Qualea Drop (The Spiral Wars #7), page 55
Ships were never supposed to be this close in combat zones, but everyone felt safe now. The reeh were gone, for the moment at least, and crews were repairing and rearming in case they came back before the evacuation was finished. Far down below his feet, Skah could see a vast expanse of white as they passed over one of Rando's poles. The polar orbit meant they'd be closer at all times to any attack that came in. The transports hadn't been able to use this orbit during the evacuation because it messed up everyone's rendezvous trajectories, and because unarmed transports liked having one part of their orbit hidden from attacking ships. Plus of course few corbi lived at the poles, and so a large part of that orbit was wasted. But Skah thought this pole looked amazing, a huge expanse of ice and cloud nearly a thousand kilometres away. Only warships used this orbit. It was much better to be a warship, he thought, than a transport. Transports couldn't shoot back. And he remembered what Styx had told him about violence, and how it wasn't all bad. Certainly these two ships had saved an awful lot of corbi. Everyone said the evacuation would have certainly failed without them.
His harness lead yanked against Hiro's suit. "Come on Skah, you can sightsee later," Hiro admonished him. "The window's short, we don't have much time."
Lisbeth hadn't wanted him to come, but Skah had been working so much with Coroset's crew during the fight that they'd almost come to treat him like one of the regulars. And as Hiro had pointed out, regular crew were expected to be able to use their EVA suits in case of emergencies. Skah knew it all in theory, but hadn't yet had the practise -- a practise that would make him more safe, not less.
The two parren spacers with them were Gorin and Meluku, both systems techs now assisting with Coroset's overdue repairs. Coroset could fabricate a lot of the required parts herself, but being drysine, Amity could make better. Coroset crew had been placing orders from Amity's offered inventories, and finding some stuff they had no idea about, but a lot that they did, and would be useful in fixing Coroset.
Approaching Amity was a very strange thing. She didn't look like a regular spaceship. There was no rotating crew cylinder within the main hull cage, just a single hull within reinforced ribs that bristled with attachments. Skah looked the attachments over, and tried to guess what each of them was for. Rail guns were simple enough. Dish and transmitter units looked very strange, but still guessable. A lot of the other stuff, he had no idea. Drysines crawled on Amity's hull, like ants over dropped food, and damaged portions sparkled with new welds.
Skah watched his visor indicators as they approached the opening. On a human or parren ship the only airlocks would be in Midships, but Amity didn't really have a Midships, just a narrowing at the waist where the enormous engines joined to the rest of the ship. As they drew closer, he saw that the large hatchway wasn't actually an airlock either -- drysine drones went in or out like ants from their hole, and left the ship's interior exposed to vacuum. Sometimes Amity would use air as an insulator, Liala had told him, or to put out fires, or some other technical reason. But drysines needed no air to breathe, didn't get sick from too much solar radiation, and wouldn't waste away without gravity. They seemed so much more suited to life in space than any organic race. No wonder they sometimes thought themselves better than everyone else.
"Watch the entrance in case anyone else comes out," Hiro warned as they drew close, firing his hand thruster to slow down.
"They won't," Skah said confidently. "Hi Liala, we're here!"
"Hello Skah, please come inside," came Liala's voice. "I'll show you the way on your helmet display. Please be careful, not everything on a drysine warship is designed with organic safety in mind."
"Yeah, like it doesn't have any friggin' air," Hiro emphasised, catching the hatch rim as it arrived. "So don't puncture your suit, kid."
"The suit can stop bullets," Skah retorted, pulling himself inside with greater ease than Hiro. Given they were talking on coms, he was speaking Gharkhan, the translation of which scarcely sounded worse than English on helmet speakers.
"Small bullets," Hiro corrected. "You guys are waiting here for your delivery?" Talking to Gorin and Meluku, Skah saw as he waited impatiently.
"The drysines said to meet them here," came the parren reply. "Juli and Stirastan will attend to your return journey."
