Metal Swarm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Tasia snorted. “And do you still feel your decision was the right one?”

  “Of course. I’m with you, aren’t I?”

  “Right answer.”

  “But this silence seems so cold, so unnecessary. It worries me.”

  “And you feel abandoned.” Tasia placed her hand on his arm.

  He nodded. After a moment, she punched him in the shoulder like an ill-behaved little sister. Then she held him tenderly. “Come on back to our quarters, and I’ll take your mind off your worries. Once we leave for Llaro in a few days, we’ll be doing something you can be proud of, no matter what anyone else thinks.”

  80 DAVLIN LOTZE

  Llaro had plenty of stars to light their way, and Davlin’s eyes adjusted easily, allowing him to focus on the goal ahead. Another mission. He’d never dreamed he would be returning under the cover of night to break back into the stockade settlement.

  He had maintained a vigorous pace cross-country, and Hud Steinman had kept up. They understood the urgency, and both cared about the people trapped inside those resin-cement walls. Hearing Clarin’s message, a whole group of the escapees had wanted to come along and join the imminent fight, but Davlin flatly refused. “You’re here now, and you all have to take care of each other. Two of us, that’s enough. I don’t want to have to rescue anybody a second time.”

  They approached the settlement carefully, alert for the clicking or rustling sounds of warriors on the hunt. They saw the glow from makeshift lights the people had set up to drive away the shadows. Nearby, the expanded Klikiss city shone with a strange phosphorescence, and the framework of the newly erected transportal stood out in the open, large enough for the breedex to send whole armies of Klikiss off to kill other subhives.

  As Steinman had promised, the openings in the stockade wall were barricaded, but not particularly secure. Davlin used a military-issue cutter to break through the makeshift gate and quietly worked it open.

  Nervous and unable to sleep, the colonists kept watch, walking the streets of the enclosed town. The two men were quickly discovered and welcomed. A messenger ran to fetch Roberto Clarin, and Davlin got ready to begin his work.

  Clarin had wasted no time recovering the weapons and equipment Davlin had stashed. When he came up to them, the Roamer leader’s eyes were bloodshot, his dark hair tousled; it appeared as if he hadn’t slept in days. Mayor Ruis looked just as haggard.

  “You people from Crenna have got to stop getting yourselves into these situations,” Davlin said in his usual humorless voice.

  Ruis’s face lit up. “Get us out of this one, and I promise we’ll be the most boring people in the Spiral Arm.”

  The prisoners had already made some preparations to defend themselves, and on an old datapad Clarin had scratched out what they’d accomplished. “Margaret Colicos can’t tell us exactly when the breedex will make its move. We’ve collected enough to make the bugs hurt plenty, and we’ve got plenty of volunteers to do the hurting. Crim and Marla Chan Tylar are already practicing with the weapons, training teams of shooters.” He grinned. “By putting us in the stockade, the Klikiss gave us the defensive high ground. A tactical error. We can stand on the walls and shoot down into them as soon as they come for us.”

  “You’ll run out of bullets before you run out of Klikiss,” Steinman said.

  “But we’ll make a mess while we’re at it.”

  “This wall was meant to keep you in, not to keep the Klikiss out.” Davlin ran his finger down the list: projectile weapons, stunner pistols, handheld crowd-control devices. Many colonists had begun to build clever boltholes, installing hidden hatches, false walls, and secret rooms where they could hide under dire circumstances, but Davlin doubted it would help them much.

  “We have to be ready at any time,” Clarin said.

  “You are ready, but I can make you more ready. Every hour helps to maximize the destruction we can cause.” He tapped his finger on Clarin’s list. “I can use construction explosives to rig land mines around where the Klikiss come and go into the stockade. I can also place bombs against this thick wall. We’ll blow it open if we need to evacuate in a rush—but once that happens it’s already the endgame.”

  Davlin glanced at his chronometer. “Four hours until dawn. We have to move quickly. Let’s just pray that we get an extra few days before all this hits the fan.”

