Cottonwood (26 page)

Sarah looked away, pretending to be distracted as T’aki swooped his toy ship up over one arm of the green chair, along the back, and down the other side.

“I don’t say this to hurt you.”

“I know.” She visibly braced herself and turned back to him again. “I’m not complaining. All I have to do is hear it. You were the one who had to live it. Go on.”

They were evacuated to the boats, if one could call that chaotic mess an evacuation. The humans were trying to help themselves to their technology, taking everything that wasn’t bolted down and unbolting it if it was. The sealed doors could not be opened and gave off a lethal synaptic shock when the humans tried to cut through them, so the rest of the ship was safe, but the hold itself was emptied.

“Down to the panels on the walls,” said Sanford grimly. “They used us to do the stripping. We were stronger, of course, and we could work the tools. All of our technology is keyed. It requires a code to operate even a standard console, let alone a weapon. Most of the civilians couldn’t even open a door if it was locked.”

“That’s threat assessment in action,” said Sarah, and he chuckled wearily.

“It was intended to keep our weapons out of civilian hands, but yes. Our histories are violent ones. It has not made us trusting…thank Ko’vi. In any event, the humans took most of it, but in the chaos—you cannot imagine the chaos—many of us were able to hide things away internally.”

Sarah, doubtless recalling the size of the weapons hidden in the crawlspace, gave him a dubious frown.

For reply, Sanford reached into a crate of mechanical parts below his work table and came up with two pieces that were, together, roughly equal to a yang’ti disrupter. “First, they must be dismantled,” he said, and before her astonished eyes, he tipped back his head and swallowed them. “As for the firing pin—” he went on calmly, and pried up part of his abdominal plating. He slid an assortment of small plastic and metal objects from around the table between his chitin and his skin, and looked at her, hands spread.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked, looking uncomfortable.

“Yes.” He removed the smaller pieces, coughed up the larger ones, and tossed everything back onto the table, adding dryly, “And hiding places are not infinite. Yet I managed one whole weapon and part of the code-bank. Of course, we were all searched when they took us off the boats, but by then, I’d had nearly sixty days to make such a search as unpleasant as possible. They found only a few things.”

“He peed on everything,” T’aki said eagerly. He’d been told this story and in particular relished that aspect of it. “And spat chaw and threw up
everywhere
.”

Sanford hushed him and the boy ran at once to Sarah, who picked him up. Her face had gone pink.

“After a very brief inspection, I arrived in the first camp, Fairfield, where I was able to bring out my salvage and do what I could with it. I’ve been moved several times since then, but so far, they’ve always been willing to let me move my possessions as long as I bribe them. I’m very good at hiding things, and besides—” He waved an arm at the electronics that covered his wall. “—most humans don’t seem to know the difference between their technologies and ours, if I break it down small enough. Most of the weapons you saw, and all the human ones, I’ve had since I lived at Fairfield. But the important thing, the only thing, was the code-bank.”

“I can’t…” She shook her head, her brows pinched. “My translator isn’t getting that word. What does it do?”

“It’s a security device,” he said. “Every codekey for every door, every operating system, every last lock on the ship is stored here. With this, I can seal the hold, move the ship out of Earth’s reach, finish the repairs, and get back to my people.” He looked at his son, curled comfortably on the human’s lap. “I had a long time on the boat to think of…oh, revolutions and seizing airships and useless fantasies of that sort. I wasn’t long in Fairfield before I knew I could never…never save us all.”

It was the first time he had ever said the words out loud, and hearing them made him feel selfish and small and never mind how true they were. The cold mathematics of this had always been a surrender of sorts, but not his own; he felt now, as he always felt when he thought of this, the accusing weight of every yang’ti who shared this world with him pressing in. Some masochistic urge made him continue, say it all: “And when I had finally swallowed that, I came to realize that every person I attempt to take with me when I do go over that wall exponentially lessens my odds of success.”

‘Even my son,’ he wanted to say, but those words stuck in his throat and would not be spoken.

Sarah looked down at the boy, as if she heard them anyway.

