“Regrettably,” Hillik observed soulfully, “the vessel proved inadequate to what was required of it in the end. But you will come to understand all of these complicated matters much better, I assure you, dear.” Her tone was one of exaggerated patience. “And we shall assist you to understand, by having you converted to one of our own number, through a process very similar to Oplyte conversion.”
“What?” A horrible chill went through her body.
“Perhaps you have wondered, as many have, why no female Oplytes are ever produced,” Saraber chuckled. “For a very simple reason, really. You see, the Aggregate requires only five Overmoms. Did your girlhood biological studies not also tell you about queen bees? What would we do with a billion or two more?”
Pateesh shook her head. “And yet our metaphorical blood grows thin, and we feel a need, for the first time in our long and glorious history, to bring outside knowledge and insights into our circle. We had wished to convert your Ceo Lia in this manner, but she proved too old, too stubborn, too set in her ways. The device we had implanted in her by an agent died, rather than alter her. In fact, we doubt the woman was ever even aware that the attempt was made.”
“You, upon the other hand,” observed Hillik, “are young, malleable, and here, where your conversion can be repeated until it is successful. As an historical and societal analyst, you will make a most welcome contribution. Too long have we been limited to just this single, miserable handful of stars. Now it is time to go back where we belong, to deal once and for all with the Coordinated Arm and extend the benefit of our tender, loving care to an entire galaxy.”
That was twice these creatures had mentioned this Coordinated Arm thing. Perhaps they were enemies with whom Loreanna’s side in this struggle could ally themselves. For the sake of this vital new information alone, she must escape.
“A place for everyone,” Janareen piped up cheerily, “and everyone in his place!”
“Take her away, now, Natalie,” Hillik ordered the girl holding Loreanna’s leads. “We have plans to make before her conversion, which I will personally supervise.”
Under the disminded gaze of an Oplyte warrior that went with them, she was led away. No sooner had she been removed, when Woulf spoke out in protest.
“You lied to her about my having taken her aboard that sixteen-gunner! At your specific instruction, I never touched her that way! But I was promised the use of her once she was here! And now you say you’ll make her one of you?”
Hillik smiled sweetly. “Would that be so terrible, Woulfie? Never mind, dear, you needn’t answer. We know what we look like. All excepting for poor Janareen, I suspect, who cherishes her illusions. I will simply warn you to regard Loreanna’s loss as a punishment, for your cretinous fumbling with the daughter.”
Woulf was stunned. He resheathed his knife and began disassembling his sharpener for storage. “You mean for letting her die? You wanted to convert her?”
“What an intriguing thought. What sort of Overmom would Henry Martyn’s daughter have made? No, for letting her live, you fool, for letting her live!”
PART SIX:
HENRY MARTYN’S DAUGHTER
YEARDAY 131, 3027 A.D.
JULLE 50, 519 HANOVERIAN
DECIMUS 10, 1596 OLDSKYAN
A TRISKEL IN THE TOWER SO HIGH
UNTO THE BEAUTY DID SAY,
“NOW WHAT IS THE MATTER, MY PRETTY MISTRESS,
THAT YOU’RE TRAVELING BEFORE IT IS DAY?”
“NO TALES, NO TALES, LITTLE TRISKEL,” SHE SAID,
“NO TALES, NO TALES,” SAID SHE,
“YOUR CAGE WILL BE MADE OF GLITTERING GOLD,
AND YOUR PERCH OF IVORY.”
“NO TALES, NO TALES,” VOWED THE LITTLE TRISKEL,
“NO TALES, NO TALES,” VOWED HE,
“MY CAGE WILL BE MADE OF GLITTERING GOLD,
AND BE HUNG ON A MARSHBERRY TREE.”
CHAPTER XXXVI:
THE LAMINA
Out of the silent depths of the Abyss they came, the raiders the Alliance had been warned of, spreading terror, destruction, and death in their gory wake.
