To his relief, Heyoka found, as he worked around the flek fire, most of his hrinn-and-human force had battered its way inside the grid during the critical minutes when the power had been disrupted. He caught glimpses of them above on the strangely angled walkways and silhouetted against gleaming white walls as they fought savagely in small groups, pressing toward the interior of the grid itself.
His other approved the flek's ferocity. Its own savageness was now an integral part of him, threaded through his every aspect, almost indistinguishable from the portions of his personality he had always accepted. He sensed it would never again be a distinct and separate part of him, never again suppressed, and that would have worried him, if he'd expected to live beyond the next ten minutes.
The ear-splitting noise climbed toward an agonizing crescendo that ate at his nerves. Striving to rejoin his forces, he slipped in and out of the harshly delineated shadows, slashing at flek with handclaws when he had the chance. Many of those he cut down were workers and, therefore by nature, not efficient fighters, but he sensed something altering the nature of the battle. The flek were falling back to form a living shield around the great open space in the middle of the grid, and even the non-warring castes, who should have been fleeing, were fighting with increased purposefulness.
Sliding his back along a disgustingly warm, slick wall, he paused as lasers sizzled just out of sight. The stench of burned fur filled the air, and he glanced reflexively down at his own scarred leg, before peering around the corner. Two smoking dark-furred hrinnti bodies lay tangled a few feet away, but the way was clear. He grimaced as the grid's screech rose another few agonizing notes. It was definitely in operation, no doubt to bring through a few thousand armed warrior-drones.
Black fur flickered, then Kei dropped out of blueshift beside him, materializing as though he had come from another dimension.
Over his shoulder, Heyoka saw the vague, ominously huge outlines of—something—forming down behind the seemingly solid veil of flek fire. His hackles raised as he pointed. "They're protecting the center, so it must be their vulnerable point. We have to get in there and destroy either their controls, or their power source before they bring in more warriors."
Kei's black eyes glittered as he turned to look. His robes were torn and spattered with blood, and the top of his left ear was badly singed. Then, without a word, he was—gone, as suddenly as if he'd been lasered into atoms. Heyoka reached for the energy to blueshift and follow, but felt only hollowness within; if he tried, this time he probably would die, as Nisk had been so direly predicting all along. It was too bad, he told himself as he jogged wearily toward the middle of the grid, that there hadn't been more truth to the Black/on/black myth after all.
The outer levels were empty of flek now and the warrior-drones were laying down their customary impenetrable firing pattern to protect the grid's core. He and the other hrinn, along with a handful of humans, assembled around the glowing center. Then he saw her, small and pale, dressed in a ragged blue shift, running between one group of flek and the next, shouting and beating at their white bodies with her fists when their attention flagged. For a moment, he forgot to breathe with the shock of seeing that familiar snub-nosed face. Mitsu—his friend and partner—was holding the flek defense together with non-warrior drones in a last-ditch effort to preserve the incoming transport.
The other males fought out of blueshift, picking the enemy off one at a time, slowly increasing the odds in their favor, but, being unfamiliar with technology, they were aiming for the flek and ignoring the controls. The outlines of the incoming shipment were firming up now, shimmering with the garish rainbow of flekish colors. He calculated that by the time his hrinn cleared the way to the center of the grid, it would be too late.
Inside the huge box-shape, he could see shiny white chitinous bodies equipped with the heavier body armor of warriors, ready to emerge and crisp the attackers. He shouted at the blueshifting males to break through the flek lines and destroy the controls, but it was no use. Blueshift was almost a silent universe; within it, normal speech sounded so garbled and drawn out that they could not understand him.
His handclaws flexed in frustration. Another few seconds and it would be too late. The new warriors would be here, armed and fresh. Human and hrinn alike would be wiped from the face of this planet and the flek would possess a new stronghold from which to infest this quadrant of human-held space.
Someone had to get inside and stop the transmission. Dodging a laser bolt, he reached for the cool feeling of otherness and again found only a curious lassitude. The other snarled, thwarted and enraged. He had to stop them, whatever the cost—there were much worse things than an honorable death. He threw back his head, roared with furious frustration, then shifted. Weariness dragged at him, but the gaps in the flek laserfire were apparent now and it was a relatively simple matter to step between the bolts into the center area where an almost motionless small human stood with her fist upraised.
