Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 20
"Ah... no," Robison said. "You died. Were dead."
"But we resurrected you," Weaver said. "You didn't even have to wait the customary three days."
"Some great medical tech in this culture, anyway, even if the rest of it is kind of totally fucked," Reichert said. "Okay, I was dead kind of, ah, a long time," Kane said, frowning. "Doesn't that cause, you know, irreversible brain damage?"
"Well," Robison said, "yes."
"Usually," Reichert said. "But what you got percolating in your brain right now is your basic brew of busy little nanotech assemblers, who are reconnecting the broken connections in your neural circuits and repairing any organic damage, and in general, you know, keeping your brain from turning into mush."
The thought made Kane's skin creep. "I so don't want to know," he said.
"That's cool," Reichert said with a shrug.
"And out there?" Kane gestured toward the screens that mere making the interior of the bridge flash.
"Coalition moles, basically, have caused a major mutiny," Robison said. "Big chunk of the warships in nearby space have suddenly clumped into a wedge and are driving hard for the big round bastard back there. And we're stuck right here on ground zero."
"What about the big cosmic secret? Where is this thing, anyway?"
Robison shrugged. "We don't know."
"No need to know." Weaver said with a malicious grin. "Mushrooms," Hays pronounced.
"Kept in the dark..." Robison began.
"Fed only horseshit," Reichert finished.
"But the others—Svarri, Pine—shit, Baptiste!" Panic stabbed through Kane like an abrupt ice pick. "Where are they?"
"They busted loose about a minute before you turned up," Grant said, "from the far side of Sidra and headed the other way from all of this."
"Making a clean getaway while the diversion our hidden allies in the enemy camp created draws all eyes and other relevant sense organs," Robison said. "Not that it takes much to set this bunch off. They're worse than a libertarian chat room."
"But with bigger guns," Reicher said. "And they're a lot less worried about who they point 'em at."
Kane sat and tried to digest all the information. "So what do we do now?"
Team Phoenix passed a look around. "We're your basic wrecking crew, guy," Hays said, taking his eternal unlit cigar stub from the breast pocket of the grimy shipman's coveralls he still wore from his stint aboard the planetoid as a space-going scavvie. "We break things and kill people" "Then put everything back together," Weaver said, "given half a chance."
"But policy," Robison said, "is made above as in the chain of command."
"You're weaseling?"
Hays snapped to attention and saluted. "Affirmative, sir" "Grant?"
"I'm busy trying to dodge out from between a hammer the size of the barony of Spearfishville and an anvil as big as all outdoors. You're always the flight commander, remember? You point—I fly."
Slowly Kane nodded. "Way I see it," he said, trying to make sense of the great flaring sheets and blazes and lightning discharges rippling across the screen, "this amounts to your basic ambush situation for us, even if we're not the guests of honor. And when you get stuck in an ambush, there's only one thing to do—assault right down the throat."
"I knew you were going to say that," Larry Robison and Grant said in unison.
"What can I say?" Kane shrugged.
"Classic one-percenter?" Grant asked.
"Less, most likely," Kane said. "But it'll do for getting along with, as the Irish say." He tipped a forefinger of an eyebrow in the private gesture he and Grant had shared for so long.
"Then here goes nothing." The big man made mystic passes in the air with his hands. The deck seemed to tilt beneath them as the pseudo-grav produced an illusion of banking and accelerating—a pale shadow of the real maneuver, which would have left them all a thin pink paste on the bulkheads
"Right... down... the throat."
"Can I at least man a weapons turret?" Reichert asked, dark eyes agleam. "If I'm gonna die, at least I want to get to play Luke in the Millennium Falcon first."
"Kid," Kane said, half amused, half disgusted, "these aren't little bitty space fighters out there. They're dreadnoughts. The ones the length of a city block are the babies. Gnats. So if you want to man one of the popguns this space-borne trash can carries, or if you want to jerk the gherkin, knock yourself out. Either one's gonna come to about the same."
Chapter 26
Into the valley of death rode the intrepid six aboard their ignoble steed.
