The last of the three worst burn victims died just after dawn. Staring at the body, still swathed in tubes beneath the portable Med, Sanyha longed to just lay her head down and weep with anger. It infuriated her to have to sit by a patient's side and watch him slip away when she knew a fully equipped Med could have saved his life, but no one had foreseen that a burn unit might be necessary here.
The smell of unguent and disinfectant filled the air as her temporary assistant, Alice, tended another patient. Sighing, Sanyha went through the motions necessary to consign the body to the crematory, then sat down before her screen to file the report. Halfway through the details, she sipped at her stale coffee and wondered again where Mitsu Jensen had gone. Obviously someone had transferred her out of Sickbay in order to make room for the incoming casualties, but she really ought to be checked daily. Those claw marks had been wicked.
Punching up the personnel roll, taken after the explosion, she scanned the list: no Jensen. Had someone forgotten to log her in, or—Sanyha grimaced—had she used the emergency to slip back outside to search for Sergeant Blackeagle? If all soldiers were as tough as she was, Sanyha was amazed the Confederation hadn't already won the war. She double-checked the lists, hoping she was wrong. If Mitsu Jensen took another bad mauling, she wouldn't survive.
This time she noticed a second name missing, Eldrich, and put in a call for Security.
A familiar face still smudged with black appeared on her screen. "Security here. Cuppertino speaking."
"Scott, it's Sanyha Alvarez."
"I think we've got all the casualties out now, Doc. How are they doing at your end?"
She paused, trying to control her voice. "I lost the three worst, but I think the rest will make it."
"Damnation!" He rubbed a burned hand over his face. "This was deliberate, you know."
"What?"
"Someone set this explosion." His smoke-reddened eyes narrowed. "Used something like a goddamned grenade. Either someone on staff, or—"
One of the visitors. Mitsu Jensen had been in the station yesterday and now she had disappeared. "You're sure, Scott? It's not an accident?"
"Accident, my—!" He broke off. "Sorry, Doc, but those guys were good buddies of mine."
Sanyha glanced over her shoulder at the remaining five patients who still needed her. "Mitsu Jensen is missing. Have you seen her?"
"No." Scott leaned up against the wall and pulled his singed hat off to wipe his brow. "She and this Blackeagle guy, they're both combat vets, aren't they?"
Sanyha nodded, hearing his unspoken words as well: not only were they both veterans, they were Rangers and therefore trained in demolitions.
"Well, if she lit out, she must have been on foot. Every vehicle we had went up with the garage."
"I can't find Eldrich either." She realized she was twining a strand of her hair around her finger and stopped.
"That cold bastard!" An expression of disgust passed over his seamed face. "I wouldn't put anything past him."
"Scott, do me a favor." Behind her, she could hear one of her patients groaning and knew she would have to get off the circuit. "Take an inventory of the motor pool. See if any of the equipment was out when the explosion went off."
"Nothing was signed out."
Sanyha bit her lip. "I know, but I have a hunch that maybe a hopper was out anyway. Just check it for me."
Scott snugged the dirty, blackened hat back over his hair. "Sure thing, Doc. Let you know in an hour or two."
She nodded and punched the connection off, hoping what she feared was not true.
Then, somewhere in the station, she heard the whump of another explosion.
A thriving hive of flek burrowed into the surface of Anktan: of all the things Heyoka had thought to find on his native planet, surely that had been the last. Still overwhelmed by what he had seen up there from the mountain pass, he accepted a steaming wooden bowl of dark tealike liquid offered by a cubling and made himself drink. It tasted, as well as smelled, of ashes, as did everything else now, since he had emerged from blueshift. And wherever he turned, things seemed hollowed out, as though they lacked a center, but whether that was a lingering side effect of the strain his body had endured, or simple culture shock, he could not say.
The loss of Mitsu was a dull ache relegated to the back of his mind now. She was most likely dead, and he had much, much more to think about now than the problems of one or two individuals. This whole world was at risk, if it weren't already too late to save it. He had to get back, alert the station as to what he had observed and summon troops. If the flek established a viable transfer point here, this entire quadrant of space was in danger as well. A dozen inhabited worlds existed within easy reach of Anktan. He had to go back now.
Kei emerged out of the darkness, shadow-silent, eyes bright with reflected starlight. He had not spoken since their return, but his smoldering presence set Heyoka's teeth on edge and his personal scent, overlaid with the pheromone signature of Levv, had intensified somehow, saturating the mountain air until he found it hard to think of anything else. Heyoka tasted iron in the back of his throat, as though lightning were about to strike.
"I have decided." Kei loomed over him, blocking out the stars. "Tomorrow, you will lead us against the Outsiders."
