The Valley Beneath the World: The Fugitive Future - Book One Page 6

  She grinned. "Don't worry, I'm not offended or anything. I guess it's because we're scientists, descended from scientists. We're too impatient to deal with anything that isn't our work, so we took to using just one name. Besides, there aren't that many of us that we need two to tell each other apart."

  She stood, picking up her plate. "Come on, I want you to meet somebody. He's a biologist, a real one. I think he'll be interested in what you found out about the hhoonom."

  She led me along one of the long curving halls that made up Tanar, for once bypassing the elevators that seemed to make up the main mode of transportation. Tanar was relatively small, but it ran vertically.

  Tierse had long ago left off carrying a weapon around me, and now that it was just the two of us, the crowds didn't part when we walked down the hall. I was used to seeing Tierse greet those she saw with a nod or a small wave, but all at once she slowed, just enough to intercept a woman approaching us from the other direction, her eyes unfocused in the manner of someone engaged in a lengthy telepathic communication. As we came into her field of awareness, however, she also slowed.

  "Oh, hi, Tierse." Her words were directed at my companion, but her eyes looked up at me. Which I guess I can't blame her for. She held out her hand. "I take it this is the famous Timash."

  I took her hand, as humans do, and bending slightly, squeezed it with the greatest care, as I had learned to do with humans.

  "Enchanté." I had no idea what it meant, but Keryl had taught it to me, saying it never failed to make human females sweat and want to get to know you better. Now, I couldn't care less if a Thoran woman wanted to get to know me better--I prefer my girls a little hairier, if you know what I mean--but humans still owned the world, and I had learned to take every small advantage I could get. And Keryl was right; whenever I said that, Thoran females first took a quick breath like they didn't quite know how to react, but then they always smiled. I hadn't tried it on any Nuum women, of course, and I wasn't sure what effect it would have on a female gorilla; that would have to wait until I met another one.

  "Hi, Avanya," Tierse said. I had been focused on taking Avanya's hand without breaking her fingers, but something in Tierse's manner pricked my curiosity. I didn't know if she had let her shields down or if I was just that sensitive, but I was getting a feeling from her that she was suddenly shy and hesitant, something I had never associated with Tierse before. I stole a quick glimpse back at Avanya; I'm no expert, but with her long black hair, symmetrical features, and rounded body, she might be what the humans called "beautiful." In which case I had just learned something about Tierse.

  As to whether Avanya was reacting the same way, I was entirely out of my depth. But what else was new?

  "Avanya is head of our diplomatic section," Tierse said with what even I could tell was an exaggerated emphasis.

  Avanya smiled and looked away. "It's not so much; we've tried to keep in touch with the other cities, but it's not easy these days. Tierse makes me sound much more important than I am."

  "But that may change--"

  Tierse stopped short at Avanya's quick glance. I made no sign I noticed; I wasn't offended if the Tanarians had secrets they didn't want to share with me. Tierse stepped back and made a half-hearted farewell. Avanya nodded to me with a smile and went on her way.

  Which was back the way we had come, since she had come from the direction in which we were now heading. And while I knew there were things going on that no one was about to tell me, I had to wonder what their head diplomat was doing in the bioresearch section?

  XIII

  I was trying very hard to watch where I stepped. I was also trying very hard to watch the treetops, the sky, and every direction around me all at the same time. It made for slow progress, which was frustrating because I, at least, was in a real hurry--a hurry to get back inside of Tanar, where the plants weren't grasping and poisonous, the birds hungry, and the trees hiding nine-foot-long snakes that liked to drop on you from above and start eating whichever extremity they happened to be facing at the time. At least so Tierse had told me; I hadn't seen anything like that yet, and I knew I didn't want to.

  We had just entered a rare clear space. Tierse, on point, stopped suddenly, raising one hand. We all halted. That kind of discipline had been mercilessly drilled into all of us, most recently me. I hadn't heard anything, and maybe Tierse hadn't either, but maybe she had. When you were outside, "stay together" was Rule Number One. After a few moments, Tierse began to flow forward again and we followed. Quiet as they were, I could hear her footsteps.

