Crystal Conquest (17 page)

Juice, attuned to her athletic capabilities,
didn’t feel the need to compete with Crispin. He carried a heavy pack filled
with her gear and ran alongside her, matching her speed with easy strides as
they made their way up the winding mountain road. She maintained a pace that
kept her heart rate at about 130 beats per minute, a level of effort she could
sustain for the remaining hour of their journey to the farmhouse and Criss’s
underground bunker.

They laughed and chatted on the flats, and Juice marshaled
her energy and focused during the steeper climbs. As they wound their way along
the road, she noted that Criss talked to her exclusively through Crispin’s
mouth. In fact, he’d been doing this since Sid and Lenny took off in the scout.
Still trying to get used to the idea of Criss versus Crispin, she asked him why.

“Mostly for practice,” he said through Crispin. “The more
skilled I am with a synbod, the more options it opens for us going forward.”

“Like what?”

“It won’t be long before I’ll feel comfortable taking Crispin
into town to run errands.”

“You make him sound like a horse.”

“He’ll add insider capability to the team. The more hands
there are, the more we can do.”

“I think the saying is ‘many hands make for light work.’”

Crispin nodded and Criss didn’t say anything. Juice liked
that about him. She knew Criss could give her a whole lecture on the saying, its
proper wording, its origins, and on and on, but instead he simply nodded.
Damn,
you’re fine,
she thought, watching Crispin run with a fluid elegance.

Her mind flashed on an image of an army of Crispins. “Do you
expect to build a lot of synbods?”

Criss didn’t answer, and Crispin drifted out of her line of
sight. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him falling back. She slowed her gait
and looked again. He’d come to a full stop. She turned around and trotted back
to him. “Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She squared in front of him and, running in place so her
legs wouldn’t stiffen, studied his face. She didn’t recognize his expression. Slack-jawed
and vacant, his eyes tracked her as she spoke, but he didn’t show much
responsiveness beyond that.

Juice, still bobbing, grew concerned. “You okay?” She
stopped her running movements, put a hand on each of his arms, and bent forward
to look at his eyes. They were clear and alert, but he remained quiet. She shifted
her hands up to his shoulders and kneaded them, trying to focus his attention. He
remained silent and passive.

“Criss, we seem to be having a malfunction or something with
Crispin.” She expected an answer in her ear, but there was no response.

“Criss,” she said in a commanding tone. “Respond now. And
not through Crispin.”

Silence.

She spoke to her crystal inside the synbod. “Crispin, we’re
going to sit down over here.” She tugged on his arm and guided him to a fallen
tree lying a few steps off the road. She pointed to the tree trunk and spoke
firmly. “Sit here.” Crispin sat. “Stay,” she said, unconsciously using the same
commands she used with the family dog when visiting her folks.

“Criss,” she called, the urgency in her voice rising. Crispin
looked around as if he were seeing this place for the first time, seemingly absorbing
the sights and sounds of his surroundings.

“Criss!” she shouted. Crispin reacted to her sharp bark,
shying away like her dog would when scolded. She looked up and down the road.
Vehicles almost never traveled this way. Criss made sure of that. She’d have to
solve this on her own.

A bright flash from above caught her attention. When she
looked up, the tall trees blocked most of her view. She couldn’t identify a
cause for the light, seeing just a wisp of clouds in an otherwise bright sky.

A gathering rumble rolled up from the valley.
Thunder and
lightning on a sunny day?
The ground started to shake. The rumble transitioned
into a roar as the shaking beneath her intensified.

An earthquake?
She crouched down, putting a hand on
the ground to steady herself, and looked over at Crispin. He was now standing.
This
doesn’t make sense.

“Criss?”

“My name is Crispin, Dr. Tallette.”

“Where’s Criss?”

“He’s not here right now.” The rumbling faded, and an eerie
silence followed. “May I help you?”

She stood up and again looked up and down the road. The
discordance of the last few minutes fed a growing anxiety.
Calm down
,
she ordered herself.

