Metal Swarm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Jess knew they could resculpt the surface, erase the crater and smooth over the crevasses, make the ice ready for Kotto Okiah to restore his facility here. But that wasn’t his intent. “There would be no purpose to it. Kotto established the outpost here when ekti was in such great demand. Now, though, with skymining open and free again, there’s no need. Jonah 12 should remain a memorial.”

  She gave a bittersweet smile. “Do you think any Roamers will come to see it, to remember those who died here?”

  “I’m hoping for something else—a living memorial. Now that the wentals are so well distributed, I’d like to turn them loose here, let them recharge the ice the way they did with the comet I sent to Theroc.”

  He bent down, placed his palms flat against the hydrogen ice, and felt wental power flow out of him into the crust of the planetoid. He sensed more than saw the shimmer that permeated the ice, which grew stronger as the inclusions of frozen water awakened, taking on a semblance of life. He was pleased with what he had done.

  Jess raised his hands and spoke directly to the water beings. “Is this place adequate for you?”

  Wentals are widely dispersed. What we require now is to be made stronger. Not diluted.

  “There are so many wentals that they could never be made extinct again. Doesn’t that in itself make you stronger?” Cesca asked.

  We are numerous, but we all sprang from the same pool. If we continue to spread from the same droplet, eventually our powers become more diffuse. We need a new wellspring. We request that you locate other wentals that were lost in the great war, just as you found us.

  Years ago, in his nebula skimmer, Jess had retrieved a small amount of the living water from inside a diffuse gas cloud. All of the subsequent wentals had sprung from that small amount of moisture.

  “But how do we find different ones?” Jess asked.

  Search the ancient battlefields across the Spiral Arm, places where wentals died. If you go there, we will show you.

  95 DAVLIN LOTZE

  After the robots retreated, having caused a great deal of damage to the subhive, Davlin didn’t have as much time as he had hoped for. None of the Llaro colonists did. The remaining Klikiss did not give them a chance.

  Looking like a scarecrow, Margaret ran back from the damaged hive city, racing as if the monsters were pursuing her. Dead insect bodies and smashed robots still lay strewn all around. Bypassing the smaller entrance gaps, she entered through the hole blasted in the stockade wall and stood haggard in the glare of Llaro’s midmorning. When she finally caught her breath, she shouted to Davlin and the milling colonists next to him. “The domates are coming for you! Now.” Her words cut like an axe blade through the morning air.

  Davlin felt a sudden chill. “They’re still reeling from the battle.”

  Roberto Clarin paused as he and three colonists struggled to shore up the town’s defenses. “Shizz, how the hell can they want to fight again? Half the bugs have been wiped out.”

  “That’s exactly why,” Margaret said. “Now, more than ever, the breedex needs to reproduce and replenish its numbers. And for that, it needs you.”

  With a surge of adrenaline, Davlin clapped his hands and shouted for everyone to take their positions—this was not a drill. The already-shaken people let out sighs of despair mixed with determination.

  Marla Chan Tylar and the colonists she’d been training jumped to gather and recharge their scavenged weapons—handheld projectile launchers, broad-beam twitchers, and two shoulder-fired jazer rifles—and scrambled up makeshift ladders to the top of the barricade. Because of his years of experience as an excellent marksman, Davlin took one of the jazers for himself. Every charge from the weapon’s energy pack, every round of ammunition in the other guns, had to be used wisely, and would likely still not be sufficient.

  Clarin said to him in a low voice, “You think it makes any difference that so many of the bugs are dead? Do we have a chance now?”

  “We always had a chance. It was never a really good one.” He looked at the Roamer leader. “It’s still not very good. But every bug the robots killed is one less that we have to shoot.”

  Insect workers had spent a full day amidst the smoke and carnage below dragging away warrior bodies and the shrapnel of destroyed black robots and Soldier compies. After climbing a makeshift ladder to reach the top of the wall, Davlin stood beside Margaret.

  “I saw that the robots killed one of the domates. Will that help us?”

  “Not much. The breedex has seven of them left.”