With him, in the awesome silence of blueshift, he saw males on the other side, killing flek with gruesome efficiency. He shouted to them, but they didn't seem to hear, so he pressed on, stumbling. He was so tired, putting one foot in front of the other seemed more than he could possibly do, and yet the other's anger kept him moving. The early days that he had spent in the flek slave pens came back to him again, the pain and the stink, the fear. He would not let that come to Anktan. These were his people and he would not let the flek have them!
The blueness wavered and, for a second, normal colors bled into his vision. Gritting his teeth, he wrenched himself back into blueness. He had to hold blueshift; if he slowed to normal speed, they would have him in a flash.
A glittering crystal array behind Mitsu caught his eye, molded as though it had grown out of the grid floor. Perhaps it had; reports said flek did not construct things in the same fashion that humans did. If he could take this grid relatively undamaged, the Confederation might learn a great deal about flek technology and how to fight it . . . if . . .
He passed Mitsu, nearing the crystals, picking up his feet with an agonizing deliberateness and laying them down as though they were part of some machine he was operating and not feet at all. The huge transport cube had nearly solidified. Inside it, he could see the flek readying their weapons, firing short test bursts of green laserfire over their smooth white heads.
He focused on the gleaming crystals, which were as beautiful as delicate stalagmites spun from the purest water ice and shining with the same breathtaking frigid blueness that surrounded him. He brought his claws down and smashed the first pillar. It drifted apart in glittering splinters. His vision blurred as he raised his arm for a second blow and he had to swing blindly, but he felt his claws bite into the crystals and send them spinning toward the grid floor. Then he slid out of blueshift, the normal colors of life jerking him back into crushing decibels of noise.
A few feet away, the huge transport vehicle blackened, then shivered into a million charred and smoking pieces. A multitude of flek incinerated between one breath and the next, he thought giddily, then found his nose pressing painfully into the floor. Somehow he had fallen without noticing. He struggled to turn over, then stared up at the grid looming over him at strangely canted angles.
Behind him, the flek whirled to face the disaster as the grid's wail wound down and down into a gut-wrenching squawk. Hrinn dropped out of blueshift all around him, intent on finishing the job he'd begun, smashing the fairy-tale crystals until they were only a sifting of crystalline dust scattered across the grid floor.
With a cry of anguish, Mitsu rushed him, laser stick extended in her hand, her face alien and twisted with hate. Blinking mistily up at her, Heyoka tried to call her name, but his tongue refused to form the words.
Then Kei was beside him, massive and black, stepping between them as Mitsu approached, fitting his alien thumbs to the laser pistol's grip and calmly taking aim.
"No!" Heyoka got the word out, but Kei did not even flick an ear. Enraged, his other gave him the strength to struggle to his knees as his vision hazed in and out. "It's not—her fault!"
Dead-on, Kei fired at the approaching small figure.
Without even realizing what he had done, Heyoka found the world blue again as he tried to outrun a laser bolt. His handclaws reached . . . caught at the edges of her shapeless garment and toppled her to the floor. As her small body fell slowly against him, he enfolded her in his arms as he had so many times before, friend to friend. The other, woven through him now in a thousand parts, agreed; no one was going to kill his partner, the only one besides Ben Blackeagle who had ever looked at him and seen a person, not while he was still kicking! Achingly cold blueness took him as he clasped her to his chest, mixing itself with an ominous blackness the exact shade of Kei's fur. "No one," he whispered hoarsely. "No one—"
A frigid blue hole had been punched through the fabric of space/time and was sucking the life out of his bones at an astonishing rate. Even the thoughts that tried to form in his head were stolen by the arctic blueness before they could gel. He would not escape this time, but Anktan was surely safe; the flek would never use that grid to travel between planets now. And Mitsu . . .
But that half-formed thought troubled him even as it slipped away. He'd had Mitsu in his arms. She should be safe, yet Kei had been there with the killing lust upon him, Kei who thought all Outsiders to be of a piece and that humans were the same as flek, Kei who would protect the Black/on/black at all costs . . .
