Kika joined the squad just as it began the assault. Without thinking, Kei motioned the pale-gray into a gap at the far end of the line and then realized belatedly he'd acted as Leader. Well, Montrose with his injured leg was still lagging back in the forest. Kei was surprised he'd made it this far. The Ranger must be stronger than most humans he'd encountered during training.
They took out four of the flek before the enemy returned fire. That still left at least three times their number, not good odds. Though he had not been interested in the sacred patterns until recently, Kei wondered what sort might be at work here. Why would it have brought them so far just to let them fail?
Then he knew the answer. Patterns had to be deciphered, then ridden, like a current in a swift river. They didn't change direction to suit you or care what you did or wanted; they just were, coming into being to shape events. If you meant to use one, you had to sniff out what was arising. So, he asked himself, as he fired another bolt, what was the shape of the particular something/in/motion here? How could he merge with it and gain advantage?
Visht worked steadily on his left, firing and advancing, firing and advancing. Skal fought hard too, but not as carefully, risking open shots, then taking a second and even a third before retreating back into adequate cover. Kei was about to shout at him not to expose himself so blatantly when a flek laser bolt took the black-and-white full in the chest.
Skal bellowed and lost his rifle, fell back into the brush. Visht surged across to hold his position. Ears pinned, shoulders bristling, he took down two of the enemy in quick succession.
Kei was furious. Skal had no right to risk himself so! None of them did! If he weren't already dead, he would have been tempted to kill the idiot himself. With a roar, he blueshifted and crossed the clearing, able to see gaps in the firing pattern in his highly accelerated state.
The noise was replaced by an eerie, brittle quiet. The air grew nose-burning cold and he could almost feel frost forming on his ears. He glimpsed the mountains rising high and deep blue above the trees and thought of Bey. They had been huntmates their whole lives. It was strange fighting without him.
Claws extended, he ripped the head off the closest flek and went on to the next without waiting for the first to drift to the ground. Vaguely, he was aware of someone closing in and turned to see Visht's blue form moving with him in this chill blue place at the same speed. Neither of them could hold this state for long, he knew, and both would pay heavily for the energy expenditure when they fell out.
Motioning to Visht to take the next flek, he swerved after the one beyond. His breathing rasped in his ears and he felt his control slipping. So cold here. So cold. His hands and legs were going numb, his ears and nose. They'd had little to eat and almost no sleep for the past day. Preparations were supposed to be made for blueshift, excess energy absorbed. The scene flickered, blue/normal colors/blue. A few more steps, he told himself. If Visht, who was considerably less able at this, could hold it, he could! Without Montrose, he was Leader, strongest of the hunt. He had to show the way.
He struck the flek, saw it begin to recoil, the weapon inch out of its startled hands. It oozed toward the ground and he ran on. How many left? He couldn't take time to count. Had to go on. Take out the next and the next.
His lungs burned and his legs were weakening. He was Levv, he told himself, strongest of all Lines, no matter that hrinnti males discounted maternal heritage. Traditionals had never been outcast as he and his agemates had been, never had to scratch and fight to wrest food out of the unforgiving mountains or redeem their stolen honor.
Let them all stay behind on Anktan, living their oh-so-proper lives and congratulating themselves on exterminating the flek on their own world. Through him, Levv would hunt flek across the entire universe!
With a shudder, he lost blueshift and found himself on his hands and knees in front of a startled flek. Drained from expending so much energy, he tried to lift his rifle, but his arms were too weak. He snarled and struggled to rise as the warrior-drone swung its laser stick around, took aim. His legs were dead wood, his arms stone. It was very bitter to come so far, only to die at the hands of this despised enemy.
A shot over his shoulder singed his fur and blasted the flek cleanly in the throat, its most vulnerable point. It gave a strangled cry and lurched backwards, clawing at the charred wound.
Kei jerked around to see Montrose's dark face peer out from the trees.
The human gave him that curious "thumbs-up" gesture humans were so fond of. "That's the last on this side," he called. "Sweep back the other way and see if there are any stragglers."
Kei hesitated, then found the strength to raise his trembling right hand in a salute. Montrose saluted back. Kei lowered his head and lurched to his feet to somehow sweep the remainder of the perimeter as he'd been ordered.
Kika reached Skal's fallen body just as he took a last shuddering breath. She knelt at his side. So much damage, she thought, as she surveyed the charred topography of the terrible wound across his chest. It had been a direct strike, searing through layers of skin. His eyes were glassy and staring. She was too late.