“Can you run?”

“Yes,” said Crispin. “I believe I can.”

“Follow me.”

Determined to reach Criss as soon as possible, Juice started
up the road at an aggressive pace. After several minutes, she accepted that she
couldn’t sustain it given the distance remaining. She increased the heart-track
on her com from 130 to 135 beats per minute and set a stride to match. The
slower gait shifted the strain from her body to her impatience, but she didn’t
have a choice.

She waved Crispin up from behind. “Water,” she said when he
was beside her. He looked at her and matched her stride. “My water pouch is in
your pack. Would you get it and hand it to me?”

Crispin reached a hand behind him, fished for a moment,
grasped her pouch, and held it out. Juice took several quick sips and handed it
back.

They ran in silence, but her mind raced, trying to make
sense of recent events. She called out to Criss every few minutes. His lack of
response was deafening.

After most of an hour, the trees on the left side of the
road gave way to a familiar plot of land. Thick with rows of sweet corn, the cultivated
field served as a landmark, signaling they were about ten minutes from the
farmhouse.

“Look at the crows.” She pointed to the distant end of the
field where a cloud of black dots flocked through the sky.

Crispin stopped and looked. He reached out and grabbed her wrist,
turned, and started dragging her in the direction of the forest to their right.

“Hey, that hurts.”

Crispin didn’t relent, pulling her straight into the woods.
After they’d gone a few dozen paces, he stopped near the trunk of a huge pine, put
a hand on each of her shoulders, and pushed until her back was flush with the
wall of tree bark.

“Stand straight,” he said, adjusting her arms so they hung by
her sides. He moved with certainty, and she chose not to resist. He stepped forward
and pushed his body against hers, pinning her against the rough bark. Spreading
his arms around her, he laid his chin on top of her head and hugged the tree. With
his efficient actions, he encapsulated her in an uncomfortable cocoon.

Juice was physically exhausted, emotionally distraught over
the absence of Criss, and confused by this mugging. Yet the full front-to-front
body press was so intimate, she flashed competing thoughts of desire and
anxiety—desire for the man who had been Criss, and anxiety because she felt so
unattractive after all of her physical exertion.

She had no time to dwell on her feelings before a humming
noise captured her attention. The hum became louder, forcing itself into her
world. Angling her head from under his chin, she peeked upward as she tried to
place the sound. She feared the answer—she’d heard the sound before—and started
to whimper when a glimpse up through a gap in the trees confirmed what her
subconscious suggested. A squadron of Kardish drones passed overhead.

“Stay still,” said Crispin. “My thermal signature is that of
a small animal, and my body can shield you from them. They will detect you if I
move.” The sound faded, yet he held their pose for several seconds more. “They
are gone,” he said, stepping back and releasing her.

Juice started to shake. Crouching down, she leaned sideways
against the tree, hugging herself as she did so. The burden that had been
placed on her in the past hour—the loss of Criss, an explosion that now had
context, the appearance of Kardish drones, the uncertainty of survival—overwhelmed
her.

Fighting for emotional control, she asked, “Where did they
come from? How did they get here?”

“Sip,” said Crispin. She looked up to see him holding her
water pouch. She stared dully at him, staying crouched and blinking rapidly.

“Stand up, Dr. Tallette. Please drink.”

His pointed demeanor prodded her out of her shell. She rose
slowly, took the water, and drank until the pouch was empty.

“How can you do these things?” She was speaking with a
crystal of her own design and knew his intellectual capabilities. While the
company bragged that it had the intelligence of a human, she recognized it as
an exaggeration. The truth is that Crispin could perform a broad category of
tasks as well as a human, if trained for and given those tasks.

“I have a stored message for you from Criss. Would you like
to hear it?”

“Yes! Please.”

Crispin stood up straight and began speaking, using Criss’s
familiar intonation. “Hello, young lady. If this message triggers, neither you
nor I are fine today, because it means I’m disconnected from Crispin and the
Kardish arrival is imminent. I have trained Crispin for a specific purpose.
That is to protect you from them and to escort you to me. Please come if it is
safe to do so. I hope we will be together soon.”

