Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

We took advantage of another storm and rode a skip north to a box canyon an EYE had located for us; by the time the sun rose we were tucked away under an outleaning cliff across the lake from Gilisim Gillin. We slept a few hours and spent the rest of the day going over and over the schema and our plans, getting equipment ready, that sort of thing, and that night we strapped ourselves onto the miniskips and headed for the city.

3. 3 years and 1 month local since Karrel Gozo flew Elmas Ofka and her Isyas for the first time.

The abandoned mine where Elmas Ofka keeps Windskimmer and lives with other outcast and divorced who’ve joined with her, also the escaped aliens with a powerful grudge against the Imperator and everyone who supported him.

A stormy autumn night, about an hour past midnight.

Elmas Ofka touched the bandage on Karrel’s hand. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me that.” She pinched the hand lightly, saw him wince. “So?”

“Elli, Elli,” he laughed at her, touched her cheek with the back of the injured hand. “Didn’t you say stay off work for a while if I could? I needed an excuse, so I spilled some acid on my hand. No big deal. I’m supposed to be making up the income loss by hide hunting. My House won’t expect me back for a couple of weeks.

“You see a healer?”

“Am I mushbrained like some I could mention? Of course I did.”

“It won’t interfere with flying?”

He laughed again, waggled fingers wound with salve-stained gauze, winced at the small pains the movement cost him. “Left hand, Hanifa.” He thrust the hand through the leather strap looped over his shoulder. “Just means I can’t knit for a while. No one’s buying, so that’s no loss.”

She frowned at him for several moments, then smiled and shook her head. “What can I say? Come along, I want to show you something.” She led him deeper into Oldtown, past tumbledown buildings rotting slowly into the earth they stood on as they were elbowed down by mesheme trees crowding into their airspace, to an area of the Mine settlement where he’d not been before.

“Convict barracks,” she said and pushed open the door to a stone structure in considerably better shape than the others; waving him back a step, she leaned into the opening. “N’Ceegh, h’ab hab h’i cecehi h’ep n’beihim hab!” She pulled back, chuckling. “That gargle means sun’s down, stir yourself, it’s me. He doesn’t like company he hasn’t invited.” She ran her forefinger along a merm scar on her forearm. “Never go inside this place without an invitation, Kar. You won’t come out again.”

There was a tiny tinny beeping; a sphere about the size of his fist floated in the door gap.

“Doa, N’Ceegh. Close the door behind you, Kar; follow me and keep your mouth shut.”

When there was no chance any light would leak outside, the sphere popped out a beam, focused it on the floor and went swimming deeper into the cavernous interior.

They followed.

N’Ceegh had a small compact body covered with fur like gray felt, skinny arms and legs, a ball of a head dominated by huge lambent violet eyes. He wore a voluminous leather apron over a leather cachesexe and thin rubber gloves on three fingered hands with long double-jointed thumbs. When they came into his workroom and the light there brightened, a film dropped over his eyes, his scoop ears twitched and folded partway shut. He swung his perch around, drew his legs up and draped his stringy arms over knees that looked sharp enough to stab with. He blinked slowly, gazed with disfavor at Karrel Goza.

“N’Ceegh, this is our pilot. He’ll be working your gadget, I thought you’d better be the one to explain it to him.”

“Unh-fidoodah’ak.” His mouth gash puckered into a pink-gray rosette as his eyes flickered over Karrel, rested a moment on the bandaged hand, moved on. “Come over here, you. Don’t bother me with your name, I don’t want it, I don’t plan to use it. The cuuxtwok’s installed already, but the proto model’s here. Cuuxtwok? She,” he jabbed a wobbly thumb at Elmas Ofka, “calls it a diverter. Same thing.” He waited until Karrel Goza stood looking down at the workbench, then he swung his chair about and began talking. “The scanners old Bitvйkeshit, Pittipat to you, he uses to watch his ass, they’re crude stuff.!Fidoo! That’s all. Need tactile contact with the suspect object before they know it’s there; he’s got some listening capacity, but it’s short range. One of the things the cuux here does is spread a slip field about the airship, the scanner pulses slide along it without noticing it and pass on till they fade out. It’ll muffle some of the noise your motors make but not all; if you can shut them off say half a kilometer from the Palace and let the wind push you over, you’ve got no problem. I’ve tucked in some long-range sensors, they’ll warn you when you’re approaching the danger zone, and this, see this gives you attack capacity, it projects the cuux field in a parabolic mirror in front of the airship, lets you trap and magnify the pulses and push them back at the generators till smoke comes out their ears.” He reached for the control panel and began demonstrating the uses of his creation.

4. In Windskimmer , heading for Gilisim Gillin/

flying over Lake Golga, plowing through swirling mists on a heavily overcast night; a thunderstorm is threatening, but is still holding off/

two hours after midnight, Ruya is full, she’s a faint icy glow coming through the clouds a few degrees past zenith, Gorruya is way off to the west, her fattening crescent a smudge near the horizon.

“Wha…” Karrel used the probe-adjunct on N’Ceegh’s device to poke into the mist, but he could find no trace of the enigmatic objects that had flashed alongside them and vanished in the darkness ahead. “Elli, did you see those things?”

“If you mean something like wingless glassy dragonflies with dark centers, three of them, zipping past us six times faster than anything normal, yeh, I saw them. What was it I saw?”

“Seems to me it’s something N’Ceegh would know about.”

“Alien?”

“Pretty obvious, don’t you think?”

“Brings up a question.”

“Two questions. Did they see us? And what are they going to do about it?”

“Three. What are we going to do?”

“You want to break off?”

“I don’t know.” Elmas Ofka glanced over her shoulder at her isyas sitting on the floor of the gondola, waiting for her decision, content to let her decide. Fingers tracing a scar line, she frowned at Karrel. Finally she said, “It’s late.”

Karrel Goza was briefly puzzled, then he nodded. “I see. What are they doing out here now. Could be they want attention as little as we do.”

“There’s a chance.”

“Right. Let’s keep going.”

“Wind’s from the east. You have to make a wide jog to position Skimmer for the drift over Gilisim, why not do it now. Make them look in the wrong direction, if they are looking.”

“Why not.” He brought the airship’s nose around, driving her as close to the wind as he could; it was too strong to face head on, just as well he was turning early, he could save some fuel and a lot of battering.

Elmas Ofka rubbed at the vertical frownline between her brows… “I wish I knew what was happening out there.”

“Yeh.” He was going to say more, but the warning bell chimed; the instruments had picked up the first pulses from the Palace scanners. He slid the cover off the sensor plate, touched on the cuux field. The thready mist outside turned solid, as if they were suddenly sealed within a brushed glass bottle; it brought a sense of oppression, a hint of claustrophobia. The isyas were troubled by it; he could hear the soft sounds they made as they shifted nervously behind him. He forced himself to relax. “You want to cross the Walls high or low? The air near the ground is apt to be more turbulent than it is at this level, but we won’t be moving that fast and the Tower is the only structure high enough to be a hazard. The guards won’t notice us; in this fog they couldn’t spot a longhauler with its warnlights blazing. The scanners are all we’ve got to worry about and the cuux will take care of those.”