Kestejoo began to run. The vast majority of warriors, solidly in their middle years, went with him, dropping their weapons to lighten their burden. Chilaili’s four oldest sons joined them. She faced down her three youngest, standing rebelliously with their age-mates. “I gave you life, sons of my nest, taught you all that I could. But if you have learned nothing of wisdom, you are no sons of mine.”
The eldest of the three muttered, “I may or may not trust a foreign-born akule and I may never trust the humans, but our mother does not lie.” He dropped his weapons and sprinted after Kestejoo. A moment later, several of the younger warriors followed, including Chilaili’s second-youngest son. The third stood his ground with nine of his friends.
Chilaili said softly, “I will not sing your names in the eulogies, for there is no bravery in a foolish death.” She turned her back and began to run. The oldest warriors of the clan joined her, led by Yiska himself.
“I hope,” he growled, “that your trust in the humans is not misplaced.”
Chilaili didn’t bother to answer. She needed her breath for running. Ten fools out of a hundred and sixty warriors. Far fewer losses than she’d dared to hope. If only they reached safety in time. If only the analog worked properly. If only . . .
She tried, frantically, to reckon the number of minutes that had passed, how much time they’d lost arguing with doomed, hotheaded fools. She decided, despairingly, that she had no idea how much time was left—and drew comfort from the silence of the tiny radio in her ear. They will warn us, if the poison catches us before we reach shelter, they will warn us, I have to believe they will.
They burst through the stand of timber to run the final mile—and found Lieutenant Carter’s shuttle parked just beyond the trees, every hatch standing wide open. Carter was standing in the snow beside it, shouting, “Hurry, Chilaili! You’re down to less than two minutes!”
Chilaili let go a sob of thanks and shouted, “Climb into the machine! Hurry!”
The warriors paused, staring.
“Move!” Chilaili snarled. “We have less than two minutes!”
Warriors stumbled forward, piling into the shuttle. Sixty of them, heavily muscled, tall, trying to scrunch down into the only available space. Chilaili shoved Yiska into the last narrow place left. Carter dogged the hatch closed. “Into the copilot’s seat, Chilaili,” the human shouted, running for the pilot’s hatch on the opposite side. Chilaili dragged herself in through the open hatch and slammed the heavy door shut. Carter scrambled into her own place and shut the final hatch. “Now, Chilaili! Release that analog now!” Carter was yanking at the craft’s controls, tugging a device over her face as the craft tilted and roared into the air.
Chilaili snatched out the canister of analog and pushed the plunger, spewing its contents into the shuttle. “I’ve released the antidote,” she shouted over her shoulder, pushing the control on the smoke bomb as well, to provide the critical visual element necessary to belief.
“Breathe as deeply as you can!”
Yellow smoke mingled with the invisible antidote, setting them to coughing. The device on Carter’s face protected the pilot’s nose and eyes from the stinging smoke. The smell of terror was as thick and choking as the smoke.
“I’m trying to climb above the neurotoxin plume,” Carter said through her protective mask. “Rapier, what’s the count?”
“You are fifteen seconds away from contamination. Fourteen . . . thirteen . . . twelve . . .”
Uncontrollable shivers hit as the Bolo counted down the seconds. Crowded into a small space, aware that this time, the poison had already been released, the terror was far deeper than before. Please, she prayed silently, unable to think beyond that one word. Please . . .
Relentless as a flash flood, the Bolo’s voice counted down the seconds to doom, using their own language so they could all follow the words. “Chilaili, you are five seconds from contamination. The cavern is already inside the contamination zone. You are three seconds from contamination . . . two . . . one . . .” A tiny pause, while all of them held their breaths in mortal fright and Carter continued climbing at a steep angle. Then: “You are contaminated. Monitoring parts per billion.” Another ghastly pause came. “I detect a low level of neurotoxin in the shuttle, holding steady at three parts per billion. Contamination in the cavern has reached twenty parts per billion and continues to climb. Shuttle levels are holding steady. I have initiated countdown to onset of symptoms based on Unit SPQ/R-561’s observations at the Rustenberg nest site. One minute thirty-nine seconds to estimated onset of poisoning effects at the cavern. Two minutes twenty seconds to onset in the shuttle.”
