Mestido turned to look over the ravine, motioning with his hand. “A flying craft. It was like a ball and it glowed with light, the whole thing. It hovered above the ravine, lights flashing all over it. Then they came out and—”
“They?”
“The aliens. They looked like gigantic green bugs, but that’s just their native form; they can take any shape they want. They had weapons and they took me into the ship and—”
The report of the gun rang out in the ravine, echoing down and back, muffled by the brush.
Mestido dropped to his knees. The brambles hooked on to the flesh of his face, caught in his hair. Dark, runny blood streamed from the back of his shirt. He fell forward, dead. The brambles didn’t allow him to reach the ground but held him up at an angle, allowing the blood to pour down his back, making a tunnel to the ground over his right hip.
The gun was still outstretched in Pol’s hand as the bugs began to gather at the sticky feast. He stared.
Fool. Stupid, scarping, brain-damaged fool.
“Kalim N2!” The voice came from above, like the voice of God.
Pol operated on instinct, diving into the brambles just as a shot whizzed by. He pulled himself a few difficult feet through the cover, and only when he was sure he was no longer visible did he allow himself to look up.
There was no one at the lip of the ravine. They—or just he; Pol was not yet sure—would be standing back, would not present themselves as a target for his gun.
“I know who you are,” Gyde’s voice drifted down.
Pol wanted to laugh. Even he did not know that.
“The state wants you alive! They want to question you. I doubt anyone has ever dared what you have dared. Killing a Silver. Taking his identity. That is bad, Kalim. Very, very bad.”
Pol was lying as flat as he could in the brambles, ignoring the thorny pain. He found that he was not surprised or angry or afraid. This moment had been coming for a long time. Still, the gun shook with the tremor in his hand. He felt… profoundly sad. He wanted to say to Gyde, You don’t understand. They did something to my scarping brain. But the man at the top of the ravine was not his friend.
“However, I will grant you a mercy since you were my partner. If you come out to me now and surrender your weapon I will give you a clean and swift death right here, right now. Think about it, Kalim. Think hard.”
He did. He lay on the frozen ground, shivering. His mind was that of a soldier, whatever his rank or class, and he understood his options. Gyde’s mistake had been saying his name. Perhaps Gyde had not been 100 percent sure. Perhaps he had wanted that raised head, that moment of shocked recognition, as final confirmation before shooting Pol dead. Instead, the name had served as warning and Gyde had missed his shot. Now Pol had the opportunity to work his way to the top through the brambles and attempt to trick and overpower Gyde. He was fairly certain Gyde was alone. He would not have offered the “mercy” if he were not alone. Gyde was alone because he wanted all the merits for Pol’s capture. Pol’s odds of taking him were fifty-fifty. But he did not want to even try.
Father. A voice in Pol’s head made the plea. He dismissed it cynically. The man at the top of the ravine was not that, either.
Pol’s fingers were stiff as he began removing his uniform. It was snagged in the fibrous spines all around him, making the job more difficult.
“Don’t make me come after you.” Gyde’s voice glittered, dangerous, like his eyes.
Now Gyde would either call backup or work his way into the ravine and attempt the capture alone. Whether he called for backup probably depended on just how many merits he needed to achieve his goal. Pol thought he didn’t need many.
The brambles were already working at the skin of his arms and back as Pol raised his hips to pull off his pants. He left the boots on. Their surface would not attract the thorns and they would protect his feet. Last, he removed the woolen undergarment of the Silvers.
“You have a few minutes left, Pol. This is your final chance to surrender. If you do not, I would advise you to use that gun on yourself before they bring you up.”
Pol, naked, his clothes discarded on the ground behind him, began worming his way through the brush, heading down, down to the bottom of the ravine.
Gyde understood all the options, too.
“Pol.” His voice was softer now. “Do your old classmate a favor and surrender. I told you—a quick death. If you’re thinking about escaping, forget it. Even if you did, you would be hunted. You cannot live without a name; you know that. You can’t buy food or anything else. And if you’re caught on the streets you’ll be shot. Surrender to me.”
Pol’s flesh moved through the brambles more readily than the cloth of his uniform. Still, hooks caught and tiny pieces of him ripped out—here, there—as he moved on his belly over the frozen earth. The pain was stinging, worsening as his own sweat salted the wounds. But the pain inside him overshadowed it like a guillotine over a switchblade.
The brackish, polluted water of the stream came into view.
His hands and arms were in front of him, crawling. At the water’s edge he stopped and stared at those bleeding arms, hands. What a tableau they made with the icy ground and filthy water.
“Pol.” Gyde’s voice a caress.
Pol slipped into the water and let it take him away.
20.5. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott
Jill managed to get Cargha to take her to the spaceport in the air car. He had relatively little tolerance for pleading. The tarmac was hot and bright with a mid-sky sun when they landed, and Nate was a tiny figure next to the scale of the ship. He was lying just under its monstrous red-lacquered belly. He wasn’t moving.
Jill ran to him, somehow managing to reach him despite the fact that she could hardly breathe. His white T-shirt was burned away over his stomach and underneath was a black-and-red wound about the diameter of a grapefruit, centered in the soft flesh of his belly.
His face was still and utterly white. His long black lashes, two crescents sweetly resting on his cheeks, cut her heart neatly in two.
She dropped to her knees, next to his body, and had the distinct realization that her life was over, that some vital part of herself, one that was far more interesting and important and wonderful than any other part of her, had just been shut down forever. A feeling of pressure, intense and painful and suffocating, built and built inside her. Then she sucked in a gigantic gasp of air and expelled it with a choked wail that turned into racking, heaving sobs. The sobs shook her entire frame, each one coming out so hard, and so fast, that it pushed out the one in front of it violently, like an army of warriors leaving the womb.
Her fingers clutched blindly at his ruined shirt. She could not see for the tears, could not hear for the wails coming out of her mouth. Something had finally broken inside Jill Talcott, and she felt emotion now all right; she felt it all. Too late.
Or maybe not. Someone was touching her arm, some cold—but living—hand, a human hand, Nate.
She tried furiously to clear her eyes. Through veils of salt water and swollen lids, she saw him looking up at her—pale and obviously in pain, but alive all the same and even looking rather amazed at her display.
“Jill. Shhhh. It’s okay.”
She stared at his bloodied stomach in surprise and began ripping back the T-shirt fabric. The laser wound was ugly and wide, but it was not all that deep. She could see what looked like cauterized skin and even muscle. It was a terrible wound, but it was possible that it hadn’t penetrated to his internal organs. He might live.
Cargha was standing beside her, watching her with the absorbed, faintly repulsed expression of a scientist studying the mating rituals of weird bugs.
“Point-oh-five-seven millimeters,” he said. “That’s the depth required to kill a zerdot. This cannot be construed as a failure, because it must be statistically impossible that zerdots would mutate within the next two-point-two million years to the point where…”