Afterburn Read online

  A red eye—the alien only possessed one—turned on her. A narrow slit appeared in the fur below it and growling sounds emerged. Her TI translated the rough voice as saying, “What do you want, Terran?”

  She made the palm-up gesture again. “I would like to use the terminal, when you are finished.” If he took too long she would simply board a glidebus and take it to orientation.

  “Relocate another meter back,” it growled. “I won’t concentrate with you standing so close. And retain your body fluids.”

  An eight-legged, black-and-green arachnid female using the terminal next to the red-eyed furry alien turned and made a low, hissing sound that didn’t translate.

  The furred alien seemed to understand it, for its red eye shifted to meet the arachnid’s black eye clusters. “You know they’re as miserable as the Skartesh.”

  “Not alwayz. Leave her alone. Zhe izn’t threatening you.” The three-foot-high spider female turned and lifted two of her legs toward Emily. “I am finizhed here, Terran, if you wizh uze of thiz terminal.”

  “Thank you.” Emily stepped up to the terminal and engaged the locator system. She was approximately five minutes from Colonial Administration. While she studied the most direct route to get there, a message flashed on the screen indicating she had a priority signal waiting to be opened.

  Please, don’t let it be orders to return home. Emily opened the relay.

  The image of a purple-skinned, masculine-looking humanoid appeared. It wore such a fierce expression that Emily took an involuntary step back from the unit.

  “Welcome to Kevarzangia Two, Miss Kim,” the alien male said. It sounded the same way someone would issue a death threat. “I am Carsa, the administrative assistant whom you will be replacing. By now my transport has left K-2 so that I may attend to a family emergency on my homeworld, so there is no need to reply to this relay.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Emily murmured, and then bit her lip. Next to her, the gray-furred being made a nasty sound that was probably a laugh.

  “I am extremely reluctant to leave K-2 at this time,” Carsa continued, “but I feel confident that with your qualifications you can serve Administrator Hansen as adequately as I have.”

  Or he would come back and beat her senseless? That was what his narrowed eyes seemed to imply.

  “I have left a detailed disk of ongoing projects and negotiations in my console storage unit for your review. You will wish to pay close attention to those items that concern the Peace Summit. Delegates from the Ninrana, Skartesh, Ylydii, and ’Zangian species will be meeting in orbit above K-2, hopefully to settle their differences and address the immediate planetary needs of this system.”

  Emily had read a little about the recent, aborted coup on Ninra, but the Terran news agencies reporting it had given it their customary contemptuous spin, even suggesting that the Ninrana’s looming extinction was deserved.

  Emily wondered if the colonial archives would provide a more enlightened view of the conflict. She could go and check them after her own orientation, and perhaps see Hkyrim again while she was there.

  “As for Administrator Hansen,” Carsa said, “I can personally attest to her kindness and infinite capacity for patience, and I believe you will find her a fair and understanding supervisor. However, if you wish to win her confidence, it would be best to display some initiative. Review the data I have left for you and learn the organization systems. The administrator finds strong emotions trying, as she has empathic talent, so keep calm. I would advise you bring her coffee, frequently, during the early-morning hours of your shifts. She seems to need the artificial stimulation it provides most at that time. Ah, and if a silver-haired Terran male named William Mayer pays a visit to the administrator, I advise you not disturb them. During such times, I usually leave to take a break or a meal interval.”

  Emily smiled at the image. Carsa might look like a killer, but he was all heart.

  “My family matter bars my return to K-2, but I have embedded my personal relay code in your desk terminal. Please use it should you have any questions. Fare well, Miss Kim.”

  A shadow passed over the terminal, and Emily glanced over her shoulder to see the passage of a nine-foot-tall being as it trudged toward a restricted-use glidebus. It seemed to be a cross between a humanoid and a killer whale—minus the white spots—and it wore a pilot’s flightsuit.

