appearance of the creatures—"arachnibunnies," as someone had christened them—it was possible to enjoy their meat, which tasted like the very best textured soya protein you'd ever come across. Polyaggle—on the advice of the Images—stuck to the bark of the trees, which tasted like rotting maize if eaten raw and like barley if cooked. There seemed to be no bird-analogues dwelling among the trees, which puzzled Strider, because there were certainly bird-analogues flying high in the sky. Evolution, she reasoned, can play curious tricks.

One quarter of the copse was designated the latrine area, and by now people walked very cautiously there.

Strider was proud of her tribe. Whatever their living conditions might look like from the outside, they had accepted the rules she had imposed on them and were in fact a disciplined little community. The chores were shared around, and everybody did what they were supposed to do. Meals were eaten exclusively during daylight hours, because Strider reckoned that heat-seeking surveillance devices wouldn't spot the fires over which the meat was cooked when the rest of the landscape was so hot. If you got hungry at night . . . well, the taste of rotting maize went away after a while, or if you were very lucky there might be some cold arachnibunny left over from the afternoon.

She liked being a primitive. Her body was covered in scratches where she'd stumbled into thorny undergrowth, but once she'd learnt that the pain didn't hurt
that
much it didn't matter any more. The soles of her feet were quite another consideration: after some experimentation she and everyone else kept their boots on.

Strider would have been happy to stay here for the rest of her life except for three facts. Sooner or later they were going to be discovered. The food supply was, as they'd known from the start, not infinite. And, by the law of averages, someone was almost certainly already pregnant: although there was a chance Pinocchio could perform the delivery safely, it wasn't something Strider wanted to prove empirically.

She was levelling her lazgun at an arachnibunny when the fighter craft arrived. At first she didn't pay attention to the faint whine, assuming that someone had disturbed a swarm of the insect-analogues that plagued the copse and inflicted the occasional irritating bite. A single shot drilled through the arachnibunny's head and the creature slumped. She gave it another blast to be certain that it was dead, and was glad that she had done so because it gave a little reflexive kick of its legs.

The buzzing noise continued.

She moved forward to grab the arachnibunny by a leg, and then Ten Per Cent Extra Free spoke.

You are needed on the far side of the copse.

"Why?"

Your people have been discovered by the forces of F-14. They have brought a fleet of fighters.

"Oh. Great."

She looked at the dead animal. It could wait for a while.

Strider half-ran, half-tripped through the undergrowth. Now that haste was needed, being naked didn't seem to be such a good idea after all. Someone had had the sense to tell everyone else to shut up, because nobody—not even the kids—had started screaming. The whining sound decreased in volume. The Autarchy must have pretty goddam good technology if it could move heavy vehicles through the air with so little noise.

She tripped on a root and fell, knocking the wind out of herself. Some of the plants in this copse had stinging leaves, and one of them stung her just above the navel. It was exactly what she could have done without. She heaved herself to her feet and carried on, pushing away branches and tall, swaying plants with her hands.

This wasn't going to be the most elegant way to fight a battle, wearing boots and nothing else. With luck there wouldn't be too many war photographers around.

When she got to the end of the copse she threw herself down beside Pinocchio, who was lying flat on his stomach as he looked down the slope. His lazgun was in his hand, sweeping from side to side as if in search of something to shoot.

"The fighters are about a hundred meters downhill from us," he said. "There are approximately fourteen of them. I may have miscounted."

Strider had difficulty controlling her breathing enough to be able to form words.

"I can't see anything."

"They're small. The biggest of them is five meters across and about twenty-five centimeters high." Pinocchio for once was sounding uncertain of himself—almost afraid, if that were possible. "I think they must be remotes. What they likely want to do is blow away half the hillside and bury us in the rubble."

"You'll probably be able to dig yourself out," said Strider. The words were coming more easily now.

"Almost certainly," said the bot. "But only to find myself alone."

WE HAVE MADE CONTACT WITH THE F-14 FORCES,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Good," said Strider. "Could you persuade a few of them to autodestruct?"

