“Yes, all right! I’ve played Joogie Launch too!”
I went through the awkward—but surprisingly intuitive—process of loading another bolt, and pulled the trigger again. The second shot clipped the side of the target, and after a bit of umming and ahhing among the components, the mechanism decided that this would suffice. A counterweight dropped and the wedge was pulled out, sending a parade of boulders trundling directly into the path of the Malmind horde.
They were slowing down. They must have seen what I was trying to do after the first miss and realized—with the eerie, instantaneous calculation of a machine mind—that they weren’t going to be able to get ahead of the rockfall in time. By the time the rocks swept across, blocking our view of the army, they had stopped completely.
“Yes!” cried Jemima, sitting beside me and pumping a fist. “We beat them!”
The carriage gave a sudden lurch of speed to narrowly avoid an errant boulder, and I had to grab her shoulder to stop her from falling out.
“Not beaten,” said the driver gruffly, whipping the reins again. “Just escaped alive.”
I turned in my seat to look at the strange girl again. Despite her youth, she controlled the chariot with practiced skill. And while the two suns of Cantrabargid had tanned her almost to a Henderson level of dull orange, her flesh didn’t look overly leathery or muscular. My curious gaze scanned up and down her body, then a little further down. Then I noticed Warden watching me, and I hastily took it all the way down to the wooden floor. “This is a . . . very well-made chariot you have here,” I offered.
“Yeah,” said the driver over her shoulder, slightly baffled.
The mass exodus of sloth things for which we were apparently serving as rear guard made its way through the valley, passing the jungle we had woken up in on the right, until the walls of the valley began to sink into the ground and the terrain shifted into flat, rocky plains.
The Malmind didn’t seem to be following, so the column of fleeing sloths became more of a miserable march, with the chariot slowing down enough to go a little easier on the rough terrain. It meant we could finally have something resembling a proper conversation, which we were well overdue for.
“All right,” I said, mentally stacking up my list of questions. “What is this all about? That was the Malmind, wasn’t it?”
“The metal men drove us out,” said the girl. “Took our village. Some were caught. They were made like them.”
“Yep, sounds like the Malmind, all right,” I said.
Warden took over for the next obvious question. “And who are you?”
“Alice,” said the native girl. “I live with the Ruggels. I was left on this planet when I was twelve.”
The Ruggels presumably being the sloth-like creatures all around us. “When you were twelve?” I asked. “So that would’ve been, what, nine, ten years ago?”
“Why do you ask?” inquired Warden, one eye narrowed.
“So what happened to the Zuvirons?”
By this stage, the chariot had slowed down to a walking pace, so Alice was able to look away from the road for long enough to give me a protracted sidelong stare. “The what?”
“You could hardly have missed them,” I said, slightly aghast. “Dominant species? Eight feet tall? Four arms? Always going on about honor and swords?”
“Never seen anything like that,” said Alice. “Only ever Ruggels.”
Jemima, who had been kneeling upright on the side of the chariot, taking in the sight of the seemingly infinite orange plain stretching to the horizon, chipped in. “Maybe this isn’t actually the planet you thought it was?”
That would have been an appealing thought and one I would very much like to believed, as it would have meant my time spent fighting the Malmind alongside the Zuvirons hadn’t been a complete waste, but it just didn’t sit right as the two familiar suns beamed down. “It looks exactly like it, though.”
“Perhaps the Malmind have a type of planet that they prefer?” suggested Warden.
I slackened my jaw at her in contempt. “Warden. They’re an intergalactic machine intelligence that turns all sentient life into more of themselves. They are not fussy. They do not hold out for a planet with nicer beaches.” I looked up into the sky again. “I dunno, though. Maybe it is just a massive coincidence. Nothing new under the suns, is there.”
“I can’t believe there was ever a war fought here,” said Jemima in a breathy voice, drinking it all in. “It’s so peaceful.”
