Chapter 10 – Copper Sun
It had been a bad day. Even the most conditioned of athletes got them sometimes: a day where balance was just a little off, cues missed that should have been obvious, hair-trigger reactions a millisecond too slow.
He slammed Siaran to the mat for what felt like the twentieth time, or the fiftieth. Jackal, a snarl of disgust spreading his upper mandibles so that they almost obscured his deep-set eyes. She got up; too slowly, lacking her normal bounce. Jackal knocked her back down again, and this time wrapped his hand around her throat, nails pricking into the claw scars on the back of her neck, and squeezed. "Get off," she managed to say, but he tightened his grasp.
"Siarrran."
Feeling the blood pounding hot and fast in her temples, the restriction of her airflow, she bucked beneath him, bringing a knee up to drive deep into the soft flesh of his lower belly. He hissed but did not let go, and lying pinned, choking, unable to move, Siaran saw his other fist come down to smash her face.
She felt the wet splash of blood, shocking in its warmth; felt cartilage and bone crunch in her nose. Too shocked to feel any pain yet, she could only watch as Jackal raised his fist and hit her again. Fury, outrage, terror, helplessness. Her face laid open, bleeding and broken. He hit her again.
"Siarrran."
Jagged shards of teeth felt smooth when she darted her tongue over them. Her chest felt like it was going to explode if she didn't get air. She opened her mouth, opened her eyes, saw the darkness, drew a huge shuddering breath.
Heavy locks of woven hair fell around her, dropping into her face, across her mouth. Siaran struggled to quiet her breathing, trying not so sob audibly. At first, the nightmare remained so vivid in her mind that she couldn't remember why being quiet was imperative. Gradually, she recovered enough to note the presence of the hunter stooping over the bed, although she couldn't see him. The room was dark; the door closed. But she could feel the displacement of hands on the bed, and the tentacular hair still dragged across her face.
She was afraid to move for a few terrible seconds. She'd been dreaming—something horrible, something about Jackal, a nightmare continuation of the off day she'd had. Had she talked in her sleep and been overheard? She must have been deep in it—she'd never failed to wake up before on the rare occasion that Rune had entered her room before she was up.
The thought that her uninvited guest might be Jackal, not Rune, acted like a catapult on her body. Siaran was out of bed and crouched on the far side, away from the predator, in less than a second. "What are you doing?" she asked, hating the shrillness in her tone that betrayed her fright. Damn the coincidence of nightmare and night-stalking hunter, anyway. She didn't go sneaking into their quarters in the dark.
The room's subdued lighting, cued as always to her voice, came up. Siaran stood up slowly, every muscle tense, and looked across the bed.
There was nobody there.
Frowning, she stepped around the high bed, half prepared to kick the intruder square in the big, ugly head as he crouched out of sight behind the bed. The floor was empty. The whole room was empty. And the door was still closed.
Siaran ran a hand over her face, still feeling her skin twitch from the tickling strands of hair. The nightmare had been vivid, horrifying, but...
"I wasn't dreaming," she said out loud to nobody. But maybe she had been. Maybe the long weeks, the intense training, the stress of dealing with Jackal every day, had taken their toll on her mind, and she was finally beginning to crack.
"No," she said stubbornly.
"Yesss."
She found herself across the room again, pressing her back into the solid reassurance of a corner. Her body was erect, her eyes as wide as a frightened rabbit's. Her heart slammed against her ribcage but she was alert, already feeling the adrenaline flow to her muscles, listening and watching as hard as she could.
"Siarrran."
There. Right beside the bed, right where the hunter had stood in the dark. The voice was a growling, rattling whisper, but very clear. She understood yes and she understood Siaran and even though those words were the first recognizable ones she'd heard spoken since she boarded the ship, she didn't understand their purpose or their origin and so they brought no joy. She was either having a powerful hallucination, or someone was messing with her.
"Come over here and say that," she called softly.
The someone did. She saw the movement as a ripple in the air, like a tall man-shaped shimmer of mirage or clear water running fast over gravel in the sunlight. It came toward her and she didn't know whether to be afraid or incredulous. Still out of reach, it stopped, and with stillness blended imperceptibly with the room again. Siaran cast around wildly, thrown off balance; she thought she knew where the thing had stopped, but her eyes were stubbornly telling her brain there was nothing there, so she began to doubt at once.