Someone spoke close to his ear. He couldn't make the words out, but strained toward them, using them as a beacon to lead him out of the frozen blueness.
The words came again, harsh and angry.
The other bristled. What right did anyone have to be angry with him? He had done his best and if that was not enough, he could do no more. Angry now, himself, he struggled toward the universe of sound, the realm of light and warmth and . . .
"—still or I will tear your ears off, not that they were ever much to look at anyway!"
The voice was hrinnti, making him even more worried for Mitsu. If he could only feel his arms and know if he still held her.
"He—live?"
That voice was human, speaking in halting broken Hrinnti. He tried to speak but managed only a slight groan.
"He will live, no doubt, a great deal longer than he deserves!"
Was that Kei? As he listened, he became aware of a distant warmth, working against the awful draining blueness. He tried to phrase a question, then shivered, sending painful spasms all through the body that only seconds ago he had not felt at all.
"Let me take him now," a soft hrinnti voice said. "You should get some rest. He will recover."
"No!" It was Kei. Suddenly Heyoka felt sure of that. "He is Levv and it is for me to do this."
"It will not benefit him if you make yourself ill too," the other hrinn chided.
And that was Vexk, Heyoka thought, so she had survived the battle. It reassured him to know that, with everything else he had bungled since coming to Anktan, at least he wasn't going to be responsible for the loss of her craft to his people. He heard the lap of water against stone, smelled a hint of sulfur.
"Let me or, perhaps, Nisk watch over him. We can call you if he awakens."
I'm all right, Heyoka wanted to say, but the connections to make his mouth respond just didn't seem to be there. The voices dissolved into a hazy blur as sleep dragged at him, a soft, welcoming normal sleep that whispered of refreshment and ease. He quit resisting and drifted away into the warm darkness.
Two lives danced in her mind, flames from two fires fed on vastly different fuel: she was Mitsu Jensen, a Ranger in the Confederation Forces, and she was a flek spy-drone, temporarily transferred into a miserable soft-skinned body. The humans in this place kept insisting such a transformation was not possible and she was one of them, but of course, they were supposed to think that. And, anyway, what did they, undifferentiated creatures that they were, really understand about the universe and the way it worked? In trying to know a little about everything, humans knew practically nothing at all, unlike the flek, masters of specialization.
Perched atop a large rock outcropping, her fingers skittered over each other almost unconsciously, beating out a sad little dirge for the ruined transfer grid down on the plains. The savage fur-covered beasts had smashed the crystals and slaughtered the tech-drones who were the only ones with the knowledge to grow replacements. Even if the drones had lived to start again the next day, the grid had been over thirty years in the making. It would never again have been functional in her lifetime.
Strong fingers grasped her shoulder and she looked around. It was the gray-and-white beast that had been set to follow her everywhere. For some reason, it continually spoke to her in low guttural syllables she did not understand.
"Go away!" she chittered at the creature in pure High-Flek, but, paying her no heed, it tugged at her arm and kept saying the same beast words over and over again. Knowing from the experience of the past few days that it would simply drag her off if she did not comply, she stood and picked her way down the rocky jumble. One of the humans came up to join them, a female, if she remembered correctly, with long dark hair and a puckered laser burn that stretched across her right arm.
The woman began speaking to her, and after a moment, she was surprised to find she understood. "—wouldn't you like to see him, Mitsu? He is asking for you."
For a second, an answer was on the tip of her tongue, then flek chitter rose in her mind, the derisive tones of the Deciders when she had made another mistake. "Spent too much time among them, did you? Damaged, are you? Never again will you be one of us?"
The woman shook her head and spoke to the gray-and-white beast. It urged her toward the dark opening leading into a system of natural caves. She hated the caves; they were dank and smelly and full of even more of the hairy beasts, but these creatures imprisoned her inside every night anyway. One evening, she promised herself, they would forget to bind her and then, before she escaped, she would find a laser and burn them all for what they had done to her people.
