Starhammer

by Christopher Rowley

  Jon fought to pry Owlcurl loose from the trooper's closed fist but could barely move the steel-reinforced fingers. He reached down for his monofil blade, snapped it open, and slashed through the cyborg's wrist.

  With a tortured sob, Owlcurl Dahn pulled herself away from the thing. She began working the clenched hand down her arm like some obscene bracelet. Jon, meanwhile, had discovered a trickle of blood on his leg, where a bullet had broken the skin, leaving an inch-long gash.

  Officer Dahn broke down for a moment at the sight of Hawkstone. She investigated the body, tears streaming down her face.

  A strange smell filled the air, salty, corrupt, it made goose flesh on their skins all of a sudden.

  They crowded around Eblis Bey who stood inside the darkness, his lamp making a small pool of light against its envelope.

  Jon felt a sense of foreboding as he gazed into the blackness. "Where are the risers?"

  The Bey aimed his torch along a smooth-walled tubular corridor lined with what seemed to be orange-brown scales. Along the ceiling ran something like an oversized zipper. The tube curved away into darkness.

  "They will be about one hundred paces down there." The Bey looked back into the airlock.

  "Who is hurt?"

  "Acolyte Aul is dead, Mr. Bey," Officer Dahn said. "As is the Captain. Dekter is very badly wounded, I think he will die, too, unless we can get him medical attention very shortly."

  "Can he be moved?" the Bey said.

  Dahn shook her head. "There's a hole the size of your fist in his back. We left the medical supplies in the mantids; I have nothing to stanch his wounds with. It would probably be best to leave him for the laowon. They might put him into surgery to preserve any information he might have."

  Then they heard a faint screech of metal on metal on the outside of the lock where a dozen cyborg troopers were attempting to pry the door open.

  "The ones caught in the door must have kept it open a fraction, they're trying to exploit it," Jon called.

  "We must go on then. We will have to leave Dekter for the moment, Dahn. Come, quickly, to the risers." The Bey turned and motioned in the proper direction with his arm.

  The inner lock door began to close.

  They pulled their torches and ran down the tube to the risers. The walls, floor, and ceiling all shared the characteristic motif of scales, each plate being about the size of a man's palm.

  At irregular intervals along the ceiling were circular protrusions of some rough, fibrous material about a foot in diameter. The scales fitted seamlessly around them, no purpose for the things was apparent.

  The risers were simply larger tubes that sank through ceiling and floor. Oval cutaways gave access. There were no doors. The Bey stepped into one, and was immediately carried up on an invisible force. The risers were set in a cluster of four so they rose in groups of four, floating upward on the back of an invisible force through total darkness.

  Jon commented on the lack of lights as he floated up beside the Bey and Officer Dahn.

  "Yes, it was the same when we first came here, so long ago. Perhaps it is another facet of the ancients' frugality. Perhaps they were accustomed to functioning at dim light levels. Whatever their reasons, the interior of the machine is mostly dark."

  By then they had reached a bigger space, they rose no farther and had to step out of the way of those rising beneath them. Once again they stood on a solid floor, their lights the only ones to break the absolute blackness around them.

  "Try to find a light switch Rhap Dimp," the Bey said.

  Rhap Dimple floated up to the ceiling and connected with a socket. A moment later a few lights set sparsely around the room, came on. The scales were much larger in there and the light made them shine a glossy gold. Structural members in pink and green eternite sectioned the walls.

  "Come, we are close now. This way." The Bey lead them around a corner of eternite into another corridor of yellow scales. It split into three, and he took the central passage, small lights gave a dim general illumination.

  They spied something on the floor, a litter of bones, a human skeleton, scraps of a desert suit.

  They paused beside it. The Bey examined the hand bones. "This is Professor Abeikar I think. He was the first of our party to disappear."

  Ahead, a set of doors swung open soundlessly at their approach. Somewhere below a heavy thud sounded, followed by a loud clang.

  "Satchel charges," Jon exclaimed. "The cyborgs have opened the outer airlock door."