"Whoa!" Sean Reichert exclaimed, as right ahead of them the whole port side of a mile-long battlewagon shaped like a blunt-ended cigar suddenly erupted with yellow flames. But not fire, although little wisps of blue-and-orange fire did dance around the edges of the greater explosion, where some kind of combustibles combined energetically with the oxygen in the atmosphere being vented. Rather the flames were an outpouring of metal and synthetics and sophont flesh turned in an instant to incandescent gas and stripped ions. "Hold on," Grant murmured. And steered them straight into the erupting plasma inferno.
The AI-controlled artificial gravity only produced or allowed faint shadows of the violent g-forces of their maneuvering to be felt. But so extreme were Grant's maneuvers through all three axes that what little motion they felt made Kane's stomach do some rolls of its own. Or maybe it was the display. The way the exploding Leviathan seemed to swoop all around them: left, right, up, down, corkscrewing, as Grant strove to throw off any weapons systems trying to track them.
Throughout the oncoming fleet a thousand alarms shrilled and flashed and buzzed for the attention of bipeds and octopods; things with feathers, things covered in slime; tubs of living clay. A thousand sensor systems locked up the vessel accelerating straight toward the onrushing mutineer fleet. A thousand battle computers tentatively identified a firing pass. A thousand fingers and claws and remote-controlled waldoes tensed on firing contacts. Then everybody's battle software, running in quantum architectures at a speed to make the finest supercomputer Gil Bates had ever encountered seem like an elderly snail on Quaaludes, revised its conclusions. The intruder's trajectory did not match a firing pass on any specific ship of the rebelling fleet. Nor did neutrino detectors or probability sweeps show signs the small craft carried any weaponry capable of doing more than scratching the paint of a lesser auxiliary battle wagon.
At contact range.
Nor was the blocky salvage ship, unlovely by any esthetic canons of any of the many species now laying the hairy eyeball and whatnot upon its fleeing form, on any kind of kamikaze trajectory. Whoever was driving seemed lobe vying to avoid getting any closer than necessary to any of the approaching warships—while, insanely, plunging right through the midst of them.
What saved the Cerberus heroes and their chronically displaced allies in the end, though, was their complete and crushing insignificance.
Nobody wanted to waste the ergs blasting a microbe with thousands of the gigantic warships of the Council fleet protecting Gil Bates and his secret swarming to meet the attackers with blood in their eyes.
SOME GUNNERS SHOT at them anyway. There was always somebody who didn't get the word. And some people were just that way.
But the Rolling Stone had a secret, if not a very big or unexpected one: it was a smuggler's ship. Faster than it looked, it also sported one of the less alarming of the myriad forms of faster-than-light drives the ancient alien races of the Far Arm used.
That wasn't the secret. Nor was the popgun weaponry, which all such ships carried against the depredations of, frankly, other ships such as this one crewed by guys a lot like the Stone's usual bunch, who might think to spy the main chance. Sitting in the dorsal turret behind a pair of antimatter machine guns, while city-sized metal machines raved and gibbered and puked and generally acted out with quantities of energy like all of the Nukecaust in each and every dazzling flash, Reichert had to admit that his blasters felt every hit as wimpily irrelevant as Kane predicted. But as a smuggling ship and blockade runner, the tubby bitch had an absolutely wizard sensor and ECM suite. And, of course, she had master pilot Grant at the hoists.
"MAJESTY." THE MESSENGER prostrated itself on its fleshy pallid abdomen before its huge and terrible ruler in her hexagon honeycomb of gleaming alloy.
"What news, drone?" the queen asked. Such creatures were not graced with names. It was especially so with tech drones of the higher-skill categories, who had a fatal tendency to get above themselves, believing that their skills and knowledge made them somehow special. As tendencies went, it was, when manifested, literally fatal. "Do we defeat the traitors and heretics who dare try to steal away the secret of the Eye?"
"I bring no news of the battle, Great Mother," the creature buzzed and popped. "Of course the great race shall be victorious imminently. Rather, I bring word of a communication."
