Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  Overawed by the blinding speed of the cyborg attackers, which flitted like flies through the great space and cut the mutants down with dreadful ease, the fort operators surrendered quickly to the laowon.

  Burochief Claath and his officers immediately took charge of the fort and began brainwiping everyone, sifting for images of the fugitives. They set the booths up right by the front entrance and hauled the people out, sat them in the brainfield printer, and then tossed the incoherent wretches into a pile where they thrashed helplessly, their brains emptied of all thought patterns. The bodies sometimes lived for days, twitching, thrashing, as long as the heart pumped.

  Before the task was half completed there was an alarm. A drumming noise filled the air and from out of the southern dust came a force of vehicles on balloon tires.

  Claath ordered the cyborgs to attack, but before the platoon had even reached the gates, the mutants fired several snaps into the fort. Each snap lifted huge plates of eternite and flipped them over in the air. At the first blast Melissa found herself simply hurled a hundred meters across the ground to land with a force that drove all the breath from her body and left a pain in her shoulder. She watched in stunned awe as the enormous, indestructible pieces of the fort, each weighing thousands of tons, rose into the air in a fountain of dust and people and fragments hung for a moment, and then returned to the ground. The desert shook from the impacts.

  Beneath the eternite plates were the smashed remains of a battalion of shock troops and two dozen laowon officers of Blue Seygfan, including Burochief Claath.

  The mutants fired another round of snaps shortly afterward, turning the whole mess over once more. Melissa had dragged herself another hundred meters away by then, but was almost smashed by an errant disk that grounded not twenty meters from her spaceboots.

  The dozen or so remaining cyborgs attacked the mutants, and a horrible carnage ensued from which only a small number of Blood Head's followers escaped, by taking immediate flight.

  The cyborgs returned, dripping blood, and lined up in precise parade-ground drill, awaiting fresh orders.

  From the sky fresh patterns of troops and laowon officers dropped. Melissa awaited them with a terrible dull ache in her shoulder and nausea in her belly. Tears rose in her eyes. Her mission was aborted, and through no fault of her own. Would they let her live? Would they let her go home?

  —|—

  Through the paling purple twilight the expedition moved down the Boneyards. Around them were piled the fossils of billions of the ancient race. The mantids led, the turtle lumbered behind.

  Mounds of forkbones, skulls, and loricae were fused around them in grotesque statuary dozens of meters high. Skulls in rows were propped up in lines on frozen vertebral columns in parade-ground formations hundreds of meters deep. It seemed as if an army of dead beings was marching out of the planet's crust itself.

  "The burial sites of an eon of civilization, Mr. Iehard," the Bey said. They stared around them as the hovercraft raced up winding gulleys cut through the enormous graveyards.

  "They were a tidy race when it came to burial then."

  The Bey smiled. "It may have been an adaptation to the problem of numbers in a successful planet-wide civilization. They were marsh cultivators, harnessing the richness of wetlands. Astonishingly frugal—they used no burial ornaments, for instance. Although there is evidence, if you go deep enough, that in earlier eras there was horizontal burial and burial ornaments were common. When their numbers grew to threaten their own habitat they adopted thrifty ways that allowed them to prosper for a very long time."

  The hovercraft passed down canyons cut in the orderly stacks of fossils. Around them, where the dead had been exposed to wind and rain, they had eroded into spines and spires of ribs and vertebrae, but in the long eon when Baraf had wandered the void, frozen, the processes of erosion had slowed to a crawl. Now the endless winds had carved the huge stacks of dead into endless friezes, honeycombs. Drifts of toppled fragments skirted the steep canyon walls.

  Jon studied the skulls as they passed. They were massive, with projecting, crocodilian jaws. The occipital lobes bulged out behind the faces. The staring eyesockets marched, rank on rank, into infinity. He wondered if any of the ancient creatures—it was hard to think of them as people like humans and laowon—survived.