  It occurred to me all at once that this was a bad thing.

  It had all started a few days before. "You did pretty well the day we pushed you outside," Tierse said without warning over breakfast. "Was that a fluke, or do you actually know how to take care of yourself?"

  Sensing a trap even if I couldn't see it, I took my time. "I've been involved in a few fights." More than a few, but that was my business.

  She grinned. "Likely more than a few. As soon as you ran out of charges you started clubbing that last wolf with your rifle. You didn't hesitate. If you had you wouldn't be here."

  "Wolves? Is that what those things were called?"

  "They run in packs," she said, giving me the impression that she, too, was playing it cool. "It's a good thing that pack was so small."

  "Yeah, I wouldn't have had a chance if there'd been more than three of them. Or if you hadn't slipped me those extra…" I stopped, thinking back. "Wait a second. You knew they were out there. That's why you gave me the extra charges, to even the odds. You wanted to see what I'd do."

  She made some kind of face that I couldn't decipher. "Blame Vollan. He told me to stick you out there. And yes, of course we knew they were there. All those monitors in his office? What do you think they're for? We keep an eye on our entire perimeter, all the time. That's why he pushed you out of his office so fast. He'd been tracking the wolves, and he needed you to be outside at just the right time."

  "So he was watching the whole thing." Tierse nodded. "And what would you have done if I hadn't managed to fight them all off?"

  "I would have waited for them to drag your carcass away and then tried to get the rifle back. They're expensive." She clapped me on the shoulder. "Come on. Deni, my friend in bioresearch, was impressed by your story about the hhoonom. He seemed to think that managing to crash-land without killing yourself was quite a feat. I'm not sure how he'd know, since he's never flown, but… Anyway, he wants me to go outside and try to pick up a few plant samples for his work. I'll need a team. You want to come?"

  I laughed. I don't think I'd laughed since I came to Tanar, but this was too funny. In the midst of it, I noticed that while my fangs didn't seem to scare Tierse any more, a few people nearby got up and moved to other tables.

  "No," I said, getting myself under control. "Been there, don't need to go again."

  "Hm." She swabbed some juice off of her plate with a scrap of bread. "Let me put it another way. You've been here long enough that you need a job. I need to take a team outside to gather some plant samples. You're big, you're strong, and you can handle a gun. You're on my team."

  She went on to point out that my alternative was to go outside on my own. I joined her team.

  I've never been a soldier, but I'd spent the last five years being part of The Dark Lady's crew, and while Skull was no match for me physically (we'd settled that almost as soon as we met), he didn't give an inch of deck space when it came to his authority on board ship. I had learned the first day that his word was law, and he had no reservations at all about letting you leave the ship if you saw things differently. Of course, there was no guarantee you'd be disembarking anywhere that bore any resemblance to civilization, but that was your lookout. If you wanted to go back to Dure or start in some other city along the way, you were free to re-board--if you could pay passage. Or you could just accept that he was the captain and stay with the crew. Not surprising how many men took that route.


  Anyway, my time on The Dark Lady helped me to accept Tierse's orders without a qualm, along with any suggestions from the rest of the team. I'd already learned the dangers of ignoring instructions from someone who knows everything about a situation where you know nothing. Tierse never gave praise, but she radiated satisfaction.

  Then we went outside. And less than ten minutes into the trees, I realized that all of the normal sounds of the jungle had ceased.

  "Tierse!" I hissed. She stopped and looked around; I held a finger up to my ear and shook my head. She took my meaning immediately and waved the team together. In the time it took us to form up, she had chosen a large, gnarled tree that did not feature any obvious dangers and we crouched in a tight bunch, eyes and weapons focused outward. Tierse had the added duty of looking up every few seconds to make sure we were not being ambushed from above.

