Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 1
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Prologue
The moons Somar, pink, and Nivatra, blue, hung low in the eastern sky, above a distant range of mountains scarcely visible in the darkness. Two figures wrapped in hooded robes against chill wind stood on a rounded slab of sandstone, trusting that the desert day's heat radiating from the surrounding rock, and the properties of the robes themselves, would mask their bodies' heat.
Below and before them, the desert's mauve sand glowed with a glare that had nothing to do with moons. The pale purple glare, with a core of eye-searing white, left yellow blobs of afterimage in the eye, like lightning. The light came from a giant amethyst, or so it seemed, descending from the black sky to touch the sand.
"The Kh'hisst," the smaller of the pair said. Her vocal apparatus made light of the guttural and glottal stop, but lisped slightly at the sibilant. Her taller companion shivered. "Virulent as a plague. Where they go, their masters— the Paa—come soon behind."
"What can they want, Elder?" the second figure said. This taller entity was clearly of a different species from the first. The lesser form shrugged. "Perhaps our Groks will tell us. They whine when we make them try to read the Kh'hisst, but when needs must, the Devil drives."
A wind whistled up from the desert below, singing softly and discordantly among the rocks, smelling of sand and ozone. To the taller figure's exposed cheek its touch felt warmer than might be expected. Perhaps it was residual heat of a full day of fierce, ultraviolet-rich sunlight. Perhaps it was something else.
The crystal ship hovered. It was modest by the standards of the major Grand Council races, a mere five hundred yards, perhaps, from tip to tip, standing edgewise as it was. A Lander, perhaps, or frigate. The taller being was no expert on spacecraft, having lived her whole life here, on this world of Sidra. She expected to die here, as well.
The thought made her shiver. Though clearly the giant vessel did not seek them—the Kh'hisst would make nothing of scorching this stretch of backwater world horizon to horizon with their chained lightnings—it brought to her the jarring realization that death could come at any time. My brother. she thought. I wonder—
She felt the dry grasp of the other's hand on hers. For a moment she wondered; no other species could read the thoughts or feelings of her kind, not directly, the way the Grok, for example, could for all other sophont races in the Far Arm. But no—the one she named Elder, though by genes and biochemistry no more similar to her than she was to slime mold, and scarcely more than either was to the rock beneath their feet, was empathetic in a more conservative sense. And very, very little escaped her hidden eyes. The smaller being squeezed her hand briefly and let it go. It was ever her way to offer support in such a way as not to encourage dependency. For that weakened, and the coalition races could not afford more weakness than they suffered already. That went especially for the taller and younger of the pair for of all sapient races, few were more despised. If any.
Overhead a patch of sky flared white. From the cliff tops above rose voices calling out in alarm.
"Elder!" called one down through cupped hands. "Come off the ledge! A storm comes."
"Haven't you got eyes?" the mother snapped. It was a rhetorical question, though it need not have been: not all known races of the Far Arm did have eyes, although everyone in this small resistance band happened to possess them. "There are no clouds above. See the stars?"
Her companion looked up. She saw stars in fact, with not the slightest wisp of cloud to screen them.
And she saw more: a line of dazzle that faded almost at once but left a pinkish pulsation in the eye that only reluctantly vanished. A swarm of yellow motes, blinking quickly out. A sudden yellow globe, which darkened to rose, to red, then assumed an angry ember hint.
She gasped. "Yes, a storm has come," said the shrouded Elder. "But not within our atmosphere. Yet."
"So it is the end," the taller figure said brokenly.
The smaller one's laugh rasped like a file on granite. "Only by accident. We're far too insignificant to attract such attention. And far too weak, especially in this region of space, to effect such a spectacular display."
The great violet ship began to ascend. A cloud of dust swirled from below, looking as if each mote glowed with its own blue-white light. High above it another new star appeared, as red as an inflamed eye. It grew, and as it did no a heart of intense yellow could be seen. Its outlines seemed to waver.
Soundless still, the amethyst ship slid sideways above the flat desert floor, still rising. Its ascent seemed to lack urgency, its lateral movement apparently precautionary. The star became a shape: a great ship, miles long, stricken, shattered, ablaze as it suffered catastrophic reentry. As the crystal ship, now clearly out of its descent path, commenced again its perfect vertical rise, the doomed leviathan streaked overhead in a glory of trailing flames. It was so huge and terrible that the taller being ducked, though even she knew the vessel had to still be in the stratosphere or above.
"Our enemies fight our enemies," commented the Elder, who stood slight but unbowed beneath the psychic weight of the monstrous hurtling machine. "It's an ill wind that blows no good." She was fond of using bromides and shopworn catchphrases, the resistance leader, as if daring others to disrespect her for it.
A shattering crack fell upon them then. The taller creature pressed her pale, soft-skinned hands to the sides of her head to shield her ears. The noise of the laming hulk's hypersonic passing made the sandstone shake beneath their feet, and beat from the stone surfaces like furnace heat. The doomed monster careened on into the west, drawing a rose-and-blue-white ghost trail of ionized air behind it, as if it had snagged one of the planet's spectacular auroras and was unraveling it behind. The comet head vanished over the mountains behind the small party. A white flash lit the sky beyond the peaks, turning them to black silhouettes. The taller figure whipped her head aside and threw up a hand to shield her eyes.
