HONG FELL FIRST, though not for lack of trying. Clubs out, he launched himself against the nearest guard, spun from him to the next, all his art and grace surrendered to violent efficiency: short, sharp blows with clubs, forehead, elbows, knees, leaving broken forms behind him. “Go!” He meant to sacrifice himself—why shrink from injury? Might as well take the blow to the ribs now. You’d feel it in the morning, but that assumed there would be more mornings in which to feel.
Stupid honor. Viv tried to pull the warriors off him, but failed; two got her arms, and she kicked one in the groin, but another took his place, and the more she fought the more they wrenched her shoulders back and at last she settled for cursing them with all the invention in her arsenal. She hoped the translator gimmick made their ears bleed.
Hong was fighting his way to her side, until the Chief joined the fray. The woman’s silver crown flared, and armor flowed out from it to shield her in a suit of coherent armor-light, a massive armature that moved flickerfast. She hit Hong like a truck. He fell, skidded, slipped as he tried to regain his footing, went down.
Only Xiara did not fight. Spears ringed her; she glared past their points at Djenn, but Djenn would not meet her gaze. Rigid with fury, Xiara wheeled on the others, the warriors who dared oppose her, memorizing each face for vengeance, knife out, growling. But she could not break the ring of spears.
Then it was over, Hong down in a pile of limbs, Viv herself held by people trained to hunt game far more dangerous than temporally displaced entrepreneurs, Xiara’s neck ringed by a spearpoint collar.
“You are guest-traitors,” she said. “Betrayers of trust. We welcome strangers. We honor pilgrimage. Is this welcome? Is this honor? When we wander distant lands, will they chain us, and feed us to monsters?”
Metal shifted on leather and plastic. Wind whistled, high up. No one spoke. The Chief’s crystal armor faded back into her torques, into her crown, and she moved between shadows, now torchlit, now a darkness against pale-barked trees. Viv tugged against her captors’ grip, but gained nothing save more pain in her shoulder. Future people, it turned out, were harder to escape than future chains.
How was Hong? Conscious at least, glaring up through the layers of hands that held him. Hot with anger, not yet calm enough to think of a plan, let alone communicate one through gaze and gesture. Viv knew how that felt. She wanted meat between her teeth. She wanted to stomp down and break these booted feet behind her. But she wasn’t strong enough. You can’t fight their way, Viv, not without broken bones you can’t afford. These fast-healing, grossly fit specimens of Orn might not even know how to do first aid for Earth-humans. Okay. No big deal. Xiara was trying an emotional appeal, the whole better-angels-of-your-nature tack. It wouldn’t work, but at least it gave Viv time to come up with something better.
The Chief, massive, silent, reached her throne, and laid one broad hand upon its arm, but she did not settle. There was something in that, maybe: when she assumed the throne, her word was law, and bound her to its consequences. She had looked so light and strong in the ring, mighty and free until she donned the crown again. “Daughter,” she said. “Xiara. We should not discuss this here.”
“If our people aid in guest-fraud, they should know the why and how of it. They should know why they have been asked to do things that will shame our ancestors when we meet them in the Cloud.”
“She is not our guest,” the Chief replied. “Nor is she a pilgrim. She does not belong to us. Brother Hong, I am sorry you became a part of this. But she came to trade. She is outside our fire.”
Oh. Shit. A trader was not a guest. A trader was an outsider, a threat.
“I welcomed her,” Xiara said. “I owe her my life and offered her my friendship.”
The Chief’s fingers traced the grain of the carved wood throne. “We owe our people more.”
“You owe them the truth,” Viv said. Xiara and the Chief both turned to her, surprised she’d spoken. She tried to continue, but the guard behind her wrenched her arm and she stumbled, cursing, breathing shallow. Stupid physical body. If she could touch the Cloud, she’d leave the flesh behind in a heartbeat. She’d miss sex and cinnamon rolls, but she had to imagine there were compensations. She breathed slow until the pain stopped. “I just want to talk. There are, like, a hundred of you. I’m no threat. Tell your boys to chill.”
The Chief nodded once, and Viv was free—well, free was pushing it, considering Hong, and the ten hunters between her and even a sprinter’s slim chance of escape. Free enough to stand, at least. She’d take it for now.
“I saved your daughter’s life. You want to discount that, fine. But we agreed to a trade while you sat on that throne.” She pointed with her chin. Pointing with your hand didn’t seem to be a thing these people did. “We gave you the news, and you were supposed to give us fuel and let us go. You’re breaking your people’s word, for what? A monster’s squatting on your fuel depot—what do you even use fuel for? And, hell, if you’d asked me I might have given you my nightmares.”