Yiska, voice hoarse, called out from the cargo space behind her. “Chilaili? What do the humans say?”
“We are breathing the neurotoxin,” Chilaili said, coughing as the smoke continued to irritate her throat. “The cavern has been contaminated, too. All we can do is wait to see if the antidote will work.” Her voice quavered badly.
A low moan rolled forward, as even the most hardened of the warriors groaned in fright. It was one thing to die gloriously in battle—and quite another to die in convulsions from poison. Each passing minute took years to complete. As they neared the moment when they would all know, Yiska broke the dreadful silence.
“Chilaili,” he said, voice low, “you have chosen wisely, leading us into this alliance with humans. I would not have thought it possible, even an hour ago. Whatever happens, know that you have the deepest respect a warrior can bestow.” A low murmur of agreement rose from the other warriors.
Chilaili’s heart overflowed with the things she wanted to say, but the tightness in her throat kept the words bottled up. So she clutched at the armrests of her seat and stared blankly at the blue sky, and simply waited. And waited. And waited longer still. Then the Bolo spoke once more.
“The cavern has passed the earliest calculated moment of onset. I detect no sound of distress through the comm link embedded in the neurotoxin monitor. Chilaili, the shuttle is now forty seconds from earliest onset. I will continue to monitor contamination levels.”
Hope flared, an agony in heart and spirit. Time spun out, inexorable, yet none of them collapsed, none of them bled from skin or eyes, no one seemed to be ill at all. Chilaili’s pulse thundered inside her skull, hammered at her throat.
“I detect no sound of distress from the cavern,” the Bolo said again.
Bessany Weyman’s voice came through the radio. “Why aren’t they getting sick? There wasn’t time to saturate their tissues with the analog.”
Alison Collingwood’s voice answered thoughtfully. “The concentrations in the shuttle, even in the cavern, are a lot lower than they are in the general atmosphere. Since they are breathing in the analog, I suspect there’s a minor war going on at the receptor sites. The neurotoxin molecules have to compete with inert analog molecules for possession of every cell. The neurotoxin may require a certain threshold, body-wide, before it reaches critical toxicity. In combination, those factors might be enough to protect them. All we can do is cross our fingers and wait.”
Chilaili didn’t understand all the words the human had spoken, but she’d caught enough of it to translate for the others. “We may be all right?” Yiska asked, voice hushed.
“We aren’t dead yet,” Chilaili answered. “No one is.” The dreadful tension gripping her had begun to drain away, slowly, as genuine hope took hold.
“Chilaili,” Carter said softly, “look out the windows.”
She did—and gasped.
There was no longer blue sky overhead. It had gone dark as night, with a blaze of stars visible. Below, a thin blue-white haze curved away beneath them. And below that, Chilaili gaped at the awe-striking sight of their homeworld, glittering where sunlight struck the snow. She could see dark patches and long, snaking scars that at first made no sense, then she made the connection between the dark green color of the patchy places and the dark green of the conifer forests she knew so well. If those were the forests, then the long, wrinkled scars were mountains. The staggering scale of it took her breath away. In the distance, where the world fell away in a mysterious curve, she could see immense stretches of a beautiful blue color.
“Wh-what is the blue?”
“The ocean, Chilaili,” Carter said gently. “You’ve never seen the ocean, have you?”
She shook her head, staring.
“You may be up here only for an hour or so, while that analog saturates everyone’s tissues, but for an hour, Chilaili, welcome to the stars.”
Chilaili’s throat closed up again. She tried three times to find her voice, then whispered, “Can you see, Yiska? Through the clear places in the machine? We’re flying among the stars. And the whole world is below our feet.”