Sharon Lee - Steve Miller - Great Migration 01 - Crystal Soldier

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Part One
Soldier
One
On the ground, Star 475A
Mission time. 3.5 planet days and counting
Jela crouched in the dubious shade of a boulder at the top of the rise he'd been climbing for half a
day. Taller rock columns on either side glared light down at him, but at least helped keep the persistent,
drying wind and flying grit from his lips and face.
At the forward side of the boulder, down a considerably steeper slope than the one he'd just
climbed, should be the river valley he'd been aiming to intersect ever since he'd piloted his damned
vessel to the desolate surface four days before.
Overhead and behind him the sky was going from day-blue to dusk-purple while—on that
forward side of the boulder—the local sun was still a few degrees above the horizon, bright over what
once had been a ragged coastline.
In theory he should be watching his back; in theory at least one of his guns should be in his
hand. Instead, he used both hands to adjust his cap, and then to slip the sand-lenses off. He used them
as a mirror, briefly, and confirmed that his face was not yet in danger of blistering from the sun's
radiation or the wind's caress.
Sighing, he replaced the lenses, and craned his head a bit to study the mica-flecked sandstone
he sheltered against, and the scarring of centuries of unnatural winds and weather. The purpling sky
remained clear, as it had been all day, and all the previous days—no clouds, no birds, no contrails, no
aircraft, no threats save the featureless brilliance of the star; no friends, no enemy spiraling in for the kill,
no sounds but the whisper of the dry, pitiless, planetary breeze.
So certain was he that he was in no danger that the rescue transponder in his pocket was
broadcasting on three frequencies...
He sighed again. Without an enemy—or a friend—it would take a long time to die in the arid
breeze. Friends. Well, there was hope of friends, or comrades at least, for he'd drawn off the attacking
enemy with a reflexive head-on counterattack that should not have worked—unless the attacking ship
was actually crewed rather than autonomous. He'd fired, the enemy had fired, his mother ship had
fired.... and amid the brawl and the brangle his light-duty vessel had been holed multiple times, not with
beams, but with fast moving debris.
Both the enemy and the Trident had taken high speed runs to the transition points, leaving Jela to
nurse his wounded craft into orbit and then spiral down to the surface and attempt a landing, dutifully
watching for the enemy he was certain was well fled.
There was no enemy here, no enemy other than a planet and a system succumbing to the same
malaise that had overtaken a hundred other systems and a hundred dozen planets in this sector alone.
Sheriekas!
Sheriekas. They'd been human once, at least as human as he was—and even if his genes had
been selected and cultivated and arranged, he was arguably as human as anyone who didn't bear a Batch
tattoo on both arms—but they'd willfully broken away, continuing with their destructive experiments and
their ...constructs... while they offered up a grand promise of a future they had no intention of sharing.
They'd named themselves after their own dead planet, which they'd destroyed early on in their
quest for transformation—for superiority. In their way, they were brilliant: Conquering disease after
disease, adjusting body-types to planets, increasing life-spans... They'd been driven to achieve
perfection, he supposed, having once known a dancer who had destroyed herself in the same quest,
though she hadn't had the means to take entire star systems with her.
And the sheriekas—they achieved what his dancer had not. To hear them tell it, they were the
evolved human; the perfected species. Along the way, they'd created other beings to accomplish their will
and their whims. And then they'd turned their altered understanding back along the way they had come,
looked on the imperfect species from which they had shaped themselves—and decided to give evolution
a hand. So they had returned from wherever it was they had gone, sowing world-eaters, robot armor,
and destruction as they came....
It had been a big war—the First Phase, they called it, fought well before his time-and the
after-effects spread over generations. That those refusing the initial offer of sheriekas guidance had
supposed they'd won the war rather than a battle meant... It meant that Jela was here, fighting a battle
centuries later... and that there was no pretense from the enemy, now, of benevolent oversight.
Jela blinked against the glare, pulling his mind back from its ramble. There was a real danger,
with your Generalist, of feeding them so much info they got lost in their own thoughts, and never came out
again. He couldn't afford that—not here. Not yet. He had time, he had duty. All he needed to do was
get off this planet, back to a base and...
