Balance Point (21 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Mort scooped larvae from the heart of a fallen tree, swallowed them, wood fiber and all, without even savoring the taste, and returned to his work.

He sifted human intellects he encountered within the distant hive called Yaven as rapidly and dispassionately as if they had been larvae. He discarded each when it did not resemble Jazen, then probed the next. The great mass within which he felt Jazen, and the other who was like Jazen nearby, shrank with each discard, but Jazen remained too distant and indistinct.

As he worked, he watched through Kit’s eyes as the Scorpion overflew a rolling and seemingly endless nightscape, rendered oddly luminous by peculiar eyelids that Kit called “Snoops.” The Scorpion flew so close to the barren soil that had he been beneath it he could have risen on two and swatted the Scorpion’s belly. The sensation of velocity was profound, but Kit’s actual progress toward the hive called Yaven seemed nonexistent.

Ahead, a round hill loomed. The Scorpion, without a touch by Kit, rose abruptly, passed barely above the obstacle, then dropped back with scant change in velocity.

Aloud Kit said, “
Hoo
ah!”

“Kit, I recognize that hill! You are traveling in circles!”

“Not exactly circles, but good point.” She spoke aloud, not to him. “Reset random loiter. Reset speed four nine zero.”

“When you evaded the killing machines and the fighter jocks you flew much faster.”

Kit said, “In vacuum no one can hear you speed. I’ve gotten this far unseen. Staying subsonic keeps me unheard.” Then she thought, “Besides, the autopilot’s governed. It only flies nap-of-the-planet below five hundred miles an hour.”

“You urge me to work faster. But you meander like a blind woog.”

“It’s early. The best time to sneak past humans is when most of them are asleep and the ones who aren’t wish they were. And I’m waiting on weather.”

“The weather there seems clear.”

“Exactly.”

Mort peered again across the bleakness, animated only by wind-beaten scrub. Hunting there without cover would be difficult. Since he began the search for Jazen, food, or the lack thereof, was constantly on his mind. “This is prairie. Where are the herds?”

“Bad air, bad water, bad agricultural and wildlife management . . . Yavet’s non-cultured megafaunal population became unmeasurable a long time ago. No cows. No cow-feed farms. But no cowboys or farmers outdoors to look up and see me fly past out here, either. Mort, you’re ninety years late for the last round-up.”

With his forepaw Mort slapped a glider that passed near enough, swallowed it whole, but still felt weakness in the forelimb with which he had swatted the morsel.

No grezzen had the means or the vanity to count calories, but grezzen knew that, as in humans, the organs that consumed the greatest proportion, fully twenty percent, of the energy they produced were their disproportionately large brains. Thirty million years of grezzen evolution had sharpened the balance point between metabolism and a predator’s measured violence to a knife edge unrivalled in the universe.

Grezzen, above all other species, had to hunt constantly to live. By his disproportionate mental activity in his search for Jazen, Mort was slowly starving himself to death.

“Why have the Yavi not starved, then, Kit?”

“Spoken like a carnivore. The upper classes get their meat from tank-raised livestock. The rest buy shaped vegetable protein grown in tray farms. Jazen said it tastes like crap.”

“How did the Yavi come to such a dreadful system?”

“Hard to say. My poli-sci profs got in a fist fight once over whether Yavi society was analogous to democratic capitalism run amok or totalitarian socialism run amok.”

“Human politics seem to be a waste of perfectly good violence.”

“Fair point. The Unified Republics of Yavet is a worldwide totalitarian police state. So they haven’t wasted any violence on nation-to-nation politics in two hundred years. The Yavi think
nothing’s
amok. At least the upper classes think so.”

“What do you think?”

“I dunno. When the few make every decision for the many, the many eat mung-bean bars, the few eat steak, and a society can rain shit on itself from outer space and think nothing’s amok.”

“Understanding humans is painfully difficult.”

“We’re really not that bad. But overthinking us’ll kill you.”

Two crawlers scurried through the moss alongside Mort. He stabbed sluggishly with his left midlimb and impaled one. Normally he would have gotten both. He returned to sifting intellects, aware that Jazen’s and probably Kit’s lives depended on it. But overthinking was, indeed, killing him.

