Hellhole Inferno

by Brian Herbert

  Bolton tried to lift himself up. “What are you doing to him?”

  The Xayan turned his smooth head and glassy eyes toward Bolton. His antennae extended and twitched. “I am preserving him, surrendering the energy of some of my plants so that his life functions continue, though it will barely sustain him.” Jonwi wrapped the thick red fronds around Escobar, as if preparing a mummy. “Eventually his own survival mechanisms must come into play and do the work.”

  “Does that mean he has a chance now?”

  “A chance.”

  The thick weed forest was alive with reawakened native species—floating and sparkling spore pods that drifted into the air, insect analogues, small grazing creatures, and even larger predators that avoided Jonwi.

  Looking at the cocooned body on the ground as the alien continued to wrap more weed strands, Bolton frowned. “Shouldn’t we get him to a medical clinic, one that knows how to treat humans? You could use your telemancy to transport him to the shadow-Xayan colony by Slickwater Springs—or Michella Town has a larger facility. My … wife is one of you. Keana Duchenet, and I think her Xayan companion’s name is Uroa.”

  Jonwi froze, then tended to his work again. “I am not part of that faction. My duty is to remain here.” He gazed upward, as if looking in the direction of some distant star system. “Those others are not my friends and would not be pleased to see me.”

  Bolton rose unsteadily to his feet. “But you’re Xayan.”

  “I am Ro-Xayan. I came back to awaken this planet, to restore the plants and animals from specimens we preserved before the asteroid impact. We thought our world was ready to receive the gift again. We did not know the others had survived.”

  Not understanding, Bolton knelt over the Redcom. There, in midday sunlight, Escobar lay on the ground cover, his damaged face visible through the wrapping that covered his body. One eye was swollen shut, and his cheeks showed deep cuts. On his torso, now wrapped in the red weed shroud, the gashes from the burrow foxes were much deeper. Internal organs had been damaged.

  But he seemed to be healing under Jonwi’s care. Escobar’s breathing was shallow. His body needed a great deal of rest, and nourishment, and Bolton could only hope that he could heal himself.

  Despite all the strangeness around him, Bolton was not afraid of the strange alien. Jonwi seemed alone, but in charge of this isolated extraterrestrial Eden. Jonwi kept turning his oversized eyes up to the sky, and seemed to have a kindly, if sad, expression—though Bolton was not at all certain he could judge Xayan moods. He found himself intrigued by the creature’s calm, almost stoic demeanor.

  As night fell, the dense red weeds felt like a comforting shelter rather than a dangerous place. Escobar remained unconscious, and Bolton tried to remain awake as long as possible, feeling obligated to stand guard, but the rushing, humming sounds of insects and the drifting weed spores lulled him, and he finally succumbed. After their ordeal of the past several days, he felt safer than he had since escaping from the POW camp.

  The next day, Jonwi returned just as Bolton awoke. The Xayan came up to him, indicated Escobar. “I monitored your companion through the night. His condition has not changed. He is still alive.” He parted tall stalks of the weed and gestured with an arm. “Come, let me show you what I have created here.”

  Bolton followed him. Though constant hunger thrust knives into his belly, the sense of wonder slowly captivated him. Grazing creatures moved over the vegetation, unlike the lumbering herd animals he and Escobar had encountered on the plain. Colorful insects danced among showers of sparkling spores that erupted from bursting, fecund nodules. He found it strangely beautiful. “You … created all this?”

  Jonwi tended a nest of scuttling crab creatures that retreated from his ministrations. When the alien departed, the crab creatures returned to their activities. “Before the asteroid struck Xaya, my faction was careful to collect specimens of the basic life-forms that were expected to become extinct. We knew that once our planet was ready to reawaken, we would need to rebuild the ecosystem and reseed the planet with all the life-forms we had harmed. In this, we planned quite meticulously.”

  Jonwi led Bolton through the vegetation, allowing him to drink greedily from a little waterfall—clean, sparkling water that ran down a cluster of rocks into a pool. But Bolton was trembling with hunger, and the native Hellhole species were incompatible with human biochemistry. However, the alien suggested some fleshy plants and fungi that the Ro-Xayans had crossbred with species from other worlds. He suggested they might be digestible by humans.

