Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 8
"Time to rock," he said.
THE BUZZ BEGAN low in volume but already painful, like a mosquito whine near your ear. It soared quickly to an eye-watering crescendo and culminated in something like a cross between a squib going off and a shrill, ear-tearing ringing. It reverberated inside Kane's skull long after the actual noise had ceased.
Larry Robison nodded at Kane's scrunched-up expression. "That's how the spuds avoid damaging their home's integrity," he said. "Sonic weapons."
"We don't know what they do if they hit you," Major Mike called from across the passageway. "Fortunately the swoopy little bastards are terrible shots."
"Hard to hit, too," Sean Reichert muttered.
He jackknifed and made a sound like a cat coughing up a hairball. "You shot?" Domi asked from behind Grant, who sheltered behind a flange-like projection that was probably a structural support closer to the end of the arm—and the gateway—than the one Kane was behind.
"Space sick," Robison called back.
"Shit," Grant said. His cheeks had taken on a greenish tint. "All we need is that crap floating over and getting all over us." Kane risked a three-second look around the stanchion. Several bodies floated at various stages down the passage-way, which was a circular tunnel a good ten feet across, sectioned by almost equally large hatches. Apparently, reasonably large objects were intended to move through the gateway; its door had been pretty outsized, too, now that he remembered. He hadn't exactly been noticing such details consciously at first, being first preoccupied with the effects of the jump, and absorbing the tactical situation as relayed by Marina.
At least seven bodies, or parts of them, floated in the passageway. Four of them were mostly blackened and burst, the signature of plasma pulses.
"How'd you manage to blast both legs off them?" Grant wanted to know.
"I didn't," Hays said. "Wait one."
A figure zipped from an open hatch near the far end of the passage. From the waist up it was a normal, if smallish man, with close-cropped graying hair. It fired some kind of blaster at them. The flange in front of Kane rang as if struck with a hammer. His cheeks stung as if sprayed by fine grit, the hair rose at his nape, his teeth vibrated as if being drilled. He and Grant both snapped shots after it, which dug little divots out of the bulkhead at the passage's far end. Clean misses.
"No legs?" Domi demanded. "They all amputees up here?"
"We think they grew that way," Weaver said. "Apparently they don't have much use for legs," Robison said "They use some kind of little jets worn around the waist. Electrostatic air impellers, most likely."
"How does their blood circulate, without the great muscles of the legs to help the heart?" Brigid asked.
"Pretty freely, from the way they splash when they're hit," Robison said, provoking a fresh round of retching from Reichert. "But remember, their tickers don't have to fight a nasty one `G’ to push the blood through their little arteries."
"Some of them have legs," Kane said. Four in fact— all men clad in skintight uniforms of a blue so dark as to seem near-black, and looking normal enough. Except for the dull gray metal skullcap each wore on his shaved head. "Bates' mercs." Hays said.
"More freezies?" Domi asked.
"Not hardly." The young man said.
Kane grinned as he suddenly realized why Team Phoenix had called them spuds.
A spud leaned out a hatch and popped another sonic blast at them. This one buzzed down the corridor and made a nasty clang on the bulkhead behind them.
The Phoenix members laughed, even Reichert, who had mostly recovered from his fit and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He had had self-control enough to puke toward the curved bulkhead, which resulted in most of it sticking in a nasty wad instead of floating around in gobbets waiting to get in everybody's hair, like exceptionally vile flies.
They knew at least one more team of handpicked special operators had been recruited by Bates and put into suspended animation pre-skydark, as they had been. The new quartet had made an attempt to assassinate Kane and Grant and gotten wiped out some months before. "Basic outlander stonehearts he hired somewhere."
Another spud launched himself side to side, screaming and blasting furiously with sonic blasters held in both hands. Kane jerked back and held his hands over his ears. The beams themselves made only a slight, strange hum, but when they struck metal, the noise they made caused his skin not just to crawl, but to try and crawl away.
