The Liberty Fleet Trilogy (War of Alien Aggression, box set two)

by A. D. Bloom

  The low-gee waves slapped at the rocky shores of the southern continent and threw up a layer of mist like a cloud and after that, all Ram could see from beside Ix's perch behind the Shediri pilot was the fast-passing scrub and sanguine dust of alien badlands. "I need to see more," said Ram.

  The pilot pulled the raider up then in a steep curve, leveled out at a couple thousand meters, and inverted the craft. All of them stayed glued to the deck where they'd been since the raider was generating its own gravity, but the canopy now provided Ram a far better view of the ground below.

  Against the blood-colored and cracked earth, a blurred darkness, a patch of shadow moved like a snake and a river both, wending its way low over the surface. "Those are flying insects," said Dana, now beside him. "The swarm looks kilometers long. And thick. Some kind of flies maybe."

  "I wonder where they're going." He didn't want to believe the temporal coincidence of that uttering and the sudden change in the flight pattern of the swarm below had any relationship, causal or otherwise, but as the insects deviated from any semblance of the meandering, presumably natural line of flight they had displayed and commenced to curve their path in a perfect arc and then a perfect circle, he said, "Slower."

  After the translator clacked and hissed his request, Dana said, That could be natural. That could be some kind of pre-feeding or pre-bivouac pattern. We have no idea."

  The insects below shifted again. The lines of the circle drew together at one end and then the middle, forming a straight line while the other end of them formed itself into two rays of equal length set at a right angle with the other line intersecting it at the vertex. "That's a bloody arrow," he said.

  "That's a bloody arrow," she repeated, momentarily stunned. "Bearing 272."

  "Pilot," he said. "Course change. New bearing: 272."

  It swayed its head left and right after the translator spoke and turned the craft on line with the arrow. "We're on course," said Ram.

  "On course," agreed Ix.

  Dana sighed. "If you two say so."

  Herds of something raised dust along the few rivers they crossed. They reminded him of tumbleweeds, but they moved against the wind. The line of them looked almost predatory.

  The pilot then began to whine and click faster than the translator daemon could keep up with. Ix clacked back at it before Ram even got the first translation. "New contact."

  Dana said "Is it one of ours?"

  "Ekkai," said Ix. "Descending. Landing." It pointed then with four of its six upper arms at the plateau top mountain in the distance. "Landing point: other side of mountain."

  "That's no mountain," Dana said. "Trust me."

  "I trust you," said Ix.

  It rose from the plain like a mountain , but even after five million years, the slope of its faces was too steep and the circular shape of the plateau some 18 kilometers in diameter on top could still be read from the air with ease. On an orbital survey image it might be taken for a geologic formation, but flying at the side of that mountain after he'd seen the shape of the arks with his own eyes, he couldn't help but see them again. It wasn't a stretch to imagine what rose up in front of them was the very bow of the alien ship he'd been told he'd find here. The forward kilometer of that ship had materialized in the open air and five-million years had made a mountain around it.

  "The Ekkai ship." She pointed at it. It wasn't trying to hide. It had turned itself sideways in the atmo and Alcyone glinted off the fins now like they were 200-meter wings. "I see landing gear. I wonder what the clams want with us."

  "It's not us they're here for." To the Shediri pilot, Ram said, "Land on top."

  "The Ekkai are maneuvering,"she said. The growing lines of shadows on the fins and the changing shape of the hull told him even before Dana did. "They're changing course to land on the plateau," she said.

  After they landed and the hatches popped, Ix clacked, "Arrival." It stepped from the belly ramp of the raider and set its 58 feet in the reddish dust and lichens that grew everywhere in sight. The hull felt cold under Ram's hand and it was wet with condensation that dripped off and evaporated almost immediately.

  "Some kind of cactus," Dudley said as he gestured to the field of them that extended seemingly all the way to the Ekkai ship almost seven kilometers away. They were cabbage-sized and blossoming a myriad of colors. "Soil can't be that deep here. Probably mostly just the lichens," he said. "This thing is like a big coral reef for them. They love it. Maybe you should watch where you step. In case they ate a sinkhole under the dirt or something."

