A World of Difference Read online

  They were getting closer, too, terrifyingly fast. That alarmed him in a way different from their banshee cries-he had swerved away from his earlier direction of travel, away from where the sentry spied him. Yet the Minervans somehow still tracked him.

  He found out how a moment later, when the warriors drew close enough for him to make sense of some of their shouts. “No, fool,” one male yelled to another, “the scent trail leads this way!”

  Scent! Lopatin was up and running again in an instant. Hiding would do him no good if the Minervans did not need to see him to find him. The KGB had cooked up a dozen stenches to throw dogs off the track. They would have been of more use to Lopatin had they been on the same planet as he was.

  He was tempted to turn around and fire a couple of clips into the warriors behind him. That would drive them off, he knew. What he did not know was what would happen to his crewmates if-no, when-someone from here got back across Jotun Canyon with word that he had opened fire.

  And so he hesitated and suffered the usual fate of those who hesitate. A Minervan sprang out from in back of a rock. Either Fralk had shouted orders at the beginning of the chase or the warrior was uncommonly wise about firearms: the first thing he did was smash the rifle out of Lopatin’s hand with a spear. It clattered to the ground and rolled away. Lopatin dove after it. The Minervan jumped on him.

  The spear had fallen, too. Even so, it was not much of a fight. Lopatin got in a kick that made the warrior wail, but the Minervan’s fingerclaws stabbed through clothes to pierce the KGB man’s flesh. One scored his cheek and missed his eye by only a couple of centimeters.

  By then, other males were rushing up. “Human, we all have spears!” one shouted. “We will use them if you do not yield.”

  Lopatin went limp. The male he had been wrestling with cautiously disengaged. “Good idea,” he said when he was convinced the fight was gone from his foe. “You almost kicked my insides out-those cursed funny big legs you humans have.” He sounded more professionally interested than angry; after a moment, Lopatin recognized Juksal’s voice.

  “Here is his strange weapon,” a male said from a few meters away.

  “Good,” Juksal said. “Hang on to that. We need it. We need it more than we need him. Without their fancy tools, these humans aren’t so dangerous.” If any Minervan had the right to say that, Lopatin thought dully, Juksal did. He wished none of them had the right.

  Wishing did not help. Prodding him along with spears, the warriors led him back toward the camp. They met Fralk before they got there. “Oleg Borisovich, have you gone mad?” the Minervan demanded. Hearing the question in Russian only made Lopatin feel worse.

  “Nyet,” was all he said.

  “Then what?” Excited or upset people waved their arms in the air. So did excited or upset Minervans. Having three times as many arms as a human being, Fralk looked three times as excited or upset. He sounded that way, too.

  “Politics. Human politics. I am sorry, Fralk, but I cannot help you anymore against the Omalo or the Americans.”

  The KGB man expected Fralk to get even more upset, perhaps to threaten all sorts of torture: he would have, standing where Fralk was. Instead, the Minervan wiggled his eyestalks with a peculiar rhythm Lopatin had not seen before.

  He said just what Juksal had. “Oleg Borisovich, it no longer matters whether or not you help us. We have your rifle, we have your bullets. We do not need you.”

  He was still speaking Russian. For the benefit of the warriors standing around, he translated his words into the Skarmer tongue. They all wiggled their eyestalks that same strange way.

  So now, Lopatin thought, I know how Minervans laugh a nasty laugh. It was one bit of knowledge he would just as soon have been without.

  Reatur had never seen more than half an eighteen of Skarmer at one time before. If he never saw even another one again, that would suit him fine. Altogether too many of them were coming up to the rim of Ervis Gorge now, straight at him.

  He peered down at them. The gorge’s slope grew shallower at the top; the warriors were approaching almost as quickly as if they had been on flat ground. But the ground was not fiat. As soon as the Skarmer drew a little nearer, they would find out why he had let them come so close to getting out of the gorge before he dealt with them.

  Which one was Fralk? The domain master wanted to smash him personally. But, he decided reluctantly, he could not let the Skarmer get close enough for him to tell them apart. They were still well out of spear range, especially uphill. That was fine with Reatur. He did not need spears to smash them.

