Embassytown - China Mieville [131]
Shonas, in his glider, fired. For a moment I thought we were being chased down by his enemy DalTon, that I was collateral in someone else’s drama, but the attacker flew jackknifes no human could have piloted. EzCal had ordered an Ariekene vessel to take us, to stop us reaching the army they must realise was our destination.
The centaurs scattered into bladdery undergrowth. I heard YlSib jabbering Language. They were telling Spanish Dancer what was happening.
“Maybe I can …” Bren said, and I wondered what plan he had. The glider caromed across our field of vision into the ground, burst in a splash of rising trees. Yl and Sib howled to see Shonas’s death.
I hadn’t believed, not really, that EzCal would spare a craft for this, for us, now. I screamed and the ground under us burst.
I woke to noise. I coughed and cried out and looked into the many eyes of an Ariekes. Above it I saw our ripped-up chassis letting the sky and swaying vegetation through. Beside me was the motionless face of another Ariekes, dead. I thought for moments I was dying. I pulled my aeoli mask up, as the living Ariekes tugged me with its giftwing and pulled me from the overturned vehicle, through a big rip.
It wasn’t many seconds since we’d been wrecked, I realised. I stumbled and leaned on Spanish Dancer. We were in a crater, edged by vegetation stretching up on frayed stems.
There was more than one Ariekene dead. The living were hauling out of the hollow, dragging Bren and Yl and Sib with them. The Absurd stumbled disoriented, and one of the wounded Ariekei shoved it, sent it towards us, jabbed its giftwing in our direction. We heard a gasp, and up from the forest at the edges of our brutal clearing went another tree, this one dangling a tangled man, one of the centaur outriders, whose mount had thrown him. He clung, but he was tiny-high very fast, and whatever had snared him gave and he abruptly fell, without a cry I could hear as the plant kept rising. We didn’t see him land but he couldn’t have lived.
I stumbled over wrecked biorigging. By the time the murderous flyer was back above the bombsite it would have seen no life. We watched it from our hide a few metres of forest in. It circled several times and headed out, toward the Languageless army.
26
“We have to walk,” Bren said. “A couple of days, maybe. We have to get through the forest.” The Embassytown army were ahead, but we knew they would delay engaging, and we still hoped to reach the attackers before them. Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to. Every couple of hours we stopped on our limping, blistered way, and repeated a lesson or tried a new one. Neither the Ariekei nor their batteries seemed to tire. I don’t know if or how they mourned their companions. Even our captive tramped before us stolidly, seemingly subdued by the environs or the attack or something.
Bren guided us with some handheld tech. I was conscious of the forest’s darkness, coloured by the bruisey flora. The wood was full of noises. Things of radial and spiral form moved around us. We bewildered the animals—we didn’t read as predators to the prey nor vice versa, and they were neither afraid of nor threatening to us. They watched us quizzically, those with eyes. Once one of the Ariekei said something dangerous was near us. A , big as a room, opening and closing its teeth. It would surely have attacked the Ariekei had they been alone, but its confusion at the sight of us aliens, uncoded in its instinct, stilled it, so we saved them.
They’d rescued a clutch of the datchips, but not all. They would have to husband them. One by one, as they had to, the Ariekei took themselves into the privacy of the wood and listened hard to EzCal’s voice, catching us up, a little high but clearer-headed.
We kept on into the evening, and the forest got sparse, until it was tree-flecked grassland under the glimmer of Wreck. We granted ourselves a little sleep: mostly, though, my