She dug her heels in as they passed under the overhanging rock of the cave entrance, but the beast didn't even seem to notice. Continuing on, it pulled her around a series of twistings and turnings that Mitsu could have sworn they had never taken before. Finally, they entered a well-lit gallery with a high ceiling and a steaming pool in the center. Torchlight danced on the water, yellow and somehow inviting.
In the pool floated a black-furred beast, its head propped against the rocky ledge and its sunken eyes closed. Something stirred in her at the sight of him; it was a him, suddenly she was quite sure of that. Kneeling, the woman touched his shoulder and spoke. The creature's eyes opened and looked up at Mitsu, strange luminous black eyes that held a bit of the vastness of deep space.
He spoke to her in a halting deep-throated voice that was cracked and strained. Her skin flushed cold and then hot in rapid succession, and a vision burst upon her of a black-furred face telling jokes under a clear green sky. Even though she was just a dirt-behind-the-ears kid, raw and untrained, she laughed with him. Just that day, she had saved his furry black hide from being burned into cinders, and they both knew it.
The double rows of white teeth glittered at her in the harsh light of the camp torch. "Think you're pretty smart, don't you?"
"Smart enough to save your ass anyway." Laying her laser rifle on the grassy ground, she plunked down beside him and began to ease her boots off.
"Not so fast!" Flexing his claws, he scratched behind one of his sharp-pointed ears. "This side is reserved for officers. The noncom flop is clear over on the other side of that grove."
"Sleep here?" She made a face at him. "I wouldn't sleep in the middle of a bunch of cross-eyed stiffs like you guys if you advanced me three months' pay." Tugging at her boot until it finally gave, she wriggled her hot, aching toes with a satisfied sigh. "A girl's got her reputation to think of, you know."
"A girl?" He shook his head in a curiously humanlike gesture. "Damn, and here I bet Danelli that you were some kind of Jernigan asexual replication!"
"Very funny, Blackeagle." She began working on the other boot. "It's not like you've got a lot of room to talk, you know."
"Well, I suppose you could stay over here in officers' country." His nose wrinkled, displaying that gruesome double set of four-inch fangs. "If I booted your ass upward."
"You wouldn't dare." The second boot slid off and allowed the cooling evening air to reach her aching foot.
"As of seventeen hundred today, local time, Shortstuff."
"You're kidding." She gathered the two boots up and stared at the sharp-muzzled face suspiciously.
"I expect your orders will be cut by this time tomorrow, that is, if you manage to live that long." He lay back against the grass-covered ground. "Though you're so goddammed green that I don't know why I even offered to train you. Guess I just felt sorry for you."
"You—train me?" She stood up and glared down at his relaxed form. "As a sodding officer? That'll be the day!"
"Tomorrow will be the day, as a matter of fact." He closed his eyes. "Oh-four hundred and don't be late. I hate that in a partner."
Partner . . . the word echoed in her mind, through the barren white chambers erected by the flek . . . partner . . . partner . . .
Tears were streaming down her face. The black-furred form stirred in the pool, then heaved up onto the rocky ledge. "You took . . . your time . . . in coming . . . Shortstuff."
Her hands started to beat out a quick tune of distress. She stared at them, startled by the paleness of the skin and the bones showing white through it, then thrust them into her pockets.
"Don't you . . . think you've had . . . enough time off?" The words came out very slowly, as though each were more valuable than gold.
The bones protruded through his hide too, all the more evident now as his wet fur clung to the outlines of his emaciated body. He'd lost so much weight that she hardly knew him. "Given—up—eating?" she asked finally, each word forced to thread a confusing maze in her head before she could force it out.
"The chow . . . here is . . . terrible." His black eye closed in a very humanlike wink. "But I'll . . . eat it . . . if you will."
She started to answer him, but flek chitter rose again in her mind, overriding the other voices, drowning out everything to keep her inside the warm, smooth-walled prison they had built for her. Then wet fingers closed around her arm, double-thumbed and strong, fingers to pull her away from the flek, back into the cave with him. For a second, they felt alien, strange, out-of-kilter, then her vision shifted and she suddenly knew it was going to be all right. She was safe at last.