A Fire Upon the Deep zot-1, page 39
part #1 of Zones of Thought Series
It had taken Scriber and Pilgrim and Johanna only three days to sail from Flenser’s Domain to the harbor at Woodcarver’s. It would take this army almost thirty days to walk back to where Johanna’s adventure began. On the map it had looked a tortuous path, wiggling this way and that through the fjordland. Yet the first ten days were amazingly easy. The weather stayed dry and warm. It was like the day of the ambush stretched out forever and ever. A dry winds summer, Woodcarver called it. There should be occasional storms, at least cloudiness. Instead the sun circled endlessly above the forest canopy, and when they broke into the open (never for long, and then only when Vendacious was sure that it was safe), the sky was clear and almost cloudless.
In fact, there was already uneasiness about the weather. At noon it could get downright hot. The wind was constant, drying. The forest itself was drying out; they must be careful with fire. And with the sun always up and no clouds, they might be seen by lookouts many kilometers away. Scrupilo was especially bothered. He hadn’t expected to fire the cannons en route, but he had wanted to drill “his” troops more in the open.
Officially Strupilo was a council member and the Queen’s chief engineer. Since his experiment with the cannon, he had insisted on the title “Commander of Cannoneers". To Johanna, the engineer had always seemed curt and impatient. His members were almost always moving, and with jerky abruptness. He spent almost as much time with the Dataset as the Queen or Peregrine Wickwrackscar, yet he had very little interest in people-oriented subjects. “He has a blindness for all but machines,” Woodcarver once said of him, “but that’s how I made him. He’s invented much, even before you came.”
Scrupilo had fallen in love with the cannons. For most packs, firing the things was a painful experience. Since that first test, Scrupilo had fired the things again and again, trying to improve the tubes, the powder, and the explosive rounds. His fur was scored with dozens of powder burns. He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
During rest stops Scrup was a familiar figure, strutting up and down the line, haranguing his cannoneers. He claimed even the shortest stop was an opportunity for training, since in real combat speed would be essential. He had designed special epaulets, based on Nyjoran gunners’ ear muffs. They didn’t cover his low-sound ears at all, but instead the forehead and shoulder tympana of his trigger member. Actually tying the muffs down was a mind-numbing thing to do, but for the moments right around firing it was worth it. Scrupilo wore his own muffs all the time, but unsnugged. They looked like silly little wings sticking out from his head and shoulders. He obviously thought the effect was raffish—and in fact, his gunner crews also made a big thing of wearing the gear at all times. After a while, even Johanna could see that the drill was paying off. At least, they could swing the gun tubes around at an instant’s notice, stuff them with fake powder and ball, and shout the Tinish equivalent of “BANG!".
The army carried much more gunpowder than food. The packs were to live off the forest. Johanna had little experience with camping in an atmosphere. Were forests usually this rich? It was certainly nothing like the urban forests of Straum, where you needed a special license to walk off marked paths, and most of the wild life were mechanical imitations of Nyjoran originals. This place was wilder than even the stories of Nyjora. After all, that world had been well settled before it fell to medievalism. The Tines’ had never been civilized, had never spread cities across continents. Pilgrim guessed there were fewer than thirty million packs in all the world. The Northwest was only beginning to be settled. Game was everywhere. In their hunting, the Tines were like animals. Troopers raced through the underforest. The favorite hunt was one of sheer endurance, where the prey was chased until it dropped. That was rarely practical here, but they got almost as much pleasure from chasing the unwary into ambushes.
Johanna didn’t like it. Was this a medieval perversion or a peculiarly Tinish one? If allowed the time, the troops didn’t use their bows and knives. The pleasure of the hunt included slashing at throats and bellies with teeth and claws. Not that the forest creatures were without defenses: for millions of years threat and counterthreat had evolved here. Almost every animal could generate ultrasonic screeching that totally drowned the thought of any nearby pack. There were parts of the forest that seemed silent to Johanna, but through which the army drove at a cautious gallop, troops and drivers writhing in agony from the unseen assault.
