C. J. Cherryh - Faded Sun 3 - Kutath

Kutath

By

C.J Cherryh

The Faded Sun Trilogy Book 3

Chapter One

There was chaos about the docking bay; Galey observed it as he was coming in,

heard it, a chatter of instructions in his ear, warning him to keep his

distance. He held the shuttle parked a little removed from the warship,

watching kilometer-long Saber disgorge a trio of small craft. Blips showed on

his tracking screen, an image supplied him by Saber-com, from Sabers view of

things. One blip was himself; one other was blue and likewise human that had

to be Santiago . . . Saber had deployed the insystem fighter between itself

and the red blip that was Shirug.

The outgoing blips were likewise red; regul shuttles in tight formation. Galey

read the situation uneasily and kept his eye to the steady flow of information

on the screen. There was one dead regul to be disposed of; that was likely

what was in progress out there . . . the late bai Sharn Alagn-ni, ferried out

to her own ship for whatever ceremony the regul observed with their dead.

Sharn; ally, as all regul were allies according to the treaties . . .

according to the agreement which had brought a human and a regul warship into

orbit about this barren world, this home base of the mri. Regul made Galey's

skin crawl. It was a reaction he did not speak aloud; promotions in the

service were politics, and politics called regul friendlies.

Mri, now mri, were near human-looking, whatever the insides of them might be

like. Galey hated them with a different, dutiful hate. He was Havener, of a

world lost and retaken in the mri wars. Parents, a brother, cousins had

vanished into the chaos of that war-torn world and never surfaced again. It

was a remote kind of grief, rehearsed guiltily in every other scene of

slaughter he had witnessed, but he could not recover the intensity of it. His

kin were lost, in the sense of not found, misplaced in the war and gone; dead

or alive, no knowing for sure. He had not been home when the strike came, and

in the years after, the service had become home, Lancet, Saber, Santiago,

whatever ship received his papers, wherever his current ship took him, live or

die. Mri were like that. Just soldiers behind their black robes and veils.

Nothing personal. He had a friend who had gone mri . . . he had seen a

different look on him after the years of absence, disdainful, remote; there

was something heart-chilling in standing close to a man in that black garb,

something intimidating in gazing close at hand into a face of which only the

eyes were visible amazing how much of expression depended on the rest of the

face, concealed behind black cloth. But for all of that, a human could

understand them.

Regul . . . regul had hired the ships, the weapons, the mri themselves, and

planned, and named the strikes, and profited from them. Forty years of war,

bought by regul. An investment . . . Galey sound the words out in his mind,

distastefully. Po-li-cy. Cash on the table. Big folk, the regul, who sat fat

and safe, who made the decisions and put out the cash, sending their mri

mercenaries out to war. Humans and mri killed each other, and the wise old

regul, reckoning a forty-year war nothing against their centuries-long

lifespans, and reckoning the tally of gain and loss kept the war going just so

long as it profited them.

In the same way the regul turned up on the human side during the cleanup had

turned on their own mercenaries, slaughtering them and the mri's civilian

population without warning. That was the mri's final payoff for serving regul.

A simple change of policy; regul knew the right moment to move. And, truth be

told, everything human breathed a sigh of relief to know the mri were gone,

and that someone else had pulled the trigger.

Regul came now, having tracked the last two survivors of the mri who had

served them, to their homeworld, to Kutath, the far, far origin of their kind.

Regul had rushed ahead to destroy a peace message from Kutath before humans

could hear it, had fired on a quiet world and elicited answering fire before

humans understood the situation. More mri were dead down there. The last

remnants of dying cities were shot to ruin; the last of a dying species were

made fugitives on their own world . . . the last place, the very last, that

mri existed.

Something tight and unpleasant welled up in Galey's throat when he thought of

that Somehow it was Haven again, and civs getting killed. He had come very far

to feel something finally. It was ironic that he felt it for the enemy, that

deep-down sickness at the belly that came of seeing an unequal contest.

It would have been that kind of blind, helpless death for his own kin. It gave

him nightmares now, after so many years. No fighting back; a city under fire

from orbit; no ships; no hope; folk armed with handguns and knives against

orbital strike.

