World Killers

by Jack McKinney

  The city was in turmoil, with Praxian slaves abandoning their work assignments, tearing off the inert headbands, and either fleeing their overseers or attacking them head-on with whatever weapons came to hand. The amazons fought with unflinching courage and great skill, but the Invid garrison was large and troops were being rushed in from all over the planet. It could only be a matter of time before the uprising was crushed.

  The defenses of Haydon IV itself were staying out of the battle, and Sarna knew why. It would be easy enough for the vast intellect of Vowad to persuade the planet's systemry that this was a limited conflict in which the Invid were in the right, technically, but needed no help in reestablishing order. Thus, the glory of Haydonite civilization was safe from all-out warfare.

  Sarna herself had attempted to get a message through to the Sentinels' cruiser-still orbiting far beyond Haydon's defensive limits-to let them know what was happening. But

  her father had interfered with the transmission somehow, and there had been no response.

  Veidt was deep within the complex somewhere, along with the other Sentinels, and Sarna wasn't about to abandon them. She gathered her resolve and sent the immense carpet sailing down toward the roof of the Central Slavepen.

  "No!" She heard the cry even as the carpet came to rest, as gently as a feather. It was Vowad, on a circular mat. He brought it in on her own carpet, confronting her.

  "This is madness! Come away with me at once!"

  She shook her head. "My friends are inside here."

  Vowad was vibrating with anger. "They're doomed! And you are, too, unless you come away with me this instant!"

  "You could prevent that, Father. Call down the wrath of Haydon IV upon the Invid!"

  "Sarna, it is my duty to preserve our world, not see it destroyed!"

  "Then go," she said, "and leave me here. For I swore a different vow."

  Jack Baker threw his hand up and skipped back as the burning Odeon bounced off the column and crashed onto its back.

  Bela and Gnea were already crowding to get past him, to Arla-Non, and it was a bit like being caught in the middle of a buffalo stampede.

  "Mother!"

  "Your Majesty!"

  There was no use in trying to restrain them. They had been frustrated enough by the sudden stopping of the elevator. The complex's power supply was disrupted from the attack on the command center, and from the sapper charges set off by Wolff. The ensuing counterattack by the Invid hadn't helped either. By the time the elevator was moving again, Janice Em was the only calm one aboard.

  Now Arla-Non waved from the shelter of an Invid design feature not far away, a thing that looked like a dendrite. Lisa and Rick and some of the others were there, rather dumbfounded.

  "Look out!" Jan burst past Jack to sweep the air with fire from her Enforcer rifle. Everyone else saw what she meant, and also fired at the skirmisher ship and its Armored Officer that had come barreling round the corner for a low-level recon. Flier and Invid flew apart like a clay pigeon.

  There was a lot of confusion then, particularly regarding the odd-looking being who only halfway resembled Janice Em at this point. Finally, Jack got them to understand that there was a bolthole: the elevator could take them clear to the roof.

  "That will do," Veidt told them all. "Sarna is there, with the carpet."

  Lisa had done some quick mental addition. "But we can only ferry up twenty or thirty at a time. We've got to hold on down here in the meantime! It might be hours!"

  "Good; that will give us a while longer yet to kill Invid," Arla-Non said blithely.

  Wounded were being taken aboard for the first trip, but there were also plenty of functionals to protect them once they got up above. Rick took Max's arm. "Get Miriya up there, too. Now! Don't argue with me, dammit."

  Max was indecisive for a second, then gripped Rick's arm and turned to get his wife and unborn child to safety. Rick discovered that Lisa was staring at him strangely.

  She gave him an arch look. "You're not going to insist I be evacuated with the injured and helpless?"

  Rick sighed, and his face colored some. "Not you, Tiger." Her answering smile warmed him.

  Veidt was staring into the elevator. "So, the Awareness has seen fit to aid us. And you are not what you seemed, Janice Em. Still, you must be eloquent! We have a great deal to discuss."

  "But not until later," Jan said. "I want you to take the elevator to the roof; it will respond to you now. I can do more good down here." She hefted the Enforcer rifle she held.

  Veidt inclined his head slowly. "And, more to the point, Sarna is up there now, eh? And, unless I miss my guess, Vowad?"

  Jan had learned how to read much of the hidden information of Haydon IV. She knew how matters stood among the three. She nodded. "There may still be time to convince him, but I'm not the one to do it."

  Without another word, Veidt entered the elevator among the wounded and the vengeful.

  Jan turned to Rick and Lisa. "I guess I don't look much like my PR photos, hmm?"

  There was a yell from the battle line as another Inorganic attack began. Rick watched the elevator doors close as it began its ascent. The Sentinels' misson had been rife with mind-boggling shocks and surprises; that Janice was an android seemed to fit in with the unbelievable scheme of things.

  "You look pretty damn good to us, Jan."

