Stardogs, page 26
Central had settled on using three cargo transports. The animals were rather dim for the job. One was loaded with such medical repair beasts as Central’s cold vaults still had in store. The other two had missiles and energy projectors hastily fitted. All had direct-link auxiliary biocomp units roughly cobbled onto the huge cargo-lifters’ thought-centers. It had been two hours since Central had finally become aware of the castaways. The transmissions from Rat had come from some distance away from the bio-zoo then. Now they appeared to be right inside it.
While the cargo-transports were in their laboriously slow flight across the mountains Central accessed the file-records from the Bio-zoo. Central was not competent to understand why the records made it uncomfortable. It didn’t really understand guilt. It determined that when this mess was sorted out the stupid little Bio-zoo could have at least some of the resources it asked for. If the Bio-zoo still existed then: Central was seriously weighing up the proposal from Ground-Control for dropping a nuclear device onto the whole structure.
Nucleonics were one of the things that contact with the Sil had taught the Denaari. But they’d never actually used the devices they’d built. Considering the degree of misunderstanding about the engineering process, that was just as well. But Central didn’t know that. Central had decided that if it proved to be alien saboteurs, and the weapons dispatched proved inadequate… well, at the first sign of problems Ground-control had the missiles ready. The bio-zoo was only 48.3 seconds away from nuclear destruction.
Central attempted for the 326th time to establish communication with the Bio-zoo’s brain. And was rewarded for its patience. It rapidly began wishing it hadn’t been. The points in favour of Ground-control’s proposal increased.
Firstly, there was the reality of the situation at the bio-zoo: Only 1.72% of the total environmental display area was still intact and functional. A massive earthquake had sheared off the one corner of the bio-zoo unit and damaged or destroyed 17.9% of the envirocages. If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the specimens had subsequently destroyed the most of the cages and consumed most of the rest of the specimens. And the stupid Bio-zoo’s brain had been too apathetic to do anything about it.
Secondly, if Central followed Ground-control’s recommendation, it would stop the Bio-zoo’s interminable whining about it all being Central’s fault. On top of it all, although the Bio-zoo could give Central internal vision on all the envirocages, there were no eyes in the service and observation corridors. That must be where the transmitter signal was coming from, because the Bio-zoo’s cage-eyes showed Central nothing but devastation, an incandescently angry hydra and a few well-kept envirocages on the top level. There’d been a fire on the penultimate level, which the Bio-zoo had successfully dealt with by altering the precipitation regime. Fires sounded like saboteurs, not survivors.
“We might as well eat what we have. There must be a way of getting at the food inside those chambers.” said Shilo Kadar.
“Eat and sleep,” said Martin Brettan with a cracking yawn. “It’s been a hellish day. But at least we have found a sanctuary at last. The snakes don’t seem to be able to get up here, and those stone-age monkey types can’t get past the snakes.”
Shari looked at the fast-gathering darkness outside. Already it was dim in the high-roofed corridor. “Let’s eat then. But we must still ration what we have. Do you mind organizing that, Martin? I just want to have a look at this arm.”
The Dagger of the Goddess was passive as she gently undid the sling. She was not to know that his confused mind was still pondering the symbolism of the breaking of the holy blade. Or that he felt he ought to recognize her. Not as the Dewa… but as someone human, and close to him. Someone beloved and someone he would have to kill.
The arm was straight. Within it the slave-units of the nanomech surgeon had been busy with prodigious engineering feats. Their host did not know this. It astounded Shari. “It was bent…”
“You ought to splint it,” said Mark Albeer. “Here, Princess. I’ve still got a few pieces of straightish stick. It looks as if you’ve got it nicely in position.” So the arm, already plated from within, was splinted and strapped on the outside too.
They ate by the glow of a lumitube. The moons were not yet up, and Shari had vetoed a fire. She hadn’t forgotten the sudden wetting that their fires had brought them earlier. Then they were in the dark, with only the stars. There was a squalling howl from below. “Snakes sounding miserable again,” said Sam, feeling uneasy.