Everything dead, and no way out.

There was a little drift in his position. It had been minor, but the shuttles

were still in his path and he had to maintain a while longer. He corrected a

fraction. Sweat was running down his sides. He tried to stop thinking, tried

to concentrate on his instruments a time. There was no reason for uneasiness.

The feeling simply grew. And in time the thoughts crept back again. His eyes

traveled inexorably and unwillingly toward the outward view. Kutath's dying

surface was barely in his visual field. The rest was stars, fewer than he ever

liked to see. He sweated. He had never been in a place where the goblins got

to him so thoroughly, those ancient human ghosts that tagged after a man in

the deep. They dogged him, kept, as proper ghosts should, just behind him . .

. gone when he would look. Look back, they whispered against his nape,

stirring the hairs, Look again.

The stars hung infinite in his drifting view, as deep down as up, as far on

left as on right; and a near star, Na'i'in, the mri called it, which would

make even Saber a mote of dust beside it. All, all those little lights which

were suns, and some cloudy aggregates of suns, themselves reduced to dust

motes by distance which reached out from himself, who was the center of the

universe, and then not an insignificance, less than the mote of a world, far

less than a sun, infinitely less than the vast galaxies, and the distance, the

cold, deep distance that never stopped, forever.

Move it, he thought at the ships which held him off. He wanted in, wanted in,

like a boy running for his front door and warmth and light, with the goblins

at his back. It had never gotten to him, not like this.

The mri had a word for it; the Dark. Scientists said so. Anyone who had

traveled the wild places in little ships had to have a word for it. Except

maybe regul, who could not imagine, only remember.

Mri felt it. He understood beings who could feel it.

He worked his hands on the controls, heard the chatter in his ear, the thin

lifeline of a voice from Saber, proving constantly his species was real,

however far they sat now from friendly, trafficked space.

Real. Alive. Men existed somewhere. Somewhere there were human worlds, less

than dust motes in the deep, but living. And that somehow affirmed his own

reality.

Was it this, he wondered, for the two mri, last of all their company . . . who

had run this long, desperate course home? Their little mote was dying, an old

world under an old sun, and what fragile life of their kind survived here,

regul refused to leave alive. Was it such a feeling, that had made home more

urgent for them than survival to come in out of the Dark, even to die?

He began to shiver, catching a moving dot of light among all the others.

Shirug. The regul shuttles were too far and too small to see now. It had to be

regul Shirug, catching the sun.

"NAS-12, come on in," Saber-corn said. "Shuttle NAS-12, come on in."

He kicked the vessel into slow life and eased onward, resisting the temptation

to close the interval with a wasteful burst of power. There was time. The bay

was all his.

"Priority, NAS-12."

They gave him leave to move. His heart started thudding with a heavier and

heavier weight of premonition. His hands moved, throwing the little ship over

into rightwise alignment and hurtling it at Saber with furious haste.

"Sir," the intercom announced, "Lt. Comdr. James Galey."

Adm. Koch scribbled a note on the screen, hit FILE and disposed of one piece

of business, touched the intercom key in silent affirmative. A second screen

showed the busy command center; Capt. Zahadi was taking care of matters there

at least; and Comdr. Silverman in Santiago was currently linked to Zahadi,

keeping a wary eye over the world's horizon. Details were all Zahadi's, until

they touched policy. Policy began here, in this office.

Galey arrived, a sandy-haired, freckled man who had begun to have lines in his

face. Galey looked distressed ought to be, summoned directly to this office

for debriefing. The eyes nicked to the corner, where a high-ranking regul had

lately died; Koch did not miss it, returning the offered courtesies.

"Sir," Galey said.

"You set SurTac Duncan downworld in good order?"

"Yes, sir. No trouble."

"You volunteered for that flight."

Galey was masked in courtesies. The face failed to react to that probe, only

the eyes, and that but slightly, betraying nothing.

"Want you to sit down," Koch said. "Relax. Do it."

The man looked about him, found the only chair available, drew it over and sat

on the edge of it. Koch waited. Galey dutifully eased himself back and

positioned his arms. Sweat was standing on Galey's face, which might be from

change of temperature and might not. Careers rose and fell in this office.