  Sarna and Vowad were locked in a battle of wills, the huge carpet

  vibrating under them. If he couldn't persuade his daughter to come with him, he resolved, he would force her to come, by taking the carpet under his command.

  But she was fighting him with more mental force than he would have believed she could marshal. Though she was of his stock, she lacked his ages of training and experience-and yet something within her was making her very nearly her father's equal in willpower.

  But the battle became moot as a structure on the roof swung open and the elevator appeared with its cargo. Wounded amazons were assisted onto the carpet, and able-bodied ones ran to set up firing positions. Max led Miriya to the carpet and eased her down.

  They ignored Vowad, who was screaming, "Go back, go back! This war must not spill over into the city at large!"

  But it was too late. Before much more could be said, an ogrelike Crann clambored into view, its sensors having detected activity on the rooftop.

  The Praxians and Max opened fire right away, but Crann were perhaps the most powerful of the biped Inorganics, and the thing just kept coming, firing back. A hole was burned through the carpet, and several of the wounded were killed instantly as the Crann advanced.

  People were diving for cover that wasn't there; Max left Miriya's side and went straight for it, dodging and laying down rounds with an Enforcer rifle.

  The Crann ignored him, swinging its weapon muzzle back and forth, immolating everything it saw. Then the beam swung toward the three Haydonites.

  Veidt tried to ram Sarna to safety, but she saw that her father was paralyzed with shock or fright.

  "No!" she cried, and eluded her mate to drive straight at Vowad, her robe fluttering over the rooftop. She struck her father with her head and upper torso, knocking him out of the line of fire, but the Crann's beam struck Sarna dead center, and she went flying to the roof's surface, her robes burning.

  Veidt was there at once, smothering the flames with his own body, feeling more helpless than he had ever felt. But Max got to them in another second, using his jacket, and even Miriya had staggered over to help.

  Meanwhile, the amazons had zeroed in on the Crann. Their massed small-arms fire found some vulnerable point in its reverse-articulated knee, and as it lost balance it also lost footing there at the edge of the roof. The Crann plunged from sight, but they heard the impact as it struck the street far below.

  Max didn't know much about Haydonite physiology, and what he saw of Sarna's wound reinforced that; the weird textures and shapes, the unfamiliar fluids and systems, looked part o
rganic, part synthetic. But he thought that the damage was too terrible for her to survive. She confirmed that when she spoke, her voice a faint bubbling.

  "Father, you see? What is Haydon IV under the Invid but a beautifully appointed slavepen? War might destroy us, but it can never defile us the way enslavement has."

  She had no expression that a Human could read, but the note in her voice wrenched at Max's heart. Vowad raised his face to regard the wounded and dying among the Praxians, the determined-looking women who showed their suffering in every line of their faces.

  Then Sarna spasmed. From deep within his faceless depths, Veidt let out a wail that was terrible to hear. With no arms for a last embrace, he dropped until he lay draped across the corpse of his mate, and the sound of something he had learned among the Sentinels came from him, a sound no Haydonite had ever made before. Veidt wept like a lost soul.

  Max's mouth fell open. From the eyeless visage of Veidt, tears were seeping.

  "Ah, Veidt: you are my love," Sarna managed, though the voice sounded far away, as if it were coming now from outside her body. "And all of time and space will not keep us apart." Then she shuddered again, and was still.

  It took the others a moment to realize that a new sound was rising to drown out Veidt's sorrow. Vowad floated there, head thrown back, blank face raised to the sky. Max somehow knew that if the Haydonite had arms, those arms would have been thrown wide, hands clenched to fists.

  The sound that issued forth from somewhere within Vowad was animal pain, and animal anger.

  "More Inorganics!" yelled a woman who had leaped to the roof's edge. The alarm was repeated by others all along that part of the building.

  Max rose tiredly, ignoring the pain of his burned hands, to take up his gun. The amazons were right; at least there was time to kill some more Invid before the final defeat was nailed down. Too bad the Sentinels had to end this way...

  But just then, with Vowad's shriek echoing off the buildings of Glike, the world began to shake.

  It wasn't like an earthquake; it was more like the whole artificial planet Haydon IV resonating like a tuning fork to Vowad's pain. The sky seemed to shimmer like a pan of water being struck and struck again on its rim. A deep sympathetic vibration was felt by everyone there on the roof. Even more amazing, the Invid teeming in the street below stopped what they were doing and stood stock still.

  Then there was a sound to be heard all through Glike, like wind-whipped flames-like the surging of a funeral pyre's inferno.

  Those on the roof abruptly saw movement all through the city. From hidden crannies and the very seams of the Oz urbanscape, incandescent colors emerged in shapes that seemed alive. And all at once the Invid in the street below were attacked by a moving ant-army of shapes.

  Max yelped and leapt back as one scampered past him, brushing his ankle. It didn't hurt, but the contact made his skin tingle and feel a bit numb. It was obvious, though, that the thing wasn't after Max; hundreds, thousands of others like it were emerging from every crevice and homing in on the nearest Invid.