  "That blast will have disturbed more than the door. We must hurry." With those words the Bey increased his pace. The corridor had acquired a slight slope now and they toiled up it as rapidly as possible.

  They were panting when they reached the riser to the control floor. Here they had to go in a single file, one at a time. First the Bey, then Owlcurl Dahn, Braunt, Angle Umpuk, Gesme, M'Nee, Chacks, and finally Jon Iehard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The discovery of the expedition and the giant machine had sent convulsions through the laowon military. More than four hundred capital ships swung in orbit above. At the command, a nuclear firestorm could be launched that would annihilate not only the huge alien machine but hundreds of cubic kilometers of the seabed beneath. A force of several thousand cyborg troopers had been dropped to occupy that seabed in the meantime. And pods of laowon officers had accompanied them.

  A flier had picked up Magnawl Ahx and Melissa Baltitude and flown them over the intervening two hundred kilometers to the site of the enormous machine.

  Ahx then supervised the interrogation of the three captives who had been secured. Officers Bergen, Wauk, and Hargen confessed freely, but in truth, they knew very little about the machine or its operation. Ahx hesitated to wipe their brains, in case they should prove more useful as hostages. He knew it was a remote hope.

  Meanwhile, the airlock gates had been successfully breached and the machine lay open, waiting for the command to invade. Two dead fugitives, and one in the process of dying, had been removed from the airlock. Also removed were the remains of three shock troopers. The laowon were amazed that the fugitives had been able to destroy the trooper that had got inside with them.

  Small detection robots had been run into the machine but they reported no signs of life, although the atmosphere was contaminated with high levels of carbon dioxide and some very unusual trace contaminants, complex hydrocarbon fragments for the most part.

  All that was in the reports before the commanding officer on the ground, underneath the machine, Battlegeneral Plezmarxsh. In conjunction with Buro Chief Ahx, the responsibility for making a successful capture rested on him.

  It was imperative that they capture the fugitives without further damage to the machine.

  The Superior Buro had made an enormous effort to track the case just to take the weapon in working order. The technology was unknown, but it represented a vast power. The Imperiom reached for that power with eager hands.

  Plezmarxsh ordered the first squads to investigate and track the humans. Laowon officers, including Superior Buro operatives, went forward into the darkness behind an advance guard of shock troops. A strange odor in the air raised the manes on laowon necks, and in nervous response they flashed their heavy-duty torch lights around them aggressively, hands on pistol butts. The strange, near-circular passageways were oddly claustrophobic and unsettling.

  A maze of passages, all lined with what seemed to be scales and zippered shut along the ceilings, confronted them. They explored and soon observed the openings to the riser tubes. They communicated this information back to battlecommand.

  The sounds and vibrations of the opening of the airlock had provoked changes within the machine, however. The squad's lights attracted attention. A wild excitation arose in another interconnecting system, which laced the machine interior as tightly as its own energy conduits.

  No one in the squad noticed the pale pink stalk, no thicker than a lao little finger, that pushed through the interlocking
teeth of the zipper above them. No one saw it grow toward them. A swift change was taking place on its surface. Feathery structures of pink and white tissue a few inches across were sprouting several inches into the air where they soaked up information about the bipedal forms that had entered the machine.

  They tasted the exhalation products and passed the information to the higher centers. There was an immediate explosion of activity. Podclusters that had lain dormant for decades, centuries, or far, far longer, snapped open and disgorged "runners." The podshells were reabsorbed by the collaring tissues beneath them.

  It happened that a few of the pods had been formed from the flesh of Aleya Bey, thirty years before.

  The pink stalk was joined by others; dozens pushed through between the joints of the scales of the walls and ceilings.

  The odd-shaped sensory organs began to branch and wobble, becoming things that looked almost like lungs or clumps of seaweed.

  —|—

  The expedition had emerged on the control floor. A hush of eons lay on the place. They played their lights around. A dozen dark ovals lay before them. This was the maze that the Bey had spoken of.

