Lassiter said, “Look over there. Something’s happening.”
Our upside-down orientation had lent the Brachiators a deceptive buoyancy. No longer dead weights, clinging to the Uppergrowth as their only defense against a fatal plunge, they now resembled balloons afraid of floating away. The wounded ones bled upward in drips and streams, the larger drops separating into drizzles as they ascended. The two Lassiter had pointed out, and which she now maneuvered us closer to, were well into their fatal combat. Each was marked by a dozen slashing wounds, with the smaller of the pair clinging to a frayed vine with a single arm that was already more wound than intact limb. The big one had jabbed a claw-blade into his enemy’s sole intact shoulder and was sawing it, slowly, ever so slowly, across what remained of the tissue connecting muscle and bone.
It was as close to a hurry as the Brachiators ever got, and my human eyes still insisted on perceiving it as dull, lazy, and drugged.
Lassiter said, “The little one’s going to fall within a few minutes. Poor thing.”
I considered vomiting. The realization that our upside-down orientation would fling it all back in my face made the need more urgent, not less. “Can we save him?”
Lassiter regarded the claws and teeth gouging furrows into flesh. “Getting between those two doesn’t strike me as a good idea.”
“I mean after he falls. Can we hover and give him something to land on?”
Lassiter gave that suggestion the kind of look people reserve for the openly delusional. “Also not a good idea, Counselor. We’re not exactly equipped to offer it medical attention, or a future. And interference of any kind is well beyond the approved scope of our mission here. We could really anger the AIsource.”
“Oh, gee,” I said. “We sure wouldn’t want that.”
“Please, Counselor. I understand your humanitarian impulses…”
“I don’t have humanitarian impulses. But I do need to find out something. Find a way to work it.”
Still she did nothing, instead staring like a woman who expected eye-stalks to sprout from my forehead.
Behind me, the Porrinyards cleared their respective throats, engineering even that noise to come from the empty air between them. “Maureen? In matters involving her investigation, the Counselor has full authority. You have to do what she says.”
Lassiter’s jaw tightened. “Can I just mention, first, that it’s a goddamn stupid order that will accomplish nothing but prolong a sentient creature’s suffering?”
“You just did,” I told her.
She rolled the skimmer again, this time without warning me. The entire world turned upside-down again, the Uppergrowth and sky switching places in less time than my equilibrium would have liked to consider possible. My fear of heights overcame that rational part of me comfortable within the skimmer’s local gravity, and I found myself clutching at my seat, my mouth gaping in soundless, instinctive terror. But the moment passed. The Uppergrowth, now returned to its rightful place as the ceiling of this demented world, hung directly above us again, its strangeness rejuvenated.
The one advantage of Lassiter’s malicious little move was that it once again brought the skimmer’s local gravity in synch with the environment’s. Down was down. So I could vomit over the side without any fear of baptizing myself with breakfast. It was a good thing she’d flipped a 180 and not 360, as by that point I had no choice.
I accepted a water bottle from Skye. “So how are we going to do this?”
Lassiter ascended to within three meters of the struggling Brachiators, positioning the flat cargo platform at the rear beneath the combatant about to surrender to the inevitable. Drops of bright pink blood, leaking from the wounds of both combatants, already specked the flatbed. “I’ll have to get close. An object the size and weight of a Brachiator doesn’t need all that much time in free fall to become a missile capable of knocking us out of its sky.”
“We’re safe at this distance, though?”
Lassiter flashed me a look of utmost contempt. “I wouldn’t agree to this otherwise, with or without your authority. No, the average human male weighs more than the average Brachiator, and showoffs among our people have been known to jump down from higher distances. But we should all scooch as far from that platform as possible. Nobody’s ever had the gall to suggest this before, and I don’t know what’s going to happen when we do.”
All five of us crowded against the forward hull, with the bulky Lassiter taking up more than her fair share of the available room. Godel, Lassiter, and Oscin Porrinyard stood with their backs against the Interface console. Skye and I crouched at their feet, making ourselves as small as possible. Above us, the Brachiator losing his battle for life screamed in what must have been agony and despair—all the more heartbreaking for its failure to express the obvious in human terms. Alien mind or not, we all knew it was thinking what any sentient creature, in its position, would have been thinking. This can’t be happening. Not to me. My life can’t be ending. I don’t want to die.
The soft ripping noises, above us, seemed to go on forever. I have no idea whether the Brachiator sense of time comes close to being as protracted as their fighting style, but would like to think not. I’d prefer to believe they perceived themselves as moving quickly. Otherwise the dying one would have felt every instant of the long minutes between one slash and the next.
Whatever else I could say about the stupidity of Brach warfare, including that it made human warfare look like a sensible endeavor, the losing Brach did have one hell of a will to live.
Then Lassiter said, “There he goes.”
I hadn’t seen anything that distinguished this particular moment from the agonizing wait that preceded it, but she was right. The losing Brach plummeted from the Uppergrowth and dropped the two meters between the site of its final battle and our flatbed, taking the bulk of the impact on its back. It didn’t convulse or roll, as we’d feared. It just lay there, the remains of its arms still reaching out toward the roof of its world.
The Porrinyards gave my shoulders a synchronized squeeze. “One second, Counselor. I want to make sure this is safe first.” They went aft, stood at the back of the passenger compartment looking over the body, then returned, their shared expression grim. “It’s alive, but it won’t be for long. I don’t think we have anything to fear.”
“This is cruel as hell,” Lassiter muttered.
“I don’t see how,” the Porrinyards said. “It’ll be dead in minutes, whatever happens. It will spend that time in pain and terror, whatever happens. We can’t help it, whatever happens. We’ve only arranged for it to spend its last minutes with us, instead of in free fall.”
Lassiter was still resentful. “For all we know, that’s worse.”
“If so we’ll do the humane thing and drop it over the side once Counselor gets what she needs. All the more reason to let her get on with it. Counselor?”
My knees cracked as I stood. Suddenly uncharacteristically hesitant in the face of violent death, despite the many I’d seen in my time, I wasted a second or two flexing my back before leaving the others to join the Brachiator for its last moments.
It lay on its back, all four limbs splayed, its bright pink blood pooled beneath it like a sheet. Its face was striped with deep, oozing gashes, one of which crossed an eye socket now containing an unrecognizable soup that might have been an eye. The other eye, which looked disturbingly human, turned toward me as I approached, widening with what might have been terror or simple incomprehension. The rest of its body, beyond the face, had been ripped open so savagely that some of the unidentifiable organs revealed by the wounds were also open and leaking various fluids. But it was the eye that bothered me, the eye that made me feel a criminal. The Brachiator may have had no idea who I was, but the eye recognized me.