His timer shook silently against his wrist. Water.
He leaned into the warm boulder and dug into the left leg pouch, fingers counting over the sealed
bulbs. Ten. That meant that there were still ten in the right leg pouch. He always drew first from the left,
ever since the fight where he'd broken his right leg.
The leg ached in sympathy with the thought, as it sometimes did, and M. Jela Granthor's Guard,
Generalist, finished his water, uncurled himself, stretched, and danced several fight moves to bring up his
attention level. Feeling considerably refreshed—his was a resilient Strain—he moved around the boulder,
heading down.
Behind him, his shadow was flung back across a day's walk or more as he strode across the
ridge, but there was no one there to notice. * * *
From orbit it had seemed clear that something... unusual... had been at work on the world, and
that a good deal of time and energy had been spent in this, the last of the river valleys likely to have
retained life under the onslaught of meteor-storms and radiation bursts. After concluding that his vessel
would not in fact leave the surface in its current state, there'd been little left to do but sit and hope—or
explore the structures on either side of the river. Being a Generalist—and an M—he'd naturally opted for
exploration.
Moments after stepping around the boulder and moving on his way, he realized that, somehow,
he was not exactly where he thought he should be. He was not overlooking the valley that led to the tip of
the former river delta, but was instead on the rim of a side valley.
Curiosity drove him to check his position against the satellite sensors—and he sighed. Gone, or
down to three and all but one on the wrong side of the planet at the moment. They hadn't had time to get
the things into stationary orbits.
"Can't triangulate without a triangle..."
The breeze took his voice along with it and rewarded him a moment later with an echo.
He laughed mirthlessly. Well, at least that ranging system worked. It was, alas, a system he'd
never learned to use, though he'd been told that on certain worlds the experts could say a song across a
snowy mountain range and tell, from the echoes, distance as well as the safety of an ice pack.
Ice pack. Now there was a dangerous thought! Truth was that this world used to have an ice
pack, but what it had now for all its trouble were two meteor scarred polar regions and a star with so
dangerously and preternaturally active a surface that it could be a candidate for a nova in a million years
or so. His ship's geologist had speculated that in the height of planetary winter—five hundred or so local
days hence, when the planet was nearly a third more distant from its star-there might be enough cold to
accumulate a water snow to some significant depth—say as deep as his boots—on the northern plains
and cap.
Checking the magnetic compass for north he saw a nervously twittering display as the field
fluctuated, and he wondered if there'd be another round of ghostly electric coronas lighting the night sky.
As he walked across the rocky ridge, anger built. Within historical record—perhaps as recently
as two thousand Common Years-this world has been a candidate for open air colonization. In the
meantime? In the meantime the sheriekas conceived and mounted a bombardment of the inner system,
setting robots to work in the outer debris clouds and targeting both the star and this world.
Kill. Destroy. Make life, human, animal, any—already improbable enough-impossible...
The sheriekas did this wherever they could, as if life itself was anathema. Overt signs of
sheriekas action were an indication that a planet or a system held something worthwhile...
And so here was Jela—perhaps the first human to set foot on the planet, perhaps the last—trying
to understand what was here that so needed destroying, what was here that the sheriekas hated enough
to focus their considerable destructive energies upon.
It wasn't useful to be angry at the enemy when the enemy wasn't to hand. He sighed, called to
mind the breathing exercises and exercised, dutifully. Eventually, he was rewarded with calm, and his
pace smoothed out of the inefficient angry stride to a proper soldier's ground-eating lope.
Suddenly he walked in near darkness, then out again as the defile he'd entered widened. In time
of snow or rain this would have been a dangerous place. It was as convenient a walkway as any, now
that the plants were killed off or gone subsurface, now that the animals, if there had been any, were long
extinct. After some time he found himself more in the dark than otherwise, saw the start of a flickering
glow in the sky to the north, and stopped his march to take stock. Underfoot was windblown silt. Soft
enough to sleep on.
He ran through his ration list mentally, pulled out a night-pack, selected his water, and camped on
the spot. Overhead the sky flickered green fire until well after he went to sleep.