Then the roof light-strips came on. As Central had intended, when it had told Bio-zoo to do this, the castaways where blinded by the sudden intensity of it. The Bio-zoo opened the sliding portal as the cargo-transporter slid level with it. Two heavy-duty stevedore beasts controlled by brain-auxiliary units disembarked, carrying energy projectors. Central was worried about those energy projectors. The energy projector beasts were old and distinctly cantankerous.
The other cargo-vessel had entered the lower door of the Bio-zoo. It had met a questing head-arm. The hydra, angry with the proceedings of the day had attempted to attack the craft for moving, even if the silicon and metallo-chitin lifeforms on it were unsuitable prey. It had received a sound chastisement… from the Bio-zoo, via the roof of the chamber in which the body-pod reposed. Now two more of the stevedore beasts were approaching from the other end of the corridor. The humans were caught like rats in a trap.
Otto gave the alarm, before pressing against his mistress’s leg. It was indeed something to be alarmed by: The creatures were the size of rhinoceroses. They were bright blue, with at least ten tree-trunk legs and an equal number of thick ropy arms, with huge grab-like hands. These hands held things which could only be guns of some sort. They looked rather like blunderbusses made of green and purple plasticine by a demented epileptic, but something about them said ‘deadly’. On top of the spoon-heads of the beasts sat the vermilion hedgehog-helmet brain-auxiliary units, controlling their vast mounts with difficulty. Stevedore-beasts are stupid, and very good at simple routine tasks. They were jittery and uncomfortable in this role. It was all the brain-auxiliary units could do to stop them from placing the energy-projectors on their cargo pallets until it was time to unload them. When it came to actually discharging the projectors the beasts would have to stand still. They didn’t handle cargo while they were moving. Rabbits would have had more potential as warriors.
The enormous blue creatures halted. The guns came up slowly. The images transmitted back to Central were not encouraging. The creatures were bipedal and wingless. This compared to the images of the Sil on file. The Sil had been taller and four-armed, and sky blue. Perhaps there were color variations? Perhaps the arms were hidden. Through the mouth of the brain-auxiliary Central addressed the humans with its limited Sil vocabulary.
It was a mistake. The nano-surgeon connected to the Dagger of the Goddess’s ear heard the booming command to surrender or die. The Sil response to such a challenge was always aggression. The control circuits damaged when the host had been struck on the head by the pipe had not been fully repaired. The huge network of myriads of nano-hair filaments would still take months to fix completely. The nano-surgeon could manage to force the host to make a few coarse movements. However the degree of fine motor-control that made the host into a deadly killer was out. But there was enough control to make the host do something it was already largely committed to.
The holy assassins kill with their hands. The will of Dewa’s dark incarnation is best served by the hands and her holy trinity of the two sacred knives and the strangling-scarf. The assassin should be close enough for the victim to touch. Killing at a distance verges on the sacrilegious, and is a domain reserved for cowards. Yet, as one of many aspects of the training that the assassins receive, they are taught to handle projectile weapons and lasguns.
The laser-unit the Dagger carried was not quite identical to the one with which he had trained. The best the Empire sold were single-shot units, and bulky at that. The one the Temple had provided for him had aspects of engineering about it that had fascinated the Stationer-engineers who had dissected it. The Sil had managed to make a hand weapon which had been capable of three discharges of infinitesimally short duration. After station engineers had finished with it, it could fire five times, before needing to be recharged. However the Dagger did not know that… any more.
The Dagger fired left-handed with precision that would have done the Nano-surgeon proud. There was no reason that he could not use the plated right arm, except that the sling was in the way. Within three point two seconds he had shot three brain-auxiliary units. That was too fast for the lumbering stevedores. A few energy projectors were discharged, balls of incandescent red flying about wildly and ploughing ineffectually into the surrounding, pyramid crystal, filling the passage with smoke. It was still ridiculously slow to Central. Before the third shot was fired the nuclear warheads were on their way.