  We did not speak--not even telepathically, because Tierse had warned me some of the wilderness' predators had developed rudimentary telepathic powers of their own, not enough to communicate, but sufficient to detect broadcast mental waves further away than they could hear. The more I knew about the deadliness of these creatures, the less I liked them--and the more suspicious I became. For such a small area, this dome seemed to hide a lot of secrets.

  I felt the ground vibrate slightly, then again, and again, in a steady pattern.

  "Thunder lizard," someone whispered, and I felt my four companions tense. I felt a shiver down my spine. I'd seen a thunder lizard up close once, and once was more than enough. Still…

  "It can't be close," I muttered. "The ground's barely shaking."

  "Keep your eyes open," Tierse ordered. "It's practically on top of us."

  Five steps away, a sapling suddenly bent sideways, pushed aside by the slavering head of a prehistoric monster whose ancestors had been regenerated in some lost laboratory centuries ago for sport until they broke free to reduce the world to terror once more. Its beady eyes followed its nose, its fetid breath washing us with the stink of rotten flesh. It screamed like a falling pile of rusty metal, a scream meant to immobilize its prey until it could strike with those armored jaws and rend its victim with its triple rows of serrated teeth. I stared in shock and disbelief--

  --then I stood up and barely aimed before I blew its head off.

  "That's it?" I demanded of my colleagues. "That's your thunder lizard?" The beast Keryl Clee and I once killed had been twice the size of our air car. The body that had just fallen out of the trees, had it still possessed a head, would have stood five feet high. "Where I come from, that was just a baby."

  "Yes!" Tierse cried. "And were we come from, that's its mother!"

  I heard the screeching roar of a mountain of falling metal right before the tree in front of me was ripped from its roots and another thunder lizard burst into the clearing, fifteen feet tall and angry as hell!

  XIV

  Four rifles were blasting before I could jump back out of the way of the falling body. The steam from the gaping hole in the lizard's neck washed over me and I fell back coughing. Had the energy rifles not cauterized the wound, I would have been drenched in its blood.

  "Qriss! Kevim! Reload!" Two of the team reloaded while the rest of us watched for more lizards, or the scavengers who would come in packs as soon as their fear of all the noise ebbed. At Tierse's command, she and Bradr, our fourth member, reloaded, and finally I was allowed to do the same.

  "Let's get moving," she said at once, and set a pace away from there that would have been reckless in other circumstances. She didn't spare me so much as a look, but I knew that once we were safely in Tanar again, she was going to have more than a look to spare. Assuming I didn’t do anything else abysmally stupid and get us all killed before then.

  I wondered if she was going to cut our mission short, but other than keeping a sharp lookout so that we didn't blunder into any of the scavengers we were trying to avoid, there was no sign of doing so. I knew we were searching for plant samples, but I wouldn’t know the right one if it tried to eat me. I was only along for the ride, and supposedly my ability to help keep my team safe, something I had just failed at. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open, stopped when I was told and ran when I was ordered. I'm from an underground city, but at the end of the day I was never so glad to see Tehana as I was to get back to Tanar.

  Tierse made a show of inspecting my rifle after I had racked it. "Get back to your quarters," she told me. "And stay there."

  According to Tierse, most people in Tanar shared quarters with someone; there simply wasn't enough space. I knew why I had managed to snag a room of my own, and it wasn't because I was lucky, or because I was important. It was because nobody wanted to sleep with me nearby. It had hurt, at first; not that I didn't like being alone, but I wasn't used to being seen as different from everyone else. Even Keryl, who came from a time when gorillas didn't speak, had accepted me quickly--not that he'd had a choice, since the first time he woke up in my presence he was in Tehana City, and everyone except him was a gorilla.

  Nonetheless, he and Maire and Skull and all the other humans I'd known had treated me like one of them from the moment we met. Nuum didn't have much use for me, but they didn't have much use for anyone but themselves. Here, humans moved away from me at meals and didn't want to sleep near me. Hell, the first thing Tierse had done was shove me outside for the black wolves--although now I knew there'd been a reason for it. I laughed inside: Tierse had pushed me out into the jungle the first day I was here, and Skull had reprogrammed Rose's AI before I left home. Both of them had caused me trouble. And these were my friends. At least when the black wolves tried to kill you they were up front about it.

