As he ran, breathing deeply to get all the air he could, Cyrus recalled waking up inside a Kresh spaceship that first time. It had been after the lost space battle. The Vomags had kicked Captain Nagasaki to death and everything had felt hopeless then. But maybe as long as men and women had breath in their bodies, they had a chance to turn things around. This was payback—he hoped.
Before evening fell, Yang called a halt. Grinder dug with a stone, finding water. Cyrus and Jana strained the water through a special cloth, filling up everyone’s canteen. Skar and Yang brought back three long-eared pas. The fresh meat would supplement their jerky.
“It’s time we started thinking about our actual strategy,” Cyrus said later. The stars had begun to appear and it would be fully dark soon. “Originally, Skar and I thought about boarding a rocket, one of those massive things that brings the ice down to the convertor.”
“What would you have done then?” Yang asked.
“Try to storm an ice-hauler ship up there,” Cyrus said, while looking at Skar.
“It was a long shot,” Skar said.
“What do you call what we’re attempting?” Yang asked.
The soldier sat on the ground with his knees raised. Like a robot, he turned toward Yang. “This is suicide,” Skar said.
“No, seriously,” Yang said.
“I am always serious,” Skar said.
Cyrus glanced at his soldier friend. “Do you care to explain why you think it’s suicide?”
“Before, you and I were going to attack ice haulers,” Skar said. “All of us here are talking about taking on soldiers like me. For there will be soldiers in the valley. And that will be suicide.”
The Berserkers stared at Skar before they glanced at each other.
Cyrus knew the soldier better than the others did, and he’d seen Skar’s wink. He finally burst out laughing.
“What is funny?” Yang asked. “We are dead men, and one dead woman.”
“Don’t you know when a fellow marine is pulling your leg?” Cyrus asked.
“I thought you said you were serious,” Yang told Skar.
“I did say that,” Skar said.
“And?”
A tight grin spread across Skar’s face. It was one of the first Cyrus had seen.
Jana scooped up sand and hurled it at Skar.
Yang stared at her in wonder, and then the realization must have sunk in. He didn’t chuckle, but a grim smile appeared before disappearing.
“I will remember that,” Yang told Skar.
“Just as I remember the beating I first received at Berserker hands,” Skar said.
“This is not a game,” Grinder told them. “This is a war of extinction, either theirs or ours.”
The word sounded strange coming out of Grinder’s mouth, but Cyrus knew the man was right. The word also showed him how much the former primitives had changed.
“I have a question,” Cyrus said. “It’s for any of you who can remember. Did the seeker know, or did any of those before her know, what Klane or the Anointed One was supposed to be able to do to throw off the Kresh yoke?”
“No,” Jana said.
“How can you say that with such certainty?” Yang asked. “The seeker’s thoughts or memories . . . I still have trouble with them. It’s like a second voice in my head. But if I listen too closely, I lose the train of thought.”
“Maybe because she was a woman, her thoughts soaked more easily into me,” Jana said.
Yang pursed his lips, soon nodding in agreement.
They spoke awhile longer, agreeing their first priority was to gain modern weapons. Skar had received his Vomag pistol back. It had one clip left, twelve pellets. Grinder had gotten hold of the heat gun, and it had three shots, maybe four, left. If they found a source, they could recharge the gun.
“We have to get to the valley and ambush someone bearing arms,” Yang said. “It’s a risky plan, and even riskier entering the demon—the Kresh city.”
“We’ll have to wear disguises,” Jana said. “I have a memory of a seeker long ago passing through the city.”
That was something Cyrus found interesting. They didn’t all seem to have the same memories, as if the seeker had parceled them out.
“Why don’t we ambush a floater like the three of you once did?” Grinder suggested. “Then we could swoop down in it in a surprise raid.”
“If the opportunity arises or we’re forced into it, possibly,” Yang said. “For now, we must sleep, and trek hard and far tomorrow. We must let our new memories soak into us. Then, as we close upon the valley, we will understand better and be able to formulate a cunning strategy for freeing Klane.”