"Great, thank you... no, Skah, don't remove the lead."
"It's not safe," Skah told him firmly, disconnecting the hook from his harness. "You join two people together in zero-G, we pull against each other, some drone bangs into us, we get all tangled up. Come on."
He hooked the thruster onto his harness, because all true spacers used their hands rather than thrusters whenever they could, and pulled himself up the corridor.
Like all places designed for zero-G, the corridor had no floors, walls or ceiling, just irregular bends, connections to other corridors that looked more like tunnels as they burrowed through the ship, and lots of exposed pipes and crazy-looking high-tech things that Skah had no idea about.
Drones made way for them in the corridor, watching with curious, darting sensor-eyes. Liala would have told them to do that, Skah knew. Despite the incredible strangeness of the place, he did not feel scared. Liala had kept everyone on Coroset safe all through the evacuation so far, and that would not change now.
Skah followed the clear, lighted indications on his helmet visor that made each corner or change of direction glow as he looked at it. After just five minutes of pulling along the walls, becoming increasingly certain that he couldn't find his way out again on his own, he came to a large, spherical room. At the room's precise center was a kind of frame, like a spherical cage, attached to the walls at many points. Within the cage was Liala, her steel body supported, her many legs free to manipulate a surrounding array of holographic displays that glowed with many colours. It looked to Skah as though she were suspended within a ball of light.
"Wow!" said Skah, pushing off the wall toward her. "That looks amazing, Liala!"
"Hello Skah. I redesigned much of my control cockpit myself." Her large head, with twin mismatched eyes, swivelled to regard him, aglow with many reflections from the controls. "Hello Hiro."
"Hi Liala." As Hiro floated over to join Skah. "Nice setup. Why all these visual cues? Don't AIs usually do everything by VR?"
"I have been experimenting," said Liala. Skah stared at all the lights, which made a crazy laser display as they reflected on his visor. Stray beams went all around the room. "Drysines are often less proficient than humans or parren at three-dimensional visual perception. We get addicted to virtual worlds, and are less able to process the real one. I am attempting to redesign my own interactive control systems to prevent the addiction."
Skah reached with one gloved finger toward a glowing beam of light past Liala's head. The glove broke the beam, which abruptly changed from green to red.
"You just launched a missile," the drysine told him. Skah stared at her. "I'm joking."
Skah laughed. "You can't launch a missile by touching a light! And you wouldn't let me do that anyway!"
"Expecting that other people will make the world safe for you is a bad habit to get into, Skah," she told him.
"Now you sound like Styx."
"Surely me sounding like Styx is not surprising?" She sounded almost amused, as though she were pleased to see him, and teasing him. "Here, I have something to show you both. I thought it would be interesting to get an organic reaction before I started using it properly."
From an adjoining tunnel entrance, a new drone appeared. Only this was no regular drone. It had a lean, sinewy body, built for agility. So smoothly it moved, there appeared nothing of 'machine' about it, as it glided along one anchor-frame for the command cockpit toward them. Four multi-segmented, synthetic tentacles emerged from its back, grasping at holds in a way that made the main legs somewhat redundant. The creature's neck was long, but the place where a head would be, protected by a wide, armoured carapace, was empty.
"Holy shit," Hiro murmured. "A queen chassis?"
"Cool!" Skah exclaimed, with awe. "Pretty scary, but cool too. Why do you want to change bodies, Liala?"
"The sensory apparatus of this body are limited. It is a combat designation, and not suited for command and control. Also, mobility is limited, as is its ability to interact with its environment."
Hiro pulled himself to drift closer, looking over the new body as it secured itself alongside. "How fast is it?"
One of those tentacle-arms lashed at him, and Hiro made a defensive flinch. The tentacle-point tapped him once on the stomach, then again on his back, then withdrew. "Faster than you," said Liala.