But the power she'd absorbed brimmed inside her like an inrushing tide, barely restrained. It wasn't meant to be contained like this, but to be used. That much she could feel, even though she had no training, nothing on her side except unhoned potential. She didn't know exactly what to do. When she'd set out, she'd only hoped the knowledge would come to her at the right time.
He is already dying, her mind whispered. She couldn't just kneel here while the life drained out of him and do nothing. A breeze threaded through the trees, stirred her mane, ruffled her fur as though trying to get her attention. No one else could do this, it was saying. It was up to her. She had to try.
Shots continued only yards away. Her ears flattened as something, or someone, very close, screamed and died. The air reeked of laser discharge worse than any firing range she'd ever trained upon. Trembling, she placed a palm on the motionless chest, closed her eyes, as she had seen other Restorers do, waited.
Stillness descended over her and she became aware of the blood flying through her body, the pathways for power crackling with blue energy. The wound was serious and painful, but it had not yet taken Skal's life. Some portion of him still lingered, though fading even as she watched.
She released a measure of raw energy into his limp form. He flinched beneath her hand, then quieted. Not enough, she thought. He needed more. How much, though? Surely too large an amount would kill him.
But he was dead anyway, unless she managed this. She placed her other hand on his chest, palm down, tried to quiet her mind, not think or plan, just be still and let the knowledge rise like a bubble from the bottom of a clear pond, feel the shape of this moment . . .
Power burst from her hands, and, once started, she could not hold it back. Skal convulsed beneath her touch, chest heaving, arms thrashing. It was as though she were the conduit for an immense wave, no easier to contain than a river in flood. She could not control any aspect of it, only hold on and endure until it spent itself.
The outpouring lessened, faded. Breathing hard, she opened her eyes and glanced around, dazed. Her entire body was alternately numb, then filled with tiny, prickling pains. The trees seemed to dip around her in great, sickening circles. Skal was staring up at her from the wet ground, more frightened than she had ever seen an adult hrinn.
With a snarl, he threw off her hands. She fell back, tried to speak, but words wouldn't come. It was as though she were still wide open to something so immense, there was no room left inside for her own thoughts. A pattern? She gazed at her shaking hands. What were the name of Restorers' patterns anyway?
Skal lurched to his feet and loomed above her, teeth bared in a fierce growl. The raw, gaping wound on his chest had transformed into ridged yellowish scar tissue. And, bracketing the affected area, was the distinct outline of two outstretched hrinnti hands.
Heyoka saw Kei drop out of blueshift and fall, then saw Montrose take the flek out from behind. Montrose shouted something and then, after a long heart-stopping moment, miracle of miracles, the two saluted each other. His mane whipped in the breeze as he stared. Evidently a few things had changed while he'd been separated from the squad.
Kei picked himself up and slogged off around the village outskirts, weariness written into every line of his powerful frame. Fresh from blueshift himself, Heyoka knew that feeling. He was as boneless as a stewed tomato.
He prowled forward, keeping an eye out for concealed flek, then bent down to pry a fallen drone's laser-stick from its dead hand. The flek weapon was short and stubby, designed for spidery flek digits, not for human or double-thumbed hrinnti grips, but it felt good in his hand, like being whole again after days of illness.
Mitsu came up behind him, trailed by a number of laka. The bruise across her face had darkened and her left eye was nearly swollen shut. "Is this all?" she said and looked from one body to the next. "By my count, there should be at least ten more warrior-drones, not counting the world-architect. I don't see it anywhere either."
"World-architect?" Heyoka looked at her sharply, trying to decide if she was rambling or making sense.
"The Deciders sent one along to survey Oleaaka and see if it could be redeemed from their previous failure to convert it." Her brow wrinkled. "The architect must have split off to check the environmental engines while the rest came here. I bet the missing warrior-drones went along."
"There's more, then." Heyoka bit off a curse, then closed his eyes and tried to think. He massaged the bridge of his nose with one hand. He was so sodding tired! They had to intercept them before they went back through the grid. Once the exploratory party returned and reported, it was probably only a matter of time, and very little at that, before an invasion force came back through. With the flek lines sweeping back toward Oleaaka, it would be very much to their advantage to establish a base here.
"You should have let the laka sing them down," she said. "The flek are terrified of them and, if we can learn why, we might be able to use it too."
