He woke up in a cold sweat. It was not quite dawn, and there was a thick fog all around them that made seeing nearly impossible and soaked everything and everybody right through.
Unable to see much of anything, even in the predawn light, he used his other senses and was glad that he wasn’t on sentry duty right then.
His hearing could place those nearest him fairly easily, and because the Family tended to make camp in the same pattern each time no matter what the lay of the land, it was also easy to find his way through, using hearing and smell to avoid walking into things or over people.
He was heading for a specific spot just outside of camp and downwind, and he had even less trouble finding that place by smell. One of the last jobs that some were assigned to do before camp was broken was to bury the pit so that no one could smell it and begin to map out camp locations.
He took his acute senses of smell and hearing for granted, and just about everybody his age did as well, but he knew that the older people did not share the abilities, at least not to the degree his age peers took them for granted. Father Alex in particular would be helpless in this soup, even to make it to piss or crap on his own. The heightened senses had not escaped his notice, either; he had wondered for some time if it was being born and raised in this new element, or just age, or if, in fact, this newly remade world was changing the people who lived in it into something slightly, subtly, different.
Littlefeet’s parents could do it, although not quite to the same degree, and the same could be said of their parents. There were also other survival senses that seemed to be emerging. Many, although not all, of the younger generation seemed to be able to sense the direction and location of the demons when they moved through the air or came near. The lines that Littlefeet said he could see from the mountain heights some professed to see even at ground level, particularly in the darkness. Some seemed to be able to see almost through the tall grasses, as if they could see or sense the heat of human bodies.
Most mutations in the past had been harmful or disfiguring; few had ever seemed really beneficial. Maybe, just maybe, humans were adapting to a new set of conditions to ensure survival after all.
Littlefeet could feel the demons still, even in his awakened state. They, or at least one or more, were not that far away; they were up somewhere in the air. They didn’t seem to be hunting for the camp or even particularly aware of or interested in it, but it was unnerving to have them so close.
If he remembered right, they were somewhere across the river, but what was a river to the Princes of the Air?
There was also something—else. He had no other way to describe it, even in his own thoughts. Later, as the rising sun burned off the fog, they hurried to feed everyone and get everything ready to move out. The warriors were all unnerved by the closeness of the demons the night before. He talked of his new sensation with the other young men. Some had felt it as well; others had no idea what he was talking about.
It was something different. Not demons, but coming from a direction where only demons could possibly be. Those who’d felt it had never felt its like before, and could not explain it, but the sensations of something, somebody new, something present and not of this world, had come from above, from the air, and had faded with the setting of the smaller moon.
TWELVE
Hector
“Get Mister Harker a dressing gown, please,” Madame Sotoropolis instructed. The automated systems built into the Odysseus immediately complied, with a small hook running in a track along the ceiling carrying a dark blue gown.
“Thanks for something,” the Navy man grumbled, taking it and putting it on, then tying it off. “You’ll see to my suit?”
“Wouldn’t want to touch it with a five-meter pole,” she responded. “Colonel N’Gana has warned us that such things are not to be trifled with.”
He found some sandals and slipped them on, then emerged from the bathroom of the small suite he now occupied. “Now, you want to tell me when you knew I was there?”
“Well, as I understand, Admiral Krill suspected that someone like you would be there, and this Dutchman confirmed it, that’s all. I must admit I was a bit surprised to find that it was you, even though I am delighted to see you here! We can use someone like you, I suspect.”
He stared at her, all shrouded but still animated, and frowned. “You knew the Navy would send somebody. You deliberately baited me with all those queries for the Dutchman.”
“Let us just say that several of us thought it better to have someone official along. Someone who could give the Navy a pretext to act if need be, or call them off. Like it or not, Mister Harker, you are now the official representative of The Confederacy’s Navy on this trip.”
“Maybe I don’t choose to be.”
“Too late. You already volunteered. Now, come this way, please. I think that you should be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”
He followed her, still feeling uncomfortable and highly vulnerable but mostly crushed by the idea that his act of bravery was so, well, useless.
“Why didn’t you just request a liaison?” he grumbled.
“Why, dear, you know they would have either ignored us or sent the wrong person. Someone either no good in a fight or only good in a fight, perhaps. But someone who had the nerve to do what you just did—now that is the kind of person we can trust. You may be the best of the lot here, Mister Harker, and we don’t even have to pay you!”
He had a lot of questions; he had nothing but questions at this stage. All that for nothing. And the Dutchman was here and had known he was there. That meant that the Dutchman, or his henchmen, had been there on the base and in the bar all along. And if he knew that, did he also know the codes and signals Harker could use in a pinch? He wondered.
Juanita Krill was taller than he’d thought from the videos and, if anything, thinner. He doubted if she could do much heavy lifting or carrying, but, then, she didn’t have to. She marketed that first-rate brain of hers that could solve all sorts of wonderful ciphers when mated with her specially designed code-breaking and security computers.
She looked up at him from a console, then went back to the screen once again. Her short-cropped wig sat on a small form on the deck. By moving just a bit behind her, he saw that she had a cyberprobe inserted in the slot in the back of her skull. It gave off a low pulsing yellow light, not because it needed the light but because others had to know when it was active in case something went wrong. On the other side of her, on the deck opposite the wig stand, was a simple one-meter-square cube with a handle on it. It, too, was pulsing in rapid time, mirroring the smaller transceiver in her skull.
The fact that she was doing complex analysis inside the computer didn’t seem to interfere with her ability to hold a normal conversation, which was probably the most impressive thing of all. He’d seen people who did computer interfacing on this level who were comatose not only while they were doing it but also for days afterward.
“Come, come, Mister Harker,” she said. “You should know you would never make heads or tails of what you are seeing. I’ll tell you what it is, though, and it is quite disturbing, some of it. It’s the output of the mind of a man who knew he was probably going to die any minute. Fortunately, whoever was stalking him did not get him until he was through. I have experienced a violent death in this manner before and it takes a great deal of work to get it out of your head.”