The Caphenon Read online

  Freed of its moorings, the cage and its three passengers swayed on the end of their cable as it was winched up. Soon it vanished through the floor hatch, which hadn’t even finished closing before the pilot picked up speed and headed toward the medical transport. The second rescue transport immediately moved into position and began lowering its own cage. It was just as efficient, and the medical transport was already on its way to Blacksun before the Mariners had landed with a third alien. This one was bundled into the protection of Tal’s transport, which was serving as a temporary shelter until the medical transport returned. Another patient was soon delivered, and finally a fifth, but this last alien was not pushed up the ramp into the transport. Instead, the gurney was set off to the side and draped with a sheet.

  Captain Serrado stared at it, then turned her head away. Tal left her to mourn in private.

  The last two engineers were found, and it was not good news: one was dead, while the other was trapped under a structural girder and needed to be cut free. The rescue team refused to give a prognosis, saying that they could not assess the patient until the weight was removed and the blood circulation restored. “It’s the most dangerous moment,” the lead healer told Tal. “Sometimes, when blood has been kept from a large part of the body for too long, it brings sudden death when it returns.”

  Tal decided that Captain Serrado didn’t need to know that just yet.

  Gehrain’s call was unexpectedly cheery. They’d broken through the last of the blockages to find all four of the weapons team waiting for them, alive and well, though considerably banged up. Three of them were able to walk under their own power, and with the fourth on a stretcher, they were all making their way out now. “We’re going to end up on the other side of the ship,” he said. “Top deck of the skirt—that’s what they call the flat section. Send the Mariners around.”

  Happy to have something else to do, the Mariners were off the ground soon after. As they vanished over the top of the ship, the medical transport came back into view, returning from its run to Blacksun.

  Tal called Dewar again as she watched it land. “Are you current?”

  “Yes, and so is Lieutenant Candini. Great news about the weapons team.”

  “I’m going over to update Captain Serrado now. Ready to be a walking translator again?”

  With Dewar on the com, she sat down next to the captain and gave her the bad news first. Serrado listened with every outward appearance of calm, but to Tal her pain was almost physically palpable. The news regarding the weapons team helped considerably. Judging by her level of relief, Tal guessed Serrado had already given them up for lost.

  She sat by the captain while the medical transport gradually filled with stable patients and the two fatalities. Still there was no definitive word from the team that was cutting the last engineer free. Then came a flurry of transmissions, half of them medical jargon that Tal couldn’t even make out, until the word finally came. It had been very close, but the healers had managed to keep the alien’s system from crashing. They were on their way out and requested immediate transport to Blacksun.

  With Dewar’s help, Tal passed this on to Captain Serrado, whose reaction was a quiet “Thank the stars.” She looked up at Tal and added, “Before you ask, no, I’m not going with that transport either.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” Tal said, and was rewarded with a ghost of a smile. It soon faded into a rising tension, however. With all but one of her crew accounted for, the captain seemed to be winding herself tighter and tighter as the ticks moved past. They watched the rescue flight deliver the badly wounded engineer to the medical transport, which lifted off the moment the door was shut. As the sound of its departure faded, Tal heard birdsong and realized to her surprise that the sun was just under the horizon. She hadn’t consciously noticed the lightening of the sky.

  The first rays of sunlight struck the ship, reflecting off the hull in a flare so bright that she couldn’t look at it. She rubbed her eyes, trying to blink away the afterimage, and heard Dewar’s voice on her wristcom.

  “We’ve got the last one! And she says she wants to tell the captain ‘It’s about time.’”

  Tal laughed, startling Captain Serrado. “I have the captain right here. Tell her to go ahead.”

  The stream of alien language that came over the com had an extraordinary effect on the captain. She held a hand to her mouth, tears shining in her eyes, and answered in a rasping voice that tried and failed to sound professional. Then she fell back to her pillow, covered her face with both hands, and silently wept.

  Reeling from the explosive release of tension, Tal decided that she had listened to the captain’s emotions long enough. There was no tactical advantage to be gained from this. Raising her blocks gave her the sensation of having stepped from a busy city street into a hushed temple, and she took a moment to revel in the peace.

  Her concentration was interrupted by Dewar. “Lancer Tal? My patient is asking to speak with you.”

  “All right. Give her the translator.”

  After a pause, she heard the voice that had so undone the captain, but this time it was speaking perfect High Alsean. “I don’t need a translator, Lancer Tal. I’m the one who programmed it in the first place. I just wanted to say thank you for taking such good care of us, and that I’ll consider it a tremendous honor to meet you.”

  Shocked, Tal stared at her wristcom. Of course somebody would have had to program that translator; she just hadn’t considered…

  Captain Serrado chuckled, wiped her eyes, and said something to Tal.

  “She says, ‘Don’t worry, she has that effect on everyone.’ Which I assure you is not true.”

  “In this instance, I believe I’ll trust your captain,” said Tal, still feeling caught out. “And I look forward to meeting you as well. Perhaps then you can talk Captain Serrado into finally agreeing to medical care.”

  “She’ll agree. Now that we’ve all been found, she can stop keeping vigil.”

