Smoke rose from it.
Chapter 6
“What now?” said Hildra.
They had been descending into lowlands and the smoke rose from a point some miles ahead. Lt. Mailos drew the convoy to a halt and the occupants of the jeep climbed onto the top of the vehicle to get a better look. Soldiers crouched on the roofs of other jeeps and transports up and down the line for the same reason. The string of military vehicles were on a high point looking across a broad swath of lowlands that fell away from the area of the mountains, since they were still descending even after several days. A few minutes ago Avery had been nodding off in the jeep, lulled by its hum and bounce, but he was wide awake now.
Lt. Mailos, who had also been traveling with them in the jeep, studied the smoke through his binoculars, then passed the instrument on. “It’s a tribal village. Looks to be under attack.”
“And it’s Sevu?” Janx said. “You’re sure?”
“It’s where the map says it is.”
Avery waited impatiently for the binoculars to be passed his way, then peered through them to see that a settlement walled in timber logs and surrounded by a blackened clearing that separated it from the thick, unnatural jungle all around had come under assault. What caused Avery to inhale sharply was the sight of the attackers: eight foot high and feathered blood-red, they fired flaming arrows into the palisade wall. The defenders appeared to be human, dark-skinned like Mailos and many Kuskians, and they fired back from atop the wall with arrows and a few single-shot rifles. Flames licked up the wall, driving the humans back.
“Are those Nisaar?” Avery said, meaning the attackers.
“They must be,” Layanna said. “They look different here than they did in the city, though. Bigger. A different breed, perhaps. In my readings on the various pre-human races, I came on one account that said they had mutated from birds.”
“You don’t mean Atomic influence. This must have happened millions of years ago.”
“This is an unusual region,” Lt. Mailos said, and Avery heard the apprehension, but also the strange note of pride, in his voice. “Prone to many phenomena that you outsiders would consider bizarre—and I don’t mean the Atomic infection. I mean something else. Something … older. Anyway. I can’t say if this fighting is some sort of response to the recent worsening of infection or not. The tribes have been warring amongst themselves, I don’t know why.”
“Wait.” Avery squinted through the binoculars again. “Guns.” Urgently, he passed the binoculars back to the lieutenant. “More Nisaar just came out of the jungle, carrying what look like submachine guns.”
Mailos appeared shocked. “They should have nothing of the sort.”
From here the distant firing of the weapons sounded like the popping of cap-guns, but along the palisade wall men were falling, Avery could see it with his naked eyes.
“Where’d they get those things?” Janx said. “We need to do something. We’ve got scoped rifles. We can pick the gunners off.”
“Involve ourselves in local trouble?” Mailos said.
“The victims are human,” Avery said.
“Perhaps the humans started it. Either way, it’s no business of ours.”
“It’s Sevu,” said Hildra.
“If we go a few more days we might find another village that—”
“Janx is right,” Avery said. “We can’t let the Nisaar massacre an entire town, no matter who started it—and I have a hard time believing the humans started it if they knew they were up against a people, if I can call them that, so armed. Besides, we don’t have another few days to waste.”
Lt. Mailos frowned, and Avery could practically guess his thoughts. The lieutenant, a man of the city who disdained the tribal nature of the jungle-folk, as Avery had heard him call them, human or other, was more than a bit loathe to dip his toes into inter-tribal conflicts.
“We must help,” Avery repeated. “Besides, there may not be another village that processes the nectar nearby. Not with this fighting.”
“Fine. You people paid for this mission, you call the shots. But if this backfires, it’s on your heads.”
Mailos called in some of his men and women from the trucks, who arrayed themselves along various vehicles—no one was mad enough to venture into the jungle to climb a tree—took aim through their scoped rifles, and, at the lieutenant’s command, fired.
“Well?” Avery asked Layanna, currently in possession of the binoculars.
“The Nisaar with the guns are dropping. Falling back. The others are looking in this direction. Now the whole mass is turning back ... disappearing into the jungle.” She lowered the binoculars. “The attack’s over.”
