“Silence. I am even less interested in your hypotheses than I am in your excuses. I agree that your concept was reasonable, but it did not succeed. There is nothing more to be said. The agreement you made was a favor for a favor. You have failed to deliver your favor to us. We shall now fail to deliver ours to you.”
Despite the pain, Macmillan heard the floating, generalized tone in the leader’s voice. “You already have delivered my favor.”
“Have we? Our factotum was overly generous, or careless, then. We shall correct this.”
Macmillan stared at the tall man. “You have no idea what deal I made, do you?” When the man’s decisiveness faltered for one crucial second, Macmillan jumped in. “You’re not even connected to the people who hired me.”
The leader shrugged. “You are relatively insightful, for an Aboriginal. No, I ‘stole’ you from the factors who originally suborned you. But I assure you that the favor was not complete. That is not how we operate.”
“You’re lying. I saw it myself. My daughter was cured of cancer.” The certainty of Macmillan’s words were undercut by the tense, desperate uncertainty in his voice.
“Oh, I’m sure she was cured — for a while. But upon returning to Earth, you would have discovered that without further service to us, she would have sickened again. And so we would own you permanently. This is our way. It has been so for many thous — for a very long time.”
Macmillan tried to lunge at the leader from his hopeless position on the ground; he didn’t even reach the toe of the other man’s boot. “You bastards. You right fucking bastards.”
The leader shouldered his weapon, waved a clone over to him. “For us family is strength. For you, it is a weakness. We recognize family — indeed, all affiliation — for what it is: an enabler of dominion, a path to power. But you confuse family bonds with love, sacrifice, and desperate tears of hope and joy.” He held out his hand for the waiting clone’s Pindad assault rifle, leveled it at Macmillan. “And so you are, inevitably, the architects of your own misguided miseries.”
Macmillan could not physically reach the leader, but now, his spittle did. “I should have killed the sniveling bastard who offered me the deal a year ago.”
The leader stared at the saliva on the leg of his duty suit. “Yes, I suppose you should have.” With strange — inhuman — speed, he raised the Pindad and fired once. A small hole appeared in Macmillan’s forehead; the big man slumped over.
Despite herself, despite the many horrors she had seen in many parts of the world, Dora sucked in her breath sharply at the calm barbarity of the scene just concluded.
The leader paused, chin raising — then turned in her general direction.
She was too well-trained to flinch back; if any part of her was exposed, he was more likely to detect movement than discriminate her shape from the surrounding foliage. She remained frozen, felt sweat run down her back.
The leader turned back to the clones, gave hasty orders: they arranged themselves into an open formation and headed toward the trail that would lead them back to the first clearing.
Back to Caine.
Chapter Fifty. SOUTHERN EXTENTS OF THE THIRD SILVER TOWER and FAR ORBIT BD +02 4076 TWO (“DISPARITY”)
Caine Riordan awakened with a gasp, struggling for air, couldn’t get his lungs to expand enough. Frantic, he grasped about, hitting the two fallen logs on either side with his elbows. And then the sun went away. Alarmed, he looked up.
The water-strider that had entered the glade a minute — an hour? — ago was standing over him, crouching down. Having become accustomed to the creatures during the days of travel down the river, Riordan felt a strange sensation of relief, almost as if a friendly dog had trotted over to check on his well-being. Strange, the bonds we forge—
Then the sun was back; the water-strider had risen abruptly, rotated towards the west side of the clearing. Something was coming from that direction; Caine could hear it too, albeit faintly.
The water-strider spread its legs in a stance Riordan had observed during their occasional dominance tests; a kind of four-legged sumo come-and-get-me posture. Oh Christ, no, you poor beast; you can’t hope to—
The water-strider turned slightly. The two full eyes on its right side, both the one above and below the jaw, gazed steadily at him. The creature emitted a low, mewling grunt — a sound of affection between water-striders — and backed up a step, its rear legs just clearing the far side of the two thick logs between which Riordan was coffined. Then it turned to face the west again.
A babble of voices speaking in a mishmash of English and Javanese-accented behasa grew, then quickly stilled as they entered the clearing. Caine rose up high on one elbow, a broad leaf concealing everything but his eye.
Five clones and one other person had entered the treeless expanse — and the hair on the nape of Riordan’s neck rose: that other person was not a human. Not a terrestrial human; that was a Ktor. The angular features, the build, the strange, almost archaic habits of speech, and above all, the aura of imperious disdain for his soldiers, made his identity as clear as if he had been wearing a sign on his back. But what the hell are you doing out here, with Optigene clones—?
The six spread out into a broad arc, the leader at the center, keeping slightly greater distance from the water-strider. Overhead, Caine could not only smell, but almost feel, a strong release of musk from the creature. Was it fear? Aggression? Dismay?
It peaked when the humans approached to twenty meters. The water-strider swiftly raised its long, graceful back-sails. Suddenly limned in orange bioluminescence, they shuddered as the creature released a long ululating hoot, both from its spine-paralleling respiratory ducts and its steam-shovel mouth. The humans stopped and raised their weapons.
God, no—
The water-strider stamped one wide foot, made to move forward—
The clones unleashed a stream of automatic fire into the body of the creature, which ducked, writhed, bucked — but neither charged nor fled. Nor did it fall; the Pindads, while effective weapons, were not elephant guns. The wounds they were inflicting would no doubt eventually prove mortal, but “eventually” might mean hours or even days.
The Ktor stepped forward, adjusted the Jufeng dustmix battle rifle, raised it, fired a single shot. Riordan knew from the sound what settings he’d chosen: semiautomatic fire, maximum propellant per shot, and expanding warheads.
The water-strider shuddered under the extraordinary impact of that round, which did approximate that of an elephant gun. As the stricken creature tried to right itself, the Ktor fired the Jufeng as steadily as the relentless pulse of a metronome.
After the fifth shot, the swaying water-strider exhaled heavily; its knees unlocked, bent, and the huge body started falling — directly toward Caine.
Who thought, better this way than at the hands of that bastard Ktor. The falling trunk of the water-strider rushed down, growing along with blackness of its widening shadow.
Which swallowed him.
* * *
Jesel checked his weapon after waving two of the clones over to inspect the body of the ungainly beast he had just slain. Perhaps a tooth would make a good trophy? No; there wasn’t the time—
“Leader, the targets must have used this as a staging area. Note their packs.”
“Yes,” Jesel replied but wasn’t really listening. This entire attack had gone miserably awry. There were still at least three or four Aboriginals unaccounted for. At the clearing there were signs that one had run further west. That could have been the one that had crippled Macmillan or a different one. Two of the humans that had skirmished with them during their approach and Pyrrhic assault had been silenced, but their bodies had not been located. There was no way of knowing if other humans had been on hand for what he had to assume was the complete annihilation of Pehthrum’s riverside flanking attack. The only reasonable option was to return to the shuttle and risk nap-of-earth flight to scan for fleeing Aboriginal biosigns. Since they were no longer packed in among Slaasriithi signatures, they could now be hunted down one by one. It might be dangerous to stay that long, but if he returned with so profound a failure to report—