FREE STORIES 2012(103)

Getting to them could be done two ways, and he chose the least likely one. He’d gathered from the Altermans’ talk that he was undergrown for his age. Well. He’d make use of that. he dropped to his stomach. The flyers were slightly curved below as well as above, an ovoid shape, which, at rest, touched the ground only in the center of its underside. This left a large area of darkness underneath, if one were able to slither underneath quietly.

It wouldn’t do for the Altermans. There were five people to get out from behind there. And he didn’t know how agile the mules were. But it would do for him.

Holding his breath, almost not daring to think, in a way that seemed to him excruciatingly slow, he crawled under the flyer, and out the other side. He approached the group, still crawling on his belly, and got behind Jane, but not before she turned towards him, the burner almost but not quite swinging his way.

“It is I,” he said, standing up and speaking as close as he could to her ear, and as low as he could. “Jarl Ingemar.”

She took a deep breath. “Jarl,” she said. She pronounced it properly too, ee-arl. And she smelled different from men, in a way that Jarl could not define, but which hit him like a kick to the head, making him feel suddenly slightly drunk. “How—”

“No,” he said. “No time. No time to talk about it. I’ve set things up. Here, here is your bag. It has everything but your clothes and toiletry articles in it. I couldn’t bring anything more. They were looking for you at the resort. I thought— When I start the distraction up, you are to leave, crawling under the that flyer on the left. I’ll show you where. All of you. I left a flyer for you,” he told her the coordinates. In the dark, he could see her hand that held Carl’s move. It seemed to him she was tapping on her husband’s wrist with her finger. He thought she was telling him what he told her. “On my mark, be ready to go.”

“No,” she said. “No. What about you? You must come with us. We’ve talked. We’ll adopt you. Where we live, no one knows what we do. We have no children. My husband . . . He was rescued, years ago. We can’t have children. We’ll adopt you. We’ll erase the markers. You can live a normal life.”

Jarl closed his eyes. The temptation was almost unbearable. He wanted that normal life. He wanted the freedom he’d seen back at the resort. But if he filed in after them—if no one stayed in the circle to distract the Peace Keepers—they’d be pursued. And, on foot, with the Peace Keepers in flyers, they’d be caught. They’d be killed.

“No,” he said. “I’ll stay. Don’t worry. I have no intention of dying for this. I’ll get out of it—somehow. And I’ll get back to where I’m supposed to be. Besides, I have friends. Xander and Bartolomeu are supposed to keep me from getting out. They’ll be half killed if I don’t come back. Now, mind you, on your mark.”

“We do this,” Jane said. “because we believe that God made man in his image and semblance and that his son once took human form, and therefore every human form is sacred.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jarl said, slightly impatient. “I have a human form.”

“You have a human heart,” she said, softly. “And today is the anniversary of the day we believe the son of God was born. They say angels sang in the sky to heraldhim. You’ve been our angel tonight.”

It was nonsensical and stupid, but he felt tears in his eyes, even if all he could get out was a gruff “Go.”

And then took the rock he’d put in his pocket, and making use of those bio-improved physical abilities, he aimed at where he left the rock pile, and threw. Hard.

The sound of someone slipping and sliding down the path on the right came. “Go,” Jarl whispered to Jane.

She got the mules out first, crawling beneath the edge of the flyer, the way Jarl had come in. It was easy, because all the Peace Keepers had run to the end of the other path, hoping to catch Jarl.

Jarl waited just long enough to make sure that the Altermans were some way away, then he started working on his own escape. He pointed at the nearest flyer, and burned. Then the one next. Then the other. He knew precisely where the power packs were—he’d stolen one of these before. Hitting them in the power packs caused a most satisfying explosion, and then some of the debris caught the other flyers, until even the blue flyer behind him was burning.

Jarl dove behind it, anyway, for some modicum of protection from the flying debris. Most of the Peace Keepers had run the other way, to avoid the debris, and he could hear them calling frantically for help, so they must have at least one working transponder. He could vaguely see orange flyers converging.