“I cannot allow anything to matter more than getting back to my people,” Sanford said, “because someone has got to tell them what has happened to us. I can’t save us, I can’t fight, I can’t help anyone…all I can do is go home and
tell someone what is happening here
.”

“I know,” she said.

He looked at her, breathing hard, his hands in fists, and believed her, oddly. He believed that she did know, that she understood and agreed, and at that moment, as ridiculous as it was, he felt the burden of it all ease. Not vanish…but ease.

“Well,” she said at last. Her eyes were troubled, solemn. “I don’t know how I’m going to get you up to the ship, but I guess IBI might have an airlift or something we can hijack when we get there. I’ll help you, Sanford. When do you want to leave?”

Just like that. His heart throbbed. He stood up and paced around his work table, looking at the bits and pieces of human technology lining his walls. “It is not so simple. The code-bank is not functional yet. When I took it—” His words caught in his throat, bitter as chaw. He said them anyway. “I had the choice to take an entire weapon and half the code-bank, or the whole code-bank and half a weapon. I took the weapon.”

“And the captain took the other half?” Sarah guessed.

“No. Commander Tlee’tathk took nothing. He surrendered himself to the humans as our leader and they took him into their custody, as surely he knew they would. I have not seen him since.”

Silence. He looked at her and saw her hand on his unfeeling arm. His heart throbbed again. He touched her briefly, then stepped away and stroked his son’s seams instead. “I took the code chips. And some of the more essential parts. The rest, I gave to another soldier. A…friend.”

His name had been M’orr’ak and although they had not met before accepting their doomed colony mission, they were of the same House and therefore very distantly related. The days when caste mattered were long, long gone, but it was enough to get them talking and, talking, they had found in one another that rare blend of familial good feeling and irreverent camaraderie. By the time they boarded the ship itself, they were brothers, just the same as the sons of his father, and thinking of him still brought a pang to Sanford’s heart. He had given M’orr’ak the rest of the code-bank’s parts to swallow and hide beneath his plates and M’orr’ak had done so without hesitation, joking that this would be the last order he followed for a while, that he had a feeling once the humans came, he would no longer be a soldier. But when they were taken down to the boats, M’orr’ak found it in him to be a soldier just once more, enough to protest the rough-handling of the colonists he saw being separated from their families. The humans ordered him back in line. M’orr’ak resisted.

He was shot, the first of them to be shot. Nk’os’a’knko saw his head opened by simple human projectile pellets, laughably crude. He saw his brother’s slack body thrown over the rails and into the sea. All his mourning was stained with thoughts of the code-bank and for that, not-yet-Sanford hated for the first time in his life. He hated humans. He hated this mission. He hated himself.

“He died,” Sanford said now. One word in his own speech. Only two in Sarah’s. It was not fair. “Nearly half the controller’s parts were lost to me. For twenty years, I have salvaged minutiae to rebuild it—sometimes as little as a wire or a single fastener. I have managed to piece most of it back together, but I still require three parts.”

She did not ask foolish questions. Three yang’ti parts could take another twenty years to find, if ever, and she knew it.

“They are absurdly basic parts,” he went on. “I could find them in a child’s toy, if I had one. Unfortunately, most of the pieces that come to me—that come to anyone after all this time—have been stripped of them, because they are such basic needs. So we will wait. As for how to board the ship, if your people have recovered one of the escape pods, I could pilot it.”

“I know they made a lot of dives,” she said. “But if they ever found anything like an escape pod, they never said so. Just a lot of other stuff…” She thought hard, only to shake her head. “But I have no idea where they’re keeping it. I’ve never seen any of the salvage, except some on TV and those were all guns. I guess if you could get the parts you need off guns, you’d be gone by now.”

“Yes.”

“But IBI does own the salvage rights.” Sarah glanced back over her shoulder, as if she could see through the wall, through all the walls, between her and whatever lay beyond the tall, stone borders of Cottonwood. “And they have a research and development department here. I could sneak in and look around.”

She offered with the same reckless optimism that she’d had when first telling him of her plan to feed five hundred yang’ti against IBI’s orders.

“Have you any experience in such things?” Sanford asked cautiously.

“Well, no, but I could at least look. If they catch me snooping, I’m sure I can talk my way out of it.”

She believed it. She really did.

She saw his incredulity. Moreover, she recognized it. And still, she said, “They can’t do anything to
me
, Sanford. In here, with you, that’s one thing, but not even IBI can make humans disappear without consequences.”

“Are you certain?” he asked quietly.

She opened her mouth to dismiss the idea…and then slowly closed it again. She thought, frowning. “Pretty sure,” she said at last, but said it in a small, uncertain voice.

“Do not go looking for this…research department,” he told her. “If you are caught there, even if they do nothing in retaliation—” Damned unlikely. “—they will surely suspect you. After the burning of Baccus’s house—”

“Baccus’s babies,” she corrected harshly and then looked away. Her hands moved, rubbing T’aki’s back. After a long, uncomfortable silence, she bent her neck and said, “I just want to help. I don’t want to be one of them, Sanford. You have no idea…I just want to make it
right
.”

He reached out impulsively and touched her arm. She had no joints for his fingers to dip along. All her body was receptive to him, he thought then, and bizarrely, the thought embarrassed him. He withdrew his hand.

T’aki looked at him, then at her. He pulled up his legs and giggled.

“Bring the food,” Sanford said. “For the…the…”

“Block party,” she said tonelessly, and nodded. “Yeah, it’s not much, but I guess it’s about what I can do. You don’t think it’s ghoulish, though? So soon after…after Baccus?”

Such things happened here every day, but he could not bring himself to say so. Perhaps she saw it in his eyes. Her own dimmed a little. She set the boy down and opened her briefcase. She handed him some forms. “For Baccus’s mark,” she said.

He made it.

“I don’t know if it’ll do any good, really, but if you happen to see him around anywhere, just…tell him I’m so sorry.”

“Your feelings are known.” Oh hell, he touched her again, her hand this time, which seemed more appropriate. “Take care they are not too well known.”

She smiled for him, took back her papers and her hand, and left his house.

Sanford went to the window and watched long enough to be certain Sam would not make a nuisance of himself, and then sat down again at his work table. Broken machines stared him down. He had just told a human that he meant to escape and how he meant to do it. In one hour, the caution of nearly twenty years had been undone.

“She’s coming back,” chirped T’aki, climbing up onto his work table to watch her go through the window.

“As often as she can,” Sanford agreed.

“She likes us.”

“Yes.”

“She likes me best.”

“Because you are wonderful,” he said by rote. “Go and play. Stay close.”

T’aki took his toy ship and ran out into the sunshine. Sanford sat a while longer, then heaved a sigh, took up his tools, and got back to work.

CHAPTER NINE

Strange, how the world could move on even when it had been shaken to its foundations. Sanford could remember vividly cracking the plates over his forearm during the ship’s near-crash into this planet and how that ridiculously insignificant little pain had asserted itself over the days that followed, while the ship hung dying in the air and humans gathered in their gunships below. He could remember sitting in the cramped cell on the human’s boat with seven other strangers, M’orr’ak dead not even an hour and his body swollen with weapon parts and his useless code-bank, and being hungry. The body doesn’t care that it may die tomorrow, it only wants what it needs to keep running today.

So Sanford worked. After taking a human into his secret bunker and showing her the code-bank, speaking openly of escape, he went right back to work like none of it had ever happened. He went to the Heaps and salvaged whatever he could to repair toys, industrial equipment, and kitchen aids, and sold them for chits. The higher-quality merchandise, he sold back to the humans, who paid him with better food, soap, tools, medical supplies, and sometimes money. They laughed at him when they gave him money, knowing he couldn’t spend it, but what can’t be spent can only accrue and Sanford had learned long ago the value of human currency changes when it is offered in quantity and in secret.

He saw Sarah nearly every day, either in passing out on the Heaps, or at home. Without consciously thinking about it, he attuned himself to her habits, so that at the end of her shift, when she was likeliest to come to his house, he was there to let her in. They did not speak of escape pods or IBI or Cottonwood when she came. She played with T’aki and complained about the weather and said admiring things when she watched Sanford work and that was it. Their time together was understandably brief—she had many other clients to see each day—and ordinary, and it was the ordinariness he missed most when she left.