After Sergeant Blackeagle tracked them back to the lighted tree, the laka dragged both Montrose and Onopa into the dark recesses of the surrounding grove. Shoved down between the gnarled roots of an old giant, Montrose could still hear the peculiar "singing" the laka seemed to go in for and Blackeagle's occasional snarl, but could tell little about what was going on.
It was dark and quiet, though enough ghostly green filtered through the trees to cast pools of light on the forest floor. The smell of stagnant water arose close by, reminding him that he was monstrously thirsty. His captors, however, wouldn't release his arms so he could access the canteen agonizingly just inches away on his belt.
Onopa, lying beside him, seemed more alert and spoke to him through the darkness occasionally, but in the end fell silent. He hoped she had just drifted off to sleep instead of succumbing to her head wound.
At some point, he must have slept himself, despite the discomfort of his cramped position, because suddenly he jerked awake without knowing what had woken him. He blinked. The rose of early dawn had crept into the eastern sky and Mitsu Jensen was standing in front of him, her face and uniform artfully smudged with dirt, a sonic blade humming in her hand.
The head of a dead laka lay against his foot, bleeding pungent ivory blood into the earth. His mouth dropped open and he realized the three-fingered hands had slipped from his arms. He stumbled up onto his feet and away from the headless corpse, heart pounding. What—?"
"You okay?" Jensen whispered, then slid around the tree without waiting for an answer. The second laka thrust Onopa toward her as though trading for its life. Jensen severed its neck with an expert stroke. The head dropped to the ground and rolled until it came to rest at the base of a tree.
"You're in luck," she said. "I was having trouble down in the cave a little while back, but apparently I can still use a knife." Her face was sober, her tone offhand. "Of course, you have to catch them right at the neck joint, otherwise the knife just slides off."
Montrose could have sworn the poor laka looked surprised. He made a grab for her knife hand, but he was stiff and sore and she easily dodged him. "Stop that!" he whispered fiercely.
"Stop what, junior?" She stepped back, thumbed the knife off, and resheathed it in her boot. The green afterimage danced in front of his eyes.
"Stop killing laka, goddammit! They just roughed us up a little, nothing life-threatening. That's not a license for you to wipe them all out."
"These are flek, junior, not laka." Her face was unconcerned. "You'd better learn the difference, if you ever want to see home again. Now, take your partner here and return to camp." She bent down and brushed back Onopa's black hair to examine the bruise on her forehead. "It doesn't look bad, but you should get it checked. I'm going to find Blackeagle."
She disappeared into the trees, and so help him, God, he was reluctant to go after her. She was even colder-blooded than the hrinn, and that was saying something. How could she go after civilians like that without a second thought?
He levered Onopa onto her feet. The tall Kalanan swayed, but then found her balance.
"I'll be all right," she said and pulled her arm free, "but I think our Corporal Jensen has lost it."
"You may be right." He did some quick calculating, based on the position of the sun, then set out for the base camp back up on the mountain, which rose above the forest. They could hear laka off to the east, making some kind of commotion, and steered clear, though it meant they had to wade through a blasted swamp.
Maybe Blackeagle could handle Jensen. At any rate, the sooner they all got off-world, the better.
Fourteenth Coordinator positioned her retinue well back, then sat on her haunches and considered the bizarre scene before her. After cavorting all night, the errant breeders had now assembled in the ceremonial area. Their postures were quite disturbing, many of them not the least bit deferential or uncertain, despite their shocking aberrant behavior.
One of the furred aliens stood inside their circle, no doubt inciting them to even more unacceptable behavior. This whole train of events was probably its fault. The colony had not experienced anything so disruptive for many generations. She turned to her personal translator, designated Fourteenth, of course, like herself.
"Direct them to return to their nest," she said. "They must be both tired and hungry. Tell them the keepers are waiting to feed and groom them, and afterwards we will discuss their disgraceful actions."
Fourteenth Translator, a lovely, lithe individual tinted a delicate orange, bent her head and spoke to the breeders in the simple, truncated grammar that was all their limited minds could process.
At first, they made no answer. Instead, they milled about with quick jerks, quite unlike their normally playful gestures, and looked to one another for guidance, rather than herself. She found that quite disturbing.