Their first hint was a change in the colors of the §-field that protected the asteroid’s surface, retaining atmosphere, moisture, and warmth in order to grow the staple crops required by the Aggregate as a whole for food, fuel, and industrial applications. The contrasting blush they normally associated with a visit from one of the regular steam-propelled freight shuttles did not come according to schedule. And as it swelled, deepening in hue, his people became afraid.
Alliance Leader Shoomer Zero Nine had been apprehensive for many weeks, himself, fearful that his own time would come, as it had recently to so many others he knew, and that, like them, he would be utterly helpless to prevent it. Neither the Fifteenth Locality to which he was required to report daily, nor the Aggregate above it, would grant him any additional Oplyte troops with which to defend the asteroid he administered. All he could do in advance was order his Burrow Mayors to hurl the unarmed bodies of their underlings against the savage horde, as if drowning them in a torrent of blood were an effective tactic.
Now the dreaded day had arrived; people in the street below were already screaming. Through the window of his office, located considerably nearer the surface than he now felt prudent, he watched agape as the enemy vanguard broke through the useless §-field—why were they not killed by it?—and knew his doom. The marauders were exactly as the recent telebriefing had described: a young human female figure, astride a monster straight out of his most lavish nightmares, bearing a heavy and illegal assault force projector upon each arm, brandishing yet another weapon nobody recognized. Behind her rode a horde of similarly mounted individuals, each of them hideously alien, no two of them alike.
They all screamed insanely as they attacked, scattering his peasants this way and that in blind, incontinent panic. To add to their cacophony, they had brought with them horrifying sonic contrivances—consisting of an armful of tubes and a plaid cloth bag—which, judging from their output and the effect it had upon the fleeing populace, ought to have been classed as weaponry and outlawed.
Some of his own folk fought back, fearing worse punishment did they not. No fewer than a thousand of his farmers died in the first five minutes as they raised their tilling implements in a hopeless defense against the murderous onslaught. The dozen Oplytes assigned to him died, too, half of them without getting in a solitary thrust. Under the protection of their fellow pillagers, the intruders stripped his soldiers of their weapons before moving on, arming another dozen of themselves. Wherever his people surrendered and threw their empty hands into the air, they were spared and ignored. Wherever they offered the least resistance, the bandits reaped them like their own wheat at harvest time.
Alliance Leader Shoomer Zero Nine enjoyed thinking of himself as a smooth man, a sleek fellow, clean-shaven, impeccably groomed, with the short, glossy hair of a sea mammal. He felt his outward appearance to be a manifestation of his inner philosophy. As he watched the slaughter through his office window—fist-thick safety glass installed against the chance of a decompression due to §-field failure—he had the beginnings of an idea. He had already sent a distress call to the Locality. He also knew from the experience of others—his dead friend Bonyor Ten came to mind—that help invariably arrived too late.
He would venture outside—once the sound and fury had abated a trifle—under a white flag of armistice, and treat with these savages, himself. He would promise them anything, until help arrived and they were wiped out to the last man and monster. The young girl he would claim for himself—willing or not, she would bear him many offspring, as no peasant female of the Aggregate had so far proven capable of doing—as a reward for his most conspicuous and exemplary courage. After all, he might easily have stayed here in his heavily fortified office until they found whatever they were looking for, took it, and departed.
Alliance Leader Shoomer Zero Nine had just turned to depress the one and only bu
tton upon his otherwise extremely tidy and uncluttered desk, summoning his body servant of the day for a change of habiliment that would be suitable to this very historic—and potentially career-advancing—occasion, when his office door suddenly exploded inward. He was thrown to the carpeted floor and showered with reams of paper from the ruptured filing cabinets beside the door.
Picking himself up from behind the desk, he spat blood from a deeply cut lip. It streamed off his chin, ruining his suit. Despite the ringing in his ears, he heard the clatter of one of his teeth hitting the floor, and cursed. Through flames and billowing smoke strode the very girl he had been thinking of.
“Who are you?” he demanded imperiously.
“Bretta Martyn,” she replied, her tone disarmingly pleasant.
“What is the meaning—” he began, but was curtly interrupted.