  “Ready, warriors?” he called. Up and down his line, males shouted and waved their arms to show they were. “Then shove!” the domain master yelled.

  The Omalo had spent the last few days dragging as many large stones as they could to the edge of Ervis Gorge. Now, by ones, twos, threes, sixes, they stood behind the stones. At Reatur’s command, they strained against them, pushed them down into the gorge.

  The slope was shallow. Some of the boulders just skidded briefly. Others turned over one or twice, then fetched up against rocks sticking up from the ground and stopped. But still others picked up speed, crashed into the ranks of the Skarmer.

  The Omalo shouted again, watching row upon row of their enemies go down in writhing heaps. “Don’t just stand there!” Reatur shouted. “More stones!”

  But as the males swarmed back to the next piles of stones, something dreadful happened. It was so far outside the domain master’s experience that at first he did not fully grasp it. He saw flashes of light coming from a male in the front rank of the Skarmer, heard a loud, barking roar unlike anything he had known before. Something went craaack past an arm. And somewhere not far away, males, Reatur’s males, were falling down and screaming.

  He and his warriors, all of whom were seeing and hearing the same things, took a long, terrible moment to understand that all those strange, terrible things were eyestalks of the same beast. For Reatur, the realization came when he saw a human near the male from whom the flashes of light and the terrible noise were coming.

  He had never seen the humans he knew using anything like this-weapon, he supposed it was-but it was too strange to have come from his own people, or even from the Skarmer. Compared to humans, he thought, surprised at himself, the Skarmer were closest kin. If humans had weapons, they would be strange, too.

  Strange and deadly. A male not two steps from Reatur was on the ground, thrashing. The domain master saw that he had a hole in him, the sort a spear might give, between two of his arms. As Reatur watched, the male voided bloodily and stopped moving.

  Craaack! Another-whatever it was-whizzed by Reatur. He heard a wet slapping noise. A male behind him started to shriek. It all happened in the same instant. The domain master pointed to the Skarmer with the weapon. “Get him!” he shouted. “Get him!”

  More stones rumbled down. One just missed the human, another would have smashed the male with the weapon had it not kicked up and flown over his eyestalks. The Skarmer kept right on wielding it, though, and Reatur’s males kept going down.

  “More stones!” Reatur yelled. “More! More!”

  His males heaved against a few more boulders. Others, though, stayed where they were, for the Omalo who should have pushed them into Ervis Gorge were running back toward Reatur’s castle. In a way, the domain master did not blame them. He wanted to run away, too, especially since a male died or was horribly wounded almost every time the strange weapon flashed and barked.

  And now the rest of the Skarmer, encouraged both because of their foes’ dismay and because they were no longer being pelted so heavily, reached the rim of the gorge. They were eager; Reatur’s males, even the ones who had not fled, were wavering.

  Off to one side, the Skarmer who had already gained the flatlands were starting to swing round to cut Reatur’s males off from the way back. If they could manage that, they could surround and destroy them at their leisure, even without their cursed weapon. With it…
Reatur did not like to think about what would happen with it.

  “Back!” he shouted, hating himself for it but seeing no better course. He quickly added another command he hoped his males would obey: “Keep your order as you go!”

  Most of them did. And, to his relief, the Skarmer let them escape. Why not, the domain master thought bitterly. They’ll already done what they needed to do. Reatur tried to stay optimistic. He thought about how much his avalanche had battered the invaders.

  Enoph tramped by. He said just what Reatur was thinking:

  “We hurt them.”

  “Aye.” The domain master sighed; he could not afford the luxury of wishful thinking, not now. “But they hurt us worse. They beat us, Enoph, and right now I have no idea how to keep them from beating us again.”

  “What are we going to do?” Sarah hated having to rely on Emmett Bragg. Making a career soldier mission commander had always struck her as part and parcel of the Washington mindset about extraterrestrial intelligence, which, she was convinced, had been formed by too many bad science fiction movies-aliens had to be enemies, therefore had to be fought, therefore a soldier should be in charge. Simple. Simpleminded, too.

