Crisis Read online

  Imani dodged left and whipped his Ieft arm up, batting the polished block aside–

  Hum!

  He dropped low and fired his right arm up, wrist bent, to block the second striker–

  Hum! Hum!

  A hook kick and a swipe saved him from the next two–

  Hum!

  His left paw’s claws snapped out and he raked the next striker hard, deflecting it, leaving deep grooves in the wood. Some poor junior student would curse over having to smooth that out–

  Hum–!

  Fifty heartbeats later, Imani, sixth master of the temple, stood back in the center of the chamber, breathing a little harder, but finished with the exercise. The thirteenth attack had brushed his left hip, only a glancing touch, hardly more than a ruffling of his gray fur. Still, Imani was perturbed, Either he was truly getting old, or the unseen disturbance he felt had bothered him more than he realized. He hadn’t been touched by a striker in the last fifty defenses.

  It was a bad sign.

  4.

  Once he was past the outposts of civilization, Stone walked easier. This part of Khalia was dressed in summer colors, it was almost pastoral, broken by large swatches of forestland here and there. The Khalia were carnivores to a large extent; they raised meat animals much like cows, but wild game was still a large part of their diet. Now and again he would pass keeps, low, rambling structures built of local stone, and he stayed well clear of these. The days were warm and sometimes rainy, the nights a little cooler but still humid, and it was a bearable climate for a man. Stone lived mostly on concentrates, tasteless but nourishing, and he had been trained to recognize several edible plants with which he supplemented his diet.

  He had been walking for nearly thirty kilometers since last seeing any signs of Khalian civilization when he reached his destination. Night had fallen and the stars had come out to dot the sky with their strange constellations. He knew the local names of some of them: The Goat, Long Tooth, The Hand of the Giver. They gave much more light than did the stars shining down on Earth, strewn thickly here as they were. In places the stars seemed clumped together to form bright splotches that would rival the light of a small moon.

  The temple lay ahead another two kilometers, the Iargest group of structures he had seen since leaving the last village nearly a week past.

  Stone continued to walk. He was uncertain of his welcome, but he had come a long way to see if the stories of the temple’s teacher were true. A Khalian who had achieved real mastery, so it was said, who had fought and won a hundred battles to the death and who had along the way become one with the universe. The fighting arts had grown watery on Earth; Stone had reached the pinnacle of what he could learn from his own kind. But if the stories were true, this Khalian master might have something to teach him.

  It was not as though he had anywhere else to go.

  It was worth crossing the galaxy to find out. His uncle’s name had eased the trip. Not every man had a genuine war hero, an admiral, for a blood relative. And his uncle had made many friends before he’d died in battle, some of whom gladly offered a hand to the nephew of the famous Ernest Stone, and the last of his distinguished line.

  Through the Khalian night, Stone walked. A freshening breeze brought the smell of rain, and distant lightning and thunder confirmed the approaching storm. If he hurried, he might be there before the skies opened up.

  5.

  Berq piloted the rented flitter through the rough air. The storm was getting worse, and while she would have circled around it, the flitter’s sensors indicated that the pod was only one of a string of such, extending for fifty kilometers in an angular line.

  The short-winged little craft was an old one, and Berq knew enough about flying to know that it would fare badly in the roiling clouds. She dropped her altitude so that she was a few hundred meters above the ground, under the overcast ceiling, and nursed the flitter along slowly. It was no worse than driving a ground car in a heavy rain, and she was high enough to avoid the tallest trees. The country here offered rolling hills, none of them large, and at her present altitude she could pass over the tops of them with only a slight upward nudge.

  Nedge were natural fliers; few felt any qualms in the air. It had been millions of years since they had come down from the trees, but the old senses lingered. Personal wingsuits were big recreation items on her home world, and on any planet where a sizable collection of Nedge could find the room to fly. Even half-blinded by the sheets of rain, Berq enjoyed soaring in the little craft.

  Lightning flared, flashing through the flitter’s plastic windows and strobing the interior. Berq was pleased with herself. The assignment had gone well. The quarry had been eliminated, and she was winging her way toward the Western Spaceport with only a little over two hundred kilometers to go. Another hour and she would be there, and a few hours after that, she’d be on a ship home.

  More lightning, closer now as she reached the center of the storm pod, and the thunder booms were enough to rattle the flitter. Berq adjusted her controls and brought the aircraft a little higher. The wind was gusting and she had no desire to fly into a shear and find herself impaled on the tops of the trees only a hundred meters below.

  The thunder began a continuous rumble of a moment, and the white flashes seemed to shade to a darker reddish-orange glow. Some of these worlds had strange weather happenings, ball-lightnings and such, but that growing roar and fiery light did not seem natural. To her left the dark clouds reflected what Iooked to be a fire in the sky.

  What was that?

  Berq checked her sensors and spotted the source on her doppler. A ship. Big one, at least big enough to hold a hundred Nedge if her sensors were calibrated right. And that glow meant it was coming down on rockets! Talk about antiques.

