Heyoka passed the remainder of the three days it took to travel back across the low mountains in a feverish haze. Every time he thought he had come to terms with the situation, the reality of it surged back over him: flek were entrenched on Anktan. In the entire history of confrontation between the two species, Confederated forces had never wrested a world back from the flek that was more than poisoned slag and ashes, if even that much. If he'd had a com-unit, he would have warned the station, then set up a command post and dug in to observe while he waited for a coordinated response from the military. As it was, he was forced to ride every rock-strewn inch back across the mountains astride a maddeningly slow yirn.
When they passed another males' house, Nisk directed them to wait outside while he went in to seek supplies. Minutes later, he returned, eyes glittering with rage, ears strangely askant, a body posture Heyoka could not interpret.
"They are dead," was all he would say, but Heyoka caught an acrid whiff of flek from Nisk's fur and pieced together the rest. Like Levv, this house was situated fairly close to the plains. After Kei and his siblings had blundered upon the grid and were routed, the flek must have searched this area. Unlike the persecuted remnants of Levv, these males had not expected an attack, and so, caught unaware, had all died. The memory of that torrid green beach on Enjas Two swept back over him, the coppery salt reek of the ocean, the crackle of flek fire as it altered the direction of his life forever.
At twilight, the three of them emerged from the rolling hills onto the fertile side of the river valley, guiding their weary yirn in silence until they reached a ford. Just above the flood plain, Heyoka saw circular fields of what Nisk identified as ripening Qartt grain, now bending before the gentle dusk breeze. The air was mellow, filled with the fresh, wet scent of running water and the rich earthiness of tilled land, wonderfully familiar. Relief flooded through him to be so close to the station and civilization again. Human thoughts coursed through his mind, human considerations. Once he alerted Confederated forces, this problem would no longer be his responsibility alone. That was how humans did things, worked in concert to multiply individual strengths and knowledge, relying on reasoning and training, rather than the aggressive, individualistic chest beating and bared teeth that characterized hrinn.
Twisting around on his yirn, he caught Nisk's eye. "The Outsiders aren't far from here. Why don't you both go back to Levv and wait until I can return?"
Nisk stiffened. His usually mobile ears did not betray his agitation, but his eyes burned like black coals. "Have you understood nothing of what is happening?" He sat his fidgety yirn like a statue, an impenetrable dark silhouette against the graying sky, staring out at the vast sweep of wasteland beyond the river. "This pattern has been emerging since the day you left this world as a cubling. Even as we stand here, it is shaping our future. Everything we are, everything we will become, is bound up into it. We cannot leave it unnamed."
Exhausted and battered, Heyoka found himself unutterably weary of hrinnti ways and hidebound hrinnti thinking. He couldn't wait to be among humans again, to eat cooked food, read a book, to talk things out rather than be forced to fight for the right to make even the smallest decision on his own. "This has nothing to do with patterns!"
"Fool!" Nisk leaned closer, ivory teeth catching the fading light. "Do you think I don't know a pattern when I smell one? This one has swept me away from my fellow males so that I am houseless, then pushed me beyond the bounds of reasoning to confront creatures no hrinn has ever seen and then continued to draw breath. If we do not learn how to flow with it, rather than stand against it, it will destroy us all, and chaos will once again rule. For reasons known only to the Voice, you stand in its center, so in order to name it, I must follow you."
Heyoka scowled and turned to Kei, who professed not to believe in such supernatural nonsense as hrinnti patterns, but the big male met his eyes only for a brief glowering instant, then looked to the ground. Having gone from brash anger to resentful deference in the space of one savage skirmish, he now maintained an almost unbroken stony silence.
At the station, he knew these two would be regarded as illiterate savages, but the cant of their ears and the set of their heads warned him it would do no good to protest further, so he urged his mount into the rushing green water. Less than a mile beyond the river, they passed out of the flood plain up into a different landscape of tough desert pavement pocked with occasional sweeps of red-orange sand. At their backs, the sun sank behind the mountains and Heyoka worried they would not reach the station before dark. Finally he caught a glimpse of the gray tarmac where he and Mitsu had stepped off the shuttle . . . how many days ago?
He wished she would be there to razz him about the appallingly inept way he had handled this whole miserable business, but knowing his kind much better now, he had no illusions that she'd survived. One unguarded slash from a hrinn's claws would have torn her throat out, and the natives never pulled their blows.
