Artemis Invaded

by Jane Lindskold

  She sounded triumphant, like a child who has secreted away a torn frock and expects to escape punishment.

  Adara shook her head as she might have at one of Bruin’s younger students caught cheating. Then she remembered that it was possible Leto couldn’t see her.

  “Do you think you can hide forever and ever? These off-worlders have some funny ideas. What if they figure out a way to control you like they can control Terrell and Bruin? I bet there’s a way…”

  Adara was guessing, but thought she must be right. The seegnur would not have left themselves without a way to get around Leto, especially if she had been as stubborn with them. The length of Leto’s pause made Adara think she was right, especially when Leto didn’t directly answer her question.

  “That Falkner has been poking in my private areas,” Leto said primly. “I shocked him once, but he’s persistent. He has no respect.”

  Fleetingly, Adara thought it was interesting how—for lack of a better word—“human” Leto seemed, especially in contrast to Artemis. Especially here in the dark, she could forget she was talking to a building or burrow or whatever this complex was, and think she was talking to an intelligent, if rather spoiled, child. She never made that mistake with Artemis.

  Adara forced herself to focus, knowing she had to push the point. “So, will you set Griffin and the others free? I bet they’d help you to get rid of those others…”

  Leto made a hissing sound. “The others have real weapons. They have defensive shields. Their machines aren’t models I know, so I can’t deactivate them—though I think I could damp them, some. But how could any of you—even Griffin—defeat them with your knives and bows?”

  Based on what she’d heard about the spaveks, Adara had some idea of what Leto meant by “real” weapons and energy shields. They were terrifying, but she felt confident that they could be gotten around.

  “These are still humans,” Adara said, “and that means they can be defeated. Will you help us?”

  Only the persistence of a faint hissing let Adara know that Leto hadn’t “left.” At long last, the voice spoke, sounding very young and childlike indeed.

  “I can’t risk helping. What if you lose? Then they’ll be after me, too, and you’ll all be dead and not able to help me.”

  That actually made sense. Adara didn’t blame Leto for being afraid. She’d seen how horribly damaged Leto’s complex had been. As with Artemis, the events of five hundred years ago were as fresh as yesterday.

  “How about this, Leto?” Adara offered. “You don’t help us, but you don’t help them either. You don’t lock anything extra. You don’t offer warnings. You don’t turn out the lights or stop the air circulating.”

  “What if they guess?”

  “Tell them that their poking around messed something up so you couldn’t sense as you usually can.”

  “I could do that…” Leto’s voice held a note of malice. “I haven’t been talking to them much anyhow. They act as if they can order me around like I’m no smarter than one of their scooters.”

  “So get quieter,” Adara suggested. “If they do talk to you and you feel you need to answer, act dumb. Don’t do anything that could be taken as acting against them—you’re right, that’s too much risk for you to take. Just don’t help them.”

  “Or you,” Leto said. “I still don’t like you, much, though maybe I do a little better than before. Do you think that if you get Griffin free he’ll come back?”

  Adara laughed soundlessly, the way Sand Shadow laughed. “Oh, I think nothing will keep him away. Maybe once he’s free to move around, he’ll find a way to beat his brothers and take control.”

  But, remembering Leto’s words about real weapons and energy shields, remembering that Terrell, Bruin, and Ring could not be counted on to act of their own accord—and might even turn against Griffin—she thought this was a very thin chance indeed.

  * * *

  Julyan was half-dozing at his post when he heard Falkner and Siegfried coming along the corridor. After they’d been in the complex a few days, the Danes had decided that sleeping in the labs and manufacturing areas was unnecessary hardship. Instead, they’d adopted quarters in the residential areas. Leto had made this easier by supplying running water and sanitary facilities. She’d even gotten a machine that did laundry working, so they all had fresh bedding and towels.

  The prisoners were being kept at the outer edge of the residential area, in rooms that Alexander speculated might have been offices or parlors, rather than living quarters. The original furnishings in these rooms had been reduced to ash so, until someone figured out how to make Leto give them detailed facility plans, the rooms’ original purpose was a matter of guesswork.

  The Dane brothers had chosen suites of rooms, each with enough space to accommodate an entire family where Julyan had been born. He wondered if the Artemesians of olden days had realized that the approved home designs had been deliberately quaint, rather than meant for the comfort of the residents. He wondered if they would have cared.

  Siegfried and Falkner were deeply absorbed in their conversation—it sounded as if it was on the verge of becoming an argument—and had forgotten that their voices would carry to where Julyan sat.

  They probably don’t care. The prisoners are locked up and sound doesn’t carry into their cells unless the door is open. Me? I’m just good old Julyan, faithful retainer, and Alexander’s little pet.

  He ground his teeth, but his frustration didn’t keep him from listening carefully. Anything that could get Falkner and Siegfried sounding so agitated was worth noting.

  “I still think it’s too soon,” Falkner was saying. “We have only the slightest idea of how those suits work. The one thing we do know—and I don’t think Griffin is lying about this—is that they play tricks with the wearer’s mind. Castor is unstable enough without that.”