“Yeah, that’s how you can tell that there was a war fought here, Jemima,” I said.
The procession slowed. The Ruggels at the head of the march must have established a campsite, and by the time we arrived, most of them had staked a claim on a few square feet of space, throwing down as bedding whatever items they had been able to grab in their escape. Six or seven were working to gather brush for a fire, while another handful were gathering large stones to form a circle for it to go in. There was little conversation beyond the occasional squeak. They seemed to have a remarkably good instinctive grasp of their assigned tasks and sleeping areas. I suspected that scent marking might have been involved, and resolved to be cautious about sitting down.
As we dismounted from the chariot, Alice had a relieved reunion with what I presumed to be her adoptive family. Four of the Ruggels, three full sized with gray streaks in their fur, one little more than a pup, hurled themselves at her and snuffled around her limbs fondly.
We could hardly escape notice at that point, and the Ruggels approached us with sniffing, brown-eyed curiosity, keeping a wary distance of a couple of feet. Jemima outstretched a hand to pet one of the smaller ones, but it shied away and hid behind what may have been its parent.
“How were you abandoned here?” I asked Alice, when she had shaken off the affectionate greeting. The Ruggels remained close enough that they could pass for a large, furry skirt.
“My parents were studying the Ruggels,” she said, idly stroking a proffered head. “They left me with them when they went off into the jungle. Didn’t come back.”
“Is that so,” said Warden. I looked at her questioningly, and she raised an eyebrow in reply.
“You can stay here tonight,” said Alice, pointing to a vacant area on the outskirts of the camp where, by some prearranged signal, some bedrolls had been set up. “Tomorrow, we take our village back.”
It hadn’t sounded like a rousing clarion call to action, but the fire roared into life with remarkably good timing, and an adorable squeak of defiance sounded throughout the campsite.
Chapter 19
It surprised me that, having spent the afternoon fleeing for their lives, the Ruggels were intent on having a bonfire party the same night. But from what Alice was saying, it seemed like a cultural thing.
“Most important time to celebrate,” she said, as food was served and a ring of Ruggels joined hands around the fire. “Bad days are there to remind us of the good ones.”
The food consisted mainly of haunches of meat, presumably from the domestic cow things I’d seen, with some wild fruit and root vegetables, but I found it surprisingly palatable. We ate reclined around a large groundsheet, with the food laid out in unhygienic piles in the middle. Warden excused herself fairly swiftly after consuming the bare minimum required for continued survival, while Jemima went to sit by the fire, swaying gently as she watched the younger Ruggels dance. I found myself alone with Alice, which presented an opportunity to ask something that had been nagging me.
“You said your parents brought you down here, then disappeared on some kind of expedition,” I said, putting down my current haunch.
“Yeff,” she replied, her mouth full.
“How did you get down here? On a ship?”
She nodded.
“Is the ship still around?” That was the first of my two big questions.
“Hasn’t been used since then,” said Alice, suddenly wary, having perhaps anticipated what the second of my two big questions was going t
o be.
And here it came. “Can we borrow it?”
She smiled deviously, in the way a child would when they are about to run to the teacher with a cry of telling! “You mean, can you take it.”
I gave an embarrassed and hopefully friendly sounding laugh. “If you don’t know how to fly it, then it’s not much use to you, is it. I could fly it. I’m a pilot. And I have a rather pressing need to get back to where I was before.”
“If you don’t know where it is, then it’s not much use to you, either, is it,” she said, imitating my voice.
“It’s back in the Ruggel village,” I deduced. “Where the Malmind are.”
She cocked her head coyly. “Help us chase them out. Then you can get what you want.”
I couldn’t deny that I was thrumming with excitement at the thought. Helping primitive people fight off the Malmind was something so perfectly attuned to my narrow skill set that only the word serendipitous sufficed. But through that giddy excitement, I sensed a note of resentment in Alice’s last few words, and some bitterness in the way she was tearing meat from the bone in front of her with her teeth.
