The Qualeewoohs looked at one another, a mournful glance, and the female waddled forward. “An egg is in my pouch. We are two. Slay us. Cooharah shall live.”
“No, I plead to the fourth degree,” the male said. “Aaw shall live. Slay me and her chick.”
Gallen studied the Qualeewoohs. Both birds appeared to be hot. The blue gathers of skin at their throats jiggled, cooling them. With them sitting on the rock, wings folded, they did not look so noble or marvelous. He could see spots on the male where feathers were missing or broken, could see the wear on their lone blade, the thin nap on the bag the female wore. The bag Aaw wore strapped across her chest was decorated with feathers and beads, held closed by a circular pin. It looked to be made of some thin strands of woven reed.
Gallen noticed blood at the edge of Cooharah’s mask. These Qualeewoohs were poor, tired. They had nothing to offer but their useless lives, and they begged to throw them away, pleading loudly, squawking. Honorable and pathetic.
Gallen decided to put Zeus to the test. “Here are your murderers. They don’t want a trial. You want to kill them?”
Zeus stared at the Qualeewoohs in disgust, his hands bunched into fists, his face pale. He seemed to struggle, to seek control. Back in the ship’s cabin, fifteen minutes earlier, Orick had been preaching about understanding and forgiveness.
“No.” Zeus looked away, shook his head. “Let the damned things go.”
Gallen said softly, so the translator would not pick up his words. “Felph will be angry.”
Zeus shook his head. “I don’t care.”
Gallen stared into Zeus’s dark eyes. “Maggie believes you want to leave Lord Felph, leave this world. Is that true?”
Zeus took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, looked up at the clear sky, the distant sun beating mercilessly. “Leave this happy place? The family fortune? I don’t know.” Gallen understood. It’s hard to leave comfort for the unknown.
Gallen remembered when he’d left his home. He’d not had it so soft as Zeus. A life of poverty and work, but with the comfort of good friends and family as recompense.
“Where were you going?” Gallen asked the Qualeewoohs.
Cooharah, answered. “We look for an oasis, a place to nest.”
Gallen debated in his mind whether to warn the Qualeewoohs that Felph wanted them dead. Judging from how they acted, the fool birds would probably demand to return to the palace for execution. So Gallen said, “You’ll find an oasis two hundred kilometers to the northeast, but you won’t be safe there. Men may hunt you. Continue on till you get to the great tangle.”
“Negative to the fourth degree,” Aaw said. “We owe blood debt. We must pay. The ancestors tell us so.”
“We can’t take your lives,” Gallen said. “Human law won’t allow it. You are forgiven the blood debt.” Gallen unsnapped the canteen from his belt and poured water into an indentation in the rock so the birds could drink. “Go in peace.”
Gallen turned and climbed down from the rock, heading for the ship, acutely aware that behind him, Zeus had not yet moved.
Zeus eyed Gallen’s back, tense, as if considering Gallen’s rationale. If Zeus did not attack now, if he did not slay the Qualeewoohs here, he’d lose the opportunity. Gallen used the sensors in his mantle to study the big man.
At last, Zeus followed, leaping down from rock to rock. “Stinking, ignorant savages,” he murmured.
The Qualeewoohs flapped their wings, glided downhill, then circled the ship, gawking, and flew off to the north.
Gallen stood watching them leave, when his mantle sent a warning that rang in his head. “Warning—imminent attack!
Gallen ducked and spun to block, imagining Zeus was attacking, but Zeus only startled backward in surprise. Gallen’s mantle continued. “Fifteen heavy battle cruisers have exited hyperspace at one hundred kilometers. Neutron mines have fired into orbit.”
From the Nightswift, Maggie shouted through the hatch.
“Gallen, get in here!” Apparently she was getting the same news.
“Neutron mines?” Gallen asked his mantle as he ran for the ship. The heavy mass of densely packed neutrons made it almost impossible to navigate a jump into hyperspace, the gravitational distortions caused by the mines could send a ship slamming into a star or crashing into a planet. If Gallen left Ruin now and hit a mine, his ship might even tear apart in the upper atmosphere. Yet there was a secondary danger: if the mines were set too close to Ruin’s gravity well, they’d get pulled in like meteors—meteors heavy enough to shoot through the planet’s crust like bullets, creating a global catastrophe. Enough neutron mines placed in low orbit could decimate a world.
