Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 11
A second explosion flared big and white from the direction of the trailing machines. Kane couldn't tell if any of the craft were hit.
A beam stabbed from one of the strangely shaped hovering craft, a white so intensely bright Kane's eyes seemed to see a dark core within before he looked away and threw up a hand to shield his face. He felt the heat on his cheeks and flanks. A scream ripped out, too gusty and prolonged to have come from human lungs. When he looked around, blinking at a pulsating pink afterimage, eyes tearing, he saw a line of brush burning to the left of their fort in the clump of rocks.
"Who the hell are the good guys?" Kane demanded. The smoke stung his nostrils. It smelled a little of sage and a little of soap.
"I didn't get a program when they passed them out," Hays's voice came back over the comm net.
The Sun had gone now, leaving only greenish glare between storm clouds and far mountains. Streaks of light passed near overhead, coming from behind. Screams tore the sky. More explosions blossomed to the west. Kane could hear little for the cacophony of cracks and booms and cackling flames. But he felt impacts through his thighs and elbows, realized they were the drumming of hooves—of heavy feet, at any rate. He turned and rose. The riders were among their boulders. He thrust his arm at a colossal misshapen shape looming against the sky, flexed his hand. His Sin Eater sighed from its forearm holster. Brigid struck his arm up. His triburst went out among the alien stars.
"Don't you see they're not attacking us?" she shouted, clinging to his elevated arm with both hands. He read her lips more than heard her.
The rider loomed above them both as if one of the peaks to the west had come to call on them. Kane had the impression that the rider was swaddled in robes, as well as hooded. It also looked to be larger than him and Grant rolled together.
It pointed to him with a great blunt finger. "You." it said blurrily but unmistakably. "Must come. Now."
Flashes tugged at Kane's peripheral vision as blasts assailed his ears. He smelled hot metal and a strange, almost sweetish smell he guessed had to be alien bodies burning. Brigid's body was almost pressed to his. He could see Grant and Domi both staring at him. He felt as if he were all alone at the center of a universe of threat and chaos. Only because it was true.
"Everybody, listen," he directed over the comm net. "We pull out with these people right now." He was far from sure they were people—he was mortally sure they weren't—but no was no time to chop semantics.
"Roger that," Hays replied at once.
Kane theist Brigid at the gigantic rider. Its tree-trunk arm swept her off the ground and behind its high-canted saddle as if she was a little girl, depositing her astride a beast that, in the pulsating light of flames and explosions, looked to Kane more like a miniature caricature of a Brachiosaurus than a horse.
The beast whirled with startling alacrity and galloped away, shaking the whole rock pile. Another approached, smaller and slimmer but otherwise looking like the same species as the first mount. This one's rider seemed no less tall than the first, but impossibly thin even in the hooded robe that concealed its form and face, always assuming it had one. It stretched out to Kane a handful of fingers like crab legs, palm up.
Avoiding the hand, Kane sprang forward, sort of belly flopped across the riding beast's croup. The air whoofed out of him as the weight of his well-stuffed pack came down on his rib cage. He swung a leg astride, was momentarily pleased and grateful he'd had presence of mind to do so in such a way that he faced forward.
He immediately found himself slipping down the sloped haunches of the creature he was on. He grabbed at the saddle's high back, which had a figure-eight shape to it, more like a chair back, he thought, than a saddle. It was obviously meant to keep the rider from sliding off the creature's butt.
Without much choice he threw both arms around the rider's midsection and clamped hand on wrist. Its narrow torso felt like a metal pipe. Kane felt a stab of gladness the hood hid the rider's features from him.
Yellow light lances stabbed past. For an instant Kane had an impression of dazzling yellow beads strung on yellow threads. One of the shiny metal craft unmistakably blew up, sending a geyser of blue-cored white flame twenty yards straight up.
A number of the curious slope-backed mounts came loping back, away from the flat-iron machines. Kane realized the Phoenix members who had been dug in at the base of the hill clung to the backs of three of them.
"We never fired a shot!" young Reichert called out, in something like despair.