  And then he realized what the thing was: a miniature humanoid figure, whose likeness Max had seen often enough to recognize it: Zor! The humunculi-Zors were the size of a kid's toy model, made of kaleidoscopic colors, bounding through the air or running at unbelievable speed to take on the Inorganics.

  The myriad Zors were seeping from the fabric of the city to attack the Regent's troops. Apparently, the ghost in the machine that was Haydon IV's Awareness knew the Invid mind well-and had chosen to form its antibodies in the image of the Regent's most hated foe.

  In seconds, the Invid mecha were battling enemies that knew no surrender or retreat. Blasts from Protoculture weapons disintegrated Haydon IV's antibodies, but in the time it took to shoot one, a dozen more tiny Zor simulacra rose up to attack. As the antibodies fastened themselves to the Inorganics, coating them, the war machines began to glow.

  Unlike the contest in which Jack's raiders had fought beneath the planet, the antibodies weren't in unending supply now. There were limits even to Haydon IV's power. As Inorganics everywhere blazed away at the tiny demons fashioned in Zor's image, fewer and fewer appeared to take their places.

  But the city was still blanketed with antibodies eager to hurl themselves onto the mecha. As Max watched, a Hellcat, coated with the shifting, coruscating colors of the antibodies that had plastered themselves to it, rolled and spat and flopped, clawing at itself uselessly. Its destructive aura grew brighter, and a moment later it was ruptured by a dazzling explosion, vanishing from sight.

  Elsewhere, an Odeon staggered drunkenly, firing into the air, as antibodies engulfed it. It tried to decontaminate its arm with blasts from its hand weapon, but only succeeded in blowing the arm off. A moment later it, too, blew apart.

  Max spun on Veidt. "Hurry! Get that elevator back down for the others! Quick, before this whole complex goes!"

  Veidt was still stretched out across Sarna, oblivious to everything around him. At length, Vowad regained some part of his composure.

  "I will go," he said. In a moment, he had started the elevator back down in a race to save as many others as he could.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

  Graffito found on Sentinels barricade in the Central Slavepen, thought to be attributable to Bela

  When the Regent heard of the revolt among the Praxian slaves, he took command of the situation himself. He left his hive just outside the city and called for his Land Cruiser-the grotesque mobile ground fortress that was the centerpiece of large-scale Invid surface action.

  When he was told that the Sentinels were in some way responsible for the slave uprising, he sent word to his torturers to prepare for a much more demanding schedule. But once he was informed that the antibodies of Haydon IV had turned against him, he instructed his personal flagship to stand ready against immediate departure.

  Not that he counted the battle lost yet; the Haydonite defenses had been designed to eliminate most of an invading force before that force got to the planet's surface, and the

  Invid were already at close range. The Regent had an advantage no invader had ever achieved before.

  "Destroy all power sources!" he ordered. "Obliterate the planet's energy production centers! The Regent was certain that without power, the antibodies would quickly de-rezz into nothingness.

  Those Invid not engulfed in Zor antibodies immediately began destroying all power sources they could detect, which meant razing things at random. The biped Inorganics, in particular, destroyed ages of craftsmanship and art in minutes, turning their aim haphazardly from one target to the next. Minarets toppled, domes shattered, and delicate mansions collapsed like fragile pastry crust. Fires flared up, and smoke began to block out Briz'dziki, Haydon's sun.

  Then commo relays showed the Regent the nature of the antibodies. Zor, again! The Regent's entourage ducked and ran from his berserk blows; he lashed out at the consoles and instrument panels around him. He wrenched the command chair from the deck, flinging it against a bulkhead so hard that the chair dented the plates.

  Zor! The perversity of the Haydon IV machinery! The towering affrontery of it! "I will have this planet or I will destroy it!" the Regent roared.

  Though he was in a part of the city that had been spared the appearance of the antibodies, the Regent thought better of his plan to travel on the ground. He called for a Terror Weapon troop dropship; but of the three on Haydon IV at the moment, two were elsewhere on the planet picking up reinforcements and the third had been destroyed while hovering near its landing pad not far from the Central Slavepen.

  The Regent changed his instructions, and the Land Cruiser swung toward the starport. Time to make a break for his flagship, while he still had other cards to play. A screen relayed the scene from the Land Cruiser's brig, showing him that Rem was still firmly chained there. The Regent stroked his mammoth Hellcats and contemplated the horrors he would inflic
t on the clone when all this was over.

  Even Jack and his team, who had seen the Haydon antibodies in action in other forms, had difficulty believing what they were witnessing. From the very walls of the dungeons came doll-size Zors in every color, setting upon the Inorganics, bringing them down and blowing them apart.

  They were a reminder, too, of Rem, who was still held captive by the Regent.

  In the slavepens, the counterattack on the Praxians and the Sentinels stopped cold. The main danger to the defenders now was the deafening sound of the Inorganic volleys and