Gallen reached the ship, jumped into the hold, ran to the bridge. Their little cruiser was fast, very fast for a civilian vessel, but it lacked weaponry and didn’t have enough armor for combat. Maggie stood at the console, looking about, obviously upset.
“Identify those ships!” Gallen ordered the ship’s AI, hoping against all odds that for some reason he couldn’t fathom, human boats would be in the sky.
The ship’s AI answered in its damned neutral voice, “Six dronon Golden-Class vessels, and nine dronon War Hives. Sensor jammers have just been initiated. All radio contact is now impossible. I cannot confirm new arrivals of ships, nor can I verify the locations of mines.”
Gallen looked at Maggie. “Six Golden-Class vessels!” she breathed.
“What does that mean?” Zeus asked.
“The dronon Lords of the Swarms are here—all of them,” Gallen said.
Maggie asked, “Ship, with the jammers on, can the dronon read our position?”
“So it’s true, what Arachne said?” Zeus asked Gallen. “You and Maggie really are the Lords of the Sixth Swarm?”
“Negative,” the ship answered Maggie. “The dronon cannot read our position unless they make visual contact.”
Maggie glanced back to Gallen. “We need to get under cover. The palace?”
Gallen shook his head, thinking furiously. “No, your scent is everywhere there.” The dronon would obviously send Seekers. And in his mind, he saw a vision of clouds, of the towering storms above Teeawah. Felph said they raged there almost constantly.
“Ship,” Gallen nearly shouted, “take us to Teeawah. Get us under the clouds, top speed.”
With a lurch, the ship hurtled forward. Gallen feared the moving ship would show easily on dronon scanners, but he only hoped that now, having just reached Ruin, the dronon wouldn’t have had time to begin extensive planetary surveillance. Besides, even if they had, he imagined, the tangle was huge. He could hide in that mess for weeks.
For twelve long minutes his ship hurtled through the sky at mach fifteen, fast enough so the heat shielding on the ship’s hull began to flame. Gallen’s heart raced; his breathing came uneasy.
Almost as soon as he saw thunderheads looming, lightning at their crowns, they slowed, bursting into their envelope. Under sullen skies, the tangle gleamed wet. Dark purple trees thrust up in exotic corkscrews or folded on themselves like nautilus shells; others towered like giant hairs.
As the ship maneuvered through this growth, the wind drove rain against the viewscreens in steady sheets.
The storm here had worsened over the past two days. Gallen had never seen a deluge like it, as if the heavens poured out all the waters in the world.
Gallen changed course, let the rains cool the burning hull. He imagined how the ship must look from outside this behemoth oozing steam. If the dronon used infrared sensors, even these clouds might not hide the ship. Gallen only hoped that the rain would cool the hull soon.
The ship soared over something huge and pale, slightly pink, like a blind snake void of pigment, worming its way through the trees. The creature must have been two hundred meters long. and eight meters in diameter.
Zeus studied the viewscreen. “Mistwife,” he said. “It must be hungry to hunt in daylight. It comes up from the ocean.”
“At the bottom of the tang
le?” Gallen asked. “Yes,” Zeus said. “They live in deep water and hunt on nights when rain slicks the trees.”
Perhaps they are amphibious, Gallen decided, or perhaps like large worms. In any case, it sounded as if they needed moisture. As the ship soared past the creature, Gallen suddenly saw dozens of others like it, worming their way out of the tangle.
“It’s excited,” Zeus said. “It senses our movement.”
Then Gallen understood. There were not dozens of mistwives. This was a single organism. He suddenly envisioned it, like an enormous anemone, sending up tentacles to fetch food. Yet Gallen found that almost impossible to imagine. The ship was two thousand meters above sea level, yet this creature sent dozens of tentacles up through the tangle, questing, searching for food. How large was a mistwife? How powerful?