  It was also wearing the kind of ferocious scowl that made Carsa seem, in comparison, as dangerous as a soft, fluffy kitten.

  Maybe I’ll walk to orientation.

  Burn was always the first back to the water after a duty shift ended. Always.

  “Running a little late today, eh, Lieutenant?” the transport driver said as Burn boarded the empty glidebus.

  “I had some reports to file.” He flicked his collar insignia. “And it’s Sublieutenant now.”

  “Not for long,” Burn thought he heard the driver mutter as the transport pulled away from the curb.

  Burn’s natal pod dwelled in the warm waters off the coast, some fifteen kim from the outskirts of the colony. The short trip gave him time to hook up his lines to the bus’s storage tank of seawater—carried exclusively for the ’Zangians’ use—and think over what he was going to say to the others.

  What is there to say? Based on the data I was given, I made the only logical choice. I was dead anyway.

  He knew Saree and the other pilots would likely resent him for the unhappy end result of their training session, but that wasn’t his fault. Dair had deliberately kept him in the dark as to the copycat maneuver. If he didn’t hold that against her, then the pilots’ pod should be just as forgiving toward him.

  And if they aren’t, then they can eat my wake.

  Burn watched as the terrain gradually sloped upward from the relatively flat land-dwellers’ territory to become a wall of rocky cliffs. A familiar tingle of excitement sizzled along his nerve endings as the air grew moister and saltier. He had his flightsuit unfastened before he climbed down the glidebus’s exit ramp, and dragged it off his body by the time he reached the edge of the cliff’s uppermost plateau.

  Before him stretched out the largest of K-2’s oceans, what the land-dwellers called the Western Sea. Four thousand kim wide and twice as long, it contained so many major reef formations that they were visible from orbit, and was thought by the land-dwellers to be populated by nearly all the aquatic species found on the planet.

  To Burn, the endless, rolling, whitecapped waves and blue-green depths were simply home.

  He dropped his uniform and skin seal on the rock and looked down. The tide had rolled in, deepening the water of the diving inlet to a dark blue. He breathed out, flattening his lungs, and then leapt off the edge of the cliff, somersaulting head over flukes before straightening out at the last possible moment to enter the water like a dark gray bolt of lightning.

  Cool blue enveloped him, flooding his gill vents and driving the last bit of air from his lungs. Burn dragged in as much water as he could expel before touching off the bottom silt with a kick and swimming out for the seamount ridge. Although he had barely disturbed the surface with his dive, and swam silently, dark figures were already gathering in the distance and heading his way.

  ’Zangians were capable of communicating with others in three different forms of language: clik, fin, and balaenea. Clik, a collection of tonal sounds and pulses, relayed brief, necessary communication to any member of the pod within a kim. Fin, made of wordless, soundless body gestures and movements, was used and understood by most intelligent aquatic species. The ’Zangians’ most evolved language, balaenea, used elements of clik and fin along with subtler, more sophisticated sounds and gestures to relay the most complex and lengthy interactions.

  No one was using clik or balaenea today, however.

  Most of the pod turned and left at the sight of him, while the few ’Zangians who bothered to acknowledge his presence treated him to a few stiff fin gestures of distant greeting or simple recognition. The
reception didn’t qualify as an outright insult, but only just.

  Burn refused to allow it to bother him. He might have violated protocol and upset everyone, but that was the price to be paid for creative thinking. Whatever his friends or Dair thought, destroying the raiders had been his primary mission, and he had carried it through to a successful completion.

  Burn. Madura, one of the few pilots who had not been assigned to the training exercise, swam up to greet him. It’s about time you returned. She turned slightly to look back at the retreating pod. Why is everyone calling you Pod Killer?

  Because I killed them in a simulation. He swam past her and saw a large figure heading directly for him. Land’s end, did they have to tell my mother?

  The young female released a strum of mirth. Oh, Burn, they’ll tell everyone.