“None but what we make ourselves,” she answered, elevating her odd weapon and pointing it at him. In spite of the desperate pitched battle she had been fighting, she had long, clean legs, exposed by ravel-edged shorts of a coarse workman’s fabric, and a slender waist. The vest, which was all she wore above it, seemed to be made of animal skin, molding itself to her ripened contours as she breathed. “It’s too late for you, bureaucrat—try again in your next life!”
The last thing Alliance Leader Shoomer Zero Nine saw—without knowing what it was—was the stainless quarrel she released from her crossbow. It penetrated his left eye, then his brain, and pinned him to the wall behind his desk, where he danced for just a moment like a marionette, and then dangled, motionless.
Outside upon the surface once again, having withdrawn her shaft and wiped the blood off upon the dead administrator’s fancy clothing, Bretta blew the nickel-plated whistle hanging upon a thong about her neck, three shorts and a long, indicating to Tarrant and his people—her people as well, now—that this location had been sufficiently “pacified” that they could pull back to a preselected spot for a breather before gathering up their booty and returning home. There was a most specific list of items they wanted that they knew were here. In most instances, thanks to the continuous monitoring of all Aggregate communications Bretta had initiated, they even knew in what shed or burrow to look.
Her sentries were already where they were supposed to be, here upon the asteroid, patrolling in the nearby Deep, alert for any contingency. But with a dozen raids like this under her belt now, she knew from experience—without succumbing to any deadly complacency—that reinforcements from the Locality could not arrive for a considerable interval, and when they did, they would take the form of a solitary sloop, hopelessly undergunned for what it faced in her. Not that she had any use for a ship, yet. That might come later, and it might not. But would her father not be surprised—and pleased beyond words, she thought—if she returned to him commanding a captured vessel of her very own?
As far as her victims were concerned, that was the trouble with being a part of a collective, was it not? It certainly put the lie to the concept of strength in numbers. Nobody in a hierarchy cared about individuals—leaders always reckoned there were plenty more of them to go around—nor even, it appeared after a dozen raids, about individual asteroid cities such as this one.
“Well, there’s the final specimen, Princess!” Tarrant tossed a military thrustible at Bretta’s feet, where she squatted in the cool shade of a self-conscious replica of a peasant village fountain. “There’s nobody left among our party sizable enough to strap this fellow on without the usual ‘smithing job.’ ” With his free hand he pointed toward the similar weapon attached to his own tiny forearm. Still clad in its official gray-green Oplyte coloration, it looked absurdly short, but it was no less deadly than those that had remained unaltered.
Not many measures away, her people, understandably eager to get away from this asteroid and unwilling—or too keyed up—to rest, began hauling their loot out of the buildings and tunnels, to be packed carefully in the central square. The little man sat down beside her in the dust, crossing his spindly legs and squinting up at her. Flies buzzed about his face, and the sun was in his eyes. “You know, Princess, there are some even upon our own side as might say that you were a trifle harsh with the mayor, here, or whatever he was.” He laid a hand over his left eye. “Whoo—gives me chills just thinking about it!”
“Alliance Leader, Hanebuth, as you know perfectly well. Pray do not try cajoling me, my friend. The truth is that we are at war. That slug in there was a working part of a ‘civilization’ that has captured and enslaved billions over the centuries, and murdered billions more. By his own choice—did you see his clothes?—he was a beneficiary of the system that raped me, beat me half to death, and left me for a corpse. See what he and his did to you and your friends! And yet I let him die quickly. Perhaps I should not have done.”
Looking at the ground, Tarrant slowly shook his head and toyed idly with the spare thrustible. “So we’re at war now, is it? I had believed we were preparing to escape. You can’t kill them all, Princess darling, more’s the pity.”
“I can if that is what it takes.” She grinned at him and hoped (in vain, as it happened) that it was not a pretty sight. “I can do anything, I know now, if that is what it takes.” Bretta thought back to all the endless, often painful, always uncomfortable weeks she had spent sweating helplessly in her body cast, healing, remembering. And more weeks, learning to walk all over again.