"Yeah... you do realise that this thing's even scarier-looking than Styx?" said Hiro. "The organic beings you need to impress and gain the trust of will wet themselves when they see this."
"I am the commander of parren-aligned drysine forces," Liala replied. "Parren don't wet themselves, House Harmony parren least of all. And besides, a little fear can be useful."
"Liala's a great warrior now, Hiro," Skah reminded him, floating around to examine the deadly chassis from a new angle. "She won this evacuation by herself."
"Many brave organics did far more than I, Skah."
"As a commander, I mean. Any other commander would have lost. Other than Styx, anyway."
"That's probably true."
"So you need to look like a great warrior. I like it." Given some recent events, he'd come to doubt whether being a great warrior was all some made it out to be. But now he'd seen great warriors save the entire corbi race. And Liala had led them, not with bravado and shouting, but with calculation, patience and reason. Being a warrior, then, was more than just one thing. The best warriors, like Liala, Styx, Captain Debogande and Major Thakur, were far more than just brave and dangerous.
"I'm glad you like it," said Liala. "In some things, the opinions of young boys are quite reliable."
"So what happens now?" Hiro asked her.
"The evacuation will be completed," said Liala. "Sometime soon, I am sure, we will hear whether Gesul feels that Lisbeth's involvement of the Coroset and Amity in this evacuation was truly in his interests or not."
"And if he judges not?"
"Then Lisbeth could be in significant danger. Her move in coming here was kind-hearted, but reckless. She has involved the Parren Empire in foreign affairs that many would rather avoid."
"It's all unavoidable," Hiro said firmly. "They should wake up to it."
"That will certainly be my message to them, Hiro. But Gesul commands only one of the five parren houses directly. My predictive ability expands daily, but this prediction lies well beyond my abilities."
Jindi stood in thigh-deep water, pants rolled up, eyes scanning the surface of the lake for telltale flashes of silver. He held a makeshift spear in one hand, a steel pole from a tent with salvaged wire bound about its end, twisted to make a three-pronged tip. There were fish in this lake, plus something like eels, and some flat, bottom-feeding things he hadn't figured a way to catch yet, but had seen in the improvised mask he'd fashioned using a tin can with its bottom replaced by clear plastic. The fish at least had tasted good, and the planet's network had told him were not unsafe to eat.
Sunlight made shafts through low cloud, broken about the peaks of nearby, tree-covered hills. The sun was yellower than he was accustomed, and smaller. At night, there was just one moon casting a single shadow. The wind from the east was colder than he'd known, though he knew there had been places on Rando where that had been true as well, just that he'd not lived in them. He wore a rough jacket, one of the millions of surplus items collected from families about croma space, donations of children's clothes that might fit their new guests on His'do. It shielded him from the chill wind that lightly skimmed the lake surface, a spread of chasing ripples.
A flash of silver caught his eye, and he lashed with the spear. It flew short with a splash, and Jindi ran and grabbed it. Upon its end was a flapping fish -- echi'do, the network had told him the species was. He waded back to the shoreline, a narrow beach of black sand against the reeds and stunted, lakeside trees, with paper-like bark that peeled in sheets. Melu was there with Iska and Cherit, washing a great pile of collected clothes in various plastic containers they'd collected, talking as they worked, and the other women's three small children played nearby.
The children came running now to see Jindi with his fish, and cringed as he killed it swiftly with his knife, then put it in the bucket of water with the two others he'd speared. Melu looked up and smiled as she worked. The wrapping on her head was new, an automated doctor in the improvised medical clinic had healed the light skull fracture, and cleared her of any further damage while dosing with corbi-approved micros to improve her bloodwork. A further treatment was promised to work on her underlying neural issues, leftovers from her time in the Splicer, but given the waiting times, that would not be soon.