Gallen didn’t want to find out.
He soared under the storm, counting on the steady throb of lightning, the ionization of the atmosphere, to shield him from the dronon’s electronic detection. The ship began to pick up urgent broadcasts from Lord Felph.
That could only mean that the dronon had turned off their signal jammers, so that they could begin their hunt. Gallen dared not answer Felph’s calls.
And be dared not stay airborne. The dronon would search the planet via conventional radar and with imaging detectors. The constant lightning that speared through the clouds should make it difficult for the dronon to search with infrared, but Gallen couldn’t be certain. If the clouds thinned, if the lightning slowed even for a few moments, he might be found.
The wisest course would be to land immediately, but not near this mistwife. It might crush the ship. Gallen wondered if he could find a region that would be safer, more secure.
But it wasn’t a hiding place that he wanted. They could hide in the tangle, maybe for weeks, but they’d run out of food, if the dronon didn’t find them first.
Now that the dronon had set a picket around the planet, he wouldn’t be able to blast off.
We cannot hide, and we cannot run, Gallen realized.
Which meant that he would have to fight. On a sudden impulse, he commanded the ship to return to the coordinates where he’d gone on his brief expedition with Lord Felph.
“Where are you going?” Maggie asked. “You don’t plan to look for the city?”
“The dronon will find us eventually,” Gallen said softly. “I won’t just hide. We have to do something.”
Chapter 28
Lord Felph had long tried to keep a low profile on Ruin. It seemed inevitable that the dronon would come to the Carina Galaxy, and he’d made certain that the coordinates of Ruin were kept quiet. The Carina Interplanetary Federation had removed the planet’s name from star charts. Conventional radio chatter on Ruin was kept minimal, and then broadcast only at low intensities on tight beams. Felph didn’t want the planet showing up under scrutiny.
As for ansibles, he didn’t own one. He knew it made him look reclusive to outsiders. Most planetary governments would have considered instantaneous communications a necessity. Not Felph. Billions of people had lived fine lives without the damned things, thank you. That’s what shuttles were for, carrying messages out to civilization.
But when the dronon appeared in the skies over Ruin,
Felph knew that some seventy years of painstaking precautions had been wasted. His world was the first in the galaxy to come under attack. The whole planet fell hostage in the blink of an eye.
Felph puttered about his palace, fretting all morning. Why this day, of all days? With Henn dead—Zeus and Gallen gone.
Felph tried, but after the dronon appeared, he couldn’t raise Gallen over the radio. The dronon’s jammers might have interrupted communications in any case, but Felph suspected that Gallen kept silent for other reasons. Even if Gallen couldn’t hear the transmissions, Felph reasoned he would hightail it back to the palace as soon as he saw the dronon. But apparently the Lord Protector knew enough to crawl under a rock when dronon invaded. Felph had to appreciate that.
At the same time, he wished he’d hired a more intrepid man. A real Lord Protector would have done something about the dronon.
Once Felph failed to contact Gallen, he decided to ask Arachne for counsel. That’s what he had created her for, but the woman was not at her loom, and a search by the droids proved she wasn’t in the palace.
As for Hera and Athena, neither of them had any idea why the dronon ships had arrived. Hera’s advice was, “Sit quietly, and see what happens.”
Athena was more practical. She set out to find Arachne, and by considering the places where the woman might have gone, she chanced upon several loose hairs and a couple of drops of blood in the lower corridors, by the launching bay.
She followed a trail of blood droplets into a droid access corridor, found hairs by a recycling shoot.
Moments later, she retrieved Arachne’s corpse, carried it up, laid it before Felph in his upper offices, and described how she’d found the body.
He stared at it in dismay, shaken, unwilling to believe his eyes, hardly hearing a word. Arachne, his best counselor, murdered. Her face was covered in blood and bruises.
Her silver hair mussed. Her dark eyes looked up blankly, like those of a stupid cow.
All that wisdom, all that beauty, all that insight lost. There was nothing for it but to clone her, start again. Yet. Felph wondered. Even if I clone her, will she be as wise? She’d accumulated so much knowledge in her short life; Felph despaired of ever recreating a creature quite as lovely, quite as prescient.