"Do you think we had anything that could hurt one of those things?" Kane called back. He doubted a rail pistol or pulse-plasma rifle would do more than scratch the finish. The rider before Kane booted heels into its mount's sides. The beast tottered into a run. Its back-and-forth gait was like instant whiplash, snapping Kane's head forward and backward with every stride.
He looked to the right. A riding beast, fleeter than his or just more lightly burdened, passed. Its rider was another tall, skinny, coasted and robed figure. Behind it crouched a figure like a cross between an exceptionally fat toad and a bald lemur, clinging with pad-tipped fingers and toes. It turned its outsized head to peer at Kane with great eyes like orbs of black glass that showed him flame reflections. Its expression seemed to be one of sheer terror—of him, not the energy-weapon battle slamming and roaring behind. As his gaze locked with the toad thing's, Kane felt an impact behind his eyes that made him reel in the saddle.
"Kane," he heard Brigid over the comm net, "are you all right?"
“No. "Yeah," he said. "What about everybody else?" Unbelievably everybody quickly checked in: Grant, Domi, the Team Phoenix quartet, Marina, who—with Joe Weaver—had just been scooped up by the strange riders. "What just happened?" Major Mike wanted to know. "Well," Kane said, "either we just been rescued or kidnapped. One of the two."
"How about both'?" Larry Robison asked grimly. Pounding Kane's tailbone and sloshing his brains in his skull, the bizarre beast fled into the night. Behind them, the desert burned.
"WHO," KANE ASKED, "Are you people? What do you want from us?"
Out on the plains below, three hulks of wrecked craft burned, sending smoke vines twining up the starry sky, their bases illuminated by yellow flames.
The striding figure Kane accosted was robed. Everybody in the camp in the sharp tall hills wore robes with the cowls pulled up over their heads: variegated shadows. Except the bald lemur-toads, like the one that squatted in the dust five or six yards away staring at him in apparent dismay. They wore nothing at all, neither clothing nor harness. The tall being turned its hood briefly toward Kane. Inside was blank blackness; Kane imagined he saw a glint of starlight or fugitive flame from the battle that raged unabated in orbit, reflecting on a surface other than skin. The being rasped a noise at him like a file across granite and strode on.
"Son of a bitch," he said, kicking at a rock. "I should kick your robed ass."
"That wouldn't do any good, Kane," Brigid said, materializing out of darkness.
"Sure, it would. It'd make me feel better."
She turned away. The rebel—or bandit, or whatever— camp lay up in the serious hills that served as prelude to the even more serious mountains to the east. Specifically it rested on the top of an outthrust about seventy yards by fifty, and flat on top. A sheer fifty-yard cliff of wind- scooped sandstone, pale in the light of a small moon that had just emerged over the eastern peaks and pocked with small holes, backed it. To front and sides it was sporadically palisaded by boulders like elongated sandstone eggs set on end.
They had been dumped here with a few grunts by way of explanation. Hays and Weaver reported hearing riders address them in simple English, too, so if that was Kane hallucinating he wasn't the only one.
And now they seemed to be ignored.
Brigid stood a few paces away, back to Kane, staring out over the plain. In the sky different-colored dots of light still arced and veered. Sometimes they came together. Sometimes they expanded rapidly. Sometimes they just went out.
She turned and walked back toward him, hugging herself beneath the breasts, although it was cool rather than cold even in the breeze sweeping across the exposed height, and her shadow suit provided a great deal of insulation. "Kane," she said quietly, as if not wishing the others to hear, "I'm worried." She moved herself between him and the other, subtly crowding as if to herd him away. He stood his ground. "Join the crowd," he growled. "No. It's not the danger. You know that."
He looked at her a moment. Then he nodded. "Yeah. I know that, Baptiste."
"It’s the uncertainty," she said, her voice low and husky. Part of him thrilled: it would have been altogether erotic, had he permitted it to be. But...that door seemed forever closed to them. At least in this life.
"Why are we here? Why would Bates come to a desolate place such as this?" Brigid asked.
Kane shrugged. "We didn't have much choice of destination, you might remember." As he said it he was almost shocked to realize they had jumped little more than an hour ago by his wrist chron. A whole lot's happened since then, he thought, even by our standards. "And the device said this was the last destination Bates accessed."