He saw a ruby flash. The terrible clangor stopped. He risked a quick look and saw the spud, still driven by its jets, bounce off the far bulkhead to join the other bodies floating in air. He had a dark spot just above his wide-open staring eyes, and his head, shorn close like Domi's, had a weird kind of distorted look to it.
"Good shot, Iron Man," Reichert called.
The erstwhile machinist did not look triumphant. Rather his face was set in what looked to Kane like disgust. He shrugged.
"These people are defending their homes from invaders," he said. "I don't feel real good about killing them."
"You rather it was you?" Grant asked.
Weaver's cheeks rode up in a cheerless grin, turning his strange slanted pale green-blue eyes into slits. "If it's them or us," he said, "I pick us. Obviously. But I think it's time to try negotiating again."
Grant looked to Kane, who shrugged. "I'm not much happier about it than he is, come to mention it. Besides, talking's always better than shooting. Less chance of getting shot back."
"Amen, brother," Hays said. "Your play."
Kane stuck his head back out. He kept well clear of the flange he sheltered behind: he was considerably more leery, at this point, of suffering the side effects of a near miss than actually getting hit.
"Hey, you people," he called. "Let's knock this off! We didn't come here to hurt you. We don't mean any harm. We're looking for Bates."
A flurry of shots fired blind made the stanchion Grant hid behind screech. Grant cursed.
"Bates was a false one," a voice called back in English. The accent was peculiar. It sounded a bit like the twentieth- century American English Team Phoenix used. The voice was pitched high; Kane couldn't tell whether it belonged to a man or a woman. "If you seek him, you can go to hell!"
"That's where we want to send him!" Larry Robison called.
A pause. "You claim you come in peace. Why did you kill us?"
"You shot at us, remember?" Hays said.
"Bates' evil ones shot at you."
"Well, you did, too."
"You invaded our home!"
Hays looked at Kane and shrugged. "I don't think logic's playing out real well here."
"We just want Bates," Robison called.
"He has gone!"
"Damn," Grant mouthed. It wasn't really a surprise. Still, Kane felt a sudden hollowness yawn in his own belly. The size of the universe, it felt like...for now.
"Then all we want to do is find out where he went and go after him," Robison called. "We apologize for invading your home. We apologize for killing your people. We'll pay any restitution you ask."
"You sure that's a good idea?" Kane hissed.
"Hush," Brigid said. "He's right."
"Mebbe we can jump 'em fresh food from Cerberus," Domi said. "Lakesh'll work it out. He always leaves as holding the bag. His turn!"
An indecipherable murmur floated down the hall. The surviving spuds were discussing their options.
"If we have to," Hays's voice came over the net as he subvocalized, "we can use stun grenades. Rush 'em, try to overpower them before they recover."
"These probably aren't the only defenders," Kane pointed out, likewise subvocalizing so the station inhabitants could not overhear no matter how keen their ears. "If we have to fight, we might have to clear this whole huge place compartment by compartment."
"We will fight no more," the voice called down the tunnel. "But you must prove yourselves worthy."
Driven by their impeller helm, a half-dozen spuds suddenly swarmed out of compartments all around the passageway. Fingers tightened on firing contacts despite the promise of no further combat. But as quick as hummingbirds the legless humans vanished through the far hatchway. "Looks like they're good as their word," Robison said.
"So far," Kane said. He pulled himself out from behind his stanchion and pushed off to propel himself like an arrow down the tunnel.
"Hey!" Reichert shouted, and launched himself in pursuit. "That's Kane," Grant said. "Always the point man." The others followed. Marina stayed back in the compartment near the jump chamber. Kane wished Brigid and Domi would prove so accommodating about staying behind out of danger. If they just weren't so damn handy in a shooting scrape...
He pushed off the body of one of Bates' mercenaries that drifted into his path. As he reached the passageway's end, a blast panel slammed across it with a bang that seemingly made the entire satellite ring about them.