For a time she and her companion stood, scarcely remembering or daring to breathe as the dome rose up to become a sphere, still bright but dimming, swarming with colors and patterns like an oil droplet on a pool of water. "Brace yourselves," called out the Elder briskly. Another crack came, deeper and immeasurably vaster than the sonic boom of moments before. And it went on and on. This time the earth shook more authoritatively. The taller creature watched warily as head-sized stones bounced down the slope above them. Their companions, up on top of the mesa, cried out in dismay as the rolling shock wave tumbled them like toys. Fortunately, all had had sense enough to move far enough from the edge that none took a header. Down in the blast shadow of the hill, the taller being felt the shock wave as no more than a quick, faint blow to her face.
"One hundred miles away," someone called down from above.
"So much the worse for Wunlei town," another voice called.
"I grieve for them," the Elder said matter-of-factly. "Yet I'll make bold enough to say this may go well for us, those of us who survive."
She turned back to the desert below. Her acolyte turned with her. The desert lay like a calm lake before them, the sand faintly aglow with the light of the setting moons. Of the amethyst ship the taller creature could see no sign, although the battle in orbit still flashed and flared and shimmered overhead. More spots glowed, in various colors.
Each pretty shiny cloud, she thought, means the death of hundreds of sophonts. Thousands. She shivered again. "But then," the Elder said, so softly those above could not have heard her even if their ears weren't still ringing, "I've always been an optimist...."
Chapter 1
"Bingo," Larry Robison said over the team push. "Head shot. Sometimes you scare me, Iron Man."
"Part of the service," a voice said in his head. "Moving to Position Gabriel, over."
Robison shook his head. I didn't see that, he thought, lowering his binoculars as somewhere hundreds of yards behind him Joe "Iron Man" Weaver hefted his heavy sniper rifle and shifted it to a new location selected in advance. What Robison had seen, or imagined he had seen, through the glasses was a wisp of blue luminescence wafting upward from the spurting, headless neck stump. Like a soul departing a freshly killed body.
I have to be hallucinating. I'd rather face that than the implications.
"Move it along, Phone Man," a far too familiar voice rasped in his skull, courtesy of the bone-conduction speaker taped lathe mastoid process behind his ear. "Or are you waiting for a written invitation?"
"Engraved," he said, rising from behind the moss-covered log. The night ahead was shades of gray and black amid a dense smell of green. Though he wore night-vision goggles, he kept them pushed up top of his Kevlar boonie hat. His biggest enemy right then wasn't fauna. Whether four-legged, two-legged or sporting no fauna at all. Rather it was flora.
Up here in the Andes foothills of what had been Peru, the Rio Maranon basin was neither as stupefyingly humid-hot as the lower Amazon it flowed to join, nor as thickly vegetated. Where he was there was no canopy to speak of, though the trees rose dizzyingly tall against a sky showing stars through high clouds. But there was more ground cover, more midlevel brush that offered nasty places where an incautious intruder, even moving slowly, could twist an ankle or take a spill down a hidden gully onto rocks that could bust a leg despite the special-weave cloth of Team Phoenix's cameo uniforms and upper-body armor. Variations in vegetation and land conformation showed up poorly on the night-vision goggles' ambient-light enhancers, and not at all on infrared. So instead of goggles they relied on good old-fashioned eyeballs tonight. When they needed special vision they would use the scopes mounted on their long-blasters.
Though the team's erstwhile special-operations troopers were well-versed in using the coolest high-tech gear— including stuff not even available back in the day before they were laid down in suspended animation for their two-century-long nuclear winter nap—they had all bashed about bush in the world's bad places to have a healthy skepticism of technology. They could roll both ways, as brash former Delta operator Sean Reichert, the team's youngest, now out about thirty yards away on point to Robison's left, might say.
Of course, the fact that environmental hazards were most immediate in the current situation did not imply that predators weren't a threat. Particularly the bipedal brand. But the brutal fact was that, while their opposition weren't the total masters of stealth in this terrain that some of the local inhabitants were, the brush was dense enough to cover a multitude of sins, even from the laser-sharp eyes and ears and noses of the Team Phoenix operatives. Fortunately, they didn't have to rely on their senses alone. "Magic Voice," Hays subvocalized for the benefit of the flesh-colored patch taped to his Adam's apple. In full daylight it was almost invisible. "What's our situation, over?"
"Phone Man," Came a voice that, to a guy with his ass in the grass deep in bandit country, sounded magical indeed—young, feminine, touched with both Spanish and Indian accents. "I see negative response to the Angel shot, over."
Larry "Phone Man" Robison nodded. He wasn't forgetting that the speaker, sitting miles away in the concrete-and-steel redoubt the team had dubbed the Fortress of Solecism, in honor of its former proprietor—and their former employer—wouldn't be looking his way. That the downriver raiders hadn't noticed anything unusual wasn't particularly surprising. Though Little Willi, the sniper rifle, spoke with a voice uncommonly loud, from over a mile away with lots of moist, sound deadening vegetation, its report had been impossible to distinguish from the thunder muttering off to the north beyond the hills that defined the river valley, and Robison had known it was coming. Besides, the team's surveillance had reported the man was alone, watching his buddies' back trail while they crept on their objective, an unsuspecting Atshuara village five hundred farther on.