"Delay no longer, wretch, or writhe long on the pain racks, stung with the venom of a hundred correctors!" she hissed. Perhaps I should have gone to them directly with that vile space rat Bates, she thought. Of course, he was unlikely to have survived, puny and soft as he is. But we'd have spared ourselves all this....
She took stern control of her thoughts. No—the race was fated to seize possession of the final secret, and absorb the Far Arm, the galaxy and the universe as a whole, until all was brought into full harmony with the Circle of Life. Subsumed within the genes and intellect and very flesh of the Paa, of course. The only race truly capable, or worthy, of sapience. For the time being she had to indulge the charade going on within the battle planetoid, which still hung near her own flagship in space. But she knew the truth.
The drone writhed on the floor mats in such a delicious ecstasy of terror and mental agony. It exuded fear pheromones in such quantities that they oozed down its heaving flanks to puddle on the dark synthetic mat and filled the queen's scent receptors with such delicious perfume that she decided to forgo subjecting it to neuro-chemical torture. A sign of softness, she knew.
"It is a communication from one of the ships that has fled the Sidra system," it said. "They lifted off from the planet, spacing from its far side, when the attack on the battle planetoid began."
"What are you saying?" the queen both roared and hissed. Her vestigial wings rattled on her any back. "The attack is apparently a diversion, 0 Mother of the Universe," said the tech, sweating rivers of shiny, reeking exudate now. "The escaping fleet consists of members of the renegade Coalition of Nonaligned Races, who, our communicant believes, have come into possession of the secret of the location of the Cosmic Eye."
So great was the eruption of rage and fear pheromones from the queen's huge body that the silver-shelled immortals who flanked her throne cell instantly lowered their fire lances and pierced the tech-drone's body with eye-hurting spears of energy. Its puffy abdomen exploded in a cloud of flash-heated steam and scalding bodily juices.
Sensitive membranes stung by the energy discharges, her oculars dancing with painful afterimages, the queen squalled in greater rage still. From the fur of her thorax beneath either wing snapped long multi-jointed arms, tipped with pincers like shears. These snipped the heads off the shiny torpedo-torsos of the two bodyguards standing nearest her, who had fired their weapons to reduce the tech into a pile of steaming, smoking, stinking organic refuse in the midst of her throne room. Green ichor gouted once from each body. Then both toppled, their various limbs twitching. Small furred servitor-beings, her own daughters, although scarcely sapient, scuttled from nests within the hexagonal cells to remove the corpses and begin sopping up the mess. A fresh pair of the immortals stationed around the throne compartment shifted to stand flanking the mass of the queen, now quivering with a complex of emotions. So great was the queen's agitation that she deigned to call upon the flagship's communications AI herself instead of waiting for an underling to do it. All her body servants who were more intelligent than mere animals had darted to comparative, if temporary, safety in the great metal honeycomb. "Tell the grand fleet," she ordered her ship mind, "to break off this futile charade! Tune sensors to maximum sensitivity! The renegades must not be allowed to beat us to the holy Eye!
"And subject yourself to twenty microseconds of pain-analogue stimulation," she added, to make herself feel better. "Twenty microseconds?" The artificial voice seemed to quaver.
"Thirty! Now do as I command, or I shall teach you the true meaning of the word suffering!"
"It shall be done, Queen of All Life," the ship replied.
"MY FRIENDS." Translated into myriad languages, Gilgamesh Bates' words echoed up the terraces of the great metal dome. Minus the irony he felt, of course—he had naturally learned to command his personal-translation software to suppress that when he desired. "We, the responsible and caring sophonts of the Far Arm. face tonight, together, the greatest challenge in the history of all our races." And now, Gilgamesh Bates thought as he stood in the focal point of the battle planetoid's immense amphitheater, now we tell these monsters how the cow ate the cabbage. The population of a small pre-nukecaust North American city had gathered in the station over the past few days.
Now pretty much all—from so many different species Bates had long since given up trying to keep track—were assembled in the ranks of metal boxes, some containing and maintaining pretty divergent microenvironments, though the vast majority of beings here assembled were oxygen breathers. Or at least did not find oxygen environments too toxic in brief doses.
