Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

Ward Master: Should I order a full alert? You have to authorize it.

Savant 4: Do it. Don’t just stand around asking stupid questions. Do it.

Rohant

“On your feet!” The wardbrother was rattling the door-grill, shrieking the order; he sounded terrified, as if he were apt to do something terminal if given half an excuse. And he was alone.

Rohant rolled off the cot and stood beside it, hands clasped behind him, head, down. They hadn’t come for him before like this, in the middle of the night, or sent a singleton guard after him; he stared at the floor and wondered what was going on.

After a delay that drove the young ward twitchy, the grill slid open and the watchandroid came in.

Rohant snatched a look at it. Yes… good… not just hesitations, the warning light by its left sound receptor was pulsing red. This wasn’t his usual escort, no scratch; it was older, too. They were scraping bottom with this one. Why? No matter. He pressed his arm against his body, felt the stunrod in the hem of his shirt. Yes. If they took him past the Novice quarters, this was it, good-bye Mimishay.

When the watchandroid was in position behind Rohant, the guard yelped, “Out, blitsor. You know the drill. Move it. Hup hup.

Rohant trotted through the corridors, the meat in a loose sandwich between guard and android, the android lagging farther and farther behind. One more turn… if we go to the right… past the Novice quarter. Go right, he thought at the youth ahead of him. Right, not left. He reached under his tunic, began sliding the stunrod from the hem.

The wardbrother turned right, turned again, the watch-android clattered along far behind… out of sight…

Rohant stunned the guard, kicked the door open to the Novice area, and plunged inside. His bare feet padding silently on the thick matting, he ran full out past the closed doors of the sleeping cells, first block, not a sound, not even a snore, second block…

The Novice Master backed from a cell, pulled the door shut, turned…

Claws out, Rohant slammed his hand into the Omphalite’s throat, jerked away before the gush of blood could saturate his fur. He caught the man as he started to fall, threw him across the narrow hallway like a fleshy speed bump, and ran on.

Just before he reached the door at the end of the corridor, he heard a metallic clatter and curled his lips back, baring his long, yellow tearing teeth. Android tripping over the dead man. Good. He slapped his palm on the sensor and pushed out before the door was halfway open.

It was dark out, wind howling round corners, clouds covering the moons. Blinking at the rain that stung his face, he raced along the walkway to the small Pleasure House built into the wall. He kicked the door open, ran inside.

A woman came from one of the bedrooms, bleary eyed and still half asleep. “Wha…”

He ignored her and ran for the back of the House, jerking doors open, cursing the barriers that kept slowing his flight. The android was coming after him, gaining on him…

He reached the postern door, ran through it. It was open as it always was, day and night. The Omphalites hadn’t yet got round to closing the holes in their defenses, God be blessed. And Ossoran and Feyvorn be blessed for killing off half the Council, apparently the smarter half. And a triple blessing for whoever took the Chom out.

Something slammed into his back, sent him tumbling into grass and gravel, rolling toward the stream that slipped past the compound walls and danced into the sea.

He sprang onto his feet, swung round.

The wind-driven rain was hissing and sliding off a dome-shaped shimmer over the Compound-the defense shield. With the android trapped inside. He laughed aloud, a full-throated laugh, his offering to the gods of absurdity.

Deafening squeals, a crash that shook the rock under his feet. What… He squinted through the rain at a swarm of small ships like dots of light moving in and out of the clouds above the dome. Others were swinging back from their first attack.

He saluted them. “The Lady kiss you, whoever you are,” he shouted, then turned and began trotting toward the mountains a few kilometers away.

Miralys

The man in the screen wore a coarse brown robe with the cowl pulled so far forward his face was lost in shadow, all but the point of a long narrow chin. He sat at a rustic desk, his hands hidden inside his voluminous sleeves. “Who are you and why do you threaten us?” he said, his voice mild and faintly metallic, passing through a distorter, something that undercut the image he was trying to project. “We are peaceful students here, acquiring merit through works of the mind. If you want gold, we have none. Why do you come with intent to attack?”

Miralys’ ears snapped down and back; her lips came open showing her teeth; anger-musk rolled off her. She waited for several seconds before she spoke, waited until she had control. “You have ours,” she said. “We want ours and payment for our dead. You have stolen my mate, my Ciocan. Give back what you have taken from me.”

“I do not understand what you are saying, Dyslaera. We are simple Brothers, here. Whoever told you…”

Kikun squeaked as Grandmother Ghost nipped him hard. “Now,” he shouted.

“… we were holding…”

Anyagyn tapped the sensor under her thumb.

Down below, the Capture Landers shifted position in a preset repatterning that left no lander occupying the original space of another.

… any of your people…”

A double dozen cutter beams drove through the suddenly empty places where the landers had been. They wavered a moment in futility, then swung about, hunting the targets that had moved too fast for them, slippery sliding dots of light flipped about by Dyslaera muscle and Dyslaera reflexes, sliding too fast, too fast…

The screen went blank, the transmission interrupted as the defensive shield flashed into place around the Compound.

The landers struck back. Some played cutter beams of their own, probing at the shield, getting nowhere while others used more specialized weapons Digby had dug up for them…

Dyslaera Fighters

Sugnarn pulled his lander in a tight circle about a cutter beam, dusted it with rot grains that went skittering and glittering down the beam edges, crawled inside the projector, and began eating everything they touched. Twenty seconds later the beam withered and died, but Sugnarn didn’t bother looking back, he was already dusting his third beam.

Once she was sure there was a flesh operator behind it, that it had been clipped loose from the kephalos, Hannys flirted with a cutter beam, letting it come close enough to graze the side of her lander but never NEVER close enough to do serious damage, teasing it down and down until it was straining in its gimbals, jammed so hard the operator could barely move it, then she dropped into the hole created in the defenses, skimmed along the shield and laid down a line of thermix eggs that hit the ground and began to melt down into bedrock, following the shield down and down, stone bubbling and seething until that section of the Compound was resting uneasily in a thin layer of lava while steam generated by rain hitting the melt rose in agitated clouds about the dome.

Hannys went screaming up and out, dancing, elusive as a thought, hunting for another beam to tease.

Tatakarn was a hair slow on one of his turns; a missile caught the edge of his drive projector, blew the lander into dust.

When Jarnys saw her brother die, her concentration went-only momentarily, but it was enough; The cutter-beam sliced into her lander, carved away a third of it, took most of the rightside of her body with it. Dying she went nincs-othran and shut the pain away; the drives were partially intact, she had some power; she fought the machine around, sent it screaming at one of flickering cuttergates in the defense shield, got her timing perfect, and took a large chunk of the Compound with her as she crashed.