I stayed where I was and waited. Ten minutes later, Festina decided I wasn’t going to follow… so she set a brisk pace heading south. I waited a few more minutes, still watching by remote perception in case she set another ambush. Then I went down the ramp and took the same route south along the Grindstone.
According to navy regs, members of the Outward Fleet can legally disobey orders if there’s no other way to save a sentient being’s life. Sticklers for military discipline growl at the thought, but the League of Peoples cares more about lives than the chain of command.
So did I. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I tried to believe I was acting out of concern for Festina’s welfare and not because the Balrog was imperceptibly steering my thoughts in the direction it wanted me to go.
A sixth sense can come in handy. It let me keep an eye on Festina while I hung back out of sight. It also let me watch the rest of our party, still inside the chemical-laden apartment building. I could see as Tut walked into my assigned rooms (without knocking, of course), whereupon he discovered I was no longer there. He rushed to Festina’s apartment and found she was gone too. Without hesitation, he ran after us — he guessed that we’d left to activate Stage Two, and he knew where we’d be heading.
Tut didn’t try to be quiet: muttering indignantly as he raced in pursuit of Festina and me. Li and Ubatu heard him as he sprinted past their doors. Ubatu, ever the athletic Amazon, gave chase and caught Tut soon after he reached the street. She made short work of wrestling him to the ground — she must have trained in jujitsu or some other grappling art — and with the help of a vicious punishment hold, she forced Tut to tell her what was happening. By then Li had joined them, puffing from the chase but still with plenty of lung power to howl in outrage at being left behind. The diplomats informed Tut he would escort them downriver… and Ubatu crushed Tut’s body into the pavement until he said yes.
Sorry, Tut, I thought as I eyed the mess of scrapes on his flesh and his golden mask. If not for me, Ubatu wouldn’t have been so ruthless… but as long as my body contained a "loa" of prime interest to Ifa-Vodun, Ubatu would do almost anything not to lose touch. She’d already defied navy law to follow me to Muta. How much further would she go?
So Ubatu forced Tut to set out immediately, with an irritable Li tagging along. They didn’t return to their apartments for food, foul-weather gear, or even a compass. They had no Bumbler, no comm, no stun-pistol. Tut surely realized they’d be in trouble once the storm arrived, but maybe he was hoping to escape during the downpour. Till then, he had no chance of outrunning or outfighting the pitiless Ubatu.
Besides, after the way she’d roughed him up, he might have relished the thought of leading her and Li into the countryside, then giving them the slip during a monsoon. Tut wasn’t vindictive by nature, but he had his limits.
So there we were: a parade, with Festina in front, me in the middle, and Tut, Li, and Ubatu bringing up the rear. As Festina might have said, "just fucking wonderful."
My perception kept track of the entire group, though we started more than two kilometers apart. Once Festina left the developed area of the city, she was forced to slow down — following game trails rather than paved roads. I too went slower when I reached the brush, though I had the advantage of automatically knowing which routes were best (shortest, fastest, least obstructed by undergrowth). If I’d wanted, I could have beaten Festina to our destination by taking shortcuts she didn’t know existed… but my goal was not to get there first, it was to protect the others along the way. I simply kept pace with Festina and watched the world for danger.
Tut and the diplomats closed some of the gap between us while they were still in the city and Festina and I had to fight our way through ferns. Once they ran out of road, however, they fell to the same speed as the rest of us. I thought they might slow even further; but Tut had been trained to find routes through thick forest, and Ubatu could clear paths quickly by muscling foliage aside. With such a combination of brain and brawn, they kept making reasonable progress.
Meanwhile, the sky darkened with dusk and clouds: clouds more purple and bruised than any I’d seen before. Just a quirk of Muta’s atmosphere — on alien planets, skies that look like home in sunshine can assume unearthly tints come twilight — but I couldn’t help wonder which clouds were simple water vapor and which were Stage One pretas, riding the storm like dragons.
Certainly, my mental awareness detected pretas within the looming thunderheads. I could sense their fury, frustration, and longing amidst the burgeoning gale, but I didn’t have the delicacy of perception to distinguish one ghost from another. Were there only a few, their particles spread thinly through the mass of cumulonimbus? Or were there hundreds of the ghosts? Thousands? Millions? I could almost believe every tormented spirit on Muta — Fuentes, Greenstriders, Unity, and any others who might have visited over the centuries, only to become trapped in Stage One’s hell — had gathered into a single sky-raging host, stampeding their war chariots overhead.
Tonight a great battle would be fought: a great, ridiculous battle, for we were all on the same side, wanting to end Muta’s pain. But history is full of senseless wars based on out-of-control emotions rather than rational decisions.
Several kilometers to the south, lightning flashed. After a long time, the sound of its thunder rumbled up the river valley… but between the flash and the rumble, rain had begun to fall.
The tree-height ferns did little to shut out rain. Most had vertical fronds, running directly up from the ground like festooned flagpoles. Flagpoles don’t make adequate umbrellas. A few ferns had long stems that curved into horizontal fronds resembling roofs over my head… but either the fronds were made up of many thin leaves and therefore leaked prodigiously, or they were solid enough to act as drainpipes, funneling every drop of rain toward some central point, then dumping it straight down the back of my neck.
The Unity uniform I wore was only partly waterproof, in that maddening way of all nanomesh. The nanites in the fabric were supposed to keep rain out while simultaneously drawing off sweat from my skin so I wouldn’t stew in my own juices. (Pushing through untamed wilderness is hard hot work.) Most nanomeshes keep you comfortably dry for fifteen minutes of downpour, after which the mathematics of chaos begins to take its toll. Some random excess of moisture accumulates in the crook of your elbow, or your armpit, or under your breasts, surpassing manageable tolerances. You feel a brief hot wetness, disturbingly reminiscent of bleeding; then the fabric dispatches reinforcement nanites to correct the problem, and the wetness goes away. (Just as disturbingly.) But shifting nanites to the trouble spot thins out nanite concentrations everywhere else… so soon there’s another ooze of moisture in some other area where rain and sweat abound. More nanite emergency crews are dispatched; more thinning occurs elsewhere; and the vicious circle spirals upward. Soon, transient seepage ambushes you every few steps, always somewhere new and unexpected; most of the time with the warmth of sweat but occasionally with the unkindly chill of a late-autumn torrent… and all the erratic "now you’re wet/now you’re not" water torture would be enough to drive you frantic if not for a more overwhelming concern: the uniform doesn’t cover your head, leaving your hair, face, and neck so utterly soaked that gushes of dampness elsewhere seem like trivial annoyances.