  And that’s what it had been, Tal realized. Not just a warrior with injured troops, as Micah had put it, but someone who truly cared about the people who served her.

  “You can’t see it from in there,” she said, “but the sun has just come up. Vigils end at dawn.”

  Chapter 10

  Pallea search II

  The sky was lightening by the time Yarnolio’s transport neared the coordinates. He and Helder were in a considerably better mood now, having heard from Base Control that the aliens up near Blacksun appeared to be friendly. They still knew nothing about what had happened in their skies, but it did seem that the right ship had ended up in pieces, which gave his team a renewed interest in finding their chunk of it. After all, how often did one get the chance to examine alien technology?

  “We’re at the edge of the grid,” Helder said. “Altering flight path to the search pattern.”

  Yarnolio watched a grid superimpose itself on his flight map, waited until they had reached the corner of it, and banked the transport around to follow the first transverse line. “On pattern,” he said.

  Helder tapped a control. “Activating thermal scanner. Although I can’t think it would still retain heat after this long.”

  “That’s what your eyeballs are for.”

  “Yes, thank you for your much-needed advice.” Helder punched the com button and called back to their crew. “Everyone look alert back there. We’re starting the search pattern over the general coordinates, but this thing could be anywhere on these slopes. The Astrophysics Lab got us this far; it’s up to us to finish the job. Eyes out the windows.”

  She clicked off and stared forward, then turned to look out her side.

  “If this is the biggest piece, and it fell from our upper atmosphere, wouldn’t it have made some sort of crater?” Yarnolio had been wondering about this for most of their flight. “Or at least flattened a bunch of trees?”

  Helder shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it disintegrated after it dropped off the scanne
r screens. Or maybe it landed in the bottom of one of these side canyons.” She pointed toward a narrow slot canyon branching off the valley they were currently crossing. “It could make a crater in there, and we wouldn’t even see it unless we flew right down the slot.”

  “Great,” he muttered. “You know that’s what happened. We’re going to fly this whole damned grid and find nothing, and then we’re going to have to start eliminating those slot canyons one by one.”

  “More flying, less complaining,” she said.

  Two hanticks of mind-numbing boredom later, Yarnolio thought he had good reason to complain. Hunting for alien technology surely ought to be more exciting than this. At the beginning of their mission he’d feared for the Lancer’s Guards approaching that giant crashed ship, but now he envied them. They were meeting aliens and making history. He, on the other hand, was flying a cargo crate on a boring search grid and finding nothing.

  The sun was well up now, which was both good and bad news. It made the search easier wherever its light reached, but the shadows it created were so dark by comparison that Yarnolio and Helder could see very little in the deeper canyons.

  “Hold on,” said Helder. “Broken trees, bearing fifteen.”

  Yarnolio looked in the direction she’d indicated. Sure enough, there were several broken trees, their freshly torn trunks gleaming against the dark green of the forest. And they were right above the vertical drop of a slot canyon.

  “We’ll have to thread that needle,” he said. As he lined up his approach, Helder called the news back to the crew.

  Yarnolio entered the canyon carefully, using his thrusters to bring the transport to a hover just ahead of the broken trees.

  “Thermal scanners show nothing,” Helder said. “I knew they’d be useless. You’re going to have to take us down.”

  “Of course, because all I wanted to do today was drop this crate into a canyon barely any wider than we are.”

  “You complain like an old man.” Helder was peering out the front, as if the mere power of her will could light the shadows beyond their searchlight. “You fly like one, too.”

  “Shut up and keep looking.” He watched the canyon walls slide by as they dropped deeper and deeper in, then checked his altimeter. They were down to double digits. He wasn’t planning to reach the singles. The way this canyon was narrowing, if they went too deep, he might actually wedge them in.

  “Stop!” Helder cried. “There!”

  In the searchlight dead ahead was a clear landing mark. But it wasn’t a crater. The flattened grass and brush in the center meant something large and heavy had landed at a relatively low speed, which was only possible if it had been able to control its descent. And the way the grass was blown flat all the way to the canyon walls…that looked like landing thrusters to him.

  But that wasn’t the strangest thing.

  “Where the shek did it go?” he asked in bewilderment.

  “No way did that piece of junk get up and walk off by itself.” Helder sounded angry. “Somebody got here before us. Did Baskensteen give our coordinates to another team by mistake?”

  Yarnolio angled the searchlight. “Helder…”

  “Oh, shek,” she whispered.

  A trail of broken brush and churned soil led away from the landing site, deeper into the canyon.

  “It did walk off by itself,” Yarnolio said, dread coiling in his belly.

  Helder was already activating the com. “Transport WSC813 to Whitesun Base Control,” she said, her voice admirably calm despite the fear he could sense rising off her skin.

  “Whitesun Base Control, go.”

  A flash of white turned the shadows of the slot canyon into blinding daylight, and both of them threw their hands up in front of their eyes. Yarnolio felt the air grow warm around him as a strange crackling noise filled his ears.

  May Fahla guide and protect us, he thought.

  The canyon lit up a second time when the transport and its crew exploded into thousands of pieces, none larger than a handspan. They drifted to the canyon floor, some still burning, as the echoes of the explosion faded away.