  81 JESS TAMBLYN

  After he and Cesca departed from Theroc, having advised King Peter and Queen Estarra on Roamer clan politics, the whole Spiral Arm was theirs to explore.

  Jess was excited to be alone with Cesca again, his wife, redefining not just their love for each other, but their entire reason for existence. They flew smoothly across empty space, needing no fuel or food, only the energy the wentals gave them.

  “We’re not just people anymore, Jess,” she said. “Our actions could have significant consequences. By the Guiding Star, what’ll we do with ourselves?”

  “Before you start making decisions, let me show you exactly what we’re talking about.” He smiled at her. “Exactly what we have inside us.”

  Knowing what they would find there, he brought their vessel to a brooding gas giant planet whose clouds smoldered with storms. The rust-colored bands now seemed tied in knots. She recognized the world as Haphine, but the whole aspect of the planet had changed from the last time Cesca had been here, only a month earlier. “Why are we here? I thought the hydrogues were defeated.”

  “They are. You defeated them.”

  “Well, I had some help from the wentals.”

  The bubble ship dove into the ever-thickening mists, and Jess could feel echoes of the water entities permeating the clouds. He knew Cesca could sense it, too. The wentals responded and connected with the energy inside their ship and inside their very cells. Though Haphine had once been a hydrogue stronghold, he sensed no sinister anger in the energy here. The deep-core aliens were contained.

  They sank into the clouds, surrounded by the gas giant’s immensity, and Jess began to feel a chill. The volume of Haphine’s atmosphere was orders of magnitude greater than any terrestrial planet’s, incalculably vaster than any area the Roamers had settled. With all that open and unoccupied space came its own loneliness. Not a single human being lived on this entire planet, no Roamer skymines, no settlements on the scattered moons.

  Finally they encountered an encrustation of domes and segmented jewel spheres, honeycombed clusters, strange geometric connections that formed an alien metropolis. The brightly colored, interlinked shapes had been designed by the deep-core aliens at a density that would have crushed any organic matter. He had seen these places before. “Each gas giant has many of these cityplexes.”

  But the hydrogue city was empty and dead, destroyed. Domes were collapsed and many of the crystalline walls eaten away by wental corrosives.

  Cesca was astonished. “Wentals did this?”

  “We did it, by bringing them here.”

  “The hydrogues attacked us. They started this war.”

  “But it wasn’t a new conflict, and this time they lost. The hydrogues are still here, just like the wentals weren’t entirely destroyed when they were defeated the last time. But the balance has certainly shifted.” The water-bubble vessel circled the ruins of the cityplex, and Jess and Cesca both stared. “Wental power was sufficient to cause this disaster, and yet the two of us have the strength to do other things as well.” He touched her, feeling the tingle through her skin. “We can build instead of tear down, create instead of destroy.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew Cesca could feel the surge of possibilities within herself. “Without question, Jess. Where do we go first?”

  The wental ship took one last flight around the hydrogue city. “Back to Plumas, of course.”

  The ice moon glittered in the distant starlight, its frozen surface illuminated by station lights and demarcated landing zones. The Roamer communication bands were filled with conversations between tanker ships, repair crews, and g
roundside excavators. Jess could see that the pumping clusters had been erected again; transfer domes, docking stations, and access huts were now aglow. The frozen crust showed tracks and melt marks from the increased traffic. But underground, he knew the water mines would be a different story. His mother—no, the tainted wental that had possessed his mother—had caused so much damage.

  Beneath the kilometer-thick ceiling, they found Caleb, Wynn, and Torin Tamblyn bossing crews of borrowed engineers from Osquivel who wrestled with spare excavation and construction equipment. Jess’s uncles yelped when they saw the two of them emerge from the ice, walking directly through the murky wall. “Come to take another look at the mess here, Jess?” Wynn said.

  “Come to do something about it.”

  “We can always use the help.” Caleb put his hands on his hips, watching the ongoing work as if he were in charge of it all. “You should have heard Denn Peroni complain about all the better things these professional engineers could be doing—but I called in some favors.”