"Why?" Koch pursued him. "The man walks into this office wearing mri robes,

asks for a cease-fire, then guns down a ranking regul ally. Security says he's

gone entirely mri, inside and out. Science department agrees. You imagined

some long-ago acquaintance, is that it? You volunteered to ferry him back why?

To talk with him? To satisfy yourself of something? What?"

"I worked with him once. And I'd flown guide for Flower's landing, sir; I

happened to know the route."

"So do others."

"Yes, sir."

"You worked with him on Kesrith."

"One mission, sir."

"Know him well?"

"No, sir. No one did. He's SurTac."

The specials, the Surface Tactical operatives, were remote from the regul

military, in all ways remote; peculiar rank, peculiar authorities, the habit

of independence and irreverence for protocol. Koch shook his head, frowned,

wondering if that was, even years ago, sufficient explanation for Sten Duncan.

Governor Stavros, back in Kesrith zones, had trusted this wildness, enough to

hand Duncan two mri prisoners and their captured navigational records. It had

paid the dividend Stavros had reckoned; they were here, at the mri home world;

and Duncan, with the mri contacts no one had ever been able to establish, came

suing for peace. . . .

Then shot a regul in the same interview, bai Sharn, commander of Shirug,

lieutenant to humanity's highest placed ally among regul, and all plans were

off.

I have done an execution, Duncan had said. The regul know what I am. They will

not be surprised. You know this. I can give you peace with Kutath now.

Mri arrogance. Duncan had been acutely uncomfortable, asked for a moment to

drop the veil with which he covered his face.

"You worked with the man," Koch said, regarding Galey steadily. "You had time

to exchange a few words with him in getting him back to Kutath. Impressions?

Do you know him at all now?"

"Yes," Galey said. "It's what he was, back on Kesrith. Only it wasn't wasn't

all the same. Now and again it's there, the way he was; and then . . . not.

But "

"But you think you know him. You . . . were in the desert together back at

Kesrith, recovered the records out of that shrine . . . had a little regul

trouble then on the way back, all true?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hate the regul?"

"No love for them, sir."

"Hate the mri?"

"No love there either, sir."

"And SurTac Duncan?"

"Friend, sir."

Koch nodded slowly. "You know the pack he was given has a tracer."

"I don't think that will last long."

"You warned him?"

"No, sir, didn't know. But he's not anxious to have us find the mri at all; I

don't think he'll let it happen."

"Maybe he won't. But then maybe his mri don't want him speaking for them.

Maybe he told the truth and maybe he didn't. There are weapons on that world

worth reckoning with."

"Wouldn't know, sir."

"Your first run down there, you took damage."

"Some. Shaken about. What I hear, it's old stuff. I didn't see anything to say

different; no fields, no life, no ships. Nothing, either time. Only ruins.

That's what I hear it was."

"Less than that down there now."

"Yes, sir."

A dying world, cities decayed and empty, machines drawing solar power to live;

armaments returning fire with mechanical lack of passion; and the mri

themselves. . . .

Rock and sand, Duncan had said, dune and flats. The mri will not be easy to

find.

If it's true, Koch thought. If there are no ships in their control, and if all

cities are machine life only.

"You think they pose no threat to us," Koch said.

"Wouldn't know that either, sir."

There was Reeling of cold at Koch's gut. It lived there, sometimes small,

sometimes when he thought of the voyage behind them larger. It grew when he

thought of the hundred twenty-odd worlds at their backs, a swath which marked

the trail mri had followed out from Kutath to Kesrith, a trail eons old at the

beginning and recent at the farther end, in human space, where the mri had

been massacred. Before that, along that strip all worlds were scoured of life

. . . more than desert; dead.

Mri hired themselves for mercenaries. Presumably they had done so more than

once, until the regul turned on them and ended them.

Ended a progress across the galaxy which left no life in its wake, a hundred

twenty-odd systems which by all statistical process should have held life,

which might have supported intelligent species.

Void, if they had ever been there . . . gone, without memory, even to know

what they had been, why the mri had passed there, or what they had sought in

passing.

Only Kesrith survived, trail's end.