Then, when one finally did speak, the reply was abrupt, his tone actually defiant. The translator, quivering with disapproval, turned back to Fourteenth Coordinator. "They say they will not go. This is their colony now and they want no other." She ducked her elegant head in shame for having been the vehicle of so rude a message.
"Their colony?" Fourteenth Coordinator backed away in shock. "Do they think to build shelters for themselves, gather food, perhaps even whelp their own young?" Each of those ideas was more ridiculous than the last.
The translator began to speak, but at that point the furred alien ducked out of the circle of breeders and ran toward the cliffs leading down to the sea. To Fourteenth Coordinator's dismay, four of the sturdier breeders actually pursued it, leaped and brought it down in the grass before it had taken more than a few steps. It struggled beneath their weight, snarling and snapping.
"Let it go!" Fourteenth Coordinator cried and dimly realized the faithful translator was already relaying her words before she'd finished. "You know aggression is not permitted! Release it!"
The four breeders glanced up at her from the ground, but did not comply. Their eyes glittered strangely in the rising sun.
This was what came of aliens mingling freely among them. Fourteenth Coordinator reeled from the shock of it. If drones were allowed to behave so, the terrible times would return. The colony would degenerate into violence once again and they would lose all they had worked so hard to build.
Those four would have to be put down early. There was even the possibility none of this hatching were fit to breed. Perhaps something had gone wrong in the brooding tower, the temperature had been too high or low, the gene charts misread. Better to forego progeny this cycle and thin the ranks than to breed vicious, unnatural savages.
She turned to her retinue and summoned her personal messenger. Small and unobtrusive with a lovely pale-green sheen to its carapace, it crept forward, obviously unnerved by this outlandish situation. "Summon the rest of the coordinators," she said in messenger dialect. "We must discuss what will be done."
The furred alien was still struggling to free itself. She walked closer, the translator at her shoulder, trying to stare down the wayward breeders who were pinning the creature. Its teeth and claws were extracting a heavy toll, but they did not seem to care. "Let that poor beast go," she said. "This crude conduct is doing great damage to your harmony, to all of us, in fact. Laka do not behave like this."
The translator relayed her words. The breeders answered quite forcefully.
" `This is a good thing.' " The translator's voice was strained and faint. She closed her eyes, obviously appalled. " `A right thing. This beast damaged one of us and we will damage it!' "
Fourteenth Coordinator was horror-struck. They must be put down immediately, as soon as the keepers could be summoned. She saw that now and she was quite certain her sister coordinators would concur. Such depravity! Any hesitation would only allow the outrageous behavior to spread further.
An alien voice rang out from the grove, shrill and demanding. The words, although not laka, were tantalizingly familiar. She had the feeling that she could make sense of them, if only the creature would speak again.
The breeders, along with her retinue, searched for its source up in the trees. The voice called out again, then a beam of hot green light pierced the morning air and struck one of the drones pinning the alien. He screamed and rolled away, all four legs thrumming against the ground, his sleek blue carapace badly scorched.
The shot had angled down from the treetops, Fourteenth Coordinator noticed. Off to the side, the alien beast used teeth and claws to free itself from the remaining breeders. It leaped to its feet, leaving a trail of injured males in its wake, and called out to the shooter.
A second beam of light raked a nearby breeder and the remaining laka scattered. The injured one fell to the ground and lay moaning. The others stared dumbly at his twitching body from a prudent distance away.
Not since a generation born so long ago that only body-memories remained, had such violence been perpetrated among them. Fourteenth Coordinator stumbled toward the safety of the trees on the far side of the clearing, urging her retinue before her. Terrible! her mind wailed. Terrible, terrible! What were they to do now, with such wickedness awakened within them? How could they ever achieve anything approaching consonance again?
Mitsu gunned down a third screaming laka before Heyoka was able to climb high enough to stop her. She had concealed herself in a clever blind made of slender boughs bound with grass, high up in the tallest tree. Had she been there all night, watching his farcical attempts below to free himself?
He grabbed the laser rifle and pushed it aside just as she fired again. The laser bolt sizzled through the leaf canopy and set fire to a limb. "I said—stop it!" He wrenched the barrel free of her hands and tucked it underneath his arm. "What do you think you're doing?"