  But now the crew of Athena found itself in the middle of a war. The aliens weren’t all enemies; some of them had become good friends. They were better friends, certainly, than Oleg Lopatin ever would be, and Oleg Lopatin’s AKT4 had killed and maimed more of them than she liked to think about.

  Her medical training had not prepared her for war wounds. They were as ghastly on Minervans as on people, not just for themselves but because they were deliberately inflicted.

  So she turned to Emmett. Having him in charge suddenly looked like a good idea after all. The trouble was, instead of instantly coming up with an answer that would solve their problems, he only scowled and said, “What are we going to do? I don’t see too much we can do, right now. Maybe the best thing to hope for is that old Oleg didn’t bring that many spare clips for his rifle.”

  Sarah felt her lips tighten. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She said, “In your cubicle-”

  He grinned at her, put her offstride. “What do you know about that? Haven’t hardly coaxed you in there.”

  “Will you shut up?” The heat of her fury amazed her. Picking her words carefully, saying them even more carefully, she went on, “In your cubicle, there is a cabinet you keep locked. I thought that perhaps-”

  “-I had an Armalite stashed away there-a rifle,” he amended quickly, seeing that she did not follow. She gave him reluctant credit for being all business once more. “Or maybe a crate of grenades. Trouble is, I don’t.”

  Sarah set hands on hips. “Well, what the hell do you keep in there, then?” She was furious at him all over again, this time for having her hopes dashed.

  “This and that,” he said. She thought that meant he wasn’t going to tell her, but he did, a little. “Some real special codes, for one thing, the kind you hope you never have to use-I mean, there’s a lot worse things could go wrong than one crazy Russian.”

  “Like for instance?” Sarah asked, genuinely curious.

  “Like the whole crew of Tsiolkovsky attackin’ us on purpose when we set out, remember, we didn’t know how far apart we were from them. Or like the natives bein’ high-tech after all, just without radio on account of they’re telepaths or some stupid thing, and overrunnin’ Athena. They’d have to be ready back home then, in case we had somethin’ happen out of Invaders from Minerva.”

  In spite of herself, Sarah giggled. “Stupid damn movie,” she said, having watched it on TV at least two dozen times since she was a kid. A late-fifties low-budget scifi classic turkey, it featured “Minervans”-who looked nothing like real Minervans-remarkable chiefly because the zippers in their costumes were visible in several scenes. Every so often, coming up with something silly like that, Emmett could surprise her and remind her that he was human, too.

  “Isn’t it?” he said now, quietly laughing himself. “I’ll tell you what I wish I had in there, and it’s got nothin’ to do with guns and such.” He waited for Sarah to raise an eyebrow, then went on, “I wish I had a couple o’ bottles o’ good sippin’ whiskey put away, for celebrating gettin’ down here, gettin’ back home…” He paused, studied her in that way she found alarming and attractive at the same time. “Maybe sharin’ a little, now and again.”

  “Hmm,” was all she said. She was damned if she would encourage him.

  “Doesn’t matter anyhow,” he said when he decided that was the only response he’d get. “NASA doesn’t understand that sippin’ whiskey is for sippin ‘, if you know what I mean.

  When I put the idea to ‘em, they just reckoned I wanted to get lit.”

  “When you what?” There was about as much likelihood of NASA bureaucrats okaying a couple of fifths of Jim Beam, she thought, as there was of dying of heatstroke on Minerva. My God, the manifest might leak out one day, and then somebody could kiss a career goodbye.

  If anybody could see that, it was Emmett. He had boundless contempt for all bureaucracies save the military. For all Sarah knew, he had asked about the bourbon just to give the three-piece-suit boys fits. That was his style.

  She expected him to chuckle and own up to twisting NASA’s tail just for the fun of it. Instead, she saw with a thrill of alarm that he had what she thought of as his sniper’s face back on- behind his eyes, he was taking dead aim at something. After a moment, she realized it wasn’t her.