  Despite his gnawing hunger, Bolton asked, “What if it’s poison to me?”

  “What is the alternative?” Jonwi asked.

  So Bolton ate the plants ravenously, realizing he would die soon enough without sustenance. He suffered no violent reaction, so he ate more. He would have to try to feed Escobar as well, perhaps something mashed and liquefied.

  Bolton didn’t ask how Jonwi knew about human biochemistry. He was just glad to be alive, although he didn’t know what to do next. The alien had such a trustworthy, nonthreatening manner that Bolton accepted his suggestions.

  When Bolton tolerated the first food, Jonwi showed him fat, purple berries to eat, a tree with thin strips of edible bark that tasted delicious and chewy, and harmless antlike insects in a tree that could be consumed for protein. After eating from this exotic smorgasbord, Bolton’s knotted stomach settled, as did his painfully sore and constricted muscles. Now he just had to worry about the Redcom … and about getting back to civilization alive.

  But it became apparent that Jonwi did not have any connection with the aliens who were allied with General Adolphus. “A rift occurred in our species,” Jonwi explained. “The complex reason for this split is not easy to explain, but it was devastating. My faction departed this planet because we did not wish to take part in ala’ru. To stop the dangerous racial ascension, we exterminated our fellow Xayans with an asteroid strike.”

  Bolton stared. “You were responsible for wrecking this planet?”

  “My faction was.” He held his head high. “But we saved Xaya’s key life-forms. Since the impact, we have been monitoring this world for centuries, waiting until the environment was stable again. When it was ready, we seeded the landscape with embryos, spores, roots, tubers, and cultured seeds in order to re-create the home that we had damaged so severely. But we knew that would be a tremendously long process.”

  Jonwi seemed to revel in the lushness of the vegetation, animals, and insects he had fostered here. “We understood that Xaya would never be exactly the same as it was, and many of our seeds and embryos did not survive the centuries of waiting. I arrived here only recently to guide the large-scale awakening. Previously, when our scout ships dispersed the basic life-forms, we saw the scattered human settlements, but were unconcerned about them.”

  As the alien glided through the red weed forest, Bolton followed him, curious. He suddenly understood. “You didn’t expect any of the other Xayans to survive, though.”

  “We did not even know they existed, didn’t know about Zairic’s slickwater or the preservation chamber used by a handful of Originals. I was sent here to help Xaya reawaken, but now we know that our enemies did survive after all. And, worse, they are rebuilding their telemancy through a powerful symbiosis with humans. They have managed to generate a very strong form of telemancy. They are approaching ala’ru once more, and the danger this poses is greater than ever. Their telemancy set off numerous alarms that called my people back from their long interstellar journeys.”

  Jonwi’s strange voice took on an ominous tone. “We had so many ambitious plans for this world, such high hopes. Yet, all of our efforts—all of my efforts—have been for naught, our hopes dashed. Sadly, Xaya has only a short time left now. Everything has changed.”

  He gazed up at the sky again. “The Ro-Xayans have no choice. The threat is too great. My people are coming again to destroy this world—completely this time. The asteroid bombardmen
t is already on its way.”

  53

  Working deep in the Vielinger iperion mines, clad in a decontamination suit with a faceplate, Erik Anderlos climbed the metal stairs to the observation platform. He felt angrier than usual because the seals in his work suit were defective, allowing the ultrafine, toxic dust to sift in. He had coughed up blood from his lungs this morning, and felt raw dryness in his throat. The iperion residue was killing him and all the other colonists seized at Buktu.

  They were prisoners of war and should have been kept safe. But Selik Riomini didn’t care. He demanded his iperion production and refused to fund adequate safety measures for the workers.

  As he held the handrail on the stairs, Anderlos saw the maintenance foreman, Jando Knight, emerge from a side tunnel and stride down a ramp to a lower level. A small, stocky man, Knight seemed preoccupied and rushed; he looked annoyed about something. Above him, the work supervisor Lanny Oberon stood at his high perch, overseeing the delicate excavations.