Heyoka squinted at the arrogant face. Kei's black-furred features were barely discernible against the background of night, as difficult to see as he was to understand. What relation would he be to Heyoka in human terms—brother . . . cousin . . . uncle? None of those relationships seemed to exist between hrinn. They had no word for "son," and certainly none for the nebulous concept of "friend." Here, there were only the males' houses and the Lines, nothing else. A hrinn's association with one or the other defined him to all he encountered as either family or foe, with nothing in between.
He set the empty bowl aside with exaggerated care. "I told you before—their weapons are so powerful, we would die before we even got close enough to see them." Weary of Kei's brash, tireless ignorance, he stood, planning to seek out Nisk and return to the river valley.
Kei's massive body moved to block his way. "You fought them and lived."
The other's pheromones beat at him, overwhelming his senses, awakening aspects of his nature he had not experienced before. He swallowed hard, trying to think past the primal images of blood and torn flesh surfacing in his mind. "It would take seasons upon seasons to teach you how to fight the flek, even if we had the proper weapons, which we don't and never will. I have to go back and get help!" He stepped around him, then staggered as pain shot through his lame right leg. Balancing precariously on his left, he leaned over and checked the brace: the green light had failed, meaning its power was exhausted, and he had no way to replace the power cell until he returned to the research station.
"I am Leader, so it is for me, not you, to decide how we will fight." Kei's scarred muzzle wrinkled in a fierce scowl. "We will lure them up into the mountains, perhaps dig a trench, then cover it and trap them that way."
Heyoka saw the ruined worlds again in his mind, the fused wreckage of ash and bone and glass that was all the flek ever left behind, and the savage other within him broke free. "We can't take chances!" His claws sprang open. "These particular Outsiders will kill everyone on Anktan," he said through gritted teeth, "not just Levv." Breathing hard, he glanced around for Nisk, hoping to use him to divert Kei. "This is far more important than any one Line."
Kei bristled. "Nothing is more important than Levv!"
"Even for a male?" Struggling for control, Heyoka limped painfully toward the cave. "I thought the matter of Line was beneath the notice of a mature male."
With a snarl, Kei seized a handful of Heyoka's loose mane, jerked his head back and slashed at his exposed throat. Heyoka blocked his arm, then countered with an elbow to the breathing nerve centered in Kei's chest. Kei doubled over, struggling for breath.
Jaws clenched, Heyoka backed out of reach. "Once they finish that grid, they will arrive here in the thousand-thousands to raise the surface temperature of this world until your blood boils and change the air until it burns your lungs to bloody shreds and when they are done, not one hrinn will be left alive anywhere!"
"You are afraid!" Kei's eyes were icy black holes into a desolate wasteland Heyoka could not fathom.
"I am afraid, because I understand this enemy," he said, "as you do not."
"Fool! You only understand how to fail!" Kei's nose twitched. "If we follow you, we will all die!" He stretched a finger at Heyoka's chest and discharged a bolt of agonizing blue fire.
The world whited out, taking all sight and sound with it. When he came to himself again, lying on his back in the grass, every cell in his body throbbed. He put a hand to his ringing ears. A few feet away, Kei studied him with a feral expression.
Heyoka tried to regain his feet, but he'd wrenched his bad leg when he fell and the pain flooded the damaged nerves until he couldn't think. He fumbled for the pressure point and, with shaking fingers, applied acupressure to the sciatic nerve until the pain backed off, a temporary measure at best, which could buy him a few more minutes of mobility. Breathing raggedly, he lurched back up onto his good leg, the other, dangling uselessly.
"So, Black/on/black." Kei circled to the left, forcing Heyoka to hop awkwardly to face him. "Tell me I'm wrong. Show us that you are fit to lead. Take my life if you can!" He leaped, his hands thick with crackling blue flame as he seized Heyoka's shoulders.
"No, I—" Heyoka hung transfixed in his grip, his consciousness fragmented by the bolt of lightning exploding through him. His vision fuzzed; he couldn't draw air into his lungs, couldn't move so much as a fingertip, the agony building until he thought his tongue and eyeballs and brain would melt. The stench of burned fur filtered through the air, but then, as his heart stuttered, he caught a faint glimmering of the nature of the energy coursing through him in an unending river of pain. There were places in his battered body that did not feel the pain, pathways of a sort. He struggled to channel the power through those and felt it charge him somehow, flowing through his abused nerves, aiding instead of destroying him. He quit fighting and instead opened himself to the wild blue fire, drawing it like a magnet. Startled, Kei thrust him away.
