Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable – and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But – also like most offplanet Raksamat – she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.
The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”
Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.
“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes – plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes – had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”
The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.
“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.
Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.
A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.
And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.
Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.
Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.
Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.
She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.
A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible – it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half-ran, half-stumbled forward into the trees.
Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.
The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.
One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.
THE RAIN LESSENED not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.
She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag – which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything – and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.
“Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”
Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.
The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground – something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree – and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.
As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.
Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and good-bye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother Ciwril had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.
No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.
Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.
The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most of their energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.