Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

I patted the skip, shook my head and started rambling back toward the chimney. When I got there, I picked up the launcher, looked from it to the Warmaster and had to grin.

A moment later I lost all desire to laugh, the lightblades were out and rotating, wider beams this time, cauterizing the city; where they passed, the crowded tenements and warehouses exploded into ash and steam. One minute, two, three, four. The barrage stopped, the Warmaster continued drifting south.

For a breath of two there was a hush. Nothing was happening, in the air or in the streets. Then, as if it were a kind of joke, a last giggle after the great guffaw of the slum clearance, a skinny little light needle about as big around as my thumb came stabbing down close enough I could feel the heat leaking off it. It hit the skip, melted her into slag that ate rapidly through the roof and dropped in a congealing cascade through the floors below, starting more fires as it fell.

The Warmaster began to rise, lifting so fast it sucked air after it, creating a semi-vacuum and then a firestorm as air from outside rushed in. Fire roared up out of the hole in the roof beside me. I had to get out of there. I slung the tube’s strap over my shoulder and ran for the rope ladder coiled near the front parapet. I flipped it over and went down in something close to a free fall. I had a moment’s regret for the slaves still chained in there, but there wasn’t anything I could do, the place was a furnace by the time I hit ground. Besides, with all the death in this city tonight, it was hard to feel horror or anything else over a few more corpses, however grisly their end.

Stunner in my hand, I ran through the dark streets. No one tried to stop me. The few Hordar who saw me, looking from windows or crouching in doorways, were shocked into inertia, too afraid, too horrified to do anything but gape. In a section with taverns and small shops I rounded a corner and came face to face with a Tassalgan who was hunting inklins or anyone else he suspected of treachery, which seemed to be just about everyone not Tassalgan. I stunned him as soon as I saw his dark wool uniform, blessing the amnesia effect of the charge; I was clearly not Huvved or Hordar and I didn’t look all that much like an escaped slave. I glanced back before I went round another corner and saw ragged children swarming over the downed guard. A wiry boy drew a knife across the Tassalgan’s throat and howled as blood spurted over him; he and the other children fought over the blood, wiped their hands in it, licked it off their palms, off his neck. Off the pavement. Hanifa, Hanifa, how are you going to civilize little animals like that? The boy looked up and saw me. I took off. I avoid weasels and all such vermin; they can kill you because they don’t know when to give up.

It took me almost an hour to work my way out of the city; it was a big place, bigger than it looked from the skip, and I had to move more warily once I got into the suburbs; there were guards on the walls and they were trigger happy. I picked up some shot in a shoulder, a hole in my leg that missed bone and most of the muscle but hurt like hell and a new part over my left ear, bullet whizzing by entirely too close. By the time I made the park south of town, I was losing blood from my shoulder and my leg and feeling not so good.

The park was on the edge of a forest preserve that spread over the hills south and west of the city on both sides of the river that emptied into the bay. It was open and grassy with rides winding through huge ancient trees, past banks of flowers and fern, glittering with dew whenever the canopy let through light from late-rising Ruya, the silence broken by a rising wind, hot and dry, blowing off the city, punctuated by snatches of sleepy birdsong; dawn was already reddening the east. I found a bench made from rough-cut planks, eased myself down, not sure I should because my leg was getting stiff and I wasn’t all that convinced I could get up again, but I had to locate Pels and I couldn’t do that traveling. I pried the mike off, used the nail on my little finger to turn the screw, then started the beeper. I waited with some anxiety but not too much; I knew Pels and I expected him to be curled up somewhere, warm and comfortable and enjoying himself.

The earplug beeped. I turned the screw back and stuck on the mike. “Gotcha, Pels. Glad you made it.”

I found out why Pels had turned down his mike. Looking a bit sheepish, as well he might, he showed me what he’d done. In the hollow thicket where he’d found shelter he had the four targets and around twenty more fugitives, the rest of the slaves housed in that barracks. He was as sentimental as a daydreaming dowager, but I couldn’t complain too much because I was… well, call it pleased to see, they weren’t roasted after all. He knew it too, blasted teddybear.

I gave Kumari a call. She wasn’t happy with us. You forget that tap? she said. What am I supposed to think when Adelaar tells me the Grand Sech is ordering the Warmaster to gul Samlikkan? I tried to reach you. Flashed the call light. No answer. I couldn’t use the buzzer, I didn’t know who or what might be listening. What took you so long? I’ve been sitting here eating an ulcer in my belly wondering if the two of you were alive or dead. Stay there. I’ll send Adelaar to fetch you. How many did you say?

Adelaar got to us late the next night, brought both skips, the second droned behind. The Warmaster was back in orbit over Gilisim Gillin, she said, just sitting there like it was brooding over what to erase next. According to the tap we didn’t have to worry about its scanners; the crew was too busy putting its insides back in order. And gul Samlikkan was still burning and the locals were concentrating their attention on containing the destruction and restoring order and they weren’t worrying about what was going on in the hills.

We packed half the fugitives in the skips, Pels and Adelaar flew them out. I stayed behind with the leftovers. There was some argument about that, Pels was determined I should go back and get some sacktime in the tub’s autodoc, but I didn’t want to face that long flight the way I was feeling; I could easily pass out somewhere along the way and I wasn’t about to trust any of those ex-slaves with the com. The autopilot could handle a lot, but things come up no flakehead can cope with. Adelaar didn’t go maternal over anyone but Aslan, she didn’t care what I did. She told Pels he could do what he wanted, but she was going now. And she went. Pels worked over me until I was as sore as he was satisfied, then he slapped bandages on my punctures and lacerations, shot me full of antipyretics, blood-builders and painkillers, left the kip’s medkit beside me and took off.

One of the ex-slaves who volunteered to stay behind was a Froska named Jair, an officious little male, precise and self-contained, stoic to the point of insanity like a lot of his species. Pels warned me about him, said he was sure to be a nuisance, he didn’t obey orders, he’d do what he wanted no matter how irritating that was to the rest. When the bunch of them got settled in the brush hollow to wait for me, Jair decided to go off on his own hunting water. Without bothering to tell anyone what he was up to, he peeled off from the group and went exploring. Being nocturnal and forest bred, he was the best suited for nightwalking in strange places, so it was a reasonably sensible thing to do; what wasn’t sensible was sneaking off. Self-contained was one thing, Pels said, carried that far, it was crazy. There wasn’t any need to ooze away like that, what could we do? Sit on him? Thing is, he’s been here over fifteen years; I suppose his natural tendencies were warped all to hell by that. Hard to argue with success, though. He found a small stream about half a kilometer deeper in the forest, rooted around till he located some large seedpods, cleaned two of them out and filled them with water. When he got back, I was furious with him, Pels said, but apart from some growling I couldn’t say much because several of the others were suffering from water loss and on the point of collapse. While they finished off the water, I wasted some time trying to get him to see where he went wrong; he listened, blinking those frog eyes at me, nodding like a good little Froska. Like he heard and agreed with everything I said. Hmm. Not a hope. Swar, if you lose the little bastard, don’t bother hunting him or waiting for him, it’s his own fault.