“I could fly you off here as well, you know,” I offered.
Baffled, she made a show of looking at the many reveling Ruggels within our field of view. “And go where?”
I shrugged. “Fair enough.”
But she didn’t seem to want to let it drop. She had put her food down now and was staring at me, reclining on her side with her arm as a pillow. “So where are you going back to?”
I was about to say “Ritsuko City,” in the prideful way we citizens of the first and biggest off-Earth colony tend to use, but then I remembered the whole marked-for-death-by-entire-peer-group thing. “There’s a space station full of people like me,” I said, looking up into the night sky as if I’d be able to see it. “If we don’t get back there, a lot of trouble might be coming their way.”
“Are they your friends?”
I looked sadly at the fraying bandage on my hand. The dark red stain in the middle was like a single eye, staring back like the reproachful gaze of a kicked puppy. “I have to assume so.”
“Why?”
I was too sleepy and full of greasy food to wrestle with philosophy. I rose to my feet, brushing the dust and sand from my jeans. “Can I get back to you on that one? We can talk about taking the village back first thing in the morning.”
She shrugged and returned to the food pile as I gingerly stepped around the numerous sleeping bodies of the older and better-fed Ruggels who weren’t joining in the festivities, making my way to our assigned sleeping area. Warden was there, sitting on a stone with crossed legs, making notes on her tablet.
“Hey,” I said, staking a claim on a bedroll by sitting on it. “I think I know how to get us off this planet.”
An eyebrow raised, and Warden’s skittering finger halted abruptly on the surface of her touchscreen. “Oh?”
Now holding new cards that she didn’t know about, I felt my mood improve further. “Unless you’re more interested in your tablet, of course.”
“McKeown . . .” she began, warningly.
“Alice has a ship. She can’t fly it, and it’s in the Ruggel village under Malmind control, but we can have it if we help them retake it.” I blinked once. “And you can stop calling me McKeown now, you know.”
“I don’t know what your real name is.”
“You must know, because you changed it on the ID network.”
“I think you know perfectly well why that wouldn’t clarify the matter.” She sighed through her teeth. “Do you trust them?”
“I trust them more than the Malmind, and we have to trust someone. Could you just drop the plying aloof thing? I am trying to get us all off this planet. You could at least get onboard. I’m not asking for gratitude, because I appreciate that that would be like asking a Slignn for tap-dancing lessons.”
“Forgive me if gratitude is not the first thing on my mind,” said Warden, meeting my gaze sternly, “when, after finally finding a place that can shelter me from Henderson and where I can make a real difference, I am immediately exiled to an alien planet because someone couldn’t keep their intoxicated mouth shut.”
I unfolded two fingers, firstly as an obscene gesture, and secondly to count them off. “Okay. One. You were the one who brought up McKeown’s money at dinner. And two. I just told you I have a way to fix this. What is your problem?”
She broke off her gaze. I could almost have said that Warden looked guilty. It was a very, very brief glimpse, and was swiftly replaced with a more familiar neutral look with the usual mix of contempt and grudging tolerance, but I was sure I’d seen it. “McKeown, something is not right about this whole situation.”
I nodded, exaggerating a stupid grin. “Yeah! There is something pretty not right about the Malmind occupying the Ruggel village. That’s why I’m proposing we do something about it.”
“I mean, the entire situation. The Malmind, the Ruggels, Alice, the whole planet. There’s something wrong.”
I frowned. “Well?”
Her mouth did a few laps around the lower half of her face as she picked through the best words to use. “It’s too . . .” Her hands came up, jiggled around, then went down again. “Cute.”
I treated her to a long pause, maintaining eye contact throughout, then echoed, “Cute.”
“Too . . . obvious,” she tried. “Too clear cut, perhaps. I get a sense that one or all parties are trying too hard.”