Some of the forest animals were more sophisticated…
Twenty-five days out, the army was stuck trying to get across the biggest valley yet. In the middle—mostly hidden by the forest—a river flowed down to the western sea. The walls of these valleys were like nothing Johanna had seen in the parks of Straum: If you took a cross-section at right angles to the river, the walls made a “U” shape. They were cliff-like steep at the high edges, then became slopes and finally a gentle plain where the river ran. “That’s how the ice gouges it,” explained Woodcarver. “There are places further up where I’ve actually watched it happen,” and she showed Johanna explanations in the Dataset. That was happening more and more; Pilgrim and Woodcarver and sometimes even Scrupilo seemed to know more of a child’s modern education than Johanna.
They had already been across a number of smaller valleys. Getting down the steep parts was always tedious, but so far the paths had been good. Vendacious took them to the edge this latest valley.
Woodcarver and staff stood under the forest cover just short of the dropoff. Some meters back, Johanna sat surrounded by Peregrine Wickwrackscar. The trees at this elevation reminded Johanna a little of pines. The leaves were narrow and sharp and lasted all year. But the bark was blistered white and the wood itself was pale blond. Strangest of all were the flowers. They sprouted purple and violet from the exposed roots of the trees. Tines’ world had no analog of honeybees, but there was constant motion among the flowers as thumb-sized mammals climbed from plant to plant. There were thousands of them, but they seemed to have no interest in anything except the flowers and the sweetness that oozed from them. She leaned back among the flowers and admired the view while the Queen gobbled with Vendacious. How many kilometers could you see from here? The air was as clear as she had even known it on Tines’ world. East and west the valley seemed to stretch forever. The river was a silver thread where it occasionally showed through the forest of the valley floor.
Pilgrim nudged her with a nose and nodded toward the Queen. Woodcarver was pointing this way and that over the dropoff. “Argument is in the air. You want a translation?”
“Yeah.”
“Woodcarver doesn’t like this path,” Pilgrim’s voice changed to the tone the Queen used when speaking Samnorsk: “The path is completely exposed. Anyone on the other side can sit and count our every wagon. Even from miles away. [A mile is a fat kilometer.]”
Vendacious whipped his heads around in that indignant way of his. He gobbled something that Johanna knew was angry. Pilgrim chuckled and changed his voice to imitate the security chief’s: “Your Majesty! My scouts have scoured the valley and far wall. There is no threat.”
“You’ve done miracles, I know, but do you seriously claim to have covered that entire north face? That’s five miles away, and I know from my youth that there are dozens of cavelets—you have those memories yourself.”
“That stopped him!” said Pilgrim, laughing.
“C’mon. Just translate.” She was quite capable of interpreting body language and tone by now. Sometimes even the Tinish chords made sense.
“Hmph. Okay.”
The Queen hiked her baby packs around and sat down. Her tone became conciliatory. “If this weather weren’t so clear, or if there were night times, we might try it, but—You remember the old path? Twenty miles inland from here? That should be overgrown by now. And the road coming back is—”
Gobble-hiss from Vendacious, angry. “I tell you, this is safe! We’ll lose days on the other path. If we arrive late at Flenser’s, all my work will be for nothing. You must go forward here.”
“Oops,” Pilgrim whispered, unable to resist a little editorializing, “Ol’ Vendacious may have gone too far with that.” The Queen’s heads arched back. Pilgrim’s imitation of her human voice said, “I understand your anxiety, pack of my blood. But we go forward where I say. If that is intolerable to you, I will regretfully accept your resignation.”
“But you need me!”
“Not that much.”
Johanna suddenly realized that the whole mission could fall apart right here, without even a shot being fired. Where would we be without Vendacious? She held her breath and watched the two packs. Parts of Vendacious walked in quick circles, stopping for angry instants to stare at Woodcarver. Finally all his necks drooped. “Um. My apologies, Your Majesty. As long as you find me of use, I beg to continue in your service.”
Now Woodcarver relaxed, too. She reached to pet her puppies. They had responded with her mood, thrashing in their carriers and hissing. “Forgiven. I want your independent advice, Vendacious. It has been miraculously good.”
Vendacious smiled weakly.