Jindi smiled, and waded back into the water. It felt good to be useful once more, in a way that did not involve sitting and telling people what to do. To the best of his memory, he was still only forty-five years old, and it was far too early for him to take on the village elder role that many of the township wanted him to. They pestered him now with this issue and that, things they wanted him to discuss with the croma, and he came out here with his spear to escape. The fish did not seem well evolved to avoid spearing, and it was a relief to simply be outside for a while.
Upon the lake's far shore, another settlement spread, a mass of multi-coloured tents upon what had once been undisturbed grassland dotted with a few trees. From near and far came the sound of earthmovers carving new roads, electric generators and water pumps. The lake was not actually a lake, but rather a large lagoon in a river that ran through this valley between hills, and the supply of fresh water had proven an attractive settlement site for all its length. Now came the work to stop a few hundred thousand corbi's waste water from polluting it entirely, and from local croma groups came concern at the enormous impact on the local environment.
Out of sight along the lakeside, there came the shrill howl of a shuttle taking off. The last Rando evacuees had stopped arriving several days ago. Word was that something like eighty percent had come, though how they'd arrived at that when the actual population of Rando had been just guesswork, Jindi didn't know. So many forests on Rando, and so many corbi good at hiding from aerial surveillance. Surely there were more left there than the croma knew.
Jindi wondered what would happen to them, and thought it probably nothing good. Yet still, plenty of corbi here were complaining that they shouldn't have left. His'do was different from Rando -- roughly the same gravity, similar air. Faster-than-light technology had had that way in all settled space, he gathered, of making rare living worlds relatively simple to access, so easy were the majority of uninhabitable worlds to bypass. But even the warmer regions of His'do were not as warm as Rando. It rained more here, the nights were darker, and as dangerous as Rando's settlements had been, they were familiar in a way that now, in hindsight, seemed charming.
Life there had not been crowds of tents and water from plastic containers. Food had not been prepackaged, and had generally been cooked on wood fires, something the environmental regulations here prohibited lest all the local forest cover disappear. Croma preparations had included millions of simple gas burners, the lights from which now made the tent cities glow at night like so many stars in the sky. When it rained, the paths between the tents turned to mud, and the same restrictions that prevented people from burning firewood also prevented them from building wooden huts to save themselves from the tyranny of the tents.
Jindi had found himself elected to the representative council of the settlements about this lake, which had in turn seen him elevated to a higher body as well, once people had realised who he was, and his role in the Splicer's destruction. Much of that time was now spent arguing with local croma authorities about corbi freedoms. If we can't make our own houses, he'd told them, and we can't hunt our own food (as the authorities didn't even want him fishing) then we're going to become completely dependent on you, like children on their parents. Or like prisoners on their jailers. People are going to become resentful very quickly, he'd told them. We thought we were escaping to some sort of freedom. Now this.
Temporary, had been the croma reply. All of this is temporary. We're currently looking to find you a new place to live. This world was selected mostly because we had to put you somewhere close to the Croma Wall to allow the evacuation to happen. Put you too far away, and the transports would have been stretched far further, making the evacuation impossible within such a short period. We will find you a new world, with less croma, where you can have more autonomy. Just be patient.
The more Jindi spoke with them, the less he believed it. Moving everyone here had been the most enormous logistical exercise. The ships used in the evacuation had all dispersed once more, to help with the ongoing operations against the reeh elsewhere along the front. Gathering them all together once had taken the most enormous political will. Doing it a second time, to move to a new croma world that would doubtless be just as resistant to their presence as this one, was going to take a long time, if it happened at all.
Instead, a new word was spreading, a rumour come down from corbi high command, as the Resistance were re-styling themselves now that their purpose for existing for the past eight hundred years had ended. That word was Vieno.
It was the name of a world in space adjoining human space. The great alien warrior Thakur had spoken of it with various corbi high command, though in truth Jindi knew it had just been Tiga and a few others. Various in that high command had somehow acquired great detail about Vieno and its surrounding regions, probably from Liala. Now that information was spreading, to anyone with a portable device, and then by word of mouth to those without.
