Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 17
With surprising speed the creature bent. Reflexively it also twisted its vast torso to its right, anticipating Kane would try to pop up behind it. As he belly flopped painfully on the silvery pavement, with only his shadow suit protecting his elbows and knees from nasty contusions, Kane sensed the creature's center of balance shifting forward. He jumped to his feet again. He straightened, head bent forward, until the monster's crotch and legs came down on the line of his shoulders like a yoke. At the same time he flung both arms around its pillarlike left thigh. It was like hugging a concrete structural column.
Sucking in a breath and tightening his every muscle, Kane drove upward with all the force of his back, belly and thighs. It was in effect a dead lift, and while he feared the Slump might weigh as much as half a ton itself, he didn't have to heft anywhere near that.
Just keep the thing's immense mass going the way it was already headed...
The Slump planted its blunt unlovely face in the concrete with a shock that bounced Kane a half inch in the air. Or maybe that was just spring effect from having its alien weight no longer pressing him down toward the core of Sidra. The muscles of his lower back and along the lower right side of his rib cage burned as if aflame. He ignored the pain, whirling like a catamount. Then he leaped like one to bestride the vast sloping shoulders as the monster heaved its upper torso up off the street.
Roaring, the giant alien raised its head and began to turn to its left as if to look at its pesky tormentor. Kane enfolded it with his arms, locking hands on the lantern slab of jaw. Then he flung himself off to the right.
The creature's head turned with him. Too far. Its body spasmed as its neck broke with a sound like a great tree branch snapping.
The Slump's final convulsion hurled Kane off to the side. He managed to get a shoulder down and bounced painfully off the pavement four or five times before coming to a stop. If he broke anything, it wasn't of consequence.
The monstrous body lay twenty feet away. Its head was lolled, its face turned away from Kane. Its rump kept jumping upward into the air as its neurons fired their last electrochemical charges, giving it the impression of eying to hump the street.
A ruby laser beam stabbed the pavement beside Kane. Molten debris sprayed his right hip. He smelled burning: vaporized pavement. It had set the baggy khaki trousers he wore over the shadow armor to smoldering.
He looked around. Two squat armored shapes lumbered down the street a hundred yards away, approaching with a rolling gait. A fire team of four unarmored peacekeepers winged out to either side. Another of these aimed its laser longblaster at Kane, who threw himself backward and rolled away as the red beam cracked overhead.
"Kane!"
He looked back. Brigid was herding the last of the bewildered slaves around the other side of the parts-floater Domi had used to crash the slave wagon, out of the line of fire. Her laser shotgun would be ineffective at this range.
Domi stood ten yards back from the anti-gravity wagon's open gate. She lobbed his pressure pistol underhand at him. Her aim was true. He had to lunge only a foot to catch it in his right hand.
He rolled, half sat up. Overly emboldened by their armored backup, the peacekeepers had trotted past their ponderous allies. Not trusting his handblaster to penetrate that armor, Kane lined up the sights of his pistol on the chest of the closest peacekeeper and squeezed the firing stud. Recoil kicked the blaster upward over his head even though he hung on with both hands. The peacekeeper farthest to Kane's right fell over backward with pink blood foam squirting from his nose and mouth, pistoned out by the sudden dramatic overpressure of having an invisible cylinder a half inch wide stamped a finger length into his keel-shaped sternum.
Light sparkled white on the front glacis of one of the monitor's armor suits. It rocked slightly back on its heels. Domi had tried her luck with her own grav-gun against the armor. Apparently the power suits had some kind of force screens.
"Grant!" Kane shouted. "Get here ten seconds ago!" "On the way, point man," Grant replied from the rescue aircraft. "Take a little while, though."
While the various enemy races were going still at it overhead—the coalition had reported more fleets kept arriving and instantly flinging themselves into the fray—they were too busy to pay much attention to events on the surface. But the attempts to seize Kane and his companions after their arrival showed that some at least of the battling council species were aware others had followed Bates from his home world, and thought they might be able to win some advantage by snagging them. Or insuring somebody else didn't.