Jana had told them about the seeker’s urgency. She didn’t have any clairvoyant memories, but she felt they should go as fast as they could.
“Now is the time,” Jana said.
“Yes,” Yang agreed, as he slapped his leg. “After all these years, these decades, now is the time to free our world of the Kresh.”
26
Klane’s baffled consciousness had left Jassac far behind. He’d attempted to reenter his inert form lying on a mentalist table. Something had hindered him from reaching his body, his mind and ego citadel. Angry and afraid, he’d leaped away in the opposite direction from before. This time he went out-system instead of in.
His consciousness roamed past the outer asteroid belt with its lonely ice-hauler teams attaching rockets to dirty snowballs. Once, there had been a silvery Bo Taw station out here, radiating thought waves into interstellar space. Klane’s consciousness didn’t even notice the wreckage created by Discovery’s heavy beams several months ago. His consciousness flashed toward a distant point an unimaginable distance—light years—away. Even at the speed of thought, it took time to cross.
Loneliness filled him, a sense of futility. Would he ever return to his body? Would he smell again, taste, touch . . . or hear? He longed for those things. The sense of disembodied wrongness grew stronger and harder to bear the farther he traveled. He recalled the savage destruction of the hive, and he wanted to smile and laugh about it. He hated the Chirr. Nothing in existence was worse than them. The Kresh should develop planet busters and use them on Fenris II and III. Annihilate the Chirr. Kill the insects. Without the Kresh, the Chirr would have likely long ago sent sub-light-speed craft to humanity’s home system and demolished every living thing there.
The beacon he’d been traveling toward now splintered into several distinct points. Vaguely, Klane was aware he must have voyaged twenty or thirty light years.
The distinct points turned into five vast spaceships. They could have been minimoons or large asteroids, but each was a metallic spheroid. Each pulsed with interior life. Messages zipped between vessels. He sensed limited psionics among them. The strongest sensation came from the last ship, and within it burned the brightest point of all.
It was another compatible mind, although there was something highly regimented about it. Klane hesitated. He didn’t want to go through another hive experience. Should he turn around and try to reenter his body again? What if he couldn’t break in? What if the strength of his consciousness weakened after prolonged traveling? He had to make a decision.
A moment later Klane’s consciousness moved through the last craft’s metallic skin. It sped past machinelike humans with biological brains. Klane noticed, wondering about them, and then his consciousness fell toward the compatible mind.
He saw it for a moment, and he knew greater fear than ever. He received psionic data concerning a thing boasting the name of Prime Web-Mind of the Fleet. It was a complex cyborg, a thing or meld of man and machine. There were rows and rows of clear biodomes. In the dozens upon dozens of domes were sheets of brain mass, many thousands of kilos of brain cells from as many unwilling donors from a war fought over one hundred years ago.
Green computi
ng gel surrounded the pink-white mass. Cables, biotubes, and tight-beam links connected the endless domes to computers and life-support systems. The combination made a seething whole. It was an empire of mind. The biotubes gurgled as warm liquids pulsed through them. Backup computers made whirring sounds as lights indicated ten thousand things.
Then Klane’s consciousness entered a section of brain mass. He expected to breath, smell, see, and hear again. Instead, a strange, bewildering complex of thoughts drowned him in an avalanche of me, me, me, me.
“Attention, attention.”
“What?” Klane asked.
He didn’t articulate anything more. Chemicals sprayed his brain mass, his particular dome. It drugged him, made his thoughts sluggish.
Despite that, waves of data flowed through him. The Prime Web-Mind—the combination of the many biodomes—felt fear and tried to soothe itself. By degrees, and due to demanding interrogation, Klane released information. He didn’t do so with words or with psionic thoughts. He communicated with chemical and neurological reactions, a vast and mighty brain—perhaps the mightiest in the universe—that had an interior split personality.
By degrees, Klane divested himself of the hive experience to the greater Prime.
