Seven
The probing roots climbing Myla's body paused. A
haunted wail of a distant siren undulated over the wilderness. Flocks of
the Covonian equivalent of birds fluttered into the air from surrounding
underbrush.
Her breath caught in her throat. She had briefly
thought that she had somehow succeeded in stopping the process of being
devoured by the carnivorous plant, but it was the route siren wailing at
all frequencies that had done so.
The colony was preparing to abandon Covonia. It had
been prepared to do so for the three long centuries the colony had called
Covonia home, waiting for an attack by the Chineen Hive.
Or perhaps a ploy on Khalin's part to scare her and
to make her reconsider his offer of an avatar. Covonia was far too small
to attract the attention of the Hive.
Would he go so far? Myla's heart beat frantically
with the terrible suspicion that the siren was no ruse. She'd know one
way or another before the tree roots claimed her life. Hive attacks were
quick and deadly. With a technology that could strike faster than the
speed of light, sometimes only fractions of a second passed between the
time a colony sealed its cities and the Hive struck.
A boom rolled across the forest. The birds that had
taken flight and filled the evening were swept away by the shockwave.
Feather trees bent to the ground, and the canopies of the umbrella trees
rained torn foliage.
A hard wall of air threw Myla to the ground and into
the waiting arms of the groping roots. The booming became a continuous
thunder that rolled across the skies from the horizon behind her.
Myla knew from the very first instant that this was
not the right sequence of events for a Hive attack. The Hive would have
opened fire from a million miles away. Death would have struck between
heartbeats. Before that happened, the colony would have been forewarned
and safely routed into the relative safety of open space.
Something else was happening. Something had taken
the colony by surprise. It had entered the atmosphere below the horizon
and was growing closer, moving at hypersonic velocities.
Was it a new tactic? Had the Hive caught the colony
on the surface of its sanctuary world where it was most vulnerable? If
so, she was doomed to watch Covonia die. Even if she never saw the
light of the impact from beyond the horizon, she would nevertheless suffer a horrible death of her own
when the shockwave of atmospheric impact struck.
She would die utterly alone.
Myla sobbed aloud as the thunder roared ever louder.
Only a stupid and arrogant child would have thought they'd set off the
route sirens for a runaway. For the first time in her life, Dikki wasn't
around to counsel or console her, and she floundered in indecision. She
felt more clumsy and ridiculous in her helplessness than even the silly
little mud dragon curled into a ball and rolling across the ground in the
conflagration.
An intensifying static charge stirred her hair. The
tips of plants and the entire overhead canopy of the trees began to
shimmer in blue light. She knew better than to look for whatever
approached. She put her face into
the dirt despite the deadly embrace of the hungry vines.
Blue-white light illuminated the forest in stark
black and white shadow. The thing approaching in the Covonian skies was
not landing, nor was it attacking. It was big and it was descending far
too fast for a controlled landing. Behind her, it rose above the horizon
and turned the sky blood red.
A flash of silvery white light
seared the roots of
the animate plant. They writhed in mindless agony. The ground steamed.
In the next instant, her face shield darkened to protect her eyes against
a lethal glare.
Concussion forced her hard against the soft earth.
Another pounded the air from her lungs. She couldn't
hear it. She felt nothing except for sickening vertigo.
She had no idea she had been thrown into the air
until she impacted with the ground and her arms and legs flailed and
wrenched at odd angles. By the time she had resigned herself to death,
the violence came to an end.
Order emerged from the chaos. Regaining her wit was
like a rebirth, an awakening elsewhere in space and time. She wanted
desperately to find herself safe in her own bed, recovering from nothing
worse than a bad dream.
Myla rolled onto her stomach and climbed to her knees
in a quiet moan of agony. Every joint in her body had been badly
wrenched. She wiped a coating of dust from her face shield.
The world around her had turned strangely barren,
filled with a gray pall of smoke and dust. The surrounding forest had
either fallen or been stripped of vegetation. Debris covered the ground,
deeper than she was tall in some places, and in places it burned.
She scurried to her feet, confronted by the spectacle
of an oval spaceship embedded at a sixty degree angle in the ground. It
was many kilometers away, the lower half hidden in a smoldering haze and
the top protruding into the clouds.
Directly overhead, something white and starkly
artificial floated slowly by. Myla followed it with her gaze until it
vanished in the haze above the ruined forest. Maybe an ejected capsule.