  Beneath them the shining crystal of the machine belt had long since been left behind. Now the dust filled with fragments of fossil. For long stretches they passed over enormous beds of small bones and skulls.

  The shadows of twilight coalesced into a deeper gloom, as they navigated the meandering passages of the ancient estuary beds. "This must have been a huge river in its day," Jon commented, awed by the seemingly endless expanse of channels and bone mounds.

  "There is much evidence to suggest that it was artificially enlarged and that the ancients flooded as much of the low-lying landmass of their world as possible in an effort to maximize their favorite, swampy habitat."

  They fled on through the expanses of the Boneyards.

  Toward midnight they pulled in at the three red globe lights advertising Bengo's Hole. They parked in the courtyard, inside the energy fence, under the guns of the turret set into the mound of bones over Bengo's limestone cavern.

  Inside considerable excitement was in the air. At the bar, which cut across Bengo's big room, Bengo himself was buying toasts to commemorate the Hardscabbies' great battle.

  "It was on the radio," one merrymaker explained. "The laowon Superior Buro dropped from the skies on Fort Pinshon. Such arrogance, such power! They were in the process of wiping the brains of every poor fool they took when the Hardscabbies came up to avenge the destruction of their larder. The laowon were severely handled by the mutants of Blood Head. Hundreds of laowon casualties, the whole place was turned over."

  "The blueskins were almost wiped out. Such a victory as we have never had before," Bengo exclaimed. He was a large rotund man with a jolly red nose and big brown eyes. He caught Jon's sleeve. "Believe me when I tell you there is rejoicing all over Baraf tonight."

  Outside in the courtyard the Elchites refueled the hovercraft and purchased water and food.

  Jon was moved to buy a round of cold beer for everyone at the news, spending the Mercantile notes of Bompipi with innocent glee. He looked up from his first draught to find the Bey frowning at him.

  "Come away from here. This generosity of yours may be remembered by these fellows, and the Superior Buro are likely to follow us here before long."

  He finished the beer sadly and joined the Bey. "Shouldn't we warn them? The Buro will brainwipe every one of them!"

  "Would they believe us? Or would they simply scoff at us for our fears and continue their drinking, and then turn over their memories of us to the laowon clear and strong?"

  Jon looked back. The Bey was correct, unfortunately.

  They slipped out. Bengo's was a series of circular rooms of puffcrete. Perimeter shields powered by a Barafi sustainer protected it. In addition, a team of guards manned guns on the tower above the main structure. The central room was Bengo's bar and restaurant, which also served as sleeping space if there were sufficient visitors.

  The outer rooms were mostly used for storage and sleeping quarters. They passed a row of phone booths and saw Finn M'Nee slipping out a door just ahead.

  When they opened it moments later, they found themselves back on the courtyard, the wind whistling overhead. Harsh lights studded the dark, and beyond loomed the twisted shapes of bonefriezed hills.

  Finn M'Nee was nowhere to be seen.

  Jon and Eblis Bey exchanged looks. Jon confessed a feeling that had been growing in him for days.

  "M'Nee troubles me. This vendetta of his seems unbalanced—particularly for one who must be dedicated to the mission. I can understand his anger over his wound, but he must know the importance of our mission. Surely he should have put aside such personal considerations."

  The Bey nodded in sympathy. "Indeed, I am troubled too
. He came to me from the Churchill program run by the Elchites of Ornholme. I doubt that I would have chosen him otherwise. He seems an odd one for a temple boy, constantly preoccupied."

  As they walked to the mantids in the refueling station, Angle Umpuk came up to them. "I've talked to the other guides here. It seems the eastern trails are the ones to stay on. Zun people have been reported on the western margins of the Boneyards."

  The Bey called a meeting. Everyone crowded around him as he squatted against the side of a mantid. "We have been given a reprieve, it seems, by the mutant Hardscabbies. The Buro has suffered a sharp defeat, and so we will take immediate advantage of the opening they have given us. We will go west in the lower Boneyards and head for the Oolite trail again. That will take a day off our travel time at least."