  Or was it? “Get lit,” he said dreamily. “That just might work.” Now he was focused on her, sharply.

  “What might work?” she demanded. “I hate it when people think through things and then leave out all the interesting parts when they start talking. It’s like-“ She started to say “sex without foreplay,” but decided that might not be a good idea. “I hate it,” she finished.

  Bragg nodded. “Can’t say I blame you.” He spent the next several minutes explaining.

  By the time he was done, Sarah wished she hadn’t asked. She knew that was stupid. As soon as Emmett got this brainstorm, he would have come to her with it. The real trouble was, it made too much sense for her to tell him he was crazy.

  But when he said, “You know, I’m jealous as hell,” she had all she could do not to reach up and bust him fight in his grinning chops. She probably would have, had it not been so obvious that he meant it.

  Fralk watched the latest raiding party come in from the north. They were leading enough massi and eloca to keep the Skarmer army fed for a couple of days. “We’ll squeeze the Omalo domain until Reatur’s eyes pop off their stalks,” Fralk declared grandly.

  His warriors cheered as the beasts, complaining every step of the way, passed through the gaps in the barricade of frozen snow. Other males, high-ranking by virtue of their closeness to Hogram-but none so close as Fralk spoke up in loud and prompt agreement.

  Then someone said, “May the domain come down with the purple itch. When are we going to take out the cursed Omalo army?”

  Sudden silence fell. The officers edged away from the male who had spoken, as if they wanted to show they had nothing to do with his words. It was Juksal, Fralk saw. What rank he had sprang only from his ability to fight and fight and fight and stay alive. Still, he had a great deal of that ability-and he had kept the human from escaping. Thus Fralk spoke firmly but politely:

  “By plundering the domain, Juksal, we also weaken the army, you know.”

  Juksal grunted. “Beat the army and the domain is ours. No matter what we do to the domain, the Omalo army can take it back if they beat us. We should have crushed them just as soon as we fought our way out of the gorge.”

  “Do you recall the state we were in when we made it out of the gorge?” Fralk asked indignantly. “Those accursed boulders almost wrecked us altogether, in spite of the rifle.” He pulled in arms and eyestalks at the memory.

  “The Omalo were worse,” Juksal retorted. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have run from us. We sho
uld have chased ‘em and slaughtered ‘em instead of letting ‘em get away to have another chance at us.”

  “All in good time.” Fralk saw his skin begin to take on the yellow tint of anger. With an effort of will, he made himself turn green again. He would not let Juksal make him angry. Now that the warrior was under his command instead of the other way around-that ghastly, endless series of drills with spears and shields, he could listen or ignore, as he pleased. And now he was pleased to ignore. “In a few more days, when we are fed, rested, and otherwise recovered from the ordeal just past, we will sally forth and put an end to the Omalo once and for all.” Juksal had the stubborn rudeness Fralk would have expected from someone who could find nothing better than fighting with which to make his way through life. “The Omalo will be feeding and resting and recovering, too, eldest of eldest.” In his mouth, Fralk’s title was a reproach.

  When Fralk started to turn yellow this time, he did nothing to try to hide his feelings. “Yes, Juksal, I am eldest of eldest,” he said proudly. “I am also commander of this army. Remember that, please. Moreover, as commander I have just won a victory. Remember that, too.”

  “You may have won it,” Juksal said, “but you don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Warrior Juksal, you are dismissed,” Fralk shouted. He was yellow as the sun now.

  Juksal widened himself, a salute as sardonic as his use of Fralk’s title. Still widened, the veteran waddled away. But he could not resist having the last word. “There’s humans here, too, remember,” he shouted back. “What if they have rifles, too? What then, commander?” Resuming his full height, he tramped off.

  What then? Fralk did not like to think about that. But Lopatin had said the humans over here probably did not have rifles. The human Juksal had killed certainly was without one, or the warrior never would have gotten close enough to use a spear. Still, Fralk trusted Lopatin’s word much less than he had before the human tried to escape. And probably was a far more reassuring word on the other side of Ervis Gorge than here. Here, being wrong would kill a lot of males.