I have done an execution, Duncan had said, black-robed, mri to the heart of

him. And; The regul know what I am.

"Bai Sharn," Koch said, "is being transported back to her ship. There is no

regul authority with us now; the rest are only younglings. They can probably

handle Shirug competently enough, but nothing more, without some adult to

direct them. That puts things wholly into our laps. We deal with the mri, if

Duncan can get their holy she'pan to come in and talk peace. We run operations

up here. And if we misread signals, we don't get any second chance. If we get

ourselves ambushed, if we die here then the next thing human space and regul

may know is more mri arriving, to take up the track the others left at

Kesrith, and this time, this time with a grudge. The thing we've seen . . .

continued. Is that understood, out among the crew?"

"Yes, sir," Galey said hoarsely. "Don't know whether they know about the

regul, but the other, yes, it's something I think everybody reckons."

"You don't want to make a mistake in judgment, do you? You don't want to make

a mistake on the side of friendship and botch a report You wouldn't hold back

information you could get out of SurTac Duncan. You understand how high the

stakes are ... and what an error could do down there."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm sending Flower and the science staff back down. Dr. Luiz and Boaz are

friends of his. He'll talk with them, trust them, as far as he likely trusts

any human now. I have need of someone else, potentially. What we want is a

substitute for a SurTac, someone who can operate in that kind of terrain." He

watched the apprehension grow, and a twinge of pity came on him. "Our options

are limited. We have pilots we could better risk. You're rated for Santiago,

and you know your value . . . don't have to tell you that. But it's not a

matter of skill in that department. It's the land, and a sense of things you

understand what I'm saying."

"Sir-"

"I want you first of all reserved. Just prep. We keep our options open. Maybe

things will work out with mri contact. If not . . . you have a good rapport

with the civs, don't you?"

"I've been in and out of the ship more than most, maybe."

"They know you."

"Yes, sir."

"In some things down there, that could be valuable; and you've been in the

desert."

"Yes, sir," the answer came faintly.

"I want you available, whenever and wherever SurTac Dun-can comes into contact

with us; I want you available if he doesn't. Willing?"

"Yes, sir."

"You'll have some semblance of an office, whatever scan materials we come up

with, original and interpreted. Whatever you think you need." Koch delayed a

moment more, pursed his lips in thought. "It took Duncan some few days to get

from the mri to groundbase; allow ten, eleven days. That's the margin.

Understood?"

It was; it very much was, Koch reckoned. He had a sour taste in his mouth for

the necessity.

One covered all the possibilities.

A private office; that was status. Someone had put a card on the door, the

temporary sort; LT COMDH JAMES B GALEY, BEOON & OPERATIONS Galey keyed open

the lock, turned on the light, finding a bare efficiency setup, barren walls,

down to the rivets; and a desk and a comp terminal. He settled in behind the

desk, shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar chair, keyed in library.

ORDERS; the machine interrupted him with its own program. He signaled

acceptance. SELECT COMPATIBLE CREW OF THREE AND RESERVE CREW, GROUND

OPERATIONS, REPORT CHOICE ADM SOONEST.

He leaned back, hands sweating. He little liked the prospect of taking himself

down there; the matter of selecting others for a high-risk operation was even

less to his taste.

He' made up a demanding qualifications list and started search through

personnel. Comp denied having any personnel with drylands experience. He

erased that requirement and started through the others, erased yet another

requirement and ran it again, with the sense of desperation he began to

understand Koch shared.

They were Haveners on this mission, and for all the several world-patches on

his sleeve, won on this ship, there was nothing they had met like this save

Kesrith itself; there was no time at which they had relied on themselves and

not on their machines. Saber had not been chosen for this mission; it had gone

because it was available. As for experience with mri none of them had had

that, save at long range.

Devastation from orbit; that had been their function until now. Now there was

the barest hope this would not be the case. He was not given to personal

enthusiasm in his assignments; but this one a means of avoiding slaughter that

possibility occurred to him.

Or the possibility of being die one to call down holocaust; that was the other

face of the matter.

He did not sleep well. He sat by day and pored over what data they could give

him, the scan their orbiting eyes could gather, the monotone reports of comp

that no contact had been made.

