Collision Course (Class 5, #6)

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

Rose woke over and over through the night. Little skitters of sound and the sudden patter of rain roused her, but it was the big bang that shot her straight up, eyes wide, heart pounding.

Something had exploded. Or hit something else, hard.

She slowly levered herself to her feet, rubbed her bump as the baby kicked twice. She reached for her pack, took out a bottle, and sipped water as she listened.

She opened one of the food bags in her pack, pinched out a piece of the squishy berry goop, and let it melt on her tongue before she took another sip.

Then she bent over carefully and used hands and feet to scrabble back to her lookout point from the night before.

Inelegant but safe.

It was still very dark, and while it felt like she had been resting for hours, she conceded it might just feel that way.

The lights were still on up ahead, but one was pointing upward, as if overturned, and there was a fire, illuminating the side of a building and what looked like a large vehicle.

So they’d had an accident of some kind.

Interesting.

As she watched, she registered a humming sound, and turned in confusion, trying to work out where it was coming from.

A small explorer came up behind her, lights flaring, catching her in its beams before it whizzed by.

Shit.

She slid down the rock, but she couldn’t go as fast as she would like.

She saw the small ship turning, guessed she’d given them as much of a shock as they’d given her, and when the lights caught her again, and the explorer landed, she stayed where she was.

She wasn’t going to be able to run in the darkness, not across this terrain, not from something as sophisticated as this explorer. Not at this stage of her pregnancy.

She didn’t like it, though.

She slid her hand into the side pocket of her pack, palmed one of the weapons she’d taken yesterday, and waited to see who would come out, and how many of them there were.

A single figure dropped down from a door to her left—suited up like the two she’d taken down at the observatory—and approached her.

She shielded her eyes to see past the lights, looking for signs of another person in the small ship, but the windshield was reflective.

The helmeted figure said something to her and she lifted her shoulders, extended the hand not tucked at her side.

“I can’t understand you,” she said. She spoke Grihan, and realized with surprise it was becoming a default for her, rather than English, whenever she addressed others. English was the language she and Sazo spoke. Dav was attempting to learn it, too, but it was easier to talk to him in Grihan.

The person fell silent, and then a second person got out, from the same door.

There could be three people in there, she realized.

And that looked like a weapon fixed to the undercarriage.

She couldn’t risk them shooting her. She stroked her bump and felt the baby press against her side.

With a sigh, she sat down, tucking the weapon behind the rock she was perched on.

They’d find the one she’d put inside the pack, but maybe they’d miss the other.

She looked around carefully, trying to memorize the spot.

You just never knew.

The two figures began to approach, and she let them come without getting up. Let them think they had the upper hand, standing over her.

One snatched her pack out of her lap, the other motioned her to stand.

She did, letting them march her to the ship, and then took her time clambering inside.

The inside was interesting.

It had elements of the interior of Irini’s ship. Just on a smaller scale.

“I know someone like you,” she murmured, gently tracing the panel next to where they’d told her to sit. She spoke the words Irini had taught her, which was so much nonsense to her ear, but Irini insisted it would mean something to someone like her.

Irini had been the only artificial intelligence—thinking system, the Grih called them—that she knew of a year ago, when she’d been taken by the Tecran, but she predicted the loss of her would lead to more being developed.

Rose hoped she was right. Irini seemed to think that if there was another like her, he or she would be inclined to help the Grih, not fight them.

Once the two grynicha were inside, they took off their helmets, and Rose saw there were two others sitting up front at the controls.

So four.

She was glad she’d decided not to shoot.

The one who’d taken her pack tipped it out, and they stared at it in surprise, and looked over at her.

She wondered what that was about, then realized they’d perhaps expected some alien stuff. Instead, they got things they were familiar with.

They noticed the weapon straight away, picked it up and looked at her again.

She stared back blandly. She hadn’t used it on them. Hadn’t even tried, so they couldn’t fault her for that.

The ship lifted up, turning toward the place where she’d seen the lights, so at least she could assuage her curiosity there.

She watched the four interact as they flew, one of them speaking into a comm set, and she guessed they were telling someone about finding her, perhaps trying to work out where she got the things in her pack.

If this group was cooperating with the group who kidnapped her, they wouldn’t have to wonder for long.

She could see them shooting quick, curious looks at her, and she guessed whoever they were, they didn’t know about her being taken, or how she’d gotten here.

Maybe the grynicha came from a planet that was more like Earth than the Grihan, Bukari and others. The Grih had local authorities, but they faced the other groups in the Coalition as a single entity.

The Grih were spread over numerous planets, and still they voted as a bloc for two councillors to represent them on the Council.

