Beowulf's Children Part 22

"Sounds good to me." Aaron nudged Jessica. "Go to the skeeter. I'll cover you," he said. "Get inside and close the doors."

She nodded vigorously. She wanted to run, but she was afraid she would drop Cadzie. It felt good to be in the familiar skeeter seat.

"Justin, do you see anything?" Aaron asked.

"Nothing on either side of the pa.s.s."

"Then I'll chance gathering the bodies," Aaron said. "But I don't get it. Something hit this camp. Fast and hard. Killed everything. Except a baby. It couldn't find a child wrapped in a blanket."

"Maybe it wasn't hungry by the time it got to Cadzie."

"No, that's not it," Aaron said. "It stripped a dog next to him, right down to the bones."

"Aaron, this is Zack. We think you should get out of there. You can gather evidence later."

"Agreed." Aaron ran across the dry ground to the skeeter and leaned in. "Give me five minutes, Jessica. Freeze Zack---I've got something important to do."

Chapter 13.

EVACUATION.

A monster fearful and hideous, vast and eyeless.

VIRGIL, Aeneid

Carey Lou was afraid. There was something wrong, and no one would talk about it. They were all calm. Too calm, so calm that their very lack of emotional expression terrified him.

Each skeeter could carry three children and one adult pilot, and under three guards, the children were escorted back up. Carey Lou was in the third group, and maybe six times he asked the same question. "What's wrong? Is something wrong?" And received no answer. Finally Aaron Tragon, big Aaron, his buddy, looked at him, his eyes like gla.s.s. Carey Lou almost felt afraid in that moment. Not of grendels or of some other bogey being out in the jungle, but of Aaron himself.

That, of course, was crazy.

So he asked no more questions as they carried load after load of children back up the mountain, and when it was his turn he didn't question, had run out of questions, and wanted only to squeeze into his seat, and make himself small.

Justin piloted the skeeter, for which Carey Lou was grateful. Whatever was going on, Justin knew about it. He could tell in the rigid set of his shoulders.

The skeeter spiraled into the air. Ordinarily he loved flying. But this time there was no joy. There was nothing but fear.

Why won't they tell us . . .

What's wrong . . .

They circled Robor. There were two pairs of guards on each side, facing away from the craft, grendel guns at the ready.

Their expressions just about froze his heart.

He had thought that Robor looked funny, almost comical. A big grendel. A big dragon, the biggest that ever lived. But there was nothing funny about it now. They landed behind the two guards, and were immediately whisked into Robor's shadow by Jessica, who looked almost as pale and emotionless as Justin.

Again he was struck with the contrast. Jessica and Justin looked scared. Aaron looked . . . intrigued?

They ushered him up the gangplank, and into the hold, and he went to the nearest knot of kids and lowered his voice, asking, "Does anyone know what's going on?"

He found Heather, who tried to smile in memory of a magic evening. She looked as frightened as he felt. "Something's wrong," she whispered. "Somebody's dead."

Carey Lou went to the front window and pressed his palms against the gla.s.s. Who? Who was dead . . .

He remembered who had stayed behind. With her baby. The room swam.

"What in the h.e.l.l was it? I won't believe in invisible grendels!" Cadmann squeezed his eyes shut, and ma.s.saged his temples with stiff fingers. There was a monster of a headache coming on. They'd seen every kind of grendel, and he was far too close to believing in this one, too.

There was a numb sensation in his chest, something spreading as if he had been struck there. He wanted to scream, to foam, to throw something . . . to do anything but sit here and wait. Wait as they received sketchy video broadcasts of skeeters relaying children back to the Robor. Wait, and pray to a half-forgotten G.o.d. "Not everything on this freezing planet is a grendel," Cadmann said, tasting the thought. It felt right: real. "We don't have any idea of what's really here. We've got to stop acting like grendels are the be-all and end-all of lethality."

Hendrick grabbed his arm. "What in the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"We've been afraid of grendels," Cadmann said. "To that extent, we've probably blinded ourselves to what is actually out there . . . over there. We never went and looked for ourselves, and I think that the grendels became a kind of bogeyman." The screens showed Robor taking off now, safe. Safe from what lived in the ground.

Have they gathered her bones? he asked himself. G.o.d. I hope they gathered her bones. But of course they would. Jessica would insist and Aaron would have done it. Thank G.o.d Aaron was there.

He felt numb. Doors were slamming in his mind, and behind them raged fear and grief.

If he wasn't careful, a door might creak open. Behind one of them was Linda's birth. Such a small, wrinkled, bulbous thing she had been. And his first touch, his first scent of her . . . she would have been a breech birth, but for the prenatal diagnostics, and G.o.d . . .

He slammed that door in his mind, and the one with invisible grendels behind it too. Pure horror fantasy. You'd have to be crazy . . . Came up, hearing the hubbub in the room . . .

. . . and then sank down again, fighting as his eyes grew hot, and then flooded, all of his efforts to keep his tears under control as futile as their attempts to tame this f.u.c.king planet.

It was no good. None of it was any good, and he had to leave the control room, which had grown crowded.

The news had to have reached every corner of the camp by now. Razelle Weyland would be flying in from the lumber preserves, and her brother Michael from over at the slope camp. People were looking at him with an emotion in their faces that he had never seen there before: Pity. Shock. They wanted to touch him, to comfort him, but with every step he felt the shields sliding down, even as the shields around his heart crumbled.