* * *
The footing had become treacherous and Jela half-regretted his decision to travel with light-pack.
The dangle-cord he carried was barely three times his height and it might have been easier to get through
the more canyon-like terrain with the long rope. On the other hand, he was moving faster than he would
have with the full pack, and he'd have had no more rations anyway...
Now that he was below the ridges rather than walking them he found the grit and breeze not
quite so bad, though the occasional eddy of wind might still scour his face with its burden. Too, not being
constantly in the direct rays of the local star helped, though that might be a problem again as it
approached mid-day. For the moment, though, he was making time, and was in pretty good shape.
Rations now. Rations were becoming an issue. It was true that his rations were designed to let
him work longer on less, and it was equally true that he'd been designed—or at least gene-selected—to
get by on less food than most people ate, and to be more efficient in his use of water. Unfortunately, it
was also true that he did require some food, some water, some sleep, and some shelter—or he, like
most people in similarly deprived circumstances, would die.
Bad design, that dying bit, he thought—but no, that was what the sheriekas had thought to
conquer—and perhaps had conquered. No one seemed to know that for sure. Meanwhile,
he—Generalist Jela—had been designed with human care, and he approved of much of the design. He
could see and hear better than average, for instance, his reaction times were fast and refined—and he
was far stronger for his size than almost anyone.
It was this last bit of design work that had got his leg broken, despite it, too, being stronger than
average. He just couldn't hold the weight of six large men on it at once. He'd gone over that fight in his
mind many times, and with several fighting instructors. He'd done everything right—just sometimes, no
matter what, you were going to lose.
He was rambling again. Deliberately, he brought his attention back to the job at hand. The next
moment or two would bring him to the mouth of the canyon and into the valley proper; soon he should
have sight of the structures he'd spotted on his recon runs.
The possibility that they were flood control devices had been suggested by the ship's geologists,
as well as the idea that they were "cabinets" for some kind of energy generating stations that needed to be
able to survive both flood and ice. Dams—for water conservation? Even the idea that they were the
remains of housing had been suggested...
His stomach grumbled, protesting the lack of wake-up rations. He figured he'd be hungry for
awhile. No reason to break that next pack open quite yet. He slogged on, cap shading his eyes, watching
for the first sign of the—
There! There was one!
It was silted in, of course, and beyond it another—but the form of it, the details of it, the stubs—
He ran—a hundred paces or so it was to the nearest—put his hand on it—
Laughed then, and shook his head.
And laughed some more, because he didn't want to cry....
Two
On the ground, Star 475A
Mission time: 9 planet days and counting
The trees had been magnificent. Their crowns must have reached above the canyon rim in spots,
and together they may have shaded the valley below from the direct light of the local star. An entire
ecosystem had no doubt depended upon them. No wonder the ship's geologists had thought them
constructs from orbit....
What remained was still impressive. The base diameter of the downed trunk he touched was
easily six or seven times his own height and he hesitated to guess how long a board might have been
sawn from its length.
The shadow caught his attention then as light began filling the area in earnest.
It was time to move downstream. If there was water left at all, it would most likely be at the
ancient headwaters—too far by days for him to reach—or downstream. Downstream, he might make in
time for it to matter. * * *
He walked, because he'd chosen to explore, and explore he would. At night, he stopped when
his augmented vision blurred, camping where he stood. He went to short rations, cut them in half, and in
half again, stinting on water as much as he dared. So far, the rescue transponder had guided no one to his
position—friend or foe.
So, he walked, and he strove to be alert, spending part of the time analyzing his surroundings,
part watching the sky, and part in an on-going argument with himself—an argument he was losing.
"Not going to do it, I bet. They can't make me!"
"Will, can."
"Won't, can't."
The argument concerned the growing fashion among the newer troops of putting their ID markers
on their face. Fashion was something he didn't deal with all that much, and besides, he felt that a
commander should be making these kinds of decisions, not a troop. And yet, he had to own it was
convenient to be able to tell at a glance which unit, rank, and specialty defined a particular soldier.
"Shouldn't!"