  The Buktu captives were working in one of the largest caverns in the Vielinger mines. Under close monitoring by guards, they operated remote-controlled skimmers to strip iperion from the walls, filling bulbous, refrigerated storage compartments on beelike flying machines. It was cold and damp in the caverns. Anderlos had worked with his fellow prisoners, no matter how dirty or dangerous the job was, and he would continue to demand better treatment.

  He had determined that Oberon was a halfway decent man, considering the vile man he worked for, and Anderlos had been hesitant to harangue him too much, but he had to keep advocating for his people. They were prisoners, not slaves, but it seemed as if Riomini wanted them to perish. This place was like a death sentence.

  The excavation cavern was large, and the stairway long. Under normal conditions, the observation level could be reached via an elevator, but the machinery had failed. Two thirds of the way up, Anderlos took a deep breath, trying to calm himself for yet another conversation about the same issue. Poor maintenance, dangerous work conditions, the Buktu captives suffering. He felt the stairway vibrating from the machines that droned in his ears.

  No stranger to hard labor, in his youth Anderlos had worked at the Lubis Plain shipyards on Qiorfu, on a crew assigned to maintaining mothballed Constellation warships. In those days, Lord Jacob Adolphus had run the facility and the planet. On Qiorfu, Anderlos had seen Lord Adolphus and his son Tiber, but had never met the legendary man who would become known as the General.

  When Anderlos subsequently emigrated to the Deep Zone and went to work for Ian Walfor at the remote Buktu operations, Walfor had often spoken of what a fine and inspirational leader General Adolphus was. Now that he was a prisoner of war, Anderlos doubted he would ever have the opportunity to meet the General.

  Yet, even far from the Deep Zone, enslaved in the Vielinger iperion mines, he considered himself under the General’s command. It gave him something to hold on to, that he was on the right side of the great conflict, even if he was far from the fighting.

  Anderlos finally reached the observation deck, felt the unstable platform shift under his feet as he walked across it. Standing at the rail, Lanny Oberon turned to watch him. The mine supervisor was a man in his middle years, his boyish face and thinning hair visible through the faceplate of his protective suit. He looked just as dirty as anyone else in the caverns, and just as unhappy.

  Oberon had operated these mines for the de Carre family before the Riominis took over Vielinger. The supervisor knew what he was doing and had made numerous muttered comments about how much he resented the poor safety measures himself. Repeated system failures and numerous mine accidents had led to the overthrow of Louis de Carre, and Lord Riomini had excoriated the nobleman for poorly managing such a strategic asset. And now Riomini was doing even worse.

  Anderlos was not impressed with the new Diadem’s foresight. Without iperion, the stringlines would eventually weaken and fade; the paths through space would dissipate, and interstellar commerce would fall apart. And yet, when the prisoners could no longer continue, he probably had backup crews ready to go to work.

  Anderlos began by saying, “My people appreciate the full-body suits you obtained for us, but they are so old that at least a third of them don’t have the proper integrity, and my people are exposed to toxic dust. Almost all of us are sick, to one degree or another.”

  Oberon said, “I’ve expressed my displeasure to Lord Riomini. I have requested more suits, along with better safety measures and other improvements, but he is preoccupied with the urgencies of being a Diadem. When he delivered you and your companions to me, I told him I couldn’t operate safely with the pitiful budget he allowed. I send letters of complaint to him almost daily.” He seemed exasperated. “No one else could keep these mines running with such a box full of setbacks.”

  Anderlos remained firm. “You have my sympathy, but that won’t save my people. You did remove our children from the danger zone and transferred them to other living quarters, but we aren’t miners. We are husbands and wives, simple colonists from Buktu. And the suits are getting worse—I’m wearing a leaky one myself.”

  The other man surprised him. “So am I. Your people have the only good ones we have left—and there aren’t nearly enough to go around.”

