Jo Clayton: Fire in the Sky

He looked nervously around. The first Eolt were arriving, moving into a pattern much like his, rising and falling to find the proper windstreams, their membranes pulsing as they fed air through their speaking sphincters and milled in a thickening circle about the kushayt. “Don’t know, but the slaughter is fixing to start, so I’m going down. Shadow, set the stunner on widecast, we won’t get the armored Chave this pass, but the others…”

“Tail on fire, Marrin, remember their reflexes. Let’s go.”

Fast as he could take it, Marrin sent the flikit into a stuttering, twisting pass over the Kushayt, recalling the running tactics he’d learned as a boy to get him away from the near lethal teasing of his older relatives. The moves were ground into his bones and nerves.

As soon as the Chave saw him coming at them, they started shooting; pellets from the heavy duty projectors whined past or grazed the flanks of the flikit, exploding the instant they touched.

Screech of tortured metal. Fingernails on slate-board tearing.

Blams. Ears ringing.

Beams from heavy-duty cutters swept past, easier to avoid, but more lethal if they touched. As the flikit tumbled wildly after an explosion from one of the pellets, half the rear end went to a beam that missed the main lifter by a hair.

Flare. Searing. Heat.

Whine of laboring lifters.

Jolting, torsion, thrown against crashwebs. “Marrin! Get us out of here. It’s not working. Out!” He didn’t bother to answer, just sent the flikit in a wavery sweep toward the trees.

Deafening blast.

Flikit cartwheeling down and down.

Roar of emergency rockets, a gasp of steadier flight, then the flikit was plowing into the trees, crashing, bouncing.

Final jolting stop.

Silence almost painful.

The flikit was upside down and in a steep tilt, the nose crumpled against the trunk of the large tree whose branches were supporting it. Shadith was hanging head down and, due to the tilt, higher than Marrin. She fumbled for the catch on the crash web, swore when her fingers touched hot, twisted composite, swore again when she heard Marrin’s catch open with that crisp bright click of finely machined parts.

Marrin chuckled. “Stuck?” He was clinging to the loosened web so he wouldn’t fall out of the wreck before he was ready to leave it.

“Definitely. You’ll have to cut me loose.” She sighed as she watched him swing his body so he could get a foothold on the side of the flikit and reach the storage bins. She started wriggling around to see if she could find a way to get out of the web without waiting for Marrin and his cutter, but adding her movements to his made the limbs the flikit rested on creak alarmingly and the flikit itself began to wobble so she stopped that.

“Hah. Got it.”

She heard the creak as he started pulling a bin door open.

“Pissssgattt!”

The flikit rocked wildly as he swung back into sight, pushed off again. She heard the clatter and rattle as the bin emptied itself, and the cutters, ropes, mealpacs and other objects hit the limbs below, then the ground.

The quality of the light was starting to change, going a deep amber. The main force of the Eolt had arrived.

Marrin got the second bin open and started throwing things out of it in what sounded like a barely controlled panic. When he was finished, the flikit rocked again as he swung back. He grabbed the web, pushed a cutter through it, then swung away, dropping from limb to limb, using them to slow him a little, but not much. As she pushed the web away from her to get a shot at cutting it, she could hear the pound of his feet as he ran off.

She chuckled. “Not one of your conventional heroes, him.”

By the time she’d cut herself loose and got to the ground, he was not only out of sight, but out of hearing.

Ceam whistled a warning to the band following him, flung himself behind a small bushy silver dudur and watched the airwagon go careening over the mesuch fort. Whoever they were in there, the Chave didn’t like them, that was sure.

Heruit crept up beside him. “What’n… what’s that?”

“I figure it has to be the mesuch from Banikoлh, you know, ones Beni told about.”

“Not doing too good, are they.”

“Better them than us.”

“You said it. We were figuring it was going to be easy. I dunno.”

“He’s getting out… aaaahhhhh… right. Ouch. Hit him in the tailfeathers.” Ceam winced as he listened to the prolonged crashing, the sudden silence. “Figure we ought to go see?”

Heruit didn’t answer. He’d gotten to his feet and was staring at the sky.

“Ihoi! Get down before the mesuch spot you.” Ceam looked up, got to his feet. “Chel Dй!”

The sky was so thick with Eolt the air itself turned gold. And still they kept coming, swirling in an immense silent vortex about the mesuch fort, out beyond the reach of the mesuch weapons, round and round, the eyes you never saw only felt fixed hard upon the killing folk. Golden anger. Golden hatred colder than a killing frost.

Sound of feet running.

Ceam wrested his gaze from the spectacle to stare at the man-a stranger with light brown skin and hair like a cabhi’s fleece and a way of moving that said he was very fit and strong. He carried a pellet gun, heavy and ugly with a round drum fixed before the stock.

The man glanced at Ceam as he trotted past but said nothing, made no gesture. He was frowning, an intensity about the way he looked at the mesuch fort that convinced Ceam this was the one in the airwagon. What he couldn’t manage in the air he was going to try on the ground.

He dropped to one knee suddenly, settled the gun against his shoulder, went very still, moved his forefinger to tap a dark spot rimmed in shiny metal.

The pellet gun made an odd spitting sound. A hair later there was a loud blam! and one of the armored mesuch tilted over. Before the last quiver of the sound had faded, he was on his feet again and trotting off to disappear in the shadows under the trees.

A few moments later Ceam heard another blam!, then a third. As the mesuch on the walls started shooting toward the sound, blowing trees apart or slicing them up with cutter beams, he grabbed Heruit who was still watching the Eolt, tugging him deeper into the trees. “Mesuch shooting at each other,” he said. “Them in the fort, they’re getting nervous. Anything that moves they’re going to bang away at.”

Heruit rubbed at his eyes. “Maybe you know what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“Who?”

“The mesuch out of the flier.”

“I was watching Them. Thousands of them, Ceam. Maybe all the Eolt there are.”

“Cha oy, I know. And madder than wet cats. And they’re going to get killed. Fire in the sky, Heruit. You want to watch? Me, I’d rather not see it.”

Standing behind one of the largest of the kerre trees in the strip of woodland, Shadith watched the two Fior walk off, glanced out at the sky again and the circling Eolt and sighed. Fire in the sky. Goлs, I want it to stop… they won’t listen to me any more now than they did before.

She jumped, caught one of the broad low limbs and pulled herself onto it, then climbed higher into the tree until she was nearly level with the top of the wall. She straddled the limb, looked through the flutter of leaves, saw an armored Chav flicker in and out of view as he ran past the firing slots.

From the shouts and the direction of fire, they were a lot more worried about Marrin and his rifle than they were about the gathering of the Eolt. She frowned as she tried to figure what she could do to expand that worry. If her ability to move small objects had a greater range… She shook her head. Trouble with that was she had to be almost in armreach. The Chave were too far away. She could use the mindride to gather an army of vermin, there were plenty of small lives lying low here in the woodland strip. But she couldn’t see any way it would be worth trying.