The asteroids that had provided Bretta with a badly needed refuge at the same time concealed the ultimate stronghold of the Aggregate—known to the Coordinated Arm as the “Clusterian Powers”—the seat of all of their obscene machinations, the very wellspring of the Oplyte Slavers’ ill-gotten wealth and power. More than once, Tarrant had observed to her that these were all data that the beleaguered Anastasia Wheeler would have given almost anything to possess.
Bretta wanted nothing more desperately than to get back to her family, to her mother, her father, her sisters, and her little brother. Yet to survive, perhaps even to pass on this vital information someday, she would now have to stop waiting (to any extent she ever had) for help to arrive (for what if it never came?) and strike out upon her own, as independently as ever her father had.
Naturally, above all she had wanted to revenge herself upon the murderous and brutal Woulf. Her dreams, both day and night, were brimming with fantasies of extravagant torture and blood-letting. Bretta had also dreamed of fighting against the Oplyte Traders, raiding slaver outposts as the self-styled “Bretta Martyn,” astride her trusty vacuum-breathing whatever-it-was, leading her band of fugitive grotesques exactly like Earth’s ancient, legendary Robinhood and Merriman.
She had realized—thanks to everything her parents had ever taught her—that she needed a plan, a requirement it took the bright, energetic young woman less than a day to fulfill. She would begin with a detailed analysis of all that she could learn about her enemies. But first, she soon discovered, she would have to deal with her newfound allies, overcome their timidity and passivity (something her father had warned her of almost from the time she was an infant), and this, to her great frustration, took her rather longer than a day.
Bretta feared she had become infatuated with Captain Nathaniel Blackburn, or at least the hologram of him Tarrant had shown her. But as her health and strength continued to improve, the little man had gone on telling her of his adventures in the stellar vicinity of Lost Earth and of the civilization—and more importantly, the extraordinary people—that had arisen out of its ashes . . .
Understand me, now, Princess, that the nonauthoritarian remainder of our species were still nominally headquartered on the Moon. Dwarfing all previous human achievements in its audacity and sheer expenditure of will, Earth’s once-barren and -worthless satellite had now been equipped with an atmosphere of its own.
It boasted of fantastically beautiful cities scattered and gleaming like bits of jewelry over the once-lifeless surface, comprised of surrealistically tall buildings made possible by the low l
unar gravity. Between them stretched long, broad, graceful, elaborate multilevel roadways. Everywhere they had provided abundant water, lush open space, luxuriant vegetation. Brilliant snow capped the impossibly prodigious Mountains of the Moon. And the often-violent Lunar weather seemed anything but artificial to any newly fledged immigrants such as ourselves.
But the important news was that humanity were now more numerous than they had ever been before their ultimately devastating war. Also, they had spread themselves, and their civilization, throughout the entire arm of the galaxy of which poor murdered Earth and her now-vibrant satellite happened to be a part. Anywhere anyone cared to look, human beings had colonized wherever conditions were right for it. And—unstoppable in their courage and ambition—they had matter-of-factly “terraformed” wherever conditions were not so favorable. (Although I always thought, myself, that they should have called the process “mooni-forming.”)
Along their way, they discovered many planets that were already occupied. Unafraid to “interfere” wherever “interference” was called for, they had never failed to establish cordial—and very mutually profitable—relationships with non-human species. It was said they even found a way to stop a centuries-long and highly destructive atomic war between the starfishlike Ewon and the Ogat “umbrella people.” These two alien people had waged seven previous such wars and were upon the brink of mutual extinction. I myself have seen the column, two klommes tall and four hundred years old, that supports the titanic statue of Rene Aurelius, who negotiated an end to the Eighth Ewonese-Ogatik War. Now they had become valued friends to humanity—and would, all too soon, become our allies.
For it was with other human beings that Lunar humanity were to experience their worst disasters. Over the span of nine hundred years, they had experienced, and grown accustomed to, some forty-five generations of peace. And now, the descendants of the authoritarian evictees were heard from again in the neighborhood of the ancient home planet at a time when the Moon people were all too vulnerable to them, and the offspring of the former outcasts began to wreak their long-sought revenge.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 39