I THINK YOU MISPERCEIVE THE SITUATION.

#

The alien spaceship had been a fertile field. Segrill had expected that it would be fitted with the tachyonic drive, of course, but he had not expected the Pockets. He had wasted rather more time than he ought to have done playing with these, buzzing his head against each of them in turn and watching the wildest of his imaginings being brought into being. At last he had realized what the gadgets were
for
, and had called up a vision of the fleeing party of aliens. They were travelling on the Preeae's transportation system, something that Segrill had experienced once and had vowed never to do again. They looked as if they were rigid with fear, which Segrill could understand. They were certainly rigid with something.

The nearest Preeae access point was about four hundred and fifty kilometers away. That was probably where the Humans were being taken. Speaking quickly into his kreebolly, he issued orders that twenty of the fighters should go to that point at once. The officer who took the instructions was obviously confused as to why he was being sent to this particular set of co-ordinates. Segrill decided not to explain. The fighters were to stay as high as possible and do nothing more than observe, because the Humans—if the technology aboard this spaceship was anything to go by—were probably equipped with pretty impressive weaponry.

The next few days were spent probing through the rest of the spaceship's appurtenances. Segrill watched entertainment holos which made very little sense to him as of course he couldn't understand a word of what the Humans were saying although he began to have a shrewd notion of their mating habits; he was less certain why sometimes two of the Humans would remove their clothing and roll around together. He accidentally fired off one of the
Santa Maria
's missiles, and was thankful that they were in the middle of a desert: the resultant plume of sand was very impressive, and could probably have been seen five hundred kilometers away. Other items of technology were far more mysterious, having no apparent purpose that Segrill and his people could ascertain. There was a machine that emitted a roar of cacophonous noise when a button was pressed and then could only be turned off again with great ingenuity. Bots of various kinds crawled around the interior of the vessel, busily continuing to do whatever it was that they were supposed to do; some were clearly cultivating what Segrill recognized as tilled fields, but others had tasks that were quite inscrutable. There were also animals in forms that Segrill had never seen before, from small fluttering things not
totally
unlike himself to much larger quadrupedal creatures with nubby horns and the habit of excreting at unpredictable moments.

Through his kreebolly he called up data on the known life-forms of The Wondervale, ruthlessly narrowing down the scope of his search as he progressed. There was nothing the kreebolly could tell him about any of these creatures, nor about the dominant species: double-armed bipeds were prolific throughout the galaxy, of course, but none approximated to these except the Lingk-kreatzai, a barely sentient species (although Segrill had his doubts) that lived in conditions of astonishing filth on a world that closely orbited a red dwarf at the opposite extreme of The Wondervale. That the Humans were not the Runtuata was readily apparent from the debris they had left behind them. They were from a high-tech species.

Through his kreebolly he also recited a series of carefully constructed, carefully boring reports back to his deputy in Hallaroi. He had found an alien spacecraft, he said. The aliens had all died when the ship had crashlanded. There was little of technological interest here—that was probably why the craft had been able to slip through F-14's defenses—but it was worth picking through what there was just in case something useful might be salvageable.

Segrill made sure that none of his people was within earshot whenever he made his reports, even though they were all utterly loyal to him . . . he was
almost
certain.

He had a sudden inspiration.

If the Pockets were capable of calling up anything he asked them for, presumably he could ask them to show him the surrounds of this ship as they had been a few days ago. That way he might be able to start guessing about where the aliens had come from.

Yes.

It worked.

He saw this ship in the middle of a sea of others. There were thousands of them there.

F-14 had several hundred warcruisers of its own, newly made and ready to be sent to various parts of the Autarchy. Segrill had, therefore, a personal space armada.

Joined to the vast fleet from which the Humans had come, it would be worth twice as much—no, far more than that, because on its own it would be next to useless against whatever the Autarch Nalla might think to put up, given time.

Segrill had never considered himself to be particularly philosophical or spiritual, but when he saw that fleet of alien starships he suddenly felt as if he were there at one of those infinitely rare moments when a corner of history was being turned.