  He was startled to see tears trickling down her cheeks. “Shouldn’t you get to shelter, or are you going to die with the rest of us?”

  “They won’t touch me. The breedex has marked me in its mind.” She clenched her fists. “I’m stuck in the middle of this bloody hurricane. I wish DD were here, but I’m glad he got away with all those others.”

  “I wish I’d gotten a lot more people out in time,” Davlin answered. He squared his shoulders. “I saved as many as I could.” Even so, he wasn’t sure how many of the escapees would survive without food, tools, or weapons at the sandstone bluffs. He could fight only one battle at a time.

  Davlin noted that the Klikiss workers had cleared a path across the battleground. He watched more warriors and a group of the massive domates emerge from the dark openings of the towers. Forming a kind of procession through their city, the battered Klikiss began marching toward the compound.

  Spotters shouted an alarm. Marla lined up her gunners along the top of the wall, while others took high positions on rooftops inside the town. They all held weapons and seemed anxious to fire. “Not yet,” she said. “Our biggest advantage is surprise.”

  Puffing and red-faced, Clarin climbed up to Davlin’s post. “We’ll hold them off as long as we can. Maybe if we kill enough now, they’ll back off.”

  “They won’t back off,” Margaret said, her tone weary and matter-of-fact.

  Clarin sighed. “I didn’t think they would.”

  Marla Chan narrowed her eyes and hefted her weapon. “I intend to leave a big pile of dead bugs all around me, one way or another.”

  The domates, with tall head crests and jaws like industrial grinding tools, strode on multiple legs across the packed dirt toward the stockade wall. Davlin tensed, drawing imaginary lines in his mind. Just a few more steps. He had already activated the network.

  “Remember, the striped ones are the real targets, second only to the breedex,” he shouted. “Get rid of all seven of them, and we deal a powerful blow to the whole subhive.”

  As the first domate stepped onto the path in front of the stockade wall, its chitinous foot tromped on the first of Davlin’s buried land mines. The explosion blasted upward like an orange geyser, hurling dust and gravel twenty feet into the air. Smashed and mangled, the dead domate crashed to the ground like a ruined spacecraft. The explosive event sent the Klikiss into a flurry of reaction. Shrill chirps and squeals made a deafening noise in the air.

  Six domates left.

  The warriors escorting the company of domates raised their bell-mouthed energy weapons in their sharp claws. In the pandemonium, many of them rushed forward to attack—just as Davlin had hoped. They charged onto the mined road, and three more explosions blew upward, vaporizing many warriors.

  “Open fire!” Marla Chan shouted.

  Davlin hefted his shoulder-mounted jazer, took careful aim, and incinerated a huge hole through another domate. Its striped body slumped to the ground amidst the debris. Five left.

  Everyone on the walls began blasting away, mowing down warriors, builders, any other Klikiss breeds they could hit. “Aim for the domates!”

  Now that three of the subhive’s eight domates had been wiped out, the warriors formed a protective wall around the towering creatures and drove them backward to relative safety. Davlin shot another burst from his jazer rifle, and killed ten warriors with the sweeping arc. He blasted two limbs off of one domate, but the imposing creature backed away, d
ucked, and scuttled to safety.

  From its squat hive structure, the breedex directed its warriors to surge forward by the hundreds. The swarm was impossible to drive back, despite the flurry of desperate gunfire from the colonists. After another hidden land mine exploded, many insect warriors in the rear guard cracked open their wing casings and simply took flight, rising up over the booby-trapped zone. Others continued to march toward the stockade walls, heedless. Dead insect bodies piled up, and live Klikiss scrambled over them.

  Davlin knew the stockade walls would provide no protection against the flying creatures. Overhead, Klikiss buzzed ominously, then swooped down to begin the direct attack. He shot into the air, killing many of the bugs in flight, but more and more warriors swept toward the stockade.

  96 ROBERTO CLARIN

  Firing his weapon again and again, Clarin splattered the flat, segmented head of a flying Klikiss warrior. The hideous creature careened into the side of a prefab building and slid down, leaving a trail of slime and gore. A poorly aimed explosion blew down another part of the prefabricated wall.