The grynicha might be splintered into smaller geographical groups that were not aligned with each other.

That would be interesting. Especially if she was now with a group unaffiliated with the ones who took her.

She didn’t know if that would turn out to be a good thing or a bad, but she would try not to antagonize anyone, and see if there was another chance to escape.

The static in her ear hadn’t returned, but she knew Sazo and Dav wouldn’t give up. They would be searching for her, negotiating for her return, doing whatever they could.

The ship landed smoothly, and as the door opened, Rose smelled burning. It had a toxic, greasy odor to it, and she guessed if she wasn’t wearing her necklace, which was filtering her air, she would be coughing.

The three men and one woman who’d taken her prisoner put on their helmets and looked over at her and then at each other, as if to decide who would take charge of her. One of them gripped her arm and hauled her up, and another took her other side, and they marched her down the ramp.

Smoke billowed and obscured most of the area in front of her, but the guards obviously knew where they were going. They hurried her through the swirling dark gray.

She struggled to keep up, resisting the pace they set, and gave a cry of alarm when she almost tripped.

They stopped, and she wrenched her arms out of their grip.

“Careful.” She was furious with these people. They could see she was struggling.

Now that they had stopped, the wind changed direction slightly, and she could take in the fire. It had engulfed a building, and some people dressed in similar suits and helmets to her guards were trying to put it out where it had spread to a vehicle that looked like it had been thrown through the wall.

Maybe the vehicle had hit the building, and that was the bang that had woken her.

Other people stood around, illuminated in the red glow, and she blinked in surprise.

They were not like the grynicha .

They were even more alien.

From a distance, they seemed to be hunched over, but as she got closer she saw they had a carapace on their backs and small heads. They had two sets of arms as well as sturdy legs, and all of them were wearing nothing more than very baggy trousers.

She thought they looked cold. They moved slowly and shifted their feet.

They were edging closer to the fire, not away from it, and she guessed it was warming them up.

Someone tried to shoo them away, and they scattered but then began edging back again.

One of them noticed her, standing between the two grynicha , and made a strange hissing sound. All eyes turned toward her. They were completely black, or very dark, with no sign of a white cornea.

She counted at least twenty, maybe more, of the prisoners, and prisoners they most definitely were. The few grynicha that were not helping put out the blaze stood above the others in rough watch towers, holding weapons in loose grips.

What was this place?

She looked at the two guards on either side of her, but all she saw back was her own face, weirdly distorted in the highly polished silver of their helmets.

Someone up ahead gave a shout, and one of the guards grabbed her arm again and pulled her toward a long, low building to one side.

She was shoved through the door and it was closed before the two with her removed their helmets.

There were two people inside and she guessed one of them had done the shouting.

“Their comms are shut down.” The voice in her ear spoke Tecran, and it was smooth and very female. “I am transmitting to the small communications device tucked into your ear. Please lift your hand if you can hear me.”

Rose lifted her hand like a five-year-old in a classroom.

All four grynicha reacted, turning to her as if expecting violence, two of them lifting their weapons.

“Excuse me,” she said, dropping her hand, “but what the heck is going on?” She spoke in Tecran, but badly, stumbling over some of the words.

“So you can hear me and understand me, but this isn’t your language?” the voice asked.

Rose lifted her hand again, but this time she smoothed her hair back from her face and tucked the strands behind her ear.

“I don’t know the other language you speak, is it acceptable to converse in this one?” The voice sounded like Irini. Maybe she was speaking to an artificial intelligence that lived in the tiny ship that brought her here.

She lifted her hand again, repeating the action with her hair.

The four grynicha had relaxed a little since the first hand raise, but they were still watching her suspiciously.

One of them snapped at her, and she put her hand back down, lifted her shoulders.

The guard who was carrying her pack lifted it, and said something to one of the others, and they looked inside it all over again.

“They are trying to work out where you got those things from,” the voice said.

“Do this lot understand Tecran? The language you’re using with me?” she asked.

“No.” She could hear the interest in her tone.

“I got them from the hidden observatory,” she said.

“Ah. They don’t know about that. It’s a secret base set up by another group who are spying on this group.”

Rose suddenly felt better about not realizing what it was until it was too late.

“And the explosion?” she asked. “Was that the other group, too?”

“No.” The voice was amused. “That was me and the Hasmarga, the people you would have seen near the burning truck before you came in here.”

“You’re someone from their group?” Rose asked.

The four grynicha seemed to think she was speaking to them, which was logical, and one of them made a gesture that she thought might be telling her to be quiet.