There are other life forms in the Fenris System, more than just the dinosaur aliens?
Sluggishly, Klane assured the Prime Web-Mind that was so. There were the Kresh, the Chirr, and humans—
Warning! Warning! Are you depicting solar system humans?
Yes. My ancestors originated in the solar system.
Klane received his greatest download of data yet, as the Prime knew panic. The solar-wide war over one hundred years ago between the Social Unity Party, the Highborn, and the cyborgs replayed at fantastic speed. Klane learned about Marten Kluge, Neptune, and the last desperate days of the cyborgs. One cyborg starship had escaped destruction, limping into the galaxy and painfully rebuilding these last one hundred years in a new system.
The Prime Web-Mind had begun as a backup to the original Prime of Neptune, and attempted to learn from the old one’s mistakes. The new cyborg empire had found a dead system forty light years from Fenris. There, the cyborgs had built automated factories and thousands of robots. Slowly, the automated factories built new ones, more and more and more. In the last ten years, the vastly increased Prime received telemetry data from probes launched eighty years earlier at the Fenris System.
The first raid into the Fenris System had shown the empire much. This was the second attack. The Cyborg Empire needed biomaterial, hundreds of thousands of tons of brain tissue. The Prime Web-Mind dreamed of conquering the solar system and creating the greatest political unit in existence.
Why must you grow? Klane managed to ask.
Expand! That is the only true directive.
Klane struggled to understand. According to the Prime, these five vessels could have destroyed the original Doom Stars, whatever they were. These five warships were the ultimate in design and destructiveness.
Open yourself, the Prime said. Do not resist the data intake.
Klane resisted as more chemicals and neuron charges attempted to tame the biomatter he inhabited. Once he took over a brain, he was affected by “material” attacks. A wealth of information smashed down on him now. The cyborgs would rip men and women, Kresh and Chirr, anything with brain tissue, putting the biomatter into layered mats and then inserting that into robotic bodies. Many humans, Vomags, Bo Taw, Tash-Toi—it didn’t matter—would enter conveyor systems. Spines, nervous systems, and brains would be torn from flesh and married to plastics and metal, creating fighting cyborgs, throwaway assault troops as the melded society grew exponentially with each conquest. Alien concepts—stealth campaigns, Lurkers, webbies—flooded Klane, bewildering him anew.
What are you? the Prime demanded to know. How did you arrive into one of my biodomes? Is a Kresh war fleet near our position?
Klane struggled to hide his knowledge, but he failed miserably.
What are psionics? the Prime asked. You must explain the concept in detail so I can develop a countermeasure.
The horror of his new existence gave Klane a last measure of strength. He thrashed about in his new mind. He raved and called upon the old seeker. He sought aid from the singing gods. And there came to him a distant siren sound.
What occurs? I do not understand this. Explain to me—
It was the last piece of coherent thought Klane heard from the Prime Web-Mind. Klane’s consciousness ripped free of the biodome. He had a microsecond’s flash of vision as massive machines rolled toward his dome. He suspected the Prime attacked him.
The suspicion became reality as the machines beamed the biodome he had resided within.
I want to go home, Klane told himself. I want to get back into my body.
His consciousness felt considerably weaker than earlier. There was a weariness of mind, of thought. He couldn’t stay here, though. Other bright points appeared in the various ships. They were the minds closest in nature to his. If he remained with the cyborg fleet, which made ready to telejump, he would fall back within another mind.
Gathering his last shreds of resolve, Klane’s consciousness began the long trek back to the Fenris System. It was a lone star over thirty light years away. There were closer star systems, but he ignored those, fixating on the planet where his body lay. He had to get back to his flesh before his consciousness dissipated. Yes. He realized that drinking the Chirr psionic force had given him greater mental strength. But that was dwindling rapidly. This was going to be a race, one for his life.
27
Niens stood before a large screen several chambers over from the test subject. He stood with his gaze cast down before the radiance of Zama Dee the 73rd. The Revered One called from High Station 3. Because of the distance, there was a short time delay.
