Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 12
Despite the fact that he was restrained and undergoing a strip and search as thorough and impersonal as if carried out by automobile-assembly robots, that made him smile. What power I will soon have at my command!” He exulted. Despite the humiliation of his current predicament—and the burning shame at this cruel surprise, this horrid, unjust, evil cheat—that filled his cheeks with a warm prickling rush like a mega-dose of niacin, made his lips smile and his penis stir within the boxer-style underwear his handlers yanked back onto him after an authentic, but mercifully brief, alien anal probe.
THE VERTICAL INNER components of the great queen's mouth worked in what seemed agitation. "Is this impertinence? I have little direct experience of your kind, man of the Orion Arm. Although you are ubiquitous as lice in the space that the council controls. What did you anticipate you might find here, small soft thing?"
Inside Gil Bates seethed with righteous rage. Fortunately he was accustomed to keeping inside all those feelings he did not suppress altogether. Consequently he had a great deal of experience in hiding rage. It had been a skill necessary to that ability to deal with powerful dolts who had formed both foundation and structure of his enormous fortune. As it forms the basis now of my vault to ultimate power, he reminded himself. But first I've got to survive this interview with this jumped-up fifties movie monster.
The thought of the Circle of Life queen as a puppet, a simple marionette like Mothra or Rodan, made him smile within his gray-edged pink beard and feel much more in control of the situation. He held his head a little higher. "I hoped I might find beings with whom I might do business!"
For a moment the chamber rang with silence. All the sound was the echo of his words chasing themselves around the gleaming steel nooks and crannies of the audience hall. The various creatures that crawled and stilted and scuttled within froze into place.
Bates plunged ahead. "I don't mind that your minions killed the men of my escort, Uvaluvu. Such misunderstandings tend to happen, and anyway they were expendable. What I find unforgivable is the way I have been manhandled, mistreated and sequestered since."
The silver-crustacean guards who stood to either side of the queen clashed their pincers in agitation. The queen's abdomen began to pulsate, bulging out of its cell. Ripples of greenish light chased one another, just discernible within the hush blue-edged illumination that filled the chamber, across it as if just beneath a layer of translucent dermis. Then the furred and armored torso shook, and the hard-shelled limbs of various sizes and apparent function. The little wing-like things on her back spasmed and clattered. And finally all the parts of her odd mouth performed a compound dance as she nodded her huge, gray-tufted, many-eyed head.
It came to Gil Bates that the Circle queen was laughing at him. You bitch! he thought. Wait and see! First I shall see you crawl, then I shall have you boiled to monster Stroganoff!
"You amuse me, little thing," she said. Motion returned to the chamber, except for the guards who held Bates' arms and the dozen or so similar beings standing guard in the royal chamber. "Be glad. Be very glad."
He held up his head. "Your Majesty," he said, unable now to keep a bit of nasty nasal whine out of his voice— as he sometimes could not, even with all his skill at dissimulation, when faced with fools too great to suffer no matter what the upside, "please don't insult my intelligence. You need me. And if you could get that you want from me without my cooperation, you'd have already wrung me dry and discarded me like a used Kleenex. Wouldn't you?"
He used the ancient trademark name with malice aforethought, in hopes of giving the alien translation software hiccups. As a matter of long experience, not to mention extremely sophisticated technical expertise, he knew full well that no matter how badly you chopped logic with a computer, you could never actually get it to spark and smoke and shut down the way you always could on the popular science-fiction television shows he'd watched as a boy in the sixties. But hope springs eternal.
The queen's spines and limbs and fur bristled. She emitted a noise like a stepped-on bagpipe, with such vehemence that the pressure of expelled air or maybe sheer sound forced both Bates and his captors back a step. "Arrogant louse of a space rat! You shall suffer until you learn proper humility before the living embodiment of all of sacred life! Away!"
As the metallized guards wheeled him about and frog marched him with quite unnecessary brio back to the great sliding door that shimmered as it slid aside, Gil Bates sighed a martyr's sigh.