Flower descended to the surface. Data returned from that source. Day by day,

there was no reply from Duncan, no sighting of mri.

He received word from the admiral's office; SELECTIONS RATIFIED. SHIBO,

KADAHIN, LANE; MATJST MISSION. HARRIS, NORTH, BRIGHT, MAGEE; BACKUP. PROCEED.

The days crawled past, measured in the piecing of maps and vexing lapses in

ground-space communication as NaYin's storms crept like plague across its

sickly face. He took what information mapping department would give him,

prowled Supply, thinking.

The office became papered with charts, a composite of the world, overlaid in

plastics, red-inked at those sites identified in scan, mri cities, potential

targets.

He talked with the crew, gave them warning. There was still the chance that

the whole project would be scrubbed, that by some miracle Flower would call up

contact, declaring peace a reality, the matter solved, the mri willing to

deal.

The hope ebbed, hourly.

Chapter Two

Windshift had begun, that which each evening attended the cooling of the land,

and Hlil tucked his black robes the more closely about him as he rested on his

heels, scanning the dunes, taking breath after his long walking.

The tribe was not far now, tucked down just over the slope by the rim, where

the land fell away in days' marches of terraces and cliffs, and the sea chasms

gaped, empty in this last age of the world. Sencaste said that even that void

would fill, ultimately, the sands off the high flats drifting as they did in

sandfalls and curtains off the windy edges, to the far, hazy depths. Somewhere

out there was the bottom of the world, where all motion stopped, forever; and

that null-place grew, yearly, eating away at the world. The chasms girdled the

earth; but they were finite, and there were no more mountains, for they had

all worn away to nubs. It was a place, this site near the rims, where one

could look into time, and back from it; it quieted the soul, reminded one of

eternity, in this moment that one could not look into the skies without

dreading some movement, or reckoning with alien presence.

The ruins of An-ehon lay just over the horizon to the north, to remind them of

that power, which had made them fugitives in their own land, robbed of tents,

of belongings, of every least thing but what they had worn the morning of the

calamity. There was the bitterness of looking about the camp, and missing so

many, so very many, so that at every turn, one would think of one of the lost

as if that one were in camp, and then realize, and shiver. He was kel'en, of

the warrior caste; death was his province, and it was permitted him to grieve,

but he did not There was dull bewilderment in that part of him which ought by

rights to be touched. In recent days he felt outnumbered by the dead, as if

all the countless who had gone into the Dark in the slow ages of the sea's

dying ought ratter to mourn the living. He did not comprehend the causes of

things. Being kel'en, he neither read nor wrote, held nothing of the wisdom of

sen-caste, which sat at the feet of a she'pan alien to this world and learned.

He knew only the use of his weapons, and tke kel-law, those things which were

proper for a kel'en to know.

It had become appropriate to know things beyond Kutath; he tried, at least The

Kel was the caste which veiled, the Face that Looked Outward. That Outward had

become more than the next rising of the land; it was outsiders and ships and a

manner of fighting which the ages had made only memory on Kutath, and pride

and the Holy the Kel defended forbade that he should flinch from facing it,

since it came.

They had a kel'anth, the gods defend them! who had come out of that Dark; they

had a she'pan who had taken them from the gentle she'pan who had Mothered the

tribe before her. . . young and scarred with the kel-scars on her face; fit he

thought, that the she'pan of this age should bear kel-marks, which testified

she once had been of Kel-caste, had once attained skill with weapons. A

she'pan of a colder, fiercer stamp, this Melein slntel; no Mother to play with

the children of the Kath as their own Sochil had done, to spend more time with

the gentle Kath than with Sen-caste, to love rather than to be wise. Melein

was a chill wind, a breath out of the Dark; and as for her kel'anth, her

warrior-leader. . . .

Him, Hlil almost hated, not for the dead in An-ehon, which might be just; but

for the kel'anth he had killed to take the tribe. It was a selfish hate, and

Hlil resisted it; such resentments demeaned Merai, who had lost challenge to

this Niun sTnteL Merai had died, in fact because gentle Sochil had turned

fierce when challenged; fear, perhaps; or a mother's bewildered rage, that a

stranger-she'pan demanded her children of her, to lead them where she did not

know. So Merai was dead; and Sochil, dead. Of Merai's kinship there was only

his sister left; of his tribe there was a fugitive remnant; and the Honors

which Merai had won in his life, a stranger possessed.