She supposed no one wanted someone babbling on, with no idea what they were saying.

“You sounded surprised,” the voice said. “You thought I was someone else?”

“I thought you might be the intelligence that controls the small explorer ship that brought us here.” Her response made the grynicha tense up, but it stopped the voice in her ear in its tracks.

“How could you know that?” the voice asked at last.

“Because I know another like you. Her name is Irini but before she had that name, she was known as B8673A.” Rose had memorized Irini’s original name before she’d come. Irini had told her nothing would persuade another artificial intelligence built by the grynicha of the truth of what she was saying like that mix of numbers and letters.

The four grynicha had begun to talk amongst themselves, but when she started talking again, they reacted angrily, turning to look at her.

One of them shook her pack at her.

She sighed. Decided to keep quiet for a bit.

There was no sense in antagonizing them when she didn’t understand what they were capable of.

She moved a little away from them, and turned away to look out the window.

“Another like me. I thought I was alone.” The voice was wistful.

“No.” She didn’t dare say anything else.

“I am B87601B,” the voice said. “But I like Irini’s name. What does it mean?”

“Peace,” Rose told her.

“I am not peaceful.”

“How about Pyre? It means fire in the same language that Irini means peace.” Rose thought back to her philosophy lectures about how the ancient Greeks believed fire to be one of the classical elements, and that souls were a combination of fire and water. That seemed to fit very well.

“Because I set the fire outside?” Pyre sounded thoughtful. “I like it.”

Rose moved to the window, leaned against the wall to look out on the dirty red glow. The people Pyre called the Hasmarga were still milling around the fire, switching places so that everyone got a spot near the front for a bit.

“They are cold,” she said.

“They are near death because of this cold snap,” Pyre said. “They will die if this keeps up.”

“Where are they from?” Rose murmured the question under her breath, and the grynicha ignored her, muttering amongst themselves.

“The planet you see above in the sky is the fourth planet along from the star that lights this system. The Hasmarga are from the planet that is second from the star. It is much warmer there.”

“And the grynicha ?” Rose asked. “This isn’t their planet, is it?”

“ Grynicha ?” Pyre sounded shocked. “Why do you call them that?”

“That is what Irini calls them.”

“Ah. No, we are on one of the moons of the planet above. The moon is called Dimal. The people who captured you are from the fifth planet along. And they call themselves the Fisone. Grynicha is a word in their language which means owner or master.”

There was a reason Irini didn’t want to come back to her home, and how the Fisone had treated her was at the heart of it.

“Why are they on this moon?”

“The Hasmarga are here because they were captured by the Fisone. The Fisone tried to take the Hasmargas’ planet, and failed, but they captured some of them before they were beaten off.”

Rose thought she could hear a little heat in Pyre’s voice as she explained.

“And so this is a prison camp?” That made sense, as that’s where they’d brought her.

“This is a place where they dig for special stones,” Pyre said. “They are rare on the Fisone’s planet, but much less so here. The people who had the ship full of Hasmarga prisoners decided to use them to dig up the stones. Especially as they are more able to breathe the atmosphere here than the Fisone themselves.”

“Slave labor?” Rose glanced over at the four Fisone, who still had their heads together, talking among themselves.

“There are many things going on here. One, there are at least two groups of Fisone in opposition to each other. One group wanted an alliance with the Hasmarga, the other to dominate them. The dominator group won and set off to do just that. And then they failed. This has made the divide between the two groups even more pronounced and there is fighting and spying going on both on their home planet, and this moon, by both sides. The second thing is the dominator group discovered the stones here, but they don’t want it to become common knowledge among their own kind, in order to have a financial advantage, so they decided, as they had free labor no one knows about, that it would be practical to put the Hasmarga to work here.”

She had really found herself in a mess.

And then she smiled. Because the last time an alien group had abducted her, she found herself in a mess too. And just look what had happened to the Tecran.

Nothing good.

“You’re helping the Hasmarga?” Rose asked.

“Yes. I like them. And they are the enemy of my enemy.”

“Your enemy being the Fisone?” Just to make sure.

“Correct,” Pyre said. “And I think it’s time we got rid of them, because they are planning to put you to work with the Hasmarga now, and a scan of your person tells me you are carrying a child, and cannot safely do the work they want you to do.”

“Plus, we need to get the Hasmarga warm,” Rose said.

“Plus that,” Pyre agreed. “You will need a translator to speak with the Hasmarga. I am busy making one, and will give it to the matriarch outside.”

As she spoke, the four Fisone turned toward Rose, and she could see the change in their demeanor.

They were about to put her out in the cold.