"I presumed," he called back over his shoulder as he was hustled into a poorly lit vaulted corridor outside, "that surely the races of the Far Arm would have matured beyond the excitability that had caused that galaxy-wide genocide a million years ago. Evidently I was—" The door slid shut across the word wrong. Which in its way was a pity. It completed a phrase seldom heard by human or alien from the pink-bearded lips of Gilgamesh Bates. Manifestly, the voice of the inner observer said within his head, this great interstellar civilization has matured as much as it was going to, long since.
That'll teach me to trust.
THE TERRANS TURNED as if all their skulls were joined with thin glass rods. A robed figure approached from the direction of the tall dark peaks. At first it looked little different from the rest in the darkness, though granted there was broad leeway. It was shorter than any other alien Kane had yet seen except the crouching naked toad-things, two of which now squatted staring at the Terrans from nearby. He felt an urge to skip over to one of the things and give it a good swift kick.
As it drew near, the newcomer swept the hood back off its head. Kane stared. The face was oval, framed in short, dark hair. An undeniably human face.
A woman's face. As well as voice.
"What the...?" Reichert began.
"How the hell do you speak English?" Kane demanded. "For the same reason you are here," she said. "The man called Gilgamesh Bates."
"Whoa," Larry Robison said.
"That's my line," Reichert stated.
"Hush," Brigid said like a stern schoolmistress. "I want to hear what this young lady has to say, even if you don't." The newcomer was a most attractive young woman, Kane was just noticing, and seemingly just a few years older than Marina: no more than eighteen terrestrial years. Provided also, he reminded himself, that she was fully human--or human at all and not a simulacrum. And that humans aged the same way here, tens of thousands of light- years from their ostensible home, as they did back on it. "Who are you?" Kane asked. It was a remarkably lame question, he realized, but in its way inevitable.
"I am P'narvayrot," she said, the final glottalized `T’ being followed with a sort of pock from somewhere at the back of her slim throat.
"Say what?" Grant said.
"One of those hyphenated foreign names," Reichert offered cheerfully.
"The translation software," Brigid said. "It's explaining itself over an ambiguity."
"Let's call you Pine," Larry Robison said. "Spare our throats some."
The young woman paused, possibly listening to the translation, then smiled and nodded. She had a very winning smile. "That would be fine," she said.
"I'm Kane," Kane said, then pointed to his comrades. "This is Grant, Brigid Baptiste and Domi."
Pine smiled and nodded as if it all made sense. She was either a pretty fair diplomat or the translation software understood Kane better than he himself usually did. Major Mike stepped forward, took Pine's hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it. She looked for a flash as if she were going to yank it back and run. Then she positively twinkled. Kane felt a transient urge to kick him.
Hays introduced his teammates, including Marina. Then everybody from Earth started talking at once.
Pine blinked and milted slightly under the barrage of questions. She had to be overwhelmed, Kane reckoned. She might run with a pack of hard-core bandits or freedom fighters—whatever they were, they were stone hearted enough to take on some kind of hover tanks from the backs of sawed-off giraffes or shrunk-down Brontosaurs or whatever the raiders used instead of horses—but she was still no more than a late adolescent, and more than a bit vulnerable. "Baptiste," he said from the corner of his mouth, "you're good at the order-out-of-chaos thing."
She was already stepping forward. "Let's not overwhelm our new friend," she said with more diplomacy than was usual for her. "I'll present questions, one at a time." Pine looked grateful and nodded.
Kane took a look around, just to keep on top of the situation. No good getting complacent, stuck deep into hostile territory with a fleet action going on a few thousand klicks over our heads, he thought. The only noise came in the form of grunts from the riding animals, all bunched together grazing back toward where the promontory widened to join with a edge, as if constrained by an invisible fence of some sort. Alien shapes moved with quiet purpose all around the outsiders. In the gloom, even with the moon fully risen, Kane couldn't tell what most of the hooded figures were up to. Some were obviously checking gear, including weapons that consisted primarily of stubby launch-tube-looking things and stocked long-blasters like ultra-skinny rifles at least five feet long.
