A slow, mischievous grin lit Rikki’s features. “There were times when you wished you could have lost me—but that’s never been your fate, Mich Yetz, and it won’t be now. I’ll come back with the ship.”
A thud reverberated in the gunwales. “That’s Hadre,” Mich said. “He’s come up. The news must have reached him. Listen, Rikki, I’m not going to let you go. Your first responsibility is to Rafe and Teuy. Forget the survey. We can download all our files and take them with us. There’s twelve years of material there.”
“And twelve more years to go—if we keep our ship. What kind of lives will our children have in the city anyway? We worked hard to get away from that travesty of humanity, that—that robot paradise—and we’ve made a good life for ourselves out here. That’s what I owe my children—and that’s why I’m going.”
Mich’s retort stalled when Numan Hadre Az popped out of the companionway from the dropship loading dock. A typical numan, two meters tall, brown-skinned with tightly-reeved hair and beard, flat nose, wide nostrils, and eyes like cracked glass, he directed his gray stare from Mich to Rikki and back again. A tight, emotionless smile showed perfect teeth. “Are my ears malfunctioning or am I actually hearing a disagreement between Chalco’s most agreeable couple?”
“We’re not in disagreement,” Mich insisted. “We’re discussing our predicament.”
“I hope you’ve reached a resolution.” Hadre held onto the bulwark to steady himself in freefall. “The zōtl have attacked Know-Where-to-Go. We are the closest Foundation ship. I must act immediately.”
Mich’s harsh face gazed into Rikki’s jaw-set determination, and his bushy eyebrows curled sadly. “Rikki will be going with you, Hadre,” he said without looking away from the clarity of her green stare. “I’ll gather our files and some extra supplies. She’ll talk to the children.”
Later, when the dropship returned from delivering Mich and the children to the downstation, Hadre admitted, “I had expected to take one of you with me on this mission—but I thought it would be Mich.”
“Why, because he’s bigger than I?”
“No. I thought you would be the choice to take care of the children on Nabu. He’s more afraid than you of rawfaces and longteeth.”
“That’s why he’ll survive Nabu.”
Alan Guth swung out of orbit on a trajectory that took it in the opposite direction from Know-Where-to-Go. They flew at top speed into a gut-twisting arc that made the seams of the ship groan as they turned and hurtled back toward Nabu. Shooting past the planet, Numan Hadre Az shut down the ramstat engines and let momentum carry them.
“The zōtl will be looking for ramstat trails in the magravity field,” the numan clarified. “Know-Where-to-Go is close enough to Chalco now that we can approach it obscured by local asteroids. I’ve plotted our course to carry us by inertial power alone through the planetesimals. It will take us longer, but we will still get there hours ahead of the fighter fleet.”
They kept busy on the two-day journey viewing their target and assessing the strength of the zōtl force. The blue flare of the proton drill came and went amid enormous bursts of gamma energy, then stopped altogether. As the explorer closed in, the reason became clear. The proton drill had hit Tryl artifacts, some of which had exploded with enormous force. After carving a canyon four kilometers deep and losing hundreds of robot workers in unpredictable explosions, the zōtl abandoned the drilling and had begun construction. What they built did not become evident until Alan Guth closed in, minutes away.
“It’s a bomb,” Numan Hadre Az announced, reading the latest spectrographic printout and outlining with his finger the profiles of radioactive materials. “The zōtl are erecting a bomb—a massive bomb, obviously designed to shatter the whole planet—smash it like an egg.”
“Why?” Rikki asked. They floated about a holoform of Know-Where-to-Go, reviewing their attack strategy.
“They want the Rimstalker’s Form.”
“Then that’s not just a legend.”
“There is no direct evidence of Rimstalker technology, other than Lod and Saor and sonar shadows we have of the Genitrix modules at the cores of the planets—but historical evidence indicates that the Rimstalker’s central processor is located directly beneath Towerbottom Library.”
“And the zōtl lynk, their proton drilling, and the new bomb are located almost precisely opposite the Library.”
“Yes—they clearly want to seize the Form, not simply destroy it.”
“How long do we have?” Rikki asked.
