They were a day’s long travel north of the tiny border village where the
Emir-al and his Amir had crossed weeks ago when they ran into the fog of glass
bugs, floating on the wind like clouds.
It was the Amir who saw them first, whistled from his position out in
front of their caravan, scouting. He’d
stopped and flung up both hands first, both to make his bird stop, but also to
signal, along with his whistle.
Ilax and Kyrus, Elemfias and the other Zon all immediately grabbed for
their veils that everyone had been wearing but loose around their necks,
hanging from their sarbands. Hara, not
knowing the whistles so well was only a moment behind though, and Werfas
followed suit. “What’s he spotted?”
Kyrus stood up, set one foot on his bird’s back to see over its head as
it hissed, but it stood for him now and he was in control of it well enough to
use it as a platform. “Fog,” he said,
sliding down with a twitch so as not to smash his genitals against the
saddle. “Something in the air.”
The land just north of the river was almost Lainz coloured, with very
little of the home planet green anywhere except near the road. The trees were buff and orange and a dim and
dusty green, every one shaped like gigantic spreading mushroom, or a pipe-scrubbing
brush, the top line of spiky leaves each tipped with a thorn. They also
provided large, welcome circles of shade now that they were down out of the
tsingy, big enough to shadow a dozen birds and riders at once.
The caravan was all halted now and people made sure of their nose and
mouth veils, checked to make sure that the semi-translucent eye coverings were
ready to drop if the fog should prove to be that toxic. The birds all had their inner eyelids shut
tight already and the fog on the horizon was visible to everyone now, sweeping
over the buff and yellow and orange ground, shrouding pink gourd-flowers with
glittering white as if dusted with powdered sugar.
It rose from the burnt orange and red landscape, a shimmering white cloud
swirling, as if boiling, from horizon to horizon and up to tint the sky paler
and paler white as it roiled along on the shoulders of the wind, glistening. Glittering
boundaries of white smudge, thick as goat cream or thin as whey made the edges
of the haze look sharp as it tumbled towards them.
Another whistle from the Amir up front and they prodded their birds
forward to ‘string up’, hooking line from saddle to saddle to not get separated
in the fog. “Glass-bug floaters,” Kyrus
translated the blast of sound for Hara and Werfas.
“Floaters?” Werfas asked.
“The little ones sort of fly.”
“But...”
“Here they come,” Ilax said.
The wind arrived across the flat land, raising white and buff grit as
well as the shimmering fog of millions of glass bugs thick enough to hide
vision, coating birds and humans alike in wiggling silicate frosting. The birds
kept moving forward, their eyes protected, the long, hair-like feathers over
their nostrils letting them breathe. They complained as they tucked their heads
down over their riders, their necks folding back, feathers fluffed out and
quivering, their moaning and thrumming giving the white fog an eerie
background. Their riders hunched down on their shoulders, under the neck
feathers, eye veils dropped to make the face covering complete.
Just like the birds’ feathers, the veils moved enough to knock clinging
insects off and let people get air in without sharp wings and legs and body fuzz,
but there were always more in the air, in the wind. Why bother brushing away
the spiky crystal bugs that clung like drifts of pollen in bee season on every
surface? More would just pile up.
Kyrus and Werfas and Hara were linked up with Zon Prizifon across the
road and the birds were pacing slowly enough that they could talk, every puff
of breath blowing a tiny cascade of floaters off their faces. The veils got sticky from breath and clung to
skin, pressed there by the weight of the insects.
“This is horrible!” That was Hara, every fold of cloth, every edge of
her coated. Werfas laughed, and blew
hard, sending a plume of bugs off his mouth veil.
“We signed on for this.”
“Yes, I guess we did.”
Kyrus just grinned behind his own veil.
Floaters were a minor inconvenience as long as you didn’t inhale any of
them, or get them in your eyes or ears. “It’s
not as bad as a sandstorm. Or a sand
geysers. Sometimes you get caustic vents
that blow out of nowhere and only the birds can tell you they’re coming.”
“Gee, and here we thought you were saving the best parts just for us!”
“I heard that horses and other Terran animals can tell when stuff is
coming. I wouldn’t have thought that
strange animals could do the same thing that natural animals do,” Ky said.
“Maybe on the homeworld there are sudden threats that they’d need to
sense?” Werfas asked.
“Makes sense,” Hara said.
“And these floaters should blow by in an hour or two,” Ky said.
Werfas coughed. “TWO hours of this?”
“Ha, boy...” That was Prizifon. “Try
keeping a unit of warbirds and riders together in the field when there’s a
flensing wind.”
“I almost don’t want to ask,” Werfas said.
“It will take most featherless or scaleless creatures down to bones in
about eight minutes.” Ky said to his wing brother.
“If you hear someone yell to get down because
of it, you force your bird down and get under one wing and make it sit
still. If the bird goes, people don’t
really have a chance. My da told me about that.”
“So why did our illustrious ancestors want to come here from the home star?”
“Who knows, Werfas,” Prizifon answered.
“I haven’t found a Zon with those memories yet.”
Floater 1,432,671: report,
possible requested deenay found. Confirmation query? The floater had time to send the request to its brethren
before it immolated itself against Kyrus the Elder’s defenses, a dust mote
sparking away in a candle.
1,400,779: 1,000,564, a flood of
confirming dust motes sparkled away into component fragments but out of a million
dust motes several hundred thousand survived to pass on their instructions.
Degrade the target deenay.
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