Chapter 10
Kane jerked back an outstretched hand. Had he gotten any closer, he would have lost fingers, if not his whole hand. Instead he collided with the alloy armor panel.
'That's gotta hurt," Sean Reichert said from right behind. He rotated deftly to land feet first on the panel, flexing his legs to absorb his momentum. Microgravity seemed to disagree violently with his stomach, but the rest of him seemed to get along with it just fine.
Kane said, "Shut up—"
A voice blared from an intercom panel set in the curved wall of the tunnel. "Intruders! You may be the strangers from the stars for whom this station was set to watch, long ago! If you do not speak the proper word of power, this station will destroy itself!"
While loud and forceful, the words lacked inflection, as if synthesized. "What kind of astronomical observatory has a self-destruct sequence?" Reichert demanded. "How screwed-up is that?"
"About typical for the late twentieth century, I'd say," Hays said, pulling himself to a stop by a stanchion one shy of the blast partition. The others braked themselves around him, all somewhat more gracefully than Kane had done. "Do you think they mean it?" Robison asked.
"They mean it," Kane said grimly. He hovered by the panel rubbing a bruised cheek and feeling around his teeth with his tongue. None seemed missing or seriously busted, although he tasted the coppery tang of blood. "Lot of these groups survived after Nukecaust, technicians or guards at various secure facilities. Because they tended to be pretty much fortress-like, with provisions stored up against emergencies, and located in remote locations, they were pretty well set up to survive even through skydark. And over time a lot of them sorta degenerated, became cults.
"Okay," Kane continued. "All this is real interesting, but none of it is keeping as from being blown up. How the hell do we figure out this word of power they want? Or should we just pull back to the gateway and jump back to Cerberus?" "Wouldn't that just be putting off getting blown up, until Bates pushes the button on the whole universe?" Reichert asked.
"Maybe he'll get his way," Hays said, "and get to run the universe. Or at least the galaxy."
"If there was anything that'd make having the whole universe blow up around us look attractive..." Robison said.
"I know," Brigid said. She kicked off a stanchion and floated forward.
"What was that, Baptiste?" Kane said as she floated determinedly past him.
She put out a hand to the bulkhead beneath the intercom and used her arm as a shock absorber to stop. "I know," she said. "I know the word of power."
"Are you sure?" Hays said. "Whatever's talking to us sounds like just the sort to yank the lanyard if they get a fake password."
"If Baptiste says she knows, she knows," Kane said with a hard edge to his voice. He looked to Brigid. "Don't you?"
She pressed the transmit button. "Taliesin," she said. After a long pause a thud sounded through the arm of the station. Kane felt it through the metal of the hull. Reichert jumped away from the stanchion he'd been hugging as if it had gone white-hot. "Damn!" he yelped as he tumbled into a position inverted in relation to the others. Hanging on to another stanchion, Domi reached out and reeled him in by an ankle as he flailed.
More solid-impact-like sounds echoed through the cylindrical passageway. Then a sliding sound.
The armored door panel ground aside. A figure floated just within: a spud, apparently male, with a bald head and bloated gray-green features. His arms were long and seemed wiry-powerful. His legs were no more than scarcely-perceptible round bumps in the gray trunks that, with his belt and a sort of T-shirt, were his only garments. "I am Teal," he said. "You are the long awaited. Welcome to Starwatch Point."
"HOW CAN THESE BE the long awaited," the female spud who floated nearest behind Teal asked, "when a long awaited has already come'?"
Kane thought he recognized her voice as the one that had negotiated with them before the blast door closed. Behind in a large passageway crisscrossed by cables of some sort, apparently part of the huge round hub, hovered twenty or more of the legless humans. Teal had led them here down a short passageway after greeting them.
“They are not necessarily the long awaited, Carmine," Teal said firmly. "The legends said that there might come one, or few, or many, in the fullness of time."