There were also purely planetary enforcers to contend with, both occupying peacekeepers and those belonging to the quisling planetary government, who though corrupt, demoralized and badly armed, could still interfere lethally. So the small flying disk Grant now piloted to the rescue had been compelled to hide out some miles away from Khaduli.
And speaking of badly armed but potentially lethal, Kane quickly blasted the other unarmored peacekeeper to his right and dropped down to his left as Domi chilled the last. Then he had to roll aside as one of the armor suits sent a yellow beam of destruction probing toward him. The blast rolled him along the pavement.
"Kane!" He wasn't sure if he heard Domi's voice through the comm net or the somewhat thin, dusty air of the planet. "Run! Now."
He did. For all the doubts he might entertain about the little albino in other aspects of life, she was lethally reliable in combat. He hopped up and sprinted away at an angle toward some top-heavy ville structures leaning together like drunkards alongside the broad street.
He heard something clunk twice off the pavement behind him. He launched himself into a prickly man-high growth that seemed to be sprouting like a weed from between a couple of slabs of sidewalk.
A powerful gren cracked off behind him. Unprotected face and hands lacerated by sharp, stiff blue leaves, he twisted his head to look behind him.
A virtual sea anemone of white smoke tendrils was shooting away from a dense central cloud. Each tendril was tipped by a tiny blue-white star. He felt something strike the back of his left calf. It felt like being flicked with a finger. He looked down. A tiny white light glowed there, spouting dense white smoke. "White phosphorus!" he yelped. Team Phoenix had shared some of its supply of the devilish bombs with the Cerberus crew for this mission. Already he felt warmth on the back of his calf as the phosphorus flake, unquenchably burning at a heat sufficient to melt steel, began to eat its way through even his shadow suit. He gouged at it with the muzzle of his pressor pistol: better have a hole burned through the weapon than him. The vicious little star fragment came away, glowing on the tip of the rod-like barrel. He scraped it quickly off on the pavement. Through the central smoke cloud the gren had left, already breaking up into a sort of plant with many waving fronds, the two armored suits emerged. They were apparently unscathed by the blast.
But each was covered in a constellation of tiny, bright, smoke-bleeding stars....
One turned toward Kane. He rolled again. The bushy weed he had dived through, burst into orange flame and oily black smoke. He jumped up and darted between buildings. He heard a loud bang and the rumble of a concrete facade, beam blasted, collapsing into the street.
"Domi, run for it!" he shouted. He darted along the rear of the building he had sheltered behind, peered around the wall.
A rocket flashed along the street, obviously fired from a boxy launcher mounted on the shoulder of one of the power suits. It exploded beneath the open rear of the slaver's grav-sled. The heavy vehicle was tossed into the air, rolling over to the left. It went right over the head of a fleeing Domi, wreathed in smoke and dust, to smash a trio of storefronts alongside the street.
Kane's lips peeled back from his teeth in a grimace of fury and frustration. Domi darted behind the salvage floater where Brigid and the freed slaves sheltered. But another such missile would strip that protection away and leave the two women and the helpless captives totally exposed to the fearful firepower of the powered armor. Including Pine's brother, without whose gifts, Bug Mama assured them, they had less than no chance of stymieing Gilgamesh Bates. Kane dashed forward with his pressor-pistol held at full extension in both hands, fired a blast at the side of the head of the nearer suit, then another. Both sparkled into futility on the force shield.
"Come on, Grant," he muttered through clenched teeth, more to himself than his partner, whom he knew was straining the unfamiliar alien craft to do just that. He waved his arms and shouted.
"Hey! Over here, you big bastards! Whoa!" He fired again at the power suits simply to distract them.
Suddenly the farther suit stopped dead. Then it began to totter in a small circle. The other suit flung up its thick arms, throwing away some kind of squat blaster it gripped in a mitten-like metal gauntlet as it did so, and walked with choppy slow steps toward the buildings on the far side of the street.
Kane realized he could no longer see the little stars of phosphorus clinging to the outsides of the armored shells.