The images were coming so fast, too fast, as if there were twenty years of tension, twenty years of fear stored up inside of him, and now that it had clawed free and claimed his youngest, there was nothing to hold back the pain anymore, and then . . .

He saw her, running up to him. Linda was just a baby, and her round and shining face, the diapers bunched up between her chubby thighs, her little chubby arms outstretched to him, her smile stretching that round little face. Her eyes so blue, her mother's eyes.

He held out his hands to her, stretched out his arms. Stretched his arms across the table, his fists closed hard on the edge, his good ear pressed flat against wood, eyelids like tiny fists closed hard around red-hot embers.

The trip back to the island was subdued. The children were wrapped in blankets. Some of them cried. All knew, by now, what had happened to Linda and Joe.

Jessica came to sit next to him. Justin looked at her, and she felt the oddest sensation from him. Almost as if he were a stranger, rather than her brother. His eyes weren't hot, or cold. They were just eyes. Black holes, gathering data.

Justin's hand strayed over and over again to his pistol, palm resting on it as if death might follow them into the air, come aboard Robor and follow them back to Camelot.

"Where were you?" he asked quietly.

"You know where," she said.

"Pranksters," he said.

"Justin-even if I had been there, right there, I couldn't have done anything."

"Of course."

"Justin-she was my sister too! Don't shut me out. Please."

"She shouldn't have been there alone."

"She was not alone. She was with Joe!"

"You're right. You're right." He wiped his hand over his face. And for the first time that she could remember, Jessica hadn't the slightest idea what was going on behind her brother's eyes. Was he blaming her? Himself? Imagining what he was going to say to Father? Was he thinking of the bones in the hold, all that remained of their baby sister?

She reached out to him, touched him gently on his shoulder, and was absurdly happy when he didn't brush her hand away.

Aaron came up behind her. "Jessica," he said, "I need to talk to you."

She was torn between Justin and Aaron for a moment. Then she smiled almost apologetically, and said, "I'll be right back."

Justin's gaze slid coldly from Jessica to Aaron and back again, and then he nodded, so shallowly that it was almost no motion at all. And then, in some way that she couldn't completely explain, Jessica knew what Justin was thinking.

And feeling.

She knew it, but couldn't quite make the thought rise up to consciousness. That might have hurt a little too much.

The entire colony was on the beach as Robor floated into the bay. Cadmann drew his coat collar up around his jaw. The cold seemed more piercing somehow, as the mist rolling in off the ocean penetrated coat and shirt and skin. Around him, radios crackled. A dozen rifles were held in crossed arms.

Perhaps Death is aboard the Robor, he could almost hear them thinking. It was what he wondered. It was the fear that had lurked just beneath the surface of their loves and growths and actions, every day for twenty years. And now it had come home to roost.

The air was filled with the ocean's steady, rolling roar, the crackle of the radios, and no other sound at all. Then they heard the purr of skeeter engines. Out of the fog loomed Robor, like some great mythical beast bearing its dreadful, beloved cargo. Its gigantic red lips glistened in the mist. As soon as the lines dropped, colonists chased after them to tie them to the docking loops.

The mood was dark, probably the worse he had seen since . . .

Remember Ernst, Cadmann . . . ?

His memory didn't want to go over it again. And over it, and over it.

Someone yelled an instant before one of the docking lines slapped across his face, smashing his head back. His hands flew up to fend off the blow. His hands clasped the flagging rope as he pulled. His hands and shoulders ached. As Stevens and Carlos lent their weight to his line he reached up a trembling hand to feel his right cheek. His fingers came away b.l.o.o.d.y, and he said something ugly.

Robor touched down. The rampway opened.

Chapter 14.

THE TRIAL.

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

JOHN BROWN, Last Statement

There had never been much need for a formal courtroom. Most problems were handled in a counselor's office. Really severe cases, such as the time years before when Harlan Masters tried to horsewhip Carlos, were decided in the council meeting room off the main a.s.sembly hall.

It wasn't a very large room. Seven First Generation, four men and three women, sat at a dinner table with their backs to a bright window, so that it was hard for Jessica to see their faces. Everything had been done in a stilted formal manner that she wasn't used to. Like something out of an old Earth novel.

"Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

She couldn't even tell who had asked that. Probably her father. No one had slept for almost forty-eight hours, so that all the voices sounded alike, unbearably weary. The forensic reports, diagnostics on the mining apparatus, the computerized clarification of the death scene, depositions from each Biter and Scout . . . all of these had taken their toll.

"Yes," she said. "We were out of contact. I'm not going to lie to you about that. I know that it was against the rules."

"And what were you doing while you were out of contact?"

"I don't see what that has to do with my sister's death."

Cadmann's fingers were folded carefully, and he looked up and down the panel. "We are attempting to determine the cause of the disaster. Your delayed reaction time may well have been a contributing factor. If some of you had stayed behind, or been closer, or responded to your radio links . . . "

"What are you insinuating?"

"They might have tried to call you on their comm links!" Cadmann half stood. "She was your little sister. You should have looked out for her!"

"The camp was secured, dammit!"

"Yes," Cadmann sat back down. "It certainly was. I ask you again, what were you doing?"

We were sleeping it off, and I am d.a.m.ned if I'll tell you that. "We slept late. Grendel Scout graduation runs late, and there's an orgy after the ceremonies." She said that defiantly. "We weren't scheduled to be back earlier."

"You're right, of course," Cadmann said. "But it's a d.a.m.n shame. More eyes, more rifles, you might have done something."