  Many colonists without weapons ducked through the broken stockade wall, frantic to escape, though they had no place to go and little chance of getting far from the hive. Others ran to their secret bolt-holes inside the town, sealing themselves in hidden rooms, under trapdoors, inside crawl spaces.

  Clarin saw five escaped colonists blunder into a group of Klikiss outside in the town. As the bugs fell upon them, the people tried to run back to the dubious safety of the stockade, but they were butchered before they could take more than a few steps.

  Marla Chan Tylar remained atop the wall, yelling and shooting. She didn’t seem interested in getting away, just in firing on Klikiss until her projectiles ran out. Clarin wished she had gotten away with her husband.

  He and Davlin ran through the narrow streets of the inner town, desperately trying to manage the faltering defense. He was reminded of the time when the damned Eddies had come in to smash his beloved Hurricane Depot. This situation didn’t look any better. During the black robot attack, the stockade walls had been breached in many places, and marauding insects now scrambled through every crumbling gap. Smoke billowed into the sky, and the smell of burning and death had already grown so thick he found it hard to breathe.

  Clarin turned toward the nearest breach in the thick wall. “I know a hopeless last stand when I see one, Davlin. But I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve.”

  “What don’t I know about?”

  “The other Remora. It’s flight-worthy, it’s loaded—and I’m taking it.”

  Davlin showed a glimmer of hope. “Good. You can probably get six people aboard. Only six . . . but it’s half a dozen we can save.”

  Clarin didn’t respond. By now more than a hundred Klikiss had flown or pushed their way into the compound to round up colonists. He might save six people . . . but which six? How could he choose, and what good would it do, if the Klikiss just came after them?

  No, Clarin had something more permanent in mind. He raced out into the open and sprinted toward the debris yard on the outskirts, where the Remora sat unnoticed. Klikiss warriors abandoned the outer portion of the city, concentrating their forces on protecting the five remaining domates and attacking the walled city.

  Still atop the wall, Marla shot again and again at the retreating domates, but those targets were too far away now. A Klikiss warrior scuttled up the inside of the wall behind her. She turned her gun around and blasted away, but a second creature raised its multiple legs and pulled her off the wall. She continued shooting all the way down.

  Clarin finally reached the repaired Remora and squirmed through the half-open hatch. The ship’s engines fired up like a charm. At least something was working right.

  He had not been able to test fly the ship, though Clarin knew how to pilot just about any vehicle with controls. Most Roamers did. Eddy controls seemed cumbersome, but Clarin leaned forward, scanned the buttons, and found what he needed. Using attitude-control jets, he drove the Remora out of the camouflaging debris, then quickly lifted it up with a blast from the main engines. The Remora pivoted in the air and flew toward the Klikiss towers.

  Everything seemed to proceed in slow motion. His ears rang from the explosions, throbbing engines, gunfire, and screams. The Klikiss’s whistles and chirps seemed loud enough to shatter even the cockpit windows. But Clarin blocked everything out of his mind and focused on his target. Adding thrust, he approached the fortress city. He saw the squat breedex hive, the thick-walled structure that contained the mind controlling all these deadly creatures.

  Primary target.

  His Remora had EDF weapons—probably enough to level that whole damned hive. If he could neutralize the breedex, he could effectively stop them all. Or I could have rescued six people, like Davlin wanted. Clarin was satisfied with his choice.

  As the Remora picked up speed, however, dozens of Klikiss warriors took flight and rose like a plague of hornets to intercept him. Though he blasted many with the EDF jazers, Klikiss swarmed all around him. Several creatures caromed off the Remora’s hull, stunned and disoriented. Others crashed into his engines, intentionally letting themselves be sucked into the air intakes. Red telltales flashed across his panels.

  “Out of my way, damn you!”

  Below, with a flash of hope, he saw Davlin leading a few more survivors in a sortie outside the walls. Hijacking a buzzing Klikiss vehicle, Davlin had taken as many colonists as he could. Now the alien groundcar bounced away across the rough terrain faster than warriors could pursue him. At least he was free . . . for the time being.