Criss’s voice and message, even if delivered by a surrogate,
lightened her burden. She wasn’t alone, and her singular priority matched
Crispin’s—get to Criss and get him back in the game. She took several deep
breaths, exhaling through pursed lips after each, and gathered her wits. She
shook her arms and legs and bounced a few times to remain limber for travel.

Comfortable being the leader in a laboratory environment,
Juice was out of her element here in the woods, hiding from aliens. “What
should we do?” She would defer to him as long as his ideas made sense.

Crispin turned slowly, peered through the forest, and looked
at open sky through a gap in the trees. “I suggest we remain in the forest. The
roadway is too exposed. Staying under cover means we will be walking. I am not
familiar with the terrain, but a forty-minute hike seems like a reasonable
estimate.” He pointed. “The farmhouse is this way.”

“If we’re hiking, I’d like to change.”

He looked at her, and she pointed to his pack and spoke with
the precision of a seasoned crystal scientist. “Please let me have access to
the clothes in the backpack you’re carrying.”

He unshouldered the pack and set it at his feet. She knelt
down, opened the flap, and rummaged inside. Pulling out a long-sleeved shirt
and a pair of pants, she sat back on her heels and held up a package the size
of her thumb. “I have this thermal blanket. Will it help hide me from their
scans?”

He took the blanket from her and began opening it as she moved
behind a tree to change. She knew that modesty was silly when her audience was
a crystal, yet as she stripped off her singlet and shorts and stepped into the
warm clothes, she gained comfort from the human ritual of privacy.

She wrapped up her running clothes and stuffed them into the
pack. Rummaging a bit, she pulled out an energy bar and more water.

Watching her eat, Crispin said, “I should drink some milk.”
She dug inside the pack and handed him a tube of specially crafted liquids and
nutrients. Criss had designed the “milk” to feed the synbod’s biological
components. It was so efficient that it left no waste for the body to eliminate.
He took three distinct gulps and held it out for her to return to the pack.

She took it from him and weighed the tube in her hand, estimating
he’d consumed half the contents. Looking through the backpack, she found six
more unopened milk tubes. “How long can you go with these?”

“I have enough for a week or so, depending on my level of
physical effort.”

He handed her the unfurled blanket and hefted the pack onto
his shoulders.

“Will this hide me from their scans?” she asked again,
wrapping it around her back and clasping it together in front. She immediately appreciated
the warmth it provided. She hadn’t realized she’d been shivering.

He studied her. “I can see deeper into the infrared range
than a human, and the blanket reduces my ability to see your thermal image.” He
looked back up through the gap in the trees. “But I do not know about their
technology. I am not trained in the subject.”

He started walking up a gentle rise. “I do know you must disable
your com. They will track you through it.”

She looked at her com. The request was on par with asking
her to cut off a leg. And an arm. She glanced at his receding back, looked back
at her com, and did as he suggested.

They made steady progress, but their path was more difficult
than she’d anticipated. Rock ledges and forest thickets forced them to weave back
and forth as they advanced to their destination. The crunching of their feet
through leaves and twigs added a hypnotic rhythm to their trek, calming Juice
and letting her mind wander beyond her own needs for survival.
If the
Kardish are here and Criss is down, Sid and Cheryl must be in real trouble.

Crispin stopped, tilted his head, and said, “Drones.”

Juice’s thoughts snapped to the present. Moments after his
warning, she heard their frightening buzz. The sound scared her, but she also
realized that, like a cat with a bell on its collar, the noise alerted them to impending
danger.

She moved near an outcropping of granite that edged a steep
rise, lay on the ground, and covered herself with the blanket. As the drones
swooped by, headed in the general direction of the farm, the earthy aroma of
the forest floor distracted her for a moment as the sound dwindled into the
distance.

“That second pass makes me think they know where Criss is,” she
said, gathering the blanket.