He'd said this loudly—definitively—just before Tree Number Sixty-four, and it was while using
the base of that tree as shade—and checking the angle of its fall—that the position locator in his pocket
chuckled briefly.
He grabbed the unit, watching the power-light—but there, that was silly. Unless things improved
pretty soon the unit's power would outlast him by quite some number of years. After all, it had been three
days—four?—since he'd last heard that sound....
Live now, the sensor showed him to be somewhat closer to the pre-marked goal than he had
expected; the map roughed in by the original orbital photos showed that he'd managed to miss an early
valley entrance—likely by refusing to walk quite as boldly as he might have into the teeth of the gritty
breeze—and had thus saved himself a half-day or more of trudging down a much longer hillside.
The big question was becoming "saved" for what? There were no signs of life that was still alive;
nor of water. The trees—
Maybe the trees were worth the walk, after all. There was a theory growing in his head—that
he'd come in part looking for great works, and he'd found great works. In the days he'd been walking
with the trees he'd found evidence of purpose far beyond the probability of happy accident.
For one thing, in places—not random places but specific kinds of places—the trees had fallen
across the ancient watercourse, high ground to high ground, just where there was no marching forward to
the ocean on that bank. They seemed to have preferred the left bank—which was generally wider, when
it existed at all—and they sometimes seemed to have rested from their march and made a small grove,
while at other times they'd hurried, stringing a long line of solitary trees.
Too, they were getting smaller. It saddened him, but the later trees... sigh.
Sloppy thinking. He didn't have dated evidence. For all he factually knew, the first tree he had
encountered was the youngest, not the eldest. And yet he persisted in believing that the trees had
marched from the high ground down to the sea, and with purpose. And what other purpose could they
have but to live—and by continuing to live fight the purpose of the sheriekas?
"As long as there is life in the Spiral Arm, especially intelligent, organized life, the sheriekas will
not easily reach their goal!" The memory-voice rang in his ears, for the moment obscuring the sound of
the wind.
That had been... who had it been, after all?
Song-woman.
Right.
Jela closed his eyes, saw the small troop of them standing on a hilltop like so many ancient
savages, singing, singing, singing.
He'd been part of a survey team then, too, his very first, and he'd laughed at their belief that they
were fighting some space-borne invader by standing there singing, singing in the light and long into the
night. In the morning there had been three fewer of the singers, and word eventually came down from
the frontier that three sheriekas world-eaters had simply vanished from tracking—gone, poof!
The timer on his arm went off. He reached for a water bulb.... and stopped before his hand got
close to the pocket. Not yet. He'd been waiting a little bit longer of late, and longer still if he could. There
wasn't a whole lot of water left and he'd stopped counting. That he was in the valley helped, since the
cutting wind—though noisier—was much less in evidence here among the fallen trees at river height.
But he'd been thinking about something....
Trees.
That was it. Like the singers, the trees had helped hold off the sheriekas, he was sure of it. But
why then had the sheriekas not taken the planet and the star system, the trees being dead? Why did they
skulk about the edge of the system, rather than occupying the place, or blowing up the star, as they had
become so fond of doing the last decade or two?
The singer-woman and her ilk were every bit as needed as was his ilk, if they could sing or pray
or startle the enemy to a standstill. The trees, too, if they were on their own inimical to the scourge. The
trees. Why if the trees, without human help or human thought-had fought the sheriekas to a standstill he
should have them—he should take a piece for cloning, plant them throughout the Arm and—
He sat, suddenly, not noticing that he landed on rock. There was something here to be thought
on. If worse came to worse, which it rapidly was, he would need to write this down, or record it, so that
the troop could see this new ally in its proper light.
Before writing or recording anything, he reached to the left leg pouch and took hold of the water
container. Beneath, in the next down, was one more. And then of course there was his right leg, with its
water....He gently squeezed a drop or two onto his fingers first, carefully rubbing them together, then
wiping his upper lip and clearing some of the grit away from his nose. Then he sipped.
As he sipped, he thought.
There had to be a connection between the trees, the pattern of their flight, and the attack from
which the sheriekas had withdrawn. Almost, he had it, that idea of his. Almost. Well. It would come.
One more sip for the moment. One more right now for the soldier.