“You have dropped the reality field?” Zama Dee asked, moving her predatory jaws as she spoke.
“I have, Revered One.”
“Was there a response from the test subject?”
“Not to date, Revered One.”
“Are you ready to raise the field?”
“At a moment’s notice, Revered One.”
The skin flaps on Zama Dee’s crocodilian snout drew back, revealing her blue-pink gums. “You are a mentalist. That means you are the most intelligent of humans. I demand more than these terse answers.”
“Forgive me, please, Revered One. I . . . find my situation precarious and it occupies too much of my mental energies.”
“Yes, yes, I much prefer to see your deviousness on display as you’re attempting now. It settles my mind into believing you aren’t hatching some subtle and ultimately foolish design.”
I love the Kresh. I love the Revered Ones, the masters of my life.
“I have called for a variety of reasons,” Zama Dee said. “The Teleship crew from Earth . . .”
Niens sensed Zama Dee lashing her tail, and it frightened him.
“After seeing them and listening to a data stream from Earth, I have changed my estimation of the test subject,” the 73rd said. “He is highly dangerous and volatile. The Resisters I’ve helped interrogate . . . Klane must never leave that chamber alive.”
Niens dared glance up. He’d never heard of any Kresh admitting to the slightest fear regarding humans before. It was unthinkable. Hope flared in his breast because of it. Perhaps he’d chosen wisely to aid—
I love the Kresh. They are my masters.
With a dry mouth and while mentally reciting the love litany, Niens asked, “Should I kill the test subject now?”
The 73rd became rigid, and her reptilian eyes gleamed with malice. “On no account are you to terminate the test subject unless there is a danger of his bodily escape from the premises. If he does escape, you may rest assured that you will perish in a grisly manner for many to witness.
”
Niens bowed his head. I love the Kresh. I love the Kresh. I deserve whatever happens to me.
“I have further orders,” Zama Dee said. “You must not allow the test subject to speak. According to High Station 3 Resister belief, he is the Anointed One. As you know, I have been trying to verify that for some time. If he is this legendary one, he will possess a golden tongue along with Herculean strength.”
“Revered One, I feel that I must inform you that I am not familiar with the last adjective.”
“I, too, found it unusual. Study has revealed that it relates to an old Earth mythos. Hercules was the son of the gods, half man and half god. He delivered his people from several misfortunes by applying his great strength.”
“The test subject will possess such physical power?” Niens asked.
“As to that I cannot attest. The Resisters believe so. There are clairvoyants among them who have had many precognitive dreams. Do all such dreams occur? That is my current area of study. To date, I have found that it depends upon the clairvoyant.
“Mentalist Niens, you have performed as I expected. It gives me greater trust in your predictability and therefore your reliability.”
“You honor me, Revered One,” he said.
“No, I most certainly do not. In fact, such words from you trouble me. For it shows you still think deviously. I am logical, among the most logical of the Hundred. I hold to facts, data, observable reality.”
“I stand corrected, Revered One.”
In silence, Zama Dee regarded him. Finally, the Kresh said, “That is all. Continue with your duties.”
Shaken, Niens left the communications chamber and returned to the reality field room. Klane still lay as before, an inert mass of flesh, barely breathing and without brain rhythms. From time to time, they had to turn on the reality field. Otherwise, the body, the husk, began to expire.
Niens tapped his chin. The 73rd had let slip amazing data. The Kresh-taught people could not live without someone in authority over them. Who would force the pay girls to their tasks? Why wouldn’t the Bo Taw simply take over, since no one could stop them from using their psi-powers with impunity? Yet apparently, people could run their own lives. The 73rd had admitted to seeing the Earth crew. The solar system foundation theory must have a basis in reality after all. It would seem that humanity hadn’t always served the Kresh, but had originated two hundred and thirty light years away. That meant his goal of freedom had an actual basis in reality.
Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) Page 24