"Were there large stones in their depths?" Taarel asked. "Dark green, smooth, perhaps two persons' height in diameter?"
"The shield generators," Korinal said, exchanging a glance with her two fellow sword-wielders.
"The Cruzatch use the stones as gates," Taarel explained. "We have found two on Muina thus far, and do not know whether the Cruzatch were involved in their origin, or merely take advantage of them."
Korinal, after a long moment, simply went on with her story. She doesn’t seem to be a type who likes to speculate.
"A swarm warning was called this morning in First Home, our oldest and largest city, during the preparations for the yearly March of Dawn. We oversaw – our first duty is to protect the evacuees into the shelters, and then we hunt, clearing all the Dazenti. But Timon, one of our own, he–" She paused. "I will hope he was under a Command. I prefer that to thinking he betrayed us. He lured us into the smallest of the shelters, claimed it was breached. And sealed it."
She let out her breath, as if she had passed some hurdle she had dreaded. "It is not possible to teleport through the shield, and we could not reach the generator. But then there was Inisar. He was burnt, starved. Filthy. But he was outside the shield, able to activate the release we use when the swarms are over. He ordered us to open all the shelters, to get everyone as far as possible away from them. He said they were a trap.
"We had barely begun – only a handful of shelters were open when we found the releases wouldn’t respond. There was a rising, overwhelming, sense of danger, and we concentrated on racing those in the open shelters to the surface."
"And then the end," said one of the other Nurans. "The death of Nuri." He was speaking in his own dialect, but it wasn’t too hard to work out.
"The shelters exploded," Korinal continued, her voice thin. "All who were in them – there could be no hope. But it did not stop there. The sense of danger only increased, and the explosions did not cease. Stronger, deeper. We could see the far reaches of the city…vanish, dropping downward. The rift was the only place to go, and only those from the nearest of the shelters had any hope of reaching it. We sent them running, carried who we could. The ground began to open – we lost hundreds within a stone’s throw of the rift – they were still pouring through and I was one of those just within trying to keep the movement flowing when it all – when – no more came through."
Someone was crying, down below, and luckily a new ship arrived to distract us all from thinking about what happened on the far side of Nuri’s rift gate, to all those running people. I’ve never been so close to so much loss, and felt inadequate and overwhelmed, and was glad when Maze only asked a few more questions after the ship was loaded.
The explanation for most of the survivors being kids turned out to be the ceremony I’d seen at Kalasa. It’s called the March of Dawn, where all the children of the city carry flowers to symbolise the new year’s blessing. The Nurans hold a form of the ceremony on the anniversary of their arrival on Nuri, and they’d just been preparing to march when they’d been sent to the shelters. Korinal didn’t know if the timing was deliberate, or if there’d been any purpose in having all the children gathered in one place.
I keep picturing a trail of crushed flowers through deep-space.
When the captains had run out of immediate questions for Korinal, I asked Kaoren to take me to find Lohn, who I felt a great need to hug. Mara had been treated in plenty of time, but the wounds were deep and her arm’s badly broken and if she’d been a fraction slower the swoop would have had her neck.
Lohn was so upset. Everyone is, shocked and jumpy and made small by an event so large, but Lohn’s fear for Mara was something I felt more equal to approaching. He didn’t say much at all, but he half broke my ribs squeezing me back, and Kaoren and I stayed with him being perimeter patrol as ship after ship came and left, until the Litara finally returned from Pandora to gather up everyone who remained. I was tired out by then, and dozed off sitting beside my favourite seat in the packed common room where most of the Setari had gathered, only to be woken by my flower-giver climbing into my lap.
She latched her arms around my neck, and it was the weirdest sensation because she was shaking as she hid her face against my throat. Not sure if she’d had a nightmare, or was just reacting to the day’s horrors, I looked about for her two shadows and found them coming into the common room. That gave me another strange jolt, because the pair – who had been so silently possessive of the younger child and spent most of the walk through deep-space glaring at me when they thought I wasn’t looking – were barely recognisable. Eyes down, faces blank, hands and shoulders held so that – it’s hard to describe it – like they were trying to be completely nothing.
They were followed by a boy a year or two their elder, half-heartedly herding them and looking like he wished he was anywhere else. And bringing up the rear, one of the adult Nurans, a plumply pretty woman who looked about anxiously, then said something sharp and soft to the two kids in front.
I was on my feet so quickly I might as well have levitated, despite the not-inconsiderable weight latched around my neck. In another second I might well have teleported across the room. I never thought the way someone was standing could have such an effect on me.
Fortunately the woman spotted me, took one look, and simply turned and walked away, quickly followed by the unhappy older boy. And the younger boy and girl became people again, heads coming up, shoulders straightening. They didn’t exactly look pleased to see me holding the younger girl, but they picked their way across the room without hesitation, and my new neck ornament let go and clutched them instead.
Kaoren, and the conscious parts of First and Fourth, had watched this mini-drama in silence, and shifted so the little trio had a corner to tuck themselves in, where they promptly pretended to be asleep. But the interface means you can always talk about someone right in front of them, with no worries about them overhearing.
"Pandora is about to become extremely…complicated," Lohn said, in the channel we made.
"There is a great deal we do not know about Nuri," Maze agreed, and added to me: "We’ll flag this trio for a higher level of monitoring. Although–" He paused, then said to Lohn. "Complicated is an understatement. It was a struggle to get Kolar to accept the interface. Nuri…traumatised Nuran children…that’s not an issue we can force."
KOTIS' well-oiled colonisation plan has gone out the window. "Was that woman related to them?" I asked Kaoren.
"I don’t believe so," Kaoren said. "Since we are likely to be hosting most of this last ship-load in the Setari facilities, we’ll have a day or more to establish some form of oversight, even without the interface."
He was right about that. There weren’t nearly enough completed buildings at Pandora to house over eight thousand Nurans, even squeezed in together, and all the Setari ended up with guests on their couches. Given KOTIS' usual efficiency, it’ll only be a day or so before they bring in fittings for some of the scads of windowless buildings waiting to be completed.
The language barrier isn’t too bad. None of the flower girl’s trio has said a word to us – or to each other that I’ve heard – but they follow instructions quickly enough to show that they’re catching the meaning when we speak Taren. While Kaoren was fetching food, I showed them all how to use the bathroom, and Kaoren and I gave them (terribly oversized) clothes to change into and after they’d eaten settled them on our couch for the night. Three of eight thousand orphans.