  The Shediri didn't seem to have any worries. Two of Ix's bodyguards had picked him up and begun to carry him already. The Stripeys moved in a straight line as if they knew exactly which way to go. Ram didn't.

  "Ix," he said. "[Interrogative] Direction known?"

  The bug extended all six of its upper arms then and swayed slightly as it twisted its thorax, presumably gesturing at all of Dudley's flowering cactus. Ram recognized the keening sound of Shediri laughter as he brought an imaging scope to his eye and recognized the element of significance in front of him that was harder for a human eye to discern without help.

  "If you look at all the flowers in infrared like the bugs see things, there's a line of them that are all unremarkable to us, but they're all reflecting infrared differently than the others. To the Shediri, they're forming a straight line, clear as day." He handed the imager to Chun to see for himself.

  The UN captain nodded as he brought it to his eye. "That's very pretty," Chun said as he trained the imager on the approaching Ekkai mechanized suits and zoomed in.

  "They're wearing armored suits. We didn't bring all that much firepower. I'm getting the rest." He ducked under and into the raider and came back with the last four MA-48s Dudley and a few others had left behind. "That's eight, fully armed pirates," Chun said as he handed them to their owners including Ram. "I feel better now."

  "I've got a sidearm," he said.

  "Then, I'll carry two."

  "I'll take it," said Hank.

  "Not before I will." Margot said as she stepped forward and took the gun from him.

  "The last thing we want here is shooting," he told her as she brought the weapon to her shoulder and adjusted the sights.

  "I just don't like the look of those tumbleweed things," she said, nodding to a line of them rolling across the cactus field. "They look hungry." Closer now, he could make out the unsettling way they clawed at the surface.

  "Follow the Shediri."

  The line of them set off through the field of cactus and with the clouds whipping low overhead and light already fading in the sky, Ram was glad he'd brought so many. Devlin set off across the bow of the buried alien ship with Chun, Dana Sellis, Asa Biko, Lucy Elan, Garlan Foet, Dudley, Margo and Hank behind him and Ix and his eight Stripeys in front.

  Some kind of search radar or LiDAR from the Shediri raider must have picked up the ship coming down fast in the atmo and relayed a warning to Ix because the Stripeys all beat their chests while the Ambassador to War pointed with all its arms before Ram could make it out.

  Dana said. "Is that...?"

  In moments it was not only visible to the naked Human and Shediri eye, but had lowered itself down through the atmo so far that the sweeping lines of the golden hull could be read with ease. "I know that skiff," Dana said. "That's Anton Cyning's skiff."

  "Is the interior nice?" Chun said. "I always imagined it was leather."

  "It is leather," said Margo. "And it smells lovely inside. I'd still shoot it down if I could."

  Ram said. "If I'm right about what's happening here - what's about to happen here, then Anton Cyning is the last human being I want anywhere near this historic meeting."

  "Too late," Garlan said. "He'll touch down in under a minute."

  "And right in our path," said Lucy.

  "He probably just followed the Ekkai," Chun said. "They came in without any stealth."

  "Whatever the reason, he's here. Let's go greet h
im before the bugs do. Ix isn't particularly fond of Cyning."

  Young Hank ran past them to the bugs. Ram turned and looked back to Margo, and she said, "You catch him; I certainly can't."

  In contrast to the Shediri raider, upon landing, Anton Cyning's skiff scorched the lichen dirt under it when its claw-footed landing gear touched down. Thin smoke came off it. It the twilight, the orange pinprick points where the lichens flared up enough to flame burned like a swarm of dim sparks flaring and snuffing and slowly spreading from the 30m long burn mark shaped like a shadow of the crescent hull.

  As they approached, one of Cyning's bodyguards stomped at the slow-creeping fire-line until sparks lifted off in the wind to light the soil on fire somewhere else. He stopped as Cyning emerged. The company man stepped down the ramp sniffing the air in a caricatured manner meant to be read from a distance like a stage gesture.

