Chapter 10
The Death Cloud
The following endweek, it took some doing for Keelic and Thotti to persuade his parents to let them go out again. The adults were worried about the attack they believed was coming and were adamant about staying close to the family shuttle. Keelic told Thotti to convince them, even though it made him sick with guilt. He had to get those guns.
Later, as he pulled himself up out of the center of the pierce-beam crater, Anny contacted him. "Keelic, I am scanning you now. Your mother requested it. I thought you would like to know."
He decided it didn’t matter for this mission and said, "That’s okay, Anny."
He pulled the weapons up from the pierce-beam hole where they were tied to the twine. He slung each gun strap over a shoulder.
Anny said, "Those are real weapons. Put them down now. They are very dangerous. I am informing your parents. Put them..." There was a pause. "Hide, Keelic. Hide in the caves now. Go! Don’t—"
Her voice was cut off. A wave of dread rose within him. His head snapped upward.
The entire dome of the sky flickered. Streaks of piercing brilliance hailed in sheets, but all stopped at the flickering dome of the sky. The catcher-net field! Ermol Station, on the south horizon, was a round shimmer of shield darkening under the onslaught. He watched no more, but set off running for home. They went racing down the bluff. Thotti ran ahead and waited impatiently at each switchback of the narrow ramp.
In the forest Keelic pushed himself until he could hardly breathe.
The sky flashed and then went a deeper blue. Beams lanced down through the atmosphere without hindrance, answered by others from the planet, and streaks of piercing white began to hail groundward. A minute later the ground shuddered and Keelic tottered as the Patamic stalks swayed.
He fell and struggled to get back up. Thotti scampered up a tree.
"What are you doing?" wailed Keelic.
Crimson worried yellow take a look at home.
A red light stabbed down right where he knew his house was. Thotti shared its vision from where it was perched on the top of the floating seed bulb, and Keelic saw the east tower of the house vanish. The east tower had held the house gun.
"Mom! Dad!" cried Keelic. The vision left him, and he ran to the tree his friend had gone up and started climbing. The ground groaned and shuddered as more torpedo-strike shock waves passed. He clung to the branches each time. In the back of his mind, he figured out the attackers were using dense-matter torpedoes. When he reached the top of the main trunk, he found that he still couldn’t see anything because of the thousands of Patamic seed stalks.
He unslung the rifle from his shoulder and sat down with his back to the fibrous seed stalk, then raised his knees to brace the weapon. Peering through the rifle's target finder, he keyed it to penetrative, heat, metallic, then followed the target lines and gasped as he recognized the sleek lines of a proto-fighter, top-class atmospheric gunship of the Alliance Defense League. Was the ADL fighting back? The ship flew out of view. What could they do with a gunship against an orbital attack?
Something flew through the scan and he sought it, zooming back for a wider field of view. A small dropship was landing in his yard. Red dots representing life forms spilled out of it and entered his house. Moments later they were moving back down toward the dropship. Furiously, he menu’d to infrared, movement, high-resolution. He could tell people were walking down to the hover pad and that some were searching his house, but nothing else.
He hit the target selector and one of the people highlighted, and he recognized his mother’s form, just like the silhouette she used to make on the wall next to his bed on Pesfor 3 when she tucked him in. Only now her arms were behind her back.
"Mother," he whispered. He touched the target selector again and the view highlighted an alien form he did not know. He touched the select a few more times and saw six other figures. Two were carrying another. His mother turned and began struggling. One near her raised an arm and struck her, making her fall to the ground.
"Mom!" screamed Keelic, and lost the image. He tried to find the targeting lines again, but he was trying to do it too fast. Finally he got it and watched the dropship rise from the ground.
The thunderous roar of reaction engines passed overhead, and he looked up to see a huge Paboosht transport soaring toward the tiny, rising dropship. Doors on the transport’s underbelly were open wide.
Helplessness made Keelic’s grip on the rifle unsteady.
He scanned for the proto-fighter. Perhaps they would help. He found it, but it was just hovering high, not doing anything, and also not getting shot at. Keelic zoomed out to watch both in the scanner, and in a wave of sick realization knew that they were all working together. The dropship was almost to the transport.
"No!"
He clenched his teeth and sighted on the transport. His thumb touched the target selector, he aimed, and pressed the fire button.
The rifle zzz’d and the world went white.
Not daring to move or breathe, he froze.
From Thotti he got an image of the aft of the transport exploding and the entire thing sliding off to the side and downward, starting to tumble groundward, vomiting smoke. The sound of the explosion boomed over the forest.
His own sight began to return and he picked up the rifle.
In Thotti’s vision, the transport struck the earth, gouging a crater in the forest. The Paboosht dropship was spiraling toward the forest, and the proto-fighter was soaring toward him, fast. Keelic selected it, and fired.