A sibilant, whispering chuckle, then blue-white arcs of lightning ran up and over the massive form of a hunter as he deactivated his shift suit. Rune stood before her, wearing the body-mesh remembered from their meeting in the Gobi, overlain with thick leather pads on shoulder, forearm, chest, and thigh. He held a bundle in one hand, and the bastard was laughing at her.
"Oh, very funny." Siaran glared at him. She wanted to hit him.
"Verrry funny," Rune confirmed. He nodded once, head inclined to his chest.
She seethed. "And you speak English? I've been babbling to myself to keep from going crazy, and all that time you could have talked to me anytime you wanted? That's just...that's..." spluttering, she waved both arms around in frustrated defeat. "You jerk."
Rune's mandibles twitched slightly, and from the jaws behind them came again that gargling, growling whisper, enunciating slowly and carefully. "You'd make a good chesss playerrr."
"What?" she stared. "That doesn't make—"
She stopped midsentence and just looked at him, trying to interpret his body language. He was relaxed, eyes glinting with something that might have been mischief.
"You still don't understand what I'm saying, do you?"
"You jerrrk."
On the other hand, the glint might have been malicious amusement. It was hard to tell.
"Good boy," Siaran muttered darkly, glowering at him. "You learn fast. Guess I should teach you all the swear words, huh, then you can really be top of your class."
"Shhit."
She stared. Rune cocked his head at her and gave a suspiciously smug-sounding trill of laughter.
Disconcerted by this new turn of events, and grouchy at being psychologically bested by the hunter twice over, Siaran changed the subject. "What's with the invisibility?" she asked, unable to help sounding impressed despite her mood. She remembered the ship having some sort of cloaking shield, but until now had not realized the hunters had adapted the same technology to their personal gear. She pointed at Rune, then swept both hands across her eyes as if erasing him from her sight. Looked left, looked right. "Invisibility. Scared me to death, thank you very much. Oh, and while we're on the subject, don't ever do it again." She glared, indignant all over again, remembering the terror of her dream and the confusion of waking to find him bending over her.
Rune rumbled at her, a low clicking growl with shades of a purr. Siaran tried to glare harder, refusing to be placated so easily.
Losing interest in the game, Rune thrust the bundle he was carrying at her. She caught it automatically, felt material that was at once slick and knobbly, and let it slide through her fingers, shaking out the folds. It was a mesh suit like the one he wore, and she saw to her surprise that the thick ropy strands were bound by some very fine, very thin transparent material. She tugged experimentally. Thin as gossamer, strong as silk.
"For me?" she eyed him in surprise.
Rune inclined his head to his chest.
"Not sure it's gonna fit," Siaran said dubiously, still chary of showing too much goodwill after his little prank. She consoled herself with the thought that at least she'd seen the distortion when he moved. The price of invisibility was stillness. She stored that away to think about later.
He made a softly dismissive click. "My ancessstorrrs went naked into batttle," he informed her, then turned his back on her, strode to the door, and palmed it open. From the doorway, he looked back and barked an imperative. A second later, Siaran was glaring only at the innocent door.
Still angry over the fright he'd given her, Siaran stomped into the bathroom and shook out the mesh suit. Cautiously, she lifted it to her nose: no trace of odor. There was no real reason to be suspicious of the thing, she reasoned; yet she hesitated to put it on. The events of the past few minutes—her nightmare, Rune's appearance in her room in no less than an invisibility suit, the revelation of his ability to mimic her own language—they made no sense in any context that she'd come to grasp in her time on the ship. She usually slept heavily, without remembering her dreams. Rune hadn't entered her quarters since her first day on board. And none of the hunters had shown the slightest inkling of understanding her language any more than she understood theirs.
Unanswerable questions, for now. Siaran set curiosity aside and rubbed the fabric between her fingers again, intrigued by the odd slippery texture of the underlying weave.
Finally, she stepped into the thing, muttering every expletive she knew under her breath as she did. Over the tank suit it went, and as she pulled it on, the strange fabric sealed to her skin like a weightless, jellied wetsuit. By the time she stuck her arms into the sleeves and settled the collar into place, her flesh was crawling at the strange sensation. The suit felt cool and slightly damp, and it didn't slide an inch as she twisted from side to side and bent to touch her toes. It was like being sealed inside a different skin. She could still feel the air currents against her flesh as she moved, but they were muted somehow, filtered. It also fit as if it had been tailored for her, although it had looked much bigger when she'd first held it up.
"Bizarre," Siaran whispered, and shook her head.
