Destiny's Road

Spectre birds were fast. Like probes, they came in staggered stance. The range was too great for pellets. Jemmy held his fire while they closed. The birds slowed as if confused, then made for the middle of the line. Why weren't they veering? Jemmy held, held... aimed and fired at the lead bird.

He hit it. The bird flinched back and lifted its head. It was as big as a small man, with oversized ripping foreclaws, the forward-facing eyes of a predator, and a beak that was a hooked prybar on top, paired prongs underneath. It came on. Jemmy shot it again, then shot the trailing bird. He had their attention now- The lead bird lunged at a gatherer's chest.

The gatherer whirled around at the last instant. The beak gashed his back, and he shrieked and tried to run. Then both birds were on him.

Jemmy yelled and charged them, firing. One ran. Jemmy fired at the other bird. Its beak was deep in the gatherer's torso. Four quick shots emptied Jemmy's gun before the bird dropped its prey and ran.

As each bird cleared the line of gatherers, Jemmy heard the nipsaw sound of the probes' weapons. Matter sprayed from the birds, blood and a chaff of feathers.

The probes' weapons didn't fire bullets: they fired streams of bullets. Jemmy tore his gaze away and ran to the fallen gatherer. Blood was flooding through holes in his poncho, and Jemmy couldn't doubt he was dead. When a probe shoved him aside, he gave way.

But he'd seen. It was Shimon.

Jemmy reloaded, looking about him. Where there were four spectre birds, there might be six or eight.

A hand snatched at his shoulder and pulled him around. The probe was a man with a full red beard. He snarled, "What did you think you were doing, shooting at a spectre? Bird guns aren't for things that big!"

Jemmy protested. "He was going after my man, man!"

"Take the pose!" The parole's chest heaved. He must have run flat out. "How often do you have to be taught? Take the pose and the bird thinks you're a firebird. Firebirds don't run, don't shout, don't shoot!"

"Shimon was posed! We were all posed. Why did it kill Shimon?" While I stood like a statue- "When the bird got close he tried to run." The probe heaved in a ragged breath. "Lost his nerve. Yeah. They could have killed you all. That's why we're here."

Jemmy had seen... but he said something safe. "Thanks, man. You took them out good."

Redbeard turned without answering. He and the other probe spoke for a time. Jemmy waved the gatherers back to work; and they obeyed, fortunately; and he waited for orders.

Redbeard told him, "Take your people back to barracks. Four of you carry this one. Wait for us. We'll look around a little. There has to be a report."

21

Suspicions

If speckles can be farmed elsewhere, we must still extract potassium to feed it. Why bother? We'll grow it here.

-Will Coffey, Hydroponics

Of course the strongest men should have been carrying Shimon; but the ones who did were the ~first names Jemmy could remember. De

Jemmy draped Shimon's nearly empty pack to keep some of the rain off Shimon's torn torso. The Parole Board might want a coroner to examine those wounds.

He walked alongside while four men carried the fifth. He'd told off two more to carry one of the spectre birds, for di

"Willametta?"

"Trusty."

"There was a joke 'Andrew' wouldn't have missed. 'It's the law'?" Willametta guffawed. "Well, I wasn't here yet, but you can picture it. Nobody gets a bird gun except the probe. But there hadn't been any birds so they'd been eating nothing but rice and veggies for weeks. One day a crooner popped up in the field. It's as big as an ostrich. Well, the probes and the trusty were a little slow for Gordon Weiss. He didn't wait. He ran the bird down and jumped on it and tried to crush it in a scissor lock."

Jemmy thought it over. "Ouch."

"Of course those aren't really feathers. There's a reason the windbird predators all have needle beaks. They've got to stab through the Destiny feathers to get at the meat. Because the feathers are nothing but needles.

"So picture it," she said. "Gordon's legs and arms are full of needles, and he rolls away screaming, and the bird is crooning and the trusty has finally started shooting, and somebody shouts," Willametta drew breath and bellowed, "'No birdfucking allowed!' And someone else yells-"

Her timing was perfect. Six people behind them shouted, "'It's the law!'"

"And ever since then-"

Light grew behind them, like a sudden dawn.

Drenched, exhausted, frightened: Jemmy could only wonder at the glare behind him that threw blurred shadows along the Road. He turned, expecting to see sunglare through split clouds. That would not be such a strange thing- Whirling storm was still there, but the clouds flared too bright to book at. Lightning was only a faint sputter against that. Jemmy shouted, "Willya! What is that?"

"They're lighting the field. Looking for more birds."

"Lighting it with what?"

The other pallbearers laughed. Willametta said, "Quicksilver."

"Quicksilver how?"

"The power comes from Quicksilver."

And the long Road stretched away, and after a time the light behind went out.

It seemed to take forever. A white flicker became an intermittent white glow, and the rain blew it away, and there it was again....ntil a blazing yellow-white ba

Like the barracks, the toolhouse was built for giants. Generations of gatherers labored to move masses of rock, their lives as nothing to their Parole Board masters... Nah.

Jemmy had come to understand Cavorite's intent.

Find potassium! Get it back to the landing site before everyone on Destiny dies!

They must have come prepared to refine the ore, here or at Spiral Town. Speckles must have been a surprise: a plant that poisoned herbivores by secreting potassium and other trace elements that Earthlife needed.

So Cavorite brought the Road here, and Cavorite's crew farmed speckles. They came with interstellar technology and desperate intent, and they built massive forts of fused rock.

If the first settlers tried to stop them from leaving, and later remembered Cavorite as a ship of deserters, perhaps it was because they were already speckles-shy.

Today's gatherers lived in housing that settler wizards had built for themselves. Prisoners swaddled in luxury! Twerdahl's crew hadn't barred this door against themselves; the bock must have been added years later, or centuries.

And he didn't have a key. Oh, that was it. Jemmy couldn't get in, so four men were standing behind him still hoisting the dead weight of Shimon. Jemmy turned toward the barracks.

Willametta blocked his way.

"You've got to give over the packs and gloves first," she said urgently, "and your gun. They'll shoot you! Have some sense!"

"We can't just Two hours' walk through rain with lightning blasted vision and thunder-shattered hearing and that damned ghostly ba

Two gatherers were half-reclined on an exposed ridge of bare white rock. Jemmy told them, "Move."

They stood, not hurrying: Rita and Dolores Nogabes.

"Here," he beckoned the pallbearers, and they set the body down. Shimon was still dripping wet, and his pack no longer covered him. Jemmy looked around and found packs piled on another bare tufa ridge, and the dead spectre bird next to them.