“
Ping
. Weather advisory.”

Mort’s head snapped up.

Time had passed. His mental acuity had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer discern precisely how much time had passed. But he knew that he had made many failed probings since his last conversation with Kit, before the metallic tone and voice broke Kit’s concentration.

Her eyes scanned a moving pattern of multicolored light on one of the leaves in front of her, then she said aloud. “Control to manual. RWR to max.”

Mort felt her increase the Scorpion’s velocity as she turned it sharply.

“Kit, what are you doing?”

“Relax. Nothing bad. The weatherman’s getting friendly, the sentries are getting sleepy, and I’ve turned to a heading into Yaven.”

“Now the Yavi will hunt you?”

“Not yet. The Radar Emissions Warning Receiver’s just a good habit. Yaven’s got radar to watch weather and airliners, but not air-defense radar to detect hostile bombers. The Unified Republics haven’t bombed their own capital in two hundred years.”

Kit’s consciousness focused on flying. Mort resumed his work, made steady progress.

“Wow.” Kit whispered aloud. “That is some big pyramid.”

In the Scorpion’s eye a mountain grew out of the darkness ahead of Kit. As the Scorpion’s eye grew clearer, Mort saw the mountain’s flanks were smooth and angular, and shimmered, in the way of most human constructs. The reason that the mountain’s flanks were visible through the darkness was that they were studded with great jets of dull flame. The jets tapered into curls of smoke as black as the roiling clouds that scudded so low above the mountain’s peak that they seemed to scrape it.

Kit was counting aloud, softly. “Thirteen . . . fourteen. Fourteen stacks a side. That’s Yaven, alright.”

Kit slowed the Scorpion, inching it forward, narrowing the distance between it and the great fiery mountain.

Jagged lightning ripped the sky between the clouds and the peak.

Boom!

Mort felt Kit stiffen. “Shit!”

He drew back from Kit’s consciousness, blinked all three eyes. Around him daylight dappled the familiar forest with light and shadow. Insects buzzed and the breeze blew gently.

Nonetheless, his heart pounded. Fire. Why did there have to be fire?

Unbidden, Kit whispered, “Crap, that was close,” and her voice drew him back in to her consciousness.

Mort heard in her ears a steady rumble, looked through her eyes and saw black rain sheet across the Scorpion’s eye, smearing the great mountain’s image into smudges of bronze and gold and shimmering, flaming orange.

“That cannot be Yaven. If Jazen were within that place he would have perished.”

“Easy, Mort! I’m not crazy about fire myself. But I’m the one who’s here, and I’m a big girl. I need your help now more than ever.”

He drew a deep breath. “You may rely on me.”

“The pyramid’s not an enclosed bonfire. It just looks that way at night. They don’t call these places stack cities just because the people live on top of each other. Those stacks exhaust airborne waste from the industrial levels underground.”

Again lightning flashed, then boomed. The rain beat harder against the Scorpion’s skin, as it now hovered close enough to the flaming pyramid that he could have run to the thing in three bounds. Though he would not have.

“Mort, time to get specific. You know where I am. How close is Jazen to me? A cruiser’s a mile long. How many cruisers?”

Mort concentrated on Kit’s location, then on the larger spherical volume to which he had reduced Jazen’s location, then felt his heart sink. “He is nine cruisers distant. But he is deep within the mountain. As many Yavi surround him as prey animals surround me here. Many of those Yavi are without doubt hostile to Jazen and to you. They may already be restraining him.”

“I know.”

“You and Howard told me you were going to pursue Jazen and assist him. Neither you nor Howard revealed to me that you would have to dig away a mountain filled with evil humans to do so. You deceived me.”

“No. Humans don’t know what the other guy doesn’t know, like you do. Ask a question, get an answer. That’s how we roll. If you’d asked, I would have told you I had a plan.”

“What? Ask at the front door for the Yavi to deliver Jazen like a gift?”

“Wow. Sex usually makes humans
less
grumpy.”

“Sarcasm remains new to me.”