The outlanders' own gear, stacked near where they stood clumped, the aliens ignored scrupulously. Either they're disciplined enough to sit hard on their curiosity. Kane thought, or they just can't be bothered with a bunch of primitive trash. He decided he didn't want to ask. Pine was holding up what looked like a sizable gold pendant hung around her neck and talking animatedly to Brigid while everybody else stared with interest. Except Domi, who had gotten bored and wandered off to grub through her own backpack, no doubt looking for something to eat. Kane had consciously tuned the conversation out while he did his quick 360 scan to make sure the bandits weren't all sneaking up on the Terrans while they were distracted, to miss them up and boil them in big pots for supper. He caught up quick enough when Robison said, "Good thing you have this cool universal translator software. Otherwise we'd have to communicate like a bunch of had mimes."
"And there ain't any good ones," Hays added.
"How come the device speaks English, though?" Grant asked. "You sure don't. And you can't tell me anybody else out here does, either."
"Oh, but one does," Pine said. "As I told you, we learned from Gil Bates."
Everybody got real silent and still. She had said that right off, Kane belatedly remembered. Apparently everyone else had spaced the fact for the general wonderment of finding an apparently human being out here, the same way he had. He caught himself with his hand formed up in a half fist ready to trigger his power holster to slam his Sin Eater into it. In the corner of his eye he caught Grant deliberately opening his own right hand.
"So was it you who negotiated with Gil Bates?" Brigid asked, suddenly in the studiedly neutral tones of a lifelong archivist. "Your people?"
Before Pine could respond, a retina-searing light beam speared a blazing yellow transverse down the sky. A tall figure striding past not twenty yards from Kane emitted a terrible shriek and fell to the ground with its robes blazing blue.
Chapter 16
Blinking at a pulsating purple streak of afterimage and gagging on stinking smoke, Kane looked up into the night sky. The descending figures were approximately man-sized and visible only as shadows drifting across the stars they apparently were dropping from. Until they fired beam weapons from their hips, which illuminated the fronts of vaguely humanoid figures with snouted helmets.
Yellow-and-blue-green beaten stabbed back at them from the ground. A tumult of hisses and shouts surrounded Kane.
He wheeled, drawing his laser pistol. The promontory was bare, as well as flat—no cover there. He ran to the front of the projecting bluff. Behind him he heard the snarling crack of an energy beam, felt pebbles thrown from its blast pelt the sole of his right foot.
At the brink he stopped shoe. Three low, flat vehicles scuttled across the plain toward him. In the dark it was impossible to make out details, although they moved as if on multiple sets of wheels. In the dark their sinister intent seemed unmistakable.
"Kane!" He heard Brigid cry from behind him.
He spun, bringing up the laser. One of the humanoids dropped right toward him. He fired the laser pistol. It sparked white on the being's chest. Showing no ill effect, it raised its own stubby blaster.
A shatter of noise, a shuddering flare of light from Kane's left, then the creature suddenly pitched forward. Pinwheeling about the axis of its own waist, it spun past Kane to slam on its back against a boulder at the bluff's edge with spine-snapping force. As it whirled by, Kane noticed it had a thick tapered tail, also apparently encased in armor.
He looked quickly back. Major Mike Hays stood with legs braced, one hand holding up his FN-MAG machine gun, the other with an ammunition belt trailed across the palm. "If I can't shoot through their armor," he shouted, "I can at least hose them off their lift-columns."
Noise rasping through the tumult snapped Kane's attention back to the fallen alien. It stirred, tried to rise with a scraping of metal or possibly ceramic on rock. Its snouted head was flung back; to Kane it looked as if the flexible armor beneath the long jaw was vulnerable. He took up the slack on the laser pistol's trigger, brought the pink targeting dot to the joint of throat and jaw, squeezed off to send a pulse of killing energy down the redline to the tiny circle. Metal sublimated to instant incandescence spiked away in a white jet. It was instantly followed by a gout of steam and flash-heated fluids. The creature's body arched upward from the rock on which it lay. In its convulsion of agony it threw its blaster away from itself. Its armored heels clacked against the stone. It slumped, clawed twice against the rock beneath it, went still.
