Marque of Caine

by Charles E Gannon

  “So,” Caine interjected before a dispute could arise, “I alone will be conveyed to whatever coordinates you specify. How long will it take for me to complete this task?”

  “A few hours. At most.”

  Well, that’s not so bad. So the catch is something else. “And what must I do?”

  “Prove your fitness. Then cross a river.”

  Too easy. “What must I do to cross it? Build a boat? A bridge?”

  “No. You simply need to cross a ford.”

  Riordan was quite sure that walking across the ford would be anything but “simple,” but he had to move forward. “Tell me more,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  JUNE 2124

  ISSQLIIN, BD +76 351

  Caine checked his wristlink, only to realize, for the third time, that it was gone, along with every other bit of technology he had unthinkingly worn down to Issqliin. Drawing a deep breath, he ran toward the last defunct robot between him and the end of the obstacle course.

  Riordan had only been planetside half an hour, but Uinzleej’s remote-controlled proxy had already tested his endurance and agility and now required that he navigate a dry river bed while striking targets: a collection of rusty, dilapidated robots. They all appeared to be inert, but Riordan wasn’t taking any chances. As he drew within two meters of the final one, he feinted, dodged, and then bashed it with his bludgeon: a manipulator arm from the first defunct bot he’d attacked.

  The rusted bot almost fell over, but ultimately its low center of gravity rocked it back upright.

  Riordan, looking back over the three ruined bots he’d felled prior to this one, asked, “Good enough?”

  At the end of the shallow streambed, Uinzleej’s proxy bot—a smoother design, clean, and fully functional—swiveled its “head” toward him. Uinzleej’s voice emerged from the small speaker where a real Dornaani’s mouth would be. “Adequate.”

  Riordan stared at the tall vegetation hemming them in, caught sight of a familiar silhouette: a goldenrod tree, identical to the ones on Rooaioo’q. Maybe the species had originated on Dornaan. “So, do we go to the river now?”

  The Uinzleej-robot turned and began rolling back toward the lightly built vertisled that had carried them from where Olsloov had landed.

  “Your fitness is satisfactory,” Uinzleej’s voice announced. “We may proceed to the river-crossing scenario.”

  Riordan looked after the robot from which the uninflected statements had emerged, wondered if Uinzleej was actually alive or if all that was left of him was a brain in a high-tech jar. Still, Glayaazh’s data chip indicated Uinzleej as the essential first step in Riordan’s search, not only because of the Caretaker’s specialized knowledge, but his connections among the Dornaani expert hobbyists most likely to guide him to Elena.

  When Riordan began comparing the relative martial merits of the robot arm he had just wielded to a leg from his last target, the robot-proxy—called a “proxrov” among Dornaani—halted. “We must depart.” Its “head” rotated toward the goldenrod trees. “Hurry, human.”

  “Just deciding which limb to take.”

  “You may not take any.”

  “What?”

  Uinzleej’s proxrov rotated back to “face” him. “The use of any modern artifacts would drastically decrease the authenticity of the final scenario.”

  Oh for the love of—

  Three hulking shapes burst from the closest stand of goldenrod trees. Quadrupeds with immense chests and shoulders, they resembled outsized gorillas with wide, multieyed heads.

  Riordan gauged the distance to the vertisled, which suddenly looked as fragile as a cubist rendering of an origami dragonfly. No way he could reach it in time. He snatched up the robot arm, cocked it back over his shoulder—

  With twinned whispers, two drones popped up from the vertisled and turned innocuous looking tubes toward the creatures. Each tube spat three times, a crackling, electric sound.

  In less time than it took to blink, ugly mauve craters erupted on the shoulders and head of each creature. A spray of similarly colored blood and chunks flew out behind them, marking the trajectories of exit wounds. Two of the shaggy ogres tumbled aside, limp. The third yowled, scrabbled in a crippled circle to retreat back toward the woods.

  The drones each spat once.

  Gobbets of ruined flesh, and dusky-colored bone exploded from the injured creature. It fell, suddenly as still as the others.