  “Where is my father?” Cesca asked, looking around and hoping to see him.

  “He’s at Ildira for some trade negotiations. I don’t know why he’d want to go to the Prism Palace’s sunshine and banquets when he could be here, with all this.” Caleb raised his hands to indicate the enormity of the destruction.

  The shipyard workers were shoring up the cracked and damaged walls with thick alloy girders that had originally been fabricated as a spaceship framework. The smell of exhaust fumes had not yet been filtered from the underground air. Parts of the discolored walls had been scoured to a mirrorlike reflective white, while drilling teams worked to straighten and repair the shafts.

  Jess looked up at the newly installed girders. He and Cesca could feel the fractures like aches in their bones. “Those support stabilizers won’t be more than a Band-Aid for the fissures that run through the ceiling.”

  “It’s all we’ve got.”

  “We can lighten your workload.” Jess reached over to take Cesca’s hand. Every time they touched, it felt as if an electric circuit was completed.

  Cesca said to the Plumas workers, “You’ll have to take care of the equipment and machinery yourselves, but we can deal with the water and ice.”

  Jess raised his hands, and energy sparkled from his fingertips. “The wentals have agreed to infuse the water molecules, inhabit the ice, and let the two of us reshape this place into what it should be.”

  The Tamblyn brothers looked at each other uncertainly. “Didn’t you say that the wentals would contaminate this place?” Wynn asked. “Our business is pumping water. We can’t have it all . . . alive and energized.”

  “The wentals assure me they can withhold their propagation and then withdraw when we are finished. They won’t change it, the way they’ve changed me and Cesca.”

  “All right. If you’re sure, then be my guest,” Caleb said. “If you save us months of work, then who are we to complain?”

  Jess felt the wentals within him building up their energy in preparation. He and Cesca independently knew what to do, and took separate tasks. Even when he let go of her hand, the power within him did not decrease. He walked on the packed ice to the edge of the subterranean ocean, knelt on the frozen shore, and extended his finger into the cold sea. Tendrils of wental energy swirled out from him so that the seawater became like an artist’s paint or a sculptor’s clay. He drew up curtains of water that stayed, glistening, exactly where he put them.

  From deep down where the artificial suns could not penetrate, he continued to draw up new currents and stir what had been left undisturbed for a long time. He sensed the pulsing, living nematodes that Karla Tamblyn had controlled, but the creatures’ primitive brains remembered nothing about the attack. He explored with wental senses, but did not contaminate or harm any of the creatures.

  Cesca went to the nearest wall, pressed her palm against the ice, and released her power into the frozen structure. She shifted the water molecules aside and parted the ice, letting her arm sink in up to the shoulder. Sparkling light spread out from her hand like ripples in a pond as wentals flowed into the thick ice and shot upward to find the flaws and cracks, to seal the deep fissures like a surgeon suturing an incision.

  Jess drew more water from the sea and fashioned patches and seals out of new clear ice, using it like putty to refill the gouges left by Karla’s explosions, to reinforce the cracked shore so that the pumping machinery could be installed on solid, level ground.

  Jess drew down support columns like stalactites and pulled up water from the ocean, freezing them together into swirled pillars that were as ornamental as they were functional. Jess and Cesca smoothed the rough-hewn walls and straightened the shafts that held the industrial lifts. They anchored heavy fixtures in the ceiling for the installation of new artificial suns.

  The Tamblyn brothers and the Osquivel shipyard workers had to scurry out of the way so as not to be swept aside in the rapid reconstruction. What would have required months or even years for the Roamer workforce to complete, Jess and Cesca finished in less than an hour.

  Tingling with energy, the two stepped back to inspect the results. The walls and ceiling of the grotto throbbed with leftover lambent energy. Wynn and Torin stood with identical expressions, their mouths agape, looking more like twins than Jess had ever seen them; Caleb remained skeptical, as if sure that something would still go wrong, no matter how bright and shiny everything appeared.