  In one doorway, the lights picked out a small, huddled shape upon the floor—another skeleton, a little smaller than the first, still wearing a desert suit. They clustered around it in a circle. Their lights picked out a sparkle of silver among the bones. Eblis Bey dropped down beside them.

  "Aleya," they heard him whisper. He reached into the bones and slipped a silver ring from the skeletal hand. They watched him place it on his own ring finger, where it perfectly matched the ring he already wore there. When he stood, tears were visible on his cheeks.

  "If your wife died here, does that mean the parasite menace you mentioned will be in this section?" Finn M'Nee thrust forward his question.

  The Bey recovered control. "It is possible. To tell the truth I never saw where it came from, or how it attacked. I was saved because I was with Doctor Sehngrohn in the foyer to the control room. The thing cannot get past the barrier set up there by the Keeper."

  There were loud noises from far below. The cyborgs were in the ship.

  The sounds seemed to decide something for Finn M'Nee. He pulled out his pistol. Gelgo Chacks had raised his weapon as well. "In that case I will take charge now. Please be so good as to surrender yourselves. I represent the Superior Buro."

  Faces were ringed with shock.

  "You're the traitor, M'Nee!" exclaimed Officer Dahn.

  "How is this possible?" the Bey said with a groan. "You were in the technical development section. You were trusted." He broke off with a sob.

  They had been betrayed from the start, anticipated from the beginning, guided by the Buro to deliver the Hammer to the Imperiom!

  But Jon Iehard had been watching M'Nee and now acted with characteristic speed. The Taw Taw longbarrel boomed deafeningly and the shot hurled M'Nee into the wall, but Jon wasn't quick enough to catch Gelgo Chacks before he got off two cartridges from his handgun.

  The first chopped down Braunt and Gesme. The second sprayed Owlcurl Dahn, Jon and the Bey before the Taw Taw boomed again and the slug ruptured Chacks' chest cavity, tumbling him head over heels.

  Jon slumped beside the Bey, who lay ominously still.

  Owlcurl Dahn was crying through clenched teeth. She held her shoulder, blood ran down her arm. "Oh, but it hurts! I never dreamed anything could hurt so bad!"

  "Let me see," Jon said, and then he grunted from the sudden pain in his own shoulder; he'd caught a pellet too.

  There was a movement at the edge of his vision. M'Nee, still alive, eyes transfixed with hate, lifting his gun, Jon fired without thinking, the bullets demolishing M'Nee's good hand and forearm, hurling the gun against the wall. The pain seared him once again.

  The Bey's eyelids fluttered open.

  "Where are you hit?" Jon said in a harsh whisper.

  "Disaster," the Bey breathed. "We are undone at the last."

  Jon shook his head. He parted the Bey's clothes. There was a small chest wound, low down on the right side. There was also blood from the thigh and the calf of the right leg. He would have to carry the old man the last leg of the journey. Officer Dahn wouldn't be much help. A quick look around showed nobody else left alive, and then he saw Angle Umpuk grinning down at him from the darkness.

  "Where did they get you from?" the guide said with a strange smile. "They warned me about you, but I had to see it to believe it." Jon's heart sank. "You were just a piece of greased murder back there in the airlock. Really wonderful shooting. But this was amazing. Damned good thing I stepped around the corner eh?"

  Umpuk brought up a small handgun. Laowon military issue, it fired small pellets that released a powerful tranquilizer. "I had a feeling you'd get M'Nee. I thought it would be best if I waited until that was over with. Now if you'll just hold still a second I'll paralyze you and you won't have to suffer another thing until they get you into hospital. I imagine your expiation will be one of the most prolonged in the history of cruelty. Of course, you won't know much about it since they're likely to wipe your brain pretty thoroughly first."

  "No," Jon said, tonelessly.

  "Yes," grinned Umpuk.

  And Rhapsodical Stardimple swung out of the shadow and knocked the gun from Umpuk's hand. With an oath he dived for it, but the Taw Taw longbarrel beat him to it. The reverberations died away.