“Long enough. The bomb is still in assembly, and that’s slowing down as the fighter fleet approaches. The zōtl are readying for battle in the next six hours. But we will begin our strike in—thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds.”
“You’ve still told me nothing,” Rikki complained, “other than that I’m going down in the dropship to pick up survivors. Why? The fleet can rescue them later.”
“You can’t come where I’m going, Rikki.”
“You promised me you wouldn’t use the ship in a suicide attack, Numan.”
“I’m not.”
“So, what weapons are you going to use? Our laser cannon can fend needlecraft but not destroy a lynk.”
The numan fit his humorless smile in place. “I was reading three camps of survivors until today,” he said, hovering about the large image of the planet. He pointed to an area near the Library. “This is the last holdout—the only distress signal I’ve received in the previous twelve hours. I’ll drop you there and let gravity swing me around to the other side. As I glide over the zōtl lynk, I’ll release the laboratory’s reactor. I’ve gimmicked it so that the uranium core will fuse on impact.”
“A fusion bomb,” Rikki whispered in awe—then her round eyes squinted with doubt. “The only way to place that effectively will be a direct fly-over. The zōtl will blow you to pieces as soon as you cross the horizon.”
“The zōtl aren’t looking for an explorer. The fleet has their full attention. I’ll be coming in low and fast from the planet’s nightside. The laser cannon will deflect their air cover, and the ship is bulky enough to take a few direct hits without falling entirely apart. But you can’t be on board. While a numan like myself can simply molt whatever cells are damaged by gamma rays, the radiation pulse from the fusion explosion would kill you. I have to drop you off. So you might as well place yourself among the survivors, where maybe you can be helpful.”
“I want this ship back, Numan Hadre Az,” Rikki said, grimly. “My family’s survival on Nabu demands it.”
“Family needs can hardly compare with the needs of the Foundation at this point, Doctor Carcam. If I’m not successful, the fleet will be destroyed. So long as the zōtl lynk is intact, the spiders can call forth all the reinforcements they need. We must destroy the lynk.”
“But you will try—” Rikki pleaded, “you will sincerely try not to trash the Alan Guth?”
“I’m a numan,” Hadre said. “I’m too valuable to trash needlessly. After the lynk is destroyed, I will power-up and retrieve you and the survivors. I, too, want to return to the Foundation. Ieuanc 751 will be most pleased if I succeed. Perhaps I will even make fleet director.”
“I’ll be happy if we’re simply not demoted to corpses,” Rikki replied and headed for the dropship.
During the bumpy entry, when death seemed more feasible than survival, Rikki Carcam thought about Ieuanc 751. She gnashed her teeth trying to bring to mind her family, but with ludicrous insistency her mind remained fixed on the Crystal Mind dictator. Most humans in the Foundation worlds of Doror admired the dictator’s administrative efficiency and the security from zōtl-attack that his superbly strategic intellect offered them. But in Chalco, Ieuanc 751 was loathed, for his security extended only to Foundation members. The wild worlds, rife with wild humans, provided only the most primitive conditions. The dictator rebuffed all appeals for help, most careful not to overextend himself and weaken the hold on what he already controlled.
Control, the Crystal Mind’s passion, drove Rikki and Mich out of Doror. They did not want to be continuously monitored for their own good by sensors every citizen had to wear. They did not want to have to log each stroll in a park or submit to the directives of numans, so proud of their superiority. As her teeth clacked with the jolts of her flight through the atmosphere of Know-Where-to-Go, she understood why she could not take her mind from Ieuanc 751. Though she had seen him only in holoforms, his famous blueblack skin and shatterglass eyes looked as familiar as Mich’s features or either of her children’s. He embodied the spiritual father of all humans who had ever lived in Doror—and now as she faced death, she recognized how thoroughly she had been conditioned to serve the Crystal Mind.
Without ramstat, the dropship had to be glided to a landing, and soon there was no time for any thoughts but those concerned with the work at hand. Once she cleared the clouds, Towerbottom Library leaped into view, its glass geodesics shattered and reflecting the wan daylight brokenly. The countryside appeared devastated, blackened from laserblasts and pocked by particle beam craters. A firestorm had erased all vegetation to the horizon.