I sighed and leaned back. “That’s your reasoning, is it? Sorry, Ruggels, we can’t avenge your lost and wounded and help you retake your ancestral home, nor accept your gift of a ship that will let us get off this planet, for I’m afraid the psycho-div over here thinks you’re too cute and trying too hard.”
“I did not say I was not in favor of such a deal,” she said, tightening her mouth and spitting each word. “I am trying to make you understand that there may be more to this situation than first meets the eye. A number of things have not been adding up.”
“Like what?”
She indicated straight downwards “This camp has been put together from what little could be seized at a moment’s notice from the Ruggel village, yes?”
“Yeah?”
“So why, among the items grabbed in those first moments of panic and flight, were there three human-sized bedrolls?”
I looked down and inspected the rough cloth beneath me. It was definitely too big for a Ruggel. And looking around, I saw that all the sleeping Ruggels were using properly proportioned bedrolls. “Maybe they’re not actually bedrolls,” I said. “Maybe they had some other purpose. Like, carrying stuff on one of those domesticated animals they have. It’s just a big, thick sack, right? And anyway, Alice said her parents were here, too, at some point. Three humans, three bedrolls.”
“It doesn’t explain why they brought all three, if only one human currently resides here,” said Warden. “There’s more. What about those mechanisms you used to cause the rockfall when the Malmind were chasing us?”
“What about them? They’re a fairly standard defensive measure for primitive cultures. The Ruggels must have been expecting an attack at some point.”
“But I can’t think of any reason why the Ruggels would also paint obvious targets onto them,” said Warden. “I mean, they knew where they were and that they had to be shot. Painting targets on them just draws attention to them. The Malmind could easily have spotted them, perhaps even used them against the Ruggels.”
“What exactly do you think that indicates, Warden? That the Ruggels were in on their own invasion? They were probably just being thick. They can’t be the brightest stars in the cosmos. If they were, they’d have invented the internal-combustion engine by now.”
The party seemed to be dying down, along with the fire. Most of the Ruggels had drifted off to their sleeping area. Warden and I watched the silhouette of Alice against the dying embers, dutifully helping the more civic-minded cr
eatures tidy up the remains of the banquet.
“There’s something strange about that girl, too,” said Warden.
“Ugh.” I mimed being knocked backward by an invisible wave of stupid and lay back on my bedroll, hands behind my head. “Will you just leave me out of your plying paranoid trac?”
She leaned over me, not taking the hint. “What kind of parents leave their child with the primitive species they are trying to study? For that matter, what kind of parents bring their child to an uncivilized planet in the first place?”
I rolled over and closed my eyes determinedly. “And who would leave their child under the supervision of an impostor and a psycho-div? Some people just haven’t got a Parents of the Year Award on their priority list. Is what I would be saying if I hadn’t gone to sleep. Snore snore.”
“But didn’t they tell anyone where they were going?” pressed Warden. “Hasn’t anyone noticed that they’re missing?”
I gave up and rolled back over, propping myself up on an elbow. “You know what I think this is all about? I think you’re afraid of niceness.”
That shut her up. “I . . . what?”
“Oh, I understand. Working with Henderson, you probably get used to niceness being the prelude to . . . cassowary disembowelment. So when you see a perfectly straightforward situation, the nice, blameless, simple people being ousted by the evil Malmind—and that’s pretty damn provably and unambiguously evil, take it from me—your first instinct is suspicion. You tell yourself there’s got be some hidden cassowary talon coming out of nowhere.”
“Do not think you understand me, McKeown.”
I grinned at her discomfort. “But it’s not just that, is it. You’re afraid of people being nice and uncomplicated because that means you’d have to be nice to them. And you couldn’t abide that, could you. You’d think it would show weakness. You’re afraid someone might get too close and see where the armor ends and the weakness begins.”
“Spare me your boneheaded pop psychology,” snapped Warden, tightening her folded arms even further.
I settled back down to sleep, my point well made. “You only say that ’cos you know I’m right.”