Fire in the Sky

5

The Eolt sang as they swept across the land toward the Bakuhl Sea, great crashing chords of sound that filled the sky and had a practical purpose as well since the air sucked in and expelled drove them even faster toward the killing field of Melitoлh. They flew high and swift, like golden leucocytes in the air veins of the world, swelling with the sunlight. A thousand and a thousand Eolt in the Bйluchar way of saying many beyond counting, filling the sky to the horizon and beyond.

When the flikit rose from the Enclave to join the flight, Eolt began converging on it, like birds mobbing an intruder-until Shadith stood. Hands clutching the top of the windshield, she sang, her voice soaring, yet tiny against the great organ beats of the Eolt. It was enough. They knew her and went back to their single-minded surge toward the water.

Shadith fell back into her seat, reached for the water bottle, sucked greedily at the nipple.

Marvin shivered. “Spooky.” He slapped the accelerod in all the way, and the small dark flikit leaped ahead, racing to catch up with the Eolt, then pass the front ranks of the throng.

Ceam stretched out on the limb, managed to focus the ocular without falling off. He scanned the mesuch fort, looking for anything that would give him a clue about the seethe of activity inside. After the firing of Dordan-that-was and the crippling of the airwagons, Tech and Drudge had been called behind the walls. The crawlers sat empty and dead in the mountains; the Keteng prison was abandoned. Maybe Ilaцrn had pulled off the coup after all. No way of telling. Except…

Three of the guards came trotting along the wall and positioned themselves behind slotted shields beside the gate. A small section of the Gate swung open and four male Drudges stumped out, one in an improvised harness linked to a crude sledge which bumped along behind him. Two guards came with them, clanking in armor, heads enclosed in glass, heavy dark weapons cradled in their arms with the tenderness of men cuddling their first bores.

One of the guards grunted something, Ceam couldn’t make out the word, but the Drudge in the harness dropped to a squat and the other three stood hipshot and shoulders rounded while the guard moved to a large kerre, burned through the trunk with his cutter.

Ceam folded the ocular, eased it down inside his shirt, lay very still, watching the mesuch.

The second guard prowled about, head turning nervously, weapon in his hand. When he heard a rustle as some bitty nose twitcher scurried through the leaves, he spun round, dropped into a crouch and sent a burning beam cutting through the brush. There was a smell of roasted meat and burned hair. He went over, kicked the charred carcass and cursed it, then went back to his prowling.

The cut was so quick and clean, the tree shivered a little, but didn’t fall over until one of the Drudges slammed his fist into it. The guard cut the tree in chunks and the Drudges stacked the chunks on the sledge until they had a tall pile of green, sappy wood.

The other Drudges attached lines to the sledge and with the first leaning into his harness, they dragged the piled wood back to the road and into the mesuch fort.

With a grin that threatened his ears, Ceam wriggled backward along the limb, went dropping down the tree and ran toward the Fen, the bearer of the best news he could imagine. If the mesuch had to use wood for heat and cooking and muscle to drag the sledge, Ilaцrn had done the job. He’d killed the fort.

“Cursed clear day.” Marrin started into a wide circle round the Kushayt. I suppose they’d know we’re here anyway, the flikit screams at scanners.”

Shadith shifted the viewfield of the binocs along the top of the eight-sided wall. “Marrin, at least thirty guards on patrol down there and they’re all armored. Visors shut. What’s going on?”

He looked nervously around. The first Eolt were arriving, moving into a pattern much like his, rising and falling to find the proper windstreams, their membranes pulsing as they fed air through their speaking sphincters and milled in a thickening circle about the kushayt. “Don’t know, but the slaughter is fixing to start, so I’m going down. Shadow, set the stunner on widecast, we won’t get the armored Chave this pass, but the others…”

“Tail on fire, Marrin, remember their reflexes. Let’s go.”

Fast as he could take it, Marrin sent the flikit into a stuttering, twisting pass over the Kushayt, recalling the running tactics he’d learned as a boy to get him away from the near lethal teasing of his older relatives. The moves were ground into his bones and nerves.

As soon as the Chave saw him coming at them, they started shooting; pellets from the heavy duty projectors whined past or grazed the flanks of the flikit, exploding the instant they touched.

Screech of tortured metal. Fingernails on slate-board tearing.

Blams. Ears ringing.

Beams from heavy-duty cutters swept past, easier to avoid, but more lethal if they touched. As the flikit tumbled wildly after an explosion from one of the pellets, half the rear end went to a beam that missed the main lifter by a hair.

Flare. Searing. Heat.

Whine of laboring lifters.

Jolting, torsion, thrown against crashwebs. “Marrin! Get us out of here. It’s not working. Out!” He didn’t bother to answer, just sent the flikit in a wavery sweep toward the trees.

Deafening blast.

Flikit cartwheeling down and down.

Roar of emergency rockets, a gasp of steadier flight, then the flikit was plowing into the trees, crashing, bouncing.

Final jolting stop.

Silence almost painful.

The flikit was upside down and in a steep tilt, the nose crumpled against the trunk of the large tree whose branches were supporting it. Shadith was hanging head down and, due to the tilt, higher than Marrin. She fumbled for the catch on the crash web, swore when her fingers touched hot, twisted composite, swore again when she heard Marrin’s catch open with that crisp bright click of finely machined parts.

Marrin chuckled. “Stuck?” He was clinging to the loosened web so he wouldn’t fall out of the wreck before he was ready to leave it.

“Definitely. You’ll have to cut me loose.” She sighed as she watched him swing his body so he could get a foothold on the side of the flikit and reach the storage bins. She started wriggling around to see if she could find a way to get out of the web without waiting for Marrin and his cutter, but adding her movements to his made the limbs the flikit rested on creak alarmingly and the flikit itself began to wobble so she stopped that.

“Hah. Got it.”

She heard the creak as he started pulling a bin door open.

“Pissssgattt!”

The flikit rocked wildly as he swung back into sight, pushed off again. She heard the clatter and rattle as the bin emptied itself, and the cutters, ropes, mealpacs and other objects hit the limbs below, then the ground.

The quality of the light was starting to change, going a deep amber. The main force of the Eolt had arrived.

Marrin got the second bin open and started throwing things out of it in what sounded like a barely controlled panic. When he was finished, the flikit rocked again as he swung back. He grabbed the web, pushed a cutter through it, then swung away, dropping from limb to limb, using them to slow him a little, but not much. As she pushed the web away from her to get a shot at cutting it, she could hear the pound of his feet as he ran off.

She chuckled. “Not one of your conventional heroes, him.”

By the time she’d cut herself loose and got to the ground, he was not only out of sight, but out of hearing.