The Chief crossed her arms, and still refused to look at Viv. She walked behind the throne and gripped its back in her hands, as if she could squeeze it until blood flowed. “The manufactory is not merely a fuel source.” Oh, good. The translation gimmick was fine. She’d just been wrong. “It makes … anything. Everything that we cannot make ourselves. Drones and glass and weapons to pierce thick plate, filters and drugs to fend off the poison the fathers left in our water, our soil. It was our joy, our wealth, our obligation, until Grayteeth came.” Shudders around the clearing. “He is a beast. A virus of metal—endlessly hungry, transforming all he touches to himself, a self-optimizer”—which seemed to be a single word in the Orn language—“seeking always and only his own pleasure. He chased us from the manufactory, defends it viciously, suckles on its matter siphon. He does not wish to eat us—he merely hungers, lusts. He tires of his own perversity; we gain what we need to live by trading our dreams, our shames, to him.”
“That’s gross,” Viv said, because someone had to. Note to self, if you ever get back home: if you must design some sort of gray goo nanovirus, don’t make it kinky. Though, on the flip side, a usual sort of gray goo nanovirus, the make-the-whole-universe-into-copies-of-me type, would have devoured all Orn by now, so maybe there was something to be said for the kinky sort. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”
“We did not chain you for the Grayteeth,” she said. “We chained you for the Pride.”
Hong, eyes wide, fought his way to his feet before his captors forced him down again.
“No!” Xiara started forward; the spears resisted her this time, scraped her breastplate, found the skin of her throat. She stopped. “Mother!”
The Ornchief sighed. “The Pride believe you are important. That much was clear from your friend’s story. And the Pride have sent ghost-messages throughout the galaxy seeking you. My seer threw the oracle stalks and called them across countless spans of darkness.” She put out her hand without looking, and found the shoulder of the jeweled man who’d waited on the throne while she wrestled. He looked ashen now, less joyful in his jowls, as if he had traveled light-years while Viv slept. A diadem flickered on his forehead, and his eyes—yes, his eyes were black from lid to lid. “They want you, especially, Viv. They hunger for you with a need I cannot fathom. They have skills and tools and powers far beyond our own. In trade for you, they will rid us of Grayteeth forever.”
“Mother, we do not deal with gods!”
“These are not gods.” The Ornchief sounded tired. “Fallen angels, at best. Hungry, and useful.”
“We have never bent knee—to the Empress, to the ghosts of the Cloud. And you would have us—”
“We have bent knee already, child, to the beast that squats on our sacred trust, pleasuring itself with our fears. One trade, and we’ll be ourselves again. No more nightmares.” But the spears drew back from Xiara’s throat; the hunters traded uncertain murmurs, flicks of eye, shifts of stance, the usual subtle boardroom gestures of resistance amplified by the fact that the discomfited rank and file were actual soldiers, actually armed. “No more stolen dreams.”
“Tell me you haven’t done this already,” Xiara said. “Tell me there’s still time.”
The Chief’s shoulders softened. Viv did not breathe. She was so tired. One more push from Xiara might save them. One well-chosen word.
“No.” The seer’s voice was high and clear, a tenor beautiful from lack of use. “There is no time. A power draws close through the Cloud, my Chief: massive and aflame with purpose.”
The Chief looked up, still tired, but with the exhaustion of a hard job done at last, if not well. “That will be the Pride. Bind the woman, gag her; her tongue will not poison our guests against us.”
Hands caught Viv from behind; she buried an elbow in a leather-armored stomach, bowled one of her assailants over, and so missed it when Xiara made her move: snatched Djenn’s spear from his hands, swept its haft around to parry the spears to her right and lock them down in the dirt, ran up one spear-haft to knee a hunter in the face, then tumbled to earth and came up sprinting toward Viv. Viv heard Xiara cry, and the thud of colliding spears, and felt a twist of panic until she spun and saw the Ornchief’s daughter bodycheck a warrior to the ground. But Xiara was reeling, breathing hard. Her spear shook in her hands as she raised it against the twenty warriors surrounding them. Her tip darted from target to target. Viv grabbed a spear herself, but she couldn’t even fake knowing how to use it. Hong, somehow, had fought his way through the crowd to Viv’s side—but he could barely raise his arms into a proper guard, and held only a single club.
The Chief stepped down from the dais, armored once more, shining amber, grim. Wind whistled in the trees. Above, a shooting star approached.
Grew larger.
“O Chief,” the seer said. “A correction. My eyes have been clouded. What approaches is not massive. It is small, but moving fast.”
Faster than sound or thought. No sooner had the seer finished his sentence than a brilliant red light hammered into the glade. Oven heat washed over them, and the stench of fire and ozone and hot glass. Sound, there was none: what struck them was greater than sound, a fist made of air, a backhand of pure pressure.
Viv thought, first: I’m dead.
Then she thought, dead people probably can’t think. At least, not dead people who don’t have souls.
Form bloomed from the red as her eyes recovered. She caught her breath. She was not sure whether she was happy.
There, in the glassed ashes of the bonfire, burning with transit, hands crooked to claws, eyes white, stood Zanj.
“You don’t know me,” she told the Ornclan, in a voice pitched thunder-low. “Yet. But trust me: you should run.”