She was pale, her blue eyes standing out huge in her drawn face. "They're just flek!" she said, her hands clenched around a limb. "I know we can't get them all, before they get us, but we can damn well go down fighting!"
"Mitsu, take another look. Those are laka." Heyoka sagged back against the trunk and let his weariness wash through him. "Noncombatants, as well as possible allies, at least they were until you started skewering them!" The wind was stronger up here, full of a thousand new scents, shifting the leaves so that shadows played across their faces.
"You've been out of combat too long, furface," she said. He saw that she'd smudged her cheeks and forehead with mud, as well as camouflaged her uniform. Her fingers played with the sonic blade sheathed just inside her boot. "Don't you know a flek anymore when you see one?"
"As a matter of fact, I do." He searched her eyes. As before, they were too bright, too eager. "How about you?"
"I couldn't do it before, down in the cave," she said, the words tumbling out. "But I'm okay now. They're going to pay for what they did to me, each and every one!"
The fur on his back stood up. "Do what?"
"Destroy the crystal power matrix for the grid," she said. Her eyes would not meet his. "I tried, but my arm wouldn't aim straight."
It was a form of shell shock, he thought. She was still suffering from the aftereffects of Anktan. "We talked about this before," he said steadily, "how the laka bear a superficial resemblance to the flek, but it's no deeper than that of humans to other humanoid alien races, a certain symmetry of form arising out of similar function. Laka don't really look that much like flek, and they certainly don't smell like them, which indicates an entirely different body chemistry. Stop for a moment and think!"
Her ribs heaved, as though she'd run a race. "Admit it, furface. They had you down," she said. "I saved your life—again."
"Yes," he said, deciding not to debate the laka's intent, "you did."
She smiled and, though it was a pale imitation of former smiles, he realized how long it'd been since he'd seen one on her face. "So, we're even." She sat down on the branch and peered through the leaves at the scene below.
The laka had scattered, leaving behind three either dead or dying bodies. They didn't seem to have any concern for their injured, he realized. That much, at least, they had in common with flek. "Have you seen Montrose or Onopa?" he said.
She raked her fingers back through her disarrayed hair. "I released them a few minutes ago. Onopa was a little unsteady; she'd taken a knock on the head, but I got the jump on the flek who were holding them, then sent them on ahead back to camp."
There were more bodies then, he thought, probably hidden back in the trees. They were never going to be able to repair the already tenuous relations with the laka after this. The bark bit into his back and he shifted position.
"There is no camp," he said, "or at least there's no one back at what's left of camp now. Didn't you hear the shuttle? We'd better collect Montrose and Onopa, then head for the mountains and hide out. The front is moving this way."
"Hell, the front is already here." She drew the knife from the sheath in her boot and thumbed it on. The green blade thrummed at full charge. "Take a look around. This place is crawling with flek."
"Right," he said, at a loss on how to deal with her delusion for the moment. "Let's go back to camp, then we'll decide our next move."
She gazed at him with perfect clarity, more at ease than he'd seen her since she'd been released from treatment. "You want to take the point?"
"Yes," he said, "so let me hang onto the rifle. Mine is down there somewhere. I lost it in that last go-round."
"No problem," she said. "I've still got my pistol."
After the breeders drifted down to the sea, Second Breeder reclined on the warm, black-sand beach and admitted to himself that he was both hungry and tired, as the coordinator had suggested. The air reeked of salt down here, which was corrosive to carapaces and not at all to his liking. The shoreline was barren of anything but sand and rocks and slimy sea wrack, and he had no idea where food might be obtained, other than back at the nest. Gleaners were a lowly caste and he had never paid their activities much mind. Breeders had a much higher purpose, the continuation of the colony. Still . . . he gazed wistfully out over the pale blue-green water . . . it would have been nice to have a ripe shellfruit right about now.
It had been a glorious night, filled with freedom and action and singing, but now it was over. The alien beast had escaped, though Second had picked up the stick it had dropped: a long, slender, black tube with a strangely curved grip at one end. This stick had purpose, he was sure of it, like a gleaner's scythe or a cultivator's hoe. It was the tool of some unknown caste.