That nonsense again. Heyoka grimaced. "Those warrior-drones didn't look so damned afraid when they were shooting up the village. There must be at least fifty dead laka lying around here."
"But didn't you see how the flek reacted during that few moments when they were singing?" she said. "Those drones couldn't move."
"Hell, I couldn't move," he said irritably. "They were shorting out my neurons with that racket."
A large mauve-tinted native approached and spoke to Mitsu. Its tone seemed to be urgent.
She answered, then turned to Heyoka. "One of their females is missing."
"Then it's probably dead," he said.
"No, they haven't found her body. She was the pale-green one I overheard talking when we first entered the village."
"That one?" He looked around, but could not spot it anywhere. "I think she was the same one who spoke Standard to me in the forest."
"They say she's a translator," she said. "Apparently, each caste speaks a different dialect so they can't communicate with each other. The translators are the only ones who speak across all caste lines. Their brains must be especially wired to decode and acquire languages, even one as alien to them as Standard."
Montrose emerged from the trees and limped toward them, using a rough staff to take the weight of his bad leg. "Well," Heyoka said, "I'm sorry about the translator, but, if she's alive, she'll probably turn up." He held a hand out to Montrose, who was ashen-faced and looked like hell. "Nice op, Corporal."
Montrose saluted, then reached out and took his hand. His grip was warm, but shaky. He looked like he needed some serious downtime. "Good to see you still breathing, Sarge." Then he glanced curiously at Mitsu. "You too, Jensen."
Mitsu nodded. "We've got to get back to the cave," she said. "What's left of the flek must be headed that way."
Kika and Skal emerged from the trees. The pale-gray female walked slowly, head down, as though she were dazed. Skal stalked well ahead of her, his lips wrinkled back in a snarl, ears flattened to his skull.
"Well, I'll be—" Montrose shook his head. "He took a direct hit back there in the trees. I thought he was a goner for sure."
"I think he was," said Mitsu. "Look at his chest."
Heyoka stared. Two shimmering double-thumbed handprints bracketed a patch of yellow scar tissue. "But there are no Restorers here," he said.
"I wouldn't be too sure of that." Mitsu fingered her own swollen eye wistfully.
From the far end of the firing line, Visht's yellow form appeared, rifle in his hand as though he'd done this all his life. Heyoka did a mental count. "Where's Onopa?"
"She's coming," Montrose said. "She went back for Naxk."
The laka were chattering at him urgently, but he ignored them. "Good fight," he said. "Everyone worked together, like soldiers are supposed to, like Rangers."
Kei finished his sweep for stray flek and returned, moving ever slower, just as Onopa and Naxk broached the forest's edge. Kei trotted over and supported the injured female the rest of the way.
"This is just the beginning, people," Heyoka said as they gathered before him. "Corporal Jensen here informs me there are more flek, probably out at the ruins in the forest, or headed back to the cave. We have to intercept them before they return to their own world and report."
"This is her fault!" Skal was bristling at Mitsu, stalking back and forth, radiating edgy defiance. "She brought the enemy back here!"
"They would have come anyway," she said, though her cheeks flushed. "They want information on the hrinn and what the Confederation is up to here, and they're talking about rebuilding the environmental engines to finish the conversion of Oleaaka for flek habitation."
Montrose looked stricken. "If the flek learn that the Confederation has pulled out—"
"If they want this world, they'll swarm in here and take it," Mitsu said, "whether the Confederation is in occupation or not. Face it, they've kicked us from one end of this quadrant to the other for decades. They never hesitate to engage us, if we get in their way, but for some reason they're very leery of the laka. These people drove them off this world forty-eight years ago and they've kept them out ever since, until we came along like meddling idiots, and reactivated the grid. We should be begging the laka to tell us how they did it all those years ago, instead of fooling around with laser rifles, one on one."
"You said the laka were flek," Heyoka put in, "that they speak High-Flek."
"Well, a form of High-Flek anyway," she said, then turned and studied the agitated natives. "Look at the configuration of their bodies, the shape of their arms and heads. They must be flek who decided at some point in their history not to be flek anymore."
"But the atmosphere," he said, "and the temperature, they're all wrong for them."
"They adapted, I guess." She spoke to the largest laka, whose carapace was pale mauve. It answered at some length. She pressed for what seemed to be clarification, then turned back to him. "She says long ago, the laka were Makers—"
"Makers?" Montrose said.