Instead, white smoke now poured out of dozens of tiny holes through the thick metal plate.
"Shit," he said. It was a tough way to go, even for such a pair of ruthless alien bastards.
A flurry of blue-green bolts slanting down from above struck the figure fleeing in slow motion from Kane. The armor shell split open like an egg struck with a hammer. Whatever was burning inside was vaporized or blasted apart by the energy bolts. A second burst shattered the other power suit and its occupant.
A shadow stole across Kane. He looked up. A silver disk twenty yards across floated no more than its diameter overhead, blotting the violet sky.
"If you're done screwing around down there, Kane," Grant's amplified voice boomed down like thunder, "gather up the captives and hustle your ass aboard! The bastards upstairs have noticed us. Our friends report that small craft are busting out of orbit and coming down to investigate."
Chapter 22
"My friends," Bates said, and such were Grand Council acoustics that he had the pleasure a hearing his voice, amplified, ringing out to the ranks of delegates from a hundred alien races gathered about him in the vast amphitheater without risk of feedback spoiling the effect. Which was fully as splendid as his most megalomaniac fantasies might have wished.
"My friends," he said again, though he knew the odds were pretty good that behind each and every alien visage, or equivalent, pulsed a burning desire to see him, Gilgamesh Bates, in Hell with his back broke, as his grandmother used so charmingly to express it, "I thank you for the trust you have chosen to repose in me.
"From this day forth begins a new era of peace and plenty! Not just for our Far Arm—for I know you are all much too noble and selfless to try to hoard the benefits of this new order for yourselves. But for the Milky Way galaxy as a whole. And who knows—tomorrow the universe itself might be brought under our benevolent sway!" That got them. The wave of exaltation washed over him. They may hate him; hate even worse the dire necessity that had led them to this pass: the hideous yet inescapable logic that they could trust him, an outsider, long before they could trust any one or any combination of their own factions or races or even individuals within their own species. To exercise ultimate power.
The prize was his.
And all that remained was to negotiate the protocols necessary to secure the source of that power: the universal doomsday device known to legend as the Cosmic Eye.
"THEY'RE ALL AROUND us!" Kane shouted, hauling back the rein bar of his outsized mount. "Ride for it! Ride like hell!" The raid on the grounded Paa longboat was ambitious. The coalition needed some means to reach orbit, to launch a smash-and-grab raid to get Kane into proximity with the man whom he and his companions had pursued for tens of thousands of light-years.
But they had ridden into the claws of a trap.
Death beams cracked from the gray granite boulders around them. Their mounts reared and screamed as ozone filled their sensitive wide-flared nostrils. Pebbles and sand, some molten and glowing yellow, flung up by near misses scourged their legs and flanks.
The small birdlike alien who had led them into this narrow defile in the mountains above the pocket valley where the grounded Circle of Life ship lay hidden might have been a prime suspect for treason. But even as Kane fought his frantic mount for control at least a trio of yellow beams from the surrounding boulders intersected on its slight hooded figure. A single screech of despair and agony escaped its scarlet beak. Or maybe just air heated to near-plasma venting from its flash-cooked lungs.
As it fell burning, the holographic sight above Kane's grav-handblaster flashed yellow. A figure like an erect lobster wearing a gray mane like a wig on its head, or at the least the top of its spindle-shaped torso, was highlighted in the act of firing its own two-handed blaster at the supine, flaming figure of the guide. The blaster bucked in Kane's hand. He was rewarded by the sight of the arthropod falling backward, green juice spurting from a punched-in carapace. Around him coalition raiders fell smoking from rearing mounts as sizzling or cracking energy beams blasted them. Kane's own mount bucked and screamed as a beam seared its shoulder. Fighting to control it, without any very good idea how, his eyes were drawn to a high point on a ridge overlooking the boulder-lined dry stream the raiding party had been following when the Paa warriors and their vassals hit them.
A solitary figure stood against the sky. There was no mistaking the silhouette of Thand, Pine's jilted suitor, on his mount, with the hood of his anti-detection robe thrown back. Kane thought he saw a glint of gold in his beard. Then Thand turned his mount and rode, down away out of sight of the massacre of his comrades.