Tenth Breeder came over and settled beside him. His brow ridges had been singed by the green fire back in the clearing. Despite the pain, he was clearly in good spirits. "Come with me back to the cave," he said.
"It was a very exciting song," Second Breeder said glumly, "but we can't live on songs and, anyway, the cave has stopped singing."
The waves threw themselves onto the shore, washing fractionally higher each time, making them edge back. The sun glimmered fat and orange-red as it slowly climbed. "It was more than just a song," Tenth said. "The trees of the crystal forest in that chamber were set into a particular order. I've been trying to remember where I'd seen it before and now I know: it is the same as my mark."
"What mark?" Second Breeder felt very dull, even though the light was increasing. Just a short time ago, he'd seemed on the edge of a vast new understanding. Now he felt like a foolish hatchling again.
"The mark on my back." Tenth craned his head around to look. "See?"
"Oh, that." Second Breeder glanced over at the dark blue pigmentation and was not impressed. All breeders bore such blemishes; just like cultivators and translators, messengers and scouts, every individual of every caste bore a mark somewhere on its body. It was just a chance of birth.
"It matches the placement of the crystal trees!" Tenth was almost beside himself, trying to make Second understand. "See? Three blotches here, two there, seven on the other side? It means something!"
Second roused himself to look closer. The scattered streaks did look something like the distribution of crystals down in the cave chamber, but that could be said of many marks, he thought, if you looked at them long enough.
"When I was down there and gazed upon them," Tenth continued, "it was as though I remembered something I'd never been told. My body was telling me that the lightning should go first here, then there, and there."
Second regained his feet and distastefully retreated again from the rising morning tide. Back in the forest, he could hear cheerful avians croaking. "What lightning?"
"The lightning that makes them sing." Tenth was fairly dancing now in his agitation. He'd always been smaller than Second, but now he seemed almost large.
"But they're not singing anymore," Second said. "For all we know, they will never sing again."
"That's why I have to go back. If they do sing again, I might remember even more."
"I don't want to go," Second said. "I'm tired, and besides, the alien beast might come back searching for its stick and then I could hurt it."
"How would you hurt it?" Tenth asked. "You don't have claws or sharp teeth like it does."
"I—" Second began, but couldn't finish. What could he do? There must be something.
"And anyway you have a mark too," Tenth said. "Don't you understand? If mine means something, then yours does too. Everyone's does."
If his mark did have significance, it didn't concern crystals buried down in boring caves, Second thought. It had to do with acting as one pleased, going places, saying whatever one liked, taking, leaping . . . none of those words seemed quite right. As before, he was certain the words he wanted existed somewhere, if only he could reach them. Once learned, he was positive they would never be lost again.
"Come with me!" Tenth urged. "Don't wait here for the keepers to scold you back into the nest."
Second heaved onto his four weary feet and followed Tenth up the sandy slope and toward the hills. His former exhilaration had faded, but perhaps, if he did go, the cave would sing and he would feel those strange stirrings again. Then he would know what the missing words were, what the mark on his own back meant, what more there might be for a breeder to accomplish in the short time that was given to him. Everything.
The flek reached the abandoned camp just after sunrise. Kei's hackles rose as he spied them from his vantage point, a mountain ledge high above their former camp. The flek were as white and gaunt as the ones Kei had fought on Anktan, and, even at this distance, there could be no mistaking that acrid smell. Most of these were smaller than the warrior-drones he'd fought before, though, and only a few carried laser-sticks.
Little was left down there but tents, sleeping mats, a bulky com unit, and some scattered food packages. The wind tumbled discarded blue-and-white wrappers through the rocks. The hrinnti Rangers, under Skal's direction, had stripped what ordnance Dennehy had abandoned, though they were by no means proficient at all of its many forms.
So far, the flek were few, not more than twenty in the detachment swarming over the deserted camp. The crystals had been deactivated, for whatever flekish reason. Their nerve-wracking screech had cut off abruptly sometime before dawn. Naxk and Bey had been all for going back down to see what had happened, but Skal had led them up into the mountains instead.
That had been good strategy, Kei acknowledged. The new Leader had not allowed hot-blooded desire for battle to cloud his reason. Perhaps this particular hunt was better off for not being under Kei's claws.
And that was a very bitter thought indeed.