  I sobered up quickly when I realized that Tierse was coming here pretty soon to take a bite out of me herself. And I was sure she'd be very up front about it.

  As someone who had grown up in a telepathic society, I shouldn't have been shocked that there was a buzz from my door a second later, but I jumped anyway. I directed the door to open and tried to prepare myself for the biggest dressing-down I had ever deserved.

  I was expecting Tierse. I would have been surprised but not stunned if Vollan had walked in. But in my wildest dreams I didn't imagine my visitor would be Avanya.

  "May I come in?" she asked. I nodded, unable to find my voice. "I hope I'm not bothering you. I heard what happened."

  I had been sitting on the bed; I waved for her to sit in the chair. "News travels fast."

  "Don't blame Tierse; she didn't say anything. But people--well, other people saw you, in the monitors…"

  I shrugged and resigned myself to the fact that Tierse's lecture wasn't going to be the end of it. I was going to have to pretend I couldn't see the sidelong looks or hear the whispers until folks lost interest and found something new to talk about.

  "I screwed up," I said at last. "Nothing I can do about it now but take my medicine." I stared at her in sudden suspicion. "You didn't come here to--?"

  She reared back. "Me? God, no. Not my job." She gave me a long up-and-down look. "Not for all the money in Tanar."

  I put my back against the wall, trying to look as unthreatening as possible in these small quarters. I knew it wasn't much, but what was I supposed to do? The room hadn't been built for a gorilla.

  On the other hand, just because I was trying not to look intimidating, I was fully aware that, to humans, I was intimidating. So I didn't say anything; I just looked Avanya over like she was a ripe fruit and I was contemplating dinner.

  She waited a few moments to speak, and I could tell that she was doing it on purpose; she wanted me to know she was scared but she wasn't going to be intimidated. All of a sudden, I found myself wanting to know why she had come to see me.

  "I know Tierse is angry with you, and from what I've heard, she has reason to be. That's not my concern. I also know that when she's really mad, black wolves find somewhere else to be. That's not my concern, either. What is my concern is what you're planning on doing after she's
finished with you."

  Now it was my turn to take my time answering. The truth was, outside of this room, Avanya and her friends held all the cards. Her question implied that she had an idea what I might be doing after Tierse chewed my behind so bad I'd be sleeping on my stomach for a week, and since there was no chance of me doing anything at all (inside the dome, at any rate) without some human help, I was definitely curious. But at the same time, as Uncle Balu would say, only a fool grabs a rope without making sure it's tied to something on the other end.

  "That's… probably not up to me," I said at last. Honesty is always the best policy when the other party already knows the truth. "You may have heard I'm new in town."

  She threw back her head and laughed, high and light. It probably drove Thoran males (and Tierse) to distraction.

  "I knew I was right about you. Vollan and Tierse and all those others think they know what's best, but they're missing what's right in front of their faces."

  I grinned toothily, waiting for her to explain what exactly the hell she was talking about.

  "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? It's a secret," she went on without waiting for an answer, "but I want you in on it. You're exactly who I want in on it, no matter what they say."

  Suddenly things were going from baffling to worrisome. Whatever this "secret" was the Avanya was hiding, it involved inside-Tanar politics about which I knew nothing. Worse, it sounded like Tierse--and maybe Vollan--were on the other side. I carefully kept my tongue.

  "Would you be interested? I have to warn you, your options are limited."

  I faked a yawn, discreetly checking to see what effect a mouthful of anthropoid fangs had. Apparently--none at all.

  "Tell me something I don't know," I said. "Like what this secret project of yours is all about."

  She stared at me without speaking--apparently I had finally put her into the same position she had put me: speechless. She finally opened her mouth but all that came out was a buzz from the door.