"Group two, gather up the swoops you’re fighting and hit it from behind," Maze said. "Light talents circle to join them. Second, Squad Three, continue the frontal assault to keep it oriented."
My group paused, then joined up with the Light talent group so they could re-enhance. I saw Lohn’s face – stiff and white-lipped – and realised Mara was one of those who’d been caught by the swoops and injured. When the next order came for him to attack, he did so with a furious anger, putting everything he had into it.
The thing fell – the quickest massive fight so far, but the one with the highest number of injuries I’d seen. Only Grif Regan and Alay from First and Second hadn’t been hurt. Mara was bleeding badly – a swoop had flown right into her, raking and biting and she’d used her arm as a shield against its teeth. Combat Sight apparently doesn’t work very well when you’ve got a massive on one side of you emanating overwhelming threat. And when it had crumpled and pitched over, a lot of the forward group had barely avoided being crushed, and been jolted with agonising pain which had left them all weak and sick and meant that a few of them fell hard because the person levitating them abruptly stopped. Best I can tell it was like instant radiation poisoning – though fortunately something they started recovering from once they’d moved out of range.
Maze was temporarily out of it, but Regan took over command without more than a moment’s pause, getting the Levitation and Telekinesis talents to let their squads down at the nearest edge of the vast stretch of Nurans, and then take the worst of the Setari injured straight up to the Litara.
There were eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine Nurans.
Or, at least, eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-nine Nurans were how many there were when we got them to Pandora and counted them. There might have been more during the fight, but I don’t like to think about that since it really was almost all kids. Only six hundred or so adults. We only got that figure this morning. Coming down from the air, all I could think was what had happened to their parents, and I guess Regan was wondering the same thing since, as soon as three of the Nurans who had been defending the survivors dropped down to join us, he asked: "Are there other groups we need to look for?"
"This is all of Nuri," said the woman who stepped forward to talk. She was basically a female version of Inisar – same hairstyle, same clothes, same upright calm – except absolutely exhausted, and her eyes were red-rimmed. It was the woman who’d been watching my testing session back on Tare. I could tell that because of my weird people sense, and I searched about for Inisar as well, but couldn’t make him out among all the other Nurans and felt rotten, though it turned out that he was there, just badly injured and unconscious.
Regan and the woman quickly got down to practicalities, postponing any explanation of what had happened to Nuri in favour of sorting out the injured and getting them and the youngest kids on board the Diodel and Litara. And bringing down everything the two ships had in the way of supplies, since the kids had been walking for hours in the cold without food or water. They were at least reasonably dressed – Nuri mustn’t have been a shorts and Singlet kind of place – but most of them were dropping from exhaustion.
I don’t know if there was any argument about whether to take the Nurans on to Muina, or to Tare or Kolar instead. Still, even though Muina isn’t exactly set up to look after thousands of orphaned kids, anyone who knew anything of Nuri wouldn’t doubt what planet the Nurans wanted to be on. They’d walked almost the entire way there.
While the Litara and Diodel were being loaded, the captains gathered together with the three Nurans (with an audience of a few hundred more in earshot) and talked over whether to continue the trek through deep-space or wait in the same spot, weighing up the threat posed by the Ddura once they’d reached Muina compared to the almost certain attack by more deep-space Ionoth. It was Taarel who suggested that people be sent to all of the platform towns, to call the Ddura to them. That way they’d be certain no Ddura would be scouting the area around the rift, giving KOTIS a chance to ferry everyone to Pandora by ship.
By the time they’d decided to push on, the Litara was crammed full of children. The Setari who’d been sick after getting too close to the massive had recovered (more or less, they looked pretty grey), and Maze and the lead Nuran, whose name was Korinal, discussed the route, then distributed the Setari squads to each corner of the huge mass of children.
Nuran kids are very quiet and obedient. Or maybe it’s just that they were all dead on their feet, too tired to even cry any more. They ranged from toddlers to nearly my age, with a smattering of adults, and seemed very wary of the Setari and the ships, but didn’t put up any fuss about being taken away. The only other question Maze asked Korinal before the Litara and Diodel started off was whether Kolar, Tare and Muina were likely to be under imminent threat. The short answer was no, which was a huge relief.
The long answer had to wait for another couple of hours, until we had reached and cleared the rift gate, since too much attention and energy had to be given to navigating deep-space’s weirdness, with pauses to fight Ionoth (no more massives fortunately), deal with aether clouds, and untangle snarls of children who had reached the point of dropping in their tracks. Most of the work for the Setari was in preventing drift off the back of the pack, and more than a few of them had to divide their time between fighting and carrying some of the remaining smaller ones.
I had one of those, and a flower, a tiny deep purple daisy, bruised and wilted but still jauntily floral, presented to me with great solemnity by a girl of four or five about twenty minutes after we’d started out. I think it had taken her that long to work her way to the front where I was walking behind Korinal and Maze. She was a very pretty girl, her hair in a long, thick black braid, and her eyes were confident not frightened when she held the flower up to me. After I’d accepted it, she lifted her arms up. A very imperious little creature, the demand to be carried totally clear.
Since she was white with exhaustion, I couldn’t not do it, though my cousins long ago taught me that kids are fun to carry for about five minutes and then they’re wriggly little torture devices. Kaoren looked at me, then past me to two other kids, a curly-haired boy and a short-haired girl both around twelve years old, who were giving me basilisk glares as the girl wrapped her arms around me, sighed once, and fell immediately asleep.
"Your sister?" I asked.
They didn’t answer, instead glancing at each other as if deciding on a way to rescue the girl. I figured that Tarens have a pretty bad rep with Nurans, which is going to make this whole mess even more complex.
Kaoren just said: "It will be easier if you adjust your suit into a harness," and I experimented with this for a while, keeping an eye on the worried reaction of the two twelve year-olds to black suit-goop suddenly oozing over their sister. I was also keeping an eye on Kaoren. Walking through deep-space wasn’t easy on him – I could see that he was having trouble blocking his own Sights while remaining on alert for attack. I managed okay carrying the girl – the harness helped a lot and she slept limply collapsed. Not that I didn’t deposit her in the first dry patch of grass I could find once we were through the rift gate, leaving her to her close-mouthed siblings.
Getting through the gate was a challenge in itself. Third went ahead with all the available Wind talents, who worked up a gale to blow it free of aether while Third searched real-space for predators. But there was just a meadow studded with rocks, and goats, the whole thing slushy with snow melt. It quickly turned to mud as an endless stream of Nurans flooded out across it.