Kane holstered his laser pistol, then ran the several yards to where the alien's discarded blaster had fetched up against a stone. He picked it up. It was bulky, a little larger than the head of the creature that had wielded it. The back of it was scooped out; trusting to his shadow-suit armor to protect them from any booby traps that might lie in wait for anyone but the rightful user who attempted to fire it, he thrust his hand into the hollow. Instead of the expected bite, sting or flash of searing heat, his black-gloved hand closed around a firm, padded grip. It felt strange to his hand, but nothing he couldn't handle.
Until the blaster discharged, blasting a dazzling yellow bolt into the ground two yards from his feet. Little globs of molten glass arced away like miniature yellow volcanic bombs. Apparently the blaster fired through simple pressure on the grip.
Triple-stupe way to set it, Kane thought. Mebbe these things got a different startle reflex than we do. To his surprise equal to the shot itself was the fact that the gun produced a marked kick, more like a standard handblaster. He looked around. Everywhere was confusion: figures running, backlit by explosions and flares of violent, saturated color. He saw one of the armored tailed humanoids standing behind Brigid, not ten yards away. She seemed unaware of his presence. Kane aimed the stolen blaster at the center of the creature's mass and fired. He hit; the shot produced an admirable spray of red sparks and white smoke and steam. The alien fell as Brigid spun, clutching her own laser pistol.
"Everybody," he called over the com-net, "grab blasters from the deaders."
Not everybody had to. He saw one descending alien flare into blue-cored orange flame from a plasma pulse from Grant's big blaster. When the flare dissipated Kane could see the charred armor suit had a great gape cratered in its chest as it dropped, trailing smoke tendrils, to land out of sight behind struggling and running figures. "Can't go over the edge," he heard Reichert report. "Got more bad guys coming in vehicles."
Kane felt a stab of guilt; he should have reported seeing the surface craft approach. It was just that immediate survival got in the way. "We got to get back up in the hills, then," he said. "We can't stay out here. Everybody intact?" He got back a ripple of reports. All nine Terrans accounted for themselves.
"Whatever kind of night-vision gear the kangaroo aliens have," Robison said, "they don't seem to be able to pick atop."
"Mebbe they're too busy staying alive themselves," Kane said.
"Screw mebbes," Grant's gravel growl came. "Just run." Seeing wisdom in that, Kane obeyed. He snatched up his heavy pack, not noticing the mass at all, slung it over one shoulder. Then he ran for Brigid, who had her pack on already and stood near the edge of the drop-off, laser clutched in both hands and staring around with green eyes wide. Hell's own flames were mirrored in them. "Let's go," Kane shouted as he came up to her. "In all this confusion we got a chance."
It seemed true. Aliens continued to fall from somewhere in the sky; Kane wondered if they were doing the grav-belt equivalent of a HALO drop, from an aircraft invisibly high overhead. The bandits or guerrillas or whatever were fighting enthusiastically, shooting or even wrestling with the invaders. He saw one of the outsized ones such as the one who had taken Brigid off the hilltop, half again as tall as Grant, rip the arm off an armored interloper.
Nobody paid any attention to the humans. "It's as if we're too insignificant to notice," Brigid said, with her head near his.
He shrugged. "Hope it stays that way."
They headed toward the bluff's eastern end, where boulders clustered like hard fruit reared high, and a ridge rose higher just beyond. Domi and Grant moved to join them; thirty yards away he saw Team Phoenix, forming a loose circle around Marina. Reichert had their pulse-plasma rifle; Hays still hung on to his machine gun.
"Wait!" a voice cried. "You must ride out of here! You will never get clear otherwise."
It was Pine, running toward them with her hood down. If she was armed, Kane couldn't see it.