  Owlcurl Dahn forced herself to get on her feet. There were more distant sounds from below. Jon turned to the prone figure of the Bey.

  "We are finished, the cyborgs are coming," Eblis Bey said.

  Jon shook his head in stubborn disagreement.

  "I cannot move," the Bey said. "You will have to go on without me." He grabbed Jon's forearm and his face contorted from the effort. "When you get to the control chamber let Rhap Dimp do all the talking when the Keeper comes. I have primed the mote with the coordinates of our likely targets. Be careful not to make sudden movements when you face the Keeper." He coughed, then renewed his grip. "Now go, leave me."

  Jon looked at Rhap Dimp. The glossy little optics stared back. He wondered what was going on in that bizarre little mind. An awful lot would be riding on it—the entire expedition, the fate of the human race, everything.

  He turned back to the Bey. "We can't give up now, let me get you on your feet. It's not that far away." Ignoring the old man's objections, Jon braced himself, lifted the Bey, and placed him over his good shoulder.

  He set off into the maze, Rhap Dimple floating just ahead. Officer Dahn, clutching her arm, leaving a trail of blood, staggering behind.

  —|—

  The troopers waited by the first set of risers. The officers came up behind them. They were put through directly to General Plezmarxsh.

  One of them shone his handlight up at the ceiling. He observed the odd lunglike things on pink stalks, and the white cone-shaped objects that were extruding from cracks between the scales of the ceiling. Abruptly the cones exploded with puffs of dust and fired threads tipped with needles into most of the officers and troopers.

  The threads thickened visibly, into wires, then to strings that inspired immediate screams of agony from the officers.

  The cyborg guns came up. A staccato drumbeat of fire echoed in the narrow space. The lung-shaped things were destroyed. The threads were cut in some places. But in others they had become ropes that drew their victims into the air.

  The screams were horrible, as the vang military form went into action. Once piercers had broken into the flesh of the food, a network of controlling nerves began to grow from the site of infection, working through the existing nervous system, drilling straight through it, linking with terrible rapidity the various organs that would be required for primary control.

  To the victims it was as if hot needles were being passed through their flesh in many different directions at once. At the same time, they were losing control of their bodies, their own nerve tissues no longer responding to the higher center
s of the brain.

  Helpless, in agony, they were hoisted toward the ceiling while the vascular connections thickened into hawsers, rich, sucking, devouring pipes of fresh military-form tissue.

  The cyborgs were affected too, but they could ignore the pain. Their nervous systems were a blend of organic circuits and phototronic controllers. The Vang system of nervous invasion was simpler with organic systems, but at a pinch the military form could harden a section of nervous system and switch it from weak chemical-ion transmission to more robust techniques. Piercers and controllers would have to be toughened considerably. This realization set off further explosive changes. Materials that had lain piled in drifts around a storage chamber for hundreds of millions years, looking like nothing so much as flakes of breakfast cereal, abruptly swelled, changed, began manufacturing complex chemicals. The storage chamber, which had contained much of the residues from the conversion of the original crew of the Hammer, filled with a strange stench.

  In the passageway leading to the risers, the cyborgs reached up and snapped the connectors or tore them out of their flesh. Their guns continued to stutter as they received orders to destroy all laowon that had been infected.

  The profusion of stalks and other organs withdrew suddenly into the ceiling. The cyborgs stood grouped beside the risers, ankle deep in fragments of their officers, and awaited new orders.

  When Plezmarxsh reported to Magnawl Ahx, the latter's face paled when he heard of the alien lifeform. "Lashtri Three," he said in a hushed whisper.

  Plezmarxsh's forehead furrowed. "Where have I heard that name?"

  "It was the world that was burned by Red Seygfan in the interregnum."

  Plezmarxsh gasped. "Of course, and this horror must be the same lifeform. But in such widely separated star systems? It doesn't seem possible."

  "Baraf did not originate in this part of the galaxy. Who can say where it wandered before it joined this system."