Read Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 for Free Online

taken that to the ultimate degree.”
    The Vines had created the virus infecting the imprisoned Furs. Or, rather, the “virus analogue”; George had said it wasn’t really a virus even as he had declined to say what it was. He didn’t know. None of the humans did. They were flying blind, trusting the Vines because there was no alternative.
    “ ’The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Karim said suddenly.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. Just something Jake once told me. We need to move fast now.”
    “I know that,” Lucy said curtly. She didn’t like any mention of Jake. “Karim… I think that’s the shield around the planet. The one George posited, made of genetically engineered spores.”
    “Yes,” Karim said slowly, “I think you’re right.”
    They both fell silent
    The planet was a featureless, mottled brown-green, partially under grayish cloud cover. There were no large patches of blue ocean. Surrounding the globe, far above it and far more arresting than anything on it, billowed a huge glittering cloud of… something … that caught the sunlight. Karim estimated the shield as extending more than a 150,000 kilometers. Its density he couldn’t estimate at all; the tiny individual points of whatever-they-were seemed individually invisible until hit just so by sunlight. Individually, but not collectively. It was as if the planet had been loosely wrapped in floating golden dust.
    Lucy said, “Look… here comes the elevator.”
    As the globe rotated beneath their feet, something gleamed at one emerging edge: an impossibly long, impossibly thin filament extending into space, a whisker on a planet-sized cat. The light caught the filament for a moment, then its rotation carried it to a different angle and it seemed to disappear.
    “What George would give to get a handful of that spore cloud!” Lucy said.
    “He can’t have it. If we got close enough to capture spores, then the spores could capture us. Or whatever they did to snare all those Fur ships for the Vines.”
    “Do you think they really are spores? That eat metal?”
    “I don’t know,” Karim said. “Enough speculation. Let’s do it now. Our quee is sending every second.”
    “We hope,” Lucy said quietly.
    They gathered their weapons, the human guns and alien “wallers,” which was what Lucy called the handheld curved batons that created small invisible walls of some energy fields they did not understand. The weapons, they thought, probably wouldn’t be needed, and they were right. The fourteen prisoners docilely left their room; all it took was gentle tugs on their arms. Meekly the Furs allowed themselves to be led, two by two, to the shuttle, and shoved inside. From some dim memory of former lives, they even strapped themselves in. When Lucy saw that, she suddenly wanted to cry.
    “They’re so … so gutted. Mentally, emotionally. Karim …”
    “They’re so harmless, is what you mean. Don’t become sentimental, Lucy.”
    “I’m not!”
    “Good. These aliens wanted to destroy Greentrees. The rest of them still do.”
    He was overstating, but she didn’t answer.
    When all fourteen Furs sat quietly in the shuttle, which was parked as close as possible to the bay door, Karim closed the small craft. The quee, of course, was already loaded into the shuttle. He and Lucy returned to the bridge and he went through the procedure he’d practiced half a dozen times on Greentrees and five hundred times since in his mind: depressurize the shuttle bay, open the shuttle doors, back away with a sudden, brief burst of acceleration that tumbled the shuttle into space as neatly as a gravid fruit.
    “I wish we knew for sure that the quee was sending,” he said to Lucy.
    It was her turn to be unemotional. They were keeping each other balanced. “Of course it’s sending. The Furs set it up to send continuously when they tried to make us ambush the Vines, remember? They were tracking us. They still are, only they think we’re a Fur ship. Now