  Znora mu V’ndema, one of the largest and oldest matriarchs of the coastal pod, swam up and circled around Burn in an agitated fashion. Are you injured? Curonal said how that leech-hided runt caused you to be thrown from that wretched contraption she forces you to endure.

  I am not injured, Mother. Burn felt impatient with Znora’s nuzzling and glided past her. Dair is not white anymore, either. You will have to think up a new name to call her.

  Byorn, wait. Where are you going? Znora caught up to him and gave him a wounded look. May I not even greet my son properly now?

  He faced her. I do not need you chasing after me as if I were a wayward podling.

  Perhaps when you cease behaving like one, I will not. His mother swam closer. What is the matter with you? You are hungry, of course. She nudged him. Come, let us go and feed.

  Burn’s stomach was empty, but he had no desire to trail after his dam to the feeding grounds. I’m not feeding now. I’ll be back later.

  Byorn, wait—

  He didn’t wait. He shot off into a nearby lateral current, using the energy to boost his speed. By the time Znora could turn to follow, he was almost out of her sight, and he kept swimming fast until he hit the colder waters above the black rock labyrinth of the northern reefs, where the coastal pod seldom came.

  His mother would never follow him here. Cold water gave her joints trouble, and she disliked being separated from the pod. Then again, so had Burn, at least until recently. He had started coming here about the same time he grew so long that he couldn’t see his flukes in the water anymore.

  He was larger and stronger than Dair, than his mother—than anyone—so why did the pod insist on treating him as if he were still shedding his belly spots? Would his mother never stop acting as if he were still taking milk from her mammary glands? Duo, didn’t she ever look at him properly? He was a meter longer than she now, an adult. Large enough to mate, if he desired a female, or to brave some of the outer currents.

  Tiny bubbles turned the current around him milky as a large wrill bloom encompassed the reef. The miniature crustaceans were too small to chew and provide a proper meal, and Burn disliked the taste of the bigger ones, but he moved through the cloud and ate them until his gullet was full and his belly stopped cramping.

  A fat, indolent gnaldrof slithered out of its cramped hole in the reef to investigate the unusual feeding activity. Its bulging eyes inspected Burn the same way it would its nemesis, the doowtasquid.

  See what I’m reduced to? Eating garbage food. He cast a resentful glance back in the direction of his home waters. I wager they didn’t turn their back fins like that on Dair.

  Unimpressed, the gnaldrof made a flatulent sound and returned to its den. It didn’t bother to lace its wake with the mild venom in its posterior ducts.

  Burn should have been glad that the eel considered him beneath its notice. Gnaldrof venom never caused permanent damage, but it smelled like rotflesh and made anything thin-hided itch unbearably for hours. Yet even the eel’s indifference infuriated him.

  Would it have killed it to hiss and acknowledge my presence?

  All Burn truly wanted was to be a pilot. It had been his ambition ever since he had followed Dair into the military. Well, perhaps not always—when he was younger he had been distracted by all the lovely weaponry and armament the League had given him to play with—but surely he was old enough now to be trusted with more important duty. And there was nothing finer than taking command of a ship and facing off with the enemy, flying into battle with engines screaming, outwitting the lizards and anything else fool enough to put itself in his path.

  Frustration made him flip in the water, dispersing the wrill bloom and clearing a path to the outer edge of the reef. Beyond the ragged curve of the rock-builders’ abandoned carapaces lay darker, colder water where no ’Zangian swam. Burn darted forward and then halted as if he had bumped into an unseen wall.

  He had never crossed into the outer currents.

  Like space, the region of the sea beyond the warm coastal waters was vast and empty; far too dangerous to support anything but the most mindless, uncivilized life-forms. Mogshrikes, the ’Zangians’ only natural predator, spent their lives stalking the freezing currents for migrating masses and wandering rogues.

  I could survive out there. Burn had grown large enough to present a danger to smaller, younger ’shrikes, and he could certainly outswim the older, more dangerous ones. Onkar did, for years.