He sighed so gently a lover sitting beside him might have missed it.
So he was a soldier. In various places humans saw the fighting and withdrew, saw the fighting
and played the warring parties against each other, fought as these trees had fought to draw every bit of
water from the dying world, fought to hide and survive and perhaps outlast the madness of the battle.
In the end, the powers-that-were had permitted the experiments to resume. To fight augmented
humans, one needed special humans. Not quite as adjusted and modified, perhaps, as the sheriekas or
their manufactured allies, and perhaps lacking the power to sing away the death of worlds, but fighters
who were more efficient, stronger, and often faster.
Did he survive this world and a dozen more he'd not live the life nor die the death of an ordinary
citizen. Retire? Quit?
"Not me!" His voice echoed weirdly against the grating of the wind. He sighed, louder this time,
sealed the partial bulb and replaced it in its pocket. Then, he staggered—truly staggered—to his feet.
He centered himself, felt the energy rise—somewhat, somewhat—danced a step or two, did the
stretch routine, settled.
Things to do. He had things to do. With or without his ID on his face, he was M. Jela Granthor's
Guard, a Generalist in the fight to save life-as-it-was. Who could ask more? He laughed and the valley
gave his laugh back to him. Heartened, he followed the march of the trees.
* * *
He'd managed to wake, which he took for a good thing, and he managed to recall his name,
which was something, too. Eventually he bullied his way through a two-day old partial ration pack,
knowing there weren't many more left at all, at all, not at all, and glanced at his location sensor.
The map there seemed clearer and his location more certain. There were still just three satellites
working instead of the ideal seven, but they were working hard—and all on this side of the planet at the
moment, by happy accident, building exactly the kind of database a Generalist would love to own.
The trees he'd been following for the last—however long it had been—now were downright
skinny, as if they'd been striving for height at the expense of girth, but that was only six or eight times his
own paltry height rather than a hundred times or two. Some of them were misshapen, short things, as if
they'd tried to become bushes. He tried to use one as a bridge from the right bank back to the left, as he
had done several times during his hike, and it broke beneath his boots, both frightening and surprising him
since this was the first such bridge that had failed him.
He'd landed in the silted river channel, not too much worse for the fall, knowing he was at the
delta he'd been aiming for since he first stepped put of his lander....
He climbed, slowly, onto the firmer soil of the bank, blinking his eyes against the scene.
Had he the water to spare he would have cried then. He'd come through the last bend of what
had been a mighty river; before him the channel led out into the dusty, gritty, speckled plain of what had
been a vast and shallow salt sea. Here and there were great outcrops of boulders and cliffs, and when he
turned around he could see the distant hills.
There were a few more trees ahead of him, lying neatly in a row as if each had fallen forward
exactly as far as it could, and a new one had sprouted right there and—
There was nothing else.
Wind.
Rock.
Grit.
Three thousand two hundred and seventy-five of the trees then, since he'd started
counting—maybe one or two more or less as he'd walked some nights until he could see nothing.
"Finish the job, soldier."
He was the only one to hear the order, so it must be his to carry out.
Dutifully, he walked those few steps more, to see it to completion. To honor the campaign,
well-planned and well-fought, which had nonetheless ended in defeat.
After, he knew, he'd need to find a shaded spot down in the dead channel. Above it he'd build a
cairn, set his transponders to full power and put them on top—and then he'd settle in with his last sip or
two of water to wait. The hill wasn't all that bad to look at, and he'd be comforted by the presence of
fallen comrades. It was a better death than most he had seen.
Reverently, Jela stepped over the last tree—like so many others it had fallen across the river,
across the channel. It was hardly thicker than his arm, and had scarcely reached the other side of what
had been a skinny riverlet, where its meager crown lay in a tangle over a rock large enough to cast a
shadow.His boot brushed the tree, snagged in a small branch, and he fell forward, barely catching himself,
the shock of the landing leaving a bright flash of sun against pale rock dancing in his head, and a
green-tinged after-image inside his eyelids, strange counterpoint to the speckled brown and dun of the
ex-seashore.
He closed his eyes tightly. Heard the sound of the wind, heard the rattling in the branches that still
graced the dead trunk, felt the sun.