Kane had the satisfaction of seeing two more crustacean Paa warriors go down to his shots from the back of the crow-hopping, rearing beast. Then he caught sight of a squat red creature that seemed to be mostly belly and mouth, perched on a boulder aiming a bell-mouthed blaster of some sort at him. As Kane spun to try to get a shot off first, the cavernous muzzle gouted golden coruscation. Kane shouted as what appeared to be a glowing gob of molten metal darted for his face. He fired, saw blood spurt from the squat entity, black in the arc-welder sunlight. The molten glow spun, expanding into a circular net of glowing golden filaments. Kane tried to avoid it by throwing himself backward over the saddle's high cantle and down his beast's slanting croup.
But it struck him, enfolded him, entangled him in sizzling discharges that filled his brain and nerves with yellow fire. Then darkness.
"LORD GILGAMESH." It was Chaufat himself, approaching Bates' high seat in the amphitheater. The Zuri noble, though high both by birth and military rank, seemed to em- brace subservience to Bates. Even though Bates had yet to be acclaimed dictator...a small matter of delivering on his promise of leading his new peoples to the Cosmic Eye. Around them fresh debate raged in a cacophony that mould have come close to deafening Bates had he not been able to surround his chair with a hush-field. The sound damper was instructed to pass oral communications addressed to him directly, and those only from parties he specified. Chaufat was among those so permitted to speak to him. I should have expected this, Bates thought wearily, not for the first time. They have agreed in principle to declare me dictator. Now they wrangle endlessly over protocols. He knew that he would have to indulge his subjects—for a while. It would give him time to perfect his plans.
Chaufat halted the ten feet away his culture demanded as a gesture of respect and bowed. "Forgive me this intrusion, I beg you, Lord."
It could only make Bates smile behind his beard. "By all means, good Chaufat. I know you would never dare do so without ample justification."
Chaufat practically wiggled at the implicit whip-crack. Authoritarians were so easy to manipulate; once you held the whip hand, it almost wasn't fun lording it over them. They craved submission so. Not like the damn totalitarians of the Circle of Life, who wanted to emote endlessly, whether before clamping down or caving in. And it was a bonus that he'd drawn the Zuri with their cavalier courtesy as dominant race of the Triangle, a position they had attained a scant ten thousand years ago. Hard-edged authoritarians, such as the twentieth-century military officers he'd spent so much time dealing with, were boring and officious. "The Paa report they have captured one of the humans you alerted as to be watchful for, from your very planet of origin. A male, if they can be believed." The translator software was to sophisticated that his skeptical intonations, that the archenemy Paa were to be trusted in anything, rang through clearly. "He is being brought to this battle-planetoid straightaway, as you have ordered." "Very good, Chaufat. Very good indeed. You have done well." Actually the Paa had done well. But Bates knew no authoritarian would dream of contradicting a superior who praised him. And frankly Bates would rather praise a good Zuri without cause than the most extravagant success from the Paa, who enjoyed everlasting pride of place on Gilgamesh Bates' list of enemies. Of all the many enemies he had made, and he had made a great many indeed, none had actually gone so far as to torture him before.
"I will interrogate the creature privately when he arrives." He looked around. Even with the sound damper up he could tell the thousand-voiced argument blasted on as cacophonously as ever. If he was any judge of these matters, they could play this out for years. Possibly millennia, while keeping up the space battle outside without interruption the while. These aliens took the long view.
He did not. When he judged they'd had enough fun, he'd give them the toe of his boot in the spot where it would do the most good.
"I will retire to my chambers to await the captive," he announced. "I need a rest anyway."
Chaufat touched the moist hp of his snout to the deck plating. "He shall be brought to you straightaway on arrival, Excellency."
Bates only hoped he'd have the self-discipline to wait until he caught some more of his old tormentors from Terra before exacting punishment. It would be so much more rewarding to have an audience, both to empathize with their comrade's pain and anticipate their own.