Both her groupmates were both out in the hall when she emerged. Siaran scowled, biting back a snappy comment at Rune in favor of giving a wide berth to her antagonist. Jackal reached out anyway to cuff her in the side of the head; she dodged, and Jackal came after her with a snarl of displeasure.
Rune interposed his body between them with a warning bark. His green eyes locked on Jackal's orange-yellow ones until the latter slid his gaze away and lowered his head. Both predators, now ignoring Siaran completely, moved off in the direction of the control room. She followed in silence, contemplating this brusque new Rune who spoke in her words and had, for the first time, put a stop to Jackal's amusing little attempts to brain her. They walked fast, in a hurry; she had to jog to keep up.
The control room was a hive of activity. The ship's lights were all on, although Siaran's internal clock told her that the sleep cycle was only about half over. The entire crew was gathered there. Some of them chattered a greeting as Siaran's group entered. The viewscreen, dark for so many weeks, again showed a field of stars. Strange stars, in patterns Siaran didn't recognize; and far fewer of them than she had seen when they'd first left Earth.
As before, three hunters manned each of the twin computers, slowing the ship down as it emerged from Planck space, coding, checking, and re-checking calculations that were beyond Siaran's comprehension. She watched with the rest as the wide field of view swung slowly and then settled with a single dim star at the exact center. A glance at the holograms confirmed that their trajectory's blue-white arrow ended at that star; or rather, at its third planet, which Siaran could see when one of the hunters manipulated the view to zoom closer.
The star itself was unimpressive; she doubted it could be seen from Earth if it was this faint so close to its own planet system. It burned in a dull tarnished sort of way, growing from a dim speck to a copper smudge to a discernible disc, closer but not much brighter.
The ship slowed even further as it entered the gravity field of the orangey-brown star, its engines switching completely to normal drive. While they had been able to emerge from Planck space much closer to this sun than to Earth's due to its reduced size, it would still be some time before they reached orbit around the destination planet. Hours, maybe a day. After that, maybe the purpose of all the intensive training would become clear.
The initial show over, the hunters turned from the screen, reforming into their trios by what was now force of long habit. Siaran stuck close to Rune and Jackal, waiting to see where they'd be off to next. The two were deep in conversation, and neither one appeared happy with what the other was saying. Rune finally gave her a doubtful look, snap-growled something at Jackal, and stepped back, finishing the exchange. Jackal chittered softly and tossed his head in triumph. That worried her. Any argument that Jackal won could mean nothing good for Siaran.
She stayed warily behind him as Rune led the way to a room she had passed many times but never yet entered. It had a heavy, reinforced door that stood out among the nondescript blank portals in the rest of the ship. Now she filed in, curiosity gaining the upper hand over concern. It was an armory, she saw at once. Along one wall was a row of faceplates, each with a glowing red digital tag beneath it. The adjacent wall held the lobsterlike silver armor: coverings for shoulders and arms and groin and thighs, spike-toed boots, studded fingerless gloves, and coiled power packs for breathable air or maybe weapons chargers.
Opposite the faceplates were the weapons. These were displayed in ranks and tiers by type. Gauntlets with extending double claws, gauntlets that fired vicious little sharp projectiles, knives, retractable flying discs, spears, net guns, long-handled short swords, shoulder-mounted plasma cannon; row after row of shining metal death. Some of the weapons she'd seen before, in the desert with Rune. Some she had no name for.
She stepped closer to the shining deadly objects, heart beating high in excitement that was not entirely due to a martial artist's love of balanced and well-made weapons. There was a subdued violence about the predators. This was the first stage of the next hunt, and already they were growing restless, eager to be on the trail of the strange new quarry their elders had chosen. Siaran had spent so much time with them that she sensed their mood changes now without being consciously aware of it, and she responded in kind to this new alertness in them.
Jackal and Rune selected faceplates. Rune's was the same one he'd worn before, its only marking the twisting symbol in the center of the skull cover, the scars and pits of battle polished over but still showing. Jackal's was ornately carved to resemble some sort of snarling carnivore, clearly made to look as fierce as possible. Siaran discreetly rolled her eyes; she'd have expected no less. Humility was not in Jackal's vocabulary.
Their armor, at least, was identical. Siaran was impressed by the speed with which they were able to suit up, clawed fingers deftly fastening catches in the armor to the leather pads underneath. Weapons were selected, checked, and loaded into various places on the broad utility belts, shoulder carriers, and gauntlets. Jackal extended his forearm blades a bare inch from Siaran's left eye and mimed swiping it across her face, then laughed as she jumped back.