  The Bey noted Jon's look of surprise but gave no other reasons for the switch in plan.

  Then Braunt spoke up. "Well, I don't fancy the thought of heading any farther south than this. If it's all the same to you I think I'll hole up here at Bengo's and then try and get back to Quism."

  "You'll have to get past the laowon. They will most certainly wipe your brain if they capture you."

  "Did you not hear? The laowon are discomfited, they are smashed! Who needs fear the laowon?"

  "One small force has been destroyed. I would imagine that others are already landing, probably already have landed, and are getting ready to pursue us. Others are probably slaughtering the Hardscabbies in their holes. They will take Blood Head back to Laogolden itself for the Expiation. What a noise the mutant will make for them! If you go back, you will be taken and we cannot allow that."

  Braunt would have protested but Aul stepped in close and showed him the long, shining knife that he held in his right hand. "You will drive under guard. Wauk and Dekter will ride with you, Dekter will spell you at the controls."

  Braunt emitted a groan of intense woe. Aul squeezed his shoulder fiercely.

  The Bey continued. "We should leave here as soon as possible. Everyone who has yet to buy water or other supplies must do so as quickly as possible. I would like to move out in about fifteen minutes."

  Sixteen minutes later, the first mantids roared up and out of the energy screen and headed south again into the dark eerie spaces of the Boneyards at night.

  For hours they continued south, then began veering westward, following the trail to the junction at the place called Small Bones.

  Here a drift of fragments, ossicles, digits, and fossil shards had piled into great dunes, amid which sat a small fortified dome. To the west beyond it the land humped up swiftly into small rounded mountains, dimly visible in the starlight.

  To the south, the braided channels and canyons of the Boneyards went on and on.

  Eblis Bey called a halt, then redirected their course south, changing the plan once more.

  "Why are we changing course?" M'Nee asked from the turtle.

  "Mr. Umpuk has a hunch about weather conditions in the west."

  Jon knew Umpuk had said nothing of the sort.

  "We cannot allow ourselves to be deflected on the whims of an old trail guide!" M'Nee protested.

  "Why ever not, Mr. M'Nee? That's what guides are for."

  M'Nee subsided into annoyed silence. The expedition forsook the west and passed on down the eastern Boneyard trail.

  The hours slid by. Jon slept in his seat in the mantid, awoke when the Elchites changed driving shifts.

  Dawn found them already enveloped in the fringes of the tropical dust belt. As they plowed on down the trails, the dust grew thicker until by midday they were slowed to less than seventy kilometers an hour, picking their way through sinuous canyons near the margins of the great continent.

  Shortly afterward they encountered a mantid limping northward. They stopped. From the damaged machine came three people, one man and two women. One of the women had a bad head wound. All were weak and thirsty.

  "Archeologists," they explained. "We were down on the southern coast, about a thousand kloms from here. The Zun people came from nowhere, they surprised us, took our mutants for their own larders. They..." The man broke down.

  "They took our colleagues away and baked them alive for feast meat," the woman coolly interjected. "They made us watch. They are baldheaded demons."

  They gave the archeologists some water and food and set off southward somewhat more cautiously than before.

  "What are these Zun people?" Jon asked.

  Eblis Bey shrugged. "Another mutation; I know little of them. When I first came here they were talked about but rarely seen. It was said they lived mainly in the southern hemisphere deserts, where outsiders never go."

  Aul, who was driving that shift, spoke up. "They have been coming north, even into the Boneyards, in the past decade. A number of atrocities have occurred. They burned out Harib Zar's hole and carried off a hundred normals into the equatorial vastnesses. It is said they worship gods who live in the equatorial machines."

  Eblis Bey blanched. "Gods?" he sputtered.

  "I've heard it said that the rites are extraordinary. Sometimes the dead come back to life, whereupon they are boiled and ground up to produce an extraordinary substance called n'sool, which the Zun people are able to control with mere thought."