  Siegfried retorted, “Castor is unstable, I give you that, but he is also the only one of us we know is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt psychic. That makes him the best candidate to try one of the suits. We cannot trust the natives. We can, however, trust Castor.”

  “True…” Falkner’s voice was fading with distance. “But why now? Why not wait a few weeks? We have plenty of supplies. There’s no rush, and Castor’s in the sleep. Once we wake him, we won’t be able to put him down again for months. You know he doesn’t handle the sleep drugs well.”

  “We brought him,” Siegfried said, “because of the theories that Old Imperial technology relied on psionics. Using him might be a shortcut to what we want to know.”

  Their voices were so faint that Julyan couldn’t make out the words, but from the inflection he guessed that Falkner was asking once again why this need for rush.

  Julyan laughed to himself. The need for rush was exactly what made Siegfried the leader of the Dane brothers. He was a man of action and decision. This was useful in combat, but could be a handicap in times like this. Julyan suspected that Siegfried could be perfectly patient if working toward a specific goal—say during a siege or during the early phases of an elaborate attack—but the unspecificity of their current action was making him restless.

  Julyan considered what he’d overheard. The only good thing about Alexander was that he liked to talk. From his monologues, Julyan had gathered that each of the Dane brothers was special in some way. Sometimes Alexander talked about himself and his siblings as if his parents had bred them like the Trainers did dogs, seeking for certain qualities to fill certain needs. The Dane brothers and sisters had been educated to bring out specific qualities as well.

  Julyan gathered that the older Dane siblings had been trained to fulfill military roles. He was less certain about what the parents had intended for Griffin or even Alexander. They were more scholarly, though, as Julyan had learned to his detriment, even introspective Griffin could fight very well if pressed.

  Alexander rarely mentioned Castor. He had said that Castor had been a twin, that Castor’s twin, Pollux, was
the only one of the Dane siblings to have died.

  A fairly remarkable thing, Julyan thought. Given the sort of lives they lead.

  He smiled slowly. Maybe we of Artemis will take down a couple of them. I’d love to see their expression when they realize that what they took for worms are actually vipers—vipers with very sharp fangs and very deadly poison, indeed.

  * * *

  When Alexander came to the door of Griffin’s cell, Griffin was flat on his back, reading from a hard copy book of verse that had been brought to him along with his midday meal by the very odd boy called Seamus. Seamus had apparently been given the job of general housekeeper and cook—if the term “cook” could be applied to doling out ration cubes and hot water for rehydration.

  The verse was handwritten in the language of Artemis, but Griffin had yet to decide whether it had been written by an Artemesian or by one of the off-world residents of the facility. The subjects were bucolic and not very challenging. Nonetheless, piecing through them beat staring at the ceiling.

  “Griffin! I have a surprise for you,” Alexander sang out as he opened the door. “Come along. He’s waiting in the labs.”

  Griffin put down the book and swung his feet to the floor. He tried to look slightly interested—something that was easier than it might have been, since Alexander had said “he.” That meant Adara and Sand Shadow remained at large. It was too bad that Kipper had been caught—he couldn’t think what else would awaken that particular look of malicious glee in Alexander’s eyes—but so far the prisoners had been treated well enough.

  He was trying to decide which response would get the most out of Alexander, and had just about concluded that a mixture of astonishment and anger would certainly cause Alexander to start gloating, when they entered the main lab. There Griffin saw his brother Castor standing next to one of the consoles, looking about, an expression of mild interest on his thin features as he munched on a food cube.

  Castor was only of average height, though so thin that he looked taller. His hair was such a brilliant orange that no one believed that the color was natural. His eyes were an equally impossible green: the wet, brilliant hue of melted peridots. The slight lump that showed on his chest under his coverall was a device that fed him highly concentrated calories. When Castor shifted to stuff the last of the food cube into his mouth so that he could offer a hand to Griffin, a tattoo beneath his floppy bangs was revealed. In the minimalistic script used for scientific notation in the Kyley Domain were the characters that spelled his name.

  This had been viewed as necessary because, unlikely as it might seem, given Castor’s appearance, once there had been two identical versions of him. Their parents had intended to have the tattoos erased when the boys were adults, but somehow no one had gotten around to it. When Pollux had died in an accident, the precise details of which Griffin still didn’t know, Castor’s grief had taken the form of the purest denial.

  The twins were named for figures in a myth so ancient that it likely would have been lost, except that the names had been used for everything from constellations to a type of racing bike. In the myth, one twin was mortal, the other immortal. As Castor explained to anyone who would listen—and to many who did not—Pollux was the immortal twin. Therefore, Pollux could not be dead; therefore the tattooed name was still necessary.

  Griffin did not know Castor well. Castor and Pollux had been fourth and fifth in the birth order—actually, they’d been “born” simultaneously, since their gestation had been within an artificial womb. Moreover, they had been raised in very controlled circumstances, meant to encourage them to develop the traits for which they had been bred.

  Those early tests had been very promising. The theories that telepathy was more likely to develop between identical twins seemed to have some basis in truth. But when Pollux had died, Castor’s abilities had vanished. Castor himself had nearly died, until he became convinced that Pollux still lived.