  Riordan panted, a receding wave of terror colliding with a sudden surge of relief. “What…what the hell were those?”

  “Feral specimens. The park is impossible to maintain properly. They grow desperate as suitable game becomes sparse.” Uinzleej’s proxrov resumed moving toward the vertisled. “I repeat, we must depart, human.”

  Riordan started following gratefully.

  “Leave the implement. You must cross the river without any advanced tools.”

  Riordan tossed the robot arm aside, but only after he had set foot on the vertisled.

  * * *

  Riordan stared across the river. Uinzleej’s proxrov stared back. Or seemed to.

  Caine examined the length of goldenrod tree he was clutching in both hands. The splintered trunk probably had little chemical similarity to terrestrial wood, but the familiarity was soothing.

  It had not, however, proven soothing to the herpiform crawling away from him, trailing yellow-green slime as it did. He’d only landed a glancing blow upon the seven-foot ciliated worm-snake, but his first target had fared less well. A two-handed swing had caved in that one’s hideous head: a fang-lined sphincter ringed by pupilless black eyes.

  Riordan cautiously followed the wounded one before slashing down again with the driftwood trunk. The sharp edge of its splintered end sliced into the flank of the animal, lopping off a few cilia before it cut through the belly and smashed down into the shallow stones of the ford. The sphincter-mouth shrilled and writhed away. Two of the other herpiforms, alerted by the sound, roved in its direction, either smelling the blood or sensing its impaired movement. As they tore into it, Riordan tossed the shattered trunk away and reassessed his situation.

  With the exception of the two herpiforms now devouring the wounded one, the rest remained as they were: a bridge of bloated, half-submerged caterpillar-shapes that spanned the river. Although not immediately dangerous, they’d shown surprising energy swarming in Caine’s direction when he’d first entered the water. They had retreated with equal alacrity after discovering that he was anything but an easy meal.

  So, a standoff. Riordan dominated his bank of the river, but the sphincter-mouths controlled the shallow waters of the ford, maws aimed upstream to catch whatever small prey the current brought them. Caine eyed the remaining driftwood on his side of the river. Not enough to bash his way across. Besides, they were sure to swarm him if he waded back in.

  Nor was there any other means of crossing the river. After the proxrov had deposited him in this narrow gorge half an hour ago, Caine had quickly discovered his lack of alternatives. The river both entered and exited the ravine over waterfalls. The upstream cataract fed a current too strong and swift to cross before being pushed into the gaping maws of the sphincter-mouths. Downstream, the river frothed around jagged boulders before becoming a cliff-plunging flume. And whereas the far, or eastern, ridge that paralleled the river appeared scalable…

  He turned. The steep western slope at his back was crested by an overhang of split and uneven rock: a troubled gray brow, brooding over the gorge. No way to get over that rim.

  As if to warn Caine against trying, the mass overhead grumbled, groaned, sent a few small stones bouncing down to join those around the ford. Riordan’s initial gut-stab of fear was tempered by a sharp, logical riposte. What are the odds of a geological shift occurring just half an hour after I arrive?

  Frowning, he checked on the proxrov. It remained inert, as it had been since piloting the vertisled to the other shore.

  Riordan turned and
reconsidered the escarpment behind him. So, the test wasn’t just to find a way across the ford; it was to do so before getting squashed by a rockslide. Uinzleej had certainly chosen the right place for it. The soil-and-stone composite of the western slope showed signs of heavy erosion, undermining its rocky crest. That was probably what had created the ford in the first place: every time a bit more of that fractured mass gave way, it rolled down and—

  Riordan’s mind stopped, swerved on to a new track. He was no geologist, but it did indeed appear the slope’s flinty skirts had been mercilessly pounded, even pulverized, by multiple rockslides. The few solid outcroppings further upslope appeared scarred and cracked, again consistent with heavy impacts from overhead. But with his life on the line, Caine couldn’t afford to leave that hypothesis unconfirmed. He scrambled up to the nearest granite protrusion, examined it closely for several minutes.