Blind again, he sat very still and waited for his sight to return, but it did not. His breath came in short jerky stabs, almost crying, but too afraid. Then he felt Thotti’s touch, soothing warm, though it too was frightened in crimson.
Since Keelic was unable to see, his friend showed him its memory of the proto-fighter disintegrating from his rifle shot. The dropship with his parents was now out of sight, and smoke from the crashed transport billowed blackly.
A white streak stabbed down from the sky and hit the house, annihilating the hill and surrounding forest in a burst of plasma rage.
Through Thotti, Keelic watched the shock wave approach, bending seed stalks over, ripping them out, exploding many. The alien gripped the top of the bulb in crimson-white terror. With a strangled cry, Keelic dropped the rifle and spun about, wrapping his arms partway around the base of the stalk.
The shock wave smacked him into the soft fibers with a roar greater than any thunder. Debris slugged his back. He felt the stalk sway, and with a sickening rip it came loose, lurching upward. Clinging with fear-locked fingers, he felt whistling wind. His dangling legs struck something hard, then swung free.
His eyes were open, but now only blackness registered. Through his fear he sought Thotti, and felt a weak answer, bleeding with red-violet pain.
He felt nothing under his legs and the wind in his ears.
"Help me!" he screamed, gripping the stalk. After a while, the presence of his friend grew close, and Keelic looked up blindly. Through Thotti’s eyes, he saw it trying to get his pack open. Pain grew in his arms. The weight of his pack pulling on his shoulders seemed terrible.
Keelic shouted at the top of his lungs, "Help me up!"
The tugging continued, and the pack opened. In Thotti’s peripheral view, Keelic could see the forest below, dropping away. Vertigo gripped him, and he lost the sight.
Fear and despair locked his grip to the stalk. He couldn’t think. There was only pain and terror.
He felt something tug on his belt, then there was a jerk and the pressure was released from his arms. His ears popped. The alien’s vision returned and Keelic saw that Thotti had attached a cling-to to the stalk and the end of the twine to the feeder on his belt. He was dangling at the base of the seed stalk, legs pointing toward a now distant forest, the two of them riding an ascending seed stalk in a vast cloud of stalks, all ripped free by the shock wave.
Keelic shouted to Thotti t
o look toward their home. Thotti's view swung to a crater with glowing molten sides, the forest razed in a wide smoking ring around it. A column of white steam marked where the river was boiling away at the edge of the crater.
"Anny," choked Keelic.
Another proto-fighter flashed through their line of vision. Where were his parents? What was he going to do now? They had to get away before that fighter scanned them. He thought furiously as the seed stalk ascended. The air rushing past his face was colder now.
To Thotti he said, We can hide inside the hollow seed bulb, but I’ve gotta get up there.
He looked up, and his friend obliged by turning one eye upward so Keelic could see. The other watched the fighter strafing the forest below with searing white beams. Hundreds of trees flashed to steam and the earth was sliced open, leaving deep smoking gashes.
At Keelic’s direction, Thotti attached a cling-to to the bottom of the bulb. Keelic still had not let go, but watching through his friend’s eyes made everything a little less scary. Thotti was in pain, but Keelic could only feel it if he concentrated, so he tried to help his friend ignore it by ignoring it himself. The alien returned and threaded a length of twine from Keelic’s belt through the cling-to that held him, and then traversed the stalk all the way to the upper cling-to.
Once the line was secured, Keelic gritted his teeth and told Thotti to release the lower cling-to. The alien came back down and released his hold while Keelic threw his mind into his hands and clung for his life.
He felt Thotti touch the belt feeder, and the subsequent lift was the most welcome sensation Keelic had ever felt. Still he didn’t let go. He couldn’t.
Keelic ground his teeth, straining to let go. Thotti climbed over and helped him pry his fingers open. It hurt, but he tried to ignore it because he knew his friend was hurting more.
He tried to climb the stalk as the feeder pulled him up, but his hands didn’t work very well. He rose smoothly along the stalk, with a couple heart-wrenching moments when he felt and saw himself blown out from the stalk by a buffeting wind. He could see things as colored blurs by the time he reached the top.
Remembering his sciences, that helium was lighter than regular atmosphere gases, he hoped that if he came in through the bottom of the bulb, he would be able to get in without losing the helium. Drawing his knife, he began to cut.
Before he got more than a decimeter into the bulb’s spongy skin, a green sticky foam began pouring out, so much that it started to fill the hole. After it was exposed to the air, it developed a rubbery surface that rapidly turned harder.
Keelic found he was fighting a losing battle, but gave up only after becoming exhausted, his arms covered with the gooey sap.
A shuttle loomed, and Keelic cried out. He fumbled for the pulse pistol, drew it from the belt over his chest, and fired. The shot went way off. The shuttle moved so close that Keelic could see faces inside mouthing wildly. A hatch in the roof opened and a man’s head and shoulders emerged with a weapon. Keelic reoriented and fired again.