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She hovered directly above the blackened remains of the earlier hylighter explosion. Hundreds of people scrambled in and out of the cover of rubble, pressing in on Flattery’s compound. Many of them wore the drab fatigues of his own security forces.
“We must get to Flattery before they do,” Crista said. “If he’s killed, there may be no hope for Avata, no hope for any of us.”
Beatriz valved off some hydrogen and dropped closer, tightening her gyre. Though certain of the combatants below pointed upward to her presence, none raised a weapon or fired on her.
Everyone topside is on one side now, she thought. Exploding a hylighter would be suicide. She wondered whether Flattery had any faithful snipers in the nearby hills.
Now that she was only a few hundred meters above the compound she noticed dozens of people in orange singlesuits popping out of underground cover throughout the area. The dozens became fifty, a hundred, more … all Zavatans of the Hylighter Clan. Swiftgrazers had fled the fire zone and scrambled into their burrows about the compound, and now the Zavatans were placing small orange flags at the entrances to these burrows.
They’re showing the villagers the way into Flattery’s bunkers, she thought. If we can get inside first, we might be able to trap him.
“Excellent!” Mack’s voice said. “And even if we don’t, he has his seaward escape and we drive him straight into Avata.”
The other three hylighters were immense, their supple tendrils dragging ballast nearly fifty meters below their gasbag bodies.
From this vantage point she saw the wildlife from Flattery’s Preserve scattered at the periphery of the scene. They had been a luxury, these mysterious Earthside animals. They got food and health care when people starved, but she did not resent their survival.
The people will care for them at least as well as Flattery did, she thought. Ben was right, there isn’t a shortage of food, just a very selective distribution.
She drifted low enough to the ground to make out individual Zavatans waving at her and shouting their greetings. The tips of her two longest tentacles stung when they touched the wihi tops. This close to the ground she found maneuvering nearly impossible, but felt no fear-sense from her hylighter host.
Fear not, human, the Avata voice said. Let the ending for this spore-bag mark our birth together on Pandora.
“What do you mean, ‘ending’?”
Unlike humans, we crush ourselves under our own weight when grounded. Without the ultimate fire our spore-dusts are trapped forever inside their shells.
“You mean, unless you explode your spores are sterile?”
Yes. Now, you see, we are already too low to recover. I will live in you, now. Hurry. The others, too, must hurry. Find each tentacle a hole, chase Flattery out. Avata will … Avata …
Beatriz felt as though a ballast rock lay on her chest, she could barely breathe. One by one her ten tentacles found burrows marked by the Zavatans and began their twining into the depths of Pandoran stone. She heard the other three hylighters valving off their hydrogen nearby.
“What is this like for them?” she wondered to her friends. “Like a mother smothering a crying child to save the village?” Then she was alive in the tentacles. It was like having ten sets of eyes, and the light that grew from the dying hylighter turned a groping mystery into a warren of horrors. Eyes looked back at her—eyes and tiny, needlelike teeth pulled back in a hissing snarl. She pushed forward and they attacked, biting off chunks of tentacle as she backed them further into the maze.
“I can’t stand it!” she screamed. “They’re biting my face! They’re horrible little …”
“Beatriz, listen to me.”
Mack’s voice was nearby, but he didn’t know what was down here, he hadn’t seen these little … things biting and biting, and down here she couldn’t close her eyes because it seemed that the whole hylighter became eyes to her.
“Beatriz, talk to me,” Mack said. “Don’t pull back, now. I’m here, we’re all here, holding hands in Avata. We’re holding hands in Avata and you’re in the Orbiter, holding a kelp hookup. Do you feel me beside you? I’m setting down beside you now.”
The Avata voice spoke to her. It sounded like Alyssa Marsh.
Remember it as holding hands, even if you know it wasn’t so. When you tell the story, say that you all held hands. It is a symbol, these clasped hands, as the clenched fist is a symbol. Choose which of these you would pass down. Avata taught through the chemistry of touch, the “learning-by-injection” method, as some called it. Humans keep their kind alive by symbols and legends, by myths.
She felt him. She felt a bulk press against her own and the weight on her chest eased off. She could breathe, and wondered whether hylighters breathed, too.
We are … more similar to you … than different, the presence said. I will enjoy a deep breath … when you are free … to take one.
The swiftgrazers kept at her, their little mouths biting, snatching off bits of flesh from her face …
From this hylighter’s tentacles, the voice reminded her.
“I’m down.” This was Crista Galli’s voice.
“Me, too,” Kaleb said. “Let’s kick some ass!”
The burrows were too narrow for the swiftgrazers to launch their typical swarming type of attack. Tentacles pressed them further into their burrows and all they could do was turn for a savage little nip every meter or so. Beatriz felt that she had snaked about half of the length of her tentacles into the ten burrows when they broke into the open. What she saw there with her battered stubs of hylighter flesh was a sight to make her gasp.
A blur of fast little animals streaked into a magnificent garden, a place so beautiful that Beatriz thought she must be in the throes of some hylighter death-vision. She heard cries and groans from the others as they encountered the vicious swiftgrazers and she tried to comfort them by concentrating on the scene before her. “You’re close,” she said, “don’t give up, you’re so close.”
Her wounded stubs sniffed the blossoms thick in the green foliage. Mosses and ferns hung down the black-glazed ceiling and carpeted most of the walls. She could not stop the light from spilling out of her into the chamber, but she wouldn’t have chosen to even if it had been possible.
She heard other screams, then. Screams of a man being shredded to bone. She saw him, an older man, flailing at the panicked swiftgrazers with a pruning rod. He seemed to melt at first, then he toppled and his screams were muffled by hundreds of little bodies upon him.
A couple of big cats came to the fray. Bigger than dashers, stronger, but they were no match for the tide of swiftgrazers that continued to pour from the thirty other tunnels nearby. Troops raced inside from an opening across the lagoon, firing their lasguns and smoking up the place. They, too, were no match for the fury of the swarm.
A foil that must’ve been Flattery’s fled beneath the surface of the pool, the splash of its crash- dive drenched the walls. She could do nothing more here. Rather than watch the horror, she withdrew to Avata and to the comfort of the light.
Chapter 63
Ferdinand of Aragon … has always planned and executed great things which have filled his subjects with wonder and admiration and have kept them preoccupied. One action has grown out of another with such rapidity that there never has been time in which men could quietly plot against him.
—Machiavelli, The Prince
Flattery heard trouble before he saw it. He had secured the upper bunker system and moved his most trusted personnel to the smaller office complex adjacent to the Greens. It was cramped, but it met his needs and could not be penetrated from above. Here he would have the luxury of waiting out the results of the fighting topside.
“If we sit tight here we can watch everything resolve around us,” he told Marta. “Fires burn themselves out, people get too tired or hungry to lift a weapon—then we’ll sort out who’s who. It will be dark soon. No one will want to be out there in the dark with a breached perimeter. Demons.”
He couldn’t suppress a shudder and he supposed, under the circumstances, that it didn’t matter. Marta and the others were here because they knew him best and they shared his passion for leaving Pandora. They were all a little giddy after the quick move to his private bunker. It helped that there were few claustrophobics on Pandora.
Flattery was pleased to see that, even though they were under fire, his people rallied even more strongly to his cause. Still, he double-latched the security hatch behind him when he returned to the Greens.