"PBIs, Eye in the Sky shows your route clear to your objectives, over." As "Angel" was code name for their sniper watching over his mates with his monstrous 20 mm rifle, so "PBI" meant the other three out with their boots on the ground—World War I slang for "Poor Bloody Infantry." "Suave," Reichert said over the same net. Magic Voice was always in the comm circuit when the team was on the ground. Anything else would obviate the whole point of having an all-seeing combat director on-line.
It was also a rude way to treat a fourteen-year-old orphan with genius IQ who had been saved from slavery in a team raid six months earlier.
"Thanks, Magic Voice," Major Mike Hays said. "Now clamp the pie holes and save your gas for serious humping, Phoenix. We got miles to go before we sleep."
"You forgot `promises to keep," Robison said, slipping forward through the brush with his suppressed machine pistol cradled before his chest.
"Fuck that," Reichert said. "I ain't no Promise Keeper." Major Mike's laughter rumbled in Robison's ears. It was a small joke, and a lame one. But it was also a precious reminder of a chronological home no man would ever see again—a home two centuries dead, and to different from the world they now inhabited as to be functionally another planet.
"WHAT IS THE MEANING Of this?"
A few heads mounted above the shoulders packed in solid around the perimeter of the gymnasium where Grant and Kane were wrestling turned at the sharp, imperious voice. Most didn't. Although the audience consisted almost entirely of refugees from the Manitius Moon base, relative newcomers to the Cerberus redoubt buried beneath the Bitterroot mountains of what had once been Montana, all had long since heard enough of Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh's command voice to be pretty well immunized by now. "Sport," Domi said sullenly. She shot a glance at the stocky, light-skinned black woman who stood next to her, shifting her weight from side to side, craning her corn-rowed head and generally looking stressed out. "Her-idea." In the middle of the gym the clinch continued. Lakesh turned a fearsome glare upon the redoubt's medic. "Reba," he said, "I trust you have some explanation for this."
"Yeah," Reba DeFore said. "They're fused out. This was the exact sort of thing I was trying to forestall, dammit!" "You're doing a bloody great job of it," growled one of the Manitius émigrés standing next to Lakesh.
"Sod off," another said. "I'm enjoying the show." Some of the refugees from the Manitius base felt gratitude to Kane and Grant for liberating them from alien oppression and near certain death. Others resented them. The audience for the afternoon's athletic event—afternoon by the clocks, since the sun never penetrated the redoubt's vanadium-steel bowels—belonged pretty solidly to the latter faction. Except for the two women, one sturdy and bronze, the other slight, snow-white and ruby eyed as an albino ferret, who stood at the rear of the mob.
Lakesh was an East Indian man, apparently in his late forties or early fifties. The gaze he turned on the speakers was incongruously deep blue. And righteously pissed. "How did this happen?" asked the woman who accompanied him. She stood almost as tall as him, with wide shoulders held in a manner that did nothing to discourage her full breasts from pushing out the front of her white jumpsuit. Nothing conscious lay behind that: even after spending several years free of the spavined life of a senior archivist in Cobaltville, Brigid Baptiste had no real emotional grasp of the fact she was a strikingly beautiful woman. Even though the hair falling around her shoulders was the hue of Hawaiian fast-flow lava and her eyes had the color of cut and polished emeralds.
Reba DeFore's sturdy shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. "I thought our personnel—especially you field operators— needed some normal activity for a change. You know; something that doesn't involve breaking people and killing things. Or getting and staying ready to do so. Anyway, I had the gym cleared out of the stuff stored here so it could be used for what the builders intended. And then—" she waved a weary hand at the floor where Kane and Grant were battling "—this happened."
"Darlingest Domi," Lakesh asked the small albino, “how did it happen?"
Domi didn't reply, but shrugged a shoulder. She was wearing a T-shirt, once red and now faded by sun to a splotchy pink, cut middle length with the short sleeves ripped off. Below it she wore denim cutoffs and a pair of red stand-up stockings. A well-weathered pair of Converse All-Stars completed the ensemble.
"Absurd," Lakesh said to himself. "Ladies, gentlemen, please let me past. We must put a stop to it at once." "Why?" said a woman with wild black hair, showing bare-scalp patches in evidence of fairly advanced female alopecia. "Let the stiff-necked bastards take some starch out of each other, say I." Her comrades grumbled agreement. Lakesh raised his voice as he addressed Grant and Kane. "Gentlemen," he called, "if I may intrude..."
Grant and Kane froze at the sound of Lakesh's voice, then picked themselves cautiously up off the floor.
"It doesn't look as if the silly protracted adolescents did each other any permanent harm," Brigid said waspishly. DeFore grinned. "You say so, Brigid. If she's wrong, Lakesh—they know where to find me." She went out the door.