  A whirring, mechanical sound replaced the echoes, punctuated by solid, deep thumps as the machine emerged from the shadows. Nearly as large as the transport, it moved on four thick legs that crushed brush and small trees beneath them. It stomped through the debris field without pausing, flattening what few pieces of the transport remained, and made its way toward the canyon’s mouth.

  Chapter 11

  Casualties

  Ekatya had agreed to be taken to the Lancer’s transport, but she had not agreed to be strapped onto that cot like an invalid. She’d had enough of lying around, and if she was going to be flown to a medical center, she would damn well arrive upright, a captain seeing to her crew. It hadn’t been difficult to convince the Alsean doctors of her intent. As Commander Baldassar had said, they just seemed to know. One of them even came up with a pair of recognizable crutches, which she gratefully accepted. The moment her personal swarm of medical attendants left her alone—or as alone as one got with a heavily armed soldier standing watch—she made her way into the bathroom one of them had pointed out and treated herself to the unbelievable luxury of an empty bladder and clean hands. It took a minute to figure out how to operate the tiny waterfall that served as a faucet, but some things seemed to be universal.

  The guard didn’t stop her when she crutched out the door and back down the ramp, though he did follow her as far as the door. Trying to ignore the eyes on her back, she stopped at the bottom of the ramp and gazed up at her broken ship.

  She should probably be feeling more heartbroken about its destruction. Certainly the light of day had not made things look any better, and she really was shocked about the damage to the hullskin. But after the battle, the crash, and the long hours of certainty that she’d lost more than she could stand, the sight of a grounded ship was no longer the stuff of her nightmares.

  Of course, that just meant she’d set a higher bar for nightmares.

  The now-familiar sound of a transport’s engines caught her attention. Lhyn and her rescuers had emerged on the starboard side of the Caphenon, and Ekatya hadn’t been able to see it. Now she felt her whole body settle as the transport appeared over the top of the ship and arced toward her. Everyone was out. She could move on.

  The tiny transport landed just forty meters away, and she gave serious thought to crutching over to it. She might have done it, too, if a uniformed body hadn’t appeared in front of her. She looked up, seeing now-familiar features. Blonde hair held back in a clip, a chiseled profile accentuated by narrow ridges running the length of the cheekbones, and the three slim forehead ridges—one vertical, the other two arching toward opposite sides of the hairline—that were unlike anything she’d seen on a Gaian race.

  “Right, of course you’d want to be here when she arrives,” she said grumpily. Lhyn’s return meant the return of communications. It meant questions and answers, and she had the feeling that Lancer Tal was not a woman willing to wait for answers any longer than she had to. But dammit, she’d wanted a moment with Lhyn all to herself.

  The Lancer tilted her head, those intelligent ice-blue eyes missing nothing. Somehow Ekatya suspected the woman knew what she’d just said, even without a common language. Ashamed, she said, “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

  Lancer Tal nodded and stepped over, standing at her side as they watched the transport ramp come down. They were almost the same height, and Ekatya wondered if the Lancer also had to deal with being prejudged for her shorter stature.

  In her peripheral vision she saw another Alsean arrive, that tank of a man who never seemed to be far from the Lancer. With his stubbly hair and barrel chest, he looked like a recruitment poster for the Ground Warfare division of Fleet. He took up a post next to Lancer Tal and waited with them.

  A stretcher emerged from the rescue transport, carried by two uniformed Alseans. Lhyn was sitting upright on it, her right arm in a
sling that was securely taped to her chest. Even from here, Ekatya could see the dirt and grime on her face, which made her smile flash all the brighter.

  “Broken in four places,” she called as they carried her closer. “But holy Shippers, these drugs are good!”

  Ekatya’s first sight of a safe, whole Lhyn nearly cracked her composure, but at this she had to laugh. “I know. I’ve already experienced them. Mine knocked me out; why are you so bright and cheery?”

  “Maybe because I was already knocked out earlier.” Lhyn’s smile faded. “I am so glad to see you.”

  Her rescuers stopped in front of them and let down the stretcher’s supports, making sure it was stable in the dirt before one of them helped her off. She gave him a smile and what was surely a thank-you, earning two wide grins in response. Ekatya made a mental note to learn that word as soon as possible.

  As the medics packed up their stretcher and prepared to leave, Lhyn addressed Lancer Tal and held up her good hand, palm outward. All of the Alseans seemed surprised by this, but Lancer Tal smiled and touched her own hand to Lhyn’s, speaking in what sounded like admiring tones. Then she introduced the man next to her, who touched Lhyn’s palm without hesitation.

  Turning back to Ekatya, Lhyn said, “I hear you’ve already met the Lancer, though Lieutenant Candini said it wasn’t exactly formal. So let me introduce you to Lancer Andira Tal and her Chief Guardian, Colonel Corozen Micah. They don’t shake hands here, they touch their palms together. Just one, because you’re not family.”

  “I’m pleased to officially meet you this time,” Ekatya said, holding up her hand. “Our first meeting wasn’t how I prefer to do these things.”