“I didn’t think the jerk had it in him,” Pilgrim said near Johanna’s ear.
It took two dayarounds to reach the old path. As Woodcarver had predicted, it was overgrown. More: In places there was no sign of the path at all, just young trees growing from slumped earth. It would take days to get down the valley side this way. If Woodcarver had any misgivings about the decision, she didn’t mention them to Johanna. The Queen was six hundred years old; she talked often enough about the inflexibility of age. Now Johanna was getting a clear example of what that meant.
When they came to a washout, trees were cut down and a bridge constructed on the spot. It took a day to get by each such spot. But progress was agonizingly slow even where the path was still in place. No one rode in the carts now. The edge of the path had worn away, and the cart wheels sometimes turned on nothingness. On Johanna’s right she could look down at tree crowns that were a few meters from her feet.
They ran into the wolves six days along the detour, when they had almost reached the valley floor. Wolves. That’s what Pilgrim called them anyway; what Johanna saw looked like gerbils.
They had just completed a kilometer stretch of easy going. Even under the trees they could feel the wind, dry and warm and moving ceaselessly down the valley. The last patches of snow between the trees were being sucked to nothingness, and there was a haze of smoke beyond the north wall of the valley.
Johanna was walking alongside Woodcarver’s cart. Pilgrim was about ten meters behind, chatting occasionally with them. (The Queen herself had been very quiet these last days.) Suddenly there was a screech of Tinish alarm from above them.
A second later Vendacious shouted from a hundred meters ahead. Through gaps in the trees, Johanna could see troopers on the next switchback above them unlimbering crossbows, firing into the hillside above them. The sunlight came dappled through the forest cover, bringing plenty of light but in splotches that broke and moved as the soldiers hustled about. Chaos, but
… there were things up there that weren’t Tines! Small, brown or gray, they flitted through the shadows and the splotches of light. They swept up the hillside coming upon the soldiers from the opposite direction that they were shooting.
“Turn around! Turn around.” Johanna screamed, but her voice was lost in the turmoil. Besides, who there could understand her? All of Woodcarver was peering up at the battle. She grabbed Johanna’s sleeve. “You see something up there? Where?”
Johanna stuttered an explanation, but now Pilgrim had seen something too. His gobbled shouting came loud over the battle. He raced back up the trail to where Scrupilo was trying to get a cannon unlimbered. “Johanna! Help me.”
Woodcarver hesitated, then said, “Yes. It may be that bad. Help with the cannon, Johanna.”
It was only fifty meters to the gun cart, but uphill. She ran. Something heavy smashed into the path just behind her. Part of a soldier! It twisted and screamed. Half a dozen gerbil-sized hunks of fur were attached to the body, and its pelt was streaked with red. Another member fell past her. Another. Johanna stumbled but kept running.
Wickwrackscar was standing heads-together, just a few meters from Scrupilo. He was armed in every adult member—mouth knives and steel tines. He waved Johanna down next to him. “We run on a nest of, of wolves.” His speech was awkward, slurred. “Must be between here and path above. A lump, like a l’il castle tower. Gotta kill nest. Can you see?” Evidently he could not; he was looking all over. Johanna looked back up the hillside. There seemed to be less fighting now, just sounds of Tinish agony.
Johanna pointed. “You mean there, that dark thing?”
Pilgrim didn’t answer. His members were twitching, his mouth knives waving randomly. She leaped away from the flashing metal. He had already cut himself. Sound attack. She looked back along the path. She’d had more than a year to know the packs, and what she was seeing now was… madness. Some packs were exploding, racing in all directions to distances where thought couldn’t possibly be sustained. Others—Woodcarver on her cart—huddled in heaps, with scarcely a head showing.
Just beyond the nearest uphill trees she could see a gray tide. The wolves. Each furry lump looked innocent enough. All together… Johanna froze for an instant, watching them tear out the throat of a trooper’s member.
Johanna was the only sane person left, and all it would mean is she would know she was dying.
Kill the nest.
On the gun cart beside her only one of Scrupilo was left, old White Head. Daffy as ever, it had pulled down its gunner’s muffs and was nosing around under the gun tube. Kill the nest. Maybe not so daffy after all!