Juan was unused to things happening so fast. He was still half asleep and the man in the grey had already shot three of the big stevedores… harmless things, and frisbeed a flat pak grenade at the fourth before he had time to sit up, and shout for help in Denaari.
“Impact 42.4 seconds, and counting.” Along with screeds of trajectory data Ground-control transmitted to Central came the count. Any one of the five warheads would have made a nuclear desert of a fifty-mile radius. The energy released by five… It amounted to using a five hundred megaton asteroid to flatten an ant. You were likely to squash yourself in the process. Central shunted the data to a holding circuit as it focused all of its great brainpower on reconstructing the last moments of transmission from the fourth brain-auxiliary unit.
The visual had been of a Mnemonic crown. And that could have been, just could have been a ‘nestling in distress’ cry, if the nestling had a severely damaged beak.
“Impact 39.1 seconds and counting.”
Central flicked into its data files. Would a nuclear device destroy a Mnemonic crown? The answer was an unequivocal ‘yes’. It replayed the audio in real time. Yes. In the midst of that noise that was a ‘nestling-in-distress’ cry. It activated responses which had been so much part of Central’s own Denaari programmer-parents basic instincts that it could not gainsay them. An adult Denaari would kill itself to help a nestling.
“Impact 30.0 seconds and counting.”
“ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!”
“Cannot Abort. Missiles on in-fall track. Locked on.” Ground-control replied stolidly.
“Deactivate the warheads.”
“Warhead triggers being withdrawn.”
Central had no teeth to grind or it would have ground them. True, the missiles wouldn’t go off. But the missiles would strike the bio-zoo pyramid, and dust it with a large volume of refined radioactives.
“You idiot!” Juan raged at the Dagger of the Goddess, unaware that he was in great danger. Not because the assassin might take offence. That was extremely unlikely. But wearing a Denaari crown was risky. The Church used them as Demonic symbols. He’d run after the man in grey and now was threatening the most deadly assassin in human space with an unloaded but shaking finger. “They’re harmless, groink whistle click, stevedores. Look!” It was true. The surviving three blue beasts had put the energy projectors onto their cargo pallets and were docilely waiting.
The Dagger was somewhat taken aback. Why had he done just what he had done? He had been ready, true. But his hand had moved of its own volition. How had he known that the red hedgehog-helmets were what he ought to shoot? But it was true that the animals now stood like statues. He’d been going to kill them before the boy had got in his way. But it really didn’t appear that there was any point in killing them. Also he would have to knock down and possibly kill the boy first. And who was this boy anyway? Then there was the slight girl who had come to back the boy up. He could see in her shrinking attitude that it was not in her nature, but she would fight to defend the boy. Something about her said ‘rider’. Rider? Why was that word so important, so full of secrets? Like an elusive fish the answer slipped away from him. But it was close. And he had to admire the boy’s courage. He would not attack. There was great virtue in such bravery. At least if the boy had to be killed he would be surely be reborn closer to the Dewa. The stocky man too was watching him, edging round for a better angle. Well, he had dealt with multiple attacks before. Attacks? But he was the one who attacked, surely. Why did the role of defender feel so familiar?
“What other control do you have over the missiles?” demanded Central of Ground-Control.
“None. They are independent, calculating their own drop vectors, so that they cannot be diverted by the enemy once targeted.”
“What other inputs do they have?”
“Just the open weather channel, to allow the missile micro-brain to correct for the wind.”
“Insert a wind speed of 720 zhat South-west to your weather broadcast.”
Ground-control needed a stutter circuit. “But……that’s not true!”
“Just do it! NOW!” Central included in the communication string the code sequence of ultimate command which none of the other Biocomputers could gainsay. It realised just what an awful thing it was ordering a fellow brain to do.
“Complying under protest. Impact 29.4 seconds,” grumbled Ground-control.