The allies from Earth faced the inhabitants of Starwatch Station in what was apparently a commissary in the greater hub structure. Marina had joined them. Once it became clear hostilities were suspended, Domi and Marina had brought the packs from the gateway compartment. It hadn't required heavy lifting—more like herding.
"Place is huge," Reichert said out the side of his mouth. He understated, if anything: as near as Kane could reckon, the hub had to be minimum thirty yards across, the six arms radiating from it, like the legs of a child's jack, a hundred yards or more in length and fifteen wide. "Not much problem with building materials," he answered the same way, "once they got a gateway out here."
"Shh!" Brigid dug an elbow sharply into his ribs. His shadow suit did way less than it should have to take the sting out of it. He floated away, grabbed by reflex at one of the cables that webbed the compartment interior, discovered it was flexible, like the bungee cords they had used to secure their backpacks.
"They said the word," said an ancient spud. Or at least it looked ancient to Kane's eyes, from the wrinkling and liver-spotting and hair loss. Then again, as far as he knew, the thing might be twenty years old and suffering radiation exposure of some kind. He wasn't even sure what sex it was; all these creatures had high-pitched voices, male and female, bulgy upper torsos and wisps of sparse, almost colorless hair. The only way he knew any of them were female, really, was that there were little floaters who had to be kids, football-sized beings yoked to parents with bungees. They called themselves the Watchers.
"But are they not the evil ones the first chosen warned as against?" asked another.
"What was he if not an evil one himself despite possession of the word of power?" asked another. "The ones he set over us were surely evil."
That produced a rippling rumble of assent. Followed by vociferous argument.
"Whatever Bates did," Grant said aloud to his companions, since they found themselves suddenly ignored by their hosts, "his shave-headed imported blasters didn't exactly endear themselves."
"Given that the spuds are armed," Kane said, "I wonder why they didn't just rise up against 'em?"
"We've seen similar patterns of behavior elsewhere, Kane," Brigid said. "When isolated groups of technicians become in effect self-sustaining sects, they are often so bound by what they regard as ancient prophecy they cannot bring themselves to act in a way that might run counter to it." A debate was rattling on crisply as a firefight. The spuds weren't so awestruck by ancient prophecies as not to have pretty firm opinions about their true meanings, not to be noticeably tongue-tied about expressing them. Kane's attention quickly drifted. The spuds had admitted them, and perhaps most important, downed weapons. With an old door-busting Mag's eye for the bottom line, Kane reckoned that meant that the side that won the debate would be ultimately, the one the Cerberus bunch and Team Phoenix backed.
"What's with these people anyway?" he asked Brigid, floating over toward where she hung by one wall and grabbing one of the bungees strung here and there to serve as handholds. "They tousles?"
She glared at him a moment, then shrugged, obviously coming to conclusions similar to those Kane had reached concerning the argument in progress. She shook her head. "Just adapted to microgravity."
"But, damn," Grant said, likewise drifting over, "they barely got legs."
"Even among astronauts raised on Earth there was substantial lower-body muscular atrophy when protracted periods were spent in orbit," Brigid said. "Also, it's likely a certain amount of load-bearing and repeated impact is necessary to stimulate bone growth in the young, as it is to cause bones to continue to replenish themselves and retain mass among terrestrial adults. The other characteristics, such as the bloated features and upper bodies, result from a migration of body fluids upwards—also characteristic of long stays in orbit."
"Hope we don't stay here long," Reichert said, joining them. His olive complexion still held a distinct green tinge. He shook his head. "Damn, I hate to say that. All my life I wanted to go to space. Now I'm here, and I can't wait to feel gravity again."
"I don't think it's catching," Hays said. "I suspect they may have been genetically monkeyed with at some point." "Not the first time that kind of thing happened," Grant grumbled.
"Look on the bright side, kid," Kane said. "We didn't come here to take up residence. We'll be moving on soon. One way or another."
