Kill them, kill them, kill them. That’s what’s left to do.
liii
Message Alliance HQ to Gehenna Station
Couriered by AS Phoenix
…inform you that pursuant to the agreement worked out in the commercial exchange treaty a limited access will be extended Union observers for several worlds of the Gehenna Reach, specifically to the reserve on Gehenna and the study program there. Gehenna is required and requested to provide such documented personnel access to quarantined areas, specific operations to be approved by the Base Director. Union observers will at all times be accompanied by Bureau personnel.
In the spirit of detente and in pursuit of mutual interests, a reciprocity has been arranged in the opening of Union records…
liv
205 CR, day 114
Cloudside
The morning came up gold and placid as they moved among the trees, beside the river, in the changes calibans had made in the land. Ridges hove up, freshly dug and showing the roots of overturned trees, the hollows between them pocked with seepage from the river, and Elai read the patterns through which they moved, shaped them with her mind.
Jin is this way, they said. So she knew the time they would meet. Ahead lies the alien. We surround you, go beneath you in harmony,
Cloud‑towers‑clustered‑Hillers
well‑ordered toward the
Green‑nest‑aggression
It spiralled off into gilded distances, the wreckage, the patterns building about them for days.
Where? she had tried to ask of Scar last night; but Scar ignored the stones, ignored her, as if he had said it all. When?
They moved when it was time; and calibans knew that time when they saw it, when the Pattern shaped itself, that was all.
Cloud against Styx.
One way against another.
There was logic in it. It had compelled Paeia, brought Taem to her side. Perhaps Weirds on both sides had shaped this confrontation: there were hints of this in the patterns…that Weirds knew no tower‑loyalty.
There was herself; there was Jin.
Two kinds; and calibans brought them both, here, to this place, long‑appointed. She had her spear in hand, her darts slung to her side. Her mates, her rivals were by her, joined with her, like Taem, who had said nothing of why he came, not the deep reasons: only he was there, and the pattern agreed with that, shaping no other way for him to go. They were Cloudside; and the whole Cloudside pattern was being shoved at now.
Not a matter now of driving them off a time. She read that too, the way she read the land. Jin took the high ground, to push. She knew what he would do, and by that what they would do, surely as the sun came up–if flesh was strong enough.
She put forward her spear in the dim dawn, in the quickening of Scar’s pace. There was no time now to order things. She gave a fleeting thought to MaGee and wished that she had had Dain put her somewhere, but MaGee would fare as they all fared, and there was no helping it. Pattern against pattern. The calibans had made MaGee part of it: part of her; that was the way of it. Grays joined them, plowed the earth like the currents of the sea. Their powerful claws found places to probe in the mounds: they dived in earth and surfaced again, hissing and whistling, but the long‑striding browns scrambled across soft ground, four‑footed and stable, bridging the gaps with the reach of their limbs, treading the grays down with grand disdain, in silent haste.
The sun arrived, spread its rays through the ruin of a forest before them, where the trees had been cast down, undermined. They plunged over this, like a living torrent, with hissings and scramblings; but greater were the rocks down by the sea that she had climbed on Scar. Grays, not their own, vacated the Pattern and fled before the browns, through the brush, over the ridges, among trees still standing.
Scar’s collar flashed up. Taem’s brown plunged ahead. The hisses of browns broke like water hitting hot metal.
Her riders surged about her. Whistles split the air; younger calibans took their riders to the fore as they climbed the mounds, refusing the patterns they met now.
Elai clamped her knees taut as they met soft ground where grays were at work and Scar lurched down and up again, past the roots of overthrown trees, past brush that raked harmlessly on her leather‑clad legs.
“Hai!” She caught the fever and shouted with her young men’s cries, with the high‑pitched yelps of the young women as they came down the banks among grays that froze under the browns’ scrabbling claws, confused and immobile. She couched her spear, held her seat, for now other shapes hove up, rider‑bearing calibans, shapes bristling with raised collars, with spears in human hands. Darts flew, struck her leathered arm.
She shouted, not knowing what she yelled, but all at once the fear was gone, every dread was gone. “ Ellai!” she was yelling at the last, which was her mother’s name; and “ Cloud!”
More darts; she shook them off; they struck Scar in vain, useless on his hide. Lesser browns fled Scar’s approach, bearing their riders out of his path. Scar trod others down, mounted over them, clawing their riders heedlessly underfoot, with riders yelling and calibans lurching this way and that through the ruin of trees.
Scar lurched, taxed her weak leg. She held as the earth opened, and grays came up, some calibans losing their riders as they slid into the undermining, and over all the hisses and the screams.
But she knew where she was going. Paeia was beside her, was delayed by one of the Styxsiders so that she lost that guard; but then came a clearing of bodies, a withdrawing except for the rider coming toward her, a caliban larger than the rest.
Jin.
Scar lurched aside, almost unseated her. One of her riders rushed by in the whirl of day and trees and plunging bodies. Her spearshaft cracked hard against another, and Scar bore her out of the path of that attack as another of her riders took it. Taem was out there, Taem’s brown trying Jin’s, circling.
“Scar!” she yelled, her spear tucked again beneath her arm. She drove with her heels, less to Scar’s tough hide than the darts that spattered about them. “Scar!”
Scar moved, shied off as Jin overrode Taem, kept retreating, retreating, disordering their lines.
Jin’s brown scrambled forward, lunged low as Scar shied off, presenting his belly. Elai fought for balance, dug with her heel and rammed the spear at the Styxsider; but Scar was still rising, up and over the collar crest of Jin’s caliban.
The lame leg betrayed her as Scar twisted, as he reared up with the Styxsider in his jaws and the Styxside caliban lunging and clawing at his gut. She hit the ground, winded, tucked low as a tail skimmed her back, melded herself in the gouged earth as it came back again, as the battle rolled over her. She spat mud from her mouth and scrambled for her life as the feet came near, as the rolling mass lashed the ground and calibans raked each other.
She fell again, legs too shaken to bear her weight, used the spear to lever herself up, sorted caliban from caliban in the mass and the one with the throat‑grip had a starlike scar shining on his side. She rammed the spear into the soft spot of the other’s neck, heaved her weight against it, and the mass all came her way: a tail hit her, but she was already going down, half‑senseless as calibans poured over her, to the sharing of the kill.