Something slammed into his back, sent him tumbling into grass and gravel, rolling toward the stream that slipped past the compound walls and danced into the sea.
He sprang onto his feet, swung round.
The wind-driven rain was hissing and sliding off a dome-shaped shimmer over the Compound-the defense shield. With the android trapped inside. He laughed aloud, a full-throated laugh, his offering to the gods of absurdity.
Deafening squeals, a crash that shook the rock under his feet. What… He squinted through the rain at a swarm of small ships like dots of light moving in and out of the clouds above the dome. Others were swinging back from their first attack.
He saluted them. “The Lady kiss you, whoever you are,” he shouted, then turned and began trotting toward the mountains a few kilometers away.
Miralys
The man in the screen wore a coarse brown robe with the cowl pulled so far forward his face was lost in shadow, all but the point of a long narrow chin. He sat at a rustic desk, his hands hidden inside his voluminous sleeves. “Who are you and why do you threaten us?” he said, his voice mild and faintly metallic, passing through a distorter, something that undercut the image he was trying to project. “We are peaceful students here, acquiring merit through works of the mind. If you want gold, we have none. Why do you come with intent to attack?”
Miralys’ ears snapped down and back; her lips came open showing her teeth; anger-musk rolled off her. She waited for several seconds before she spoke, waited until she had control. “You have ours,” she said. “We want ours and payment for our dead. You have stolen my mate, my Ciocan. Give back what you have taken from me.”
“I do not understand what you are saying, Dyslaera. We are simple Brothers, here. Whoever told you…”
Kikun squeaked as Grandmother Ghost nipped him hard. “Now,” he shouted.
“… we were holding…”
Anyagyn tapped the sensor under her thumb.
Down below, the Capture Landers shifted position in a preset repatterning that left no lander occupying the original space of another.
… any of your people…”
A double dozen cutter beams drove through the suddenly empty places where the landers had been. They wavered a moment in futility, then swung about, hunting the targets that had moved too fast for them, slippery sliding dots of light flipped about by Dyslaera muscle and Dyslaera reflexes, sliding too fast, too fast…
The screen went blank, the transmission interrupted as the defensive shield flashed into place around the Compound.
The landers struck back. Some played cutter beams of their own, probing at the shield, getting nowhere while others used more specialized weapons Digby had dug up for them…
Dyslaera Fighters
Sugnarn pulled his lander in a tight circle about a cutter beam, dusted it with rot grains that went skittering and glittering down the beam edges, crawled inside the projector, and began eating everything they touched. Twenty seconds later the beam withered and died, but Sugnarn didn’t bother looking back, he was already dusting his third beam.
##
Once she was sure there was a flesh operator behind it, that it had been clipped loose from the kephalos, Hannys flirted with a cutter beam, letting it come close enough to graze the side of her lander but never NEVER close enough to do serious damage, teasing it down and down until it was straining in its gimbals, jammed so hard the operator could barely move it, then she dropped into the hole created in the defenses, skimmed along the shield and laid down a line of thermix eggs that hit the ground and began to melt down into bedrock, following the shield down and down, stone bubbling and seething until that section of the Compound was resting uneasily in a thin layer of lava while steam generated by rain hitting the melt rose in agitated clouds about the dome.
Hannys went screaming up and out, dancing, elusive as a thought, hunting for another beam to tease.
Tatakarn was a hair slow on one of his turns; a missile caught the edge of his drive projector, blew the lander into dust.
##
When Jarnys saw her brother die, her concentration went-only momentarily, but it was enough; The cutter-beam sliced into her lander, carved away a third of it, took most of the rightside of her body with it. Dying she went nincs-othran and shut the pain away; the drives were partially intact, she had some power; she fought the machine around, sent it screaming at one of flickering cuttergates in the defense shield, got her timing perfect, and took a large chunk of the Compound with her as she crashed.
Miralys
On the bridge of the Cillasheg Miralys watched the battle below her, her claws shredding the padding of the co-seat. Rohant was dead, his body might still be alive down there, somewhere, but that didn’t matter, he was dead and gone, beyond her reach. She wasn’t grieving yet, she wasn’t even angry now, just grimly determined to take that island down to bedrock, not even a microbe left alive.
Kikun and his Gods
Kikun watched the deathdance on the great forward screen and mourned the lives he’d known and not known. This was what his grandfolks had seen when the daivavig landed their guns on Keyazee’s shores, when they’d flown their hot air balloons overhead and dropped incendiaries around the easterness forces. This is what they’d seen and he could feel the terror of it.
His gods came to him.
Suddenly they were there, watching, demanding… Jadii-Gevas stood behind Miralys, wild black eyes fixed on the screen. He was snorting and jerking his head, the antlertree swaying up and down, forward and back.
Spash’ats stood at the back of the bridge, bigger and darker than before, his darkness pressing against the glow from the screen.
LIFE NOT DEATH, Spash’ats rumbled at Kikun. What must be done, see that it is done without excess, that it is finished quickly and cleanly as such things go. You can do this, Nayol Hanee, you must do this.
Xumady snorted and danced across the control panels and sensorboards beneath the great forescreen, his nimble black paws flickering over and around the nimble clawed hands of the Dyslaera working there, his long limber body humping and flattening. He sang a wordless song of fierce triumph, a hot joyous song of rage and hate as the Mimishay compound began to crumble under the blows from the landers. And when a lander burned to ash or went tumbling in a black arc to the boiling stone, he sat up on his haunches, his long back straight and stiff, his short forelegs stretched wide, and he keened his grief and the Dyslaera grief. He was all passion and heat, his fire beating at the cool restraint of Spash’ats’ dark reason.
’Gemla Mask hung before Kikun, white stripes across the black base flushing red with Xumady’s song, going ice-white and pure when Spash’ats was stronger… change and change again, a rhythm as steady as the splash of waves against the island’s shore. Kikun was Mask, was caught in the ebb and flow…
Then Grandmother Ghost was back, pinching him, her strong ancient fingers as punishing now as they were when she was still alive and he was a small naughty tokon playing in the mud.
Your girl’s down there, chile. You want her alive, you’d best go get her, Her and that Rohant. What I can see, they going to get themselves roasted any minute now. Gaagi, you gormless shade, haul your tail out here and show him…
She pinched at Kikun till he swung his chair about and stared at the emptiness where Spash’ats had drawn back into himself.