  "Is that a secret diplomatic meeting I smell, Mr. Devlin, between you and the bugs and our new, Ekkai friends? I should have been invited. But I'm not the sort of guest to ruin the fun once I arrive. So. After you. Please, lead the way. I assure you," he said, as the dozen, armed Staas Security Guards descended the ramp to stand behind him. "Nothing is going to keep me away from this."

  Ix's translator clacked out Cyning's words in Shediri while the wind roared in Ram's ears, and at the Ambassador's urging, the Stripeys continued on the path, ignoring the company man as they passed on twitching legs. "After you," Cyning said to Ram.

  Only two kilometers later, night had fallen, but here, unlike at the equator, there were no clouds blocking the starlight that lit the badlands the color of tarnished silver. He knew Cyning and his guards were behind them and tried to ignore them like the Shediri had. When he stopped walking and brought the imager to his eye now, he had a decent view of the Ekkai party walking towards them, presumably guided by cactus flowers or insect swarms or worms or god only knew what else.

  The three canned clams to the rear wore the same armored Ekkai exosuits he'd seen on their disabled flagship. They had the same set of five legs underneath and three above and had the same shape to the tank that held their liquid environment under high pressure. The one in front was different than the other walking pickle-barrels. It was larger, like it had been made for more than one of them at a time and it was shaped like a fat hourglass. Porthole windows of sorts dotted it all round, especially over the domed top. That one had no legs. It floated perfectly evenly over the surface on some kind of artificial gravity while the mechanized monsters behind it tore deep gouges in the thin soil and kicked up dust.

  Ran didn't guess what crunched under his boot was a bone until he shone a light on it. He crouched down to pick up the pieces and make sure. "There's more over here," Biko said.

  "Over here as well," said Dudley. "Different animals."

  "Those rocks don't belong here," Dana said. That's when he saw the stones that looked out of place. They were beautifully rounded like river rocks, but there was no water in sight. "They're arranged in lines," she said. He shined the light out to the sides and saw they were walking inside two lines of stones placed long ago by something that carried them here and left them to delineate a path.

  The further they went, the more stones they saw until the line of them was solid on either side and what had begun with a scratch repeated on each rock had become deeply carved relief sculptures. Of what, he couldn't guess, but the number of ancient bones he trod and shattered increased with the intricacy of the carvings.

  "The Ekkai have stopped," Chun said in the darkness. "I can see them clearly with the imager. They've stopped. There's something in front of them, I can tell what it is. Some kind of pit maybe. Should we warn the bugs?"

  "They can see it better than we can," he said.

  "Will it be dangerous?" Hank said. The voice came from down and to his right.

  "I didn't see you there."

  The boy grinned like it was a compliment. "Have you considered that it might be dangerous what we find?"

  "Whatever it is, I'll protect you," Ram said.

  Hank rolled his eyes. "Don't patronize me," the boy said. "I mean, is it dangerous to have whatever we find? Too dangerous maybe to let just anyone near it?"

  "Do you mean the Ekkai?"

  "No," the boy said laughing like a child before he spoke with the memories of two lifetimes. "I mean bloody Cyning. You're not going looking for anything to steal, but I assure you he is. I bloody would."

  The boy spoke words that seemed straight out Harry Cozen's mouth. "Watch your bloody language," Ram said as the boy ran up ahead with the Shediri who were approaching the edge of the very same depression in the surface that had halted the advance of the Ekkai fish tanks.

  "The formative years are...difficult," Chun said.

  "You have no idea," Margo moaned from behind.

  He could hear the spoken Shediri on the cold, gusting wind as they approached. The bugs' Shediri-Ekkai translator flashed the Ekkai from the scroll in Ix's hand and lit them up brightly. He thought he saw the clams' ocular branches fanning in the portholes before a window in the dome, flashed a message back.

  Ram and his party stepped in next to the Stripeys, and he could finally see that the roughly oval pit between them and the Ekkai was no more than 12 meters wide and shallow. It was, indeed, more of a depression than a pit, but the drop at the edges was sudden and straight like it was a shallow, fallen sinkhole. He wondered if a piece of the hull of the ancient ship underneath had shifted in the ages or if this was where the lichens had finally eaten through after five million years. Maybe there was a way in if you dug, but all he could see lining the flat of the shallow bottom were bones. A carpet of them covered every inch and it looked deep.