  The wentals seemed reluctant to leave their new habitation. They had gained strength and even pleasure by infusing the ice moon. ”It’s time to withdraw,” Jess said.

  We know.

  All of a sudden, he felt energy streaming back into him. The phosphorescence drained out of the walls, withdrew from the shining pillars, and rose back up from the depths of the sea. The shining wonder left the frozen moon, and it returned to normal.

  Jess let out a long breath. Cesca wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him. “We’ve done a good day’s work.”

  82 DENN PERONI

  When the Dogged Persistence landed on Ildira, Denn self-consciously touched the ribbon that held his hair back. He had dabbed a bit of cologne on his neck and put on his finest outfit. Caleb thought of him as a dandy, overly concerned with his personal appearance, his clothes, and “colorful plumage like some fancy bird,” but Denn didn’t let the teasing bother him. Caleb himself could have paid a bit more attention to personal appearance and hygiene.

  Inside the Prism Palace, Rlinda Kett and Branson Roberts were already in the midst of a diplomatic reception. He learned that he had—thankfully!—missed the performance of Ildiran singers. Denn had never understood the alien music.

  The Mage-Imperator welcomed him and asked him to take a seat at his long table near the other human traders. “Captain Kett has been telling me about the new government humans are forming. It always intrigues me to know of your political differences and difficulties, although I do not truly comprehend them.”

  “Neither do we, sire. We’re still trying to figure it out after thousands of years. But we do our best.”

  Servant kithmen moved about like frenetic worker ants, hurrying to bring him his own plate and a wildly extravagant meal. It certainly beat prepackaged shipboard food and the commissary fare at Osquivel.

  During the meal, they spoke of opening various trade routes, expanding markets for Ildiran goods, ekti from Roamer skymines, exotic items from Theroc, heat-resistant materials from Constantine III. Rlinda was, after all, the Trade Minister, and Denn was the designated representative of the Roamer clans.

  Except for the news about the EDF invading Rhejak and the generally grim reports from Earth, Denn felt that times were getting better. Stories of the Klikiss returning from wherever they had disappeared millennia ago sounded more like fairy tales than any real threat, though Denn did not doubt the reports.

  He had been to Ildira before, but he was impressed with the changes. “I saw your space construction facilities
from orbit, sire. You’re rebuilding the Solar Navy ten times faster than my Roamer shipyards can do the work. Must be your perfect Ildiran cooperation.”

  The Mage-Imperator smiled. “Actually, we have humans to thank for this efficiency. Our industrial operations are managed by an engineer named Tabitha Huck. She was among the Hansa cloud harvesters who were our . . . guests for some time. We offered her a job.”

  “Hansa humans accomplished that?” Denn said, offended by the very idea. “Maybe I could learn a thing or two from her.”

  The Mage-Imperator turned to one of his bureaucratic kithmen, who hurried off. “I shall arrange for you to tour our operations.”

  The orbiting shipyard hub was a model of efficiency, and Denn couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Space construction workers flew about in precise coordination like well-choreographed dancers; the warliner components were assembled as if they wanted to go together. He saw not a single misstep, not the slightest hesitation. “This is incredible, Ms. Huck. By the Guiding Star, I’ve never seen anything like it. This boggles my mind.”

  Ildirans seemed to share a telepathic bond, but the few dozen former Hansa engineers (who had never impressed Denn before) were just as attuned to each other. Tabitha guided the work crews from her central station; her underlings passed along curt orders, abbreviated instructions, sketchy details—and everyone followed them with perfect synergy.

  Tabitha had a squarish jaw and a blunt nose that made her look just a bit too rough to be attractive, and her hair was cut short and straight in a serviceable but not stylish fashion. Even so, she had a radiance about her, a satisfaction and contentment that gave her an entirely different sort of beauty. “It’s simple enough if you know how to do it, Mr. Peroni. Once others understand you in such a way that all wishes become common, then all instructions turn to mutual consent. Each person knows what he or she should do and what everyone else is doing. No unnecessary redundancy. Everything comes off without a hitch.”