“The Nisaar better not be coming in our direction,” Mailos said. His soldiers had stopped firing, and he directed them to get the convoy ready to move once more. Several minutes later Avery, Layanna, Hildra and Janx were back inside the jeep and driving away, military trucks to the fore and rear.
The riotous vegetation, and the fauna that lived within it, continued to stun Avery as he passed through. The claw-tipped limbs of great trees with thick, aged carapaces scraped against each others’ armor. A golden-scaled creature popped a head out of a squirming anemone bush, whose white-violet tentacles stirred as if in the grip of invisible currents and against all perceivable gravity. The creature’s fish-like maw gaped, its tendrils quivering, but its hooves and antlers indicated it had not always been fish-like, or at least its parents hadn’t. A mammalian creature about the size of a bear climbed the trunk of a carapaced tree overhead, the animal changing colors as it went, having received an octopus’s camouflage ability, and chomping on something with its beak. Pink and blue corals mounted on all sides.
Perhaps most impressive and fearsome were the great, glistening, semi-translucent jellyfish trees. Huge and drooping, their long slimy tentacle-branches swaying and heaving in the smallest wind, the awesome trees, which could tower a hundred feet or more, dripped venom from every limb and spattered it with every gust; just being near them could choke a person, such was the poisonous air they gave off. Avery had seen the gear the troops carried in the eventuality of some emergency that would force them into the jungle: metallic body armor that looked like something a medieval knight would wear, but with a tank of air and respirator to breathe with and long poles to hold venomous limbs away, armor or not.
“The Atomic Jungle,” Avery breathed, watching it squirm and wriggle past.
“Amazing, ain’t it?” said Janx. “Haven’t been here in years. Can’t believe how much it’s changed.” When he saw the others looking at him, he said, “Came here to hide out a few years ago. Someone said I owed ‘em somethin’—can you imagine?—and I had to lay low for a while. Got involved with some stuff while I was here—gods! There was this warlord, and he’d found a way to …”
“Another time,” said Hildra.
“Anyway, it’s much worse now—the Atomicness, I mean. I heard it used to be real bad, hundreds of years ago, but after they found ways to fight the infection in the rivers the Atomicness faded, at least partly. Now it’s all comin’ back. In a few years won’t be a single green tree left.”
“It won’t go that far,” Avery assured him. “The war is over. Octung may have some influence in the area still, but that will go away. They will go away, and the locals can devote their time to treating the infection instead of fighting.”
“You hope,” Layanna said. “The Nisaar obtained their guns from someone, remember.”
“You think the Octs … ?” Hildra said, then swore.
Avery nodded. “Yes, I can see it. Arming the locals to buy friends. But, if we’re successful, the Octunggen will go away. If we’re not ... well, it will be as Janx says, I imagine. Eventually the whole world will be, to use Janx’s parlance, Atomic-ized. If we fail, if the R’loth win, the whole planet will be like this jungle, but magnified exponentially. In a few decades it will be an alien world. An Atomic World.”
“That’s what your people want, right, darlin’?” Janx said.
Layanna nodded guardedly. “They do. I don’t.” She grimaced. “I mean ...” She shook her head, looking weary.
“No,” Avery said, “you can say it. What is it?”
“Nothing, only that it ... would be nice ... to have a forest, even just a garden, ‘Atomic-ized’. If I could have somewhere to walk through banks of blooming rose-coral, and towering tapeworm stalks, like those I’ve seen here—yes, I would like that very much.”
“You may get your chance,” Hildra said, “if we get caught in any more local trouble. You might survive it, blondie, but I don’t think the rest of us’d like it a whole lot.”
Layanna studied her silently for a moment. “No. I don’t suppose so.”
Avery tried to suppress a frown. Layanna was feeling more and more alienated, he could tell, ostracized and alone. He’d told her it was something she would have to deal with on her own, but he wasn’t sure if she could. He wasn’t sure if anyone could. The trouble was he couldn’t think of what to do about it. Some problems just didn’t have answers, at least not good ones.
The jeep jerked to a halt, and Avery’s stomach lurched. Glancing forward and back, he saw the whole convoy had stopped. Questions and shouts rang outside. Those in the back of the jeep looked at each other.
“We’d better go see,” Avery said.