Nisk and Kei rode up to the long low station compound with him, silent as two shadows. Their glittering black eyes watched as he slipped down the yirn's shaggy side and limped over to the outer lock's monitor. He'd lost his yellow security pass somewhere in that first day out so he punched the call button. "This is Sergeant Blackeagle. I need access."
Static burst from the speaker embedded in the door. He keyed it again. "Blackeagle here. Open up." Minutes trickled past. He raised his fist to bang on the outer lock. "Blast it, let me in!" Finally he propped himself against the rough sand-scoured wall to ease his leg. Although he'd been on it for barely ten minutes, he might have been standing knee-deep in hot coals. His lips curled back from his teeth at the thought of the months of physical therapy ahead to make walking merely endurable again.
The door grated open, a few inches at a time, then a slender dark-haired woman peered around the edge at him, brown eyes reddened from weariness, or lack of sleep.
"It is you!" She tucked a straggling lock of long dark hair behind her ear. "My god, Blackeagle, you look terrible."
For a baffling second, he couldn't place her, then caught her scent: Dr. Alvarez, who, only days ago, had tricked him with a sedative while precious hours were passing, hours in which he might have had a chance to find Mitsu before it was too late. She was one of the last people he wanted to see now.
His nose twitched as he realized how small she was. He'd already forgotten how much more frail in every way humans were compared to hrinn. He caught a whiff of something in the station's conditioned air, familiar, yet out of place. His hackles rose. "What the—?" He darted past her into the lock. With an air of grim disapproval, Kei and Nisk followed.
"Hey," she protested as the pair pushed past her, "they can't come in here!"
Inside, Heyoka smelled the telltale odor more clearly. Nostrils flaring, he identified the acrid signature of at least three different kinds of explosives. He turned back to Alvarez. "What's your situation?"
Giving his companions a wide berth, she caught up with him. Her long hair straggled around her face and there were smears of dirt on her cheeks. She looked like she hadn't slept in days. "We've had a series of explosions." Her brown eyes were bleak. "Security thinks they were set. There have been eight deaths so far, and more are missing."
Two blue-uniformed men sprinted around the corner and slid to a wary stop on the tiled floor, weapons ready. Kei threw back his head and roared as Nisk sank into a fighting crouch, his claws flexed. The guards flinched and Heyoka hastily interposed himself, empty hands raised and turned palms out. "Be still!" he called over his shoulder in Hrinnti.
The guards gripped their rifles until their knuckles shone white. Alvarez waved them back. "It's all right. This is Sergeant Blackeagle. I know him."
"But what about the other two?" The first guard, swarthy and middle-aged, motioned with the muzzle of his gun. "That one may be tame, but the other two are as wild as they come."
"I'll handle it, Scott!" She passed a hand over her sweat-grimed face. "Please."
The guard hesitated, then nodded. "All right, Doc, it's your funeral." He lowered the rifle.
Tame . . . Heyoka felt a snarl rumbling in his own throat at the implications of that word. He realized his handclaws were flexed and forced them sheathed again; he had to sound sane, reasonable. "I have to get word to the authorities. I've found a flek installation on the other side of the mountains."
Alvarez went alabaster beneath her smudges and scrapes. "Our communications center is nothing but smoke and ashes."
Heyoka tried to jolt his mind back into the military mode in which he'd functioned for so many years. "I need transport and arms."
"Every bit of transport we had went in the first explosion." Her eyes moved past him into the gathering darkness outside. "And the armory went up too. All the firepower we have left is what Security had checked out that day."
"Damn!" The human word felt good on his tongue, like scratching an itch that couldn't even be acknowl-edged in Hrinnti. Options, he told himself, there had to be alternatives. There had to be something he could do. "When is the next ship due in?"
"Seventy-eight days from now. I checked." Arms hugged to her body, she dug at the wall with the heel of her shoe. "I thought we could make it until then, but now . . ."
No communications, no transport . . . His head whirled. Someone had done a surgical job of rendering the station helpless. He called the shining lines of the flek grid back into his mind, comparing the unfinished structure to holos of finished units he'd seen. "I don't think we have seventy-eight days left."
The fear in her eyes confirmed that she had followed the progress of the war and knew all too well what the flek would do to this world. "Isn't there anything we can do to stop them?"
Stop a transport grid without trained troops? In his mind, he saw the line of chitinous dead-white warrior-drones again as they swarmed down the beach, laying an impenetrable shield of green laser fire before them. "I don't know." His eyes slid to the black-furred forms of Kei and Nisk standing behind him.
She brushed at her hair again with a gesture that reminded him so much of Mitsu that guilt stabbed through him. "Have you had any word of my partner?"