Each predator had the shoulder cannon that seemed to be the last holdover in an emergency, but from that necessity their tastes varied widely. Siaran noticed that Jackal loaded his weapons cache for bear, choosing one of every weapon on the high wall, and two of some, until he could hold no more. By contrast, Rune chose only a set of wrist blades for each arm, a spear, and two throwing discs. She smiled grimly at the difference, and whispered, "Coward," at Jackal's back on the other side of the room, even though she felt like one herself as soon as the word was out.
Armed and armored, Rune turned to Siaran, who had been forgotten until this point, and beckoned her closer. She went to him, feeling diminished between the two warriors in all their gear. Jackal growled and hissed behind his faceplate but otherwise made no move, to her relief. He could have decapitated her as easily as falling off a log with all the hardware he was carrying.
Rune indicated the wall with a generous sweep of one arm, then turned expectantly to Siaran. She glanced at him uncertainly and he barked at her. "You want me to choose?"
A nod.
Unhesitating now, and thinking of the spear back in her quarters, Siaran reached for one of the short swords. It was an easy choice. She'd been offered no armor, which was probably for the best because none of it came close to fitting her. The strange mesh skinsuit might have some advanced elastics technology that allowed its fit to adjust to the wearer, but she doubted the armor could do the same. Half the weapons on the wall required some piece of armor to mount them, so they were out; the other half, such as the flying discs, she didn't know how to use. The short sword had been her weapon of choice after she'd earned her second degree black belt, and even though this one was different in shape than the curved blade she was used to, it was the most familiar.
Rune grunted at her choice, but it was impossible to tell whether he meant approval or censure. She hefted the sword, feeling its weight and perfect balance, and stepped back to swing it experimentally. It blended perfectly with the flexing of her wrist and Siaran made passes, fast then slow, aligning it to her arm. It was a superb weapon and would not take much time to get used to. She smiled and inclined her head to Rune, who considered her for a long moment in silence. Then he plucked a dagger with a serrated edge and a deep blood groove from the wall and handed that to her, haft first.
She was so surprised that she accepted it unthinkingly in the ritualistic gesture she'd learned from Tae Kwon Do. Setting the sword on the floor, she reached with her right hand for the dagger's pommel, left hand open and flat beneath the right elbow, body inclined in a half bow. It was an old display of trust: to offer and accept a weapon with both hands showing meant that neither party was hiding a blade somewhere, ready to strike when the other's guard was down.
The hunter considered Siaran's new posture, the submission and trust. He glanced sidelong at Jackal, who made a chuffing sound caught somewhere between disbelief and humor. Siaran looked up into Rune's metal faceplate, eyes questioning. Rune moved his shoulders in what looked suspiciously like a shrug and pushed the handle of the knife into Siaran's hand. "Thanks," she said, wondering what subtle social cue she'd stumbled over this time.
Rune answered her in her own voice. "Full of surprises, aren't you?" The tone was sarcastic, wary; one of the first things she'd ever said to him.
They didn't train all that long day. The rest of the hunter crew entered the armory three by three. The teams emerged resplendent in shining lobstertail metal, fairly bristling with weaponry. Siaran ducked into her room at one point and pulled the pants and heavy jacket of her do bohk on over the skinsuit, tying her belt properly around the jacket.
She ate alone for the first time she could remember. Jackal and Rune had disappeared on some errand of their own, and though hungry Siaran could scarcely force the food down. The wire-taut atmosphere on the ship had her in thrall. After consuming a few bites, she wandered to the control room and stood watching as the copper sun grew slowly, steadily closer. Rune found her there and gave her a broad leather belt that fit snugly against her hips and held scabbards for both her dagger and her sword. The screw tightened another turn against her nerves. She hated waiting.
Eventually she returned to her room and tried to sleep, fully clothed, weapons laid out on the bed beside her. A klaxon woke her for a restless doze some time later, howling eerily through the ship. Siaran was instantly alert, her mouth dry and her belly faintly nauseous, as it she always felt in the bated-breath time of inaction before a big competition. When Rune and Jackal came along the corridor to fetch her, she was already waiting quietly in the hall, hiking boots feeling stiff and awkward after so many weeks in bare feet.
Going forward with them, Siaran saw that the screen was filled with the view of a planet, half obscured in umbra. The sunlit side was mostly pale with ice or cloud, with a thin band of green-flecked brown at the bulge of the equator. The light from the dim copper star tinted the white paleness to a faint rust-red, like the color of dried blood.
They had arrived.