  Despite Oberon’s efforts, the suits needed daily emergency repairs with whatever materials the work crews could put their hands on. The protective fabric had a tendency to break down at the seams from caustic dust, and the resealing apparatus worked poorly.

  The two men commiserated, but found no solution. This litany of complaints and helpless excuses had become a daily ritual with them.

  From the observation platform, Anderlos coughed as he watched an extraction skimmer hover over the blue-veined walls, removing microthin layers. Oberon mentioned the previous lords, especially Christoph de Carre, lamenting the fate of the young nobleman. “He didn’t deserve the raw deal his family got. The de Carres treated us with respect, made certain we were paid well and received everything we—”

  Oberon’s words suddenly cut off as a roaring noise increased in volume like a mounting explosion. Panicked, the supervisor grabbed a voice amplifier so he could shout orders. “Emergency! Leave your stations and get to higher ground! Climb stairs, get onto platforms or ledges, anything!”

  Anderlos understood as the roar increased. Water—thunderous water. “It’s an underground flood!”

  Down on the cavern floor, workers scrambled onto ledges, raced up stairs.

  Oberon yelled over the noise, “There’s a big aquifer down here. It’s been dammed up for years with diversion tunnels and pumps. Jando Knight has been working hard to keep it up, but something’s—”

  A blast of water hammering into the grotto drowned out his words. Anderlos felt the platform shudder with the strain as workers climbed the ladder, overloading the structure. The flood stampeded into the chamber, slamming against the support structure. He heard screams, saw men and women in work suits washed away and slammed against rock walls.

  Oberon descended partway down the ladder, yelling even though his words could not be heard. He gestured the frantic miners toward a smaller tunnel. “This passage goes upward, winds around—eventually it’ll lead outside, but you should be able to stay ahead of the rising water.”

  Anderlos added his own voice. “Now run!”

  Not everyone could make it, but many followed the instructions. When the last survivors had made it into the escape tunnel, Anderlos and Oberon charged in after them. Water continued to thunder in the grotto.

  Inside the passage, after they had climbed high enough to feel safe, Oberon leaned against a wall, panting. “Lord Riomini is not going to like this. He wants iperion production, and he’s not a man to accept excuses. He’ll find a way to blame all of us.”

  Anderlos thought of everyone who had died back there, probably at least a hundred—lost due to some cost-cutting measure that Riomini had ordered. He shook his head. “No, he will have the p
risoners as scapegoats. We are expendable, but he still needs you.”

  54

  After he recruited them for his plan, the shadow-Xayans assured General Adolphus they would succeed. The stringline hub had to be recaptured, at all costs. He had already lost half a day setting up the details, and now the asteroids were that much closer.

  His only other option would be to surrender as George Komun demanded. And, in order to save his planet and his population, he would do that if necessary, but he didn’t believe a traitor’s promises.

  Before preparing to launch from Ankor, Adolphus had steeled himself and spoke with Sophie over the comm. “However this turns out, we have to begin the evacuation immediately, so start making preparations. I can’t lose any more time. Komun will let me call his bluff. And even if Keana and Lodo do find the Ro-Xayans on their expedition, I have very little hope they’ll be able to stop the asteroids.”

  She was alarmed, and obviously wished she could be there with him. “If you surrender to Komun as he demands, he will still let us all die here. He’s proved that he’s dishonorable.”

  Adolphus shook his head. “George Komun is not the man I expected him to be, but I think he’d keep his word if I presented myself for surrender. He wants me; he doesn’t want everyone on Hellhole to die.” Even so, he heard the uncertainty in his own words.

  “Then we’d better hope that the shadow-Xayans can do what they say they will.”

  Since Sophie knew the converts much better than he did, she had helped him pick the best members for his team, even insisting on Peter Herald from Slickwater Springs, whom they both trusted greatly. Herald was racing to Ankor even as a defeated-looking General made his overture to Komun. Herald would wear his old uniform for veracity, and the other fifteen shadow-Xayan volunteers—his escort—would also wear old Rebellion uniforms, brave and loyal veterans standing by their beloved commander. Unless Komun recognized any of them by sight, he wouldn’t know they were shadow-Xayans.