Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (26 page)

THE AVERY MOUNTAINS

K
arim and Jon McBain couldn’t get near the biomass pole. The Cheyenne took them for their daily exercise to a different part of the upland meadow, standing guard as the captives, wrists still bound but ankles free, were permitted to walk or run in circles. Jon sped around at top speed, usually until he exhausted himself. Lucy, Karim, and Kent jogged, Karim feeling like a fool in the Cheyenne animal pelt that was still his only clothing. Kueilan didn’t run. Instead she used her brief freedom to go through graceful yogalike contortions, her slim body bending so far backward that her long, filty braid lay in loops on the ground. All of them smelled horrible, although it was only after the exercise period in the clean outside air that Karim really noticed their collective reek.

One day Jon took off toward the biomass pole at a dead run. He was easily, contemptuously caught, and all five captives were dumped back inside their inflatable.

“That was stupid,” complained Kent. “I wanted to run more!”

“And what could you have accomplished anyway, Jon?” asked Kueilan reasonably. “The Cheyenne took away the computer. There’s nothing but the pole sticking up from the ground.”

“I don’t know,” Jon admitted sheepishly. “I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Why are they even holding us here anyway? If we’re hostages, for what and from who?”

“Well, I wish that brave hadn’t been so rough,” Kueilan said, rubbing her arm. “I’m going to have a bruise where they grabbed me.”

Lucy said thoughtfully, “They’re not usually rough. In fact, they usually don’t touch us at all.”

“They usually don’t have some idiot like Jon making a break for it toward a pole,” Kueilan replied crossly.

“No,” Lucy said. “I think it’s more than that. The Cheyenm seemed … not agitated, because they’re never that, but somehow more uneasy. And last night there was a different quality to that drumming and dancing, more—I don’t know—more urgent.”

“I didn’t notice it,” Kent said.

“You were asleep,” Kueilan said. “And snoring.”

Karim respected Lucy’s human antennae. “What do you think it meant, Lucy?”

“I don’t know. Bad news of some sort for the Cheyenne.”

Jon said, “Maybe the war with the wild Furs is going badly for them.”

“It could be.”

Kent said, “Let’s just hope they don’t take it out on us.”

Karim said, for perhaps the hundredth time, “I’ve got to get to Mira City and warn them that the ship upstairs is Vine, not Fur.”

No one said aloud that by this time, with Julian Martin in charge, the ship upstairs might no longer be anything.

“Wake up!” Lucy cried. “Everybody wake up!”

Karim bolted upright. He heard it then: yelling so heartstopping that instinctively he strained against his bonds. The human yelling was followed by even louder noises that clearly were not human.

“My God,” whispered Jon. “What’s happening out there?”

Kueilan said, “It could be a wild Fur attack.”

The five of them sat there in the darkness, unable to see one another until Jon fumbled the powertorch on.

“Kent, can you see out the door?”

“No, I—”

The inflatable door ripped open. A wild Fur darted inside, spear raised high. Karim saw the thing clearly, teeth bared and crest raised.
I’m going to die.
He groped for Lucy’s hand, hoping numbly that being impaled was quick, please Allah let it not take too long…

“Karim?”
a voice said incredulously.
“Karim Mahjoub?”

A wiry old woman dressed in animal pelts, her skin as rough as the pelts under cropped gray hair, her strong arms holding a spear, stared at Karim.
“Lucy? Lucy Lasky?”

“Who … who …” Karim stammered.

“My God,” Lucy whispered. “It’s Nan Frayne.”

Nan Frayne? But Nan was a girl, barely out of her teens, she’d gone with them and Jake on their first trip off-planet, Karim had seen her only…

Only thirty-nine years ago.

“So you’re back,” Nan said, amused. She’d regained her composure; Karim had not. “What a stupid place to turn up. Get out of here, all of you.” She said something to the wild Fur, who vanished. The yelling outside had stopped. Nan bent and deftly cut their bonds, one after the other.

“What is—”

“War is. My people are avenging themselves.”

Nan vanished from the inflatable. Pulling Lucy to her feet, Karim followed Kent outside.

It was a moonless night. But by the Cheyenne’s fire, burning bright, Karim could clearly see the bodies. The braves lay where they had fallen, one holding a bow but the others unarmed. Karim smelled burning flesh.

Burning, not pierced.

Karim stumbled closer. The brave lay face upward, his eyes open. In the middle of his chest was a laser burn, smoking away the clothing in a neat round hole and burning through to the heart. Two wild Furs hovered just beyond the firelight. They held guns in their hands.

Nan Frayne smiled at him. She made a strange, alien noise in her throat, and the Furs moved toward the bodies.

“You don’t want to see this,” Nan said with malicious defiance to Karim and Lucy. “My Furs aren’t human, remember. And they’re carnivores. I suggest you follow the river downstream until you reach Mira City. You’ll be all right. I’ve told the Furs not to touch you as long as you stick to the river. Our war isn’t with you.”

“You’re insane,” Lucy gasped to Nan.

She smiled again. “Better get going, little Lucy. Give my regard to Jake if he hasn’t croaked yet.”

Karim grabbed Lucy’s hand and pulled her away. The five humans stumbled in the dark toward the river. Karim could hear it, rushing downhill beyond a dark strand of trees.

They had just reached the woods, scratched and torn from underbrush, when the entire research station lit up like day. Karim could just see startled Furs raise their heads from the bodies on the ground. Above, the source of the light but itself a black shape against the stars, a craft slid silently down the sky.

“A shuttle,” Lucy breathed. “The Vines!”

“Or the Furs,” Jon said. “The real ones. It—” He fell silent.

Karim strained his eyes into the darkness. Small branched crossed his field of vision, dark lacy lines. For the rest of his life he remembered what he saw next as seen through those twigs, as if the scene were indivisible from that intricate living mesh. As if it could somehow screen him.

The shuttle landed, egg shaped with a long flexible tail, as were both Fur and Vine shuttles. Instantly the door opened. Armed Furs strode out, completely clad in clear space suits. Karim had not, whenever he’d encountered Furs, ever seen them wear anything except weapon sashes. These warriors were dressed as if they feared vacuum—or contamination.

The wild Furs stood still for a long moment, eerily frozen by this, their first look at their cousins from another world, another infinitely more technologically advanced time. The two with laser guns dangled them limply by their furred sides. The ones with spears held them poised aloft, unmoving until it was too late.

One of the space Furs must have done something. Every wild Fur crumpled to the ground, Nan Frayne with them. Without so much as breaking stride, the Furs picked up their primitive kin and carried them into the shuttle. Nan Frayne they left on the ground. The shuttle door closed.

Karim said shakily, “The infection worked. The Furs are in negative-pressure space suits so nothing can contaminate them. The ones we left must have infected others with the virus, or how would these Furs suspect that either wild Furs or humans might still be able to harm them with microbes? We did it, Lucy, the infection has reached more of the space Furs—”

The entire research camp disappeared.

The shuttle’s flexible tail moved slowly in an encompassing arc, and as it went, everything before it disappeared. Inflatables, pole leading down to the biomass, foamcast buildings, Cheyenne tents, fire and drying racks and the dead braves. And the body of Nan Frayne. Gone, as if it never existed.

No one spoke.

The shuttle lifted, and it was halfway up the sky before Jon McBain gasped, “I… I never saw anything like that before!”

Karim said grimly, “We did. Fifty years ago the Furs destroyed all the wild Fur villages in the same way. I mean, the wild Furs that had been created to test other versions of the Vine viruses to render them passive. The space Furs called them ’blasphemies’ and wiped them out and their villages just like that.”

Kueilan gave a small moan. She said, “If they use that thing on Mira City…”

Jon demanded, “But they didn’t destroy the wild Furs! Why not, if what you say is true and last time they destroyed all the ’blasphemies’?”

Karim was thinking as fast as he could. “Maybe because these aren’t blasphemies. They were the Vines’ control group. They’re whole and sound and the Furs want them—”

“Why?”

It was Lucy who answered. “Maybe for breeding stock. Maybe the Vine plan worked really well and the virus is spreading across their home world and even their colonies! Maybe they plan to use those males to reach more females because they need a larger gene pool. They know that they didn’t get the control group last time because so many wild Furs were off hunting, not in the village when the space Furs wiped it out. Maybe our plan worked!”

“I hope so,” Karim said. “But now the space Furs are
here
again. They want their uninfected cousins and I’m afraid they want…” He couldn’t say it.

“Greentrees,” Lucy said. He saw that she was following his line of thought and that she had to say it aloud, for her own sake. To get it out of her vulnerable mind, like a dangerous predator flushed into the open.

“The space Furs want… want G-Greentrees. Because they know that the virus isn’t here among the wild Furs. They can see that— the wild Furs aren’t passive and helpless. And Greentrees has air the Furs can breathe, has enough shared DNA to colonize. It… it’s rich and lush and mostly empty. It’s a prime colonization world for… for this uninfected group of Furs. Except… except…”

“Except for us,” Karim said. “Except for humans.”