  Or maybe the ship’s repellors had gone out. Maybe it was some kind of emergency–that had to be it, otherwise why the hell would it be landing way out here past the edge of nowhere, and in the middle of an electrical storm? No pilot with any sense would risk going through the eye of a storm this bad, not if she had a choice.

  Well. It was not her business. Let the rats splash themselves all over the countryside if they wished. She had accomplished her task and she was leaving.

  The landing ship vanished behind a distant hillside, probably ten or fifteen klicks away. The glow died, along with the rumble, and Berq felt a certain curiosity. Didn’t seem to have crashed. What the dervish, she could divert a couple of minutes out of her way to check it out.

  She pulled a slight turn in the flitter and headed toward the little hill her sensors showed was there. She couIdn’t see shit in the pouring rain, but she was low enough to see a hundred-passenger ship if she flew over it.

  Berq dropped the flitter lower, to get a better view. She followed the contour of the hill, still fifty meters above the trees.

  Half a klick, maybe, just ahead, it should be–

  The flitter’s main engines died. The entire control panel went blank, all the screens wiped. Even the running Iights on the ends of the stubby wings blinked out. The flitter’s power was gone, as if it had been cut with a sharp blade.

  Fuck! The flitter was dead in the air and gliding like a thrown brick!

  Frantically Berq looked for a clear spot. She had only a few seconds to find a perch for this bird or she was going to be joining her ancestors.

  6.

  Resting in his private cell, Imani heard the sound in the storm, and he searched his memory for its match. He had not always been a teacher a week’s walk from the nearest village of any size. He had done his duty as a soldier, had been off-world a dozen times, and the noise that cut through the rain was one he recalled. He had not heard such a thing in many years, but he knew it for what it was: a ship’s landing rockets. Such rocket engines were only used rarely, such as in the event of an emergency that somehow stopped the use of repellors, or when the commander did not wish for repellor energies to be detected. Khalian pirates had long ago learned how to sne
ak onto a planet. Repellors generated vast, double-butterfly-shaped fields that would show on spy sat or ground-based sensors for hundreds, even thousands of kilometers. Like a bright fire in a dark night, repellor fields were hard to miss and impossible to mistake for anything else. On the other paw, dropping from space without power and waiting until the last minute to kick the engines into life was effective, if risky. True, rocket engines made loud noises and bright visible lights, but neither would be heard or seen far in the middle of a thunderstorm.

  This was the ripple in the Flow, Imani had no doubt.

  Why was a ship landing here?

  The senior student tapped lightly at the open entrance to Imani’s cell. “Master?”

  “I heard it,” Imani said. “A ship has landed, not far from here. Take three third-levels and go and find it. Report back when you have done so. Do not allow those on the ship to see you.”

  “At once, Master!”

  The student departed, eager to be off to see the surprising phenomenon. Imani took a deep breath and allowed it to escape. His stomach fluttered once before he forced it to calmness. This event was the problem he had felt. How large a problem and what must be done to resolve it remained to be known. Perhaps it would be minor.

  There came a sudden tension in the air, an itch-behind-the-eyes kind of feeling. What–?

  The dim electric lamp next to his pallet winked out.

  lmani stood and moved easily in the darkness to the doorway. All the hall lamps were out, too. The generator had gone down. It was not new, but it had been repaired and overhauled only a few months back.

  Imani went back into his cell and picked up the com unit next to his pallet. Dead. The com was powered by batteries, automatically recharged when low.

  The master of the temple padded through the well-known dark halls to the computer room. Most of the instrumentation was powered by the generator, but there were also battery- and solar-driven units. The old air-defense sensors were not used anymore but had been kept operative as a matter of course. They were self-contained and held lithium cells good for at least ten more years.

  The sensors were inoperative, but the old-style mechanical needle on the battery pack showed that the cells were still more than half-charged.

  All the electronic gear was out, but in some of it, the power sources were still good.

  Imani sighed. The temple had been pulsed. Somebody had swatted them with an EMP energy field, fusing even the shielded electronics and effectively killing power and communications.

  Such a thing had to have come from the unexpected ship. Who? Why? It made no sense to spend that kind of energy on a poor temple with no value. They were kilometers away from anything here, and Imani could think of no reason for such an attack. There was a possibility it could be an accident, but he did not think it so.

  The something wrong had just gotten worse.

  7.

  Stone had managed to reach one of the small outbuildings before the storm split the skies and hurled its heavy rain and lightning at him. The building had seen better years, and had, from its smell, once been the home of livestock. The floor was dirt, covered in patches with moldy hay, but the roof was sound. Wind howled through the open windows and rotted door, but there were corners kept dry. Stone found one of these comers and sat in it. He would wait until the rain slackened or stopped before he tried for the main building. He had come this far, there was no hurry now.

  A few minutes after he arrived, a roar began. Stone went to one of the windows and peered out into the downpour. What he saw in the darkness were the triple tongues of rocket engines, lowering a fair-sized craft in the distance. He couldn’t judge how far away it was, but it was not close. The rocket’s flames were no more than pencils of fire, and he could block them out with one hand at arm’s length.

  Odd. He hadn’t known there was a port anywhere around here. According to his information, the one he’d arrived at was the only extee port for five hundred klicks. And surely even the Khalia didn’t use rockets?