Energy crackled through Heyoka's body, running along his nerves now in the same way blood flowed through his veins. He was vibrantly alive . . . empowered in a way he'd never known before. He stretched a hand toward Kei's chest and blue fire snaked from his fingers to the other's fur. Kei staggered backwards, then crumpled with telltale slowness to the scintillating blue ground. Glancing around the clearing, he saw everything was blue again, bluer than the skies had been back on Enjas Two, as blue as the clearest day on Old Earth.
In slow motion, Nisk drifted through the scrubby trees around the mouth of the cave, met his gaze languidly, then abruptly approached him at what seemed like normal speed. "You must shut it off," he said, his words ungarbled. "You have to control it, or you will die. Think of silence . . . darkness . . . sleep."
Blue fire sizzled through his brain as he tried to concentrate on what Nisk was saying. This episode of blueshift was different; he had more energy available, and so could spend more time accelerated like this, but he already sensed on the cellular level, the price would also be greater, and the last episode had nearly cost his life. Closing his eyes, he reached for the remembered feel of space on the long hops between missions, deep and cold, empty as silence itself. When he felt it at his core, still and vast, he opened his eyes to Nisk's grave face, now returned to its normal black.
Nisk sagged to his knees, drained. "I did not draw power first."
A few feet away, Kei sprawled in the grass, his breathing shallow, singed fur still smoking. How long had they fought, Heyoka wondered numbly, minutes . . . hours . . . days? He took a deep breath and realized the sun was just edging up over the horizon. He thought again of the flek entrenched out on the plains, the transfer grid almost completed. "I have to go."
"I will get the yirn." Ears lowered, Nisk rose.
"No!" Kei hoisted up to one elbow, his eyes glazed with pain. "He is Levv. The Lines will kill him if he goes back!"
Heyoka squatted beside the black-furred male who represented the family he had crossed light-years to find, the only family he would ever have. "And the flek will destroy this world, if I do not."
The red-eyed flek chittered at Mitsu, then paused as the voder it clutched in its spidery digits translated. "For being here you investigating."
Mitsu stuffed her knuckles between her teeth to keep a hysterical laugh from bubbling up. She realized it was only exhaustion compounded with adrenaline, but she couldn't allow herself the luxury of weakness, not that she understood what these sodding things wanted from her anyway.
She braced her bound wrists on her knees and stared up at the stomach-churning creature. Her skin crawled to be so near it. "Vacation! You smush-faces savvy that? I'm here on a goddamned, stinking vacation!"
The flek's feathery ear stalks trembled as the voder twisted her words into flek chitter. Then it tucked the voder box under a thin white arm and walked through the seemingly solid wall of her cell. Mitsu wedged herself into the corner and tried to stop shaking. If she could only figure out how they triggered the wall's permeability, then maybe she could get out of this place.
She was too goddamned angry with herself to be as afraid as she ought to be. Why had she let that worm, Eldrich, trick her into leaving the station? She was a combat vet, not some naive weak-kneed civilian with mud for brains! She should have seen through his ruse.
As for the fact flek were on Anktan—that was a good one. She'd bet a year's pay no one in Confederated space had the slightest suspicion about this setup. She raised her wrists and eyed the slick white fiber which bound her hands. Her teeth hadn't made a dent; it was, no doubt, fabricated in some particularly nasty flek sort of way.
Eldrich's head appeared through the slick surface of the wall with a faint pop. He stepped aside and made room for several flek who followed him. The air they brought with them was strong and acrid.
She coughed. "Disgusting company you keep these days, Director."
"Preferable to that of previous days," he answered smoothly. "Soon, however, I will shed this vile shell and return to my previous state."
The butterfly flutters in her stomach turned to lead. "What are you talking about? Are you brainburned?"
The two flek chittered about something, but the voder they carried remained silent.
Eldrich smiled thinly. "How much does the Confederation know about our work here?"
That again. She hunched farther back in the corner and tried to think past the thud of her heart. No wonder Eldrich had been after her at the station about "missions" and "irregularities." He suspected she and Heyoka were here because of the flek.
"How much do they know?" Eldrich's cold gray eyes pierced her.
No matter what he said, he couldn't be a flek, she thought. The biotechnology didn't exist to turn one of those things into the semblance of a human. But if he were human, why was he working for them? "I don't get it. Are they paying you, Eldrich?"
The voder chittered out a translation. Eldrich scowled, then gestured. The two emaciated-looking creatures seized her sore shoulder and dug fingers into the tender, half-healed skin. "How much have you told your superiors?" he demanded. "And where has Blackeagle gone?"
"All-Father blast your hide, get these sodding things off me!" She screwed her eyes shut against the pain.
"Then tell us what you know."
But she knew nothing, could tell them nothing! And yet the truth would not suffice. "Everything!" she lied. "They know it all!"
