I was standing there, thinking hard and chewing my knuckle in the dark, when my wrist started squealing.
13
RUNNING AROUND IN THE DARK
It had been twenty years since I’d heard that squeaclass="underline" a personal Mayday from someone close by. A navyish someone. When you joined the fleet, you got a tiny beeper embedded under the skin of your wrist, so if you got caught in some terrible disaster, you could call for help. The beeper sent out a radio beam that activated everyone else’s beeper within a few kilometers — a shrieky shrill signal that said, "Come running, shipmate in trouble."
The last time my beeper went off was on Troyen: Sam desperately trying to reach me.
I’d got there too late.
"Counselor!" I yelled into the darkness. "Sorry to disturb you, but this is important. Can you turn on the lights and open the door? Counselor? Counselor?"
No answer.
"Hey!" I shouted louder. "Hey!"
Nothing.
"Can anybody hear me? Anybody there?"
It was only a small dome: two rooms. And Mandasars are light sleepers. In fact, experts get into arguments whether Mandasars ever truly sleep, or just go into a resting doze where they’re always half-conscious. Either way, Counselor and the others would never snooze through me calling, let alone the squealing from my wrist.
That squeal was making me jumpy. I told the implant, "Shut off," and the beeper stopped its noise, leaving behind a thick stuffy silence. No sound of moving or breathing anywhere close by; I was all alone in the dome.
Why did that worry me? There’d been two other domes beside this one. The kids probably ate here, and slept next door. Nothing strange about that… but it was surprising they’d left me alone, me being sick and all. Before I’d passed out, they were giving me the royal treatment. Did they change their minds once I went delirious? Or had they been watching over me, till something big and important drew everybody away?
I could imagine Counselor dozing on a pallet beside me when suddenly some crisis struck. Maybe one of her hive-mates yelled from outside. Counselor ran to help, knocking over the water bowl and not even stopping to clean up.
But what could cause such a fuss? Recruiters on a raid?
I thought about my wrist beeper again… and suddenly, it all made sense. Someone had come from the navy. A recovery team had picked up the escape pod’s homing beacon and followed the signal here. Maybe they’d decided to look around a bit, to see if anyone had been inside the pod.
What would the Mandasars think when they spotted humans wandering about in the dark? Every warrior in the valley would come howling for blood, believing recruiters were on the march.
No wonder the poor navy people fired off a Mayday.
I blundered across the room and banged my fist against the wall. The dome field didn’t budge. "House-soul, attend!" I yelled. "Can you open a door? Please."
The house-soul ignored me. For all it knew, I could be a burglar trying to make a getaway. The computer would keep me locked in here, unable to help the navy folks till some recognized member of the hive came to let me out.
"House-soul!" I yelled again. "This is an emergency. The warriors might kill someone innocent."
No response. I took a breath, then drove my heel into the wall with a hard side-kick. The impact knocked me backward, but it didn’t make any impression on the dome. A typical dome field is strong enough to withstand a hurricane or lightning bolt; my strongest kick just wasn’t an irresistible force of nature.
"House-soul, come on! Listen to me! It’s a matter of life and death. Don’t you have any overrides for when sentient lives are threatened?"
Still nothing. I could be speaking a foreign language for all this computer cared about me…
Oh.
Three seconds later, the house-soul had popped open a door right in front of my face. Counselor must have authorized the computer to take orders from me. All I had to do was ask in Mandasar.
The weather had turned spring-night cool, with a starry sky and three yellow moons the size of confetti. I lifted my wrist, and whispered to the implant, "Find Mayday source." Then I held out my arm and turned in a slow circle till the implant gave a beep. At that second, my arm pointed up the road and along the canal, in the direction the escape pod had been floating when I left it.
That made sense. If the Mayday had come from a navy recovery team, the team would be close to the evac module.
I told my wrist implant to switch to silent mode, so it wouldn’t squeal no matter what. You don’t want your beeper going off when you’re trying to sneak around in the dark… especially not within earshot of Mandasar warriors, ready to gut any human they met.
For a second, I wondered if I was crazy to be out here at all. How did I think I could help? It was one thing to take on a single untrained warrior in full daylight; but if a navy recovery team was under attack by a whole militia of warriors, with every Mandasar believing the team was a desperate threat to their hives… it would take more than a few fighting tricks to get anyone out in one piece. Including me.
On top of that, these navy folks likely came from the Jacaranda. They may have been sent to capture me and drag me off to some awful place halfway across the galaxy. If they were as nasty as Tobit said, they might even have set off a fake Mayday to flush me out of hiding.
But… it was stupid to worry over what-ifs when there was only one right thing to do.
Help the best I could. Hope the rest worked out.
I started running up the road beside the silent dark waters of the canal.
The first thing I found was an unconscious worker. It could have been Hib, Nib, or Pib… but it could also have been any other worker in the valley. Even with the moonlight, it was too dark to make out the teeny facial features that distinguish one worker from another.
As far as I could tell, the worker wasn’t hurt, just unconscious. Breathing peacefully. That made me think it’d been shot by a hypersonic stunner — a standard navy-issue weapon, mostly used by Explorers who encounter unknown alien lifeforms. It’s handy to have a little pistol that knocks out attackers without killing them… especially when you’re on an unexplored planet and don’t know whether you’re shooting at a big dumb predator or a sentient being who’s just mad at you for trampling its sweet potatoes.
If the navy team had stunners, they might not be in such trouble… as long as the guns’ batteries held out. Stun-pistols were good for twenty shots or so. That wasn’t nearly enough to take down every Mandasar in the marsh, but it was better than nothing. I’d have to be careful myself. If the team was looking to capture me, one shot from a stunner could lay me out cold for six hours.
I left the worker where it was and moved forward again, this time keeping under the shadow of the trees between the road and canal. Soon after, I found an unconscious gentle, then an unconscious warrior. During our discussions that afternoon, Counselor had said all three castes took turns at sentry duty… and if an alert came in, the whole community fanned out over the marsh to find the intruders. Lucky for me, the searchers in this area had already got stunned; otherwise, they might be shouting, "He’s here, he’s here," and bringing the militia down on my head. That would be very bad.
Half a kilometer and six more unconscious bodies later, I came to the escape pod. It was still floating in the middle of the canal, barely moving on the slow current. A scatter of Mandasar bodies lay flumped unconscious at the edge of the water, all of them warriors… as if there’d been a pitched battle here, not just sentries caught off guard in the dark.