Bowl of Heaven

They went back into rooms and crouched below windows. A pale light rose in the walls outside, and they all brought out their lasers. These were nearly fully charged, since they had followed strict recharging rules in the magcar.

Quert crouched as the train slowed. Cliff sprang up as it stopped with a solid jolt and there were robots everywhere outside.

“Go time,” Quert said, and they went.

Out onto the platform, identical to the one at which they’d boarded. Robots of gray and green worked steadily on the freight cars and ignored them as they passed. They ran.

After some dim corridors they came out into a broad high-arched plaza under the relentless sunlight. Cliff slowed, stunned.

Hundreds of howling creatures like Quert sent up a warbling, sonorous call. They carried tubes and packs and looked well organized, formed up into ranks. They greeted Quert with high-pitched shouts and words that came over more as shrieks to Cliff. In the eyes of these aliens he saw jittery vigor, anxious turns of heads, a fearful energy. They seemed oddly human, but made small dances that broke out among them, knots of spinning joy within rectangular ranks. This stirred and confused him. The smell was like a crisp, fragrant corral. The humans ran through a corridor of celebration.

They nearly made it. Outside in the raw sunlight, the surging bodies made an impressive display, but halfway across a big canyon floor some zipping pulses came down abruptly from the ramparts above.

Screams, loud hollow thumps, panic. Cliff stuck close to Quert and ran for the canyon walls.

They got into a cleft in an orange conglomerate rock and were working back through it, led by Quert, when a heavy rolling blast caught them and slammed them to the ground.

Quert got up unsteadily. “Come … they.”

Strange whistling sounds came from the plain outside. Cliff glanced back as they jogged down the cleft. He could see a lancing green light surge down, a hard fizzing spark like a lightning flash you could see in full daylight. Answering deep explosions rocked the air. Pebbles and sand streaked by them with a whoosh. They ran harder.

They came out into a side canyon where more of Quert’s kind clustered. They grouped around black angular snouts that thrust up into the air. Guns, Cliff thought. No matter how alien this place was, form followed function. They stopped and Quert said, “We show now.”

The guns erupted in short, spatting flashes. Cliff ducked at the noise and tried to see what they were firing at. The narrow barrels recoiled like howitzers, but no spent shells ejected from their base. The barrels tracked slowly and the alien teams cheered.

“Get we over!” Quert yelled in a high, rasping voice.

“Where?” Irma shouted over the banging salvos.

Quert gestured to a rock bluff hundreds of meters away. There were at least a dozen of the long-barreled guns firing and aliens ran everywhere, shouting orders. We’re in a war, Cliff thought. And I thought we were getting away from trouble on the nice train.…

“Better do what they say!” Aybe yelled. “We dunno what’s up.”

Understatement, Cliff thought, and nodded. They started running, weaving away from the gun crews.

They got about halfway across, led by the swift Quert, when suddenly horrible screeches rose from all sides. Quert barked out a congested howl and fell to the ground. But Cliff felt nothing.

The guns stopped. Screams of agony came from all around.

“It’s some kind of pain gun!” Aybe yelled. “Gets them, not us.”

They hesitated. He had once been the kid who stood at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. Finally he had learned to do, not think, and navigate the chute as it came at you. A big moment, back when he was six years old. Now here it was again. Same answer: down the chute.

“Go!” He picked up Quert — surprisingly light, as if it had no bones — and sprinted forward. Where? With no guide, he just ran across the canyon. There was a tunnel in the canyon wall and the humans fled to it. Shrieks of terrifying pain came all around them. It was a long run through chaos, three hundred meters as fast as they could go. They made it, to the tunnel, leaping over writhing alien bodies, driven to hammer forward by barely controlled panic. He put the alien down.

Panting in the shadows, Irma gasped, “I couldn’t see who was shooting.”

“Up in the sky,” Aybe said in a hoarse voice, winded. “A smaller version. Of that living blimp. We saw before.”

Cliff looked down at Quert, who was sprawling, dazed. He edged out and looked up. A scaly brown football with fins was waltzing lazily across the sky. Big flat antennas hung down from it, probably the source of the pain ray. It moved like a fat, preying insect. The green beams cast down their burning lances.

He remembered feeling a pain flash once. His flesh had cried out, I’m on fire! He had looked down at his arm where the invisible beam was landing, and tried to say, This is just my nerves getting jangled, I can take this, but that didn’t work. The body ignored his mind, which knew the 95-gigahertz radiation was stimulating the nerves in his skin. His skin just kept screaming, I’m on fire!

Same effect here, different frequency. The aliens had different wiring. If you wanted to hurt them, you tuned for the wavelengths that forked into the nervous system and didn’t let go. Electromagnetics were the same everywhere; you just had to know the right frequency. Pain flowed into you on invisible wings.

The other aliens were running away. No, herded away.

The brown football was churning across the sky, angling its antennas toward the crowd it swept before it. He watched the hundreds of fleeing figures rush down the canyon. A rabble.

“Maybe they’re rounding these up,” Irma said at his side.

“Nope,” Aybe said beside her. “Getting them out of the way, yes. They’re after us. That was our reception committee, Quert’s people. The ones up there are running them off. I think — ”

Then there was no more thinking as the brown football forked down more of the green rays. This time the enormous hollow whoosh thundered on for endless moments. They ducked. Debris blew by them. Pebbles rattled against rock, and big orange, broad-winged birds fell from the sky, squawking as they died.

They stood and watched as the dust cleared. Cliff didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened, resisting what his eyes told him, until at his elbow Quert said in its slow, sliding sibilants, “Know we share with you. They kill us.”

“Where can we go?” Terry asked in a dry croak, eyes jittery.

Cliff felt the same — dozens of Quert’s folk had died a few hundred meters away. Thin screams came from there. And the football was moving this way.

Quert, too, seemed shaken, its face a frozen stare. Slowly the alien drew its eyes away from infinity and said softly, slowly, “We share under ways. Must cross open spaces now.”

“Why is that — ” Terry groped for a word, failed. “ — that thing in the sky shooting at you?”

“You they seek,” Quert said simply, eyes still dazed.

“So they’re after us?” Aybe asked, eyes wide.

“We heard you come. They know also.”

Aybe eyed the living dirigible. “So they’ll come after us.”

“And we. Oppose Astronomers now.”

“Then we have to nail them,” Aybe said firmly.

Cliff saw the logic. Their pursuers knew the terrain; they didn’t. “But we have no — ”

“Use their guns. Can’t be that hard.”

The cries outside diminished. They looked out carefully and saw the big balloon was dealing with their victims, slamming down shots at them. “Distracted,” Terry said. “Let’s blow a hole in them. They’re in range.”

If the enemy’s in range, so are you, Cliff thought but did not say.

* * *

Of course, the brown football turned and started beaming their pain gun again. The burst caught Quert while it was showing them how to aim and fire the auto-fed gun. Quert doubled up with the pain and went into thrashing jerks, head lolling back, eyes popping out as though pressure built inside its head. An awful sight.