“And my progenitor,” he says. “Don’t feel bad about killing him, either, because doing so saved my life.”
I nod again, but I know that is a lie, too. Bishop’s creator was done fighting. Maybe forever. I could see it in his strange, red eyes. He’d won his battle, somehow proving to himself that the man he’d become after a thousand years of experience and wisdom was superior to the raw talent and energy he was as a youth. But that victory cost him—he could no longer see my Bishop as an empty shell waiting to be filled. Even after a thousand years, there was a good man in there. A man who finally remembered right from wrong.
And when he did, I ripped him into pieces.
Yong…the pig…Ponalla the Springer…Old Bishop…O’Malley…Old Visca…
All dead by my hand.
And Bello, beaten to a pulp, alive only because the shuttle’s engines distracted me.
Why am I like this?
What’s wrong with me?
How many more will I kill?
“I am the wind,” I say quietly. “I am death.”
Bishop nods in solemn understanding. “Someone has to be, Em.” He glances at Barkah, at Lahfah, taking in their wounds. “In every civilization, someone has to be.”
“We’re in visual range,” Gaston says. “Three minutes from landing.”
The front-wall view changes from a crystal-clear picture of endless yellow jungle flowing by to a slightly shaking image of the crescent-shaped clearing. It curves away from us, as if we are approaching the bottom point of a quarter moon that is surrounded by tall trees.
On that clearing, I see lines of tiny, moving things, morning sunlight glinting off of metal. A long line of Springers, marching forward, muskets in hand.
Then, from the trees on the opposite side of the wide clearing, four yellow machines scurry out.
Spiders.
We are too late. The battle is about to begin.
“Gaston, get us there, now,” I say. “Go faster!”
He nods. “Give me maximum thrust.”
The shuttle lurches forward so violently that the floor beneath me can’t accommodate fast enough; I almost lose my grip on the handhold.
Lahfah is chittering and chirping. I’m not sure if he’s scared of the ride, or dreading what he sees on the battlefield.
Images on the pilothouse wall gain detail as we close in. I see my people at the edge of the jungle, hiding behind trees and cowering in shallow ditches. Most of them hold tools that should be used for farming, and most of them are circles—fodder for Aramovsky’s war.
The Springer lines stop. A staccato flash of glinting metal as hundreds of muskets take aim. As one, they fire, and are obscured by a long grayish cloud of smoke.
One of the advancing spiders slows to a stop.
From the other three, beams of white light shoot out, sweeping across the Springers. Clouds of dirt and grass fly into the air, clouds that I know also contain meat and bone, blood and brains.
Barkah cries out, a howl that rends my heart.
The remaining Springers flee. What came forward as an organized line runs away as scattered individuals.
But the spiders don’t stop. On they march, to the middle of the clearing, beams blazing new holes, turning living beings into explosions of fluid and char and vapor.
I feel so helpless.
“Dammit, Gaston, get us there!”
“The poles you’re holding aren’t designed for aggressive flight,” he says. “There’s too much inertia to—”
“Do it! We’ll hold on! Put us down between the Springers and the spiders. We have to push our people back.”
Spingate looks away from the little images of light floating around her, locks eyes with me.
“We’re in range for the shuttle’s missiles,” she says. “We can destroy the spiders.”
The missiles…I’d forgotten that Gaston told me the shuttle has weapons.
But if we destroy the spiders, will we kill whoever is riding them? If we had left a few minutes earlier, we might have stopped this. And now the only way to end it is if I order the death of my own people?
The image before us now shows the battlefield in perfect detail. Torn earth. Burning vines. Smoldering corpses. Severed limbs. Springers, trying to crawl despite missing legs, or hopping around holding bloody stumps that used to be arms. In the motionless spider, I see two young circle-stars and a tooth-girl, unmoving behind the protective ridge, a pool of blood filling the deck beneath them.
“Thirty seconds to landing,” Gaston says. “We’re coming in fast, so this is going to be rough—hold on tight.”
“Em, I have missile-lock,” Spingate says. “Do you want me to fire on the spiders?”
I open my mouth to say yes, but nothing comes out.