  A warrior threw its body into the cockpit canopy, creating a spiderweb of cracks across the transparent shield, effectively blocking Clarin’s view. More warriors swarmed around the Remora, intent on pulling him out of the sky, and he opened fire indiscriminately, not caring what he hit. Explosions blossomed on the sides of the lumpy towers.

  One of his engines gave out completely, torn loose by the clinging bugs. Many more warriors were crawling on the Remora’s hull. Even as he flew, he could hear them ripping through the armor plating. The ship was going to crash. He jerked the control stick from side to side, sending the ship into a barrel roll, and two bugs slid off the cockpit canopy. Not enough.

  The insect city was ahead, but he was losing altitude fast. The attacking insects were wreaking havoc on his systems, dismantling the weapons mounted to his hull. Three of the jazers already refused to fire.

  He couldn’t make it all the way to the breedex hive, damn it!

  Below, all but one of the domates had been hustled into the towers. The last tiger-striped creature remained outside, surrounded by thirty warriors. When it tilted its spiny, crested head, Clarin thought he could look directly down into those faceted eyes.

  It would have to do.

  Clarin used the last of his control to guide the Remora, launching whatever remained of his weapons. He focused on the lone domate, the future of the hive. Secondary target. That one huge ugly bug seemed to have a big bull’s-eye painted on it.

  Clarin dove the Remora downward, accelerating with the last gasps of his fuel. He never saw the flash of impact.

  97 RLINDA KETT

  Rlinda and BeBob flew the Voracious Curiosity to Earth with Sullivan Gold, minding their own business. Rlinda hummed to herself to hide her uneasiness. “Here we are, just an independent trader bringing a load of goods to Earth. No need to pay special attention to us.”

  For the past few weeks, all Confederation traders had done their best to transmit the King’s condemnation and Patrick Fitzpatrick’s recorded confession. The message had been picked up by repeater stations and widely disseminated. Rlinda had to be very careful, though. They would be in a world of trouble if the Curiosity were caught doing it.

  On their way to Earth, she and BeBob had stopped at three colonies that hadn’t formally joined the Confederation. Not bothering to express disbelief at what Chairman Wenceslas and General
Lanyan had done, the local government officials had simply shrugged. Even the story about the EDF cracking down on Rhejak only reinforced their reluctance to break away from the Hansa.

  BeBob had been appalled, while Sullivan shook his head and sighed. “You won’t get through to them. They’re brainwashed.”

  “Or terrified,” BeBob said.

  Rlinda shrugged. “Maybe so, but the King asked us to spread the word, so we’re spreading it. I am the Confederation’s Trade Minister, you know. I think I need to make myself a special badge or something.”

  BeBob had insisted on coming along on this run to Earth, even though Rlinda was apprehensive. His puppy-dog face was filled with an embarrassing degree of affection for her. “Really, I won’t set foot off the ship. I’ll keep a lower profile than a speck of dust on wet hull paint. You don’t have to worry, Rlinda. I promise.”

  “Who said I was worried?”

  He gave her a give-me-a-break frown. “I can read you like a book.”

  “Since when do you read books?”

  By scanning the broadcast channels, Rlinda found at least two amateur groups that had copied the King’s inflammatory message after she secretly broadcast it, and they were redistributing it as widely as possible before the Hansa managed to stop them. One independent repeater was shut down almost immediately, but other network nodes handed off the message again and again. People would hear it, she was sure; whether they chose to take action and rise up against the Chairman was another question entirely. . . .

  After a long, strangely awkward silence, BeBob spoke up, and she could tell he had been wrestling with his words for some time. “If we’re going to be partners, are you sure we shouldn’t try getting married again?”

  “We learned that lesson already.”

  “But times have changed. Why not consider it?”

  She squeezed him against her hard enough that he seemed buried in her flesh. “Feeling insecure? You’re my partner, in business and in . . . physical interactions. Don’t mess with a good thing. Paperwork can only screw it up.”