Even Hlil. . . this stranger had gained, for kel-law set the victor in the

stead of the vanquished, to the last of his kin debts and blood debts and

place debts. Hlil was second to Niun s'lntel as he had been second to Merai.

He sat by this stranger in the Kel, tolerated proximity to the strange beast

which was Niun's shadow, bore with the grief which haunted the kel'anth's acts

. . . which could not, he was persuaded, be distraction for the slaughter of a

People the kel'anth had not time to know but which more attended the

disappearance of the kel'anth's other alien shadow, which walked on two feet

That the kel'anth at least grieved ... it was a mortality which bridged one

alienness between them, him and his new kel'anth. They shared something, at

least; if not love . . . loss.

Hlil gathered up a sandy pebble from the crumbling ridge on which he rested,

cast it at a tiny pattern in the sands downslope. It hit true, and a nest of

spiny arms whipped up to enfold the suspected prey. Sand-star. He had

suspected so. His hunting was not so desperate that he must bring that to the

women and children of Kath. It wriggled away, a disturbance through the sand,

and he let it. A pair of serpents, a fat darter, a stone's weight of game; he

had no cause to be ashamed of his day's effort, and there was a stand of pipe

growing within the camp, so that they had no desperate need of moisture,

certainly not the bitter fluid of the star. It nestled into safety next to

some rocks, spread its arms wide again, a pattern of depressions in the sand.

He did not torment it further; it was off the track so, and offered no threat

Kel-law forbade excess.

And in time, with the sun's lowering, kel'ein came. Hlil sat his place,

sentinel to the homecoming path, and marked them in, as he had known by the

fact this post was vacant, that none had come in before him. They saw him as

they passed, lifted hands in salute; he knew their names and put a knot in the

cords at his belt for each knew them veiled as they were, by their manners and

then; stature and simply by their way of walking, for they were his own from

boyhood. Had there been one of higher rank than he that one would have come

and relieved him of this post, to take up the tally; there was none, so he

stayed, as they entered the perimeter of the secure area of the camp.

They came in groups as the sun touched the horizon, appearing like mirages out

of the land, so well they judged their time, to meet at homecoming after

hunting apart all day; black-robed, like drifting shadows, they passed in the

amber twilight, while the sun stained the rocks and touched the hazy depths of

the sea basins, going down over the far, invisible rim as if it vanished in

midair, drawing out shadows.

The knots filled one cord and another and another, until all the tale was told

but two.

Hlil looked eastward, and of certainty, at the mid of sunfall, there came Ras.

He need not have worried, he told himself. Has would not be careless, not she

kel'e'en of the Kel's second highest rank. No reasoning with her, nothing but

ordering her outright, and he could not, even if it were wise.

Ras s'Sochil Kov-Nelan. Merai's truesister.

Of that too, Niun had robbed him. They had been a trio, Hlil and Merai and

Ras, in happier days; and he had dreamed dreams beyond his probabilities. He

was skilled; that was his claim to place; he had Merai's friendship; and

because of that he had been always near Ras. He had taught her, being older;

had gamed with her and with Merai; had watched her every day of her life . . .

and watched her harden since Merai's death. Her mother, Nelan, had been one of

those who failed to come out of An-ehon; of that Ras said nothing. Ras laughed

and spoke and moved, took meals with the Kel and went through all the motions

of life; but she was not Ras as he had known her. She followed Niun s'lntel,

as once, as a kath-child, she had followed him; where Niun walked, she was

shadow; where he rested, she waited. It was a land of madness, a game lacking

humor or sense; but they were all a little mad, who survived An-ehon and

served the she'pan Melein.

Ras arrived, in her own time, paused on the path below the rocks began,

wearily, to climb up to him. When she had done so, she sank down on the flat

stone beside him, arms dropped loosely over her knees, her body heaving with

her breaths.

C. J. Cherryh - Faded Sun 3 - Kutath

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: