Cottonwood (55 page)

“It’s going to be okay,” she heard herself say. “You’re going home. Can you stand?”

“I’m going home,” he gasped, flecking her chest with his blood on every word. “I can fly.”

He knotted his hands in her hospital gown and heaved himself onto his feet with her help. He kept laughing as he ran with her to the pod, laughing through his wet, pain-taut breaths. Sanford was waiting to help them inside. He tried to pull her up too, but she ducked away and raced back into the battleground.

The next man she found shook her off. “Someone has to hold the line!” he shouted at her, firing.

“You have to go now, while you can!”

He looked at her, piercing alien eyes holding her to the spot. “There’s not enough room for everyone,” he said. “You know it. I know it. Leave me alone and get to work.”

She did. She had to. There was no time.

As yang’ti fell back, the humans pressed in. Soon, a small number of soldiers had made the lunge in and were slowly but steadily working their way around the edge of the room, behind the crates, flanking the prisoners and pinning them in cross-fire. It was getting hard to see through the smoke and the electric spray of human bodies, but Sarah kept her feet and concentrated on getting back and forth as fast as possible, bringing them in by ones and twos to the safety of the pod.

And it filled up so fast.

“Strap the wounded in,” she kept saying. “Everybody else, stand up! Leave the guns, there’s no room for guns! Get close, as tight as you can! Please, you’ve got to make room!”

“Sarah!” Sanford fought his way through the hold, pushing some bodies aside and climbing over others in his effort to reach the door. “Now you! There is still room for you! Get in!”

She reached for him, but ducked down screaming as something exploded in the main room, cracking that heavy glass window into instant lace. Crouching here, under the smoke, she squeezed open her eyes and saw a yang’ti sprawled in the doorway, looking back at her.

And it was Baccus.

Half her arm was gone and that side of her body was burnt black from her head to her hip, but recognition was immediate and incontrovertible for all that. It was Che Baccus; it could be no one else. She didn’t speak, maybe couldn’t speak, but in her eyes, Sarah could see that Baccus knew who she was too.

They stared at each other as Sanford called her name.

A second explosion knocked a few chips from the window. They had to go.

Sarah stretched out as far as she could. Baccus took her hand and let herself be pulled, coughing and spitting, to the pod. Sanford held out his hand when he saw her, but his fingers curled when he looked down and saw Baccus clinging to her hospital gown. He looked up again, torn. Behind him, clutched in some stranger’s arms, T’aki began to skree and struggle.

“I’m not leaving you,” Sanford said, again almost conversationally.

“Yes,” she answered. “You are. Please understand. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t if it means leaving someone else behind. You’ve got to take her.”

He reached out again, not for her hand or the injured yang’ti huddled against her knees, but to touch her face.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I do.”

If he answered, she couldn’t hear him. Explosion after explosion rocked the storeroom; they’d started lobbing in concussion bombs. The window cracked and cracked and finally shattered.

Sanford took his hand away. It was bloody. He closed it in a fist, reached down with his other hand and pulled Baccus into the already-packed pod.

There was no more room. He turned away as T’aki screamed for her and shut the door. It sealed with a hiss and a metallic clang of finality. She backed away, her eyes swimming, and was seized in thorny arms and carried out of the little room. “Don’t look!” someone bellowed in her ear. “Burners! Get down!”

So she stumbled with him blindly in the smoke and was still knocked flat when the pod’s engines fired, blasting out safety glass in half-melted hunks of slag. She rolled onto her back and watched it right itself, raise up, slowly turn.

Another concussion bomb went off, this one practically at her feet. She was shoved back, smacked up hard into a stack of crates, and did not see the pod in flight. It didn’t matter, she decided, as her world bled out to grey. He got away, that was the important thing.

The only thing, really.

* * *

It was over by the time she awoke, so she didn’t see the point in resisting anymore. Exhausted, disorientated, and in tremendous pain that seemed to occupy a space ten times the physical dimensions of her broken arm, Sarah let herself be pulled off the floor and cuffed. Someone punched her, she didn’t see who. Someone else spit on her. That was all right. That was just fine. Sanford and T’aki were on their way home and that was all she needed to know.

She was taken belowdecks to a conference room of some kind, where van Meyer, Piotr Lantz, and a handful of other soldiers were already waiting, along with eight yang’ti on their knees with their hands on their heads, most of them bleeding and still choking on smoke residue. Sarah’s escort shoved her roughly down among the yang’ti. Van Meyer calmly came around the side of the table and helped her up, seating her with his usual dignity and chivalry in a chair and patting her on her uninjured shoulder.

“So,” he said, returning to the head of the table. He sat, laced his fingers, and looked at her. “Have you anything to say?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do more,” she said, honestly.

The soldier nearest her gave her the butt of his rifle right in the worst part of her arm. She screamed, thrashing mindlessly away from the pain until she fell out of her chair onto one of the aliens. Her eyes swam with tears of pain and, yeah, okay, fear. Some hero. She began to understand that she was going to die and even though she accepted that, she didn’t think she was going to be terribly brave about it when it happened. Those tears became a little more insistent; for the moment, she could still blink them back.

Someone put her back in the chair. Van Meyer did not appear to have moved. His expression was one of very mild disappointment and no more. “You should be sorry,” he told her seriously. “You could have done more. Oh
ja
, you could have cut me so much deeper if only you had been clever instead of…what is the word…? Spunky. How fortunate I am that you are no more than a stupid child.”

“Call me all the names you want. I don’t care.”

“
Nee
, I suppose you do not. You have done your little mischief and so you are content. And your bug, the one who convince you to trade your life for his, he is content as well. Look around you, my dear. You will not see him here. After all you sacrifice, after all you do for him…he leave you behind. He scuttle away,
nee
? He abandon you.”

She did not have to look at her fellow prisoners to know they were not dismayed by this pronouncement. Although none spoke, she could hear the soft snaps and scraping sounds that meant contempt. Even she was smiling.

“Oh, you want to believe he’s scuttling, I’m sure you do,” she said. “But if I were you,
sir
, I’d get out there right now and start making some big changes. You’d better start feeding them right, build some decent homes, and clean up your so-called recycling program, because they are coming back, and when they do, it’ll be with warships and well-trained, well-armed,
pissed-off
soldiers who will have heard all about what you call integration!”

One of the yang’ti spat. Two others buzzed quietly, tensely.

Van Meyer glanced at them, then returned his eyes to her. He said, “You make it very difficult to help you when you are so eager to betray your people.”

“My people? You’re not
my
people! You…You’re nothing but a thug! A lying thug!”

“
Ja
?”

“That’s why you don’t let cameras in! You’re afraid to let people see what you’re really doing and you’re right to be afraid! No matter how much you scare people with your lies, you know no good and reasonable person would ever let you get away with this!”

“Such naiveté.”

“If they could see this place, they would take you down and you know it! Even the people who believe your lies would stop you if they ever set foot on this ship!”

“You think so?” Van Meyer looked indulgently around the room at the men and women sharing it with him. “It hasn’t happened yet, but then, it’s only been…what? Twenty years?”

“It’ll happen,” Sarah insisted. “Sooner or later, people will always do the right thing!”

He laughed at her, long and hearty laughter as rich as coffee. So did his soldiers.

“Well,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. “While I wait for mob of townsfolk with torches, there is still small matter of what to do with you, Miss Fowler. I am afraid I have no opening for spunky young speechwriter,
nee
? So. So.”

He stood up and came around the table to sit down again before her, thinly smiling, eyes cold. “Before your unwise mischief is made, Dr. Chapel is finding some very interesting DNA…in a very interesting place.”

Confusion took a little of the fire out of her, and then icy understanding came sweeping in to cover it. She didn’t want to, tried not to, but shrank back slightly into her chair.

His smile broadened, never touching his eyes. “And so once again, you surprise me. Once again, it take you to make me think. So long I have been searching for some new boogeyman to show my frightened sheep. The bug himself is no more enough, but the bug who mate with human? And the monster that he produce, ah!”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m sure it comfort you to think so,” he said, patting her cheek. “But it is simple science only…and much easier than to take apart a spaceship and rebuild. We just give a little injection now and then,
ja
? To soften you up, make you, ah, receptive. Then we find nice bug to fuck you.
Ja
. Piotr will be disappointed, but there are several ways yet that he can amuse himself without disruption to my plans and I think he deserves small reward for his efforts on my behalf, don’t you?” His eyes shifted to a guard behind her. “Take her and, oh, that one to Cell Four. We begin gene-treatments tomorrow. Tonight is for…getting acquainted. You, bug.”

A sour click on her right as Sarah was pulled to her feet.

“Do your part and I send you back to Buena Vista,
ja
? What heaven it is, after two months here! You think about it. Think hard.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I regret that I must leave you now, Miss Fowler. I have scheduled press conference and since you will not be able to watch for yourself, I feel it is only fair that I tell you what I will be telling them. I will tell them that due to circumstance beyond our control, we lost control of the bug mothership.”

Sarah huffed out a laugh, shaky and tearful as it was. “That’s one way to spin it.”

Van Meyer came around the table and leaned in very close, almost kissing-close, and his eyes were flat and dead. “So we shoot it down.”

The breath caught in her throat, solid enough to choke on.

“We shoot it down and it fall into the sea, lost to us forever.”

“You’re lying,” she said, but she wished she hadn’t. Her voice next to his was thin and fragile, the voice of a stupid child who had seen the escape pod arcing up into the sky…and no more.

“I am sure it comfort you to think so.” He stroked her hair once and then turned around. “No one is coming back, Miss Fowler,” he called, moving calmly and unhurriedly out the door. “No one got away.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The first flight was a short one, only as far as the system’s sixth planet, where Sanford put them into orbit and went immediately to the medical bay with the wounded. He had no medical training and no idea how to use the more advanced surgical equipment, so anyone whose injuries required more attention than he knew how to give went into a Sleeper. That left him with thirteen men to make the ship ready for its final flight, but even so, it did not take long. The yang’ti prisoners were all technicians, engineers and mechanics; it was plain that they had been at work here, repairing and maintaining the ship’s systems under the watchful eyes of their captors, all the while carefully sabotaging their own efforts so that the ship was never quite functional. The humans had scavenged all they could, but their access was limited and the dark man had clearly been unwilling to damage his prize in the stripping of it. For that, he supposed he should be grateful.

They went to work. There was no sense of time in space, but he was sure that days passed. At last, the engines were primed and the Sleepers charged. Sanford set their course and once the ship was in Slipspace, he put the others in hibernation and took himself to the command deck, alone, standing watch over a navigation’s system that had betrayed them once already. T’aki had not protested when Sanford ordered him into the Sleeper; all the wonder for this ride, the home-going dreamed of even in the egg with Sanford’s whispers against his shell, had all been left on Earth. They were the same family now that they had been before, but now it felt broken.

He found tasteless rations in the officers’ supply deck and ate, more out of habit than hunger. He wandered the ship during his more restless hours, occupying his hands with maintenance and systems tests, but more often only sat in the commander’s chair and watched the stars bend around the ship in impossible streams of light. He stood over T’aki’s Sleeper and talked to the health monitor as if it were his son. When the solitude became more than he could bear, he woke one of the others and Slept, but only for short spans of time. He dreamed too often of hearing Sarah humming somewhere in the dark and never finding her.

Home. Yang’Tak. A world of red and green, wrapped like a jewel in the sky. He felt no relief at the sight of it, only an anxiety to do what he had to do and get back. It would only be home when he came for the second time, when his people were saved and his family was restored to him.