Alverez looked stricken. "She came in with Eldrich a few days ago, but disappeared again the next morning."
"With Eldrich?" Heyoka's ears flattened. "He sent a team out after all?"
"No, he brought her in himself." Her face was hollow-cheeked and drawn. "After his initial refusal to allow anyone to look for her, I thought it doubly strange when he and Allenby showed up with her in the middle of the night, all very hush-hush, and then the three of them disappeared the next day."
"Eldrich is gone too?" Heyoka prowled restlessly to the other side of the doorway, the pain in his leg eating at him with each step.
"And Allenby. They might have died in the explosion, but . . ." She bit her lip.
"What?"
"One of the airhoppers is missing, although none were signed out."
But Mitsu had survived. He made himself hold onto that. If only he'd come back sooner.
Three more men, their blue uniforms stained with soot and sweat, joined the others, wearily staring at the hrinn. Heyoka's nose twitched as Kei flexed his handclaws. "Tell them to give us weapons so we can leave." Kei's tone was close to a low snarl. "Hrinn cannot live in this stench."
"They have no weapons." Heyoka's nose wrinkled; the station did smell terrible, reeked in fact of humans and sweat and explosives and plastics and a hundred other things he'd almost forgotten in just a few days' time.
Nisk shook himself. "It is as I have been telling you—this pattern does not involve the Outsiders. We must find this shape alone."
Heyoka hesitated, then decided to check the communications center for himself. "I must look at something before we leave. Wait for me outside." He headed down the dimly lit station corridor. After a moment, he heard the pad of hrinnti feet behind him.
Vexk waited on the low roof of the Restorers' Hold, chin propped on her bent knees, while Cimmi and Khea dug medicinal roots up on the ridge. Twilight had descended and the growing dimness to the east possessed a dense, clotted consistency, denoting, she thought, a rare convergence of patterns. Everywhere, new shapes were arising unexpectedly within the bounds of those already extant, grinding each other into furious chaos, then spinning away into nothingness. Most hrinn experienced but six or seven recognizable patterns in a lifetime, but these days had lately proved themselves of an altogether different quality, crowded with too many possibilities and therefore fraught with danger.
The wind carried the heady promise of rain out of the west, rare this late in the season. She had tasted the same damp edge in the air on the night she had severed her own ties with Vvok. Watching Khea, it swept back over her now, the anguish and loss of identity, the intense period of mourning that followed. Leaving one's Line was devastating enough, but in addition Khea had witnessed Vvok's disgrace, something new, even to Vexk, who had thought by now nothing Seska did could surprise her.
No word had come to her from Vvok, not even an imperious demand for the return of this surprising cubling over whom they had imperiled their honor. But then, if old Seska were dealing with the Outsiders for weapons, a disobedient cubling was likely to be the last thing on her mind.
The two cublings walked back through the gathering darkness toward the hold, the tube-shaped collecting baskets slung low across their shoulders. Khea lagged behind, silent and weary, although she had insisted upon making herself useful. Her wounds were healing well, but she carried herself stiffly, as though something deep within pained her still. There was more to this matter than she had yet revealed. Vexk jumped to the ground as the two approached.
She gave Cimmi's red, white and black head a playful rub as the cubling passed, then waited for Khea to catch up. She could see the deep gash on the cubling's throat was still scabbed over, but looked as though it would heal cleanly. One of her own ears, notched with old scars, twitched as she remembered Seska's punishing claws in her long-ago cubhood. Vvok was indeed a harsh mistress, but no different of course than any other Line. This business of trading for Outsider weapons though, that was different. "Stay, youngling," she said.
Khea sank into the prototypical posture of respect, eyes down, head bowed. The next thing she knew, Vexk thought sourly, the child would hide her face against the sandy ground. Reaching down with both hands, she pulled the cubling up until she could look into her startled eyes.
"This," she said firmly, "is our way. We are equals here, with no Line Mother to demand obedience or shred our ears. We are in balance, within and without. We come because we fit no pattern followed by the Lines, and we stay because we are one with the sacredness of restoration/to/balance itself." The young body trembled in her hands. "I knew you felt its shape when I first saw you with the Outsider."
She loosed her fingers and Khea stumbled back until she fetched up against the hold wall. She looked over Vexk's shoulder to the red-orange cliffs leading up to the plateau—and Vvok. Her eyes were shad-owed with overwhelming grief.
"We must be in balance ourselves, before we can restore others," Vexk said.