Rikki landed beside the rim of a crater, where the distress signal had originated. There she found five humans, scorch-faced and shivering with shock—the only people left alive on the planet. They crouched in a covert they had dug with their own hands under the lip of the crater. Rikki broke open medical and food packs and passed around a canteen before hunkering down among them to wait for Numan Hadre Az.
On the planet’s far side, the fly-by of the Alan Guth transpired precisely as the Crystal Mind had calculated. Needlecraft startled into the sky when the bulky explorer thundered out of the darkness. Sparking laserfire, the ship zoomed over mountain crags that flanked the lynk site, bursting the surprised needlecraft who rose against it. The dolmen lynk pulsed red on the floodlit plain below, overlooking the vast canyon that the proton drill had excavated. Wormings of Tryl architecture reticulated the scooped-out quarry in hive-like patterns. Hadre released the rigged reactor. While it dropped, he methodically picked off needlecraft with his laser cannon. Then the landscape below vanished in nuclear glare.
The shock of the fusion explosion almost shattered the low-flying explorer, and Hadre momentarily lost control of the ship’s laser defense. In that lag, three needlecraft rammed into the explorer’s hull and docked with magnetic anchors. As the Alan Guth’s ramstat engines ignited and the vessel curled toward the planet’s dayside leaving behind a boiling mushroom cloud where the zōtl lynk had been, the hull shook. The spiders used their lasers to cut through the bulwarks.
“Rikki!” Hadre shouted into his radio, hoping to be heard above the magnetic pulse from the fusion blast. “Get up here fast! I’ve got three needlecraft on me and they’re cutting through the hull! Hurry!”
Rikki heard enough of the static-torn message to understand Hadre’s plight. She leaped to her feet, but one of the survivors, a woman narrow-faced as an opossum, grabbed her. “Wait. You heard the numan—zōtl are up there. Don’t go. In a few hours, the fleet will be here and we’ll be saved.”
“Rikki! This is Hadre Az, your numan commander! I’m giving you a direct order. Get up here now. I need your help.”
“Leave the numan,” the scoop-cheeked woman said. “He would leave you. Numans think people are expendable, because Crystal Minds are so much more expensive to manufacture. Everyone knows that. Why risk your life?”
Rikki leveled a predatory stare on the woman. “Are you coming to fight zōtl with me or waiting here for the fallout from the fusion blast?”
The five survivors and Rikki crammed the dropship. With ramstat boosting them, the flight was short. As soon as they docked, even as the airlock was pressurizing, Rikki fired the emergency release bolts, kicking the dropship’s hatch into the docking area, crushing the three plasma-suited zōtl waiting outside for them. With a laser pistol in each hand, she led the charge through the airlock and into the ship.
Hadre had already dispatched most of the zōtl by disengaging the chambers where the needlecraft had punched through. But one of the needlecraft had magnetized to the engine module, and the humans had to go in and flush them out.
“Why don’t you lead us?” the narrow-faced survivor asked Hadre, who had decided to remain in the command chamber.
“I’m a numan,” he answered matter-of-factly.
“Ah, yes—” the survivor agreed with a glance at Rikki, “much too valuable to risk when there are expendable humans who can do the job.”
“Go—” Hadre commanded, “before the spiders scuttle our engines. And watch where you shoot. If you hit the ramstat coils, we’re going nowhere but down.”
The engine module housed a large chamber, a maze of ducts, cable-pipes, and the scaffolding that braced the ramstat coils. Alan Guth’s low orbit provided enough gravity for the humans to walk. Using heat sensors, Rikki and her haggard crew moved back-to-back through the darkness, stalking zōtl—the only defense against the zōtl’s laserfire the bulky armor vests, thighpads, and infragoggles they had donned before entering.
The zōtl did not wait to be found. Laserbolts smashed the metal flooring in front of the humans as the zōtl attempted to kill their enemy with hot shards. Gushes of blasted plasteel sprayed molten sparks over them, burning their exposed clothing and blistering flesh. The attack pinpointed the zōtl, and the humans fired back. Laserbolts intercut the darkness. Several of the humans’ shots flashed against the ramstat coils. “Watch your fire!” Rikki shouted. “You’re shooting wild!” Enraged at the peril to her ship, she dared to expose herself and struck several of the spidershapes in quick succession, dropping them to smoking twitches on the floor.