Maybe just a piece of debris.
Or, a Hive probe.
Parts of the kilometer high craft glowed strangely.
Probably lots of dangerous radiation, she thought to herself, maybe
killing her even now. Except what was it? Not Covonian or Alazhir, or
even Hive in configuration. Something else entirely.
It hardly mattered in that moment. The departing
colony caught and held her attention like a spike nailing her to a tree.
Along the horizon halfway between night and sunset,
three dark ovaloids rose into what was left of the day's light, three of
the ten cities of Covonia. They passed through layers and smoke and haze
and sparkled briefly in direct sunlight on the edge of the atmosphere.
An earthquake followed their departure. Myla stoically rode out the rocking and shaking of the earth at
her feet. The Ark, itself the size of a city, had folded itself in time
and space and vanished from the crust of the world in the same manner in
which it had appeared three centuries ago. Nobody could have dug it so
deep with any manner of ordinary machinery.
Despair deepened to a pain more intense and profound
than any physical injury. If she had been using an avatar, it would be
tumbling to the ground even now, an empty shell. She would be awakening
safely in a replacement avatar aboard one of the cities, or at least in
her hibernation crypt aboard the Ark in her own body. Everybody in the
escaping colony would be wearing an avatar now, even the Nats who would be
needed to help with the emergency, but whose natural bodies would
otherwise be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation generated by the
defensive fields shielding against Hive attack.
The danger would be at its peak. Only the Ark itself
with generators putting out more power than a small sun could withstand
any conceivable onslaught. The Arks were irreplaceable products of
Alazhir technology from the big population centers of the core worlds
prior to the terrible Hive War five hundred standard years in the past.
Shrieking wind whipped away the smoke and haze,
leaving Myla feeling exposed and vulnerable in the abruptly open and
barren landscape. The danger hadn't ended. It hadn't even begun. The
Hive was sure to investigate. Myla glanced toward a low line of cliffs
visible now along the horizon, standing between herself and the more
distant mountains. Maybe the rock would offer refuge against the heat
sensors the Hive would employ to search for survivors. The alien craft
hadn't crashed so hard that survivors were not possible. Recalling the
parachute or balloon she had seen passing overhead, she scanned the
horizons, hoping to see where it had landed. She saw nothing and thought
no more about it.
Myla started forward. Within a half dozen steps, she
paused, confronted by a ball of singed scales. She reached for it
with a stab of despair. The mud dragon had abandoned the security of
its sink hole to follow her.
“Typical male behavior,” she
murmured.
It had balled up in defense
against its injuries, or maybe it was dead. So many of the creatures
of the forest had died this terrible day. She picked it up by one of
its sturdy spines lining the backbone, deciding it would serve as a handle
without further harming the creature. Dead or alive, she would
return it to the first sink hole she encountered.
Hours later and miles closer to the cliffs, another
sonic boom sounded, lower in tone than the first. Something large moved
against the setting sun. A shadow of ominous darkness crept across the
desolation.
Myla raced across the open terrain at a dead run,
galvanized by renewed panic, leaping the smoldering trunks of fallen trees
and steaming masses of wilted vegetation.
Before complete darkness descended, she saw a gleam
of fading sunlight reflect against the curve of a hull half buried in
debris a short distance away. She only glanced at it, the escape module
she had seen floating by from the crashed ship. It warned that perhaps
she was not alone in the forest. Something else not native to Covonia
would be hunted by the approaching Hive this terrible night.
Myla's heart pounded in more fear than she had ever
known. She tried not to think about what would happen if the Hive caught
her in the open. If it happened, she'd wish herself capable of tearing
her own heart out of her chest with her bare hands. Her fate in their
hands of metal would be far worse.
Little more than a scattering of ruddy fires
illuminated her way by the time she reached the low line of cliffs. Dim
light undulated against bare rock towering above her. She turned toward a
dark recess in the rock where a cave funneled her deep beneath the
overhang.
Lights moved in the darkness behind her. The gentle
hum of small reconnaissance craft approached.
The cave ended in a water fall and a vicious
white-water stream that raged a short distance before it dived into one of
several dry sink holes and vanished. The sink holes were two or three
times as wide as she was tall and even the vertical sections of the cliff
were peppered with the holes. She dived into a vertical opening at random
when the very air vibrated with the insidious power of the closing
machines. She would have dived knowingly to her death rather than allow
herself to be captured by the Chineen Hive.