"I—" Khea's voice was low, strained. "I have brought great shame upon myself, so I have no place anywhere, most of all not here where such sacred work is done."
Vexk waited as Khea's healing chest heaved.
"I—challenged the Line Mother," Khea managed finally, her face averted. "When she struck the Outsider, I lost my head and attacked her, before Fitila pulled me down from behind."
Vexk was amazed Khea had taken on old Seska herself, as well as Fitila. "Lawful challenge forbids onlookers to intervene," she said, considering Khea's dilemma. The demands of restoration sometimes conflicted with the need to conduct one's self honorably in the eyes of other hrinn, so it was important to always seek the balance point, where as many aspects were fulfilled as possible. "It was Fitila who dishonored herself, not you," she said. "And you must realize it was not really you who protected the Outsider, but the pattern itself. You were drawn into the sacred process of restoration/to/balance, so that you could do nothing else but take whatever steps were necessary to preserve its life."
Khea stared at her dumbly.
Vexk closed her eyes, reliving the exhilaration of being caught up in something so much larger than herself, that heady, dizzying sense of power and purpose which made everything else seem vague and petty. "One does not decide to become a Restorer," she said. "The pattern takes its own. You were destined for us from the blink in which you perceived its sacred shape. Tomorrow, we will go before the Council of Lines and settle this matter officially."
The corners of Mitsu's lips were split and bloodied from chewing at the fiber binding her wrists, but she thought that if she gave up, she would go crazy. After repeated rounds under the conditioning device Eldrich was using on her, flek thoughts skittered through her brain like tiny insects. During her clearer moments, she'd pieced together that this must have been what had happened to Eldrich, too. They had twisted his mind into knots until he believed he was a flek serving them in a temporary human body. No wonder he worked for their cause.
If she could manage to become flek enough to understand how that damned permeable wall worked, she could escape, but sometimes now it seemed she remembered what it was like to have four arms and to serve the hive from the instant of her birth. It was fortunate she didn't possess the information Eldrich was working so hard to extract from her, because she had the gut-wrenching feeling that very soon she was going to slip over the edge.
It was beyond Kei how any sane creature could live amidst the putrid smells and sharp-angled objects Outsiders crowded into their cramped hold. He'd heard a few vague tales of the bizarre way they lived, but experiencing it for himself was far more unsettling than he had anticipated. The ceilings brushed the tops of his ears and there was no room to turn around, and certainly no sign of sand or pool or rock. How did they clean themselves? Where did they rest? His nerves crawled with the need to be away. On the other side of the chamber, the Black/on/black, who had shed his tattered brown robes for fresh black ones, sorted through a heap of incomprehensible items, ears laid back, expression grim.
A fierce emotion swelled within Kei's chest whenever he looked upon him now. Puzzling and altogether unfamiliar, it dominated his mind as surely as the Black/on/black had bested his body. He felt prickly as a thorn about it, yet knew that for as long as he continued to draw breath, wherever the Black/on/black walked, there he would have to walk too. Was this what it was like to be caught up in a pattern/in/progress?
He approached the door, then flinched as it slid open again, revealing the gleaming silver passage beyond. His ears flattened as he sniffed cautiously at the smooth slab of metal. How did it move by itself like that—had they imprisoned some unfortunate early-culled servant inside? It was far too thin to contain even the smallest of hrinnti cublings, but the biggest Outsider he'd seen was paltry in size. He backed away and the door closed with a faint whoosh.
The Black/on/black glanced up, lips wrinkled back in irritation. "Quit playing with that thing!" He picked up a round gray cylinder the length of his hand and tucked it into the waist of the black trousers.
Kei caught the musty scent peculiar to the pale flat-muzzled creatures of this hold and looked back to the door as two of them edged into view. A low snarl escaped his throat. The Black/on/black flattened his ears and spoke to the intruders in a short string of the high-pitched alien gabble.
One answered and gestured with the gleaming gray stick in its hands at Kei and Nisk.
Casting aside the bag in his hands, the Black/on/black replied sharply.
Kei could see the fur on the other's neck standing straight up. Were they threatening him? He bared his own teeth.
The Black/on/black glanced at him. "Stay back!"
"Why are they here?" Kei prowled restlessly from wall to wall. "Do they wish to go and fight these flek creatures with us? Or do they mean to challenge you?"
"They want you and Nisk to leave," the Black/on/black replied, never taking his eyes from the two at the door.
"Good!" Kei shook himself. "This is no place for hrinn."
"No, you don't understand. They want you to go"—the Black/on/black's expression was grim—"and for me to stay."