The fleks released her. She opened her eyes, sweating and heaving as though she were going to be sick. Eldrich watched her, tapping a slender silver tube against the palm of his hand. "I surmised you could be of some use, and naturally, I prefer to be right." He pointed the tube at her head and smiled.
Once the sun's red disk dropped behind the peak overlooking the flek, Kei and Nisk insisted the three of them stop for the night. Heyoka maintained too much was at stake; they had to ride on, but Nisk and Kei overruled him, arguing that yirn did not see as well at night as hrinn. Pushed on after dark, the beasts would mostly likely take a critical misstep and break their necks, as well as those of their riders.
But Nisk and Kei had no concept of the carnage flek would wreak on a defenseless world like this one, could not possibly imagine what lay in store for all of them, hrinn and human alike, should the grid be completed, and Heyoka knew it was his fault for not making them understand. Urgency beat through him as he paced the clearing they had chosen on the side of the mountain, unable to settle and rest, though every step wrung another jolt of pain from his bad leg.
They were surrounded by striated gray boulders, protected not only from the winds, but the eyes of the flek, he hoped. A leathery winged flyer soared on the updrafts overhead, hunting, and its thin cries echoed against the mountain. For the first time since awakening in the thermal pool, he could smell the dozens of varieties of plants that grew in the damp earth and sun-heated stone. Long-buried memories stirred as he paced, fragments of conversation, frustrating glimpses of nameless faces, all of which slipped away even as he tried to grasp them. He had stood in these mountains as a child, breathed this same air. He could almost remember . . .
"Sit down," Nisk said as he struck a spark from his flint. "Wearing yourself out will not help after using Old Power."
Heyoka squatted beside the older black-furred male. "Just exactly what is this `power'? You never really explained."
Nisk fed a handful of twigs, one at a time, into the tiny yellow flames he'd kindled, then added a scattering of tiny blue leaves from his pocket. They gave off a soothing scent as they curled into flame. His ears waggled as he considered. "Many males are born with the ability to draw power. It is an ancient discipline which allows them to move with such speed that the eye cannot follow, and also to wield the sacred blue fire. Some are made with a small talent for this, others more." He met Heyoka's eyes, his face impassive over his white throat. "The Black/on/black receives this ability in the greatest measure."
Back to that Black/on/black nonsense again. Heyoka rubbed his ears in frustration. It was just a myth based upon a kernel of truth. His particular coloration must be a genetic tag for a certain type of mitochondria in his cells, nothing "sacred" about it. "Where does this power come from?" he asked.
"The warmth of Ankt will provide it, if you bask long enough." Nisk gestured with his muzzle at the ruddy glow along the western horizon. "But it is easier to draw the heat from a pool." He sat back on his haunches, gaze trained on the flames. "In the last few days, you have proven the legends about the Black/on/black to be true. Even in my prime, I would have been dead long before now, if I had even attempted what you have done since we left the males' house."
Uncomfortable, Heyoka lurched to his feet again, but Nisk continued, not seeming to notice. "It is taught that the Black/on/black comes among us when the immense patterns/in/motion that shape all of existence decree such strength is needed. Now that I have seen that monstrous thing defiling our plains, I know why you were born into these days. You have come, not to see this extraordinary pattern, or to name it, as ordinary hrinn must, but because you are part of the pattern itself."
Nisk looked up as Kei came back from watering the yirn. "In the beginning, I thought this pattern might be patience/in/illusion, which obscures the true nature of things, but that has arisen before, and has therefore been described, and is reportedly nothing like this. We are in the midst of something far larger and more powerful than any pattern ever detected. Seeking out patterns is the most sacred act a hrinn can perform; it orients us in the stream of life, gives us direction, puts us in balance with the rest of creation. We must name this particular pattern which has brought you back among us, so we know what we are supposed to do, or chaos will destroy us all."
Superstition piled upon superstition, Heyoka thought, yet as good an explanation for the outrageous presence of flek on Anktan as any he might come up with. "Can females draw power?"
"A few, but it is a much rarer gift, and wielded only in order to restore/to/balance, not to fight." Nisk's nose twitched as Kei threw a handful of silvery fishlike creatures onto the grass, then sank to his haunches. Beyond insisting he would accompany them, the big Levv male had said almost nothing since Heyoka had bested him that morning.
"You spoke to me of Restorers before." Heyoka looked down at his aching leg, encased in the now useless power brace.
Nisk followed his gaze. "When we reach the valley, we shall seek them out."
That is, Heyoka amended to himself, if there were any Restorers, or anything else left by the time they reached the valley at this rate. He turned his eyes to the early evening sky and searched for the telltale lights of flek transport while Kei tore into a raw fish.