"What if that was a trick'?"
Kane looked at her upturned face—not far upturned, because he wasn't that much taller than her. It was strained and pale, and the gem-green eyes had dark thumb smudges beneath them.
"I don't know any better than you do," he said, in a voice that sounded broken to his ears.
"If I'm not intruding too much," a voice said from behind him, "I think I do."
Kane turned, frowning. Mike Hays stood behind him with his cigar in his mouth.
Hays took out the cigar and waved it, drawing aced arc through the night air. "Gil Bates is capable of any kind of trickery you want to name. Treachery? That's his middle name. But as funny as he would no doubt find it, I don't think he set us up to maroon ourselves out here on the ass end of the galaxy."
"Why not?" asked Grant, who had moved to join what had subtly become a group discussion from a private conversation.
"He wants an audience." Larry Robison said. "He wants somebody to see how clever he is. And not just a bunch of ETs. Humans."
"Us," Weaver said. "You folks from Cerberus, us four, Marina, here."
Thunder split the sky. But it wasn't normal thunder, not a distant grumble, nor even a sharp, hard crack like a giant door slamming. This was threaten-your-eardrums. Heavy artillery-barrage thunder.
As the crack reverberated in Kane's eardrums, Reichert yelled, "Incoming!" and hit the dirt. Everybody else just ducked.
Something made Kane look up. A large ovoid shape hurtled across the star field, northeast to southwest and already past the zenith, its form partially masked by a glaring yellow boss wave of atmosphere heated incandescent by friction and shock compression. Behind it came two smaller shapes, arrowheads veiled by air made almost plasma by their own violent passage.
Lines of violet darted from them and struck the fleeing greater ship. They flared in brief white coruscations, faded. The ovoid spit back a blob of pink radiance. It struck the lead pursuer. The arrowhead blew up; its residue chased the pursued and surviving pursuer out of sight beyond the horizon like meteors.
"If you want a sign telling us where Bates is," Weaver shouted through the ringing in everybody's ears.
They looked at him. From the corner of his eye Kane saw Reichert picking himself up off the ground, dusting off his camou blouse and trousers and looking sheepish, as well as grateful not to be the center of attention.
Like an Old Testament prophet Weaver raised an one to the torn sky. "How about a sign from Heaven?"
"What do you mean?" Grant asked.
"Do you think it's just a coincidence that Bates happened to land on a planet just beneath a colossal space battle? Isn't that stretching the laws of probability just a bit?" "When we first landed, Robison said only Bates could piss people off that much," Domi said. "Mebbe he's right." "So this—" Brigid flipped a hand toward the stars and the ongoing space battle, silent again.
"Is all over Gilgamesh Bates," a strange voice said. "And the terrible knowledge he possesses. Yes."
Chapter 15
It seemed, Gilgamesh Bates realized, all the fault of his naive belief in progress.
As the guards metallic pincers, digging cruelly into biceps left bare by the white T-shirt he wore, dragged Gilgamesh Bates into the orbiting throne room of a monster queen, he drew a deep breath, mentally recited the mantra he'd received during a brief flirtation with Transcendental Meditation in his thirties and tried to assess the situation.
It sucked, the teenaged hacker buried deep within him told him succinctly.
The enormous arched hall was metal polished to a gleam by legions of octopedal slaves. They applied some manner of soap or polish with their foremost pair of limbs, dried and polished with their hind set, and with the two pairs in between managed somehow to cling to an apparently solid metal surface, even sheer walls or upside down, despite a gravity Bates felt with acute discomfort to be at least approximating that of Earth. For muscles and bones grown unaccustomed to gravity, it was a painful, bowing burden. Note to self, Bates thought. Add to list of grievances for which I will make these barbarians eat shit in exchange for being allowed to live, once I rule the galaxy.
Across the chamber rose a huge metal honeycomb. It reminded Bates of a wall of Japanese sleeping tubes. The queen's head and enormous torso protruded from a hex-shaped cell in the great honeycombed wall, into which her RV-sized white bloat of an abdomen was stuffed. She was a sight to strike the strongest man mute with terror. How fortunate for Bates, then, that he was not strong, but mad.