Felph’s heart hammered, and for a long while he simply stared at the corpse in shock. She’d been killed in the corridors, near Gallen’s ship. Beaten to death.
Who could have done it? Gallen? The bear? And why? Surely Zeus would not have done it, Felph told himself, even as a cold dread filled his breast.
Felph did not have long to wonder. Two hours after he’d first discovered the dronon presence and scant minutes after Athena located Arachne’s corpse, his perimeter security droids suddenly wailed a priority-one intruder alert.
The exterior security cameras showed a dozen craft approach from the southeast. Vanquishers, with black carapaces gleaming in the dull sunlight, skimmed through the grainfield on airbikes.
They halted at the front gate of the palace. Felph, flanked by his two remaining daughters, drove a house transport down to the main gate—a structure of rose quartz that stood some forty meters in the air, supported by twin pillars of red sandstone.
At the gate, Felph commanded the palace AI to open the doors; silently they swung outward.
Felph studied the Vanquishers. Each dronon rode a bike like nothing ever built by humans. The sleek silver machines reflected the dull red morning sun. The Vanquishers straddling them were more repulsive than Felph imagined they would be. Their black carapaces and amber wings appeared regal, but the clusters of eyes, along with the sensor whips protruding above the strikingly cruel mandibles, made them look too much like insects.
For all that, their appearance did not shake Felph so much as the casual way they held their weapons. The huge battle arms of each Vanquisher, with their serrated lower edges, looked crablike. Each arm cradled a dronon pulp pistol or incendiary rifle. The Vanquishers held the weapons as if they intended to use them.
One dronon pulled within a few meters of Felph; dozens of mouthfingers under its mandibles began clicking. A small device that seemed to be mounted to the exterior of the dronon’s skull, just above the mandibles, translated, “We seek the Lords of the Sixth Swarm, Gallen O’Day, and his Golden Queen, Maggie. Our Seekers detect her scent on your premises.”
Felph suddenly became aware of how fiercely his heart pounded. “Maggie, the Golden Queen?”
It suddenly made sense—a Lord Protector and his wife, here on the far edge of nowhere. Arachne must have known. Perhaps she’d said as much to Gallen, and in order to keep his secret, he’d murdered her.
As Felph recognized who Gallen was and why
he’d come, a fierce hope began to burn within him.
I created Zeus to beat the Lords of the Swarms, Felph wanted to tell the dronon. He should be here now, to challenge your lords to Right of Charn.
But Zeus was with Gallen.
Felph looked to Hera, who stared at the Vanquishers, wonder and fear warring in her eyes. She was so beautiful, so flawless. She would make a fine Golden Queen. If only Zeus were here to fight beside her.
“Gallen and Maggie left, this morning, to work in the desert. They disappeared when you showed up.”
“They are hiding,” the dronon’s voice drummed out. “It is madness to hide from us. They dishonor their species. They will be destroyed.”
Not madness to hide, Felph wanted to say. Wisdom.
A plan began to blossom, taking solid form in his head. If the dronon found Gallen, they’d find Zeus, too.
“I think I know where they will hide. I’ll help you find them,” Felph whispered, “in exchange for a promise.”
“What do you require?” the dronon Vanquisher clicked.
“When the Lords of the Swarms challenge Gallen and Maggie to battle, I want to be there.”
In answer, the dronon Vanquisher did an unexpected thing. He put his head forward, crossing his battle arms in front of him, and bowed to Lord Felph.
“It is agreed.”
Chapter 29
Two days earlier, when Lord Felph had piloted Gallen down into the tangle, he’d simply plummeted, letting the ship use phased gravity pulses to pond the tangle beneath into pulp.
The technique had a certain brutish simplicity to it, but Gallen opted now to pilot his ship down by skill, diving into crevasses, following side tunnels as far as possible before battering through the deepest layers of growth, using his antigrav only as a last resort before skirting sideways into some new pocket. By doing this he hoped that he would not leave a visible trace as to the path he took into the tangle.
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