I could stay here, he thought, just like this, sleep, perhaps not wake—
He opened his eyes despite the thought, caught movement across the way, keeping time with the
beat of the wind.
There at the root of the rock, just beyond the meager crown of the downed tree, was a spot of
green. A leaf—and another.
Alive.
Three
On the ground, Star 475A
Mission time: 14 planet days and counting
Duty was a strange thing to think of in this moment, for he was giddy with a joy totally beyond
reason, and he knew it. He felt as he had when he'd come back to the troop hall after serving seventeen
days in detention for his single-handed fight against the squad from Recon. He came into the hall to
absolute silence. No one spoke to him, no one said anything. He'd been so sure he'd be sent off—
And there on his bunk was his personal unit flag—wrapped around the haft of it were green and
blue ribbons of exactly the shade Recon preferred. When he had it in his hands and held it up and looked
out at them, they cheered him.
And that's how he felt, looking across at the green life dancing in the wind—as if dozens stood
about it, cheering.
And then, there was duty.
Though the tree was alive, and mostly green, some of the leaves were browning, and his first
thought was to give it water.
Of course, he didn't have enough water to rescue it, really, just as he didn't have enough rations
to rescue him. But he gave it water, anyway—the last of the partial, and a fourth of a new bulb, the same
as he drank himself.
Duty made him wonder if the tree was poisonous.
It was a scrawny thing, barely half his height, with a fine fuzzy bark about it. Perhaps he could
suck on a few of the leaves.
There was something else, among those leaves, and he knew not if he should consider it fruit or
nut. He knew not if he should eat it, for surely anything that could live in this environment was—
Was what? He was living in this environment, after all. For a time.
The fist-sized pod was high on the tree, its weight bending the slim branch on which it grew, and
he saw the thing now as yet another soldier carrying out its duty. All of the trees he'd walked beside had
marched down to the river and then down to the sea, each with the goal of moving forward, each after
the other bearing the duty of taking that seed-pod, high up in the last tree this world was likely to see, as
far forward as possible.
Duty it was that made the little tree grow that pod....
And duty told him that this tree was far more important than he was. It and its kin had preserved
a world for centuries, as the report he'd carefully written and repeated into voice record told those who
would follow.
At this point, even with the tree withering in spots, it would—like the satellite sensor he
carried—outlast him. Duty dictated that he should help keep it alive, it being life and he being sworn, in
essence, to help things live.
He sat down, finally, for standing was taking its toll on him, and leaned against the rock where he
could touch the tree, lightly. He was tired, for all that it was not yet noon, but he had shade—green
shade—and could use a rest.
If only his pick-up would come. He'd grab the tree up in a heartbeat, and take it away, for there
was nothing to keep it here, or him. He'd take it someplace where water was certain. Someplace with
good light and good food, and dancing girls. He was partial to dancers and to pilots—people who knew
how to move, and when. They'd have a great time, him and the tree, and there'd be room for a dozen
more trees—and why not?—dozens of dancers...
He fell asleep then, or passed out, and dreamed a dream of storms and floods and trees lying
across swollen rivers and falling in the depths of snow, and of landers coming down from the sky, unable
to rise again-and behind it all both a sense of urgency and a sense of possibility. He dreamed of his dozen
dancers, too, recalling names and lust. * * *
He woke with the smell of food in his nostrils, and a clear sense that he'd made a decision. He
opened his eyes and saw the leaves rattling in the breeze.
He knew he'd die soon, but if he drank the last of his water and then—rather than going to
shelter in a cave or a hole—arranged himself to die here, beside the tree, so he'd not be alone, it was
likely that his fluids and remains would nourish the tree for some time, and that would be the best use of
what duty he had left to him.
And then maybe, just maybe, that seed pod would sprout, and the soldier born of it might have
the chance to be found and taken away, to continue the fight.
Food. The smell of fruit. He eaten the last partial rations—when? A day ago? A year? And the
smell of the pod so close left him hungry,
Guiltily, he got to his feet and moved a few steps away from the tree.