Inside he seethed with fury. He didn't know whom he was more pissed off at, his incompetent allies, who thought themselves fit to rule the universe but couldn't keep track of a handful of bandits and backwoods savages. Or those savages themselves, his fellow humans from far-off Earth, which he had now decided he would see one last time, from orbit, before having it blown to an asteroid belt.
They're like cockroaches, he thought, Kane and Grant and those idiot ex-employees of mine. You can't kill them, and they won't go away.
Except they had—and all indications were, they had somehow, impossibly, stolen the secret of the location of the Cosmic Eye.
From him.
A tumult of a lot more noises than Bates was sure he could name nested down as he spread his hands in a gesture commanding silence. He had quickly taught his hearers to respect his gestures. There was an advantage to having enthusiastic authoritarians as his greatest allies. They could be counted on to punish slow learners enthusiastically and rapidly—even as Bates plied his expertise at manipulation to marginalize the offenders getting chastised, and so strengthen the loyalty of the others. "As you may know by now," he declared, "the secret of the location of the great and terrible artifact known as the Cosmic Eye has been stolen."
That brought a hush like the vacuum of deep space to the whole enormous hall, for the first time since Bates had set foot inside it.
"Stolen, I say—" he allowed his voice to rise and ring with outrage that was not at all contrived "—by bandit renegades and terrorists. Some who tracked me from my own home world in the distant Orion Arm with the very purpose of stealing that ultimate secret for their own evil, antisocial, chaotic ends."
He turned, holding his arms outstretched as if to embrace every creepy, crawly, fuzzy, chitinous one of his listeners. "My friends, our holy community of life, our sacred principle of order, are threatened now as never before."But this I promise you. The forces of individualism, of mere anarchy, will not prevail. I lead you now in a holy crusade, uniting all the races of the Far Arm, in the last and greatest battle of all time—the final confrontation of good and evil. And I lead you to a victory that shall endure forevermore!"
The amphitheater erupted in thunderous noise. The battle planetoid's AI clamped a damper field around him to prevent his fragile tissues from damage by a volume of noise like a hundred jet engines arrayed around him, not to mention the effects of certain unusual high-frequency harmonics, including enough microwaves to fry him to a cinder where he stood. Indeed he saw a couple of gushes of juice and organic goo from boxes occupied by delegates whose own micro-environmental controls were insufficient to similarly protect them.
Meanwhile his translation routine repeated mindlessly to him in the soft-voice monotone it used to convey concepts that weren't literally translatable: "Wild applause...wild applause...wild applause...wild applause..."
And then from the enthusiastic and perilous din arouse a single strain of chanting: "Lead us! Lead us! Lead us!" Bless my Zuri friends, he thought. I didn't even need to prep them—they're natural shills. And their vassal races and allies, of course, whom the evolved pack predators' abrupt ways with discipline, had long taught them on which side their bread was buttered.
The chant was taken up, and Bates saw that the Circle of Life delegates had taken up the chant more lustily than any, as if to drown their Triangle rivals and so co-opt the idea.
The idea that the alliance of great races, of factions that had fought as bitter rivals for hundreds of millennia, should be united and led by one...lowly...space rat.
It took all his iron will to keep himself standing upright. Hell, he thought, from dissolving into a mass of undifferentiated protoplasm.
Because he had had the absolute whip hand—and lost it. There was no reason for these monstrous beings, the weakest of whom commanded power to blot Earth and its reborn alien overlords from the cosmos as casually as wiping their sphincters, to leave him alive. His great bargaining chip was lost beyond hope of recovery.
But in the greatest act of salesmanship in his entire life, he had convinced this collection of monsters that not only should he be allowed to live, but he had to continue to ride over them all. That he and only he could recoup what could still win for them ultimate power.
There remained to him but one sublime sacrifice—and risk.
"I thank you, my friends," he said, once more raising hands above his head and bringing them down as if calling creation into being. "And now I will share with you, the representatives of all life and the stewards of order, the secret our enemies have stolen, that the evil individualists may not hoard it for their own selfish ends."