“No, you’re right. I never planned to go in the front door. And I never planned to dig my way in. But I think I can drop down the chimney.”

“Through
fire?
”

“It’s not fire. Waste stack upflow is mostly toxic gas, superheated steam, cinders, metallic sparks and flaming debris. Most points on the inner walls of those stacks, you could barely fry eggs.”

“Oh. Piece of pie.”

“Cake. Piece of cake. But you nailed the sarcasm.”

The rumble of rain against the Scorpion’s skin diminished.

“Mort, I gotta go before I lose the storm’s cover. When I get inside, you have a precise location waiting for me, okay?”

His head sagged with fatigue and he paused.

Kit believed that she had concealed from him the manner of her initial phrasing, which had been “
If
I get inside alive.” And he felt that, beneath her banter, she was as coldly terrified as any limping woog was when it heard him approach.

“I will do my best.”

“You sound tired. Go get a bite while I’m busy.”

Humans often attempted a joke to ease stress in others.

He thought, “Kit? If you cannot be good, be careful. Ha-ha.”

He felt her inner terror turn for an instant, but not to amusement. It turned to sorrow. “Mort, assassins can’t usually choose to be either.”

Then her thoughts became cold, precise and impenetrable, as his own did, and his mother’s had, when tracking dangerous prey in dangerous terrain.

Through her eyes, he saw Yaven’s broad, bronze skin, only a paw’s reach away as the Scorpion crept up the pyramid’s flank. Slick with rain that coursed down its slope, the metal sparkled in bright white flashes less and less frequently as the storm weakened and the lightning strikes ebbed.

Red glow flooded Kit’s vision as the Scorpion rose above the edge of one of the great stacks.

The Scorpion’s nose jerked toward the clouds, struck by the gale roaring up from deep within the great nest. Caught and buffeted, the Scorpion tumbled as insubstantially as a leaf.

Kit forced the Scorpion’s nose back down. The stack’s opposite wall was so distant that had the circular opening been a plain, a hundred woog could have grazed comfortably within its area. The wall’s texture was distorted by the shimmer of rising heat and interrupted by an inverted storm of sparks, translucent steam, and twisting, unidentifiable, flaming bits.

The entire mass roared upward twice as fast as one of the humans’ wheeled shells traveled across level ground.

Kit tipped the Scorpion so that it floated, like the melon seed it resembled, blunt end down, its belly nearly grazing the stack’s vertical inner wall.

Then the shell that protected one of the two humans who Mort most valued began to crawl down into smoky darkness and flame.

For a time that seemed interminable, the Scorpion crept deeper inside the great pyramid, as he heard in Kit’s ears the roar of the scorching maelstrom that buffeted her. He saw through her eyes fire and sparks that rushed up and past her.

It suddenly seemed to Mort that the Scorpion was more fragile than an eggshell.

“Kit, can the Scorpion protect you within that fire?”

“Piece of pie, Mort. Outside air temperature’s two twenty, in here a cozy seventy-two. A Scorpion fuselage gets twice that hot just poking along in atmosphere at two thousand miles an hour. The headwind I’m bucking from the updraft is only one hundred ten.”

“How far are you descending?”

“The map that rude lady at Teufelsberg Station uploaded shows an emergency maintenance hatch at level Thirty Lower. It exits into an inspection-‘bot storage chamber, then out to a quiet neighborhood. I’ll park alongside the hatch, pop the canopy, lean out and paste a couple thermite strips on the latch. Burn my way in. By then you’ll have Jazen pinpointed for me, right?”

Mort touched the lining of his mouth with the tip of his index foreclaw.

Already, the membrane was stiff and dry. Next, his vision would deteriorate. Since his cousins all across his world had realized that he had undertaken this task, he had felt first their mild consternation, then bewilderment. The death of a cousin was inevitable, but an untimely death rare. However, he had mated successfully, so his life had served its purpose. His demise, if he chose a behavior that hastened it, would be merely sad. But the choice was his to make.

“Right?”

“Right. Kit, you will go out into the fire?”

“This flight suit’s fireproof and insulated, and I’ve got a rebreather. I could work outside in that crap for ten minutes before I was toast.”