The stink of the burning zōtl gagged the humans. They advanced and used their heat sensors to corner the last of the zōtl against the hatchway they had bored from their needlecraft. The zōtl frantically dismantled their hatch, hoping to breech the hull and explosively depressurize the chamber. Rikki shot them, and their slithery shapes burst into flames and collapsed.
Hadre, pleased, greeted them at the portal to the engine module, a laserifle tucked under his arm. He grinned his empty smile, and three of the survivors aimed their laser pistols at him and at Rikki. Rikki managed a surprised shout before they fired. The laserbolts flashed harmlessly in the numan’s and Rikki’s faces. Hadre’s grin widened, and he rapid-fired his rifle, crimson bolts of laserfire kicking the five survivors backward against the closed portal, where they slumped, startled limbs jerking.
Rikki shouted from her stomach and leaped back as three of the bodies split open like shucked fruits, ribs flaying and spidershapes lifting from the sticky viscera where the bodies’ stomachs should have been. Hadre fired again, and the zōtl burned in the decoy corpses.
“How did you know?” Rikki gasped.
“I didn’t. But this kind of horror has happened before. I adjusted their pistols to fire harmless red light with the same visual characteristics as laserbolts. You were the only one with a live weapon. And I wasn’t even sure about you—until you killed the zōtl in the engine module.”
“Two of these people are not infested,” Rikki said, kneeling over the woman who had wanted her to stay behind. She and the other human were still breathing. “They’re alive.”
Hadre fired twice more, punching holes in their hearts and spraying Rikki with blood. “Now they’re dead,” he announced.
Horrified, Rikki muttered, “They’re not infested—and you killed them.”
“We can take no chances. The zōtl may have rigged them with other weapons. Maybe viruses. We can’t be sure. I’ll have the psybot clean this up. You better shower yourself. Their blood may be contaminated.”
“What do you know about blood?” she spluttered and rushed away from the stink of burning flesh.
She had showered and was changing her clothes, hands still trembling from outrage, when Hadre called: “Rikki!”
“Fuck you, Hadre!” s
he screamed, and tugged on her underwear.
“Rikki—I’m in the map chamber,” he said, voice broken by staccato blasts of laserfire. “Another needlecraft has docked! They’re coming in through the con-bubble! Get down here on the double!”
Rikki snatched her laser pistol and, half naked, sprinted through the companionway to the ladder-shaft that dropped into the map room. A zōtl hovered over the shaft among gruesome-smelling vapors of seared flesh. One of its pincered forearms, sheathed in the metallic cuff of a lasergun no bigger than a thimble, fired at her—and the bulwark to her side spanged with sparks. She dropped to her knees, fired twice, and shattered the zōtl to a writhing black rag.
Two more zōtl appeared, shooting, showering her with hot sparks of plasteel. She screamed and swiftly retreated.
“Rikki! I’m in the map chamber! Where are you?”
Rikki dashed among companionways, stopping only once to fire at her pursuers. She slammed the hatch that sealed off the map chamber and scurried up a ladder to the bridge.
“Rikki! Respond! This is a direct command!”
Heaving for breath, Rikki slumped in the pilot’s sling. From below, she heard the searing hiss of laserlight cutting metal. In moments they would break through—and she realized with hurtful clarity that she had to make a decision. She could grab a laserifle and go back down, try her best to save the numan, and maybe get maimed or killed. Or—
Without another thought, and with the siren of the laser-sheared metal reaching toward its highest pitch in her ears, she reached over the control console and began the sequence that would disengage the module containing the map chamber and con-bubble.
“Rikki!” Hadre shouted, his rifle fire so rapid it sounded like static. “What are you doing?”
I’m cutting you off for the gangrene you are, numan, she thought, but said nothing. Her mouth was too dry, and she needed all her concentration to complete the sequence before the zōtl broke through the hatch.
“I am the numan commander of this vessel, Rikki Carcam. Do as I command. I am too valuable to be sacrificed like this. I am ordering you—”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 29