"That's what the flek call themselves." She ran a hand back through her straggling black hair. "They looked the same, thought the same, even came to this world to live as Makers live on all worlds, by ripping it apart and putting it back together in their own distorted image. But then one clutch was born whose bodies remembered something everyone else had forgotten—how to sing certain long-forbidden songs."
The laka interrupted.
She nodded. "This is Fourth Translator and she's amazing. In just these few minutes, she's already picked up enough Standard to understand a great deal of what we say and she's learning more with every word. She says the ones who were born were what we would call throwbacks, a coming together of all the recessive genes of many generations, and they remembered what the Makers were like, before they became Makers."
Heyoka faced Fourth Translator. "What does the singing do?"
The laka spoke again and Mitsu translated. "For drones, it scrambles the violent impulses and makes aggression impossible. For the rest of us, it soothes and reminds us who we are and what we must hold onto, if we are not to slip back into those savage, dark days."
They were tame flek, Heyoka thought numbly. Who would have thought such a thing could exist? All his adult life, he had fought this fierce, predatory species. Flek never gave up, never backed away, cared nothing about individual lives and could only be overwhelmed by superior numbers, greater firepower, or a combination of both, and now these pacifist natives said what had been needed all this time was only the proper tune?
"We have to get this information, unbelievable and sketchy as it is, back to headquarters," he said. "I certainly don't know what to make of it."
"What about the grid?" Mitsu asked.
"Ask Fourth Translator if we can leave Naxk here," he said, though the tawny young female jerked her drooping muzzle up and found the strength to snarl. "She can keep us apprised via the com unit if any hostiles show up back at the village. The rest of us will return to the grid and see if we can destroy it before they get there."
"Fourth Translator says Naxk may stay," Mitsu related, "and she and a number of her sister translators will go with us. She fears that is where they will find Ninth Translator."
Heyoka started to protest that this would likely be a fight to the death and no place for civilians, but then he realized that he did not have all the answers and this was, after all, their world.
"All right," he said. "Collect the rest of the flek laser-sticks and meet back here in five minutes. See if the laka can spare us some food. Those of us who used blueshift must eat or we'll going to be nose-down in the dirt."
They sorted themselves out and he noted even Mitsu and Kei did not give each other a second glance. Skal kept to himself, while Kika moved as though her mind were somewhere else entirely. Heyoka shook his head, humanstyle, and went to strip the flek dead of their weapons. It was going to be a bizarre assault force.
Second Breeder had not been to the echoing white ruins in some time. The keepers avoided this location, finding it too reminiscent of ancient troubles, and so he and the other breeders had only been able to slip off once in a while when their attention was otherwise engaged.
Even the hardiest of wandering vines shunned this place. Mottled red-trees, all that would grow here, towered over the fallen columns now and shed their leaves with greater frequency than usual. Some element in the soil pleased them and their leaves were much redder than trees of the same variety which grew elsewhere. Their shade was deep and cool, the air filled with a tantalizing hint of chemicals long ago leeched into the earth, balances that had once veered sharply out of stasis. The soaring walkways between the towers had fallen and lay shattered in the naked dirt, yet an elegance of line remained which called to him.
He tightened his grip on Ninth Translator and dragged her into the ruins' shadow. She averted her head at the sight. The dark green bruise beneath her shattered carapace had spread. She might die after all, as she had claimed. If so, he thought, that would at least be entertaining. They could watch, then have a Feast of Leavetaking of their own.
His brother breeders must be here somewhere, along with the gleaner they had captured. He sniffed the breeze, hoping to come across some hint of their scent. He detected the faint menthol of shellfruit upwind and the spice of a patch of ripening sweetcane, tiny green-furred rank-smelling climbers who made themselves pests at the colony and ate the thatching, and something else, strong and hearty, familiar . . .
A line of tall white figures emerged from behind a fallen column. Their red eyes gleamed in the dimness. They carried deadly weapon sticks in their first-hands and there was a uniformity to them that seemed both right and pleasing. The ones from the cave, the Makers, they had come to this ancient place too! Did they revere it as he and his fellow breeders did?
The largest one cocked its head and spoke. Its forceful voice carried through the stillness. A covey of shrieking scarlet avians burst from cover and flew away. Second Breeder thought he would die of joy. He had understood the words.
The Maker had said, "Sing one note and you will be destroyed."