Johanna jumped up on the wagon. It rolled back toward the dropoff, banging against a tree; she scarcely noticed. She pulled up the gun barrel, just as she had seen in all the drills. The white headed one pulled at the powder bag, but with just his one pair of jaws he couldn’t handle it. Without the rest of its pack it had neither hands nor brains. It looked up at her, its eyes wide and desperate.
She grabbed the other end of the bag, and the two of them got the powder into the barrel. White Head dived back into the equipment, nosing around for a cannon ball. Smarter than a dog, and trained. Between them, maybe they had a chance!
Just half a meter beneath her feet, the wolves were running by. One or two she could have fought off herself. But there were dozens down there, worrying and tearing at random members. Three of Pilgrim were standing around Scarbutt and the pups, but their defense was unthinking slashing. The pack had dropped its mouth knives and tines.
She and White Head got the round down the barrel. White Head whipped back to the rear, began playing with the little wick-lighter the gunners used. It was something that could be held in a single mouth, since only one member actually fired the weapon.
“Wait, you idiot!” Johanna kicked him back. “We gotta aim this thing!”
White Head looked hurt for an instant. The complaint wasn’t completely clear to him. He had dropped the standoff wand, but still held the lighter. He flicked on the flame, and circled determinedly back, tried to worm past Johanna’s legs. She pushed him back again, and looked uphill. The dark thing. That must be the nest. She tilted the gun tube on its mounting and sighted down the top. Her face ended up just centimeters from the persistent White Head and his flame. His muffed head darted forward, and the flame touched the fire-hole.
The blast almost knocked Johanna off the cart. For a moment she could think of nothing but the pain that stabbed into her ears. She rolled to a sitting position, coughing in the smoke. She couldn’t hear anything beyond a high-pitched ringing that went on and on. Their little wagon was teetering, one wheel hanging over the dropoff. White Head was flopping around under the butt of the cannon. She pushed it off him and patted the muffed head. He was bleeding—or she was. She just sat dazed for a few seconds, mystified by the blood, trying to imagine how she had ever ended up here.
A voice somewhere in the back of her head was screaming. No time, no time. She forced herself to her knees and looked around, memories coming back painfully slow.
There were splintered trees uphill of them; the blond wood glinted among the leaves. Beyond them, where the nest had been, she saw a splash of fresh turned earth. They had “killed” it, but… the fighting continued.
There were still wolves on the path, but now they were the ones running in all directions. As she watched, dozens of them catapulted off the edge of trail into the trees and rocks below. And the Tines were actually fighting now. Pilgrim had picked up his knives. The blades and his muzzles dripped red as he slashed. Something gray and bleeding flew over the edge of the cart and landed by Johanna’s leg. The “wolf” couldn’t have been more than twenty centimeters long, its hair dirty gray brown. It really did look like a pet, but the tiny jaws clicked with murderous intent at her ankles. Johanna dropped a cannon ball on it.
During the next three days, while Woodcarver’s people struggled to bring their equipment and themselves back together, Johanna learned quite a bit about the wolves. What she and Scrupilo’s White Head did with cannon had stopped the attack cold. Without doubt, knocking out the nest had saved a lot of lives and the expedition itself. The “wolves” were a type of hive creature, only a little like the packs. The Tines race used group thought to reach high intelligence; Johanna had never seen a rational pack of more than six members. The wolf nests didn’t care about high intelligence. Woodcarver claimed that a nest might have thousands of members—certainly the one they’d tripped over was huge. Such a mob couldn’t be as smart as a human. In terms of raw reasoning power, it probably wasn’t much brighter than a single pack member. On the other hand, it could be a lot more flexible. Wolves could operate alone at great distances. When within a hundred meters of the home nest they were appendages of the “queen” members of the nest, and no one doubted their canniness then. Pilgrim had legends of nests with almost packish intelligence, of foresters who made treaties with nearby nests for protection in return for food. As long as the high-powered noises in the nest lived, the worker wolves could coordinate almost like Tine members. But kill the nest, and the creature fell apart like some cheap, star-topology network.