Looking warily into the darkness the castaways did not see the cargo transporters. Central had pulled these back. They did see five streaks of sudden fire off to the north-east. They hit the desert 10.3 miles away with the satisfaction of job well done. Such thought-paths circuits were always bred or gene-spliced into organisms which would be destroyed in their proper function. The Denaari firmly believed that a happy organism performed best.
Central had been obliged to track them through channels which excluded Ground-control. That poor biocomputer was being inundated with demands for more information about the hurricane from half the Control centers across the planet. Central dispatched a team of specialist radioactives seeker-eaters to the area. The creatures would have a feast, and would hopefully recover some of the precious material.
Now to try to establish contact with the source of the distress-cry.
“We need somewhere to hide. Those were probably meant to hit us. Also there is a patch of sky over there which is dark. It should be full of stars,” said Martin Brettan, peering into the night. Shari had intervened in the incipient firefight between Deo and Mark Albeer. Deo had responded. Slowly. As if something were nagging at him. Now they were standing on the other side of the remains of the second stevedore, looking out of the now open sliding portal.
“What! Down to the snakes in the dark? Or do you think the lights will be on there too? Besides, two of those things came from down there,” said Lila wearily.
“It is a choice of down the inside or down the outside.” Shari stuck her hand out. “The stuff is glass smooth. You’d be sliding faster than a bullet before you hit the bottom.”
“If only we’d worked out how to get into one of the cages,” moaned Johannes. “We could hide or… or pretend we were just some of the animals or something.”
“It’s worth trying,” said Shari. “Would one of those grenades blow a hole for us, Deo? Or what about the laser?”
He realized she was addressing him. Felt the wall. Shrugged. “The laser is discharged, Dewa. It is possible that a grenade may do the task. This material does not feel like glass. The grenade is not a shaped charge. Most of the force would not be directed at the wall. The hole may also be small. I will try.”
“Why not just tell the wall to open?” Juan’s Denaari side said… in the wrong language for the rest of the castaways to understand. The Bio-zoo wall understood however, despite the atrocious pronunciation his odd shaped mouth forced on the words. It complied, as it had been bred to do.
For a moment they all stared at the open wall section next to them. Then Tanzo realised what had happened. “Quickly. Inside.”
They hurried in. Once they were in the alien environment, Shari turned on the boy. “Just what did you do?”
“I…. I told it to open.”
“Well, tell it to close, and be quick about it,” she said cheerfully.
A few moments later they were in the moonlit dark, shut into the envirocage. The Denaari had been master zoo-keepers. If the creatures of the world now known as Mali V had been accustomed to the light of seven moons, they would still see seven moons. Mali V was a Sahel world. A boom-and-bust place, where, because of the vast tides caused by its moons, the weather alternated between torrential downpour and searing drought and heat. The cage was in the just-after-the-rains’ growth phase right now. The grass was as high as a Taur-elephant’s eye, which is about eight foot. And it was still growing. Everything was growing, breeding and eating with frantic haste. In another two months the cage would be a dying place. In six months the only signs of life would be seeds, eggs, and hibernating Taur-elephants.
The native species of Mali V didn’t stop to sleep when things were good.
As a cage to hide in, the grass made it a good place. As a choice of environments to be in, it was terrifying. You couldn’t see anything for grass, but the place was full of noise. Bellowing beasts. Things munching to all sides. What could only be predators they could not see making their kills. Hoots from something big, really big, in the distance. And the sound of Mali-grass growing, and starting to seed.
They made their way forward cautiously. On a low mound, actually a Taur-elephant hibernation burrow, they formed a defensive ring. “Well, I suppose we’re safer in here than we were out there. At least here we can’t be seen.”
Sam didn’t agree with Tanzo. He had a cold ‘you-are-being-watched feeling’ in the small of his back.
At last Central had decent visuals of them. The Bio-zoo’s in-cage monitoring system was still in perfect order. The one with the mnemonic-crown was not a Denaari. Central did not understand how to feel heartbreak, but the entire great bio-brain was stilled for a moment.