  Satisfied, Riordan picked his way back down slowly, taking particular care not to dislodge any of the rubble that had proven stable enough to bear his weight. Stopping two meters away from the ford, he lowered himself into a squat. It would have been more comfortable to sit, but it took too long to get up from that position. So, hunched forward, he stared across the river at the motionless proxrov and waited.

  And waited.

  Without a wristlink, Riordan had no way to mark the passage of time; the cloud cover was absolute. However, after two stand-and-stretch routines, and what Caine guessed was a little less than half an hour, there was another rumble from the craggy crest of the slope behind him. He wondered how Uinzleej managed that trick. Probably something he’d embedded deep in the rock formation long ago. But Riordan didn’t allow himself to get distracted by pondering the specifics; Dornaani always seemed to have plenty of near-miracles up their sleeves.

  The next episode of stony groaning and cracking occurred about ten minutes later. Granite chunks broke away from the lip, crashed down the slope, were reduced to pebbles after impacting each other or the outcroppings. Riordan turned back to face the proxrov, didn’t even try to suppress a yawn.

  There was no way of knowing if Uinzleej understood what a yawn was or what it signified, but he might have. Within a few minutes, a third rumbling began, but this one built slowly and along a wider section of the overhang. Sections of the shelf cracked, fell away, showered down, raising small explosions of dirt wherever they impacted. Riordan yawned again.

  The rumbling built into barely suppressed thunder, punctuated by sharp lightning cracks as the splits in the crest widened and new ones appeared, cleaving previously solid masses of stone. Caine smiled. Not long, now.

  Even though he was expecting it, Caine flinched at what sounded like pile drivers colliding directly overhead. Without wasting time to look, he jumped up…and fell. His left leg had gone to sleep. Cursing, he rolled to his feet, and hobble-sprinted up the slope.

  Straight at a massive landslide.

  The lighter rocks expelled by the shattering lip flew over him into the river; a few even hit the far shore. Heavier ones rained down around Riordan as he leaped from one spot of solid footing to the next. The main wave of boulders was not far behind, the smaller ones leaping up high wherever larger ones smashed into them from either side, squirting them above the mass of rushing stone.

  Riordan realized the landslide was moving faster than he’d anticipated just as his bounding run brought him within three meters of the nearest outcropping: a crooked fang of broken granite. He threw himself toward it, rolling into the narrow furrow underneath as the approaching roar grew into deafening thunder.

  Abruptly, Riordan was hemmed on both sides by a torrent of rocks, some the size of buffalos as they tumbled and spun and leaped past his shelter. One crashed on top of it: the mass shielding him groaned, dipped slightly, but held.

  The drumming of the smaller, following stones increased as the leading edge of the landslide raged down toward the river. Slabs that had collided higher up the slope now streamed past as fragments trailing in the wake of the bow-wave of destruction. Some caromed sideways, were flung under his shelter. One the size of a fist struck a glancing blow against his left thigh: probably not a break, but Riordan expected he’d have a grapefruit-sized contusion and limp to go along with it.

  And then, along with the scree and gravel that flowed and chattered in the aftermath of the stones, came the dust. Gray, white, choking: it was as if Riordan had been thrown into the exhaust plume of a quarry’s grinder. Coughing, he scrambled from beneath the outcropping, sleeve across his face as he picked his way down toward the ford, mindful of the new rockfall’s treacherous footing.

  At the bottom of the ragged, reconfigured slope, the dust began thinning where it encountered the water, the sediment sinking instead of remaining airborne. Riordan emerged from that fog near where he had started, but the ford was unrecognizable. Its once-smooth apron was buried under almost a meter of large, jagged stones. And further out…

  The rockfall had not merely devastated the ford, but also the sphincter-mouths. Pools of bile welled up from where herpiforms either lay inert or still thrashed fitfully. The new rubble narrowed into a causeway as it progressed from the shore, stretching most of the way across the river.

  A few of the most distant sphincter-mouths were only moderately wounded and still capable of feeble movement. Riordan watched them writhe away from the new rocks and wallow in the disrupted current.