  "Devlin needs know," Ix said through the audio translator. "Ekkai Admiral tells same story."

  "Say hello for me." He felt powerless without access to the Ekkai's language and the Shediri hadn't yet shared it. As the hissing, clicking and flashing conversation continued between Ix and the Ekkai Admiral, Margo stepped to his side and whispered in his ear.

  "Those carvings on the stones and the predominance of bones in this place..." Margot said, "I don't think you need to be an anthropologist to be appropriately alarmed at what we've seen here so far. It appears as if, at some point, the natives were engaged in a goodly bit of sacrifice."

  "I haven't seen any skulls," Hank said. "Not a one. Where are they? I wanted a skull."

  Cyning stepped beside them and stood close to edge as he looked at the bones. "Sacrifice has a long and distinguished history among our peoples," he said. "You're a collector of Pre-Columbian art, Margo. You should know that. This is nothing more than another artifact, just like the ones you collect."

  The company man had no notion of the significance of the structure on which he stood. Cyning had no idea what he was standing on; Ram was sure of it. The proof was in the way not a lick of fear crossed the man's gene-cut, ageless face as he fell into that pit. The alien bones shattered beneath his fine boots as he landed on his feet and immediately turned to young Hank who had stepped back from the edge, presumably as the company man fell. Cyning turned and faced him immediately. "You pushed me," the company man said, pointing his finger at the boy.

  "I did not," insisted Hank. "You fell!"

  Cyning took a step towards the lip to climb out as one of his guards extended a hand to help him, but Cyning's hand never met his. The company man seized up and fell backwards to the carpet of bones under his boots. His fingers gnarled up and his knees curled towards his chest as his mouth opened farther than a mouth should ever open. And then, all at once, every muscle in the man's body relaxed at once and he was still. Cyning stared absent-eyed at the stars above, clearly dead.

  None of his guards risked jumping into the pit to save him. The Shediri didn't even sway then. They were all still as the cold seemed to creep up from the ground and caress Ram's fingertips.

  "Something moved in the pit," said Dana. "There!"

&nbs
p; Ram looked into the shadows of the pit and saw it moving, but it wasn't form, it was shadow flitting over the starlit bones, dimming the light like a thin oil slick as it moved. "There's another," Chun said.

  He heard Lucy shoulder her rifle. "Nobody shoot anything!" Ram said.

  They floated up like eels from the bony murk and swirled clockwise round the pit together casting themselves over Cyning's body one by one for a few seconds until they swarmed on him. Anton's Cyning's body jerked and spasmed under so many of them Ram couldn't count. They covered the dead company man like coats of paint running all over him and under him until that jaw of his reanimated and gaped open and the first of them flew inside. The dim creatures flowed down Cyning's throat like he was drinking ink until none remained to swirl in the bones or paint shade over his body, until all of them had invaded the company man.

  Cyning fell on his back then and twitched. And then, he spoke. They used his body to speak in a wheezing monotone, exhaling each of the words on a separate breath like a huffing bellows. "This world...is ours. This world...is yours. Human, Shediri, Ekkai. And we, whom you have met before, we who exist in both future and past, we who cast only shadows in the present." Ix hissed and clacked his Shediri translation and flashed it to the clams as fast as it could. "We....are too strange for you to understand, but know we ally with you. This world is ours, this world is yours."

  "What do we call you?" said Ram, but they would say nothing more.

  The company man's jaw opened wide, and the dim creatures flew out his mouth in a geyser a meter-high. They spilled down and off the lifeless body like a shadowy flood and skated silent and smooth and quickly over the bones of the pit and up the sides in all directions. They slid over and under Ram's feet before he could hop out of the way. He shone the light and saw them everywhere, skating fast over the lichen badlands, shadows chasing shadows.

  "I'm calling them Weirdlings," said Hank.

  The treaty would be signed on Cyning's stage, but the meeting that mattered happened there. He'd have to trust what Ix told him about what the Ekkai said, but the bug said the clams were happy with the arrangement. This world is ours. This world is yours.