No, he couldn't. It would have been one thing if he'd found the pod beside the tree, with no
chance of it growing, no rainy season to hope for at this latitude any longer, no winter. But now, at best,
what could it do? Give him another hour? Or kill him outright?
He was hoping that his eyes deceived him, for the leaves around the pod looked browner now
than when he'd first spotted the tree. He didn't want it to be failing so quickly. He didn't want to see it go
before he did.
The tree moved slightly, and the leaves rattled a bit in the breeze. There was a snap, sudden and
pure. Aghast, Jela watched the leaves flutter away as the pod tumbled to the silty soil.
The pod sat there for a dozen of his accelerated heartbeats. It seemed to shiver in the breeze,
almost eagerly awaiting his touch, his mouth.
Jela pondered the sight, wondering how long such a pod might be fresh, considering how
useless—and how senseless of duty—it would be to let it lie there unused and uneaten.
He moved carefully and bent to the pod, lifting it, cherishing it. Feeling the sections of rind eager
and ready to peel away in his hand, he wondered if he had waited too long, and was even now
hallucinating in the desert, about to eat a pebble found next to a dry, dead stick.
He sniffed the pod and found an aroma promising vitamins and minerals and, somehow, cool
juicy refreshment.
He saluted the tree, and then, dragging from memory the various forms he'd learned, he bowed
to it, long and low.
"I honor you for the gift freely given, my friend. If I leave this place, you will go with me, I swear,
and I will deliver you into the hands of those who will see you as kin, as I see you." Then his fingers
massaged the pod, and it split into several moist kernels.
With the first taste, he knew he had done the right thing. With the second he recalled the joy of
rushing water and spring snow, and the promise of dancers.
And then, considering the promise of dancers yet again, weighing the fragility of the inner kernels,
Jela pushed aside the restraint which suggested he try to save one kernel out, just in case... and he
devoured the entirety. * * *
The in-between place—the plane of existence between sleep and consciousness—was a place
Jela rarely visited. It generally took drugs or alcohol to get him there, and even achieving there he rarely
stayed, as his optimized body sought either sleep or wakefulness, the latter more than the former.
His dreams, all too often, were also optimized: explicit problem solving, pattern recognizing,
recapitulations of and improvements on things he'd actually done, or actually attempted to do.
So this was unusual, this feeling of being comfortably ensconced below wakefulness. Odd in the
security of it, though he had a right to be tired, having laid out an arrow of rocks—actually a double row
and more of his tracks and a row of the whitest stones—pointing to the tree and his fox-den nearby.
Perhaps it was completion he felt; he'd done the best he could, all considered, and if he were
now to fall into the fullest sleep and never wake it would not have been for lack of trying to do otherwise.
Certainly, he was not one who might call to him ephemeral magics and gossamer wings to fly to the edge
of space and command a comet to carry him, cocooned, to a place where others of the sheriekas-bred
might find and thaw him...
That briefing came to him now, of how certain of the others created by the sheriekas as spies
and weapons were able to move things so easily to their wills... That such were rare, and as erratically
dispersed as the killer things was to the good...
But there, the doze was both deeper and lighter now, and he had truly not meant to sleep.
Not dream, he'd nearly said, all the while hearing the wind and its acts: the slight rustle of leaves
near his head, the sound of gritty sand-bits rushing to fill an empty sea, perhaps an elegant thunderstorm
distantly giving impetus to waves on a beach and wings that beat. Perhaps the distant tremble of air as
some flying thing cavorted...
Now here there was comfort, for there had been flying things once, of many sizes, and if they'd
fought amongst themselves at times, they'd done their work, too, moving seeds and pods about, taking
away loose branches, warning of fires and off-season floods, sharing a measure of joy in the world until
they were vanquished by some short-term calamity beyond the thought of trees.
What an interesting idea...
In his mind's eye he soared with great wings above a world populated by trees and quiet
creatures, above seas willing to carry rafts of the flood-swept for years, rafts where nests and young
might travel in the shade of those still green, growing, and accomplishing. Very nearly he could feel the
weight of such a pair, singing and calling, perched in his crown at sunrise, answering the call of others
across the canyon, and those passing on rafted currents along the sometimes untrustworthy coastal
cliffs... No! He knew he had never had a crown of green, nor had creatures perching in it! His mind took
that thought, rejected it as it might a bad element in a dream, came back to the sounds, things that he
might measure, rather than ones that might keep him comfortably immobile.