  "They are strict communalists," Gesme added. "They share everything, equally, down to the last shreds of flesh. The most advanced Zun forms lack eyes and noses but still retain ears. They have developed abilities that transcend the need for sight and the sense of smell."

  "Let us pray we do not fall into their hands!" the Bey said fervently.

  They continued in silence, the channels slipping past them on either side. The bony stares of the billions filling the world. After a while Jon slipped back into an uneasy sleep. The trail stretched ahead, seemingly endless.

  His dreams were of little consequence at first. But later strange pictures filled his mind. They were tying them down, whoever they were, and leaving them. But where?

  He awoke, felt something stirring uneasily on the fringe of his psi sense. It grew in intensity. After another hour he received a crystal-clear mental picture. Someone with powerful psi ability waited ahead, had already spotted the caravan and signaled the fighters.

  Yet he also sensed that the psi ability was unlike his own. The individual ahead was crouching down to aim a crudely built machine gun, scavenged from captured parts.

  "Zun people," Jon said. "Up ahead. I can sense them. There's one about a kilometer ahead who's aiming his gun at us right now. But we're not quite in his range, a homemade weapon, I think."

  The Bey gave him a swift look. "You're sure?"

  "Clear picture. I can feel something else about them, they're all linked, they share a gestalt power. It feels 'big,' a vague description, I know, but that's the feel. As if it stretches back into the desert for thousands of kilometers."

  They pulled over, the others took cover. They scanned the mound tops ahead and discovered several other motionless figures dug in behind heavy-caliber machine guns. The faces lacked eyes, the skulls were much larger than those of ordinary humans. It looked almost as if each head had grown two brains, one alongside the other. They wore strips of hide, weapons, and long ochre cloaks.

  "Can we get through past those guns?" Eblis Bey asked him.

  "Something about their disposition says they possess great confidence that we cannot. I would not risk it if there was a way around them."

  "Good enough." The Bey turned to Umpuk. "What lies east of here?"

  "We'll double back twelve klicks to the junction with the next channel. There we have a choice of three different courses, each farther east than this."

  They turned around and recharted their progress back to the point where the trail branched once again. They sought the farthest course to the east and passed quickly down it. Jon felt the rage and confusion somewhere behind them in the west. He realized that the Zun people had not detected him, despite his clear reading of at least one of their minds.
They were linked but they were not "one." Their gestalt was imperfect, perhaps they did not understand it fully yet. But he could sense them clearly, and it seemed they did not sense him.

  Eventually, in late afternoon, the Guillotine Stone loomed up ahead. They had crossed the great limb of Bolgol, right down the length of the Boneyard trail. Ahead lay the continental shelf, marked by a few volcanoes, some active, some—like the Guillotine Stone—extinct. Beyond the shelf lay the seabed and the equatorial dust, an endless maelstrom where the superheated atmosphere was rotating frantically about the dying planet.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the Guillotine Stone after they sighted it. But finally, they came to the lip of a scarp looking over the volcanic plug and the wind-carved Guillotine blade held high on two side pillars. There was even a semicircular notch cut in the cleft below, although that was said to have been created by an early exploration party as a joke.

  They came to a halt as the Bey and Iehard and Umpuk examined the site. No activity was visible. But it was a small, deep-desert post that had few visitors. Only a pair of machines was visible inside the defense shield, which lay above the entrance to the caves.

  They were about to send one mantid down for a closer look when a slender figure in a mutant's ochre desert cloak appeared in their midst. A young Elchite, he announced, "I am from the man with half a head. He advises against a visit to the house under the Stone. The Superior Buro came last night and brainwiped everyone there. Fortunately our master had forbidden any contact between us and the fort."

  The same intense fires burned in this young Elchite as the others, but an extra quality was there, too: an awareness of desert living on the very extreme of life, a consciousness of death and life and the almost invisible line that separates them at any one moment.

  "What is your name?" Jon asked.