  A heavy gust of wind drove the rain into the window and it struck him like tiny wet hammers. Stone moved back into the shelter of the stable. He was not concerned with ships, only with his Art. It was not important.

  8.

  With the power gone, the flitter’s controls responded sluggishly on the hydraulic backups, the dead craft nosed down, and it took most of Berq’s strength to hold the little ship steady. The glide was more a controlled fall, and she aimed as best she could for a patch of bare rock down the hillside. It looked in the lightning flashes as if a landslide had cleared a path through the trees sometime back. The ground seemed more gravel than foliage, though some undergrowth had come up since the slide.

  Ho, Mother and Father, prepare to welcome your only child to the Cold Skies–

  A less skilled pilot would have missed it. As it was, Berq barely managed it, landing on the flitter’s belly. The craft bounced back into the air, came down, bounced again, and hit a final time. The nose of the flitter dug into the gravel and struck a rock; the ship did a half flip, twisted into the beginning of an Immelmann, and hit on one wing, breaking it off. Half of the plastic windows shattered. but the craft spun back onto its belly again. After what seemed forever, the destroyed flitter skidded to a stop.

  Rain splattered on Berq’s head and ran down into her eyes, and it was the nicest rain she had ever felt.

  Perhaps not just yet, my parents.

  All power was still out, the com dead, and she was a long way from anywhere. Nobody would be coming to find her, either, since she had filed a false flight plan and was traveling at 180 degrees different from what she had claimed.

  Well. Aside from a sore shoulder and an ache in one hip, she seemed to be uninjured. Nothing wrong with her feet.

  She unstrapped from the seat, collected her bag, and paused to assemble a small spring-dart pistol from components disguised to look harmless. The darts were stacked-carbon needles loaded with anaphylactic nerve poison and while the little gun only had an effective range of about fifty meters, it would stop anything smaller than a curl-nose stonewall dead in its tracks. Even a curl-nose would be unhappy about being shot. The magazine in the pistol’s butt held ten darts, and Berq had two spare loaded mags. No point in wandering around a strange countryside naked. She was alive and armed and could walk. Somewhere.

  9.

  Stone heard the sound of running footsteps splashing through puddles. The rain had slackened some, the brunt of the storm passed, and the time between lightning flashes and thunder had grown longer.

  At first he thought the footsteps were coming for him, but he held still and they passed, moving off into the distance. After a moment he stood and moved to the window. The distant lightning flashes were enough to reveal four figures in the distance. Khalians running in the direction of the ship he’d seen landing earlier.

  That made sense, he supposed. Maybe they hadn’t been expecting company.

  As the rain slowed to a stop, Stone saw that the lights of the main building had gone out. Storm must have caused a power failure.

  Well. Time to go and see if anybody was home.

  10.

  Imani felt the alien presence before the knocking on the temple’s outer door. He was already there, waiting, holding a bright blue biolume stick when the visitor announced himself.

  Was this one from the ship? It hardly seemed likely, given the EMP attack, but Imani had not survived this long by acting thoughtlessly. He had collected his old personal sidearm, an antique rocket auto. The pulse wouldn’t have hurt the solid-fuel rockets or simple mechanical operating system. He strapped the launcher around his waist and loosened it in its holster.

  The scanners were out, but there was a preelectronic peephole lens built into the thick wooden door, and Imani looked through this to see the visitor.

  A human stood there. He was tall, had light fur on his head, wore a coverall, and carried a small bag upon his back. He bore no visible weapons.

>   Imani opened the door. “Yes?”

  “I am called Stone,” the man said, his militaryspeak flat and without accent. His head fur looked green in the blue light of the biolume. “I have come to see the master of this temple.”

  Imani had seen a few humans in his time. They were brash, usually undisciplined, and generally soft. Not this one. He carried himself in balance, no small accomplishment, and from his stance and moves–or rather, his lack of movement–Imani knew him for what he was almost instantly: here was a swimmer in the Flow.

  “I am Imani. Enter.”

  The Khalian moved back to give the human plenty of room.

  He did not doubt that this one–Stone, where had he heard that name?–also knew him for what he was. The wa was unmistakable in the entryway, and one swimmer usually could recognize another.

  “Why have you come seeking me?”

  “To learn.”

  “Ah. This way.”

  “You keep your temple dark.”

  “A problem with the power source.” He produced another biolume, squeezed it, and the light around them doubled. He handed the stick to Stone. They continued to walk.

  “What is your system called?”

  “Chan-gen,” Stone said.

  “And you are adept at it?”

  “Yes.”

  “In here. The biolume will give you sufficient light for you to see what you need to see.”

  With that, Imani opened the door to the spring-chamber and motioned for Stone to enter.

  The man looked at the Khalian, eyes unblinking. He nodded, once, and Imani felt the thrill of recognizing another who was a near equal. Stone knew he was about to be tested, knew that it was dangerous, and knew that if he refused, he had wasted his time in coming here. All this was apparent in the simple nod to Imani, and the Khalian returned the nod with full courtesy.