  Now Griffin knew why Castor was here.

  I was innocently searching for a mythical paradise with no greater goal than being able to say “Here it is!” It seems that others had far more complex motivations. Were Castor and Pollux created for the same reasons that the Old One—in a much cruder fashion—sought to breed the adapted back to some creature that could interface with the devices of the seegnur?

  Griffin felt his skin crawl and the hairs along the back of his neck prickle. If so, the plans had been in place since long before his birth. Was his quest even of his own doing, as he had always imagined, or had he been steered to it as his brothers and sisters had been steered to their own professions?

  Did our parents know or did they merely suspect, hope, dream? What lay at the end of those dreams?

  He feared he knew, for the Danes had always been a warlike clan.

  Griffin decided that playing dumb would do him no good. As he grasped Castor’s proffered hand, feeling it just a little damp as it always was, he shaped his lips into a rueful smile.

  “So they’ve brought their own test subject in,” he said, watching carefully to see how Castor would react.

  Alexander intervened before Griffin could say anything more. “We’ve brought Castor down because we believe that we might have something he and Pollux have long desired. Come along.”

  As he led the way to the bunker where the spaveks waited in the arms of their squires, Alexander expanded on his theory. “Ever since the accident, Pollux has been short a body. It occurred to me that if Castor put on one of the spaveks, Pollux might be able to—well, slide in—make himself at home.”

  Griffin frowned. He remembered how the spavek had felt as if it had an intelligence of its own and guessed what Alexander was doing. He was trying to condition Castor so that when Castor put on the suit he would come to the conclusion that the suit’s operating system was actually his long-lost brother. If he did so, then his psi powers—rumored to be quite potent—should become active once more, because he would be communicating with his lost twin.

  The idea was diabolically clever—just the sort of thing Alexander would think of. Griffin knew their parents had tried to get Castor to interact with other proven psi talents, but the experiments had not worked because Castor was convinced that he and Pollux were more than simply twins; they were two parts of the same soul.

  Alexander’s offering Castor back his soul, Griffin thought in despair. If this works, then they’ll be able to manipulate Castor. He’ll do anything to keep his contact with Pollux. Up until now we’ve had a slight edge because we’re the only ones who have had any luck working the spaveks. If Alexander’s plan works, we will be increasingly expendable.

  * * *

  Kipper listened intently as Adara reported her meeting with Leto. When she finished, he shifted uneasily. “That’s good, I guess. But Leto’s not working against us is not the same as her working for us, if you know what I mean.”

  Adara nodded gently, trying to adopt the posture Bruin always took when encouraging his young charges to speak out. It seemed to work because, after a moment, Kipper continued.

  “There’s just you and me, Sand Shadow and Honeychild. I don’t think we can count the horses and Sam the Mule.”

  “That’s not precisely true,” Adara said. “Sam is proving a remarkably reliable guardian for our little horse herd. That means we don’t need to waste one of us standing guard. Perhaps it will help us plan if we enumerate our other advantages, just as we would if planning a hunt.”

  Kipper looked dubious, so Adara started. “First, Sand Shadow and my bond means that we have communication over distance. We don’t have the same direct contact with Honeychild but, between her ability to talk to Sand Shadow and those written signs I taught you, we can do pretty well. Now, your turn.”

  Clearly Kipper still had his doubts, but he also didn’t want to disappoint her. After a few moments’ thought he said, “Honeychild can communicate with Bruin. That means we can let them know when we’re coming for them.”

  “We can
do more than that,” Adara added. “We might be able to work out a way to coordinate so that we can take advantage of some particular event—say when Ring is wearing the blue spavek or at least when they’re all out of their cells.”

  “That would be nice,” Kipper agreed. “My turn again. How about this? We know something of the layout of Leto’s complex and can plan our attack to come from a couple different directions. There’s the door into the meadow and the hidden one into that cavern. If Leto keeps her promise not to interfere, we might be able to lure them one way while our strength goes in another.”

  Adara nodded approval. “Now you’re thinking like a hunter! If foxes can come up with ways to lay a false trail, surely we can do the same. I wish I could have gotten Leto to work with us. She would have been very useful that way, but that’s beyond us.”

  Kipper beamed. “Foxes and false trails … What else? Wolves never go after the whole herd, they cut off their prey from the larger group. We might be able to manage something like that. There aren’t all that many of them: Griffin’s three brothers, the Old One, a boy, and that Julyan.”

  “Four brothers, now,” Adara reminded him. “I think … I’m still trying to work out what Honeychild and Sand Shadow were saying. I’m certain there’s a new arrival but, after that, it’s uncertain. It’s as if Bruin can’t figure out how much of a threat this new fellow—he has red hair, so we’ll call him ‘Red’—will be.”

  “Brothers don’t always get along,” Kipper said in a way that made Adara certain he was speaking from experience. “Maybe this Red won’t like that the others locked Griffin up.”

  “We can hope,” Adara agreed. “There is one problem, though, one we need to deal with before we go in.”

  “What?” Kipper asked. His face fell as he remembered. “That Alexander and his ability to make the others do what he wants.”