  The proxrov remained motionless, just beyond.

  Riordan turned, began picking his way along the upstream shore toward the cluster of driftwood that had been beyond the landslide’s path.

  With any luck, he wouldn’t need more than one or two stout clubs to finish making his way to the other shore.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  JUNE 2124

  ISSQLIIN, BD +76 351

  Uinzleej met Caine at the entrance to the last intact building in the small, fortified Caretaker’s compound. He clasped his hands in excitement, eyes assessing his visitor from head to toe. “At last, a successful and valid test subject.” His entire torso bobbed as they made their way into Uinzleej’s home. “Your performance was most satisfactory. Please, be seated.” He waved absently around the dingy oval room.

  Riordan glanced after his host’s gesture: nothing but the saddle-shaped “chairs” designed for the buttock-free physiology of a Dornaani. He lowered himself to the floor, took in the wild clutter of stacked tables, control platforms, holosphere pits, and shelves of unrecognizable gear. It looked like an explosion had gone off in the middle of a Dornaani rummage sale.

  Uinzleej swung unsteadily into his seat. He was very old, possibly the oldest Dornaani Riordan had yet seen. “Your participation today definitively refutes all doubts regarding the ability of unaugmented humans to succeed at atypical survival challenges. Idiotic cavils, really, but they could not be dismissed without modern proof of your species’ primal capabilities.” He fumbled after a bottle designed for his extrudable lamprey mouth.

  Okay, so today I’m not really a lab rat; I’m a knuckle-dragging specimen of Cro-Magnon. “So your work is focused on whether primitive humans were able to survive without genetic enhancement or exosapient assistance.”

  Uinzleej sat erect and stared, as if Caine were a dog that had suddenly spoken quite clearly but had said something absurd. “No. My only concern is with measuring how vulnerable primitive humans were to unusual challenges. I do not expect you to understand why that is important.”

  Riordan struggled to make a connection, flung out his best guess. “You’re trying to determine how much the traits and instincts of risk takers and innovators improved early humanity’s odds of survival.”

  Uinzleej sat straighter, as if the talking dog had said something intelligent.

  Riordan followed his hunch to its probable conclusion. “And therefore, you’re hoping to determine how statistically prevalent those ‘change agents’ were in primeval breeding populations.”

  Uinzleej sat silent for three full
seconds. “I did not expect you to be able to adopt so detached an evolutionary perspective on your own species.”

  Riordan smiled. “I did not expect to discover that you were so interested in humanity.”

  The old Dornaani leaned back on his saddle seat, folded his hands together and rested them on his small, wrinkled potbelly. If he had had spectacles, he would have resembled a stock character—specifically, the gnomish professorial type—from a Victorian comedy of manners. “The more one knows of Dornaani history, the more one discerns that it is ineluctably entangled with your own, human.” Uinzleej’s mouth twisted. “Have you not wondered,” he resumed in an almost coy tone, “at the strange density of intelligent species in this part of space? Why, beyond the borders of the Accord, there is nothing but silence?”

  Riordan nodded. “I have wondered if it is a result of intent, rather than chance.”

  The Dornaani’s mouth straightened. “Intent may be too strong a word. Excepting humanity, which is clearly native to Earth, there is little to suggest that the rest of us were seeded here as part of a plan. Rather, this was simply a fortuitously remote haven for those who dwelt or fled here when the prior historical epoch imploded.”

  Riordan folded his arms. “That certainly explains the co-located human and Slaasriithi ruins on Delta Pavonis Three.”

  Uinzleej leaned forward. “As hostility between the mentor races grew, we Dornaani implicitly understood that resisting such advanced powers would be tantamount to defying the Great Wave of Fate itself. The community that ultimately grew to become the Collective was swollen first by migrants who foresaw that flood, then by refugees seeking as distant a corner of space as could be found. What little evidence exists all points to this conclusion.”

  Riordan frowned. “That still doesn’t explain the absolute silence almost twenty millennia later.”