  The only reason ’Zangians entered the outer currents, however, was because they had been outcast from their natal pod. Burn might have made fools of the other SEALs during their training session, but they wouldn’t drive him out for doing that. They wouldn’t dare.

  The pulsing anger inside him faded as he looked back at his home territory. Would they?

  Burn didn’t waste any time debating the matter with the gnaldrof, or himself. It wasn’t fear that made him turn away from the column of dark water, or put a little extra speed into the swim back to warmer, brighter currents. He would simply sort things out with the other SEALs and put this matter behind them.

  The same way he did the outer currents, as fast and as far as he could swim away from them.

  Liana swam quickly away from the threat. Behind her lay something shapeless, dark, and menacing, but ahead there was brilliant light and the promise of haven. Colors glowed around her and, as she moved closer, delicious trills from fresh, eager food vibrated against her hide. She was so hungry; she could not remember the last time she had fed. The petite veils of her lateral fins ached to be released, to spread their multihued webbing and lure something tasty into their barbs.

  Not yet. Make sure it is safe for the others.

  Liana ignored the pleasures and temptations around her. Slowing and listening carefully were imperative, if she were to send a summons. This place might offer permanent refuge, something she felt the Ylydii needed desperately right now, but she would not be careless and risk others’ lives.

  So many depended on her that she could not call them by name or even count them anymore.

  Part of her hated that—she had never wished to rise this far—but she had been born of the green. With the green came terrible responsibilities, especially toward the one who mattered most. The one who had sent her here, the one who had forced her to keep silent and keep moving. The one she had left back in the cold darkness.

  The one she would not think about, ever, until this was done.

  Liana slowly swam through the light. She could not yet see the great schools of rextab and brevlisgre, but she felt their massing and movements. The water tasted clean, almost sweet on her tongue. No threat came to confront her, nothing disturbed the currents but that which could warm empty bellies.

  When Liana felt sure of the place, she pulsed out reassurance to the lead females of her synchrony. No danger here. Secure. Food.

  Now she could, at last, relax and enjoy her surroundings. Had she ever swum waters this soft and warm? In the quiet cove where she had been born, perhaps, or while exploring the shallows above the sunken cities. She saw no sign of her grandmothers or the time-worn ruins; only green and purple columns of light streaming down from
the star-dappled surface. Wherever she was, Liana felt completely at ease and wholly protected. Her sisters within the synchrony would soon join her, and call to their sequestered males, and they, too, would revel in this place.

  They would come. Any moment now.

  Liana thought about releasing her veils, but decided to wait for the other hunters. Luring worked better when there were many webs to link together, and of course the males would need to be fed first or they would whine and screech like infants.

  An odd taste filled her mouth. It was only the slightest trace of something strange on the current, but she couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it made the ridge that ran the length of her long dorsal fin stiffen. Her veils remained furled and cool, but their fluttering tips tingled as the sensory organs there, too, sampled the current. Something about this place had changed, and that was of deep concern to her. She had summoned the others; she had to find the source of the odd taste before they arrived or risk their lives as well as her own. She would send her bodyguards. . . .

  Liana turned and saw no one behind her or flanking her. Her guards were gone. What happened to my escort?

  Liana had never been alone, not since she had slipped from her mother’s birth canal and all the whelping throng had immediately seen the green monarch’s ring within her eyes. Born of the green, she carried the rarest, royal affliction, so highly prized among her kind, and she had been pampered because of it from that day forth.

  The grandmothers and aunts and cousins had done their best for Liana, and had kept close until she had enough strength to make her own kills. But feeding was not meant to be done alone, and neither was exploring, not even for one meant to rule.

  Liana had never been alone, could not be left alone. The waters closed in around her, squeezing on all sides. Had she fallen into an abyss? Been caught in some narrow cave? Her mother would be frantic.