David Brin - The Uplift War

Of course, to keep them at bay — in order to return this world for the Roost Masters — there must be complete surety that there would be no attacks from behind, from the surface. The ground opposition had to be eliminated!

The Suzerain of Beam and Talon refused even to consider the possibility that anger and revenge might also have colored its decisions. To have admitted that would be to begin to fall under the sway of Propriety. Already, several good officers had deserted down that path, only to be ordered back to their posts by the sanctimonious high priest. That was particularly galling.

The admiral was determined to win their loyalty back in its own right, with victory!

“The new detectors work, are effective, are efficient!” It danced in satisfaction. “They let us hunt the Earthlings without needing to scent special materials. We trace them by their very blood!”

The Suzerain’s assistants shared its satisfaction. At this rate, the irregulars should soon all be dead.

A pall fell over the celebration when it was reported that one of the troop carriers that had brought them here had broken down. Another casualty of the plague of corrosion that had struck Gubru equipment all over the mountains and the Vale of Sind. The Suzerain had ordered an urgent investigation.

“No matter! We shall all ride the remaining carriers. Nothing, nobody, no event shall stop our hunt!”

The soldiers chanted.

“Zooon!”

She watched as the hirsute human read the message for the fourth time, and could not help wondering whether she was doing the right thing. Rank-haired, bearded, and naked, Major Prathachulthorn looked the very essence of a wild, carnivorous wolfling … a creature far too dangerous to trust.

He looked down at the message, and for a moment all she could read were the waves of tension that coursed up his shoulders and down his arms to those powerful, tightly flexed hands.

“It appears that I am under orders to forgive you, and to follow your policies, miss.” The last word ended in a hiss. “Does this mean that I’ll be set free if I promise to be good? How can I be sure this order is for real?”

Athaclena knew she had little choice. In the days ahead she would not be able to spare the chimpower to continue guarding Prathachulthorn. Those she could rely upon to ignore the human’s command-voice were very few, and he had already nearly escaped on four separate occasions. The alternative was to finish him off here and now. And for that she simply had not the will.

“I have no doubt you would kill me the instant you discovered the message wasn’t genuine,” Athaclena replied.

His teeth seemed to flash. “You have my word on that,” he assured her.

“And on what else?”

He closed and then reopened his eyes. “According to these orders from the Government in Exile, I have no choice but to act as if I was never kidnapped, to pretend there was no mutiny, and to conform my strategy to your advice. All right. I agree to this, as long as you remember that I’m going to appeal to my commanders on Earth, first chance I get. And they will take this to the TAASF. And once Coordinator Oneagle is overruled, I will find you, my young Tymbrimi. I will come to you.”

The bald, open hatred in his mind simultaneously made her shiver and ako reassured her. The man held nothing back. Truth burned beneath his words. She nodded to Benjamin.

“Let him go.”

Looking unhappy, and avoiding eye contact with the dark-haired human, the chims lowered the cage and cut open the door. Prathachulthorn emerged rubbing his arms. Then, quite suddenly, he whirled and leaped in a high kick landing in a stance one blow away from her. He laughed as Athaclena and the chims backed away.

“Where is my command?” he asked tersely.

“I do not know, precisely,” Athaclena answered, as she tried to abort a gheer flux. “We’ve scattered into small parties and even had to abandon the caves when it was clear they were compromised.”

“What about this place?” Prathachulthorn motioned to the steaming slopes of Mount Fossey.

“We expect the enemy to stage an assault here at any moment,” she replied honestly.

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t believe half of what you told me, yesterday, about that ‘Uplift Ceremony’ and its consequences. But I’ll give you this; you and your dad do seem to have stirred up the Gubru good.”

He sniffed the air, as if already he were trying to pick up a spoor. “I assume you have a tactical situation map and a datawell for me?”

Benjamin brought one of the portable computer units forward, but Prathachulthorn held up a hand. “Not now. First, let’s get out of here. I want to get away from this place.”

Athaclena nodded. She could well understand how the man felt.

He laughed when she declined his mock-chivalrous bow and insisted that he go first. “As you wish,” he chuckled.

Soon they were swinging through the trees and running under the thick forest canopy. Not much later, they heard what sounded like thunder back where the refuge had been, even though there were no clouds in the sky.

The night was lit by fiery beacons which burst forth actinically and cast stark shadows as they drifted slowly groundward. Their impact on the senses was sudden, dazzling, overwhelming even the noise of battle and the screams of the dying.

It was the defenders who sent the blazing torches into the sky, for their assailants needed no light to guide them. Streaking in by radar and infrared, they attacked with deadly accuracy until momentarily blinded by the brilliance of the flares.

Chims fled the evening’s fireless camp in all directions, naked, carrying only food and a few weapons on their backs. Mostly, they were refugees from mountain hamlets burned down in the recent surge of fighting. A few trained irregulars remained behind in a desperate rearguard action to cover the civilians’ retreat.

They used what means they had to confuse the airborne enemy’s deadly, precise detectors. The flares were sophisticated, automatically adjusting their fulminations to best interfere with active and passive sensors. They slowed the avians down, but only for a little while. And they were in short supply.

Besides, the enemy had something new, some secret system that was letting them track chims even under the heaviest growth, even naked, without the simplest trappings of civilization.

All the pursued could dp was split up into smaller and smaller groups. The prospect facing those who made it away from here was to live completely as animals, alone or at most in pairs, wild-eyed and cowering under skies that had once been theirs to roam at will.

Sylvie was helping an older chimmie and two children climb over a vine-covered tree trunk when suddenly upraised hackles told her of gravities drawing near. She quickly signed for the others to take cover, but something — perhaps it was the unsteady rhythm of those motors — made her stay behind, peering over the rim of a fallen log. In the blackness she barely caught the flash of a dim, whitish shape, plummeting through the starlit forest to crash noisily among the branches and then disappear into the jungle gloom.

Sylvie stared down the dark channel the plunging vessel had cut. She listened, chewing on her fingernails, as debris rained down in its wake.

“Donna!” she whispered. The elderly chimmie lifted her head from under a pile of leaves. “Can you make it with the children the rest of the way to the rendezvous?” Sylvie asked. “All you have to do is head downhill to a stream, then follow that stream to a small waterfall and cave. Can you do that?”

Donna paused for a long moment, concentrating, and at last nodded. “Good,” Sylvie, said. “When you see Petri, tell him I saw an enemy scout come down, and I’m goin’ to go and look it over.”