The sounds he was hearing were old sounds, echoed off of canyon walls last week or last month
or last year or... or when?
If he'd been half asleep moments before, now he was one quarter asleep. His muscles still
lounged, and his eyes, but his ears recalled a distant mammalian heritage and would have twisted like
those of a fox if they could... for there was something there, something that hadn't been there in the days
of his walk, or the nearer days of his hibernation—something he was hearing as if through a template.
He agreed with himself somewhere deep in the near-sleep: a template. A template not of sight,
but of sound and vibration. An old template that shuffled a million years of experience and separated the
sounds and shifted other templates to form a nearest match.
Flying thing.
Not a fox's template though. Not usually heard through ear, but through branches.
Flying thing.
He willed his eyes open, did Jela, who found his name then, and his duty, but his lids remained
closed, so he listened harder, for this was a template recently used, despite its age, and he must connect
it to the sound in the root and branches and—
Then there was thunder enough to open his eyes, and his ears were his, and to his wakeful mind
the pattern came: sonic boom.
He shed sleep entirely then, and glanced at the tree, which had been shading him as best it might.
"Flying things, my friend? And dragons?" He laughed, to hear his voice sounding remarkably like
the dragons of the dream. "Dragons and now spaceships? What a fine delirium you bring!"
His eye caught the line of a single narrow contrail in the sky, floating with no obvious sign of an
attached craft. It looked like they were heading away from him—to the place he'd touched down. Else
they were headed in the other direction. Directly for him.
Sighing, Jela the soldier reached for his sun shades, tapped the knife on his belt for comfort, and
drew the gun to be sure the barrel was not full of sand, nor the charge useless.
"Field of fire," he remarked to the tree, "favors both of us. If it isn't someone we know and they
can read the signs, they'll have an idea where I am, so I'll be just a little bit someplace else. If they're
bright, they'll expect it, but hey, I've got the rescue beacons on.
"You... I'm going to camouflage as best I can."
His handiwork, when admired from a distance, appeared to be another random pile of debris,
though his tracks around it were hard to disguise entirely. He'd used his vest to sweep the more obvious
tracks into smudges, and left the beacon on. He took one transceiver, leaving all the other powered items
in the den, where they'd either not be noticed or, if detected, where they'd serve to convince anyone
oncoming that he was sensibly in the shade.
He was not exactly sensibly in the shade, though he had some of it. That wouldn't be a problem
for much longer today, in any case, since the sun would soon be on the horizon.
His choice was a gully where the meandering of the stream bed had made a short-lived branch;
there, looking across at the tree, he laid out his pistol and his backup, and emptied his pockets of
anything that might weigh him down if he needed to move fast.
He laughed mirthlessly, no doubt in his mind that he was running on adrenaline and hope,
knowing too that his chance of moving with speed or stealth was pretty slim, this far into no rations.
It was then that he felt the ship, as if large welcome wings were overhead. There was a whine of
the wind, and some slight hissing—remarkably like that of the CC-456s he'd known for decades.
It swept in low over the tiny campsite, its wings not all that large-indeed the ship itself was not all
that large!—did a half-turn, displaying a single black digit on each of its stubby maneuvering wings, then
another half turn—incidentally bringing the nose cannon to bear on the campsite. Then it hissed itself
quietly into the empty ocean, and was still for very nearly eight full seconds, at which point Corporal
Kinto jumped out the open hatch, slipping on the shifting sand with an obscenity.
Four
摘要：

PartOneSoldierOneOntheground,Star475AMissiontime.3.5planetdaysandcountingJelacrouchedinthedubiousshadeofaboulderatthetopoftherisehe'dbeenclimbingforhalfaday.Tallerrockcolumnsoneithersideglaredlightdownathim,butatleasthelpedkeepthepersistent,dryingwindandflyinggritfromhislipsandface.Attheforwardsideo...

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