And also pissed. "Your Majesty," he proclaimed when he was dragged close enough to the curved talons with which she was polishing the horizontal, insectile portion of her mandibular array to be heard by whatever aural apparatus her long, unlovely head might possess, "I must protest. These are hardly the terms on which I agreed to treat with the Circle of Life!"
The chamber itself seemed vaguely domed, although the honeycomb was as flat as a motherboard. Curving flanges and stanchions of mirror-polished alloy, structural, ornamental or both, suggested Gothic flying buttresses soaring to meet far overhead in a great groined vault. Several dozen other beings occupied the chamber, as well, ranging in size from small dog to Japanese economy car, and of at least half a dozen exceedingly variegated shapes. The queen studied Bates with an insultingly small number of her multiple eyes. She had, so far as he could count and allowing for a certain factor of uncertainty to what in her case might constitute eye, to have eighteen of them, distributed mostly along and across the top front quadrant of her five-foot-long, overturned-boat-shaped head. In general she appeared to combine the characteristics of a rat, a soldier ant and possibly a dragon, if those odd leathery excrescences projecting from her back were the vestigial wings they resembled.
To Bates, even under duress, she possessed a certain beauty. There was unquestionably a purity to the terrible queen.
He still felt bubbling outrage but little fear. The idea that he might himself suffer consequence was one that came slowly to him, and left quickly.
But it came as she clashed her compound mouth at him, the gleaming black tips of her larger mandibles clacking within a handspan on his nose. Saliva or some similar fluid drooled from her mouth, to be sponged quickly away by one or another of the host of small attendants like arthropod opossums with nasty white spider-fur who swarmed about her. Her breath, which emanated from pink lined vents in her thorax armor, frilled with a very attractive and slightly iridescent royal blue, stank of rotting hopes.
"You are in my power now," she said. Or rather she emitted a series of wheezes, whistles and joint pops. A disk of some hard substance he'd never gotten a good look at had been attached to the mastoid bone behind his right ear, and it translated her vocalizations into feminine American English, perfectly clear and colloquial if on the sibilant side. "Which is of course the power of the Circle of Life, which naturally encompasses the true will of the all of sacred life within the galaxy. Therefore you are mine to dispose of, small soft thing. As a mere individual you are of no more consequence than a single cell. Do cells presume to negotiate with the bodies of which they form microscopically insignificant parts, much less dictate?"
"Yes," he answered forthrightly. "When a cell possesses a secret as potent as I do. Your Majesty."
The creatures, or robots, who still held his arms, hissed in outrage and cruelly pinched his arms with their attenuated lobster claws. He frowned.
ON ARRIVAL ON THE PLANET that he presumed still lay some distance beneath the six-mile-long dreadnought belonging to the so-called Circle faction of the Grand Council, he had been met as arranged by a shuttle in the shape of a great purple crystal. Unfortunately, and contrary to his clear prior understanding, he had been seized by beings like Shetland-pony-sized spiders with five legs and, after a certain brisk unpleasantness that left him somewhat bespattered, hustled unceremoniously aboard the craft.. As it lifted skyward on some silent propulsion system he had glimpsed on a screen some kind of dogfight twisting in air overhead, where similar green bell-shaped craft dueled with golden spindles with lances and dazzles of pink-and-violet light. Then he had been half dragged, half carried into a compartment with amethyst walls tantalizingly translucent but in fact revealing nothing, and sealed within so completely he could not even make out the outline of a door. No doubt the gem shuttle carried out some violent evasive maneuvers at the least; he doubted it would voluntarily engage in combat with such invaluable cargo as himself inboard. As a congenital nerd, born and raised in the weird and dustily sterile suburb-without-an-urb of Los Alamos, dropped more or less at random in the midst of New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, he was a lifelong science-fiction fan. Therefore he understood that these aliens had to possess some form of truly wizard inertia-less drive--antigravity plus a whole lot more—that would allow a craft not simply to defeat the miserable one g or so pull of the pink- sand planet, but to allow its contents, including fragile protoplasm passengers, to survive both momentary and sustained g loadings that would otherwise reduce them to russet paste.
